Weirdhouse Cinema: Footprints on the Moon - podcast episode cover

Weirdhouse Cinema: Footprints on the Moon

Jan 24, 20252 hr 31 min
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Episode description

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe tap into the January Giallo spirit of things with 1975’s “Footprints on the Moon,” a beautifully-shot surreal mystery starring Florinda Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi and Klaus Kinski -- with cinematography by Oscar-winner Vittorio Storaro.

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Transcript

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 today on Weird House Cinema we are going to be talking about the nineteen seventy five Italian mystery thriller Footprints on the Moon aka Primal Impulse aka just Footprints. It's a much less intriguing title. I don't know why anybody would just say footprints. Footprints on the Moon much much better. But this movie stars Florinda Bulkan, Peter mckinnery, and in a bit part, klaus Kinski.

Speaker 2

Right right though, even if you just have a dash of Klauskinski in there, you know it. People notice. It's a powerful spice.

Speaker 3

So I came to this selection in a slightly awkward way, because here's where it came from, folks, to get the whole backstory. Earlier this month, you had mentioned that some creatures of the Cinemadrome celebrate something called Jallo January, a sort of Jay and B guzzling leather gloved cousin of

noir November. And when you mentioned this, I was definitely intrigued because I'm sort of something of a Jallo fan, but I think I had already decided I wanted to do a Santo movie for my previous pick, but when this week came around, I decided to give in to the reason for the season and look for a Jallo to talk about, one that would be weird enough for Weird House and one that I had never seen before.

So I was poking around online reading things trying to find a good weird Jallo I was not familiar with, and I ended up settling on Footprints on the Moon. And while I think this movie is very excellent, I'm more than pleased with the choice, I am skeptical whether it would actually be considered a Jallo by most fans of the genre. A lot of the online references were classifying it as such, but it's missing some of the key genre elements, though on the other hand, still maintaining

a lot of the genre's signature esthetics. So maybe we can talk about this more later in the episode, but I think there will be serious debate over whether it should be thought of as a Jallo or not.

Speaker 2

Yeah, you could make a case for it being Jallo adjacent. I guess which is close enough for our purposes here.

Speaker 3

Now, if you're not familiar with the terminology, I think we've probably gabbed about this on the show before, but hey, why not talk about it again. It's always fun to define and try to understand what the soul of the jallo. But if you're not familiar Jallo movies, the plural is technically Jalli are typically understood as a genre of Italian murder mystery thrillers, often with strong horror elements and often erotically charged Jallo movie. These are kind of a long

running staple in our house. Used to be whenever I visited Videodrome, whatever else I was checking out, I would also always grab at least one unfamiliar disc from the video corner of shame, the Jallo corner there, so we know and are fans of jallo around here. So any seemingly disparaging comments I make about the genre in the rest of this episode come from a place of familiarity. In love.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense. You want to get a little side item from the Gava menu. You know, it's like it's you know, it's not super nutritious, but you know you're having a meal out you might as well indulge yourself.

Speaker 3

It's just I don't know, so often on a Friday night, what Rachel and I wanted was a jallo.

Speaker 2

And there's so many this genre has. Just it's a never ending well. Anytime we dive into even just into the filmographies of people who worked in this genre or subgenre, I'm always discovering new titles. And it's sometimes helps that there are generally multiple titles in the mix for any given film.

Speaker 3

Yeah, So, coming back to what makes a yellow, of course they are these usually murder mystery thrillers. Usually the plot involves a series of grizzly, shocking homicides, often committed with a strange or disturbing weapon. So it's usually not just like a gun or a regular knife, but more often say a knitting needle or a shard of glass, or a venomous animal, or like an antique suit of armor glove with spikes on the knuckles or something.

Speaker 2

Yeah, but it's worth noting that this is distinct from like the whole slasher genre that would then bubble up mostly in America, especially strongly during the nineteen eighties. Like there's there's something different about the way murders are committed, the way that they're stylistically portrayed, and so forth.

Speaker 3

Yeah, well, I mean, I think Jello is often considered a major predecessor of an influence on the wave of American slasher films that would come in the late seventies and especially in the nineteen eighties, though I think there are important differences. But I think definitely the soul of the Shallo movies of the sixties and seventies is influential on the slasher movies that would come later. So the plot involves a series of murders, but the other thing

is that the story is a mystery. The identity of the killer is unknown, and the viewer is pulled along to the conclusion of the movie wanting to find out who the killer is and what their motivation was. So a lot of the big Shallo movies have an exciting payoff because the reveal of the killer is quite surprising. Often it's a minor character you wouldn't have expected, or someone who gave no sign of danger previously. A lot of times the reveal I think this is sort of

influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The reveal of the killer's motivations is often a divulging of some kind of like psychological trauma that was previously unknown in a pre existing character's backstory. Common esthetic features of Jello. I notice what feels like a real combination of high art and pulp sensibilities all jumbled together. So these movies are on one hand, quite often trashy and prurient, but also with a really palpable sense of artistic pride that you don't get in

most American slasher movies. In these Italian movies, you get the feeling that you know, while they were staging some tawdry potato peel or murder scene, they were thinking, I am, like Michaelangelo, this is important artistic work.

Speaker 2

They're often It's also I think important to stress that jallo are almost always, if not always, thoroughly modern, and there's probably a subtext in there somewhere in most of these films too, like dealing with issues boiling up around the state of modernity, it current social norms, social problems, and so forth. But yeah, it's not surprising to see, like all the latest technologies that are going to be present in say nineteen seventy three or something in a given example of this subgenre.

Speaker 3

That's right, and in terms of dealing with like current

social issues. Another big thing about Shalla movies is that they often explore themes of sex and gender conflict, sometimes projecting misogynist attitudes by casting women as helpless sort of feeble objects of male lust and violence, or treating women as especially psychologically frail, but in other cases sort of taking the woman's point of view and showing misogyny and pathetic forms of resentment against women as the primary motivators of the movie's villainy and the thing that has to

be unmasked and destroyed at the end.

Speaker 2

Yeah, So there's definitely room in a HOLLO picture for a strong female character. You don't always find them there, 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 a lot of times, high contrast, a bold or even lurid color palette, real like artistic attention to shot composition. Like a lot of these movies in terms of plot content might be kind of trash, but a lot of them really look great. They're kind of beautiful.

Speaker 2

Yeah, murder is often beautiful or at least stylish in these pictures.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Another thing is an often unsubtle musical score. So you can think about if you've ever heard this Dario Argento's work with Goblin that goes in his movies or in the movie we're talking about today, that it's debatable whether it's actually a jello, the kind of fugue like blasts of organ that we get through throughout the film.

Another thing is a tendency toward voyeuristic camera work. So in these movies, the camera watches the protagonist or the murder victim from a hiding place, maybe peeking through the slats in a wall or looking through a keyhole, or it just in some other way kind of intrudes into private spaces to see the characters that their most vulnerable, or it takes the killer's point of view. This is a cinematography choice that is often poured over into the

American Slashers as well. In terms of like set dressing and costuming, there are some very strong themes that occur again and again the killer. The killer often hides their identity by wearing a hat, a trench coat, and black leather gloves, and there's also just a general kind of inflammation of seventies clothing. It's one of our favorite elements of these movies when my wife and I watch them. I love the clothes.

Speaker 2

Oh, I agree to you. I mean, anytime I watch one of these films, it's that focus on the modern world and often some sense of fashion that is just thoroughly captivating. I mean, for me, having been born in the seventies, I'm just you know, endlessly fascinated with you know, the style and the culture that I was born out of.

