Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: The Twilight Time Edition of 'Flaming Star'

The things we expect from an Elvis movie—mindless joviality, pretty actresses, mediocre songs—arrive early in Flaming Star. Then just ten minutes in, shocking acts of violence transform it from an Elvis movie into a movie starring Elvis Presley. The title does not refer to a celebrity pop singer; it refers to “the flaming star of death,” and this western is nothing if not elegiac and serious as a stopped heart.

A hint that this might not be your typical romp with the King of Rock & Roll is dropped in the opening credits when the words “Directed by Don Siegel” flash on the screen. Siegel is renowned for dead-dark stuff like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers, and Dirty Harry. He doesn’t let any light shine in no matter who’s starring in his movie, and though Elvis is really part of an ensemble cast in Flaming Star, there’s no question who its star is. As the half-Native American son of a multiracial frontier family, Elvis is clearly the stand out player. He took his work on the film so seriously that he insisted the other unnecessary musical numbers Siegel shot be cut from it.

Elvis is Pacer. He and his family are caught in the middle of a war between white invaders and the Kiowa tribe. Depicted as craven, hot-blooded racists and rapists, the whites want Elvis’s all-white half-brother Clint (Steve Forrest) to fight alongside them. Led by Chief Buffalo Horn (Mexican actor Rodolfo Acosta) and driven by honor and the understanding that the whites intend to wipe them off their own land, the Kiowa believe Pacer should stand with them. The brothers vow loyalty to their family alone until another act of violence impels Pacer to take a side. 

Not only is Flaming Star unusually serious, violent, and light on music for a movie with Elvis Presley, it is uncommonly thoughtful too. The filmmakers clearly side with the Kiowa (and rightfully so) yet they are completely honest about the violence and tragic mistakes either side of any war perpetrates. That honesty extends to the way Siegel shot his film. He curbs the stylized strokes he brought to Body Snatchers and The Killers for a more straight-forward, more realistic approach in Flaming Star. Siegel works with pale daylight exteriors, dim blue nighttime ones, and shadowy interiors, making Flaming Star a sort of color noir without the weird angles.

Twilight Time’s new blu-ray of Flaming Star respects its muted aesthetic with fine clarity, depth, and grain. Film Historians Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman provide an audio commentary in which they discuss Elvis’s movies without pulling punches and relate how the relative commercial failure of Flaming Star ultimately did them a disservice. Interesting to my fellow horror fans is an extended discussion of how Barbara Steele was originally cast for a minor role that ended up going to Barbara Eden (who is quite good). The disc also includes original trailers and an isolated score track.

So long, Kevin McCarthy

It was arguably the most genuinely disturbing scene yet to appear in an American film: Kevin McCarthy zig-zagging between speeding cars in a paranoid frenzy, screaming through windows with crazed futility, "You're next! You're next!" At the last moment, his mad eyes glare directly into the camera to warn the viewer that she or he is not safe either.

Kevin McCarthy may have performed in some 200 films and TV shows during his 96 years, but it is his starring role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers for which he'll always be best remembered. And the above scene particularly solidified his role as a cinematic icon. Philip Kaufman even had him recreate that scene for comedic effect in the 1979 remake of Body Snatchers.

But McCarthy's creepy credentials don't end with the original 1956 sci-fi-horror classic. Certain young genre fans who were terrified and enthralled by his work in Invasion of the Body Snatchers grew up to be folks like Joe Dante, who cast McCarthy in Piranha, The Howling, and one of the better segments in Twilight Zone: The Movie. That final title was particularly appropriate considering that McCarthy starred in the classic original "Twilight Zone" episode "Long Live Walter Jameson". McCarthy's square jaw, animated expressions, and nervous energy were fixtures of film and TV right up through the current year (according to his imdb page, he played in a 2010 short film called "Drawback").



McCarthy died on Saturday, September 11th, of natural causes.