Mervin Purvis: G-Man
While I'm fairly certain that Special Agent Melvin Purvis was never involved in the investigation, much less the capture, of the Machine Gun Kelly Gang, that does not prevent the American International Pictures film, Melvin Purvis: G-Man (1974), from being a hell of a good time for one and all. In fact, writer John Milius and director Dan Curtis place all sorts of historical clues throughout the movie, most of which are correct in detail and wrong in general, something that comes off as remarkably effective, even to Prohibition-era gangster buffs.
George Kelly's wife Kate really did work at developing the mythology around her husband. Kelly and associates really did kidnap a rich guy--actually two of them--and held them for ransom. There actually was a loose five hundred dollars from the paid ransom. The collected pay-off was $200,000, rather than $500,000, but the movie makes more reference to the former amount than the latter, so somebody at AIP evidently knew the difference. And Kelly actually did beg those who apprehended him not to shoot, while calling them out as "G-Men." But verisimilitude rather than factual accuracy is what makes this film such a delightful success. Well, that and Dale Robertson's dead pan performance in the title role. Here was the long-term host of a Wells Fargo TV Western series playing an egomaniacal, self-indulgent, humorous and occasionally sentimental and always well-tailored agent of J. Edgar Hoover. He walks onto the scene of a kidnapping from the night before at some oblivious industrialist's party and, after surveying the crime scene, snatches a fine cigar from the humidor and requests an assistant to pour them both some of the victim's champagne.
In a lot of gangster movies of the era--the subjects of which Purvis narrates in the opening scene--the emphasis was on the folklore components of the outlaws. Here we have nothing at all to cling to regarding the criminals, primarily because the way Kelly is presented here (again, historically accurate) reveals him to be a bully, a coward, a cheat, and not especially attractive. Not so with Kate, his wife. Kate (played by Margaret Blye) is an outlaw, not a criminal. When Dick Sargent, as the kidnap victim, tries to understand her, she makes it clear to him that he is responsible for their lifestyle, a political thought infinitely beyond the awareness of her colleagues.
On the down side, the notion that a Jew's harp and banjo make a soundtrack plays a pathetic homage to Bonnie and Clyde, a substantially more affecting motion picture. The film exploits the legend of that and a slew of Cagney and Robinson movies. That too is inoffensive because of the ambitious amateurism of the filmmakers. Again and again, while strolling through the AIP resume, we find glorious examples of small-d divine inspiration. This is no exception.
George Kelly's wife Kate really did work at developing the mythology around her husband. Kelly and associates really did kidnap a rich guy--actually two of them--and held them for ransom. There actually was a loose five hundred dollars from the paid ransom. The collected pay-off was $200,000, rather than $500,000, but the movie makes more reference to the former amount than the latter, so somebody at AIP evidently knew the difference. And Kelly actually did beg those who apprehended him not to shoot, while calling them out as "G-Men." But verisimilitude rather than factual accuracy is what makes this film such a delightful success. Well, that and Dale Robertson's dead pan performance in the title role. Here was the long-term host of a Wells Fargo TV Western series playing an egomaniacal, self-indulgent, humorous and occasionally sentimental and always well-tailored agent of J. Edgar Hoover. He walks onto the scene of a kidnapping from the night before at some oblivious industrialist's party and, after surveying the crime scene, snatches a fine cigar from the humidor and requests an assistant to pour them both some of the victim's champagne.
In a lot of gangster movies of the era--the subjects of which Purvis narrates in the opening scene--the emphasis was on the folklore components of the outlaws. Here we have nothing at all to cling to regarding the criminals, primarily because the way Kelly is presented here (again, historically accurate) reveals him to be a bully, a coward, a cheat, and not especially attractive. Not so with Kate, his wife. Kate (played by Margaret Blye) is an outlaw, not a criminal. When Dick Sargent, as the kidnap victim, tries to understand her, she makes it clear to him that he is responsible for their lifestyle, a political thought infinitely beyond the awareness of her colleagues.
On the down side, the notion that a Jew's harp and banjo make a soundtrack plays a pathetic homage to Bonnie and Clyde, a substantially more affecting motion picture. The film exploits the legend of that and a slew of Cagney and Robinson movies. That too is inoffensive because of the ambitious amateurism of the filmmakers. Again and again, while strolling through the AIP resume, we find glorious examples of small-d divine inspiration. This is no exception.
The Gambler
Winston Smith, also known as Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, insisted that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. The son of Maria and Mikhail, also known as Alexei Ivanovich, also known as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, insisted that freedom is the freedom to believe that two plus two equals five. In Orwell's world, Spanish bombs dropping all around him turned him into what he considered to be a realist and what some others have classified as a bitter pessimist. In truth, he was an anti-utopian, ever fearful that the only way wide-opened dreams are actualized is with the heavy drop of a jackboot. In Dostoyevsky's world, exiled Siberian winters screamed that things could only improve, a belief system reinforced by his cohorts in the Petrashevsky Circle.
It's an interesting mental challenge with which you can play along. A man holds up two fingers on each hand. He tells you the correct answer is five. Because that's what he wants you to not only say but also believe, you rationalize and give him the answer he wants, even though you know it's wrong. Invisible electric walls of pain sear through your joints like the agony of a million arthritics. The misery holds, grips, strangles, cuts off your breath, your mind turns white with the heat and at last it disappears with all the deliberate suddenness with which it originally greeted you. After months of this, the man returns. He holds up two fingers on each hand and repeats the question. The mere sight of the man's fingers causes your muscles to tighten, yet when you look at those fingers, you know without question what the true answer is. There really are five fingers there! You say it. He smiles.
If anything of the sort ever locks me in Room 101, I am certain I too would perceive five fingers, just as Winston Smith did. Yet there is a part of me that always pulls for Fyodor's lucid lunatic in Notes From Underground. Two plus two might not equal five today, I reason. But maybe tomorrow, with enough faith and especially willpower, I might just see five fingers and still be correct.
But then again, I'm no gambler. I loathe any element of risk in which I perceive that I play no part in the outcome. Dostoyevsky, a man made of different and probably better stuff, gambled consistently from 1863 until 1871. Hooked on the roulette wheel, he became so destitute that he agreed to a powerful wager with a publisher named Stellovsky that he would deliver a novella for publication within a short time or else that publisher could print the writer's works for the next nine years without paying him a cent. Fyodor finished the book. He called it The Gambler. The title character is Alexei Ivanovich.
The 1974 movie of the same name stars James Caan as Axel Freed. Axel teaches literature at a local college. One of his favorite authors is Dostoyevski. Axel plans to write a book some day.
Probably he would have had the book written already except he's been very busy gambling.
So we have a charismatic, brutally handsome, erudite professor spending his off hours with gangsters, petty thieves, drunkards, loan sharks and their debt collectors (Burt Young comes at this role with sociopathic tranquility), that is, when he isn't putting the arm on his girlfriend, played by Lauren Hutton, or his mother Naomi (Jacqueline Brooks), the bank officer (James Woods), his buddy Hips (Paul Sorvino), and an assortment of pimps and hookers. During some extended moments, Axel does quite well at his different gambling ventures. But ultimately, as he himself readily admits, he isn't chasing the next big win so much as the next big loss.
The movie not only posits parallels with one of the greatest Russian novelists. It also connects with the screenwriter, James Toback. The writer himself taught creative writing at City College of New York while indulging a serious gambling problem of his own. Unlike his protagonist, Toback couldn't quite seem to lose, at least at the box office, and The Gambler, the first of nine features under his name, was a huge success. With the tagline they used, the picture could hardly miss: "For $10,000 they break your arms. For $20,000 they break your legs. Alex Freed owes $44,000."
The script was just amazing, catching every nuance of the gambling addict between the highs and lows. Most of what's between the two is looking over your shoulder, wondering if that sound you hear is a massive boulder seconds from rolling you under or the swish of a baseball bat turning just upwards as it collides with the vertex of your skull.
James Caan trembles with restrained excitement at every win and every loss. In one remarkable scene, he finds himself in Las Vegas at a blackjack table. He's been winning steadily at several different games of chance. He has a lot of chips pushed out toward the dealer. The dealer has a face card showing and a hole card. Axel shows eighteen with two cards. He can read the dealer. He knows the dealer has a face card in the hole. So he not only calls for another card, he doubles the bet! The dealer makes sure he heard the gambler right. Yep. "Show me the three." And out from the dealer's deck tumbles that very lovely trey, floating through the air and settling right where it belongs.
Caan's reactions to his own lifestyle trapped in a crippled environment of his own making are nothing short of mesmerizing. Enticing us to experience the psychological complexities of an everyday character is what good, hard acting is all about. No one in this film disappoints (except, unfortunately, Hutton). And Caan is the leader of the pack.
For those looking to continue the conscious irony, Jimmy Caan went on to star in a TV drama called "Las Vegas."
Incidentally, a remake of the movie, starring Mark Wahlberg, is presently in development.
It's an interesting mental challenge with which you can play along. A man holds up two fingers on each hand. He tells you the correct answer is five. Because that's what he wants you to not only say but also believe, you rationalize and give him the answer he wants, even though you know it's wrong. Invisible electric walls of pain sear through your joints like the agony of a million arthritics. The misery holds, grips, strangles, cuts off your breath, your mind turns white with the heat and at last it disappears with all the deliberate suddenness with which it originally greeted you. After months of this, the man returns. He holds up two fingers on each hand and repeats the question. The mere sight of the man's fingers causes your muscles to tighten, yet when you look at those fingers, you know without question what the true answer is. There really are five fingers there! You say it. He smiles.
If anything of the sort ever locks me in Room 101, I am certain I too would perceive five fingers, just as Winston Smith did. Yet there is a part of me that always pulls for Fyodor's lucid lunatic in Notes From Underground. Two plus two might not equal five today, I reason. But maybe tomorrow, with enough faith and especially willpower, I might just see five fingers and still be correct.
But then again, I'm no gambler. I loathe any element of risk in which I perceive that I play no part in the outcome. Dostoyevsky, a man made of different and probably better stuff, gambled consistently from 1863 until 1871. Hooked on the roulette wheel, he became so destitute that he agreed to a powerful wager with a publisher named Stellovsky that he would deliver a novella for publication within a short time or else that publisher could print the writer's works for the next nine years without paying him a cent. Fyodor finished the book. He called it The Gambler. The title character is Alexei Ivanovich.
The 1974 movie of the same name stars James Caan as Axel Freed. Axel teaches literature at a local college. One of his favorite authors is Dostoyevski. Axel plans to write a book some day.
Probably he would have had the book written already except he's been very busy gambling.
So we have a charismatic, brutally handsome, erudite professor spending his off hours with gangsters, petty thieves, drunkards, loan sharks and their debt collectors (Burt Young comes at this role with sociopathic tranquility), that is, when he isn't putting the arm on his girlfriend, played by Lauren Hutton, or his mother Naomi (Jacqueline Brooks), the bank officer (James Woods), his buddy Hips (Paul Sorvino), and an assortment of pimps and hookers. During some extended moments, Axel does quite well at his different gambling ventures. But ultimately, as he himself readily admits, he isn't chasing the next big win so much as the next big loss.
The movie not only posits parallels with one of the greatest Russian novelists. It also connects with the screenwriter, James Toback. The writer himself taught creative writing at City College of New York while indulging a serious gambling problem of his own. Unlike his protagonist, Toback couldn't quite seem to lose, at least at the box office, and The Gambler, the first of nine features under his name, was a huge success. With the tagline they used, the picture could hardly miss: "For $10,000 they break your arms. For $20,000 they break your legs. Alex Freed owes $44,000."
The script was just amazing, catching every nuance of the gambling addict between the highs and lows. Most of what's between the two is looking over your shoulder, wondering if that sound you hear is a massive boulder seconds from rolling you under or the swish of a baseball bat turning just upwards as it collides with the vertex of your skull.
James Caan trembles with restrained excitement at every win and every loss. In one remarkable scene, he finds himself in Las Vegas at a blackjack table. He's been winning steadily at several different games of chance. He has a lot of chips pushed out toward the dealer. The dealer has a face card showing and a hole card. Axel shows eighteen with two cards. He can read the dealer. He knows the dealer has a face card in the hole. So he not only calls for another card, he doubles the bet! The dealer makes sure he heard the gambler right. Yep. "Show me the three." And out from the dealer's deck tumbles that very lovely trey, floating through the air and settling right where it belongs.
Caan's reactions to his own lifestyle trapped in a crippled environment of his own making are nothing short of mesmerizing. Enticing us to experience the psychological complexities of an everyday character is what good, hard acting is all about. No one in this film disappoints (except, unfortunately, Hutton). And Caan is the leader of the pack.
For those looking to continue the conscious irony, Jimmy Caan went on to star in a TV drama called "Las Vegas."
Incidentally, a remake of the movie, starring Mark Wahlberg, is presently in development.
The Brink's Job
The money security folks known as Brink's have suffered two significant robberies. The latter, occurring in 1981, was far more deserving of enshrinement in celluloid, considering it involved a group called the Black Liberation Army, along with some disaffected members of the former Weather Underground, then calling themselves the May 19th Communist Organization. Two police officers and one security guard were murdered. The robbers netted $1.6 million. Flash forward to 2008: conspirator Kathy Boudin was appointed an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Social Work.
Now that's a fascinating true story.
The first big Brink's robbery happened in January 1950 when robbers made off with $2.7 million (slightly less than half in cash, the rest in checks). Six of the eleven-member gang were not arrested until six days before the statute of limitations was set to expire.
This, too, was a great premise for a motion picture.
Unfortunately, the movie we got was The Brink's Job (1978).
The casting and acting cannot be faulted. Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, Allan Garfield and Warren Oates: these people are absolutely at the top of their game. Sorvino, in particular, has never been more relaxed and cool than he is here.
The problem is that director William Friedkin simply didn't know what to with Walon Green's less than impressive screenplay. Evidently both men thought they were making a buddy film. First rule of the buddy film: the men involved need to like one another, at least once in a while, how ever grudgingly. Second rule of the buddy film: the audience must believe that the men in question are at least marginally capable of carrying out whatever operation that serves as the plot device. Friedkin and Green forgot these two crucial rules.
A good rule for making a movie about a robbery is that whatever significance the robbery may have be in some way communicated to the viewers--and it is not enough to call the robbery "the biggest."
The final problem with The Brink's Job is that it is staged as comedic, if not quite an out and out comedy. That would be no problem except that lame attempts at occasional slapstick work solidly against some of the film's best performances, especially one where Oates appears to struggle against collapsing psychologically when interrogated by the FBI men.
Oh, yeah: and don't waste the talent of Gina Rowlands.
Now that's a fascinating true story.
The first big Brink's robbery happened in January 1950 when robbers made off with $2.7 million (slightly less than half in cash, the rest in checks). Six of the eleven-member gang were not arrested until six days before the statute of limitations was set to expire.
This, too, was a great premise for a motion picture.
Unfortunately, the movie we got was The Brink's Job (1978).
The casting and acting cannot be faulted. Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, Allan Garfield and Warren Oates: these people are absolutely at the top of their game. Sorvino, in particular, has never been more relaxed and cool than he is here.
The problem is that director William Friedkin simply didn't know what to with Walon Green's less than impressive screenplay. Evidently both men thought they were making a buddy film. First rule of the buddy film: the men involved need to like one another, at least once in a while, how ever grudgingly. Second rule of the buddy film: the audience must believe that the men in question are at least marginally capable of carrying out whatever operation that serves as the plot device. Friedkin and Green forgot these two crucial rules.
A good rule for making a movie about a robbery is that whatever significance the robbery may have be in some way communicated to the viewers--and it is not enough to call the robbery "the biggest."
The final problem with The Brink's Job is that it is staged as comedic, if not quite an out and out comedy. That would be no problem except that lame attempts at occasional slapstick work solidly against some of the film's best performances, especially one where Oates appears to struggle against collapsing psychologically when interrogated by the FBI men.
Oh, yeah: and don't waste the talent of Gina Rowlands.
The French Connection
My much younger niece and nephew, Lori and Wendell, came over to hassle me about movies. In particular, they taunted me about something they had read on these fine electronic pages a while back, something that had left them questioning the judgmental wherewithal of Yours Truly regarding just about everything I've ever written, said or thought. "Like the thirteenth chime of a crazy clock," declared Lori. "It casts doubt on all that came before and all that comes after."
That's not what I said! What I said was that you might have been wrong. Don't gum this up with your hype, okay?
Hey, I'm just trying to give you some credibility, Lori McStory.
That's not my name, Uncle Phil!
Fine, fine. Kids today got zero sense of humor. Hell, in my day everybody had nicknames and we were damned proud of it. Not like today where every swinging dick calls himself OC-Kid Knockers or some such pseudo urban rubbish.
Hey, Phil! Maybe you could just tell the story, huh?
Indeed I shall, Lord Wendell. By the way, if anybody ever needed a good nickname, nephew o' mine, it's a guy named Wendell. When I was your age, we'd would have caught a guy with that name by the collar and trolled his ass over the bridge just for carrying a flute in one pocket and a box of baking soda in the other.
Argh!
Argh!
Okay, all right! Sorry. Just a little harmless fun. We never actually did things like that. Truth is we were mostly too busy watching movies on late night TV or down at the Starlite Drive-In to have time to work up a good sweat over something as boring as a name like Wendell.
Will you get on with it?!?
Please?
What had so upset these little urchins was a remark I made about movies from the 1970s being more or less inherently superior on their own merits compared to your garden variety slime of prequels and sequels and reboots and offshoots that pass themselves off these days as entertainment. Lori pointed out, with some justification, that the 1970s actually did have its share of lemons which by any standards whatsoever could not stand the test of time or for that matter even the test of a single screening.
You even admitted, uncle dear, that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the worst movie ever made.
Quite right, young lady. And up against some strict competition came that 1978 fiasco. Let's see, there was another music-oriented stack of swill called Saturday Night Fever, which came out the year before. The soundtrack wasn't half bad, I'll admit. But the story itself tried so hard to be about something by transcending the banality of the lifestyles of the characters that it stunk up the theatre.
Don't forget I Spit on Your Grave.
If I only could, Wendell. Some genius decided to remake that despicable layer of toad puke back in 2010. Probably thought it was campy. The original from 1978 was mostly a vile reaction against the women's movement. You see, back in those frequently unenlightened times, every time something progressive actually permeated the public consciousness--something like civil rights, or being against the wars, or the women's movement--pretty soon some Hollywood cretins would decide that the squares needed to feel reassured that Hollywood wasn't entirely comprised of communists, which is why we ended up with that entire series of Dirty Harry movies.
Wendell, do you remember reading in our Modern Film class that writer who called Dirty Harry a fascist masterpiece?
I think she was talking about Magnum Force.
Clint Eastwood movies.
Yeah, Pauline Kael got a lot of things right. But as I was saying, there were--
That whole anti-hero crap was so prevalent. A Clockwork Orange was pure fascism.
Where'd you pick up that pearl of wisdom, Lori?
From you!
Oh. Well, in any case, what you too brats were prattling on about earlier was what you declared to be a stench of racism in certain movies from the otherwise beloved Seventies and I have to admit that at first I thought you two were dead wrong. Then you stomped your Buster Browns and screamed to watch The French Connection. Now at first that may seem to be a tough call because even though the storyline itself was somewhat fictionalized, the movie's two main characters were based on a pair of real cops: Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. Egan and Grosso actually did participate in a major heroin bust nine years before the movie came out, but most of the chase scenes in the movie were just there to sell tickets.
Didn't they take away Egan's pension or something?
They tried, young Wendell, they tried. Mishandling evidence was the charge. Mostly the New York police brass were hacked off that their boy had gone Hollywood. But a higher court reversed the decision and Egan lived to laugh another day. What I was getting at, though, in between the interruptions, is that all the street scenes and foul language and crazed violence was intended to give director William Friedkin's movie enough verite to make it interesting. Or at least artful. As to the racist language and behavior--well, that's hard to justify, in my opinion. Sure, you can say that some of it was just police technique, trying to startle or intimidate the perpetrators or suspects, by saying and doing things that policemen weren't expected to do or say. Like when Hackman's character, Popeye Doyle, demands the dealer answer his question, "Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" that question blows the dude's mind because it doesn't make any sense, right?
But cops back then did act that way. They also took suspects down back alleys and kicked the shit out of them, just like in the movie.
Hey, little girl, I was just getting to that. You're right. And that's part of the problem with this movie as a whole. An engrossed audience will forgive just about anything, I suspect. But they sure do hate it when they see the movie makers are liars. Or when they don't explain certain things that very much need explaining. When Popeye spends night after night on these essentially free-time stakeouts trying to catch the French heroin traffickers, when he drives a civilian's car into the ground, when he shoots dead a federal agent and then keeps right on looking for the bad guy--a guy he calls Frog One--we wonder why he has this deranged obsession. We wonder, but we get no clue whatsoever, other than that he is a policeman. Is his being a cop supposed to be justification for his duty to catch the bad guys at any cost?
You could argue that Friedkin was just making a damned movie, just as he did with The Exorcist a couple years later. But that was accused at the time of being a reaction against women asserting their rights. On the other hand, I don't know if it's fair to claim the title of "reactionary" to Friedkin considering he made The Boys in the Band, one of the first mainstream movies about the friendship of gay men. I think it might be more fair to argue that the director was attracted to what some fool decided to call "edginess" in his work.
You're saying it's acceptable to use blatantly racist phraseology in a movie so long as it could have happened that way in real life?
That's really the rub, isn't it, Lori? I mean, the movie would have been far more stupid had there been some third cop chasing after Popeye and Roy Scheider with a notebook taking down all their inappropriate language, right? Especially if that had been to remind the audience of something it was already expected to know: It's wrong to use racist language. It's wrong to kick a suspect in a field. It's wrong to barge into a bar and debase every patron on account of their ethnicity. It's probably even wrong to shoot and kill a federal agent, or at least I'm pretty sure it was in 1971. Friedkin would probably have said that he was giving the audience credit for knowing the difference between right and wrong behavior.
Now hang on. I can see that both of you are about to explode with some brilliance of your own, but I'm getting tired of having to point out to the reader which one of you said what, so just let me anticipate your objection. In The French Connection, the drug smugglers are all very good looking people. You've got Fernando Rey, who is arguably the most suave individual ever to be in a motion picture. And Tony Lo Bianco was damn near the definition of cool. But all the drug dealers were black guys and all the cops were working class stiffs, which is exactly what the director's real life father was--working class, that is. What we have, then, is the smugglers are rich and attractive and refined. Not a foul word from any of them. But the working guys, cops and criminals alike, were all pretty mangy, except Scheider, who always looked great no matter what he was doing.
And what about Ferguson?
Yeah! What would be the reaction to a movie like that one today?
You tell me. We just watched it.
What? No answers? Fine. I'll tell you what I think. I think that power is what most things come down to. Or at least the perception of one group having power over another. The policeman has a car and a gun, a radio and another gun. A canine and one more gun. He can run red lights and stop people on suspicion of anything. The rest of us realize that if we tried to do those things we'd get in trouble. So the police's self-perception gets reinforce by the public's inherent distrust. Even people who admire law enforcement don't necessarily trust them. Pretty soon you get into an Us versus Them mentality on both parts, the difference being that the cops have a responsibility to behave as if that weren't the case. Instead, you add some racism, something that makes it easier to believe that you're better than the other guy. The rest of us, though, we tell ourselves that they've got the guns but we've got the numbers. With the constant reporting and speculations by the media, always done by airblown model types, the message gets lost within what you might call the entertainment business that blurs the distinctions, kind of the way that movie did.
Christ, you're cynical.
Wendell, Lori, don't ever be like me.
Deal.
Aw, you're all right.
That's not what I said! What I said was that you might have been wrong. Don't gum this up with your hype, okay?
Hey, I'm just trying to give you some credibility, Lori McStory.
That's not my name, Uncle Phil!
Fine, fine. Kids today got zero sense of humor. Hell, in my day everybody had nicknames and we were damned proud of it. Not like today where every swinging dick calls himself OC-Kid Knockers or some such pseudo urban rubbish.
Hey, Phil! Maybe you could just tell the story, huh?
Indeed I shall, Lord Wendell. By the way, if anybody ever needed a good nickname, nephew o' mine, it's a guy named Wendell. When I was your age, we'd would have caught a guy with that name by the collar and trolled his ass over the bridge just for carrying a flute in one pocket and a box of baking soda in the other.
Argh!
Argh!
Okay, all right! Sorry. Just a little harmless fun. We never actually did things like that. Truth is we were mostly too busy watching movies on late night TV or down at the Starlite Drive-In to have time to work up a good sweat over something as boring as a name like Wendell.
Will you get on with it?!?
Please?
What had so upset these little urchins was a remark I made about movies from the 1970s being more or less inherently superior on their own merits compared to your garden variety slime of prequels and sequels and reboots and offshoots that pass themselves off these days as entertainment. Lori pointed out, with some justification, that the 1970s actually did have its share of lemons which by any standards whatsoever could not stand the test of time or for that matter even the test of a single screening.
You even admitted, uncle dear, that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the worst movie ever made.
Quite right, young lady. And up against some strict competition came that 1978 fiasco. Let's see, there was another music-oriented stack of swill called Saturday Night Fever, which came out the year before. The soundtrack wasn't half bad, I'll admit. But the story itself tried so hard to be about something by transcending the banality of the lifestyles of the characters that it stunk up the theatre.
Don't forget I Spit on Your Grave.
If I only could, Wendell. Some genius decided to remake that despicable layer of toad puke back in 2010. Probably thought it was campy. The original from 1978 was mostly a vile reaction against the women's movement. You see, back in those frequently unenlightened times, every time something progressive actually permeated the public consciousness--something like civil rights, or being against the wars, or the women's movement--pretty soon some Hollywood cretins would decide that the squares needed to feel reassured that Hollywood wasn't entirely comprised of communists, which is why we ended up with that entire series of Dirty Harry movies.
Wendell, do you remember reading in our Modern Film class that writer who called Dirty Harry a fascist masterpiece?
I think she was talking about Magnum Force.
Clint Eastwood movies.
Yeah, Pauline Kael got a lot of things right. But as I was saying, there were--
That whole anti-hero crap was so prevalent. A Clockwork Orange was pure fascism.
Where'd you pick up that pearl of wisdom, Lori?
From you!
Oh. Well, in any case, what you too brats were prattling on about earlier was what you declared to be a stench of racism in certain movies from the otherwise beloved Seventies and I have to admit that at first I thought you two were dead wrong. Then you stomped your Buster Browns and screamed to watch The French Connection. Now at first that may seem to be a tough call because even though the storyline itself was somewhat fictionalized, the movie's two main characters were based on a pair of real cops: Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. Egan and Grosso actually did participate in a major heroin bust nine years before the movie came out, but most of the chase scenes in the movie were just there to sell tickets.
Didn't they take away Egan's pension or something?
They tried, young Wendell, they tried. Mishandling evidence was the charge. Mostly the New York police brass were hacked off that their boy had gone Hollywood. But a higher court reversed the decision and Egan lived to laugh another day. What I was getting at, though, in between the interruptions, is that all the street scenes and foul language and crazed violence was intended to give director William Friedkin's movie enough verite to make it interesting. Or at least artful. As to the racist language and behavior--well, that's hard to justify, in my opinion. Sure, you can say that some of it was just police technique, trying to startle or intimidate the perpetrators or suspects, by saying and doing things that policemen weren't expected to do or say. Like when Hackman's character, Popeye Doyle, demands the dealer answer his question, "Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" that question blows the dude's mind because it doesn't make any sense, right?
But cops back then did act that way. They also took suspects down back alleys and kicked the shit out of them, just like in the movie.
Hey, little girl, I was just getting to that. You're right. And that's part of the problem with this movie as a whole. An engrossed audience will forgive just about anything, I suspect. But they sure do hate it when they see the movie makers are liars. Or when they don't explain certain things that very much need explaining. When Popeye spends night after night on these essentially free-time stakeouts trying to catch the French heroin traffickers, when he drives a civilian's car into the ground, when he shoots dead a federal agent and then keeps right on looking for the bad guy--a guy he calls Frog One--we wonder why he has this deranged obsession. We wonder, but we get no clue whatsoever, other than that he is a policeman. Is his being a cop supposed to be justification for his duty to catch the bad guys at any cost?
You could argue that Friedkin was just making a damned movie, just as he did with The Exorcist a couple years later. But that was accused at the time of being a reaction against women asserting their rights. On the other hand, I don't know if it's fair to claim the title of "reactionary" to Friedkin considering he made The Boys in the Band, one of the first mainstream movies about the friendship of gay men. I think it might be more fair to argue that the director was attracted to what some fool decided to call "edginess" in his work.
You're saying it's acceptable to use blatantly racist phraseology in a movie so long as it could have happened that way in real life?
That's really the rub, isn't it, Lori? I mean, the movie would have been far more stupid had there been some third cop chasing after Popeye and Roy Scheider with a notebook taking down all their inappropriate language, right? Especially if that had been to remind the audience of something it was already expected to know: It's wrong to use racist language. It's wrong to kick a suspect in a field. It's wrong to barge into a bar and debase every patron on account of their ethnicity. It's probably even wrong to shoot and kill a federal agent, or at least I'm pretty sure it was in 1971. Friedkin would probably have said that he was giving the audience credit for knowing the difference between right and wrong behavior.
Now hang on. I can see that both of you are about to explode with some brilliance of your own, but I'm getting tired of having to point out to the reader which one of you said what, so just let me anticipate your objection. In The French Connection, the drug smugglers are all very good looking people. You've got Fernando Rey, who is arguably the most suave individual ever to be in a motion picture. And Tony Lo Bianco was damn near the definition of cool. But all the drug dealers were black guys and all the cops were working class stiffs, which is exactly what the director's real life father was--working class, that is. What we have, then, is the smugglers are rich and attractive and refined. Not a foul word from any of them. But the working guys, cops and criminals alike, were all pretty mangy, except Scheider, who always looked great no matter what he was doing.
And what about Ferguson?
Yeah! What would be the reaction to a movie like that one today?
You tell me. We just watched it.
What? No answers? Fine. I'll tell you what I think. I think that power is what most things come down to. Or at least the perception of one group having power over another. The policeman has a car and a gun, a radio and another gun. A canine and one more gun. He can run red lights and stop people on suspicion of anything. The rest of us realize that if we tried to do those things we'd get in trouble. So the police's self-perception gets reinforce by the public's inherent distrust. Even people who admire law enforcement don't necessarily trust them. Pretty soon you get into an Us versus Them mentality on both parts, the difference being that the cops have a responsibility to behave as if that weren't the case. Instead, you add some racism, something that makes it easier to believe that you're better than the other guy. The rest of us, though, we tell ourselves that they've got the guns but we've got the numbers. With the constant reporting and speculations by the media, always done by airblown model types, the message gets lost within what you might call the entertainment business that blurs the distinctions, kind of the way that movie did.
Christ, you're cynical.
Wendell, Lori, don't ever be like me.
Deal.
Aw, you're all right.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Any motion picture with the decency to begin with a song by Mott the Hoople leaps into the world with enough credibility to sustain damn near anything, including a script by Robert Getchell that has not necessarily aged all that well, a performance by Kris Kristofferson which (while being his overall best acting job) does not bode well for his thespian future, and some issues that get raised while often cancelling out one another. While I must admit that I am not one of those film critics who genuflects every time the name Martin Scorsese is mentioned, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975) remains one of his best films, right up there with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas in the sense that as a member of the audience you believe you are right there in the thick of things, hurting and laughing and smacking your fists.
Ellen Burstyn plays Alice, a recently single mom who moves Arizona to start a new life with her young son. Alice is a singer and she plans to make it big in Monterey, California. She is also a realist, so she knows she will have to work some toilets and dives before getting discovered by the right talent scout. She is not a pessimist, however, and so she expects to at least get a shot at performing in divers and toilets. Instead she finds herself waiting tables at Mel and Ruby's Diner in Tucson. It is there that she meets Diane Ladd as her co-worker Flo, Vic Tayback as Mel, and Harvey Keitel as a snake in the grass.
Scorsese's contribution to the film's success lies in his willingness and ability to exploit useful realism while not getting bogged in pointless minutiae. So we find Alice and Flo sharing a laugh about Vera's boyfriend, Tommy the son belittling Kristofferson's love of "shit-kicking" music, and especially Jodie Foster's performance as a pre-teen seductress and shoplifter (and when will the retired Ms. Foster be recognized as one of the greatest actors of her generation?), any one of which episodes--much less all of them--so true to life that we struggle with the natural affinity between laughing and crying.
This movie recently played again on TMC's "Essentials" where hosts Robert Osborne and Sally Field repeatedly referred to it as Scorsese's first movie. It was no such thing. Discounting documentaries and shorts, there was still Who's That Knocking at My Door from 1967 with Harvey Keitel and Boxcar Bertha in 1972 with David Carradine, either one of which might be reasonably overlooked. But how could these two presumed experts not remember Mean Streets from 1973? Especially since that was the film that at long last put Robert De Niro on the map (another name intended to cause the audience to bow) and that most of its success was enhanced by the director's unauthorized use of Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes.
Beats me.
Alice remains a great movie. Also starring Valerie Curtin as Vera and Alfred Lutter as Tommy.
Ellen Burstyn plays Alice, a recently single mom who moves Arizona to start a new life with her young son. Alice is a singer and she plans to make it big in Monterey, California. She is also a realist, so she knows she will have to work some toilets and dives before getting discovered by the right talent scout. She is not a pessimist, however, and so she expects to at least get a shot at performing in divers and toilets. Instead she finds herself waiting tables at Mel and Ruby's Diner in Tucson. It is there that she meets Diane Ladd as her co-worker Flo, Vic Tayback as Mel, and Harvey Keitel as a snake in the grass.
Scorsese's contribution to the film's success lies in his willingness and ability to exploit useful realism while not getting bogged in pointless minutiae. So we find Alice and Flo sharing a laugh about Vera's boyfriend, Tommy the son belittling Kristofferson's love of "shit-kicking" music, and especially Jodie Foster's performance as a pre-teen seductress and shoplifter (and when will the retired Ms. Foster be recognized as one of the greatest actors of her generation?), any one of which episodes--much less all of them--so true to life that we struggle with the natural affinity between laughing and crying.
This movie recently played again on TMC's "Essentials" where hosts Robert Osborne and Sally Field repeatedly referred to it as Scorsese's first movie. It was no such thing. Discounting documentaries and shorts, there was still Who's That Knocking at My Door from 1967 with Harvey Keitel and Boxcar Bertha in 1972 with David Carradine, either one of which might be reasonably overlooked. But how could these two presumed experts not remember Mean Streets from 1973? Especially since that was the film that at long last put Robert De Niro on the map (another name intended to cause the audience to bow) and that most of its success was enhanced by the director's unauthorized use of Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes.
Beats me.
Alice remains a great movie. Also starring Valerie Curtin as Vera and Alfred Lutter as Tommy.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Most motion pictures that involve extended dreams are not particularly entertaining. In fact, many are quite annoying. I can think of only three that ring true: The Wizard of Oz, 3 Women, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. This last film, directed by Luis Bunuel, is a true gem, easily on a par with the other two.
Six middle-class twits try to eat a meal. That's the entire premise. The emphasis, of course, is on the word try. If Freud was correct about dreams being in part wish-fulfillment, then this is the movie that makes his point for him, as long as you are willing to concede that wishes are devised to be frustrated.
The Discreet Charm posits three couples who haven't one scruple among them, each trying to give into various urges, whether making love with a friend's wife, killing one's father, mating with one's mother, or getting a decent leg of lamb in these days of violent insurrections.
For years writers wrote and speakers spoke about the influences upon the first cast of the creators and performers of the TV show "Saturday Night Live." Much appropriate credit was given to The Bonzo Dog Band, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Second City, but anyone who enjoyed the interactions of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd will instantly recognize the inspiration this Bunuel picture imbued their comedy with, if you'll pardon my ending the clause with a preposition. The influence may not be direct and it may not have been conscious. It is nonetheless real.
And that is a very good thing because this is the type of comedy that has very much been missing in contemporary society. One of the disappointing aspects to much of modern humor is the way it has (a) shifted much of its focus from satirizing hypocrisy into ridiculing the weakest members of society, and (b) it's attempts at substituting mimicry for wit. Impressions of Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney do nothing to point up the absurdity of their pronouncements. The world views of these and other current leaders remain as pliable and easy to purchase as were those of three generations ago. The Discreet Charm is timeless. It is timeless because of its emphasis on the reality of dream content, even to the extent of having one character's dream pop up in that of another character, or of a group of hungry diners finding themselves together on a theater stage being served a meal they will never finish, or a young man who interrupts three women at a cafe that only serves water, the young man having the temerity to interrupt the trio to tell them about a dream he has had, a dream the three women are quite happy to hear out.
The imaginative elements of this movie are sufficient to have earned the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture of 1972. Taking matters gloriously farther, the visual elements radiate in the mind long after the final credits, especially the recurring vision of the six primary members of the stable class strolling down the highway on foot, intent on going nowhere.
Six middle-class twits try to eat a meal. That's the entire premise. The emphasis, of course, is on the word try. If Freud was correct about dreams being in part wish-fulfillment, then this is the movie that makes his point for him, as long as you are willing to concede that wishes are devised to be frustrated.
The Discreet Charm posits three couples who haven't one scruple among them, each trying to give into various urges, whether making love with a friend's wife, killing one's father, mating with one's mother, or getting a decent leg of lamb in these days of violent insurrections.
For years writers wrote and speakers spoke about the influences upon the first cast of the creators and performers of the TV show "Saturday Night Live." Much appropriate credit was given to The Bonzo Dog Band, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Second City, but anyone who enjoyed the interactions of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd will instantly recognize the inspiration this Bunuel picture imbued their comedy with, if you'll pardon my ending the clause with a preposition. The influence may not be direct and it may not have been conscious. It is nonetheless real.
And that is a very good thing because this is the type of comedy that has very much been missing in contemporary society. One of the disappointing aspects to much of modern humor is the way it has (a) shifted much of its focus from satirizing hypocrisy into ridiculing the weakest members of society, and (b) it's attempts at substituting mimicry for wit. Impressions of Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney do nothing to point up the absurdity of their pronouncements. The world views of these and other current leaders remain as pliable and easy to purchase as were those of three generations ago. The Discreet Charm is timeless. It is timeless because of its emphasis on the reality of dream content, even to the extent of having one character's dream pop up in that of another character, or of a group of hungry diners finding themselves together on a theater stage being served a meal they will never finish, or a young man who interrupts three women at a cafe that only serves water, the young man having the temerity to interrupt the trio to tell them about a dream he has had, a dream the three women are quite happy to hear out.
The imaginative elements of this movie are sufficient to have earned the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture of 1972. Taking matters gloriously farther, the visual elements radiate in the mind long after the final credits, especially the recurring vision of the six primary members of the stable class strolling down the highway on foot, intent on going nowhere.
Rollerball
The premise of the movie Rollerball (1975) takes a while to reveal itself. We spend the first twenty minutes of this film looking on at a sport which is, to put it generously, somewhat eclectic. The game connects the violence of football with the design of roller derby, with the revved engines of motocross, the crashes of Nascar, the stuffing of basketball, the fielding grounders of baseball, and the suspension of sportsmanship and theatricality of the World Wrestling Federation. Oh, and let us not leave out the murderous impulses of physicians who execute prisoners with lethal injections. The best player in this, the only sport that matters, is Jonathan E., known to we folks at home as a young and beautiful James Caan. Being the best player at Rollerball is his big mistake.
The story happens in 2018. By then, corporations have wiped out the concept of the nation. Cities still exist, however. Jonathan plays for the Houston Energy team. What Houston gives the world is all forms of energy--and a championship Rollerball team. The sport--as explained by John Houseman, the evil Bartholomew--exists to vicariously allow the masses to work out their bloodlust. But what must be maintained, asserts the CEO of Energy, is that each person must be reminded that the individual has no chance of rising above the class or team. Because Jonathon E. is so accomplished, his existence is a threat. Bartholomew orders him to retire.
Failing to understand why, he declines. Bartholomew is disappointed. Jonathan leaves.
But he wants to understand. He flies to Geneva, where the world library is housed. Jonathan discovers the library to be a librarian, played by Ralph Richardson, and a lava lamp-style computer named Zero, an apparent reference to things of a binary nature. Zero won't tell Jonathan what he wants to know. Jonathan leaves.
Jonathan gets invited to a party held in his honor. Expected to announce his retirement, he declines. Bartholomew is disappointed. Jonathan leaves.
Jonathan Leaves would have made a good name for this movie, since it provides the only logical consistency in the motion picture.
Despite the fact that the concept of this movie is vastly superior to the plot, the acting, the editing, the directing, and the uniforms, that concept itself is worth anticipating. In the same way that Rollerball is an eclectic sport, so the politics of this movie are both Corporatist and communistic, both pro libertarian and pro government.
The story happens in 2018. By then, corporations have wiped out the concept of the nation. Cities still exist, however. Jonathan plays for the Houston Energy team. What Houston gives the world is all forms of energy--and a championship Rollerball team. The sport--as explained by John Houseman, the evil Bartholomew--exists to vicariously allow the masses to work out their bloodlust. But what must be maintained, asserts the CEO of Energy, is that each person must be reminded that the individual has no chance of rising above the class or team. Because Jonathon E. is so accomplished, his existence is a threat. Bartholomew orders him to retire.
Failing to understand why, he declines. Bartholomew is disappointed. Jonathan leaves.
But he wants to understand. He flies to Geneva, where the world library is housed. Jonathan discovers the library to be a librarian, played by Ralph Richardson, and a lava lamp-style computer named Zero, an apparent reference to things of a binary nature. Zero won't tell Jonathan what he wants to know. Jonathan leaves.
Jonathan gets invited to a party held in his honor. Expected to announce his retirement, he declines. Bartholomew is disappointed. Jonathan leaves.
Jonathan Leaves would have made a good name for this movie, since it provides the only logical consistency in the motion picture.
Despite the fact that the concept of this movie is vastly superior to the plot, the acting, the editing, the directing, and the uniforms, that concept itself is worth anticipating. In the same way that Rollerball is an eclectic sport, so the politics of this movie are both Corporatist and communistic, both pro libertarian and pro government.
Even this confusion would be tolerable were it not for the miserable directing by Norman Jewison. Here he was with some mighty hot talents at his disposal, none more mighty and none more disposable than that of Mr. Caan. Probably, Lewison was aiming for some type of "acting without acting" stylism that he thought would amplify the sterility of the futurist society. With one exception, this does not succeed. The only scene--or segments of scenes--where the bloodcurdling essence of vacuity comes across is in the scene where a bunch of Luded and coked-out partygoers greet the dawn by drunkenly firing a flare gun at some innocent pine trees, the latter responding by going up in flames to the laughter of the soulless mannequins. That one brilliant scene does what the rest of the movie does not. It makes us angry. And anger is supposed to be the emotion consequent with this film. It is not. That is why this well-thought-out movie lands on its back and gets run over by an athlete on skates.
Speaking of violent images, they are plentiful, and even though the movie has dated in other ways, the violence here is just as contemporary as last week. A case in point is one where Moonpie, an accomplice and player of Jonathan, faces off against some Tokyo players, one of whom strips off Moonpie's helmet so that another can whack the back of his head with a lethal karate chop. That scene makes us mad, too, although there's no good reason for that feeling since Moonpie displays all the humanity of a statue of Porky the Pig.
That lack of humanity is perhaps the main reason why this movie fails to connect. Without some internal frame of reference or moral center with which to compare the interior events of the movie, we are unable to emit or revel or even imagine the tragedy that would otherwise be the lives of these pawns. That such talent was wasted on what quickly became known as a "cult movie" is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.
Speaking of violent images, they are plentiful, and even though the movie has dated in other ways, the violence here is just as contemporary as last week. A case in point is one where Moonpie, an accomplice and player of Jonathan, faces off against some Tokyo players, one of whom strips off Moonpie's helmet so that another can whack the back of his head with a lethal karate chop. That scene makes us mad, too, although there's no good reason for that feeling since Moonpie displays all the humanity of a statue of Porky the Pig.
That lack of humanity is perhaps the main reason why this movie fails to connect. Without some internal frame of reference or moral center with which to compare the interior events of the movie, we are unable to emit or revel or even imagine the tragedy that would otherwise be the lives of these pawns. That such talent was wasted on what quickly became known as a "cult movie" is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.
The Ruling Class
Because that despicable Andrew Breitbart is finally dead, I thought this would be an appropriate time to talk about Milton Rokeach. I imagine that everyone has their own personal favorite psychologist. For some folks it's Freud or Jung, Adler or Reich, Milgram or Zimbardo. For me it's always been Milton Rokeach. I'll tell you why.
My belief is that anything that reveals to us information about the truth of our specific natures is a good thing, even if we are not necessarily ready to accept it. We have defense mechanisms aplenty to protect us from awful realities and when those machines malfunction or become overloaded, we get sick. We may suffer from any of the maladies listed in the DSM-IV or V and in all likelihood won't get better until we're good and ready. As most shrinks know, forty percent of the time people get better regardless of the method of treatment, so most of the research ends up existing for its own sake, which is perfectly fine by me. I like knowing things and unless we get into the type of concentration camp experiments popularized by Nazis and NASA, then I see nothing wrong in manipulating circumstances if doing so shows people something useful about their own true nature. When Stanley Milgram showed that the majority of people prefer to follow orders even when those orders presumably violate their own belief systems, I felt that it was good that people come to recognize that about themselves and if some of them couldn't bear to see things the way they were, then take a grown-up pill and adjust. I feel exactly the same way about the Zimbardo experiment where the "guards" discovered what their role did to them once they came into contact with the "prisoners."
And that brings us to Rokeach. In the late 1950s he brought together three men, each of whom believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Figuring that their understanding of Themselves would require Them to admit that three people cannot inhabit the same exact space, he brought Them all together at the Ypsilanti State Hospital. His expectation was that They would realize that someone among Them had to be wrong and further that the odds were that the wrong person would be the individual having this cognition.
To no one's surprise except that of Rokeach, nothing of the sort transpired for Leon, Joseph and Clyde.
In the 1984 edition of his book, Rokeach wrote: "I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere round the clock with their daily lives."
Perhaps not. But that was not actually what he was doing. What he was doing, consciously or otherwise, was showing all of us to one another and more importantly to ourselves. Let me give you another example that may make things clearer. I used to know a guy named Chris who told everyone that he had been with the CIA. This is a fairly common delusion among psychiatric patients and in Chris's case the theory was that he had developed this delusion to explain away the self-inflicted gun shot wound to his face. Now, Chris had to know on some intellectual level that he could not really have been a CIA agent, if for no other reason than that being one would preclude him from discussing that fact. Rather than attempting to disabuse him of this belief and rather than to humor this delusion with condescending remarks, I chose to interact with him as I saw him rather than as he saw himself. I saw him as a bright young man who had been temporarily bent beneath the weight of some pretty horrible experiences but who was getting stronger and perhaps as someone who would come to value things outside himself once again.
Today Chris owns his own landscaping business, has a girlfriend, and drives a Subaru.
He still harbors the belief that he used to be a secret agent. He recognizes that the rest of us are unwilling to take his word for this and so he does not make much mention of it.
There is probably a reason why certain people with schizophrenia adopt the persona of Christ or CIA agents or Napoleon. I suspect it is the same reason that motivates some people who believe in past lives to think they were Cleopatra or Marc Anthony rather than the guy who milked the donkeys. If someone doesn't respect himself, the least he can do is trade up. If one simply must be delusional, one might as well go for the glory.
In the motion picture The Ruling Class, Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney (the 14th Earl of Gurney), played by Peter O'Toole, believes himself to be Jesus Christ, the God of the New Testament, the God of Love. His father, a member of the House of Lords, commits suicide in a particularly embarrassing manner and the rite of esteem falls to Jack, a man who is actually quite good at being JC, as he prefers to be called. About midway into this funny and disturbing film, the psychiatrist in charge of Jack's recovery introduces him to a man suffering the delusion of believing himself to be the Old Testament God. Whenever Jack's self-perceptions are challenged, he reverts to crawling up onto the living room cross. The Old Testament God won't let him get away with that.
This is a fascinating movie for at least one hundred reasons and I have only touched upon the identity crisis. Anyone made uncomfortable by Luis Bunuel's depiction of the upper middle class in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie will become positively apoplectic with the brilliant script by Peter Barnes (taken from his stage play) and even though director Peter Medak is not as adept as he would later become (his most recent work includes episodes of "Breaking Bad" and "Cold Case"), his skills are more than sufficient to get the job done here. The real force of this film, after all, is the script and the talent of the actors, particularly O'Toole, who reportedly got quite bombed with the writer and demanded that the play become a film.
Audience manipulation gets its own fair share of exposure in The Ruling Class. Barnes isn't quite Terry Southern here, and Medak isn't Stanley Kubrick, but whenever Jack's delusion gets challenged, the audience cringes just a bit, in part because of his character's frailty, but in larger part because compared to the rest of his family, Jack is quite a good guy. Advocating love above all else, Jack is direct while the others are sly, he is open where they are deceitful, and he is loving (at least self-loving) where they are greedy beyond repair.
After seeing this movie, you may still not love Milton Rokeach, who after all was not an Englishman and therefore warrants some suspicion, at least according to this movie. However, you will love O'Toole even more than you already do. You may also discover something about yourself, as I did, when you evaluate your feelings about what ultimately happens to certain members of the family that attempts to manipulate Jack.
What has any of this to do with Andrew Breitbart? Well, for one thing, he thought himself a good man and in reality he was as evil as Jack the Ripper.
My belief is that anything that reveals to us information about the truth of our specific natures is a good thing, even if we are not necessarily ready to accept it. We have defense mechanisms aplenty to protect us from awful realities and when those machines malfunction or become overloaded, we get sick. We may suffer from any of the maladies listed in the DSM-IV or V and in all likelihood won't get better until we're good and ready. As most shrinks know, forty percent of the time people get better regardless of the method of treatment, so most of the research ends up existing for its own sake, which is perfectly fine by me. I like knowing things and unless we get into the type of concentration camp experiments popularized by Nazis and NASA, then I see nothing wrong in manipulating circumstances if doing so shows people something useful about their own true nature. When Stanley Milgram showed that the majority of people prefer to follow orders even when those orders presumably violate their own belief systems, I felt that it was good that people come to recognize that about themselves and if some of them couldn't bear to see things the way they were, then take a grown-up pill and adjust. I feel exactly the same way about the Zimbardo experiment where the "guards" discovered what their role did to them once they came into contact with the "prisoners."
And that brings us to Rokeach. In the late 1950s he brought together three men, each of whom believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Figuring that their understanding of Themselves would require Them to admit that three people cannot inhabit the same exact space, he brought Them all together at the Ypsilanti State Hospital. His expectation was that They would realize that someone among Them had to be wrong and further that the odds were that the wrong person would be the individual having this cognition.
To no one's surprise except that of Rokeach, nothing of the sort transpired for Leon, Joseph and Clyde.
In the 1984 edition of his book, Rokeach wrote: "I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere round the clock with their daily lives."
Perhaps not. But that was not actually what he was doing. What he was doing, consciously or otherwise, was showing all of us to one another and more importantly to ourselves. Let me give you another example that may make things clearer. I used to know a guy named Chris who told everyone that he had been with the CIA. This is a fairly common delusion among psychiatric patients and in Chris's case the theory was that he had developed this delusion to explain away the self-inflicted gun shot wound to his face. Now, Chris had to know on some intellectual level that he could not really have been a CIA agent, if for no other reason than that being one would preclude him from discussing that fact. Rather than attempting to disabuse him of this belief and rather than to humor this delusion with condescending remarks, I chose to interact with him as I saw him rather than as he saw himself. I saw him as a bright young man who had been temporarily bent beneath the weight of some pretty horrible experiences but who was getting stronger and perhaps as someone who would come to value things outside himself once again.
Today Chris owns his own landscaping business, has a girlfriend, and drives a Subaru.
He still harbors the belief that he used to be a secret agent. He recognizes that the rest of us are unwilling to take his word for this and so he does not make much mention of it.
There is probably a reason why certain people with schizophrenia adopt the persona of Christ or CIA agents or Napoleon. I suspect it is the same reason that motivates some people who believe in past lives to think they were Cleopatra or Marc Anthony rather than the guy who milked the donkeys. If someone doesn't respect himself, the least he can do is trade up. If one simply must be delusional, one might as well go for the glory.
In the motion picture The Ruling Class, Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney (the 14th Earl of Gurney), played by Peter O'Toole, believes himself to be Jesus Christ, the God of the New Testament, the God of Love. His father, a member of the House of Lords, commits suicide in a particularly embarrassing manner and the rite of esteem falls to Jack, a man who is actually quite good at being JC, as he prefers to be called. About midway into this funny and disturbing film, the psychiatrist in charge of Jack's recovery introduces him to a man suffering the delusion of believing himself to be the Old Testament God. Whenever Jack's self-perceptions are challenged, he reverts to crawling up onto the living room cross. The Old Testament God won't let him get away with that.
This is a fascinating movie for at least one hundred reasons and I have only touched upon the identity crisis. Anyone made uncomfortable by Luis Bunuel's depiction of the upper middle class in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie will become positively apoplectic with the brilliant script by Peter Barnes (taken from his stage play) and even though director Peter Medak is not as adept as he would later become (his most recent work includes episodes of "Breaking Bad" and "Cold Case"), his skills are more than sufficient to get the job done here. The real force of this film, after all, is the script and the talent of the actors, particularly O'Toole, who reportedly got quite bombed with the writer and demanded that the play become a film.
Audience manipulation gets its own fair share of exposure in The Ruling Class. Barnes isn't quite Terry Southern here, and Medak isn't Stanley Kubrick, but whenever Jack's delusion gets challenged, the audience cringes just a bit, in part because of his character's frailty, but in larger part because compared to the rest of his family, Jack is quite a good guy. Advocating love above all else, Jack is direct while the others are sly, he is open where they are deceitful, and he is loving (at least self-loving) where they are greedy beyond repair.
After seeing this movie, you may still not love Milton Rokeach, who after all was not an Englishman and therefore warrants some suspicion, at least according to this movie. However, you will love O'Toole even more than you already do. You may also discover something about yourself, as I did, when you evaluate your feelings about what ultimately happens to certain members of the family that attempts to manipulate Jack.
What has any of this to do with Andrew Breitbart? Well, for one thing, he thought himself a good man and in reality he was as evil as Jack the Ripper.
They Might Be Giants
For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore, if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert, go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers, believe it not.
Matthew 24, verses 24-26, KJV
Positioning your mind to believe in other person's delusions can sometimes lead to tremendous joy. It can also get you into a lot of trouble, depending on whose paranoid symptoms you adopt as your own. From Simon Magus in the first century, a Samaritan who called himself the Standing One and who hinted of his messianic powers, to David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians; from Ann Lee who, in the eighteenth century, became a fixture of the Shakers and who believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ, to Lazlo Toth who, in the twentieth century, believing himself to be the male incarnation of Christ, took a geologist's hammer and smashed away at Michelangelo's Pieta; from the recently late Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, to David Shayler, a former British military intelligence employee and journalist who declared himself the messiah, capable of affecting the weather, preventing terrorist attacks, and predicting football scores--from the first to the last, from the alpha to the omega, these would all have been people from which the wise parent would advise the children to stay as far away from as possible. Yet they each had their believers. Well, if they can have their followers and their faithful flock, then why--tell me--why cannot a very nice man named Justin Playfair be left alone to have his own anointed followers to believe him to be the one and only Sherlock Holmes?
Most of us have read the stories of Arthur Canon Doyle and perhaps secretly permitted ourselves to project our own tepid personalities into the character of Holmes. So after a traumatic loss, might it not be understandable to others that one of us might find comfort in adopting the personality traits and deductive reasoning faculties of the master detective? Who among us as children has not pretended to be someone from a book, a television show, a movie? Who has not taken refuge from the barbarisms of daily life by flying into the persona of someone far more capable than our miserable selves?
In the movie, They Might Be Giants (1971), Justin Playfair (George C. Scott) meets his personal Doctor Watson. Of course, this Watson's first name is Mildred and Playfair's nasty brother wants her to sign papers committing him to a contemporary insane asylum. Holmes has lost his wife a few years earlier and has no memory of anything happening before her death. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) doesn't think much of her own life. She cannot cook, she had acne until her early twenties, hasn't been on a date in years and relates quite effortlessly to patients with debilitating illnesses. Holmes charms her (and us) immediately, in part with his phenomenal reasoning powers, and almost as quickly with his durability. People know him everywhere--from the bums hanging out in the movie theatre to the bookworm in the deserted subterranean library. The more shunned and abused the stranger who meets him, the more susceptible he or she is to the wiles and charms of Sherlock Holmes.
Just as in the short stories, Watson herself is fairly complex. When we meet her, for instance, she is lying on the patient's bed, looking up at the ceiling, talking about a huge spider from a dream. We are not certain whether this woman is the patient or the doctor, a quirk of her personality that makes her entirely believable to us, especially as she more and more buys into the supposed delusion that Playfair is Holmes.
But there must be a Professor Moriarty, mustn't there? As Justin Playfair himself asks, "If there is no Moriarty, then can there be a Sherlock Holmes?"
So everyone from telephone operators to nurses in the asylum buy into Holmes apparent delusion. They band together around Holmes and Watson. His delusion becomes theirs and once this occurs, we have to wonder if there really is a delusion happening here at all.
To tell you very much more about this wondrous film might endanger the delight you will likely experience. I will say that the humor in this movie occasionally borders on the brilliant, as when Holmes and Watson encounter an old couple who have been living in their abandoned school and who have stayed there for thirty years because they found the outside world confusing. "Criticize our garden, won't you?" they ask. Holmes and Watson are happy to oblige.
The humor here is gentle, never mocking. The amazing faith the friends of the master detective have in the power and safety of the delusion is never ridiculed. Even a mute whom Holmes determines to be Rudolph Valentino is sympathetic and not without charm. Any corporate bathroom toilet licking scribbler could write and direct the type of brutalizing mockery that passes itself off for comedy these days.They Might Be Giants is a movie that wards off those truly psychotic demons. You can believe it.
It's also nice to see Times Square before it got all beautified.
Matthew 24, verses 24-26, KJV
Positioning your mind to believe in other person's delusions can sometimes lead to tremendous joy. It can also get you into a lot of trouble, depending on whose paranoid symptoms you adopt as your own. From Simon Magus in the first century, a Samaritan who called himself the Standing One and who hinted of his messianic powers, to David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians; from Ann Lee who, in the eighteenth century, became a fixture of the Shakers and who believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ, to Lazlo Toth who, in the twentieth century, believing himself to be the male incarnation of Christ, took a geologist's hammer and smashed away at Michelangelo's Pieta; from the recently late Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, to David Shayler, a former British military intelligence employee and journalist who declared himself the messiah, capable of affecting the weather, preventing terrorist attacks, and predicting football scores--from the first to the last, from the alpha to the omega, these would all have been people from which the wise parent would advise the children to stay as far away from as possible. Yet they each had their believers. Well, if they can have their followers and their faithful flock, then why--tell me--why cannot a very nice man named Justin Playfair be left alone to have his own anointed followers to believe him to be the one and only Sherlock Holmes?
Most of us have read the stories of Arthur Canon Doyle and perhaps secretly permitted ourselves to project our own tepid personalities into the character of Holmes. So after a traumatic loss, might it not be understandable to others that one of us might find comfort in adopting the personality traits and deductive reasoning faculties of the master detective? Who among us as children has not pretended to be someone from a book, a television show, a movie? Who has not taken refuge from the barbarisms of daily life by flying into the persona of someone far more capable than our miserable selves?
In the movie, They Might Be Giants (1971), Justin Playfair (George C. Scott) meets his personal Doctor Watson. Of course, this Watson's first name is Mildred and Playfair's nasty brother wants her to sign papers committing him to a contemporary insane asylum. Holmes has lost his wife a few years earlier and has no memory of anything happening before her death. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) doesn't think much of her own life. She cannot cook, she had acne until her early twenties, hasn't been on a date in years and relates quite effortlessly to patients with debilitating illnesses. Holmes charms her (and us) immediately, in part with his phenomenal reasoning powers, and almost as quickly with his durability. People know him everywhere--from the bums hanging out in the movie theatre to the bookworm in the deserted subterranean library. The more shunned and abused the stranger who meets him, the more susceptible he or she is to the wiles and charms of Sherlock Holmes.
Just as in the short stories, Watson herself is fairly complex. When we meet her, for instance, she is lying on the patient's bed, looking up at the ceiling, talking about a huge spider from a dream. We are not certain whether this woman is the patient or the doctor, a quirk of her personality that makes her entirely believable to us, especially as she more and more buys into the supposed delusion that Playfair is Holmes.
But there must be a Professor Moriarty, mustn't there? As Justin Playfair himself asks, "If there is no Moriarty, then can there be a Sherlock Holmes?"
So everyone from telephone operators to nurses in the asylum buy into Holmes apparent delusion. They band together around Holmes and Watson. His delusion becomes theirs and once this occurs, we have to wonder if there really is a delusion happening here at all.
To tell you very much more about this wondrous film might endanger the delight you will likely experience. I will say that the humor in this movie occasionally borders on the brilliant, as when Holmes and Watson encounter an old couple who have been living in their abandoned school and who have stayed there for thirty years because they found the outside world confusing. "Criticize our garden, won't you?" they ask. Holmes and Watson are happy to oblige.
The humor here is gentle, never mocking. The amazing faith the friends of the master detective have in the power and safety of the delusion is never ridiculed. Even a mute whom Holmes determines to be Rudolph Valentino is sympathetic and not without charm. Any corporate bathroom toilet licking scribbler could write and direct the type of brutalizing mockery that passes itself off for comedy these days.They Might Be Giants is a movie that wards off those truly psychotic demons. You can believe it.
It's also nice to see Times Square before it got all beautified.
The Boys in the Band
The estimable William Friedkin directed and Mart Crowley wrote the screenplay for The Boys in the Band, the first overtly gay film with a budget in the seven figures. The film starts out funny and uncomfortable, just like the party it is superficially staged around. The plot turns bitter once a nasty telephone game is introduced to the birthday shenanigans and honesty gets put on the chopping block.
Anyone threatened by the campy artifice enacted by some gay men will become positively apoplectic from watching these wild characters and other viewers may find themselves just as jarred as the character Michael is when the party is punctuated by the presumably straight Alan, a friend from college. The dialogue, or the chatter, or the bright badinage, is often brilliant and anyone who cringes just because of the sexual orientation of the people in the film is denying himself/herself one hell of a good ride through the uncanny realism of a culture that has not changed all that much since its release in 1970.
And that's pretty interesting because, as with the previous film--The Magic Christian--and for a completely different set of reasons, this film wouldn't stand much of a chance of being made today, although people would love it if it were. You see, the film is smart, something which is not true of all Friedkin product, the credit for which going to screenwriter Crowley. No, you couldn't make this film now because of studio fear that people wouldn't want to see it or that psycho-zealots would boycott or from their own terror at the prospects of being linked to such a film. This film in fact is so gay that most religious zealots would refuse to boycott it just because they would fear being linked, if only in opposition. This is not La Cage aux Folles. This is an angry movie that uses humor as a whip.