Speaker 3

Yeah, another thing I have to mention, can't make a Jallo without a J and B bottle. Something you will always see one either on a shelf or being poured into a glass, into a into a kind of ornate crystal tumbler glass. There's you know, there's a lot of good glassware in the films, and always a J and B. Also, just a lot of focus on loud flourishes of art

and design and interior decor. The movie often features, or sometimes actually directly involves in the plot crazy wallpaper patterns, bizarre tapestries, oil paintings, art exhibits, stained glass, statuary, and things like that. Now, beyond that, there are also some common plot and character features of Jolly One is that it's been observed that the main character is usually an outsider of some kind or is alienated, so they might be in an unfamiliar place, or they might be estranged

from their social group for some reason. That the protagonist of Ajallo is not in their element as they try to piece together the clues and solve the mystery. Another thing is protagonists are very often found questioning their sanity or being thought insane by others. And then, finally, this is one that I've read about less, but I've just

always noticed it myself and found it so interesting. So so many of the movies within this one subgenre have the same plot device, which is a protagonist who already saw the solution to the mystery, or saw some important clue with their own eyes, or sensed it with their

own senses. Maybe they heard something but in somehow, they somehow sensed with their own senses the solution to the mystery, but they can't quite remember it or they can't quite make sense of it, and they spend the rest of the film trying to reconstruct the memory or trying to understand what it is they already saw. And this has always struck me as a potent psychological metaphor that may

have some deeper cultural significance. I don't know enough about Italy in the sixties and seventies to speculate on exactly what that cultural kind of metaphor would be, but it's very interesting that the solution to the murder mystery is so often not completely hidden. It's something that you already saw, you already took it in, but now, for whatever reason, you can't remember it or can't make sense of it.

So the final piece of puzzle in terms of the plot structure, is often an event or a clue that causes the protagonist to suddenly fully remember or finally understand what they already saw in the beginning. I'm trying to think if there's much precedent for this in other mystery stories outside of the shallow subgenre, and nothing's really coming 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 is present in the larger mystery genre. But then within Jalloh becomes like a part of the blueprint more or less, you know, Yeah, you often see that. I guess with different genre spinoffs and subgenres.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, And I wonder how this plot convention of like in a way you already saw the answer, but you can't remember it or understand it is connected to another thing about Jali, which is that usually the investigator or the protagonist who's trying to solve the mystery is 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 detective and I've got to be here and solve the mystery. Usually the protagonist has a personal connection to the crimes 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 piecing together all of these different attributes you get this sort of this picture of a of a stranger in a strange modern world, almost a sense of future shock to it at least, well but less on the technological side of things and more on just like the social

side of things. And uh uh, you know, I guess this movie is the one that is that is that I'm most current on since I just watched it, But it lines up with this theme in a number of ways.

You know, the sense of like a globe trotting, modern professional woman, and well while there there are you know, there are some elements where we can see that she's maybe not at odds with the world, but it has like real world stressors in play, and that sort of like bleeds over into this more surreal scenario that we see in the picture.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, I don't want to spoil too much about the ending of the film now, though by the time we get to the end of the plot section, we definitely are going to spoil the ending. And this movie is full of surprises. So if you want to see Footprints on the Moon without having anything spoiled, I guess now would be a good time to pause the episode

and go watch it yourself. But there are questions raised by the reveal at the end of the movie about it, like exactly what the motivation for the main character's psychological state or struggle is and to what extent that's brought on by something within her or by circumstances outside her control. So anyway, having reviewed all of this stuff about what Jallo is, is Footprints on the Moon a shallo? I think a lot of people would say no, because it

is not a murder mystery. The film does not begin with a murder, and there is really very almost no violence in it until closer to the end. Nevertheless, it does really feel like a shallo. It's a mystery with an aura of menace. It is somewhat sexually charged. It involves an out of place protagonist physically out of place and also alienated, a protagonist haunted by something that she

apparently cannot remember. It looks and sounds like a shallo in terms of the musical soundtrack, it looks like one in the shot composition and the use of color and all that, And one of the clues to solve the mystery is a memory of a giant stained glass peacock.

So my ruling is, I think, yeah, you can call it a shallo, even though it does not have the main plot element that defines a shallow you know, it's not solving a murder mystery, though it does have murders within a recurring dream, and as a bonus, they are they are moon murders.

Speaker 2

I'm glad you mentioned that the giant stained glass peacock, which we'll come back to, because that is almost literally a bird with crystal plumage.

Speaker 3

You know, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2

I think the most important thing to stress about, and the Gallo or not Jallow conversation is that I think you probably do the film a disservice if you hype it up as yalloh too much, because then you run the risk of people coming into it expecting an Argento film or expecting a folk sci film. And if you do that, you're going to be disappointed. It's just not that sort of picture, and it's it's really very tame by Jalla's standard. It's almost like g rated Joab likewise,

even on the color and visual spectrum. If you're if you come in expecting it to be in line with Mario Bava, I mean, you're gonna be disappointed with any non Mario Bava film if you're doing that. But you come in expecting Suspiria or something like that. This film is gorgeous in its own right, but it's it's doing

its own thing for the most part. Some scenes are definitely more surreal in their color scheme than others, but you're it's not a picture that's going for those Mario 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 of it as art house surreal or psychological mystery.

Speaker 3

Yes, but I don't know if I've emphasized this enough already. I loved Footprints on the Moon. I thought this movie created such an enticing atmosphere of mystery. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie and I was so curious to know what the solution was.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and it's it's exceedingly beautiful, as we'll discuss. Like the first twenty minutes of this picture, I was just

captivated by the cinematography and the shot composition. Like I get, it's something you can take for granted in a lot of movies, obviously, but this this film does such a great job with just like the little details and just like there's there's some puttsing around in an apartment building early on in the picture that could just be, you know, thankless and maybe a little bit boring in another picture.

But it was very captivating here, just in large part because of the way it was shot and the way it was presented.

Speaker 3

Yeah. I mentioned that a lot of shallow films are more visually striking than you would have given their subject matter. But I feel like this is an especially beautiful movie. It is better looking even than the shallow standard. Yeah, and there are some ugly shallows. I just meant that generalization on average.

Speaker 2

Yeah, the better ones are often remembered for their stunning visuals. Yeah, all right, well hit us with an elevator pitch.

Speaker 3

H here we go. Alice Chespie is missing three days of her memory and is haunted by visions of an astronaut murdered on the surface of the moon. What happened to her? And what does klaus Kinsky have to do 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, 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. Look it looks like blood.

Speaker 5

What was I doing for those three days? Why can't I remember a single thing about them?

Speaker 4

It's all those tranquilizer as you take. You probably took 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 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? Who told you I had a friend named Harry?

Speaker 2

All right, so at this point, if you would like to go out and watch Footprints on the Moon, well, there is a DVD of the film, but it's also widely available for digital rental or purchase, and is also on some of the package streaming services. I was snowed in, so I rented it on Prime and the quality was great. However, I will say I had no audio options I was. I do not know if there are other language dubs for this, but the version I watched it in was English.

Speaker 3

You said the disc version is a DVD, but I'm pretty sure there is a blu ray from Severin.

Speaker 2

Is there? Okay? Yeah, well that, oh it would be even better.

Speaker 3

It's under the alternate title. It's not called Footprints on the Moon. It just says Footprints. I mean, what's what why I put the moon in the title, That's what sells it.

Speaker 2

I think that was the name of the original Italian novel. But all right, now I'm pulling up the Severin's website. I'm looking at the cuts let's see what do we have. We have an Italian cut and a US cut. I'm assuming I probably watched the US cut based on everything.

Speaker 3

Yeah, that's probably what I saw. That we may have watched the same streaming version. I watched the one available through scream Box, which is a premium subscription on Prime.

Speaker 2

My main question is just about like the version I watched, Kloskinski is dubbed. It's not klass Kinski's voice, and you know is we'll discuss his is a bit part and it doesn't really matter. But I mean that whether it's his voice or not. But I was just wondering, well, does this mean there is a different cut like in the Italian cut?

Speaker 5

Is?

Speaker 2

I mean, I don't know. They're probably dubbed in either case, but at any rate, the version I watched was in English. But this Blu ray does look excellent, So this would be the ideal physical media viewing A choice right here?

