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Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I am hoping and praying that you can answer this question for me. I've recently been sucked into repeats of Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride II, maybe because I am married and pregnant I'm really relating to it — I especially love the Banks family's house and everything about it. So I'm wondering, is the house on Maple Drive a real house in San Marino, California? Is the house real but located somewhere else? And was the interior a set, like most movies, or an actual house? It looked so authentic. Jessica

FlickChick: The house in Father of the Bride (1991) and Father of the Bride II (1995) is real, but it's not on Maple Drive in San Marina; it's on El Molina Avenue in nearby Pasadena. The interiors were shot in the house, but the inside of the house was totally redone by the movie's production design team, up to and including temporary walls that could be pulled down to facilitate setting up dolly tracks for the camera. Apparently the couple who currently own the place are also fans of the movie and got something of a shock when they discovered that the real structural interior of the house didn't look at all like what they'd seen on screen.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick

Question: I'm trying to add to my DVD collection, and I'd really like to get a copy of a basketball movie from my childhood starring Robbie Benson and, I believe, Annette O'Toole. I thought the title was One on One but can't find it anywhere; if you could let me know if it's in distribution, I'd be grateful. John

FlickChick: You have the title right: The trouble is that One on One, a 1977 feature that was widely called the "Rocky of basketball movies," isn't available on DVD. You can get used copies on VHS — it was put out by Warner Home Video in 1992 — so if you want it badly enough, you could buy one and burn it to DVD. Although Spike Lee once told an ESPN interviewer that One on One was the worst basketball movie he'd ever seen (speaking, presumably, as a rabid fan of the sport and the maker of 1998's He Got Game), the movie nonetheless has many fans.


Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

I can't imagine recommending a film about which I have more reservations than The Thief and the Cobbler, newly released on DVD by the Weinstein Company. But I'm recommending it because the things that are wrong with it are the result of studio meddling: It's been called The Magnificent Ambersons of animated film, a butchered masterpiece. And for all the strikes against it, Thief and the Cobbler contains sequences of such breathtaking visual imagination that it must be seen by anyone who cares about animation. It's that good.

The story is basic middle Eastern fairy tale stuff involving a feisty princess, a lowly cobbler with a pure heart, a wicked wizard and an bumbling but persistent thief determined to steal three golden spheres from the princess' father. But the visuals are almost unbelievably subtle, sophisticated and complex: Animator Richard Williams' influences range from traditional Persian miniatures to Op Art, M.C. Escher's intricate interplay between image and negative space to the trippy psychedelia of Heinz Edelmann's Yellow Submarine, Rube Goldberg's ludicrously complex machines to the intricate patterning characteristic of Islamic non-figurative traditions.

The Thief and the Cobbler barely registered in 1995, when Miramax gave it a blink-and-you'll-miss-it release as Arabian Knight. Most people assumed it was a cheap rip-off of Disney's Aladdin. But it was actually a 25-years-in-the-making labor of love by Williams, the three-time Oscar winning animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?(1988). Williams worked for both Disney and UPA (the pioneering independent animation house that created Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing) in the late 1940s, and went to the UK to self-financed his first feature, the award-winning, allegorical short The Little Island (1958). Other animators revere him, and over the years many of them worke d on portions of The Thief and the Cobbler, including Disney veteran Art Babbitt, who created Goofy;
Ken Harris, who worked with Chuck Jones at both Warners and MGM; and Myron Natwick, who created Betty Boop while working for Max and Dave Fleischer. .

Williams started work on what eventually became The Thief and the Cobbler in the late 1960s, inspired by Sufi folktales, and everything that could have gone wrong did: Copyright disputes, cost overruns, financing that suddenly dried up, missed deadlines -- everything. Williams had to redo large pieces of the project and worked on it between commercial jobs; showing it around Hollywood got him hired for Roger Rabbit and Roger Rabbit's success finally produced a distribution deal that fell through when Aladdin appeared on the horizon. The sorry conclusion of the story found Williams fired from his own film, which was completed and extensively altered by other hands.