The only problem with the film or the off Broadway play from which the entire cast was drawn is in the self-deprecating nature of the dialogue. When I was in college, a lot of my friends were gay, or said they were gay, or wished they were gay, and so I found myself at the occasional party when I was one of very few straights and was often treated as if I fit in, which was actually a compliment to me, so I didn't mind. Well, one thing and another and alcohol would pour and people would become more loose in their speech and I would hear people referring to themselves or to one another as bitch, faggot, queen, and the like. At first I was surprised to hear lines like "Oh, you've had worse things than that in your mouth," delivered from one man to another. Hell, you get used to it, I suppose, just as I did when I was hanging out with African-Americans who referred to themselves and one another in similarly disparaging manners. In The Boys in the Band, the sub-dermal self-loathing (masquerading as parody of straight stereotypes but a little too close and constant for that to be all it is) balls its fists and punches you repeatedly in the stomach, over and over, as if to say, "Hey! You get it? I'm pissed!"
We get it, we get it, take it easy, everything's okay.
Everything, that is, until you read the Facebook entry of a cretinous friend of a friend of mine who taunts the posthumous life of one of the teenage boys who offed himself rather than endure the constant tortures and taunts of his presumably post-enlightened classmates. I strongly considered giving up this imbecile's name just so anyone so inclined could ring him up and give back a little of what he and his slithering ilk dish out, but then I realized that anyone undeveloped enough to think that saying "Splash!" somehow negates an opponent's argument isn't worth the trouble. I will, however, suggest that you watch this film on YouTube and then consider ordering a copy that you can send to your most despicably bigoted colleague. Think of it as film as guerrilla warfare, something sorely missed in modern cinema.
Anyone threatened by the campy artifice enacted by some gay men will become positively apoplectic from watching these wild characters and other viewers may find themselves just as jarred as the character Michael is when the party is punctuated by the presumably straight Alan, a friend from college. The dialogue, or the chatter, or the bright badinage, is often brilliant and anyone who cringes just because of the sexual orientation of the people in the film is denying himself/herself one hell of a good ride through the uncanny realism of a culture that has not changed all that much since its release in 1970.
And that's pretty interesting because, as with the previous film--The Magic Christian--and for a completely different set of reasons, this film wouldn't stand much of a chance of being made today, although people would love it if it were. You see, the film is smart, something which is not true of all Friedkin product, the credit for which going to screenwriter Crowley. No, you couldn't make this film now because of studio fear that people wouldn't want to see it or that psycho-zealots would boycott or from their own terror at the prospects of being linked to such a film. This film in fact is so gay that most religious zealots would refuse to boycott it just because they would fear being linked, if only in opposition. This is not La Cage aux Folles. This is an angry movie that uses humor as a whip.
The only problem with the film or the off Broadway play from which the entire cast was drawn is in the self-deprecating nature of the dialogue. When I was in college, a lot of my friends were gay, or said they were gay, or wished they were gay, and so I found myself at the occasional party when I was one of very few straights and was often treated as if I fit in, which was actually a compliment to me, so I didn't mind. Well, one thing and another and alcohol would pour and people would become more loose in their speech and I would hear people referring to themselves or to one another as bitch, faggot, queen, and the like. At first I was surprised to hear lines like "Oh, you've had worse things than that in your mouth," delivered from one man to another. Hell, you get used to it, I suppose, just as I did when I was hanging out with African-Americans who referred to themselves and one another in similarly disparaging manners. In The Boys in the Band, the sub-dermal self-loathing (masquerading as parody of straight stereotypes but a little too close and constant for that to be all it is) balls its fists and punches you repeatedly in the stomach, over and over, as if to say, "Hey! You get it? I'm pissed!"
We get it, we get it, take it easy, everything's okay.
Everything, that is, until you read the Facebook entry of a cretinous friend of a friend of mine who taunts the posthumous life of one of the teenage boys who offed himself rather than endure the constant tortures and taunts of his presumably post-enlightened classmates. I strongly considered giving up this imbecile's name just so anyone so inclined could ring him up and give back a little of what he and his slithering ilk dish out, but then I realized that anyone undeveloped enough to think that saying "Splash!" somehow negates an opponent's argument isn't worth the trouble. I will, however, suggest that you watch this film on YouTube and then consider ordering a copy that you can send to your most despicably bigoted colleague. Think of it as film as guerrilla warfare, something sorely missed in modern cinema.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
One seldom associates director Sam Peckinpah with the notion of subtlety, much less subtlety of the light variety, and yet that is precisely what we get in this occasionally beautiful film about the inevitable demise of Luddites and the damnation of invention.
It is not overstating the matter when discussing the attributes of The Ballad of Cable Hogue to argue that with the understated talents of lead Jason Robards and visual stunner Stella Stevens, this film, while something of an artistic failure, is among the most ambitious and heartwarming failures in the western genre. In fact, I like to think that the best aspects of this charming film are Robards/Hogue's internal struggle between revenge and the more Christian aspects of his personality; the cosmic beauty of Stevens as Hildy, a woman whose body itself is every bit as fascinating as the western skies; the blowing away of the lizard in the opening moments (which is the only truly violent scene in the film); and the introduction of the horseless carriages near the end of the film, cars which look so strange when rolling across the cheap and eager landscape. All of those elements are important to the fun of the film, but Peckinpah refused to have his movie be just another period piece that made subtle commentary of the transformation from horses to automobiles. He insured the longevity of his film with cinematic techniques rarely if ever seen in the western film: super-imposing of close-ups over wide screen shots, double split screen images, the use of the human body as landscape, fast motion sequences. These and other techniques were becoming virtually de riguer in motion pictures by 1970. But no one had applied them to the horse opera and certainly not to the morality tale horse opera.
The songs that bookend and punctuate the movie weren't much to begin with and they have aged like spoiled eggs. But that's the worst thing one can say about this film. It may not have inspired anyone--except possibly Sergio Leone, who by this point had already recognized what a terrific talent Jason Robards was from Once Upon a Time in the West. Those it did inspire sat in the movie houses with their mouths agape at the success of the bum prospector and the fetching prostitute with a heart of gold.
If my sniveling retelling of the plot reeks of cliche, these elements weren't cliche at the time of the film's release in 1970. The sexism in the movie is real, be forewarned. It is also puerile, stupid and didn't reinforce bad behavior in anyone, except possibly in the retelling of the only line I will ruin by repeating it here. Cable Hogue demands payment to a preacher who keeps popping up in the movie. The payment is for dinner. Protesting, Hildy the hooker tells Hogue that he never charged her for dinner. Hogue agrees, saying, "That's because you never charged me."
You would have to go back to middle period John Ford work to find a western this appealing to the senses. Art, desert and horses didn't come together in the same movies all that often (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and possibly Once Upon a Time in the West, depending on who you ask). Unlike Leone and very much like Ford, Peckinpah made his touches of art--at least in this gem of a failure--light as morning desert air. And that's appropriate. After all, if you can taste the air, it ceases to be refreshing.
It is not overstating the matter when discussing the attributes of The Ballad of Cable Hogue to argue that with the understated talents of lead Jason Robards and visual stunner Stella Stevens, this film, while something of an artistic failure, is among the most ambitious and heartwarming failures in the western genre. In fact, I like to think that the best aspects of this charming film are Robards/Hogue's internal struggle between revenge and the more Christian aspects of his personality; the cosmic beauty of Stevens as Hildy, a woman whose body itself is every bit as fascinating as the western skies; the blowing away of the lizard in the opening moments (which is the only truly violent scene in the film); and the introduction of the horseless carriages near the end of the film, cars which look so strange when rolling across the cheap and eager landscape. All of those elements are important to the fun of the film, but Peckinpah refused to have his movie be just another period piece that made subtle commentary of the transformation from horses to automobiles. He insured the longevity of his film with cinematic techniques rarely if ever seen in the western film: super-imposing of close-ups over wide screen shots, double split screen images, the use of the human body as landscape, fast motion sequences. These and other techniques were becoming virtually de riguer in motion pictures by 1970. But no one had applied them to the horse opera and certainly not to the morality tale horse opera.
The songs that bookend and punctuate the movie weren't much to begin with and they have aged like spoiled eggs. But that's the worst thing one can say about this film. It may not have inspired anyone--except possibly Sergio Leone, who by this point had already recognized what a terrific talent Jason Robards was from Once Upon a Time in the West. Those it did inspire sat in the movie houses with their mouths agape at the success of the bum prospector and the fetching prostitute with a heart of gold.
If my sniveling retelling of the plot reeks of cliche, these elements weren't cliche at the time of the film's release in 1970. The sexism in the movie is real, be forewarned. It is also puerile, stupid and didn't reinforce bad behavior in anyone, except possibly in the retelling of the only line I will ruin by repeating it here. Cable Hogue demands payment to a preacher who keeps popping up in the movie. The payment is for dinner. Protesting, Hildy the hooker tells Hogue that he never charged her for dinner. Hogue agrees, saying, "That's because you never charged me."
You would have to go back to middle period John Ford work to find a western this appealing to the senses. Art, desert and horses didn't come together in the same movies all that often (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and possibly Once Upon a Time in the West, depending on who you ask). Unlike Leone and very much like Ford, Peckinpah made his touches of art--at least in this gem of a failure--light as morning desert air. And that's appropriate. After all, if you can taste the air, it ceases to be refreshing.
The Confession
This is the history: The Confession (1970, Costa-Gavras) is the true story of Artur London, a loyal Communist who served with the International Brigade in Spain and with the Communist anti-Nazi underground in France, and who suffered a long term in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1949, Mr. London returned to his native Czechoslovakia from France to become Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Communist Government of President Klement Gottwald. Two years later, along with thirteen other leading Czech Communists (eleven of whom were Jewish), Mr. London was arrested for treason and espionage and found guilty in what became known as the Slansky trial. This trial, named for the secretary general of the Czech Communist Party, who was also a defendant, was one of the last major wheezes of the Stalinist purges that began with the Moscow trials in the 1930s. All of the Slansky defendants were found guilty and all but three, including Mr. London, were executed. Mr. London lived not only to see the defendants rehabilitated and to write his book but also to return to Czechoslovakia on the day in August, 1968, when Soviet troops invaded his country to end the short Czech spring.
Yep, that is the history. Yet as we see in this beautiful and horrifying film, truth is a lie. Only a lie can set you free. Or so it was in the post-Stalinist trials and purges that swept through the Soviet bloc throughout the years of Khrushchev and his reign of impotence. London, played with such dignity by Yves Montand, is broken down one layer at a time, forced to admit to objective facts while insisting that subjective truths also matter.
Q. You associated with the traitor Smith in 1949?
A. Yes, but I did not know he was a traitor until 1952.
Q. Are you denying that Smith was a traitor?
A. No. I am--
Q. We will deal with the subjective elements later. First, you must memorize your confession. Doctor, bring in the sunlamps. We must prepare this man for trial.
What happened in Czechoslovakia is one of the reasons that some people have abandoned politics altogether. Economics is dependent upon politics for its implementation. Politics is religion and religion is madness. Faith guarantees the freedom of the bull whip. You may go to sleep. What is your number? Louder! Assume the position. Guards!Only your confession can save you. Do you believe what your wife says in this letter? Has this man been bathed in twenty-one months?
The Confession is not Costa-Gavras' most popular film. That would probably be Amen, Missing, or Z, any of which are powerful testaments against authoritarian forces. However, The Confession remains vital in the way it makes no compromise to an uninformed, uninvolved public. One needn't be a student of post-WWII Soviet or Eastern European history in order to get this. One need not have memorized every word of Orwell's novel to find a similarity in the absurd processes used to extract falsehoods that everyone from the interrogators to the members of the tribunal to the general public understood to be falsehoods.
The goal here is not to lead people to a rejection of politics based in apathy. It is rather to tell Artur London's story with some degree of accuracy and to convey the permeating sense of dread that flooded those awful times just as they did, it must be admitted, at other times in our collective history, whether in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, or in the days following the revelations of Abu Ghraib. Costa-Gavras does not flinch. The psychologically overlapping flashbacks that let us in on London's "rehabilitation" spoils nothing. On the contrary, the more we learn of his ultimate fate, the more horrified we are at what happens to him in the process of getting there. The colors are bleak, the staging stark, and the acting unbearable in its verisimilitude, or at least its relation to what we are unable to dispute as true. A rose dipped in liquid nitrogen remains a rose, at least right up until it shatters like glass. This film is the liquid nitrogen. Our sensibilities are the rose.
Yep, that is the history. Yet as we see in this beautiful and horrifying film, truth is a lie. Only a lie can set you free. Or so it was in the post-Stalinist trials and purges that swept through the Soviet bloc throughout the years of Khrushchev and his reign of impotence. London, played with such dignity by Yves Montand, is broken down one layer at a time, forced to admit to objective facts while insisting that subjective truths also matter.
Q. You associated with the traitor Smith in 1949?
A. Yes, but I did not know he was a traitor until 1952.
Q. Are you denying that Smith was a traitor?
A. No. I am--
Q. We will deal with the subjective elements later. First, you must memorize your confession. Doctor, bring in the sunlamps. We must prepare this man for trial.
What happened in Czechoslovakia is one of the reasons that some people have abandoned politics altogether. Economics is dependent upon politics for its implementation. Politics is religion and religion is madness. Faith guarantees the freedom of the bull whip. You may go to sleep. What is your number? Louder! Assume the position. Guards!Only your confession can save you. Do you believe what your wife says in this letter? Has this man been bathed in twenty-one months?
The Confession is not Costa-Gavras' most popular film. That would probably be Amen, Missing, or Z, any of which are powerful testaments against authoritarian forces. However, The Confession remains vital in the way it makes no compromise to an uninformed, uninvolved public. One needn't be a student of post-WWII Soviet or Eastern European history in order to get this. One need not have memorized every word of Orwell's novel to find a similarity in the absurd processes used to extract falsehoods that everyone from the interrogators to the members of the tribunal to the general public understood to be falsehoods.
The goal here is not to lead people to a rejection of politics based in apathy. It is rather to tell Artur London's story with some degree of accuracy and to convey the permeating sense of dread that flooded those awful times just as they did, it must be admitted, at other times in our collective history, whether in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, or in the days following the revelations of Abu Ghraib. Costa-Gavras does not flinch. The psychologically overlapping flashbacks that let us in on London's "rehabilitation" spoils nothing. On the contrary, the more we learn of his ultimate fate, the more horrified we are at what happens to him in the process of getting there. The colors are bleak, the staging stark, and the acting unbearable in its verisimilitude, or at least its relation to what we are unable to dispute as true. A rose dipped in liquid nitrogen remains a rose, at least right up until it shatters like glass. This film is the liquid nitrogen. Our sensibilities are the rose.
Zabriskie Point
Michelangelo Antonioni made so many outstanding films, it's a pityZabriskie Point isn't one of them. Before we get too far into this conversation, I should admit that many people love this film and those who do will probably dislike me very much for saying that it dry heaves Saltines. The good news is that as with a lot of movies that don't quite accomplish all to which they aspire, Zabriskie Point is an occasionally enjoyable failure and it still stands heads and eyebrows above the underwhelming majority of stupid love stories popular in that year of 1970, including the most popular turd-licker love story of all time, Love Story.
The first clue that this movie may not be Antonioni's master work is the soundtrack. The opening credits terrified me by announcing music from The Grateful Dead as well as from Pink Floyd, two reasons to leave the theatre if you have anything at all pressing to do. On the other hand, a lot of people find drugged-out hippie music to be exactly what they want after a long day of committing home foreclosures and initiating hostile takeovers, so perhaps I should try to keep an open mind.
I will admit the cinematography is superb, possibly the best aspect (ratio) of the film, especially if you favor fly-along shots of airplanes approaching the top of 1952 Buicks, which I do and so should everyone. The photography is so good that I am not bothered in the least that the movie has no conventional plot. Conventional plots are so. . .well. . . conventional. After all, were it not for the photography in this movie, we would have no choice but to rely on the meager story-line, wherein we find that George cannot be a revolutionary because he is an assassin instead (probably--we never know this for certain), just as mercenaries cannot be fascists. Both assassins and mercenaries work best alone, rendering whatever political persuasion they may favor to be largely beside the point. Because he cannot be a revolutionary, he buys a gun and maybe shoots a police officer. What he does do is steal a small plane and take off after Daria, one of the best reasons to shoplift an airplane that I have ever seen. (In fact, it is the third most popular all-time reason. Number One is: Go to Cuba. Number two is: Leave Cuba. Number three is: Take off after Daria.)
Daria is pretty and George is handsome and politics is so. . .well. . .political. Student activism permeates the first half of Zabriskie Point, to the extent that the discussions in which the globs of young folk engage seem all too real for their inability to persuade. One of the most frustrating aspects of 1960s radicalism was the occasional dip into party ideology and this film misses not one cliche, even if the lines are delivered as tired gospel.
"How you get there depends on where you're at." So reads the movie's theatrical tagline. Whaddya want? Good grammar or good movies? Either one would be fine.
The final uplifting feature of this movie is, ironically, that it is actually about something, whereas so many love stories are about love, which is probably the most uninteresting type of film. Zabriskie Point uses love as a metaphor for flying, and vice versa, what with 1970 being a great year for metaphors of this type, Brewster McCloud using sex in the same exact way, only funnier.
It's up to you. Either you favor Roger Waters and Jerry Garcia making mood music for moderns or you have better things to do, such as thinking. But those airplane shots will still reimburse you for the cost of the DVD or download.
The first clue that this movie may not be Antonioni's master work is the soundtrack. The opening credits terrified me by announcing music from The Grateful Dead as well as from Pink Floyd, two reasons to leave the theatre if you have anything at all pressing to do. On the other hand, a lot of people find drugged-out hippie music to be exactly what they want after a long day of committing home foreclosures and initiating hostile takeovers, so perhaps I should try to keep an open mind.
I will admit the cinematography is superb, possibly the best aspect (ratio) of the film, especially if you favor fly-along shots of airplanes approaching the top of 1952 Buicks, which I do and so should everyone. The photography is so good that I am not bothered in the least that the movie has no conventional plot. Conventional plots are so. . .well. . . conventional. After all, were it not for the photography in this movie, we would have no choice but to rely on the meager story-line, wherein we find that George cannot be a revolutionary because he is an assassin instead (probably--we never know this for certain), just as mercenaries cannot be fascists. Both assassins and mercenaries work best alone, rendering whatever political persuasion they may favor to be largely beside the point. Because he cannot be a revolutionary, he buys a gun and maybe shoots a police officer. What he does do is steal a small plane and take off after Daria, one of the best reasons to shoplift an airplane that I have ever seen. (In fact, it is the third most popular all-time reason. Number One is: Go to Cuba. Number two is: Leave Cuba. Number three is: Take off after Daria.)
Daria is pretty and George is handsome and politics is so. . .well. . .political. Student activism permeates the first half of Zabriskie Point, to the extent that the discussions in which the globs of young folk engage seem all too real for their inability to persuade. One of the most frustrating aspects of 1960s radicalism was the occasional dip into party ideology and this film misses not one cliche, even if the lines are delivered as tired gospel.
"How you get there depends on where you're at." So reads the movie's theatrical tagline. Whaddya want? Good grammar or good movies? Either one would be fine.
The final uplifting feature of this movie is, ironically, that it is actually about something, whereas so many love stories are about love, which is probably the most uninteresting type of film. Zabriskie Point uses love as a metaphor for flying, and vice versa, what with 1970 being a great year for metaphors of this type, Brewster McCloud using sex in the same exact way, only funnier.
It's up to you. Either you favor Roger Waters and Jerry Garcia making mood music for moderns or you have better things to do, such as thinking. But those airplane shots will still reimburse you for the cost of the DVD or download.
Gimme Shelter
The Rolling Stones energized an otherwise druggy and dragging San Francisco night, turning the smell of beer and vomit into a rapturous excuse to forget about the cans of hops that rained down from the sky, courtesy of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and instead to ponder the exploding cascade of fuzz guitar machines gunning the bass player's layers of flaming jelly as "Street Fighting Man" closed out the show at the Altamont Raceway in early December 1969.
David and Albert Maysles brought about a dozen cameras (and a young George Lucas) to film the tail end of the Rolling Stones U.S. tour, an event which captured the group shortly after the death of original member Brian Jones as well as at a time when their collective reputations were being plastered as cosmic-demonic.
In a study reported in the February 26, 1998 issue of Nature (Vol. 391, pp. 871-874), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science conducted a highly controlled experiment demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed. The experiment revealed that the greater the amount of "watching," the greater the observer's influence on what actually takes place.
This effect may have played a role in the Maysles Brothers' film Gimme Shelter. Heaven knows we wouldn't still be talking about the movie after all these years if Meredith Hunter hadn't had a gun and if the "security" of bikers hadn't stabbed him to death right on camera. Sure, Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane got off a great line at the Angels' expense ("I'd like to mention that the Hells Angels just punched our lead singer and knocked him out for a little while. I'd like to thank them for that."), just as did some well-intentioned woman who was collecting money for the defense of the Black Panther Party when she quipped in all seriousness, "After all, they're just Negroes."
Ultimately, the fact of the film being made added to the horror of Hunter being killed, even though his intentions may have been to snuff Jagger right on camera. I'm suggesting, without intentional humor, that the presence of the cameras on the electrons in attendance may have contributed to the events that the cameras captured. To quote from Nature: "Strange as it may sound, interference can only occur when no one is watching. Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it's clear it didn't go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being 'forced' to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings." Werner Heisenberg formalized the notion that observation affects outcome way back in 1927. Who were the Maysles to prove him wrong?
I can't imagine any of this being an issue upon the film's release in 1970. At that time the group was the most exciting thing going, even if the presence of Tina Turner was simply to masturbate the microphone or if the Flying Burrito Brothers were not captured to decent effect or if Grace Slick proved herself to be an emotional fascist once and for all by becoming an apologist for the bikers.
It's still a great film, despite all the baggage it's been forced to carry over the decades (end of the sixties, end of the innocence, end of "American Pie" song, etc). Jagger looks good critiquing himself as he and the band review the early cuts of the film. The whole process prompted me to ask myself if I would have still enjoyed the movie if I didn't know anything about the group or Melvin Belli or any of that. It's sort of a bullshit proposition, I guess, but I'd like to think I would still love it if for no other reason than the importance of the idea of needing a security force to protect the band from the public that they themselves had energized into becoming a threat.
Oh yeah. The music was nice.
David and Albert Maysles brought about a dozen cameras (and a young George Lucas) to film the tail end of the Rolling Stones U.S. tour, an event which captured the group shortly after the death of original member Brian Jones as well as at a time when their collective reputations were being plastered as cosmic-demonic.
In a study reported in the February 26, 1998 issue of Nature (Vol. 391, pp. 871-874), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science conducted a highly controlled experiment demonstrating how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed. The experiment revealed that the greater the amount of "watching," the greater the observer's influence on what actually takes place.
This effect may have played a role in the Maysles Brothers' film Gimme Shelter. Heaven knows we wouldn't still be talking about the movie after all these years if Meredith Hunter hadn't had a gun and if the "security" of bikers hadn't stabbed him to death right on camera. Sure, Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane got off a great line at the Angels' expense ("I'd like to mention that the Hells Angels just punched our lead singer and knocked him out for a little while. I'd like to thank them for that."), just as did some well-intentioned woman who was collecting money for the defense of the Black Panther Party when she quipped in all seriousness, "After all, they're just Negroes."
Ultimately, the fact of the film being made added to the horror of Hunter being killed, even though his intentions may have been to snuff Jagger right on camera. I'm suggesting, without intentional humor, that the presence of the cameras on the electrons in attendance may have contributed to the events that the cameras captured. To quote from Nature: "Strange as it may sound, interference can only occur when no one is watching. Once an observer begins to watch the particles going through the openings, the picture changes dramatically: if a particle can be seen going through one opening, then it's clear it didn't go through another. In other words, when under observation, electrons are being 'forced' to behave like particles and not like waves. Thus the mere act of observation affects the experimental findings." Werner Heisenberg formalized the notion that observation affects outcome way back in 1927. Who were the Maysles to prove him wrong?
I can't imagine any of this being an issue upon the film's release in 1970. At that time the group was the most exciting thing going, even if the presence of Tina Turner was simply to masturbate the microphone or if the Flying Burrito Brothers were not captured to decent effect or if Grace Slick proved herself to be an emotional fascist once and for all by becoming an apologist for the bikers.
It's still a great film, despite all the baggage it's been forced to carry over the decades (end of the sixties, end of the innocence, end of "American Pie" song, etc). Jagger looks good critiquing himself as he and the band review the early cuts of the film. The whole process prompted me to ask myself if I would have still enjoyed the movie if I didn't know anything about the group or Melvin Belli or any of that. It's sort of a bullshit proposition, I guess, but I'd like to think I would still love it if for no other reason than the importance of the idea of needing a security force to protect the band from the public that they themselves had energized into becoming a threat.
Oh yeah. The music was nice.
Eat the Document
The film of Bob Dylan's 1966 tour of Britain is not a remake of Don't Look Back, the brilliant and beautiful movie of the English 1965 tour. Just writing those words causes me to suspect you may be wondering about the value of analyzing a remarkably bad film from 1971-72. There actually is a point and we will get to it in short order. Meanwhile, your patience is appreciated.
One thing must be admitted: The film features Dylan at his best looking and at one of the peaks of his artistic talent. This is the period of his three greatest recordings (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde) and his most artistically successful work. The concert tour took place shortly before Bobby wrecked his motorcycle, an event which laid him up for a spell and kept him off the stage, although not away from music. Somehow or other he got it in his head that it would be nice to edit the film himself, a statement of fact causing more than one person to wonder what horrors were contained in the outtakes. Because Dylan did have an astute awareness of the power of film--having grown up on Elvis movies and having been a grown-up at the time of A Hard Day's Night--he knew just enough, as they say, to be dangerous. The film takes about ten minutes to move beyond scenes from a van of the English countryside, scenes which probably meant a lot to the farmers and shepherds but not to anyone else. This is quite simply one of the sloppiest, most literally unfocused films ever involving a major star.
And yet. . .
We get to see and hear four-fifths of the group that would soon become The Band. We get to see and hear Dylan sing a proud and intimate duet with Johnny Cash. We get to endure a tedious yet occasionally interesting car ride with Dylan and John Lennon, both of whom appear to be smashed, although John clearly handles the condition better. But most importantly we get to lay back shaking in awe of two live versions of "Ballad of a Thin Man," the second of which is so vituperative you'd swear the singer had swallowed a bayonet. For the duration of that performance, it is possible to forgive Bob Dylan anything, including the remainder of the movie, which has a running time of 54 minutes but which is nevertheless otherwise interminable.
Some genius at ABC-TV had encouraged the film's production, thinking the network might turn a handy dollar or two on the free-spending youth market. I am certainly not the first person to wonder if the entire cinematic enterprise were intended to be so bad that ABC would reject it--as they in fact did. The best arguments against that theory are
(a) Dylan did choose to release the bugger, and
(b) artists are driven more by ego than by any other thing.
It's entirely possible Bob thought this film was a major statement. After all, he did write the book Tarantula.
Some of the lessons of the 1960s spoke to the dangers of over-indulgence, in one sense meaning that the human form is not invincible, as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Keith Moon, among others, can attest. In another sense, though, an over-abundance of self-indulgence can be nearly as lethal as a speed ball overdose. This film and its many cousins of that period are visual records of just how deadly dull ego-centrism can be when it's given no guidance whatsoever, unless chemicals count.
A lot of people called the 1966 concerts "The Judas tour," referring to an audience member who shouted that epithet at the stage. Dylan shouts back, "Aw, it's not that bad." Except for the aforementioned song, it actually is.
One thing must be admitted: The film features Dylan at his best looking and at one of the peaks of his artistic talent. This is the period of his three greatest recordings (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde) and his most artistically successful work. The concert tour took place shortly before Bobby wrecked his motorcycle, an event which laid him up for a spell and kept him off the stage, although not away from music. Somehow or other he got it in his head that it would be nice to edit the film himself, a statement of fact causing more than one person to wonder what horrors were contained in the outtakes. Because Dylan did have an astute awareness of the power of film--having grown up on Elvis movies and having been a grown-up at the time of A Hard Day's Night--he knew just enough, as they say, to be dangerous. The film takes about ten minutes to move beyond scenes from a van of the English countryside, scenes which probably meant a lot to the farmers and shepherds but not to anyone else. This is quite simply one of the sloppiest, most literally unfocused films ever involving a major star.
And yet. . .
We get to see and hear four-fifths of the group that would soon become The Band. We get to see and hear Dylan sing a proud and intimate duet with Johnny Cash. We get to endure a tedious yet occasionally interesting car ride with Dylan and John Lennon, both of whom appear to be smashed, although John clearly handles the condition better. But most importantly we get to lay back shaking in awe of two live versions of "Ballad of a Thin Man," the second of which is so vituperative you'd swear the singer had swallowed a bayonet. For the duration of that performance, it is possible to forgive Bob Dylan anything, including the remainder of the movie, which has a running time of 54 minutes but which is nevertheless otherwise interminable.
Some genius at ABC-TV had encouraged the film's production, thinking the network might turn a handy dollar or two on the free-spending youth market. I am certainly not the first person to wonder if the entire cinematic enterprise were intended to be so bad that ABC would reject it--as they in fact did. The best arguments against that theory are
(a) Dylan did choose to release the bugger, and
(b) artists are driven more by ego than by any other thing.
It's entirely possible Bob thought this film was a major statement. After all, he did write the book Tarantula.
Some of the lessons of the 1960s spoke to the dangers of over-indulgence, in one sense meaning that the human form is not invincible, as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Keith Moon, among others, can attest. In another sense, though, an over-abundance of self-indulgence can be nearly as lethal as a speed ball overdose. This film and its many cousins of that period are visual records of just how deadly dull ego-centrism can be when it's given no guidance whatsoever, unless chemicals count.
A lot of people called the 1966 concerts "The Judas tour," referring to an audience member who shouted that epithet at the stage. Dylan shouts back, "Aw, it's not that bad." Except for the aforementioned song, it actually is.
Get Carter
There are those who will tell you that Get Carter ranks as one of the worst films ever made, by which they mean the 1971 Mike Hodges original rather than the 2000 Sylvester Stallone remake, in which case, if those folks who say it were talking about the latter they might actually have a point. The original, however, is very much something else again and should not be missed, even if the story-line does leave the novice wondering what the bleeding hell is going on.
What is going on is that Michael Caine proves himself to be one of the world's finest actors. If one of the reasons you go to movies is to witness great acting, then you've been disappointed of late. But if that is one of the reasons, Get Carter will win you over immediately. Notice how Caine casts his glance at the telephone when the other party has hung up. Notice how he stares at one woman while seducing another over the phone. Notice the title of the book he's reading on the train reinforces our misperception of his character's real occupation.
It's a brilliant film that several folks thought was immoral and they thought this primarily because of the convincing performance Caine delivers. If Caine had sucked in it the way Stallone did in the remake, no one would have cared that a bad guy appeared to be getting glorified. In other words, forget Alfie and even forget Dressed to Kill. Get Carterinstead. You won't like it, but you will love it.
Why will you love it and how can I know? Aside from exploiting the audience's preconceived notions that Jack Carter is a P.I.--which he isn't--the film makes great use of low angle shots from what feels like beneath the floor and even gives a sense of the English town of Newcastle grit that I'm willing to bet didn't make it into the Chamber of Commerce brochures. Oh, yes, and Britt Ekland appears in the film as Anna, Carter's neice. She's quite young and either vulnerable or tough as nails--it's hard to say which.
There's a part of me that hopes this film is your first exposure to Mr. Caine, unlikely as that may be. If it is, everything else you see him in will be measured against this performance, one of his very best, which is to say, one of the best of anyone.
What is going on is that Michael Caine proves himself to be one of the world's finest actors. If one of the reasons you go to movies is to witness great acting, then you've been disappointed of late. But if that is one of the reasons, Get Carter will win you over immediately. Notice how Caine casts his glance at the telephone when the other party has hung up. Notice how he stares at one woman while seducing another over the phone. Notice the title of the book he's reading on the train reinforces our misperception of his character's real occupation.
It's a brilliant film that several folks thought was immoral and they thought this primarily because of the convincing performance Caine delivers. If Caine had sucked in it the way Stallone did in the remake, no one would have cared that a bad guy appeared to be getting glorified. In other words, forget Alfie and even forget Dressed to Kill. Get Carterinstead. You won't like it, but you will love it.
Why will you love it and how can I know? Aside from exploiting the audience's preconceived notions that Jack Carter is a P.I.--which he isn't--the film makes great use of low angle shots from what feels like beneath the floor and even gives a sense of the English town of Newcastle grit that I'm willing to bet didn't make it into the Chamber of Commerce brochures. Oh, yes, and Britt Ekland appears in the film as Anna, Carter's neice. She's quite young and either vulnerable or tough as nails--it's hard to say which.
There's a part of me that hopes this film is your first exposure to Mr. Caine, unlikely as that may be. If it is, everything else you see him in will be measured against this performance, one of his very best, which is to say, one of the best of anyone.
Little Murders
You may know the name Jules Feiffer from his comics, his books, or his script for the film Carnal Knowledge. It would be appropriate that you know him for these things and so I hope you do, although it is for a play he wrote and the movie it later became that I wish to draw your attention, the name of that being none other than Little Murders, a title you may not find all that captivating but one which I trust you will recall because it refers to one of the great motion pictures of the early 1970s and it is unquestionably one of the prime reasons this blog has been dedicated of late to making mention of this wonderful period of film making.
You can take your Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and even your Samuel Beckett and I will still stand by Jules Feiffer as the preeminent absurdist playwright of our era based on the power of Little Murders, a power which the passage of time has only served to intensify. Released in 1971 and based on the 1967 play of the same name, this movie knocks you down from the first frame and never lets up. From a recurring obscene phone caller to the eloquent brutality of lines delivered by Elliott Gould, Marcia Rudd and Vincent Gardena, from the silent commentary direction of Alan Arkin to the stammering soliloquy of the same Arkin, as well as a thoroughly brain-busting performance by Donald Sutherland as a minister, this movie is absurd for reasons other than for the sake of absurdity, which is usually good enough. The insanity of our own existences has left us unable to perceive their ridiculous essences and so this motion picture would have had to create Jules Feiffer if he hadn't created it first.
Elliott Gould was the only actor from the original Broadway play to make the transition to the film and watching him here shows the wisdom of that decision. He enriches every line--even the ones that seem to be throwaways, like "I'm not a good debater," with amazing strength that draws in the audience's empathetic tendencies, especially when Marcia Rudd tells him she married him so she could change him and mold him.
I realize that certain schizophrenics out there more married to exactness than creativity will take issue with me calling this film absurdist. I don't care. Those who do take such issue are probably accustomed to being wrong. Little Murders is absurdist specifically because it takes the internal logic of human beings and exposes that for the emotionally-based cowardice that it usually is fronting for. I guarantee you this: After watching this movie, you will experience the world in which you most likely vegetate in an entirely different way. About how many of today's films can you say that? Imagine getting changed--or even excited--by Avatar or Sherlock fucking Holmes! That is why all blockbusters and/or star-infested films are de facto bullshit scum slime, including several that I actually enjoy. They do not try to change you, they do not want to change you, and they indeed do not change you. I want to emerge from the cinema a screaming psychopath, a raving beast who for the first time in his stinking miserable pot-piss of a life actually sees things for the way they are. Fuck movies! Any imbecile can make a fucking film. When you make something that alters the way we look at everything else, then, my sons and daughters, you have genuinely accomplished something worth talking about. Jules Feiffer did that with Carnal Knowledge (and despite Mike Nichols). He did it with Little Murders with the help of Alan Arkin. Buy it, download it, steal it. I don't care how you acquire it. Just do it. You can thank me later.
Elliott Gould was the only actor from the original Broadway play to make the transition to the film and watching him here shows the wisdom of that decision. He enriches every line--even the ones that seem to be throwaways, like "I'm not a good debater," with amazing strength that draws in the audience's empathetic tendencies, especially when Marcia Rudd tells him she married him so she could change him and mold him.
I realize that certain schizophrenics out there more married to exactness than creativity will take issue with me calling this film absurdist. I don't care. Those who do take such issue are probably accustomed to being wrong. Little Murders is absurdist specifically because it takes the internal logic of human beings and exposes that for the emotionally-based cowardice that it usually is fronting for. I guarantee you this: After watching this movie, you will experience the world in which you most likely vegetate in an entirely different way. About how many of today's films can you say that? Imagine getting changed--or even excited--by Avatar or Sherlock fucking Holmes! That is why all blockbusters and/or star-infested films are de facto bullshit scum slime, including several that I actually enjoy. They do not try to change you, they do not want to change you, and they indeed do not change you. I want to emerge from the cinema a screaming psychopath, a raving beast who for the first time in his stinking miserable pot-piss of a life actually sees things for the way they are. Fuck movies! Any imbecile can make a fucking film. When you make something that alters the way we look at everything else, then, my sons and daughters, you have genuinely accomplished something worth talking about. Jules Feiffer did that with Carnal Knowledge (and despite Mike Nichols). He did it with Little Murders with the help of Alan Arkin. Buy it, download it, steal it. I don't care how you acquire it. Just do it. You can thank me later.
A New Leaf
One of the things I've intended to do with this site is to write about the brilliant person known as Elaine May. People of a certain age may have first become aware of her tremendous talents when she was paired with another future writer-director, a fellow named Mike Nichols. Back then the comedy-duo were known as Nichols and May. Rather than tell jokes, they performed sketches of life's more awkward moments. They were amazing.
Since her "solo" career began in the mid-1960s, she has worked as an actor, a writer and a director, some of her finer credits being having written the screenplay for the remake of Heaven Can Wait, her work on the script for Reds, and her writing for The Birdcage and Primary Colors. Her low point, and it was pretty low, was her involvement in Ishtar, about which the less said the better.
One of the best things she ever did--and one that people sometimes forget--is her writing and acting credit on a fantastic little gem of a film that came out in 1971. The film, A New Leaf, starred herself and Walter Matthau. Mathhau plays Henry, a pseudo-aristocrat who has squandered his wealth. May plays Henrietta, a smart and clumsy woman who has more wealth than she can spare and a great deal of bookish interests which she yearns to share. The genius of the movie--aside from the stark and gorgeous acting of the two leads--is how Elaine wrote the scenes so that the inner workings of both leads' characters seep out so slowly that we hardly realize it has happened.
What with Henry's despicable personal history, his horrible haircut and his ugly double-breasted suits, he is primed to be roundly despised by the audience. The only reason he is not is because he comes to Henrietta's psychological defense even as he is planning to manipulate her into a marriage that will presumably rescue him from his financial woes. May plays the struggling klutz with brains to absolute perfection just as Matthau plays the worthwhile cad. The denouement works but doesn't annoy or surprise (as often happens in screen comedies) because it is thoroughly uncontrived. Everyone in this film is stellar, including a young Doris Roberts, a woman who acted in many of the early-seventies smashes we've been discussing lately.
Since her "solo" career began in the mid-1960s, she has worked as an actor, a writer and a director, some of her finer credits being having written the screenplay for the remake of Heaven Can Wait, her work on the script for Reds, and her writing for The Birdcage and Primary Colors. Her low point, and it was pretty low, was her involvement in Ishtar, about which the less said the better.
One of the best things she ever did--and one that people sometimes forget--is her writing and acting credit on a fantastic little gem of a film that came out in 1971. The film, A New Leaf, starred herself and Walter Matthau. Mathhau plays Henry, a pseudo-aristocrat who has squandered his wealth. May plays Henrietta, a smart and clumsy woman who has more wealth than she can spare and a great deal of bookish interests which she yearns to share. The genius of the movie--aside from the stark and gorgeous acting of the two leads--is how Elaine wrote the scenes so that the inner workings of both leads' characters seep out so slowly that we hardly realize it has happened.
What with Henry's despicable personal history, his horrible haircut and his ugly double-breasted suits, he is primed to be roundly despised by the audience. The only reason he is not is because he comes to Henrietta's psychological defense even as he is planning to manipulate her into a marriage that will presumably rescue him from his financial woes. May plays the struggling klutz with brains to absolute perfection just as Matthau plays the worthwhile cad. The denouement works but doesn't annoy or surprise (as often happens in screen comedies) because it is thoroughly uncontrived. Everyone in this film is stellar, including a young Doris Roberts, a woman who acted in many of the early-seventies smashes we've been discussing lately.
This story and the filmed visualization of it will stay with you for several days, tugging at you to want to watch it again, and that's a good reason to request the bloody thing to be issued on DVD. I've no idea how such a request is to be made, but I urge those of you who do know such matters to get on it right away. Elaine May is a national treasure, as much a bedrock of American comedy as Lily Tomlin and her acting blows the wind out of the sails of far lesser performers such as the truly vile Sarah Silverman. If you need a point of reverence, the genuine comedy of a show like "30 Rock" would be unimaginable without Elaine May having prepared the stages for it.
Bad Company
When I first saw Robert Benton's Bad Company way back in 1972, I was simultaneously mesmerized and offended. I was mesmerized by the story of a group of young males on the lam from Civil War-era conscription and by the sawed-off shimmer of Jeff Bridges' character Jake. What offended me then was the casual aspect of the barbarism as, for instance, when the group of young men and boys shoots a wild rabbit for food or when they slaver for a taste of poontang. Of course, I was quite young at the time and I suppose I was easily abused. These days the fight scenes and casual criminality wouldn't startle a five-year-old and I'm actually a little embarrassed by the prudish aspects of my own earlier response.
What has not changed is the open-eyed wonder of Bridges' acting, especially as it plays off against his foil, Drew, played by the underrated Barry Brown. One of the things that can draw in an audience to choose to identify with a less-than-heroic screen character is for the actor to reveal the rapid transition of the character's thoughts and feelings. Bridges own youthfulness in this regard is an asset. He doesn't mug for the camera and makes no effort to sweeten the performance or the role. His influence over the character of Drew, our narrator, builds with a clumsy determination until it explodes with the last three words of the film, words that stayed in my memory since that evening forty years earlier.
I have read that some people think Bad Company is a western. This fallacious conclusion is no doubt reached because the story takes place in 1863, because the characters are heading west, and because some of the young actors in the film are familiar from actual westerns of the period. But this motion picture is almost disparaged by that label. It's more of an old-style morality play, with the Civil War as metaphor for Vietnam and the deluge of racism and profanity nothing more than simple victors in a fight for survival.
The movie merits a cultural footnote for serving as the inspiration for the name of the rock group lead by Paul Rodgers.
What has not changed is the open-eyed wonder of Bridges' acting, especially as it plays off against his foil, Drew, played by the underrated Barry Brown. One of the things that can draw in an audience to choose to identify with a less-than-heroic screen character is for the actor to reveal the rapid transition of the character's thoughts and feelings. Bridges own youthfulness in this regard is an asset. He doesn't mug for the camera and makes no effort to sweeten the performance or the role. His influence over the character of Drew, our narrator, builds with a clumsy determination until it explodes with the last three words of the film, words that stayed in my memory since that evening forty years earlier.
I have read that some people think Bad Company is a western. This fallacious conclusion is no doubt reached because the story takes place in 1863, because the characters are heading west, and because some of the young actors in the film are familiar from actual westerns of the period. But this motion picture is almost disparaged by that label. It's more of an old-style morality play, with the Civil War as metaphor for Vietnam and the deluge of racism and profanity nothing more than simple victors in a fight for survival.
The movie merits a cultural footnote for serving as the inspiration for the name of the rock group lead by Paul Rodgers.
Boxcar Bertha
Here is the final paragraph of the review Roger Ebert wrote in 1972 after viewing the American International Picture Boxcar Bertha. "[Director Martin] Scorsese remains one of the bright young hopes of American movies. His brilliant first film won the 1968 Chicago Film Festival as I Call First and later played as Who's That Knocking at My Door? He was an assistant editor and director of Woodstock, and now, many frustrated projects later, here is his first conventional feature. He is good with actors, good with his camera and determined to take the grade-zilch exploitation film and bend it to his own vision. Within the limits of the film's possibilities, he has succeeded."
Well, hey, well, hey. Yummy kudos from Roger Ebert. When the Big Ebe calls you out as a rising star, you can best believe your time has come, my friend. Of course, it helps to have Roger and Julie Corman backing you with finance and a nonsense story about getting the rights to radical labor struggler Bertha Thompson's story through the closed door of a bag o' fleas hotel, even though the story had already been written by anarchist physician Ben Reitman. It also really helps to have an unknown but interesting David Carradine and an unknown but fascinating Barbara Hershey starring in your film. But mostly it helps to be a young Martin Scorsese.
Corman was the mastermind behind AIP's most interesting crime-violence films, of which Bloody Mama was perhaps one of the more inspired. Even though RC may have made shoot-outs and death scenes art fodder for the drive-in set, it was MS who made it into Art and it happened with Bertha.
This film radiates the way the street scenes in Taxi Driver did, with the neon signs dripping their colors all over the Great Depression train rides. The film includes a couple of racy sex scenes between Hershey as Bertha and Carradine as Big Bill Shelly, yet there is a degree of tenderness and even sensitivity to these scenes that was unlike anything in the traditionally exploitative American International canon.
In the film, a young Bertha loses her father to the bullying greed of a capitalist exploiter. No one comes right out and tells us that this is the impetus for her life of crime, and indeed little mention is made of the event of her dad's passing. Big Bill and his African American friend Vox team up with Bertha and Rake (the world's worst gambler) to punish the railroad owner (played by father John Carradine), Bill constantly reminding all his robbery victims that he is not a criminal; he's a union organizer.
The story itself is highly fictionalized and probably even based on a compound of characters, but that matters very little. Scorsese gets the details exactly right, with even the music serving to carry along the camera from one adventure to the next.
Well, hey, well, hey. Yummy kudos from Roger Ebert. When the Big Ebe calls you out as a rising star, you can best believe your time has come, my friend. Of course, it helps to have Roger and Julie Corman backing you with finance and a nonsense story about getting the rights to radical labor struggler Bertha Thompson's story through the closed door of a bag o' fleas hotel, even though the story had already been written by anarchist physician Ben Reitman. It also really helps to have an unknown but interesting David Carradine and an unknown but fascinating Barbara Hershey starring in your film. But mostly it helps to be a young Martin Scorsese.
Corman was the mastermind behind AIP's most interesting crime-violence films, of which Bloody Mama was perhaps one of the more inspired. Even though RC may have made shoot-outs and death scenes art fodder for the drive-in set, it was MS who made it into Art and it happened with Bertha.
This film radiates the way the street scenes in Taxi Driver did, with the neon signs dripping their colors all over the Great Depression train rides. The film includes a couple of racy sex scenes between Hershey as Bertha and Carradine as Big Bill Shelly, yet there is a degree of tenderness and even sensitivity to these scenes that was unlike anything in the traditionally exploitative American International canon.
In the film, a young Bertha loses her father to the bullying greed of a capitalist exploiter. No one comes right out and tells us that this is the impetus for her life of crime, and indeed little mention is made of the event of her dad's passing. Big Bill and his African American friend Vox team up with Bertha and Rake (the world's worst gambler) to punish the railroad owner (played by father John Carradine), Bill constantly reminding all his robbery victims that he is not a criminal; he's a union organizer.
The story itself is highly fictionalized and probably even based on a compound of characters, but that matters very little. Scorsese gets the details exactly right, with even the music serving to carry along the camera from one adventure to the next.
I will tell you that even now, forty years after its initial release, the last ten minutes of the film are hard to take sitting down. All the same, the film does what few other movies--very few--had then managed with any degree of success. Boxcar Bertha aims reasoned reaction to the idea that the guys in white hats are necessarily the good guys. Of course, the early 1970s drive-in audience that flocked to AIP's movies already understood that and understood it well. Any high school greaser who'd ever been bullied by his principal, any rocker who'd been ridiculed by his relatives, any protester who'd been clubbed by the police, any girl who'd been pawed by her teachers, any black people who'd ever walked out their front doors--in short, everyone who was lined up to slurp down a bottle of Coke and a flask of rum at the Star-View Drive-In knew the self-righteous twinkle in the eye of the man holding the whip and each of us wanted not so much revenge as expiation and validation.
Look for the director making a cameo near the end of Bertha's scene in the bordello.
This remains a good story, well told.
Look for the director making a cameo near the end of Bertha's scene in the bordello.
This remains a good story, well told.
The Tenant
Roman Polanski directed, wrote and/or starred in some of the most enjoyable films of the last sixty years, including Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Tess, Frantic, The Ninth Gate, The Pianist, and The Ghost Writer. Apartment life, demonology and stress are among his recurring themes. Often his films stand out for their playfulness, in the sense that a big toe on a small foot is playful. In his 1976 movie The Tenant, his playfulness doubles back on itself and ends up kicking the audience into mesmerizing terror.
Polanksi remains uncredited in the starring role of Trelkovsky, a Polish work-visa emigre living in Paris. While we never quite learn Trelkovsky's job, we see that it attracts a boorish bunch, including one lout who takes pleasure in playing bad music at all hours simply to annoy the sick woman who lives upstairs. And speaking of noise, the Egyptologist Simone Choule, the previous tenant in Trelkovsky's digs, must have made quite the crescendo as she fell from the apartment window and crashed through glass onto the sidewalk below. Even as Trelkovsky moves in, he begins a strange consumption with the story of Simone, despite not knowing her. He visits her in the hospital primarily to make sure that she will in fact die from her injuries in order that he may secure her apartment for himself. At the hospital he meets Stella, a friend of Simone. He tells her he knows Simone because that feels more proper than admitting he is ghoulishly waiting out her demise. He and Stella experience a quick and recurring fling, through which we learn that Simone was either a lesbian or, more likely, a man who dressed and lived as a woman.
Immediately the people the new tenant meets begin trying to fit him into the mold already established by Simone, including bringing him the same drink in the cafe, converting him to her brand of cigarettes, and even giving him a kiss from an intoxicated admirer who shows up to court Simone the day after she has died.
To reveal more of the story would be to risk spoiling it and this movie has some serious surprises, including an ending that will make a point of messing you up.
Although many people consider The Tenant to be a grand artistic success, there is nothing about the direction or cinematography in this film that jumps up and grabs or slithers out and gnaws at us. The best reason to watch the film again after all this time is because Polanski proves himself possessed of considerable theatrical charm, as well as being an actor capable of tremendous understated humor and thoroughly convincing nervousness. In one memorable scene in his freshly-rented apartment, Polanksi discovers a neighbor from upstairs complaining to him about the noise his boorish guests are making. The actor's character responds by blending magnanimous charm and paranoia into his reaction. He wants to maintain the good will of his coworkers and yet is desperate to avoid annoying the landlord. About a million screwed up ways exist to poorly communicate this unease. Polanksi selects the one appropriate style.
Another acting phenomenon in The Tenant is Shelley Winters, a woman who by this time had already won and earned two Academy Awards for Acting, the first in 1960 for The Diary of Anne Frank and the second in 1966 for A Patch of Blue, a woman who made significant contributions to Lolita, The Night of the Hunter, A Place in the Sun, andI Am a Camera, a woman who had, over the years, been reduced to playing a villain in the TV show "Batman," to starring in the Roger Corman film Bloody Mama --in the former she played Ma Parker and in the latter Ma Barker--to a great performance in a shit movie called The Poseidon Adventure. Shelley Winters takes the role of the concierge and makes it into the ambiguously sinister role of a lifetime. Is she a scheming, plotting, ambitious bitch or simply a tired, unfeeling crone with a fondness for the gruesome elements of life? This was her last truly great performance and she played it as if every second counted, which of course it does.
The film is not perfect. For instance, the title character's paranoia comes from an unexamined place, one which some clues materialize to inform, but none of which hang all that well together. To an extent, the motivation for the paranoia doesn't matter because we are all so caught up in the behavior of the actors on the screen. But again, it is the ambiguity that helps propel us ass over teakettle right alongside Polanski as he causes us to wonder if he might be the man the people in his office speak about from a newspaper article, if he might indeed have a connection to Simone that spills over into one of lifestyle (which might well explain his paranoia, given the crowd he attracts), or if people actually are messing with him about the noises coming from his apartment or if instead he is making those noises and he just doesn't remember doing it. Even the presumed flaws in the film project a strong sense of suspense that lingers beyond the swinging doors of the theatre.
And besides, Bruce Lee makes an appearance.
Polanksi remains uncredited in the starring role of Trelkovsky, a Polish work-visa emigre living in Paris. While we never quite learn Trelkovsky's job, we see that it attracts a boorish bunch, including one lout who takes pleasure in playing bad music at all hours simply to annoy the sick woman who lives upstairs. And speaking of noise, the Egyptologist Simone Choule, the previous tenant in Trelkovsky's digs, must have made quite the crescendo as she fell from the apartment window and crashed through glass onto the sidewalk below. Even as Trelkovsky moves in, he begins a strange consumption with the story of Simone, despite not knowing her. He visits her in the hospital primarily to make sure that she will in fact die from her injuries in order that he may secure her apartment for himself. At the hospital he meets Stella, a friend of Simone. He tells her he knows Simone because that feels more proper than admitting he is ghoulishly waiting out her demise. He and Stella experience a quick and recurring fling, through which we learn that Simone was either a lesbian or, more likely, a man who dressed and lived as a woman.
Immediately the people the new tenant meets begin trying to fit him into the mold already established by Simone, including bringing him the same drink in the cafe, converting him to her brand of cigarettes, and even giving him a kiss from an intoxicated admirer who shows up to court Simone the day after she has died.
To reveal more of the story would be to risk spoiling it and this movie has some serious surprises, including an ending that will make a point of messing you up.
Although many people consider The Tenant to be a grand artistic success, there is nothing about the direction or cinematography in this film that jumps up and grabs or slithers out and gnaws at us. The best reason to watch the film again after all this time is because Polanski proves himself possessed of considerable theatrical charm, as well as being an actor capable of tremendous understated humor and thoroughly convincing nervousness. In one memorable scene in his freshly-rented apartment, Polanksi discovers a neighbor from upstairs complaining to him about the noise his boorish guests are making. The actor's character responds by blending magnanimous charm and paranoia into his reaction. He wants to maintain the good will of his coworkers and yet is desperate to avoid annoying the landlord. About a million screwed up ways exist to poorly communicate this unease. Polanksi selects the one appropriate style.
Another acting phenomenon in The Tenant is Shelley Winters, a woman who by this time had already won and earned two Academy Awards for Acting, the first in 1960 for The Diary of Anne Frank and the second in 1966 for A Patch of Blue, a woman who made significant contributions to Lolita, The Night of the Hunter, A Place in the Sun, andI Am a Camera, a woman who had, over the years, been reduced to playing a villain in the TV show "Batman," to starring in the Roger Corman film Bloody Mama --in the former she played Ma Parker and in the latter Ma Barker--to a great performance in a shit movie called The Poseidon Adventure. Shelley Winters takes the role of the concierge and makes it into the ambiguously sinister role of a lifetime. Is she a scheming, plotting, ambitious bitch or simply a tired, unfeeling crone with a fondness for the gruesome elements of life? This was her last truly great performance and she played it as if every second counted, which of course it does.
The film is not perfect. For instance, the title character's paranoia comes from an unexamined place, one which some clues materialize to inform, but none of which hang all that well together. To an extent, the motivation for the paranoia doesn't matter because we are all so caught up in the behavior of the actors on the screen. But again, it is the ambiguity that helps propel us ass over teakettle right alongside Polanski as he causes us to wonder if he might be the man the people in his office speak about from a newspaper article, if he might indeed have a connection to Simone that spills over into one of lifestyle (which might well explain his paranoia, given the crowd he attracts), or if people actually are messing with him about the noises coming from his apartment or if instead he is making those noises and he just doesn't remember doing it. Even the presumed flaws in the film project a strong sense of suspense that lingers beyond the swinging doors of the theatre.
And besides, Bruce Lee makes an appearance.
Bed and Board
Everyone else is an expert on director Francois Truffaut. All I know from the point of view of an expert is that what was once light may one day be weighty. In other words, there is more than one way to defy gravity.
Everyone else memorized the script from The 400 Blows, the first new wave French film, the movie that introduced the world to Antoine Doinel, the Truffaut-like character who carries on through Stolen Kissesand into Bed and Board, wrapping up in Love on the Run. Everyone, in short, knew the whole story before I ever thought about it and that may put me at a disadvantage when dealing with one of the world's best directors. On the other hand, if ignorance is really bliss, why don't I care about not finding my umbrella? Hell, I didn't even know who Francois Truffaut was until I saw him acting as the scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Of course, that was back in 1977.
Unlike everyone else in the world, I like a good movie, a designation based on the criteria of innovative and either pleasing or distressing cinematography, the existence of a storyline that I cannot figure out right away or else no storyline at all, characterization that intrigues or alienates, and either brilliant acting or something so weird that I might not even describe it as acting.
With those criteria in play, at least approximately, then Bed and Board is a first-rate film, one that features Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) evolving from teenage games of thievery and hide-the-snake into young adulthood, marriage and the demands of social responsibility, none of which include a fling with an attractive Asian woman. Either this interests you or it doesn't. What interests me in this movie is the beauty of the camera-work. Maybe a favorite moment would be near the opening when Christine (Claude Jade) is filmed at leg-level, insisting that everyone address her as "Madame," to acknowledge her matrimony. Maybe a favorite is the night blue of the in-laws' house. Most likely, however, it is the shot of Christine indicating to Antoine that she has learned of his affair. He didn't see that one coming and neither did anybody else.
Bed and Board stands alone satisfactorily and sheds some nice insight into the autobio of the director. But unless you are a film student or want to bed someone who is, you might do better to download Jules et Jim instead.
Everyone else memorized the script from The 400 Blows, the first new wave French film, the movie that introduced the world to Antoine Doinel, the Truffaut-like character who carries on through Stolen Kissesand into Bed and Board, wrapping up in Love on the Run. Everyone, in short, knew the whole story before I ever thought about it and that may put me at a disadvantage when dealing with one of the world's best directors. On the other hand, if ignorance is really bliss, why don't I care about not finding my umbrella? Hell, I didn't even know who Francois Truffaut was until I saw him acting as the scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Of course, that was back in 1977.
Unlike everyone else in the world, I like a good movie, a designation based on the criteria of innovative and either pleasing or distressing cinematography, the existence of a storyline that I cannot figure out right away or else no storyline at all, characterization that intrigues or alienates, and either brilliant acting or something so weird that I might not even describe it as acting.
With those criteria in play, at least approximately, then Bed and Board is a first-rate film, one that features Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) evolving from teenage games of thievery and hide-the-snake into young adulthood, marriage and the demands of social responsibility, none of which include a fling with an attractive Asian woman. Either this interests you or it doesn't. What interests me in this movie is the beauty of the camera-work. Maybe a favorite moment would be near the opening when Christine (Claude Jade) is filmed at leg-level, insisting that everyone address her as "Madame," to acknowledge her matrimony. Maybe a favorite is the night blue of the in-laws' house. Most likely, however, it is the shot of Christine indicating to Antoine that she has learned of his affair. He didn't see that one coming and neither did anybody else.
Bed and Board stands alone satisfactorily and sheds some nice insight into the autobio of the director. But unless you are a film student or want to bed someone who is, you might do better to download Jules et Jim instead.
The Butcher
As with Bed and Board, The Butcher, or Le Boucher, is also from 1970, and also from France. Director Claude Chabrol wows us with his French-language thriller that regrettably couples male chauvinism with the concept of psychoanalytic liberation.
Stephane Audran plays Helen, a self-repressed village schoolteacher who meets Paul, played by Jean Yanne, at a colleague's wedding. Paul obsesses over his fifteen years of war experience and contemporary labor in the butcher shop just as Helen obsesses about not giving her physical body to Paul, although she does give him a cigarette lighter, a prop used to considerable symbolic devices. The movie suggests that a series of nonsexual murders of young girls are somehow connected to the teacher's unwillingness to make love with the butcher. Once he confesses to Helen, Paul does the noble thing and stabs himself.
This feels relatively hideous as the concept for a film and yet the damned thing is not without its charm. Once again the acting is first-rate and even such harsh concepts as those mentioned above are handled deftly and not without thought to Helen's feelings. All in all, though, the movie is a thematic throwback, just as the Cro-Magnons the children discuss are throw-backs, just as Paul the butcher is.
Stephane Audran plays Helen, a self-repressed village schoolteacher who meets Paul, played by Jean Yanne, at a colleague's wedding. Paul obsesses over his fifteen years of war experience and contemporary labor in the butcher shop just as Helen obsesses about not giving her physical body to Paul, although she does give him a cigarette lighter, a prop used to considerable symbolic devices. The movie suggests that a series of nonsexual murders of young girls are somehow connected to the teacher's unwillingness to make love with the butcher. Once he confesses to Helen, Paul does the noble thing and stabs himself.
This feels relatively hideous as the concept for a film and yet the damned thing is not without its charm. Once again the acting is first-rate and even such harsh concepts as those mentioned above are handled deftly and not without thought to Helen's feelings. All in all, though, the movie is a thematic throwback, just as the Cro-Magnons the children discuss are throw-backs, just as Paul the butcher is.
Claire's Knee
From the instant we see Jermone, the middle-aged diplomat, we feel certain he will get himself into trouble. Indeed, we meet him in the arms of Aurora, an Italian novelist spending her time as a half-assed housekeeper for some bourgeois multiple-divorced woman with two teenage daughters, Laura and Claire. (Just reading back over that description, I discover that the premise already sounds like a tawdry porno flick with pretensions of art.)
There is nothing phony or convoluted, much less pornographic, about Claire's Knee. This is, in fact, one of the most touching unsentimental films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. Granted, Jean-Claude Brialy, as Jerome, over-intellectualizes the vicissitudes of love, as does Aurora Cornu, who plays the novelist, as does Beatrice Romand, the actor who plays sixteen-year-old Laura, daughter of Madame Walter (Michele Montel). Hell, the only person in the entire movie who simply accepts things and plays any importance at all on the magic of experience is the attractive older teenage daughter Claire. Despite the physical beauty of Laurence de Monaghan in the role of the owner of the knee in question throughout much of this movie, she is ultimately interesting only for her simpleness, her acceptance of everything she is told, and her discovery of an ability she does not fully understand when it comes to controlling men.
Even though director and writer Eric Rohmer indulges bourgeois luxuries such as motor-boating on the most beautiful lake I've ever seen in a film, Lake Acceny, which floats between France and Switzerland, you can forgive him damned near anything because of the way he structures the dialogue so that talking actually narrates the film, normally a fatal flaw but here a remarkable achievement.
So, as I said, we expect Jerome to get into trouble. He admits to being engaged to a mysterious Lucinde, a woman we only meet via a photograph he casually flaunts (Wonder if she's real?), and yet is quite flirty with Aurora, the dominatrix-style author who is not content to experiment with the lives of her fictional characters but even has to play her games with her closest friends, an elitist diversion and an intriguing one. When she observes that Laura has a crush on Jerome, she tells him to pursue it. He claims he will do it only for the intellectual satisfaction but we may be forgiven for suspecting that what he is actually pursuing is a validation that he can still turn heads at age thirty-five. Although the playfulness of Jerome and Laura makes us initially uncomfortable, things never get amorous between them and we cannot help but admit that they do get on well together.
