Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 3: today on Weird House Cinema we are going to be
Speaker 3: talking about the nineteen seventy five Italian mystery thriller Footprints
Speaker 3: on the Moon aka Primal Impulse aka just Footprints. It's
Speaker 3: a much less intriguing title. I don't know why anybody
Speaker 3: would just say footprints. Footprints on the Moon much much better.
Speaker 3: But this movie stars Florinda Bulkan, Peter mckinnery, and in
Speaker 3: a bit part, klaus Kinski.
Speaker 2: Right right though, even if you just have a dash
Speaker 2: of Klauskinski in there, you know it. People notice. It's
Speaker 2: a powerful spice.
Speaker 3: So I came to this selection in a slightly awkward way,
Speaker 3: because here's where it came from, folks, to get the
Speaker 3: whole backstory. Earlier this month, you had mentioned that some
Speaker 3: creatures of the Cinemadrome celebrate something called Jallo January, a
Speaker 3: sort of Jay and B guzzling leather gloved cousin of
Speaker 3: noir November. And when you mentioned this, I was definitely
Speaker 3: intrigued because I'm sort of something of a Jallo fan,
Speaker 3: but I think I had already decided I wanted to
Speaker 3: do a Santo movie for my previous pick, but when
Speaker 3: this week came around, I decided to give in to
Speaker 3: the reason for the season and look for a Jallo
Speaker 3: to talk about, one that would be weird enough for
Speaker 3: Weird House and one that I had never seen before.
Speaker 3: So I was poking around online reading things trying to
Speaker 3: find a good weird Jallo I was not familiar with,
Speaker 3: and I ended up settling on Footprints on the Moon.
Speaker 3: And while I think this movie is very excellent, I'm
Speaker 3: more than pleased with the choice, I am skeptical whether
Speaker 3: it would actually be considered a Jallo by most fans
Speaker 3: of the genre. A lot of the online references were
Speaker 3: classifying it as such, but it's missing some of the
Speaker 3: key genre elements, though on the other hand, still maintaining
Speaker 3: a lot of the genre's signature esthetics. So maybe we
Speaker 3: can talk about this more later in the episode, but
Speaker 3: I think there will be serious debate over whether it
Speaker 3: should be thought of as a Jallo or not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you could make a case for it being Jallo adjacent.
Speaker 2: I guess which is close enough for our purposes here.
Speaker 3: Now, if you're not familiar with the terminology, I think
Speaker 3: we've probably gabbed about this on the show before, but hey,
Speaker 3: why not talk about it again. It's always fun to
Speaker 3: define and try to understand what the soul of the jallo.
Speaker 3: But if you're not familiar Jallo movies, the plural is
Speaker 3: technically Jalli are typically understood as a genre of Italian
Speaker 3: murder mystery thrillers, often with strong horror elements and often
Speaker 3: erotically charged Jallo movie. These are kind of a long
Speaker 3: running staple in our house. Used to be whenever I
Speaker 3: visited Videodrome, whatever else I was checking out, I would
Speaker 3: also always grab at least one unfamiliar disc from the
Speaker 3: video corner of shame, the Jallo corner there, so we
Speaker 3: know and are fans of jallo around here. So any
Speaker 3: seemingly disparaging comments I make about the genre in the
Speaker 3: rest of this episode come from a place of familiarity.
Speaker 3: In love.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense. You want to
Speaker 2: get a little side item from the Gava menu. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like it's you know, it's not super nutritious, but
Speaker 2: you know you're having a meal out you might as
Speaker 2: well indulge yourself.
Speaker 3: It's just I don't know, so often on a Friday night,
Speaker 3: what Rachel and I wanted was a jallo.
Speaker 2: And there's so many this genre has. Just it's a
Speaker 2: never ending well. Anytime we dive into even just into
Speaker 2: the filmographies of people who worked in this genre or subgenre,
Speaker 2: I'm always discovering new titles. And it's sometimes helps that
Speaker 2: there are generally multiple titles in the mix for any
Speaker 2: given film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, coming back to what makes a yellow, of
Speaker 3: course they are these usually murder mystery thrillers. Usually the
Speaker 3: plot involves a series of grizzly, shocking homicides, often committed
Speaker 3: with a strange or disturbing weapon. So it's usually not
Speaker 3: just like a gun or a regular knife, but more
Speaker 3: often say a knitting needle or a shard of glass,
Speaker 3: or a venomous animal, or like an antique suit of
Speaker 3: armor glove with spikes on the knuckles or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's worth noting that this is distinct from
Speaker 2: like the whole slasher genre that would then bubble up
Speaker 2: mostly in America, especially strongly during the nineteen eighties. Like
Speaker 2: there's there's something different about the way murders are committed,
Speaker 2: the way that they're stylistically portrayed, and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, I think Jello is often considered
Speaker 3: a major predecessor of an influence on the wave of
Speaker 3: American slasher films that would come in the late seventies
Speaker 3: and especially in the nineteen eighties, though I think there
Speaker 3: are important differences. But I think definitely the soul of
Speaker 3: the Shallo movies of the sixties and seventies is influential
Speaker 3: on the slasher movies that would come later. So the
Speaker 3: plot involves a series of murders, but the other thing
Speaker 3: is that the story is a mystery. The identity of
Speaker 3: the killer is unknown, and the viewer is pulled along
Speaker 3: to the conclusion of the movie wanting to find out
Speaker 3: who the killer is and what their motivation was. So
Speaker 3: a lot of the big Shallo movies have an exciting
Speaker 3: payoff because the reveal of the killer is quite surprising.
Speaker 3: Often it's a minor character you wouldn't have expected, or
Speaker 3: someone who gave no sign of danger previously. A lot
Speaker 3: of times the reveal I think this is sort of
Speaker 3: influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The reveal of the killer's
Speaker 3: motivations is often a divulging of some kind of like
Speaker 3: psychological trauma that was previously unknown in a pre existing
Speaker 3: character's backstory. Common esthetic features of Jello. I notice what
Speaker 3: feels like a real combination of high art and pulp
Speaker 3: sensibilities all jumbled together. So these movies are on one hand,
Speaker 3: quite often trashy and prurient, but also with a really
Speaker 3: palpable sense of artistic pride that you don't get in
Speaker 3: most American slasher movies. In these Italian movies, you get
Speaker 3: the feeling that you know, while they were staging some
Speaker 3: tawdry potato peel or murder scene, they were thinking, I am,
Speaker 3: like Michaelangelo, this is important artistic work.
Speaker 2: They're often It's also I think important to stress that
Speaker 2: jallo are almost always, if not always, thoroughly modern, and
Speaker 2: there's probably a subtext in there somewhere in most of
Speaker 2: these films too, like dealing with issues boiling up around
Speaker 2: the state of modernity, it current social norms, social problems,
Speaker 2: and so forth. But yeah, it's not surprising to see,
Speaker 2: like all the latest technologies that are going to be
Speaker 2: present in say nineteen seventy three or something in a
Speaker 2: given example of this subgenre.
Speaker 3: That's right, and in terms of dealing with like current
Speaker 3: social issues. Another big thing about Shalla movies is that
Speaker 3: they often explore themes of sex and gender conflict, sometimes
Speaker 3: projecting misogynist attitudes by casting women as helpless sort of
Speaker 3: feeble objects of male lust and violence, or treating women
Speaker 3: as especially psychologically frail, but in other cases sort of
Speaker 3: taking the woman's point of view and showing misogyny and
Speaker 3: pathetic forms of resentment against women as the primary motivators
Speaker 3: of the movie's villainy and the thing that has to
Speaker 3: be unmasked and destroyed at the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's definitely room in a HOLLO picture for
Speaker 2: a strong female character. You don't always find them there,
Speaker 2: but there are examples that you can turn to.
Speaker 3: Some do and some really don't.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another thing is that they tend to be visually striking
Speaker 3: a lot of times, high contrast, a bold or even
Speaker 3: lurid color palette, real like artistic attention to shot composition.
Speaker 3: Like a lot of these movies in terms of plot
Speaker 3: content might be kind of trash, but a lot of
Speaker 3: them really look great. They're kind of beautiful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, murder is often beautiful or at least stylish in
Speaker 2: these pictures.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Another thing is an often unsubtle musical score. So
Speaker 3: you can think about if you've ever heard this Dario
Speaker 3: Argento's work with Goblin that goes in his movies or
Speaker 3: in the movie we're talking about today, that it's debatable
Speaker 3: whether it's actually a jello, the kind of fugue like
Speaker 3: blasts of organ that we get through throughout the film.
Speaker 3: Another thing is a tendency toward voyeuristic camera work. So
Speaker 3: in these movies, the camera watches the protagonist or the
Speaker 3: murder victim from a hiding place, maybe peeking through the
Speaker 3: slats in a wall or looking through a keyhole, or
Speaker 3: it just in some other way kind of intrudes into
Speaker 3: private spaces to see the characters that their most vulnerable,
Speaker 3: or it takes the killer's point of view. This is
Speaker 3: a cinematography choice that is often poured over into the
Speaker 3: American Slashers as well. In terms of like set dressing
Speaker 3: and costuming, there are some very strong themes that occur
Speaker 3: again and again the killer. The killer often hides their
Speaker 3: identity by wearing a hat, a trench coat, and black
Speaker 3: leather gloves, and there's also just a general kind of
Speaker 3: inflammation of seventies clothing. It's one of our favorite elements
Speaker 3: of these movies when my wife and I watch them.
Speaker 3: I love the clothes.
Speaker 2: Oh, I agree to you. I mean, anytime I watch
Speaker 2: one of these films, it's that focus on the modern
Speaker 2: world and often some sense of fashion that is just
Speaker 2: thoroughly captivating. I mean, for me, having been born in
Speaker 2: the seventies, I'm just you know, endlessly fascinated with you know,
Speaker 2: the style and the culture that I was born out of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, another thing I have to mention, can't make a
Speaker 3: Jallo without a J and B bottle. Something you will
Speaker 3: always see one either on a shelf or being poured
Speaker 3: into a glass, into a into a kind of ornate
Speaker 3: crystal tumbler glass. There's you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: good glassware in the films, and always a J and B. Also,
Speaker 3: just a lot of focus on loud flourishes of art
Speaker 3: and design and interior decor. The movie often features, or
Speaker 3: sometimes actually directly involves in the plot crazy wallpaper patterns,
Speaker 3: bizarre tapestries, oil paintings, art exhibits, stained glass, statuary, and
Speaker 3: things like that. Now, beyond that, there are also some
Speaker 3: common plot and character features of Jolly One is that
Speaker 3: it's been observed that the main character is usually an
Speaker 3: outsider of some kind or is alienated, so they might
Speaker 3: be in an unfamiliar place, or they might be estranged
Speaker 3: from their social group for some reason. That the protagonist
Speaker 3: of Ajallo is not in their element as they try
Speaker 3: to piece together the clues and solve the mystery. Another
Speaker 3: thing is protagonists are very often found questioning their sanity
Speaker 3: or being thought insane by others. And then, finally, this
Speaker 3: is one that I've read about less, but I've just
Speaker 3: always noticed it myself and found it so interesting. So
Speaker 3: so many of the movies within this one subgenre have
Speaker 3: the same plot device, which is a protagonist who already
Speaker 3: saw the solution to the mystery, or saw some important
Speaker 3: clue with their own eyes, or sensed it with their
Speaker 3: own senses. Maybe they heard something but in somehow, they
Speaker 3: somehow sensed with their own senses the solution to the mystery,
Speaker 3: but they can't quite remember it or they can't quite
Speaker 3: make sense of it, and they spend the rest of
Speaker 3: the film trying to reconstruct the memory or trying to
Speaker 3: understand what it is they already saw. And this has
Speaker 3: always struck me as a potent psychological metaphor that may
Speaker 3: have some deeper cultural significance. I don't know enough about
Speaker 3: Italy in the sixties and seventies to speculate on exactly
Speaker 3: what that cultural kind of metaphor would be, but it's
Speaker 3: very interesting that the solution to the murder mystery is
Speaker 3: so often not completely hidden. It's something that you already saw,
Speaker 3: you already took it in, but now, for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: you can't remember it or can't make sense of it.