So remember: The insipid songs and the goofy dialogue are like a magic marker mustache on the Mona Lisa -- all you have to do is watch and it's clear that the thief wasn't meant to speak at all, let alone carry on a jokey running commentary about his misadventures. Vincent Price -- who'd been dead for two years when the movie finally opened -- gives fine, silky voice to the scheming wizard, but the rest of voices are typical celebrity stunt casting: Jennifer Beals as pouty lipped Princess Yum Yum, Eric Bogosian as a vulture named Phido, Matthew Broderick as the cobbler (who was also clearly not drawn as such a chatterbox) and Toni Collette as Yum Yum's dotty nurse. And on top of everything else, the DVD is panned and scanned (sorry, "formatted to fit your screen") rather than letterboxed. And it's still worth watching. Once you see it, you'll want to join the petitioners trying to get the film released in a version closer to the one Williams imagined.

In most of the world, animation is used to create a broad spectrum of movies. In the US, animation=children's entertainment. How come?

Do CGI films like Happy Feet look better than traditional hand-drawn animated films like Bambi?

What can filmmakers do with animation that can't be done with live action, and how often do they actually do it?

Is the extensive use of CGI for effects and image sweetening gradually eroding the line between animation and live action?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

Nashville

Panic in the Streets and Jack Palance interview

The Pusher Trilogy

Scarface

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: This Week's New DVD Releases

Question: Do you know what was the first TV show to have a feature length movie made about it while the show was still on the air? Did that show see a bump in ratings because of the movie? — Ryan

FlickChick: This is an interesting question and I have to say up front that I have no way of answering the second part. I'm sure there is a way of getting ratings information for 1960s television shows and checking against the release dates of the appropriate feature films, but it would involve physically sifting through archived network information that isn't readily available to outsiders. And the more I think about it, the less I am sure that the information is even there – we're talking about the same networks that regularly reused videotapes or dumped the only copies of early shows into catch-all storage facilities and forgot about them. The first two Superbowl broadcasts were taped over and no-one knows what became of Johnny Carson's first appearance on The Tonight Show. No strong commitment to history.

All that aside, you made me very curious about the earliest examples TV shows that inspired feature films. The first I can think of and verify is Dr. Who and the Daleks, the first of two theatrical films inspired by the pioneering BBC sci-fi series. The first iteration of Doctor Who, which is still going strong (with periodic interruptions throughout the years), aired in 1963 and the film debuted in 1965. Daleks--Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. followed in 1966, and both played while the first Who cycle, starring William Hartnell, was still on TV. I leave it to Doctor Who fans to address the controversy surrounding these films, which starred Hammer icon Peter Cushing as the traveling time lord.

Following that, I think we're looking at Batman (1966), which took off from the hugely popular TV series that ran from '66 through 1968. That same year, Thunderbirds Are GO was spun off from the puppet animated series Thunderbirds (1965-1966), like Doctor Who, a UK production. I suppose this is a borderline case – Thunderbirds was cancelled in August of 1966 and Variety reviewed the film in December, so the movie was in production while the show was still on but opened after it was gone. And after that, House of Dark Shadows (1970), which opened while the gothic supernatural soap Dark Shadows (1966-1971) was still going strong. Bob Rafelson's Head (1968) opened shortly after The Monkees (1966-1968) was cancelled, but it was counter-culture deconstruction of the pop TV show rather that a big-screen extension of it – the posters didn't even feature the pre-fab four.

And then there are the judgment calls – this is what I mean, by the way, when I lament that there's nothing more frustrating than to try answering a question that involves the word "first." Take To Trap a Spy, made in 1964 as the pilot for the Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series (1964-1968), then re-edited and released to theaters in 1966, while the show was at the peak of its popularity. Complicating matters further, episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. were cobbled together, re-edited and released as features throughout the run of the series; they were The Spy With My Face (1965), One Spy Too Many (1966), The Spy in the Green Hat (1966), One of our Spies is Missing (1966), Karate Killers (1967), The Helicopter Spies (1967) and How To Steal The World (1968). Can you imagine the outrage if someone tried a stunt like that now? MGM, who produced both the series and the "movies" is lucky there was no internet then.