Whereas Laura's intelligence transforms otherwise modest features into mysterious beauties, Claire has no personal depth at all, other than her intellectual vulnerability. Evidently, being longed for by the smart daughter is somehow insufficient; Jerome the professional diplomat needs the ability to make a conquest of Claire without actually acting on it. And that--at long last--is why this is a supremely moral movie. Oh, yes, we saw something a bit similar in American Beauty where Lester Burnham/Kevin Spacey gets the young girl and then pulls away instead of consummating.
I have not chosen the term "moral" without cause. Claire's Knee is fifth in a series of "six moral tales" Rohmer created over a span of ten years. I'll admit straight up I've not seen any of the other five (which, for the benefit of purists, are The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne's Career, The Collector, My Night at Maud's, and Chloe in the Afternoon), and it is possible I never will simply because I'd hate to be wrong about the director's intention here. I think he actually is Aurora in the sense of moving characters around just to see how they behave, perhaps tipping his own hand by tempting them to behave well rather than badly. Yet there is nothing even remotely quaint in the presentation. We are pulling for Jerome to stay strong, not so much because we like him, although eventually that becomes easier than in the beginning, but rather because we don't want Lucinde--who we never meet--to be betrayed! Lucinde! The woman with the severe haircut, the fiance who may not even exist!
Ah, it's a bloody great film and I can't urge you enough to see it. Hey, Siskel (remember him?) and Ebert had it near the top of their own lists for 1970. That doesn't mean you have to do the same. Just watch the first ten minutes, though, and you'll be hooked.
There is nothing phony or convoluted, much less pornographic, about Claire's Knee. This is, in fact, one of the most touching unsentimental films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. Granted, Jean-Claude Brialy, as Jerome, over-intellectualizes the vicissitudes of love, as does Aurora Cornu, who plays the novelist, as does Beatrice Romand, the actor who plays sixteen-year-old Laura, daughter of Madame Walter (Michele Montel). Hell, the only person in the entire movie who simply accepts things and plays any importance at all on the magic of experience is the attractive older teenage daughter Claire. Despite the physical beauty of Laurence de Monaghan in the role of the owner of the knee in question throughout much of this movie, she is ultimately interesting only for her simpleness, her acceptance of everything she is told, and her discovery of an ability she does not fully understand when it comes to controlling men.
Even though director and writer Eric Rohmer indulges bourgeois luxuries such as motor-boating on the most beautiful lake I've ever seen in a film, Lake Acceny, which floats between France and Switzerland, you can forgive him damned near anything because of the way he structures the dialogue so that talking actually narrates the film, normally a fatal flaw but here a remarkable achievement.
So, as I said, we expect Jerome to get into trouble. He admits to being engaged to a mysterious Lucinde, a woman we only meet via a photograph he casually flaunts (Wonder if she's real?), and yet is quite flirty with Aurora, the dominatrix-style author who is not content to experiment with the lives of her fictional characters but even has to play her games with her closest friends, an elitist diversion and an intriguing one. When she observes that Laura has a crush on Jerome, she tells him to pursue it. He claims he will do it only for the intellectual satisfaction but we may be forgiven for suspecting that what he is actually pursuing is a validation that he can still turn heads at age thirty-five. Although the playfulness of Jerome and Laura makes us initially uncomfortable, things never get amorous between them and we cannot help but admit that they do get on well together.
Whereas Laura's intelligence transforms otherwise modest features into mysterious beauties, Claire has no personal depth at all, other than her intellectual vulnerability. Evidently, being longed for by the smart daughter is somehow insufficient; Jerome the professional diplomat needs the ability to make a conquest of Claire without actually acting on it. And that--at long last--is why this is a supremely moral movie. Oh, yes, we saw something a bit similar in American Beauty where Lester Burnham/Kevin Spacey gets the young girl and then pulls away instead of consummating.
I have not chosen the term "moral" without cause. Claire's Knee is fifth in a series of "six moral tales" Rohmer created over a span of ten years. I'll admit straight up I've not seen any of the other five (which, for the benefit of purists, are The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne's Career, The Collector, My Night at Maud's, and Chloe in the Afternoon), and it is possible I never will simply because I'd hate to be wrong about the director's intention here. I think he actually is Aurora in the sense of moving characters around just to see how they behave, perhaps tipping his own hand by tempting them to behave well rather than badly. Yet there is nothing even remotely quaint in the presentation. We are pulling for Jerome to stay strong, not so much because we like him, although eventually that becomes easier than in the beginning, but rather because we don't want Lucinde--who we never meet--to be betrayed! Lucinde! The woman with the severe haircut, the fiance who may not even exist!
Ah, it's a bloody great film and I can't urge you enough to see it. Hey, Siskel (remember him?) and Ebert had it near the top of their own lists for 1970. That doesn't mean you have to do the same. Just watch the first ten minutes, though, and you'll be hooked.
King: A Filmed Record
Watching King: A Filmed Record. . . Montgomery to Memphis shakes the shell of the time machine, splintering all we know from all we believe, throwing levers and kicking dials until the space craft of our minds moans in silent voids of loneliness at just how strong and brave a figure walked among us not all that many years ago. History tells us that life equates to struggle, be it a struggle to oppress or a struggle to break free of oppression. It is on the latter side of that equation that the angels sit, staring on in horror at the taking of so resilient a life as that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Those familiar with the reasons behind the propriety of a national holiday celebrating the life of this man likely have heard or seen the Eugene "Bull" Connor stories about fire hoses and barking German shepherds, of clubs upside the head and jail cells cold and crowded. What may be most disturbing as it unfolds is that animosity King faced in Chicago in 1966. The writer Richard Wright talked about how Chicago was a hundred times more racist than any southern town because the south had to institutionalize their racism whereas in Chicago the evil buried itself into the skin of the people there. When you see the angry and scared whites with their Nazis memorabilia, you will believe Wright, just as you believe King.
Directed by Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz, King is composed of newsreel narration that begins in December 1955 and winds up in April 1968. A lot of period celebrities who lent their names and images to the civil rights movement narrate brief passages, at least in the full-length version of the film, the 180+ minute edition now available on DVD. But ultimately, this documentary comments upon itself, just as it testifies about all of us, black and white, good and bad, smart and stupid. Broken down into forty-five second sound bites for MLK Day telecasts, the significance of the message gets lost, leading young folks to perhaps question about what all the fuss was being raised. Look upon the windows with their signs. Look into the halls where restrooms segregated by race as well as by gender. Look into the eyes of Bull Connor as he tells the white citizens council that the police will take care of the problems for them. Most of all, stare at the face and feel the words of Martin Luther King Jr--not MLK; please, let's not further trivialize the man in our haste to be hasty--as he preaches that God has taken him to the mountain top and shown him the Promised Land. He may well have seen it. If anyone ever has, Martin would have been that man. The rest of us must endure the terrestrial elements, pedestrian and pointless as they often feel. Yet, now and again, we draw inspiration from one far better than the best of us. . . and we at last breathe together.
Those familiar with the reasons behind the propriety of a national holiday celebrating the life of this man likely have heard or seen the Eugene "Bull" Connor stories about fire hoses and barking German shepherds, of clubs upside the head and jail cells cold and crowded. What may be most disturbing as it unfolds is that animosity King faced in Chicago in 1966. The writer Richard Wright talked about how Chicago was a hundred times more racist than any southern town because the south had to institutionalize their racism whereas in Chicago the evil buried itself into the skin of the people there. When you see the angry and scared whites with their Nazis memorabilia, you will believe Wright, just as you believe King.
Directed by Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz, King is composed of newsreel narration that begins in December 1955 and winds up in April 1968. A lot of period celebrities who lent their names and images to the civil rights movement narrate brief passages, at least in the full-length version of the film, the 180+ minute edition now available on DVD. But ultimately, this documentary comments upon itself, just as it testifies about all of us, black and white, good and bad, smart and stupid. Broken down into forty-five second sound bites for MLK Day telecasts, the significance of the message gets lost, leading young folks to perhaps question about what all the fuss was being raised. Look upon the windows with their signs. Look into the halls where restrooms segregated by race as well as by gender. Look into the eyes of Bull Connor as he tells the white citizens council that the police will take care of the problems for them. Most of all, stare at the face and feel the words of Martin Luther King Jr--not MLK; please, let's not further trivialize the man in our haste to be hasty--as he preaches that God has taken him to the mountain top and shown him the Promised Land. He may well have seen it. If anyone ever has, Martin would have been that man. The rest of us must endure the terrestrial elements, pedestrian and pointless as they often feel. Yet, now and again, we draw inspiration from one far better than the best of us. . . and we at last breathe together.
The Landlord
Beau Bridges moves into Pearl Bailey's neighborhood in this 1970 movie by Hal Ashby, the director's first foray into film.
The idea of this often moving film is that we have a rich white guy named Elgar who thinks it would be fun to renovate the ghetto apartment building he just purchased and to transform it into a swinging pad for his own bad self, what with mom becoming something of a drag and don't even get me started about dad. He moves in and discovers that he rather likes these black individuals. They possess a sense of reality that his material word so obviously lacks.
I suppose this wouldn't be that much of a story were it not for the innovative way in which he transforms Kristin Hunter's novel. It's all about education in The Landlord and Ashby runs us through Ender's early schooling as well as the teaching of a Park Slope "professor." There's no sugar-coating here, no pretenses to enlightenment that isn't earned. Liberal guilt gets smacked around just as much as conservative hatred does and not everybody in the African American community is made out to be a saint. This is a real movie with real people and a real soundtrack courtesy of Al Kooper.
What I think is most fascinating is that Elgar falls for two women in the movie, both of whom are black, both of whom are outside his socio-economic range, and both of whom his mother is certain to dislike. Both women are beautiful and when one of the two becomes pregnant, Elgar comes close to getting his head crushed by an angry and potentially quite dangerous lover played by Lou Gossett. Miscegenation is a big concept in The Landlord, with a group of men at a party lecturing Elgar on how white men have gone out of their way to dilute the gene pool.
The idea of this often moving film is that we have a rich white guy named Elgar who thinks it would be fun to renovate the ghetto apartment building he just purchased and to transform it into a swinging pad for his own bad self, what with mom becoming something of a drag and don't even get me started about dad. He moves in and discovers that he rather likes these black individuals. They possess a sense of reality that his material word so obviously lacks.
I suppose this wouldn't be that much of a story were it not for the innovative way in which he transforms Kristin Hunter's novel. It's all about education in The Landlord and Ashby runs us through Ender's early schooling as well as the teaching of a Park Slope "professor." There's no sugar-coating here, no pretenses to enlightenment that isn't earned. Liberal guilt gets smacked around just as much as conservative hatred does and not everybody in the African American community is made out to be a saint. This is a real movie with real people and a real soundtrack courtesy of Al Kooper.
What I think is most fascinating is that Elgar falls for two women in the movie, both of whom are black, both of whom are outside his socio-economic range, and both of whom his mother is certain to dislike. Both women are beautiful and when one of the two becomes pregnant, Elgar comes close to getting his head crushed by an angry and potentially quite dangerous lover played by Lou Gossett. Miscegenation is a big concept in The Landlord, with a group of men at a party lecturing Elgar on how white men have gone out of their way to dilute the gene pool.
It really doesn't matter how comfortable a person thinks he is with the idea of race relations. Until you are sitting in a parked car at midnight outside a convenience store waiting until a group of guys decide to step out of your way so you don't run over them, wondering if they are just standing there to torment you--until your girlfriend squeezes your knee and begs you to get her the hell out of there--then you don't really know what your feelings about other people actually are. The Landlord is just like that. No matter how hip you think you are, no matter how enlightened and free, the fact is this movie will challenge you.
Oh, and it's very funny. If that matters.
Oh, and it's very funny. If that matters.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
By now most of us are familiar with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. You may not know that in 1970 a film adaptation of the book was released. Directed by Caspar Wrede and shot in northern Norway, the film was banned in Finland until 1993 for fear on the part of the Finnish government that the movie would hurt relations between Russia and Finland, this film sticks quite closely to the author's fictionalization of his own time as a prisoner in a Stalin-era Soviet gulag.
The movie is not much fun.
It is, however, excellent propaganda.
I avoided reading the book for years and avoided even more strenuously viewing the film, not because I didn't believe the author's narrative, but rather because I did believe it and suspected that if anything he might he downplayed certain matters. I resisted the book and film because I already understood that these two things would cause me to hate totalitarian systems even more than I already hate them and yet somehow that never stopped me from reading about the Nazis or watching movies about the Holocaust. So what exactly was my problem?
I'm on the left. There is no sense denying that.
What bothered me was being reminded that my pro-government, pro-bureaucracy, pro-collectivist proclivities could turn into the type of nightmare Wrede so magnificently conveys in the film. The things I believe in are not supposed to turn into bad dreams. And yet they unquestionably do, just about every day.
Mitt Romney was on camera a couple weeks ago, getting fresh with an Occupy supporter about how if the supporter didn't like things in the United States he was free to go live somewhere else and let us know how he liked it elsewhere. That made me mad and I fired off a letter to Romney that suggested he himself might enjoy spending this summer in an internment camp in Cuba. I have yet to hear back.
But I meant what I said, which is more than the presidential candidate can claim. The old saw about "love it or leave it" still burns, just as he knew it would, which is why he said it, which is why I responded, which is why I watched this film.
The reason utopias turn into dystopias is because dreams make lousy realities. When the Soviets declare that the sun is at its peak at 1pm rather than noon, Ivan wonders if the commissars can actually make that happen. Whenever any of my leftist friends (or myself) demand the overthrow of the capitalist economic system, we need to be prepared to defend the people involved in that overthrow from the smirking evil that lies behind the misery any economic system is capable of instilling, be it social democratic, communist, libertarian, or what have you, because once the real life nightmare takes hold, it does not allow you to wake up. The people in One Day in the Life do not look forward to the sunrise. One of them even looks forward to blizzards to avoid having to go out into the weather. In the film, if the temperature drops below forty degrees below zero, they do not have to go out. A man climbs the pole to see the temperature, reporting that it says only twenty-seven below. the other replies, "They's never but up a thermometer that told the truth."
Or you may recall the first sentence of Orwell's most famous novel, the one that begins with the clock striking thirteen. It's part of an old joke. What time is it when the clock strikes thirteen? It is time to get a new clock. Just make sure the new clock doesn't make a habit of striking fourteen.
The movie is not much fun.
It is, however, excellent propaganda.
I avoided reading the book for years and avoided even more strenuously viewing the film, not because I didn't believe the author's narrative, but rather because I did believe it and suspected that if anything he might he downplayed certain matters. I resisted the book and film because I already understood that these two things would cause me to hate totalitarian systems even more than I already hate them and yet somehow that never stopped me from reading about the Nazis or watching movies about the Holocaust. So what exactly was my problem?
I'm on the left. There is no sense denying that.
What bothered me was being reminded that my pro-government, pro-bureaucracy, pro-collectivist proclivities could turn into the type of nightmare Wrede so magnificently conveys in the film. The things I believe in are not supposed to turn into bad dreams. And yet they unquestionably do, just about every day.
Mitt Romney was on camera a couple weeks ago, getting fresh with an Occupy supporter about how if the supporter didn't like things in the United States he was free to go live somewhere else and let us know how he liked it elsewhere. That made me mad and I fired off a letter to Romney that suggested he himself might enjoy spending this summer in an internment camp in Cuba. I have yet to hear back.
But I meant what I said, which is more than the presidential candidate can claim. The old saw about "love it or leave it" still burns, just as he knew it would, which is why he said it, which is why I responded, which is why I watched this film.
The reason utopias turn into dystopias is because dreams make lousy realities. When the Soviets declare that the sun is at its peak at 1pm rather than noon, Ivan wonders if the commissars can actually make that happen. Whenever any of my leftist friends (or myself) demand the overthrow of the capitalist economic system, we need to be prepared to defend the people involved in that overthrow from the smirking evil that lies behind the misery any economic system is capable of instilling, be it social democratic, communist, libertarian, or what have you, because once the real life nightmare takes hold, it does not allow you to wake up. The people in One Day in the Life do not look forward to the sunrise. One of them even looks forward to blizzards to avoid having to go out into the weather. In the film, if the temperature drops below forty degrees below zero, they do not have to go out. A man climbs the pole to see the temperature, reporting that it says only twenty-seven below. the other replies, "They's never but up a thermometer that told the truth."
Or you may recall the first sentence of Orwell's most famous novel, the one that begins with the clock striking thirteen. It's part of an old joke. What time is it when the clock strikes thirteen? It is time to get a new clock. Just make sure the new clock doesn't make a habit of striking fourteen.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Argento first drew cinematic attention to himself as one of the writers on Sergio Leone's film Once Upon a Time in the West. Today's movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, should not be judged by the standard of that ultimate spaghetti western. On the contrary, what is fair is to judge it in relation to both its influences and its influence, and even more importantly, to judge it as to whether or not it's a good film on its own merits.
The last question comes first: Yes. It stood up then and it continues to do so. In fact, it does more than stand. It runs. Tony Musante demonstrates some genuine talent, if not a typical lack of warmth, in his performance as Sam Dalmas, an American writer temporarily living in Rome with his girlfriend, the beautiful Julia, played with considerable melodrama by Suzy Kendall, a woman I at first mistook for Susan George. Julia's purpose in this film is to stand in a for the concept of the doe-eyed potential victim, a not unheard of role in 1970s suspense-horror dramas. She does as much with that part as that part allow, as, to be fair, does Musante with his portrayal of a man who witnesses a crime while standing between two sets of glass doors. He can see in at the crime being committed, yet he can neither escape nor assist. He is trapped and is even seen being trapped, just as the film projectionist in the movie theaters watched the audiences trapped in their seats while viewing this movie. The difference? The movie-goer doesn't want to leave.
Argento builds the suspense layer by layer. Sam knows that what he has seen--the stabbing of a woman in an art gallery by a man who escapes detection--is real, and yet he cannot quite parse out the significance of the action in a way that will be helpful to the police. He faces pressure to solve the crime from not only law enforcement but from the killer as well, the identity of whom we are given multiple clues, most of them false in the way of Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaking of whom, Argento occasionally is called the Italian Hitchcock because of certain alleged similarities in the use of misdirection and knee-level camera angles, as well as his tendency to allow the plot to establish the characters rather revealing those details through contrived conventions. But if it's possible that two different people could independently develop the radio and two other people could independently develop the telephone, then it seems possible that Argento and Hitchcock may have inspired one another far less than is commonly argued.
What also seems possible is that director Brian DePalma, who is often accused of going beyond homage and into the realm of thievery when it comes to his relationship with Hitchcock, actually owes a bit more to Dario Argento in general and this film in particular.
Trapped, mesmerized voyeurism, murder by shining blade in confined quarters, a sense of dispassion regarding the victims, a man being helpless in defense of a female victim, constant misdirection as to guilt, psychologically-based motives, the use of the camera backing up as actors charge a staircase, the presence of a manipulative police force: these are elements of Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and Blow Out, just for starters. It may be granted that DePalma does more with these elements than Argento, but that argument doesn't really hold water. Neither director works particularly hard at providing the viewer with something that will carry on after the experience itself. That's okay. We've come to expect the under-expected. DePalma adds more intrigue through his use of sexual inducement, although cinematic mores have as much to do with that as artistic license. The real force of either director's work is largely to engage the viewer without doing much more than taunting him for the duration of the film, whereas someone like Hitchcock--say Hitchcock himself, for instance, and in the only instance--endeavored in several films to leave the viewer feeling things after he or she left the movie. Notorious is probably the best example of this, another being Rope, and another being Rear Window.
All in all, The Bird is a fascinating show of multiple levels of psychological perversion worth experiencing as much for the onscreen value as for its modest historical stature.
The last question comes first: Yes. It stood up then and it continues to do so. In fact, it does more than stand. It runs. Tony Musante demonstrates some genuine talent, if not a typical lack of warmth, in his performance as Sam Dalmas, an American writer temporarily living in Rome with his girlfriend, the beautiful Julia, played with considerable melodrama by Suzy Kendall, a woman I at first mistook for Susan George. Julia's purpose in this film is to stand in a for the concept of the doe-eyed potential victim, a not unheard of role in 1970s suspense-horror dramas. She does as much with that part as that part allow, as, to be fair, does Musante with his portrayal of a man who witnesses a crime while standing between two sets of glass doors. He can see in at the crime being committed, yet he can neither escape nor assist. He is trapped and is even seen being trapped, just as the film projectionist in the movie theaters watched the audiences trapped in their seats while viewing this movie. The difference? The movie-goer doesn't want to leave.
Argento builds the suspense layer by layer. Sam knows that what he has seen--the stabbing of a woman in an art gallery by a man who escapes detection--is real, and yet he cannot quite parse out the significance of the action in a way that will be helpful to the police. He faces pressure to solve the crime from not only law enforcement but from the killer as well, the identity of whom we are given multiple clues, most of them false in the way of Alfred Hitchcock.
Speaking of whom, Argento occasionally is called the Italian Hitchcock because of certain alleged similarities in the use of misdirection and knee-level camera angles, as well as his tendency to allow the plot to establish the characters rather revealing those details through contrived conventions. But if it's possible that two different people could independently develop the radio and two other people could independently develop the telephone, then it seems possible that Argento and Hitchcock may have inspired one another far less than is commonly argued.
What also seems possible is that director Brian DePalma, who is often accused of going beyond homage and into the realm of thievery when it comes to his relationship with Hitchcock, actually owes a bit more to Dario Argento in general and this film in particular.
Trapped, mesmerized voyeurism, murder by shining blade in confined quarters, a sense of dispassion regarding the victims, a man being helpless in defense of a female victim, constant misdirection as to guilt, psychologically-based motives, the use of the camera backing up as actors charge a staircase, the presence of a manipulative police force: these are elements of Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and Blow Out, just for starters. It may be granted that DePalma does more with these elements than Argento, but that argument doesn't really hold water. Neither director works particularly hard at providing the viewer with something that will carry on after the experience itself. That's okay. We've come to expect the under-expected. DePalma adds more intrigue through his use of sexual inducement, although cinematic mores have as much to do with that as artistic license. The real force of either director's work is largely to engage the viewer without doing much more than taunting him for the duration of the film, whereas someone like Hitchcock--say Hitchcock himself, for instance, and in the only instance--endeavored in several films to leave the viewer feeling things after he or she left the movie. Notorious is probably the best example of this, another being Rope, and another being Rear Window.
All in all, The Bird is a fascinating show of multiple levels of psychological perversion worth experiencing as much for the onscreen value as for its modest historical stature.
Billy Jack
Here is how I began an article about the use of art as propaganda. I started writing the article ten years ago and published it sometime last year.
In 1971 a group of film students wrote, directed, produced and acted in a movie called Billy Jack. The film, which starred Tom Laughlin and Dolores Taylor, was dependent for approval first upon the pre-existing politics of the viewer and second upon that viewer's decision about the acceptable means of achieving political change. Naive and simplistic, Billy Jack was also brash, daring, and quite accurate in its message that pacifists exist at the mercy of emotional heathens. And emotional heathens have a history of being unmerciful.
Billy: You worked with King. Where is he?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: And where are Jack and Bobby Kennedy?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: Not dead. They had their brains blown out.
The significance of this movie should not be underestimated. Not many films released in the USA have suggested that the Allies lost World War II or that the government's government is none too benignly fascist or that it is not only appropriate but even urgent to defend the country against that government. The film makes the choices simple. The man v. man conflicts are (a) oppressed native Americans versus reactionary WASPs, (b) communal dwellers versus urban despot, (c) youth versus aged, (d) poor versus rich, (e) free versus neurotic, and (f) good versus evil. At the time, those who enjoyed the film saw it as an inspirational work that gave hope to those opposed to the status quo. Today, such a film would be considered inspired propaganda, even by those who agree with its central themes, just as today such once revolutionary philosophies have been co-opted and perverted by right wing separatists who find safe havens in Idaho and Montana.
While I stand by every word of that, I feel the need to add a few items and one of the perks of this blog (perks for me, at any rate) is that I can add or subtract at my leisure, all in the pursuit of providing you, Constant Reader, with the best I have to offer.
I never got around to mentioning in all twenty-thousand words of that article why the writer, director and star of that film, Tom Laughlin, deserves to be held in the high esteem that he is among those of us--mostly those of us of a certain age, admittedly--who credit the man with shaking us up in that most sacred of temples, the movie theater. There we were, sitting in our respective sanctuaries, glued to our seats as we watched the character of Billy Jack suggest to us that our own programming was a bunch of shit. You see, we had been led to believe that we pretty much had to take it: the war in Southeast Asia, the deaths at Kent State, the corruption of our political system, the inherent contradictions of our economic system, the abuse of our children, race hate, greed, on so on. Certainly some riots had exploded and not all those explosions had been peaceful. But for the most part we had convinced ourselves that we didn't fight back. Well, the character Billy Jack fought back. The difference was that he didn't take a stand for himself. He took a stand for others, specifically for the kids at "The Freedom School." He was not going to stand passively/pacifistic-ally by and let Jean and the children be abused.
Even though smart critics such as Roger Ebert (who actually had many good things to say about Billy Jack) raised the point that the film forced viewers to choose between "bad fascists and good fascists"), that argument is mostly ridiculous, at least as far as film criticism is concerned. The choice is a hard political reality within the world constructed in that film and to the extent that the film reconstructed the world outside the theater. "It's a little one-sided," says one of the councilmen in the movie, giving his reaction to a skit put on during the film. Howard Hesseman, as one of the players, responds that "Kids see things one-sided." He's correct. The difference is that here the kids point of view is given voice, and by "kid" I mean children, women, Native Americans, and anybody else who has less power than the mayor of your town.
Tom Laughlin may or may not make a long-awaited sequel as part of his Billy Jack franchise (the other movies being The Born Losers, The Trial of Billy Jack and the unreleased Billy Jack Goes to Washington). His health is a possible factor and, let's face it, the role of politics in the movie industry is just as real today as ever, and there's even the suggestion that Laughlin's occasional vitriol against the motion picture industry has done nothing to endear him to certain investors. Still, Billy Jack and Jean, if it is released, stands a good chance of being the life-changer that it's namesake was so many years ago. Either way, we owe a debt of thanks to Tom--and to his wife Delores Taylor (since 1954!)--for showing us one way to stay strong against the emotional as well as psychic erosion of our morality.
In 1971 a group of film students wrote, directed, produced and acted in a movie called Billy Jack. The film, which starred Tom Laughlin and Dolores Taylor, was dependent for approval first upon the pre-existing politics of the viewer and second upon that viewer's decision about the acceptable means of achieving political change. Naive and simplistic, Billy Jack was also brash, daring, and quite accurate in its message that pacifists exist at the mercy of emotional heathens. And emotional heathens have a history of being unmerciful.
Billy: You worked with King. Where is he?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: And where are Jack and Bobby Kennedy?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: Not dead. They had their brains blown out.
The significance of this movie should not be underestimated. Not many films released in the USA have suggested that the Allies lost World War II or that the government's government is none too benignly fascist or that it is not only appropriate but even urgent to defend the country against that government. The film makes the choices simple. The man v. man conflicts are (a) oppressed native Americans versus reactionary WASPs, (b) communal dwellers versus urban despot, (c) youth versus aged, (d) poor versus rich, (e) free versus neurotic, and (f) good versus evil. At the time, those who enjoyed the film saw it as an inspirational work that gave hope to those opposed to the status quo. Today, such a film would be considered inspired propaganda, even by those who agree with its central themes, just as today such once revolutionary philosophies have been co-opted and perverted by right wing separatists who find safe havens in Idaho and Montana.
While I stand by every word of that, I feel the need to add a few items and one of the perks of this blog (perks for me, at any rate) is that I can add or subtract at my leisure, all in the pursuit of providing you, Constant Reader, with the best I have to offer.
I never got around to mentioning in all twenty-thousand words of that article why the writer, director and star of that film, Tom Laughlin, deserves to be held in the high esteem that he is among those of us--mostly those of us of a certain age, admittedly--who credit the man with shaking us up in that most sacred of temples, the movie theater. There we were, sitting in our respective sanctuaries, glued to our seats as we watched the character of Billy Jack suggest to us that our own programming was a bunch of shit. You see, we had been led to believe that we pretty much had to take it: the war in Southeast Asia, the deaths at Kent State, the corruption of our political system, the inherent contradictions of our economic system, the abuse of our children, race hate, greed, on so on. Certainly some riots had exploded and not all those explosions had been peaceful. But for the most part we had convinced ourselves that we didn't fight back. Well, the character Billy Jack fought back. The difference was that he didn't take a stand for himself. He took a stand for others, specifically for the kids at "The Freedom School." He was not going to stand passively/pacifistic-ally by and let Jean and the children be abused.
Even though smart critics such as Roger Ebert (who actually had many good things to say about Billy Jack) raised the point that the film forced viewers to choose between "bad fascists and good fascists"), that argument is mostly ridiculous, at least as far as film criticism is concerned. The choice is a hard political reality within the world constructed in that film and to the extent that the film reconstructed the world outside the theater. "It's a little one-sided," says one of the councilmen in the movie, giving his reaction to a skit put on during the film. Howard Hesseman, as one of the players, responds that "Kids see things one-sided." He's correct. The difference is that here the kids point of view is given voice, and by "kid" I mean children, women, Native Americans, and anybody else who has less power than the mayor of your town.
Tom Laughlin may or may not make a long-awaited sequel as part of his Billy Jack franchise (the other movies being The Born Losers, The Trial of Billy Jack and the unreleased Billy Jack Goes to Washington). His health is a possible factor and, let's face it, the role of politics in the movie industry is just as real today as ever, and there's even the suggestion that Laughlin's occasional vitriol against the motion picture industry has done nothing to endear him to certain investors. Still, Billy Jack and Jean, if it is released, stands a good chance of being the life-changer that it's namesake was so many years ago. Either way, we owe a debt of thanks to Tom--and to his wife Delores Taylor (since 1954!)--for showing us one way to stay strong against the emotional as well as psychic erosion of our morality.
Dodes'ka-Den
Akira Kurosawa grew so depressed at the commercial and critical failure of his 1970 film Dodes'ka-den that he slit himself thirty times with a razor. The movie is nothing to kill yourself over. On the contrary, the colors of this motion picture--the first color picture the director ever made--make life more than worth living. Of course, colors come in all kinds of hues and Kurosawa colors his garbage dump with some fascinating characters: a businessman with terrible tic and a wife thin on manners but who stands by her husband; a mentally challenged boy who drives an imaginary trolley car; a man and his son who build a mansion out of their own imaginations; a despondent old man who looks like he could kick the shit if he had half a mind; another old man wise beyond his many years; a pair of drunks who aggravate their wives so much that the two women swap husbands; and none of these or any of the other characters in this beautiful film let their stories get in the way of the plot, an element that is nonexistent here and rightly so. Ultimately the movie is about adaptation and forgiveness. You cannot earn one without enduring the other.
Filmed and printed in 35 mm, Dodes'ka-den uses light and separation techniques so advanced at the time that other filmmakers still have not caught up. High Definition, Blue-Ray, (chuckle) 3-D: these are for fools. However Kurosawa did it (I know a little about lighting and I have no clue how the director pulled this off), the real beauty is in how we come to care for these fascinating and deprived people. Even a despicable and drunken "uncle" who does something pretty rotten gains our sympathy, if not quite our compassion.
The comic elements to the movie are real and touching, as when the kid who drives the invisible trolley nearly runs over a painter and his easel or when the same boy prays that Buddha will make his mother smarter. There is also real tragedy here: a starving boy contracts diarrhea, a raped and pregnant girl murders her only ally, a man objects when his genuinely abusive wife is criticized by his friends. Throughout the movie, the director slaps us in the face with the colors and figure definitions that insist that both the joys and travails of a ghetto life are every bit as real as the people staggering through them.
Filmed and printed in 35 mm, Dodes'ka-den uses light and separation techniques so advanced at the time that other filmmakers still have not caught up. High Definition, Blue-Ray, (chuckle) 3-D: these are for fools. However Kurosawa did it (I know a little about lighting and I have no clue how the director pulled this off), the real beauty is in how we come to care for these fascinating and deprived people. Even a despicable and drunken "uncle" who does something pretty rotten gains our sympathy, if not quite our compassion.
The comic elements to the movie are real and touching, as when the kid who drives the invisible trolley nearly runs over a painter and his easel or when the same boy prays that Buddha will make his mother smarter. There is also real tragedy here: a starving boy contracts diarrhea, a raped and pregnant girl murders her only ally, a man objects when his genuinely abusive wife is criticized by his friends. Throughout the movie, the director slaps us in the face with the colors and figure definitions that insist that both the joys and travails of a ghetto life are every bit as real as the people staggering through them.
Panic in Needle Park
A decade ago everyone who meandered through my life over a fourteen-month period lived on painkillers: Vicodin, oxycodone, morphine, Darvocet, Tramadol, you name it. Unable to sleep, they would load up on benzo jellies or anything in the lam or pam family. In the morning they'd do a line of soda or some crushed up psych meds and repeat the waltz. Christ, what an awful way to live, I thought. And I was right.
The Panic in Needle Park (1971) shows us pain. Admittedly, if heroin wasn't fun, no one would ever do it. I have been told it is the psycho-physical equivalent of napalming yourself. I guess napalm must be fun, too, or no one would ever have used it.
A lot of people take painkillers even now. I prefer to think of these things as "painkillers" rather than referring to them by their clinical or street names because I think it's important to remember that the reason people take them is to alleviate pain. Sometimes that pain manifests in a physiological manner. Sometimes the pain shows itself to be neurological. It really doesn't matter, I suppose, because if you are the person suffering then you want it to stop. When it turns out the pain not only goes away but is replaced by a decided sense of pleasure, well, it can be asking a lot to encourage someone to resist it.
In Panic, director Jerry Schatzberg gives us no particular list of reasons why these characters--Bobby, Helen, Chico, Irene, and others--have taken on the lives of junkies. Because Bobby (played in pure beauty by Al Pacino) has a burglar brother, the suggestion seems to be that it runs in families, or maybe it's just something white people do to try to identify with African-Americans. The Joan Didion script comes off just that disengaged, although Pacino and the late Kiel Martin (as Chico) do appear to be having the times of their lives, at least until the addictions become overly pricey and the greed of the fix takes hold. It's at that point that the struggling artist Helen, portrayed by Kitty Winn (who regular viewers of anything 1970s-oriented will recognize from being under-utilized in all manner of work, despite her winning the Cannes festival for her role here), turns to prostitution to feed her habit, just as Bobby turns to making big scores that will free the two of them from this rotten existence, except that it never quite does, it never quite does. The cop keeps telling Helen that she will sooner or later rat out her boyfriend because that is what junkies do and we see it coming and the real shame is that neither the screenwriter nor director give us any real reason to care. Only the acting saves this film--well, that and a very brief appearance by Paul Sorvino, which is worth watching for.
But the movie does bring up an interesting point. I mean, does everybody eventually rat out their friends and do the friends learn to take that abuse in stride? This movie screams that the drugs ear us down so far that even a betrayal that lands a lover in stir for six months--that is, if the lover in turn rats out the person above him on the dope ladder--is just business as usual, perhaps not a welcome behavior but certainly not an unforgivable offense, either.
With so much emphasis on the techniques of shooting up, fading out, nodding off and stringing along, none of which have any glamour whatsoever, The Panic in Needle Park loses whatever good will it may have hoped to garner. If the subject is important enough to warrant this very serious film, then aren't the people affected by it--or their on-screen representatives--worth developing as individuals? The only thing we see are people helping one another score, or a woman freaking out because Bobby almost dies from an overdose while she's expecting company, or just how debased life is here in New York City.
My first thought about a soundtrack that this film could have sorely used might have included the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." That my memory reconnected that in this day of merging time zones and infinity of perception, a better mix would be The Brains' original "Money Changes Everything," especially with its lines: "And you say, well who can you trust? I'll tell you it's just no one else's money."
The Panic in Needle Park (1971) shows us pain. Admittedly, if heroin wasn't fun, no one would ever do it. I have been told it is the psycho-physical equivalent of napalming yourself. I guess napalm must be fun, too, or no one would ever have used it.
A lot of people take painkillers even now. I prefer to think of these things as "painkillers" rather than referring to them by their clinical or street names because I think it's important to remember that the reason people take them is to alleviate pain. Sometimes that pain manifests in a physiological manner. Sometimes the pain shows itself to be neurological. It really doesn't matter, I suppose, because if you are the person suffering then you want it to stop. When it turns out the pain not only goes away but is replaced by a decided sense of pleasure, well, it can be asking a lot to encourage someone to resist it.
In Panic, director Jerry Schatzberg gives us no particular list of reasons why these characters--Bobby, Helen, Chico, Irene, and others--have taken on the lives of junkies. Because Bobby (played in pure beauty by Al Pacino) has a burglar brother, the suggestion seems to be that it runs in families, or maybe it's just something white people do to try to identify with African-Americans. The Joan Didion script comes off just that disengaged, although Pacino and the late Kiel Martin (as Chico) do appear to be having the times of their lives, at least until the addictions become overly pricey and the greed of the fix takes hold. It's at that point that the struggling artist Helen, portrayed by Kitty Winn (who regular viewers of anything 1970s-oriented will recognize from being under-utilized in all manner of work, despite her winning the Cannes festival for her role here), turns to prostitution to feed her habit, just as Bobby turns to making big scores that will free the two of them from this rotten existence, except that it never quite does, it never quite does. The cop keeps telling Helen that she will sooner or later rat out her boyfriend because that is what junkies do and we see it coming and the real shame is that neither the screenwriter nor director give us any real reason to care. Only the acting saves this film--well, that and a very brief appearance by Paul Sorvino, which is worth watching for.
But the movie does bring up an interesting point. I mean, does everybody eventually rat out their friends and do the friends learn to take that abuse in stride? This movie screams that the drugs ear us down so far that even a betrayal that lands a lover in stir for six months--that is, if the lover in turn rats out the person above him on the dope ladder--is just business as usual, perhaps not a welcome behavior but certainly not an unforgivable offense, either.
With so much emphasis on the techniques of shooting up, fading out, nodding off and stringing along, none of which have any glamour whatsoever, The Panic in Needle Park loses whatever good will it may have hoped to garner. If the subject is important enough to warrant this very serious film, then aren't the people affected by it--or their on-screen representatives--worth developing as individuals? The only thing we see are people helping one another score, or a woman freaking out because Bobby almost dies from an overdose while she's expecting company, or just how debased life is here in New York City.
My first thought about a soundtrack that this film could have sorely used might have included the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." That my memory reconnected that in this day of merging time zones and infinity of perception, a better mix would be The Brains' original "Money Changes Everything," especially with its lines: "And you say, well who can you trust? I'll tell you it's just no one else's money."
The Visitors
Chris Kazan, son of Elia, wrote the screenplay for The Visitors, a film his father directed. The movie stars a young James Woods as a Vietnam War veteran who testified at the court martial of two of his friends, Mike and Tony. The film begins on the day the two friends get out of Leavenworth for raping a civilian Vietnamese woman while on a mission. Mike, played with eerie intensity by Steve Railsback, wants revenge. Tony, played by Chico Martinez, claims he doesn't hold a grudge, but we may be forgiven for not believing him.
Bill (Woods) finds himself surrounded by enemies. He lives with his girlfriend in a house own by her father. The father is a hateful old bastard who writes western novels, when he isn't busy taking vengeance on the neighbors by the behavior of their dogs. The old man despises Bill for not having killed anyone in Vietnam, for not having married his daughter, and for simply having been born. Funny enough, the old man gets along well with Mike and Tony.
There is a painful segment where the old man's dog Max gets attacked by a neighbor dog, in the process losing one of its legs. The old man curses, "What am I gonna do with a three-legged dog?"
For all intents and purposes, Bill is a three-legged dog. He tries to carry on as if nothing is wrong despite the ominous looks that Mike and Tony give him, despite the leering looks they give his girlfriend Martha (Patricia Joyce), and despite the old man liking them much more than he does the poor dog.
The Visitors is a very unpleasant movie in much the same way thatThe Deer Hunter was unpleasant. No moral value gets placed on the behavior of anyone in these films. Things simply happen, no judgment gets cast--in fact, Mike screams at Martha because he assumes she has the temerity of judging him--and people move on, silently changed, but only after they commit some crazed act. The message, to the extent that there is one, is that the filmmaker was bitter, which I'm sure Kazan was. Hated by Hollywood for years, the director may have thought he was regaining relevance with this film. While he should be given credit for hosting James Wood and Steve Railsback, no one else in the film is much of anything except dull, which is a pretty sad indictment on the lives of real people. Relevance hardly makes up for a script that unfortunately lacks the courage to say something sincere about atrocities.
Bill (Woods) finds himself surrounded by enemies. He lives with his girlfriend in a house own by her father. The father is a hateful old bastard who writes western novels, when he isn't busy taking vengeance on the neighbors by the behavior of their dogs. The old man despises Bill for not having killed anyone in Vietnam, for not having married his daughter, and for simply having been born. Funny enough, the old man gets along well with Mike and Tony.
There is a painful segment where the old man's dog Max gets attacked by a neighbor dog, in the process losing one of its legs. The old man curses, "What am I gonna do with a three-legged dog?"
For all intents and purposes, Bill is a three-legged dog. He tries to carry on as if nothing is wrong despite the ominous looks that Mike and Tony give him, despite the leering looks they give his girlfriend Martha (Patricia Joyce), and despite the old man liking them much more than he does the poor dog.
The Visitors is a very unpleasant movie in much the same way thatThe Deer Hunter was unpleasant. No moral value gets placed on the behavior of anyone in these films. Things simply happen, no judgment gets cast--in fact, Mike screams at Martha because he assumes she has the temerity of judging him--and people move on, silently changed, but only after they commit some crazed act. The message, to the extent that there is one, is that the filmmaker was bitter, which I'm sure Kazan was. Hated by Hollywood for years, the director may have thought he was regaining relevance with this film. While he should be given credit for hosting James Wood and Steve Railsback, no one else in the film is much of anything except dull, which is a pretty sad indictment on the lives of real people. Relevance hardly makes up for a script that unfortunately lacks the courage to say something sincere about atrocities.
Across 110th Street
Across 110th Street wastes no time getting our faces dirty. "Them Aye-talians are just no damn good," mumbles Lou Reed with righteous passivity. And righteous is right on.
Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto: I mean, you can hardly go wrong with these two doing up kind of a 1972 version of In The Heat of The Night, except that Kotto could actually act whereas Sidney was always so refined. Sweet Sweetback may have been the first blaxploitation gangster dude and Mister Tibbs may have been the first major black copper, but Across 110th was probably the first movie to anticipate the incredible racism that permeates the thin blue line between the Italians and the African-Americans, an element in hoodlum movies only since The Godfather, released that same year.
But The Godfather didn't have Huggie Bear getting crucified. The Godfather didn't have Quinn the Eskimo knocking half the future cast of "Hill Street Blues" across the squad room. The Godfather didn't have Tony Franciosa getting shot in the teeth like he deserved it.
Director Barry Shear opened a door or two with his work on Wild in the Streets, but spent most of his time on crappy TV shows like "McMillan and Wife," "Alias Smith and Jones," and "Ironside." Across 110th Street starts out just as stupid as those programs, but soon transcends the form through the time-honored use of cinematic violence, in this case well-captured as the first movie use of the 35 millimeter Arriflex, a handy dandy hand-held camera that would soon be all the rage. While how Shear got the chance to make an actual movie is beyond my kin to fathom, it is good that he did because as blaxploitation flicks go--and the Bobby Womack tracks are a big part of the fun, although Womack was no Curtis Mayfield--this one is right up there with Shaft, Superfly, and Shorty the Pimp, meaning it sho ain't Baaaadasssss Song, but it definitely rocks the caz when the wops kick down the door to the nightclub only to find Huggie doing his women with their money, which don't really matter none no how since it was one of Huggie's babes that dropped the rat on the po boy, don'tcha see? Seriously, the race hate in this film is so thick you kind of wonder how much of it was really the writing and acting and how much of it was Quinn just with a mad-on. After all, the actor's money helped finance the damned thing.
So, yeah, it's gritty as ground glass in a gangster salad, that's fo sho. But it's also done with a certain fatalistic angst that whispers that we might do well to remember that junk and dope make the world go round. You want a better society? Put down the pipe and let a gangster work for a living.
Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto: I mean, you can hardly go wrong with these two doing up kind of a 1972 version of In The Heat of The Night, except that Kotto could actually act whereas Sidney was always so refined. Sweet Sweetback may have been the first blaxploitation gangster dude and Mister Tibbs may have been the first major black copper, but Across 110th was probably the first movie to anticipate the incredible racism that permeates the thin blue line between the Italians and the African-Americans, an element in hoodlum movies only since The Godfather, released that same year.
But The Godfather didn't have Huggie Bear getting crucified. The Godfather didn't have Quinn the Eskimo knocking half the future cast of "Hill Street Blues" across the squad room. The Godfather didn't have Tony Franciosa getting shot in the teeth like he deserved it.
Director Barry Shear opened a door or two with his work on Wild in the Streets, but spent most of his time on crappy TV shows like "McMillan and Wife," "Alias Smith and Jones," and "Ironside." Across 110th Street starts out just as stupid as those programs, but soon transcends the form through the time-honored use of cinematic violence, in this case well-captured as the first movie use of the 35 millimeter Arriflex, a handy dandy hand-held camera that would soon be all the rage. While how Shear got the chance to make an actual movie is beyond my kin to fathom, it is good that he did because as blaxploitation flicks go--and the Bobby Womack tracks are a big part of the fun, although Womack was no Curtis Mayfield--this one is right up there with Shaft, Superfly, and Shorty the Pimp, meaning it sho ain't Baaaadasssss Song, but it definitely rocks the caz when the wops kick down the door to the nightclub only to find Huggie doing his women with their money, which don't really matter none no how since it was one of Huggie's babes that dropped the rat on the po boy, don'tcha see? Seriously, the race hate in this film is so thick you kind of wonder how much of it was really the writing and acting and how much of it was Quinn just with a mad-on. After all, the actor's money helped finance the damned thing.
So, yeah, it's gritty as ground glass in a gangster salad, that's fo sho. But it's also done with a certain fatalistic angst that whispers that we might do well to remember that junk and dope make the world go round. You want a better society? Put down the pipe and let a gangster work for a living.
The Fury
Following the tremendous artistic, critical and commercial success of Carrie, the film director Brian DePalma adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, the world's greatest Hitchcock imitator released a movie with some of the same themes and some of the same cast members as his earlier gem of a movie. He called it The Fury. Based on the novel and adapted screenplay by John Farris, this movie might have been more interesting if it had been entitled The Furry, because at least then we horror aficionados could have anticipated a movie about deranged bunny rabbits. Of course, that would have stood a chance of actually being funny, which is a tad more than can be said for this disaster film, by which I make no references to Irwin Allen.
Starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving, The Fury begins strong enough, with a bunch of rich folks lounging on a Mediterranean beach about to be attacked by unfriendly Arabs in full bisht and chmagh. Kirk Douglas plays Peter, a super spy intelligence guy whose son, Robin, possesses a super telekinetic ability and psychometric powers. Robin, portrayed by Andrew Stevens, gets kidnapped by the nasty John Cassavetes-character, Ben Childers, and so Douglas must find a female with the same psi-powers as his son to help locate him before the evil government witch doctors destroy the world and all that jazz. If this sounds a bit like The Firestarter, you're on the right track but in the wrong train. This movie isn't even that good, if by good you mean supplying an even semi-plausible story-line or providing much in the way of believable acting, other than that done by Douglas.
The good news here is that DePalma does not disappoint when it comes to capturing genuine beauty and on this point I attempt no humor. Kirk Douglas is beautiful. You would have to go back toSpartacus to find him looking any better than this. Amy Irving, likewise, truly radiates a rather startling set of good looks, something I have to admit I had never noticed about her. Matter of fact, I'd often wondered what it was about her that had mesmerized so many people since I had always found her rather plain. In The Fury she does not have that hideous fuzzy hair she had in Carrie and elsewhere. Joyce Easton, who plays her mother, is likewise something of a knockout. Carrie Snodgress starts out looking quite terrible, but by the time we discover that Kirk Douglas loves her, she is looking fine indeed.
But the flattering photography is not merely limited to the humanoids in this film. The cities themselves--the filming was 99% in Chicago and 1% Caesarai, Israel--scream out their gorgeoisty, as do the internal architectural structures. Shopping malls begin a DePalma tradition with this film, becoming a recurring source of maze-like majesty.
And that brings us to the rather sad part of this "Experiment in terror and suspense." Deliberately or not--and the director is such a craftsman and perfectionist that I can't imagine he'd leave anything to chance--this movie also offers up an unfortunate string of simpleminded stereotypes far below the abilities of such an "auteur." For instance? Well, there's the early Arab attack on the happy people on the coast of the "Mid East," as the film calls it. Later in the film, Robin, the psi-power guy, throws a shit fit and causes an amusement park ride called the Paratrooper to come unhinged and fling a car of Arabs off the ride and into a restaurant lounge, clearly some serendipitous revenge. There's also an almost strict Freudian tendency in DePalma's films to lay the blame for almost all the bad stuff at the feet of the maternal parent. In Carrie, it was the mother who had brought the curse upon her daughter and likewise had driven the young girl half insane. In The Fury, the excessively bourgeois Mrs. Bellaver, with her severe haircut and unwillingness to make mention of a father for Irving's character Gillian, is so busy with her job that she can only pretend to care about what happens to her only child. Whatever one may think of DePalma's relative talents as a director, it must be admitted that by the late 1970s, he and quite a few other wild talents in the horror movie world were exploiting a backlash against strong, independent women, all of whom are either at risk of getting chopped up or are guilty of abandoning their progeny. We like and identify immediately with the wife-less Peter, yet pull back a bit from Dr. Ellen Lindstrom, Kristen the schoolyard bitch, and all the other females in the film except Hester, who we like and so can be fairly certain will die in a nasty way, which she does.
I have an unfortunate tendency to spew vituperative criticism of people whose work I actually admire. I have almost always enjoyed any DePalma film I've ever seen (this being one exception, Scarface being another, although for completely different reasons, and Snake Eyesbeing perhaps the very bottom of the barrel), Blow Out being my all-time personal favorite horror movie. Perhaps we come to expect more from people whose talents we revere.
Incidentally, one of the other hidden pleasures of The Fury--and there are more than a few, admittedly--is the viewing of certain small roles by recognizable actors such as Darryl Hannah and Gordon Jump. There's even an unsubstantiated rumor that James Belushi plays an uncredited beach bum here, although you need a lot of patience to find him.
Starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving, The Fury begins strong enough, with a bunch of rich folks lounging on a Mediterranean beach about to be attacked by unfriendly Arabs in full bisht and chmagh. Kirk Douglas plays Peter, a super spy intelligence guy whose son, Robin, possesses a super telekinetic ability and psychometric powers. Robin, portrayed by Andrew Stevens, gets kidnapped by the nasty John Cassavetes-character, Ben Childers, and so Douglas must find a female with the same psi-powers as his son to help locate him before the evil government witch doctors destroy the world and all that jazz. If this sounds a bit like The Firestarter, you're on the right track but in the wrong train. This movie isn't even that good, if by good you mean supplying an even semi-plausible story-line or providing much in the way of believable acting, other than that done by Douglas.
The good news here is that DePalma does not disappoint when it comes to capturing genuine beauty and on this point I attempt no humor. Kirk Douglas is beautiful. You would have to go back toSpartacus to find him looking any better than this. Amy Irving, likewise, truly radiates a rather startling set of good looks, something I have to admit I had never noticed about her. Matter of fact, I'd often wondered what it was about her that had mesmerized so many people since I had always found her rather plain. In The Fury she does not have that hideous fuzzy hair she had in Carrie and elsewhere. Joyce Easton, who plays her mother, is likewise something of a knockout. Carrie Snodgress starts out looking quite terrible, but by the time we discover that Kirk Douglas loves her, she is looking fine indeed.
But the flattering photography is not merely limited to the humanoids in this film. The cities themselves--the filming was 99% in Chicago and 1% Caesarai, Israel--scream out their gorgeoisty, as do the internal architectural structures. Shopping malls begin a DePalma tradition with this film, becoming a recurring source of maze-like majesty.
And that brings us to the rather sad part of this "Experiment in terror and suspense." Deliberately or not--and the director is such a craftsman and perfectionist that I can't imagine he'd leave anything to chance--this movie also offers up an unfortunate string of simpleminded stereotypes far below the abilities of such an "auteur." For instance? Well, there's the early Arab attack on the happy people on the coast of the "Mid East," as the film calls it. Later in the film, Robin, the psi-power guy, throws a shit fit and causes an amusement park ride called the Paratrooper to come unhinged and fling a car of Arabs off the ride and into a restaurant lounge, clearly some serendipitous revenge. There's also an almost strict Freudian tendency in DePalma's films to lay the blame for almost all the bad stuff at the feet of the maternal parent. In Carrie, it was the mother who had brought the curse upon her daughter and likewise had driven the young girl half insane. In The Fury, the excessively bourgeois Mrs. Bellaver, with her severe haircut and unwillingness to make mention of a father for Irving's character Gillian, is so busy with her job that she can only pretend to care about what happens to her only child. Whatever one may think of DePalma's relative talents as a director, it must be admitted that by the late 1970s, he and quite a few other wild talents in the horror movie world were exploiting a backlash against strong, independent women, all of whom are either at risk of getting chopped up or are guilty of abandoning their progeny. We like and identify immediately with the wife-less Peter, yet pull back a bit from Dr. Ellen Lindstrom, Kristen the schoolyard bitch, and all the other females in the film except Hester, who we like and so can be fairly certain will die in a nasty way, which she does.
I have an unfortunate tendency to spew vituperative criticism of people whose work I actually admire. I have almost always enjoyed any DePalma film I've ever seen (this being one exception, Scarface being another, although for completely different reasons, and Snake Eyesbeing perhaps the very bottom of the barrel), Blow Out being my all-time personal favorite horror movie. Perhaps we come to expect more from people whose talents we revere.
Incidentally, one of the other hidden pleasures of The Fury--and there are more than a few, admittedly--is the viewing of certain small roles by recognizable actors such as Darryl Hannah and Gordon Jump. There's even an unsubstantiated rumor that James Belushi plays an uncredited beach bum here, although you need a lot of patience to find him.
The Blank Generation
There are two movies with similar titles and separated by four years. One is Blank Generation, which was released in 1980. The film we will talk about today is The Blank Generation, which came out in 1976. The former is a work of fiction. The latter is a work of art.
The Blank Generation was filmed in silent 16 mm black and white at New York City's CBGB's night club, mostly in 1975. The film captures live performances by Patti Smith, Richard Hell, The Talking Heads, Blondie, Johnny Thunders, the Ramones, and other new wave heavies of the period. The directors, Ivan Kral (of Patti Smith Group) and Amos Poe (video producer and music documentarian), dubbed studio recordings and demo tracks deliberately out of sync with the hodgepodge and looped sequences of the artists on stage, back stage, and running up and down the sidewalk.
What makes this an art film, and a pretty good one at that, is how well Poe and Kral convey the essence of so many completely different performers without sacrificing the feel of the performances themselves. Some of these singers admittedly were great, like Patti, the Ramones, and The Talking Heads. But they had damn little in common with one another except for this venue. The idea that anyone would think to call both Joey Ramone and David Byrne "new wave artists" still causes shivers among purists, despite the fact that this film demands that such was very much the case.
The other unifier here is the image. However much these groups may have been attempting to mock various aspects of consumerism or technical proficiency, the fact remains that leather jackets, torn t-shirts and tight pants, while not quite de rigeur, clearly held sway over most other accouterments, even in the case of Blondie, where Deborah Harry was expected to vamp it up amidst the more casually dressed boys in the band.
This film is relatively brief, coming in at just under fifty-five minutes, or twice the length of a Ramones album. That isn't too much time to invest in a film that really does rock and for all the wrong reasons. The main reason is because of someone we have not mentioned yet, and that someone is Wayne County, whose song "Rock n Roll Enema" very much steals the show. Now known as Jayne County, the former Wayne Rogers made her mark as rock's first transsexual or cross-gender performer, a gal whose biggest hit album was Are You Man Enough to be a Woman?, a disc certainly worth tracking down, and not only because it's occasionally funny or even hysterical, but mostly because the damned thing is just good old hard rocking raw-edged serrated spine-snap.
The Blank Generation was filmed in silent 16 mm black and white at New York City's CBGB's night club, mostly in 1975. The film captures live performances by Patti Smith, Richard Hell, The Talking Heads, Blondie, Johnny Thunders, the Ramones, and other new wave heavies of the period. The directors, Ivan Kral (of Patti Smith Group) and Amos Poe (video producer and music documentarian), dubbed studio recordings and demo tracks deliberately out of sync with the hodgepodge and looped sequences of the artists on stage, back stage, and running up and down the sidewalk.
What makes this an art film, and a pretty good one at that, is how well Poe and Kral convey the essence of so many completely different performers without sacrificing the feel of the performances themselves. Some of these singers admittedly were great, like Patti, the Ramones, and The Talking Heads. But they had damn little in common with one another except for this venue. The idea that anyone would think to call both Joey Ramone and David Byrne "new wave artists" still causes shivers among purists, despite the fact that this film demands that such was very much the case.
The other unifier here is the image. However much these groups may have been attempting to mock various aspects of consumerism or technical proficiency, the fact remains that leather jackets, torn t-shirts and tight pants, while not quite de rigeur, clearly held sway over most other accouterments, even in the case of Blondie, where Deborah Harry was expected to vamp it up amidst the more casually dressed boys in the band.
This film is relatively brief, coming in at just under fifty-five minutes, or twice the length of a Ramones album. That isn't too much time to invest in a film that really does rock and for all the wrong reasons. The main reason is because of someone we have not mentioned yet, and that someone is Wayne County, whose song "Rock n Roll Enema" very much steals the show. Now known as Jayne County, the former Wayne Rogers made her mark as rock's first transsexual or cross-gender performer, a gal whose biggest hit album was Are You Man Enough to be a Woman?, a disc certainly worth tracking down, and not only because it's occasionally funny or even hysterical, but mostly because the damned thing is just good old hard rocking raw-edged serrated spine-snap.
The Blank Generation whops us upside the head with its dedication to a do-it-yourself attitude that would scare the dickens out of the people who these days think DYI means "build your own home." These folks, one and all, risked everything for what really should have been, in most cases, far less fame than they actually enjoyed (after all, how many Blondie albums do you really need?).
Going Places
I very much wanted to at least like Bertrand Blier's 1974 film Going Places, or Les Valseuses, if you prefer. I wanted to like the movie because it stars Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou, the latter a quite marvelous actor who has been in any number of fine French films, some of which even permitted her to remain moderately clothed. I also liked Jeanne Moreau and I rather foolishly had hoped her character would add a touch of maturity to this exercise in revolutionary behavior.
That just goes to show you what an idiot I can be.
The movie starts out flashing its counter-cultural credentials all over the place as the two young men, Pierrot and Jean Claude--Patrick DeWaeare and Depardieu--burst into the frame in a stolen shopping cart while pursuing a not altogether beautiful woman whom they hope to rob. The two young men charm the audience immediately, just as they make us recoil ever so slightly as they toy with this woman whom they decide to call Ursula. You see, Jean-Claude and Pierrot are apolitical nihilists. They are the ultimate extreme of a perfect misunderstanding of the influence the 1960s spread out over the following decade. They do not work, neither do they toil. They do not love, although they do conquer. They do not purchase, and yet they consume, at least for the moment. And while they do these things, silly music plays across the soundtrack, suggesting that the boys' inner charm is just a smile away.
Indeed, these two men do not exude repugnant behavior or attitudes. They are virtually amoral in their drive to avoid boredom. They are, in their way, the prototypes of punk. Except--
Johnny Rotten, to the best of my knowledge, never paid a woman to breast-feed Sid Vicious on a train while the woman rode along on her way to meet her military husband.
I'm not going to give away every item in this film that leaves me uneasy. However, I will say that the acting is universally outstanding and if what these hedonistic nihilists did all the time wasn't so socially counterproductive--not all anarchists are nihilists but all nihilists are anarchists, if you catch my drift--this film would stand out as the landmark it clearly yearned to be. The problem is that most of the people Jean-Claude and Pierrot confront are not the cause of the boredom. For instance, when Jean-Claude confronts the security man in the department store, the employee snarks off some sly remarks and Jean-Claude retorts in kind. Fine. But then again his plan is to buy suits with stolen money. Indeed, all of the targets in this film are middle or lower-middle class, and our guys ridicule one man as "Proletariat!" while addressing others as "Comrade!"
Technically, this film lacks any major flaws, unless you want to include a bit of potential irony that was either implied or allowed to slip away, I'm not quite certain which. Here is what I mean: The boys steal a barber/pimp's Citroen DS sports car after one of them gets shot in a testicle. The shooting victim is so outraged that he talks a friend into loosening one of the car's front wheels so that, once the vehicle is recovered, the wheel will come off and the driver will get hurt or killed.
So far so good. After a great deal of sex, the boys learn that the car has been sold to an insurance salesman. Nearly an hour later into the film, we find our presumed heroes driving down the highway in this same car, a car they have stolen three times. We expect the wheel to come off.
We expect a lot of things in this movie. Most of them never happen.
This film was supposed to knock down doors and build castles among the enlightened. What it does instead is simply trick a few ought-to-know-better critics into believing it actually had something to say.
That just goes to show you what an idiot I can be.
The movie starts out flashing its counter-cultural credentials all over the place as the two young men, Pierrot and Jean Claude--Patrick DeWaeare and Depardieu--burst into the frame in a stolen shopping cart while pursuing a not altogether beautiful woman whom they hope to rob. The two young men charm the audience immediately, just as they make us recoil ever so slightly as they toy with this woman whom they decide to call Ursula. You see, Jean-Claude and Pierrot are apolitical nihilists. They are the ultimate extreme of a perfect misunderstanding of the influence the 1960s spread out over the following decade. They do not work, neither do they toil. They do not love, although they do conquer. They do not purchase, and yet they consume, at least for the moment. And while they do these things, silly music plays across the soundtrack, suggesting that the boys' inner charm is just a smile away.
Indeed, these two men do not exude repugnant behavior or attitudes. They are virtually amoral in their drive to avoid boredom. They are, in their way, the prototypes of punk. Except--
Johnny Rotten, to the best of my knowledge, never paid a woman to breast-feed Sid Vicious on a train while the woman rode along on her way to meet her military husband.
I'm not going to give away every item in this film that leaves me uneasy. However, I will say that the acting is universally outstanding and if what these hedonistic nihilists did all the time wasn't so socially counterproductive--not all anarchists are nihilists but all nihilists are anarchists, if you catch my drift--this film would stand out as the landmark it clearly yearned to be. The problem is that most of the people Jean-Claude and Pierrot confront are not the cause of the boredom. For instance, when Jean-Claude confronts the security man in the department store, the employee snarks off some sly remarks and Jean-Claude retorts in kind. Fine. But then again his plan is to buy suits with stolen money. Indeed, all of the targets in this film are middle or lower-middle class, and our guys ridicule one man as "Proletariat!" while addressing others as "Comrade!"
