A Tax on Dreams and a Very Unusual Movie

 

 

 

 

 

STRAWBERRY MANSION (2021)

Written and Directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley

Music Box Film, 91 minutes, Not-rated

★★★

 

Strawberry Mansion is a film so bizarre that it makes Hundreds of Beavers seem like a documentary of the fur trade.  It is the brainchild of Albert Birney and Kentucker [sic] Audley and you can take your pick of what category into which to plug it: science fiction, comedy, surrealism, fantasy, or a warning shot across the bow. Unless you were at Sundance in 2021 or in one of the 27 theaters that screened in during its 11-week run, you’ve not seen it. It made just $54,762 during those 11 weeks and the only thing we can definitely say is that it is indeed an independent film. I can’t imagine taking any attempted synopsis of this film before a group of high-roller producers.

I don’t mean to imply I didn’t like it; it’s more a case of not having the foggiest idea of how to explain it as I’m not sure what just happened on my screen. The year is 2035 and the government has figured out how to tax people’s dreams. The film blurs the line between dreaming and being awake. Early on we see James Preble in an entirely pink room: walls, furniture, cups, utensils…. An obsequious pink-suited man called Buddy (Linas Phillips) comes bearing a bucket of Cap’n Kelly’s Chicken and a tall cup of Red Rocket Cola. He tries to entice James to try a chicken and gravy milkshake and, heaven help him, James likes it. What in the name of Col. Sanders is going on? Buddy reappears from time to time, always with chicken and cola to make James believe that he is James’ only friend. Is he, or is a glad-handed Satan as ad man?

James is a dream auditor. By 2035, all our dreams are recorded on a small stick that can placed into a computer to determine how much tax is owed. James is dispatched to the home of an old woman named Arabella–call me “Bella –Isadora (Penny Fuller), who lives alone with her turtle “Sugar baby,” and has not submitted her dream stick or paid her dream tax in quite some time. She lives a quirky remote home, the movie’s titular Strawberry Mansion, and Bella immediately offers pie and a place to stay while James does his audit. James tells Bella that she is supposed to keep track of all her dreams and she smiles and says she has; it’s all stored on tapes: cassettes, VHS, Betamax, reel-to-reel…. Stacks and stacks of them. To make sense of them he has to don a cross between a diving helmet, the head of a 1950s robot, and Australian bandit Ned Kelly’s iron mask. But James keeps seeing things: a young version of Bella, human-like creatures covered by green foliage, and occasional scarier images.

James learns from Bella that she and her late husband discovered that advertisers figured out how to infiltrate our dreams. Imagine if you were in the middle of a very pleasant or terrifying dream that was interrupted by commercials! Bella also recounts that she and her husband built a device to shut off the commercials. What happens next is so weird you’ll need to remind yourself that it might be dream logic. James will spend what seems like years being on a desert island with Bella, losing her, and seeking her. They will dine in a restaurant with a frog waiter, run away from Buddy, and then lose each other for “years” when James appears as a ship’s commander whose crew consists of two life-sized talking rats named Richard and Marcus. From time-to-time James encounters the terrifying Blue Demon. The Demon, like the Rats and the Frog wear what appear to be papier-mache heads. Getting hit on the head with a bowling pin presage some of these… what? Dreams? Shifts of reality? When he finds Bella again, she has to remove all the greenery he has acquired as one of the grass/foliage figures that line her property.

Is James some sort of chosen one to save humankind from rampant commercialism? Just a nerd who got in the way? A figment of his own imagination? There is an explanation of sorts and a possible happy ending, but who’s to say whether it’s just another flight from reality? Don’t ask me! All I can say is that Strawberry Mansion is my new standard of a weird movie.

 

Rob Weir

 

Rob Weir

Fallen Angel (1945): A Blend of Good and Silly

 

FALLEN ANGEL (1945).

Directed by Otto Preminger

20^th Century Fox, 97 minutes, not rated.

★★ ½

 

There are at least three other movies titled Fallen Angel, but his one is from 1945, just as World War II was ending. In American mythology, the troops came home to a booming economy. That’s not so; it took several years for the economy to convert to peacetime use. Fallen Angel stars, Dana Andrews as Eric Stanton, a veteran but also a drifter. He jumps on a bus headed for San Francisco, but is booted out in the small town of Walton, California, as he can’t afford the entire fare.

 

Stanton decides to stay in Walton for a while, because he’s a grifter as well as a drifter. He enters Pop’s Eats and bums a meal from Pop (Percy Kilbride) and overhears him telling Mark Judd (Charles Bickford), an ex-New York City policeman now working in Walton, that he worries about where Stella (Linda Darnell) might be. Judd tells Pop and others in the greasy spoon diner not to fret because Stella is a free spirit who will appear when she feels like it. Sure enough, the lusty Stella comes waltzing in as if nothing is out of the ordinary. She’s quite a looker, but is not impressed by Eric’s pick-up banter. Eric nonetheless identifies Stella as flirtatious and licentious, so he is not deterred by her rejection.

 

Eric needs money. At this point of the film, we have a drifter pursuing a femme fatale, classic film noir material. Alas, Director Otto Preminger stuck too carefully to the forgettable novel from which the script devolved. A contrived set-up leads Eric to the Faye sisters. He encounters Joe (Olin Howard) the “drummer” for a mentalist/fortune teller, but he’s a poor salesman. Eric grabs some tickets and hands out some for free, gambling that word of mouth will swell the box office. He’s right, but he also has to convince “Professor” Madley (John Carradine) to jazz up his show. Madley’s performance is trite, but when channels the spirit of Abraham Mills, everyone is drawn to his instant séance, as Mills was a beloved mayor and the richest man in Walton.

