Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 97: Tue Apr 7

No 1: White Dog (Fuller, 1982): Nickel Cinema, 6pm

Peter Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to appear on the programme. It was an invitation that sadly was never extended to him and I thought of that tale when I was actually asked to contribute to the most famous of all movie polls, run by Sight & Sound magazine. All those years of trawling the previous decades choices with rapt fascination, reading the articles on the canon and the time keeping that running list of my ten all-time favourites that were inevitable mixed up with the greatest in my head was not wasted. Now, though, I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Others were doing the same, prompting responses varying widely from “it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”. 

The more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted people to see but had not been considered in the previous voting, and modestly hoping for a re-evalution of the choices. I made two rules. All of the films in my list (reproduced below) would deserve to be part of the Sight & Sound Greatest poll conversation and all the choices would not have received a single vote in the 2012 poll.

Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases there are very good reasons some of these films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared after bombing at the box office and the subsequent dissolving of the director’s production company, deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishes in limbo, only seen at major retrospectives. The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are both once lost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery. White Dog, after a desultory release overshadowed by misguided accusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years. Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, was shown in 2013 from (fortuitously I later discovered) 16mm in an ICA gallery and felt thrillingly authentic, the sound of the whirring projector and the artist’s singular framing combining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:

Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)

Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)

The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)

Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)

Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)

Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)

White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)

Six from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll appeared and now we have a rare screening of the brilliant director Sam Fuller's late masterpiece at the Nickel Cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
Samuel Fuller's 1982 masterpiece about American racism—his last work shot in this country—focuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks. Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an animal; in this respect it's like Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, and Fuller's brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable intensity. Through a series of grotesque misunderstandings, this unambiguously antiracist movie was yanked from U.S. distribution partly because of charges of racism made by individuals and organizations who had never seen it. But it's one of the key American films of the 80s. With Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, and, in cameo roles, Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Christa Lang, and Fuller himself.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the original trailer.

***************************

No 2: Plan 9 from Outer Space (Wood, 1959): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm

This screening includes an extended intro by BFI National Archive preservation and curatorial staff, and writer Ken Hollings. The film is screening as part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on April 21st. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Bela Lugosi died during the making of this low-budget science fiction programmer, but that didn't faze director Edward Wood: the Lugosi footage, which consists of the actor skulking around a suburban garage, is replayed over and over, to highly surreal effect. Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice has made a case for Wood as an unconscious avant-gardist; there's no denying that his blunders are unusually creative and oddly expressive.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.