NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL
#421
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)
Irma La Douce (1963)
The Iron Horse (1924)
The Day after Trinity (1981)
Road Movie (1974)
every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)
According to the opening credits: Images by Kenneth Anger, sounds by Mick Jagger. Anger is a famous creator of short experimental films, and you may have heard of Jagger, who makes rock’n’roll.
As usual for Mr Anger, there are no ‘usual’ images here. People seem to be inhaling reefer through a rock-shaped bong. A religious-looking dude hollers on a religious-looking stage, though I don’t recognize the religion and you can’t hear what he’s hollering. Two male torsos merge together like a PushMePullYou. The entire cast walks down a flight of stairs playing musical instruments we can’t hear. Vietnam, Nazis, and a hunky Swedish-looking guy are peripherally involved.
It’s trippy and shimmery, it’s eleven minutes, it’s Kenneth Anger, and it’s cool. I am skeptical, however, that Mr Jagger was involved with the film’s noise.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Irma La Douce (1963)
Produced & directed by Billy Wilder, and written by Wilder and I A L Diamond — a dynamite combo. Some Like It Hot, ’nuff said.
But Irma La Douce is only a mildly amusing and eventually tiresome comedy, about a Parisian prostitute (Shirley MacLaine) and an honest cop (Jack Lemmon) who first arrests her, then falls in love with her.
There’s nothing more to it than that. She’s a hooker with a heart of gold, and he’s an innocent cherub. He wants her to stop with the sex work, but she enjoys it and wants to support him as her pimp and protector.
It’s not awful, and perhaps it was daring or scandalous for 1963. You get a few laughs toward the beginning, but the end is two hours and 27 minutes away, and in between are only sit-com-style complications. It’s visually colorful and of course Ms MacLaine is adorable, but the movie’s at least an hour too long.
Soon-to-be Star Trek‘s Grace Lee Whitney has a supporting role. Bill Bixby is listed deep in the credits, but I nodded off and missed his moment. Also, the Hollands had an aunt named Irma whose name was pronounced correctly, like it’s spelled, so it became annoying to hear everyone say Ear-ma so many times.
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Iron Horse (1924)
The is director John Ford’s first big-budget western, a biopic of the Trans-Continental Railroad. It has trains, sure, but also romance, drama, humor, adventure, treachery, heroics — all the required elements for a blockbuster, and it was, and a century later it still busts some blocks.
The natives are savage, because the movies rarely took a balanced view, and President Lincoln is fair and wise, there’s patriotism all over, massive herds of buffalo are slaughtered to feed Chinese workers, and the railroad must go through, and it does.
If you have an interest in American history or trains, the long scenes of workmen laying rails and hammering spikes look absolutely authentic. This was made only 45 years after the Trans-Continental Railroad’s actual completion, so Ford had living experts to turn to, and the budget to show it accurately, or at least believably. According to the film’s PR, both locomotives in the film’s climactic “golden spike” scene were the same locomotives present when the golden spike was hammered, connecting the east and west coasts for the first time.
This is not John Ford’s best film, which remains Stagecoach, and some of the history lessons presented via intertitles are too wordy, but for a 2½-hour silent movie, The Iron Horse holds up hella well.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Day after Trinity (1981)
“Must’ve been nearly twenty miles away, and it was as if somebody had set off a flash bulb right in your face. It completely blinded everyone for about thirty seconds, then gradually your vision cleared and you saw this huge orange and purple and green and violently colored ball just rolling up towards the sky.”
This is a documentary on the testing of the first atomic bomb. I hadn’t known most of the info here, and my favorite mind-snapper is that Enrico Fermi took bets on whether the first experimental detonation would incinerate the state of New Mexico.
Among other things I hadn’t known: Las Alamos was pretty much built from scratch for the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer (friends called him Oppy) thought he’d need about 30 scientists and their families, but got a walled city of 6,000.
“We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ’Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
I also didn’t know that when Oppy famously said the above, he was on camera, crying.
The only misstep is that the film is narrated by some man with a 10-foot-deep voice, who sounds like the announcer on the old Rocky & Bullwinkle Show. He’s the wrong voice for this material, saying serious things so seriously he sounds like a parody of serious things. Checking the credits after watching the film, he’s Paul Frees — who was indeed the narrator on the old Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.
Written by Jon Else (cameraman on Crumb and The Times of Harvey Milk), David Webb Peoples (Blade Runner), and Janet Peoples (12 Monkeys).
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Road Movie (1974)
Gil and Hank are two men driving their big-rig truck, making payments and deliveries and hoping to get ahead but you know they never will. For fifty bucks — a bargain price, whittled down from $100 — they bring Janice along for the ride. She’s a prostitute, available to both of them in the truck’s rumblebed.
Barry Bostwick, playing one of the truckers, is the only known name in the cast, but Regina Baff as Janice gives the movie its gumption. She’s not playing a clichéd working woman on her way to redemption — Janice is damaged, unpredictable, dangerous if doublecrossed, and she’s not stupid. I fell in love with her when she listened to a kooky Christian radio broadcast and laughed.
This is a 1970s no-budget movie that probably played in drive-ins. It has the requisite sex and violence, but also has something to say. With almost documentary-level glimpses of the American underbelly in the 1970s, you get to know two losers who don’t know they’re losers, and one woman who trades sex for money but refuses to come out behind on the deal.
You think it’s exploitation schlock, and it is, but it’s more, and keeps getting better and better as the movie rolls along.
Also, with my apologies to Ms Baff, she’s not presented as particularly attractive or sexy, which makes Road Movie unique among virtually all movies ever made with a prostitute as a central character. Certainly she’s the opposite of Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce.
Directed and co-written by Joseph Strick (Interviews with My Lai Veterans).
Verdict: BIG YES.
11/1/2025
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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