All right, Well, let's get into the people behind Footprints on the Moon, starting at the top with the director Luigi Bzzoni born nineteen twenty nine died twenty twelve, also a writer on the picture, a Tiger director and screenwriter with five films to his credit, all genre pictures of different types. There's a nineteen sixty five's The Possessed that was a mystery starring Peter Baldwin. Sixty seven's Man Pride and Vengeance that's a western with Franco Nero and Klauskinski.

Seventy one's The Fifth Chord that's a Franco Nero Jallo and also and then there's seventy three's Brothers Blue that say Western with jack palettes. And then came this film Footprints on the Moon, which was his final picture.

Speaker 3

Never seen anything else by this guy, but Footprints is so strong. I may have to check these other ones out. Even the westerns. Oh, come on a Franco Niro and Klauskinski western.

Speaker 2

What I mean? There are a number of spaghetti westerns that that are on my eventual viewing list. Sometimes it's really hard to pass up a horror film for a western, but some of these are very well regarded, and there you know, obviously there are some real classics in the spaghetti western zone. So uh yeah, we should maybe come back to one. Even on Weird House. There are some

weird spaghetti westerns for sure, all right. The other writing credit and also credit for the original novel goes to Mario Finelli, who lived nineteen twenty four through nineteen ninety one, an Italian writer, screenwriter, and director in his own right. In fact, he seemingly directed some on this film in an uncredited capacity. Again, the film was based on his original novel The Footprints, but he'd also worked with Bozoni

on The Fifth Chord and Brothers Blue. He has an extensive directing filmography as well, including a great deal of TV work. All right, now getting into the cast. The star of the picture is Florinda Bulkin playing Alice. Born nineteen forty one, Brazilian actress and model who moved through both art house and grindhouse Italian cinema. She was active to one degree or another from nineteen sixty eight through

twenty nineteen. Her first film credit was a supporting role in the nineteen sixty eight picture Candy, which had an all star international cast like I think John Houston was in it, and Ringo Star and just various other folks. It was a lot of pretty crowded cast on that one.

Speaker 3

Of movie is that like is it a screwball comedy or it is a sex farce? Oh boy, but.

Speaker 2

It's from a screenplay by Buck Henry. I haven't seen it, but again, it's like it's got Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, 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, just that it's it has a lot of people I recognize in it.

Speaker 3

Oki Doki.

Speaker 2

Her subsequent work again weaves back and forth between the genres, including the likes of Luccio Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin in seventy one and Don't Torture a Duckling in seventy two, as well as pictures like like the James Clavel directed and adapted The Last Valley in seventy one that starred Michael Kine and Omar Sharif. I was a big fan of this picture when I was younger. I haven't seen it in a long time, but it's set during the Thirty Years War. Has to do with this

whole like com mercenary crew. It's headed up by Michael Kaine's character and they defect, and as they defect, he stabs somebody to death with his spiked helmet. So that was That's a pretty fun I think I've probably mentioned that before on the show. Okay anyway, Bulcan was also in nineteen seventies Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and yeah,

she's been in a ton of stuff. She also wrote and directed the two thousand film I Didn't Know Taruru, and she was the longtime partner of producer Marina Chigona.

Speaker 3

Florinda Bulkan is fantastic in this movie, and she has to The movie really rests on her because there are long stretches of the film where she is acting alone. She is in scenes without anyone, in scenes with no dialogue, with no one to act against, and so she's communicating the whole arc of her of her character's you know, feelings and discovery of things, just silently kind of reacting to her environment. And I think she really carries the film wonderful.

Speaker 2

Absolutely, she's terrific in this. This is not a picture where she's going to spend the run time running from a mass man trying to stab her with a moon rock. Now it's her quietly investigating her surroundings, and it's very psychological in nature for the most part. With that PS psychological focus turned inward. So yeah, it always takes a skilled performer to really bring that sort of thing to life.

So we were talking about the potential for strong female characters in a Jallah or Jallah adjacent film, and I feel like this is a pretty strong character in a definitely a strong performance.

Speaker 3

Definitely strong performance. I think, I don't know people would argue about the meaning of the ending in that regard, but yeah, I mean, regardless there, I mean, I think it's definitely a fascinating character and a wonderful performance by Florinda Bulkan. Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2

Another character that turns up is the character Henry, played by Peter mcchinry born nineteen forty, a well regarded actor with a long career on the British stage and in British television obviously some euro projects as well. We chatted about him before in one of our core stuff to Blow your Mind episodes, Anthology of Horror seven, because he starred in the nineteen eighty Hammer House of Horror episode The Mark of Satan.

Speaker 5

Oh.

Speaker 3

Yeah, we did that in an anthology episode because it was a movie about a man who became who became possessed of the notion that there was an evil virus that was infecting people and turning them against him, and it was a kind of loss of sanity play as well. But that was an interesting Hammer episode, and I think we ended up relating it to certain kinds of viral viral conditions in real life.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Among the other things that he was in, there was a seventy three this nineteen seventy three horror anthology picture Tales that Witnessed Madness. Oh, and he was in a wonderful nineteen eighty one adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, one that I believe I watched in a Shakespeare class in college. Uh, it's not too much if I remember correctly, 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 productions where it's you know, there aren't a bunch of like lavish locations and sets. It's pretty minimal. But then the but then the performances are generally really top notch. And this particular production had the likes of Helen Mirren as Titania, Phil Daniels from Billy the Kid in the Green Bays Vampire, Yeah, and many other things obviously, but he played pucking It and then Brian Glover from Alien

three plays Bottom. You'll remember Brian Glover. He was the 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. I think is bigger, So he's more, he's more. But mcginny played Oberon in that adaptation of Summer Night's Dream.

Speaker 3

I can see that he's got range. I mean, in the Hammer House of Horror episode he played a very unsettling, troubled guy who did not at all have the same energy he has in this and Footprints on the Moon, he plays a kind of intriguing, good natured and mysterious hunk.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Yeah, and one is mustache and one is not must No mustache. In this picture he had a mustache, and yeah, the Hammer Horror anthology. But yeah, he's quite good. And there may be some other things I've seen him in. He has, Like I say, he's had a very long career. All right, another role in this one, and this one

definitely gets into some other Jallo credits. We have Nicoletta Elmi playing this child, this child that wanders up and has various interactions with our star and a face that you will recognize from various nineteen seventies Italian genre and horror pictures, including seventy one's Bay of Blood, seventy two's Barren Blood, seventy three's Flesh for Frankenstein, seventy five's Night Child, and of course nineteen seventy five's Deep Red Dario Argento film.

And she continued to act through the nineteen eighties as an adult, appearing in such pictures as nineteen eighty five's Demons.

Speaker 3

What would it be like to, you know, have your acting career start when you were younger? Is like, I was the recurring character character type of creepy child in Jallo film. Actually she's not so creepy in this one. 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, but not to the to the point where you're like, is this a ghost child or not? Yeah, Like when this character is I believe she slapped at one point at one point, oh yeah, yeah, our main character slaps her and I'm like, that's not okay. And whereas if we thought she was a ghost child, I don't know then it's kind of a gray area at that point. Is it okay to slap a ghost? It's not really a child, it's not really a person anymore. It's a ghost.

And can your hand make contact with the ghost? I'm not sure?

Speaker 3

Important questions?

Speaker 2

Yeah, all right, the Okay, the next two actors. I want to mention There are characters I honestly don't completely one remember from this film, because not all the A lot of the investigations end up being very visually memorable, but I don't necessarily remember what information was gained from them. There's a character named Mary, and then there's a character named Marie.

Speaker 3

So, if I'm getting this right, Alice has there are essentially three other women her age that she interacts with in the beginning of the movie before she leaves for Garma, and they are named Rosemary, Mary, and Marie.

