Night of the Lepus (1972, William F. Claxton)

Night of the Lepus is about giant bunny rabbits. The movie’s got lousy special effects. The composite shots of regular-sized bunny rabbits blown up to giant-ish size are bad, but the life-size giant killer bunny rabbit arms and body parts—only used for rapid-cut action sequences—are worse. When they have the bunny rabbits run around on model train sets and pretend they’re big, it’s the best (of the film’s options) because you get to see the bunny rabbits. They’re adorable.

With these special effects, Lepus doesn’t have a chance. It doesn’t have a chance for many reasons, but the special effects are the most obvious (and adorable). Otherwise, all the failings are boring and mundane. Director Claxton barely keeps the eighty-eight-minute movie running. Someone—Claxton, maybe producer A.C. Lyles (who, shockingly, is not an Australian who made Lepus to say “yes, bunnies are too dangerous” to his doubting Hollywood chums)—decided to let editor John McSweeney Jr. do rapid-fire cutting to cover: bad special effects, lousy acting, reused footage of the actors, reused special effects footage, boring scenes, nonsensical scenes, and stock footage. Lots of stock footage in Lepus.

The film only always uses the rapid cutting for action scenes. It’s predictable. But then, towards the third act, they start using it everywhere and anywhere. It’s an assault on the senses. And the cuts are way too fast to see the cute widdle bunny wabbits.

Then there’s the script, which manages to be joyless in its stupidity. It’s just bad writing, poorly adapted for its cast. The first actor we see is Rory Calhoun. He’s a man’s man rancher who intentionally rides his horse through a bunny rabbit burrow, breaking the horse’s leg, so he kills it and doesn’t even care. Manly.

Calhoun’s bad, but he’s so much better than eventual lead Stuart Whitman; he’ll eventually be a welcome sight. Whitman’s a bug scientist who wants to kill them off without using chemicals. Instead, he wants to do it naturally, like causing a bat plague or something. See, Calhoun goes to the local university to see DeForest Kelley (who, despite a happening wardrobe and a very seventies mustache, looks embarrassed much sooner than anyone else). Calhoun wants someone to kill off the bunny rabbits but without poison. Kelley suggests anti-poison Whitman, who travels around in a camper with wife Janet Leigh and daughter Melanie Fullerton.

Even Fullerton can tell acting off Whitman is pointless. Even in the scenes where Whitman is doing science exposition, he can’t carry the scene. It becomes about the people listening to him, waiting for him to stop talking so they can get on with it.

Leigh doesn’t embarrass herself, which is almost more embarrassing. She can weather stepping in giant bunny rabbit turds without it phasing her. It’s a compliment to her professionalism, but damn sad.

There are a bunch of other characters. They’re mostly bad, but what are you going to do about acting when it’s pretending there are giant killer bunny rabbits who eat Brussels sprouts like they’re heads of lettuce and cherry tomatoes like they’re… giant tomatoes, I guess.

Paul Fix plays the sheriff. He’s the best performance in the movie. Paul Fix isn’t going to let this Lepus nonsense get in the way of his performance, not even when he’s waiting for the other actors to remember their lines and getting visibly frustrated with them.

Ted Voigtlander’s photography is surprisingly competent. Not with the effects shots but the other times. Terrible sound design—the bunnies do phone perv heavy breathing to show they’re mean—and a weird, lousy score from Jimmie Haskell.

Lepus is the pits. But it is a movie about giant adorable bunny rabbits, so it’s at least a fun time at the pits.

The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936, John Ford)

Warner Baxter is one good actor. I’ve only seen him in one other film, but he’s great in The Prisoner of Shark Island. Baxter’s got a depth to him–he builds on it, adds to it, throughout scenes and throughout the film. Shark Island is about the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg–and is an idealized portrait of the physician, which is unimportant–and almost everything in the film happens to Baxter… and when he actually has to do something for himself, it’s a big something.

Shark Island is another pre-World War II John Ford film. This John Ford is the one who made The Informer, not the one who made The Searchers (but it is the same Ford who made Stagecoach). Color didn’t change Ford too much, since the post-WWII cavalry trilogy are not the same Ford as this film and at least one of those is black and white. The Shark Island Ford is the one who did exciting things with confined space and people’s place in that space, as opposed to the later Ford, who did things with open space and the place of people in that space. That sentence has two “that” spaces, I hope it makes sense. Since Shark Island is from the 1930s and it’s from Fox, it has a certain feel to it. It’s filmic. Fox films from the 1930s don’t have the crispness of an MGM or Warner picture. Ford perfectly creates a 1860s time period too. It’s lushly rural for the Maryland scenes and then the scenes on the prison island are spacious but confined. With Shark Island, you get the feeling Ford didn’t know what he was doing and he was trying things. Ford is the most confident filmmaker I’ve ever seen, so seeing him exert himself and succeed is interesting.

He does get quite a bit of help from Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay. Johnson went on to write The Grapes of Wrath for Ford, which might be the last of this period of his career. Regardless, Johnson is unsung superstar. The Prisoner of Shark Island has a number of conversations and they’re these beautiful moments–even if they aren’t the defining conversations of the film, which are beautiful too–but these conversations are perfectly paced and rich. They’re rich. They’re full of living character. Ripe with it. Having Gloria Stuart as the wife makes a lot of the film work. Without her, it wouldn’t work as well. Stuart’s wonderful in the film. There’s also a great performance by Ernest Whitman, who was black and got fourteenth billing instead of fourth (which he deserved). Then there’s John Carradine as a sadistic prison guard. He’s so good and Ford knows it. He gives Carradine these awesome creepy angles, something a later Ford wouldn’t have done.

I guess Shark Island never had a VHS release in the United States–but Fox Movie Channel shows it a couple times a year (probably not for President’s Day, though it would be interesting–the film presents Lincoln as a humane, soft-spoken, decent person, which modern Americans certainly don’t find appealing in a president). I watched the Masters of Cinema release from the UK, which (for once) didn’t have any noticeable PAL speedup. It’s a good film to see, for both Baxter and Stuart, but particularly for Ford.