Showing posts with label Lew Ayres. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lew Ayres. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 December 2021

Salem's Lot

 Year of Release:  1979

Director:  Tobe Hooper

Screenplay:  Paul Monash, based on the novel 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

Starring:  David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres

Running Time:  183 minutes

Genre:  Horror


Writer Ben Mears (Soul) returns to his childhood home of Salem's Lot, a small town in Maine, where he hopes to write a book about the nature of evil, inspired by the sinister Marsten House, the local "haunted house".  However, Ben is not the only newcomer to Salem's Lot.  Debonair antiques dealer Mr. Straker (Mason) plans to open a shop with his mysterious partner Mr. Barlow (Reggie Nalder).  Before long the town is plagued by a mysterious disease and a spate of disappearances.  It quickly turns out that Barlow is a vampire who is feasting on the townspeople, who become vampires themselves.  Soon, it is up to Ben, horror-obsessed teen Mark (Kerwin) and Susan (Bedelia), daughter of the local doctor, to stand against a town of the undead.

Directed by Tobe Hooper, who made his name with the classic horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this was originally shown as a two part miniseries on NBC TV in America, and it has been released subsequently as a 150 minute TV movie and a 114 minute theatrical movie which lops off over an hour of material and includes more gruesome alternate takes of certain scenes to increase the gore quotient.  The three hour version has a slow start, and is definitely too long, and has some obvious breaks for adverts.  It also pulls some of it's punches in deference of TV standards and practices.  However, sometimes it really works well. David Soul, best known for the TV show Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979), is pretty bland, but James Mason steals the show as the silkily sinister Straker.  The production is full of veterans, such as Lew Ayres and B-movie stalwart Elisha Cook and soon-to-be familiar faces such as Bonnie Bedelia, who is probably best known as Bruce Willis' estranged wife in Die Hard (1988) and would appear in Needful Things (1993), another Stephen King adaptation about a sinister antiques dealer in a small Maine town; Fred Willard who would go on to appear in This Is Spinal Tap (1983) and the Anchorman films; and Kenneth McMillan who would appear as the grotesque Baron Harkonnen in the David Lynch film Dune (1984).  The novel is a solid slice of early Stephen King, and the film follows it fairly closely.  The main difference is that Barlow in the novel is a suave Count Dracula style vampire, but here he is a grotesque, silent monster, inspired by Nosferatu (1921) with blue-white skin, bat-like ears and rodent-like teeth, with shining yellow eyes.  It is pretty slow to begin with, opening like a kind of off-beat soap opera, but if you stick with it, the second half is genuinely creepy,  The floating vampire children, with their shining silver eyes, scratching and tapping at windows, begging to be let in, are memorably eerie.  The decayed interior of the Marsten House is creepy, and Barlow's sudden appearances are quite frightening, particularly when he appears as a small, crawling bundle on a kitchen floor, before rising up to unveil himself in front of a terrified family.  This has become something of a cult film in recent years, and while some may struggle with the length and slow pace, it is worthwhile sticking with it.



Ben Mears (Davis Soul) in Salem's Lot

Saturday, 23 April 2011

All Quiet on the Western Front

Year: 1930
Director: Lewis Milestone
Screenplay: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson, Del Andrews and C. Gardner Sullivan, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque
Starring: Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray, Arnold Lucy, Ben Alexander
Running Time: 138 minutes
Genre: War, drama

Summary: Germany, 1914: World War One has just begun and people are swept up with patriotic fervour, believing that the war will be over within a few months. Among those caught up in the excitement are a class in a boy's High School who, egged on by their teacher (Lucy), decide to enlist in the Army en masse. After surviving basic training under the sadistic Sergeant Himmelstross (Wray), the boys are sent to the front line in France. Once there, their patriotic fervour and enthusiasm for warfare is quickly crushed by the brutal realities of trench warfare.

Opinions: This film is a powerful anti-war statement and has influenced war films ever since from Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) to Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997) and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998).
The film is a real epic following a large number of characters over a long period of time. At a time when sound cinema was in it's infancy, many early "talkies" were noted for being very static, due to the problems of recording sound, but this film uses a highly mobile camera. The battle scenes which proved to be hugely influential are still powerful, intense and genuinely shocking, even if some of the techniques used in them, such as speeded up film don't really work.
The film also depicts the hardships, drudgery and sheer boredom and stress of the soldier's lives in between the battles. Enlivened only by grim humour and the occasional periods of rest and recreation, they live in miserable, rat filled conditions usually with nothing to eat.
The acting is good from all involved, even if it is jarring at times to hear the German characters speaking with American accents. Milestone direction is impressive, with the battle scenes in particular handiled with great skill and sensitivity, however he was also as sure with the quieter scenes
The movie was hugely acclaimed on its inital release and was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning two (Outstanding Production and Best Director). On it's release in Germany the film was heavily criticised by the Nazi Party who disrupted screenings by releasing rats and throwing stink bombs into cinemas. When they came to power they banned the film outright and it wasn't released in Germany again until 1956.
This remains one of the great anti-war films and a classic of the genre and it has lost none of it's power to move and shock.




Lew Ayres and Raymond Griffith in All Quiet on the Western Front