Head

MOVIES that include quotes from other movies generally run afoul when the excerpted film makes its showcase suffer by comparison. It happens even to good films. Vivian Kurz in Andrew Meyer's Match Girl watches a chunk of Vertigo on TV, and a sensible spectator gets irritated when Meyer decides to return to his own film. The same holds for Peter Bogdanovich's Targets: even the glimpse of Hawks' The Criminal Code Bogdanovich shows us is enough to persuade that it has Targets beat by a mile.

Derivative movies, those which imitate better films, are somehow more tolerable since they don't offer concrete alternatives to the immediate reality of the film on the screen. The Monkees' Head (a real stinker, by the way) holds the dubious distinction of both quoting and copying other films.

About fifteen minutes into the picture, a television set presents us with a sublime moment from Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, starring Karloff and Lugosi. Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a tortured psychoanalyst imprisoned during WW I by the villainous General Poelzig (Karloff) who, in turn, married and murdered Werdegast's wife Karen. Werdegast, after fifteen years in the prison from which few men return ("I have returned," he says gravely at one point), journeys to Poelzig's house to investigate Karen's death and eventually kill the murderer. Through a nasty turn in the weather, he is accompanied by two American newlyweds honeymooning in Hungary. Of course, their unexpected presence in Poelzig's fantastic Bauhaus mansion (built on the ruins of the most impressive battlefield-graveyard produced by the War) cramps his style--particularly when Poelzig takes a fancy to the young bride and decides to make her the victim in the very next congregation of a devil cult Poelzig heads.

When Head cuts in, the young bride has gone into a strange trance as a result of a sedative Poelzig has given her, as well as the sensual psychic vibrations emanating from the house. Werdegast is explaining all this to the bewildered husband, who skeptically asserts, "Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me." Werdegast smiles calmly and explains, "Supernatural perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not." Definitely one of the great moments of the American screen.

EDGAR ULMER'S films constitute a relatively unknown group of excellent low-budget pictures made during a period of more than 30 years. His art is in many respects highly pictorial, yet in the most developed films his complicated intellect adds dimension to the straightforward impact of the images. In The Black Cat and The Naked Dawn, initially simple confrontations are made ambiguous by Ulmer's elusive concept of morality. The camera often works against the script in directing audience sympathies, and should we feel secure in our assessment of character relationships, Ulmer will invariably undermine the status quo and shift the dramatic balances. Consequently, Ulmer presents dozens of ideas in terms of changing moral alternatives, choices presented both to characters and audience. This becomes disturbing since the melodramas ostensibly deal with good and evil while actually wandering the vast territories in between.

Like Lang's, Ulmer's work tends to combine shots in constant motion, the camera slowly dollying in or out. Godard says that the director's decision to move the camera is a political act; for these greater film-makers, Lang and Ulmer, it is perhaps applicable that moving shots represent decisions of morality in terms of the dynamic relationship between foreground and background. In addition to Ulmer's command of composition, lighting, and occasionally dazzling montage, is his ability to translate these subtle aspects of morality into cinematic spectacle.

In simple cases like Carnegie Hall he imparts a sense of total grandeur to the symphony, singling out groups of instruments without losing the greater visual scheme of their physical and musical relationship to the rest of the orchestra. This makes him ideal for that potentially pedestrian assignment, as well as for The Black Cat where Poelzig's house becomes an incredibly grand stage for the anguish displayed.

In later scenes Ulmer substitutes anticipated melodramatics with long and thoughtful camera journeys through the strange geographies. A guided tour of Poelzig's basement reveals his beautiful victims perfectly preserved in suspended glass coffins; Ulmer's camera explores the photographic potential of the situation: one shot has Poelzig screen left, the girl screen right; another Poelzig reflected in the glass, his face partly superimposed over the girl; a third the corpse, her own reflected image, and Poelzig in background, etc.

Oh yes, Head. After a well-conceived opening sequence, its humor descends well beneath that of The Monkees' TV show, despite the implications of one of the most calculated publicity campaigns in recent memory. The quartet have mercifully honored us with only five songs, indistinguishable from one another with the exception of The Porpoise Song which has been on the radio for 41/2 months. The director plainly aspires to TV commercials and thinks he's got a line on how to be Richard Lester. He's mistaken. The film's distinguishing trait is its unbelievable paranoia: the plotless action has The Monkees chased, separated, persecuted, imprisoned, ignored, shot at, busted, spyed upon, abandoned, attacked, starved, crated, drowned, dropped from great heights, shrunk, crushed, disbelieved, stripped, transfigured, and generally much maligned. Head earns the prize for Biggest DOWN of 1968. Your initial inclination might be to go stoned, but don't take the chance.