This essay on Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) was written by Erica Moulton, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen salute to Olivia de Havilland on Sunday, October 30, at 2 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art.

By Erica Moulton

Hush hush, sweet Charlotte
Charlotte, don't you cry
Hush hush, sweet Charlotte
He'll love you till he dies

The lyrics to the theme song of Robert Aldrich’s delightfully disturbing 1964 film Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte sound like a lullaby from a bygone era, but in between the dulcet tones of Frank De Vol’s song hides a deadly message. The eponymous Charlotte, played with maniacal élan by Bette Davis, is an aging southern belle plagued by violent mystery from her past that has left her an agoraphobic deranged old women. She clings to the dilapidated Louisiana mansion left to her by her long dead father (an imposing Victor Buono in flashback scenes), refusing to yield the property to the construction crew who show up every day to tear down her house to make way for a highway (Bette Davis even fires a shotgun at the crew foreman played in a cameo by George Kennedy.)

The story has its roots in the southern gothic stories written by the likes of Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers, but the execution is pure psycho-biddy, with Davis and Agnes Moorehead hamming it up as mistress and housekeeper of Hollis house, screeching and mugging their way through the film. Olivia de Havilland shows up as cousin Miriam, who is tasked with talking reason into Charlotte. Moorehead, sporting a nearly incomprehensible southern dialect, plays Velma, who suspects that Miriam’s intentions may not be entirely honorable.

At the core of the film is a murder mystery, which Aldrich introduces in a lengthy pre-credit sequence. Flashing back to 1927, Charlotte’s father, Big Sam Hollis, is unhappy his young daughter has taken a married lover (Bruce Dern in one of his first roles). At a glamorous party, the lover is brutally decapitated and the murderer is never found. The townsfolk and, at times Charlotte herself, suspect that she murdered him when he told her he planned to go back to his wife (played in present day by Mary Astor). The shocking sequence is as disturbing today as it must have been to audiences in 1964. Back in present day, a group of children stand outside Charlotte’s house taunting her, singing:

Chop Chop Sweet Charlotte
Chop chop ‘til he’s dead
Chop Chop Sweet Charlotte
Chop off his hand and head.

The film was made for 20th Century Fox and planned to reunite costars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford after the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, which was also directed by Robert Aldrich. Hush…Hush was the first film produced by Aldrich’s newly formed Associates & Aldrich production company, and his entire family was involved in the production, with his younger children appearing as actors and his older daughter acting as script supervisor. Aldrich may have surrounded his cast and crew with his family, but one person who did not feel welcome on the set was Joan Crawford.

The legendary feud between Crawford and Davis came to a head during the making of Hush…Hush, and Aldrich sided with Davis. Halfway through production, a dissatisfied and bitter Crawford left the film, citing illness. Aldrich accused her of lying to get out of her contract, and even hired a private investigator to follow Crawford. The director was forced to shut down his production for three weeks in search of an actress to fill Crawford’s role. Davis suggested her old friend from Warner Brothers, Olivia De Havilland, but convincing her to take the role proved a challenge for Aldrich. De Havilland lived in a remote estate in Switzerland, which Aldrich traveled to and spent four days at her home cajoling her into taking Crawford’s part. Looking back on the decision, De Havilland remarked, “I can't say I regretted it, because working with [Davis] was special, but I can't say it was a picture I am proud to put on my résumé.”

Despite her reservations, De Havilland relented, and the film was reshot with her in the role of Miriam. Davis, Joseph Cotten (who plays Charlotte’s family doctor) and Aldrich reportedly toasted Crawford’s replacement on set with Coca-colas (a dig at Crawford, whose late husband was the chairman of Pepsi). There was not enough time to make new costumes, so many of the clothes De Havilland wears in the film are her own, and the cosmopolitan glamor and gentility she brings to the role perfectly offsets Davis’ unhinged look, all spindly braids and flowing nightgowns.

