Word: vagabonde
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Richard Corliss's piece "Sex! Violence! Trash!" on so-called exploitation movies of the past belongs in the third category because of its lack of focus and misinformation [CINEMA, July 7]. Corliss branded my father, Edgar G. Ulmer, "the vagabond king of grade-Z films." My father's films did not purvey either sex or violence; perhaps their budgets were sometimes trashy, though only by necessity. None of his films were exploitive in the sense used in the article, but all were exploitable--read marketable--by virtue of my father's creativity as a director. His movie Detour...
...were the independent filmmakers in an era dominated by Hollywood. No one made black films for black audiences, so Micheaux did, beginning in 1918; and if his films often showed an actor waiting for him to bark out a stage direction, they satisfied their constituency. Edgar G. Ulmer, the vagabond king of grade-Z films, directed the black musical Moon over Harlem--as well as pictures in Yiddish and Ukrainian--all in the same year (1939). These guys were tireless: from 1935 to 1945, hack-of-hacks Sam Newfield directed an impossible 150 quickie movies, including the grindhouse curio...
...harder and harder to ignore, as the film is buffeted about by the tired-eyed wonder of the younger and the stilted bluster of the elder. Apart from a consistently hilarious deadpan performance by Mary Kay Place, the story remains dreamy and quirky, but, almost too faithful to its vagabond kiddie heroes, a little grating and puzzling...
Stone plays Charles with some discomfort. Charles is a stock character, a young vagabond whose ignorance makes him vacillate between over-confident threatening statements to pathetic acts of (sincere?) sorrow. I do not know if it is with the acting or the directing, but Charles needs to be slimier. He is a con man who is trying to get money out of John while feigning gay companionship. While Stone utilizes his Pudding past and tries to play up the effeminacy of his gay character, it is not made certain until Charles threatens to leave John if he does not swindle...
...pulp. His outward emotions change, almost as visibly as his eye blackens. But by the end, he opts not for love but for wandering. This type of movie could undercut all of the statements of modernity Leigh has spent two hours making. Johnny must continue his solitary, vagabond ways with only his sharp wit and active libibo. Like a modern-day Huck Fin, Johnny sees the skeleton that forms the basis of the human psyche, he also sees the skeletons in everyone's closet. With this knowledge and his determination, we hope he finds the meaning that he wants...