Recently, the only series I can think of that spawned feature films while they were still on the air are South Park and X-Files. South Park debuted in 1997 and is still going strong; South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was released in 1999. The X-Files ran from 1993 to 2002 and The X-Files opened in 1998.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

As I was watching Bobby last week (a movie that, by the way, I like rather better than most reviewers, its reach outstrips its grasp, but isn't ambition a good thing?) I couldn't keep my mind off Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a model for successful multistrand narratives. It's one of my favorite films ever; I saw it when it opened at a now-vanished theater called the Baronet, I showed it regularly during the five years I taught film history/theory/criticism, and after all those viewings it retains the power to chill me with its distillation of the heart-wrenching gulf between ideals and actions, between dreams and the grubby day-to-day reality of making it from sunrise to sunset without drowning in the troubles of the world.

I know what you're thinking: You don't really like country music. Doesn't matter. I don't either — Nashville isn't about country music. Regularly cited as one of the most influential films of the '70s, it's been characterized as the quintessential portrait of post-Vietnam War/Watergate America, but the reason it remains so bitterly relevant is that its underlying concern is the way pop culture smoothes and shapes vivid, inchoate longings into tidy manageable tropes, and the cost of surrender to those prefabricated dreams.

Altman juggles 24 characters, ranging from old-school country stars like Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton and steel magnolia Connie White (B-movie regular Karen Black) to country-pop crossover artist Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), bedraggled housewife Winifred (Barbara Harris), who's abandoned her husband in search of stardom, L.A. groupie Joan (Shelley Duvall), and sundry hangers-on. Their stories play out against the grassroots presidential campaign of independent candidate Hal Phillip Walker, whose team is trying to entice fragile C&W legend Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who's barely recovered from one nervous breakdown and well on her way to another, to do a concert on his behalf. Altman's cast not only sing — some extremely well, including Black and Carradine, whose "I'm Easy" became a bona fide hit — but also wrote their own material, with an assist from music supervisor Richard Baskin. Altman is the master of the multithread narrative, but Nashville was lightning in a bottle: He's never matched, let alone topped, it. I couldn't help but see 2006's A Prairie Home Companion as Nashville's pale shadow, and Meryl Streep's character, iron butterfly Yolanda Johnson, as a less tragically vulnerable Barbara Jean.

The notion of destiny vs happenstance underlies all multithread narratives, from Grand Hotel (1932) to last year's surprise Oscar-winner, Crash. Is everything that happens to us part of a larger design? Or is it as Shakespeare writes in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."

One critic suggested that the fact that Nashville's actors were able to write creditable C&W songs was evidence that country music is reductive and formulaic. Yes or no?

Nashville explores the intersection of entertainment and politics. Are people more sophisticated about that relationship than they used to be?

Altman is famous for his use of overlapping dialogue. Does having actors talk over one another actually duplicate the ebb and flow of real-life conversation, or is it just another form of stylization?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I know how much you love holiday movies – joke, joke – so I'm wondering which one you object to least? And don't say Bad Santa – that's not a Christmas movie! Copper

FlickChick: You may laugh, but I actually like It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the original Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Christmas in Connecticut (1945). And I like them all for the same reason: They're not cute and saccharine – if you've never seen any or all of them, you'd probably be surprised by their sharpness. It's a Wonderful Life, especially, goes to some very dark places. And Christmas in Connecticut is a blast: Barbara Stanwyck plays a magazine columnist who made her reputation writing about how to maintain a perfect household – she's basically the Martha Stewart of her day, and she's always writing about the wonderful meals she makes for her husband and their small child on the family's Connecticut farm. But she's making it all up: She lives in an apartment, the old Hungarian guy who owns the restaurant around the corner cooks for her, and she isn't married or a mother. Her career is threatened when the magazine's publisher (not her editor, who knows the truth) cooks up a heartwarming PR stunt: He wants her to invite a wounded war veteran recently released from the hospital — his human interest story has been all over the papers — to join her family for Christmas dinner.

And just so everyone doesn't think I'm going soft, I also like The Hebrew Hammer (2003), which manages to be rude about Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa — I've never cared for Andy Dick, but he is unrepentant as evil Santa Damian.