Speaker 2

Okay, these two characters are not very important to the picture towards, but I did want to mention them briefly, just because they do have connections to other Jallo pictures and some pictures we've talked about on the show before. So Ida Golly born nineteen thirty nine, credited here as Evelyn Stewart. She's an Italian actress who pops up in

a number of Spaghetti Western Jaalo pictures. We previously mentioned her in our episode on Mario Bava's dark peplum film Hercules in the Haunted World, in which she played a 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 in the Body, sixty four's War of the Zombies, sixty six, Django Shoots First, and Lucio Fulci's seventy seven thriller The Psychic and then Marie is played by Rosita Torros. As

Rosita Torros. She lived nineteen forty five through nineteen ninety five Italian actress who also appeared in various Shalloh and horror films, including nineteen seventies The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Regento Picture and seventy four Is Almost Human from umberto Lindsay.

Speaker 3

So, I think this is the character of Marie Leblanche, the translator who takes Alice's job after she disappeared.

Speaker 2

That's right, Yeah, So again they're not vital too. The large stretches of the picture but they're kind of interesting connections. And then, of course Klaskinsky we mentioned plays Professor Blackman. I don't know if it was the same for you, but I found different versions. Different renditions of this character's name have different numbers of n's and k's in it, so that may vary depending on where you're looking. Kinsky

saw two ends at the end. Maybe I just I imagined the extra K. But at any rate, Klauskinsky lived nineteen twenty six through nineteen ninety one. We've previously discussed Kinsky in our episodes on Venom from eighty one and Creature from eighty five. You know, this was, of course an infamous actor known for his crazed intensity, and his career also is one of those that straddles worlds of both art house and grind house, you know, B movies

and very well regarded productions as well. We're not going to go into put too much depth here, in part because it is a bit part for Kinski. We only see him in dream sequences in Stunning black and White, and his voice, at least for me, was dubbed with a thoroughly non Kinsky voice.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it didn't sound like him at all. I don't think even had a German accent.

Speaker 2

No, they weren't even going for Kinski. They were just like that, just dub him over.

Speaker 3

But Kinsky's voice would have made sense because the character he plays as a mad scientist, like the character he plays as a character who sounds like Klaus Kinsky does in real life.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and like Kinsky's voice is one of those that, like, I feel like a lot of people can do, so it seems like a very deliberate choice. Yeah, it's kind of like if you dubbed Peter Lorie, you know, it's like somebody could do that voice. Come on, Yeah, yeah, all right. I mentioned how I spent the first twenty minutes of the film like just really admiring the composition of it all. And that's the point where I was like, oh,

I didn't check to see who the cinematographer was. And that's when I checked and saw that the director of photography was Vittorio Storraro, who was born in nineteen forty and is a three time Oscar winner. He earned the Oscar for his work on nineteen seventy nine Apocalypse Now nineteen eighty one's Reds that I Haven't seen. That was written and directed by Warren Beatty and nineteen eighty seven's The Last Emperor, so a legendary cinematographer working on this picture.

He was also nominated for nineteen nineties Dick Tracy.

Speaker 3

I've wondered before if we should cover Dick Tracy on the show because talk about weird, weird movies.

Speaker 2

Yes, a weird film that I loved as a kid, haven't seen in forever, but yeah, it's like a brightly colored comic book, old time comic book, gangster picture full of mutant gangsters.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, I don't know how well it would hold up, but it's got to be one of the weirder mainstream films ever released.

Speaker 2

It has to be. Yeah, I would like to revisit it sometime. Other pictures of note for stro include nineteen seventies The Bird with a Crystal Plumage, another bird related picture, nineteen eighty five's Lady Hawk, and the two thousand Dune mini series, which all of these had very strong visual composition, So you know, yeah, this is a big name, and it makes sense that a big name was involved here given how great everything looks.

Speaker 3

It is a gorgeously shot film, so this makes a lot of sense. I'm still kind of processing where the two thousand Dune mini series fits in. Maybe I'm not being fair because I haven't seen that, but I've seen stills from it. It never struck me as something that looked amazing. But maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 2

I recently rewatched parts of it, and I will have to say the CGI did not hold up well at all, and it does feel I know it cost a pretty penny, but it feels like a TV production, you know, in many respects. But on the other hand, like the costumes are very inventive, It's got some great performances in it, and given its length, it actually gives you a chance to see some of the scenes that are often omitted from adaptations of Doom. All right, then, finally, the composer

on this one. We already mentioned how nice the music is. It is the work of Nicola Piovanni born nineteen forty six, Italian composer who won an Oscar himself in nineteen ninety nine for Life Is Beautiful. His other credits include seventy four's The Perfume of the Lady in Black. I don't think I have to tell you that's a Gallo picture with the title like that, as well as Flavia the Heretic, 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 a deep blue night sky with no stars in sight, just the moon, which is pale and gray in the center of the frame. And I quite like the music that plays over the opening credits here. So at the beginning it's mostly strings and flute, and the melody is subtle, mysterious, kind of cold. I was thinking of it as the sound of like seeing something that looks very odd far away out of window and then looking back to try

to see it more clearly, and it's gone. But suddenly into this texture, the pipe organ comes roaring in, and it's immediately like we are phantoming the opera out of this. Yes, So the credits roll and we zoom in on the moon to reveal this is not genuine night sky photography.

This is an illustration of the moon in a gorgeous but old school style, so it looks like something out of one of those great old nineteenth century astronomy books with the hand drawn illustrations of the craters and the lunar maria, and then in the foreground we see a lunar landing vehicle appear, so it's drifting gracefully down toward

the toward the Moon, down toward the surface. And then when we see the surface in close up, it's another classic style illustration, the kind of planet surface you would get in Planet of the Vampires and these landing party adventures of the fifties and sixties. So it's not just rocks and dust, but these craggy spires which you don't really get in the actual topography of the Moon, at least not our Moon. So after the lander sets down,

we cut to a rather surprising shot. We see one astronaut in a suit and a classic bubble helmet, apparently unconscious, being dragged across the surface by another astronaut with his boots, leaving these streaks in the regolith as his limp body is pulled along, and then the upright astronaut drops the other one in the dust in a field that is framed by these pointy moon spires, and then begins to walk away. So is somebody just being abandoned on the

surface of the moon, it seems. Yes, we watched the lander begin to take off and then rise up into orbit once again, and it's only once the lander is far away that the astronaut comes to and sits up and realizes what's happening, and they watch in terror as the vehicle departs. And Rabbi attached a couple of screenshots of this moment for you to look at here, because I thought this part was wonderful. It's so strange and

mysterious and evocative. The soundtrack goes on alternating between the cold, ominous strings and woodwinds with these sudden explosions of pipe organ and we're thrown off by this unusual scenario and the mid century science fiction aesthetics of the EVA suits

and the lunar set design. So it sounds based on that the latter stuff there like the effect of this could be comical, but it's really not in this moment, because we're seeing the abandoned astronaut's eyes wide in fear behind the curved glass of the face plate, but the glass is partially fogged over, so we only see their face through this obscuring screen of fog, which kind of mutes the detection of emotion there and makes them inaccessible and haunting. I think it's a really great moments.

Speaker 2

It's extremely well executed because it manages to walk that line where it never feels hokey. But it also is not going for a high highly accurate rendition, like they're not trying to make it look like the actual surface of the Moon in actual like lunar landings and so forth.

Speaker 3

Yeah, then from here we cut to a different scene, still in the aesthetics of old school sci fi, but now fully in black and white. So we see a gruff man in an EVA helmet starting a radio communication. He announces himself as Gunter, and he calls out for a Professor Blackmann. Who could that be? Why it's Klaus Kinski.

Kinsky says, receiving you over in a non Kinsky voice, And so Kinsky is hunched over in some kind of mad science mission control room with lights flashing everywhere and computers making little beeps and boops, and we learn from their exchange that Blackman and Gunter are collaborating on some kind of morbid experiment. They intentionally abandoned the other astronaut, whose name is we learn as McGregor on the moon so they could study something about him from a distance.

