The Alphabet (1968)

Before Eraserhead and everything else he’s famous for, the late David Lynch made this three-minute animated short, inspired by a young relative’s nightmare, wherein the kiddie alphabet song becomes a nightmare of blood, fear, and horror.

It’s loaded with smooth, strange, hand-drawn imagery by Lynch himself, in mostly muted colors, which makes the full-force reds explosive. Characteristic for Lynch, it’s jammed with unsettling background sounds — unrecognizable, unstoppable unless you turn the volume off (but never annoying, so the volume stays on).

In a feature-length collection of Lynch shorts, cleverly called The Short Films of David Lynch, the director mentions that this was his first paid gig as a filmmaker, and he’d been given a completely free hand. “Take the money, do whatever you want, and give me a print,” a benefactor said.

What a dream assignment! And wow, what an announcement The Alphabet is, of what Lynch could do with a few hundred bucks. “Tell me what you think of me,” indeed. It genuinely creeped me out.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

From Rainer Werner Fassbinder and made for German telly, this is a weird-in-a-good-way noir meditation on glumness, casual cruelty, and lousy life. It’s a TV miniseries, so get a comfy seat and spend 15 hours with a middle-aged man who has anger issues and Nazi tendencies.

As the show starts, it’s the 1930s, and a glum, pudgy dude named Franz is being released from prison, where he’s been doing time for murder. He definitely done the deed, but he wouldn’t do something like that again, would he?

Over the run of the show, Franz rapes his girlfriend’s sister, slips into depression, pals around with Nazis and pimps, drinks too much and turns violent again, but between doing other shitty things he occasionally gets glum and guilty about the shitty things he’s done and doing. He loses an arm (it’s gotta be around here somewhere!), which makes him unemployable, but luckily there’s always crime to pay the rent.

You have not seen much like Berlin Alexanderplatz, except after a few episodes when it starts seeming reminiscent of itself. Hour after hour the show stretches on, and sometimes I was tempted to click it off, but then Franz would say or do something oddly human or stupid (as if there’s a difference) and what the hell, I needed to see the next episode, and then the next.

And then, when it seems to be over, the final episode is a bizarre and ludicrous hour-and-a-half flashback through Franz’s unpleasant life, with allegorical flash-forwards through Germany’s unpleasant WW2 future, set to music by Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, The Velvet Underground, and Kraftwerk. It’s brilliant and batshit crazy.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a mirror of The Prisoner — that show was about an inmate in a surreal prison, and this show is about a prisoner released to our surreal world.

Verdict: YES, but not all of it on the same afternoon.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Accuse! (1957)

Everyone’s heard of the Dreyfuss affair, but if it was even mentioned in history class when I was a kid, it whizzed right over my head, or maybe I was skipping that day. Always thought it was some complicated espionage matter, but as presented here it’s simple, straightforward anti-Semitism.

Captain Alfred Dreyfuss was the first high-ranking Jewish officer in the French Army, and within ten minutes (in movie time) he’s charged with treason. There’s no ambiguity, though, he’s innocent as a eunuch in a whorehouse, but he’s convicted in a trial where evidence can’t be presented — state secrets and all — and then sentenced to rot the rest of his life on the notorious Devil’s Island.

Eventually and rousingly, the truth comes to life, but the military being military, there’s no day of reckoning for the liars.

Screenplay by Gore Vidal, seventh cousin once removed to former VP Al Gore. Starring and directed by José Ferrer, father and spittin’ image of his son, Miguel Ferrer, who played the stick-up-his-ass FBI man in Twin Peaks.

This is a well-made film, but the anti-Semitism that powers everything in the plot is treated with feather-duster severity. Dreyfuss being Jewish is mentioned a few times, but it’s never even implied as the motive for framing him. Which is like saying Breonna Taylor was killed by the police — it leaves out a very pertinent detail.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Am Cuba (1964)

Made jointly by the commies comrades of Cuba and the Soviet Union, and recently restored by Francis Ford Fuckin’ Coppola, this is a 1960s love story to Cuba’s new commie regime.

It tells four fictional stories from the pre-revolutionary era, when things were very, very awful, up to the dawn of the Castro era, when Cuba became an island of endless orgasms.

I Am Cuba is lifeless propaganda. We see snotty, wealthy American tourists treat Cubans crappy, before the revolution. We see a hardworking peasant chop sugar cane, drowning in sweat and injustice, and burn his field to prevent United Fruit (a/k/a the CIA) from taking it. Every Cuban is a glorious comrade, victimized by everyone else.

Here comes the secret police, breaking into an underground hiding space and discovering a copy of Lenin’s The State and Revolution. “Whose book is this?” a cop ominously asks.

“It’s ours,” says a handsome rebel, “and anyone who hasn’t read that book is an ignoramus.”

The acting, in Spanish and English, is bilingually bad, and the entire movie is filmed beautifully, dazzlingly, but with a fish-eye lens. That’s a technique usually used to suggest something’s wrong or rotten, so that’s the message here — everything before Castro was wrong and rotten, and the pinko path was the answer.

I don’t strenuously disagree, but the effect grows cartoonish. No denying that the camerawork is stunning, not merely for its time but for our time, and likewise the film’s earnest anti-Americanism is eternally correct. Sheesh, though, propaganda this black-and-white is a bore.

Pity the Cubans who were expected to sit through this movie, eating pinko popcorn, and then applaud as the revolutionaries march to victorious music at the end. Doubtless what they were actually applauding was that the movie was over.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Patty Hearst (1988)

If you’re geriatric like me, you’ll remember that Patty Hearst was a daughter of gazillionaire William Randolph Hearst II. She was kidnapped at age 19 by 1970s radicals pretentiously calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), but there was no army. They were just a handful of counterculture kooks and bank robbers, and after being taken by them, somehow, Patty became one of them.

This is based on Ms Hearst’s memoir Every Secret Thing, and directed by Paul Schrader, the king of going where nobody else goes. Here he goes far inside Patty’s head, with reenactments, imagined moments, and sordid depravity that’s exactly in Schrader’s strike zone, and he hammers a gland slam.

An electronic and woodwind score by Scott Johnson helps ratchet up the crazy. Natasha Richardson’s star-making performance is painfully authentic, and Ving Rhames is chilling and also funny as the SLA’s dimwitted mastermind, Donald DeFreeze, a/k/a ‘Cinque’.

Patty Hearst is sympathetic to Patty, and so am I. My only disappointment is with the facts of the matter, not the movie. I wish she’d remained a radical and continued robbing banks and trying to topple the oligarchy, instead of returning to her quiet life in the marble mansion. Oh, well.

Verdict: BIG YES.

5/4/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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