Speaker 3: So the final piece of puzzle in terms of the
Speaker 3: plot structure, is often an event or a clue that
Speaker 3: causes the protagonist to suddenly fully remember or finally understand
Speaker 3: what they already saw in the beginning. I'm trying to
Speaker 3: think if there's much precedent for this in other mystery
Speaker 3: stories outside of the shallow subgenre, and nothing's really coming
Speaker 3: to mind, though I'm sure there are stories like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a trope that
Speaker 2: is present in the larger mystery genre. But then within
Speaker 2: Jalloh becomes like a part of the blueprint more or less,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, you often see that. I guess with
Speaker 2: different genre spinoffs and subgenres.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I wonder how this plot convention of
Speaker 3: like in a way you already saw the answer, but
Speaker 3: you can't remember it or understand it is connected to
Speaker 3: another thing about Jali, which is that usually the investigator
Speaker 3: or the protagonist who's trying to solve the mystery is
Speaker 3: not an investigator by way of like their job.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: It's not like these cop mystery movies where I'm a
Speaker 3: detective and I've got to be here and solve the mystery.
Speaker 3: Usually the protagonist has a personal connection to the crimes
Speaker 3: take place, and they are a non professional investigator.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, it's it's interesting when you start
Speaker 2: piecing together all of these different attributes you get this
Speaker 2: sort of this picture of a of a stranger in
Speaker 2: a strange modern world, almost a sense of future shock
Speaker 2: to it at least, well but less on the technological
Speaker 2: side of things and more on just like the social
Speaker 2: side of things. And uh uh, you know, I guess
Speaker 2: this movie is the one that is that is that
Speaker 2: I'm most current on since I just watched it, But
Speaker 2: it lines up with this theme in a number of ways.
Speaker 2: You know, the sense of like a globe trotting, modern
Speaker 2: professional woman, and well while there there are you know,
Speaker 2: there are some elements where we can see that she's
Speaker 2: maybe not at odds with the world, but it has
Speaker 2: like real world stressors in play, and that sort of
Speaker 2: like bleeds over into this more surreal scenario that we
Speaker 2: see in the picture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't want to spoil too much about
Speaker 3: the ending of the film now, though by the time
Speaker 3: we get to the end of the plot section, we
Speaker 3: definitely are going to spoil the ending. And this movie
Speaker 3: is full of surprises. So if you want to see
Speaker 3: Footprints on the Moon without having anything spoiled, I guess
Speaker 3: now would be a good time to pause the episode
Speaker 3: and go watch it yourself. But there are questions raised
Speaker 3: by the reveal at the end of the movie about it,
Speaker 3: like exactly what the motivation for the main character's psychological
Speaker 3: state or struggle is and to what extent that's brought
Speaker 3: on by something within her or by circumstances outside her control.
Speaker 3: So anyway, having reviewed all of this stuff about what
Speaker 3: Jallo is, is Footprints on the Moon a shallo? I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people would say no, because it
Speaker 3: is not a murder mystery. The film does not begin
Speaker 3: with a murder, and there is really very almost no
Speaker 3: violence in it until closer to the end. Nevertheless, it
Speaker 3: does really feel like a shallo. It's a mystery with
Speaker 3: an aura of menace. It is somewhat sexually charged. It
Speaker 3: involves an out of place protagonist physically out of place
Speaker 3: and also alienated, a protagonist haunted by something that she
Speaker 3: apparently cannot remember. It looks and sounds like a shallo
Speaker 3: in terms of the musical soundtrack, it looks like one
Speaker 3: in the shot composition and the use of color and
Speaker 3: all that, And one of the clues to solve the
Speaker 3: mystery is a memory of a giant stained glass peacock.
Speaker 3: So my ruling is, I think, yeah, you can call
Speaker 3: it a shallo, even though it does not have the
Speaker 3: main plot element that defines a shallow you know, it's
Speaker 3: not solving a murder mystery, though it does have murders
Speaker 3: within a recurring dream, and as a bonus, they are
Speaker 3: they are moon murders.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you mentioned that the giant stained glass peacock,
Speaker 2: which we'll come back to, because that is almost literally
Speaker 2: a bird with crystal plumage.
Speaker 3: You know, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: I think the most important thing to stress about, and
Speaker 2: the Gallo or not Jallow conversation is that I think
Speaker 2: you probably do the film a disservice if you hype
Speaker 2: it up as yalloh too much, because then you run
Speaker 2: the risk of people coming into it expecting an Argento
Speaker 2: film or expecting a folk sci film. And if you
Speaker 2: do that, you're going to be disappointed. It's just not
Speaker 2: that sort of picture, and it's it's really very tame
Speaker 2: by Jalla's standard. It's almost like g rated Joab likewise,
Speaker 2: even on the color and visual spectrum. If you're if
Speaker 2: you come in expecting it to be in line with
Speaker 2: Mario Bava, I mean, you're gonna be disappointed with any
Speaker 2: non Mario Bava film if you're doing that. But you
Speaker 2: come in expecting Suspiria or something like that. This film
Speaker 2: is gorgeous in its own right, but it's it's doing
Speaker 2: its own thing for the most part. Some scenes are
Speaker 2: definitely more surreal in their color scheme than others, but
Speaker 2: you're it's not a picture that's going for those Mario
Speaker 2: Bava sequences either.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not going nuts with the Jeli. It's like Boba.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, So I think it's better to really think
Speaker 2: of it as art house surreal or psychological mystery.
Speaker 3: Yes, but I don't know if I've emphasized this enough already.
Speaker 3: I loved Footprints on the Moon. I thought this movie
Speaker 3: created such an enticing atmosphere of mystery. I can't remember
Speaker 3: the last time I saw a movie and I was
Speaker 3: so curious to know what the solution was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's it's exceedingly beautiful, as we'll discuss. Like
Speaker 2: the first twenty minutes of this picture, I was just
Speaker 2: captivated by the cinematography and the shot composition. Like I get,
Speaker 2: it's something you can take for granted in a lot
Speaker 2: of movies, obviously, but this this film does such a
Speaker 2: great job with just like the little details and just
Speaker 2: like there's there's some puttsing around in an apartment building
Speaker 2: early on in the picture that could just be, you know,
Speaker 2: thankless and maybe a little bit boring in another picture.
Speaker 2: But it was very captivating here, just in large part
Speaker 2: because of the way it was shot and the way
Speaker 2: it was presented.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mentioned that a lot of shallow films are
Speaker 3: more visually striking than you would have given their subject matter.
Speaker 3: But I feel like this is an especially beautiful movie.
Speaker 3: It is better looking even than the shallow standard. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and there are some ugly shallows. I just meant that
Speaker 3: generalization on average.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the better ones are often remembered for their stunning visuals. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, well hit us with an elevator pitch.
Speaker 3: H here we go. Alice Chespie is missing three days
Speaker 3: of her memory and is haunted by visions of an
Speaker 3: astronaut murdered on the surface of the moon. What happened
Speaker 3: to her? And what does klaus Kinsky have to do
Speaker 3: with it?
Speaker 2: All right, let's hear a little bit of the trailer audio.
Speaker 5: Why am I here? Why did I come to Gama,
Speaker 5: to this strange town? I know I was never in before.
Speaker 4: Your prince is Alice. My name is Alice. That's not true.
Speaker 4: Look it looks like blood.
Speaker 5: What was I doing for those three days? Why can't
Speaker 5: I remember a single thing about them?
Speaker 4: It's all those tranquilizer as you take. You probably took
Speaker 4: a larger dose than usual and slept right through you.
Speaker 5: This morning, I saw you on the beach.
Speaker 4: I think one day this week?
Speaker 5: Was it Tuesday?
Speaker 4: Are you sure it was me? No? I didn't see
Speaker 4: it at all on Tuesday.
Speaker 5: Alice, I know you can hear me open the door.
Speaker 4: Did you find him? Who? Your friend? What friend? Your friend? Harry?
Speaker 4: Who told you I had a friend named Harry?
Speaker 2: All right, so at this point, if you would like
Speaker 2: to go out and watch Footprints on the Moon, well,
Speaker 2: there is a DVD of the film, but it's also
Speaker 2: widely available for digital rental or purchase, and is also
Speaker 2: on some of the package streaming services. I was snowed in,
Speaker 2: so I rented it on Prime and the quality was great. However,
Speaker 2: I will say I had no audio options I was.
Speaker 2: I do not know if there are other language dubs
Speaker 2: for this, but the version I watched it in was English.
Speaker 3: You said the disc version is a DVD, but I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure there is a blu ray from Severin.
Speaker 2: Is there? Okay? Yeah, well that, oh it would be
Speaker 2: even better.
Speaker 3: It's under the alternate title. It's not called Footprints on
Speaker 3: the Moon. It just says Footprints. I mean, what's what
Speaker 3: why I put the moon in the title, That's what
Speaker 3: sells it.
Speaker 2: I think that was the name of the original Italian novel.
Speaker 2: But all right, now I'm pulling up the Severin's website.
Speaker 2: I'm looking at the cuts let's see what do we have.
Speaker 2: We have an Italian cut and a US cut. I'm
Speaker 2: assuming I probably watched the US cut based on everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's probably what I saw. That we may have
Speaker 3: watched the same streaming version. I watched the one available
Speaker 3: through scream Box, which is a premium subscription on Prime.
Speaker 2: My main question is just about like the version I watched,
Speaker 2: Kloskinski is dubbed. It's not klass Kinski's voice, and you
Speaker 2: know is we'll discuss his is a bit part and
Speaker 2: it doesn't really matter. But I mean that whether it's
Speaker 2: his voice or not. But I was just wondering, well,
Speaker 2: does this mean there is a different cut like in
Speaker 2: the Italian cut?
Speaker 5: Is?
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know. They're probably dubbed in either case,
Speaker 2: but at any rate, the version I watched was in English.
Speaker 2: But this Blu ray does look excellent, So this would
Speaker 2: be the ideal physical media viewing A choice right here?
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's get into the people behind Footprints
Speaker 2: on the Moon, starting at the top with the director
Speaker 2: Luigi Bzzoni born nineteen twenty nine died twenty twelve, also
Speaker 2: a writer on the picture, a Tiger director and screenwriter
Speaker 2: with five films to his credit, all genre pictures of
Speaker 2: different types. There's a nineteen sixty five's The Possessed that
Speaker 2: was a mystery starring Peter Baldwin. Sixty seven's Man Pride
Speaker 2: and Vengeance that's a western with Franco Nero and Klauskinski.
