uncle42dave

I liked it very much also, although my wife hated it. I agree that Walpurgis Night is preachy - as in "Reefer Madness" the moral of the story drives the reason behind making the movie, ergo the characters in the story run into the moral at every turn - this worse so in Walpurgis Night than in many other, similar pictures. The message is: Procreation is essential to success of Swedish society, and is the way to happiness for married couples. "Walpurgis Night" is a socially conscious soap opera, but a high class one. I found it similar in tone to Lois Weber's "Where Are My Children" (1916) also shown some time ago on TCM. Bergman radiates in her supporting role, and is the main reason to watch the film. But I also appreciated seeing Lars Hanson in something less melodramatic than "The Scarlet Letter" (1926), but he still appeared to some degree a little overly made-up, kind of stiff and stentorian. Sjostrom brought dignity, but not depth, to his role as Bergman's father. The camerawork was outstanding - from the first shot to the last, framed for maximum effect. The set dressing was nearly as good. There is a weird defect to the film's soundtrack, as though for many stretches one take of the music cue seems to be riding on top of an another. It is clear in some dissolves the music dissolves along with the picture, and a couple of these soundtrack joins work. but it seems like the cutter used to soundtrack strips of A & B choices of cues, and achieved the good music dissolves by moving from A to B along with the picture. But the sound cutter neglected to replace all of the "B" cues with blank sountrack. Such a defect may go back to the original prints. I have no idea how you would solve the problem if you didn't have the original sound elements. Perhaps Svensk Industri DOES have these elements and should be notified. Uncle Dave Lewis

It had been a long time since I'd seen The Blob entire. I used to have a super 8mm black and white condesation of it which I used as a background element in early 1980s New Wave concerts - running the the scene in the movie house back and forth, back and forth... To me what was amazing to me this time was how The Blob is such a "credible" picture compared to so many other science fiction films of the period. The monster, derived from Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space," is treated as a natural disaster from beyond, and the audience is not asked to buy some nonsense from from an "alien" in a diving helmet and a gorilla suit. The generational subtext also works and helps to create tension - no one will listen to Steve because he is a "kid," but if they don't it can mean the destruction of the whole community. It seems someone at an executive level in "The Blob" said "we've got this wonderful star who's going to amount something, rather than a nobody to play the lead. Let's play to his strengths." Steve is called by his own name in the script, wears a tan suede jacket of the kind he would wear in many of his later films, and plenty of screen time is devoted to buisiness we associate with McQueen - silent, lost in thought, confused - mulling over something in his head. If you were a major star who would need at least one "bad" film on your resume, McQueen could hardly have picked a friendlier film than "The Blob" - it probably helped make him a star in the long run. Jack Nicholson, by comparison, was not nearly so lucky. One thing Robert may have mentioned in his intro was the interesting theme song to the film, written by Burt Bacharach and not credited to him onscreen. While "The Blob" may not have been McQueen's "first" film, the theme music to "The Blob" is just about the earliest thing Burt Bacharach did in any medium. Uncle Dave Lewis