And by the way, when we get a look at this full control room, I was kind of wondering for some reason if they shot these in like a real decommissioned nuclear plant like they did in Shocking Dark. Whatever these controls panels are, they look pretty good.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And I love this gritty black and white that they shoot everything, and it reminds me a lot of a picture that would come much later two thousand and one is the American Astronauts. The same kind of quality where it's just like grungy black and white and it doesn't feel it doesn't have that feeling like you just turned down the color settings on your old school television 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, the mad scientists, mad scientists conspirators here, they confirm that the experiment is underway, and then Kinsky says, I will alert the organization. And from here we cut to a telephone buzzing on a furry shag carpet. Could this be Kinsky's call to the organization. I don't think so because something has changed. We have gone from black and white to full color, and we pan up to see our protagonist,

Alice Chess be sleeping on her bed. She's wearing a black eye mask, curiously in almost the same posture as the unconscious astronaut from the other story, and the blinds are drawn over the windows in the room, but from in between them. The light is falling in over her face in a way that suggests it's late morning. She has overslept groggily. Alice answers the phone, and it's her friend Rosemary, who says she's been trying to reach her for hours. I think she literally says the phone, the

phone has been ringing for hours. That's that's dedication for Rosemary to wait that long.

Speaker 2

What is wrong with you? Why would you the phone ring for hours, not just on the receiving end, but on the calling in is Why would you do that?

Speaker 3

So Alice seems disoriented, but discovers it's late in the morning and she has to turn in a translation she hasn't finished yet. Alice works as a translator for some kind of consolate or diplomatic office, apparently specializing in scientific topics. I think so it makes plans to meet with Rosemary

later that morning, and then she gets to business. So there are kind of some scenes here of like you said earlier, Alice, She's just kind of puttering around her apartment doing nothing all that mysterious, but they are framed in such a strange and beautiful way. Immediately something feels significant. I'm kind of looking for clues, even before the plot

suggests I should. And we see her standing at her window, looking in the mirror, getting ready for the day, lighting the gas under her coffee maker, settling down to finish typing her translation of an audio tape. And one thing I noticed is that outside of her apartment window there is first of all, a beautiful view of whatever city this is. I don't know if this is Rome or whatever. But the second thing is there is a giant construction crane, and Alice's body is a couple of times seen framed

within the angle of the crane. Feels like it means something. So while she goes about her business, Alice at one point finds something on the floor of her kitchen, next to the garbage can. It is a torn up postcard bearing the image of a stately old hotel. She puzzles the pieces back together and then looks at it and then flips it over to see that this is the Hotel Garma of a place called Garma. What is it? She has no idea where it came from, So Alice

leaves home and then goes about her day. First of all, she meets up with her friend Rosemary. There's a funny scene where Rosemary's trying to tell her a story about something that happened when she went to a club on Tuesday night, which is strange because we just saw Alice

flip her daily calendar from Monday to Tuesday. And she realizes Alice is lost in thought, not really paying attention, and Alice says she is thinking about a dream she had the night before, and in fact, a dream she's had many times, where she says a man is abandoned on the moon for an experiment. Rosemary says this sounds like science fic, and Alice says, yes, it was. In fact, this was a dream that was inspired by a film

she saw when she was young. The movie was called Footprints on the Moon, and it scared her so much that she ran out of the theater and never saw the end of it. So it's just kind of been hanging in her mind all these years. Now, after this,

we see Alice going to work. She's going to whatever this diplomatic office is to turn in her translations, and on the way there she moves through such interesting spaces, like this big empty auditorium with all these green chairs lined up and these stained wooden walls, and then walking through behind this colonnade with these doorways framed against the sunlight. She eventually comes for a meeting with her boss or maybe it's her client I think. Actually she's supposed to

be a freelancer. But when she gets there, everything is confused, like she tries to turn in the translation, which was due at noon, but this leads to a bizarre revelation. The trans reslation was of a speech I think concerning science and astronautics that was given on Monday, and it was supposed to be turned in at noon on Tuesday, which is what time Alice believes it is. But actually her client here informs her that it is now noon on Thursday, and Alice has no memory of the missing

two days. Her handler tells her that she abruptly left in the middle of the address. In the forum there and then for the following several days they tried to contact her and got nothing, so in her absence they had to hire a different translator, a miss Lablanche, and Alice is clearly shaken by this. She doesn't know what to make of it and apparently has no memory of leaving the speech or of the missing time.

Speaker 2

And so in this we we really begin to get into the big psychological mysteries of the picture of missing time, of lost memories. And again, these are questions that are very internal. And so it's another way that this performance is so good. It's that you know, they're not really exploring all of this through flashbacks or exploring it through conversations in facial expressions. It's very nice.

Speaker 3

Yeah, And this is also another way it really does fit Jallo conventions, even though it's not a murder mystery. I mean, this idea of like having to reconstruct the lost memory to solve the mystery of what happened is absolutely like core Jallo feeling. Yeah. So Alice meets with another friend of hers named Mary to talk about what's

going on. Mary asks if she can remember anything about what happened at this session in the assembly, that she apparently ran out in the middle of So we cut to this big public auditorium with a stage and electern, with a speaker talking into the microphone, and at the back of the room there are sound isolated translation booths surrounded by glass, with a line of these different booths, each one filled with worker translating the speech into different

languages in real time, and Alice is one of these translators. Curiously, this memory is in black and white and on a grainier film stock, and in that way it resembles Alice's dreams of the science fiction movie Footprints on the Moon. The speaker who's talking and being translated in the scene is someone named Madame Verdi, who says, I actually wrote down because it's kind of confusing because we were seeing subtitles of the translation of the narration, but then also

the subtitles of the speech that's going on. The speech says, so that man will find the possibility of surviving extremely difficult unless he begins immediately to totally alter his ways of thinking and living, to devote all his energies to try to avoid these dangers which are rushing upon him. By nineteen ninety, pollution and poisoning will have killed all the biological life in the sea. Our computer has also shown that in the year two thousand, it will be

almost impossible for men to live on planet Earth. So within the scenario of this movie, it's funny because she's listening to this speech that's full of these extremely dire warnings of like coming environmental catastrophe, but she makes no direct reference to the contents of the speech. Instead, this is just presented as like it's just her job to translate this, and the content is almost like neutral, it 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, it's just flowing through her being translated. It's part of her job. And so you get kind of an early idea that, yeah, this could be having a toll on her.

She may not be quite aware of it, but like, this is horrible news, and you know, it's interesting to sort of take this sort of forecast, you know, certainly within the context again of a very modern setting of the original picture, but then as a contemporary viewer of this film, like on one level, like you hear that and you're like, Oh, it's like it's like realizing you've been you know, eating, you know, using a jar of

jam and it expired you know, twenty five years ago. Yeah, yeah, you know, so in a way it feels even more dire. And then also the other part of the course, it is that like this is still the scenario that we have roughly without the exact dates in play, like yeah, like we're on a terrible path. Yeah, and it does to have a toll take a toll on one.

Speaker 3

Yes, But it's so interesting the way that it's like it's presented to us the viewer, so we can see that and we can see the emotional effect it should have, but she doesn't really comment on it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, this is this is a wonderful tool that is these sometimes you see used in pictures. I'm reminded of the nineteen eighty five neo noir film Trouble in Mind by Alan Rudolph that starred Chris Christofferson. Picture is also super weird, and I go back and forth on whether we should cover it on the show. Maybe someday. But in the background of that setting, like it's clear that there's some sort of a foreign occupation of the city,

which I think is like Seattle or something. But it's never really like nobody ever really comments on it as far as I remember. It's just sort of in the background. But then you know, it's in the psyche, it's in the world, like it's definitely it's presented as background material, 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 fit to comment on, it can be such a powerful storytelling.

Speaker 2

Tool, absolutely, and so they're just wonderful job with it here in this picture.