Speaker 2: Seventy one's The Fifth Chord that's a Franco Nero Jallo
Speaker 2: and also and then there's seventy three's Brothers Blue that
Speaker 2: say Western with jack palettes. And then came this film
Speaker 2: Footprints on the Moon, which was his final picture.
Speaker 3: Never seen anything else by this guy, but Footprints is
Speaker 3: so strong. I may have to check these other ones out.
Speaker 3: Even the westerns. Oh, come on a Franco Niro and
Speaker 3: Klauskinski western.
Speaker 2: What I mean? There are a number of spaghetti westerns
Speaker 2: that that are on my eventual viewing list. Sometimes it's
Speaker 2: really hard to pass up a horror film for a western,
Speaker 2: but some of these are very well regarded, and there
Speaker 2: you know, obviously there are some real classics in the
Speaker 2: spaghetti western zone. So uh yeah, we should maybe come
Speaker 2: back to one. Even on Weird House. There are some
Speaker 2: weird spaghetti westerns for sure, all right. The other writing
Speaker 2: credit and also credit for the original novel goes to
Speaker 2: Mario Finelli, who lived nineteen twenty four through nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: an Italian writer, screenwriter, and director in his own right.
Speaker 2: In fact, he seemingly directed some on this film in
Speaker 2: an uncredited capacity. Again, the film was based on his
Speaker 2: original novel The Footprints, but he'd also worked with Bozoni
Speaker 2: on The Fifth Chord and Brothers Blue. He has an
Speaker 2: extensive directing filmography as well, including a great deal of
Speaker 2: TV work. All right, now getting into the cast. The
Speaker 2: star of the picture is Florinda Bulkin playing Alice. Born
Speaker 2: nineteen forty one, Brazilian actress and model who moved through
Speaker 2: both art house and grindhouse Italian cinema. She was active
Speaker 2: to one degree or another from nineteen sixty eight through
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen. Her first film credit was a supporting role
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixty eight picture Candy, which had an
Speaker 2: all star international cast like I think John Houston was
Speaker 2: in it, and Ringo Star and just various other folks.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of pretty crowded cast on that one.
Speaker 3: Of movie is that like is it a screwball comedy
Speaker 3: or it is a sex farce? Oh boy, but.
Speaker 2: It's from a screenplay by Buck Henry. I haven't seen it,
Speaker 2: but again, it's like it's got Marlon Brando, Richard Burton,
Speaker 2: Walter Mathowl, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh, James Coburn. Yeah, it's it's a loaded cast.
Speaker 2: But I can't I can't really speak for it beyond that,
Speaker 2: just that it's it has a lot of people I
Speaker 2: recognize in it.
Speaker 3: Oki Doki.
Speaker 2: Her subsequent work again weaves back and forth between the genres,
Speaker 2: including the likes of Luccio Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's
Speaker 2: Skin in seventy one and Don't Torture a Duckling in
Speaker 2: seventy two, as well as pictures like like the James
Speaker 2: Clavel directed and adapted The Last Valley in seventy one
Speaker 2: that starred Michael Kine and Omar Sharif. I was a
Speaker 2: big fan of this picture when I was younger. I
Speaker 2: haven't seen it in a long time, but it's set
Speaker 2: during the Thirty Years War. Has to do with this
Speaker 2: whole like com mercenary crew. It's headed up by Michael
Speaker 2: Kaine's character and they defect, and as they defect, he
Speaker 2: stabs somebody to death with his spiked helmet. So that
Speaker 2: was That's a pretty fun I think I've probably mentioned
Speaker 2: that before on the show. Okay anyway, Bulcan was also
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventies Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and yeah,
Speaker 2: she's been in a ton of stuff. She also wrote
Speaker 2: and directed the two thousand film I Didn't Know Taruru,
Speaker 2: and she was the longtime partner of producer Marina Chigona.
Speaker 3: Florinda Bulkan is fantastic in this movie, and she has
Speaker 3: to The movie really rests on her because there are
Speaker 3: long stretches of the film where she is acting alone.
Speaker 3: She is in scenes without anyone, in scenes with no dialogue,
Speaker 3: with no one to act against, and so she's communicating
Speaker 3: the whole arc of her of her character's you know,
Speaker 3: feelings and discovery of things, just silently kind of reacting
Speaker 3: to her environment. And I think she really carries the
Speaker 3: film wonderful.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, she's terrific in this. This is not a picture
Speaker 2: where she's going to spend the run time running from
Speaker 2: a mass man trying to stab her with a moon rock.
Speaker 2: Now it's her quietly investigating her surroundings, and it's very
Speaker 2: psychological in nature for the most part. With that PS
Speaker 2: psychological focus turned inward. So yeah, it always takes a
Speaker 2: skilled performer to really bring that sort of thing to life.
Speaker 2: So we were talking about the potential for strong female
Speaker 2: characters in a Jallah or Jallah adjacent film, and I
Speaker 2: feel like this is a pretty strong character in a
Speaker 2: definitely a strong performance.
Speaker 3: Definitely strong performance. I think, I don't know people would
Speaker 3: argue about the meaning of the ending in that regard,
Speaker 3: but yeah, I mean, regardless there, I mean, I think
Speaker 3: it's definitely a fascinating character and a wonderful performance by
Speaker 3: Florinda Bulkan. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: Another character that turns up is the character Henry, played
Speaker 2: by Peter mcchinry born nineteen forty, a well regarded actor
Speaker 2: with a long career on the British stage and in
Speaker 2: British television obviously some euro projects as well. We chatted
Speaker 2: about him before in one of our core stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow your Mind episodes, Anthology of Horror seven, because he
Speaker 2: starred in the nineteen eighty Hammer House of Horror episode
Speaker 2: The Mark of Satan.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we did that in an anthology episode because it
Speaker 3: was a movie about a man who became who became
Speaker 3: possessed of the notion that there was an evil virus
Speaker 3: that was infecting people and turning them against him, and
Speaker 3: it was a kind of loss of sanity play as well.
Speaker 3: But that was an interesting Hammer episode, and I think
Speaker 3: we ended up relating it to certain kinds of viral
Speaker 3: viral conditions in real life.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Among the other things that he was in, there
Speaker 2: was a seventy three this nineteen seventy three horror anthology
Speaker 2: picture Tales that Witnessed Madness. Oh, and he was in
Speaker 2: a wonderful nineteen eighty one adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Speaker 2: one that I believe I watched in a Shakespeare class
Speaker 2: in college. Uh, it's not too much if I remember correctly,
Speaker 2: it's not too much more than a film play.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: They're a number of these that, you know, like British
Speaker 2: productions where it's you know, there aren't a bunch of
Speaker 2: like lavish locations and sets. It's pretty minimal. But then
Speaker 2: the but then the performances are generally really top notch.
Speaker 2: And this particular production had the likes of Helen Mirren
Speaker 2: as Titania, Phil Daniels from Billy the Kid in the
Speaker 2: Green Bays Vampire, Yeah, and many other things obviously, but
Speaker 2: he played pucking It and then Brian Glover from Alien
Speaker 2: three plays Bottom. You'll remember Brian Glover. He was the
Speaker 2: bald guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's the he's like the boss at the prison.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, they're all bald. That's the joke from his head.
Speaker 2: I think is bigger, So he's more, he's more. But
Speaker 2: mcginny played Oberon in that adaptation of Summer Night's Dream.
Speaker 3: I can see that he's got range. I mean, in
Speaker 3: the Hammer House of Horror episode he played a very unsettling,
Speaker 3: troubled guy who did not at all have the same
Speaker 3: energy he has in this and Footprints on the Moon,
Speaker 3: he plays a kind of intriguing, good natured and mysterious hunk.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and one is mustache and one is not
Speaker 2: must No mustache. In this picture he had a mustache,
Speaker 2: and yeah, the Hammer Horror anthology. But yeah, he's quite good.
Speaker 2: And there may be some other things I've seen him in.
Speaker 2: He has, Like I say, he's had a very long career.
Speaker 2: All right, another role in this one, and this one
Speaker 2: definitely gets into some other Jallo credits. We have Nicoletta
Speaker 2: Elmi playing this child, this child that wanders up and
Speaker 2: has various interactions with our star and a face that
Speaker 2: you will recognize from various nineteen seventies Italian genre and
Speaker 2: horror pictures, including seventy one's Bay of Blood, seventy two's
Speaker 2: Barren Blood, seventy three's Flesh for Frankenstein, seventy five's Night Child,
Speaker 2: and of course nineteen seventy five's Deep Red Dario Argento film.
Speaker 2: And she continued to act through the nineteen eighties as
Speaker 2: an adult, appearing in such pictures as nineteen eighty five's Demons.
Speaker 3: What would it be like to, you know, have your
Speaker 3: acting career start when you were younger? Is like, I
Speaker 3: was the recurring character character type of creepy child in
Speaker 3: Jallo film. Actually she's not so creepy in this one.
Speaker 3: She's creepy I think in some of the other ones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, in this she's I mean, she's a little creepy,
Speaker 2: but not to the to the point where you're like,
Speaker 2: is this a ghost child or not? Yeah, Like when
Speaker 2: this character is I believe she slapped at one point
Speaker 2: at one point, oh yeah, yeah, our main character slaps
Speaker 2: her and I'm like, that's not okay. And whereas if
Speaker 2: we thought she was a ghost child, I don't know
Speaker 2: then it's kind of a gray area at that point.
Speaker 2: Is it okay to slap a ghost? It's not really
Speaker 2: a child, it's not really a person anymore. It's a ghost.
Speaker 2: And can your hand make contact with the ghost? I'm
Speaker 2: not sure?
Speaker 3: Important questions?
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, the Okay, the next two actors. I
Speaker 2: want to mention There are characters I honestly don't completely
Speaker 2: one remember from this film, because not all the A
Speaker 2: lot of the investigations end up being very visually memorable,
Speaker 2: but I don't necessarily remember what information was gained from them.
Speaker 2: There's a character named Mary, and then there's a character
Speaker 2: named Marie.
Speaker 3: So, if I'm getting this right, Alice has there are
Speaker 3: essentially three other women her age that she interacts with
Speaker 3: in the beginning of the movie before she leaves for Garma,
Speaker 3: and they are named Rosemary, Mary, and Marie.
Speaker 2: Okay, these two characters are not very important to the
Speaker 2: picture towards, but I did want to mention them briefly,
Speaker 2: just because they do have connections to other Jallo pictures
Speaker 2: and some pictures we've talked about on the show before.
Speaker 2: So Ida Golly born nineteen thirty nine, credited here as
Speaker 2: Evelyn Stewart. She's an Italian actress who pops up in
Speaker 2: a number of Spaghetti Western Jaalo pictures. We previously mentioned
Speaker 2: her in our episode on Mario Bava's dark peplum film
Speaker 2: Hercules in the Haunted World, in which she played a
Speaker 2: character I don't one hundred percent remember named Missotidi.
