•THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), •MIDGET CAR MANIACS (- Excerpt: BUCK PRIVATES COME HOME, 1947 -) (1950), •UNIVERSE (1976), •KING SIZE CANARY (1947), •ALLURES (1964), •THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), <<< SHORT AND SWEET!!!

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             SPLODGE! NOTES: 1st. Mon. MAY (03/05/04)
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                           2nd. Quartile

                                MAY
                              AD 2004

                           Monday, 03rd.

             Registration:    7.30    -      8.00 pm
             Screening: >>>>> 8.00  (*EIGHT*!!!!)  pm <<<<<

                   TONIGHT: STRICTLY MEMBERS-ONLY
          MEMBERSHIPS STILL AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR ON THE NIGHT
                          DETAILS  BELOW

                    
                        SHORT AND SWEET!!!

               Firstly, Quickie Theatre returns(!) with:

 

•MIDGET CAR MANIACS (1950),
Excerpt: BUCK PRIVATES COME HOME [aka: ROOKIES COME HOME], (1947). Slicker Smith (BUD ABBOTT) and Herbie Brown (LOU COSTELLO) - two demobbed servicemen - return home from France to civilian life - Herbie having smuggled into the country a little French orphan girl, Evie, who was the camp mascot, and for whom he has developed a fondness ( – in the nicest possible way, mind you. Oh, we are a sick bunch, these days).  They find familiarity in civilian life again by selling neck-ties on a street corner, as they had done so often in past adventures. Having gotten Evie into the country, Herbie now must find a way for her to stay in the US.
They wind up running into their old sergeant - who hates them - and getting involved with a race-car builder who's trying to find backers for a new midget racer he's building. After the bank refuses them a loan for the racecar, they borrow money from their veteran pals.
The boys end up dodging the cops down at the race track, but Slicker is arrested just before the big race. Herbie, who doesn’t even know how to drive, takes off in a souped-up midget car just as the race begins! He misses several turns but there follows a hilarious chase sequence - one of the best on film.
Castle Films capitalized on this hilarious racing footage from this popular Abbott and Costello comedy, and released this retitled 16mm short home-movie version (Castle Films #818). Prod: Robert Arthur. Dir. Charles Barton. Wr. Richard Macaulay, Bradford Ropes, John Grant, Frederic I. Rinaldo, Robert Lees. Phot: Charles Van Enger. Ed: Edward Curtiss. SPFX: David S. Horsley. Starring:  BUD ABBOTT (Slicker Smith), LOU COSTELLO (Herbie Brown), Beverly Simmons (Yvonne 'Evie' LeBrec). 8 mins. ALC

•UNIVERSE (1976),
Journey through the solar system and beyond, to the Milky Way with BILL SHATNER (Captain James T. Kirk - 1966~1997, STAR TREK) - and he should know! - as he takes we Splodge!ers on an information-packed tour deep into the vast reaches of a mysterious and incredibly violent Universe, evolving, developing and populated by clouds of gas and dust, red giants, white dwarfs, and clusters of galaxies populated by billions and billions of stars.
Learn the theories behind black holes, pulsars, the solar system, the planets, the stars and galaxies, in this superb, information-packed, Academy AwardTM-nominated tour through space and time ( - 1 nomination: Documentary "Short Subjects", 1977)!
Explore almost-inconceivable extremes of size and time: from the vast islands of stars called galaxies, to subatomic particles; from cosmic events that occurred billions of years ago, such as the birth of the Universe, to microcosmic events in the present which occur for only a billionth of a second using spectacular ( - for their day! - ) computer-animation techniques and archival film of actual space programmes and technology. Prod: Lester Novros. Prod. Co: Graphic Films Corp. - for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Starring WILLIAM SHATNER. 24 min. NFVLS

