I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!: House (1977)

An updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!

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This is the 13th of 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. I know I said "monthly basis" all through 2017, and instead, there ended up being two posts this October and three back in August, but I guess I discovered that in August and now October, I found plenty of shit I wanted to write about before I call it quits. "I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts in which I reveal that I never watched a certain popular or really old movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

Director Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 Japanese box-office hit House is the kind of film that, had it been made in 2017, would have ended up being the subject of various audience reaction videos by YouTubers who want to show how confused and bewildered the audience members look while trying to process the extremely weird shit they're watching. Not to be confused with the 1985 American horror comedy of the same name and the long-running Hugh Laurie vehicle of the same name, Obayashi's J-horror oddity was largely unknown in America until 2010, when Janus Films introduced the Toho Studios flick in theaters to American film geeks and the Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray. Both a Phil Chung blog post for YOMYOMF (his post is basically "I don't know what the fuck I saw, but I loved it!") and a Trailers from Hell commentary track for the film's 1977 trailer made me want to see House.



House is definitely the most unconventional haunted-house movie I've ever seen. I was expecting a Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky-type bloodbath with a bit of a Battle Royale-style attitude about not giving a fuck about brutally killing off so many innocent-looking Japanese teens.

What I got instead was something stranger than Riki-Oh. I believe I have a clip of myself reacting to every scene in House:

An irresistible impulse to play it again and again: Anatomy of a Murder, which just got Criterion-ized, featured the first Hollywood film score by a black composer

Anatomy of a Murder star Lee Remick, Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Woode

Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, which finally received the Criterion Collection treatment last week, is a classic of the courtroom genre. Every time Anatomy of a Murder turns up on TCM, I get an irresistible impulse a la the late Ben Gazzara's hotheaded soldier client character to stop whatever I'm doing and revisit the entire (and rather lengthy) film or at least a chunk of it.

Criterion posted three reasons why AOAM continues to shine, especially in a bothersome age of right-leaning, constantly-parodied-during-NTSF:SD:SUV:: procedurals, or as I like to call them, "Dad shows."



I second those reasons, but I'd combine reasons #1 and #3 so that it's "It gets the law right and it's not all black and white" and give the reason #3 slot to Duke Ellington's sensational, Grammy-winning score. It captures well both the tranquil Sunday-morning-stroll-through-the-town-square side (like in "Sunswept Sunday" and "Low Key Lightly") and the seamy white-trash side of the film's small-town Michigan backdrop (some, like Wynton Marsalis, think that the score is poorly edited into the film, a gripe that Marsalis expressed while discussing Ellington's score in the liner notes of Sony Legacy's 1999 AOAM CD reissue, which can be heard during the "AFOS Prime" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks).

Besides introducing then-controversial words like "intercourse," "contraceptive," "spermatogenesis" and "panties" into movie houses where conservatives reacted to hearing those words by crapping said panties, AOAM is notable for containing the first original score for a Hollywood film written by an African American composer. (A year before Ellington's effort, Miles Davis contributed a score to a French film, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, a.k.a. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.) It's fitting that Criterion drops the AOAM Blu-ray during Black History Month because of that milestone.

The first Hollywood score by an African American is distinguished by a catchy theme Ellington described as "gutbucket." Written for the bass and first known as "Pie Eye's Blues," the composition wasn't originally intended to be the film's main theme. It was supposed to represent Pie Eye, the roadhouse bandleader character played by Ellington during his cameo in AOAM (in South Africa, Ellington's scene with Jimmy Stewart was banned from the film because interracial two-man piano playing was apparently too disturbing for them). But then someone in the AOAM crew changed the order of the cues ("Was this Duke's idea?," wondered CD reissue producer Phil Schaap in the reissue liner notes) and must have found "Pie Eye's Blues" to be the perfect fit with those jazzy and striking Saul Bass opening titles, and the rest is history.



Then Sir Duke handed AOAM's main theme over to Peggy Lee, who added lyrics to the melody in her cover version, which was titled "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'," a nice reference to the film it originated from and its main character's love of fishing.

After Ellington's AOAM score, in walked Quincy Jones (who had an impressive hot streak of crime or comedy film and TV series scores from the '60s to the '70s) and then the slightly less prolific blaxploitation-era likes of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Johnny Pate and J.J. Johnson (while over on the Asian American side, Japanese American composer Paul Chihara contributed scores to Death Race 2000 and Prince of the City). Then in the '90s, Stanley Clarke, the still-active Terence Blanchard (who did a cover of the AOAM main title theme for his 1999 Jazz in Film album) and even RZA followed in Ellington and Jones' footsteps. They all penned great original scores, but there needs to be more film and TV composers of color besides those maestros.

Court's adjourned.