Speaker 3: I don't remember her at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but her other credits include sixty threes, The Whip
Speaker 2: in the Body, sixty four's War of the Zombies, sixty six,
Speaker 2: Django Shoots First, and Lucio Fulci's seventy seven thriller The
Speaker 2: Psychic and then Marie is played by Rosita Torros. As
Speaker 2: Rosita Torros. She lived nineteen forty five through nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: five Italian actress who also appeared in various Shalloh and
Speaker 2: horror films, including nineteen seventies The Bird with the Crystal
Speaker 2: Plumage Regento Picture and seventy four Is Almost Human from
Speaker 2: umberto Lindsay.
Speaker 3: So, I think this is the character of Marie Leblanche,
Speaker 3: the translator who takes Alice's job after she disappeared.
Speaker 2: That's right, Yeah, So again they're not vital too. The
Speaker 2: large stretches of the picture but they're kind of interesting connections.
Speaker 2: And then, of course Klaskinsky we mentioned plays Professor Blackman.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was the same for you,
Speaker 2: but I found different versions. Different renditions of this character's
Speaker 2: name have different numbers of n's and k's in it,
Speaker 2: so that may vary depending on where you're looking. Kinsky
Speaker 2: saw two ends at the end. Maybe I just I
Speaker 2: imagined the extra K. But at any rate, Klauskinsky lived
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six through nineteen ninety one. We've previously discussed
Speaker 2: Kinsky in our episodes on Venom from eighty one and
Speaker 2: Creature from eighty five. You know, this was, of course
Speaker 2: an infamous actor known for his crazed intensity, and his
Speaker 2: career also is one of those that straddles worlds of
Speaker 2: both art house and grind house, you know, B movies
Speaker 2: and very well regarded productions as well. We're not going
Speaker 2: to go into put too much depth here, in part
Speaker 2: because it is a bit part for Kinski. We only
Speaker 2: see him in dream sequences in Stunning black and White,
Speaker 2: and his voice, at least for me, was dubbed with
Speaker 2: a thoroughly non Kinsky voice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it didn't sound like him at all. I don't
Speaker 3: think even had a German accent.
Speaker 2: No, they weren't even going for Kinski. They were just
Speaker 2: like that, just dub him over.
Speaker 3: But Kinsky's voice would have made sense because the character
Speaker 3: he plays as a mad scientist, like the character he
Speaker 3: plays as a character who sounds like Klaus Kinsky does
Speaker 3: in real life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like Kinsky's voice is one of those that, like,
Speaker 2: I feel like a lot of people can do, so
Speaker 2: it seems like a very deliberate choice. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like if you dubbed Peter Lorie, you know, it's
Speaker 2: like somebody could do that voice. Come on, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: all right. I mentioned how I spent the first twenty
Speaker 2: minutes of the film like just really admiring the composition
Speaker 2: of it all. And that's the point where I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I didn't check to see who the cinematographer was. And
Speaker 2: that's when I checked and saw that the director of
Speaker 2: photography was Vittorio Storraro, who was born in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: and is a three time Oscar winner. He earned the
Speaker 2: Oscar for his work on nineteen seventy nine Apocalypse Now
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one's Reds that I Haven't seen. That was
Speaker 2: written and directed by Warren Beatty and nineteen eighty seven's
Speaker 2: The Last Emperor, so a legendary cinematographer working on this picture.
Speaker 2: He was also nominated for nineteen nineties Dick Tracy.
Speaker 3: I've wondered before if we should cover Dick Tracy on
Speaker 3: the show because talk about weird, weird movies.
Speaker 2: Yes, a weird film that I loved as a kid,
Speaker 2: haven't seen in forever, but yeah, it's like a brightly
Speaker 2: colored comic book, old time comic book, gangster picture full
Speaker 2: of mutant gangsters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't know how well it would hold up,
Speaker 3: but it's got to be one of the weirder mainstream
Speaker 3: films ever released.
Speaker 2: It has to be. Yeah, I would like to revisit
Speaker 2: it sometime. Other pictures of note for stro include nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies The Bird with a Crystal Plumage, another bird related picture,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five's Lady Hawk, and the two thousand Dune
Speaker 2: mini series, which all of these had very strong visual composition,
Speaker 2: So you know, yeah, this is a big name, and
Speaker 2: it makes sense that a big name was involved here
Speaker 2: given how great everything looks.
Speaker 3: It is a gorgeously shot film, so this makes a
Speaker 3: lot of sense. I'm still kind of processing where the
Speaker 3: two thousand Dune mini series fits in. Maybe I'm not
Speaker 3: being fair because I haven't seen that, but I've seen
Speaker 3: stills from it. It never struck me as something that
Speaker 3: looked amazing. But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: I recently rewatched parts of it, and I will have
Speaker 2: to say the CGI did not hold up well at all,
Speaker 2: and it does feel I know it cost a pretty penny,
Speaker 2: but it feels like a TV production, you know, in
Speaker 2: many respects. But on the other hand, like the costumes
Speaker 2: are very inventive, It's got some great performances in it,
Speaker 2: and given its length, it actually gives you a chance
Speaker 2: to see some of the scenes that are often omitted
Speaker 2: from adaptations of Doom. All right, then, finally, the composer
Speaker 2: on this one. We already mentioned how nice the music is.
Speaker 2: It is the work of Nicola Piovanni born nineteen forty six,
Speaker 2: Italian composer who won an Oscar himself in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: nine for Life Is Beautiful. His other credits include seventy
Speaker 2: four's The Perfume of the Lady in Black. I don't
Speaker 2: think I have to tell you that's a Gallo picture
Speaker 2: with the title like that, as well as Flavia the Heretic,
Speaker 2: which starred Florinda Bulcan.
Speaker 3: All right, do you want to start talking about the BLA.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get into the plot of Footprints on the Moon.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, the credits play in yellow type script over
Speaker 3: a deep blue night sky with no stars in sight,
Speaker 3: just the moon, which is pale and gray in the
Speaker 3: center of the frame. And I quite like the music
Speaker 3: that plays over the opening credits here. So at the
Speaker 3: beginning it's mostly strings and flute, and the melody is subtle, mysterious,
Speaker 3: kind of cold. I was thinking of it as the
Speaker 3: sound of like seeing something that looks very odd far
Speaker 3: away out of window and then looking back to try
Speaker 3: to see it more clearly, and it's gone. But suddenly
Speaker 3: into this texture, the pipe organ comes roaring in, and
Speaker 3: it's immediately like we are phantoming the opera out of this. Yes,
Speaker 3: So the credits roll and we zoom in on the
Speaker 3: moon to reveal this is not genuine night sky photography.
Speaker 3: This is an illustration of the moon in a gorgeous
Speaker 3: but old school style, so it looks like something out
Speaker 3: of one of those great old nineteenth century astronomy books
Speaker 3: with the hand drawn illustrations of the craters and the
Speaker 3: lunar maria, and then in the foreground we see a
Speaker 3: lunar landing vehicle appear, so it's drifting gracefully down toward
Speaker 3: the toward the Moon, down toward the surface. And then
Speaker 3: when we see the surface in close up, it's another
Speaker 3: classic style illustration, the kind of planet surface you would
Speaker 3: get in Planet of the Vampires and these landing party
Speaker 3: adventures of the fifties and sixties. So it's not just
Speaker 3: rocks and dust, but these craggy spires which you don't
Speaker 3: really get in the actual topography of the Moon, at
Speaker 3: least not our Moon. So after the lander sets down,
Speaker 3: we cut to a rather surprising shot. We see one
Speaker 3: astronaut in a suit and a classic bubble helmet, apparently unconscious,
Speaker 3: being dragged across the surface by another astronaut with his boots,
Speaker 3: leaving these streaks in the regolith as his limp body
Speaker 3: is pulled along, and then the upright astronaut drops the
Speaker 3: other one in the dust in a field that is
Speaker 3: framed by these pointy moon spires, and then begins to
Speaker 3: walk away. So is somebody just being abandoned on the
Speaker 3: surface of the moon, it seems. Yes, we watched the
Speaker 3: lander begin to take off and then rise up into
Speaker 3: orbit once again, and it's only once the lander is
Speaker 3: far away that the astronaut comes to and sits up
Speaker 3: and realizes what's happening, and they watch in terror as
Speaker 3: the vehicle departs. And Rabbi attached a couple of screenshots
Speaker 3: of this moment for you to look at here, because
Speaker 3: I thought this part was wonderful. It's so strange and
Speaker 3: mysterious and evocative. The soundtrack goes on alternating between the cold,
Speaker 3: ominous strings and woodwinds with these sudden explosions of pipe
Speaker 3: organ and we're thrown off by this unusual scenario and
Speaker 3: the mid century science fiction aesthetics of the EVA suits
Speaker 3: and the lunar set design. So it sounds based on
Speaker 3: that the latter stuff there like the effect of this
Speaker 3: could be comical, but it's really not in this moment,
Speaker 3: because we're seeing the abandoned astronaut's eyes wide in fear
Speaker 3: behind the curved glass of the face plate, but the
Speaker 3: glass is partially fogged over, so we only see their
Speaker 3: face through this obscuring screen of fog, which kind of
Speaker 3: mutes the detection of emotion there and makes them inaccessible
Speaker 3: and haunting. I think it's a really great moments.
Speaker 2: It's extremely well executed because it manages to walk that
Speaker 2: line where it never feels hokey. But it also is
Speaker 2: not going for a high highly accurate rendition, like they're
Speaker 2: not trying to make it look like the actual surface
Speaker 2: of the Moon in actual like lunar landings and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, then from here we cut to a different scene,
Speaker 3: still in the aesthetics of old school sci fi, but
Speaker 3: now fully in black and white. So we see a
Speaker 3: gruff man in an EVA helmet starting a radio communication.
Speaker 3: He announces himself as Gunter, and he calls out for
Speaker 3: a Professor Blackmann. Who could that be? Why it's Klaus Kinski.
Speaker 3: Kinsky says, receiving you over in a non Kinsky voice,
Speaker 3: And so Kinsky is hunched over in some kind of
Speaker 3: mad science mission control room with lights flashing everywhere and
Speaker 3: computers making little beeps and boops, and we learn from
Speaker 3: their exchange that Blackman and Gunter are collaborating on some
Speaker 3: kind of morbid experiment. They intentionally abandoned the other astronaut,
Speaker 3: whose name is we learn as McGregor on the moon
Speaker 3: so they could study something about him from a distance.
Speaker 3: And by the way, when we get a look at
Speaker 3: this full control room, I was kind of wondering for
Speaker 3: some reason if they shot these in like a real
Speaker 3: decommissioned nuclear plant like they did in Shocking Dark. Whatever
Speaker 3: these controls panels are, they look pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I love this gritty black and white that
Speaker 2: they shoot everything, and it reminds me a lot of
Speaker 2: a picture that would come much later two thousand and
Speaker 2: one is the American Astronauts. The same kind of quality
Speaker 2: where it's just like grungy black and white and it
Speaker 2: doesn't feel it doesn't have that feeling like you just
Speaker 2: turned down the color settings on your old school television
Speaker 2: or anything. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, black and white.
