Tess

The next movie that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM is Tess. As of this writing, it's going to be on overnight tonight at 2:45 AM, so still late in the evening of October 15 out on the west coast.

Tess is a film version of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles Nastassja Kinski plays Tess, a young woman in England of the 1880s. She's the eldest daughter in a poor rural family named Durbeyfield, with a father who is an alcoholic. Dad is walking along a country road when the local vicar rides by, referring to him as "Sir John". It turns out that the parson has been doing some research, and has determined that the Derbyfields are actually descended from a nobleman who came over as part of the Norman conquest in 1066, the d'Urbervilles. Their particular line, however, fell into poverty due to the death of male heirs and, I'd guess, not being the eldest son in a line.

The parson also knows that there's a family of d'Urbervilles a town or two over, and that this particular line is rather well to do. So Tess' parents get the idea that Tess should introduce herself, and perhaps the d'Urbervilles might be able to help the Durbeyfields in some way. Yeah, is seems rather like a grift to me. But Tess goes along with it, in part probably because it's at least a chance at a better life.

Tess doesn't meet the matriarch of the family, but instead the matriarch's son, Alec d'Urberville (Leigh Lawson). He's intrigued by the idea of country cousins, but much more by Tess' beauty, with him and Mom eventually giving Tess a trial job as manager of the manor's poultry. It also transpires that Alec is not a real d'Urberville, having simply bought the name and coat of arms because he was from a working class family but worked his way up to prosperity and wanted a good name to go with that prosperity.

Alec also has the hots for Tess so seduces her, and eventually rapes her, knocking her up in the process. Tess is horrified and returns home, but doesn't take care of herself, and the child dies as an infant. Tess goes off again to try to escape her life, getting a job as a dairy maid. It's there that she meets Angel Clare (Peter Firth), a farmer who's hoping to grow his business as well. He falls in love with Tess, and eventually decides to ask for her hand in marriage even though his mom would prefer a better marriage for her.

It's only after the wedding that Tess decides to tell Angel about her background, specifically the having been raped and impregnated part. This being the Victorian era, that really ticks Angel off, with his thinking it's somehow Tess' fault. The two still kinda-sorta love each other, but for whatever reason Angel thinks they can no longer live together for the time being. He's going to go off to find himself, eventually coming back when he does after a long sojourn in Brazil of all places.

Tess, needing some form of support, decides to go back to Alec, which is why Angel has trouble finding Tess when he returns to England. And once Angel returns, Tess finds that perhaps having chosen to live with Alec wasn't such a good move. Not like she had anyone else to go to, however, since Dad finally died and the rest of her family became part of the indigent itinerants as a result. But Angel's return ultimately leads to tragedy....

I had never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, so I didn't know what a mess it was in terms of plotting. That's partly because the novel was originally serialized. But in any case it's a sprawling story. Director Roman Polanski also wrote the screenplay for this adaptation, and he didn't bother to edit it down into a manageable length, so we get a story here that's fairly slow and all over the place. The technical parts of the movie -- the cinematography and production design -- however, are quite good, and both won Oscars.

Roman Polanski's original edit of the movie was a shade over three hours. The version that TCM ran in 31 Days of Oscar was a restoration from the early 2010s, and runs 172 minutes. However, as I write TCM only has the movie in a 165-minute block; the following presentation, an episode of MGM Parade, is set for 5:30 AM and runs 25 minutes in a half-hour block. The previous film, A Room With a View, is 117 minutes and starts at 12:30 AM. If A Room With a View were on during weekday daytime, TCM could conceivably put it in a two-hour block. But since this is part of a prime-time block, there's an intro and an outro, which would make it run past 2:30 AM if you wanted to put Tess in a three-hour block starting at 2:30 AM. By the time this actually posts, however, things may have changed.

Neptune's Daughter

Once again, I've hit a period where there are multiple movies on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before but that are coming up soon on TCM, so you're going to get a bunch of such posts in quick succession. First up is Neptune's Daughter, which concludes a night of Ricardo Montalbán movies early tomorrow (October 15) morning at 4:00 AM.

Montalbán is the male lead here, although the star of the movie is Esther Williams. She plays Eve Barrett, a swimmer who wins a bunch of trophies in the days when you couldn't make money from a competitive sport like swimming since the International Olympic Committee highly frowned on that. So, needing to make money, Eve went into business designing swimsuits with Joe Backett (Keenan Wynn). Joe has a thing for Eve, but for her there's a business partnership and just a friendship.

