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The Internet Archive now offers the complete film The Outlaw as a free download.

Howard Hughes produced and directed this wonderful western turkey as a vehicle for his 19 year old mistress, Jane Russell. The exentric multi-millionair even had a team of aircraft engineers working on the problem of how to make certain parts of the young starlet’s anatomy display perfectly on screen, thus spawning the invention of the push-up bra.

After firing (brilliant) director Howard Hawks, Hughes decided to direct himself, which probably helped make this movie strange and boring, instead of just boring. He also did his best to whip up a lot of scandalous publicity about the films shocking sexuality. This ensured that the film was held back for years by censors, thereby turning a pretty bad movie into a cult classic. All in all there is only one good reason to see this movie, and that is Jane Russell. Err… Make that two reasons.

Before every home in the western world had a television set, there was another popular device which stood in a prominent place in most living rooms. It was called a radio. Whereas moving pictures had to be pre-recorded (for obvious celluloid reasons), radio was usually live. There was no practical way of editing an audio recording, so a radio show was often performed on the fly, and then recorded for preservation as it was broadcast, complete with live sound-effects and music.

These recordings are now mostly in the public domain, which means that they are no longer copyrighted. Or to be more precise… very few broadcasts from the golden age of radio were ever copyrighted to begin with. The trick is to find these old broadcasts online for free. There used to be plenty of sites that had huge archives of old radio shows, but it seems they have now all discovered that it’s possible to charge money for something they themselves have downloaded for free earlier. People are scoundrels. Nothing new there.

There are still a few places that offer some free downloads. One good place to start is with my favourite show; Bold Venture hosted by RadioLovers.

Bold Venture starrs Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and takes place in “the sultry setting of tropical Havana and the mysterious islands of the Caribbean”. Each episode is pretty much a radio version of a typical Bogie-movie of that era. He plays Slate Shannon, an American who for unexplained reasons have withdrawn to an exotic location where he now runs a cheap run-down hotel. He has Sailor Duval, a beautiful young woman, hanging around the hotel. She makes occasional passes at him, but he brushes her off. Of course. In ’40s and ’50s fiction, it is the young women who chase the middle-aged men. He also has a simple-minded ethnic comic sidekick in the form of a calypso-singer named King Moses. And there is the boat, Bold Venture, which he charters out to all the unsavory characters that drift into his hotel.

It sounds exactly like Casablanca, or To Have And Have Not, or Sirocco or any other 1940s tropical noir-script. Which is precisely what is so great about it. And it works as radio since the black & white movies of that time have some of the same artificial studio-abstraction from reality.

What is somewhat less impressive is the audio quality on most of the episodes. Bold Venture was recorded on a exciting new invention called audio tape. The technology was developed by the nazis during the war and then “liberated”. As I mentioned earlier, radio shows were usually broadcast live. Bogart himself had done several radio plays. There are various different radio versions of Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and other Bogart classics. Each starring all of, or part of the original cast, and broadcast live.

Bogart however, was not interested in committing himself to a long-running radio series. There were places to go and movies to be made. But when tape was being experimented with for radio, he was willing to do it. They recorded 78 episodes of Bold Venture, adding music and sound-effects later. Bogart and Bacall were free to travel to Africa to shoot The African Queen for John Huston while the show was being put on air back home. That must have been pretty impressive in it’s day. A bold venture indeed.

Visit RadioLovers’ Bold Venture page

The Internet Archive now offers Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 masterpiece The Man Who Knew Too Much as a free download.

Hitch remade this movie in 1956 when he was at the top of his fame and had every resource at Universal Studios available to him. But while he himself considered the remake superior to the original, it is in my opinion almost unwatchable due to the inclusion and seemingly constant repetition of Doris Day’s hit song Que Sera, Sera.

The original however, is uncontaminated by this unbelievably annoying piece of audio cheese. It is also a great example of Hitchcocks influences from German expressionism, and of what miracles that man could perform with a small budget and a mediocre script. It also has Peter Lorre, which adds about ten points to any ’30s evil villain-thriller. Fetch.