And I'll watch any Christmas-themed horror movie. Most of them are crap, but I love seeing department-store St. Nicks murdered in public restrooms and psychopaths wreaking havoc in Santa suits; they pander to all my most ingrained loathing of the forced gaiety and soft-focus sentimentality of the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's — that's five long weeks that also happen to be my busiest weeks of the year at work because it's when all the studios release all their big-budget, Oscar-contending movies. As soon as every cabdriver in New York adds Dean Martin singing "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" to his heavy rotation, I start craving a slay ride. I suppose I should be happy that the remake of Black Christmas (1974) is opening on December 25, but in my heart of hearts I suspect it will be as obvious and uninteresting as director Glen Morgan's 2003 remake of Willard. There we go — now I'm starting to sound like my familiar holiday self!

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I'm trying to locate a copy of a movie that was made in the late 1960s or early '70s. It's about high-school football and Gary Busey stars as a player. I think Larry Hagman is his coach, and his dad puts all kinds of pressure on him, but I'm not sure of the name. I thought it was "Poetry in Motion," but all I find under that title is a DVD of poets reading poetry. The movie was filmed in Northern California and I'd like to surprise a friend with a copy because her husband was an extra and their kids are dying to see it. Becky

FlickChick: You're looking for a 1973 made-for-TV movie called Blood Sport (1973), with a young Gary Busey as a teen athlete whose father (Ben Johnson) pressures him into playing high-school football (Busey himself played in college); his coach is played by Larry Hagman. I've heard people say they were reminded of it by Friday Night Lights (the book and the film) because it dealt with the pressures put on young players by football-loving towns, by parents who live vicariously through their kids, and by coaches who are determined to win at all costs. The bad news is that like many TV-movies of the 1970s and '80s, it's never been commercially available on video or DVD. I haven't even been able to locate a bootleg, but if I were you I'd start scouring sites that specialize in obscure or hard-to-find videos and DVDS. You should also check eBay regularly, but be careful: There's a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie of the same title — and you don't want that one.

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

In honor of the late, great Jack Palance (born Vladimir Palahnuik in 1919), who died on November 10, age 87, my recommendation this week is Panic in the Streets (1950).

Shot on location in New Orleans, Elia Kazan's thriller stars Richard Widmark as a U.S. Public Health Service investigator forced to infiltrate the city's seedy underbelly in hopes of preventing an outbreak of the plague. In an age when emerging diseases can travel across the world in 24 hours, the story is still all too timely.

Palance plays petty gangster Blackie, who's been exposed to the plague virus. It's an electrifying movie debut: Anyone who thinks of this actor only as the feisty old guy doing one-armed push-ups at the 1991 Academy Awards ceremony — when he won an Oscar for his comic supporting performance in City Slickers — is in for a surprise. I interviewed Palance last year, when Panic in the Streets came out on DVD, for a sidebar to my review. Only a couple of lines ever made it into print, so this seemed a good opportunity to run the rest.

Jack Palance on Panic in the Streets

Halls of Montezuma and Panic in the Streets were both released the same year, so which was really your first feature?

JP: It was Panic in the Streets.

And how were you cast?

JP: That was a while ago — 1949 — and to tell you the truth, I don't really remember exactly how I got it. But I worked with Elia Kazan on the play A Streetcar Named Desire; I got to know him very well, he got to know me, and we got along very well. It all worked out.

So he offered you the role of Blackie, a pretty dreadful person by any reckoning.

JP: Well, dreadful to somebody else. I don't think he thinks of himself as dreadful. Blackie just figures if he has to do something, he does it.

Panic in the Streets was shot on location in New Orleans....

JP: Yes, it was. I don't know whether New Orleans was a wild town or not, but I loved it.

How much of your own stunt work did you do?

JP: I did all my own stunt work. I was always in good shape, so it didn't bother me. I do remember only doing the shot where Blackie falls into the Mississippi while trying to escape. I had to swing my body over that thing that's there to stop rats [from climbing up a mooring rope onto a ship], and then I had to fall. It really was difficult, but I did it. However, I remember Kazan saying, "Do you want to give it another try?" And I said, "No sir. That's it." And that was it.

Was Zero Mostel really doing his own stunts as well?

