The Engine

  SOUTHERN GOTHIC American Gothic Gothic literature eventually began to cross the Atlantic, especially in the stories, poems, and novellas of Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849).   Poe is best known for poems like The Raven and short stories like The Fall of the House of Usher .   The raven appears as a kind of revenant with a message from the beyond for whomever wishes to hear it.   In Poe’s story The Fall of the House of Usher themes of incest and madness inform the story of brother & sister Roderick & Madeline Usher.   Eventually Roderick’s house falls into a swamp and disappears forever.   In The Pit and the Pendulum Poe places his tale in the past, at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, fashioning an unmistakable horror from material gleaned from his interest in the horrors of the Old World.   Other stories like The Tell Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , and The Black Cat concern revenge, murder, retribution, and, sometimes, justice.   Poe was also the inventor of dete

  DRACULA There is no doubt that the first four chapters of Bram Stoker's Dracula are an account of a dark and terrible dream.   Stoker never pretended to be an artist but in Jonathan Harker's journal he created great and powerful art.   Harker writes his journal, we are told, in shorthand, to keep it away from the Count who has taken to snooping and spying when he isn't crawling lizard-like down the walls of his castle.   Is Castle Dracula a figment of Harker's imagination?   This is suggested in Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu .   We glimpse Castle Dracula in long shot, but it is only a series of ruins.   Inside the castle everything is cosy and well arranged.   The Count is an amusing eccentric whose personality grows darker, angrier, and more deadly by the day.   Everything becomes plain when Harker encounters Dracula's wives who view him as a good meal.   Count Dracula appears and drives them away, intent on keeping Harker for himself.   Harker guesses hi

  SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz) In Freud The Secret Passion , John Huston’s direction is sometimes overly respectful, shying away from overt criticism of psychoanalysis, depicting Freud as a martyr, but there is enough engagement with its subject to make it consistently engaging. The black and white cinematography is crisp and decisively focussed.   Montgomery Clift’s Freud is his most incisive performance.   He had inhabited the role of psychiatrist before, in Tennessee William’s Suddenly, Last Summer , for instance.   In this film he is Dr Cuprowicz, a psychiatrist and a surgeon performing lobotomies in a state hospital which also happens to be cash strapped.   He is urged to perform a lobotomy on Catherine Holly, niece of wealthy widow Mrs Venables, performed by Katherine Hepburn.      Mrs Venables has her own private reasons for wanting Catherine silenced, primarily because she had witnessed the death of her son Sebastian.    Visual icons like the Martyr

Last evening I watched Pat Garret and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah.   I haven't seen such a film for a very long time, dull melancholic edge tainted with sadness and elegiac to the core.   I noticed that there were many production problems, as many as 6 editors, and Peckinpah disowned the film eventually.   I think the problem with the film, however, is Bob Dylan, not the editing.   He clearly can't act, his presence is irritating and, apart from the well-known song, hardly quoted in the film, the soundtrack is underwhelming.   There were so many laudable cameos otherwise, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, and Kris Kristoffersen who pulls it off somehow as Billy but who knows what his acting is really like.   I really wished someone would shoot Dylan just to get him out of the film, instead Pickens is shot and various other worthwhile character actors. The still centre of the film is James Coburn in this, his second film for Peckinpah.   After he shoots Billy