Here is something you don’t see every day… a filmmaker who makes an entire feature film of his available for download. And it’s well worth watching. Shot in black & white in New York City, it pulsates to a quiet reggae dub beat, which isn’t what most filmmakers would have thought up. With an almost constant narration through much of it, and everyday scenes viewed from surveillance camera angles, this is the kind of film that many people are likely to either love or hate. Ok, so that love and hate thing could probably be said about nearly all movies. It was a dumb thing to say. What I mean is… people are likely to find it either pretentious or fresh, depending on how many independent films they have seen and their own level of cynicism.

It is slightly reminicent of the opening montage of Manhattan, but without the iconic, timeless Gershwin mood. It is sort of indiely similar to Family Viewing, but not quite as clearly narrated. It is as inaccessible as a Fellini film, but frankly not as brilliant. It does have however, a very pleasant low key groove of unspoken drama. The conflicts are inside the characters and we can only covertly watch from across the room and wonder what they are thinking. The question is if these images are strong enough to stick with us until we have had time to make up our minds.

In either case I suggest you download it, if you have the bandwidth, and watch it. It is worth 98 minutes of most peoples lives. (Actually, anything is worth 98 minutes of mine). It is also a film that may be unlikely to appear in the shelves of your local video store. At least if you live in Norway, where we only watch Steven Segal-movies. (It’s in our constitution right below the paragraph about drinking only beer). Go on, give a modern movie in black & white a chance. Nobody needs to know.

Discovered through Errata

The Internet Archive keeps adding goodies to it’s already huge collection of royalty-free downloadable media.

Their current spotlight feature is Herk Harvey’s 1962 low-budget masterpiece Carnival of Souls. It’s even the director’s cut, judging from the length. Shot for just over $30.000, this is the kind of film that fills a failed filmmaker like myself with envy. Film critic Roger Ebert says:

“Unlike most of today’s horror movies, Carnival of Souls has few special effects — some wavy lines as we pass through various levels of existence, and that’s it. Instead, it depends on crisp black-and-white photography, atmosphere, and surprisingly effective acting. It’s impossible to know whether this movie was seen by such directors as David Lynch or George Romero. But in the way it shows the horror beneath the surface of placid small-town life, it suggests Blue Velvet, and a shot of dead souls at an abandoned amusement park reminded me of the lurching undead in Night of the Living Dead.”

Which brings us to another downloadable free film, George Romero’s original zombie classic Night of The Living Dead.

I was discussing the 1949 film noir D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) just the other day with one of this weblogs four or five raders. It turns out that this movie is available as a free download as well.

And here is another coincidence: I was just thinking about buying a DVD of His Girl Friday since I can’t be bothered to search for my old VHS taping of it. I have so many movies that sometimes it’s actually faster to go out and buy a new copy than to read spines looking for the one I already have. (I only buy new ones if they are an upgrade to the old copy though. A DVD or a director’s cut. Something like that). Anyway… His Girl Friday is now available as a download too. It starrs Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (who plays a “girl reporter”).

There are also several great ’50s monster/alien invasion B-flicks. I have seen and can recommend Killers From Space, Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman* and Ray Kellog’s The Killer Schrews. Kellog also directed The Giant Gila Monster, which is even better.

A final recommendation is F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (1922).

I think I will grab something I haven’t seen before. Last Woman On Earth or The Phantom Planet sounds like good places to start.

*= This movie is erroneously entered into their database as The Wasp Women (plural) instead of Wasp Woman (singular). If they correct this, my link will no longer work, in which case you have to search for it.

…is now available as a free download through The Internet Archive. This classic no-budget flick was written and directed by Edward D. Wood Jr, who also wrote and/or directed numerous other cheap but occasionally fun and sexy horror films, including Bride of The Monster, Orgy of The Dead and Night of the Ghouls.