Technically, this film lacks any major flaws, unless you want to include a bit of potential irony that was either implied or allowed to slip away, I'm not quite certain which. Here is what I mean: The boys steal a barber/pimp's Citroen DS sports car after one of them gets shot in a testicle. The shooting victim is so outraged that he talks a friend into loosening one of the car's front wheels so that, once the vehicle is recovered, the wheel will come off and the driver will get hurt or killed.
So far so good. After a great deal of sex, the boys learn that the car has been sold to an insurance salesman. Nearly an hour later into the film, we find our presumed heroes driving down the highway in this same car, a car they have stolen three times. We expect the wheel to come off.
We expect a lot of things in this movie. Most of them never happen.
This film was supposed to knock down doors and build castles among the enlightened. What it does instead is simply trick a few ought-to-know-better critics into believing it actually had something to say.
Salem's Lot
The scariest novel Stephen King has written is Salem's Lot. I did not say it was the best. I said it was the scariest. That's probably a subjective thing, but I'll stand by it because around the time I read that book I had to walk home from work at night through a creepy and deserted part of town and I will tell you that even as the hardest-nosed skeptic against anything even vaguely metaphysical who ever doodled in math class, I was occasionally quite uncomfortable. I attribute my fear to Salem's Lot. Thanks, Steve. So imagine my disappointment at the two movies that have been made out of this book. The first, by Tobe Hooper--of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame--was the real disappointment since by the time the 2004 remake came along I no longer gave much of a damn. But why anyone would have cast David Soul from "Starsky and Hutch" in the role of Ben Mears is beyond the reaches of my trembling imagination, just as I still reel from the idea of casting Lance Kerwin from "James at Fifteen" in the role of the boy. The problem with both these actors is that they are more stiff than Billy Joel at a communion. Still, the movie did feature the brilliant James Mason as the vampire's helper, as well as the nearly brilliant Fred Willard as Crockett, the real estate agent, so going into it there was some reason for hope.
Things begin well enough with Mears and the boy in the present time roaming through unpronounceable regions of Mexico, on the lam from what we imagine are the pursuing spirits of pissed off vampires. That fades away and we revert to two years earlier, which is where the story really begins, with Ben Mears, budding novelist, returning home after far too many years away. The camera work in the opening segment is great, especially the way Hooper puts the camera right down in the weeds as we look at James Mason descending from the evil Marsten House, just about the place where a young Ben Mears would have been all those years ago. I mention this as just one example of Hooper;s skill as a way of highlighting the fact that in terms of technique, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this film, except maybe the vampire itself, who, based on his appearance, would not have frightened a teenage girl scout, much less the people of that town. Likewise, the sound is excellent, resonating just under the action when necessary and just over it during drive segments.
Part of the craft that Tobe Hooper brings to this movie--and toChainsaw, easily the most terrifying movie ever made--is an occasional disregard for getting in and out of scenes easily or with finesse. Sometimes we go from a daytime conversation in the rooming house where Mears is staying to an exterior scene at night with Mears standing alongside his jeep, with no concern at all for continuity. What makes this artful instead of clumsy is that Hooper simultaneously weaves the cast of characters in and out of the scenes with what I can only think to describe as a sneakiness that actually adds to the suspense. The use of headlights for nighttime exterior lighting is also a clever move. Hooper even adds an element to the movie that was missing from the novel: a tepid suspicion by the townsfolk of the writer.
"I like you, Ben. Modern aggressive partially liberated states her feelings," says the woman. "Does that make you uncomfortable?"
"No," says the writer. "It makes me feel good."
There's no telling how that little exchange would have disturbed the Phyllis Schaftley contingent of the audience.
Stephen King traditionally treats women in his books as if he actually likes them rather than desires to use them specifically to resolve his Oedipal tensions. It is the same with Tobe Hooper. The neat trick he manages to pull off in this film is a trick often missing from film adaptations of King product: he actually pulls off the sometimes insurmountable task of character development. Here the Ben Mears character is actually the weakest of the lot, so to speak, but the women, by golly, they get to be the most interesting people in the whole production. Susan Norton, the love interest, actually blossoms throughout, moving from strength to strength. (Her mother is likewise an interesting sort, just this side of being an overprotective pest, but not quite.) And Susan breaks free of her mother just as she breaks free of her ex-boyfriend, even as she attempts to leave behind what she feels are the limitations of her little town. This is not unusual in a horror film. What is unusual and what adds to the plus column in an evaluation ofSalem's Lot, is that when Susan becomes a victim in this movie, it is not in retribution for her independence. On the contrary, the audience pulls for her to survive specifically because of her personal strength.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that everyone with whom I've ever discussed this movie has liked it much more than have I. Forewarned, if you can get beyond the Made-For-Television acting of two of the three lead characters, you may find that Hooper's treatment of the rural landscape, with its browns and yellows, and his attention to detail being so precise that even the crickets natter on cue, then you may find this quite the spine tingler.
A few closing points compel me. First, this is one of the most pro-human vampire tales of all time. There's no attempt to paint the vampires as misunderstood. They are tragic, yes, but not to be dismissed as lovable. Second, the treatment of women in this horror movie is a million times better than the way modern lawmakers treat real life women, just as things were back in 1979 when this movie came out. And third, James Kerwin only branched out into theatrical films two other times, one of which was 1995's rather hideous Outbreak. Nuff said?
Things begin well enough with Mears and the boy in the present time roaming through unpronounceable regions of Mexico, on the lam from what we imagine are the pursuing spirits of pissed off vampires. That fades away and we revert to two years earlier, which is where the story really begins, with Ben Mears, budding novelist, returning home after far too many years away. The camera work in the opening segment is great, especially the way Hooper puts the camera right down in the weeds as we look at James Mason descending from the evil Marsten House, just about the place where a young Ben Mears would have been all those years ago. I mention this as just one example of Hooper;s skill as a way of highlighting the fact that in terms of technique, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this film, except maybe the vampire itself, who, based on his appearance, would not have frightened a teenage girl scout, much less the people of that town. Likewise, the sound is excellent, resonating just under the action when necessary and just over it during drive segments.
Part of the craft that Tobe Hooper brings to this movie--and toChainsaw, easily the most terrifying movie ever made--is an occasional disregard for getting in and out of scenes easily or with finesse. Sometimes we go from a daytime conversation in the rooming house where Mears is staying to an exterior scene at night with Mears standing alongside his jeep, with no concern at all for continuity. What makes this artful instead of clumsy is that Hooper simultaneously weaves the cast of characters in and out of the scenes with what I can only think to describe as a sneakiness that actually adds to the suspense. The use of headlights for nighttime exterior lighting is also a clever move. Hooper even adds an element to the movie that was missing from the novel: a tepid suspicion by the townsfolk of the writer.
"I like you, Ben. Modern aggressive partially liberated states her feelings," says the woman. "Does that make you uncomfortable?"
"No," says the writer. "It makes me feel good."
There's no telling how that little exchange would have disturbed the Phyllis Schaftley contingent of the audience.
Stephen King traditionally treats women in his books as if he actually likes them rather than desires to use them specifically to resolve his Oedipal tensions. It is the same with Tobe Hooper. The neat trick he manages to pull off in this film is a trick often missing from film adaptations of King product: he actually pulls off the sometimes insurmountable task of character development. Here the Ben Mears character is actually the weakest of the lot, so to speak, but the women, by golly, they get to be the most interesting people in the whole production. Susan Norton, the love interest, actually blossoms throughout, moving from strength to strength. (Her mother is likewise an interesting sort, just this side of being an overprotective pest, but not quite.) And Susan breaks free of her mother just as she breaks free of her ex-boyfriend, even as she attempts to leave behind what she feels are the limitations of her little town. This is not unusual in a horror film. What is unusual and what adds to the plus column in an evaluation ofSalem's Lot, is that when Susan becomes a victim in this movie, it is not in retribution for her independence. On the contrary, the audience pulls for her to survive specifically because of her personal strength.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that everyone with whom I've ever discussed this movie has liked it much more than have I. Forewarned, if you can get beyond the Made-For-Television acting of two of the three lead characters, you may find that Hooper's treatment of the rural landscape, with its browns and yellows, and his attention to detail being so precise that even the crickets natter on cue, then you may find this quite the spine tingler.
A few closing points compel me. First, this is one of the most pro-human vampire tales of all time. There's no attempt to paint the vampires as misunderstood. They are tragic, yes, but not to be dismissed as lovable. Second, the treatment of women in this horror movie is a million times better than the way modern lawmakers treat real life women, just as things were back in 1979 when this movie came out. And third, James Kerwin only branched out into theatrical films two other times, one of which was 1995's rather hideous Outbreak. Nuff said?
Winter Soldier and The Weather Underground
We begin with an excerpt from the opening paragraph of an article published in the March 11, 2012 edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "Moving from house to house, a U.S. Army sergeant opened fire Sunday on Afghan villagers as they slept, killing 16 people — mostly women and children — in an attack that reignited fury at the U.S. presence following a wave of deadly protests over Americans burning Qurans."
Eight days later an article appeared in Slate that began: "Lynndie England, the former U.S. solider made infamous in 2004 for a photo of her giving two thumbs-up at Abu Ghraib, isn't sorry for how she and her fellow soldiers abused prisoners there. 'Their lives are better,' she [said] in an interview for a story published Monday. 'They got the better end of the deal. They weren't innocent. They're trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them?'"
In February 1971, 125 Vietnam Veterans came to a Howard Johnsons in Detroit to give testimony about the atrocities they had either witnessed or participated in while stationed in Vietnam.
It was called the Winter Soldier Project and this filmed documentary of the event will give you nightmares, just as the events described gave the soldiers involved nightmares for years. Unlike the despicable, sanctimonious and rationalizing Ms. England, these men were not proud of their behavior. On the contrary, while not attempting to justify themselves, these men ravage our hearts with stories of how their leaders conditioned and brainwashed them into becoming professional torturers, rapists and mass murderers. The movie is the farthest thing from dispassionate and yet its only commentary comes by way of the occasional gasps, moans and tears from the members of the press and public who had gathered to hear the testimony. To quote from the website for the film: "Though the event was attended by press and television news crews, almost nothing was reported to the American public. Yet, this unprecedented forum marked a turning point in the anti-war movement. It was a pivotal moment in the lives of young vets from around the country who participated, including the young John Kerry. The Winter Soldier Investigation changed him and his comrades forever. Their courage in testifying, their desire to prevent further atrocities and to regain their own humanity, provide a dramatic intensity that makes seeing Winter Soldier (1972) an unforgettable experience."
The beauty--and that is the proper word--of this film radiates in the balance the filmmakers establish between the self-loathing and sudden liberation of the men testifying against themselves and the actual victims of these horrors. The men are shown in black and white. The victims in living color. This balance does not exist today, of course. Today the accused killer of the sixteen Afghans receives media coverage while his alleged victims remain nameless entities, simply today's version of gooks, slopes, krauts, japs and coloreds.
My father served in World War II. He was in what was at the time called the Army-Air Force. Until his dying day he could not quite understand what was supposedly different about the Vietnam experience. My dad spent most of the war in the Pacific and saw more than his share of brutality, most of it random and anonymous. But because he did not undergo conditioning geared to brutalize himself and dehumanize the enemies, he could not conceive that such a thing had happened to a younger generation. And yet it did happen. My father joined up after the attack at Pearl Harbor. That attack was all the motivation he needed--well, that and the fear that he would get drafted into the infantry--to leave the home he had not strayed more than fifty miles from in his life to that point in order to defeat the curse of fascism. But in Vietnam, the closest thing to a provocation had been the nonsense of the Gulf of Tonkin incident which, even at the time, most people didn't believe and which, it turned out, never actually happened. So brutality and dehumanization became essential in a war that was about (a) enriching Brown & Root (later absorbed by Halliburton), Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics, and (b) body counts. Body counts? Sir, yes, sir. The Vietnamese government estimated in 1995 that four million civilians died in that twenty-year war. The Hanoi government revealed on April 3 of that year that the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. 58,212 Americans died.
I cannot recommend Winter Soldier too highly. It will rip you apart. It will also help you make sense of our second film, The Weather Underground. Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, two men who give the movie an aroma/perfume of PBS, TWU tries very hard to establish the context in which Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers and others struggled to bring the war home to America through the use of provocation and violence. That context, of course, was the war being waged against a people ten thousand miles away, one which good and solid American people may have felt was getting just a little too damned much media coverage, the kind of stuff that, you know, radicalized the youth of the day.
The young Dohrn comes across quite bloodthirsty in the early footage and a teenage Rudd appears just as obnoxious as his reputation suggested. The thirty to one hundred members of what was originally called The Weathermen--the result of a 1969 split within Students for a Democratic Society--broke windows, robbed banks and placed bombs. Mostly, however, they drew the attention of the FBI, an organization prone to violating the law in the name of upholding it. The Weather Underground also did a good job of getting itself killed, as when on March 6, 1970, Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Teddy Gold died when a bomb the group had been constructing in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew them to kingdom come. Kathy Boudin, one of two survivors in the group, went on to participate in the Brinks robbery. She was finally released from prison in 2003. There is absolutely no mention whatsoever of Boudin in this documentary.
I will say that without the context of Winter Soldier, or at least a memory of and emotional connection to the atrocities of the war in Vietnam, it is hard to develop much sympathies for this group of people who, in all sincerity, were trying to show Americans what it felt or at least looked like to have combat in the streets. What the film does not admit--and what ultimately dooms it to artistic failure--is the youthful exuberance and downright energy of being a kid in Sixties America. These were smart, mostly college-educated young folks to whom the old days of the bridge over the river Kwai may have been an abstraction but to whom the contemporary sight of their brothers coming home in boxes was a reality, as was the nightly news reports of villages strafed, civilians slaughtered, and senselessness shared.
We still do not see that these days. We do not see the news reports of coffins beneath draped flags. We do not see the cemeteries. We do see stupid video games that glorify murder in combat.
Vietnam did not have "embedded" reporters. Iraq did. Afghanistan does. And yet chances are we know less about what has happened there than the average sixteen-year-old knew about Vietnam a generation or two ago. Maybe that is why there has yet to be a Weather Underground II.
Eight days later an article appeared in Slate that began: "Lynndie England, the former U.S. solider made infamous in 2004 for a photo of her giving two thumbs-up at Abu Ghraib, isn't sorry for how she and her fellow soldiers abused prisoners there. 'Their lives are better,' she [said] in an interview for a story published Monday. 'They got the better end of the deal. They weren't innocent. They're trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them?'"
In February 1971, 125 Vietnam Veterans came to a Howard Johnsons in Detroit to give testimony about the atrocities they had either witnessed or participated in while stationed in Vietnam.
It was called the Winter Soldier Project and this filmed documentary of the event will give you nightmares, just as the events described gave the soldiers involved nightmares for years. Unlike the despicable, sanctimonious and rationalizing Ms. England, these men were not proud of their behavior. On the contrary, while not attempting to justify themselves, these men ravage our hearts with stories of how their leaders conditioned and brainwashed them into becoming professional torturers, rapists and mass murderers. The movie is the farthest thing from dispassionate and yet its only commentary comes by way of the occasional gasps, moans and tears from the members of the press and public who had gathered to hear the testimony. To quote from the website for the film: "Though the event was attended by press and television news crews, almost nothing was reported to the American public. Yet, this unprecedented forum marked a turning point in the anti-war movement. It was a pivotal moment in the lives of young vets from around the country who participated, including the young John Kerry. The Winter Soldier Investigation changed him and his comrades forever. Their courage in testifying, their desire to prevent further atrocities and to regain their own humanity, provide a dramatic intensity that makes seeing Winter Soldier (1972) an unforgettable experience."
The beauty--and that is the proper word--of this film radiates in the balance the filmmakers establish between the self-loathing and sudden liberation of the men testifying against themselves and the actual victims of these horrors. The men are shown in black and white. The victims in living color. This balance does not exist today, of course. Today the accused killer of the sixteen Afghans receives media coverage while his alleged victims remain nameless entities, simply today's version of gooks, slopes, krauts, japs and coloreds.
My father served in World War II. He was in what was at the time called the Army-Air Force. Until his dying day he could not quite understand what was supposedly different about the Vietnam experience. My dad spent most of the war in the Pacific and saw more than his share of brutality, most of it random and anonymous. But because he did not undergo conditioning geared to brutalize himself and dehumanize the enemies, he could not conceive that such a thing had happened to a younger generation. And yet it did happen. My father joined up after the attack at Pearl Harbor. That attack was all the motivation he needed--well, that and the fear that he would get drafted into the infantry--to leave the home he had not strayed more than fifty miles from in his life to that point in order to defeat the curse of fascism. But in Vietnam, the closest thing to a provocation had been the nonsense of the Gulf of Tonkin incident which, even at the time, most people didn't believe and which, it turned out, never actually happened. So brutality and dehumanization became essential in a war that was about (a) enriching Brown & Root (later absorbed by Halliburton), Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics, and (b) body counts. Body counts? Sir, yes, sir. The Vietnamese government estimated in 1995 that four million civilians died in that twenty-year war. The Hanoi government revealed on April 3 of that year that the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. 58,212 Americans died.
I cannot recommend Winter Soldier too highly. It will rip you apart. It will also help you make sense of our second film, The Weather Underground. Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, two men who give the movie an aroma/perfume of PBS, TWU tries very hard to establish the context in which Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers and others struggled to bring the war home to America through the use of provocation and violence. That context, of course, was the war being waged against a people ten thousand miles away, one which good and solid American people may have felt was getting just a little too damned much media coverage, the kind of stuff that, you know, radicalized the youth of the day.
The young Dohrn comes across quite bloodthirsty in the early footage and a teenage Rudd appears just as obnoxious as his reputation suggested. The thirty to one hundred members of what was originally called The Weathermen--the result of a 1969 split within Students for a Democratic Society--broke windows, robbed banks and placed bombs. Mostly, however, they drew the attention of the FBI, an organization prone to violating the law in the name of upholding it. The Weather Underground also did a good job of getting itself killed, as when on March 6, 1970, Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Teddy Gold died when a bomb the group had been constructing in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew them to kingdom come. Kathy Boudin, one of two survivors in the group, went on to participate in the Brinks robbery. She was finally released from prison in 2003. There is absolutely no mention whatsoever of Boudin in this documentary.
I will say that without the context of Winter Soldier, or at least a memory of and emotional connection to the atrocities of the war in Vietnam, it is hard to develop much sympathies for this group of people who, in all sincerity, were trying to show Americans what it felt or at least looked like to have combat in the streets. What the film does not admit--and what ultimately dooms it to artistic failure--is the youthful exuberance and downright energy of being a kid in Sixties America. These were smart, mostly college-educated young folks to whom the old days of the bridge over the river Kwai may have been an abstraction but to whom the contemporary sight of their brothers coming home in boxes was a reality, as was the nightly news reports of villages strafed, civilians slaughtered, and senselessness shared.
We still do not see that these days. We do not see the news reports of coffins beneath draped flags. We do not see the cemeteries. We do see stupid video games that glorify murder in combat.
Vietnam did not have "embedded" reporters. Iraq did. Afghanistan does. And yet chances are we know less about what has happened there than the average sixteen-year-old knew about Vietnam a generation or two ago. Maybe that is why there has yet to be a Weather Underground II.
Soldier Blue
Today's film, Soldier Blue (1970), absorbed its cinematic influences from John Ford, William Hart, and John Sturges. Its morality, however, emerges directly from the spirit of the preceding decade, one which challenged the pre-existing order, sometimes offering that challenge with a peace sign in the face, other times with a closed fist. Co-mingling these influences can serve as satire, homage, or simple artistic choice. On the levels of which this movie fails, the most stark is that the audience will be unable to answer that particular set of questions. All the old elements present themselves: an Indian attack on a confused cavalry, a woman rescued from the clutches of the Cheyenne, music that cues the proper emotional response from the audience, wide opened spaces that take the breath from even the black-hatted villain.
And yet where the movie does work, it works well. Those small victories begin with the casting of Candice Bergen as the female lead, Cresta Lee. I can think of no one else who could have played the role of the woman freed from her presumed captivity with the native Americans. Cresta is at once angry, sentimental, cynical, lascivious and ornery. By the end of the film's first fifteen minutes, during which most of the bad actors are happily killed off, Bergen proves herself brilliant at initiating the role reversal that will captivate us for the rest of the film. Her foil is Honus Gent, played well by Peter Strauss. His character is slightly deluded, prudish, loyal, merciful, and fastidious. This gender role reversal is tough to play straight and audiences lulled into accepting the traditional accouterments of a John Ford western (which director Ralph Nelson clearly emulates) probably won't know whether to laugh or be suspicious. And while certain comic flourishes pop up from time to time, Soldier Blue is a tragedy, plain and simple. It was also considered ultra-violent in those days and near the end you may even agree. While this movie doesn't warrant much more commentary than this, if I were Ebert I'd give it at least one up-turned thumb just because Strauss has such great hair and because Bergen conveys a set of emotional strengths at a time when she was only twenty-four years old that actors twice her age would have murdered to possess. But even a nice bit of theme music sung by Buffy Sainte-Marie still can't quite save this movie from being relegated to the "made for TV" dustbins of the period. Still, if you want to see the framework for a class where promising young actors are pitted against old-and-in-the-way hacks, this'll be right up your totem pole.
And yet where the movie does work, it works well. Those small victories begin with the casting of Candice Bergen as the female lead, Cresta Lee. I can think of no one else who could have played the role of the woman freed from her presumed captivity with the native Americans. Cresta is at once angry, sentimental, cynical, lascivious and ornery. By the end of the film's first fifteen minutes, during which most of the bad actors are happily killed off, Bergen proves herself brilliant at initiating the role reversal that will captivate us for the rest of the film. Her foil is Honus Gent, played well by Peter Strauss. His character is slightly deluded, prudish, loyal, merciful, and fastidious. This gender role reversal is tough to play straight and audiences lulled into accepting the traditional accouterments of a John Ford western (which director Ralph Nelson clearly emulates) probably won't know whether to laugh or be suspicious. And while certain comic flourishes pop up from time to time, Soldier Blue is a tragedy, plain and simple. It was also considered ultra-violent in those days and near the end you may even agree. While this movie doesn't warrant much more commentary than this, if I were Ebert I'd give it at least one up-turned thumb just because Strauss has such great hair and because Bergen conveys a set of emotional strengths at a time when she was only twenty-four years old that actors twice her age would have murdered to possess. But even a nice bit of theme music sung by Buffy Sainte-Marie still can't quite save this movie from being relegated to the "made for TV" dustbins of the period. Still, if you want to see the framework for a class where promising young actors are pitted against old-and-in-the-way hacks, this'll be right up your totem pole.
Harold and Maude
The old theatre maxim declares that "Acting is reacting." In the development of one's skill, this remains a vital bit of advice. In the movie Harold and Maude (1971), we witness something a bit more organic than synthetic, a bit more natural than contrived. For that reason, some critics didn't care much for the performance of Bud Cort as Harold and gave only backhanded praise to Ruth Gordon as Maude. Here's an example. When Maude meets Harold, she asks him if he sings and dances. He replies that he does not, speaking the words as if it were not entirely crazy that someone would ask him that. Maude watches his mouth as he replies and then says that she didn't think he did. Harold's reaction to this is something we are denied because at that moment Maude roars off in a stolen VW bug.
The psychology of being an audience member or viewer is that we get conditioned to expect certain reactions in advance and director Hal Ashby (whom we last discussed in The Landlord) denies us this preconceived satisfaction. The actions and reactions remain unaffected. This can cause things to drag a bit, particularly if we fall into another expectation, this time by believing the movie to be a comedy, which apparently a lot of people did.
Harold and Maude are a bit obsessed with funerals, you see, although for very different reasons. Harold is roughly eighteen and lives at home with his mother, a wealthy narcissist who knows all the trendy psychological terminology of the day. The psychiatric foundation is essential in her life because Harold commits no less than four suicide stunts in the first twenty minutes of the film. His mother's tired indifference to these actions initially push us around until we realize that she has been enduring this behavior for some time. And so our nervous giggling turns to a more cerebral curiosity of just what it is that makes poor Harold so unhappy. After all, he has money, he has boyish good looks, he has an excellent wardrobe.
He also has no father, although he does have a one-armed, kill-crazy military uncle who attempts to draft the boy into the service to make a man of him. He has a series of uninteresting female callers who want to get to know him better. And he has all the Cat Stevens records money can buy. What more does a growing boy need?
What this boy needs is a humanist, anarchistic scofflaw, an eco-friendly woman approaching her eightieth birthday by living in a box car, sculpting erotic forms, stealing cars and going to funerals. Her name, of course, is Maude.
To give the critics their due, Ashby does misdirect us with the occasional visual blip of hysterical humor, as when the uncle salutes with his missing arm and when Harold's mom finds that the third of three computer-selected dates has killed herself during their first meeting (Mother: "Oh, Harold. That was your last date.") And yet the fact remains that life contains all sorts of laughter and crying, wit and sorrow, daisies and tombstones (which the cinematographer juxtaposes with some brilliance). But the real clue that Ashby is deadly serious in his transformation of writer-producer Colin Higgins' script comes as, for just one second, we are clued in that Maude is a survivor of the Holocaust. I'm not going to tell you the specific clue because it is the kind of thing you need to observe for yourself. Indeed, it is possible that you will be too young and underexposed (as Harold may be) to recognize it as a clue at all.
Ultimately, I suspect what the critics objected to most about this movie was the idea of a love affair between a man-child and an old woman. But the experience of getting to understand Maude is what changes Harold for the better, however painful that change may have been.
Now, I have to admit at this point that the songs Cat Stevens sings throughout this film, at least to my ears, give the movie something of a preachy tone and that is unfortunate because being preached at is one of the major drags of being a young person in any age. That brings us to the other area in which I do agree with the people who had problems with this work. We really get no particular insight into what it is that bothers Harold so much. Apparently Harold's persona exists so that we can throw our own memories of teenage horror (recent or ancient) onto the screen and hope that something sticks. Or, we can simply take it for granted that what Ashby and Higgins rail against is the sterility of the upper class. After all, Harold lives in something of a castle and Maude's digs are infinitely more modest. But that explanation doesn't really satisfy, however preconditioned we may be to expect it. Well, maybe it's the self-absorbed mother or the unspoken absence of a father in these materialistic times. Maybe it's the glorification of killing or the contrived happiness shoved down our throats. It's a good question and we don't really get much of an answer.
All the same, it feels good to see Ruth Gordon breathing life into every frame of this film, just as it feels weird watching Bud Cort's subdued performance. And even a bad movie by Ashby is better than no Ashby at all. This movie is not bad. It simply falls short of being great. Just like life.
The psychology of being an audience member or viewer is that we get conditioned to expect certain reactions in advance and director Hal Ashby (whom we last discussed in The Landlord) denies us this preconceived satisfaction. The actions and reactions remain unaffected. This can cause things to drag a bit, particularly if we fall into another expectation, this time by believing the movie to be a comedy, which apparently a lot of people did.
Harold and Maude are a bit obsessed with funerals, you see, although for very different reasons. Harold is roughly eighteen and lives at home with his mother, a wealthy narcissist who knows all the trendy psychological terminology of the day. The psychiatric foundation is essential in her life because Harold commits no less than four suicide stunts in the first twenty minutes of the film. His mother's tired indifference to these actions initially push us around until we realize that she has been enduring this behavior for some time. And so our nervous giggling turns to a more cerebral curiosity of just what it is that makes poor Harold so unhappy. After all, he has money, he has boyish good looks, he has an excellent wardrobe.
He also has no father, although he does have a one-armed, kill-crazy military uncle who attempts to draft the boy into the service to make a man of him. He has a series of uninteresting female callers who want to get to know him better. And he has all the Cat Stevens records money can buy. What more does a growing boy need?
What this boy needs is a humanist, anarchistic scofflaw, an eco-friendly woman approaching her eightieth birthday by living in a box car, sculpting erotic forms, stealing cars and going to funerals. Her name, of course, is Maude.
To give the critics their due, Ashby does misdirect us with the occasional visual blip of hysterical humor, as when the uncle salutes with his missing arm and when Harold's mom finds that the third of three computer-selected dates has killed herself during their first meeting (Mother: "Oh, Harold. That was your last date.") And yet the fact remains that life contains all sorts of laughter and crying, wit and sorrow, daisies and tombstones (which the cinematographer juxtaposes with some brilliance). But the real clue that Ashby is deadly serious in his transformation of writer-producer Colin Higgins' script comes as, for just one second, we are clued in that Maude is a survivor of the Holocaust. I'm not going to tell you the specific clue because it is the kind of thing you need to observe for yourself. Indeed, it is possible that you will be too young and underexposed (as Harold may be) to recognize it as a clue at all.
Ultimately, I suspect what the critics objected to most about this movie was the idea of a love affair between a man-child and an old woman. But the experience of getting to understand Maude is what changes Harold for the better, however painful that change may have been.
Now, I have to admit at this point that the songs Cat Stevens sings throughout this film, at least to my ears, give the movie something of a preachy tone and that is unfortunate because being preached at is one of the major drags of being a young person in any age. That brings us to the other area in which I do agree with the people who had problems with this work. We really get no particular insight into what it is that bothers Harold so much. Apparently Harold's persona exists so that we can throw our own memories of teenage horror (recent or ancient) onto the screen and hope that something sticks. Or, we can simply take it for granted that what Ashby and Higgins rail against is the sterility of the upper class. After all, Harold lives in something of a castle and Maude's digs are infinitely more modest. But that explanation doesn't really satisfy, however preconditioned we may be to expect it. Well, maybe it's the self-absorbed mother or the unspoken absence of a father in these materialistic times. Maybe it's the glorification of killing or the contrived happiness shoved down our throats. It's a good question and we don't really get much of an answer.
All the same, it feels good to see Ruth Gordon breathing life into every frame of this film, just as it feels weird watching Bud Cort's subdued performance. And even a bad movie by Ashby is better than no Ashby at all. This movie is not bad. It simply falls short of being great. Just like life.
Helter Skelter
It's not quite like yesterday, but I can still remember with considerable clarity the night of April 1, 1976. The first half of the television movie "Helter Skelter" was being aired. VCRs and DVDs did not exist in people's homes in those days, so I filmed the TV set with my 35mm home movie camera. The finished product didn't turn out particularly well, although it was good enough for my purposes.
You see, I had a fascination with this case, one that only diminished slightly in the ensuing years. But we'll get to that a bit later. The reason I filmed the movie was so I could do a scene-by-scene analysis of it for my senior English class. I had a paper due under the general heading of process and development, meaning I was to write a paper about how some particular thing had come into existence and how it had then developed into something else. Because the teacher, whose last name I will not use here but whose first name was Virginia, had rejected my first proposal for a paper, on the grounds that the development of acne was not quite what she was looking for, I figured I'd do something else to freak her out. I picked that movie. Good Lord, I had no idea with whom I was messing, and I do not mean Charlie Manson.
It turned out that Virginia had spent much of the summer of 1969 living in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, not far at all from what was at that time 10050 Cielo Drive. Had I put actual effort into trying to find one subject that would send the teacher into frantic fits, I couldn't have done a better job. So let's be clear. I did not like this English teacher at all. I thought then and I think now that she was a mean-spirited, underfed woman who believed herself the victim of a cruel world because she had been relocated from the land of the hoi polloi and sunshine to the windblown acreage of central Ohio. She thought herself a supreme intellectual and a worthy critic of the presumably limited imaginations of those students she had the misfortune of instructing.
So, no, I did not like this Virginia woman.
I did not, however, know that she had been a neighbor of the Polanski family or that she had spent time under psychiatric care because of the fear the Tate murders had caused her. I really did not know this.
I selected my subject, as I say, because I thought it would mildly annoy her and because it was a topic about which I was a minor-level expert.
I filmed the movie's first half the night of April 1. I was duly impressed. The Vincent Bugliosi/Curt Gentry book had been one scary ride and I had been anxious to seen how things would play out on film. The next night I filmed the second half. Not quite as scary as the first, I thought, but still pretty intense.
The third night I sat down and played the damned thing back, once I picked up the developed copy at the photography studio. The quality was quite poor but I had enough clarity to plot out what was basically a storyboard of what had been on the screen. By the time the morning rolled around, I had over one hundred pages of notes and drawings, along with an opening and summation. While I had originally planned to shock Virginia with the subject matter, I ended up quite proud of myself for the effort I had spent doing this. I was fairly certain that she would approach it with grudging interest and I would certainly receive a fine grade for the course.
In the words of Puck the dancing fairy, "Oh what fools these mortals be."
She read no more than the first page. Her quivering hand reached out to me. She said, "This is unacceptable. You need to select a more traditional topic."
Well, that's the way it goes. My reaction got me suspended from school for three days, which is the only time I was ever in any real trouble in high school.
The exercise was good for me, all the same. It was way back then that I first began to understand that I had what I guess you could call a love affair with the movies. I loved the way one scene was constructed so that it would lead naturally into the next. I loved the fact that movies are typically filmed out of sequence. And I loved the ability of a group of people under the supervision of a director to put together a product that people could view in their own homes or in the theatre and be affected by it.
I think it goes without saying that I have watched the original "Helter Skelter" movie a few times over the following years, most recently just a few minutes ago. Compared to the remake, which came out in 2004, I suppose this seems rather tame. And yet the original served a purpose and still does. It has a degree of authenticity lacking in any of the follow-ups. For instance, director Tom Gries was able to use the actual LaBianca house for the murders of the second night. Likewise, the vehicle used by the "family" in the film was the actual Johnny Swartz Ford used by the real killers. Beyond that, however, Steve Railsback, who played Manson, and whom we last saw in The Visitors, did a good job playing a mass murderer for a TV audience. Granted, the camera didn't take us into the Tate house during the actual recreations of the killings, as it did during the remake, but the implied horror was even more intense if not more so because of the suggestion, repeated a few times near the conclusion, that these killers might soon be getting out on parole.
Some questions remain, even after all these years. First is the exact number of people murdered by Manson and his followers. It now appears we will not know the answer to this and that is a damned shame. In her jailhouse "admission" to Ronnie Howard, Susan Atkins stated that there were eleven murders committed by the family that the police would never solve. This admission took place within the context of a conversation regarding the murders of Gary Hinman and the seven Tate-LaBianca killings and so the logical inference is that she was not including those eight people in her head count. One of the eleven was probably Donald "Shorty" Shea, a laborer at Spahn Ranch. By pouring over old police records, trial transcripts, magazine articles, online sources and books, I have come up with a total of about twenty-two possibles, not including Tate-LaBianca. I believe many of these victims are known to the police who simply lack evidence to charge and prosecute. A search of the area surrounding Barker Ranch in Death Valley as recently as three years ago did not turn up any physical remains.
A second question that remains is: Who's eyeglasses were those left at the Tate murder scene? A follow-up question is: How did they get there? We know that the glasses did not belong to any of the victims and we know they did not belong to the killers. The logical inference is that they were left behind as a false clue. But by whom? Susan Atkins did not mention them in any of her admissions in Sybil Brand detention, nor during her grand jury testimony or during her testimony during the guilt phase of her own trial. Writer Ed Sanders has speculated that Manson himself placed the glasses inside the house after the killings. This would require him to have gone to the Tate house after the killers he sent returned to Spahn Ranch that August night, something that prosecutor Bugliosi thinks is unlikely because of the natural fear Manson would have had at putting himself at risk by entering the house at all. Susan Atkins knew whose glasses they were, but apparently no one in authority ever got around to asking her before she died.
The third question is: Why did they pick the LaBianca house? The house where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered was chosen for several reasons, chiefly being that Manson had a grudge against a former tenant there, Tex Watson knew the home's layout, and these victims were successful in areas where Manson himself had aspired and failed. But why go after the LaBiancas? Granted, Charlie and others in the Family had been in the house next door on several occasions, but nothing else has ever been presented that would shine light on why the husband and wife, Leno and Rosemary, were slaughtered by these people, other than a totally random attempt to start the race war known as Helter Skelter. Random just doesn't make it. There has to have been another reason.
Charles Manson, Charles Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten: one or more of these prisoners of the state of California must know the answers to these questions. And while it would be absurd to expect any of them to acknowledge or admit to participation in still other murders (Claudia Delaney, Marina Habe, Mark Watts, Doreen Gaul, Karl Stubbs, Darwin Scott, Jane Doe 59, and others), some of them must be able to exchange what they know for special consideration, giving the fact that, except for Van Houten, it now seems highly unlikely that any of them--or Robert Beausoleil and Bruce Davis, for that matter--will be released in this life time. That leads us to the final question that I have:
Will any of the convicted murders of Sharon Tate and the others ever be released?
I think not. Again, with the possible exception of Van Houten, who was along and a willing participant in the events of the second night, there is very little chance that any of the others will see freedom. Even if they were granted parole, no California governor with dreams of reelection would ever sign the executive release orders.
And so the story goes on. Steve "Clem" Grogan was released years ago. Squeaky Fromme is out. Most of the men and women, now quite gray and hunched, are settling into old age, hoping to put the past behind them, just as the families of the victims try to do the same. And yet, until the above questions are answered, I doubt we can actually take any comfort in telling ourselves that the events of August 1969 are completely over.
The original "Helter Skelter" movie is a good place to start your own curious mind to wandering. Just don't expect to get any sleep for a few nights.
You see, I had a fascination with this case, one that only diminished slightly in the ensuing years. But we'll get to that a bit later. The reason I filmed the movie was so I could do a scene-by-scene analysis of it for my senior English class. I had a paper due under the general heading of process and development, meaning I was to write a paper about how some particular thing had come into existence and how it had then developed into something else. Because the teacher, whose last name I will not use here but whose first name was Virginia, had rejected my first proposal for a paper, on the grounds that the development of acne was not quite what she was looking for, I figured I'd do something else to freak her out. I picked that movie. Good Lord, I had no idea with whom I was messing, and I do not mean Charlie Manson.
It turned out that Virginia had spent much of the summer of 1969 living in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, not far at all from what was at that time 10050 Cielo Drive. Had I put actual effort into trying to find one subject that would send the teacher into frantic fits, I couldn't have done a better job. So let's be clear. I did not like this English teacher at all. I thought then and I think now that she was a mean-spirited, underfed woman who believed herself the victim of a cruel world because she had been relocated from the land of the hoi polloi and sunshine to the windblown acreage of central Ohio. She thought herself a supreme intellectual and a worthy critic of the presumably limited imaginations of those students she had the misfortune of instructing.
So, no, I did not like this Virginia woman.
I did not, however, know that she had been a neighbor of the Polanski family or that she had spent time under psychiatric care because of the fear the Tate murders had caused her. I really did not know this.
I selected my subject, as I say, because I thought it would mildly annoy her and because it was a topic about which I was a minor-level expert.
I filmed the movie's first half the night of April 1. I was duly impressed. The Vincent Bugliosi/Curt Gentry book had been one scary ride and I had been anxious to seen how things would play out on film. The next night I filmed the second half. Not quite as scary as the first, I thought, but still pretty intense.
The third night I sat down and played the damned thing back, once I picked up the developed copy at the photography studio. The quality was quite poor but I had enough clarity to plot out what was basically a storyboard of what had been on the screen. By the time the morning rolled around, I had over one hundred pages of notes and drawings, along with an opening and summation. While I had originally planned to shock Virginia with the subject matter, I ended up quite proud of myself for the effort I had spent doing this. I was fairly certain that she would approach it with grudging interest and I would certainly receive a fine grade for the course.
In the words of Puck the dancing fairy, "Oh what fools these mortals be."
She read no more than the first page. Her quivering hand reached out to me. She said, "This is unacceptable. You need to select a more traditional topic."
Well, that's the way it goes. My reaction got me suspended from school for three days, which is the only time I was ever in any real trouble in high school.
The exercise was good for me, all the same. It was way back then that I first began to understand that I had what I guess you could call a love affair with the movies. I loved the way one scene was constructed so that it would lead naturally into the next. I loved the fact that movies are typically filmed out of sequence. And I loved the ability of a group of people under the supervision of a director to put together a product that people could view in their own homes or in the theatre and be affected by it.
I think it goes without saying that I have watched the original "Helter Skelter" movie a few times over the following years, most recently just a few minutes ago. Compared to the remake, which came out in 2004, I suppose this seems rather tame. And yet the original served a purpose and still does. It has a degree of authenticity lacking in any of the follow-ups. For instance, director Tom Gries was able to use the actual LaBianca house for the murders of the second night. Likewise, the vehicle used by the "family" in the film was the actual Johnny Swartz Ford used by the real killers. Beyond that, however, Steve Railsback, who played Manson, and whom we last saw in The Visitors, did a good job playing a mass murderer for a TV audience. Granted, the camera didn't take us into the Tate house during the actual recreations of the killings, as it did during the remake, but the implied horror was even more intense if not more so because of the suggestion, repeated a few times near the conclusion, that these killers might soon be getting out on parole.
Some questions remain, even after all these years. First is the exact number of people murdered by Manson and his followers. It now appears we will not know the answer to this and that is a damned shame. In her jailhouse "admission" to Ronnie Howard, Susan Atkins stated that there were eleven murders committed by the family that the police would never solve. This admission took place within the context of a conversation regarding the murders of Gary Hinman and the seven Tate-LaBianca killings and so the logical inference is that she was not including those eight people in her head count. One of the eleven was probably Donald "Shorty" Shea, a laborer at Spahn Ranch. By pouring over old police records, trial transcripts, magazine articles, online sources and books, I have come up with a total of about twenty-two possibles, not including Tate-LaBianca. I believe many of these victims are known to the police who simply lack evidence to charge and prosecute. A search of the area surrounding Barker Ranch in Death Valley as recently as three years ago did not turn up any physical remains.
A second question that remains is: Who's eyeglasses were those left at the Tate murder scene? A follow-up question is: How did they get there? We know that the glasses did not belong to any of the victims and we know they did not belong to the killers. The logical inference is that they were left behind as a false clue. But by whom? Susan Atkins did not mention them in any of her admissions in Sybil Brand detention, nor during her grand jury testimony or during her testimony during the guilt phase of her own trial. Writer Ed Sanders has speculated that Manson himself placed the glasses inside the house after the killings. This would require him to have gone to the Tate house after the killers he sent returned to Spahn Ranch that August night, something that prosecutor Bugliosi thinks is unlikely because of the natural fear Manson would have had at putting himself at risk by entering the house at all. Susan Atkins knew whose glasses they were, but apparently no one in authority ever got around to asking her before she died.
The third question is: Why did they pick the LaBianca house? The house where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered was chosen for several reasons, chiefly being that Manson had a grudge against a former tenant there, Tex Watson knew the home's layout, and these victims were successful in areas where Manson himself had aspired and failed. But why go after the LaBiancas? Granted, Charlie and others in the Family had been in the house next door on several occasions, but nothing else has ever been presented that would shine light on why the husband and wife, Leno and Rosemary, were slaughtered by these people, other than a totally random attempt to start the race war known as Helter Skelter. Random just doesn't make it. There has to have been another reason.
Charles Manson, Charles Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten: one or more of these prisoners of the state of California must know the answers to these questions. And while it would be absurd to expect any of them to acknowledge or admit to participation in still other murders (Claudia Delaney, Marina Habe, Mark Watts, Doreen Gaul, Karl Stubbs, Darwin Scott, Jane Doe 59, and others), some of them must be able to exchange what they know for special consideration, giving the fact that, except for Van Houten, it now seems highly unlikely that any of them--or Robert Beausoleil and Bruce Davis, for that matter--will be released in this life time. That leads us to the final question that I have:
Will any of the convicted murders of Sharon Tate and the others ever be released?
I think not. Again, with the possible exception of Van Houten, who was along and a willing participant in the events of the second night, there is very little chance that any of the others will see freedom. Even if they were granted parole, no California governor with dreams of reelection would ever sign the executive release orders.
And so the story goes on. Steve "Clem" Grogan was released years ago. Squeaky Fromme is out. Most of the men and women, now quite gray and hunched, are settling into old age, hoping to put the past behind them, just as the families of the victims try to do the same. And yet, until the above questions are answered, I doubt we can actually take any comfort in telling ourselves that the events of August 1969 are completely over.
The original "Helter Skelter" movie is a good place to start your own curious mind to wandering. Just don't expect to get any sleep for a few nights.
Assault on Precinct 13
As the title suggests, John Carpenter's "original" movie, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), is Rio Bravo crossed with Night of the Living Dead. It is also a thoroughly enjoyable movie, because in the spirit of the best westerns and horror movies, Assault has an undeniable energy and, yes, even a sense of integrity. It also has a lot of people in it who couldn't act to save their lives, the sole exceptions being Austin Stoker, who plays Lieutenant Bishop, a new cop assigned to what he anticipates will be a boring night in charge of a police precinct that is being closed down, and Darwin Joston, who plays Napoleon Wilson, a convicted murderer on his way to doing either a life stretch or death row, depending on which scene we're in. For those keeping score, Stoker plays a black John Wayne and Joston plays a resourceful and trustworthy scalawag with a wit as dry as dirt. The zombies are played by half a million teenagers of all races and nationalities. They aren't actually zombies, though. They're gang kids in Anderson, a ghetto in Los Angeles, at least in this movie. As the film begins, two anonymous policemen shoot down six gang members under curious circumstances. The rest of this enormous group wages a "cholo" or blood oath against the father of a little girl they murdered. The father, who does probably the worst acting job in the entire film, even though he was likely doing what Carpenter told him to do, seeks refuge in the soon-to-be-deserted police station. Given the nasty sun spots the man on the radio keeps talking about, we know bad times are on the rise.
In the real world outside the theatre, a cholo is a Mexican gangster, but this movie is not the real world, which is one of the great things about it. Oh, there's all types of realism going on, mind you. Carpenter probably spent more money on the synthesizer he used for the music he played and composed than he did on sets, and that is, now that I think of it, entirely appropriate considering he was not a movie-house common name in those days. So we have city streets that are deserted even though in real life L.A. they would be choked with people. We have an old-style phone system that no longer existed in 1976. We have a team of police officers with all the personality of mildew and--well, okay, maybe Carpenter did get that part right. Otherwise, however, the movie is complete and total bullshit from beginning to end, just like any of a thousand wonderful movies from the world of science fiction, horror, or westerns. None of it matters. It doesn't matter that a potential victim runs like hell while the attackers walk after him and somehow the walking attackers catch up with the running victim. It doesn't matter that we don't really see about half the cast inside the precinct getting shot; somehow we just accept that they have been. And it doesn't matter that most of the costly pyrotechnics don't actually happen on-screen at all because that would have been too expensive. Look, this was only the writer-director's second full-length film, and he followed it up withHalloween, so let's get off the dude's back.
What matters is that Assault on Precinct 13 stays on point for its duration, doesn't go off on some pointless deeper meanings nonsense, and does not attempt to solve all of society's problems. Indeed, it is the film-maker's responsibility to create problems for society rather than to solve them. This movie is simply a lot of fun, you can probably watch it for free on YouTube, and you won't be bothered by anything approximating society for a full ninety-four minutes. With a set-up like that, how can it miss?
What matters is that Assault on Precinct 13 stays on point for its duration, doesn't go off on some pointless deeper meanings nonsense, and does not attempt to solve all of society's problems. Indeed, it is the film-maker's responsibility to create problems for society rather than to solve them. This movie is simply a lot of fun, you can probably watch it for free on YouTube, and you won't be bothered by anything approximating society for a full ninety-four minutes. With a set-up like that, how can it miss?
A Clockwork Orange
I've seen Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange three times in the theatre, the first being by myself because everyone I knew it the time was terrified that seeing it might warp them in some way, and the other times I watched it with my friend Joyce and then with my friend Ruth Ann. I mention this in such detail because the two women expressed no particular sense of uneasiness, and I considered then and still do that these were and are among two of the wisest and most wonderful women ever, despite my apparent need for alliteration. Anyway, I was originally quite troubled by the movie and I'll tell you why. It's a troubling movie. That's why.
Whenever something this well done runs counter to everything you believe in and hold sacred, you are going to feel uneasy. Technically, no film before or after has exceeded the brilliance of A Clockwork Orange, from the use of oppositional colors during the opening titles to the overlay of synthetic classical music during the same entrance into the nightmare comic world of Alexander DeLodge. "There was me, then, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Carova Milkbar trying to make up our razoodocks what to do with the evening." Even if you've seen this film only one time, I guarantee you'll remember that bit of nadsat commentary as the camera at first lingers on the lizard-like huffing face of our friend and humble narrator and then inches back effortlessly to reveal the world in which his story is taking place, a world in which everything has mechanical connotations, including sex, violence, and criminality. Sex is not just sex; it's the old in-out. Violence isn't just violence; it's the old ultra-violence. And crime isn't just crime; it's accompanied by music, old music made by new machines.
I watched this movie for the umpteenth time this morning and was disturbed all over again. There they stood at the mouth of some blue drained alley with the old drunk burbling away. Alex jammed his cane into the old man's belly and with a tight close up, inquired of the man who had remarked of the stinking world, "Oh? And what's so stinking about it?"
The movie is terrifying because you can't help but worry that if Hitler had had Kubrick instead of Leni Riefenstahl, the bastard just might have won the way more overtly. The audience gets programmed just as the Alex character in the film gets programmed. And in exactly the same manner. Oh, I know. I went on about that subject about a year ago here and that is true. But dammit, the movie is still every bit as good and every bit as horrible as it ever was and yet I have a hunch that we as an audience or we as a people have just possibly not risen above our own prurience.
Of audience manipulation Kubrick is a master, as anyone who has enjoyed The Shining can attest. But relocating the audience around the chessboard or being relocated is insufficient for an engaging evening. We still require an interesting story and here as well we are met head-on with the response to our challenge. Kubrick, as with novelist Anthony Burgess, wastes no time getting down to business. Visually, sartorially and otherwise, A Clockwork Orange does not so much pull us in as it grabs us by the collar and drags us into the admittedly comic shenanigans of the despicable teenager played to perfection by Malcolm McDowell.
So what is my problem? My problems are many, but the one I wish to mention in passing is that within the larger context of the director's work, it is reasonable to inquire if just possibly all the psychological shifting wasn't just a magnificently artistic way of camouflaging a deep misogyny. Just like Ray Davies, you and I do not want to die in a nuclear war, but we don't necessarily enjoy the fact that Dr. Strangelove used women as objects, just as they were used in Lolita, just as they were used as either officious bitches or sheer ugliness and stupidity in The Shining. Oh, but that's just part of the auteur's genius at work, they say. Very well, then that is one particular type of genius who is free to stay the hell away from me because I have changed and can no longer put up with this type of betrayal of talent. It turns out that I rather like women. My mother, for instance, was a woman. And I can't say that my initial and prolonged discomfort with A Clockwork Orange and its anti-rehabilitation, anti-statist proclivities are any more palatable today than they were back in 1971 when the film first came out. The only difference is that I no longer have the intellectual burden of needing to rationalize the vacuousness and evil that is ultimately celebrated here in the name of freedom of choice. Better a million Alexes than a system in which he could not be free to exist. That's what they said then and it's been repeated everywhere since from Baghdad to Virginia Tech. Fuck it.
Whenever something this well done runs counter to everything you believe in and hold sacred, you are going to feel uneasy. Technically, no film before or after has exceeded the brilliance of A Clockwork Orange, from the use of oppositional colors during the opening titles to the overlay of synthetic classical music during the same entrance into the nightmare comic world of Alexander DeLodge. "There was me, then, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Carova Milkbar trying to make up our razoodocks what to do with the evening." Even if you've seen this film only one time, I guarantee you'll remember that bit of nadsat commentary as the camera at first lingers on the lizard-like huffing face of our friend and humble narrator and then inches back effortlessly to reveal the world in which his story is taking place, a world in which everything has mechanical connotations, including sex, violence, and criminality. Sex is not just sex; it's the old in-out. Violence isn't just violence; it's the old ultra-violence. And crime isn't just crime; it's accompanied by music, old music made by new machines.
I watched this movie for the umpteenth time this morning and was disturbed all over again. There they stood at the mouth of some blue drained alley with the old drunk burbling away. Alex jammed his cane into the old man's belly and with a tight close up, inquired of the man who had remarked of the stinking world, "Oh? And what's so stinking about it?"
The movie is terrifying because you can't help but worry that if Hitler had had Kubrick instead of Leni Riefenstahl, the bastard just might have won the way more overtly. The audience gets programmed just as the Alex character in the film gets programmed. And in exactly the same manner. Oh, I know. I went on about that subject about a year ago here and that is true. But dammit, the movie is still every bit as good and every bit as horrible as it ever was and yet I have a hunch that we as an audience or we as a people have just possibly not risen above our own prurience.
Of audience manipulation Kubrick is a master, as anyone who has enjoyed The Shining can attest. But relocating the audience around the chessboard or being relocated is insufficient for an engaging evening. We still require an interesting story and here as well we are met head-on with the response to our challenge. Kubrick, as with novelist Anthony Burgess, wastes no time getting down to business. Visually, sartorially and otherwise, A Clockwork Orange does not so much pull us in as it grabs us by the collar and drags us into the admittedly comic shenanigans of the despicable teenager played to perfection by Malcolm McDowell.
So what is my problem? My problems are many, but the one I wish to mention in passing is that within the larger context of the director's work, it is reasonable to inquire if just possibly all the psychological shifting wasn't just a magnificently artistic way of camouflaging a deep misogyny. Just like Ray Davies, you and I do not want to die in a nuclear war, but we don't necessarily enjoy the fact that Dr. Strangelove used women as objects, just as they were used in Lolita, just as they were used as either officious bitches or sheer ugliness and stupidity in The Shining. Oh, but that's just part of the auteur's genius at work, they say. Very well, then that is one particular type of genius who is free to stay the hell away from me because I have changed and can no longer put up with this type of betrayal of talent. It turns out that I rather like women. My mother, for instance, was a woman. And I can't say that my initial and prolonged discomfort with A Clockwork Orange and its anti-rehabilitation, anti-statist proclivities are any more palatable today than they were back in 1971 when the film first came out. The only difference is that I no longer have the intellectual burden of needing to rationalize the vacuousness and evil that is ultimately celebrated here in the name of freedom of choice. Better a million Alexes than a system in which he could not be free to exist. That's what they said then and it's been repeated everywhere since from Baghdad to Virginia Tech. Fuck it.
Joe
Knowing what side you are on, however, can be crucial, and in the Land That Drugs Forgot, also known as the 1970s, it isn't always easy.
Take for instance our first feature, Joe (1970). I'll tell you straight up that you'll want to watch this John G. Alvidsen-directed film if for no other reason than to see a young Susan Sarandon naked. We also get to see Peter Boyle naked, although our love for Mr. Boyle in the buff is what you might call an acquired taste.
His acting, however, requires no acquisition. Here he is his typical brilliant self and also his typically bad self, playing a working class racist that would make Archie Bunker run and hide. He is Everyman and that is precisely what is so scary about him. Is that us up there on that big screen, momma? Boyle plays the title character in this film and when Joe meets Bill Compton, played by character actor Dennis Patrick, he confesses that what he'd really like to do is "kill one of them."
"I just did," Compton blurts out, referencing the murder he just committed against Frank, a lousy stinking drug dealer played to despicable perfection by a guy we've never heard of named Patrick McDermott. We in the audience hate Frank because he has turned the beautiful Melissa Compton--who we recognize as the beautifully naked Ms. Sarandon--into a freaky addict. Frank is trying to pull together enough cash so that he can buy a big sack of drugs which he will sell and the proceeds from which he and Melissa will presumably use to stay high indoors for the rest of their lives. To accomplish this, Frank cons local kids into buying vitamins that he assures them are some heavy head trips. So we hate Frank because he's a heartless junkie, because he has wrecked the beautifully naked Susan Sarandon, and because he sells fake drugs to kids. But when he tells Melissa's father that his daughter balled half the guys in the Fillmore, well, sir or ma'am, for a moment there we feel pretty darned good when the old man starts pounding the stinking drug dealer's head against the wall. When it turns out Compton has killed Frank, we're not really all that upset. After all, it's just one less cockroach in the world.
Then, dammit all, we find out that our thinking on this matter is the same as that of Joe, the resident bigot and violence freak.
This movie comes at you in a hundred different ways, many of them quite comical and each and every one of them highly deceptive. Everything that happens in this film, originally titled The Gap, will surprise you. A lot of it will probably offend you, and rightly so, which is pretty amazing considering that we have evolved so far as a species in the forty-two years since this mesmerizing movie was released. The only problem with that preceding sentence is the part about us evolving because, as you will see almost immediately, nothing has changed at all, not even one infinitesimal iota, my friends. We still want what's best for our families even if we have to destroy those families in order to give it to them. We still think of the world as being divided up between whites and blacks, the working and the freeloaders, the women and the men, the gays and the straights, the haves and have nots. And then this movie comes along and shows us that some well-off advertising executive and a guy who sweats over a radiator all day can be equally out of touch to what is going on, that makes it not all that surprising then that the young people we see in this movie are all a bunch of parasites.
See? You weren't expecting that word, were you? Yep, every last person in this film, except possibly the gloriously naked Ms Sarandon, is either vaguely or precisely despicable. The young people in this movie are very much the way the bigoted Joe characterizes them: they screw all night, take drugs that they stole to pay for, and laugh at other people's pain. So if you were expecting this movie to be like Norman Lear or something, think again, muchacha, because this movie will take you places you have never been.
And yet it does occasionally fly its real colors. Killing the very young people that we raised to be just like us says a lot about what a sick-ass society ours often is and Joe does not flinch from this truism.
Take for instance our first feature, Joe (1970). I'll tell you straight up that you'll want to watch this John G. Alvidsen-directed film if for no other reason than to see a young Susan Sarandon naked. We also get to see Peter Boyle naked, although our love for Mr. Boyle in the buff is what you might call an acquired taste.
His acting, however, requires no acquisition. Here he is his typical brilliant self and also his typically bad self, playing a working class racist that would make Archie Bunker run and hide. He is Everyman and that is precisely what is so scary about him. Is that us up there on that big screen, momma? Boyle plays the title character in this film and when Joe meets Bill Compton, played by character actor Dennis Patrick, he confesses that what he'd really like to do is "kill one of them."
"I just did," Compton blurts out, referencing the murder he just committed against Frank, a lousy stinking drug dealer played to despicable perfection by a guy we've never heard of named Patrick McDermott. We in the audience hate Frank because he has turned the beautiful Melissa Compton--who we recognize as the beautifully naked Ms. Sarandon--into a freaky addict. Frank is trying to pull together enough cash so that he can buy a big sack of drugs which he will sell and the proceeds from which he and Melissa will presumably use to stay high indoors for the rest of their lives. To accomplish this, Frank cons local kids into buying vitamins that he assures them are some heavy head trips. So we hate Frank because he's a heartless junkie, because he has wrecked the beautifully naked Susan Sarandon, and because he sells fake drugs to kids. But when he tells Melissa's father that his daughter balled half the guys in the Fillmore, well, sir or ma'am, for a moment there we feel pretty darned good when the old man starts pounding the stinking drug dealer's head against the wall. When it turns out Compton has killed Frank, we're not really all that upset. After all, it's just one less cockroach in the world.
Then, dammit all, we find out that our thinking on this matter is the same as that of Joe, the resident bigot and violence freak.
This movie comes at you in a hundred different ways, many of them quite comical and each and every one of them highly deceptive. Everything that happens in this film, originally titled The Gap, will surprise you. A lot of it will probably offend you, and rightly so, which is pretty amazing considering that we have evolved so far as a species in the forty-two years since this mesmerizing movie was released. The only problem with that preceding sentence is the part about us evolving because, as you will see almost immediately, nothing has changed at all, not even one infinitesimal iota, my friends. We still want what's best for our families even if we have to destroy those families in order to give it to them. We still think of the world as being divided up between whites and blacks, the working and the freeloaders, the women and the men, the gays and the straights, the haves and have nots. And then this movie comes along and shows us that some well-off advertising executive and a guy who sweats over a radiator all day can be equally out of touch to what is going on, that makes it not all that surprising then that the young people we see in this movie are all a bunch of parasites.
See? You weren't expecting that word, were you? Yep, every last person in this film, except possibly the gloriously naked Ms Sarandon, is either vaguely or precisely despicable. The young people in this movie are very much the way the bigoted Joe characterizes them: they screw all night, take drugs that they stole to pay for, and laugh at other people's pain. So if you were expecting this movie to be like Norman Lear or something, think again, muchacha, because this movie will take you places you have never been.
And yet it does occasionally fly its real colors. Killing the very young people that we raised to be just like us says a lot about what a sick-ass society ours often is and Joe does not flinch from this truism.
Superfly
Superfly (1972) does not flinch. Watching it again last night, I tried to count all the different levels on which this movie was calculated to offend people and gave up somewhere around one hundred eleven. Ron O'Neal plays Priest, the bad ass mofo who wants to make one last and large score of cocaine so that he can take his million dollars and get out of the life. This movie, as O'Neal himself would later admit, is basically a commercial for cocaine, and yet, once again, we find ourselves pulling for this guy because he's still the most noble person in the film and I guess we learn to expect to try to identify with somebody. As with our first picture, Superfly gets by on the occasionally phenomenal talent of the title character actor. O'Neal's career didn't go far, but you'll wonder why after watching him play this incredibly intense fellow who does not have a heart of gold, no, not by a long shot. Yet we like the fact that, as Curtis Mayfield reminds us during the glorious soundtrack, he "Had a mind, wasn't dumb." Indeed he is not. He outsmarts the corrupt connection between the cops and the syndicate, he manages to get what he wants from everyone, including Eddie, the partner who betrays him, from Fat Freddie, the jealous clown who gets killed running from cops and criminals, and including the women whom he uses because they have the audacity to think that they are using him.
So anyone waiting for anything socially redeeming about Superfly must take another bump and split. And that reminds me: After you watch this film, just try to think up any urban expressions that this film did not anticipate, a fact that not only suggests something about the way young audiences continue to relate to this film but also about the limited imaginations of succeeding generations.
So anyone waiting for anything socially redeeming about Superfly must take another bump and split. And that reminds me: After you watch this film, just try to think up any urban expressions that this film did not anticipate, a fact that not only suggests something about the way young audiences continue to relate to this film but also about the limited imaginations of succeeding generations.
And Soon the Darkness
Where have all the flowers gone? One of the places they've gone is to Merry Olde France, the location of the original 1973 version of And Soon the Darkness, one of those films whose title suggests it will either be one scary-ass ride or the biggest snooze fest of our lives. To our collective surprise, the movie did not entirely suck. Credit for that non-suck-itude goes to writers Albert Finney and Brian Clemens, whose names you may recognize on the credits for thirty-some episodes of the 1960s British television series "The Avengers." The story is of two early-twenties English ladies who peddle their bicyclettes across the French countryside while on a jolly vacation. The girls quarrel over the definition of fun and go their separate ways. It is at this point that the central themes of the film manifest: Ladies, never hang your underwear on a copse of trees. It's not truly decorative and may send the wrong message. Fellas, never assume that putting a woman's underwear on your head will make her laugh. She is liable to call the police on you. Police, try to find someone better to represent your cause than the pair of boyos portrayed in this movie, two creepier guys than whom I have not had the misfortune of meeting since I was rousted at the age of five for diving into boxes of Honeycomb cereal in search of unearned prizes.