Eve has a kid sister, Betty (Betty Garrett). Betty is man-hungry, so when news comes that a South American polo team is going to be visiting, Betty gets excited. Joe is excited by the idea of putting on an aquacade for the team and all the audience that will show up for the matches to make some money and serve as advertising for the swimwear company. Eve, however, is not excited, because she knows that poor Betty will go after the guys and possibly get herself in troube for it.

The star of the polo team is José O'Rourke (that's Montalbán, of course). He, being a performance athlete, gets a lot of the aches and pains that high-level athletes do, and needs a masseur. He gets on in Jack Spratt (Red Skelton), and gives Jack some advice on Latin lovers and that the reason Anglo women go for them is that apparently they find Spanish irresistible. José leaves, Betty walks in, and since Jack is practicing his Spanish, Betty immediately assumes this is José. As if Red Skelton could look even remotely Latin.

The real José shows up at Joe and Eve's factory, which gives Eve the chance to speak her piece to José, telling him to stop seeing Betty, even though he never has met Betty. So instead, José takes this as an opportunity to start putting the moves on Eve, who does after all look good in a swimsuit. Eve tries to rebuff José at first, but you know she's going to fall for him despite the mistaken identities that will need to be resolved.

And then out of nowhere the plot takes a ridiculous turn. Mac (Mike Mazurki) is a professional gambler who has a wager on the outcome of the big polo match, and figures the best way to hedge his bets is to try to waylay José, by less than legal means if necessary. This has an affect on both the José and Eve relationship, as well as on Jack, since of course with Red Skelton in the film you're going to get some of his physical comedy.

The plot of Neptune's Daughter is wafer-thin, but that's not the reason to watch the movie. The real reason is that all of the main leads are so appealing here in spite of the plot. Betty Garrett and Red Skelton get the better musical numbers, including one with Xavier Cugat. Among the songs is one that's now become a Christmas standard, "Baby It's Cold Outside", although Neptune's Daughter has nothing to do with Christmas. The song is also done twice, once with Esther Williams not able to stay and Montalbán telling her it's cold -- and a second time with the sex roles reversed, and Red Skelton feigning wanting to leave with Betty Garrett trying to convince him to stay. Also, all four of the characters have their eyes fully open about what they're doing. So this Christmas if anybody tries to claim that "Baby It's Cold Outside" is "problematic", tell them to go fuck themselves.

Rant aside, Neptune's Daughter is a decidedly entertaining movie, if one that's fairly mindless.

The Belle of Broadway

I think I mentioned the last time I did a silent movie, back on Silent Movie Day a few weeks back, that I have a fairly substantial backlog of silent films to get through, like with foreign films, so it means those two genres are going to show up a bit more often than they normally do. Up next is a silent from Columbia that I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Belle of Broadway.

Oddly enough, Broadway really has precious little to do with the movie, other than the fact that one of the two main characters supposedly starred on Broadway in her youth. That character is Mme. Adèle. As the movie opens, it's 1896 in Paris, and Adèle (played here by Betty Compson) is the toast of the Paris stage, playing her most celebrated role, Madame du Barry, who was the last mistress of French King Louis XV in the 1760s and 1770s. Adèle has all sorts of men swooning over her, such as Count Raoul. However, she's also got a husband Fabio, who is set up in the orchestra box and can see all of the men who are not Mr. Adèle like he is trying to woo her. Fabio decides he's had enough of this, and leaves his wife. Worse for her, however, is that he also takes their infant son with him.

Fast forward to the present day, or at least 1926 when the movie was made. Adèle has, like everyone else, grown 30 years older. Acting is, for women, the same as it's always been: a profession where the audience wants young, beautiful things. Adèle (now played by Edith Yorke) is pushing 60, and looking like a woman of 60. Not terrible by any means, but no longer what the audience generally wants in a leading role. The stage producers can no longer find any good roles for her.

Living in the same building as Adèle is young Marie Duval (that's Betty Compson again, so you can guess where the movie is going). She's walking along the sidewalks of Paris on a rainy day when she gets her shoe stuck in a mud puddle. A kind young man named Paul (Herbert Rawlinson) rescues her from her predicament and takes her home. It's at this point that Marie and Adèle finally meet, and Adèle notices the similarity between her younger self when she was playing Mme. du Barry, and Marie. This is also where the plot starts getting ridiculous.