JP: Zero did everything himself as well — I thought he was wonderful. Zero was a little on the fatty side, but gol-darn-it, he got around beautifully! Everyone in the cast was top-notch in my book: Dick Widmark, Barbara Bel Geddes, Paul Douglas... all of them real good. I think a lot of the supporting cast were local — they had a good theater there in New Orleans, so Kazan was able to borrow actors.

The story still feels very modern: The fear that diseases spreading quickly because modern travel has made the world so small is as intense today as it was in 1950.

JP: I guess that's true. The film was in black-and-white and maybe the kids have gone beyond that, but I think some of them will appreciate it.

What do you remember most about making Panic in the Streets?

JP: I remember loving being able to work with Elia Kazan. I thought he was terrific, and I was lucky to get the chance.

Things to discuss:

Palance became a film actor at a time when studios signed actors to multiyear contracts and used them frequently to justify their weekly salaries: Palance made well over 100 films in a five-decade career. Featured actors now work less but have more control over what they do — or do they? What are the plusses and minuses of being a contract player versus being an independent performer?

Palance alludes to the idea that many younger moviegoers don't like black-and-white: Are black-and-white movies inherently less visually compelling than color ones?

Though Palance's looks didn't entirely typecast him, he played a lot of gangsters, thugs and Old West outlaws. Does the intimacy of the close-up mean that physical appearance matters more in movies than it does on stage?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

The Pusher Trilogy

Scarface

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: This Week's New DVD Releases

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

This is a first. I'm recommending not one movie, but three: Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn's crime trilogy: Pusher (1998), Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands (2004) and Pusher 3: I'm the Angel of Death (2005). Do you love the inconsistent number on the sequels? Things like that drive those of us who maintain databases insane… but I digress.

Odds are, the only one you might have seen in a theater was Pusher, which received an art-house release in 1999. It was re-released earlier this year in a handful of markets alongside with the other two, clearly in an effort drum up good reviews to promote the DVDs. All three are great stand alones, but together they're astonishing.

Less an original and two sequels than a set of interlocking stories spread over three films, the Pusher pictures are a slice of life in Copenhagen's underbelly. The first revolves around Frank, a low-level drug dealer whose life goes to hell when he tries to square things with Serbian wholesaler Milo, to whom he's in debt, by buying additional dope on credit. Frank anticipates a quick, lucrative turnaround on the merchandise but gets busted instead; having dumped the drugs in a pond, he scrambles to make good on the cash and convince Milo that he didn't rat out his connection. Pusher II picks up the story of Tonny (Mads Mikkelson), one of Frank's pals. About to be released from jail, the fierce-looking, heavily tattooed Tonny is already being squeezed for money he borrowed before his arrest and must appeal to his father, a minor crime boss and major bastard with nothing but contempt for his son, for work. The same combination of bad decisions and bad luck that did in Frank undo Tonny, who has a fatal soft streak and a gift for turning gold into mud; it's the highlight of the series and ends on a note of pure heartbreak. Pusher 3 focuses on Milo (Zlatko Buric), who appeared in both of the previous installments. A veteran dealer, Milo's tough facade is undermined by middle age, the selfish, demanding daughter he adores and the habit he's trying to control through 12-step meetings. A high-pressure 25th-birthday party for his little girl is the catalyst for Milo's descent into the abyss.

Refn's influences are clear: Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), John Mackenzie's underrated The Long Good Friday (1982), Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), among others. But the sight of squeaky clean Copenhagen's mucky underbelly is fascinating, in part because of the particular confluence of nationalities, social policies and specific laws that dictate its form. Down and dirty in Copenhagen, London or New York -- the broad strokes are the same, but the devilish difference is in the details. And Refn both writes complex characters and elicits subtle, multifaceted performances: Without making excuses for Tonny, Frank, Milo or any of their associates, he allows his actors to reveal traits that make them more than anonymous thugs, drug dealers and all-around menaces to society.

Things to consider:

Pusher was Refn's first feature and bubbles over with freshman energy. He made the second and third films in a rush after the disastrous Fear X (2004), his first English-language film, left him broke, and yet they're as richly imagined and vividly realized as Pusher. What role can adversity play in fueling creative energy?

Why would you want to make -- or watch -- a movie about people you'd never want to know?

How do you judge performance in a language you don't speak?