Plan 9, however, is his best known achievement (some would rather use the word “attempt”) due to the fact that it won Ed Wood a post-humous Golden Turkey Award, and has been proudly marketed ever since as “the worst movie ever made”. This of course is nonsense. Plan 9 is far from the worst move ever made. It’s probably not even in the top 50 if you think of it in terms of production costs and hype contra actual content. What about The Fast And The Furious? Or The Chronicles of Riddick? Or Pretty Woman? Or Gone With The Wind? Now those movies really sucked and nobody seemed to notice because they were marketed as masterpieces.

Plan 9 From Outer Space (almost) stars Bela Lugosi, who died before they really started shooting. It also stars wrestler Tor Johnson, Vampira and Ed Wood regular psychic Chriswell, playing himself (badly). The intended title was Graverobbers From Outer Space, but the Baptist church that Ed Wood conned into financing this epic felt that the word “graverobber” in the title might not be in line with the scriptures.

Chriswell intro:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty, let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?

Discovered through We-Make-Money-Not-Art

Beijing Video has a great guide to the various Bruce Lee clones that popped up in the ’70s. These guys were all over the video stores here, or rather, the gas station shelves, because there weren’t any video stores yet where I grew up. This was in the great days of the VHS/Betamax war for world domination. There was no video censure yet and the market was flowing over with badly made violent low-budget flicks on low quality tapes with poorly illustrated cover artwork. Very few people had these new bulky and hugely expensive machines that played video tapes, but some lucky kids (myself not included) could sit at home and watch Bruce Le and Bruce Li and Bruce Lei as they fought their way through bad plots and badly dubbed lines of dialogue.

After this first video boom, all of the feminist amazons who really run this country started anti-video campaigns. They convinced the courts that all scenes in movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were real murders, and that anyone who caught a glimpse of any of it on tape would instantly turn into a homicidal maniac. So anything good was either altogether outlawed, or cut into shrivels by distributors who wanted to avoid having their films on the banned list. Even to this day, most releases of actual Bruce Lee films in Norway have half of the action missing.

Discovered through We make money not art

The Internet Archive, one of my favourite online resources, now has the full length movie Charade from 1963 as a free download. At the time of it’s original release, someone screwed up and forgot to add the copyright text to the credits, thus making it public domain, in accordance with the copyright laws of the time. The movie stars my all time greatest love Audrey Hepburn, as well as Cary Grant and Walter Matthau. This is an excellent romantic thriller-comedy. The music is by Henry Mancini, title designs is by Maurice Binder and the direction is by Stanley Donen. You simply need to see this movie.

The Internet Archive, for those who haven’t visited it, is a HUGE archive of copyright-free material that can be downloaded in various formats. You can find full-length features and cult series, such as Reefer Madness or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, or you can enjoy old ’50s instructional films, such as Dating: Do’s And Don’ts, Are You Ready for Marriage? and Are You Popular?

There are also countless wonderful vintage car commercials and Populuxe films, such as Design For Dreaming, A Wonderful New World of Fords, and American Look (part 1, 2, and 3) and the ever popular A Great New Star, staring Dinah Shore and some sparkling new Chevrolets.

Charade download link found through Memap.org. Audrey Hepburn photos link through Growabrain

As a teenager I used to read a lot of comic books imported from the states, as we didn’t really have pop culture in this country back then and there were only innocent comics for kids published domestically, like Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse etc…

In the imported comics, there were these masked wrestlers appearing from time to time, living everyday lives like regular people, only with their masks on, like a cross between a super hero and a normal citizen. I didn’t get it.

Only a few months ago I discovered that these characters actually exist! Curious. Not only are there hundreds, if not thousands of these masked wrestlers in Mexico, but some of these guys keep their mask on after work, shrouding their daily life in mystery. I can picture some of these bulky masked people going to the market to buy eggs and coffee in the morning… Reading the sports-pages on a park bench… Signing a few autographs for the local kids.

El Santo (”The Saint”) is probably the most famous Mexican wrestler of all time, and his life rivals any B-movie. It’s all like a badly written plot.