Speaker 2: You can taste, get the grid of it in your teeth.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's as a little bit salty. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 3: the mad scientists, mad scientists conspirators here, they confirm that
Speaker 3: the experiment is underway, and then Kinsky says, I will
Speaker 3: alert the organization. And from here we cut to a
Speaker 3: telephone buzzing on a furry shag carpet. Could this be
Speaker 3: Kinsky's call to the organization. I don't think so because
Speaker 3: something has changed. We have gone from black and white
Speaker 3: to full color, and we pan up to see our protagonist,
Speaker 3: Alice Chess be sleeping on her bed. She's wearing a
Speaker 3: black eye mask, curiously in almost the same posture as
Speaker 3: the unconscious astronaut from the other story, and the blinds
Speaker 3: are drawn over the windows in the room, but from
Speaker 3: in between them. The light is falling in over her
Speaker 3: face in a way that suggests it's late morning. She
Speaker 3: has overslept groggily. Alice answers the phone, and it's her
Speaker 3: friend Rosemary, who says she's been trying to reach her
Speaker 3: for hours. I think she literally says the phone, the
Speaker 3: phone has been ringing for hours. That's that's dedication for
Speaker 3: Rosemary to wait that long.
Speaker 2: What is wrong with you? Why would you the phone
Speaker 2: ring for hours, not just on the receiving end, but
Speaker 2: on the calling in is Why would you do that?
Speaker 3: So Alice seems disoriented, but discovers it's late in the
Speaker 3: morning and she has to turn in a translation she
Speaker 3: hasn't finished yet. Alice works as a translator for some
Speaker 3: kind of consolate or diplomatic office, apparently specializing in scientific topics.
Speaker 3: I think so it makes plans to meet with Rosemary
Speaker 3: later that morning, and then she gets to business. So
Speaker 3: there are kind of some scenes here of like you
Speaker 3: said earlier, Alice, She's just kind of puttering around her
Speaker 3: apartment doing nothing all that mysterious, but they are framed
Speaker 3: in such a strange and beautiful way. Immediately something feels significant.
Speaker 3: I'm kind of looking for clues, even before the plot
Speaker 3: suggests I should. And we see her standing at her window,
Speaker 3: looking in the mirror, getting ready for the day, lighting
Speaker 3: the gas under her coffee maker, settling down to finish
Speaker 3: typing her translation of an audio tape. And one thing
Speaker 3: I noticed is that outside of her apartment window there
Speaker 3: is first of all, a beautiful view of whatever city
Speaker 3: this is. I don't know if this is Rome or whatever.
Speaker 3: But the second thing is there is a giant construction crane,
Speaker 3: and Alice's body is a couple of times seen framed
Speaker 3: within the angle of the crane. Feels like it means something.
Speaker 3: So while she goes about her business, Alice at one
Speaker 3: point finds something on the floor of her kitchen, next
Speaker 3: to the garbage can. It is a torn up postcard
Speaker 3: bearing the image of a stately old hotel. She puzzles
Speaker 3: the pieces back together and then looks at it and
Speaker 3: then flips it over to see that this is the
Speaker 3: Hotel Garma of a place called Garma. What is it?
Speaker 3: She has no idea where it came from, So Alice
Speaker 3: leaves home and then goes about her day. First of all,
Speaker 3: she meets up with her friend Rosemary. There's a funny
Speaker 3: scene where Rosemary's trying to tell her a story about
Speaker 3: something that happened when she went to a club on
Speaker 3: Tuesday night, which is strange because we just saw Alice
Speaker 3: flip her daily calendar from Monday to Tuesday. And she
Speaker 3: realizes Alice is lost in thought, not really paying attention,
Speaker 3: and Alice says she is thinking about a dream she
Speaker 3: had the night before, and in fact, a dream she's
Speaker 3: had many times, where she says a man is abandoned
Speaker 3: on the moon for an experiment. Rosemary says this sounds
Speaker 3: like science fic, and Alice says, yes, it was. In fact,
Speaker 3: this was a dream that was inspired by a film
Speaker 3: she saw when she was young. The movie was called
Speaker 3: Footprints on the Moon, and it scared her so much
Speaker 3: that she ran out of the theater and never saw
Speaker 3: the end of it. So it's just kind of been
Speaker 3: hanging in her mind all these years. Now, after this,
Speaker 3: we see Alice going to work. She's going to whatever
Speaker 3: this diplomatic office is to turn in her translations, and
Speaker 3: on the way there she moves through such interesting spaces,
Speaker 3: like this big empty auditorium with all these green chairs
Speaker 3: lined up and these stained wooden walls, and then walking
Speaker 3: through behind this colonnade with these doorways framed against the sunlight.
Speaker 3: She eventually comes for a meeting with her boss or
Speaker 3: maybe it's her client I think. Actually she's supposed to
Speaker 3: be a freelancer. But when she gets there, everything is confused,
Speaker 3: like she tries to turn in the translation, which was
Speaker 3: due at noon, but this leads to a bizarre revelation.
Speaker 3: The trans reslation was of a speech I think concerning
Speaker 3: science and astronautics that was given on Monday, and it
Speaker 3: was supposed to be turned in at noon on Tuesday,
Speaker 3: which is what time Alice believes it is. But actually
Speaker 3: her client here informs her that it is now noon
Speaker 3: on Thursday, and Alice has no memory of the missing
Speaker 3: two days. Her handler tells her that she abruptly left
Speaker 3: in the middle of the address. In the forum there
Speaker 3: and then for the following several days they tried to
Speaker 3: contact her and got nothing, so in her absence they
Speaker 3: had to hire a different translator, a miss Lablanche, and
Speaker 3: Alice is clearly shaken by this. She doesn't know what
Speaker 3: to make of it and apparently has no memory of
Speaker 3: leaving the speech or of the missing time.
Speaker 2: And so in this we we really begin to get
Speaker 2: into the big psychological mysteries of the picture of missing time,
Speaker 2: of lost memories. And again, these are questions that are
Speaker 2: very internal. And so it's another way that this performance
Speaker 2: is so good. It's that you know, they're not really
Speaker 2: exploring all of this through flashbacks or exploring it through
Speaker 2: conversations in facial expressions. It's very nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And this is also another way it really does
Speaker 3: fit Jallo conventions, even though it's not a murder mystery.
Speaker 3: I mean, this idea of like having to reconstruct the
Speaker 3: lost memory to solve the mystery of what happened is
Speaker 3: absolutely like core Jallo feeling. Yeah. So Alice meets with
Speaker 3: another friend of hers named Mary to talk about what's
Speaker 3: going on. Mary asks if she can remember anything about
Speaker 3: what happened at this session in the assembly, that she
Speaker 3: apparently ran out in the middle of So we cut
Speaker 3: to this big public auditorium with a stage and electern,
Speaker 3: with a speaker talking into the microphone, and at the
Speaker 3: back of the room there are sound isolated translation booths
Speaker 3: surrounded by glass, with a line of these different booths,
Speaker 3: each one filled with worker translating the speech into different
Speaker 3: languages in real time, and Alice is one of these translators. Curiously,
Speaker 3: this memory is in black and white and on a
Speaker 3: grainier film stock, and in that way it resembles Alice's
Speaker 3: dreams of the science fiction movie Footprints on the Moon.
Speaker 3: The speaker who's talking and being translated in the scene
Speaker 3: is someone named Madame Verdi, who says, I actually wrote
Speaker 3: down because it's kind of confusing because we were seeing
Speaker 3: subtitles of the translation of the narration, but then also
Speaker 3: the subtitles of the speech that's going on. The speech says,
Speaker 3: so that man will find the possibility of surviving extremely
Speaker 3: difficult unless he begins immediately to totally alter his ways
Speaker 3: of thinking and living, to devote all his energies to
Speaker 3: try to avoid these dangers which are rushing upon him.
Speaker 3: By nineteen ninety, pollution and poisoning will have killed all
Speaker 3: the biological life in the sea. Our computer has also
Speaker 3: shown that in the year two thousand, it will be
Speaker 3: almost impossible for men to live on planet Earth. So
Speaker 3: within the scenario of this movie, it's funny because she's
Speaker 3: listening to this speech that's full of these extremely dire
Speaker 3: warnings of like coming environmental catastrophe, but she makes no
Speaker 3: direct reference to the contents of the speech. Instead, this
Speaker 3: is just presented as like it's just her job to
Speaker 3: translate this, and the content is almost like neutral, it
Speaker 3: doesn't matter what's being said. She's just there to translate it.
Speaker 2: But it's so effective, isn't it, Because the content is horrifying. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's just flowing through her being translated. It's part of
Speaker 2: her job. And so you get kind of an early
Speaker 2: idea that, yeah, this could be having a toll on her.
Speaker 2: She may not be quite aware of it, but like,
Speaker 2: this is horrible news, and you know, it's interesting to
Speaker 2: sort of take this sort of forecast, you know, certainly
Speaker 2: within the context again of a very modern setting of
Speaker 2: the original picture, but then as a contemporary viewer of
Speaker 2: this film, like on one level, like you hear that
Speaker 2: and you're like, Oh, it's like it's like realizing you've
Speaker 2: been you know, eating, you know, using a jar of
Speaker 2: jam and it expired you know, twenty five years ago. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, so in a way it feels even more dire.
Speaker 2: And then also the other part of the course, it
Speaker 2: is that like this is still the scenario that we
Speaker 2: have roughly without the exact dates in play, like yeah,
Speaker 2: like we're on a terrible path. Yeah, and it does
Speaker 2: to have a toll take a toll on one.
Speaker 3: Yes, But it's so interesting the way that it's like
Speaker 3: it's presented to us the viewer, so we can see
Speaker 3: that and we can see the emotional effect it should have,
Speaker 3: but she doesn't really comment on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is a wonderful tool that is
Speaker 2: these sometimes you see used in pictures. I'm reminded of
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighty five neo noir film Trouble in Mind
Speaker 2: by Alan Rudolph that starred Chris Christofferson. Picture is also
Speaker 2: super weird, and I go back and forth on whether
Speaker 2: we should cover it on the show. Maybe someday. But
Speaker 2: in the background of that setting, like it's clear that
Speaker 2: there's some sort of a foreign occupation of the city,
Speaker 2: which I think is like Seattle or something. But it's
Speaker 2: never really like nobody ever really comments on it as
Speaker 2: far as I remember. It's just sort of in the background.
Speaker 2: But then you know, it's in the psyche, it's in
Speaker 2: the world, like it's definitely it's presented as background material,
Speaker 2: but it's very much a part of the foreground as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean in storytelling, like what characters don't see
Speaker 3: fit to comment on, it can be such a powerful storytelling.
Speaker 2: Tool, absolutely, and so they're just wonderful job with it
Speaker 2: here in this picture.
Speaker 3: So anyway, in this scene, we pan over the different translators,
Speaker 3: each speaking their respective languages while taking down the speech.
Speaker 3: And this really also kind of takes on the feeling
Speaker 3: of a political espionage thriller, you know, it has that
Speaker 3: feeling of I don't know, like three Days of Condor
Speaker 3: or something. Alice talking to Mary while we watched this
Speaker 3: scene play out in black and white from her memory.
Speaker 3: Talking to Mary, she says that the speech was very long,
Speaker 3: and in her isolation booth, she became very hot, so
Speaker 3: hot she couldn't breathe and she couldn't really concentrate, and
Speaker 3: then she noticed looking down at the crowd below that
Speaker 3: Marie le Blanche was sitting there, and ooh, we get
Speaker 3: a rear window style zoom in on Leblanche. Remember she's
Speaker 3: the woman who the Diplomatic office hired to replace Alice
Speaker 3: when she disappeared. And she says that le Blanche was
Speaker 3: just staring at her, so like everybody else in the
Speaker 3: room is looking forward, but Leblanche is in her chair
Speaker 3: looking straight back up at Alice, and she says, you know,
Speaker 3: it's like she was willing her to make a mistake,
Speaker 3: kind of putting a curse on her from a distance.