Adèle and the people close to her decide that they could give Marie her big break. But, it would come as Marie pretening to be Adèle, having been rejuvenated by all sorts of plastic surgery and other fountain of youth-type treatments that as I understand it were the rage in the 1920s when the movie was made. Marie goes on stage, and all those suitors Adèle had 30 years prior come out of the woodwork despite the fact that they're now lecherous sexagenarians, The Thin Man joke about the meaning of sexagenarian aside. Marie obviously doesn't remember these people, but they remember who they think she is, and are going to put her in compromising situations.

But if that's not bad enough, the plot is going to get even more ridiculous. Paul, the man who saved Marie from the mud and brought her home, is actually the son of Fabio and Adèle. Dad died when Paul was a kid, and he obviously never met his biological mother. So by going out with Marie who is trying to pass herself off as Adèle, the suitors would consider this an incestuous relationship.

The plot of The Belle of Broadway gets ridiculous in the latter half of its brief running time, but the movie is still a fun one. Granted, if I were trying to introduce people to silent film, this isn't the one I'd pick, but for people who are already fans of the genre, I'd absolutely recommend it.

India from a passage

I've mentioned quite a few times before in passing the "Blind Spot" blogathon, where the point is to select a dozen "essential" movies you haven't actually seen, and blog about them over the course of a year. I've never taken part it it, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over the course of the following year, and whether movies that are one of my blind spots are going to show up on TV for me to watch. In any case, a movie that had been one of my "blind spots" was David Lean's A Passage to India, which TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar and which I finally watched.

Judy Davis plays Adela Quested, a young woman in 1920s England. As the movie opens, she's booking passage to India, together with a much older traveling companion, Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft). Mrs. Moore has a son, Ronny, who's part of the British administration, and Adela is set to marry Ronny at some point in the future. Mrs. Moore books a round trip, but Adela only books one way, as she is uncertain when she's going to come back.

Adela and Mrs. Moore get to India, where they find that the British have mostly tried to bring a piece of Britain to India, living as rich feudal lords and using the local Indians as hired help. Some of the local Indians, however, are taking the opportunity to get into the good graces of the British colonial authority, from where they'll try to agitate for independence. One example is the widower Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), whom we first see being very obsequious to a British school headmaster, Fielding (James Fox).

Fielding is a bit different from the other British in that, while he certainly hasn't gone native, seems to have more sympathy towards the Indians. And, of course, they certainly have legitimate grievances. Fielding even has a friend in the form of the guru/scholar Godbole (Alec Guinness), whose presence in the film seems to serve the purpose of being the detached person who can look at events from both sides and with the view of someone never directly involved.

It's through Fielding that Adela is introduced to Dr. Aziz, which Adela is happy for as she doesn't want to be part of an insular British community. Aziz, ever eager to do the needful and curry favor with the British, takes Adela and Mrs. Moore on a tourist excursion to some local caves.

But something happens in the caves, something that's never made quite clear. Adela seemingly gets separated from Aziz in the relatively dark cave, before running out of the cave, down the hill, and winding up terribly bloodied. But what actually happened? To save her honor, Adela says that Aziz attempted to rape her. (I think the plot would make a bit more sense if Adela had accused the local guide, who may or may not have met up with her again after being separated.) The rape trial becomes a sensation as the local Indians start showing their nascent political awakening. At the same time, however, they feel like they can't really get justice from British courts, who are always going to stand with one of their own.

A Passage to India is a visually beautiful movie, largely because director David Lean did a lot of location shooting and had access to very lovely places to film. The movie is also well acted, although 40 years on some people will argue whether Alec Guinness should have been playing a non-British character. The movie, however, runs at a very leisurely pace, lasting 163 minutes for what really isn't all that much story. Some people may find it a bit too slow.

Overall, however, it's easy to see why critics and the Oscars loved A Passage to India, ad why it generally gets positive reviews to this day. It's definitely worth a watch if you can block out the 160-plus minutes it lasts.

A Global Affair

Bob Hope's movie career really tailed off sometime around 1960, as he made one subpar comedy after another. An example of this that showed up on TCM some time back is A Global Affair.

A Global Affair is one of those 1960s films that opens with a terribly dated MOR song. After that, Lisette (Michèle Mercier) is leading a tour of the United Nations building. Just at the end of the tour, she discovers that sombody has abandoned a baby in the building! There's a note attached to the baby, and when Lisette takes the baby to the boss, it's revealed that the mother left the baby there after having heard the radio speeches delivered by UN official Frank Larrimore (Bob Hope).

