Wonderland Burlesque: Wonderland Burlesque's Let's All Go To The Movies: With Or Without, Part III

Thursday, August 07, 2025

Wonderland Burlesque's Let's All Go To The Movies: With Or Without, Part III

Wonderland Burlesque's

Let's All Go To The Movies:

With Or Without

Part III

As the say in show biz: some got it, some ain't.

To do with or without?

That appears to be the question. And these are the men with the all the answers.

Or so these films would have us believe.

Let's take a peek at what the world of cinema has to offer when it comes to the haves and have not.

Either way? It's movie magic!

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Man With A Movie Camera

(1929)

AKA: Человек с киноаппаратом

A man wanders Russia with movie camera in hand, capturing daily life. This playful film is at once a documentary of a day in the life of the Soviet Union, a documentary of the filming of said documentary, and a depiction of an audience watching the film. Even the editing of the film is documented. We often see the cameraman who is purportedly making the film, but we rarely, if ever, see any footage when he is in the act of shooting.

This experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film was directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova.

Director Dziga Vertov cast his own brother Mikhail Kaufman as the film's main actor. Kaufman also handled cinematography duties.

The film is divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel on which it would have originally been printed. Each part begins with a number appearing on screen and falling down flat. Filmed over a period of three years and a revelation in its day, the film was noted for introducing all sorts of camera techniques to audiences. Some of these include double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, backward footage, and stop motion animation.

Concerned about how the film would be received (and, frankly, that it might be destroyed by government censors) Dziga Vertov took out messaging in Pravda to try to explain the film's intentions and its anti-conventional stance against regular filmmaking. That tactic actually created greater interest in the film.

Although this film was well-received abroad, its style caused considerable controversy in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's increasingly repressive rule. Even director Dziga Vertov's colleague Sergei Eisenstein accused him of indulging in "unmotivated camera mischief". Vertov enjoyed a few more years of relative creative freedom before the government banished him to anonymously editing newsreels.

The original Ukrainian intertitles were lost when they were cut and replaced with Russian intertitles in the mid 1930s. Since 1983, over 25 music soundtracks have been created by various composers.

Man with a Movie Camera was not always a highly regarded work. The film was criticized for both the staging of scenes and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses". It is now regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made, ranking 9th in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the world's best films. In 2009, Roger Ebert wrote: "It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it."

You can watch this film in its entirety for free on YouTube.

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The Man With Nine Lives

(1940)

Dr. Leon Kravaal develops a potential cure for cancer, which involves freezing the patient. But an experiment goes awry when authorities believe Kravaal has killed a patient. Kravaal freezes the officials, along with himself. Years later, they are discovered and revived in hopes that Kravaal can indeed complete his cure. But human greed and weakness disrupt the project.

This American horror science fiction film was directed by Nick Grinde and stars Boris Karloff, Roger Pryor, Jo Ann Sayers, and Stanley Brown.

Both The Man with Nine Lives and The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) - Karloff starred in both films - were based in part on the real-life saga of Dr. Robert Cornish, a University of California professor who, in 1934 announced that he had restored life to a dog named Lazarus, which he had put to death by clinical means. The resulting publicity, including a Time magazine article and motion picture footage of the allegedly re-animated canine, led to Cornish falling out of favor with the university and being banned from the campus.

The word 'cancer' was normally not permitted by the Production Code, but perhaps because this was not considered an important picture, they somehow allowed it.

Fred B. Philips, the uncredited makeup artist for this film, became the chief makeup man for the original Star Trek television series.

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X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes

(1963)

AKA: X

Dr. James Xavier is a world renowned scientist experimenting with human eyesight. He devises a drug, that when applied to the eyes, enables the user to see beyond the normal realm of our sight (ultraviolet rays) it also gives the user the power to see through objects. When his funding is cut off, Xavier tests this drug on himself . As he continues to test the drug on himself, Xavier begins to see, not only through walls and clothes, but through the very fabric of reality!

This 1963 American science fiction horror film in Pathécolor was produced and directed by Roger Corman and stars Ray Milland, Don Rickles, Diana Van der Vlis, Harold J. Stone, John Hoyt and Morris Ankrum.

Roger Corman has said the idea for the film was his. It was originally about a scientist, then he felt that was "too obvious", so he changed the protagonist to "a jazz musician who had taken too much drugs, and I get into about four or five pages, and I thought, 'You know, I don't like this idea,' and so I threw the whole thing out and started back and went back with the scientist, which was the original idea."

Shot in three weeks on a budget of under $300,000.

Features the cinematography of Oscar-winner Floyd Crosby, a well-known cinematographer with a long and distinguished career.

To create the effect of being able to see through a building, the director filmed the building while it was under construction.

This film originally had a five-minute prologue about the human senses. This prologue was removed from all post-theatrical prints of the film, and may have been removed from some of the theatrical release prints.

Gold Key released a comic book adaptation: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (September 1963).

In 1972, Ray Milland and Don Rickles appeared together on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. At one point, Milland interrupted the proceedings to say that while this film was terrible, Rickles had been brilliant in it, and expressed his admiration for Rickles' acting ability.

The film won the Astronave D'argento (Silver Spaceship) award in 1963 at the first International Festival of Science Fiction Film (Festival internazionale del film di fantascienza) in Trieste, Italy.

American International Pictures distributed the film in the fall of 1963 as a double feature with Francis Ford Coppola's horror thriller Dementia 13. The low-budget film was a major financial success.

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The Man With The Glass Eye

(1969)

AKA: Der Mann mit dem Glasauge, Terror On Half Moon Street

A man is found dead in a London hotel. The knife is still stuck in the victim's chest, and Inspector Perkins strangely finds a glass eye in his jacket pocket. Shortly afterwards, a second mysterious murder occurs: a well-known dancer of the Las Vegas Girls, who perform in London's Odeon Theater, is poisoned. Is there a connection between the pretty dancer and the hotel guest? Inspector Perkins and his colleagues are pressed for time. The "man with the glass eye" strikes fatally again and again.

This West German crime film was directed by Alfred Vohrer and stars Horst Tappert, Karin Hübner and Hubert von Meyerinck.

Part of Rialto Film's long-running series of Edgar Wallace adaptations. This was Director Alfred Vohrer's 14th and final film based on the works of Edgar Wallace.

Shot at the Spandau Studios and on location in West Berlin, Hamburg and London.

Writer Edgar Wallace died in 1932 while in the United States working on the film which would become King Kong (1933).

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The Man With Icy Eyes

(1971)

AKA: L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio, The Violent Racket

A state senator is murdered outside his home, and the police arrest a strange man described as having "icy eyes" for the crime. An Italian reporter finds a stripper who claims to have been an eyewitness to the assassination and saw the man with the icy eyes commit it. At his trial she testifies against him, and he's sentenced to death. However, the reporter soon begins to find holes in the stripper's story, as other circumstances arise, which makes him believe that the wrong man may have been convicted.