cinema history class: macabre (1980)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 5 (Joe's choice): Macabre (1980)
Directed by Lamberto Bava

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A married woman’s lover is decapitated in a car accident after her young son dies under suspicious circumstances. After a year in a psychiatric hospital, she returns to their old love nest, where it becomes clear that she has preserved her lover’s severed head and resumed their grotesque relationship.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Yes, I fully expected the severed head in the freezer.

That was probably the movie’s biggest drawback for me. The eventual reveal is clearly supposed to be a major shock, but I had been expecting it for a while. So when it finally came, my reaction was less “OH MY GOD!” and more “Well, there it is.”

Fortunately, the movie had plenty of other places to go. And boy, did it go there.

This was an amazing psycho-thriller that just kept getting weirder and weirder as it went along. Necrophilia? Check. Cannibalism? Check. Both were suitably gross. Yuck! But strangely enough, the grotesque visuals weren’t what I enjoyed most.

My favorite part was Lucy finally screeching at her mother about how she had drowned her little brother. It’s a deeply disturbing scene, obviously, but I got a kick out of the sheer deranged intensity of it. For me, that confrontation was the highlight of the movie and helped make for a great climax.

Then there was Robert Duvall.

No, not that Robert Duvall. For reasons known only to the filmmakers, there is actually a character named Robert Duvall. He’s blind, but also remarkably resourceful—sort of a blind MacGyver—and watching him figure things out and improvise his way through increasingly bizarre circumstances was one of the more interesting aspects of the movie.

There were also some amusing Mommie Dearest echoes in the mother-daughter relationship. Of course, Macabre actually came out a year before Mommie Dearest, so technically Joan Crawford should probably be accused of ripping off Jane Baker.

The New Orleans setting seemed like an odd choice for an Italian psycho-horror movie. On the other hand, the city’s above-ground burial practices actually make the setting relevant to the story, so it wasn’t just exotic window dressing.

I’m less certain what I thought about the supernatural ending. On its own, it’s a classic horror-movie ending and a pretty effective final jolt. But the rest of the movie hadn’t really established itself as supernatural, so it felt a little as though the movie suddenly changed the rules at the finish line. Joe pointed out that supernatural possibilities had been hinted at throughout, albeit ambiguously, so maybe the ending was more earned than I initially gave it credit for.

There were even some moments along the way that made me wonder whether the filmmakers were deliberately setting up those possibilities—or just messing with us.

Either way, by the time it was over, I had seen a movie involving a drowned child, a decapitated lover, a head in a freezer, necrophilia, cannibalism, a blind MacGyver named Robert Duvall, and a supernatural punchline.

What more could you reasonably ask from Bring Your Own Movie month?

Since this was Joe’s choice, he didn’t get to rate it.

But we know it’s a ten in his book.

mystery solved: no more cake edition

 

Sometime around 1974, I spent a summer at Camp Massad Gimmel, an Orthodox Jewish Hebrew-immersion camp. I don't remember for certain which summer it was, but it was after the Yom Kippur War, which happened in the fall of 1973, and that summer we sang a lot of songs that had come out of the war.

One of them was "Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og" (אין לך מה לדאוג) — "You Have Nothing to Worry About."

At the end of the summer, there was some sort of event at which every group performed a musical number. My group did "Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og."

Our counselor decided to lean heavily into one particular lyric in the chorus, in which the soldier asks the woman back home to send him underwear and undershirts. Without telling us, he took one undershirt and one pair of underpants from each kid in the group and dyed them purple. For our performance, we wore our newly purple underwear and undershirts over our white Shabbos clothes.

I no longer remember whether we actually sang the song or merely danced in a line while the recording played.

I do remember the purple underwear.

And, for more than half a century, I have remembered something else about that chorus that made absolutely no sense to me.

Here is the chorus:

שלחי לי תחתונים וגופיות

כאן כולם כבר כמו חיות

נלחמים כמו אריות

מורל ממש גבוה

ואצלנו בפלוגה

מבקשים קצת הפוגה

מותק לא לשלוח לי עוגה.

Roughly translated:

Send me underwear and undershirts,
Here everyone is already like animals,
Fighting like lions.
Morale is really high,
And here in our company
We're asking for a little break.
Honey, don't send me cake.

And for fifty-some years, every time I heard or thought about that song, I had essentially the same reaction:

Why the hell wouldn't he want cake?

Underwear, yes. Undershirts, yes. But surely underwear, undershirts and cake would be better.

I finally asked ChatGPT about it.

It turns out that the line isn't some Hebrew idiom I was missing. It means exactly what I thought it meant.

Don't send me cake.

And there was a very good reason.

"Ein Lecha Ma Lid'og" was written by Telma Eligon-Rose during the Yom Kippur War and was inspired in part by a postcard from her brother Giora, who was serving as a reservist near the Suez Canal.

During the war, Israelis on the home front were sending packages to the soldiers. And apparently they sent them an absolutely stupendous quantity of cakes and sweets.

So much cake.

The soldiers weren't sitting in the desert thinking, "Gee, I wish somebody would send us a nice chocolate babka."

They were apparently thinking, "For God's sake, we have enough cake."

What they needed were mundane things that weren't nearly as much fun for people back home to put into care packages.

Like underwear.

And undershirts.

And, as it turns out, toilet paper.

According to the story behind the song, Eligon-Rose's brother's actual list of needed supplies included toilet paper, underwear and undershirts. An early version of the song even mentioned the toilet paper. That proved a little too earthy for Israeli sensibilities at the time, and the lyric was changed.

Which makes the whole chorus considerably funnier once you understand it.

The message isn't really:

"I'm at war, but strangely I don't like cake."

It's more like:

"We're fine. Don't worry about us. We're fighting like lions. Morale is good. Now, please send underwear and undershirts. We could use toilet paper, too, although apparently we're not allowed to sing about that on the radio. And seriously — we appreciate the thought, but STOP SENDING CAKE."

After ChatGPT explained all this to me, I happened to be sitting with Blair, Sharon and British Rich. I read the explanation aloud to them, and we were literally laughing out loud. Well I was anyway.

Because suddenly a lyric that had puzzled me since approximately 1974 made perfect sense.

And it made me think back to Camp Massad Gimmel, where a counselor had already recognized the comic potential of this song and stolen our underwear to dye it purple.

Apparently, though, he missed an opportunity.

He should have taken away our cake, too.