Does merely depicting criminal lives in movies inherently glamorize them? I'd say no, and the Pusher films would be my Exhibit A: Rarely has crime looked more demanding or less lucrative – in fact, it looks like a miserable grind.

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

Scarface

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: This Week's New DVD Releases

I know you answered this question about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre around the time of the remake in 2003, but I can't find it on your new page. I'm wondering how much of the film is true and how much is Hollywood made up? A friend of mine thinks it's totally true, chainsaw and all, but I'm trying to tell her it's only partially true and she doesn't believe me. Thanks for all your answers from forever; I read you every week. You've even won me more than a few bets! Brandi

If I keep winning bets for you, I may have to start asking for kickbacks. You can't find the old posting because it isn't there any more, but here's a recap of the salient points. A warning to the faint of heart: The details get very nasty in paragraph three.

Let's start with the truth of the title: The real-life case that inspired The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and all its various sequels, prequels and remakes took place in Wisconsin, did not involve a chainsaw and was not a massacre -– by all reliable accounts, only two women were murdered and not at the same time. This isn't to say that it's okay to kill two people as long as you space them out or anything, only that two killings three years apart do not a massacre make.

What filmmaker Tobe Hooper and his collaborators took from the case of Ed Gein, a reclusive farmer from Plainfield, Wis., who was arrested in 1957 on charges of having fatally shot a local shopkeeper, Bernice Worden, and gutted her like a deer in his shed, were the grotesque trappings of Gein's crimes, most of which began with grave robbery rather than murder. Local police, who knew Gein had visited Worden's store shortly before she disappeared, leaving no concrete clues other than a disturbing trail of blood, were only stopping by to talk to Gein. Gein was a well-known local eccentric who had lived alone in a rundown farmhouse since the death of his mother more than ten years earlier, but noone thought he was dangerous. Neighbors even let him babysit for their children. So finding Worden's butchered body was a hell of a shock, as was what they found when they went poking around the main house: A bowl made of the top of a human skull, a shade pull with a pair of lips at the end, human-skin lampshades made, a box full of women's private parts, a belt made of nipples, a complete "lady suit" made of human skin and hair, apparently from different sources, and much, much more as the old carny hucksters used to say. Under questioning, Gein admitted to a second murder, that of a tavern keeper named Mary Hogan in 1954.

The sheer lunatic inventiveness of Gein's tinkering with body parts was reproduced and embellished upon by Texas Chain Saw Massacre's art director, Robert Burns. Hooper also took the idea of deranged doings behind the faηade of an apparently ordinary country house, and worked with his cast to evoke an atmosphere of sheer, near-incomprehensible horror, which is certainly what the discoveries in the Gein house aroused. Gein seems to have dabbled in cannibalism, but it wasn't the primary purpose behind his crimes; Gein was driven by a bizarre, warped fascination with the female body that had its roots in a suffocatingly close relationship with his oppressively religious mother.

And that's about it for the film's factual basis: Whatever Gein did, he did alone, not with members of his family. He shot his victims, rather than dismembering them with a chainsaw. He did have a human flesh mask, but it was part of the lady suit. And he certainly wasn't a hulking butcher like the movies' Leatherface: Gein was a skinny, weather-beaten farmer in a trucker cap.

Gein was suspected in several killings and disappearances besides the ones to which he admitted, including the suspicious death of his own brother, Henry, in 1944, which was ruled accidental at the time. The grounds around the Gein house were dug up, but no concrete evidence was ever found to contradict his claim that he had killed Hogan and Worden, acquiring the rest of the raw materials for his handiwork by digging up corpses from cemeteries and spiriting away the parts he needed. Examination of the Plainfield graveyard supported his story.

Subsequent Chainsaw Massacre movies elaborated on the mythology of the first film, but other filmmakers and novelists went back to the source material and manipulated it to their own ends. Robert Bloch's novel Psycho, which Alfred Hitchcock turned into the famous 1960 movie, was also inspired by the Gein case; Bloch and Hitchcock were more interested in the psychology of an isolated killer, warped by his close relationship with his mother, who was able to hide his insanity from neighbors and acquaintances than in the skull bowls.