After a fraught production, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte was released in December of 1964. Part horror film, part demented romance, part crime thriller, and a southern gothic tale to boot, it perplexed some critics but delighted audiences, grossing $7,000,000 at the box office. Bosley Crowther, chief critic for the New York Times called the film “grisly, pretentious, disgusting and profoundly annoying” in his review. He also mentions the rather eccentric acting styles, singling out Agnes Moorehead in particular, writing that she “is allowed to get away with some of the broadest mugging and snarling ever done by a respectable actress on the screen. If she gets an Academy award for this performance—which is possible, because she's been nominated for it—the Academy should close up shop!”

De Havilland gives by far the most restrained performance of the main cast. Her naturally warm onscreen presence belies the more sinister aspects of her mysterious character, making the film’s final twist both surprising and ridiculous. Who would have thought that Melanie Hamilton from Gone with the Wind would one day wield a severed head!

This essay on John Waters' Multiple Maniacs (1970) was written by Matt Connolly, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A new DCP restoration of Multiple Maniacs will screen Monday, October 17, at the Marquee Theater at Union South in our Marquee Monday series, co-presented with WUD Film.

By Matt Connolly

Those who have come to know John Waters through his later, irreverent-but-accessible films such as Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990), and Serial Mom (1994) are often dumbstruck when they explore the director’s 70s-era cinematic shockers. The sexual and scatological excesses of films like Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977) continue to jolt some forty-odd years later. Waters’s aficionados take a certain amount of pride in their love for these movies’ hair-raising scenes of gleeful cannibalism, feces gobbling, and chicken-inclusive copulation.

To those die-hard fans, I can only say: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Rarely screened for decades, Multiple Maniacs showcases some of Waters’s most startling scenes of taboo-shattering humor, not to mention the cock-eyed critique of societal norms and hypocrisy that would run throughout his oeuvre. Waters himself deemed Multiple Maniacs his personal favorite amongst his own films, writing in his memoir, Shock Value, “I like the meanness and harsh documentary look; and for the first time the actors could spew forth the endless pages of dialogue I had written, lip-synced at last.” (Indeed, Multiple Maniacs was the first of Waters’s films to have sync-sound—a somewhat astonishing fact, given how central his foul-mouthed dialogue would become to his cinematic world.) Finally back in theaters in a newly restored DCP, Waters’s acolytes and newbies alike can bask in the director’s self-proclaimed “celluloid atrocity.”

The film’s loose plot offers Waters both the opportunity to scandalize his audience and to mock our own desire for such appalling sights. Run by the wild-eyed Lady Divine (Divine) and her sleazy boyfriend Mr. David (David Lochary), the traveling freak show deemed the Cavalcade of Perversion lures in suburban gawkers with the promise of witnessing such “horrors” as puke eaters, bicycle-seat sniffers, and (in a winking nod to the still-restrictive sexual norms of the time) “two actual queers kissing.” Once inside the tent, the audience that sneers and leers at the show’s performers becomes the victims of Lady Divine herself, who proceeds to rob her patrons at gunpoint. Lady Divine grows increasingly unglued when it becomes clear that Mr. David has been cheating on her with the endlessly chatty Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce). Her desperation and rage leads Lady Divine into a series of increasingly jaw-dropping situations, including a “rosary job” given in a local church by prowling sex fiend Mink Stole. The confirmation of David’s infidelity soon pushes Lady Divine into pure psychosis. Without giving away any of the twisted surprises of the film’s final few scenes, I will only say that you’ll never look at a lobster quite the same way again.

As with all of Waters’s films, Multiple Maniacs was shot on location in and around his beloved hometown of Baltimore. Waters recalled the particularly tricky task of finding a church in which they could film the deeply sacrilegious sexual acts that Stole performs on Lady Divine as the latter prays for spiritual enlightenment. The solution came when Waters was introduced to a left-leaning local priest who agreed to allow the filmmaker to shoot in his house of worship. As a radical friend of Waters’s distracted the priest with political chatter, Waters got his scandalous footage, and even grabbed an image of a local actor shooting up on the altar for that extra touch of impiety. With typical impish understatement, Waters would later write “Multiple Maniacs really helped me to flush Catholicism out of my system.”

