The 812

By Cornelia

I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday, since I live in my car pretty much, what with these being the chauffeur years of parenthood. The movie review dude on Terry Gross was talking about a new DVD box set: Essential Arthouse: 50 Years of Janus Films.

For $650, you can now own 50 of the foreign films that graced the screens of America's most Boho theaters. Since movie review dude only discussed a few of these selections, I went to the Janus website this morning to check out the entire list, wondering if any of the ones I grew up with had made the cut.

There was only one of my seminal flicks listed--Black Orpheus.


Originally titled Orfeu Negro, it's a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in the favelas of Brazil during Carnival. As above in a contemporary poster, this was "the film that introduced bossa nova to the world..." and I spent a lot of time as a kid listening to the soundtrack album.

My mom had seen it in New York, back when it was originally released in the States. I first watched it in the early seventies, at the 812 Cinema on Cannery Row.



The 812 is long gone, as are most of the funky businesses I remember operating out of the abandoned canneries along the shores of Monterey Bay in that era, like Kalisa's, a Middle Eastern restaurant whose namesake owner drove around the peninsula in an ancient ambulance, painted a striking metallic lavender.

Nowadays, Cannery Row is a slick and bustling tourist destination, anchored by the Monterey Aquarium. You can buy cotton candy and ride indoor carousels. You can load up on stuffed toy sea otters and souvenir "All I got was this lousy t-shirt" t-shirts. You can barely make your way down the sidewalk through the crowds, most days. Everything's spiffy and shiny and repainted.

I miss the funky stuff, back in the days when all you'd see on the street at dusk was that purple ambulance and tumbleweed bits of paper, rolling down the empty asphalt. I miss the 812 especially.

It was a narrow, high-ceilinged building, built on pilings out over the water. Sometimes if the audience got quiet, you could hear surf moiling below. There were no seats, no aisles--just piles of giant pillows, stuffed with torn foam rubber and upholstered in faded Indian print bedspreads. Parking was not exactly a problem.

One of the non-Janus-distributed films we saw there was Zorba the Greek, which my sister and I basically turned into an early audience-participation deal--perhaps the Ur Rocky Horror experience--having memorized the bits of dialogue on the soundtrack album for years beforehand.

Such as Alan Bates sounding all British and wussy, going "Teach me to dance, will you?" and Anthony Quinn responding, "Did you say... dance?... Go on my boy!"
Although I think our favorite bit was when Zorba was asked whether he were married, to which he answered, "Am I not a man, and is not a man stupid? I am a man... so, I married... wife, house, children, everything... the full catastrophe."

Another film we saw there was the original Lost Horizon, the black-and-white film of James Hilton's novel about a secret valley in the Himalayas where everyone is immortal and pacifist. Seeing it years later, I found the whole art-deco-meets-Tibet set design a little harder to swallow, but it's still one of my favorite movies--so much so that I still hate Burt Bacharach for trying to remake it as a musical in the seventies.


The coolest part is when the High Lama explains to Ronald Coleman why he founded Shangri-La in the first place:

I saw all the nations strengthening, not in wisdom, but in the vulgar passions and the will to destroy. I saw the machine power multiplying, until a single weaponed man might match a whole army. I foresaw a time when man, exalting in the technique of murder, would rage so hotly over the world, that every book, every treasure, would be doomed to destruction. This vision was so vivid and so moving, that I determined to gather together all things of beauty and of culture that I could, and preserve them here, against the doom toward which the world is rushing. Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality.

A time must come my friend, when this orgy will spend itself. When brutality and the lust for power must perish by its own sword. Against that time, is why I avoided death, and am here. And why you were brought here. For when that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life. And it is our hope that they may find it here. For here, we shall be with their books and their music, and a way of life based on one simple rule: Be Kind! When that day comes, it is our hope that the brotherly love of Shangri-La will spread throughout the world.

These were pretty much all message movies, and that was the message they shared: "Iconoclasts of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your day jobs...."

Yellow Submarine depicted the overthrow of the Blue Meanies, with nothing but some good Beatles tunes employed to topple their hegemony:


A Thousand Clowns pitted Jason Robards against the Madison Avenue/Network broadcasting brigade. When social workers show up to inspect the premises in which he's raising his nephew Nick (who delights in trying on different names throughout the film), Robards tries to return to the day-job fray, writing TV schtick for the odious Chuckles the Clown.


Chuckles patronizes young Nick and offers him a small bag of the sponsor's potato chips, into the bargain, causing Nick to observe, when asked for his "simple childhood reaction" to the man's wheezing patter:

My simple child reaction of what you did is that you are not funny. Funnier than you is even Stuart Schlossmen, who is my friend, and is eleven, and puts walnuts in his mouth and makes noises. What is not funny is to call us names, and what is mostly not funny is how sad you are, and I'd feel sorry for you if it wasn't for how dull you are. And those are the worst-tasting potato chips that I've ever tasted. And that's my opinion from the blue, blue sky.

Robards woos the female social worker by playing "Yessir, That's My Baby" on the ukelele, and taking her to the old passenger-liner docks of Manhattan to throw confetti and wish total strangers bon voyage.

At least he didn't shoot her at the end, like Elvira Madigan. This was a Scandinavian film perhaps best remembered today for the bits of Mozart in its soundtrack, and for featuring the very first instance of lovers running toward one another across a field, in slow motion.

Probably my favorite movie of all the things we saw at the 812, however, was King of Hearts, in which Alan Bates morphed from wimpy Brit dancing on Greek beaches to a Scots soldier in World War I, sent to warn a town in France that the Germans are about to invade. He's missed the actual townspeople, however, and spends a day frolicking with the inmates who've wandered out of the local asylum, including a tremendously fetching Genevieve Bujold.


The man looked pretty good in a kilt, I have to say. Plus there was the bootie shot at the end, when he takes off all his clothes in the hopes the nuns will let him past the asylum gates as a resident for at least the rest of the war.

I've been thinking about movies a lot recently, since I'm going to have lunch in LA on Monday to discuss the possibility of writing a screenplay, which would be really cool if it works out.

I imagine we might discuss movies, during this meal, and I admit I'm not too up on recent releases since I don't get out much, what with the price of babysitting and everything. I haven't seen the rehash of The Poseidon Adventure, or Marie Antoinette, or pretty much anything that's come out in the last year, so I'll probably sound vaguely Amish, should the subject come up. I guess I'm hoping that my lunchmates have a fondness for the old arthouse stuff, since I'd love to talk about that instead. Not so much Bergman and Kurosawa, just the funky little anti-establishment flicks we cheered for at the old 812.... the ones that tried to get us all to just be kind.