Sadly Over-hyped

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

On the Edge (1949) ** 1/2 (out of 4)This early experimental film from director Curtis Harrington casts his own parents in the two leads. An elderly man walks up on an elderly woman who is sitting in a rocking chair knitting. He soon takes some of the wool and runs off to some sort of pit. ON THE EDGE is a film that I'm sure each viewer could take something different away from. The "meaning" of the movie is certainly something people could debate but I'm not into this sort of thing so I'll just comment on the film. The movie certainly makes you feel on the edge with its good but sometime rough editing and I really thought Harrington did a fine job at showing somewhat of a countdown as the man faces what he's going up against. I'm not going to ruin the ending but it's done very nicely.

Curtis Harrington was one of the few to successfully make the leap from experimental cinema into the mainstream; while I have watched quite a few of his latter efforts, this is the first among the former that I am checking out. Stylistically, it approaches the work of renowned (and contemporaneous) underground film-makers Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. The premise of the 6-minute film is a very simple one: an elderly man appears from over the hills onto the porch of a cabin surrounded by boggy terrain; there, a woman sits knitting on a rocking-chair. He forcibly removes the wool from her hands and takes off with it…but, when it runs out, he is swallowed up by the slime (with the embroidery magically slinking back to its original position inside a jar)! The film, then, is possibly a metaphor for Man's futile attempt to cheat Death; incidentally, the non-professional actors making up this two-hander are none other than the director's parents!