The Horn Blows at Midnight

The Horn Blows at Midnight: written by Sam Hellman, James V. Kern, and Aubrey Wisberg; directed by Raoul Walsh; starring Jack Benny (Athanael), Alexis Smith (Elizabeth), Dolores Moran (Fran), Allyn Joslyn (Osidro), Reginald Gardner (Archie Dexter), Guy Kibbee (The Chief), John Alexander (Doremus), and Ethel Griffies (Lady Stover) (1945): I don't say this often, but someone should remake this movie. An angel sent to Earth to blow the Doomsday horn at exactly midnight instead gets into a variety of shenanigans involving gangsters, hotel detectives, suicidal cigarette girls, large gangs of violent children, giant dill pickles, giant coffee cups, and fallen angels.

Jack Benny made fun of this movie -- which sorta bombed -- for decades thereafter on his radio show. But it isn't half-bad. I don't like the fantasy-negating frame story (it's all a dream), though even that supplies some laugh, including the inadvertant laugh at an advertising campaign for a coffee (Paradise Coffee!) that helps you sleep.

Either war-time shortages had replaced all the coffee in coffee with chicory (this was 1945), or the people of 1945 had an odd idea of how coffee worked. Well, or they smoked so many cigarettes that coffee actually did work as a sedative. Who knows?

The main body of the story presents some surprisingly deft visual effects work, some impressive sets, some funny comic setpieces, and lots of fish-out-of-water comedy. Benny plays the angel Athaniel as an innocent -- indeed, a couple of scenes seem to anticipate Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The supporting cast is strong and fairly funny, and the whole thing is only 78 minutes long. Theologically speaking, the presentation of Heaven's bureaucracy is funny but underlyingly sinister. The Coen Brothers could have a field day with this stuff. Recommended.

Angels in the Outhouse

In honour of the completely wacky looking Legion, starring Paul Bettany as the archangel Gabriel and Dennis Quaid as some guy with a shotgun (opening January 22), my list of favourite angels from the movies.


1. The Exorcist III (1990). Oddly enough, the novel the third Exorcist movie was based on was called...Legion. Hoo ha! A surprisingly effective horror movie that generated almost no box office, The Exorcist III has terrific acting turns from George C. Scott, Jason Miller and Brad Dourif. At one point, Scott's police detective has a weird dream set in what appears to be a departure lounge for the afterlife. There's even an angel playing a trumpet, which I've always assumed was a veiled reference to Jack Benny's angel comedy, The Horn Blows at Midnight. But that's not what makes this scene great. What's great is that Fabio and Patrick Ewing have cameos as angels, complete with white robes and giant white wings. Fabio and Patrick Ewing! That is fucking ridiculous!

2. The Prophecy (1995). This is one of those revisionist Christian fantasies for which the creators make a lot of shit up and hope it sounds plausible. But what makes it awesome isn't its out-of-left-field collision of fake Christian mythology and fake Native American spirituality. No, it's Eric Stoltz and Christopher Walken playing angels and Viggo Mortenson playing Lucifer! Christopher Walken is typically awesome playing Christopher Walken playing Gabriel. No dancing, though.

3. Dogma (1999). No, not for Affleck and Mattttt Daamonnn. For Alan Rickman as the Voice of God, Metatron, who's snarky and anatomically incorrect when it comes to his groinal area. Technically, Metatron isn't exactly an angel -- he's more like God's press secretary, and he used to be the prophet Enoch. Still, pretty funny.

4. Diablo II Expansion Version: Lord of Destruction (2001). OK, so it's not a movie. But the folks at Blizzard did some fine design work on Tyrael, the angel who occasionally helps your character out. And by 'occasionally', I mean 'not much at all, you lazy bastard. Even Deckard Cain gives me unlimited free identification of magical objects!' Basically, Tyrael's role is to bitch about you not arriving fast enough to save his angelic ass from imprisonment at the hands of Baal and Diablo, and to let you do all the dirty work fighting the forces of darkness while he chills in the Pandemonium Fortress. As a plus, he does finally do some heavy lifting by destroying the WorldStone in the awesome final animation sequence, and he also gives you 2 skill points for killing Izual. So I guess he's all right. Plus he has cool wings.

5. Wings of Desire (1988). Oh, those sad, compassionate angels wandering around Berlin and occasionally running into Columbo's Peter Falk. This is pretty much the only film directed by art-house legend Wim Wenders that more than ten non-Germans have seen, and it's occasionally gloomy, existential fun. The only really bad thing about this movie is that it got remade as City of Angels with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Sweet fancy Moses!

6. Constantine (2005). I wouldn't call this a good movie exactly, but it does feature Tilda Swinton as an androgynous, somewhat loopy Gabriel. Yes, with the release of Legion, the archangel Gabriel has now been played by Christopher Walken, Tilda Swinton and Paul Bettany. That's got to win some sort of award for weirdest trio of oddball actors to portray the same character in three different movies.

If These Are The Chosen, I'd Rather Be Damned...

Movie (Spoilers!!!:

Knowing starring Nicolas Cage and Rose Byrne, directed by Alex Proyas (2009): When this movie goes completely off the rails with about 30 minutes to go, what results is one of the most laughable 30 minutes in bad movie history. And it's not like the first 90 minutes were all that great. Mysterious numbers left in a time capsule from 1959 accurately predict major disasters from 1959 to the present. Can widowed astrophysicist Cage save the world?

Well, no, but he does give a lecture on randomness vs. determinism to his astronomy class that doesn't actually explain either principle correctly. And he does reconcile with his pastor father approximately 30 seconds before a solar flare destroys the Earth. And angelic aliens do save his son and a few other people and animals to populate another Earth-like planet somewhere else. See, it's the story of Noah and the flood. Or maybe Sodom and Gomorrah. Or Adam and Eve. Or something. But the angels travel around in UFOs and, for reasons never explained, disguise themselves as people who can't talk and who drive around in what look to be 1970's era Crown Victorias.

There's a great moment when the aliens take Cage's son, a little girl, and two rabbits onto their spacecraft. Cage isn't allowed to go because he isn't one of the Chosen. Anyway, if this movie had had Captain Kirk in it, I imagine Kirk would have argued the angel-aliens into stopping the solar flare. Given that these beings have a fleet of spaceships and premonitory abilities, I have to figure they could stop a solar flare if they wanted to. So I imagine Kirk giving a rousing speech to the aliens/angels, at the end of which one of the beings says, "OK, we'll stop the solar flare. But we're keeping these rabbits!"

Apparently, Heaven exists, so the six billion people who die go to a better place. I don't remember the people left behind by Noah getting that sort of deal, Heaven not having been invented yet, so there is that. The whole thing ends up playing like one of C.S. Lewis's demented Christian science-fiction novels (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, for those who know only Lewis's Narnia books) in which aliens are actually angels. The aliens also travel around in a ridiculously complex looking spaceship that suggests they had a lot of free time to pimp out their ride while they were waiting for the apocalypse.

For all that, the movie is worth watching. There's a spectacular plane crash about 45 minutes in, and the whole thing becomes so ludicrous that it's enjoyable in a pompously, pretentiously overblown way. It's like an episode of the X-Files reimagined by Jack T. Chick.