All in all, And Soon the Darkness was the kind of early 1970s picture that you'd find at the drive-in way back when, sort of a leggily-acceptable alternative to dry-humping Mable in the parking lot at the local Buckeye Mart, meaning that those of you still struggling with virginity will probably get a hoot from this. And the ending, while not a complete surprise, at least works, which is more than one can say for the excretion that was the 2010 remake.
All in all, And Soon the Darkness was the kind of early 1970s picture that you'd find at the drive-in way back when, sort of a leggily-acceptable alternative to dry-humping Mable in the parking lot at the local Buckeye Mart, meaning that those of you still struggling with virginity will probably get a hoot from this. And the ending, while not a complete surprise, at least works, which is more than one can say for the excretion that was the 2010 remake.
Big Boss Man
"You got me working, boss man
Working 'round the clock
I want me a drink of water
You won't let me stop
You big boss man
Can you hear me when I call?
Oh, you ain't so big
You just tall, that's all."
--Al Dixon
Known as Fists of Fury in Europe, Big Boss Man (1971) was not, as is often argued, Bruce Lee's first motion picture. It was, however, his first starring role in a film and was certainly the movie that put master Bruce on the road map as the philosophic and practical king of a style of fighting called Jeet Kune Do. Interestingly, the follow-up movie was going to be called Fist of Fury (note the singular), but ended up being called The Chinese Connection.
Whatever one calls The Big Boss, it was and remains one of the most beautiful examples of the form. Lee's character, Cheng, moves from China to Thailand to go live with his uncle. He has sworn on his mother's amulet to not fight and we are given the impression that his sudden arrival in Thailand may have something to do with avoiding the law back home, although this is strictly conjecture. Cheng takes a job with an ice company that packs clear bags of heroin inside the large blocks of frozen water. As more and more of the workers realize what is going on, those workers get offed by the merciless foreman's men, or the manager's men, or, ultimately, the men of the Big Boss. There's a hierarchy here--one that gets referred to in all Lee's films, whether literally or metaphorically--and that provides a nice continuity, believe it or not. It also provides an understanding of society, one no more complex than, say,Romeo and Juliet, but one that is a lot more interesting.
Cheng gets pushed around and eventually the warrior decides to fight, just as we know he will. After all, there was no reason to make him a reluctant pacifist other than to enjoy watching him struggle against the promises he has made to people who are no longer on camera.
Speaking of the camera, I for one think it was clever to have the blaring opening theme music carry over onto the opening shots of the actual film, as if to suggest that this Hong Kong movie was either an example of great art or the sloppiest thing ever made. The truth is that it comes far closer to the former than the latter, though it has elements of both, just like Romeo and Juliet.
Working 'round the clock
I want me a drink of water
You won't let me stop
You big boss man
Can you hear me when I call?
Oh, you ain't so big
You just tall, that's all."
--Al Dixon
Known as Fists of Fury in Europe, Big Boss Man (1971) was not, as is often argued, Bruce Lee's first motion picture. It was, however, his first starring role in a film and was certainly the movie that put master Bruce on the road map as the philosophic and practical king of a style of fighting called Jeet Kune Do. Interestingly, the follow-up movie was going to be called Fist of Fury (note the singular), but ended up being called The Chinese Connection.
Whatever one calls The Big Boss, it was and remains one of the most beautiful examples of the form. Lee's character, Cheng, moves from China to Thailand to go live with his uncle. He has sworn on his mother's amulet to not fight and we are given the impression that his sudden arrival in Thailand may have something to do with avoiding the law back home, although this is strictly conjecture. Cheng takes a job with an ice company that packs clear bags of heroin inside the large blocks of frozen water. As more and more of the workers realize what is going on, those workers get offed by the merciless foreman's men, or the manager's men, or, ultimately, the men of the Big Boss. There's a hierarchy here--one that gets referred to in all Lee's films, whether literally or metaphorically--and that provides a nice continuity, believe it or not. It also provides an understanding of society, one no more complex than, say,Romeo and Juliet, but one that is a lot more interesting.
Cheng gets pushed around and eventually the warrior decides to fight, just as we know he will. After all, there was no reason to make him a reluctant pacifist other than to enjoy watching him struggle against the promises he has made to people who are no longer on camera.
Speaking of the camera, I for one think it was clever to have the blaring opening theme music carry over onto the opening shots of the actual film, as if to suggest that this Hong Kong movie was either an example of great art or the sloppiest thing ever made. The truth is that it comes far closer to the former than the latter, though it has elements of both, just like Romeo and Juliet.
As to the art, this was the first movie I ever saw to have kicks coming right into the camera, much less to have them punctuated by over-the-top dramatic music that cues our emotional reactions for us. This is also part of the sloppiness I mentioned. But art trumps clumsy if for no other reason than that Bruce Lee was such a beautiful guy.
And he was beautiful. Part of that beauty comes across as this near-deity gets used by the manager when the latter promotes Cheng to the role of foreman, consciously driving a wedge between the warrior and his supplicants. Again we are reminded of the hierarchy and again we get a sense that this wasn't such a bucket of slop after all.
The title character himself is a hedonistic karate master of considerable skill, although he is no match for Bruce Lee. He is also without conscience and possesses something of a sadistic streak, one which his own minions have internalized and use to control the humble working class.
Real life is usually not so cut and dried and there are scumbag workers just as it is possible that some bosses are humane. But that consideration is not appropriate to the genre. Just as the two teenagers in R&J are the only ones with any sense--despite being proved to be complete idiots--so is it with The Big Boss. The powerful are monsters and the weak need a good example set for them in self-defense. Well, sometimes that is exactly the way it feels out in the real world and this movie is all about feeling over thought. Again, because this is a fight movie, that prioritization is entirely appropriate, however reprehensible it may sound on the written page.
If you want to argue that since everything about this movie is blatantly contrived and that Lee is one of the few people in the film who can actually act, well, you'll win that argument, at least on points. If you want to say that that means this is any less exciting than the sword fights in the story of the Capulets and Montagues, you are certain to get your ass kicked.
And he was beautiful. Part of that beauty comes across as this near-deity gets used by the manager when the latter promotes Cheng to the role of foreman, consciously driving a wedge between the warrior and his supplicants. Again we are reminded of the hierarchy and again we get a sense that this wasn't such a bucket of slop after all.
The title character himself is a hedonistic karate master of considerable skill, although he is no match for Bruce Lee. He is also without conscience and possesses something of a sadistic streak, one which his own minions have internalized and use to control the humble working class.
Real life is usually not so cut and dried and there are scumbag workers just as it is possible that some bosses are humane. But that consideration is not appropriate to the genre. Just as the two teenagers in R&J are the only ones with any sense--despite being proved to be complete idiots--so is it with The Big Boss. The powerful are monsters and the weak need a good example set for them in self-defense. Well, sometimes that is exactly the way it feels out in the real world and this movie is all about feeling over thought. Again, because this is a fight movie, that prioritization is entirely appropriate, however reprehensible it may sound on the written page.
If you want to argue that since everything about this movie is blatantly contrived and that Lee is one of the few people in the film who can actually act, well, you'll win that argument, at least on points. If you want to say that that means this is any less exciting than the sword fights in the story of the Capulets and Montagues, you are certain to get your ass kicked.
The Conversation
The Conversation (1974) is a very good movie that falls just a wee bit short of being a great one. I'm not certain that it is necessarily the fault of anyone that this film stops just a bit shy. Certainly, it is not the fault of director Francis Ford Coppola. Indeed, the production company Coppola worked with enabled the film to be made at a time when it otherwise might have been impossible. What had happened was that Gulf+Western head Charlie Bluhdorn managed to consolidate directors Coppola, Peter Bogdonavich and William Friedkin into forming a group called The Directors Company. The rules were simple: The guys could make any movie they wanted without consulting the studio--in this case Paramount--as long as the cost was under three million dollars. Coppola had had the idea for The Conversation going on in his mind since 1966, but had been unable to sell any major studio on the concept of a surveillance specialist who, against his own will, gets caught up in protecting the interests of the people upon whom he is spying. Neither Bogdonavich nor Friedkin much liked the idea, but the beauty of the arrangement was that none of the three directors had the power to veto any one director's concept. Coppola brought the film in for $1.6 million and it ended up grossing nearly triple that amount.
The film stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, the surveillance chief assisted by Stan, played well enough by John Cazale. Their job is to record a lunchtime conversation between Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest, a conversation replayed many times throughout the movie. On the surface, the talk feels almost suspiciously unimportant. But Harry doesn't care about that. All he wants is to make the recording and get paid. Nagging questions about who the hell would want such a stupid exercise in "conversating" recorded and for what purpose are anathema to him. He is a craftsman, albeit, one with a not very well deserved reputation for being the best in the business. Stan can't quite understand why Harry doesn't care. That's because he doesn't know that years earlier, Harry's work was used by political forces to get a family of three brutally murdered.
This movie is all about Harry, the guy who wears the roll-up transparent rain slicker rain or shine, the guy who lives in an apartment that he pretends is far more secure than it actually is, the guy who spies on his mistress, who keeps his telephone in a desk drawer, who falls for some pretty obvious pranks, a Roman Catholic sinner, a man whose job reinforces his alienation and whose alienation drives him deeper and deeper into his own obsession with his work. Everyone with whom Harry interacts is merely fluff for getting the job done.
Except that these people steadily reveal themselves to be a bit more than mere fluff.
A downright spooky Harrison Ford plays the assistant to a corporate director (an uncredited Robert Duvall). Ford doesn't necessarily reveal it, but this is far and away the most emotionally complex character he has ever played. At first we assume that he is just a somewhat sneaky and ambitious underling charged with separating the director from a hired contractor. Then we interpret him to be an accomplice to some vile nastiness. And eventually it occurs that he may have been on the side of the angels. And then--well, perhaps not.
The film stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, the surveillance chief assisted by Stan, played well enough by John Cazale. Their job is to record a lunchtime conversation between Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest, a conversation replayed many times throughout the movie. On the surface, the talk feels almost suspiciously unimportant. But Harry doesn't care about that. All he wants is to make the recording and get paid. Nagging questions about who the hell would want such a stupid exercise in "conversating" recorded and for what purpose are anathema to him. He is a craftsman, albeit, one with a not very well deserved reputation for being the best in the business. Stan can't quite understand why Harry doesn't care. That's because he doesn't know that years earlier, Harry's work was used by political forces to get a family of three brutally murdered.
This movie is all about Harry, the guy who wears the roll-up transparent rain slicker rain or shine, the guy who lives in an apartment that he pretends is far more secure than it actually is, the guy who spies on his mistress, who keeps his telephone in a desk drawer, who falls for some pretty obvious pranks, a Roman Catholic sinner, a man whose job reinforces his alienation and whose alienation drives him deeper and deeper into his own obsession with his work. Everyone with whom Harry interacts is merely fluff for getting the job done.
Except that these people steadily reveal themselves to be a bit more than mere fluff.
A downright spooky Harrison Ford plays the assistant to a corporate director (an uncredited Robert Duvall). Ford doesn't necessarily reveal it, but this is far and away the most emotionally complex character he has ever played. At first we assume that he is just a somewhat sneaky and ambitious underling charged with separating the director from a hired contractor. Then we interpret him to be an accomplice to some vile nastiness. And eventually it occurs that he may have been on the side of the angels. And then--well, perhaps not.
Ford's character is only one example of a litany of people who march through this film in the guise of people with roles and sub-roles of hidden behavior, the true intents of which we can often only speculate.
Is Cindy Williams an innocent victim of a jealous husband's psychotic rage? Is Bernie Moran (played by Allen Garfield) just a bag of gas on legs, or is he a despicable rival who will stop at nothing? Can we trust Stan, the assistant? Whatever happened to Teri Garr, the mistress? Why can't Hackman remember the age of the character he plays?
The unraveling of technological details will remind viewers who've reached a certain maturity of Antonioni's Blow Up, and rightly so. But despite the magnificent opening shot, The Conversation is not an art film. It is a psychological drama. It is one hell of a psych-drama, I'll grant you, but ultimately it does not make the leap we keep expecting. Sensitized as we are since the days of at least Watergate, we continue to anticipate some larger societal connection to the presence of this spy's work upon the world at large and that connection just never comes. Again, this is no one's fault. Coppola wasn't trying to make a movie that linked his protagonist's paranoia with that of the people in the audience. But that is what would have been required if this movie were to be in the same category of the director's best work, which is to say, the best movies of his generation.
Incidentally, Harrison Ford has enlisted someone to hide a listening device that Hackman never finds. The astute viewer (very astute) may discover what Harry Caul never does.
Is Cindy Williams an innocent victim of a jealous husband's psychotic rage? Is Bernie Moran (played by Allen Garfield) just a bag of gas on legs, or is he a despicable rival who will stop at nothing? Can we trust Stan, the assistant? Whatever happened to Teri Garr, the mistress? Why can't Hackman remember the age of the character he plays?
The unraveling of technological details will remind viewers who've reached a certain maturity of Antonioni's Blow Up, and rightly so. But despite the magnificent opening shot, The Conversation is not an art film. It is a psychological drama. It is one hell of a psych-drama, I'll grant you, but ultimately it does not make the leap we keep expecting. Sensitized as we are since the days of at least Watergate, we continue to anticipate some larger societal connection to the presence of this spy's work upon the world at large and that connection just never comes. Again, this is no one's fault. Coppola wasn't trying to make a movie that linked his protagonist's paranoia with that of the people in the audience. But that is what would have been required if this movie were to be in the same category of the director's best work, which is to say, the best movies of his generation.
Incidentally, Harrison Ford has enlisted someone to hide a listening device that Hackman never finds. The astute viewer (very astute) may discover what Harry Caul never does.
The Taking of Pelham 123
Three different movies have called themselves The Taking of Pelham 123. Heck, it's a great title, suggesting a count-off to something foreboding, which in an unintended way is appropriate. Most recently there was the Washington-Travolta version from 2009, written as it was by Brian Helgeland, usually a good thing, but not in the hands of director Tony Scott. Far worse was the made-for-Canadian-TV version that starred Edward James Olmos and Vincent D'onfrio, two very fine actors who did not work particularly well together. But the best version of this presumed classic remains the first, the one released in 1974, starring the universally excellent Walter Matthau, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, Earl Hindman, and most especially the beautiful and brilliant Robert Shaw.
Two points require mention in any discussion of this disturbing movie. The first, as you may have guessed, is Mr. Shaw. Shaw was a Shakespearean actor as far back as the early 1960s. But his resume is even more interesting than that. Before becoming something of a household name, Shaw was both a popular novelist, a news reporter and world traveler. A lot of people got their first impression of the man in his role as Quint in Jaws. However, the tough guy image he carried in that film was mild compared to his role as Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting and most especially in tonight's classic.
Two points require mention in any discussion of this disturbing movie. The first, as you may have guessed, is Mr. Shaw. Shaw was a Shakespearean actor as far back as the early 1960s. But his resume is even more interesting than that. Before becoming something of a household name, Shaw was both a popular novelist, a news reporter and world traveler. A lot of people got their first impression of the man in his role as Quint in Jaws. However, the tough guy image he carried in that film was mild compared to his role as Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting and most especially in tonight's classic.
Most of the time the remainder of the movie is every bit as compelling as this clip would indicate. Shaw as Mr. Blue (and yes, this movie was the inspiration for the character names in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs) chills us to the marrow as he matter-of-factly discusses with Messrs. Green, Grey and Brown how they will shoot the hostages if necessary, as he looks up from his crossword puzzle book.
No, the problem with The Taking of Pelham 123 is not the acting. The problem--and it's a big one--is the extent to which filmmakers in the early 1970s would often go to try to make their product "edgy." In this case, the effort was to appear as if many of the characters are racists. This was tied to a much-deserved tendency in films of the day to shun the Pollyanna approach and to give audiences some realism. Peckinpah gave us a new style of violence, Russ Meyer gave us titillating sexuality in the occasionally ridiculous form of double-D chested women, Polanski gave us psychological horror that often surpassed Hitchcock in its intensity. And even racism managed to find its place, especially in the social exploration we encountered in Joe and of course in The French Connection. In these two movies, the racism was presented and identified with characters who, in the context of issuing forth their vile epithets, were disgusting pig people. But in Pelham, the racism is far more overt and lands somewhere between Black Hawk Down and The Birth of a Nation.
Matthau, as Transit Police Lt. Garber, gets the plum assignment of escorting some Japanese visitors throughout the New York City Subway System. Convinced that they cannot understand a word he says, he patronizes them and even refers to them as "monkeys." Okay, so maybe that's just what his character would have done. And maybe a bad guy like Mr. Grey really would have called one of his victims a "nigger." I don't know. I do know that in this particular film the use of racist and sexist terminology and attitude was gratuitous rather than realistic. How do I know that? For one thing, director Joseph Sargent's credits were almost exclusively in TV cop shows such as "Longstreet" and "Kojak," none of which were exactly what one thinks of as enlightened" viewing and all of which were notorious in their use of tags to gain viewer identification. Kojak was a bald cop with a love of lollipops and Longstreet was blind. These are the tags. In Pelham, the tag is incipient racism, which is de facto gratuitous. The only reason for doing it is to blow us away with the realism, which is bullshit.
The other reason I know it is gratuitous and quite despicable is because of the closing credits. We have The Maid, The Mother, The Homosexual, The Hooker, The Spanish Woman, The Pimp, The Hippie, The WASP, and so on. Now, I was able to figure out that the maid was The Maid. Same with The Mother. As to who the other characters were, I have no idea. The woman who gets called a hooker doesn't conform to my mental stereotype. I didn't see any pimp, and I was looking, believe me. And who the hell was the homosexual?
The use of these word-ideas in the closing credits announces quite clearly what the intent of the director was: to cast characters with whom the audience could get off a few cheap laughs. The movie already had more than enough inexpensive merriment, mostly in the form of Matthau. It did not need--and was never unburdened by--the idiotic use of forced hatred to carry the suspense.
No, the problem with The Taking of Pelham 123 is not the acting. The problem--and it's a big one--is the extent to which filmmakers in the early 1970s would often go to try to make their product "edgy." In this case, the effort was to appear as if many of the characters are racists. This was tied to a much-deserved tendency in films of the day to shun the Pollyanna approach and to give audiences some realism. Peckinpah gave us a new style of violence, Russ Meyer gave us titillating sexuality in the occasionally ridiculous form of double-D chested women, Polanski gave us psychological horror that often surpassed Hitchcock in its intensity. And even racism managed to find its place, especially in the social exploration we encountered in Joe and of course in The French Connection. In these two movies, the racism was presented and identified with characters who, in the context of issuing forth their vile epithets, were disgusting pig people. But in Pelham, the racism is far more overt and lands somewhere between Black Hawk Down and The Birth of a Nation.
Matthau, as Transit Police Lt. Garber, gets the plum assignment of escorting some Japanese visitors throughout the New York City Subway System. Convinced that they cannot understand a word he says, he patronizes them and even refers to them as "monkeys." Okay, so maybe that's just what his character would have done. And maybe a bad guy like Mr. Grey really would have called one of his victims a "nigger." I don't know. I do know that in this particular film the use of racist and sexist terminology and attitude was gratuitous rather than realistic. How do I know that? For one thing, director Joseph Sargent's credits were almost exclusively in TV cop shows such as "Longstreet" and "Kojak," none of which were exactly what one thinks of as enlightened" viewing and all of which were notorious in their use of tags to gain viewer identification. Kojak was a bald cop with a love of lollipops and Longstreet was blind. These are the tags. In Pelham, the tag is incipient racism, which is de facto gratuitous. The only reason for doing it is to blow us away with the realism, which is bullshit.
The other reason I know it is gratuitous and quite despicable is because of the closing credits. We have The Maid, The Mother, The Homosexual, The Hooker, The Spanish Woman, The Pimp, The Hippie, The WASP, and so on. Now, I was able to figure out that the maid was The Maid. Same with The Mother. As to who the other characters were, I have no idea. The woman who gets called a hooker doesn't conform to my mental stereotype. I didn't see any pimp, and I was looking, believe me. And who the hell was the homosexual?
The use of these word-ideas in the closing credits announces quite clearly what the intent of the director was: to cast characters with whom the audience could get off a few cheap laughs. The movie already had more than enough inexpensive merriment, mostly in the form of Matthau. It did not need--and was never unburdened by--the idiotic use of forced hatred to carry the suspense.
Up Tight!
It may be true, as a bearded and barefoot philosophy professor once told me, that you cannot understand existentialism without first studying Aristotle. Okay, Doc. That'll work. It is also true that it is difficult to comprehend just how occasionally magnificent some of the movies that labored under the genre-title "blaxploitation" really were without exploring the films of the 1960s. Perhaps that is so. Then how are you going to grok that decade, or any other, without cogitating on the one that came before? For that matter, who's to say one can understand the 1950s without enduring the war-torn 1940s, or the forties without surviving the desperation of the 1930s, or the presumed abundance of the 1920s? Indeed, how can we understand our current era without knowing something about the Mesozoic?
You have to begin somewhere. If we are going to get to the bottom of this thing called blaxploitation movies, then the fairest place to begin, according to that wise and weird philosophy professor of mine, is with a dynamite movie based on the 1938 flickola The Informer. The movie in question came out in 1968. It was directed by Jules Dassin, a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants to Amereeka. Some of the great early blaxploitation films were framed by Jewish directors, an entirely understandable situation given the shared heritage of strangers in a strange land, plus the inescapable fact that the Hollywood studio system was far more open to Jewish directors than to African Americans exercising the same trade.
Anyway, this movie that we're talking about was called Up Tight! Yep, just like the name of that Stevie Wonder record. Unlike that 45 rpm, there was not much jolliness in this movie. On the contrary, this movie, which featured an all-African American cast starring Ruby Dee, remains one of the most affecting and tragic motion pictures I have ever seen.
It is also the ideal leaping point for that thing that quickly became known as blaxploitation.
This is a term with which I have often found myself uneasy. Etymologically speaking, the word suggests an exploitation of the hunger of the emerging class of African Americans for cheap and easy film fare. And while there can be no question that there were several tons of money to be made in the production and distribution of many of these films, not all of them were exploitive. Not by a long shot.Up Tight!, as the fountainhead, as it were, for these movies, might be better considered as Black Consciousness. I do not intend that somewhat trite expression as it has been attached to movies such asGuess Who's Coming to Dinner or other neat little vignettes stretched into a (you should pardon the expression) pale imitations of real life. What I am talking about is movies with ideas, movies with writers and players who are able to establish visual dialogues with their audiences.Up Tight! does this as well as any movie in the genre.
The film begins with the crowd reactions to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The opening sequences of personal and group response to this horrible murder drives everything else we will encounter. Tank (played to perfection by Jullian Mayfield), an experienced inebriate, is scheduled to accompany his friends in the black revolutionary movement to rob a gun and ammo supply warehouse. He begs off, in part because he's wasted and in larger part because he does not wish to tarnish the essence of Dr. King with a criminal act such as the one Johnny Wells and the other two men are planning. The three men leave without him. A guard is killed in the robbery. The police know the killer was Johnny. What they do not know is where he is.
Enter one of the great character actors of our time, Roscoe Lee Browne, as Clarence, the mercenary traitor who tells the police that he will make sure that Johnny is turned over to them. The Cleveland (shot on location, incidentally) cops don't understand what all the fuss over King is all about, naturally. And they don't hold the prissy and well-dressed Clarence in much esteem, either. Yet they know he's leveling with them. He has no loyalty to anyone, not even to himself.
Meanwhile Tank gets excommunicated from the Militant Brotherhood, much in the way they kick out a white guy named Teddy. This fight against the Caucasians is serious stuff and they are not going to be derailed by liberal guilt or well-meaning drunkards. These serious revolutionaries--all well-versed in the vernacular of the day--even distrust one of their own members who urges them to turn away from violence. All these rejections of former allies brings up one of the potent ideas in this film: Are the black solidarity radicals hell-bent on violence because they have learned that pacifism only gets you killed, or is it because they were always predisposed to that point of view from the outset, or even because peace is always the more difficult tact? Is the desire and willingness to kill a predictable response to the savagery of black oppression, perhaps not unlike a country's eagerness to go to war after the events of 9/11, despite all reason and faith to the contrary?
You have to begin somewhere. If we are going to get to the bottom of this thing called blaxploitation movies, then the fairest place to begin, according to that wise and weird philosophy professor of mine, is with a dynamite movie based on the 1938 flickola The Informer. The movie in question came out in 1968. It was directed by Jules Dassin, a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants to Amereeka. Some of the great early blaxploitation films were framed by Jewish directors, an entirely understandable situation given the shared heritage of strangers in a strange land, plus the inescapable fact that the Hollywood studio system was far more open to Jewish directors than to African Americans exercising the same trade.
Anyway, this movie that we're talking about was called Up Tight! Yep, just like the name of that Stevie Wonder record. Unlike that 45 rpm, there was not much jolliness in this movie. On the contrary, this movie, which featured an all-African American cast starring Ruby Dee, remains one of the most affecting and tragic motion pictures I have ever seen.
It is also the ideal leaping point for that thing that quickly became known as blaxploitation.
This is a term with which I have often found myself uneasy. Etymologically speaking, the word suggests an exploitation of the hunger of the emerging class of African Americans for cheap and easy film fare. And while there can be no question that there were several tons of money to be made in the production and distribution of many of these films, not all of them were exploitive. Not by a long shot.Up Tight!, as the fountainhead, as it were, for these movies, might be better considered as Black Consciousness. I do not intend that somewhat trite expression as it has been attached to movies such asGuess Who's Coming to Dinner or other neat little vignettes stretched into a (you should pardon the expression) pale imitations of real life. What I am talking about is movies with ideas, movies with writers and players who are able to establish visual dialogues with their audiences.Up Tight! does this as well as any movie in the genre.
The film begins with the crowd reactions to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The opening sequences of personal and group response to this horrible murder drives everything else we will encounter. Tank (played to perfection by Jullian Mayfield), an experienced inebriate, is scheduled to accompany his friends in the black revolutionary movement to rob a gun and ammo supply warehouse. He begs off, in part because he's wasted and in larger part because he does not wish to tarnish the essence of Dr. King with a criminal act such as the one Johnny Wells and the other two men are planning. The three men leave without him. A guard is killed in the robbery. The police know the killer was Johnny. What they do not know is where he is.
Enter one of the great character actors of our time, Roscoe Lee Browne, as Clarence, the mercenary traitor who tells the police that he will make sure that Johnny is turned over to them. The Cleveland (shot on location, incidentally) cops don't understand what all the fuss over King is all about, naturally. And they don't hold the prissy and well-dressed Clarence in much esteem, either. Yet they know he's leveling with them. He has no loyalty to anyone, not even to himself.
Meanwhile Tank gets excommunicated from the Militant Brotherhood, much in the way they kick out a white guy named Teddy. This fight against the Caucasians is serious stuff and they are not going to be derailed by liberal guilt or well-meaning drunkards. These serious revolutionaries--all well-versed in the vernacular of the day--even distrust one of their own members who urges them to turn away from violence. All these rejections of former allies brings up one of the potent ideas in this film: Are the black solidarity radicals hell-bent on violence because they have learned that pacifism only gets you killed, or is it because they were always predisposed to that point of view from the outset, or even because peace is always the more difficult tact? Is the desire and willingness to kill a predictable response to the savagery of black oppression, perhaps not unlike a country's eagerness to go to war after the events of 9/11, despite all reason and faith to the contrary?
The moral issues are only beginning. They end, as we might expect, with whether Tank will tip off the cops to collect the thousand dollar reward on Johnny. Johnny Wells has been his friend. Johnny Wells is looked up to by his community. He is a hero. Tank is just a has been. When one of the leaders of the Brotherhood tells Tank that Johnny doesn't want Tank in the movement any longer--we never learn if this is an accurate reference--Tank is primed and pissed.
Nothing in this movie is played for cheap. People come and go just as in the real world. Some you see again. Most you do not. You haven't seen many movies as strong as this one.
The scene in the fun house with Tank's distorted yet accurate mirrored impressions of the white folks who laughingly want to know if the revolution is really going to happen and if so when is one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed on screen. "Thursday," Tank tells them. Then he tells them what it will be like. They don't think it's funny at all. The joke stops being funny when you become the punchline yourself.
Nothing in this movie is played for cheap. People come and go just as in the real world. Some you see again. Most you do not. You haven't seen many movies as strong as this one.
The scene in the fun house with Tank's distorted yet accurate mirrored impressions of the white folks who laughingly want to know if the revolution is really going to happen and if so when is one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed on screen. "Thursday," Tank tells them. Then he tells them what it will be like. They don't think it's funny at all. The joke stops being funny when you become the punchline yourself.
Blaxploitation Films
Here, then, is the truth: There is no difference among us. Sure, you might be able to trace your DNA markers back to the original humans, according to one theory being the Bushmen of Namibia, an idea I quite like. Race, as the wonderful Melissa Harris-Perry points out, is socio-economic rather than genetic. We are all Africans. Read a book, specifically The Journey of Man by Spencer Wells.
Here, then, is the promised list in question. (BTW, you know perfectly well we'll never be able to get all this completed in one article, so you can anticipate a continuance. What we'll likely do is lay these out one year at a time, probably on the weekends.)
. . . tick. . . tick. . .tick (1970). Directed by Ralph Nelson. This wasn't the first blaxploitation film. That honor goes to either Up Tight! (1968) orThe Black Klansman (1966). It was, however, the first such movie to star Jim Brown, one of the big stars in the field.
Here, then, is the promised list in question. (BTW, you know perfectly well we'll never be able to get all this completed in one article, so you can anticipate a continuance. What we'll likely do is lay these out one year at a time, probably on the weekends.)
. . . tick. . . tick. . .tick (1970). Directed by Ralph Nelson. This wasn't the first blaxploitation film. That honor goes to either Up Tight! (1968) orThe Black Klansman (1966). It was, however, the first such movie to star Jim Brown, one of the big stars in the field.
The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970). The final film directed by William Wyler and one written by the same person who wrote In The Heat of the Night. It's hard to imagine a black movie that starred Lee J. Cobb, Lee Majors, and Barbara Hershey. On the other hand, the subject matter was a wealthy black man who encounters white racism as a result of divorcing his white wife. Roscoe Lee Browne kicks ass, as does Lola Falana (there's a name we don't see much any more), and the typically amazing Yaphet Kotto.
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). For a brief period of time, Godfrey Cambridge, who stars here as Gravedigger Jones, threatened to become the face of Black America. Cambridge wasn't quite as safe as Flip Wilson. But he was close.
Watermelon Man (1970). Cambridge gets edgy in this Melvin Van Peebles directed film about a white bigot who turns black over night. There's a lot more art to this presumed comedy than the movie posters indicated. Estelle Parsons plays the struggling wive.
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970). More of a spin-off than a sequel toIn the Heat of the Night, this is largely a gathering of well-intentioned liberals (Ed Asner, Martin Landau, etc) trying to blend drama with white resistance. Starring Sidney Poitier.
Right On! (1970). Anyone who think anything new of a cultural nature has happened in the 21st century should disabuse that notion by watching this very cool hip hop documentary about The Last Poets, being Gylain Kain, Felipe Luciano, and David Nelson.
The Red, White and Black, aka Soul Soldier (1970). A black Civil War western, starring Cesar Romero. Bad idea gone wrong, unless you love cliches.
The Big Doll House (1971). Directed by Jack Hill. Roger Corman sent director Jack Hill to the Philippines to make this exploitation film. To everyone's surprise, stars Pam Grier and and Roberta Collins could actually act, and Hill actually knew how to shoot a film, so this ended up being one of those movies that appealed to both the proles and the bourgeoisie. Great drive-in fare.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). Directed by, written by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles. Not many movies ever sought out to be as deliberately offensive to white people as this. A black kid grows up in a brothel, becomes a male prostitute, gets friendly with Black Panthers, allies himself with racist cops whom he quickly betrays, while taking a white chick bike gang leader on a tryst and essentially endangers the free world. Loose plot but riveting all the while.
Shaft (1971). Directed by Gordon Parks. Starring Richard Roundtree. This was a wickedly intense black private eye movie about the exploits of John Shaft. In many ways, this was a movie about taking white behavior/stereotypes and painting them black. In other ways, it was more phenomenal than that, in large part because it launched the Parks film dynasty.
The Bus is Coming (1971). Directed by Wendell Franklin. A Vietnam vet comes home to learn that white cops killed his brother. What's his solution Join a black nationalist militant group to eek and reek vengeance. Nothing new here, but lots of clever use of the phrase "The Man."
Goodbye Uncle Tom--Addio Zio Tom (1971). Gulatiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi wrote, directed and starred in this mock-documentary about two documentary filmmakers who return to the time before the U.S. Civil War to make a movie about the slave trade.
Honky (1971). Directed by William A. Graham. Rich black woman falls for poor white man. Audience laughs at being conned. Best thing about movie is it starred Brenda Sykes--no relation.
Man and Boy (1971). Directed by E.W. Swackhamer. This was Bill Cosby's chance to show that he could play a serious, historical role. Oops.
The Organization (1971). The second spin-off (rather than sequel) fromIn the Heat of the Night. This time out, Virgil Tibbs (Sydney Poitier) befriends black revolutionaries who steal millions in heroin from gangsters in an attempt to keep drugs out of the blood of black people. At least this movie had ideas, however amateurishly presented.
Speeding Up Time (1971). Directed by John Evans. If ever a movie's title was ironic, this one was. This interminably slow-moving movie had some good ideas and some quirky cinematography. It did not have a workable script or competent acting and so went the way of other good intentions.
Brother John (1971). Directed by James Goldstone. Another Poitier vehicle, this time with a grooving soundtrack by Quincy Jones.
Honky (1971). Directed by William A. Graham. Rich black woman falls for poor white man. Audience laughs at being conned. Best thing about movie is it starred Brenda Sykes--no relation.
Man and Boy (1971). Directed by E.W. Swackhamer. This was Bill Cosby's chance to show that he could play a serious, historical role. Oops.
The Organization (1971). The second spin-off (rather than sequel) fromIn the Heat of the Night. This time out, Virgil Tibbs (Sydney Poitier) befriends black revolutionaries who steal millions in heroin from gangsters in an attempt to keep drugs out of the blood of black people. At least this movie had ideas, however amateurishly presented.
Speeding Up Time (1971). Directed by John Evans. If ever a movie's title was ironic, this one was. This interminably slow-moving movie had some good ideas and some quirky cinematography. It did not have a workable script or competent acting and so went the way of other good intentions.
Brother John (1971). Directed by James Goldstone. Another Poitier vehicle, this time with a grooving soundtrack by Quincy Jones.
Buck and the Preacher (1972). Directed by and starring Sidney Poitier. Also starring Harry Belafonte. Horse opera, slaves, free labor, and a man of God, or at least of peace.
The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972). Directed by Martin Goldman and starring Fred "Hammer" Williamson in the title role. This movie answers the musical question: "If you beat a man with a whip, are you punishing him or just teaching him the value of pain?"
Cool Breeze (1972). The ads at the time of the film's release were careful to remind us that they (MGM) were the hep cats who had brought usShaft, so you know they had to have the creds to pull off a flick about a small group of black guys determined to rob three million in cold diamonds in order to finance a Black People's Bank. Directed by Barry Pollack, whom you likely do not remember from his work with the TV show "Trapper John MD," and starring the wild Thalmus Rasulala as Sidney Lord Jones, aka Cool Breeze Himself. This kind of white-financed African American vengeance cinema absurdite is what really got people to calling the genre blaxploitation. Still, it was exciting.
The Final Comedown (1972). Four years earlier, Jimmy Garrett wrote a powerful play called We Own the Night. This movie, which stars Billy Dee Williams (who also directed and financed the film), is approximately the screen adaptation of that play.
Shaft's Big Score (1972). Once again director Gordon Parks (Sr) teamed with rising star Richard Roundtree in this sequel to begin all sequels. Another MGM gem, you had to "ask your mama" if you could see this R-rated action adventure that featured lots of fifty dollar bills, some erotic dance sequences, about one million bullet holes and some genuinely exciting car chases--honest! I know most people think car chases equals stupid, but that's just silly. Best line? "My mama always told me to watch out for black honkies with big flat feet!" At least half the Seventies cop and P.I. shows could not have existed had it not been for the action sequences in this film to show the way.
Come Back, Charleston Blue (1972). This was the non-anticipated sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem. Boredom comes to audience. Great name, though.
Come Back, Charleston Blue (1972). This was the non-anticipated sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem. Boredom comes to audience. Great name, though.
The Big Bird Cage (1972). Speaking of great names, the first half of the 1970s had few names greater than Jack Hill and Pam Grier, who directed and starred (respectively) in this remarkably exploitative black revolutionary-women in cages in the Philippines flick that did nothing to further the cause of liberation but was fine drive-in fare all the same.
Bone (1972). A little bit of irony in the night. Yaphet Kotto stars in what was sometimes called Beverly Hills Nightmare. Social relevance plus great acting by Kotto and even lovely Joyce Van Patton.
Super Fly (1972). Directed by Gordon Parks Jr and starring Ron O'Neal as the genuinely dangerous Priest, a coke dealer who wants to get out of the life by committing one final million dollar score that will free him up to live in peace on some quiet island somewhere. As O'Neal himself would later admit, this was basically a long commercial for cocaine. It also solidified the black genre because of the tremendous strength of O'Neal's performance and especially because of the incredible soundtrack brought by the beautiful Curtis Mayfield.
Slaughter (1972). For all intents and purposes, American International Pictures launched exploitation films. It is therefore a little curious that they would come right along a couple years later and formula-ize the mixture of black star, white support cast, and bigotry begets violence brew that this film epitomized. Directed by Jack Starrett and starring Jim Brown, this movie also gave us buxom Stella Stevens as "the girl" and occasionally hilarious and always fascinating Rip Torn as "the mob." Slaughter, the trailers of the day proclaimed, is not just his name. It's his business.
Slaughter (1972). For all intents and purposes, American International Pictures launched exploitation films. It is therefore a little curious that they would come right along a couple years later and formula-ize the mixture of black star, white support cast, and bigotry begets violence brew that this film epitomized. Directed by Jack Starrett and starring Jim Brown, this movie also gave us buxom Stella Stevens as "the girl" and occasionally hilarious and always fascinating Rip Torn as "the mob." Slaughter, the trailers of the day proclaimed, is not just his name. It's his business.
Blacula (1972). Another AIP hoot-and-a-half, this one referred to the title character (played by William Marshall, although the real star was Thalmus Rasulala) as Dracula's Soul Brother. This was just a mostly lame attempt at marrying black culture to the horror genre that had by then become AIP's stock in trade. Still, there were some great lines, as when the bartender asks the title character what he'll have and the response is "Bloody Mary."
Hammer (1972). Fred Williamson stars as the prizefighter caught in a corrupt system. Rocky meets Super Fly.
Hammer (1972). Fred Williamson stars as the prizefighter caught in a corrupt system. Rocky meets Super Fly.
Trouble Man (1972). Not even Marvin Gaye's first-rate soundtrack could save this unfortunate flop from the dustbin. Star Robert Hooks simply didn't have the dark charisma of his contemporaries to elevate the lame script from the shredder.
Black Gunn (1972). For a little while there things got so predictable that the writers couldn't be bothered to come up with a character name that didn't smack of pedantry. Guess what kind of weapon Jim Brown used, for instance? Why not have a movie called Em-16, starring a teenaged sister named Emma who falls into possession of automatic weapons that she sells to the Brotherhood so they can take over the Catholic Church in Scranton? Actually, that kind of works, doesn't it?
Black Gunn (1972). For a little while there things got so predictable that the writers couldn't be bothered to come up with a character name that didn't smack of pedantry. Guess what kind of weapon Jim Brown used, for instance? Why not have a movie called Em-16, starring a teenaged sister named Emma who falls into possession of automatic weapons that she sells to the Brotherhood so they can take over the Catholic Church in Scranton? Actually, that kind of works, doesn't it?
Trick Baby (1972). Robert Beck spent ten months in solitary for pimping. When he got out, he changed his ways and turned into the writer Iceberg Slim. He wrote Pimp, as well as the novel that became this movie, a film that starred future "Hill Street Blues" heartthrob Kiel Martin and occasional "All in the Family" neighbor Mel Stewart. The movie probably cost about two hundred dollars to make, including acting lessons for all but the two principal characters, but it still was good in the way it captured both the danger, thrills and even humor of the hustling life.
The Harder They Come (1972). An excellent movie in its own right, blaxploitation or otherwise, Harder starred a young Jimmy Cliff in the role of real life gangster Ivanhoe, a man who was to Jamaican culture what Clyde Barrow was to white folks in the Great Depression. "I was here but I disappear." Brutal, gorgeous and genuinely frightening, it also presented America with a first-rate soundtrack and launched Cliff as a major reggae star.
Across 110th Street (1972). I would walk across sheets of blazing metal to watch the late Yaphet Kotto act. Add Anthony Quinn to the mix and we have a painfully dark drama about the mob and the brothers battling it out while the cops scratch their heads and treat their own wounds.
The Harder They Come (1972). An excellent movie in its own right, blaxploitation or otherwise, Harder starred a young Jimmy Cliff in the role of real life gangster Ivanhoe, a man who was to Jamaican culture what Clyde Barrow was to white folks in the Great Depression. "I was here but I disappear." Brutal, gorgeous and genuinely frightening, it also presented America with a first-rate soundtrack and launched Cliff as a major reggae star.
Across 110th Street (1972). I would walk across sheets of blazing metal to watch the late Yaphet Kotto act. Add Anthony Quinn to the mix and we have a painfully dark drama about the mob and the brothers battling it out while the cops scratch their heads and treat their own wounds.
Switchblade Sisters
Here's the skinny on the Jack Hill classic The Jezebels (1975), a movie that sometimes goes under the name Switchblade Sisters. Director Jack Hill quit the business after making this knife-fight-in-hot pants romance story, the rumor being that he and his wife wanted to find a lazy place to meditate and get in touch with their more spiritual inner workings. In his early film school days, Jack was tight with Francis Coppola and he even made his apprenticeship bones with Roger Corman. Hill is the man behind Coffy and Foxy Brown, both vehicles for Pam Grier. In The Jezebels, he introduces us to the cutthroat world of high school female delinquents, most of whom had to turn to crime because they sure couldn't act to save their lives. These gals rip off a bill collector in the community elevator and sling their chains at boys in the roller rink. They're quite a tough bunch, which is why Lace, the head Deb, comes off so ridiculous with her snarling kitten voice and bared teeth. See, Lace has got it bad for Dominic, the head of the Daggers, for which the Debs are the auxiliary group. Well, you know how guys can be. When Maggie, the new girl, joins up, Dom just has to take a run at her, thereby insuring that Lace will want to waste the new chick just about the time that one of them ends up preggers.
Then there's the rival gang, led by a guy named Crabbs, a dude who dresses like Robin Williams coming out of a thrift store. Crabbs' number two man looks a lot like Chevy Chase, and funny enough, that makes him scary as hell.
The cops are no better than the punks, and both fuzz and fiends drive most of the shopkeepers out of whatever city this is supposed to be. That is the extent of the social commentary offered by this film, although we do get to hang with a black militant Sappho society for a few minutes, mostly as an homage to the blaxploitation films that had become Hill's stock and trade.
Nothing much really happens in this movie except for grab-ass and defiance, but that's appropriate to the form. It's still visually pretty good, with lots of knife fights and the occasional under-age boob spillage. The story line is straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald by way of Marsha Brady on angel dust. You'll laugh. You'll giggle. You'll snort like a swine.
Then there's the rival gang, led by a guy named Crabbs, a dude who dresses like Robin Williams coming out of a thrift store. Crabbs' number two man looks a lot like Chevy Chase, and funny enough, that makes him scary as hell.
The cops are no better than the punks, and both fuzz and fiends drive most of the shopkeepers out of whatever city this is supposed to be. That is the extent of the social commentary offered by this film, although we do get to hang with a black militant Sappho society for a few minutes, mostly as an homage to the blaxploitation films that had become Hill's stock and trade.
Nothing much really happens in this movie except for grab-ass and defiance, but that's appropriate to the form. It's still visually pretty good, with lots of knife fights and the occasional under-age boob spillage. The story line is straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald by way of Marsha Brady on angel dust. You'll laugh. You'll giggle. You'll snort like a swine.
Willie Dynamite
Willie Dynamite (1974) is one of those odd movies where the bad guy from the title comes from a nice home, but just turns out rotten in pursuit of his version of the American economy. Willie's a pimp, not because he necessarily wants to exploit women but because there's money to be made in it. He declares himself a capitalist and refuses to consolidate with the other pimps in town cuz he's doing well enough to drive around in the most ridiculous looking car you've ever seen and can get away with wearing the most outlandish clothes in the universe. But, sure, some social worker married to a cop's gotta come along and try to convert him to a normal lifestyle, the way social workers were always doing back then. That's okay.
This film has a strange moral core. On the one hand the social worker tries to get the hookers to go into modeling so they can make money off their looks in a legitimate way. On the other hand, she actually sees some human potential in Willie.
This film has a strange moral core. On the one hand the social worker tries to get the hookers to go into modeling so they can make money off their looks in a legitimate way. On the other hand, she actually sees some human potential in Willie.
Despite all the lavish color, this is no Kid Rock fake-ass version of street life. This is the real thing and it's got some genuinely touching moments and sincere humor to it, right along with all the ugliness.
Rolling Thunder
Operation Rolling Thunder was an LBJ-era US Air Force, US Navy and South Vietnamese Air Force offensive that bombed North Vietnam for three solid years. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a not particularly excellent touring band of Bob Dylan during 1975-76, one that featured Joan Baez, Kinky Friedman and Roger McGuinn, among others. The movie, Rolling Thunder (1977) was very different from these other things that went by the same name. I'm pretty sure writer Paul Schrader had the war in mind, rather than the concert. But you never know.
Schrader had just written Taxi Driver the previous year. He was positioned to further his reputation as the dark mind of Hollywood. Rolling Thunder was not quite the previous film. But it was close.
Schrader had just written Taxi Driver the previous year. He was positioned to further his reputation as the dark mind of Hollywood. Rolling Thunder was not quite the previous film. But it was close.
Sounds like they might be thinking of the drive-in audience, doesn't it? Well, of course. Who do you think spent all that money to watch Taxi Driver? A bunch of effete film critics like me? Aw, hell no. I was the only effete film critic within a mile of the Starlite County Drive-In Picture Show Palace.
So RT was a movie about a disturbed and returning Vietnam vet. But this movie didn't try to make some huge social statement that was so convoluted that you'd forget why it was important by the second reel (cringe: Deer Hunter). And it wasn't trying to say something subtle about the female orgasm (as in Coming Home). Naw, this was about just how incredibly stupid-ass cruel some people can be, especially when they come upon someone who has already suffered more than either you or I could possibly withstand. Major Charles Rane (William DeVane) comes home from being a POW for God knows how long, accompanied by his immediately twisted friend Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). These boys have been tortured by experts. Yet they have no agenda. They just want to sit around, try to get some semblance of their lives back, and see what's playing at the drive-in. Well, we lose track of Johnny right away because we're gonna need him in the last reel. For the moment, we focus on Major Rane. On his first day back he finds out that his son does not remember him, that his wife wants a divorce, and that mini skirts are on their way out. On his second day back, he meets a hot waitress (Linda, played by Linda Haynes), receives a Cadillac convertible, and gets two grand in silver dollars, each coin representing one day of captivity. On his third day back, four hombres break into the Major's house and demand that he give them the money he received. We notice right away that there's all kinds of valuable merchandise in the house, plus the Caddy's parked in the driveway. But these bastards want the box of coins because that's the most effective way they have of raping the Major's mind. There's no other reason.
Well, you know these vets. They just won't bend for anything. Rane says forget it. They punch him in the mouth. He still won't talk. They stand him up and beat him senseless. Nope. They get nothing. Then Luke Askew, one of the great bad guy character actors of all time, ram-jams Rane's arm in the garbage disposal. Rane doesn't much like this, but he still won't hand over the change. Then the wife and kid come home. Well, you know how kids are. The son hands over the loot to protect his dad. In turn, the hombres shoot and kill the wife and kid.
Rane goes through some rehab. His new girlfriend Linda comes to see him, as does Johnny and the military shrink (Dabney Coleman, who was in damned near every movie ever made in those days). The cop who was engaged to Rane's wife wants to know who the bad guys were so he can arrest them. But Papa don't take no mess. He lies and says he has no idea. In reality, he remembers details we in the audience have even forgotten. Names, faces, places--click, click, click. The major is a smart guy, if somewhat emotionally fodderized, to coin an expression.
He pulls together Johnny and a ton of ammo and the two of them hide out in a whorehouse waiting for the bad guys to get distracted. In one of the all-time sickly hilarious exchanges in movie history, the hooker says "The fuck are you doing?" to which Tommy Lee Jones replies, "Gonna kill a bunch of people."
If this sounds like standard revenge-flick nonsense, then assume that my own explanatory skills are deficient because this movie is a slow burning fuse that catches all the subtle details in ways that are not subtle at all. This is a smart film that just happens to have been loosely focused on what was then a topical matter. The real issue, as I mentioned earlier, is man's inhumanity to man and how that inhumanity causes people to react. This is no bullshit Death Wish nonsense, where you kind of get the sense that Charles Bronson was secretly glad his wife got killed so he could shoot up the city. In Rolling Thunder, the heroes and villains exist for real reasons, rather than something stupid and contrived. There really was a war. People really did get tortured. Some of them really did come home. And some of those who did were treated very badly. To my knowledge, RT is the only movie of that period that even attempted to illustrate how the whole thing might have felt.
So RT was a movie about a disturbed and returning Vietnam vet. But this movie didn't try to make some huge social statement that was so convoluted that you'd forget why it was important by the second reel (cringe: Deer Hunter). And it wasn't trying to say something subtle about the female orgasm (as in Coming Home). Naw, this was about just how incredibly stupid-ass cruel some people can be, especially when they come upon someone who has already suffered more than either you or I could possibly withstand. Major Charles Rane (William DeVane) comes home from being a POW for God knows how long, accompanied by his immediately twisted friend Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). These boys have been tortured by experts. Yet they have no agenda. They just want to sit around, try to get some semblance of their lives back, and see what's playing at the drive-in. Well, we lose track of Johnny right away because we're gonna need him in the last reel. For the moment, we focus on Major Rane. On his first day back he finds out that his son does not remember him, that his wife wants a divorce, and that mini skirts are on their way out. On his second day back, he meets a hot waitress (Linda, played by Linda Haynes), receives a Cadillac convertible, and gets two grand in silver dollars, each coin representing one day of captivity. On his third day back, four hombres break into the Major's house and demand that he give them the money he received. We notice right away that there's all kinds of valuable merchandise in the house, plus the Caddy's parked in the driveway. But these bastards want the box of coins because that's the most effective way they have of raping the Major's mind. There's no other reason.
Well, you know these vets. They just won't bend for anything. Rane says forget it. They punch him in the mouth. He still won't talk. They stand him up and beat him senseless. Nope. They get nothing. Then Luke Askew, one of the great bad guy character actors of all time, ram-jams Rane's arm in the garbage disposal. Rane doesn't much like this, but he still won't hand over the change. Then the wife and kid come home. Well, you know how kids are. The son hands over the loot to protect his dad. In turn, the hombres shoot and kill the wife and kid.
Rane goes through some rehab. His new girlfriend Linda comes to see him, as does Johnny and the military shrink (Dabney Coleman, who was in damned near every movie ever made in those days). The cop who was engaged to Rane's wife wants to know who the bad guys were so he can arrest them. But Papa don't take no mess. He lies and says he has no idea. In reality, he remembers details we in the audience have even forgotten. Names, faces, places--click, click, click. The major is a smart guy, if somewhat emotionally fodderized, to coin an expression.
He pulls together Johnny and a ton of ammo and the two of them hide out in a whorehouse waiting for the bad guys to get distracted. In one of the all-time sickly hilarious exchanges in movie history, the hooker says "The fuck are you doing?" to which Tommy Lee Jones replies, "Gonna kill a bunch of people."
If this sounds like standard revenge-flick nonsense, then assume that my own explanatory skills are deficient because this movie is a slow burning fuse that catches all the subtle details in ways that are not subtle at all. This is a smart film that just happens to have been loosely focused on what was then a topical matter. The real issue, as I mentioned earlier, is man's inhumanity to man and how that inhumanity causes people to react. This is no bullshit Death Wish nonsense, where you kind of get the sense that Charles Bronson was secretly glad his wife got killed so he could shoot up the city. In Rolling Thunder, the heroes and villains exist for real reasons, rather than something stupid and contrived. There really was a war. People really did get tortured. Some of them really did come home. And some of those who did were treated very badly. To my knowledge, RT is the only movie of that period that even attempted to illustrate how the whole thing might have felt.
The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane
Just in time for a week or so before Halloween, we have a chilling little suspense thriller called The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane (1976) starring--as every movie ever made has done--both Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen. Jodie was all of fourteen during the shooting of this film, a fact which raised some eyebrows as well as other parts of a perverted public because of a quick nude scene that actually feature Jodie's sister Connie (then all of twenty) as the body double.
The movie is strictly standard narration--beginning, middle, end, in that order--and the cinematography, while pleasing, isn't any big shakes in a decade that specialized in some major earth tremors. Yet this remains one of the most charming of suspense films for two very obvious reasons.
First, the acting gets your attention without calling attention to itself. I've read that Ms. Foster does not recall her work on this picture with much fondness and that's a shame because she really glows as a kid her own age, one who is left to run her own life at the blossoming of her teen years. Her sassy patter, the way she defies without overt belligerence, the vulnerable yet struggling air of superiority--she did every bit as good a job here as she did in Taxi Driver, which had been released just a few months earlier.
Martin Sheen ain't half bad either, working to broaden his wings as one of the creepiest molesters in memory. He plays the son of the real estate lady who has leased the house--the one down the lane--where Rynn--Jodie--lives with her nonexistent father.
Alexis Smith plays Sheen's mother. Gotta admit it, folks, everybody loves a good bitch and Smith plays one of the best. She marches into Jodie's house looking for the father, for her jelly jars, for whatever it might be, as if she owns the bloody house and the tension between her character and Rynn will have you cheering in your skivvies, the appropriate attire for this bedtime tale.
Even Mort Shuman, the music supervisor for the movie, appears here, playing the friendly and a slightly awkward town cop, Ron Miglioriti. When I saw the name on the opening credits, I thought, "Mort Shuman? The songwriter who worked with Doc Pomus, the team responsible for such hits as 'This Magic Moment' and 'Viva Las Vegas'? That Mort Shuman?" Yes indeed. Now Shuman was a lyricist because he wasn't that polished an actor, as this movie makes clear, and yet that actually works out just fine here because it gives a bit of indirect emphasis to the superior acting of Foster and Sheen.
It also helps with the acting of Scott Jacoby, who plays the smart accomplice to Rynn's survival instincts. Matter of fact, the whole bond between Foster and Jacoby feels so incredibly natural, spontaneous and improvised that you might even forget about the dead lady down in the cellar.
The movie is strictly standard narration--beginning, middle, end, in that order--and the cinematography, while pleasing, isn't any big shakes in a decade that specialized in some major earth tremors. Yet this remains one of the most charming of suspense films for two very obvious reasons.
First, the acting gets your attention without calling attention to itself. I've read that Ms. Foster does not recall her work on this picture with much fondness and that's a shame because she really glows as a kid her own age, one who is left to run her own life at the blossoming of her teen years. Her sassy patter, the way she defies without overt belligerence, the vulnerable yet struggling air of superiority--she did every bit as good a job here as she did in Taxi Driver, which had been released just a few months earlier.
Martin Sheen ain't half bad either, working to broaden his wings as one of the creepiest molesters in memory. He plays the son of the real estate lady who has leased the house--the one down the lane--where Rynn--Jodie--lives with her nonexistent father.
Alexis Smith plays Sheen's mother. Gotta admit it, folks, everybody loves a good bitch and Smith plays one of the best. She marches into Jodie's house looking for the father, for her jelly jars, for whatever it might be, as if she owns the bloody house and the tension between her character and Rynn will have you cheering in your skivvies, the appropriate attire for this bedtime tale.
Even Mort Shuman, the music supervisor for the movie, appears here, playing the friendly and a slightly awkward town cop, Ron Miglioriti. When I saw the name on the opening credits, I thought, "Mort Shuman? The songwriter who worked with Doc Pomus, the team responsible for such hits as 'This Magic Moment' and 'Viva Las Vegas'? That Mort Shuman?" Yes indeed. Now Shuman was a lyricist because he wasn't that polished an actor, as this movie makes clear, and yet that actually works out just fine here because it gives a bit of indirect emphasis to the superior acting of Foster and Sheen.
It also helps with the acting of Scott Jacoby, who plays the smart accomplice to Rynn's survival instincts. Matter of fact, the whole bond between Foster and Jacoby feels so incredibly natural, spontaneous and improvised that you might even forget about the dead lady down in the cellar.
Two (and if you recall, we were indexing here), the music for once does not overpower the film in the way all too common then and now in movies that were trying to scare us or even just tense us up. I know that from the above trailer you'd get the idea that this movie was all sloppy dialogue and organ grinding (pardon the pun). But's it's much better than that. Shuman selected a cool Chopin piano concerto for the mood and praise God there's no hokey AM radio blather pretending to be pop music anywhere in the film.
The film is also set at Halloween time and that's no mere coincidence, just as it's not entirely exploitive of the season. There is an undercurrent of witchiness to this film that comes out in the blatant bigotry of the leasing agent, as well as in the names of most of the characters, and it's definitely not an accident that Mario, the love interest, is both crippled and a magician.
So see The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. See it because the writer used the proper personal pronoun referent. See it because of Jodie Foster. See it because the music will lull you in. And see it because Halloween is almost here.
The film is also set at Halloween time and that's no mere coincidence, just as it's not entirely exploitive of the season. There is an undercurrent of witchiness to this film that comes out in the blatant bigotry of the leasing agent, as well as in the names of most of the characters, and it's definitely not an accident that Mario, the love interest, is both crippled and a magician.
So see The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. See it because the writer used the proper personal pronoun referent. See it because of Jodie Foster. See it because the music will lull you in. And see it because Halloween is almost here.
A Bullet for Pretty Boy
After sleeping in parks, getting two ribs cracked open by a psycho with a baseball bat, running a behavioral health clinic, writing speeches for Salt River Project, getting shot at while driving a taxi, sweating out nine years at American Express, finding twenty dollars in a landfill, getting kicked in the head by a cop on Christmas morning, being raped by two losers outside a Starbucks one night, fighting back from pancreatic cancer, owning a portrait studio, getting my windpipe busted by a jealous teenage girl, reading every volume of the 1967 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, driving across the country in two days in a car that had been falsely reported stolen, working as a corporate trainer at a collection agency, having a pacemaker put in above my left tit, receiving a prestigious award from a Canadian writer's association while remaining largely ignored in my own country, alienating virtually all my friends and then slowly, surely reestablishing those treasured relationships--after all this and a lot more that has receded into the un-dusted crevices of my memory, I figured the worst was over.
There was a period of about three years, back in my early twenties, when the only women who would go out with me were lesbians, and that was mostly because I was at that time the prototypical non-threatening male, not a bad thing to be, I'll admit, but also a not infrequently frustrated nonthreatening thing to be, one who--when the movie ended and my mind set to wandering about the soft brush of lips, the slightest hint of unbra'd cleavage, or the gentle swelling of an exposed calf, and what I ended up getting was an easy slap on the back or punch on the shoulder, some well-intended laughter and an occasional meal cooked to perfection--almost invariably found myself alone with a warm hand and a cold shower. And even though, all these wondrous years later, I still find my head turning and my neck straining bands of admiration at some beauty in her forties or fifties who finds herself unable to comply due to a firm commitment to her own gender, despite this, I still figured the most frustrating moments of my life had passed.
A couple years ago I had not one but two book deals lined up with a more than reputable American publishing house, found myself in receipt of flattering emails and encouraging telephone calls, as well as more dinner invitations than I could possibly have accommodated. Yet about two weeks before the deals were to be consummated, as it were, the publisher went back on its word and its representative actually expressed a certain delight in that they had managed to extricate themselves from an arrangement with someone--presumably me--who had such an unpleasant attitude. Well, at least the worst is over, I assured myself.
I was in error. I only thought that I had encountered enough ups and downs in a life that was beginning to resemble a tiny raft in an angry ocean of swells and recessions.
Tonight I watched a movie called A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970). Now, friends and family, I know the true pulsing waves of confusion, expectation and disappointment.
As with all the other rocks that fell from an azure sky of deepest summer, I should have seen this disappointment coming. I mean, the star of this motion picture was Fabian Forte who, it turns out, is still very much alive as of this writing and who, for all I know is one hell of a nice person. In case you're unaware of it, Fabian, as he was known, started out the path to fame as a teen idol, a handsome face behind some tepid hits between the years 1958 and 1963, back when Elvis was in the army, Chuck Berry was in the pokey, Buddy Holly was dead, and Jerry Lee Lewis was banned, and before the U.S. arrival of the Beatles. Anyway, once the British Invasion, as they called it, hit our eager shores, there was no audience for Tepid, so he did what others before him had done: he turned to acting. 20th Century Fox bought him up and he appeared in some quickie exploitation flicks of the mid-to-late 1960s. Then Fox went through one of its frequent changes in policies and Fabian found himself looking mighty hungry at the front door of American International Pictures, the real Big Daddies of exploitation and drive-in fare for the Clearasil generation.
This was exactly the kind of movie that AIP loved to make. Bonnie and Clyde had rocked everyone from the gang at the Starlite to lovely Pauline Kael, so it only stood to reason that Depression-ear gangster pics were the latest craze. Because Fabian had remained a good-looking guy who fit the age bracket (Floyd died at age thirty), he was cast amidst a group of people, only one of whom could really act to save her life and that was a young lady named Jocelyn Lane, a British spitfire who had made the drive-in circuit the previous year in a some wondrous trash called Hell's Belles. Her role in Bullet was first as the hooker who seduces the escaped convict Floyd, and later as his trusted accomplice. Her performance as Floyd's foil is really excellent. She bites her lip, not to be coquettish but in rage. There, I said it.
The movie does not hone to historic accuracy in any regard, so far as I can tell. There never was an accomplice named "Preacher," for instance, and at the time of Floyd's capture and death, the FBI did not go by that name (they were called the Bureau of Investigations). The movie also ignores most of the details of the folk hero aspects of Charles Arthur Floyd, even though those details were mostly false, even in the 1930s. Woody Guthrie wrote and recorded a song called "Pretty Boy Floyd" with the memorable line "Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen." Guthrie did a good job pointing out the irony of the government going after Floyd for robbing banks while the banks had robbed the country and left its people starving. (The Byrds recorded the most famous version of the song on Sweetheart of the Rodeo.) I kept expecting to hear bits of this song during the movie. Instead I heard some guy named Harley Hatcher singing about how he was always running from himself. Ole Harley had made kind of a name for himself with exploi flicks like Killers Three, Satan's Sadists and Cain's Cutthroats, so this film was a natural move for him.
