F FOR FAKE - Orson Welles - "Truth And Lies" (1973)

Tonight's Super Saturday Night Special is Orson Welle's "F For Fake!" It's the best documentary made since Fellini's "Clowns!"..and possibly the best documentary ever made!

You will have to wonder, is this movie even real? And you might be right and you might be wrong, because the man behind the curtain pulling all the strings is the notorious.....

..................Orson Welles, the Joker, the Jester, and one of the best Prestidigitationers of all time!

"F For Fake" is a movie about fakes, forgers, hoaxes, and more, and because he's a freakin' genius, Orson ties all the stories together almost seamlessly!

World famous forger Elmyr de Hory explains that if you see a beautiful painting in a museum, why does it matter if Matisse painted it or if Elmyr painted it posing as Matisse, because the end result is the same, the viewer gets to see a great piece of art! Elmyr has a cool way of legitimizing everything he has ever done!

Elmyr is being interviewed for a book by the writer Clifford Irving, who is also known as a world famous faker because he was the author of a biography about Howard Hughes. The only problem was he never spoke to Howard Hughes once. Howard Hughes was such a recluse, Irving thought he'd never find out or notice!

So Orson is filming the faker and the forger, and mixing it all up with other freakin' fantastic phony stuff! Why is there a monkey in Clifford Irving's shoulder? Because the whole thing is happening on the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain! (Although the IMDB says it was shot in France! Why would you expect anything to be what it is supposed to be?)

Elmyr quickly whips out a fake Matisse, claims it would be worth thousands of dollars, and then burns it!

There are so many great shots of Orson, I thought about just using the pictures of him, but this movie is too picturesque to do that!

I'm pretty sure it was Orson himself who drew this portrait of Howard Hughes!

Every night at some oddball hour in the dead of night, a courier leaves a small but perfectly wrapped package in a designated tree outside the Los Angeles home of Howard Hughes! What was in the bag? A ham sandwich that very rarely got consumed! That's right, WTF!?

I just love these shots of vintage Las Vegas!

While incinerating, I  mean iterating his own hoax on the world, Orson used footage from the movie "Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers" instead of "War Of The Worlds," contractual problems, or just more deliberate confusion? The latter I'm sure!

"F For Fake" is credited as Orson Welle's last full length film, but he continued to act etc. until his death in 1985! Orson was looking good! Compare this picture to the way he looked in "Touch Of Evil" some 15 years earlier! It doesn't even look like the same guy!

Clifford Irving ended up spending 17 months behind bars for his little escapade into deceit!

"F For Fake" has more than it's share of eye candy footage, you might get a sugar spike watching it, like here's one sample, and......

........Here's another!

And then there's the story about the trombone player...........

.....................Oja Kodar, The mysterious girl.......................

.................and Picasso!

Orson Welles is, was, and will always simply be one of the best!

Fake, real, or just tomfoolery?  It doesn't really matter because Orson is entertaining, no matter what!
"F For Fake" is a Fabulist, Faburden, Facinorous, Factious, Fadoodle, Fain, Falsidical Farrago! Fuckin' A!

LURED - "Killer Bait" (1947)

 

Tonight's Saturday Night Special is a fun and very interesting film from 1947 that features Lucille Ball in a non-comedic film noir, with an all-star cast!

 

"Lured" was directed by Douglas (Written On The Wind) Sirk, and that in itself should be enough to make you want to see it, and I seriously doubt you will be disappointed when you do!

Lucy is an American named Sandra Carpenter who has come to London searching for a better life. She works as a hostess in a dance club full of lonely men willing to pay anything just to dance with a woman.

She doesn't really like her job, but then, who does? One of her fellow dancers has just become a victim of a weird serial killer who meets his victims through the personal columns, and then sends the police cryptic Baudelaire styled poems before each murder happens, just to mess with them!

 

So Sandra is enlisted as bait to try and flush out the killer. She is to be watched all the time by members of the force to guarantee her safety.

Sandra has to meet all kinds of strange men under strange circumstances in strange locations.

One of her first encounters is with a very odd old dude named Charles van Druten as played by Boris Karloff. I've seen a lot of films with Boris Karloff in them, and I'll tell you one thing........

............I think this is one of the most bizarre roles Boris has ever had!

Charles is a fashion designer, and this is an outfit from one of his finest hours!

He has a mini-theater set up in his flat with a dog and a mannequin as his audience.

Sandra decides that Charles is off his nut a little, but is not a serial killer by any means!

The mood changes quickly, and it appears that Charles night be a little more than just eccentric!

Sandra is saved by a stranger who has a big tussle with Charles who then falls down some stairs and we never see or hear from him again!

Sandra is then shuffled off into a car with another weirdo in it!

The weirdo turns out to be George Zucco as Police Officer H.R. Barrett, who was also the one who saved her from Charles. It was really refreshing to see George Zucco in the role of a quasi-comedic crossword-puzzle-junkie police officer instead of some dour and menacing villain!

After that, every one of the gentlemen that Sandra meets has the potential to be the killer, and if they are not that guy, they are usually into something equally against the law, or just losers in general.

Alan (Terror By Night) Mowbray is the creepy butler Lyle Maxwell who is up to his elbows in graft, but he's not a serial killer!

Sandra is sent a note and a ticket to a concert by an admirer called Music Lover, and in a pretty funny scene she waits for the seat next to her to fill up. When this guy sits down she slyly tries to find out if he's the guy, but it turns out he's in the wrong seat!