Speaker 3: And Alice says she felt overwhelmed. She couldn't keep up
Speaker 3: with the voice she was translating it. She was afraid
Speaker 3: it would just keep going on without her, which I
Speaker 3: guess it would write, you know, if she can't keep up,
Speaker 3: it's just going to keep going. Then she says something happened,
Speaker 3: and we don't really know exactly what it was, but
Speaker 3: in the black and white memory, now everyone in the
Speaker 3: hall turns to stare up at Alice, and in this moment,
Speaker 3: we don't really have a way of knowing whether that
Speaker 3: actually happened, or whether her memory of this event might
Speaker 3: be faulty or we're getting a kind of emotionally tinged
Speaker 3: version of it. So suddenly everybody turns and looks and
Speaker 3: is staring at her in this isolation booth, and she
Speaker 3: gets up and runs. She remembers she got up and
Speaker 3: ran out and rushed out of the building through the
Speaker 3: gardens next door, like she was running away from something.
Speaker 3: But that's where her memory stops. She can't recall where
Speaker 3: she went after that or why now. Mary suggests it's
Speaker 3: all those tranquilizers in take. She says, you know, you
Speaker 3: took a big dose and you just simply slept through
Speaker 3: two whole days. And Mary reminds her of how eggs
Speaker 3: are she has been from work.
Speaker 2: She's like, look, it's the seventies. It happens, yeah, But.
Speaker 3: Alice has good reason for thinking that's not what happened,
Speaker 3: because she brings up something she hasn't told anybody else
Speaker 3: so far, the torn up postcard of the Hotel Garma.
Speaker 3: She says that the facade of the building looked so
Speaker 3: familiar to her. She doesn't have a memory of going there,
Speaker 3: but she could swear she had seen it before, and
Speaker 3: she has a memory of a room inside the hotel
Speaker 3: with a window painted and stained glass showing a giant peacock. Oh,
Speaker 3: then there are some more clues that something must have
Speaker 3: been going on. Back in her apartment, Alice realizes that
Speaker 3: she only has one of her two gold earrings. She's
Speaker 3: got one for one ear, but it's missing its mate. Also,
Speaker 3: she is missing a gray suit that should be in
Speaker 3: her closet, and in its place she finds a yellow
Speaker 3: dress her size that she has never seen before. Then
Speaker 3: on that yellow dress there is a small stain, a
Speaker 3: spot of blood. Also right around here. There's these little
Speaker 3: things throughout the movie that I think are so clever
Speaker 3: because there will be a scene where nothing overtly scary happens,
Speaker 3: but there's just a little strange, slightly ominous accident. So
Speaker 3: one case of something like that that happens here is
Speaker 3: her phone rings and she answers and there's just silence
Speaker 3: on the other side. No one is there. Nothing super
Speaker 3: scary happens. But I don't know when things like that
Speaker 3: pile up in a movie, they can really they can
Speaker 3: really be effective. It just feels like something is wrong
Speaker 3: with the world. She's being targeted somehow. And I also
Speaker 3: love that the phone looks like a computer mouse.
Speaker 2: This phone? Is it is this is a plug into
Speaker 2: the wall telephone? Yes, but yeah, it looks the most
Speaker 2: like a like a mouse. But I couldn't even I
Speaker 2: didn't even know what it was when I saw it there.
Speaker 2: I was like, is this something that you use like
Speaker 2: on your body or scans? I like, I just this
Speaker 2: is clearly some sort of modern technology, but it's like
Speaker 2: so cutting edge that it's unrecognizable decades later, you know.
Speaker 3: So Alice is troubled by this situation and by her
Speaker 3: inability to remember the past two days. So she wakes
Speaker 3: up in the middle of the night. She's clearly wrestling
Speaker 3: with this, and she goes to the kitchen and retrieves
Speaker 3: the pieces of the torn up postcard and once again
Speaker 3: puts them together. And this causes her to think once
Speaker 3: again of the painted peacock in the glass. What is
Speaker 3: the source of that memory? And it seems if there
Speaker 3: is an answer to this riddle, it may lie in
Speaker 3: Garma wherever. That is from what I can tell, Garma
Speaker 3: is not a real place. I tried to look it
Speaker 3: up and couldn't really come up with anything, but within
Speaker 3: the world of the movie, it is a small island
Speaker 3: in the Mediterranean. I thinks it's supposed to be off
Speaker 3: the coast of Turkey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looks like they film at a couple of
Speaker 2: different locations in Turkey, So I think that's fair too soon.
Speaker 3: So Alice books a flight to the nearest airport. There's
Speaker 3: no airport on Garma. She has to fly to another
Speaker 3: island or a town on the mainland, I think, and
Speaker 3: then take a boat out to Garma. And on the
Speaker 3: airplane we see she like sleeps in the in the
Speaker 3: airplane chair and she's dreaming about the astronaut strained on
Speaker 3: the moon again and it's again a haunting image because
Speaker 3: the astronaut is this is after the lander has already left,
Speaker 3: So the astronaut is like stumbling around in the moon dust.
Speaker 3: But where can he go? You know, you imagine yourself
Speaker 3: in that situation, like why what sense would it even
Speaker 3: make to walk anywhere? There's no help to be found.
Speaker 3: You're on the moon. So she arrives at the port
Speaker 3: of Garma, where she disembarks from the boat and then
Speaker 3: meets a friendly young man with a British accent named Henry,
Speaker 3: who offers to give her a ride to the hotel.
Speaker 3: And on the way, we see some beautiful local sites
Speaker 3: and architecture. There are these old stone mosques with huge
Speaker 3: rising domes and minarets. There are wooded cemeteries with tall,
Speaker 3: slender headstones. I really liked these graveyards where there would
Speaker 3: be like trees in them, and the trees are kind
Speaker 3: of the low branches are hanging out and mingling among
Speaker 3: the tall headstones of the graves. There's even what looks
Speaker 3: like an antique city wall with an arched gateway and
Speaker 3: the car just drives underneath it. It looks like something
Speaker 3: where I don't know, they'd want to keep traffic away
Speaker 3: from it or something, But I guess you get that
Speaker 3: more in I don't know, in like Europe and Turkey
Speaker 3: and stuff, where just like the ancient and the modern
Speaker 3: are just commingled. Everything's right there together.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is one of the great things
Speaker 2: about about traveling to locations like this. I've never been
Speaker 2: to Turkey, but these Turkish locations look look fabulous, and
Speaker 2: this film really found some great locations for these shots.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I wonder what this main mosque that we keep
Speaker 3: seeing is with the minarets. It's really really gorgeous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not sure, I think there are, Like, there
Speaker 2: are three different Turkish locations that are sited in IMDb.
Speaker 2: One of them is Kemer, which I'm to understand is
Speaker 2: essentially like a Mediterranean vacation destination. So I think when
Speaker 2: we see the more vacationy parts of this place where
Speaker 2: we're looking at Kemer, I'm not sure about these, about
Speaker 2: the cemetery or the mosque and so forth.
Speaker 3: So Alice tells Henry on the car ride that it
Speaker 3: is her first time visiting Garma, and Henry explains that
Speaker 3: he's there because he owns an old house. There's an
Speaker 3: old house on the island in the woods, and he's
Speaker 3: trying to fix it up, though he says he is
Speaker 3: not a very good carpenter, and he holds up a
Speaker 3: bandaged hand as proof of that. I guess it would
Speaker 3: have been funnier if there was like still a nail
Speaker 3: sticking out of it, but it's just a bandage hand.
Speaker 3: Henry drops Alice off at the hotel, the one from
Speaker 3: the post and we see it framed exactly the same
Speaker 3: way it is in the postcard. There's a nice little
Speaker 3: touch where a flock of pigeons on the sidewalk scatter
Speaker 3: into the air as the car arrives outside, and then
Speaker 3: they all just kind of settle down again. But at
Speaker 3: the hotel, Alice tries to ask for the room she
Speaker 3: remembers the room with the peacock painted on the window,
Speaker 3: but the manager doesn't seem to know what she's talking about,
Speaker 3: so she takes a regular room with a balcony facing
Speaker 3: the ocean. And as with so many of the sets,
Speaker 3: the inside of this hotel is elegantly wacky. Like the
Speaker 3: lobby is just beautiful. It has these pillars and arches
Speaker 3: and this tile pattern, and I guess a lot of
Speaker 3: this looks like, you know, kind of classic Islamic architecture,
Speaker 3: so those kind of like arch window styles. But then
Speaker 3: also these beautiful hanging lights that have I don't know,
Speaker 3: they're not like a normal chandelier, They're more like randomly
Speaker 3: arranged lights along i don't know, kind of a Christmas
Speaker 3: light vibe. And then the plants indoors and old furniture
Speaker 3: is just a beautiful looking place. And also her room
Speaker 3: is by contrast, kind of lovely but hideous, like a
Speaker 3: totally red blanket on the bed, and then these wallpaper
Speaker 3: walls and like bear light bulbs it's something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this movie does a great job at something that
Speaker 2: This is another thing is easy to take for granted
Speaker 2: in a film, and not all films pulled this off,
Speaker 2: but making you so invested in the pre speculativelopment or
Speaker 2: pre call to adventures and so forth aspect of the plot.
Speaker 2: You're like on vacation with this woman and you're like,
Speaker 2: this is pleasant. I want to see what's next. What's
Speaker 2: she doing for lunch? Let's look at more details in
Speaker 2: her hotel room. Like I'm game. I'm totally down with
Speaker 2: the pace at which we're exploring this world.
Speaker 3: That's right. So Alice explores the island. She takes in
Speaker 3: more of the sites in the atmosphere. There's one particularly
Speaker 3: lovely shot where she's i think, wandering around outside the
Speaker 3: moss we saw earlier, and there are these trees in
Speaker 3: the courtyard sort of you just see like the tree
Speaker 3: trunks and these stone pillars framed in almost the same way,
Speaker 3: like you can mistake one for the other, and it's
Speaker 3: quite beautiful. And so she's exploring the island, lounging on
Speaker 3: the coast. There's one thing that's kind of interesting here.
Speaker 3: We were talking about the scene earlier with the speech
Speaker 3: about the coming environmental catastrophe, where this very captivating and
Speaker 3: disturbing premise is established by what's happening in the background,
Speaker 3: but the characters don't really acknowledge or comment on this
Speaker 3: at all, so it's like it might not be affecting them,
Speaker 3: or maybe maybe it is affecting them, but they don't
Speaker 3: acknowledge or realize themselves how it is affecting them. There's
Speaker 3: a similar thing with the history in the setting, this
Speaker 3: island being full of old buildings, holy places, ruins, ruins
Speaker 3: in the woods, ancient city walls, and cemeteries. Very little
Speaker 3: is said about this, but the setting really contributes to
Speaker 3: the psychic connotations of the action, like something is old, buried,
Speaker 3: maybe sacred, maybe haunted. So I guess at this point
Speaker 3: it makes sense to kind of zoom out and give
Speaker 3: a more summary description of this middle portion of the movie,
Speaker 3: a lot of which is Alice going about having various
Speaker 3: encounters on the island, trying to piece together what happened,
Speaker 3: what her connection to this place is, and what people know.