Ironically, Waters had relied upon local religious institutions as exhibition sites for his previous short films and his first feature, Mondo Trasho (1969). He had first screened his work at the Great Hall of Emmanuel Church, but switched to First Unitarian Church for the premiere of Multiple Maniacs after the reverends at Emmanuel had, in Waters’s words, “decided they had risked their necks enough for ‘art.’” These first showings offered glimpses of the midnight-movie bacchanalia that would soon become associated with Pink Flamingos. A consummate if highly self-conscious showman, Waters loved the outrageous gimmicks of such B-cinema masters as William Castle. He took up exploitation film’s mantle of anything-to-get-em-in-the-door overkill, but did so with an eye towards the trash culture he celebrated in Multiple Maniacs. As a result, lucky viewers at the midnight showings of Multiple Maniacs received such fabulous “door prizes” as a book on Sharon Tate and a pound of ground beef.

Even more so than his previous feature, Multiple Maniacs also made a splash outside of Charm City. Underground Cinema 12, a traveling series of experimental and independent movies, picked up the film and circulated it across the country. Perhaps more importantly to Waters’s burgeoning reputation within the countercultural and queer communities of the early 1970s, Multiple Maniacs played as part of the Nocturnal Dream Shows. A notable midnight-movie program run out of San Francisco’s Palace Theater, the Nocturnal Dream Shows both screened films and showcased the wild stage shows of the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe whose performances blended campy Hollywood glamour with the drug-infused ethos of the Bay Area hippie scene. Waters would soon collaborate with the Cockettes on original live productions starring Divine, who received a rapturous airport greeting by the Cockettes upon first arriving in San Francisco. Such a glowing reception would, in Waters’s eyes, give Divine the confidence that he needed to fully embrace the “terrorist drag queen” persona perfected in Pink Flamingos. “It was the first time Divine became Divine in his other life,” Waters told critic Scott MacDonald, adding that Divine’s “whole life changed. He realized he wanted to do this for a living.”

Certainly, Multiple Maniacs proves fascinating in how it lays the groundwork for Waters’s later 1970s masterpieces. Not only does Divine fully come into focus as a character and persona, but Waters’s stalwart and Pink Flamingos stand-out Edith Massey first graces the screen here as a barmaid and confidante of Lady Divine. You don’t have to be a Waters’s devotee, however, to appreciate Multiple Maniacs’s defiantly grimy aesthetic, its pitiless upending of social mores and good taste, its fervent and witty celebration of the deviant and debased. Few lines capture that unique Waters’s mixture of aggression, affection, and bodily excretion better than Mr. David’s breathless ode to his beloved Bonnie: “I love you so fucking much I could shit.”

This essay on Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue was written by Vincent Mollica, WUD Film Programmer and previous contributor to this blog. A 35mm print of Out of the Blue will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, on Saturday, October 1, at 7 p.m.

By Vincent Mollica

Following the massive success of Easy Rider, people wanted more directed by Dennis Hopper. However, when the counterculture radical/actor/director released the gonzo The Last Movie in 1971, audiences wanted nothing to do with it. Although a fascinating achievement, the film was a colossal failure leaving Hopper, at least as a director, to become a persona non grata in Hollywood. A 1978 New York Times interview finds Hopper, although still acting, tucked away in New Mexico, drinking with his pals Neil Young and Dean Stockwell, truly living the hippie dream. Hopper ends the interview by saying that if he were to direct another feature he would like this one to be easier to follow, while still being a film that would “torment” audiences.