Speaker 3

So anyway, in this scene, we pan over the different translators, each speaking their respective languages while taking down the speech. And this really also kind of takes on the feeling of a political espionage thriller, you know, it has that feeling of I don't know, like three Days of Condor or something. Alice talking to Mary while we watched this scene play out in black and white from her memory.

Talking to Mary, she says that the speech was very long, and in her isolation booth, she became very hot, so hot she couldn't breathe and she couldn't really concentrate, and then she noticed looking down at the crowd below that Marie le Blanche was sitting there, and ooh, we get a rear window style zoom in on Leblanche. Remember she's the woman who the Diplomatic office hired to replace Alice

when she disappeared. And she says that le Blanche was just staring at her, so like everybody else in the room is looking forward, but Leblanche is in her chair looking straight back up at Alice, and she says, you know, it's like she was willing her to make a mistake, kind of putting a curse on her from a distance. And Alice says she felt overwhelmed. She couldn't keep up

with the voice she was translating it. She was afraid it would just keep going on without her, which I guess it would write, you know, if she can't keep up,

it's just going to keep going. Then she says something happened, and we don't really know exactly what it was, but in the black and white memory, now everyone in the hall turns to stare up at Alice, and in this moment, we don't really have a way of knowing whether that actually happened, or whether her memory of this event might be faulty or we're getting a kind of emotionally tinged version of it. So suddenly everybody turns and looks and is staring at her in this isolation booth, and she

gets up and runs. She remembers she got up and ran out and rushed out of the building through the gardens next door, like she was running away from something. But that's where her memory stops. She can't recall where she went after that or why now. Mary suggests it's all those tranquilizers in take. She says, you know, you took a big dose and you just simply slept through two whole days. And Mary reminds her of how eggs 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, because she brings up something she hasn't told anybody else so far, the torn up postcard of the Hotel Garma. She says that the facade of the building looked so familiar to her. She doesn't have a memory of going there, but she could swear she had seen it before, and she has a memory of a room inside the hotel with a window painted and stained glass showing a giant peacock. Oh, then there are some more clues that something must have

been going on. Back in her apartment, Alice realizes that she only has one of her two gold earrings. She's got one for one ear, but it's missing its mate. Also, she is missing a gray suit that should be in her closet, and in its place she finds a yellow dress her size that she has never seen before. Then on that yellow dress there is a small stain, a

spot of blood. Also right around here. There's these little things throughout the movie that I think are so clever because there will be a scene where nothing overtly scary happens, but there's just a little strange, slightly ominous accident. So one case of something like that that happens here is her phone rings and she answers and there's just silence on the other side. No one is there. Nothing super

scary happens. But I don't know when things like that pile up in a movie, they can really they can really be effective. It just feels like something is wrong with the world. She's being targeted somehow. And I also love that the phone looks like a computer mouse.

Speaker 2

This phone? Is it is this is a plug into the wall telephone? Yes, but yeah, it looks the most like a like a mouse. But I couldn't even I didn't even know what it was when I saw it there. I was like, is this something that you use like on your body or scans? I like, I just this is clearly some sort of modern technology, but it's like so cutting edge that it's unrecognizable decades later, you know.

Speaker 3

So Alice is troubled by this situation and by her inability to remember the past two days. So she wakes up in the middle of the night. She's clearly wrestling with this, and she goes to the kitchen and retrieves the pieces of the torn up postcard and once again puts them together. And this causes her to think once again of the painted peacock in the glass. What is the source of that memory? And it seems if there is an answer to this riddle, it may lie in

Garma wherever. That is from what I can tell, Garma is not a real place. I tried to look it up and couldn't really come up with anything, but within the world of the movie, it is a small island in the Mediterranean. I thinks it's supposed to be off the coast of Turkey.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it looks like they film at a couple of 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 no airport on Garma. She has to fly to another island or a town on the mainland, I think, and then take a boat out to Garma. And on the airplane we see she like sleeps in the in the airplane chair and she's dreaming about the astronaut strained on the moon again and it's again a haunting image because the astronaut is this is after the lander has already left, So the astronaut is like stumbling around in the moon dust.

But where can he go? You know, you imagine yourself in that situation, like why what sense would it even make to walk anywhere? There's no help to be found. You're on the moon. So she arrives at the port of Garma, where she disembarks from the boat and then meets a friendly young man with a British accent named Henry, who offers to give her a ride to the hotel. And on the way, we see some beautiful local sites and architecture. There are these old stone mosques with huge

rising domes and minarets. There are wooded cemeteries with tall, slender headstones. I really liked these graveyards where there would be like trees in them, and the trees are kind of the low branches are hanging out and mingling among the tall headstones of the graves. There's even what looks like an antique city wall with an arched gateway and

the car just drives underneath it. It looks like something where I don't know, they'd want to keep traffic away from it or something, But I guess you get that more in I don't know, in like Europe and Turkey and stuff, where just like the ancient and the modern are just commingled. Everything's right there together.

Speaker 5

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean it is one of the great things about about traveling to locations like this. I've never been to Turkey, but these Turkish locations look look fabulous, and this film really found some great locations for these shots.

Speaker 3

Yeah. I wonder what this main mosque that we keep seeing is with the minarets. It's really really gorgeous.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I'm not sure, I think there are, Like, there are three different Turkish locations that are sited in IMDb. One of them is Kemer, which I'm to understand is essentially like a Mediterranean vacation destination. So I think when we see the more vacationy parts of this place where we're looking at Kemer, I'm not sure about these, about the cemetery or the mosque and so forth.

Speaker 3

So Alice tells Henry on the car ride that it is her first time visiting Garma, and Henry explains that he's there because he owns an old house. There's an old house on the island in the woods, and he's trying to fix it up, though he says he is not a very good carpenter, and he holds up a bandaged hand as proof of that. I guess it would have been funnier if there was like still a nail sticking out of it, but it's just a bandage hand.

Henry drops Alice off at the hotel, the one from the post and we see it framed exactly the same way it is in the postcard. There's a nice little touch where a flock of pigeons on the sidewalk scatter into the air as the car arrives outside, and then

they all just kind of settle down again. But at the hotel, Alice tries to ask for the room she remembers the room with the peacock painted on the window, but the manager doesn't seem to know what she's talking about, so she takes a regular room with a balcony facing the ocean. And as with so many of the sets, the inside of this hotel is elegantly wacky. Like the

lobby is just beautiful. It has these pillars and arches and this tile pattern, and I guess a lot of this looks like, you know, kind of classic Islamic architecture, so those kind of like arch window styles. But then also these beautiful hanging lights that have I don't know, they're not like a normal chandelier, They're more like randomly arranged lights along i don't know, kind of a Christmas light vibe. And then the plants indoors and old furniture

is just a beautiful looking place. And also her room is by contrast, kind of lovely but hideous, like a totally red blanket on the bed, and then these wallpaper walls and like bear light bulbs it's something.

Speaker 2

Yeah, this movie does a great job at something that This is another thing is easy to take for granted in a film, and not all films pulled this off, but making you so invested in the pre speculativelopment or pre call to adventures and so forth aspect of the plot. You're like on vacation with this woman and you're like, this is pleasant. I want to see what's next. What's she doing for lunch? Let's look at more details in

her hotel room. Like I'm game. I'm totally down with the pace at which we're exploring this world.