•KING SIZE CANARY (1947),
While scavenging for food, a mangy cat, on the verge of starvation, finds a mouse who deflects his menaces over to a nearby canary. However, the canary is scrawny, so the cat hits upon the idea of feeding the bird some of the contents of a handy bottle of "Jumbo Gro", a miraculous plant-growth fertilizer in order to "beef" the warbler up a bit. Soon, the situation competitively takes off as everyone starts swigging the stuff. Once the participants have taken a few belts, suburban America - and then a (Lilliputian) planet - are rampaged by the four gargantuan domestic pets in - what becomes - an escalating power struggle, as canary, cat, dog and mouse grow to larger and larger proportions, spiralling rapidly out of control to a completely ridiculous conclusion.
Absolutely the best cartoon for sheer hilarity that has ever been committed to celluloid! Everything Avery strived to do is here; he loved taking a quasi-normal situation, tossing in a random, improbable element or three, and then piling on sight gag after sight gag - each one more outlandish than the ones before.  The insanity builds from a merely amusing opening to a mind-boggling, yet inevitable, finale, an image that will stay with you for some time after the fade-out. Prod Co: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Director, Tex Avery. 8 mins. NFVLS

•ALLURES (1964),  
This was the first film in which Belson moved away from single-frame animation towards real-time photography. He describes it as a mathematically-precise film on the theme of "cosmogenesis" ( - Teilhard de Chardin's term intended to replace cosmology, and to indicate that the universe is not a static phenomenon but a process of "becoming", of attaining new levels of existence and organisation). Belson sees it as relating more to human perceptions than his subsequent films: "a trip back along the senses to the interior of the being".
Filmmaker Jordan Belson's mathematically precise film on the theme of cosmogenesis (Wow!), utilizing light manipulation and continuous ( - as opposed to stop-motion - ) photography and shot in black and white, presenting evolving geometric patterns of white dots and lines on a black background, exploring metaphysical concepts through abstract imagery.
This film is the combination of "molecular structures" and "astronomical events", mingled with subjective and unconscious phenomena, presented simultaneously. The beginning of the film is almost purely sensual, whereas the end is perhaps "immaterial". It seems to go from the material to the spiritual to some extent.
ALLURES is famous for its designs of circular landscapes, which Stanley Kubrick borrowed as a starting point for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968).
Jordan Belson, painter and experimental scenarist of almost 35 films, was born into 1926 in the USA, graduated from the School of Art at Berkeley in 1947, and devoted himself to abstract expressionist painting. Around that time, he discovered the work of Oskar Fishinger and James Whitney during the 1946 San Francisco Festival of Film Art. He then made his first film TRANSMUTATION (1947), which so strongly impressed Fishinger that he recommended Belson to the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. There, he was exposed to the technique of  "color-morphing" by Thomas Wilfred: he was more interested in the colors and a little less in the geometrical effects. James Whitney worked with him with and took as a starting point Belson's MANDALA (1958) FOR his own LAPIS (1966).
From 1966 to 1968, Belson became familiar with the systems of Yoga, Indian philosophy and Buddhism. after PHENOMENA (1968), he made SAMADHI (1967), WORLD (1970), CHAKRA (1972) and LIGHT (1973).
Hollywood called apon his services for the mental representations of the Proteus computer in Donald Cammell's DEMON SEED (1977) (not-credited), and for Philip Kaufman's THE RIGHT STUFF (1983) (credited).
At the age of 71, he made MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY (1997) on video, and has continued reworking his earlier films with sophisticated variations, producing a series of Caballed Mandala: DIAGRAM, WHEEL OF LIFE, MOTHER UNIVERSE. Filmmaker: Jordan Belson. 8 mins. NFVLS

                         and featuring:

•THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957),
Check out the Movie Trailer (Windows Media Player): http://snipurl.com/606i

 

And this is our favourite TISM web-site, with oodles of still pictures, lobby cards, posters and other images from the film: http://shrinkingman.topcities.com/links.htm

 

The Closing Soliloquy from THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957):
 "I was continuing to shrink, to become...what? The infinitesimal? What was I? - Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I STILL EXIST!" - Scott Carey (the "Incredible Shrinking Man")