An opportunity to make such a film would arise for Hopper soon after that interview. Hopper was initially meant to act as the abusive father in the Canadian melodrama Cebe about a young girl in peril (Linda Manz, star of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven) and her kindly psychiatrist (Raymond Burr). However, Hopper became director after producer Paul Lewis deemed its current director (Leonard Yakir) too inexperienced. Although he doesn’t carry a screenwriting credit, Hopper completely reconstructed the film. Hopper seemed to have a lot of contempt for the aging Burr. He shot many scenes with him, but Hopper knew he would cut him down to two scenes. Hopper comically notes Burr never knew he wasn’t the film’s lead. The emphasis was placed on Manz’s character with a secondary focus on her father and their troubled relationship.

The film, now called Out of the Blue, starts with the father (still Hopper) crashing into a school bus full of children and blowing it up. The story picks up with Hopper in prison and Manz living in a state of total independence, despite living with her kind, but ineffectual, mother (Sharon Farrell). She struts around with her walkman and denim jacket, acting as if the rest of the world exists only to entertain her. Hopper is released from prison, and although he starts to acclimate back into society, with an adoring Manz by his side, he descends into a drunken, violent state. This results in a troubling and unexpectedly brutal finale, especially for Manz’s character. At the end of the film, whether it’s better or not, its characters burn out rather than fade away.

On the film’s DVD commentary track, Hopper claims the film is a “pretty raw look at life.” Despite its more conventional aesthetic and style, Out of the Blue is certainly a raw film. Some have seen it as a kind of commentary on American society at the end of the ‘70s, a reading perhaps driven by having Hopper at the helm. A Variety review from Cannes claims the film looks at “what the 70s drug culture and dregs of the counterculture could have wrought on those easy riders who got off their bikes and tried to conform and had children.” Hopper says that allusions to the kind of characters found in Easy Rider are unintentional, although he doesn’t dismiss the idea.

Another reading might be a feminist one, invited by a gender non-conforming lead character as well as her, eventually, violently intolerant father figure. In a 1983 Heavy Metal interview, when asked about his use of such a “strong, independent, female lead,” Hopper seems progressively minded but he also self-consciously remarks “there’s a great part of me that has always been very cruel, I guess, to women, because I don’t understand them.” It’s a statement that forces one to think about the threat of physical and sexual violence that permeates Out of the Blue’s conclusion, as well as Hopper’s own abuse in his marriage to Brooke Hayward years earlier. The film feels like both a reflexive look at toxic masculinity and potentially an expression of the same.

However, there’s still a lot of joy in Out of the Blue. The film’s most notable aspect is Linda Manz’s Cebe and her relationship with music. Hopper took a liking to Manz on set, and helped form a unique punk character for her. In one sequence Cebe hitchhikes to Vancouver and infiltrates a punk show where the drummer allows Cebe to play. Cebe and the drummer are up against a brightly lit open wall, complete with silly poster, so the moment has a warm quality which matches the sweet interaction between the two. In this moment music is an awesome force that Manz timidly starts to tap into. Hopper says of this moment “she’s scared to death, you can see it in her.” However, as indicated by the warm mise en scène, this fear is an exciting one. Like many people in real life, without other guiding forces, music is Cebe’s roadmap in life, shaping her identity and serving as a great emotional outlet. One wonders about a grownup Cebe, perhaps becoming a Riot Grrl or a Penelope Spheeris-like filmmaker.

Out of the Blue played at Cannes IN 1980, where it picked up fans like Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, however, it took several years until getting distribution through Discovery Films. Ebert and Canby supported the film on successful small release, and Jack Nicholson, another fan, did a radio spot promoting it. Three years later Hopper would act as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which may go down as his most known performance. Manz did not really work in film after Out of the Blue, although she does appear in 1997’s Gummo. However, a 2011 Village Voice interview with her makes it seems like it’s not a huge deal for her (“I haven’t been to a movie in 20 years…”). It may not carry a huge reputation but, even with its problematic climax, Out of the Blue is a special film. In some ways it’s a follow up to Easy Rider (it was this similarity that attracted the film’s eventual distributor). It’s another tragedy about sticking it to the man, and living a life out of a status quo. However, in placing a focus on gender and music, as well as reigning in some of his excesses, Hopper made a deeply felt, sympathetic piece of cinema.

