CORMAN VALUES

R.I.P. to the great Roger Corman.

Here's my utterly trivial Corman story: Back in 2000, I did an edition of my KTAR radio show Another Saturday Night by remote from a station in Palm Springs during the weekend of the Palm Springs International Film Festival. There were a few pretty big Hollywood stars there that year, and I had expressed confidence to my bosses at the station that I might be able to get a couple of them to sit down as guests on the show.

I wasn't.

One of the few guests of any stature that I was able to land was Rachel Samuels, who had directed a film in the festival called The Suicide Club with Jonathan Pryce and Paul Bettany, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson story, for the Irish division of Corman's Concorde Pictures (it was later lamely retitled The Game of Death). Samuels said the usual stuff about Corman; what a great opportunity he had given her, and how little he had paid her.

After the show, I went back to the hotel room to change into something more appropriate for dinner. While I was changing, The Wife, who was already in the bar downstairs, called me.

"You'll want to hurry. Roger Corman and his wife just came in."

I hurried. I took the promotional card for The Suicide Club with me. When I walked into the bar, there the great man was at a high top table, handsome and natty as ever, enjoying a drink with his lovely wife. I walked over and asked if he'd sign my card, telling him that I had just plugged the film on my radio show. He thanked me very graciously and signed my card.

I wish I could say I pushed the conversation, that we bonded and that he offered me a job--apparently he was known to do such things--but I was too shy and didn't want to intrude on his evening out. So I didn't. But the card still hangs, framed, next to my desk.

Last night my friend Richard and I had a Corman movie night; we watched the director's 1957 opus Not of This Earth.

The star is the late, incomparable Beverly Garland, at whose hotel in Burbank I stayed a couple of times; I once saw her, large and in charge, taking care of business with some underlings in the parking lot.

Here the ever-fabulous Bev is a nurse (she seriously rocks the uniform) menaced by Paul Birch as a creepy telepathic vampiric alien in cool shades that mask his hypnotic blank eyes. The monotonic fellow is from the planet Davanna, which has been devastated by radiation and needs Earthlings--who he refers to as "sub-humans"--for our blood.

This truly nutty picture is quintessential Corman, scripted by Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna, with an eerie animated title sequence and a cast that includes Corman's repertory company members Jonathan Haze (of The Little Shop of Horrors), and Dick Miller (of A Bucket of Blood) as a vacuum cleaner salesman. There's also a small alien monster, created by the marvelous low-tech creature craftsman Paul Blaisdell; sort of a tentacled flying flapjack that settles on to a victim's head like an oversized hat, then sucks the blood out of his noggin.

Thank you for this and all the other wacky and wonderful times, sir. Peace and joy eternal to you.

TRENCH MOB

In theaters this weekend:

Journey's End--Samuel Johnson famously said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. That guilty sentiment (which now probably extends to a lot of women as well) negates the intentions of a lot of supposedly "anti-war" movies.

The makers of such movies may even genuinely intend them to be anti-war, but the nature of the western narrative tradition being what it is, what often ends up onscreen is an action-adventure story with some inserted piety about the horrors of war. They may leave young viewers in the audience even more eager to rush off to battle, and older viewers reproaching themselves, Johnson-style, for never having done so.

There are exceptions, though. Probably because World War One is now historically regarded as such a colossally wasteful, sordid mess, that conflict has produced several pretty effective cautionary war dramas. All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and Lewis Milestone's 1930 movie, truly seem to get across something of both the terror and the futility of trench warfare in WWI. So, from the other side, does R. C. Sherriff's 1928 English play Journey's End, about desperate, shell-shocked, boozing British officers at the end of their rope in the trenches in France in spring of 1918.

Not long ago I saw the 1930 film version of Journey's End, the feature debut of director James Whale, and was impressed with how potently and poignantly it holds up. Going into this new, but surprisingly faithful, British version, directed by Saul Dibb, I feared that the claustrophobic quality of the original might be sacrificed for a more epic scale, and I'm happy say that this isn't the case. This new Journey's End is "opened out" just enough to keep it from feeling stagey, but not enough to lose its atmosphere of crushing dread.

The focus is on the veteran Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), a shattered alcoholic barely held together by his older Lieutenant, the avuncular schoolmaster Osborne (Paul Bettany). There's a reason that Stanhope isn't happy to see the eager new Lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), an old school friend who hero-worships him. Also under Stanhope's command are the chuckling, equable Trotter (Stephen Graham), the terrified Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) and the deadpan cook Mason (Toby Jones). This ensemble is terrific top to bottom, with Claflin subtly getting across the same bitter, jittery fury that Colin Clive did as Stanhope back in 1930. Butterfield is touchingly callow, and Bettany is heartbreakingly dignified as the "Uncle" Osborne.

The drama arises from the tensions and clashes, and the kindnesses, between these men. There's little in the way of battlefield action, and what there is lacks romance; it's hectic and frightening, with no sense of accomplishment. The heroism in the film, such as it is, comes from the stoicism with which these men try to face their useless deaths. By the end, you may admire them for their courage, but you're unlikely to reproach yourself for declining to share their fate.

Ready Player One--Human society is run down and slummy, but most people don't care that much because they spend most of their time in virtual reality anyway.

But enough about present-day America. Steven Spielberg's latest, based on a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, takes this state of affairs further, into a bleak and distressingly plausible version of 2045. The teenage hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) resides in a stack of mobile homes in Columbus, Ohio. But he, like most of his neighbors, spends as much time as possible in an immersive online universe called The Oasis, in which people assume the roles of "avatars," many of them based on favorite pop-culture characters ranging from the Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harryhausen's Cyclops, as well as many original creations: Wade's avatar Parzival resembles an anime hero.

The departed creator of the The Oasis, a socially awkward genius named Halliday (Mark Rylance), has left behind a series of "Easter Eggs," three keys that, if found, will make the player the heir to The Oasis. Tye, of course, is determined to find them. It's a bit like The Matrix meets Willy Wonka, with Ben Mendelssohn as an evil corporate Slugworth. There's a dash of The Searchers, too.

Wade/Parzival falls in with various allies, and wild fights and chases ensue, both in The Oasis and the real world. The movie starts slow, and is a bit of a mess; long stretches of it, like a nutty passage set in the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining, are absorbing and funny, while other stretches, especially the real-world stuff, recall the heavy-handed, obsequiously crowd-pleasing Spielberg of the later '80s. It's a bit perplexing to see, after the effortless command Spielberg demonstrated a couple of months ago in The Post.

The real fun is in the juxtaposition of pop icons: Where else can we get King Kong and Chucky and The Iron Giant all in the same movie, along with countless characters from video games and cartoons and toy series? Even Mechagodzilla turns up, accompanied by a whisper of Akira Ifukube's unforgettable Godzilla theme.

Ready Player One seems to be an allegorical plea for, on the commercial and political end, net neutrality, and on the personal end, a bit of moderation where online life is concerned. Neither of these positions is particularly radical, but the movie seems to have its middle-of-the-road heart in more or less the right place.