 

Eric continues to see Stella, but so too do other men (single and married). The implication is that Stella is also a hooker, but Eric finds himself falling for her. Stella’s morals aside, she has a clear goal; she wants to marry a handsome man who can provide her with a home of her own. That’s not Eric! He’s making some money from the professor, but not enough to buy a house. Eric tries another scheme to make money. The séance attracted the attention of Clara Mills (Anne Revere), the eldest daughter of the late Abraham Mills. She doesn’t think much of Eric, but his goal is to marry Clara’s younger sister, the naïve June (Alice Faye), the heir to most of the Mills fortune. If he can marry June and gain access to some of her dough, he can divorce her and provide for Stella. Sure enough, June is swept off her feet by the smooth-talking Eric. Their honeymoon evening is not exactly poems and flowers. Eric waits until June is asleep and goes to Stella. Big mistake!

 

That very evening, Stella is murdered and nearly every man in Walton who dated Stella, including Eric, is a suspect. Judd tries to beat a confession out of Dave Atkins (Bruce Cabot but he’s not Judd’s real target, and Eric knows it. He convinces June to flee with him to a dingy hotel room in San Francisco until he can work out who killed Stella. You might think that June would give him the bum’s rush, but she actually loves Eric.

 

Again, Preminger waded into water so shallow that Eric’s revelation of the true killer would scarcely get your feet moist. Preminger had a hard time getting this film made. Andrews was not his choice for leading man, but Alice Faye had been a big musical star for 20^th century Fox and wanted him. She was also promised she could sing a torch song for the film, but it didn’t make the final cut. Nonetheless, Faye called the shots, which perhaps explains the film’s unevenness. Andrew is actually very good as Eric, but so many things were over the top that we think of the film that could’ve been rather than what was.

 

Rob Weir

 

The Man With the Golden Arm Highlights Sinatra's Acting Chops

 

Preminger wouldn't allow anyone to replace the above design

 

 

 

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955)

Directed by Otto Preminger

United Artists, 119 minutes, Not-rated and Not-approved

★★★

 

Younger readers might not know that crooner Frank Sinatra was also a pretty good actor. He was the star of The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1955 movie directed by Otto Preminger. Perhaps only a director with the gravitas and moxie of Preminger could have made it. It was based upon a 1949 novel by Nelson Algren, and the first American film of the sound era to deal with heroin addiction.

 

The movie rights to Algren’s book were sold to John Garfield in 1949, who planned to star in it. The first script was rejected by the Movie Production Code Authority (MPCA) and the Catholic League of Decency (CLD). Garfield died in 1952, and when filming started as “An Otto Preminger Production,” Algren sued based his 1949 contract promising he’d get a large percentage of the royalties. (Algren ran out of money and dropped his suit.) Preminger began to shoot before the script got MCPA or CLD approval, which were not forthcoming. Preminger simply ignored them. Moreover, the script was sent to both Sinatra and Marlon Brando; Sinatra agreed almost immediately as he was still angry that Brando got the lead in On the Waterfront.

 

Sinatra played the role of Frankie Machine, an addict recently released from a federal narcotics farm in Kentucky. The old crowd welcomes him back to Chicago, including Sparrow (Arnold Stang), an oddball–perhaps mentally slow– who makes his living selling street dogs, even if he has to put shoe polish on canines for those who want a “black” dog. Sparrow, in turn, follows Frankie around like a puppy. In lockup, Frankie learned to play the drums and harbors dreams of landing a place in a big band jazz outfit. He also insists that he’s clean and wants no part of drugs, no matter how often street provider Zero Schwiefka (Robert Strauss) offers, or Frankie’s wheelchair-bound wife “Zosh” Sophia (Eleanor Parker) begs him to help her relieve her pain. She too clings to him like glue and, though he doesn’t love her, he feels beholden as she was injured in an auto accident when Frankie was driving while drunk.

 

Zero also wants Frankie to “deal” for him, by which is meant a card dealer for Schwiefka’s all-night, high-stakes poker games. Frank is also burning the midnight oil pursuing Molly Novotny, a stripper and escort. She was Frank’s flame before he married Zosh out of guilt. Band tryouts further exhaust Frankie and Schwiefka is only too happy to stick a needle in his arm to give him a boost or bail him out when he’s pinched in a suit stolen for him by Sparrow.

 

Preminger’s Chicago bears resemblance to the slums of Hoboken in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront–gritty, filled with temptation, and easy-to-fall. As Zosh guilt-trips Frankie to the point where he’s smothered by her, he retreats to Molly’s first-floor flat and rekindles their romance. There’s a lot about Zosh that’s fishy, even as Frankie spirals downward into new addiction. Why, for example, has “Nifty Louie” Fomorowski (Darren McGavin) been hanging around with Zosh? Even as he becomes more and more dependent on a fix, Frank knows the wheels are about to fly off for him, though he’s on the eve of realizing his dream. When he tries to bum fix money from Molly, she proposes a different solution; she will help him if he agrees to go cold turkey. If not, she will never see him again.

 

The Man with the Golden Arm implies that the golden arm is Frankie’s drumming riffs, but we all know that the real reference is to injecting heroin and/or morphine. By today’s standard, the film is predictable and melodramatic, but Sinatra is terrific in it. His was one of the most extended and harrowing depictions of going cold turkey in cinematic history. Call it also a film with an A-level cast: Sinatra, Novak, McGavin, and Strauss were all big stars, even if the eccentric Stang stole a few scenes. The film didn’t do as well as On the Waterfront, but it did get three Oscar nominations and was added to the National Film Registry. The jazz soundtrack from Elmer Bernstein (not related to Leonard) was big hit, as was Saul Bass’s poster design.

 

Rob Weir