#63- Woman in the Dunes

Quick recap: A schoolteacher explores the dunes, looking for a rare insect. Realizing he has missed his bus for the night, some villagers offer to help find him a place to sleep. They send him down into a dune with a widow, whose job is to shovel sand for a company. The next morning, the schoolteacher realizes he is trapped. With no way out, he begins to bond with the woman and eventually they fall in love.

obligatory ‘tie her up because she lured me in here’ dance before falling in love

Fun(?) Fact: Quicksand isn’t really all that deadly. Most of the time, it runs just a few feet deep and if you make slow movements, you’ll end up floating to the top and be just fine. I don’t know why, but I always assumed quicksand would be an obstacle in my life at some point and now I’m a little disappointed that it wasn’t the enemy I feared. 😦

bonus fun fact! Apparently there is a fetish for people getting stuck in quicksand. Thanks, Google images!

My thoughts: When people gush to me about their love of foreign films, what they usually mean is Amélie. Which is fine, and I totally get it because it is a sweet movie, after all. But then I have the experience of watching an unexpected foreign film and I wonder why it isn’t getting the same recognition as all the others we ‘love’. Woman in the Dunes is a weird movie, but not so weird that it couldn’t be embraced by all the foreign film aficionados. In fact, if I had to come up with a tagline for this movie, it would be, ‘It’s not El Topo‘. Clear and concise, just the way it should be.

One of the thoughts that struck me throughout the movie was that I could never get a handle on what genre I was actually watching. This was the first time I chose to forgo research before sitting down to watch something and I must say that it increased my affection for the movie just a little bit more because everything is unexpected. The beginning of Woman in the Dunes would make for great horror film fodder: A young man, unaware of his situation, is lured into the dunes where there is no escape. The sand almost becomes a monster, a living thing. It is its own life force. And there is no escaping it. In fact, the widow must shovel daily, not just because it is her job, but also because if she didn’t the sand would bury her house within a couple of days, with her along with it. But it was also horror as the man realized he was just as trapped as his insects were, after catching them. This is his life now.

At some point, the mood changed and the plot centered more on the romance than the Sisyphus lifestyle. Earlier the sand had frightened me, but now it was being used for sexual tension. One of the aspects of living in a dune is that water is not readily available and when it is, it must be rationed. Therefore, when bath day rolls around, it is a big deal. The scenes with the schoolteacher and widow bathing each other were pretty hot and made me wonder if I had a future in writing sand dune related erotic novels. But then I also thought of a certain scene in the desert from El Topo, and the thought was gone. I guess it makes sense that love would blossom, seeing as literally the only other activity is shoveling sand.

And then finally, after an escape attempt where the schoolteacher falls into quicksand, he is resigned to his fate. One day, he stumbles across an idea to pump water from underground so that it will be available at all times. When his lover is taken away due to an ectopic pregnancy, he even has a chance to escape. Instead of doing so, the schoolteacher climbs out of the dune to look at the ocean, and then puts himself right back where he was so that he can continue his project. It was a very depressing ending, although I suppose there are several ways to take it. My opinion is that there are aspects of life that seem like you may be trapped, and you very well might be, but there is always something interesting that you can throw yourself into and focus on.

Final review: 3/5. Very interesting concept, but there were some slow moving parts and it seemed like there was one disaster after another, which lost my interest a few times.

Up next: I actually haven’t a clue. I’m open to suggestions!

#61- Psycho

Quick recap: This is the one with the shower scene.

Fun (?) fact: Alfred Hitchcock tested how scary Mother’s corpse was by placing it in actress Janet Leigh’s dressing room and then hearing how loud she screamed.

My thoughts: If I had to choose one movie that I am most ashamed to have never seen, it would be Psycho. It is one of those movies I know the entire plot and even some quotes, but until last night had never sat down to watch it. I think the two things that surprised me most were 1) Marion dying in the middle of the film (for some reason, I always thought it was at the beginning) and 2) how attracted I was to Norman Bates. I’m sure the latter will be dissected in future therapy sessions, but for now, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with these thoughts.

and such a polite boy. A little stabby at times, but then again, aren't we all?

In thinking further about my thoughts before and after the movie, the character of Marion confounded me more than anything else. I’m not sure what I had pictured her character would be-maybe just an unlucky woman who shows up at the motel, instead of what she turned out to be: A Woman of Ill Repute. Which is my favorite kind of woman, although the statistics aren’t that favorable for such a person surviving in a horror film. I think I actually said out loud, ‘she’s dead!’ when she stuffed the $40,000 into her purse. And as for that Infamous Shower Scene, I was ultimately underwhelmed. I suppose I have been desensitized to such violent scenes thanks to modern films and the news, but still, I was at least expecting a bloodier scene. Instead, the murder scene looked more like that time back in college when I was stupid enough to walk barefoot outside and then step on a shard of glass. I’m sure audiences of the 60s would’ve practically fainted if they had seen my dorm room that night. Marion also doesn’t do any good fighting back. She just screams and lets this guy stab her repeatedly. She is kind enough to turn around several times, though, and give Bates even more stabbing opportunities. What a gal.

The most legitimately scary part of the film was that Bates had kept his mother as a corpse. The corpse itself was also creepy, although it also reminded me of a dried apple. If the film had ended with Bates being caught, I would’ve been satisfied. After all, I mostly believe that evil needs no further explanation. I think the audience already assumed that Bates was dressing up as his mother and murdering people, so why spell it out further? Then again, this was the same audience who, even though this was a black and white movie, fervently believed they had seen red blood during the shower scene. And also, there were faintings during the showing of the film. As a side note, was fainting just a fashionable thing to do back then?Was it a way to woo a suitor? In either case, I’m glad we as a society have mostly grown up in that respect.

