Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Robe!

Theme: Black Bush - 16 Horsepower

The most entertaining film about the early Christians is Cecil B. DeMille's spectacular and batshit insane Sign of the Cross, which features an hilariously graphic battle to the death between women and dwarfs:

????

But equally fascinating in an altogether different vein is 1953's The Robe. Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds) HAS IT ALL: political connections, devoted gf Diana (Jean Simmons, who is not that juggalo with the big tongue), and a real shot at hot twins:

In ancient Rome you could just buy hot twins.

BUT THEN he overplays his hand and finds himself shipped off to Jerusalem, courtesy of the jealous machinations of flaming pervert Caligula, whom the script preposterously expects us to believe has the hots for Diana, and not some dude in chaps with a handlebar moustache.

Bro does the same flamboyant twirl twice in the same take before sitting down fr no cap.

When in Jerusalem, however, Gallio is obligated to preside over the crucifixion of three condemned men. One is of course our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, though at the time Gallio is given only a vague overview of Who He is supposed to be. The actor playing Jesus is seen only at a distance, or from angles that obscure his face, placing the viewer in the position of a rando catching a glimpse behind a crowd. Yet Gallio's Greek slave Demetrius (Victor Mature) manages to make eye contact with the Christ, compelling his immediate allegiance.

Yeah, I know this would have been a gr8 poast for Holy Week but I drop Halloween and Christmas articles at all times of the year too so just enjoy the wild ride as the wheels come off.

Only upon that fateful Friday, when the world turned dark, does Gallio begin to realise a fraction of the awesome cosmic import of his actions. As he gambles for the Christ's possessions with the soldiers, Gallio wins the titular garment, onto which he projects all the burden of his tormented conscience. The film takes on an uniquely haunting atmosphere as Gallio is beset by fever nightmares to which we suspect we are only partly party. It's the best attempt by any film to portray the presence of God, reflecting not the undepictable Itself, but the way most of us experience It: as a haunting, maddening voice urging us against our best efforts to shut It out.

While Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ emphasised the physical brutalisation meted out to God incarnate by His unworthy creations, The Robe best captures an infinitesimally small impression of the sheer ineffable alienness of God. Despite what terminal modernity patients might assert with laughable confidence, there's actually nothing unrelatable nor baffling at all about an Alien (1979) that doesn't care about you and just wants to eat and rape you; that's just a bear, a shark, or a fast-tracked asylum seeker. The essence of alienness is that which seems to us most paradoxical: that God Himself, impossible to dream of apprehending in His supercosmic magnificence, cares about our wretched souls.

They don't call it a Mystery for nothing.

The rest of the film deals with the aftermath in which Gallio attempts to track down the Robe to destroy it, and learns of the Resurrection from the Christians, FORCING him to CHOOSE where his allegiance lies. It's all compelling enough, but it's those scenes of holy horror that remain wedged in the memory, whispering to us of the judgement that awaits us all.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: 3:10 to Yuma!

Theme: it has its own!

Not to be confused with its much noisier and less suspenseful remake, the original 3:10 to Yuma is the western Alfred Hitchcock might have made, had he ever made a western instead of eating pork pies. IDK why suspense is a lost art; it's not like the technology has been lost or superceded, but noone does suspense anymore and that sucks. Much more of the OG 3:10 is spent waiting, to far greater effect than all the sound and fury of the remake, which adds pointless detours, setpieces and characters, and every memorable line of which is ripped straight from the classic.

Composition is a lost art too.

Van Heflin, who is not an hard rock band, plays Dan Evans, the everyman tested with the onerous duty of herding legendary outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) to the station in the line of fire of Wade's gang buddies. Heflin plays nervous better than any actor I can name, eye twitching and grim face sweating as the pressure mounts, while Ford's cool-guy baddy counterpoints him with the detached calm of a seasoned psychopath. Evans has reason to be nervous: his land suffers from drought and his wife passive-aggressively implies he should have picked a fight with Wade's gang and been easily and instantly killed like a real man.

You almost never get fatally shot anymore, it's like you don't even love me.

In stark contrast to this troubled marriage, Wade forms a fleeting attachment to Felicia Farr's world-weary saloon thot with effortless charm, only later to muse that the grass might be greener on Evans' side. It would be easy for Wade to lapse into nothin-personnelisms like all the shitty, non-Manhunter versions of Hannibal Lecter, but neckbeardry is nimbly swerved by the deft, calculating performance and palpable charisma of the character. It's a simple but highly credible battle of wits and nerves between two men who cultivate a healthy mutual respect based in wariness, making for a character study as satisfying as the finely honed suspense.

Body Language EXPERTS react to 3:10 to Yuma! The guy on the bed is the calm one. Thanks for the 500k views! Don't forget to hit the bell!