I could go on and on about how it would have been nice if someone had bought the camera operators a tripod so the picture didn't jump around at the wrong moment, or how if the two brothers of the brothel owner hadn't been moving with poles up their backs, or how Fabian himself might have been encouraged to understand the difference between being cold and having no emotion whatsoever. I could talk about that stuff all night. You are spared that particular rant because there is no earthly reason why you should debate with yourself about seeing this movie based on this or any other review. You might, however, ask yourself why, with a $350,000 budget, AIP (who made some of the most fascinating cheap films of the era) turned out this rubbish. As for me, the phone's ringing. I'd better get it. With any luck, it'll be Rachel Maddow. Yay!
There was a period of about three years, back in my early twenties, when the only women who would go out with me were lesbians, and that was mostly because I was at that time the prototypical non-threatening male, not a bad thing to be, I'll admit, but also a not infrequently frustrated nonthreatening thing to be, one who--when the movie ended and my mind set to wandering about the soft brush of lips, the slightest hint of unbra'd cleavage, or the gentle swelling of an exposed calf, and what I ended up getting was an easy slap on the back or punch on the shoulder, some well-intended laughter and an occasional meal cooked to perfection--almost invariably found myself alone with a warm hand and a cold shower. And even though, all these wondrous years later, I still find my head turning and my neck straining bands of admiration at some beauty in her forties or fifties who finds herself unable to comply due to a firm commitment to her own gender, despite this, I still figured the most frustrating moments of my life had passed.
A couple years ago I had not one but two book deals lined up with a more than reputable American publishing house, found myself in receipt of flattering emails and encouraging telephone calls, as well as more dinner invitations than I could possibly have accommodated. Yet about two weeks before the deals were to be consummated, as it were, the publisher went back on its word and its representative actually expressed a certain delight in that they had managed to extricate themselves from an arrangement with someone--presumably me--who had such an unpleasant attitude. Well, at least the worst is over, I assured myself.
I was in error. I only thought that I had encountered enough ups and downs in a life that was beginning to resemble a tiny raft in an angry ocean of swells and recessions.
Tonight I watched a movie called A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970). Now, friends and family, I know the true pulsing waves of confusion, expectation and disappointment.
As with all the other rocks that fell from an azure sky of deepest summer, I should have seen this disappointment coming. I mean, the star of this motion picture was Fabian Forte who, it turns out, is still very much alive as of this writing and who, for all I know is one hell of a nice person. In case you're unaware of it, Fabian, as he was known, started out the path to fame as a teen idol, a handsome face behind some tepid hits between the years 1958 and 1963, back when Elvis was in the army, Chuck Berry was in the pokey, Buddy Holly was dead, and Jerry Lee Lewis was banned, and before the U.S. arrival of the Beatles. Anyway, once the British Invasion, as they called it, hit our eager shores, there was no audience for Tepid, so he did what others before him had done: he turned to acting. 20th Century Fox bought him up and he appeared in some quickie exploitation flicks of the mid-to-late 1960s. Then Fox went through one of its frequent changes in policies and Fabian found himself looking mighty hungry at the front door of American International Pictures, the real Big Daddies of exploitation and drive-in fare for the Clearasil generation.
This was exactly the kind of movie that AIP loved to make. Bonnie and Clyde had rocked everyone from the gang at the Starlite to lovely Pauline Kael, so it only stood to reason that Depression-ear gangster pics were the latest craze. Because Fabian had remained a good-looking guy who fit the age bracket (Floyd died at age thirty), he was cast amidst a group of people, only one of whom could really act to save her life and that was a young lady named Jocelyn Lane, a British spitfire who had made the drive-in circuit the previous year in a some wondrous trash called Hell's Belles. Her role in Bullet was first as the hooker who seduces the escaped convict Floyd, and later as his trusted accomplice. Her performance as Floyd's foil is really excellent. She bites her lip, not to be coquettish but in rage. There, I said it.
The movie does not hone to historic accuracy in any regard, so far as I can tell. There never was an accomplice named "Preacher," for instance, and at the time of Floyd's capture and death, the FBI did not go by that name (they were called the Bureau of Investigations). The movie also ignores most of the details of the folk hero aspects of Charles Arthur Floyd, even though those details were mostly false, even in the 1930s. Woody Guthrie wrote and recorded a song called "Pretty Boy Floyd" with the memorable line "Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen." Guthrie did a good job pointing out the irony of the government going after Floyd for robbing banks while the banks had robbed the country and left its people starving. (The Byrds recorded the most famous version of the song on Sweetheart of the Rodeo.) I kept expecting to hear bits of this song during the movie. Instead I heard some guy named Harley Hatcher singing about how he was always running from himself. Ole Harley had made kind of a name for himself with exploi flicks like Killers Three, Satan's Sadists and Cain's Cutthroats, so this film was a natural move for him.
I could go on and on about how it would have been nice if someone had bought the camera operators a tripod so the picture didn't jump around at the wrong moment, or how if the two brothers of the brothel owner hadn't been moving with poles up their backs, or how Fabian himself might have been encouraged to understand the difference between being cold and having no emotion whatsoever. I could talk about that stuff all night. You are spared that particular rant because there is no earthly reason why you should debate with yourself about seeing this movie based on this or any other review. You might, however, ask yourself why, with a $350,000 budget, AIP (who made some of the most fascinating cheap films of the era) turned out this rubbish. As for me, the phone's ringing. I'd better get it. With any luck, it'll be Rachel Maddow. Yay!
The Last House on the Left
It's sadistic revenge drive-in horror movie night here at Philmer, where we bring you our famous in progress review of the first feature film bearing the writer/director credits for Wes Craven. As you may have guessed, the film is The Last House on the Left (1972), a movie based on the story conveyed in an Ingmar Bergman film called The Virgin Spring (1960). Bergman's film stirred a bit of controversy upon release and even found itself banned in parts of Texas because of its depiction of a particularly brutal rape. Craven's film was far more shattering and found itself awash in controversy that actually helped promote this movie (budgeted at less than $90,000) into the ten million dollar zone.
One thing must be understood going in. This is a horror movie. What happens in this film is horrible. You would not want to be one of the victims and you would not want to be one of the perpetrators. You would not want to be close to either group. Chances are you wouldn't want to be the parents of the victims, even though it's the parents who seek to balance the scales of justice. You certainly would not want to be the two idiot cops who are only in the film to confuse us, which is part of what I'll be bold and refer to as Craven's style.
One of the things about this film that continues to disturb many people all these years later is that the inserted scenes with the sheriff and his deputy have their humorous elements, yet those scenes are invariably inserted between incidents of vile torture and brutality happening not far away. Plus bad guy David Hess, who plays Krug, the leader of the sadistic gang, also gets to sing the songs in the movie and the songs are all upbeat bluegrass or country rock numbers. So on the one hand we are properly repulsed by some elongated and grisly stuff initiated by Krug, Weasel and their accomplices against Mari and Phyllis, two seventeen year olds out for a fun evening at the rock show. On the other hand, we have chirpy music and clownish cops punctuating the proceedings for no apparent reason other than to demarcate the distinction between the naive wholesomeness of the law and order boys and the depraved actions of some savage sex offenders. When Mari tells her Dad that nobody wears bras anymore, we're a little surprised at her candid approach with her pop. Yet we also suspect that what's really going on is that her fascination with her own developing physique is going to parallel with some unwanted trouble. After all, they didn't call this an exploitation film for nothing.
The two girls are out looking for some Colombian red bud smoking material when they happen upon Krug's junkie son. He says he can hook the two up and leads them to their doom. Krug and Weasel have escaped prison and joined Junior and Sadie on a crime spree of torture and delight. To give you one example (one that back then caused a lot of people to freak out--and I'll bet it still does), out in the woods, Krug orders Phyllis to piss her pants. She does it. She does it because she is afraid what will happen if she refuses.
I don't doubt for one second that there are bad folks out there who would get their kicks doing something very much like what happens in this film. I imagine they'd think themselves fairly cool and removed from Pleasant Valley Sunday, the way the four bad folks in this movie do. We're accustomed to seeing that kind of gang mentality in gangster movies from the 1940s. What no one was expecting and the reason this film remains noteworthy all these years later is that it is the parents who act out the revenge. And that, in a strange way, is an attempt to make a moral statement, something that did not always happen in a drive-in knife flick.
Moral statement? Am I nuts? Yes, possibly, but it also happens that in this particular case I may also be correct. That's because in its own occasionally sloppy way, The Last House is an allegory for certain atrocities that were taking place in Vietnam. When the cops finally get to the house where the parents have systematically taken care of business, there is not much doubt but what these two representatives of authority are going to cover up the crime. Now we are never explicitly told this and it must be admitted that subtlety is not exactly an overwhelming component of this movie. But one needn't be Kreskin to figure out that the cops are going to side with the parents because of what the bad guys did to the two young girls. So while this movie may go about its subject in a way that you will feel is somewhat less than admirable (and you may be right about that), it does suggest that the history of violence is that it (a) begets more violence, and (b) that people tend to be more sympathetic to what they consider revenge than to other motivations when it comes to violent behavior. Hey, at least this crazy thing offers an idea, which is much more than most of the grindhouse movies of that time were doing.
Incidently, Craven reportedly worked with Rogue Films on the 2009 remake, although you won't find his name attached to the IMDB listing, probably because the remake was so grossly inferior. The original, while not exactly earth-shattering in its visuals, does have the advantage of starring Hess, one of the most underrated villains you've ever loathed.
One thing must be understood going in. This is a horror movie. What happens in this film is horrible. You would not want to be one of the victims and you would not want to be one of the perpetrators. You would not want to be close to either group. Chances are you wouldn't want to be the parents of the victims, even though it's the parents who seek to balance the scales of justice. You certainly would not want to be the two idiot cops who are only in the film to confuse us, which is part of what I'll be bold and refer to as Craven's style.
One of the things about this film that continues to disturb many people all these years later is that the inserted scenes with the sheriff and his deputy have their humorous elements, yet those scenes are invariably inserted between incidents of vile torture and brutality happening not far away. Plus bad guy David Hess, who plays Krug, the leader of the sadistic gang, also gets to sing the songs in the movie and the songs are all upbeat bluegrass or country rock numbers. So on the one hand we are properly repulsed by some elongated and grisly stuff initiated by Krug, Weasel and their accomplices against Mari and Phyllis, two seventeen year olds out for a fun evening at the rock show. On the other hand, we have chirpy music and clownish cops punctuating the proceedings for no apparent reason other than to demarcate the distinction between the naive wholesomeness of the law and order boys and the depraved actions of some savage sex offenders. When Mari tells her Dad that nobody wears bras anymore, we're a little surprised at her candid approach with her pop. Yet we also suspect that what's really going on is that her fascination with her own developing physique is going to parallel with some unwanted trouble. After all, they didn't call this an exploitation film for nothing.
The two girls are out looking for some Colombian red bud smoking material when they happen upon Krug's junkie son. He says he can hook the two up and leads them to their doom. Krug and Weasel have escaped prison and joined Junior and Sadie on a crime spree of torture and delight. To give you one example (one that back then caused a lot of people to freak out--and I'll bet it still does), out in the woods, Krug orders Phyllis to piss her pants. She does it. She does it because she is afraid what will happen if she refuses.
I don't doubt for one second that there are bad folks out there who would get their kicks doing something very much like what happens in this film. I imagine they'd think themselves fairly cool and removed from Pleasant Valley Sunday, the way the four bad folks in this movie do. We're accustomed to seeing that kind of gang mentality in gangster movies from the 1940s. What no one was expecting and the reason this film remains noteworthy all these years later is that it is the parents who act out the revenge. And that, in a strange way, is an attempt to make a moral statement, something that did not always happen in a drive-in knife flick.
Moral statement? Am I nuts? Yes, possibly, but it also happens that in this particular case I may also be correct. That's because in its own occasionally sloppy way, The Last House is an allegory for certain atrocities that were taking place in Vietnam. When the cops finally get to the house where the parents have systematically taken care of business, there is not much doubt but what these two representatives of authority are going to cover up the crime. Now we are never explicitly told this and it must be admitted that subtlety is not exactly an overwhelming component of this movie. But one needn't be Kreskin to figure out that the cops are going to side with the parents because of what the bad guys did to the two young girls. So while this movie may go about its subject in a way that you will feel is somewhat less than admirable (and you may be right about that), it does suggest that the history of violence is that it (a) begets more violence, and (b) that people tend to be more sympathetic to what they consider revenge than to other motivations when it comes to violent behavior. Hey, at least this crazy thing offers an idea, which is much more than most of the grindhouse movies of that time were doing.
Incidently, Craven reportedly worked with Rogue Films on the 2009 remake, although you won't find his name attached to the IMDB listing, probably because the remake was so grossly inferior. The original, while not exactly earth-shattering in its visuals, does have the advantage of starring Hess, one of the most underrated villains you've ever loathed.
Scorpio
What with a new James Bond film out of the can and into the streets this week, it feels altogether appropriate that we kick down the doors and out the jams with a terrific little spy-assassination thriller calledScorpio (1973). There's a definite cold war aroma to this movie, so the right wing contingent will groove on it. There is also an even stronger philosophic enlightenment flavor here, though, one that will elevate the spirits of the more progressive elements of the audience. Plus it's just plain fun.
Burt Lancaster is Cross, an assassin in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. His job is to knock off world leaders whose aims run contrary to those of the current administration. Alain Delon is Scorpio, a French assassin who clearly admires and respects Cross. He also respects his own freedom and personal power, so when McLeod, one of the bosses at the CIA, has Scorpio arrested on a trumped up heroin possession charge, the Frenchman decides to play the hand he's dealt.
Burt Lancaster is Cross, an assassin in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. His job is to knock off world leaders whose aims run contrary to those of the current administration. Alain Delon is Scorpio, a French assassin who clearly admires and respects Cross. He also respects his own freedom and personal power, so when McLeod, one of the bosses at the CIA, has Scorpio arrested on a trumped up heroin possession charge, the Frenchman decides to play the hand he's dealt.
We end up sort of liking both these guys because of their smarts, their instincts and of course their friendship with one another. And friendship is a huge theme in this movie, as well as a device. Probably the most interesting support character is the Soviet spy Zharkov, played--no, inhabited--by Paul Scofield. There's a scene where Cross--the Russian's friend and nemesis--is sitting around a safehouse discussing communism. "I am a communist," Zharkov tells Cross.
"Then you're an idiot," Cross retorts. "How can you be a communist after the [Stalin era] purges and trials?"
Then Zharkov nails it. "I watched poor men who embraced the party, who were true communists, pulling plows like mules in forced labor camps. I was there too. It did not change the basic understanding of the nature of man. This is about ideas. No injustice can defeat that."
So when I said earlier that friendship is a device in this movie, that's what I'm talking about. Director Michael Winner and screenwriter David Rintels used the love-hate relationship between Cross and everyone else to get the viewer to feel and--as a consequence--to think. The movie doesn't try to persuade you of the propriety of one world view over another. It does, however, pretty accurately offer up what the alternatives are, something you'll never see in a typically amoral Bond movie.
There's a segment between Cross and an old friend he rescued from the Nazi concentration camps year earlier. Cross needs a message delivered to his wife. The friend says sure, I'll do it. I owe you. Cross says, well, now, this might be kind of dangerous. The friend says it was dangerous when Cross took out the field marshalls back in WWII but that didn't stop him. So we really get a sense that behind all the cynicism of killing for money in the national interest that Cross has some principles lurking and even manifesting. Even Scorpio, cold as he is, refuses to take the contract on Cross until he learns the reason for the assignment. McLeod tells him Cross is a double agent, selling out to the commies. No way in fuck, Scorpio replies. He's just not that kind of guy. Sure he is, says the spymaster. Besides, we'll lock you up for the heroin. Tell you what, says Scorpio. You give me Cross's job and we've got a deal. There's a profound difference between Cross and Scorpio. It's a difference not only of morality but of humanity.
So in the final analysis, Scorpio is that rarest of things in the spy movie genre: it transcends the genre itself, despite some highly realistic chase and shoot-up scenes, by exploring the very human nature of the principal players here. It's also unfortunately somewhat careless with the female characters, using them as more than scenery but not much more. How exciting it would have been to have had a Laura Flanders journalist type character in the process of exposing the government's complicity in the assassination of foreign leaders and thereby adding to the internal pressure on both killers to either make the escape or get the job done. Well, that's what we would see if the movie were made today, if it weren't perverted into some type of Broccoli and Saltzman gadget festival.
So skip the Daniel Craig nonsense, order up the queue and lean toward the screen, Gunga Din. This picture is for you.
"Then you're an idiot," Cross retorts. "How can you be a communist after the [Stalin era] purges and trials?"
Then Zharkov nails it. "I watched poor men who embraced the party, who were true communists, pulling plows like mules in forced labor camps. I was there too. It did not change the basic understanding of the nature of man. This is about ideas. No injustice can defeat that."
So when I said earlier that friendship is a device in this movie, that's what I'm talking about. Director Michael Winner and screenwriter David Rintels used the love-hate relationship between Cross and everyone else to get the viewer to feel and--as a consequence--to think. The movie doesn't try to persuade you of the propriety of one world view over another. It does, however, pretty accurately offer up what the alternatives are, something you'll never see in a typically amoral Bond movie.
There's a segment between Cross and an old friend he rescued from the Nazi concentration camps year earlier. Cross needs a message delivered to his wife. The friend says sure, I'll do it. I owe you. Cross says, well, now, this might be kind of dangerous. The friend says it was dangerous when Cross took out the field marshalls back in WWII but that didn't stop him. So we really get a sense that behind all the cynicism of killing for money in the national interest that Cross has some principles lurking and even manifesting. Even Scorpio, cold as he is, refuses to take the contract on Cross until he learns the reason for the assignment. McLeod tells him Cross is a double agent, selling out to the commies. No way in fuck, Scorpio replies. He's just not that kind of guy. Sure he is, says the spymaster. Besides, we'll lock you up for the heroin. Tell you what, says Scorpio. You give me Cross's job and we've got a deal. There's a profound difference between Cross and Scorpio. It's a difference not only of morality but of humanity.
So in the final analysis, Scorpio is that rarest of things in the spy movie genre: it transcends the genre itself, despite some highly realistic chase and shoot-up scenes, by exploring the very human nature of the principal players here. It's also unfortunately somewhat careless with the female characters, using them as more than scenery but not much more. How exciting it would have been to have had a Laura Flanders journalist type character in the process of exposing the government's complicity in the assassination of foreign leaders and thereby adding to the internal pressure on both killers to either make the escape or get the job done. Well, that's what we would see if the movie were made today, if it weren't perverted into some type of Broccoli and Saltzman gadget festival.
So skip the Daniel Craig nonsense, order up the queue and lean toward the screen, Gunga Din. This picture is for you.
The Seven Ups
Even in 1973 it was a challenge to make a cop film that was somehow different from the hundreds of other such films being released, seemingly, every other day. You had your Buford Pusser Redneck Against Corruption flick, your Billy Jack Indian Chief on the Rez flick, your Anti-Counterculture Dirty Harry flick, your Only Thing Worse Than A Cop is Everybody Else Onion Fields flick, your Racist Cops Mofo Blaxploitation flick, your Racist Cops Against Drug Dealers Connection flick, your What We Really Need is Less Cops and More Social Workers flicks, and all the others that were really just more of the same. The genre appeared to be played out.
Then director Philip D'Antoni came along and said, "We could always make a cop film about an elite squad in New York where the head elite cop grew up and stayed friends with some dago who wears nice suits and is kind of mobbed up. The cop, well, he'd be like Roy Scheider, you know, Italian without looking like it, and he could have some guys work with him in his squad who won't steal scenes, you know. Then his friend, some really major wop like Tony Lo Biano, who can actually act from what I hear, his friend could be like, you know, a hood. A well-dressed hood, am I right? The Vito, he'll be suave as all get-out and he'll be shaking down his own people 'cause you know how they are. He'll use that small talk he gets from Scheider to shake down the other hoods in some way that has something to do with a car."
"A car? What's you mean?"
"We gotta have a car chase, man. It's a cop movie, dig? So, I know! We'll bring in a car wash!"
"You gots to be putting on my ass."
"No, no, it'll play, it'll play. Like, the Vito Dago, he'll have these ugly guys working with him. They'll be in the drive-through car wash waiting to pop the trunk and steal the ransom."
"Shit, man! What ransom?"
"The ransom. Dude, there's always a ransom. Listen to me. Scheider, he and his boys will be hated by the regular beat cops 'cause he dresses nice just like his Vito Dago pal. The other cops'll figure him for a skell, but he ain't. He bends the rules, he don't break 'em."
"Until--"
"Correct! Until his friend gets offed. Then we have the car chase. And brother this chase will be the best one ever. We'll make it like ten minutes long."
Then director Philip D'Antoni came along and said, "We could always make a cop film about an elite squad in New York where the head elite cop grew up and stayed friends with some dago who wears nice suits and is kind of mobbed up. The cop, well, he'd be like Roy Scheider, you know, Italian without looking like it, and he could have some guys work with him in his squad who won't steal scenes, you know. Then his friend, some really major wop like Tony Lo Biano, who can actually act from what I hear, his friend could be like, you know, a hood. A well-dressed hood, am I right? The Vito, he'll be suave as all get-out and he'll be shaking down his own people 'cause you know how they are. He'll use that small talk he gets from Scheider to shake down the other hoods in some way that has something to do with a car."
"A car? What's you mean?"
"We gotta have a car chase, man. It's a cop movie, dig? So, I know! We'll bring in a car wash!"
"You gots to be putting on my ass."
"No, no, it'll play, it'll play. Like, the Vito Dago, he'll have these ugly guys working with him. They'll be in the drive-through car wash waiting to pop the trunk and steal the ransom."
"Shit, man! What ransom?"
"The ransom. Dude, there's always a ransom. Listen to me. Scheider, he and his boys will be hated by the regular beat cops 'cause he dresses nice just like his Vito Dago pal. The other cops'll figure him for a skell, but he ain't. He bends the rules, he don't break 'em."
"Until--"
"Correct! Until his friend gets offed. Then we have the car chase. And brother this chase will be the best one ever. We'll make it like ten minutes long."
"Jeezoy!"
"Don't you 'Jeezoy" me, cat. That was one hell of an expensive scene. Cost more'n the rest of the picture minus salaries, clown."
"Was pretty good, huh?"
"Yeah, cat. It was good. So anyway, what happens is that the guy back in the garage, the guy they arrested for opening the garage door, I guess that's a crime, he'll never talk, so they'll free his ass and follow him to the hideout, which is cool 'cause Vito Dago will be waiting there, or more likely his boys'll be there, them two ugly bastards, and Scheider will blow their heads off and then he'll know it was Vito who tipped them off, so what we'll have is a good old fashioned buddy cop movie that goes different because in this movie the cop only turns bad to take revenge on his friend the criminal. Slick, right?"
"Slicker 'an ole Miss Slick and she died slick. Who's the target aud?"
"Oh, there's your standard JD crowd, for one. There's also your standard Archie who likes law and order no matter how it comes. You got your stock car crowd who'll watch anything with a Pontiac in it--and boy this one'll have more Pontiacs than Nixon got thieves."
"What about broads?"
"Man, you a dumb sumbitch. First, we don't calls 'em broads no more, right? Second, there ain't no chicks in this here movie, not one, Jack. So fogetabowtit."
"Cool. Just one question."
"Hits me."
"Why you talk like that?"
"Dunno. It's in the script."
"Don't you 'Jeezoy" me, cat. That was one hell of an expensive scene. Cost more'n the rest of the picture minus salaries, clown."
"Was pretty good, huh?"
"Yeah, cat. It was good. So anyway, what happens is that the guy back in the garage, the guy they arrested for opening the garage door, I guess that's a crime, he'll never talk, so they'll free his ass and follow him to the hideout, which is cool 'cause Vito Dago will be waiting there, or more likely his boys'll be there, them two ugly bastards, and Scheider will blow their heads off and then he'll know it was Vito who tipped them off, so what we'll have is a good old fashioned buddy cop movie that goes different because in this movie the cop only turns bad to take revenge on his friend the criminal. Slick, right?"
"Slicker 'an ole Miss Slick and she died slick. Who's the target aud?"
"Oh, there's your standard JD crowd, for one. There's also your standard Archie who likes law and order no matter how it comes. You got your stock car crowd who'll watch anything with a Pontiac in it--and boy this one'll have more Pontiacs than Nixon got thieves."
"What about broads?"
"Man, you a dumb sumbitch. First, we don't calls 'em broads no more, right? Second, there ain't no chicks in this here movie, not one, Jack. So fogetabowtit."
"Cool. Just one question."
"Hits me."
"Why you talk like that?"
"Dunno. It's in the script."
Minnie and Moskowitz
In the personal confessions department, this writer must preface the following remarks with the news that I have, until last night, avoided the films of John Cassavetes. I had no particular reason for this stupid behavior; it's just that from what I'd heard his films tried so hard to be real that I suspected I would end up resenting myself for watching them.
I can no longer hold with my own ignorance because last evening I had the immeasurable delight of viewing Minnie and Moskowitz (1971).
These electronic pages, I feel, should more often than not be used to praise an often ignored film than to mock some pathetic attempt at larceny, which is why I walked out on Disco Godfather (1979) after ten minutes and moved next door to watch Cassavetes' wondrous achievement. Minnie and Moskowitz is perhaps the most amazing example of what is probably called neo-realism that I have ever seen. Seymour Moskowitz is not an attractive character, not in the slightest. As the scene on the airplane makes clear, he has a face only a child could love. He's not heroic, not good-looking, not intelligent (his own mother says of him, "Albert Einstein he is not") and yet he is endearing in a way that is beautiful, brave and brilliant. Standing outside the dance hall with Minnie, an art museum employee, the couple run into some friends of hers who know her from her work. When she doesn't even bother to acknowledge Seymour's existence we cringe before he even has a chance to respond. When he finally does react, we suddenly feel Minnie's shame in a way that a less contrived setting would have permitted.
But what I suspect most people will take away from this film is the "realism" in the dialogue, a facet that the director obviously encouraged with his actors. When we watch Gina Rowlands as Minnie sitting in the theater talking with her girlfriend about how the movies have always lied to her, about how she will never find her Clark Gable or whomever, we know this isn't scripted because we have been in that same seat watching as Humphrey Bogart walks off with Claude Raines talking about the beginning of a beautiful friendship and we know from our own life experiences that things simply do not work out that way: people betray one another constantly; friends lie, enemies kill, lovers cheat--and the movies have taught us that this kind of behavior doesn't pay off and yet our lying eyes tell us that it happens every day. Into this jaded worldview of Minnie's leaps Seymour, played by Seymour Cassel, a parking lot attendant who lacks, shall we say, some of the sophistication of a Gable or Bogart.
These electronic pages, I feel, should more often than not be used to praise an often ignored film than to mock some pathetic attempt at larceny, which is why I walked out on Disco Godfather (1979) after ten minutes and moved next door to watch Cassavetes' wondrous achievement. Minnie and Moskowitz is perhaps the most amazing example of what is probably called neo-realism that I have ever seen. Seymour Moskowitz is not an attractive character, not in the slightest. As the scene on the airplane makes clear, he has a face only a child could love. He's not heroic, not good-looking, not intelligent (his own mother says of him, "Albert Einstein he is not") and yet he is endearing in a way that is beautiful, brave and brilliant. Standing outside the dance hall with Minnie, an art museum employee, the couple run into some friends of hers who know her from her work. When she doesn't even bother to acknowledge Seymour's existence we cringe before he even has a chance to respond. When he finally does react, we suddenly feel Minnie's shame in a way that a less contrived setting would have permitted.
But what I suspect most people will take away from this film is the "realism" in the dialogue, a facet that the director obviously encouraged with his actors. When we watch Gina Rowlands as Minnie sitting in the theater talking with her girlfriend about how the movies have always lied to her, about how she will never find her Clark Gable or whomever, we know this isn't scripted because we have been in that same seat watching as Humphrey Bogart walks off with Claude Raines talking about the beginning of a beautiful friendship and we know from our own life experiences that things simply do not work out that way: people betray one another constantly; friends lie, enemies kill, lovers cheat--and the movies have taught us that this kind of behavior doesn't pay off and yet our lying eyes tell us that it happens every day. Into this jaded worldview of Minnie's leaps Seymour, played by Seymour Cassel, a parking lot attendant who lacks, shall we say, some of the sophistication of a Gable or Bogart.
He loves her. That's all there is to that.
There is really no other way to make a movie about love, is there? To put it another way, love isn't necessarily about all the things that the movies say. It isn't about Brad and Jennifer or Tom and Katie--sometimes it's about Billy Bob and Angelina.
Another thing that's outstanding about this movie is the way Cassavetes economized. Half of Rowlands' family appears in this film, including her own mother as her mother and her dad as the minister. The truck Seymour owns is exactly the right vehicle for him to be driving and I wouldn't be surprised at all if it had belonged to the actor himself. The director even put himself in the movie as a very nasty ex-boyfriend who garners no sympathy and yet manages to come across as exactly the type of Tom Cruisean rat we'd expect Minnie to meet.
So, yes, I'll be watching Faces next. Nothing could keep me away from it. There's nothing more fascinating than a born again convert.
There is really no other way to make a movie about love, is there? To put it another way, love isn't necessarily about all the things that the movies say. It isn't about Brad and Jennifer or Tom and Katie--sometimes it's about Billy Bob and Angelina.
Another thing that's outstanding about this movie is the way Cassavetes economized. Half of Rowlands' family appears in this film, including her own mother as her mother and her dad as the minister. The truck Seymour owns is exactly the right vehicle for him to be driving and I wouldn't be surprised at all if it had belonged to the actor himself. The director even put himself in the movie as a very nasty ex-boyfriend who garners no sympathy and yet manages to come across as exactly the type of Tom Cruisean rat we'd expect Minnie to meet.
So, yes, I'll be watching Faces next. Nothing could keep me away from it. There's nothing more fascinating than a born again convert.
Punishment Park
Harry Truman had many faults, but one thing must be acknowledged and that is that he feared the rise and presence of a police state in America. He expressed this concern when he signed into authorization the National Security Act of 1948. Two years later he had quite properly learned to distrust the paranoid tendencies of many of those in Congress who sought to wage an internal war against dissent in the name of national security. On September 22, 1950, he vetoed the proposed Internal Security Act, also known as the McCarran Act, named after Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, the guy with the airport named after him. Because Congress overrode his veto by a wide margin and because filmmaker Peter Watkins used the existence of the McCarran Act as an impetus for his 1971 pseudo-documentary Punishment Park, it behooves us to take a couple moments and look at Truman's response to the Act that he sought to prevent becoming law.
Here are excerpts from this important speech.
It has been claimed over and over that this is an "anticommunist" bill—a "Communist control" bill. But in actual operation the bill would have results exactly the opposite of those intended…It would help the Communists in their efforts to create dissension and confusion within our borders. It would help the Communist propagandists throughout the world who are trying to undermine freedom by discrediting as hypocrisy the efforts of the United States on behalf of freedom.
Specifically, some of the principal objections to the bill are as follows:It would aid potential enemies by requiring the publication of a complete list of vital defense plants, laboratories, and other installations.
We can and we will prevent espionage, sabotage, or other actions endangering our national security. But we would betray our finest traditions if we attempted, as this bill would attempt, to curb the simple expression of opinion. This we should never do, no matter how distasteful the opinion may be to the vast majority of our people. The course proposed by this bill would delight the Communists, for it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world…We need not fear the expression of ideas—we do need to fear their suppression.
Our position in the vanguard of freedom rests largely on our demonstration that the free expression of opinion, coupled with government by popular consent, leads to national strength and human advancement. Let us not, in cowering and foolish fear, throw away the ideals which are the fundamental basis of our free society…I do not undertake lightly the responsibility of differing with the majority in both Houses of Congress who have voted for this bill. We are all Americans; we all wish to safeguard and preserve our constitutional liberties against internal and external enemies. But I cannot approve this legislation, which instead of accomplishing its avowed purpose would actually interfere with our liberties and help the Communists against whom the bill was aimed.
Here are excerpts from this important speech.
It has been claimed over and over that this is an "anticommunist" bill—a "Communist control" bill. But in actual operation the bill would have results exactly the opposite of those intended…It would help the Communists in their efforts to create dissension and confusion within our borders. It would help the Communist propagandists throughout the world who are trying to undermine freedom by discrediting as hypocrisy the efforts of the United States on behalf of freedom.
Specifically, some of the principal objections to the bill are as follows:It would aid potential enemies by requiring the publication of a complete list of vital defense plants, laboratories, and other installations.
- It would require the Department of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation to waste immense amounts of time and energy attempting to carry out its unworkable registration provisions.
- It would deprive us of the great assistance of many aliens in intelligence matters.
- It would antagonize friendly governments.
- It would put the Government of the United States in the thought-control business.
- It would make it easier for subversive aliens to become naturalized as U.S. citizens.
- It would give Government officials vast powers to harass all of our citizens in the exercise of their right of free speech.
We can and we will prevent espionage, sabotage, or other actions endangering our national security. But we would betray our finest traditions if we attempted, as this bill would attempt, to curb the simple expression of opinion. This we should never do, no matter how distasteful the opinion may be to the vast majority of our people. The course proposed by this bill would delight the Communists, for it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world…We need not fear the expression of ideas—we do need to fear their suppression.
Our position in the vanguard of freedom rests largely on our demonstration that the free expression of opinion, coupled with government by popular consent, leads to national strength and human advancement. Let us not, in cowering and foolish fear, throw away the ideals which are the fundamental basis of our free society…I do not undertake lightly the responsibility of differing with the majority in both Houses of Congress who have voted for this bill. We are all Americans; we all wish to safeguard and preserve our constitutional liberties against internal and external enemies. But I cannot approve this legislation, which instead of accomplishing its avowed purpose would actually interfere with our liberties and help the Communists against whom the bill was aimed.
It is not easy to imagine a politician today addressing the nation with that plain-spoken eloquence. It would have been nice if someone in a leadership capacity had made similar remarks about the so-called Patriot Act. Then again, almost no one in Congress bothered to read it before they overwhelmingly voted to pass it.
This is one of several reasons why Watkins' movie is still important.
Another major reason is that the movie works well, lo these many years later. The story is of a documentary being filmed in a joint venture between NBC and a German television network. They are tasked with filming for public dissemination the legal and actual process of the provision of the McCarran Act that allows the President to "apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage."
The filmmakers of the documentary--whom we do not see but occasionally hear--play a key role in the movie. As one group of prisoners is being set out to cross a fifty-three mile section of desert to reach an American flag and their own consequent freedom, another group of prisoners is being detained at a nearby tribunal. They are all brought up on various charges of sedition. One is a fiery folksinger, another a pissed off Panther, another a foul-mouthed Yippie, one a soft-spoken pacifist, et cetera. They are eventually found guilty and now face a choice: they can accept a lengthy federal prison term or endure four days in Punishment Park.
The goal of the Park is that the prisoners will have a two-hour head start on the police in their quest across the desert. If the police catch them, they must surrender or die. If they can make it across the desert to the flag, they will be set free. Naturally they are permitted no provisions and it gets hot in the desert in the daytime and cold at night. They are told there will be water at the halfway point and that turns out to be a lie. Fifty-three miles. Let's see the Ironman competitors handle this.
Near the end of the movie, the news crews stop being objective. Oh, they try to maintain, in that they won't give the prisoners water and they ask all sorts of stupid questions, but by the end they are so outraged at some of the atrocities that have occurred that they begin to break down that objective fourth wall. This is yet another reason this movie is so crucial. As Watkins himself would later say, everyday the media presents snippets of real life within a context that by its very nature makes those real-life events fictitious. This fictionalization of real events does not even have to be implemented consciously to happen. In fact, I suspect it's usually quite unconscious. I'm not referring to the commentary that often accompanies a news story. I mean that, for instance, when a network presents coverage, say, of the horrible shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, they are inadvertently fictionalizing what happened in the sense that nothing they show can approximate the real horror of the sequence of events, in that the reactions of onlookers are influenced by the presence of television cameras, in that the people asking the questions or doing the news work are inescapably impacted by the nature of what they are reporting as well as by whatever may be going on in their personal lives at the time, and in the most important sense of all that, as psychologist Theodor Adorno pointed out, everything loses its context once the anchorman says, "And in other news today. . . "
This is one of several reasons why Watkins' movie is still important.
Another major reason is that the movie works well, lo these many years later. The story is of a documentary being filmed in a joint venture between NBC and a German television network. They are tasked with filming for public dissemination the legal and actual process of the provision of the McCarran Act that allows the President to "apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage."
The filmmakers of the documentary--whom we do not see but occasionally hear--play a key role in the movie. As one group of prisoners is being set out to cross a fifty-three mile section of desert to reach an American flag and their own consequent freedom, another group of prisoners is being detained at a nearby tribunal. They are all brought up on various charges of sedition. One is a fiery folksinger, another a pissed off Panther, another a foul-mouthed Yippie, one a soft-spoken pacifist, et cetera. They are eventually found guilty and now face a choice: they can accept a lengthy federal prison term or endure four days in Punishment Park.
The goal of the Park is that the prisoners will have a two-hour head start on the police in their quest across the desert. If the police catch them, they must surrender or die. If they can make it across the desert to the flag, they will be set free. Naturally they are permitted no provisions and it gets hot in the desert in the daytime and cold at night. They are told there will be water at the halfway point and that turns out to be a lie. Fifty-three miles. Let's see the Ironman competitors handle this.
Near the end of the movie, the news crews stop being objective. Oh, they try to maintain, in that they won't give the prisoners water and they ask all sorts of stupid questions, but by the end they are so outraged at some of the atrocities that have occurred that they begin to break down that objective fourth wall. This is yet another reason this movie is so crucial. As Watkins himself would later say, everyday the media presents snippets of real life within a context that by its very nature makes those real-life events fictitious. This fictionalization of real events does not even have to be implemented consciously to happen. In fact, I suspect it's usually quite unconscious. I'm not referring to the commentary that often accompanies a news story. I mean that, for instance, when a network presents coverage, say, of the horrible shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, they are inadvertently fictionalizing what happened in the sense that nothing they show can approximate the real horror of the sequence of events, in that the reactions of onlookers are influenced by the presence of television cameras, in that the people asking the questions or doing the news work are inescapably impacted by the nature of what they are reporting as well as by whatever may be going on in their personal lives at the time, and in the most important sense of all that, as psychologist Theodor Adorno pointed out, everything loses its context once the anchorman says, "And in other news today. . . "
People who have been raised on the specter of idiotic reality TV programs will in no way be prepared for this, although they might stop finding much pleasure in such mindless swill as "Survivor," although programs such as that one do sort of unintentionally remind us that television inherently distorts and often does so on purpose.
Punishment Park would be a vital movie even if there had been no Vietnam War, no dissent against it, and even if there had been no McCarran Act (the provision allowing for detainment was overthrown in 1971 and the law as a whole was ruled un-Constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1993). This movie plays everything real in a way and to a degree that you are not prepared to expect. Credit for this goes to the amazing cinematography of Joan Churchill and Peter Smokler. These two were carrying very heavy and awkward sixteen millimeter cameras around with them during chase scenes through the desert and had the added burden of keeping the cameras from shaking all over the place and yet providing enough unsteadiness to give this movie its terrifying realism. Director and writer Peter Watkins made the crucial decision to have the actors largely script themselves. In the case of the tribunal defendants and militants, the actors responded to questions by developing their own personas. These actors were mostly espousing political positions that they themselves held. In the case of the tribunal members, cops and National Guardsmen, some of the actors were very much the right wing bootlickers they portrayed themselves as being while others held the same views as the militants but took on a role of a character with the exact opposite worldview. It is a credit to everyone involved in this movie that we cannot tell which of the reactionaries were faking it and which were not. I will tell you that the coldest, most realistic and hence terrifying person I have seen in a movie in a very long time was Jim Bohan, the Captain of the Sheriff's Department.
So I hope you will see this movie. Anyone in sympathy with or participating in the OWS movement out to get a training lesson here. Anyone out to stop them might want to consider what this "reality" film has to say. You can order it through Netflix (the disc only at this point; they won't stream this one) or through Fandor. If you can pick this up at your local DVD depository, I'd be surprised. But it can't hurt to ask. Just be sure to watch the eyes of the guy or gal behind the counter when you mention the name. You never know for whom he or she might really be working.
Punishment Park would be a vital movie even if there had been no Vietnam War, no dissent against it, and even if there had been no McCarran Act (the provision allowing for detainment was overthrown in 1971 and the law as a whole was ruled un-Constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1993). This movie plays everything real in a way and to a degree that you are not prepared to expect. Credit for this goes to the amazing cinematography of Joan Churchill and Peter Smokler. These two were carrying very heavy and awkward sixteen millimeter cameras around with them during chase scenes through the desert and had the added burden of keeping the cameras from shaking all over the place and yet providing enough unsteadiness to give this movie its terrifying realism. Director and writer Peter Watkins made the crucial decision to have the actors largely script themselves. In the case of the tribunal defendants and militants, the actors responded to questions by developing their own personas. These actors were mostly espousing political positions that they themselves held. In the case of the tribunal members, cops and National Guardsmen, some of the actors were very much the right wing bootlickers they portrayed themselves as being while others held the same views as the militants but took on a role of a character with the exact opposite worldview. It is a credit to everyone involved in this movie that we cannot tell which of the reactionaries were faking it and which were not. I will tell you that the coldest, most realistic and hence terrifying person I have seen in a movie in a very long time was Jim Bohan, the Captain of the Sheriff's Department.
So I hope you will see this movie. Anyone in sympathy with or participating in the OWS movement out to get a training lesson here. Anyone out to stop them might want to consider what this "reality" film has to say. You can order it through Netflix (the disc only at this point; they won't stream this one) or through Fandor. If you can pick this up at your local DVD depository, I'd be surprised. But it can't hurt to ask. Just be sure to watch the eyes of the guy or gal behind the counter when you mention the name. You never know for whom he or she might really be working.
Serpico
We cannot fault director Sidney Lumet for the movie Serpico (1973). The exterior shots show a genuinely artful man against society style conflict, with the title character dwarfed by a system a lot bigger than himself. Lumet wasn't even the producer's first choice for the project, but he did his job and then some.
We cannot fault the actors, either. Al Pacino and Tony Roberts are arguably at their respective peaks here, the former using method acting precisely as Strasberg intended and the latter creating the serious-boyish foil to Pacino's wild-eyed and wide-eyed enthusiasm.
We cannot fault the actors, either. Al Pacino and Tony Roberts are arguably at their respective peaks here, the former using method acting precisely as Strasberg intended and the latter creating the serious-boyish foil to Pacino's wild-eyed and wide-eyed enthusiasm.
The editing is slick, the script decent enough, and the original source, a book by Peter Maas, worked well.
Even the real life Frank Serpico--today living a monastic life in upstate New York--was every bit as vain, idiosyncratic and courageous as the story made him out to be, so we can't reject the film because of factual distortions, even though there were a few, such as the delivery of Serpico's detective badge ("They handed it to me like a pack of cigarettes," the real McCoy lamented).
Even the real life Frank Serpico--today living a monastic life in upstate New York--was every bit as vain, idiosyncratic and courageous as the story made him out to be, so we can't reject the film because of factual distortions, even though there were a few, such as the delivery of Serpico's detective badge ("They handed it to me like a pack of cigarettes," the real McCoy lamented).
The problem--and it is a very real one--is that no one walking the streets in America today knows anyone like this guy. That may seem an unfair criticism. After all, we don't know any Hamlets, either, but that doesn't lead us to reject Shakespeare's play. But here the movie is stacked upon the notion that Serpico, as an honest cop among bribe-takers, actually accomplished something of consequence. After all, that's the feeling the movie tries to give. This police drama is evidence that one can get the facts correct and still miss the truth by a mile.
I've had a couple friends who were police officers. I've also been kicked around by a couple and helped tremendously by a couple others. Even among the men who I felt were decent law enforcement officers, there was a kind of raw cynicism that irritates me. One of those friends, a retired cop named Jerry, told me a story that illustrates what I'm saying. "These two patrolmen, they picked up this Indian for drunk and disorderly. He was a big bastard. Drunk and mean as hell. One of the patrols, the bigger one, jumped up and punched the Indian, cold cocked him right out. So he's in the back of the cruiser, right? They get to the jail and the duty officer tells the patrols to unload the Indian. They open the door and the younger patrol tells the Indian to get out. He doesn't move. The officer grabs him by the arm and starts pulling him. The Indian doesn't budge. Finally, both patrols and the duty officer yank on the guy's arm trying to get him out. The Indian's hollering and screaming and he still won't get out. Finally the sergeant hears the racket. He marches over to the back of the car, looks inside, leans back out and says that somebody ought to uncuff the Indian's other arm from the mesh screen."
If you're a policeman or anyone else who has had to do an unpleasant and even dangerous job that involved people who appeared different from you, that story may sound pretty funny. If you've ever been kicked awake by a cop on Christmas morning, you may still be waiting for the punchline.
That difference of perspective is what's wrong with Serpico. No one thinks of himself as a bad guy. The cop who kicked me in the head, the two guys in Jerry's story, the guy who shoots up a school full of kids and then himself--nobody really thinks his actions are unjustified. As Jean Renoir said it, "Everyone has his reasons." This otherwise decent enough movie does not provide any rationalization for the corrupt behavior other than that the cops have bills to pay and besides, everybody's doing it. If you're going to make a convincing movie about an heroic officer who speaks out against evil, then you'd better have at least one of the bad guys be sympathetic rather than just plain pathetic.
I've had a couple friends who were police officers. I've also been kicked around by a couple and helped tremendously by a couple others. Even among the men who I felt were decent law enforcement officers, there was a kind of raw cynicism that irritates me. One of those friends, a retired cop named Jerry, told me a story that illustrates what I'm saying. "These two patrolmen, they picked up this Indian for drunk and disorderly. He was a big bastard. Drunk and mean as hell. One of the patrols, the bigger one, jumped up and punched the Indian, cold cocked him right out. So he's in the back of the cruiser, right? They get to the jail and the duty officer tells the patrols to unload the Indian. They open the door and the younger patrol tells the Indian to get out. He doesn't move. The officer grabs him by the arm and starts pulling him. The Indian doesn't budge. Finally, both patrols and the duty officer yank on the guy's arm trying to get him out. The Indian's hollering and screaming and he still won't get out. Finally the sergeant hears the racket. He marches over to the back of the car, looks inside, leans back out and says that somebody ought to uncuff the Indian's other arm from the mesh screen."
If you're a policeman or anyone else who has had to do an unpleasant and even dangerous job that involved people who appeared different from you, that story may sound pretty funny. If you've ever been kicked awake by a cop on Christmas morning, you may still be waiting for the punchline.
That difference of perspective is what's wrong with Serpico. No one thinks of himself as a bad guy. The cop who kicked me in the head, the two guys in Jerry's story, the guy who shoots up a school full of kids and then himself--nobody really thinks his actions are unjustified. As Jean Renoir said it, "Everyone has his reasons." This otherwise decent enough movie does not provide any rationalization for the corrupt behavior other than that the cops have bills to pay and besides, everybody's doing it. If you're going to make a convincing movie about an heroic officer who speaks out against evil, then you'd better have at least one of the bad guys be sympathetic rather than just plain pathetic.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ah, to be a criminal now that winter has come.
I remember watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) for the first time. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the house where Sandy Hatten lived. The movie was being aired uncut and commercial free on a local affiliate network. This happened, I believe it was, in 1979, which would make it four years following its theatrical release. Anyway, Sandy had seen the movie at the cinema, where it properly belonged, and I had not seen it at all. Once R.P. McMurphy strutted into the Oregon State Mental Hospital and the patients there started watching him and reacting to his manner, I started laughing. I mean, the inmates in the nut house were so obviously funny. Then I noticed that Sandy wasn't laughing. Her face was more akin to exploring the screen, studying the faces of the men in the group, thinking about the nature of power. Sandy was a year older than me and far more sophisticated, so I immediately reconsidered my own response to the early parts of the film. Clearly, I had been a fool.
That is true and yet it is not true. Yes, I had been a fool and yes, I should not have necessarily laughed at the antics of Danny Devito, Christopher Lloyd, and the others. Yet their behavior made one of the other characters, played by Jack Nicholson, laugh. If it was good enough for Jack to laugh, it should have been okay for me.
The problem is that it's not nice to laugh at crazy people. Crazy folks cannot really help themselves. Their illnesses are the psychological equivalent of pancreatic cancer, stomach ulcers, or pneumonia, and what the hell's so funny about those things?
Of course, the real problem is that with physical maladies, it's fairly easy to tell who is the sick person in the room, whereas with mental patients, you cannot always be certain that the patient is the fruit cake. The same thing is true of people locked up in criminal prisons. Maybe they're the prisoners and just maybe the real convicts are the guards, the warden, and the lovely taxpayers who foot the bill in relative safety. And who is more free: a Marine with a machine gun or the villager he blows away?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the rare cinematic delights that came from the so-called independent film world. Fantasy Records and Films was helmed by a man named Saul Zaentz, although in 1975 the company was a lot better known for having been the record label of Creedence Clearwater Revival than of being in the movie business. In any case, Fantasy was located in Berkeley, California, not far from the streets of San Francisco where a young Michael Douglas was filming a TV called "The Streets of San Francisco." Somewhere along the line the two men met and decided to make a film of the Ken Kesey novel. Casting alone took them six months, especially since so many people kept turning down the plum roles. Gene Hackman, for instance, was offered the role of McMurphy and passed on it, later claiming his manager had advised him against it. Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched, says that four other well-known actresses passed on her part because they were not comfortable playing someone so self-assuredly evil. The producers didn't have a ton of money, but all the actors except Nicholson were asked to work for scale wages and agreed to do so. That suited director Milos Forman just fine because, as something like the tenth director Zaentz and Douglas interviewed for the job, he wanted Nicholson's character to be the only one recognizable to a movie audience because he figured we would see the patients as unknown entities just the way McMurphy would see them. It worked.
To think of this movie as being specifically about mental illness is shortsighted. It's also not necessarily an anti-establishment movie, although it works well enough on that basis. But I suspect there was something else going on, something in particular about Kesey's novel and Dale Wasserman's play that intrigued the two producers. If you listen to the commentary track of the DVD edition of the film, as I did this evening, one of the things you may pick up on is Douglas making a point, twice, of not being sexist. He says it in relation to Nurse Ratched being the powerhouse road block in every institution. He says it again in reference to the women who turned down the Ratched role (those women reportedly including Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway). Douglas has, in the ensuing years, attached himself to a number of films that suggest a kind of suave sexism, be it as the victimized family man in Fatal Attraction, the misogynist Everyman inFalling Down, or the sexually harassed underling in Disclosure. Look, I don't know the guy. However, if we judge a person by his or her work, it would not be unfair to suggest that there might be a bit of chauvinism going on here.
In the Kesey novel, when McMurphy explodes at the destruction of Billy, he rapes the Big Nurse as a means of imparting justice. I've always been uneasy with that idea because it fits so well with much of the male-dominated leftism of the period, where, as Eldridge Cleaver is reputed to have said, "The woman's position in the Movement is supine." It's not much of a surprise, in retrospect, that Cleaver would turn out to be a Christian fundamentalist and belligerent right winger.
The way the book and the movie are set up, the female roles are either authoritarian freaks or hookers. The nurses exist only to chip away at the testicles of the men, leaving only the prostitutes to "understand" what men really need. Well, I can only take so much horse shit before I start to puke.
You could argue that sexism has nothing to do with the story and that in order to make several cogent points about the evils of power and the powers of evil, the writer and later the filmmaker decided that the gender-segregated mental institution was the perfect scene. Okay, then how come when the men are escaping to go fishing and their bus passes a store that sells televisions, the sets in the store window feature the image of Gloria Steinem even though the setting of the movie is 1963 and back then almost no one had ever heard of her and she sure didn't appear on television.
I realize we're not supposed to say things like that because Cuckoo's Nest is such a great movie. Taken strictly at face value, that's exactly correct. It's a masterpiece. But then again, as Pauline Kael said of Dirty Harry, it's a fascist masterpiece. It's not you that's sick. It's society. You're not the one with the problem, buddy. The problem is with those uppity women and those black boys who do her bidding for her. Oh, yeah, you could say that Kesey and Forman intended all that ironically. But that's bullshit. Kesey, for his part, was suggesting that when those who have been oppressed get into a position of authority, they become just as despicable as the former masters. But this movie is not just another Raisin in the Sun ready to explode. The men in this movie are being controlled, but in most cases their emasculation is voluntary, suggesting that, unlike McMurphy, these momma boys actually prefer to stay infantile rather than accept the responsibility of manhood, a condition women such as Ratched are all too ready to exploit.
Wow. That's some kind of wicked.
The truth is that I like this movie very much and feel as if it deserved the five big time Academy Awards it received. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher are amazing adversaries and Forman's decision to keep the actors in character while the cameras moved around them in the group therapy sessions was brilliant. But I also have some insight into what it may have been that my friend Sandy was thinking as she stared intensely at the screen, never once cracking a smile.
I remember watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) for the first time. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the house where Sandy Hatten lived. The movie was being aired uncut and commercial free on a local affiliate network. This happened, I believe it was, in 1979, which would make it four years following its theatrical release. Anyway, Sandy had seen the movie at the cinema, where it properly belonged, and I had not seen it at all. Once R.P. McMurphy strutted into the Oregon State Mental Hospital and the patients there started watching him and reacting to his manner, I started laughing. I mean, the inmates in the nut house were so obviously funny. Then I noticed that Sandy wasn't laughing. Her face was more akin to exploring the screen, studying the faces of the men in the group, thinking about the nature of power. Sandy was a year older than me and far more sophisticated, so I immediately reconsidered my own response to the early parts of the film. Clearly, I had been a fool.
That is true and yet it is not true. Yes, I had been a fool and yes, I should not have necessarily laughed at the antics of Danny Devito, Christopher Lloyd, and the others. Yet their behavior made one of the other characters, played by Jack Nicholson, laugh. If it was good enough for Jack to laugh, it should have been okay for me.
The problem is that it's not nice to laugh at crazy people. Crazy folks cannot really help themselves. Their illnesses are the psychological equivalent of pancreatic cancer, stomach ulcers, or pneumonia, and what the hell's so funny about those things?
Of course, the real problem is that with physical maladies, it's fairly easy to tell who is the sick person in the room, whereas with mental patients, you cannot always be certain that the patient is the fruit cake. The same thing is true of people locked up in criminal prisons. Maybe they're the prisoners and just maybe the real convicts are the guards, the warden, and the lovely taxpayers who foot the bill in relative safety. And who is more free: a Marine with a machine gun or the villager he blows away?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the rare cinematic delights that came from the so-called independent film world. Fantasy Records and Films was helmed by a man named Saul Zaentz, although in 1975 the company was a lot better known for having been the record label of Creedence Clearwater Revival than of being in the movie business. In any case, Fantasy was located in Berkeley, California, not far from the streets of San Francisco where a young Michael Douglas was filming a TV called "The Streets of San Francisco." Somewhere along the line the two men met and decided to make a film of the Ken Kesey novel. Casting alone took them six months, especially since so many people kept turning down the plum roles. Gene Hackman, for instance, was offered the role of McMurphy and passed on it, later claiming his manager had advised him against it. Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched, says that four other well-known actresses passed on her part because they were not comfortable playing someone so self-assuredly evil. The producers didn't have a ton of money, but all the actors except Nicholson were asked to work for scale wages and agreed to do so. That suited director Milos Forman just fine because, as something like the tenth director Zaentz and Douglas interviewed for the job, he wanted Nicholson's character to be the only one recognizable to a movie audience because he figured we would see the patients as unknown entities just the way McMurphy would see them. It worked.
To think of this movie as being specifically about mental illness is shortsighted. It's also not necessarily an anti-establishment movie, although it works well enough on that basis. But I suspect there was something else going on, something in particular about Kesey's novel and Dale Wasserman's play that intrigued the two producers. If you listen to the commentary track of the DVD edition of the film, as I did this evening, one of the things you may pick up on is Douglas making a point, twice, of not being sexist. He says it in relation to Nurse Ratched being the powerhouse road block in every institution. He says it again in reference to the women who turned down the Ratched role (those women reportedly including Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn and Faye Dunaway). Douglas has, in the ensuing years, attached himself to a number of films that suggest a kind of suave sexism, be it as the victimized family man in Fatal Attraction, the misogynist Everyman inFalling Down, or the sexually harassed underling in Disclosure. Look, I don't know the guy. However, if we judge a person by his or her work, it would not be unfair to suggest that there might be a bit of chauvinism going on here.
In the Kesey novel, when McMurphy explodes at the destruction of Billy, he rapes the Big Nurse as a means of imparting justice. I've always been uneasy with that idea because it fits so well with much of the male-dominated leftism of the period, where, as Eldridge Cleaver is reputed to have said, "The woman's position in the Movement is supine." It's not much of a surprise, in retrospect, that Cleaver would turn out to be a Christian fundamentalist and belligerent right winger.
The way the book and the movie are set up, the female roles are either authoritarian freaks or hookers. The nurses exist only to chip away at the testicles of the men, leaving only the prostitutes to "understand" what men really need. Well, I can only take so much horse shit before I start to puke.
You could argue that sexism has nothing to do with the story and that in order to make several cogent points about the evils of power and the powers of evil, the writer and later the filmmaker decided that the gender-segregated mental institution was the perfect scene. Okay, then how come when the men are escaping to go fishing and their bus passes a store that sells televisions, the sets in the store window feature the image of Gloria Steinem even though the setting of the movie is 1963 and back then almost no one had ever heard of her and she sure didn't appear on television.
I realize we're not supposed to say things like that because Cuckoo's Nest is such a great movie. Taken strictly at face value, that's exactly correct. It's a masterpiece. But then again, as Pauline Kael said of Dirty Harry, it's a fascist masterpiece. It's not you that's sick. It's society. You're not the one with the problem, buddy. The problem is with those uppity women and those black boys who do her bidding for her. Oh, yeah, you could say that Kesey and Forman intended all that ironically. But that's bullshit. Kesey, for his part, was suggesting that when those who have been oppressed get into a position of authority, they become just as despicable as the former masters. But this movie is not just another Raisin in the Sun ready to explode. The men in this movie are being controlled, but in most cases their emasculation is voluntary, suggesting that, unlike McMurphy, these momma boys actually prefer to stay infantile rather than accept the responsibility of manhood, a condition women such as Ratched are all too ready to exploit.
Wow. That's some kind of wicked.
The truth is that I like this movie very much and feel as if it deserved the five big time Academy Awards it received. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher are amazing adversaries and Forman's decision to keep the actors in character while the cameras moved around them in the group therapy sessions was brilliant. But I also have some insight into what it may have been that my friend Sandy was thinking as she stared intensely at the screen, never once cracking a smile.
Rock n Roll High School
The letter began and ended by saying, "Hey! There's a lot of movies from the 1970s you haven't said anything about."
That is true, I replied, even if you did conclude your sentence with a preposition.
Many of the movies I have seen from the period I most enjoy--1967 through 1975--are fairly obvious choices. I have to assume a few things and one of the things I take for granted is that anyone nice or even twisted enough to read this website with regularity has probably seen most of the easy great movies, such as The Godfather, Godfather II, The French Connection, The Sting, Badlands, Sleeper, Klute, 2001, Midnight Cowboy, Cool Hand Luke, and The Jungle Book. What I try to do here, with varying degrees of success, is to focus on movies around and about that period that people may have forgotten or may have not seen or may have not seen reviewed in the way we do it here.
It also feels right to jump outside the 67-75 time warp when a particularly enjoyable movie treads down the pike and tonight we have one of those often under-appreciated movies that some wide-eyed bozo decided to call "cult films." This one came out in 1979 and had the heavy backing of Roger Corman himself. We can only be talking about Rock 'n' Roll High School.
The story itself is mostly just a bunch of leggy silliness: Fascist high school administration wants to stamp out hormonally-charged youth music. The curious thing about Rock 'n' Roll High School is that the movie actually gets damned near everything dead on. High School really is what the fascinating P. J. Soles (as Riff Randell--P.J. played Norma in the original Carrie) claims it to be. It's just a walled-off place grown-ups send you for four years because they don't know what else to do with you. Of course, it's also a concentration camp for the programming that's supposed to make you devote all kinds of time digging sports teams for no particular good reason, a place where you learn to play marching band instruments (I was delighted to recently learn that a friend of mine never once played her instrument; she just pretended to all four years!), and sublimate your sexual tensions until you get lucky enough to find somebody who can tolerate your awkwardness long enough to take care of that little problem.
I don't want to give the impression that anybody associated with this movie necessarily wanted to change the world, although I have to admit that when we watch The Ramones play it really is possible to believe that music can mow down the Philistines better than all the automatic weapons imaginable. So I also don't want to claim that these kids don't want to change the world. If you remember your HS years with anything like the fogged-out clarity that I do, you may recall that what it felt like was going on in between the church meetings, the physical abuse, the lectures, the waiting in line for some idiot principal to pick the lint out of his ass before taking the microphone--it was all really too much to take on and I suspect we knew we were bound to lose so the only appropriate action was to blast all the bad shit out of our collective brains with whatever we could find that was annoying as hell to the men and women in suits.
I remember our school's chemistry teacher. Her name was Jean Mills. She and I did not get along well. You see, just like in your school, there were the kids who toed the line and those who did not. Jean really liked her line-toers. That meant she was never going to like me so I didn't even bother to pretend to understand what was going on. To get away from as much of this woman's insolent neglect as possible, one day I was hanging outside the classroom, waiting for Mills to come by and unlock the door so we could collapse inside. Then inspiration struck me. I pulled a sharpened pencil from my pocket and rammed the point into the lock hole, breaking off the lead. When the teacher finally deigned to arrive, she jammed her key into the lock and the graphite point froze into place, requiring her to summon the janitor to pick out the pencil tip so she could get us inside the room. Well, that blew about half an hour that we would have been wasting balancing unstable equations.
My little prank worked so well that I did the same thing the very next day and was rewarded with the same results. It didn't dawn on me that anyone would rat me out.
Not wanting to push my luck, the next day I decided against a three-pete. When the bell rang, the door unlocked from the inside. I turned the nob and we all entered. Inside waiting for us was Jean Mills and the fat-assed principal, Dow West. He didn't know me from Adam, but Mills poked him in the ribs as she nodded at me and said, "That's him."
While everyone else in the class took their seats, West pulled me out into the hall and informed me that he knew I had been the one who had "sabotaged" the classroom door. I suggested he might be in error. He smiled and said, "You're right. I can't prove you did it. If I could, I would give you the hardest beating I've ever given a student here."
I told him to use his threats on a student who was afraid of him.
He never did get around to giving me that beating, although my senior year I was suspended for three days for some minor infraction because West had been patiently waiting for any opportunity. I didn't care then and I still don't.
What Riff tells her friends at Vince Lombardi High School is that nothing that happens there will matter to them in a few years. She's exactly right.
Except: One thing that sometimes happens is that you get to meet some people who will stay in your head for years into the future. Usually those are the people you imagine are a lot like yourself, people who maybe experience the world the way you do, people who like your music, or like the way you dress or talk, or who enjoy the jokes you tell. It's a narcissistic time, but in this case narcissism is about all a kid has to keep himself sane against precisely the type of cartoon administration this movie creates.