This essay on Satoshi Kon's Paprika (2006) was written by Jacob Mertens, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Paprika will screen at 7 p.m. on Saturday, September 24, a screening that marks the conclusion of our Heroines of Anime series.

By Jacob Mertens

The international trailer for Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) offered a compelling pull quote from The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, stating that Kon’s film proved “that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox.” The quote never made Dargis’ print review, but resonates in a trailer filled with fantastic imagery. Her words underscore a promise for experimentation and mature themes delivered by a national cinema committed to exploring animation’s full potential. In practice, Paprika over-delivers on this promise, not only demonstrating the diversity of Japan’s animation but also the mastery of a director at the height of his expressive powers.

In the opening sequence of the film, Detective Kogawa Toshimi wanders through his own dream, accompanied by the dream therapist Paprika. The two flit between environments as a circus bleeds into a jungle, then a train, a crowded dock on the water, and a hotel hallway that spans into an endless horizon. Kon transitions between these settings through a series of matches on action, creating a sense of continuity amidst these discordant shifts. In other words, the film’s match cuts help to reinforce the coherence of an otherwise incoherent dream. Kon further complicates this sequence by undermining the dreamer’s identity, such as when the circus crowd suddenly mimics the detective’s appearance and charges him, or by having the world of the dream deteriorate at its end. All this happens in less than three minutes, setting the tone for a film that subverts the boundaries of waking life and fantasy.

Paprika also signaled the culmination of themes that had preoccupied Kon throughout his career. In Perfect Blue (1997), the director used disjunctive edits to disrupt a character’s sense of reality and identity. In Millennium Actress (2001), he used an unconventional narrative structure and matches on action to show an aged actress shifting into past roles and memories. And in Tokyo Godfathers (2003), admittedly the most conventional of Kon’s films, the director privileged characters who are, for one reason or another, haunted by their past while living in a stagnated present. Throughout Kon’s cinema, characters are not always who they say they are or even who they think they are. Notions of identity, memory, and reality remain constantly in flux and the world reflects that uncertainty in increasingly bold and nuanced ways. 

These motifs find fruition in Satoshi Kon’s final film. In Paprika, the therapist Dr. Atsuko Chiba gains the ability to enter the dreams of her patients using a device called the DC Mini. Once there, she assumes the appearance and wholly changed personality of her alter-ego Paprika. In real life, Dr. Chiba appears reserved and thoughtful. In the dream world, Paprika is suddenly free and vivacious. Presumably, the dream allows Dr. Chiba to express a part of her personality that remains carefully controlled, and in some respects repressed, in the real world. However, after the DC Mini is stolen, reality and dreams begin to merge and the environment that once gave Dr. Chiba affirmation and freedom becomes compromised by the ill will of other dreamers. As the film spirals, Dr. Chiba must resolve her conflicted sense of self and past suppression of emotions, all while navigating a dream world that devolves into a nightmare. In the end, the film refuses to give its viewers level footing, embracing a radical narrative progression that prioritizes imagination and emotional engagement above all else.  

Satoshi Kon’s career was short-lived. He died of pancreatic cancer four years after completing Paprika, at the age of 42. However, with just four films and a televised series to his name, he managed to push the boundaries of style and storytelling in ways that captured the full power of his medium. Unlike some artists who died before their time, we do not have to lament potential left unrealized. Among Satoshi Kon’s limited oeuvre, his first film Perfect Blue and last film Paprika stand out as unquestionable masterpieces. They are films that not only experiment with animation in formally exciting ways but do so while telling stories that make use of animation’s ability to show us a world that can change or dissolve or reconfigure itself at will. And while Perfect Blue was conceived amidst the opening gambit of a new movement in Japanese animation—joined by influential works like Akira (1988), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), and Princess Mononoke (1997)—Paprika in many ways marked that movement’s zenith. One only wishes that Kon lived long enough to tackle the unenviable task of following up such a critical success.