Speaker 3

That's right. So Alice explores the island. She takes in more of the sites in the atmosphere. There's one particularly lovely shot where she's i think, wandering around outside the moss we saw earlier, and there are these trees in the courtyard sort of you just see like the tree trunks and these stone pillars framed in almost the same way, like you can mistake one for the other, and it's quite beautiful. And so she's exploring the island, lounging on

the coast. There's one thing that's kind of interesting here. We were talking about the scene earlier with the speech about the coming environmental catastrophe, where this very captivating and disturbing premise is established by what's happening in the background, but the characters don't really acknowledge or comment on this at all, so it's like it might not be affecting them, or maybe maybe it is affecting them, but they don't

acknowledge or realize themselves how it is affecting them. There's a similar thing with the history in the setting, this island being full of old buildings, holy places, ruins, ruins in the woods, ancient city walls, and cemeteries. Very little is said about this, but the setting really contributes to the psychic connotations of the action, like something is old, buried,

maybe sacred, maybe haunted. So I guess at this point it makes sense to kind of zoom out and give a more summary description of this middle portion of the movie, a lot of which is Alice going about having various encounters on the island, trying to piece together what happened, what her connection to this place is, and what people know. And a big thing is that as she meets people on the island, especially other tourists, she gets recognized, so

she meets a red haired girl named Paula. They're out on the beach. I think she's lounging in a chair sort of in the shade of a tree that's very close to the beach. It just looks closer to the beach than the tree usually is, I think. But she's sitting there and this girl, Paula, comes up and talks to her as if she already knows her, and she says they've met before, but this girl knows her not as Alice, but as Nicole, And Paula says that Nicole

looked alike her, but with long red hair. And I like that a sort of double doppelganger theme is established here. It's sort of spooky because not only is the implication that Alice has some kind of unknown lookalike, but also it's kind of spooky because the child telling her about this look alike with long red hair also has long red hair.

Speaker 5

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And so these are the moments where you do wonder. It's like, is the child also some manner of doppelganger or a ghost of the child that you were, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Paula says that Alice is similar to Nicole but nicer. Something about Nicole was frightening, and she did something scary out in the woods. And I love in the setting here, the presence of these woods kind of at the edge of a lot of these beach scenes. So we'll see Alice talking to people out on the beach or out on the rocks near the coast, and then there's often like arow throw of attention towards this peninsular coast that's got a pine forest on it, and it's very ominous.

So something about the energy that these woods radiate is powerful.

Speaker 2

Yeah, they feel thick and wild, as if all the like the resort town energy that we see elsewhere, and even the deeper history of the island, the human history that they seem to struggle here in these woods. These woods are more primal, wilder, and less touched by humanity.

Speaker 3

Yeah, there's a really good scene in them coming up in a minute. But first of all, Alice also has an encounter with an older woman named missus Him also a tourist on the island who also recently saw Nicole. This woman who looked like Alice, but with long red hair. So what's going on? Does Alice have a secret look alike or was she somehow here in disguise in the days she can't remember. Why would she have been in

disguise if that was her. She also has another meeting with Henry, the nice man who gave her a ride to the hotel, and there is a hint of romantic interest between them, and Henry invites her to meet him for a drink later. But I mentioned the creepy scene in the woods is the scene with the dog and the wig. So there's a scene where Alice and Paula the younger girl, they go out into the woods into I think these are like there are ruins in the 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 that this? They went here because this is the place where Paula said she saw Nicole burning things in a fire. Yes, So they go here and they find the remains of whatever Nicole had been burning, and Paula confesses that Nicole scared her. Nicole herself apparently was afraid she had been acting erradically and she was afraid that people or following

her hunting her. And there's some kind of espionage story implication, like was Alice burning documents in the woods, burning something having to do with her work, maybe diplomatic secrets about scientific research and with somebody trying to get a hold of that information. But in the end of the scene, Paula is scared by Nicole slash Alice and runs away, and Alice sees a stray dog. I think they have

a name for this dog. Is he called Fox or something? Fox? Yeah, there's a stray dog who hangs around and the dog is like chewing on a red wig. So Alice retrieves the wig, and this is another clue, and it takes her to the local wig shop. So Garma appears to have a very it's a small town, but they do 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 this washed, she says, washed in cone. Yeah, yeah, which I don't know. I don't know much about wigs, but I was just assumed, like, once it's in the woods in the mouth of a dog, like maybe that wig's gone. I don't know, but maybe you can bring him back from that.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, you can always bring a wig back, I'm sure. Anyway, at the whig shop, Alice is once again recognized as Nichole. The man there fixes up her wig and offers to redo her makeup in the way that he had done it before. So, if Nichole was Alice, it seems maybe she had been trying to change her whole appearance. And there are multiple possibilities there, like was she trying to hide her identity or was she trying to change it entirely, like change who she was? We don't know at this point.

From here, Alice traces the path of Nichole's business with various shops in town. She finds the shop where she had bought the yellow dress with the spot of blood on it that she found in her closet. She finds somehow reference to an or at the stationery store, and when she goes to pick it up, the shopkeeper there says, oh, you know, this order was already filled. You already got the item. But Alice asks for the same item again to find out what it is. When she gets it,

it is a large sharp pair of scissors. Also, throughout this middle section of the movie, there are scenes that just raised the specter of Alice being pursued or watched in some way. You know are there people who are following her? And other people are telling her that if Nicole was her Nicole was afraid of men who had been following her, and she has recurring dreams of the science fiction film with klaus Kinski killing these astronauts on

the moon to complete the experiment. There's a scene where Alice meets Henry for a drink, and here he acts a little bit strange. He's still he comes across as very nice, like not threatening at all, but he does start to say things like is there something you'd like to tell me? You have something you want to say, and she doesn't understand what's going on and ends up leaving. Alice tries to make arrangements to leave the island on the last boat of the day, but this ends up

going wrong. She misses the boat because she first has to pick up her wallet which she lost, which is in the possession of missus Him that other tourists she met, and missus Him has asked her to meet to meet at an organ concert in a local church, and this is supposed to be some great traveling organist who's performing. Don't normally I'm not going to knock other people's musical performance as a sloppy musician myself. But I heard what sounded like a lot of mistakes on this organ playing.

I don't know how like world class this one this performer was.

Speaker 2

I can't speak to that, but I did find that the whole organ performance felt kind of like creepy and low energy at the same time, where I'm like, is this really the only thing to do in this town right now? I don't know, Maybe it is.

Speaker 3

It just kind of sounded like the music that's, you know, playing at a local church when people are like filing in and finding their seats.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Now somehow from here, Alice ends up back in the woods trying to piece together what happened, and she she has some kind of mental exhaustion episode and she falls down and faints. Do you remember what the exact trigger of this moment is?

Speaker 2

I do not. I don't think it was the organ concert specifically.

Speaker 3

Yeah, that organ music was so bad.

Speaker 2

But is it Is it ever established that it is 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 feels very off season.

Speaker 3

Yes, it's not the high tourist season. Henry says that when they're first traveling together, when they're in the car heading into town. So I think this is why the tourist locations are sparsely populated.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Rgan music is the only the only act in town, because otherwise you'd think, well, maybe there'd be some more traditional Turkish music to listen to, or various uh uh, you know, European acts coming in to appeal to the European tourists. And I guess that's what the organist is doing here anyway.

Speaker 3

So she falls down unconscious and wakes up in a different place. She is in an old, empty mansion, and looking around, she discovers the peacock, the one from her memory, the window painted with the peacock on the class What is this place? Well, here we get the payoff of an earlier conversation. Remember when she met Henry, he said he was fixing up an old house in the woods. Here it is so, with Henry's help, Alice remembers what apparently happened earlier this week, and in fact, what happened

earlier in their lives. Do we do we learn? I think here that Henry is not Henry's real name, that 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 there's a lot of insisting that he is actually Henry.