Plus the music's great. You get all the big Ramones hits like "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," "Teenage Lobotomy," "Blitzkrieg Bop," and the title tune. You also get to see a high school blown to smithereens.
The acting is no big shakes, but who cares? This isn't a movie for the ages. This is a movie for the moment. That moment has lasted, though. After all, as the tagline warned, "Will your school be next?"
That is true, I replied, even if you did conclude your sentence with a preposition.
Many of the movies I have seen from the period I most enjoy--1967 through 1975--are fairly obvious choices. I have to assume a few things and one of the things I take for granted is that anyone nice or even twisted enough to read this website with regularity has probably seen most of the easy great movies, such as The Godfather, Godfather II, The French Connection, The Sting, Badlands, Sleeper, Klute, 2001, Midnight Cowboy, Cool Hand Luke, and The Jungle Book. What I try to do here, with varying degrees of success, is to focus on movies around and about that period that people may have forgotten or may have not seen or may have not seen reviewed in the way we do it here.
It also feels right to jump outside the 67-75 time warp when a particularly enjoyable movie treads down the pike and tonight we have one of those often under-appreciated movies that some wide-eyed bozo decided to call "cult films." This one came out in 1979 and had the heavy backing of Roger Corman himself. We can only be talking about Rock 'n' Roll High School.
The story itself is mostly just a bunch of leggy silliness: Fascist high school administration wants to stamp out hormonally-charged youth music. The curious thing about Rock 'n' Roll High School is that the movie actually gets damned near everything dead on. High School really is what the fascinating P. J. Soles (as Riff Randell--P.J. played Norma in the original Carrie) claims it to be. It's just a walled-off place grown-ups send you for four years because they don't know what else to do with you. Of course, it's also a concentration camp for the programming that's supposed to make you devote all kinds of time digging sports teams for no particular good reason, a place where you learn to play marching band instruments (I was delighted to recently learn that a friend of mine never once played her instrument; she just pretended to all four years!), and sublimate your sexual tensions until you get lucky enough to find somebody who can tolerate your awkwardness long enough to take care of that little problem.
I don't want to give the impression that anybody associated with this movie necessarily wanted to change the world, although I have to admit that when we watch The Ramones play it really is possible to believe that music can mow down the Philistines better than all the automatic weapons imaginable. So I also don't want to claim that these kids don't want to change the world. If you remember your HS years with anything like the fogged-out clarity that I do, you may recall that what it felt like was going on in between the church meetings, the physical abuse, the lectures, the waiting in line for some idiot principal to pick the lint out of his ass before taking the microphone--it was all really too much to take on and I suspect we knew we were bound to lose so the only appropriate action was to blast all the bad shit out of our collective brains with whatever we could find that was annoying as hell to the men and women in suits.
I remember our school's chemistry teacher. Her name was Jean Mills. She and I did not get along well. You see, just like in your school, there were the kids who toed the line and those who did not. Jean really liked her line-toers. That meant she was never going to like me so I didn't even bother to pretend to understand what was going on. To get away from as much of this woman's insolent neglect as possible, one day I was hanging outside the classroom, waiting for Mills to come by and unlock the door so we could collapse inside. Then inspiration struck me. I pulled a sharpened pencil from my pocket and rammed the point into the lock hole, breaking off the lead. When the teacher finally deigned to arrive, she jammed her key into the lock and the graphite point froze into place, requiring her to summon the janitor to pick out the pencil tip so she could get us inside the room. Well, that blew about half an hour that we would have been wasting balancing unstable equations.
My little prank worked so well that I did the same thing the very next day and was rewarded with the same results. It didn't dawn on me that anyone would rat me out.
Not wanting to push my luck, the next day I decided against a three-pete. When the bell rang, the door unlocked from the inside. I turned the nob and we all entered. Inside waiting for us was Jean Mills and the fat-assed principal, Dow West. He didn't know me from Adam, but Mills poked him in the ribs as she nodded at me and said, "That's him."
While everyone else in the class took their seats, West pulled me out into the hall and informed me that he knew I had been the one who had "sabotaged" the classroom door. I suggested he might be in error. He smiled and said, "You're right. I can't prove you did it. If I could, I would give you the hardest beating I've ever given a student here."
I told him to use his threats on a student who was afraid of him.
He never did get around to giving me that beating, although my senior year I was suspended for three days for some minor infraction because West had been patiently waiting for any opportunity. I didn't care then and I still don't.
What Riff tells her friends at Vince Lombardi High School is that nothing that happens there will matter to them in a few years. She's exactly right.
Except: One thing that sometimes happens is that you get to meet some people who will stay in your head for years into the future. Usually those are the people you imagine are a lot like yourself, people who maybe experience the world the way you do, people who like your music, or like the way you dress or talk, or who enjoy the jokes you tell. It's a narcissistic time, but in this case narcissism is about all a kid has to keep himself sane against precisely the type of cartoon administration this movie creates.
Plus the music's great. You get all the big Ramones hits like "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," "Teenage Lobotomy," "Blitzkrieg Bop," and the title tune. You also get to see a high school blown to smithereens.
The acting is no big shakes, but who cares? This isn't a movie for the ages. This is a movie for the moment. That moment has lasted, though. After all, as the tagline warned, "Will your school be next?"
Car Wash
The movie Car Wash (1976) is the greatest vehicle director Michael Schultz has ever helmed. It is also the greatest thing screenwriter Joel Schumacher ever wrote. Prior to the creation of this film, both men worked in television and that's a tradition in which they continued. But if it's true that each person has at least one mighty work inside him, then this surely was their picture.
Is the movie derivative of Robert Altman? Sure! Is it great all the same? Absolutely! Why? Because something can be derivative without being a copy, especially when the talent in front of the camera is as strong as it is here. The strongest talent in front of the camera here is yet another man who primarily distinguished himself in the television medium. I'm talking about the late great Ivan Dixon. If the only thing you know Ivan for is "Hogan's Heroes," then you are depriving yourself because he directed some of the best episodes of "The Rockford Files," "In the Heat of the Night," and even "The Waltons"! His all-time best directorial work was with the movie The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the most brilliant black power movies ever made. As the lead man in the gang at the Dee-Luxe car wash, he plays Lonnie, a stoic man who did some time, who gets hassled by his probation officer, and who cannot quite get by on the salary the white boss is paying him. His character is the solid foundation of this film and without Dixon in that role, this would have been an entirely different film. It would not have been as good.
That foundation work is crucial in a movie lacking a traditional plot. The storyline involves one long shift at the car wash, where we meet men and women, each of whom is one good day away from emotional, psychological or physical destruction. We meet Franklin Ajaye as the equally under-appreciated combination Lothario and superhero known as The Fly. We meet George Carlin, doing the best impression of an L.A. taxi driver in the history of the profession. We meet Bill Duke, a Black Muslim who is damned tired of trying to explain to the others about their real place in the system. We meet Garrett Morris, a sort of good-natured Shylock character who forgets to pay his traffic fines. We meet Melanie Mayron, who gets fed up with being the owner's mistress and finally gets a date with someone else who will take advantage of her in some other ways. We meet Professor Irwin Corey, who only wants to get his car washed while providing a urine specimen for the doctors. We meet Richard Pryor and the Pointer Sisters, who as Daddy Rich and his flock, assure the multitudes that the way to happiness is paved with money. These people and all the others live over the edge. They know their future probably lies in washing other people's cars. Yet some of them do have their dreams. Some want to meet the right young woman. Some want to break out with their musical act. Some plan a political revolution. And some just want a raise so they can pay rent.
Car Wash is also a very funny movie. To deny that is to deny yourself some well-earned pleasure. The humor is real in a way that escapes most movies. There's nothing evil in the shots. When the hooker skips out on the cab fare, she's not trying to hurt the driver. She just doesn't have the money. When one employee puts hot peppers inside another guy's burrito, he's not trying to kill him. He's just evening the score from an earlier prank. Even when the workers smart off to the owner's son for reading to them from Mao's Red Book, they don't hate the kid. They just want him to wake up. There is, in other words, a friendliness to this movie that links with Lonnie and holds together for repeated viewings. (Danny DeVito and Brooke Adams are also in the film but you need a magnifying glass to spot them in the food stand across the street.)
The Norman Whitfield soundtrack that plays throughout the day's work is punctuated by raving disc jockeys with a sense of the absurd, just as it should be. The three hit songs from the movie were the title track, "I Wanna Get Next to You" (which sounds very much like the Stylistics) and "I'm Going Down," as well as The Pointer Sisters tune "You Gotta Believe."
When this movie first came out, some people called it the blackM*A*S*H, which was just silly. There's multiple ethnicities represented here and besides this is funnier than M*A*S*H and the acting is every bit as spontaneous and authentic. But the label stuck, so most of these excellent actors went back to their day jobs with the television studios.
The humor in Car Wash will break your heart every bit as much as the cathartic ending. It'll also give you something to think about the next time you take your sedan in for a cleaning.
Is the movie derivative of Robert Altman? Sure! Is it great all the same? Absolutely! Why? Because something can be derivative without being a copy, especially when the talent in front of the camera is as strong as it is here. The strongest talent in front of the camera here is yet another man who primarily distinguished himself in the television medium. I'm talking about the late great Ivan Dixon. If the only thing you know Ivan for is "Hogan's Heroes," then you are depriving yourself because he directed some of the best episodes of "The Rockford Files," "In the Heat of the Night," and even "The Waltons"! His all-time best directorial work was with the movie The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the most brilliant black power movies ever made. As the lead man in the gang at the Dee-Luxe car wash, he plays Lonnie, a stoic man who did some time, who gets hassled by his probation officer, and who cannot quite get by on the salary the white boss is paying him. His character is the solid foundation of this film and without Dixon in that role, this would have been an entirely different film. It would not have been as good.
That foundation work is crucial in a movie lacking a traditional plot. The storyline involves one long shift at the car wash, where we meet men and women, each of whom is one good day away from emotional, psychological or physical destruction. We meet Franklin Ajaye as the equally under-appreciated combination Lothario and superhero known as The Fly. We meet George Carlin, doing the best impression of an L.A. taxi driver in the history of the profession. We meet Bill Duke, a Black Muslim who is damned tired of trying to explain to the others about their real place in the system. We meet Garrett Morris, a sort of good-natured Shylock character who forgets to pay his traffic fines. We meet Melanie Mayron, who gets fed up with being the owner's mistress and finally gets a date with someone else who will take advantage of her in some other ways. We meet Professor Irwin Corey, who only wants to get his car washed while providing a urine specimen for the doctors. We meet Richard Pryor and the Pointer Sisters, who as Daddy Rich and his flock, assure the multitudes that the way to happiness is paved with money. These people and all the others live over the edge. They know their future probably lies in washing other people's cars. Yet some of them do have their dreams. Some want to meet the right young woman. Some want to break out with their musical act. Some plan a political revolution. And some just want a raise so they can pay rent.
Car Wash is also a very funny movie. To deny that is to deny yourself some well-earned pleasure. The humor is real in a way that escapes most movies. There's nothing evil in the shots. When the hooker skips out on the cab fare, she's not trying to hurt the driver. She just doesn't have the money. When one employee puts hot peppers inside another guy's burrito, he's not trying to kill him. He's just evening the score from an earlier prank. Even when the workers smart off to the owner's son for reading to them from Mao's Red Book, they don't hate the kid. They just want him to wake up. There is, in other words, a friendliness to this movie that links with Lonnie and holds together for repeated viewings. (Danny DeVito and Brooke Adams are also in the film but you need a magnifying glass to spot them in the food stand across the street.)
The Norman Whitfield soundtrack that plays throughout the day's work is punctuated by raving disc jockeys with a sense of the absurd, just as it should be. The three hit songs from the movie were the title track, "I Wanna Get Next to You" (which sounds very much like the Stylistics) and "I'm Going Down," as well as The Pointer Sisters tune "You Gotta Believe."
When this movie first came out, some people called it the blackM*A*S*H, which was just silly. There's multiple ethnicities represented here and besides this is funnier than M*A*S*H and the acting is every bit as spontaneous and authentic. But the label stuck, so most of these excellent actors went back to their day jobs with the television studios.
The humor in Car Wash will break your heart every bit as much as the cathartic ending. It'll also give you something to think about the next time you take your sedan in for a cleaning.
A Paper Moon
All kinds of things should drive me crazy and don't. I should be freaking out over the debt ceiling, turning blue about global warming, doing the spazz dance in dread of political redistricting, driving spikes into my ear holes amid broadcasts of impending asteroid attacks (What's that? You haven't heard of the attacking asteroids? Where've you been, friend?), covering my crotch in anticipation of kicks from the angry midgets, leaping from the teeth of disaster (and the jaws of death, while I'm at it) at news of a new Nora Roberts novel, flailing myself on the rocks of doom at the sound of people laughing at anything Adam Sandler and/or Seth Rogan have ever said or done--I should just pack it in and give it up for good. But what really frosts my flakes, tightens my cinch belt, curls my lips and bites my tin foil is having to admit that I thoroughly love a movie made by a director for whom the word "director" has always felt misapplied and for whom, to take it one step farther and yet one step more distant, I have heretofore been unable to muster so much as a kind word. That man, of course, is Peter Bogdonavich and the movie can only be Paper Moon (1973).
Bogdonavich shot the movie in black and white through a red filter. That's why the images have such excellent contrast. You need that if you're going to make a movie about a time and place where everything sort of faded together, this particular time being 1936 and the place being Kansas and Missouri. Yeah, the camera work was nice. Whee.
The real beauty of the movie, however, has almost nothing to do with the director (which figures) and everything to do with Tatum O'Neal, who was nine years old when she appeared in this movie. Folks, I'm here to tell you she steals the show and everything else that's not nailed down, including daddy Ryan's best lines, although to be fair, Mr. O'Neal does a fair job not hogging the screen and instead sharing it with his daughter, just the way professionals are alleged to want to do. But who cares about him? Wasn't he the hockey player in Love Story or something? Four years later he decides to redeem himself? Bah. Tatum is enough redemption for anybody.
That too is really saying something because the director drives this cast (which also features Madeline Kahn and John Hillerman) through a frenetic pace that does not slow down for sentiment, at least not until the last five minutes of the film, which is exactly the point at which the audience really needs a breather. Despite the speed of the dialogue--and at times that speed comes across like a movie from the thirties or forties, rather than more contemporary "reflective" talk--Tatum (Addie) and Ryan (Moses) keep going with the jabs like two boxers who secretly care about one another but don't want to show it. It would have been cheap and easy to have Tatum come across like come little cutie pie girl in a dress. Bogdonavich uses his head by putting her in denim overalls rolled up at the cuff. The only time she looks uncomfortable is when someone forces her to wear a dress.
Paper Moon was released seven months before another good movie about con artists: The Sting. Good as The Sting was, it ultimately holds up less well than Paper Moon precisely because the latter movie gives us reasons to care about these characters and the movie with Newman, Redford and Shaw never got around to showing us why we should give a damn. The Sting was set in the Depression of Chicago. Paper Moon in the Depression of rural America. From the instant we set eyes on Addie, we recognize that she is the embodiment of the Depression itself. Farm country at that time was a motherless bastard child who didn't know for sure who its daddy was. Tatum O'Neal wears that attitude of emotional bruising right alongside her co-occurring attitude of eternal optimism. She's also somewhat better than her "father" at sizing up a mark, imposing her own ideas on the way Moses runs his Bible-selling business.
You may want to judge Peter Bogdonavich by the movies The Last Picture Show or What's Up, Doc? and I would never stop you. Those are two of several movies that he directed that I wouldn't walk across the street to spit on. You may believe that PB is the finest progeny Orson Welles ever inspired. I would beg you to reconsider. But if you say that Paper Moon is anything less than an unsentimental heart-breaker, then I must assume you have no soul.
In light of certain recent Golden Globe confessions, it may interest the reader to recall or discover that this movie inspired a decent though short-lived TV series of the same name, one which starred Christopher Connelly (a Ryan O'Neal lookalike, and a good one) and a young Jodie Foster as Addie.
Bogdonavich shot the movie in black and white through a red filter. That's why the images have such excellent contrast. You need that if you're going to make a movie about a time and place where everything sort of faded together, this particular time being 1936 and the place being Kansas and Missouri. Yeah, the camera work was nice. Whee.
The real beauty of the movie, however, has almost nothing to do with the director (which figures) and everything to do with Tatum O'Neal, who was nine years old when she appeared in this movie. Folks, I'm here to tell you she steals the show and everything else that's not nailed down, including daddy Ryan's best lines, although to be fair, Mr. O'Neal does a fair job not hogging the screen and instead sharing it with his daughter, just the way professionals are alleged to want to do. But who cares about him? Wasn't he the hockey player in Love Story or something? Four years later he decides to redeem himself? Bah. Tatum is enough redemption for anybody.
That too is really saying something because the director drives this cast (which also features Madeline Kahn and John Hillerman) through a frenetic pace that does not slow down for sentiment, at least not until the last five minutes of the film, which is exactly the point at which the audience really needs a breather. Despite the speed of the dialogue--and at times that speed comes across like a movie from the thirties or forties, rather than more contemporary "reflective" talk--Tatum (Addie) and Ryan (Moses) keep going with the jabs like two boxers who secretly care about one another but don't want to show it. It would have been cheap and easy to have Tatum come across like come little cutie pie girl in a dress. Bogdonavich uses his head by putting her in denim overalls rolled up at the cuff. The only time she looks uncomfortable is when someone forces her to wear a dress.
Paper Moon was released seven months before another good movie about con artists: The Sting. Good as The Sting was, it ultimately holds up less well than Paper Moon precisely because the latter movie gives us reasons to care about these characters and the movie with Newman, Redford and Shaw never got around to showing us why we should give a damn. The Sting was set in the Depression of Chicago. Paper Moon in the Depression of rural America. From the instant we set eyes on Addie, we recognize that she is the embodiment of the Depression itself. Farm country at that time was a motherless bastard child who didn't know for sure who its daddy was. Tatum O'Neal wears that attitude of emotional bruising right alongside her co-occurring attitude of eternal optimism. She's also somewhat better than her "father" at sizing up a mark, imposing her own ideas on the way Moses runs his Bible-selling business.
You may want to judge Peter Bogdonavich by the movies The Last Picture Show or What's Up, Doc? and I would never stop you. Those are two of several movies that he directed that I wouldn't walk across the street to spit on. You may believe that PB is the finest progeny Orson Welles ever inspired. I would beg you to reconsider. But if you say that Paper Moon is anything less than an unsentimental heart-breaker, then I must assume you have no soul.
In light of certain recent Golden Globe confessions, it may interest the reader to recall or discover that this movie inspired a decent though short-lived TV series of the same name, one which starred Christopher Connelly (a Ryan O'Neal lookalike, and a good one) and a young Jodie Foster as Addie.
Sometimes a Great Notion
My immediate knee-jerk reaction was that this was somehow a right wing response to the progressive actions of the latter half of the preceding decade because the major male characters in the film stood against the lumber workers union. That I was wrong just goes to show you where reactive thinking will get you. It wasn't far into Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) that I realized that something else was happening here. Yes, Henry, Hank and Joe Ben Stamper run an independent lumber company that has "contracts to fill, eggs to hatch, cats to kill." They also stand every bit as opposed to the large corporations that are swallowing up the bulk of the industry that has been very good to the Stamper family. But the focus of this Paul Newman-directed gem of a film is not what the Stampers are against but rather what they are for. As Henry (Fonda) Stampers says it, going on is all there is.
What he means by that amazing statement is that we do what we do. There is a value in getting up in the morning, wolfing down a breakfast that isn't there for taste but for sustenance, booting on your footwear, taking the pick-up out to the forest and swinging that ax. The first step is creation, the second step is confiscation, and the third step is making something that momma can use to wipe the baby's butt. The Stampers play a crucial role in this peculiar triumvirate and just as we are trying to figure out what that role is, along comes the Prodigal Son, Leland (Michael Sarrazin), fresh out of college and with a head full of ideas that are driving him insane, not to mention a head full of hair. "It grows," he explains.
For my money, the most fascinating character in the movie is Joe Ben (Richard Jaeckel), far and away the most good-natured human being ever to stroll across this mortal coil. He may not recognize his half-brother Leland when the latter returns home, but he loves him all the same and treats him with none of the routine family criticism that half-brother Hank and father Henry do. Even when the world's largest log pins Joe Ben under water and it looks as if he's doomed, the brother just keeps on laughing, saying how daddy Henry would freak out if he saw Hank giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation.
The scenes with the men on the job are among the most amazing and disturbing you're likely to witness. I say amazing because the majesty of the trees the Stampers cut down dwarf the independence of the hard-working family. I say disturbing because we kind of hate it that these glorious staffs reaching up to God get knocked down by mere human beings. As director, Newman doesn't beat us over the head with this dichotomy. He presents it and allows it to take our breaths away without cheap commentary.
Speaking of Newman, his acting here is a match for his directorial skills and vice versa. Indeed, beneath both hats he gives new meaning to the notion of "understated." And that's appropriate because the wild roughness of the daily lives of this family would have been tarnished with melodramatic editorializing.
None of this should indicate that Sometimes a Great Notion is a perfect movie. It is not. The women exist largely as tabula rasa. Viv Stamper (Lee Remick) is there only to make us wonder what the hell she might be thinking. The other women characters are even less defined and while I suspect that novelist Ken Kesey and director Newman might have argued that the women's transparency was a reflection of the reality of this story, I don't buy it. Women in a working family contribute a lot more than just scenery and dreams of what might have been. "Don't go out," Viv says to Hank. "Let's get going," counters daddy Henry. There's never a doubt as to who will win that argument.
The biggest problem with the movie, however, is one of counter-motivation. We never get much of an idea as to why the union men are striking--only that doing so has crippled the town's economy. If we'd had a sense as to their reason for holding back--other than to make payments on a Chevrolet--the sense of tragedy that subtly erupts as a result of the Stampers refusal would have been more emotionally powerful. What we get instead is Willard, the town movie theater owner, telling Hank that if the Stampers don't join the strike that he will kill himself. "Good luck," replies Hank. Horrified, Willard demands an explanation. Hank, confused by this, replies that he couldn't think of anything more appropriate to say. It's better than bon voyage, he reckons.
What he means by that amazing statement is that we do what we do. There is a value in getting up in the morning, wolfing down a breakfast that isn't there for taste but for sustenance, booting on your footwear, taking the pick-up out to the forest and swinging that ax. The first step is creation, the second step is confiscation, and the third step is making something that momma can use to wipe the baby's butt. The Stampers play a crucial role in this peculiar triumvirate and just as we are trying to figure out what that role is, along comes the Prodigal Son, Leland (Michael Sarrazin), fresh out of college and with a head full of ideas that are driving him insane, not to mention a head full of hair. "It grows," he explains.
For my money, the most fascinating character in the movie is Joe Ben (Richard Jaeckel), far and away the most good-natured human being ever to stroll across this mortal coil. He may not recognize his half-brother Leland when the latter returns home, but he loves him all the same and treats him with none of the routine family criticism that half-brother Hank and father Henry do. Even when the world's largest log pins Joe Ben under water and it looks as if he's doomed, the brother just keeps on laughing, saying how daddy Henry would freak out if he saw Hank giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation.
The scenes with the men on the job are among the most amazing and disturbing you're likely to witness. I say amazing because the majesty of the trees the Stampers cut down dwarf the independence of the hard-working family. I say disturbing because we kind of hate it that these glorious staffs reaching up to God get knocked down by mere human beings. As director, Newman doesn't beat us over the head with this dichotomy. He presents it and allows it to take our breaths away without cheap commentary.
Speaking of Newman, his acting here is a match for his directorial skills and vice versa. Indeed, beneath both hats he gives new meaning to the notion of "understated." And that's appropriate because the wild roughness of the daily lives of this family would have been tarnished with melodramatic editorializing.
None of this should indicate that Sometimes a Great Notion is a perfect movie. It is not. The women exist largely as tabula rasa. Viv Stamper (Lee Remick) is there only to make us wonder what the hell she might be thinking. The other women characters are even less defined and while I suspect that novelist Ken Kesey and director Newman might have argued that the women's transparency was a reflection of the reality of this story, I don't buy it. Women in a working family contribute a lot more than just scenery and dreams of what might have been. "Don't go out," Viv says to Hank. "Let's get going," counters daddy Henry. There's never a doubt as to who will win that argument.
The biggest problem with the movie, however, is one of counter-motivation. We never get much of an idea as to why the union men are striking--only that doing so has crippled the town's economy. If we'd had a sense as to their reason for holding back--other than to make payments on a Chevrolet--the sense of tragedy that subtly erupts as a result of the Stampers refusal would have been more emotionally powerful. What we get instead is Willard, the town movie theater owner, telling Hank that if the Stampers don't join the strike that he will kill himself. "Good luck," replies Hank. Horrified, Willard demands an explanation. Hank, confused by this, replies that he couldn't think of anything more appropriate to say. It's better than bon voyage, he reckons.
The Bad News Bears
Quick, what two things do all of the following movies have in common? A League of Their Own, Field of Dreams, Eight Men Out,Pride of the Yankees, Bull Durham, Bang the Drum Slowly and The Natural. Answer? They are all excellent baseball movies and none of them are half as good as The Bad News Bears (1976).
Bill Lancaster wrote the screenplay. He was Burt Lancaster's kid. He claimed he based the Walter Matthau character of Morris Buttermaker on his father. He also claimed he based the Tatum O'Neal character of Amanda on himself.
Directed by Michael Ritchie (The Candidate), this movie uses the theme of the American pastime as a way of saying something about sportsmanship, about the cost of winning, about the amazing fun of the game, and about affirmative action.
Beg pardon? Did I say affirmative action? Why, if that were true, then elements of this would be political. Dear. How unseemly.
Unseemly it is. In The Bad News Bears, we get caught up with a bunch of Southern California misfits of the mid-seventies, meaning an African American, a couple Hispanics, a pair of runts, at least three nerds, a Jew or two, a fat kid, a delinquent, and a girl. Oh, and there's the manager, a grumpy old man with a bit of a problem with his drinking. These kids have nothing in common with one another other than their outsider status in middle class SoCal and their adoration of the game and of one another, although the latter matter gets strained some of the time as Buttermaker yearns to win and forgets what the game is really all about. Meanwhile the local power structure grumbles about a lawsuit that forced the league to form a seventeenth team when sixteen teams were presumably good enough. The problem? The good L.A. suburbanites didn't want to let blacks, Latinos, Jews, girls or delinquents play the game in their league. Presumably the nerds and fatties would exclude themselves. Anyway, a class action suit ensued, the defendants lost, and the team was formed. Director Ritchie doesn't club us over the head with any of these details but neither does he shy away from them.
By now most of you know the story. The team struggles in the early stages of the season until Buttermaker brings in his old friend, the eleven-year-old Amanda, as well as Kelly the motorcycle rider who smokes and has the reputation as the best athlete in town. The team recovers, makes it all the way from last place to the championship game, and during the last inning, the manager puts in his worst players, all of whom know they aren't very good, but Buttermaker has by this point regained his perspective and knows the game is about everybody having a chance. If this had been some stupid movie, the Bears would have won the championship. They do not. But they celebrate as if they did win. And that's fantastic. Imagine a World Series between the Yankees and The Mets. Let's say the Yankees win the seventh game by two runs. The Mets figure, to hell with that. Let's crack the champagne! Can you imagine the uproar in the "winning" team's clubhouse? Can you imagine how much fun it would be to hang with the "losers"?
Matthau is amazing, far more complex than his typical replay of Oscar Madison. This was only Tatum's second movie and already she moved with the confidence of a veteran. And Vic Morrow as the overwrought manager of the opposing team plays the bad guy with more sensitivity than any "bad guy" I can remember. Oh, and we even get Brandon Cruz of "Courtship of Eddie's Father" fame as Morrow' kid, doing a maneuver in the final game that makes you want to stand and cheer. Then again, the whole movie will have you pounding the table, throwing your hot dogs in the air and laughing like a monkey. This is bliss.
Bill Lancaster wrote the screenplay. He was Burt Lancaster's kid. He claimed he based the Walter Matthau character of Morris Buttermaker on his father. He also claimed he based the Tatum O'Neal character of Amanda on himself.
Directed by Michael Ritchie (The Candidate), this movie uses the theme of the American pastime as a way of saying something about sportsmanship, about the cost of winning, about the amazing fun of the game, and about affirmative action.
Beg pardon? Did I say affirmative action? Why, if that were true, then elements of this would be political. Dear. How unseemly.
Unseemly it is. In The Bad News Bears, we get caught up with a bunch of Southern California misfits of the mid-seventies, meaning an African American, a couple Hispanics, a pair of runts, at least three nerds, a Jew or two, a fat kid, a delinquent, and a girl. Oh, and there's the manager, a grumpy old man with a bit of a problem with his drinking. These kids have nothing in common with one another other than their outsider status in middle class SoCal and their adoration of the game and of one another, although the latter matter gets strained some of the time as Buttermaker yearns to win and forgets what the game is really all about. Meanwhile the local power structure grumbles about a lawsuit that forced the league to form a seventeenth team when sixteen teams were presumably good enough. The problem? The good L.A. suburbanites didn't want to let blacks, Latinos, Jews, girls or delinquents play the game in their league. Presumably the nerds and fatties would exclude themselves. Anyway, a class action suit ensued, the defendants lost, and the team was formed. Director Ritchie doesn't club us over the head with any of these details but neither does he shy away from them.
By now most of you know the story. The team struggles in the early stages of the season until Buttermaker brings in his old friend, the eleven-year-old Amanda, as well as Kelly the motorcycle rider who smokes and has the reputation as the best athlete in town. The team recovers, makes it all the way from last place to the championship game, and during the last inning, the manager puts in his worst players, all of whom know they aren't very good, but Buttermaker has by this point regained his perspective and knows the game is about everybody having a chance. If this had been some stupid movie, the Bears would have won the championship. They do not. But they celebrate as if they did win. And that's fantastic. Imagine a World Series between the Yankees and The Mets. Let's say the Yankees win the seventh game by two runs. The Mets figure, to hell with that. Let's crack the champagne! Can you imagine the uproar in the "winning" team's clubhouse? Can you imagine how much fun it would be to hang with the "losers"?
Matthau is amazing, far more complex than his typical replay of Oscar Madison. This was only Tatum's second movie and already she moved with the confidence of a veteran. And Vic Morrow as the overwrought manager of the opposing team plays the bad guy with more sensitivity than any "bad guy" I can remember. Oh, and we even get Brandon Cruz of "Courtship of Eddie's Father" fame as Morrow' kid, doing a maneuver in the final game that makes you want to stand and cheer. Then again, the whole movie will have you pounding the table, throwing your hot dogs in the air and laughing like a monkey. This is bliss.
Un Flic
The last time we saw French actor Alain Delon, he was playing the title sociopath in the movie Scorpio. In that movie his villainy played opposite Burt Lancaster's heroic character. This time out he stars as a cop named Eduard Coleman in the Jean-Pierre Melvin-directed movieUn Flic, or A Cop, or Dirty Money (1972). His villainy in this movie contrasts with Richard Crenna, who plays Simon, the owner of a nightclub that features transvestites and who plans and commits major robberies in his off hours. Simon and Superintendent Coleman share three things: a mutual friendship, an icy nature, and the affections of Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), a woman who must decide which of her two paramours to betray--and when.
Friendship--or at least relationships--is what this movie is really about. That's a big part of what makes Un Flic so timeless, a fact that not so much speaks well for the movie as it does ill for the time.
Coleman is systematic. He has been doing what he does long enough to be able to do it without a semblance of emotion. His criminal friend, Simon, works out his robberies with cool precision. Melville cues us into the why of this from the first frame: "The only feelings mankind has ever inspired in policemen are those of indifference and derision." That statement, spoken by Superintendent Coleman, is not cynicism. It is philosophy. Indeed, it is the world he lives in and the world he has created. Like any other social disease, his philosophy is contagious. All of his assistants know to leave him alone, other than to hand him the phone when it rings and then get out of the way.
There is a little more humanity--very little--in Simon's world, mostly because of the spectacular support characterization performed by Michael Conrad, who as Louis Costa, the getaway driver and second in command, evokes more social awareness and superficial decency than all the others combined. He also carries himself--as he always did--with tremendous presence.
Simon, on the other hand, wears his coolness in an entirely different suit. Whereas Coleman is systematic, Simon is methodical. To that end, if you ever need to employ someone to steal a briefcase full of drugs from a gangster aboard a moving train, Simon is the guy to call. Like Coleman, he fancies himself a realist and when the time comes to croak a member of his own gang to prevent that man from telling what he knows to the police, he has no reservations enlisting Cathy to do the job for him.
Cathy is a strange duck. She seems to be playing both sides against the middle but we don't get any overt explanation for why she does so, although it's possible she hopes that her ultimate betrayal with either land her a bond with the frostiest man on earth or else will shake loose some humanity from one of them.
Actually, the most human character in the movie is the transvestite, a guy made up so perfectly that for the first half of the film I just assumed he was a woman. I wish I could tell you this character's name or who played him, but it won't come to me. Anyway, we genuinely care about this person because's she's so obviously in love with Coleman and feels just terrible when the information she shares about a drug deal with Suitcase Matthew goes sour because of the robbery Simon and crew commit. When Coleman roughs her up, it really hurts.
Everyone conventional here has a job to do. Only the transvestite--being the real outlaw--has any warmth. The other characters are sympathetic only because of their lack of humanity.
Influence is not nearly as important as contribution. All the same, Melville has been as much a French New Wave influence as Godard and Truffaut. Artistically, he may not quite hold those men's jock straps. Stylistically, he is certainly their equal. Just ask Quentin Tarantino.
Friendship--or at least relationships--is what this movie is really about. That's a big part of what makes Un Flic so timeless, a fact that not so much speaks well for the movie as it does ill for the time.
Coleman is systematic. He has been doing what he does long enough to be able to do it without a semblance of emotion. His criminal friend, Simon, works out his robberies with cool precision. Melville cues us into the why of this from the first frame: "The only feelings mankind has ever inspired in policemen are those of indifference and derision." That statement, spoken by Superintendent Coleman, is not cynicism. It is philosophy. Indeed, it is the world he lives in and the world he has created. Like any other social disease, his philosophy is contagious. All of his assistants know to leave him alone, other than to hand him the phone when it rings and then get out of the way.
There is a little more humanity--very little--in Simon's world, mostly because of the spectacular support characterization performed by Michael Conrad, who as Louis Costa, the getaway driver and second in command, evokes more social awareness and superficial decency than all the others combined. He also carries himself--as he always did--with tremendous presence.
Simon, on the other hand, wears his coolness in an entirely different suit. Whereas Coleman is systematic, Simon is methodical. To that end, if you ever need to employ someone to steal a briefcase full of drugs from a gangster aboard a moving train, Simon is the guy to call. Like Coleman, he fancies himself a realist and when the time comes to croak a member of his own gang to prevent that man from telling what he knows to the police, he has no reservations enlisting Cathy to do the job for him.
Cathy is a strange duck. She seems to be playing both sides against the middle but we don't get any overt explanation for why she does so, although it's possible she hopes that her ultimate betrayal with either land her a bond with the frostiest man on earth or else will shake loose some humanity from one of them.
Actually, the most human character in the movie is the transvestite, a guy made up so perfectly that for the first half of the film I just assumed he was a woman. I wish I could tell you this character's name or who played him, but it won't come to me. Anyway, we genuinely care about this person because's she's so obviously in love with Coleman and feels just terrible when the information she shares about a drug deal with Suitcase Matthew goes sour because of the robbery Simon and crew commit. When Coleman roughs her up, it really hurts.
Everyone conventional here has a job to do. Only the transvestite--being the real outlaw--has any warmth. The other characters are sympathetic only because of their lack of humanity.
Influence is not nearly as important as contribution. All the same, Melville has been as much a French New Wave influence as Godard and Truffaut. Artistically, he may not quite hold those men's jock straps. Stylistically, he is certainly their equal. Just ask Quentin Tarantino.
Illustrious Corpses
Cadaveri Eccellenti refers to a surrealist game allegedly created by Andre Breton wherein several players contribute their own imaginative twists to a portion of a drawing without seeing what the other players are up to. Illustrious Corpses (1976), which is the literal translation from the Italian (or, as the movie posters proclaimed, Cadavres Exquis), is a fascinating thriller that hangs together through the understated glue of its protagonist, Inspector Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura), as well as the wild plot, those two forces joining to give us one of the most exciting slow-boilers in a very long time.
Directed by Francesco Rosi, Illustrious Corpses begins with an Italian judge named Vargas walking toward us through a long corridor, on all sides of which appear human cadavers. Since when we first meet Vargas we have no way of knowing that he is a judge, we haven't any way of explaining or understanding the significance of these corpses. Is this man a horrible mass murderer who has retained the bodies of his many victims? Or is he a retired law enforcement official who is revisiting the scene of a ghastly crime? Once we learn that Vargas is not only a judge but a former prosecutor, we wonder if these bodies are some sort of symbolic reference to the men he has sentenced. Then again, maybe the scene is there merely to jolt us.
Inspector Rogas is an instantly likable sort of pragmatist who wants to figure out where the judge's assassination fits into a larger pattern of murders. His bosses, on the other hand, say that they want him to hang the crime on the communist party. When more judges are murdered, Rogas digs a bit and learns that there are three cases these judges collaborated that suggest certain suspects. One of these suspects, a Mr. Cres, appears to have been innocent. The bosses are outraged that Rogas can't follow a simple directive to figure out a way to blame the opposition party. Trudging forward as a good cop will, Rogas finally gets a meeting with the Supreme Court President (Max von Sydow) to warn him that this innocent Mr. Cres may plan to kill him. The Judge intuits that Rogas is implying judicial error. "There is no such thing as judicial error," he asserts in total seriousness. His argument is that seeing as how the justices uphold, affirm and dictate the law, they are as incapable of error as the Pope.
There are all sorts of additional directions taken and misdirections given, including one misdirection that turns out to be the farthest thing from erroneous. Rogas becomes convinced that the killer or killers is out to snuff him for getting too close to the truth. Since we are certain that Rogas does not know the truth, we suspect his suspicions are just paranoia. Indeed they are, but it is his own paranoia that leads his superiors to kill him.
I see that the way I've described the plot makes it sound as if this film were a comedy. It is not. As a matter of fact, this is a brilliantly serious movie that has informed the work of a lot of modern day directors whom you will likely recognize (is that Oliver Stone in the front row?)
The only thing to watch out for is something apparently unavoidable at present. This fine Italian film is dubbed into English rather than provided English subtitles. The dubs are occasionally entirely inappropriate and the "vocal overacting" really detracts from the otherwise brilliant twists and turns of this movie.
Oh, and Fernando Rey is in this movie! That should make you want to see it on that basis alone. I will tell you that he plays the Security Minister. I must also tell you that I have no idea whether he is a good guy or bad guy. I have simply decided he is a villain, with no real proof. Maybe I can get a job with the Italian police. After all, the truth may not set you free but it sure does pay well.
Directed by Francesco Rosi, Illustrious Corpses begins with an Italian judge named Vargas walking toward us through a long corridor, on all sides of which appear human cadavers. Since when we first meet Vargas we have no way of knowing that he is a judge, we haven't any way of explaining or understanding the significance of these corpses. Is this man a horrible mass murderer who has retained the bodies of his many victims? Or is he a retired law enforcement official who is revisiting the scene of a ghastly crime? Once we learn that Vargas is not only a judge but a former prosecutor, we wonder if these bodies are some sort of symbolic reference to the men he has sentenced. Then again, maybe the scene is there merely to jolt us.
Inspector Rogas is an instantly likable sort of pragmatist who wants to figure out where the judge's assassination fits into a larger pattern of murders. His bosses, on the other hand, say that they want him to hang the crime on the communist party. When more judges are murdered, Rogas digs a bit and learns that there are three cases these judges collaborated that suggest certain suspects. One of these suspects, a Mr. Cres, appears to have been innocent. The bosses are outraged that Rogas can't follow a simple directive to figure out a way to blame the opposition party. Trudging forward as a good cop will, Rogas finally gets a meeting with the Supreme Court President (Max von Sydow) to warn him that this innocent Mr. Cres may plan to kill him. The Judge intuits that Rogas is implying judicial error. "There is no such thing as judicial error," he asserts in total seriousness. His argument is that seeing as how the justices uphold, affirm and dictate the law, they are as incapable of error as the Pope.
There are all sorts of additional directions taken and misdirections given, including one misdirection that turns out to be the farthest thing from erroneous. Rogas becomes convinced that the killer or killers is out to snuff him for getting too close to the truth. Since we are certain that Rogas does not know the truth, we suspect his suspicions are just paranoia. Indeed they are, but it is his own paranoia that leads his superiors to kill him.
I see that the way I've described the plot makes it sound as if this film were a comedy. It is not. As a matter of fact, this is a brilliantly serious movie that has informed the work of a lot of modern day directors whom you will likely recognize (is that Oliver Stone in the front row?)
The only thing to watch out for is something apparently unavoidable at present. This fine Italian film is dubbed into English rather than provided English subtitles. The dubs are occasionally entirely inappropriate and the "vocal overacting" really detracts from the otherwise brilliant twists and turns of this movie.
Oh, and Fernando Rey is in this movie! That should make you want to see it on that basis alone. I will tell you that he plays the Security Minister. I must also tell you that I have no idea whether he is a good guy or bad guy. I have simply decided he is a villain, with no real proof. Maybe I can get a job with the Italian police. After all, the truth may not set you free but it sure does pay well.
Slap Shot
Sports movies can be great or they can be total bombs. Virtually anything qualifies as a sport nowadays so there's all kinds of opportunities. Disgusting as they were, I can think of two cockfighting movies, the first one being done by the Thomas Edison company (The Cock Fight--1894). In a more socially acceptable orientation, baseball has been well represented by the original The Bad News Bears and the first half of Bull Durham. Basketball has brought us Hoop Dreams,White Men Can't Jump and Hoosiers, the latter film's charms being lost on this writer, what with its only virtue being that you keep expecting the plot to take a surprising turn and--surprise!--it never does. Football has given us Heaven Can Wait and (again) the original The Longest Yard. Even boxing has managed to cough up the excellent Raging Bull and a string of Rocky movies. Pool/billiards brings us a new movie every twenty years or so, the last halfway decent one being The Color of Money. Track and field did Chariots of Fire. But how many great hockey movies do you know?
You might be startled. There've been at least three of the Mighty Ducks films, each one half as compelling as its predecessor. You can go back as far as 1937 and dig a young John Wayne in Idol of the Crowds. There was the genuinely horrible Youngblood with Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze. Mystery Alaska was nice. But you have not truly had a fun time at a sports movie unless you have watched the 1977 George Roy Hill puck-gem Slap Shot.
Paul Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop, the player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs, a third rate team in a fourth rate town that is on the brink of losing ten thousand factory jobs due to a plant closure. Coming up behind Dunlop is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), a young pretty boy who doesn't mind scamming his fellow players but doesn't want to scam himself. Braden and his wife Lily (Lindsay Crouse) see themselves as the only class acts in the town, but they're young so we forgive them. Reggie learns that the Chiefs are probably going to fold at the end of this season, so he fools a local media hack into fabricating a story that the team is being bought by a bunch of farts in Florida. To drum up more enthusiasm for the team, Reggie goads his team into turning goon. The three newest members of the squad, the Hanson Brothers, are happy to oblige.
The movie is profane, vulgar, violent, occasionally obvious and definitely obscene. It is also inspired, hilarious, and brutally pure. Newman handles the comedy here better than anywhere in his life, his situation actually does draw us in, and the devotion and commitment of the Hanson Brothers (David Hanson plus Jeff and Steve Carlson, who really looked like that) is genuinely moving.
For a sports movie to work, it has to transcend its genre, just as a great western must do, or a great war movie, or even a great comedy. Slap Shot is sports, western, war, and comedic. If you've never been to a hockey match, this movie will get you as close as possible.
You might be startled. There've been at least three of the Mighty Ducks films, each one half as compelling as its predecessor. You can go back as far as 1937 and dig a young John Wayne in Idol of the Crowds. There was the genuinely horrible Youngblood with Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze. Mystery Alaska was nice. But you have not truly had a fun time at a sports movie unless you have watched the 1977 George Roy Hill puck-gem Slap Shot.
Paul Newman stars as Reggie Dunlop, the player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs, a third rate team in a fourth rate town that is on the brink of losing ten thousand factory jobs due to a plant closure. Coming up behind Dunlop is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), a young pretty boy who doesn't mind scamming his fellow players but doesn't want to scam himself. Braden and his wife Lily (Lindsay Crouse) see themselves as the only class acts in the town, but they're young so we forgive them. Reggie learns that the Chiefs are probably going to fold at the end of this season, so he fools a local media hack into fabricating a story that the team is being bought by a bunch of farts in Florida. To drum up more enthusiasm for the team, Reggie goads his team into turning goon. The three newest members of the squad, the Hanson Brothers, are happy to oblige.
The movie is profane, vulgar, violent, occasionally obvious and definitely obscene. It is also inspired, hilarious, and brutally pure. Newman handles the comedy here better than anywhere in his life, his situation actually does draw us in, and the devotion and commitment of the Hanson Brothers (David Hanson plus Jeff and Steve Carlson, who really looked like that) is genuinely moving.
For a sports movie to work, it has to transcend its genre, just as a great western must do, or a great war movie, or even a great comedy. Slap Shot is sports, western, war, and comedic. If you've never been to a hockey match, this movie will get you as close as possible.
The Day of the Jackal
This is true. On August 22, 1962, a group called the OAS (Secret Army Organization) made an assassination attempt on French President Charles De Gaulle, whom they believed had betrayed France by giving up Algeria to Algerian nationalists. Near dusk De Gaulle and his wife were riding from the Elysee Palace to Orly Airport. As his black Citroen DS sped along the Avenue de la Liberation in Paris at 70 miles per hour, twelve OAS gunmen opened fire on the car. A hail of 140 bullets, most of them coming from behind, killed two of the president's motorcycle bodyguards, shattered the car's rear window and punctured all four of its tires. Though the Citroen went into a front-wheel skid, De Gaulle's chauffeur was able to accelerate out of the skid and drive to safety, presumably thanks to the car's superior suspension system. De Gaulle and his wife kept their heads down and came out unharmed.
We see the recreation of this in the first few minutes of the 1971 Fred Zinnemann movie The Day of the Jackal.
This is one hell of a movie.
Edward Fox gives a chiller performance in the title role of the man hired by the OAS to assassinate De Gaulle. You won't recognize anyone else in this film because all the actors here are consciously understated, a facet of their character's personalities which oddly adds to the mounting suspense. Indeed, this may be the most understated thriller ever made. There's no imposed commentary about the propriety of the actions committed by the French authorities or by their enemies--this is not a class in comparative politics. This is a an historical film. And that's a chancy approach to take because, while it does add to our horror at the building of the conspiracy itself, we are given no sense as to whether the conspirators were or were not "justified" in their plans, just as we get no indication (outside whatever knowledge we may bring to the party) as to De Gaulle's liberation of Algeria. The French President was a very complex individual and, short of an eight-hour documentary, there was really no way the filmmaker here could have told the viewers everything they needed to know.
On the other hand, that would have been a different film altogether and The Day of the Jackal is really about the brilliance of treachery. The Jackal is an Englishman who goes about his work of putting into place an admittedly smart operation with a lack of surface passion which, again, adds to the horror of what may result. Likewise, the Inspector (Tony Britton), who must prevent the killing, works with equal dutiful thrust to apprehend the bastard. Both of these men are actually simply employees in a grand design of global politics and they know it. To combat that self-awareness, both men develop a certain disdain for their employers, one which we in the audience latch onto at every opportunity. As despicable as the Jackal may be, he is genuinely morally superior to his backers, just as Inspector Thomas makes fools of the pomposity of the French Parliament and indeed of De Gaulle himself.
This is an innervating film that ranks among the greatest spy thrillers of the 1970s.
We see the recreation of this in the first few minutes of the 1971 Fred Zinnemann movie The Day of the Jackal.
This is one hell of a movie.
Edward Fox gives a chiller performance in the title role of the man hired by the OAS to assassinate De Gaulle. You won't recognize anyone else in this film because all the actors here are consciously understated, a facet of their character's personalities which oddly adds to the mounting suspense. Indeed, this may be the most understated thriller ever made. There's no imposed commentary about the propriety of the actions committed by the French authorities or by their enemies--this is not a class in comparative politics. This is a an historical film. And that's a chancy approach to take because, while it does add to our horror at the building of the conspiracy itself, we are given no sense as to whether the conspirators were or were not "justified" in their plans, just as we get no indication (outside whatever knowledge we may bring to the party) as to De Gaulle's liberation of Algeria. The French President was a very complex individual and, short of an eight-hour documentary, there was really no way the filmmaker here could have told the viewers everything they needed to know.
On the other hand, that would have been a different film altogether and The Day of the Jackal is really about the brilliance of treachery. The Jackal is an Englishman who goes about his work of putting into place an admittedly smart operation with a lack of surface passion which, again, adds to the horror of what may result. Likewise, the Inspector (Tony Britton), who must prevent the killing, works with equal dutiful thrust to apprehend the bastard. Both of these men are actually simply employees in a grand design of global politics and they know it. To combat that self-awareness, both men develop a certain disdain for their employers, one which we in the audience latch onto at every opportunity. As despicable as the Jackal may be, he is genuinely morally superior to his backers, just as Inspector Thomas makes fools of the pomposity of the French Parliament and indeed of De Gaulle himself.
This is an innervating film that ranks among the greatest spy thrillers of the 1970s.
Busting
Busting (1974) stars Elliott Gould and Robert Blake as two idealistic vice cops in Los Angeles who come up against some fairly rancid characters as they attempt to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, despite the corruption that surrounds them. This is significant because--despite the very unfortunate homophobia that occasionally spews from Gould's mouth--this movie brings out the reality that there are among us people who just want to do a good job and are often thwarted by the very people whose job it is supposed to be to allow a good job to happen by getting out of the way.
However different the off-screen associations are between the two actors, their friendship in this film is never questioned and those of us who are--as am I--suckers for a buddy movie will find this film very satisfying.
There's also a certain weary cynicism that creeps into the minds of these two which will be familiar to fans of mid-1970s cop movies. And the ending is worth the price of the tickets in and of itself.
I had watched an interview with Blake just a few days before seeing this movie. He looked good for all his troubles and was openly hostile to the pretentious fool who was asking him loaded questions. Blake has always been a beautiful loser to his fans and he still knows it. That got me to thinking that it might be fun to watch this period piece and I'm glad I did. It's great to see the two men bounce lines off one another like friendly handball enthusiasts. Their rebellion against the men at the top is calm and cocky, loose and strong.Busting is a weird film because we've come to see Blake and Gould as far too anti-establishment for their roles and that itself is part of the fun of watching this movie. Is it brain surgery? Nope. Is it worth your time? Absolutely. Is it better than Serpico? Yeppers.
However different the off-screen associations are between the two actors, their friendship in this film is never questioned and those of us who are--as am I--suckers for a buddy movie will find this film very satisfying.
There's also a certain weary cynicism that creeps into the minds of these two which will be familiar to fans of mid-1970s cop movies. And the ending is worth the price of the tickets in and of itself.
I had watched an interview with Blake just a few days before seeing this movie. He looked good for all his troubles and was openly hostile to the pretentious fool who was asking him loaded questions. Blake has always been a beautiful loser to his fans and he still knows it. That got me to thinking that it might be fun to watch this period piece and I'm glad I did. It's great to see the two men bounce lines off one another like friendly handball enthusiasts. Their rebellion against the men at the top is calm and cocky, loose and strong.Busting is a weird film because we've come to see Blake and Gould as far too anti-establishment for their roles and that itself is part of the fun of watching this movie. Is it brain surgery? Nope. Is it worth your time? Absolutely. Is it better than Serpico? Yeppers.
Coffy
I miss the days of the so-called blaxploitation movies because dammit some of those movies were first rate experimental films with hard-working casts and crazed directors who had axes to grind. Some people say that Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) wasn't actually self-exploitive because more than any primarily African-American-oriented film it did not pander to white stereotypes and in fact took on the white establishment from beginning to end. That's perfectly fine with me. Matter of fact, there's an even better reason to think of Sweetbackoutside that particular category: It can't be strict blaxploitation because it came out a full year before The Godfather and a big part of the black film movement was a reaction to a line in Coppola's film where Don Zaluchi, referring to the idea of the Mafia getting in the drug business, says, "In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls." But with the financial and extreme artistic success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (top grossing indie film of 1972) and the commercial popularity of Shaft, also from 1971, the retroactively amusing concept of amplifying certain aspects of a successful film and running those aspects into the ground caught fire, giving us a lot of genuine blaxploitation flicks, some of which were serious fun and some of which were just tripe.
Sweetback itself remains an amazing work that is nearly all to the credit of Melvin Van Peebles, who starred in, directed, produced, did the stunts and wrote the mother. In the movie, Sweetback is a hung stud with remarkable sexual prowess. When a Black Panther gets offed, the cops ask the whorehouse pimp if they can temporarily blame the deed on Sweet. The Beetle the pimp agrees. The cops pick up another brother on the way to the station. The brother, Mu-Mu, gives the cops lip and Sweet breaks loose all hell. We get riots and the Hells Angels led by a long-haired lady, corrupt piggies and a swim across the Mexican border. We also get great lines such as a preacher concerned with the popos finding Sweetback. He says, "Man, you're hotter than little sister's twat." We also get some first rate propaganda against cops, most of which sort of writes itself. We even get the real life Melvin VP catching the clap from the "unsimulated" sex acts performed in the film. Well, hey, it was the age of realism. Speaking of which, Sweetback even impressed the fans of art films with its lighting and with the way the characters would break through the fourth wall by speaking directly about their own roles right into the camera.
The following year saw the release of another truly great blaxploitation film, Superfly. In this dynamite film, Ron O'Neal stars as Youngblood Priest (damn, whadda great name!), a coke dealer and karate expert who just wants to get out of the one business and has to use his fighting skills and brains to make it happen. See, it was kind of getting through to people in a big way at that time that hard drugs were just another tool used by the Man to keep us down and that trips like soda and smack were just another type of shackle. Even though I just wrote those words in a jive manner common to that period, the sentiment is real, folks, and the makers of films like these--and some of their young, white counterparts, such as Coppola--understood in ways that the glorifiers of hooch never would.
If you think I'm wrong about the anti-Mafia sentiment of these films, just consider some of the other hits of this period. In Hit Man, Bernie Casey (yep, the football player) kills a mobster for ruining his sister. InAcross 110th Street (a true classic), Yaphet Kotto tries to save some brothers from getting killed for robbing the mob. And in Slaughter, Jim Brown takes on the crime syndicate. A lot of the film's carried an anti-dope aroma, but none more so than Coffy, which starred a frequently undressed and active Pam Grier, yet another karate expert with an overdosed relative to avenge.
One of the most innovative aspects of these and other blaxploitation films of the era was the soundtrack. A good score can carry a film along and even enhance it. In some of these, the soundtrack did more than that. In some cases, the songs made commentary on the film itself. In others, it make the film bearable. Sweetback featured a then-unknown group called Earth, Wind and Fire. Superfly had the incredible Curtis Mayfield. And Trouble Man, which would not have otherwise been worth spit, had sweet Marvin Gaye.
If it's genuine exploitation you want, it was there. Black Mama, White Mama (again with Pam Grier) was a female version of The Defiant Ones.Blacula's referent is obvious, as is Black Caesar and Blackenstein.
Sweetback itself remains an amazing work that is nearly all to the credit of Melvin Van Peebles, who starred in, directed, produced, did the stunts and wrote the mother. In the movie, Sweetback is a hung stud with remarkable sexual prowess. When a Black Panther gets offed, the cops ask the whorehouse pimp if they can temporarily blame the deed on Sweet. The Beetle the pimp agrees. The cops pick up another brother on the way to the station. The brother, Mu-Mu, gives the cops lip and Sweet breaks loose all hell. We get riots and the Hells Angels led by a long-haired lady, corrupt piggies and a swim across the Mexican border. We also get great lines such as a preacher concerned with the popos finding Sweetback. He says, "Man, you're hotter than little sister's twat." We also get some first rate propaganda against cops, most of which sort of writes itself. We even get the real life Melvin VP catching the clap from the "unsimulated" sex acts performed in the film. Well, hey, it was the age of realism. Speaking of which, Sweetback even impressed the fans of art films with its lighting and with the way the characters would break through the fourth wall by speaking directly about their own roles right into the camera.
The following year saw the release of another truly great blaxploitation film, Superfly. In this dynamite film, Ron O'Neal stars as Youngblood Priest (damn, whadda great name!), a coke dealer and karate expert who just wants to get out of the one business and has to use his fighting skills and brains to make it happen. See, it was kind of getting through to people in a big way at that time that hard drugs were just another tool used by the Man to keep us down and that trips like soda and smack were just another type of shackle. Even though I just wrote those words in a jive manner common to that period, the sentiment is real, folks, and the makers of films like these--and some of their young, white counterparts, such as Coppola--understood in ways that the glorifiers of hooch never would.
If you think I'm wrong about the anti-Mafia sentiment of these films, just consider some of the other hits of this period. In Hit Man, Bernie Casey (yep, the football player) kills a mobster for ruining his sister. InAcross 110th Street (a true classic), Yaphet Kotto tries to save some brothers from getting killed for robbing the mob. And in Slaughter, Jim Brown takes on the crime syndicate. A lot of the film's carried an anti-dope aroma, but none more so than Coffy, which starred a frequently undressed and active Pam Grier, yet another karate expert with an overdosed relative to avenge.
One of the most innovative aspects of these and other blaxploitation films of the era was the soundtrack. A good score can carry a film along and even enhance it. In some of these, the soundtrack did more than that. In some cases, the songs made commentary on the film itself. In others, it make the film bearable. Sweetback featured a then-unknown group called Earth, Wind and Fire. Superfly had the incredible Curtis Mayfield. And Trouble Man, which would not have otherwise been worth spit, had sweet Marvin Gaye.
If it's genuine exploitation you want, it was there. Black Mama, White Mama (again with Pam Grier) was a female version of The Defiant Ones.Blacula's referent is obvious, as is Black Caesar and Blackenstein.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit going into this that I am a fan of the late director Ivan Dixon. I liked him as an actor in the otherwise uninteresting TV series "Hogan's Heroes" and I liked him playing alongside Sidney Poitier in the film of A Raisin in the Sun. I knew he had turned director after leaving Hogan and company, and if you're a fan of the TV show "The Rockford Files," you'll see his name pop up on some of that series' better episodes.
Before The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Ivan Dixon directed the troubled Trouble Man, a great soundtrack with a lame movie accompanying it. But then, in 1973, the flood gates and blood gates spilled open and Dixon directed the film of a lifetime, one of the most disturbing and important films of anyone's career--and United Artists, the distributors of the film, yanked it from theaters and refused to release it on DVD until 2004.
Let's see if we can guess why. Based on the Sam Greenlee novel, the story is that of an African-American named Dan Freeman, played with understated elegance by Lawrence Cook, who becomes the first black man to crack the color barrier at the Central Intelligence Agency. Aware that he is being used as a token, he blends in without rocking the boat, only to find himself assigned to the copy room. He stays there for five years until he informs the Director of Central Intelligence that he will be resigning quietly to go into social work back in Chicago. Hyper-paranoid, the Agency has been surveying his activities all along and they have found him to be no threat whatsoever, one of the reasons they agreed to take him on in the first place.
To this point, the movie is no more dangerous than your average 1970s situation comedy. To this point, you may find the lily white character development predictable. To this point, you may be pardoned if you have a good case of the yawns.
And then Dixon smacks you across the face and stomps out your guts.
I'm not going to give away the twist, although you can find out easily enough online. I will tell you that no matter how many period piece blaxploitation films you may have seen, you are not prepared for what happens in this movie. However, when you do watch the film, if you haven't done so already, I guarantee you that you'll be very uncomfortable with the ultra-specific details revealed about the nature of unrest. You may even wonder if this movie is still dangerous all these years later.
I hope it is dangerous. If a film cannot carry over the tension on the screen out onto your own personal sidewalk, then what the hell good is it? Don't get me wrong. This movie does not detail how a home mechanic can construct a hydrogen bomb. For that, there are many web sites. No, what this film reveals is far more dangerous and important than that. This film is about ideas brought into action. This film is a plan, a blue print, a schemata.
As such, I must admit that the editing leaves a bit to be desired. No, it isn't sloppy in the way of some films of the period. On the contrary, one gets the sense right away that this movie has production values far in excess of most films marketed to the black audience, the legitimacy those values give in turn adding to the fear factor. No, the editing issues I have here are with the pacing, which could have been sharper and a bit more urgent. But that's sort of like trying to impose plot constraints onto the writings of Hegel. It's theoretically possible, yet hard to imagine.
Harder to imagine still is that any American film company went along with releasing this movie. If somebody puts out a piece of shit that calls for the overthrow of the capitalist system, nobody gets alarmed because the lousy quality of the movie takes the edge off. If Woody Allen releasesBananas, which is indeed about that very subject, no one gets terribly upset because it's a comedy, and a good one at that. But let Ivan Dixon create a movie that confronts the power structure in this country--which is all I'm going to reveal here--and Bokan (the production company, which only has this one film to its credit) gets to make the movie even though the distributor--United Artists--gets to pull it before it has a chance to find an audience.
Here's my theory: Somebody at UA said to his friends: "Hey, this'll just be another Super Fly or Trouble Man. You know, some shit about dope setting you free and getting out from under The Man. Haw har haha! Them darkies is so predictable." And that turned out to be incorrect.
What is correct is that the FBI suppressed the film and the only reason it's available today is because Dixon kept a copy of the negatives of the film himself. That leads us to a contemporary documentary that I hope you will see. The film is called Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
Before The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Ivan Dixon directed the troubled Trouble Man, a great soundtrack with a lame movie accompanying it. But then, in 1973, the flood gates and blood gates spilled open and Dixon directed the film of a lifetime, one of the most disturbing and important films of anyone's career--and United Artists, the distributors of the film, yanked it from theaters and refused to release it on DVD until 2004.
Let's see if we can guess why. Based on the Sam Greenlee novel, the story is that of an African-American named Dan Freeman, played with understated elegance by Lawrence Cook, who becomes the first black man to crack the color barrier at the Central Intelligence Agency. Aware that he is being used as a token, he blends in without rocking the boat, only to find himself assigned to the copy room. He stays there for five years until he informs the Director of Central Intelligence that he will be resigning quietly to go into social work back in Chicago. Hyper-paranoid, the Agency has been surveying his activities all along and they have found him to be no threat whatsoever, one of the reasons they agreed to take him on in the first place.
To this point, the movie is no more dangerous than your average 1970s situation comedy. To this point, you may find the lily white character development predictable. To this point, you may be pardoned if you have a good case of the yawns.
And then Dixon smacks you across the face and stomps out your guts.
I'm not going to give away the twist, although you can find out easily enough online. I will tell you that no matter how many period piece blaxploitation films you may have seen, you are not prepared for what happens in this movie. However, when you do watch the film, if you haven't done so already, I guarantee you that you'll be very uncomfortable with the ultra-specific details revealed about the nature of unrest. You may even wonder if this movie is still dangerous all these years later.
