31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (25) Lesleh Donaldson in FUNERAL HOME (WITH A SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTION FROM LESLEH DONALDSON)

I remember very clearly the first time I saw the striking Canadian born Lesleh Donaldson in a film.  I was in my mid-teens and the film was the classic 1981 slasher Happy Birthday to Me and Lesleh's brief, but very memorable appearance, as Bernadette O'Hara immediately caught my eye.  A bit later, via another battered but treasured old VHS tape I caught up with Lesleh's most famous role, that of Christie Burns in the 1983 chiller Curtains.  Anyone who has seen Curtains will certainly recall Lesleh's role in that film as she is featured in, simply put, one of the most memorable and terrifying sequences in all of modern horror (a scene which did for outdoor ice skating what Jaws did for ocean swimming).

Lesleh's name will be eternally tied to the early eighties slasher craze that meant so much to so many film fans from my generation, even though she only appeared in a few films from the genre.  Beautiful and talented, with an especially warm quality that comes through in even the smallest role, Lesleh graced a number of films and television shows throughout the seventies but never got the break she should have which is one reason that Funeral Home is so special.

The 1980 William Fruet directed Funeral Home gave Lesleh one of the much deserved leading roles that alluded her most of her career and she really makes the most of it.  Barely sixteen when she shot the film, Lesleh is truly splendid in this chilling little-seen film and she totally deserved the Genie nomination she received for her performance.  Funeral Home isn't a perfect film but Lesleh's performance in it is and it serves as a sharp reminder that many more leading roles should have come her way.

Flash forward from that initial viewing of Happy Birthday to Me all the years ago to just a couple of years back when I became friends with Lesleh over at Facebook.  While making contact with your idols often proves disastrous Lesleh and I sparked up a nice friendship and share similiar tastes in music, film, art and politics.  In the first of a few surprises this month, Lesleh has kindly agreed to share a few thoughts on Funeral Home for my readers here at Moon in the Gutter and I am oh so excited to be able to offer this contribution from her.  Thanks so much to Lesleh for stopping by and sharing these thoughts and I hope everyone will track down a copy of Funeral Home!

- Lesleh Donaldson on FUNERAL HOME written for Moon in the Gutter-

"I remember when I was filming FUNERAL HOME aka: CRIES IN THE NIGHT people would ask me what movie I was doing and most of them would perk up and say to me " Oh my God what is Jamie Lee Curtis like?" I of course would smile and say "you must mean PROM NIGHT" then they would look at me embarrassed and say 'oh yeah sorry'. Well at the time back then I desperately wanted to be in PROM NIGHT and MY BLOODY VALENTINE and all the other cool films that had a group of teenagers trapped in some godforsaken situation with an axe wielding maniac on the loose. I actually did get to go on to do a film like that shortly after FUNERAL HOME, but what makes FUNERAL HOME special to me, and I think makes it stand out from the rest of those films at that time, is an atmospheric quality it had and of course the William Fruet touch (anyone who has seen WEDDING IN WHITE will know what I'm talking about). 
Bill Fruet had an ability to capture a part of rural, isolated living that was a big part of Canadian cinema back in those days and not only did he capture the loneliness and isolation of these people, whether it was in a horror movie or just a gut wrenching tale of humanity, but he captured it so that it seems time capsuled. FUNERAL HOME has a lot of faults as a film but to me it is a part of the Canadian cinema that has long gone. I'm proud to have been a part of it and it will always hold a special place in my heart!"

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (26) Charles Napier in SUPERVIXENS (1975)

By the early seventies, Kentucky born Charles Napier was pretty much fed up with acting.  He had been working steadily in film and television since the late sixties but, as he was approaching forty, he was bored with performing and had began working for a trucking magazine called Overdrive.  Napier's biggest champion, legendary filmmaker Russ Meyer, had a new part in mind for Napier though and courted the imposing actor back into cinematic playing field with what Meyer biographer Jimmy McDonough would call "the greatest role of Charles Napier's weird career." in his essential Big Bosoms and Square Jaws.

Watching Charles Napier's incredibly jolting and terrifying performance as Harry Sledge in Meyer's masterpiece Supervixens (1975) today it is impossible to imagine any other actor in the role. Channeling an extreme misogynistic macho-male energy passed the point of wrong into the realm of psychotic, the six-foot Napier is beyond imposing as Sledge...he's positively monstrous and, more importantly, absolutely brilliant.  Harry Sledge is the kind of role most actors would have run away from, or at the very least attempted to soften, but Napier inhabits it completely and devours the screen in one of the most ferocious performances in film history.