Out vacationing on his boat, while his wife - Louise (Randy Stuart) - is below deck, average American "Joe", Scott Carey (Grant Williams - MONOLITH  MONSTERS, also 1957) is enveloped by a strange mist on the open ocean. Days later, he starts to notice that his clothes are starting to become much too big for him, and that he's also losing weight at a rather rapid pace.
In the beginning, he finds support and understanding from his wife and his brother, who take him to the hospital where an attempt is made to find an antidote to stop the shrinking process, but doctors are baffled by his condition, and there's not much he can do but watch himself shrink, shrink, and shrink some more. Seems that the mist was radioactive ( - wasn't everything in the fifties? - ) and is somehow causing his body to diminish. Soon he's an inch tall and living in a dollhouse, hounded by the press, and taking his frustrations out on his perplexed but sympathetic wife.
After facing such trials as confounded doctors and his angry cat, he accidentally gets locked in the basement. His very life then becomes a battle for survival, with only his wits to overcome the liability of his size.
The film really gets moving at the mid-way point, with Scott's famous fight with the house cat and his plunge into the great abyss of the basement where he struggles against hunger, spiders, and the impossible task of scaling the stairs.
This is simply a superb science-fiction drama of a couple's prosperous 1950s world turned upside down, with all the attendant subtexts you'd want to read in that. Interestingly, Carey begins as Joe Average, but, as he gradually shrinks, becomes more deep and humble, and even "poetically intellectual" for a former jock. There’s a wicked irony in how his shrinking begins to "castrate" him in the sexual power-politics stakes, until he's in the humiliated, inferior position to his physically bigger wife. Sinister, as to how their roles slowly reverse - the patriarch is now under foot, literally!
Critics question why the mist did not affect others, including Scott's wife, but the doctors' ( - Raymond Bailey - whom we most-fondly recall as the slimy mercenary banker, Milburn Drysdale, from the BEVERLY HILLBILLIES tv series - and the magnificent WILLIAM SCHALLERT of PATTY DUKE SHOW and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970) fame - ) explanation later, ringing of the warnings of Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING ( - top screenwriting honors go to RICHARD MATHESON (THE OMEGA MAN, 1971; TRILOGY OF TERROR, 1975) for his brilliant script that makes all the pseudo-science believable, and maybe even possible! - ), is that Carey was accidentally previously exposed to insecticides, the two compounds in his system reacting together to create the phenomenon. (This idea was also used in THE LEECH WOMAN (1960), also with Williams, where fluid from a male pineal gland ( - yecch! – 'tho that’d be melatonin, I guess - ) had to be mixed with a floral powder to achieve youth).
Initially, we are held in awe by the attacks from the housecat and the spider, but later one feels great sympathy for Carey and his wife in his predicament. Williams, a handsome Nordic blonde, gives a beautiful performance, and narrates throughout much of the film, which later has no dialogue, but is enhanced by a moving score; the title piece is haunting with its trumpet-solo set against an advancing overwhelming cloud that gets bigger while the human frame dwindles.
Randy Stuart is terrific as the suffering wife, faintly resembling Dinah Shore, she even co-starred with Shore's ex-husband George Montgomery in the following year's MAN FROM GOD'S COUNTRY (1958), her last film. April Kent is warm and sympathetic in her two scenes playing a midget (although not) when Williams is 3 feet high, a poignant interlude. The special effects are supremely done. Master Director Jack Arnold, who later went on to direct episodes of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, paces beautifully. MATHESON's script is intelligent, and the closing scenes have a soaring, wonderous quality the likes of which few films have ever matched.
This is an Existential sci-fi movie. "Man alone against the Universe" is always a powerful topic, and MATHESON, who adapted his own novel for the screen, does an admirable job. Grant Williams' character isn't fighting aliens or demons, but rather the extraordinary circumstance of his mysterious shrinking, and the unforeseen consequences of his ever-dwindling size. Makes you think about the everyday challenges in one's own life, and reflect on the primordial fight for existence in Man's earliest days.
On the surface, TISM conforms to all the usual expectations we have for a sci-fi movie. However, during its final third, the film reveals these deep existential undertones which culminate in Carey's memorable final monologue. Having come to terms with his emasculation, he begins to ponder the meaning of man's existence in a speech reminiscent of Sartre or Camus: "I was continuing to shrink, to become what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? To God there is no zero. I still exist." With its inexorable progression - the hero slowly coming to accept his new, human, yet lone condition, the focus is on state of mind and problem-solving.
The basic idea was used again in other pictures such as ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958) and VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS (1965), but this was the first and by far the best. Director JACK ARNOLD - also responsible for such horror sci-fi classics as CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) - regularly displayed a lot of style and panache when he had a decent script and a good cast to work with.
TISM even explores the inner-psychology of the man trying to understand and eventually accept his situation, and oddly enough, actually becomes a parable for accepting the inevitable, whatever that turns out to be. The man goes through the same process as someone experiencing a terminal disease, trying to keep his dignity and "humanity", at least as far as he sees it, even as it is being taken away from him. The end is nothing less than "transcendental", which is extremely uncharacteristic of the output of American cinema being produced in the 1950s, but this is the result of the imput from MATHESON’S fertile imagination.
As a child, Grant Williams acted in summer stock productions. After graduation from high school he joined the Air Force for a four-year stint. Then, returning to New York, he took acting classes with Lee Strasberg. A few minor Broadway roles followed as did parts on some live TV dramas. One of these parts caught the eye of a talent agent and Williams signed with Universal Pictures in 1956. Universal put him into several supporting roles - most notably as the gas-station stud Biff Miley in DOUGLAS SIRK's WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956) - but the high point of his career came around 1957 in TISM and in THE MONOLITH  MONSTERS.
Director ARNOLD said that Williams gave an OscarTM-worthy performance because, in many special-effects scenes, he could only imagine his surroundings and his fellow actors.
In 1959, Williams moved over to Warner Brothers, which cast him in the HAWAIIAN EYE tv series. After this, Williams' career faded. His last appearance may have been on a FAMILY FEUD episode in 1983, which featured other HAWAIIAN EYE alumni. A lifelong bachelor, Williams died in 1985.
And now, some BAD news, TISM is currently in pre-production for a remake - as a comedy - starring Eddie Murphy! Projected release date is some time in 2005. Pardon me while I barf.
Prod Co: Universal International. Prod: Albert Zugsmith. Dir. JACK ARNOLD. Wr: RICHARD MATHESON (novel THE SHRINKING MAN, & screenplay), Richard Alan Simmons  (uncredited). Phot: Ellis W. Carter. Ed: Albrecht Joseph. Art Dir: Robert Clatworthy, Alexander Golitzen. SFX: Charles Baker, Everett H. Broussard, Roswell A. Hoffmann, Fred Knoth. Mus. Dir: Joseph Gershenson. Mus. HANS SALTER. Orig. Mus: Foster Carling (song), Earl E. Lawrence  (song). Sp. Phot:Tom McCrory, CLIFFORD STINE. Cast: GRANT WILLIAMS (Scott Carey), Randy Stuart (Louise Carey), April Kent (Clarice), Paul Langton (Charles Carey), RAYMOND BAILEY (Dr. Thomas Silver ), WILLIAM SCHALLERT (Doctor Arthur Bramson).  80 mins. NFVLS