Speaker 3

Yes, anyway, whatever his real name is. These two characters, when Alice and Henry were both teenagers, they met one summer while Alice's family was on vacation in Garma, and I think Henry's family had owned this house there, And so when they met all these years ago, they had a brief but intense young love, and Alice recalls a memory of taking Henry's hand in front of the peacock window,

And so it seems earlier this week. What happened was something in Alice's life back in Rome caused her to snap, and she fled Rome and fled to Garma and assumed this new identity of Nicole, And so she wore a wig and dressed herself differently. They say that she somehow remembered that Henry's favorite color was yellow, and so she bought a yellow dress in town and wore it and came to Henry, seeking to connect with this time in her past when she had felt happy, when she felt

loved and felt safe. She came here she found Henry and they rekindled their love after these many years. But for some reason she left again. She'd only been she only stayed for I guess a day or two. She left, went back to Rome, and then somehow lost all memory 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, maybe we could have a happy ending here. Maybe they rekindle their love and they you know, they find happiness in each other. You know, they take care of each 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 she sneaks downstairs to hear Henry on the phone talking to someone about the fact that he now has Alice here at his house. I think he's talking to somebody on the phone and he's like, yes, I went and I retrieved her things from the hotel. Yes, you don't

have to worry about that now I've got them. And something about the conversation sounds suspicious, and Alice begins to fear, Wait a second, is this really my lost teenage love or is this guy here part of the plot, the plot of the men who have been pursuing me. Why was I hiding as Nicole when I came here last? Why was I doing that? You know? Something doesn't feel right here. So she confronts Henry and he claims that

he was only on the phone with a doctor. He was trying to arrange for her to receive some medical attention since she obviously suffered some kind of mental episode, and she doesn't believe him, And then it is revealed how their last encounter ended. The wound on his hand is not because he's a bad carpenter and like hammered his own fingers. The bandaged hand is from where she slashed him with the scissors she bought the last time they were together, earlier this week. So why didn't he

acknowledge this when they met the day before? Henry says that he wanted her to remember naturally, he didn't want to put pressure on her to recall this all at once, not to force it on her all at once, So 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 is now thinking about this more like it's the espionage movie we've been talking about, where she's being pursued by agents. Increasingly, it's clear that she's thinking of these as the agents of Blackmun, the professor in the science fiction movie that she has these nightmares about. There are agents working for this evil, mad scientist and they are following her, and

it seems kind of plausible even from our perspective. I mean, the identity of the pursuer doesn't seem plausible, but even from the viewer's perspective, I wasn't sure what was going on. I was wondering, wait a minute, maybe is Henry trying to exploit her in some way? Is he trying to get her diplomatic information, you know, like learn something for an enemy government.

Speaker 5

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's We're unsure as the viewer, like where to stand on this. And it adding to this is that this sequence feels increasingly surreal because we have that huge peacock stained glass piece behind them, the colors are very vibrant. Things. Really feel that this is the sequence in the picture that feels the most baba asque I would say of any sequence.

Speaker 3

And so as Henry is trying to approach her and calm her. She panics and she stabs him with the scissors, 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 we see Alice in a panic. She flees out into the woods, is running through the woods and then is running on the beach and is looking over her shoulder everywhere we see her, like looking in the woods and looking for people who she thinks might be Henry's co conspirators, the people who have been following her. And in the

end they appear. In fact, they are not just like I was imagining, like if there are men following her, what are we going to see kind of guys in suits with dark sunglasses or what. When they appear, they are astronauts dressed in full EVA suits with the bubble helmets, and they chase her down on the beach, which is interesting because the pebbles of the beach somewhat resemble the surface of the moon set. The astronauts chase her down and they capture her, and that is the end of the film.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And also the coloration of the chase sequence eventually transfers over to it like a deep Blue very much exactly like those sequences we saw earlier in the picture at at the start of the picture. So instead of a happy ending, we get a descent into madness ending, which I guess in many ways is more in keeping with the genre.

Speaker 3

Yes, and I think it's a very ambiguous ending. I mean I took it to most likely mean she's not actually being pursued by anyone, that she's having delusions of persecution most likely. But then again I wondered, well, wait a minute, I wonder also if maybe somebody is pursuing her here and it's just that she's also having a mental health episode where she's overlaying the frame of her nightmares about the astronauts on top of this whatever it is.

Speaker 2

Yeah, these could be operatives for some nation, but she is seeing them as astronauts from this film scarred her so as a child.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and I really am interested by the choice that they They don't make explicitly clear what caused her to have this psychotic break where she's like where she broke down in the middle of her work and fled to Garma and was trying to seek solace in her young love.

We get the indication that like she's very stressed out by her job, and so it could just be that she's overworked and and like reached, you know, a level of burnout at work that you know that sent her into having a mental health episode, or is it something else? I mean, we we are also given these hints, though she never acknowledges it, that there's that there's something wrong with the world, that there's like these heavy themes of doom kind of just in the air around her all the time.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and as a translator, she's kind of been, like we said earlier, this conduit for all of this terrible news and these these terrible forecasts for the future. And you know, she feels on some level like it has just rolled through her and she has been this conduit, but perhaps it has seeped out into her in disastrous ways.

Speaker 3

I think back to the scene where she's translating and she says that she, you know, she was feeling hot in the room and like she couldn't breathe, and she says what she feared was that the words would just keep going past her and that she wouldn't be able to keep up. And that's like literally what would happen, you know if you're like, if you can't stop, and you're supposed to be a real time translator. The speech

doesn't stop, They just keep going. But it's also a speech about the coming destruction of human life on earth.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Yeah, and again with kind of I think it wouldn't be unrealistic at all to apply some future shock to this scenario. I mean, it's the right decade as well, on top of everything. But again instead of it being like a pure technological future shock, which future shock, as the Toddler's laid out, doesn't necessarily mean just technological change, but also all these other changes social and environmental.

Speaker 3

Yeah. And the skin she puts on her her panic is as a science fiction one. It's from this science 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 that interacts or doesn't with with like the kind of comfort she's seeking from what she's suffering, and the comfort she's seeking is trying to find her you know, her one true love again from you know this boy she met all these years ago and has never seen since.

Speaker 2

Yeah, there's probably a great deal of deconstruction one could do in the film too, regarding the differences between Alice and Nicole, Nicole being described as more feminine, as having you know, a different makeup and longer hair. And yeah, so there's there's something to be made of all that as well. So there's a there's a lot going on in this in this picture, uh, and and a lot of it is kind of beneath the surface, and is you know, it's not really you know, push pushed down

your throat at all. It's uh, there's a lot of ambiguity. And I think that's one of the things that makes it so tantalizing. It is like a h it is a true mystery in so many respects, and it is it's kind of like a piece of surrealistic art where you get to sort of apply your own interpretation to it.

Speaker 3

We we both do and do not get an answer to the mystery. Like we do learn in the end it seems what happened, and so like we we learned the physical circumstances that we're missing that we didn't know earlier, but we're still left with a lot of questions about why and how.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I also like how and you know, this may be this was different in the original novel, but I like how nobody was like, oh, yeah, this movie, you're talking about Footprints on the Moon. I remember that because there is something tantalizing about films you remember or think you remember from your childhood. You know, in some cases they might not exist or you never find out what

they are. Yeah. I like that detail as well. There's so many ways that the mystery could have been deluded by just little moments like that.

Speaker 3

The fact that nobody else in the movie ever claims to have seen this science fiction film. Yeah, it isolates her, and in many ways she is isolated in the film, I mean, keeping with the kind of Jello themes. Even though this isn't strictly as Yello, probably it has so many of these themes. I mean, the main character is an outsider and is alienated. She's both in an unfamiliar location and she is in psychological ways sort of estranged

from everyone else. She is the astronaut who is alone 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 stress enough how beautiful this tomatography is in this one. It's definitely worth worth checking out. But again, don't go into it expecting Dario Argento. Don't go into it expecting, you know, Kloskinsky stabbing people with the moon rock or anything like that. It's a much more subtle affair, but it is rewarding totally.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close out this episode of Weird House Cinema. A reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you'd like to keep up with Weird House Cinema, you can find us on

letterbox dot com. Our username is weird house, and we have a list of all the films that we have covered so far. Sometimes there's even a peak ahead at what comes up next. You'll also find us on some other social media platforms under the Stuff to Blow Your Mind banner, including Instagram, where we are STBYM.

Speaker 3

Podcast Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Jjposway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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