Now, it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to call the local authorities both to help find the biological mother as well as to find someone suitable to take care of the baby. But the UN building is technically sovereign territory, or at least not US territory, and the UN jealously guards its jurisdiction, so they're not about to call the New York police. Instead, they give the baby to Frank for him to take care of until they can find a suitable solution. Of course, that comes with its own set of problems.

Frank is a bachelor, so there's no woman to be the mother of the child. And then there's the fact that he lives in an apartment building that's for the childless, and having a child would break the lease. Frank calls in his friend Randy (Robert Sterling), and he invited a bunch of nubile young women over, theoretically in the hopes that a suitable mother can be found, but more because Randy is just into beautiful young women. Lisette sees the party going on, and she's pissed.

The next day when Frank takes the baby to the UN building on his way to work, the subject of what to do with the baby is discussed. Segura (Nehemiah Persoff), the delegate from Peru, rightly realizes that the baby is liable to cause an international incident, although he does admire the things Frank has had to say about children's rights. So Frank can keep the baby a little while longer until a decision is reached.

The eventual idea is for all the member states of the UN to put forward proposals as to why they'd be the best place for the kid, and somehow somebody will make the right choice about which country gets the child. At the same time, the Soviets send over a pediatric researcher, Sonya (Lilo Pulver), to research the kid.

A Global Affair goes on like this, combining unfunny humor with a large dollop of UN propaganda. Thankfully, it only runs for a brief 84 minutes. Some people may like A Global Affair, but I'd rather recommend Bob Hope's earlier movies.

The Pride of the Yankees

We're into the baseball playoffs now, and I don't think that I've done a post on a baseball movie in a while, so it's time to watch one that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar: The Pride of the Yankees.

The Pride of the Yankees is, actually, a bit tough to do a good full-length post on, in part because most people are already going to know the story. Lou Gehrig (played here by Gary Cooper) was the son of German immigrants who found baseball as a kid and played professionally after college, eventually making it to the big leagues on the big team of the day, the New York Yankees. When he made it into the lineup, he didn't give up his spot, playing every game for nearly 14 seasons, until... he was diagnosed with ALS, which is still commonly referred to in the US as "Lou Gehrig's disease".

Complicating matters is that apparently Gehrig wasn't the most exciting person. Not that I mean this in a bad way; it's more that he was clean enough that he didn't get himself involved in the sorts of things that made, say, his teammate Babe Ruth (who plays himself) a larger-than-life figure. (Or, in a later Yankees generation, someone like Mickey Mantle.) In short, Gehrig's life seems relatively cinematically boring. There's no real plot conflict here of the sort that might drive other Hollywood biopics.

So the scriptwriters have to try to create something, which here is a conflict between baseball and family, if you will. A young Gehrig is seen finding a sandlot game at the opening of the film, and we pretty quickly get to Gehrig's college days at Columbia. His parents (played by Elsa Janssen and Ludwig Stossel), like a lot of immigrant parents, want him to go into something professional, much like his unseen uncle Otto did, becoming an engineer. Mom for the longest time can't understand why her son loves baseball.

There's another conflict, which isn't really that much of one, involving Gehrig's devotion to his mother and the fact that, well, he's going to grow up and find a woman to be his wife. That woman is Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), a Chicago socialite who first sees Gehrig when he's in town to play the White Sox. He trips over a bat and she calls him "Tanglefoot". They eventually meet again and ultimately get married, with Eleanor scrapbooking Lou's career. After his retirement and young death, she would preserve and safeguard his legacy until her own death; she never had children and never remarried.

If you haven't noticed, there's actually precious little baseball action in the movie, as a lot of it is done with montages and shots of pennants with the different American League cities on them. There's also a subplot about two sportswriters with opposite views of how to cover the players. Sam (Walter Brennan) is more protective of Lou and one of his best non-baseball friends, while Hank (Dan Duryea), while not an iconoclast, doesn't seem to want to be a hagiographer.

The acting in The Pride of the Yankees is all well done; the problem with the movie is that there's just not a dynamic story to be told from the material. And certainly not one that runs over two hours. Still, The Pride of the Yankees is a beloved movie, probably in part because of Gehrig's tragic story. So definitely it's worth a watch.

Briefs for October 9-10, 2024

I probably should have mentioned when I did the post on Star of the Month Bela Lugosi last Wednesday that among his movies is Zombies on Broadway, which I did a brief post on back in October 2010. It's showing up in a few hours, tonight at 9:30 PM. Apologies for not mentioning it sooner. But I assume it's going to be on the Watch TCM app, since it's an RKO movie.