Speaker 3: And a big thing is that as she meets people
Speaker 3: on the island, especially other tourists, she gets recognized, so
Speaker 3: she meets a red haired girl named Paula. They're out
Speaker 3: on the beach. I think she's lounging in a chair
Speaker 3: sort of in the shade of a tree that's very
Speaker 3: close to the beach. It just looks closer to the
Speaker 3: beach than the tree usually is, I think. But she's
Speaker 3: sitting there and this girl, Paula, comes up and talks
Speaker 3: to her as if she already knows her, and she
Speaker 3: says they've met before, but this girl knows her not
Speaker 3: as Alice, but as Nicole, And Paula says that Nicole
Speaker 3: looked alike her, but with long red hair. And I
Speaker 3: like that a sort of double doppelganger theme is established here.
Speaker 3: It's sort of spooky because not only is the implication
Speaker 3: that Alice has some kind of unknown lookalike, but also
Speaker 3: it's kind of spooky because the child telling her about
Speaker 3: this look alike with long red hair also has long
Speaker 3: red hair.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so these are the moments where you do wonder.
Speaker 2: It's like, is the child also some manner of doppelganger
Speaker 2: or a ghost of the child that you were, that
Speaker 2: sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Paula says that Alice is similar to Nicole but nicer.
Speaker 3: Something about Nicole was frightening, and she did something scary
Speaker 3: out in the woods. And I love in the setting here,
Speaker 3: the presence of these woods kind of at the edge
Speaker 3: of a lot of these beach scenes. So we'll see
Speaker 3: Alice talking to people out on the beach or out
Speaker 3: on the rocks near the coast, and then there's often
Speaker 3: like arow throw of attention towards this peninsular coast that's
Speaker 3: got a pine forest on it, and it's very ominous.
Speaker 3: So something about the energy that these woods radiate is powerful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they feel thick and wild, as if all the
Speaker 2: like the resort town energy that we see elsewhere, and
Speaker 2: even the deeper history of the island, the human history
Speaker 2: that they seem to struggle here in these woods. These
Speaker 2: woods are more primal, wilder, and less touched by humanity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a really good scene in them coming up
Speaker 3: in a minute. But first of all, Alice also has
Speaker 3: an encounter with an older woman named missus Him also
Speaker 3: a tourist on the island who also recently saw Nicole.
Speaker 3: This woman who looked like Alice, but with long red hair.
Speaker 3: So what's going on? Does Alice have a secret look
Speaker 3: alike or was she somehow here in disguise in the
Speaker 3: days she can't remember. Why would she have been in
Speaker 3: disguise if that was her. She also has another meeting
Speaker 3: with Henry, the nice man who gave her a ride
Speaker 3: to the hotel, and there is a hint of romantic
Speaker 3: interest between them, and Henry invites her to meet him
Speaker 3: for a drink later. But I mentioned the creepy scene
Speaker 3: in the woods is the scene with the dog and
Speaker 3: the wig. So there's a scene where Alice and Paula
Speaker 3: the younger girl, they go out into the woods into
Speaker 3: I think these are like there are ruins in the
Speaker 3: pine woods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like an arch that's still intact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they go here because am I remembering right
Speaker 3: that this? They went here because this is the place
Speaker 3: where Paula said she saw Nicole burning things in a fire. Yes,
Speaker 3: So they go here and they find the remains of
Speaker 3: whatever Nicole had been burning, and Paula confesses that Nicole
Speaker 3: scared her. Nicole herself apparently was afraid she had been
Speaker 3: acting erradically and she was afraid that people or following
Speaker 3: her hunting her. And there's some kind of espionage story implication,
Speaker 3: like was Alice burning documents in the woods, burning something
Speaker 3: having to do with her work, maybe diplomatic secrets about
Speaker 3: scientific research and with somebody trying to get a hold
Speaker 3: of that information. But in the end of the scene,
Speaker 3: Paula is scared by Nicole slash Alice and runs away,
Speaker 3: and Alice sees a stray dog. I think they have
Speaker 3: a name for this dog. Is he called Fox or something? Fox? Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a stray dog who hangs around and the dog
Speaker 3: is like chewing on a red wig. So Alice retrieves
Speaker 3: the wig, and this is another clue, and it takes
Speaker 3: her to the local wig shop. So Garma appears to
Speaker 3: have a very it's a small town, but they do
Speaker 3: have a wig shop and like a wig styling specialist.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: She brings it in and she's like, I would like
Speaker 2: this washed, she says, washed in cone. Yeah, yeah, which
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know much about wigs, but
Speaker 2: I was just assumed, like, once it's in the woods
Speaker 2: in the mouth of a dog, like maybe that wig's gone.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but maybe you can bring him back
Speaker 2: from that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you can always bring a wig back, I'm sure. Anyway,
Speaker 3: at the whig shop, Alice is once again recognized as Nichole.
Speaker 3: The man there fixes up her wig and offers to
Speaker 3: redo her makeup in the way that he had done
Speaker 3: it before. So, if Nichole was Alice, it seems maybe
Speaker 3: she had been trying to change her whole appearance. And
Speaker 3: there are multiple possibilities there, like was she trying to
Speaker 3: hide her identity or was she trying to change it entirely,
Speaker 3: like change who she was? We don't know at this point.
Speaker 3: From here, Alice traces the path of Nichole's business with
Speaker 3: various shops in town. She finds the shop where she
Speaker 3: had bought the yellow dress with the spot of blood
Speaker 3: on it that she found in her closet. She finds
Speaker 3: somehow reference to an or at the stationery store, and
Speaker 3: when she goes to pick it up, the shopkeeper there says, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, this order was already filled. You already got
Speaker 3: the item. But Alice asks for the same item again
Speaker 3: to find out what it is. When she gets it,
Speaker 3: it is a large sharp pair of scissors. Also, throughout
Speaker 3: this middle section of the movie, there are scenes that
Speaker 3: just raised the specter of Alice being pursued or watched
Speaker 3: in some way. You know are there people who are
Speaker 3: following her? And other people are telling her that if
Speaker 3: Nicole was her Nicole was afraid of men who had
Speaker 3: been following her, and she has recurring dreams of the
Speaker 3: science fiction film with klaus Kinski killing these astronauts on
Speaker 3: the moon to complete the experiment. There's a scene where
Speaker 3: Alice meets Henry for a drink, and here he acts
Speaker 3: a little bit strange. He's still he comes across as
Speaker 3: very nice, like not threatening at all, but he does
Speaker 3: start to say things like is there something you'd like
Speaker 3: to tell me? You have something you want to say,
Speaker 3: and she doesn't understand what's going on and ends up leaving.
Speaker 3: Alice tries to make arrangements to leave the island on
Speaker 3: the last boat of the day, but this ends up
Speaker 3: going wrong. She misses the boat because she first has
Speaker 3: to pick up her wallet which she lost, which is
Speaker 3: in the possession of missus Him that other tourists she met,
Speaker 3: and missus Him has asked her to meet to meet
Speaker 3: at an organ concert in a local church, and this
Speaker 3: is supposed to be some great traveling organist who's performing.
Speaker 3: Don't normally I'm not going to knock other people's musical
Speaker 3: performance as a sloppy musician myself. But I heard what
Speaker 3: sounded like a lot of mistakes on this organ playing.
Speaker 3: I don't know how like world class this one this
Speaker 3: performer was.
Speaker 2: I can't speak to that, but I did find that
Speaker 2: the whole organ performance felt kind of like creepy and
Speaker 2: low energy at the same time, where I'm like, is
Speaker 2: this really the only thing to do in this town
Speaker 2: right now? I don't know, Maybe it is.
Speaker 3: It just kind of sounded like the music that's, you know,
Speaker 3: playing at a local church when people are like filing
Speaker 3: in and finding their seats.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now somehow from here, Alice ends up back in
Speaker 3: the woods trying to piece together what happened, and she
Speaker 3: she has some kind of mental exhaustion episode and she
Speaker 3: falls down and faints. Do you remember what the exact
Speaker 3: trigger of this moment is?
Speaker 2: I do not. I don't think it was the organ
Speaker 2: concert specifically.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that organ music was so bad.
Speaker 2: But is it Is it ever established that it is
Speaker 2: perhaps off season in Garma?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yes, they talk about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're good, that's what I because it
Speaker 2: feels very off season.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's not the high tourist season. Henry says that
Speaker 3: when they're first traveling together, when they're in the car
Speaker 3: heading into town. So I think this is why the
Speaker 3: tourist locations are sparsely populated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Rgan music is the only the only act in town,
Speaker 2: because otherwise you'd think, well, maybe there'd be some more
Speaker 2: traditional Turkish music to listen to, or various uh uh,
Speaker 2: you know, European acts coming in to appeal to the
Speaker 2: European tourists. And I guess that's what the organist is
Speaker 2: doing here anyway.
Speaker 3: So she falls down unconscious and wakes up in a
Speaker 3: different place. She is in an old, empty mansion, and
Speaker 3: looking around, she discovers the peacock, the one from her memory,
Speaker 3: the window painted with the peacock on the class What
Speaker 3: is this place? Well, here we get the payoff of
Speaker 3: an earlier conversation. Remember when she met Henry, he said
Speaker 3: he was fixing up an old house in the woods.
Speaker 3: Here it is so, with Henry's help, Alice remembers what
Speaker 3: apparently happened earlier this week, and in fact, what happened
Speaker 3: earlier in their lives. Do we do we learn? I
Speaker 3: think here that Henry is not Henry's real name, that
Speaker 3: he has he has another name. I'm forgetting what it is.
Speaker 2: I don't remember what Henry's other possible name is, but
Speaker 2: there's a lot of insisting that he is actually Henry.
Speaker 3: Yes, anyway, whatever his real name is. These two characters,
Speaker 3: when Alice and Henry were both teenagers, they met one
Speaker 3: summer while Alice's family was on vacation in Garma, and
Speaker 3: I think Henry's family had owned this house there, And
Speaker 3: so when they met all these years ago, they had
Speaker 3: a brief but intense young love, and Alice recalls a
Speaker 3: memory of taking Henry's hand in front of the peacock window,
Speaker 3: And so it seems earlier this week. What happened was
Speaker 3: something in Alice's life back in Rome caused her to snap,
Speaker 3: and she fled Rome and fled to Garma and assumed
Speaker 3: this new identity of Nicole, And so she wore a
Speaker 3: wig and dressed herself differently. They say that she somehow
Speaker 3: remembered that Henry's favorite color was yellow, and so she
Speaker 3: bought a yellow dress in town and wore it and
Speaker 3: came to Henry, seeking to connect with this time in
Speaker 3: her past when she had felt happy, when she felt
Speaker 3: loved and felt safe. She came here she found Henry
Speaker 3: and they rekindled their love after these many years. But
Speaker 3: for some reason she left again. She'd only been she
Speaker 3: only stayed for I guess a day or two. She left,
Speaker 3: went back to Rome, and then somehow lost all memory
Speaker 3: of what had happened.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a red flag for everyone involved here.