But something else that elevates it over the remake is the heightened, mythic quality conveyed in its dramatic theme song and more subtly in the hints of providence that start to show through in the final break for the station. The train itself comes on like a portent of judgement, venting clouds of steam, and the crane operator gets a workout sending the omniscient camera wheeling and descending over the action like a rich kid on Christmas might abuse his brand new drone. Malign 60s revisionism, spaghetti hipster nihilism and miseryslop from Unforgiven to Deadwood have all coagulated into one big push to demythologise and demystify the Old West, just as Game of Thrones attempted to beshit the magic and lustre of Tolkien and friends, but all such smarmy drivel pales in the face of something far more vital and profound. The great stories continue to ennoble with stolid persistence through the years, so skip the remake and the dEcOnStRuCtIoNs, and take that traaaaiiiin.

Imagine thinking you can demythologize a place that looks like this.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Shack Out on 101!

Theme: Red Sharks - Crimson Glory

Even though 99% of movies are to the left of Lenin and always were, disingenuous dorks still wail and sob over the small and undistinguished run of low-budget anti-commie B-joints in the late 40s and 50s, most inexplicably infamous of which is guaranteed sleeping aid Woman on Pier 13, AKA I Married a Communist. Fortunately there was one kino noir in the set, which shares an oneiric oceanic opening motif with the 50s' best noir of all, Screaming Mimi:

The setting also reminds me of Tormented!. For some reason pairing curvy hotties with west coast beaches was a popular way to open 10/10 kinographs in the late 50s.

Terry Moore stars as Kotty, the waitress at a coastal diner whose unhappy lot consists in fending off the advances of rapey slimeball Slob (Lee Marvin) and the diner regulars. Sure, she could easily become the country's top model or movie star, or just marry any man with money, but shhh, if we pull on that thread they'll stop casting Sydney Sweeney in movies I'm never going to see too. Much of the runtime is actually chewed up in Clerksian vignettes of workplace banter and shenanigans, such as these two trying out scuba gear in the empty diner:

Movies could have been so good, you know.

But then the plot kicks in and the suspense begins to rise: IS everyone around our Ter Ter what they seem? WHOM can she trust, if anyone? WHO will survive, and WHAT will be left of them? Oh wait, that's the tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, incidentally the second best tagline of all time, after A Nightmare on Elm Street's "if Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all!". CAN you remember a tagline from any post-80s movie? I can't.

Too soon?

There's just one other thing about this kino that makes it still relevant, though I imagine it's entirely incidental. There's no actual mention of communism, the USSR or any other specific identity for the enemy faction soliciting nuclear secrets from our cast of shifty fuckers, which makes one wonder whether some other foreign interest might just as well be behind it all. For obvious reasons, it's not a double meaning H*llywood would ever knowingly let slip into a movie, but it's grimly lulzy to consider all the same.

The way she then turned to camera and said "yeah, I'm talking about you, Ben Shapiro" was really ahead of its time.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Creature from the Black Lagoon!

Theme: Dragon's Child - Iced Earth

The Universal classic monster movies have been more endearing than unnerving since about 1950 at the latest. I can't tell you late entry Creature from the Black Lagoon is any exception, but it's my favourite and the best regardless. The design of the titular Creature, more often referred to as the Gillman, is so GOATed it makes me unreasonably mad that Universal didn't make more horrors based on original treatments over the well-worn sources of Victorian novels and folklore.

The Gillman rocks 16-pack abs. Personal trainers HATE him. What's his secret? Click to find out!

Creature dropped in 3D back when that was cool (1954, and not a year later). While 3D would become synonymous with B-joint schlock and, worse, Avatar (2009), in 1954 it inspired a more kino grandiosity. You don't open a picture much bigger than this:

Based.

We then flash forward a bunch to the 50s, when the good ship Rita explores the waters of the Amazon, where dwells the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)! Tormented!'s Richard Carlson leads the cast beside Julia Adams, who becomes the locus of the Gillman's foreveralone affections. In a curiously poignant sequence, he observes her from below in the act of not-quite-synchronised swimming:

Fortunately Julia at no point looks down, prompting you to wonder who's just out of your own field of vision right now and for the next few weeks.

The most hilariously dated aspect of this movie is the Creature's bombastic leitmotif, which goes (and this is highly technical musical notation) "Dahn-dahn-DAAHN, dahn-dahn-DAAHN", etc. whenever the Creature or, more often (likely to spare the stuntman who played him donning the entire elaborate kit all the time), his hand appears.

I'm tempted to make an Airplane!esque parody in which he reaches through people's windows to grab popcorn and stuff, yelling "dahn-dahn-DAAHN" the entire time.

I feel like it wouldn't be too hard to make a proper R-rated horror remake of Creature that was actually scary. Images like his webbed footprints in the sand seem like they would lend themselves well to found footage, if anyone still makes those, though with the coolness of the costume maybe you'd want proper camerawork and lighting to show it off to its best effect.

Working title: The Black Lagoon Project OC DO NAHT STEAL

Like Bride of Frankenstein, the Creature's story was redundantly extended through two sequels, neither of which are particularly essential viewing and, given that they extend his streak of striking out with human women, seem a bit like piling on. My version would give the Gillman the happy ending he deserves: after being arrested for mauling the explorers who rudely interrupt his daily swim, Ol' Gil is sentenced to life in Seaworld (this is more or less the plot of the second one, if memory serves), but his trainer (Sidney Sweeney) is won over by his amphibious charm and they escape together on the back of that orca from Free Willy, then kill and eat it because fuck orcas, they murder seals for fun.