Over on FXM, October 1 did bring a few films out of the vault, although much of what's new is stuff I've already blogged about. Desiree, which was the subject of a post five years ago, showed up today; it's actually showing up on TCM later this month. The Barbarian and the Geisha is another on that's back and ran today, although it's not on in the next two weeks. One that is is As Young As You Feel, an early 50s movie about forced retirement, which you can see at 4:40 AM Saturday. That's immediately follows one of the few movies in the rotation I haven't blogged about, Only the Strong. That one seems to have several airings, although I don't know exactly which one will get the post on it, since I've got enough other stuff on TCM that's also on my DVR to blog about and I'm already ahead through almost the end of October in terms of posts scheduled on the blog.

Today was the birth anniversary of Jacques Tati, who was born on this day in 1907. Tati is probably best known for M. Hulot's Holiday, although I've also blogged about Mon Oncle before.

I just don't get Albert Brooks

I reveiwed the movie Lost in America some months back, and found it not as good as a lot of the critics seem to think it is. Then, on one of the movie channels on I think PlutoTV, I saw another of Albert Brooks' films show up: Modern Romance. I gave up on this one after maybe a half hour because it just wasn't funny. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch my recording of Albert Brooks' directorial debut, Real Life.

Albert Brooks got the idea for this from an early 1970s PBS documentary series, An American Family, which focused on a real family in California. Apparently, the family's consent to having PBS come in and record a whole lot of their personal interactions had a profound effect on the family, and not for the better. In Real Life, Brooks plays a documentary filmmaker named Albert Brooks, contending that his new film is about to change forever what film can be, as it's going to show real life.

The movie starts off with Brooks leading a press conference in the rapidly-growing metropolis of Phoenix, AZ (the city population at the time is about half what is is today while the metropolitan area is three times the size it was hen the movie was made). Brooks and his crew are announcing that they've picked a family from Phoenix to do their documentary on "real life" about; the family isn't introduced because they've been sent on vacation to give the crew time to prepare. Brooks concludes the conference with a song that makes no sense but you get the sense Brooks thought people would find funny.

We then get an extended back story about the Institute for Human Behavior and how they conceived a study and picked the family, as well as all the pseudoscientific stuff that's going to go into making a documentary like this about a family. As for Brooks himself, he buys a house across the street from the selected family, the Yeagers, in order to set up shop. He's working with a psychologist, Dr. Cleary, while having regular contact with the researchers from the Institute as their experiment is supposed to run an entire year.

Needless to say, the experiment doesn't go as planned. On the Yeagers' first night back, Mrs. Yeager seems depressed, and decides that she's going to have the implanted birth-control device removed. Eventually she calls Brooks, who decides to take the totally unprofessional step of having a "private" (well, with cameras in tow) conversation with her, convincing her to let the cameras in on the appointment with her gynecologist, who, in turn, was the subject of a 60 Minutes exposé some years prior.

As for Mr. Yeager (Charles Grodin), he's a veterinarian who seems to have started off more positive about the idea of the documentary. But his wife's depression has a strain on him, as he accidentally ODs a horse during surgery, killing the horse and leaving him depressed for several weeks. Things continue to spiral out of control, with matters finally coming to a head when local news figures out (really? It took them this long?) what family is being filmed and starts following the family themselves.

Surprisingly, for once I'm in agreement with Roger Ebert about a movie. He really hated Real Life, and I didn't care for it either. It's supposed to be a mockumentary, which implies comedy. But most of the comedy doesn't work. Brooks' character is also terribly self-centered and obnoxious, starting with that song in the opening scene. The script also fails in that Brooks seems to have had no idea how to resolve the conflict at the heart of the movie. There's also a race-relations scene between him and the Dr. Cleary character that brings the movie to a screeching halt.

But, as I implied at the beginning, there are people who really seem to love Brooks' films, not that he directed that many. So if you liked Lost in America, you might be the sort of person who will like Real Life.

Before the foxes were even little

I did a post on the movie The Little Foxes some time back. Some years late, Lillian Hellman wrote a play that was a prequel to The Little Foxes, called Another Part of the Forest. It's unsurprising that the play would get turned into a movie, and it's one I'd been curious to see for some time. Several months back, TCM finally ran it, and I recently got around to watching it to do a post on here.