Speaker 3: I think. So now it seems at this point like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe we could have a happy ending here. Maybe they
Speaker 3: rekindle their love and they you know, they find happiness
Speaker 3: in each other. You know, they take care of each
Speaker 3: other and it's all good.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, that's not the trajectory of this motion picture, right.
Speaker 3: So Alice she rests, but she wakes again later and
Speaker 3: she sneaks downstairs to hear Henry on the phone talking
Speaker 3: to someone about the fact that he now has Alice
Speaker 3: here at his house. I think he's talking to somebody
Speaker 3: on the phone and he's like, yes, I went and
Speaker 3: I retrieved her things from the hotel. Yes, you don't
Speaker 3: have to worry about that now I've got them. And
Speaker 3: something about the conversation sounds suspicious, and Alice begins to fear,
Speaker 3: Wait a second, is this really my lost teenage love
Speaker 3: or is this guy here part of the plot, the
Speaker 3: plot of the men who have been pursuing me. Why
Speaker 3: was I hiding as Nicole when I came here last?
Speaker 3: Why was I doing that? You know? Something doesn't feel
Speaker 3: right here. So she confronts Henry and he claims that
Speaker 3: he was only on the phone with a doctor. He
Speaker 3: was trying to arrange for her to receive some medical
Speaker 3: attention since she obviously suffered some kind of mental episode,
Speaker 3: and she doesn't believe him, And then it is revealed
Speaker 3: how their last encounter ended. The wound on his hand
Speaker 3: is not because he's a bad carpenter and like hammered
Speaker 3: his own fingers. The bandaged hand is from where she
Speaker 3: slashed him with the scissors she bought the last time
Speaker 3: they were together, earlier this week. So why didn't he
Speaker 3: acknowledge this when they met the day before? Henry says
Speaker 3: that he wanted her to remember naturally, he didn't want
Speaker 3: to put pressure on her to recall this all at once,
Speaker 3: not to force it on her all at once, So
Speaker 3: he just was giving her space, I.
Speaker 2: Guess, but also lying, yeah, also gaslighting herself.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, this makes her very fearful and suspicious. She
Speaker 3: is now thinking about this more like it's the espionage
Speaker 3: movie we've been talking about, where she's being pursued by agents. Increasingly,
Speaker 3: it's clear that she's thinking of these as the agents
Speaker 3: of Blackmun, the professor in the science fiction movie that
Speaker 3: she has these nightmares about. There are agents working for
Speaker 3: this evil, mad scientist and they are following her, and
Speaker 3: it seems kind of plausible even from our perspective. I mean,
Speaker 3: the identity of the pursuer doesn't seem plausible, but even
Speaker 3: from the viewer's perspective, I wasn't sure what was going on.
Speaker 3: I was wondering, wait a minute, maybe is Henry trying
Speaker 3: to exploit her in some way? Is he trying to
Speaker 3: get her diplomatic information, you know, like learn something for
Speaker 3: an enemy government.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's We're unsure as the viewer, like where to
Speaker 2: stand on this. And it adding to this is that
Speaker 2: this sequence feels increasingly surreal because we have that huge
Speaker 2: peacock stained glass piece behind them, the colors are very vibrant. Things.
Speaker 2: Really feel that this is the sequence in the picture
Speaker 2: that feels the most baba asque I would say of
Speaker 2: any sequence.
Speaker 3: And so as Henry is trying to approach her and
Speaker 3: calm her. She panics and she stabs him with the scissors,
Speaker 3: with the scissors she got from the stationary.
Speaker 2: Store, seemingly fatally this time.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, Henry falls down dead, and then we see
Speaker 3: we see Alice in a panic. She flees out into
Speaker 3: the woods, is running through the woods and then is
Speaker 3: running on the beach and is looking over her shoulder
Speaker 3: everywhere we see her, like looking in the woods and
Speaker 3: looking for people who she thinks might be Henry's co conspirators,
Speaker 3: the people who have been following her. And in the
Speaker 3: end they appear. In fact, they are not just like
Speaker 3: I was imagining, like if there are men following her,
Speaker 3: what are we going to see kind of guys in
Speaker 3: suits with dark sunglasses or what. When they appear, they
Speaker 3: are astronauts dressed in full EVA suits with the bubble helmets,
Speaker 3: and they chase her down on the beach, which is
Speaker 3: interesting because the pebbles of the beach somewhat resemble the
Speaker 3: surface of the moon set. The astronauts chase her down
Speaker 3: and they capture her, and that is the end of
Speaker 3: the film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And also the coloration of the chase sequence eventually
Speaker 2: transfers over to it like a deep Blue very much
Speaker 2: exactly like those sequences we saw earlier in the picture
Speaker 2: at at the start of the picture. So instead of
Speaker 2: a happy ending, we get a descent into madness ending,
Speaker 2: which I guess in many ways is more in keeping
Speaker 2: with the genre.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I think it's a very ambiguous ending. I
Speaker 3: mean I took it to most likely mean she's not
Speaker 3: actually being pursued by anyone, that she's having delusions of
Speaker 3: persecution most likely. But then again I wondered, well, wait
Speaker 3: a minute, I wonder also if maybe somebody is pursuing
Speaker 3: her here and it's just that she's also having a
Speaker 3: mental health episode where she's overlaying the frame of her
Speaker 3: nightmares about the astronauts on top of this whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these could be operatives for some nation, but she
Speaker 2: is seeing them as astronauts from this film scarred her
Speaker 2: so as a child.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I really am interested by the choice that
Speaker 3: they They don't make explicitly clear what caused her to
Speaker 3: have this psychotic break where she's like where she broke
Speaker 3: down in the middle of her work and fled to
Speaker 3: Garma and was trying to seek solace in her young love.
Speaker 3: We get the indication that like she's very stressed out
Speaker 3: by her job, and so it could just be that
Speaker 3: she's overworked and and like reached, you know, a level
Speaker 3: of burnout at work that you know that sent her
Speaker 3: into having a mental health episode, or is it something else?
Speaker 3: I mean, we we are also given these hints, though
Speaker 3: she never acknowledges it, that there's that there's something wrong
Speaker 3: with the world, that there's like these heavy themes of
Speaker 3: doom kind of just in the air around her all
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and as a translator, she's kind of been, like
Speaker 2: we said earlier, this conduit for all of this terrible
Speaker 2: news and these these terrible forecasts for the future. And
Speaker 2: you know, she feels on some level like it has
Speaker 2: just rolled through her and she has been this conduit,
Speaker 2: but perhaps it has seeped out into her in disastrous ways.
Speaker 3: I think back to the scene where she's translating and
Speaker 3: she says that she, you know, she was feeling hot
Speaker 3: in the room and like she couldn't breathe, and she
Speaker 3: says what she feared was that the words would just
Speaker 3: keep going past her and that she wouldn't be able
Speaker 3: to keep up. And that's like literally what would happen,
Speaker 3: you know if you're like, if you can't stop, and
Speaker 3: you're supposed to be a real time translator. The speech
Speaker 3: doesn't stop, They just keep going. But it's also a
Speaker 3: speech about the coming destruction of human life on earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and again with kind of I think it
Speaker 2: wouldn't be unrealistic at all to apply some future shock
Speaker 2: to this scenario. I mean, it's the right decade as well,
Speaker 2: on top of everything. But again instead of it being
Speaker 2: like a pure technological future shock, which future shock, as
Speaker 2: the Toddler's laid out, doesn't necessarily mean just technological change,
Speaker 2: but also all these other changes social and environmental.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And the skin she puts on her her panic
Speaker 3: is as a science fiction one. It's from this science
Speaker 3: fiction movie that scared her when she was younger.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's so strange and interesting to think how
Speaker 3: that interacts or doesn't with with like the kind of
Speaker 3: comfort she's seeking from what she's suffering, and the comfort
Speaker 3: she's seeking is trying to find her you know, her
Speaker 3: one true love again from you know this boy she
Speaker 3: met all these years ago and has never seen since.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's probably a great deal of deconstruction one could
Speaker 2: do in the film too, regarding the differences between Alice
Speaker 2: and Nicole, Nicole being described as more feminine, as having
Speaker 2: you know, a different makeup and longer hair. And yeah,
Speaker 2: so there's there's something to be made of all that
Speaker 2: as well. So there's a there's a lot going on
Speaker 2: in this in this picture, uh, and and a lot
Speaker 2: of it is kind of beneath the surface, and is
Speaker 2: you know, it's not really you know, push pushed down
Speaker 2: your throat at all. It's uh, there's a lot of ambiguity.
Speaker 2: And I think that's one of the things that makes
Speaker 2: it so tantalizing. It is like a h it is
Speaker 2: a true mystery in so many respects, and it is
Speaker 2: it's kind of like a piece of surrealistic art where
Speaker 2: you get to sort of apply your own interpretation to it.
Speaker 3: We we both do and do not get an answer
Speaker 3: to the mystery. Like we do learn in the end
Speaker 3: it seems what happened, and so like we we learned
Speaker 3: the physical circumstances that we're missing that we didn't know earlier,
Speaker 3: but we're still left with a lot of questions about
Speaker 3: why and how.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also like how and you know, this may
Speaker 2: be this was different in the original novel, but I
Speaker 2: like how nobody was like, oh, yeah, this movie, you're
Speaker 2: talking about Footprints on the Moon. I remember that because
Speaker 2: there is something tantalizing about films you remember or think
Speaker 2: you remember from your childhood. You know, in some cases
Speaker 2: they might not exist or you never find out what
Speaker 2: they are. Yeah. I like that detail as well. There's
Speaker 2: so many ways that the mystery could have been deluded
Speaker 2: by just little moments like that.
Speaker 3: The fact that nobody else in the movie ever claims
Speaker 3: to have seen this science fiction film. Yeah, it isolates her,
Speaker 3: and in many ways she is isolated in the film,
Speaker 3: I mean, keeping with the kind of Jello themes. Even
Speaker 3: though this isn't strictly as Yello, probably it has so
Speaker 3: many of these themes. I mean, the main character is
Speaker 3: an outsider and is alienated. She's both in an unfamiliar
Speaker 3: location and she is in psychological ways sort of estranged
Speaker 3: from everyone else. She is the astronaut who is alone
Speaker 3: on the surface of the moon.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Okay, does that do it for Footprints on the Moon?
Speaker 2: I believe it does.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This was a very interesting one, and again I can't
Speaker 2: stress enough how beautiful this tomatography is in this one.
Speaker 2: It's definitely worth worth checking out. But again, don't go
Speaker 2: into it expecting Dario Argento. Don't go into it expecting,
Speaker 2: you know, Kloskinsky stabbing people with the moon rock or
Speaker 2: anything like that. It's a much more subtle affair, but
Speaker 2: it is rewarding totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close out
Speaker 2: this episode of Weird House Cinema. A reminder that Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
Speaker 2: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a
Speaker 2: short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 2: film on Weird House Cinema. If you'd like to keep
Speaker 2: up with Weird House Cinema, you can find us on
Speaker 2: letterbox dot com. Our username is weird house, and we
Speaker 2: have a list of all the films that we have
Speaker 2: covered so far. Sometimes there's even a peak ahead at
Speaker 2: what comes up next. You'll also find us on some
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Speaker 3: Podcast Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Jjposway.
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Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello.
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