Gamers rise up.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Lost!

Theme: Subcutaneous Phat - Desert Sessions

In the meme years, Sophia Loren is now chiefly remembered for this historic mogging at the hands of Jayne Mansfield:

M*n will never understand the murderous rage of a Casey out-Stacied.

But if being in even a single good movie were a category (it sure isn't at the Oscars), Loren takes the W hands down. Batjac gem Legend of the Lost (one imagines the word "City" might have rounded out the title before some clever clogs realised the title could refer to the protagonists as much as what they seek) sees Loren play petty thief and men-resenting thot Dita, whose hard-knock life in the alleys of Timbuktu must be self-imposed, as anyone who looked much like Loren could easily marry the first rich tourist she meets, but never mind. For some reason, like every Tinder foid, she's never met a moid to satisfy her laundry list of high-falutin standards until clean-cut idealist Paul (Rossano Brazzi) enters her life and introduces her to the radical notion of not being a resentful thot.

The hero we need.

But who's that other - why, it's John Wayne himself, of course, playing himself once more as "Joe January", a Dionysian cynic whose rough edges contrast sharply with Paul's goody-two-shoes schtick and whose disdain for wahmen matches Dita's for men. This unlikely trio seem an all-too-likely cast for an odd-couple (or odd-triad) action-adventure to find a lost city in the Sahara filled with jewels, an impression bolstered by the early scenes of obligatory good-natured broad humour typical of Batjac's unpretentious populism.

One early scene has a comic sleazoid seek out Wayne in this club (he's not even there; the scene is otherwise pointless) just so we can see this chick do this swimming dance:

I have no idea whether they do this dance in Mali IRL but I hope so. Email the government of Mali at MaliGov@whatever.com and ask.

But Legend soon strikes out in a surprisingly profound psychological and theological direction. Foreshadowed action scenes between our heroes and the Tuareg are deferred in favour of the elemental antagonists of heat, thirst, temptation and madness. Paul's goodness and Joe & Dita's badness are all tested. Featureless desert yields strange, beguiling beauty, and elaborate sets moan emptily with wind, which is appropriate because Legend has less in common with the Duke's thousands of crowd-pleasing westerns and more to do with Sjöström's silent psych-western opus The Wind, with its flawed men, neurotic women, and strangely cathartic hints of hope for their reconciliation.

They might not all make it, but we can.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mighty Crusaders!

Article theme: Crusader - Saxon

Me and the boys gather round the sacred gaming chair (2025, colourised).

The Muslim conquests started in the 7th Century and devastated the Persian and Byzantine empires, not because the Arabs had superior technology, strategy or tactics, but because both empires had outsourced large swathes of their militaries to Arab mercs who simply defected to Islam en masse. No one has learned anything from this, as the Respectable Bipartisan Consensus for the west under the Global American Empire has been to continuously wage war on Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Palestine while simultaneously importing Muslim immigrants into Europe at replacement levels.

Great job, asshole! You really thought that one through.

The same staggering endemic historical illiteracy and incuriosity explains why most westerners now think that The Crusades were unprovoked wars of aggression by Evil Christians instead of the most provoked and justified wars ever fought in history - a misnomer actively astroturfed by every single institution in the first world in a campaign of systematic DARVO that would shame Amber Heard. Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 after four and a half centuries of nonstop Muslim pillage and sporadic efforts at defence and reconquest by heroes such as Charles Martell and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid Campeador).

I choose to believe they were this dripmaxxed IRL.

But Italian kinograph The Mighty Crusaders, very loosely based on Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, the epic poem that should rightly be renowned the Christian Iliad, extends thoroughly unwarranted grace to the forces that occupied Jerusalem at the time of the First Crusade. Just as in Homer's oftener regaled narrative, this siege has heroes on both sides.

For never was a story of more woe, than this of Tancredi and his mid MENA ho.

Macchiato Luigi plays Tancredi, the mightiest crusader of them all. Ferrari Pepperoni plays his archenemy and love interest, Clorinda. Gabagool Ovaheah plays Armida, the ambiguously witchy femme fatale. The epic poem has straight-up magic spells being thrown about this way and that, but the movie, much like the 2000s Troy, plays down any hint of supernatural bewitchment, rendering some of the characters' choices dumber than we might allow had the sorcery remained overt. Crusaders also treats us to some Star Trekian fight choreography:

"To win a swordfight, whip your sword around in the air like you're a helicopter" - Shadiversity

But as dumbed-down an adaptation as it inevitably is, it's still based to have an aesthetic kino celebrating those who took the cross, to say nothing of a film set in the middle ages with a colour palette beyond brown and grey.

It's also funny how Italian it all is.

Watch The Mighty Crusaders, read the poem, press S to spit on Ridley Scott, etc.