Thomas Harris modeled Silence of the Lambs killer Jame Gumb on Gein -- Gumb kidnaps and murders women so he can use their skin to build his own lady suit. The 1974 film Deranged, which was completely eclipsed by Texas Chain Saw Massacre, lightly fictionalizes the Gein case and features a really disturbing performance by Roberts Blossom as killer/corpse violator "Ezra Cobb," and the direct-to-video Ed Gein (2000), starring Steve Railsback (who, you may recall, jump-started his career with a truly creepy performance as Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie Helter Skelter), is a remarkably accurate account of Gein's life and crimes.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters

We all know the drill: Sequels are never as good as the originals. And it's true, except when it isn’t: That's why I devoted a whole chapter of my book, Movie Lust: Recommended Viewing for Every Mood, Moment and Reason, over to remakes that defy conventional wisdom, including Jonathan Demme's 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), What Price Hollywood (1932) and the musical remake A Star is Born (1954) and Brian DePalma's Scarface, which updated Howard Hawks' 1932 gangster drama Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (inspired by the rise and fall of Al Capone) to then-contemporary Miami.

Scarface is newly available in a "Platinum Edition" whose additional features lean heavily to the jokey, reflecting the fact that over the course of some two decades the film has gone from being so shocking that it nearly received an X rating to being a sentimental favorite of gangsta rappers, wanna-be players and Miami Vice-era nostalgists. The extras include a scoreboard that lets you count the number of times the word "f**k" or variations thereupon are uttered (hint: a lot) and keep track of the bullets fired (a whole hell of a lot), and a montage of especially foul-mouthed scurrilous scenes from the original film in their tidied up TV versions. I leave you to imagine what Tony Montana (Al Pacino) really said before it was redubbed to "This town is like a great big chicken, waiting to be plucked."

Joking aside, De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone took former newspaperman Ben Hecht's original screenplay and updated it without changing much more than the names and the locales. Contemporary reviewers all remarked on how much more violent it was than the original, but if you go back to the original reviews of Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, you'll find that in 1932 it was deemed horrifyingly brutal.

Tony Montana comes to the US as part of the Mariel boatlift, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), the antihero of Hawks' film, is an Italian immigrant.

Montana traffics in cocaine, Camonte traffics in alcohol, which was just as illegal in Prohibition-era America. Both claw their ways to the top of criminal empires and fall because they lose sight of the fact that there's always someone younger, hungrier and just as ruthless waiting in the wings.

Camonte and Montana share old-country mothers and near-incestuous relationships with their sisters (respectively Ann Dvorak and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Both films draw an explicit relationship between the ruthlessness of criminal entrepreneurs and businessmen who remain within the bounds of the law (because what they sell is legal) but are equally morally corrupt. Even a detail like Montana's enthusiasm for his "leetle friend" echoes Camonte's glee at seeing his first Tommy gun: "They got a machine gun you can carry around – I gotta get me one of those!"

But there are also distinct thematic differences that reflect the way in which the America of the 1930s had changed by the 1980s. First and foremost, Camonte is a classic immigrant striver who aspires to be part of the American elite – he wants to be respected, not looked down on as a peasant with dirty hands and an accent. His origins appear to be working class, not criminal, and he sells bootleg liquor because it's a lucrative business that's open to people like him. For Camonte money is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Montana, by contrast, has contempt for the social elite and their affectations to gentility – he's proud of coming "from the gutter." He doesn't want to be one of the elite: He them to be afraid of him and to feel small by comparison. That's why everything Montana owns has to be the biggest and the best – vastest house, most expensive meal, most powerful gun, biggest mound of cocaine, most desirable woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) – and why acquisition of such material signifiers of wealth and power is itself an end. And unlike Camonte, Montana helps precipitate his own downfall by breaking the rule he himself made famous: "Don't get high on your own supply. Camonte never becomes a drunk but Montana winds up a cocaine addict, with all the paranoia and volatility that implies.

Things to consider:

Why has Tony Montana become a perverse role model?

What fuels moviegoers' aparantly insatiable hunger for mafia movies in all their permutations: Irish mafia, Russian mafia and so on?

Are the operations of gangs truly a mirror of American capitalism at its most ruthless?

Are there other remakes you think oare the equal of the films that inspired them?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: This Week's New DVD Releases