The prologue to the life of this living saint was a chance event that just happened to trigger a mass-movement: In the early 1930s a small troupe of US wrestlers went south of the border to compete against their Mexican counterparts. One Irish-American wrestler, fighting under the name of El Ciclón (”the Cyclone”) apparently disliked his unpopularity and had a local craftsman fashion him a leather mask to hide his identity in the ring. Perhaps the locals favored their grappling countrymen to these visiting gringos and he got fed-up with all the booing, or perhaps he just wanted to avoid being recognized in a dark alley after a match he had won over some local hero. In any case, when the people saw this masked wrestler, something clicked with their ancient Mayan culture of masks and ritual sacrifice and with the tradition of honoring their dead with dramatic costumes. Lucha Libre, the modern Mexican free style wrestling was born.

Meanwhile… another unpopular wrestler, Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta spent the first half of the ’30s trying to come up with the ultimate wrestling image for himself. He picked up on the new trend of wearing masks and tried several aliases in the ring. After years of unsuccessful attempts he hit upon the formula of wearing a silver mask and cape. It looked very flashy. But what would soon spark his improbable fame was his decition to keeping his identity permanently hidden outside the ring as well as inside it. The mask always stayed on and Santo, “El Enmascarado de Plata” (”The Man in the Silver Mask”) was born. During his years of image building, he had also become a very good wrestler and had a seemingly endless arsenal of new spectacular moves (many of which are now commonplace in pro wrestling). In 1951 he got his own weekly comic book. The next step up was the movies. His debut film was the 1958 film Cerebro del Mal (”Brain of Evil”).

Throughout his career Santo starred in around 50 hugely popular B-movies, playing… himself. These movies are unique in that the protagonist who battled monsters and aliens on-screen could also be seen live in the wrestling ring. People could follow this real living super-hero in the comic books and in magazines… everywhere. El Santo was as big in Mexico as Elvis was in the States. And he stayed in character and in every Mexican’s heart for forty years! He kept wrestling into his 60s before he retired to embark upon a new career as an escape artist. Shortly prior to his death in 1984, he shocked everyone by suddenly unmasking on a TV-show. When he died he was buried in his mask.

During Santo’s long career, other masked wrestlers cropped up everywhere. Some became almost as big as he was, such as Blue Demon, who co-starred in several Santo-pictures, Blue Panther and Mil Mascaras (”a Thousand Masks”). And of course there is El Hijo del Santo (”the Son of Santo”) and Blue Demon jr. who both continue their fathers’ legacies.

Lucha Libre is now being re-vamped north of the border for the English-speaking audience. The cartoon show ¡Mucha Lucha! ran for three successful seasons and at Club Mayan in Los Angeles the emphasis in on the comically kitchy popular culture surrounding Mexican wrestling, rather than the deeply serious sport itself. Huge events are staged where the wrestling is interwoven with comedy, burlesque strip-tease and various ’50s inspired music. Several of the most popular wrestlers from Mexico attends, such as Mil Mascaras, now in his 60s and still going strong. The name of this new retro salsa of camp is Lucha VaVoom. The next show is billed as Two Nights of Sex And Violence. Does entertainment get any better than this?

Links and sources: Check out the fantabulous VIVA LUCHA art show, listen to some lovely surf rock with Los Straitjackets (who also have their own Tetris-style online game). Get your masks here or here. Read an Introduction to Lucha Libre or read more about El Santo here, here or here. DVDs of some of the movie classics are available from Rise Above Entertainment, Santo And Friends and VCI Home Video. Sonambulo looks like a promising comic book. Haven’t read that one yet. Randy’s Bamboo Room has some examples of Los Bros Hernandez’ incredible comic artwork in the form of an EP cover. You should also read the brothers’ comics Love And Rockets (my favourite comics ever). They are published by Fantagraphics. Here are some very nice Lucha action figures.
And finally some excellent info sites with lots of useful links: From Parts Unknown, Fwak! and Viva La Lucha Libre Dot Net. Many of the above links were found through these three.