 

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          Minor programme changes may occur due to unforseen
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        SPLODGE! GETS BOLSHY WHEN IT'S MATES ARE IN TROUBLE!

Our amiable hosts at The Empress Hotel, who supply us with a safe and
congenial space for our exclusive use and enjoyment ( - which we could
never otherwise afford - ) are under siege by nefarious anti-joy forces, so we are rallying to their help!

If you support Splodge!, you can play YOUR part in helping fight the
sound restrictions unfairly placed on our beloved venue by signing THE
PETITION! And RETURNING IT! ( - You could send it back over to Splodge!, or straight to the kindly folk at the Empress. If you're coming to our future screenings, you'll find a hard copy of the
petition at our admin desk.)

 - Splodge! says thanks for you consideration in this matter. You could not begin to imagine how much our l'il film society owes these people!

"VicMusic supports it. Fair go 4 Live Music supports it. Hundreds - if not thousands - support it and enjoy it!

This call for help is wider, though, not only punters and musicians
need to respond to this call. Anyone who has taken advantage of the colourful and diverse live music scene in Melbourne will be affected by this. The Threat? One resident!

The Empress stands as a 16 year old supporter and promoter of live
music.

And her demise will undermine the value and joy of our inherent musical talent, and jeopardise the future of local businesses and artists. The solution? Well! Its starts with your support at the benefit gigs. 
 
Highly regarded artists such as Vika and Linda, The Lucksmiths and
Machine Translations as well as locally celebrated artists such TZU,
Curse of Dialect, Music Vs Physics and The Dave Broadly Band, to name a few have banded together, making a stand to save a stronghold of the
Melbourne Live music scene currently under fire.

The petition, already signed by so many across Melbourne, is available
at:

             http://www.theempresshotel.com.au "

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