MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

The first recorded horror movie was a home movie shot with a Bolex camera, and film critics hesitate to classify it as a horror movie or a slapstick comedy. Its author is known to be a Texas housewife named Margaret Lockwood. The movie lasts seven minutes and has no title. The first sequence is a chase peppered with blows. A man wearing nothing but a poncho and a cowboy hat (probably Mr. Lockwood) is being chased around a table by a h arum-scarum elderly woman (probably Mr. Lockwood’s mother-in-law). The woman brandishes a rolling pin with which beats the man up every time she reaches him. The man laughs at the comical situation. His laugh is contagious and the viewer can't help but laugh too. Everyone laughs, even the old woman. But suddenly the viewer's laughter freezes when seeing the old woman stopping, reaching into her petticoats, and pulling out a revolver. The next second, the laughing man is riddled with bullets. In the following sequence it’s seen how the old woman cu...

In Hollywood in the mid-1950s, a new type of movie star emerged characterized by rebellion, sadness, self-destruction and blue suede shoes. James Dean and Annie Branchowsky are the two most paradigmatic examples. Let's focus on the last one. Annie Branchowsky was born in a small Ohio town of just five neighbours. (When she moved to Hollywood with her two brothers and parents, the town went into bankruptcy and was wiped off the map.) In Hollywood, Annie got an audition to play the young woman bitten by a snake in the B movie "The Bite," but all the other applicants yelled louder. She just said "Ouch!" and bite off the snake's head, which ruined the production. Desperate, the director predicted an uncertain future for her as an actress, but she was not discouraged and landed a walk-on part in a Warner production. She was supposed to help the old protagonist cross the street, but instead she got into a taxi with the old woman and they both disappeared for five ...

In the early days of the film industry, an atmosphere of intolerable moral corruption reigned in Hollywood. The films displayed a degree of depravity that would have flushed the Marquis de Sade. The natural separation between actresses and actors began to relax and towards the end of the 1910s, mixed films began to be shot: actors and actresses shared the same set, appeared in the same sequences and even spoke to each other without even blushing. Actresses like Theda Bara, Clara Bow, and Gloria Swanson appeared in makeup and holding huge Gruyère cheeses on their heads. Actors like Rodolfo Valentino, John Gilbert and Ronald Colman allowed themselves to put a flower in their buttonholes, look in the mirrors and smooth their hair while smiling at the portrait of his fiancée. Most of the spectators went to the movie theaters blindfolded so as not to see so much ignominy. In spontaneous attacks of hysteria, some of them rolled around on the floor like possessed persons. Others teared their ...

Not at all. We all know what the first movie is about. The second one isn’t as well known, so I'm going to explain its plot as I remember it. “It! The Terror From Beyond Space” has as its protagonist a galactic kangaroo that hops around the outer space. (This is a cliché in a lot of sci-fi movies.) On the other hand, we have a spaceship sent by Earth to retrieve an earring that Lieutenant Sarah Vaughan dropped during her spacewalk eight years before (The earring is costume jewelry, but has sentimental value.) The spaceship has been searching for it tirelessly for all these years but without success. The crew is about to mutiny when they notice that the weird being who has just passed jumping close to the spaceship (whom they call 'It' because they had never seen a kangaroo before) wears the earring on its right ear. However, they underestimate the It's belligerence. (Also for the kangaroo the earring has sentimental value.) The fight over the earring is fierce since the...

Citizen Kane is a movie of extreme complexity. The cinematographic technique is complex: those risky camera movements that in no time go from a general shot to a close-up one hitting the face of the actors, who thus suffer continuous concussions, and forcing makeup artists to use large doses of makeup to hide the bruises. But also the plot is complex: the humble sledder who somehow manages to become a newspaper mogul and then fall in love with a cauliflower but keeps it a secret for fear of being branded as eccentric. Complexity extends even to the praiseworthy work of the hairstylists who, in a burst of creativity, adopted the hairstyle of the French aristocracy of the 1780s to create sophisticated ‘pompadours' for each and every one of the characters. The higher the character's social status, the more tall and voluminous his hairstyle is. And since Charles Foster Kane's social status progresses throughout the film, the stylists added accordingly more and more vertical vol...

"Strangers on a Train" is a double-bottomed film, like the suitcases of smugglers. This was common practice in Hollywood, where many directors tried to sneak Bolshevik ideas into their films. (The House Un-American Activities Committee saw this diaphanously.) When it comes to talking about Alfred Hitchcock, his real name was Boris Karshenko and he was a secret KGB agent specialized in following bald guys with a goatee. The best MI6 agent fitted that profile, so Karshenko (aka Hitchcock) was parachuted into London. However, the KGB was unaware that the MI6 agent in question had long been using a hair restorer and now had a mop of hair. Overnight Hitchcock found himself in London with nothing to do, so he tried to eke out a living in the cinema. Unexpectedly he succeeded and made the jump to Hollywood. However, he continued to think that communism was not only superior to capitalism but that communists were taller and more handsome than capitalists. His 1951 movie ‘Strangers on...

“Red Planet Mars” (1952) is undoubtedly one of the best (or one of the worst: in any case it’s not a halfway point) movies about the intrigues that preceded the Bolshevik revolution. The film narrates with realism the invasion of our planet by some Martians who are forced to make an emergency landing as a result of the drunkenness of the pilot, Grtyyuk Drakorewoo (whose name is significant because in Martian language it means 'the drunkest teetotaler'). Once on Earth the Martians have no choice but to rummage through the dumps, until they get tired and take out their ray guns. Humanity believes itself to be in danger of death or, if not of death, at least of total annihilation, and asks a circus clown (Peter Graves) for help. For a while, the clown manages to distract the Martians by juggling, but when one of the balls falls to the ground, the Martians understand that this is nothing more than a gross diversionary tactic, and they run out of the circus tent ready to conquer the...