Maybe this should be a new category for my blog: Things that shouldn’t bother Mary, but they do. It really annoyed me that Hitchcock tried to pass off Norman Bates talking as his mother when it obviously wasn’t. I know he didn’t want to spoil the surprise, damn him, so he recorded women doing the voice instead of Anthony Perkins. But it also sort of ruined the explanation for me, that he was a schizophrenic who had become his mother, because obviously he didn’t inherit her vocal cords.

Final review: 3/5. I won’t say I was disappointed in the film, because it is very well made and Hitchcock is the master of suspense. But it also didn’t quite live up to the hype.

Up next: Woman in the Dunes

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#31- Splendor in the Grass

Quick Recap: Girl and Boy date. Girl loves Boy, and Boy doesn’t know what he feels except horniness. Boy breaks up with Girl because of said horniness and Girl goes insane. Both lower their expectations significantly and marry other people. A classic tale of romance, indeed!

Memes are hilarious still……right?

Fun(?) Fact: In real life, the actor who plays Warren Beatty’s father is only 13 years older than Beatty. It must have been a very hard 13 years.

I don’t even.

My thoughts: Sex is bad and you should never have it unless you are married. Then again, Deanie, played by Natalie Wood, refused to put out and she ended up in a mental asylum. So…..sex is good! Have lots of it and with lots of different guys! And everyone knows that the best place to meet young suitors is your oil tycoon father’s New Year’s Eve party. That’s what Bud’s sister, Ginny, did! But she also died in a car accident years later, which no one was surprised by. So who the hell knows what the point of this movie is?

Trying to start an orgy with your brother just a few feet away is the classiest way to go

When the synopsis of the movie included the word melodrama, I curled up into a little ball while nightmare-ish visions of ‘Written on the Wind‘ danced around my head. But, while that movie’s ‘melodrama’ consisted of nothing more than a guy going crazy because he couldn’t have children, this one took the description and owned it. SO.MUCH. MELODRAMA.

The point is driven home so many times how much Deanie is in love with Bud. She has pictures of him plastered to her wall and kisses them goodnight often. Instead of paying attention in class, she spends the time doodling her name over and over again with Bud’s last name attached. She patiently waits in his car while he finishes football practice. That kind of adoration will never end well. As for Bud, I think he loved Deanie too, but he also wanted to get in her pants so it was hard to tell. And speaking of getting into pants, Deanie’s mom was all over who was and was not in her pants. She has several conversations with the poor girl about not going too far because it would ‘spoil’ her and no man wants that. And for added proof we see the high school slut that all guys sleep with because they don’t want to ‘spoil’ their girlfriends. Despite all the over the top emotion about love, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty acted so perfectly and natural that I could see various people I knew from high school in this same exact situation.

Beatty and Wood did such a superb job making their characters likeable and able to be sympathized with that I kept hoping they might end up together. Even though that would’ve been a very bad idea indeed. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending with the two of them marrying other people except that I guess teenage love is fleeting and even though it sucks when it ends, we all move on at some point. And if we can’t move on, we get shipped to the mental asylum.

Final Review: 4/5. I’m still not a fan of melodrama but I loved the actors and was especially impressed by Pat Hingle, who played Bud’s father. He was so intense and real that I would watch the movie for his performance alone. Also, I had no idea Warren Beatty looked like this:

oh my.

Up next: The Host at Alamo Drafthouse. It’s going to be a good one!

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#19- Dr. Strangelove

Quick recap: General Ripper orders an air strike on Russia for no reason. As expected, it does not go well. Most of the movie takes place in the war room, as the president and his council attempt to get hold of the situation and recall the alert. Russia is understandably displeased and threatens to set off the doomsday device if they are bombed, ending all humanity as we know it. The movie switches back and forth between Dr.Ripper’s further descent into insanity and on one of the planes carrying the bomb.

Fun (?) Fact: Peter Sellers, who played three major rolls in the film, ad-libbed most of his lines. Kubrick later added the dialogue into the written screenplay.

Dr.Strangelove fighting with his own arm to keep from giving the president the Nazi salute

My thoughts: I don’t have much to say about this movie, unfortunately, for a few reasons. 1. It was directed by Kubrick and I love his ideas so I knew this would be amazing. And that it was. 2. What makes this movie so wonderful is its spot on satire of the cold war. I say ‘spot on’ based on my limited knowledge of the subject, since I wasn’t actually alive at the time. 3. Dr.Strangelove was truly hilarious so me adding anything insightful would just be fruitless. This movie filled in several holes of my pop culture wall. For example, the quote, ‘You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!’ is a line I had heard several times, but only now know where it came from. Same goes for the last scene of the movie, as the Major rides the bomb as if it were a bull in a rodeo. There were so many wonderful moments, but my absolute favorite was the first conversation the president had with the Russian Premier where he explains that the General went and did a ‘silly thing’. The movie is gold, but I’d watch it again for just that one scene.

Yet another Simpsons joke I can better appreciate now!

Final review: 4/5. I’d give it a perfect score, but I know that I missed so many jokes, based on my limited knowledge of the Cold War. That’s probably something I should change. I plan to rewatch this movie again in a year from now and see what I else I can pick up.

Where/how I watched it: Netflix DVD

Up next: High Society

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1001 Movie Nights

Tag Archives: 1960’s

#63- Woman in the Dunes

#61- Psycho

#31- Splendor in the Grass

#19- Dr. Strangelove

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