The Little Foxes tells the story of the Hubbard family in a small town in Alabama circa 1900. As Another Part of the Forest opens, it's Confederate Memorial Day in the year 1880, so 15 years after the war ended. Col. Isham leads the entire town -- well, almost the entire town -- in remembering their defeat, specifically a massacre of local boys that Isham just knows someone local had to clue the Union Army into, at the local war memorial, and watching from the nearby woods is Lavinia Hubbard (Florence Eldridge), the matriarch of the Hubbard family. I metioned that almost the entire town is there. Conspicuously not there are most of the Hubbards. Oscar (Dan Duryea, who in the earlier movie played Oscar's son) shows up, but Isham tells him he's decidedly not wanted. This especially because he cavorts with a dance-hall girl.

Oscar's brother Ben (Edmond O'Brien) comes to town having been in the big city, where he was hoping to invest some money. But he was called back home by his father, Marcus (Fredric March), who runs the local dry goods store with an iron fist. Dad was ruthless in making his fortune, and he thinks that all of his kids are varying sorts of weak, and doesn't necessarily care for any of them. As for Lavinia, she seems to think the family has some sin to atone for, as she shows up at the Confederate memorial statue talking about taking some of the family fortune and using it to start a local hospital.

Rounding out the family is daughter Regina (Ann Blyth). She's been carrying on with a rather older man, John Bagtry (John Dall), who was injured in the war and who still hasn't gotten over it. Regina is hoping he'll marry her and take her away to Chicago to get the heck away from the rest of her family. Ben thinks she should marry one of the richer guys in town, but Regina is having nothing to do with that. Indeed, she's perfectly willing to use her brothers' secrets to try to get Dad to do her billing. It's clear that nobody in the family loves one another, with the exception of Lavinia. But then Lavinia is the sort of woman who, in that era, might have been a candidate for a sanitarium, if only for the rest of the family to keep her silent.

Lavinia reveals what she knows of the family secrets, which is that Marcus made the family fortune by smuggling salt during the war and then selling it at inflated prices. That too explains why the rest of the county seems to hate the Hubbards. But there's a lot more in the way of secrets, and as the family bicker with one another, those secrets are about to come out.

I mentioned at the beginning that Another Part of the Forest was based on a stage play, and once again those origins seem fairly clear. Another Part of the Forest, however, is helped by a bunch of fine performances, as well as a script that while not great, is so overripe that it makes the movie fun. The movie winds up being good, although probably not for the reasons Lillian Hellman would have wanted.

A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove

One of the movies that TCM ran last year for Halloween that I hadn't seen before is the Japanese ghost story Kuroneko. So I watched before it expired from my cloud DVR in order to be able to do a post on it this October.

The movie is set sometime during the samurai period; I don't think it mentions specifically when. It's a warring samurai period, however, which if I understand correctly would place it before the Edo period that began in 1600. There's an introductory scene of two women who live by themselves, a mother and wife of a man who's gone off, although more on that later. Their house is in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of samurai show up, raping and killing the two women. After their deaths, a black cat passes by and licks them, apparently not realizing the two are dead.

Black cats apparently have some of the same supersitions attached in Japan as in the west, as we see the two women show up at the gates of one of the fortresses that dot the region since Japan isn't unified at this point. Of course, they didn't survive; these are just the ghosts or spirits of the two women, in a way that the Japanese would visualize such spirits. The samurai who killed them show up, and the women get their revenge by taking the samurai away from the fortress and killing them.

Cut to northern Japan, where a different part of the warring period is going. A man who looks like he's seen better days is being chased through the reeds by another man who is much better dressed. The two meet up and fight a duel to the death, with the peasant winning. That peasant, calling himself Gintoki, is, as you can eventually deduce, the man whose mother and wife are killed in the opening scene. He shows up back on his home turf, first stopping at his old house, which burned down after the women were killed. He's been away for several years fighting, so there are new people here who don't remember him.

The local chife, Minamoto, however, is impressed by Gintoko's courage, and gives Gintoko the task of finding those spirits who are showing up outside the fortress gates every night and doing away with them so that the people can be safe again. But what's going to happen when Gintoko finds out who the spirits really are?

Being a Japanese "horror" (really, supernatural) movie, Kuroneko has a decidedly different tone from Hollywood or even Hammer horror movies. On the one hand, that makes it an interesting watch. However, I also get the impression that it would probably help to be fairly familiar with both Japanese culture and history to get more of the subtler nuances of the movie. As a result, I didn't dislike the movie, but I can also see where other people are really going to enjoy it.

Having said that, Kuroneko is definitely quite well-made technically, with the black-and-white cinematography often being quite crisp and striking. So Kuroneko is definitely worth a watch for anybody who's a fan of horror movies.