Australian director Phillip Noyce is that dying breed jack-of-all-tradesperson in the Michael Curtiz mold who can successfully work in different genres, budgets, countries, and styles and, more often than not, come up with something worth watching. In a career that started in 1969, Noyce has directed underground short films (Better to Reign in Hell, Castor and Pollux), arty independent dramas (Newsfront, The Quiet American, Rabbit-Proof Fence), Hitchcockian thrillers (Dead Calm), mainstream Hollywood action movies and suspense thrillers (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Salt), TV episodes and miniseries (Revenge, Luck, Roots), and a couple of mega-flops (Sliver, The Saint). Then there's Blind Fury. An American remake of the Zatoichi story, Blind Fury is a medium-budget stupid-fun cartoon-violence '80s action B-movie with Rutger Hauer as the blind swordsman, facing a metric shit-ton of bad guys played by an oddball assortment of veteran character actors, up-and-coming character actors, a foreign movie star, and a comedian. This is a ridiculously fun movie that never takes itself seriously or stops to catch its breath, marred only by a couple of cheap early-digital visual effects and an annoying little kid. Hauer is Nick Parker, blinded in action in Vietnam but rescued by some kindly villagers who teach him how to enhance his other senses and kick ass with a sword. Cut to present-day '89, and Nick is wandering the back roads of Florida with his walking stick/sword, living a free-spirited vagabond's life, interrupted only by the occasional alligator and a beatdown he has to dish out to a punk who deliberately pours too much hot sauce on his taco. Nick stops in at the home of an old Army buddy he served with in 'Nam, but finds out his buddy is now divorced and living in Reno. He chats pleasantly with his buddy's ex-wife Lynn (Meg Foster) and annoying son Billy (Brandon Call), but soon finds himself foiling a kidnapping plot and escorting Billy to Reno to reunite him with his dad Frank (Terry O'Quinn) and kick a whole lot of bad-dude ass, assisted by Frank's girlfriend Annie (the late great Lisa Blount, who should have been in twice as many films). Those bad dudes are played by Noble Willingham, Randall "Tex" Cobb, Nick Cassavetes, Sho Kosugi, Charles Cooper, standup comic Rick Overton, and a handful of others. The action sequences are brutal, fun, over-the-top, and take place in such varied locations as cornfields, vans, ski resorts, nightclubs, casino floors, elevators, trams, and hot tubs. Blind Fury also contains my favorite movie credit of all time: "Supervisor of Tram Operations -- Squaw Valley - Phillip F. St. Pierre, Jr."
One of many adaptations of Hanns Heinz Ewers' novel about the mandrake root, Alraune is a perverse bit of sci-fi/horror/psychosexual drama from the earliest days of German sound film. Albert Bassermann plays Privy Councillor ten Brinken, a scientist and professor who lives in opulence thanks to a wealthy princess who funds his experiments and his lifestyle. Ten Brinken has successfully created rats through artificial insemination, but on a challenge by his nephew, he becomes possessed with the idea of creating a human through the artificial insemination process. Through a bribe, ten Brinken collects the seed of a prisoner about to be executed and then kidnaps a prostitute from a boisterous restaurant/nightclub to carry the artificially inseminated child. I don't know how ten Brinken expects his work to get peer reviewed and accepted as a scientific breakthrough when he achieved it through kidnapping and bribes, but that's his problem. The film then jumps 18 years into the future, and the artificially created woman Alraune (Brigitte Helm, who also plays the prostitute) is a young adult. She believes she is the orphaned niece of ten Brinken, and she has a seductive allure that leads men to their doom. Several plot twists ensue before the film's lyrical conclusion. These early sound films can be pretty rough, thanks to the clunky and primitive early sound equipment, and Alraune suffers from this in its early scenes. Silent film near the end of its 30-year run was a beautifully expressive medium, and much of this innovation and technique was discarded to capture sound. In scenes requiring dialogue, the camera doesn't move (or moves awkwardly and abruptly), the framing is artless and stagy, and the actors sometimes look stiff and uncomfortable. Oswald's approach becomes artier and more expressive as the film progresses, and a scene of driving is punctuated by a highly effective pattern of quick edits and montage. The closeups on actors' faces are beautifully expressive, and the interiors are intricately detailed. Alraune is a fascinating piece of film history.
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