 

I should be showing you shots of some of the other great actors in this film like Charles (Around The World In 80 Days) Coburn as Inspector Harley Temple, and the star of the film, George (Village Of The Damned) Sanders as Robert Fleming, and Sir Cedric (Uncle Simon, The Forms Of Things Unknown) Hardwicke as Julian Wilde, but there's not room for everything, and I just really like this shot of Lucy and George better! It's such an odd pairing!

Joseph (Touch Of Evil) Calleia as Dr. Nicholas Moryani is an extremely likely suspect, but despite all the nefarious activities he's into, he's not a serial killer! Joseph was in two very cool gorilla movies, "The Monster And The Girl," and "The Gorilla."

It's very mysterious that Lucy was 5' 7½" but Sandra's I.D. card shows that she was only five foot six.

Sandra is just about to get married to Peter Fleming when she finds this photo of her dead friend who had been abducted in the drawer of her future husband's desk, so they finally have a suspect. Too bad he's not the serial killer either! Tanis (Spook Busters) Chandler had the role of Lucy Barnard.

In the end, the serial killer makes a move on Sandra Carpenter, but Police Officer Barrett is there too, and the case is finally solved, the murderer is revealed, and Lucille Ball gets to go on to entertain us for years in "I Love Lucy!"

HOT CARS - Les Baxter - "Sucker Bait" (1956)

Normally when you see the words "Hot Cars," you think of souped-up hot rods and hot chicks, and that's sure what this poster looks like, but No, that's not it! Welcome back to Weird-Ass Wednesday outside in the parking lot of The Dungeon, and tonight's red light special.........

"HOT CARS"

"Hot Cars" is a truly unique movie about used car lots selling stolen cars, or literally, "Hot Cars!"

To make it look legit, they used real car lots, and gave them credit at the end! Robert(Invasion Of The Body Snatchers) Osterloh is the owner of this lot, Big John!

Now isn't this iconic America circa 1956? Handsome John(Revenge Of The Creature, Curucu, Beast Of The Amazon) Bromfield as the recently fired used car salesman, Nick Dunn, and his dear lovely stay-at-home wife Jane, as played by Carol Shannon. I don't know why, but Carol looks very familiar to me although she was only in 5 TV shows besides this movie. I must have seen them all!! Nick and Jane have a sick baby boy named Davy who is always off camera! I guess that's how they saved the money up to finance the big climax!

Bow House!

For some, the number one blonde bombshell of the 1950's and 60's was Joyce Renee Brown, aka Joi Lansing! Sometimes it's hard not to agree! Here's some creds: "Touch Of Evil," "Atomic Submarine," and "Hillbillies In A Haunted House!"

You might not know his name until now, but with 310 acting credits, Dabbs Greer as the snoopy Detective Davenport, has a face you will recognize if you've ever watched anything on TV from 1950 to 2003!

Joi Lansing died from breast cancer at the very young age of 43, but she still outlived both Marilyn Monroe (36) and Jayne Mansfield (34) by almost a decade! Besides her movie roles, some of her TV roles are forever too, like Shirley Swanson on "The Bob Cummings Show," and Gladys Flatt on "The Beverly Hillbillies!"

Nick Dunn just needs a shoulder to cry on, and Joi's character Karen Winter seems overly available!

Nick doesn't realize yet that Karen is the best girl of the crook who hired him! He's about to get set up to take a fall, but he doesn't have a clue! Sucker bait is right!

That claw of Karen Winter's might as well be around Nick's throat!

Detective Davenport has been murdered, and all the evidence points to Nick, but Oh, Yeah, he has an excuse, and his wife doesn't even care if he was with another woman as long as it means that he didn't kill anybody, so he admits that he was at Karen Winter's apartment! I like the way this shot is set up!

Another great shot shows the Detective questioning Miss Winter who denies she even knows Nick Dunn! Nick tells them he can identify the furnishings in the bedroom without going in there, but everything has been changed, and he looks like a dunce!

The music in the hot theme and throughout this film is by one of the Dungeon Super Faves, the phenomenal Les Baxter! You like horror movies, you like 60's surf movies, then Les Baxter is THE man!! Here are just the movies that Les composed for in the random year of 1963 : THE YOUNG RACERS, THE RAVEN, THE EVIL EYE, A BOY TEN FEET TALL, OPERATION BIKINI, X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, BEACH PARTY, BLACK SABBATH, SAMSON AND THE SLAVE QUEEN, I TABÙ, and THE COMEDY OF TERRORS!

I would imagine that cinematographer William Marguiles gets credit for stuffing a camera inside the dashboard! Mark(The Pharaoh's Curse)Dana is tough guy Smiley Ward! Both Mark Dana and Joi Lansing were also in the 43rd of 48 Bowery Boys movies made also in 1956, called ironically "Hot Shots!"

Great cast, great music, but what makes this movie truly unique and historically significant is that it ends up in Santa Monica at magnificent Pacific Ocean Park!

The Sea Serpent Roller Coaster is the stage for what is in my humble opinion the best fight scene I've ever seen on a roller coaster!

You would think they would have had to use green screen to get shots that look this good, but as far as I could tell, it's all live action footage!

Freakin' Smiley gets what's coming to him!

I found "Hot Cars" streaming on Amazon Prime, and you can too! It's compact at just over an hour long, and a roller coaster ride that's well worth taking!