Supervixens is a dazzling work by an angry artist looking to show that he still had at least one major masterpiece left in him and he didn't need any damn studio backing to deliver it.  Meyer's film is a breathtaking and brutal experience and it contains his most astonishing momenst as a filmmaker (and, perhaps most importantly, editor) during the legendary bathtub fight sequence between Napier and stunning Shari Eubank (whose work in Supervixens could have appeared on this list as well).  The sequence, which would serve as inspiration for an equally brilliant fight between Patricia Arquette and James Gandolfini in Tony Scott's True Romance year later, is absolutely jaw-dropping not just for its brutality and ugliness but also for just how technically brilliant it is and how incredible both Napier and Eubank are.  It's an absolute stunner.

There is really nothing else in cinema quite like Supervixens and there has never been anything quite like Charles Napier's performance as Harry Sledge.  The role and film would re energize Napier's passion for acting and he would go onto have one of the most prolific careers in all of modern film and television.  He worked right up to his death in 2011 and he remains one of the great cinematic gifts my state ever offered up.

More of my thoughts on Supervixens and Charles Napier's work as Harry Sledge can be read in the upcoming Directory of World Cinema:  American Independent 2, which is due out in January for those  interested.    

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (27) Dalila Di Lazzaro in THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE (1977)

One of the most searing, thoughtful and touching performances ever given in an Italian genre film was delivered in 1977 by a former Fashion model who is sadly still almost exclusively just known for her looks rather than her considerable skills as an actress.  Dalila Di Lazzaro hadn't even turned twenty-five when she was cast as the doomed title-character in Flavio Mogherini's gruelling and hypnotic La ragazza dal pigiama giallo.  The Italian born Lazzaro had already become a staple of Italian Genre films in the seventies but most filmmakers were content to use her just for her lovely body and perfect face, but Mogherini had different things in mind and trusted that there was a whole lot of depth and untapped power behind those striking eyes and boy was he right. 
Lazzaro is incredibly compelling in The Pyjama Girl Case and her work as Glenda Blythe remains one of the defining performances of the Italian Giallo (although Mogherini's film pushes the definition of the Giallo to the absolute extreme).  Lazzaro's performance is incredibly captivating, extremely moving and finally quite heartbreaking.  I wish more filmmakers would have recognized just how truly great she was, as The Pyjama Girl Case is one of the few films where she really got to show her range as an actor and performer. 
The Pyjama Girl Case is available from Blue Underground and it remains one of my favorite Italian films from the seventies.  Dalila Di Lazzaro would continue to work steadily, and do solid work,  in film and television before retiring in the late nineties but she was never again be given a role that equaled that of Glenda Blythe.  Lazzaro's work in The Pyjama Girl Case remains one of the most haunting and unsettling characterizations in all of modern film. 

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (28) Pierre Clémenti in PARTNER (1968)

Parisian born Pierre Clémenti could be simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, savage and tender, perverse and poetic.  He was an enigma, a genius and one of the best screen actors I have ever seen.  By the time of his death in 1999, Clémenti had worked with many of the greatest European filmmakers, spent time in prison, penned a book, directed his own underground films, and had even got name-checked in a song by Patti Smith, and yet he still never managed to truly break through with English language audiences like many of his peers.  

My favorite performance from Pierre Clémenti can be found in Bernardo Bertolucci's dazzling and frustrating Godard inspired Partner (1968).  While his work from the same period for filmmakers like Bunuel and Pasolini might have gained more attention, Clémenti as the double Giacobbe is a performance of astonishing force and veers successfully from the absurd to the surreal to finally something achingly human.  Partner might well be the most flawed of Bertolucci's great films but with Clémenti he found one of his ideal performers and it is still breathtaking watching this strangely unhinged, and yet supremely controlled, artist all the years later.  

The best way to see Partner is via No Shame's now out of print double-disc set that came out several years back.  It's filled with a number of enlightening extras and has some haunting behind the scenes clips of Clémenti, an artist who was at his peak in 1968 when the footage was captured.  

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (29) Rosanna Arquette in NOBODY'S FOOL (1986)

"It's just me Cassie Stoolie, it's just me...it's...just...me."

In his original two-star review of Evelyn Purcell’s 1986 comedic drama, Nobody’s Fool critic Roger Ebert wrote of the film’s star Rosanna Arquette:

“Her name is Cassie, and she is played by Rosanna Arquette, who is one of my favorite actresses, but who is best when she plays against her inclinations. Cassie is perhaps too close to an idea she has of herself, and so we don't feel enough pain in those early scenes. She seems odd, rather than suffering.”

Arquette was also one of my favorite actresses back in 1986 as well but, unlike Ebert, I greatly admired her work in Nobody’s Fool and more than twenty-five years later it remains one of my favorite performances from my high school years.  Cassie might not be the strongest role Rosanna Arquette has been given in her long and prolific career (convincing arguments could be made for Baby it’s You, Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours and Life Lessons,as they are certainly all ‘better’ films than Nobody’s Fool) but I find it to be one of the purest in the sense that I feel like it plays to all of Arquette’s really distinctive strengths.

Rosanna’s ability to channel women experiencing a life and spiritual crisis is uncanny and the disgraced Cassie is certainly one of the most neurotic creations a modern American actor has given us in the past several decades.  One can only imagine how many awards would be sitting on Rosanna Arquette’s shelf had she started her career in the early seventies (as opposed to the early eighties) when American film really embraced studies of fragmented personalities and lost souls.

Nobody’s Fool might not be the best film Rosanna Arquette ever made but her work in it encapsulates everything I love about her…disarmingly funny, unapologetically sexy and resoundingly moving, there still hasn’t been anyone else quite like Rosanna Arquette and I remain as touched by her best work as I was more than thirty years ago when I first discovered it in my teens. 

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (30) Eric Stoltz in THE WATERDANCE (1992)

"Do all shrinks wear sweaters?  I remember Judd Hirsch had a nice sweater in Ordinary People...You know I am a writer, that's what I do and I don't need to walk to do that, so this is 'denial', right doc?"

What a fascinating career Eric Cameron Stoltz has had.  The prolific, and always exceptional, Stoltz got his start in the late seventies with appearances in a number of television shows (and films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High where he memorably appeared as one of Spicoli's stoner buddies) but his career didn't really kick into gear until his moving appearance in Peter Bogdanovich's Mask.  Eric brought such a great, and distinctive, quality to each of his performances and he seemed to have no trouble going from light comedies to heavy dramas. 
By the early nineties Eric Stoltz became one of the most recognizable faces of the new American Independent movement and the decade would see him giving one great performance after another.  Despite his consistently great work Stoltz has never really gotten the proper respect he deserves and it's insane that he has still never received an Oscar nomination or been granted a major acting award.  I think it was Stoltz's incredible reliability that ultimately became his biggest enemy as great work was finally just expected from him. 
Of the many fine performances Eric Stoltz has given us in the past five decades, none equal his incredible turn as paralyzed Joel Garcia in Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg's amazing The Waterdance (1992).  Acting opposite a luminous Helen Hunt, Stoltz gives an incredibly controlled and vivid performance that ranks among the great works of the nineties.  What is most amazing about Stoltz's work in The Waterdance is just how damn intelligent it is, and how different.  Where most actors would have gone for histrionics and show, Stoltz goes subtlety and depth.  Stoltz's Joel Garcia is a funny and heartbreaking creation that feels eerily authentic and perfectly realized.
The Waterdance has never been granted the audience it has so long deserved and it remains one of the great under the radar films of the nineties and Eric Stoltz's work in it is really, really fine.  To recognize just how complex and gifted an actor Stoltz is may I recommend a double feature of The Waterdance and Roger Avery's ferocious Killing Zoe (1993).  You'll swear you are watching a totally different actor even though these films were made virtually back to back.

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery: (31) Cynthia Davis in COOLEY HIGH (1975)

"You write poetry?  I didn't know that."

Like the reassuring sound of an often-played but treasured 45, the soulful performance of Cynthia Davis as Brenda in Michael Schultz's extraordinary Cooley High feels sweeter and sweeter with each passing year.  A total novice when she appeared in Cooley High, Davis' work has continued to haunt the many, like myself, who have remained touched by Schultz's powerful coming of age story set in mid-sixties Chicago. 
Cooley High remains the one and only on-screen credit for Cynthia Davis, a sublimely gifted beauty who pulled one of the greatest disappearing acts in cinematic history after its release.  Graceful, poetic and witty, Davis had a strikingly subtle quality about her and, I believe, could have developed into one of the most interesting actors of the seventies had she not dropped out of sight after appearing in Schultz's powerful work.
Fans moved and tantalized by her work as Brenda in Cooley High have wondered about the whereabouts of Cynthia Davis for decades.  Rumors have swirled about what exactly happened to Davis for years, with no real hard facts appearing, but most signs point to the notion that she retired from acting after Cooley's High's release to start and raise a family.  Perhaps it is the fact that she never appeared in another film that makes her performance feel so resonate, but, like a particularly sweet memory from my youth, I have never quite been able to shake Cynthia Davis' role in Cooley High and while I often wonder what happened to her perhaps not knowing makes her work all the more special. 

 

 

-Jeremy Richey, 2012-

Coming in December from Moon in the Gutter: 31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery

 

Throughout the month of December I am going to be paying tribute to 31 performances that I honestly wish I could turn the whole world on to.  Acclaim, awards and respect often alluded the 31 very special actors and actresses I am going to be paying tribute to throughout the last month of 2012, as Moon in the Gutter celebrates its sixth year online, but they have all meant a great deal to me and I am very excited to have the opportunity to show them some love.  The countdown will begin December 1st and will close of the 31st with my favorite 'undervalued' performance, a role that has haunted me for all of my adult life.  I hope the list proves enjoyable and I want to hear some readers favorites as well. 

The Pete Walker Collection

One of Britain's great genre filmmakers Pete Walker finally gets some much-needed respect here in the States via Redemption's terrific new Blu-ray box set, The Pete Walker Collection, which hits stores on November 20th. While the films in this collection, Die Screaming, Marianne (1971), House of Whipcord (1974), Schizo (1976) and The Comeback (1978), have all been available on DVD before in the States they have never looked quite as incredible as they do on this new Kino Lorber/Redemption collection.

The essential Walker works gathered together for this new box-set were previously released by both Image entertainment (as part of their EuroShock line) and Shriek Show (who assembled their own box several years back).  While those releases were notable in that they did bring some of Walker's most shocking visions to Region 1 DVD, the prints utilized left a lot to be desired and were in some instances quite dismal.  While the Shriek Show releases did include some valuable commentary tracks with Walker the films in general looked too dark and grimy and sounded too muffled and muddy.

The new high-def tranfers of Die Screaming, Marianne, House of Whipcord, Schizo and The Comeback are real wonders to behold.  Remastered in HD from the original negatives, these Walker classics have never looked quite as colorful or held such a visual allure.  While some print damage is apparent in each film these new transfers represent a huge visual and audio upgrade from those older Image and Shriek Show DVDs.  House of Whipcord especially benefits as we can now actually see what is happening on screen in some of the films darker and more notorious moments.  

The supplements that have been gathered together for this new Pete Walker Collection are also quite superb.    The original audio commentary tracks for House of Whipcord, Die Screaming Marianne and The Comeback have all been thankfully carried over from the older releases and are all highly recommended.  Walker is an intelligent, well-spoken and witty artist and all of these tracks are a pleasure to listen to.  Schizo is the only film here lacking a commentary, which is a shame as it is such a strong film.  Original trailers also accompany each film and the only older extras not carried over from the Shriek Show releases are some 'photo galleries', which honestly weren't all that essential in the first place.

New to this set are several fascinating recently shot interviews with Pete Walker conducted by the great filmmaker Elijah Drenner.  Each chat gives us some great insight into the films, Walker's style and how demanding it can be operating as an independent filmmaker working with lower than needed budgets.  Each talk helps solidify Walker's place as a true independent, and visionary, and Drenner should be quite proud of his work here.

The Pete Walker Collection continues Kino and Redemption's major winning streak for the classic exploitation and horror film market.  Walker's works are now at a home with a company in charge of other maverick filmmakers like Rollin, Bava and Franco and genre-film fans should be very grateful.  The Pete Walker Collection is yet another essential purchase and would make an ideal stocking-stuffer for the cult-film lover in your life, or as an early Christmas present for yourself!