I hope it is dangerous. If a film cannot carry over the tension on the screen out onto your own personal sidewalk, then what the hell good is it? Don't get me wrong. This movie does not detail how a home mechanic can construct a hydrogen bomb. For that, there are many web sites. No, what this film reveals is far more dangerous and important than that. This film is about ideas brought into action. This film is a plan, a blue print, a schemata.
As such, I must admit that the editing leaves a bit to be desired. No, it isn't sloppy in the way of some films of the period. On the contrary, one gets the sense right away that this movie has production values far in excess of most films marketed to the black audience, the legitimacy those values give in turn adding to the fear factor. No, the editing issues I have here are with the pacing, which could have been sharper and a bit more urgent. But that's sort of like trying to impose plot constraints onto the writings of Hegel. It's theoretically possible, yet hard to imagine.
Harder to imagine still is that any American film company went along with releasing this movie. If somebody puts out a piece of shit that calls for the overthrow of the capitalist system, nobody gets alarmed because the lousy quality of the movie takes the edge off. If Woody Allen releasesBananas, which is indeed about that very subject, no one gets terribly upset because it's a comedy, and a good one at that. But let Ivan Dixon create a movie that confronts the power structure in this country--which is all I'm going to reveal here--and Bokan (the production company, which only has this one film to its credit) gets to make the movie even though the distributor--United Artists--gets to pull it before it has a chance to find an audience.
Here's my theory: Somebody at UA said to his friends: "Hey, this'll just be another Super Fly or Trouble Man. You know, some shit about dope setting you free and getting out from under The Man. Haw har haha! Them darkies is so predictable." And that turned out to be incorrect.
What is correct is that the FBI suppressed the film and the only reason it's available today is because Dixon kept a copy of the negatives of the film himself. That leads us to a contemporary documentary that I hope you will see. The film is called Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
Blue Collar
Does the sound ring familiar? Is that the Bo Diddley rip-off by George Thorogood, "Bad to the Bone"? Is it an update take on "I'm a Man" by Diddley himself? Or did you and I crank it out one morning after being up all night playing hide the snake with Mary Jane Cocopuffs?
Naw, man, that ain't no Diddley and that ain't no Destroyers, dude. That's Captain Beefheart cussing and blowing up a storm of working class rage, probably right out of that little trailer he lived in most of his life, out in the real boondocks, the kind Billy Joe Royal never saw, that's for sure, Mister Who Dat Be.
Okay, but that little black cat. That sure look like Richard Pryor, 'cept he ain't exactly funny in this here movie, is he? I mean, you keep expecting him to crack you up, getting all animated as he does, yet he don't do that kind of thing at all. I mean, it's like he turned into an actor or something, huh?
That's right, Jive Man. The dude was an actor. Anybody doubt that fact can be said to kiss my sweet tuchis and that anybody in question sure to hell ain't spied his likes in this here movie we talking about.
Well, what is this movie, Splits? And why we watching it anyhow for?
You dumb cracker. Maybe if you stop talking like some Afro-wearing street slicker and go back to talking like the pony white wonder bread you really is, then maybe people'd start to get the idea. You think?
Alright, alright. You win. Here's your damned review. But I think we were having more fun when I was being in character.
Blue Collar (1978) is such a fantastic mix of ugly reality and beautiful friendship undone that writing a straight review almost breaks me down. But such is my task and it's the least I can do to repay director Paul Schrader for this tense and brilliant movie about three guys who work together in Detroit on the automobile line.
Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto play, respectively, Zeke, Jerry and Smoke, three guys working for Checker in Detroit. Schrader and his brother Leonard get all the details exactly right, from the heavy metal of the machines to the foiled camaraderie that comes from sweating out the foreman, the paint, the grease and the hard lifting right on down to the beer at Little Joe's across the street. Smoke's an ex-con, a two-time loser who likes the ladies and who knows the bitter taste of being rammed down every pipe in the labor shack. Jerry's wife worries a lot and his daughter needs braces that work better than the paper clips she strung together to straighten her teeth. As for Zeke, he just finished paying off the color television and now the IRS man is tapping on his door. These men live in an all too familiar state of being jammed up, a condition that most working people know well enough.
We're talking about real work here too. Real work is where you can get fired any time the foreman and union shop boss decide you aren't worth the trouble any more. Real work is when you are so beat down by the end of a shift that all you can do is anesthetize yourself with stupid sex, cheap drinks and powerful drugs. Real work is when you're locked in an internal battle between wanting to help your fellow worker and just wanting to get the hell out of here, wherever here may happen to be. Real work is when there's just no way out, legitimate or otherwise.
Zeke wants his locker fixed. He's had to pry the thing open with a pen every day for six months and it's embarrassing. He brings up his complaint at the local union meeting. The shop steward doesn't care. He tries to paint Zeke as a trifling trouble-maker. Zeke goes to the steward's boss. The boss says, "Oh my. That's just terrible. Let me make a phone call, Zeke." Nothing ever changes.
Early one morning after a drug and sex party, the three men get the idea to rob the union hall safe. There's got to be money there. After all, those union dues are just piling up.
They rob the place, only to find there's about six hundred dollars in total. Thinking themselves idiots, they divide up the loot. But Zeke keeps a ledger from the robbery. The ledger has records of illegal financial dealings between the Detroit union and certain Las Vegas individuals. Zeke wants to use the ledger to force the union to make important changes in its operations. Jerry says there must be another angle. Smoke, being an ex-con, thinks of blackmail.
Meanwhile, the union officials claim that more than $20,000 was stolen, a lie they use to rob the insurance company. When they figure out who committed the robbery, they send some bully boys to Jerry's house to rough up his wife. Smoke is waiting for them with a baseball bat.
Schrader doesn't let anybody play cheap laughs here for an instant. Neither does he allow phony sentiment to get in the way of the bloodship among these three men. For their part, the three principals reach deep inside themselves--and inside one another--to pull out an understanding of Real Work that virtually no one else has captured so well. When that friendship bond--bowling, dinners, meetings, all the modern day festivities--breaks apart like a shattered vase, we feel a genuine pain because we get a sense that bad things are going to happen once the three men are manipulated into being something other than friends.
That our prediction comes true does nothing to undermine the brilliance of this movie.
Blue Collar is not interested in liberal reform. That type of thing, the movie declares, either gets you to be a sell-out (if you're fortunate) or murdered (if you're not). It isn't asking us to rethink brotherhood or racial relations. This movie asks us to declare emotional war on the very nature of the working class experience. Every significant thing that happens in the work place is wrong. One man is told to do the work of three. The union is supposed to have your back, but having your back is often a front. When the union itself becomes big business, then there is no union. Welcome to your world, pilgrim. The whip has arrived and the scourge cuts deeply.
There's a lot to be said for the dissolution of working class friendship. As a teenager, I worked at a steakhouse restaurant, the kind of work that either prepares you for the line in an auto plant or other manufacturing hell or else scares you so bad you do whatever you have to to get into college to either beat out the military or the police. The second summer of college, my dad got me a job at Ashland Oil, the refinery where he worked. The job was straight labor. Those of us who were brought in that summer were overpaid charity cases, getting our noses dirty for premium wages the union men and women had actually earned. When I watched Blue Collar this evening, I remembered the looks on the faces of the Real Workers at that refinery. A lot of those men were lifers on their way to retirement. Some of them were twice our age with half a lifetime to go. None of them were ever going to go to college, although a lot of them hoped their kids would. These men--and a few women--cursed and drank and smoked and occasionally knocked around in friendly fights, but most of all they worked whatever shifts they could get because they had loans to pay off, taxes to file, and kids to raise. These folks were not what you'd call pretty. But they sure were beautiful.
Pryor, Keitel and Kotto, they too are beautiful. So is this movie. Watch it.
Naw, man, that ain't no Diddley and that ain't no Destroyers, dude. That's Captain Beefheart cussing and blowing up a storm of working class rage, probably right out of that little trailer he lived in most of his life, out in the real boondocks, the kind Billy Joe Royal never saw, that's for sure, Mister Who Dat Be.
Okay, but that little black cat. That sure look like Richard Pryor, 'cept he ain't exactly funny in this here movie, is he? I mean, you keep expecting him to crack you up, getting all animated as he does, yet he don't do that kind of thing at all. I mean, it's like he turned into an actor or something, huh?
That's right, Jive Man. The dude was an actor. Anybody doubt that fact can be said to kiss my sweet tuchis and that anybody in question sure to hell ain't spied his likes in this here movie we talking about.
Well, what is this movie, Splits? And why we watching it anyhow for?
You dumb cracker. Maybe if you stop talking like some Afro-wearing street slicker and go back to talking like the pony white wonder bread you really is, then maybe people'd start to get the idea. You think?
Alright, alright. You win. Here's your damned review. But I think we were having more fun when I was being in character.
Blue Collar (1978) is such a fantastic mix of ugly reality and beautiful friendship undone that writing a straight review almost breaks me down. But such is my task and it's the least I can do to repay director Paul Schrader for this tense and brilliant movie about three guys who work together in Detroit on the automobile line.
Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto play, respectively, Zeke, Jerry and Smoke, three guys working for Checker in Detroit. Schrader and his brother Leonard get all the details exactly right, from the heavy metal of the machines to the foiled camaraderie that comes from sweating out the foreman, the paint, the grease and the hard lifting right on down to the beer at Little Joe's across the street. Smoke's an ex-con, a two-time loser who likes the ladies and who knows the bitter taste of being rammed down every pipe in the labor shack. Jerry's wife worries a lot and his daughter needs braces that work better than the paper clips she strung together to straighten her teeth. As for Zeke, he just finished paying off the color television and now the IRS man is tapping on his door. These men live in an all too familiar state of being jammed up, a condition that most working people know well enough.
We're talking about real work here too. Real work is where you can get fired any time the foreman and union shop boss decide you aren't worth the trouble any more. Real work is when you are so beat down by the end of a shift that all you can do is anesthetize yourself with stupid sex, cheap drinks and powerful drugs. Real work is when you're locked in an internal battle between wanting to help your fellow worker and just wanting to get the hell out of here, wherever here may happen to be. Real work is when there's just no way out, legitimate or otherwise.
Zeke wants his locker fixed. He's had to pry the thing open with a pen every day for six months and it's embarrassing. He brings up his complaint at the local union meeting. The shop steward doesn't care. He tries to paint Zeke as a trifling trouble-maker. Zeke goes to the steward's boss. The boss says, "Oh my. That's just terrible. Let me make a phone call, Zeke." Nothing ever changes.
Early one morning after a drug and sex party, the three men get the idea to rob the union hall safe. There's got to be money there. After all, those union dues are just piling up.
They rob the place, only to find there's about six hundred dollars in total. Thinking themselves idiots, they divide up the loot. But Zeke keeps a ledger from the robbery. The ledger has records of illegal financial dealings between the Detroit union and certain Las Vegas individuals. Zeke wants to use the ledger to force the union to make important changes in its operations. Jerry says there must be another angle. Smoke, being an ex-con, thinks of blackmail.
Meanwhile, the union officials claim that more than $20,000 was stolen, a lie they use to rob the insurance company. When they figure out who committed the robbery, they send some bully boys to Jerry's house to rough up his wife. Smoke is waiting for them with a baseball bat.
Schrader doesn't let anybody play cheap laughs here for an instant. Neither does he allow phony sentiment to get in the way of the bloodship among these three men. For their part, the three principals reach deep inside themselves--and inside one another--to pull out an understanding of Real Work that virtually no one else has captured so well. When that friendship bond--bowling, dinners, meetings, all the modern day festivities--breaks apart like a shattered vase, we feel a genuine pain because we get a sense that bad things are going to happen once the three men are manipulated into being something other than friends.
That our prediction comes true does nothing to undermine the brilliance of this movie.
Blue Collar is not interested in liberal reform. That type of thing, the movie declares, either gets you to be a sell-out (if you're fortunate) or murdered (if you're not). It isn't asking us to rethink brotherhood or racial relations. This movie asks us to declare emotional war on the very nature of the working class experience. Every significant thing that happens in the work place is wrong. One man is told to do the work of three. The union is supposed to have your back, but having your back is often a front. When the union itself becomes big business, then there is no union. Welcome to your world, pilgrim. The whip has arrived and the scourge cuts deeply.
There's a lot to be said for the dissolution of working class friendship. As a teenager, I worked at a steakhouse restaurant, the kind of work that either prepares you for the line in an auto plant or other manufacturing hell or else scares you so bad you do whatever you have to to get into college to either beat out the military or the police. The second summer of college, my dad got me a job at Ashland Oil, the refinery where he worked. The job was straight labor. Those of us who were brought in that summer were overpaid charity cases, getting our noses dirty for premium wages the union men and women had actually earned. When I watched Blue Collar this evening, I remembered the looks on the faces of the Real Workers at that refinery. A lot of those men were lifers on their way to retirement. Some of them were twice our age with half a lifetime to go. None of them were ever going to go to college, although a lot of them hoped their kids would. These men--and a few women--cursed and drank and smoked and occasionally knocked around in friendly fights, but most of all they worked whatever shifts they could get because they had loans to pay off, taxes to file, and kids to raise. These folks were not what you'd call pretty. But they sure were beautiful.
Pryor, Keitel and Kotto, they too are beautiful. So is this movie. Watch it.
Little Big Man
Many of the names used to identify one or another American Indian tribes refer to those Indians as "People" or "Human Beings," just like in the Arthur Penn movie Little Big Man (1970). Alnombak means "The People." Anishinaabe means, more specifically, "Original People." Degexit'an means "People of This Land" while Dena'ina and Dunne-Za both translate as "True People." Hopi means "Civilized People," while Hinonoeino is another word for "Our People." Innu means "The People" and Lenape means the same. Dakota and Myaamie each mean "The Allies." I imagine most of you already knew this. You may not have know that Tom Jefferson favored the expression "We The People" to begin the preamble to the United States Constitution because he knew perfectly well already that the words bestowed a certain holiness synonymous with the Native Americans.
The word Cheyenne never actually meant specifically "Human Beings," but that's all right. Novelist Thomas Berger may be forgiven for this slip. He got the spirit right. And the movie version of his book is all about spirit.
Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) is a 121-year-old retiree living in an old folks home. He is also the last surviving member of the battle of Little Big Horn. Indirectly, he is the man who, throughout his recollections, destroyed General George Armstrong Custer. Again, this is not technically accurate, in the sense that the real Little Big Man had little to do with the Battle of Little Big Horn, aka the Battle of Greasy Grass, aka Custer's Last Stand, although he is reported to have participated in the murder of Crazy Horse. That too matters very little because in this version of events, Jack Crabb (Little Big Man) is a white man who was orphaned as a result of a massacre at the hands of the Pawnee, then rescued and adopted by the Cheyenne, and in particular by the chief, known as Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George). Jack has a lot of fascinating experiences which he tells for our enlightenment, such as being taken in by a mean-spirited parson and his lecherous wife, Mrs Pendrake (Faye Dunaway), hooking up with a medicine show man (Martin Balsam) who keeps losing body parts to the people in the towns where he plies his trade, joining forces as a gunfighter with Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey), and working as a muleskinner (and later as a scout) for General Custer himself (Richard Mulligan). These stretched and winding tales allow us to have some good laughs, laughs which are quickly snuffed by their real purpose, which is to show us the other side of the bullshit traditional western movie. In this brilliant recreation of the wild west, it's the Indians who are slaughtered by the white folks, in many cases for the sheer sport of doing so and in other cases because gold had been discovered on land that Congress had declared was the Indians' as long as the grass grew, the water flowed and the sky was blue.
The parallel between the genocide of the American Indian and the Vietnamese was far from coincidental. Penn quite deliberately placed women of Asian decent in the roles of Little Big Man's four wives.
If all this movie did was to inject a bit of old fashioned belly laughs to set us off guard for the horrible atrocities, it would be important to watch. If all it did was provide an alternate emphasis on the plight of the Americas, it would remain an essential artifact. What makes this one of the best movies of the 1970s is that Arthur Penn did a John Ford number on the marvelous Calder Willingham script, giving us luscious scenery that is so powerful it actually comments on the actors' thoughts and reactions. He also assembled a remarkable cast, with Hoffman doing one of his big three roles (the other two being Ratso Rizzo and Mr. Kramer). This cast just keeps on giving and although each person is given every opportunity to burlesque their characters--which happens on occasion and forty odd years later still makes us cringe--the ultimate result is a masterpiece that we come to see for laughs and end up being changed by through the abject horror that is a white man's reflection on the destruction of half his people by the other half of his people.
The word Cheyenne never actually meant specifically "Human Beings," but that's all right. Novelist Thomas Berger may be forgiven for this slip. He got the spirit right. And the movie version of his book is all about spirit.
Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) is a 121-year-old retiree living in an old folks home. He is also the last surviving member of the battle of Little Big Horn. Indirectly, he is the man who, throughout his recollections, destroyed General George Armstrong Custer. Again, this is not technically accurate, in the sense that the real Little Big Man had little to do with the Battle of Little Big Horn, aka the Battle of Greasy Grass, aka Custer's Last Stand, although he is reported to have participated in the murder of Crazy Horse. That too matters very little because in this version of events, Jack Crabb (Little Big Man) is a white man who was orphaned as a result of a massacre at the hands of the Pawnee, then rescued and adopted by the Cheyenne, and in particular by the chief, known as Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George). Jack has a lot of fascinating experiences which he tells for our enlightenment, such as being taken in by a mean-spirited parson and his lecherous wife, Mrs Pendrake (Faye Dunaway), hooking up with a medicine show man (Martin Balsam) who keeps losing body parts to the people in the towns where he plies his trade, joining forces as a gunfighter with Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey), and working as a muleskinner (and later as a scout) for General Custer himself (Richard Mulligan). These stretched and winding tales allow us to have some good laughs, laughs which are quickly snuffed by their real purpose, which is to show us the other side of the bullshit traditional western movie. In this brilliant recreation of the wild west, it's the Indians who are slaughtered by the white folks, in many cases for the sheer sport of doing so and in other cases because gold had been discovered on land that Congress had declared was the Indians' as long as the grass grew, the water flowed and the sky was blue.
The parallel between the genocide of the American Indian and the Vietnamese was far from coincidental. Penn quite deliberately placed women of Asian decent in the roles of Little Big Man's four wives.
If all this movie did was to inject a bit of old fashioned belly laughs to set us off guard for the horrible atrocities, it would be important to watch. If all it did was provide an alternate emphasis on the plight of the Americas, it would remain an essential artifact. What makes this one of the best movies of the 1970s is that Arthur Penn did a John Ford number on the marvelous Calder Willingham script, giving us luscious scenery that is so powerful it actually comments on the actors' thoughts and reactions. He also assembled a remarkable cast, with Hoffman doing one of his big three roles (the other two being Ratso Rizzo and Mr. Kramer). This cast just keeps on giving and although each person is given every opportunity to burlesque their characters--which happens on occasion and forty odd years later still makes us cringe--the ultimate result is a masterpiece that we come to see for laughs and end up being changed by through the abject horror that is a white man's reflection on the destruction of half his people by the other half of his people.
El Topo
American businessman Allen Klein died, perhaps fittingly, on July 4th, 2009, of Alzheimer's disease. If you know his name at all, you likely know it because of his actions as one-time business manager for The Rolling Stones and somewhat later for The Beatles. Klein was an amazing charlatan and ruthless adversary. He also possessed a savage, streetwise and almost Zen-like ability to charm people when he wanted, or when he sensed that certain people needed to be charmed. For instance, after buying out former manager Andrew Loog Oldham's share of the Rolling Stones, he learned that each band member held a share of a British music publishing company called Nanker Phelge. Klein set up a U.S. company with the same name and advised the Stones to sign on, which they did, unknowingly giving away the proceeds of their own recordings through 1970. Klein went on to charm no less a figure than John Lennon with his knowledge of the latter's songwriting, leading the chief Beatle to convince all but Paul McCartney to sign on with Klein. Lennon quickly changed his tune, as it were, when Klein began expressing concerns over the viability of Yoko Ono's music.
But on one point Lennon and Klein very much agreed. Both men loved the movie El Topo (1970), directed by and starring Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky. John instructed Allen to buy the rights to the film and Klein happily obliged. The movie played in the major markets for six months, invariably at either midnight or later, becoming, in its own way, the first of the so-called Midnight Movies.
Some viewers found the movie vaguely obscene because of the rivers of gore, violence, sexual perversity, and exploitation of people with deformities (for instance, in one memorable scene, we are treated to a man with no legs being carried by a man with no arms). Other people thought it was a great stoner flick, while many, including critic Gene Siskel, claimed it was a big yawn.
There remains some validity to each of these interpretations.
Controversy often sells, as does obscenity, perversion and even boredom, so Klein wanted Jodorowsky to direct the upcoming production of The Story of O. Alejandro was not interested and said as much. In spite, Klein withdrew El Topo from circulation for decades and it was not until 2005 that the film was legitimately available on DVD or otherwise.
The movie itself remains amazing, far more than an artifact of a drug-saturated era. Many people have argued over the value and sense of the film's use of symbolism--Western Christian in some regards, Eastern mystical in others--but for me that's the least interesting aspect of the movie. I don't necessarily care one way or another about the symbolism of a lamb sitting on a trap door leading to the home of one of the master gunfighters. Even the storyline--which is occasionally hilarious and somewhat more often sickening--interests me far less than the film's visual integrity, if one may use such a word.
Anyone who struggles with this film's symbolism is going to grow frustrated (the director himself said that only "tuned-in" people would get it, something that probably excludes me, among a few others) and anyone who clings to a need for dramatic plot is going to get sleepy right away. The long term interest in El Topo is, as I say, with the visuals. The movie is shot in the desert, in roughly the style of a spaghetti western. Yet anyone hoping for a satire of the conventions of Sergio Leone will suffer long. Rather than parody those conventions, Jodorowsky shoots them full of holes. "How will we survive here in the desert without water?" asks the woman Mara--named for bitter sweet agua. The Man in Black shoots the top off a monolith and out springs a geyser. One may find that amusing or not, but a film crammed to the gils with this kind of monkeyshines can be downright delightful, as long as you can get beyond the gruesome scenes of animal savagery committed against the monks by the colonel and his hyena-men.
El Topo is ultimately religious cinematic poetry. Divided into two parts, the first resembles, loosely, elements of the Old Testament, just as the second, very loosely, reflects the New.
Maybe the appeal of this movie is, as Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "a violent fantasy head-comics." Certainly the drive for self-discovery by the lead character comes across these days as corny, if not trite. Still, I suspect there's more than a little autobiographical insight, unless you think Alejandro was just trying to save money by casting himself in the lead role. Autobiographical psychoanalytical projection might also explain why Allen Klein felt so betrayed that he held onto the movie until his own son finally ordered its release.
But on one point Lennon and Klein very much agreed. Both men loved the movie El Topo (1970), directed by and starring Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky. John instructed Allen to buy the rights to the film and Klein happily obliged. The movie played in the major markets for six months, invariably at either midnight or later, becoming, in its own way, the first of the so-called Midnight Movies.
Some viewers found the movie vaguely obscene because of the rivers of gore, violence, sexual perversity, and exploitation of people with deformities (for instance, in one memorable scene, we are treated to a man with no legs being carried by a man with no arms). Other people thought it was a great stoner flick, while many, including critic Gene Siskel, claimed it was a big yawn.
There remains some validity to each of these interpretations.
Controversy often sells, as does obscenity, perversion and even boredom, so Klein wanted Jodorowsky to direct the upcoming production of The Story of O. Alejandro was not interested and said as much. In spite, Klein withdrew El Topo from circulation for decades and it was not until 2005 that the film was legitimately available on DVD or otherwise.
The movie itself remains amazing, far more than an artifact of a drug-saturated era. Many people have argued over the value and sense of the film's use of symbolism--Western Christian in some regards, Eastern mystical in others--but for me that's the least interesting aspect of the movie. I don't necessarily care one way or another about the symbolism of a lamb sitting on a trap door leading to the home of one of the master gunfighters. Even the storyline--which is occasionally hilarious and somewhat more often sickening--interests me far less than the film's visual integrity, if one may use such a word.
Anyone who struggles with this film's symbolism is going to grow frustrated (the director himself said that only "tuned-in" people would get it, something that probably excludes me, among a few others) and anyone who clings to a need for dramatic plot is going to get sleepy right away. The long term interest in El Topo is, as I say, with the visuals. The movie is shot in the desert, in roughly the style of a spaghetti western. Yet anyone hoping for a satire of the conventions of Sergio Leone will suffer long. Rather than parody those conventions, Jodorowsky shoots them full of holes. "How will we survive here in the desert without water?" asks the woman Mara--named for bitter sweet agua. The Man in Black shoots the top off a monolith and out springs a geyser. One may find that amusing or not, but a film crammed to the gils with this kind of monkeyshines can be downright delightful, as long as you can get beyond the gruesome scenes of animal savagery committed against the monks by the colonel and his hyena-men.
El Topo is ultimately religious cinematic poetry. Divided into two parts, the first resembles, loosely, elements of the Old Testament, just as the second, very loosely, reflects the New.
Maybe the appeal of this movie is, as Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "a violent fantasy head-comics." Certainly the drive for self-discovery by the lead character comes across these days as corny, if not trite. Still, I suspect there's more than a little autobiographical insight, unless you think Alejandro was just trying to save money by casting himself in the lead role. Autobiographical psychoanalytical projection might also explain why Allen Klein felt so betrayed that he held onto the movie until his own son finally ordered its release.
They Harder They Come
Some artistic accomplishments maintain their social relevance long after their moment of recognition fades into the brown mist. Placing a young man from a simple world in the midst of the corrupt urban civilization with which he aspires to achieve parity signals that a filmmaker knows how to apply history to social awareness. Such is the case with the film The Harder They Come.
Here is an excerpt from the Jamaican Observer, October 21, 2007:
"During the 1940s, when black Jamaicans were, for the most part, living in abject poverty and squalid conditions, and the colonial master ruled with an iron fist, gunmen were a rarity. But out of those social conditions rose the first and perhaps the most infamous of the long list of fugitives who have wreaked havoc on the country. His name was Vincent 'Ivanhoe' Martin, popularly known as 'Rhygin', dubbed by the press as 'The Two-Gun Killer'."
The character played and sung by Jimmy Cliff is the 1972 contemporary Ivan Martin, a violent rudeboy who sure can sing and write some great reggae. That term? Nice, isn't it? A rudeboy was a guy or gal in Jamaica, inspired by the furtive thrill of delinquency, influenced by the stylistic accouterments of juke joints, soul music and gangster movies, and seriously hooked on primarily ska or even rock steady, or if it makes it easier for you to grok, reggae music, which evolved from the one and gave birth to the other.
In any event!
So Ivan is now in what we presume to be Kingston, a town where he just can't catch a break. All his possessions are swiped minutes after he gets off the bus, he tries to connect with the preacher's concubine only to have a run-in with the man of God and one of his stooges, and to make matters worse, the Leslie Kong-style record company owner dude records his title-track song and tells him he'll give him twenty dollars for the rights, suggesting that the DJs only play what he tells them to play and without his good word the record will go nowhere, baby. (Actually, this statement is unfair to Kong, who may not have exactly been a sweetheart of a guy but who to this day remains the most recognizable name in the 1970s reggae business and for good reason. The association this film has with Kong, a Chinese Jamaican, is one linked to Jimmy Cliff having been recorded by Kong in the early 1960s and to the fact that the producer in the film is also Chinese Jamaican, although in the film the producer is not Kong but most likely one of his sound men.) After he chops up the stooge and settles with the music man, Ivan turns to dealing grass to get what's his, choosing not to wait for that pie up in the sky.
One of the tragic aspects of The Harder They Come is that Jimmy Cliff as Ivan sings the hell out of the title song, ironic components intact, as well as "Many Rivers to Cross" and "You Can Get It If You Really Want," a fact not lost upon we viewers as we sympathize with his awareness that he is entitled to the fame and fortune he so furiously desires. (The rest of the film soundtrack is also excellent, especially the songs by Toots and the Maytals. They do "Pressure Drop" off and on throughout the film.) But we know he is doomed, as does he, until he turns to violent crime. Frustrated by getting ratted out by his drug buddy Jose, he offs the dude's woman and some cops, starts stealing cars for his getaways, and generally throws around his weight, even taking the step of having some excellent gangster photographs snapped and sent to the editor of a newspaper. Everyone he meets, except his girlfriend and his grandmother, are completely corrupt: the preacher, the newspaper editor, the photographer, the policemen, the entertainment people. In such a world, only an honest man can be an outlaw.
The real Ivanhoe Martin of the 1030s and 40s came to a bloody end, but before he did, he wrote a letter to the Jamaican Timesnewspaper: "I have an arsenal of 29 shots and I am satisfied that I have made history for the criminal element in Jamaica. Don't think that I am going to kill myself because this will only serve to spoil my great record. But I hope that Detective Scott will train his men some more. I am going to show the police force what is lacking and what I can do."
So many things could have derailed the artistic achievement of this film, but the primary potential for disaster would have been for writer-director Perry Henzell to attempt commentary. On the morality of Ivan's behavior Henzell is thankfully silent. There is an almost documentary quality to the film, although the scenes of Cliff riding his bicycle against the backdrop of the water are too poignant for that style of photography. The only scene where Henzell slips into glorification is one where that tone is inevitable, and that is where Ivan decides to have the photos made of himself posing like John Dillinger, something the original Ivanhoe did and far too tempting an idea for a fine filmmaker to resist. But, yes, otherwise Henzell lets the camera and mics do the talking and we find ourselves horrified at some of Ivan's cruelty, despite sympathizing with his hardships and desires. This type of emotional involvement is exactly what great 1970s film-making was about, or at least it was a big part of what it was about, as people the world over raised their voices to demand answers to the serious questions about the value of morality in a world where legitimate governments murdered their own people, where police forces stood behind broken badges, where mothers and fathers celebrated the destruction of their own children. "When policemen break the law," Billy Jack said, "Then there isn't any law." Tom Laughlin's character was no rudie and he certainly would not have condoned Ivan's behavior. But he would have understood it. By the ending credits of The Harder They Come, we do as well.
Here is an excerpt from the Jamaican Observer, October 21, 2007:
"During the 1940s, when black Jamaicans were, for the most part, living in abject poverty and squalid conditions, and the colonial master ruled with an iron fist, gunmen were a rarity. But out of those social conditions rose the first and perhaps the most infamous of the long list of fugitives who have wreaked havoc on the country. His name was Vincent 'Ivanhoe' Martin, popularly known as 'Rhygin', dubbed by the press as 'The Two-Gun Killer'."
The character played and sung by Jimmy Cliff is the 1972 contemporary Ivan Martin, a violent rudeboy who sure can sing and write some great reggae. That term? Nice, isn't it? A rudeboy was a guy or gal in Jamaica, inspired by the furtive thrill of delinquency, influenced by the stylistic accouterments of juke joints, soul music and gangster movies, and seriously hooked on primarily ska or even rock steady, or if it makes it easier for you to grok, reggae music, which evolved from the one and gave birth to the other.
In any event!
So Ivan is now in what we presume to be Kingston, a town where he just can't catch a break. All his possessions are swiped minutes after he gets off the bus, he tries to connect with the preacher's concubine only to have a run-in with the man of God and one of his stooges, and to make matters worse, the Leslie Kong-style record company owner dude records his title-track song and tells him he'll give him twenty dollars for the rights, suggesting that the DJs only play what he tells them to play and without his good word the record will go nowhere, baby. (Actually, this statement is unfair to Kong, who may not have exactly been a sweetheart of a guy but who to this day remains the most recognizable name in the 1970s reggae business and for good reason. The association this film has with Kong, a Chinese Jamaican, is one linked to Jimmy Cliff having been recorded by Kong in the early 1960s and to the fact that the producer in the film is also Chinese Jamaican, although in the film the producer is not Kong but most likely one of his sound men.) After he chops up the stooge and settles with the music man, Ivan turns to dealing grass to get what's his, choosing not to wait for that pie up in the sky.
One of the tragic aspects of The Harder They Come is that Jimmy Cliff as Ivan sings the hell out of the title song, ironic components intact, as well as "Many Rivers to Cross" and "You Can Get It If You Really Want," a fact not lost upon we viewers as we sympathize with his awareness that he is entitled to the fame and fortune he so furiously desires. (The rest of the film soundtrack is also excellent, especially the songs by Toots and the Maytals. They do "Pressure Drop" off and on throughout the film.) But we know he is doomed, as does he, until he turns to violent crime. Frustrated by getting ratted out by his drug buddy Jose, he offs the dude's woman and some cops, starts stealing cars for his getaways, and generally throws around his weight, even taking the step of having some excellent gangster photographs snapped and sent to the editor of a newspaper. Everyone he meets, except his girlfriend and his grandmother, are completely corrupt: the preacher, the newspaper editor, the photographer, the policemen, the entertainment people. In such a world, only an honest man can be an outlaw.
The real Ivanhoe Martin of the 1030s and 40s came to a bloody end, but before he did, he wrote a letter to the Jamaican Timesnewspaper: "I have an arsenal of 29 shots and I am satisfied that I have made history for the criminal element in Jamaica. Don't think that I am going to kill myself because this will only serve to spoil my great record. But I hope that Detective Scott will train his men some more. I am going to show the police force what is lacking and what I can do."
So many things could have derailed the artistic achievement of this film, but the primary potential for disaster would have been for writer-director Perry Henzell to attempt commentary. On the morality of Ivan's behavior Henzell is thankfully silent. There is an almost documentary quality to the film, although the scenes of Cliff riding his bicycle against the backdrop of the water are too poignant for that style of photography. The only scene where Henzell slips into glorification is one where that tone is inevitable, and that is where Ivan decides to have the photos made of himself posing like John Dillinger, something the original Ivanhoe did and far too tempting an idea for a fine filmmaker to resist. But, yes, otherwise Henzell lets the camera and mics do the talking and we find ourselves horrified at some of Ivan's cruelty, despite sympathizing with his hardships and desires. This type of emotional involvement is exactly what great 1970s film-making was about, or at least it was a big part of what it was about, as people the world over raised their voices to demand answers to the serious questions about the value of morality in a world where legitimate governments murdered their own people, where police forces stood behind broken badges, where mothers and fathers celebrated the destruction of their own children. "When policemen break the law," Billy Jack said, "Then there isn't any law." Tom Laughlin's character was no rudie and he certainly would not have condoned Ivan's behavior. But he would have understood it. By the ending credits of The Harder They Come, we do as well.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
From an article by Dr. Alan F. Philips, from the Project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation:
On October 24, 1973, when the U.N. sponsored cease fire intended to end the Arab-Israeli war was in force, further fighting stared between Egyptian and Israeli troops in the Sinai desert. U.S. intelligence reports and other sources suggested that the U.S.S.R. was planning to intervene to protect the Egyptians. President Nixon was in the throes of Watergate episode and not available for a conference, so Kissinger and other U.S. officials ordered DEFCON 3 [Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON 5 is the peacetime state; DEFCON 1 is a maximum war readiness).] . The consequent movements of aircraft and troops were of course observed by Soviet intelligence. The purpose of the alert was not to prepare for war, but to warn the U.S.S.R. not to intervene in the Sinai. However, if the following accident had not been promptly corrected then the Soviet command might have had a more dangerous interpretation. On October 25, while DEFCON 3 was in force, mechanics were repairing one of the Klaxons at Kinchole Air Force Base, Michigan, and accidentally activated the whole base alarm system. B-52 crews rushed to their aircraft and started the engines. The duty officer recognized the alarm was false and recalled the crews before any took off.
That paragraph neatly sums up the feeling of what things were like in 1973 far better than the Andrea Killen book 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, although the latter does have its value, despite the hyperbolic title. The United States, the Soviet Union, Israel, Egypt and Syria were all about to blow one another away, each for different reasons, while just a few months earlier, in June of that year, audiences across America were treated to a Bostonian version of the same thing, albeit, on a microcosmic scale.
Peter Yates directed The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a film in which Robert Mitchum as the title character could have represented, say Israel, while the gun dealing Jackie Brown might have been Syria, with Egypt played with masterful skill by the always dependable and disturbed Peter Boyle, and the role of the ATF cop, naturally, filled by the USA. The way the characters in this movie move Coyle around the table is excessively heartless, calculated and ultimately without purpose, just as in real life. Now I am not suggesting that Yates gave any thought whatsoever to the geopolitical symbolism I'm assigning to his film. After all, the novel upon which the movie was based was published in 1970 and the events described in the opening block quote had not happened at the time of this motion picture's release. What I am suggesting is that events do sometimes breathe together to create what I'll reluctantly call a zeitgeist, one which in both the instance of the film and the Middle East found everyone making deals with their enemies and using one another in the final analysis for no other practical purpose than to assure his destruction.
Eddie Coyle got popped for heisting a delivery truck for Dillon, the Boyle character. Facing the offer of a long prison term for which he has no use, Coyle decides to rat out a gun dealer--and easily the coolest guy in the film--in exchange for a complimentary phone call from the ATF guy. The deal goes down and so does the gun dealer, but the court wants Eddie to turn professional, full-time snitch. Eddie recognizes this is a death sentence, but he gives in anyway, turning over some friends who have been pulling some very clever bank robberies in the area (so clever that they were stolen for use in a subsequent film called Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry). It turns out the ATF guys don't need Eddie for this after all, but the robbers assume Eddie is the snitch and order Dillon to snuff him. Dillon, of course, is already working for the ATF guy and the mob, so we aren't sure what he'll do until he actually does it.
The truth is that the geopolitical implications, the personal betrayals and the long hard drop of the highly sympathetic Coyle would not merit holding this film in the public consciousness were it not for the acting skills of the participants, particularly Mitchum. Lesser talents, such as John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone owe most of their "trademark" moves from Mitchum and the latter in particular should admit the debt. I would even go so far as to say that I'd be willing to bet that the other actors in this movie learned something about understating their deliveries from Bob. In any other context, a line like, "April fool, motherfuckers," would sound ridiculous. Here, it makes you want to cry as you see how each layer of development is just one more layer of Eddie Coyle going down.
Eddie has played the cards he's been dealt. He hasn't played them as well as they could have been played, true, but he has played them as well as he knew how. We learned his story right away when he explains to the gun dealer that some bad guys smashed his hand in a drawer. "The worst part is you know he's gonna kick that drawer shut. You know it's gonna hurt and it hurts you before it even happens." And God damn Sam, the gun dealer actually thinks about this. He reacts with sudden sympathy. The feeling is quick and gets replaced with other emotions, but it's there and we see it.
These people are fascinating, the story holds your attention throughout, somebody even brought Mo Greene in from Vegas to rob the banks, and even the car wrecks are understated so that there isn't one gratuitous instant in the entire film. When you watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle, you may think of one nation or another, you may think of your old neighborhood, or you may simply imagine the tired horror of Eddie's life. The point is that you will be thinking and feeling at the same time. How many movies lately have had that going for them?
On October 24, 1973, when the U.N. sponsored cease fire intended to end the Arab-Israeli war was in force, further fighting stared between Egyptian and Israeli troops in the Sinai desert. U.S. intelligence reports and other sources suggested that the U.S.S.R. was planning to intervene to protect the Egyptians. President Nixon was in the throes of Watergate episode and not available for a conference, so Kissinger and other U.S. officials ordered DEFCON 3 [Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON 5 is the peacetime state; DEFCON 1 is a maximum war readiness).] . The consequent movements of aircraft and troops were of course observed by Soviet intelligence. The purpose of the alert was not to prepare for war, but to warn the U.S.S.R. not to intervene in the Sinai. However, if the following accident had not been promptly corrected then the Soviet command might have had a more dangerous interpretation. On October 25, while DEFCON 3 was in force, mechanics were repairing one of the Klaxons at Kinchole Air Force Base, Michigan, and accidentally activated the whole base alarm system. B-52 crews rushed to their aircraft and started the engines. The duty officer recognized the alarm was false and recalled the crews before any took off.
That paragraph neatly sums up the feeling of what things were like in 1973 far better than the Andrea Killen book 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, although the latter does have its value, despite the hyperbolic title. The United States, the Soviet Union, Israel, Egypt and Syria were all about to blow one another away, each for different reasons, while just a few months earlier, in June of that year, audiences across America were treated to a Bostonian version of the same thing, albeit, on a microcosmic scale.
Peter Yates directed The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a film in which Robert Mitchum as the title character could have represented, say Israel, while the gun dealing Jackie Brown might have been Syria, with Egypt played with masterful skill by the always dependable and disturbed Peter Boyle, and the role of the ATF cop, naturally, filled by the USA. The way the characters in this movie move Coyle around the table is excessively heartless, calculated and ultimately without purpose, just as in real life. Now I am not suggesting that Yates gave any thought whatsoever to the geopolitical symbolism I'm assigning to his film. After all, the novel upon which the movie was based was published in 1970 and the events described in the opening block quote had not happened at the time of this motion picture's release. What I am suggesting is that events do sometimes breathe together to create what I'll reluctantly call a zeitgeist, one which in both the instance of the film and the Middle East found everyone making deals with their enemies and using one another in the final analysis for no other practical purpose than to assure his destruction.
Eddie Coyle got popped for heisting a delivery truck for Dillon, the Boyle character. Facing the offer of a long prison term for which he has no use, Coyle decides to rat out a gun dealer--and easily the coolest guy in the film--in exchange for a complimentary phone call from the ATF guy. The deal goes down and so does the gun dealer, but the court wants Eddie to turn professional, full-time snitch. Eddie recognizes this is a death sentence, but he gives in anyway, turning over some friends who have been pulling some very clever bank robberies in the area (so clever that they were stolen for use in a subsequent film called Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry). It turns out the ATF guys don't need Eddie for this after all, but the robbers assume Eddie is the snitch and order Dillon to snuff him. Dillon, of course, is already working for the ATF guy and the mob, so we aren't sure what he'll do until he actually does it.
The truth is that the geopolitical implications, the personal betrayals and the long hard drop of the highly sympathetic Coyle would not merit holding this film in the public consciousness were it not for the acting skills of the participants, particularly Mitchum. Lesser talents, such as John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone owe most of their "trademark" moves from Mitchum and the latter in particular should admit the debt. I would even go so far as to say that I'd be willing to bet that the other actors in this movie learned something about understating their deliveries from Bob. In any other context, a line like, "April fool, motherfuckers," would sound ridiculous. Here, it makes you want to cry as you see how each layer of development is just one more layer of Eddie Coyle going down.
Eddie has played the cards he's been dealt. He hasn't played them as well as they could have been played, true, but he has played them as well as he knew how. We learned his story right away when he explains to the gun dealer that some bad guys smashed his hand in a drawer. "The worst part is you know he's gonna kick that drawer shut. You know it's gonna hurt and it hurts you before it even happens." And God damn Sam, the gun dealer actually thinks about this. He reacts with sudden sympathy. The feeling is quick and gets replaced with other emotions, but it's there and we see it.
These people are fascinating, the story holds your attention throughout, somebody even brought Mo Greene in from Vegas to rob the banks, and even the car wrecks are understated so that there isn't one gratuitous instant in the entire film. When you watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle, you may think of one nation or another, you may think of your old neighborhood, or you may simply imagine the tired horror of Eddie's life. The point is that you will be thinking and feeling at the same time. How many movies lately have had that going for them?
Sisters
Many people have bought into the idea that Brian DePalma is a comedic film-maker. New Yorker film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael started this rumor in writing about--of all things--DePalma's filmCarrie. While I agree that the man's motion pictures have their humorous touches, I can't help thinking that speaking of DePalma as a comedic movie-maker is like claiming Charlie Chaplin as a great tragedian. It might be technically correct, but it so misses the point that whoever says it loses a certain credibility, at least with people such as myself, unaccustomed to literal-ism in any form as we are. I'll grant the opposing side the humor in the first five minutes of Blow Out, the parody of Antonioni in Greetings, the fast motion tuxedo scene inCarrie, the murder clean-up segment in Sisters and even the title of Hi, Mom! But DePalma, like his influences, is not primarily any one kind of a film-maker at all, unless frequently brilliant is a new classification.
As the above concessionary examples indicate, Brian DePalma is capable of making audiences laugh, although he typically evokes this visceral response in the midst of some wicked camera work alongside a mess of other emotional complexities. Sisters, released in 1973 and generally considered his breakout film, exploits influences from Tod Browning to Alfred Hitchcock (and it is a long journey from Freaks toRear Window) while announcing the new director as the master of the split-screen scene. The difficulty in doing the split-screen technique is in resolving the dissonance created in the viewer's mind once the viewer is reminded by what he sees on the screen that this is a motion picture. Flashy technical tricks such as revolving shots, long continuous follow-throughs, multiple-perspective imagery and that type of thing generally announces to the audience: Hey! This is a movie! Good luck suspending your disbelief! But the sophistication DePalma brings to Sisters--a sophistication which the passage of almost forty years has done nothing to diminish--instead declares that we are in the presence of a master and had best behave ourselves if we want to get out alive.
Even DePalma's superior use of visual techniques
could be challenged as purely self-serving were it not that they add unspoken commentary to the story. Sisters, the story of Danielle and Dominique, severed Siamese twins, utilizes all of the aforementioned techniques, as well as a scene with English subtitles for a French-spoken sequence where the speaker(s) is off-camera and the dual role is segregated into regular font and italics.
The director's recurring themes are well established in this film. We have the presumed freakish nature of the asylum, the lack of personality in the early victim, multiple personalities in the villains, hard-boiled policemen, human neuroses, multi-dimensional voyerism, and, yes, satire. Sisters is so rife with satire that the film comes close to becoming a self-parody. Early on, we watch a scene where a man is in a room. A woman enters. She appears to be blind. Unaware that the man is in the room, she begins to disrobe. The camera reveals the set-up to be a TV game show where the contestants must predict the man's behavior, just as the theatrical viewing audience does throughout the film that is in process. This type of varicolored psychological work-out makes the large cinema screen a monster in and of itself, a hyperactive iguana that slams its images into us because we are taught from the opening instants that we cannot trust the things we see, just as Jennifer Salt cannot trust what she sees Margot Kidder do. (The rumor is that DePamla, who was a neighbor of roommates Kidder and Salt, gave the women a copy of the script as a Christmas present.)
None of this should be taken to suggest that the morality of the film will parallel that of the viewer. Indeed, there are touches of very vile attitudes in many of DePalma's films, and Sisters is no exception. What are we to make, after all, of the presentation of police as rational cynics, of women as sexualized victims, of people with mental problems as evolutionarily lower than the rest of humanity, of "freaks" being fit for the ridicule they receive? I have never known quite what to make of these things, probably because I have never thought of myself as fitting into any of those categories and chances are I have a lot of gall defending people who don't need me to speak up for them. But if the answer to my question is as simple as saying the director is trying to lull us into hating the victim, how then do we explain the scene near the end of Sisters of the photographers taking pictures of the twins? The scene is staged to the sympathy of the conjoined girls and to the revulsion of the circus-attendees, so whose side are we to be on? Is the film-maker presenting all the different points of view or is he himself simply noncommittal?
It is possible that DePalma never resolved these questions for himself or that he may have tired of asking them over and over. In later years he turned his formidable talents toward thrillers such as Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, Redacted (all of which having much to recommend about them, each in its own way being something more than mere "entertainment"), as well as the soon-to-be-released Passion. He makes movies, they do well, and we move on. But I hope I may be forgiven for missing the conflicting moralities of his pre-Scarface work, when he took the sensibilities and budget of an American International picture and imbued those same movies with the awareness of a genuine auteur and the presence of a giant laughing iguana on speed.
As the above concessionary examples indicate, Brian DePalma is capable of making audiences laugh, although he typically evokes this visceral response in the midst of some wicked camera work alongside a mess of other emotional complexities. Sisters, released in 1973 and generally considered his breakout film, exploits influences from Tod Browning to Alfred Hitchcock (and it is a long journey from Freaks toRear Window) while announcing the new director as the master of the split-screen scene. The difficulty in doing the split-screen technique is in resolving the dissonance created in the viewer's mind once the viewer is reminded by what he sees on the screen that this is a motion picture. Flashy technical tricks such as revolving shots, long continuous follow-throughs, multiple-perspective imagery and that type of thing generally announces to the audience: Hey! This is a movie! Good luck suspending your disbelief! But the sophistication DePalma brings to Sisters--a sophistication which the passage of almost forty years has done nothing to diminish--instead declares that we are in the presence of a master and had best behave ourselves if we want to get out alive.
Even DePalma's superior use of visual techniques
could be challenged as purely self-serving were it not that they add unspoken commentary to the story. Sisters, the story of Danielle and Dominique, severed Siamese twins, utilizes all of the aforementioned techniques, as well as a scene with English subtitles for a French-spoken sequence where the speaker(s) is off-camera and the dual role is segregated into regular font and italics.
The director's recurring themes are well established in this film. We have the presumed freakish nature of the asylum, the lack of personality in the early victim, multiple personalities in the villains, hard-boiled policemen, human neuroses, multi-dimensional voyerism, and, yes, satire. Sisters is so rife with satire that the film comes close to becoming a self-parody. Early on, we watch a scene where a man is in a room. A woman enters. She appears to be blind. Unaware that the man is in the room, she begins to disrobe. The camera reveals the set-up to be a TV game show where the contestants must predict the man's behavior, just as the theatrical viewing audience does throughout the film that is in process. This type of varicolored psychological work-out makes the large cinema screen a monster in and of itself, a hyperactive iguana that slams its images into us because we are taught from the opening instants that we cannot trust the things we see, just as Jennifer Salt cannot trust what she sees Margot Kidder do. (The rumor is that DePamla, who was a neighbor of roommates Kidder and Salt, gave the women a copy of the script as a Christmas present.)
None of this should be taken to suggest that the morality of the film will parallel that of the viewer. Indeed, there are touches of very vile attitudes in many of DePalma's films, and Sisters is no exception. What are we to make, after all, of the presentation of police as rational cynics, of women as sexualized victims, of people with mental problems as evolutionarily lower than the rest of humanity, of "freaks" being fit for the ridicule they receive? I have never known quite what to make of these things, probably because I have never thought of myself as fitting into any of those categories and chances are I have a lot of gall defending people who don't need me to speak up for them. But if the answer to my question is as simple as saying the director is trying to lull us into hating the victim, how then do we explain the scene near the end of Sisters of the photographers taking pictures of the twins? The scene is staged to the sympathy of the conjoined girls and to the revulsion of the circus-attendees, so whose side are we to be on? Is the film-maker presenting all the different points of view or is he himself simply noncommittal?
It is possible that DePalma never resolved these questions for himself or that he may have tired of asking them over and over. In later years he turned his formidable talents toward thrillers such as Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, Redacted (all of which having much to recommend about them, each in its own way being something more than mere "entertainment"), as well as the soon-to-be-released Passion. He makes movies, they do well, and we move on. But I hope I may be forgiven for missing the conflicting moralities of his pre-Scarface work, when he took the sensibilities and budget of an American International picture and imbued those same movies with the awareness of a genuine auteur and the presence of a giant laughing iguana on speed.
American Graffiti
American Graffiti is the film that made the reputation of George Lucas. The film's narrative style of sliding from one scene into the next with recurring images and concepts loosely uniting the vignetted story of one night in Modesto--one night before the world of the teenager seeps into that of the adult--has never been done better. The film also went a long way towards dispelling the idiotic notion that the kids of pre-JFK assassination American were naive and simple-mindedly idealistic when what they really wanted were the same things kids have always wanted: the get messed up, to get laid, and to drive around cruising all night. Oh, and some of us wanted to stay alive. If that's idealistic, then go fuck a tree.
What's really most memorable about the movie is the thoroughly brilliant soundtrack selection, some of the tunes being total crap and the majority being perfectly suited for the 1962 night the film purports to recreate. This is a soundtrack in the most essential sense of the term because the music does not merely accompany the movie; it is interwoven into the movie, which is the only way to endure a bit of dross like "16 Candles" right alongside a genuine treasure such as "Little Runaway."
So it's a beautiful film, it gets the details exactly right, it's edited so that we never get tired of the characters or their interactions, the music is great, and the tragic elements are not only explicit, they are even implied. Oh, and the acting was incredible, featuring as it did the best work ever of Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, as well as some first-rate work by Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfus. So what's not to love?
The film was in many ways a turning point. By 1971, two years before this film's release, everyone in Hollywood with any awareness at all recognized that the three big up and coming dudes in movie work were Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Just as a new band of actors had taken over the entertainment industry and just as new ways of financing and distributing films was coming down, so was the new style of director. Lucas took three-quarters of a million dollars of Coppola's money and made a film that grossed more than 115 million. That's a hell of a return. That type of return doesn't happen today, despite all the Avatars, Batmen, and Harry Palmed Pottery flicks. So, again, what's the problem?
Lucas used the money from American Graffiti to help finance Star Wars, which a lot of people have liked, even though this writer has stubbornly made a point of never having watched either the original or any of the follow-up product. But, hey, science fiction benefited from Lucas and that's a good thing, yes?
Well, yes, of course. My only problem with any of this stuff is that here's George Lucas, a talented guy by any standards, one with tremendous vision and a dedication to making films that change people's lives. And how did he go about this? He went about this by taking the best inspiration from the experimental and daring directors of his time and commercializing those elements while adding fresh ideas of his own and channeling the whole thing through a prism that insisted that MOVIES THAT THREATEN TO ROCK THE SOCIAL SYSTEM SHOULD NOT BE MADE. Lucas has said that he was tired of movies that made Americans feel guilty. Okay. There's certainly no national guilt in Graffiti, no more than in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Escapism has its place and there's nothing specifically inappropriate about it, as any fan of "Seinfeld" will tell you. However, within the context of what was going on around him, it would have been downright inspirational if both Lucas and Spielberg had directed their indisputable brilliance into something a tad more worthy than CARS, for God's sake!
What I'm actually saying here is a little unfair since I've always insisted that it is wrong to criticize an artist for failing to do something that he didn't set out to do. At the same time, I feel completely justified in criticizing Lucas for what he set out to do. His movies suffer, when they suffer at all, from being safe. There is nothing controversial aboutAmerican Graffiti. Hell, even a curmudgeon such as myself praises the fucking thing, even though it's less social relevant than a film Pauline Kael properly referred to as a "fascist masterpiece," that film beingDirty Harry, a movie that at least had the courage of its convictions, twisted convictions that they were. Eastwood's character co-opted the anti-hero, gave him a badge and made him the strong man amid a sea of twinkies. Lucas took a time-piece where American kids were being fattened up for the slaughter and made it no more significant than a drag race.
Where were you in '62? was the movie's tagline. Me, I was four years old. But here's what was really happening.
The Navy SEALS came into existence.
Fidel Castro was kicked out of the Catholic church.
A military coup rocks the Dominican Republic.
Francis Gary Powers is released from Russia.
The first K-Mart store opens, as does the first Wal-Mart.
Project Mercury orbits the earth.
Eichmann is hanged.
Three men escape from Alcatraz.
The SDS formulate the Port Huron Statement.
Mandatory school prayer is properly banned.
Marilyn Monroe dies.
James Meredith becomes the first black student to enter the University of Mississippi.
We have the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize.
These things are all pretty important, important enough that even a messed-up kid with triple hormones cruising around in his hot rod in Modesto might even be aware of some of them. The deepest thought these kids have is whether or not surf music will catch on.
In the final analysis, Lucas' film remains more quaint than the period of time he sought to encapsulate.
What's really most memorable about the movie is the thoroughly brilliant soundtrack selection, some of the tunes being total crap and the majority being perfectly suited for the 1962 night the film purports to recreate. This is a soundtrack in the most essential sense of the term because the music does not merely accompany the movie; it is interwoven into the movie, which is the only way to endure a bit of dross like "16 Candles" right alongside a genuine treasure such as "Little Runaway."
So it's a beautiful film, it gets the details exactly right, it's edited so that we never get tired of the characters or their interactions, the music is great, and the tragic elements are not only explicit, they are even implied. Oh, and the acting was incredible, featuring as it did the best work ever of Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, as well as some first-rate work by Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfus. So what's not to love?
The film was in many ways a turning point. By 1971, two years before this film's release, everyone in Hollywood with any awareness at all recognized that the three big up and coming dudes in movie work were Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Just as a new band of actors had taken over the entertainment industry and just as new ways of financing and distributing films was coming down, so was the new style of director. Lucas took three-quarters of a million dollars of Coppola's money and made a film that grossed more than 115 million. That's a hell of a return. That type of return doesn't happen today, despite all the Avatars, Batmen, and Harry Palmed Pottery flicks. So, again, what's the problem?
Lucas used the money from American Graffiti to help finance Star Wars, which a lot of people have liked, even though this writer has stubbornly made a point of never having watched either the original or any of the follow-up product. But, hey, science fiction benefited from Lucas and that's a good thing, yes?
Well, yes, of course. My only problem with any of this stuff is that here's George Lucas, a talented guy by any standards, one with tremendous vision and a dedication to making films that change people's lives. And how did he go about this? He went about this by taking the best inspiration from the experimental and daring directors of his time and commercializing those elements while adding fresh ideas of his own and channeling the whole thing through a prism that insisted that MOVIES THAT THREATEN TO ROCK THE SOCIAL SYSTEM SHOULD NOT BE MADE. Lucas has said that he was tired of movies that made Americans feel guilty. Okay. There's certainly no national guilt in Graffiti, no more than in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Escapism has its place and there's nothing specifically inappropriate about it, as any fan of "Seinfeld" will tell you. However, within the context of what was going on around him, it would have been downright inspirational if both Lucas and Spielberg had directed their indisputable brilliance into something a tad more worthy than CARS, for God's sake!
What I'm actually saying here is a little unfair since I've always insisted that it is wrong to criticize an artist for failing to do something that he didn't set out to do. At the same time, I feel completely justified in criticizing Lucas for what he set out to do. His movies suffer, when they suffer at all, from being safe. There is nothing controversial aboutAmerican Graffiti. Hell, even a curmudgeon such as myself praises the fucking thing, even though it's less social relevant than a film Pauline Kael properly referred to as a "fascist masterpiece," that film beingDirty Harry, a movie that at least had the courage of its convictions, twisted convictions that they were. Eastwood's character co-opted the anti-hero, gave him a badge and made him the strong man amid a sea of twinkies. Lucas took a time-piece where American kids were being fattened up for the slaughter and made it no more significant than a drag race.
Where were you in '62? was the movie's tagline. Me, I was four years old. But here's what was really happening.
The Navy SEALS came into existence.
Fidel Castro was kicked out of the Catholic church.
A military coup rocks the Dominican Republic.
Francis Gary Powers is released from Russia.
The first K-Mart store opens, as does the first Wal-Mart.
Project Mercury orbits the earth.
Eichmann is hanged.
Three men escape from Alcatraz.
The SDS formulate the Port Huron Statement.
Mandatory school prayer is properly banned.
Marilyn Monroe dies.
James Meredith becomes the first black student to enter the University of Mississippi.
We have the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize.
These things are all pretty important, important enough that even a messed-up kid with triple hormones cruising around in his hot rod in Modesto might even be aware of some of them. The deepest thought these kids have is whether or not surf music will catch on.
In the final analysis, Lucas' film remains more quaint than the period of time he sought to encapsulate.
Scarecrow
With all the well-deserved brouhaha about the auteur director in the early 1970s, some of the people often overlooked in the cinematic process of this period are those to whom a previous generation turned for their inspiration: the players. This occasional oversight is endemic, of course, because it was with the enlightenment of this period that the classical attributes of an actor pulled back in favor of the ability to be interesting instead. Two distinctions in particular came to a head, one becoming quite clear, the other remarkably blurred.
Perhaps the clearest distinction in the enlightenment that Hollywood believed had engulfed the ticketed audience was that between actors and movie stars. The distinction that with some grace thankfully blurred was between actors and actresses.
As in previous years, all poodles were dogs, yet not all dogs were poodles. A movie star was no longer by necessity considered to be an actor, although the overlap did still occur. But if it were classic good looks that were sought, audiences quickly learned to adjust their dials as to exactly what was beautiful. And what was interesting is what became the new standard: Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, Paul Sorveno, Stacey Keach, Dustin Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle, Elliott Gould, John Cazale, Ned Beatty, Roscoe Lee Browne, Gene Hackman, Bernie Casey, Jack Lemmon, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and John Belushi could all hold their own against the pretty boy actors such as Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Melvin Van Peebles, Jeff Bridges, William Devane and Warren Beatty, to name the first ones to come to mind. Even these latter pretty-boys held an interest beyond their good looks because they did and said things that film stars of an earlier time did not, except maybe Robert Mitchum, who had the respectability of getting busted for grass.
Just as fascinating was the blur between men and women, one which resulted, at least for a while, in both genders being thought of as actors. This didn't happened because of a political movement. This happened because the women involved worked very, very hard to achieve parity. The political movement may have given this hard work a name. The hard work is what accomplished it.
Some of the greatest women actors who made their initial dance into the whirlwind of brilliance in the 1970s were Jane Fonda (Klute), Liza Minnelli (Cabaret), Mia Bendixsen (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), Faye Dunaway (Network), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Ali MacGraw (The Getaway), Julie Christie (Shampoo), Diana Ross (Lady Sings the Blues), Diahann Carroll, Margaux Hemingway, Jill Clayburgh, Goldie Hawn, Isabelle Adjani, Brooke Shields (Pretty Baby), Shelley Duvall (Brewtser McCloud), Linda Blair, Glenda Jackson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver), Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon), Pam Grier (Coffy), Meryl Streep, Gena Rowlands, Lily Tomlin (The Late Show), Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Senta Bergerm Jenny Agutter, Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces), Dyan Cannon, Carole Kane (The Last Detail), Susan Sarandon, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton (The Godfather) and, yes, at long last, Eileen Brennan.
Mother of God, you talk about hard working! Eileen Brennan is the hardest working woman in show business and has been such since her short-lived stint on TV's "Laugh-In" back in 1968. Some of you will recognize her from the recruitment film Private Benjamin (she played Captain Lewis), while others may know her work as Zandra from the TV series "Will and Grace." I guarantee you know her from somewhere, be it The Sting, Reckless, Texasville, Rented Lips, Sticky Fingers, or the more than one hundred television appearances she has made.
One of her best performances was a brief one in a 1973 film calledScarecrow. As was common in those days, she played an attractive, feisty woman of some complexity and, as was also common, she played against a pair of guys who overshadowed her only because their talent was so magnificent, certainly due to no lack of ability on the part of Brennan herself. She simply made the error of being a great actor in a film with a pair of young geniuses, in this case Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Chances are you are less familiar with Scarecrow than you are with Eileen. I hope that by the end of this piece, you will be motivated to watch for both.
Scarecrow is the story of two men who are down but not quite out. Max, played by Hackman, is fresh out of the joint on a six year stretch. Lionel (Pacino) is fresh out of the Navy where he spent the last five years. The world has changed in their absence and because of that Max has developed a plan to which he is determined not to waver. Lionel, on the other hand, wants to make people laugh. He is a good-natured clown and watching the man prove that is one of the treats of this movie, as is Hackman's character's eventual transformation. This movie is about the beauty of the road, the horrible price exacted by vengeance, the stupidity and absolute necessity of being tough, and it is also an opportunity to watch some of the most exciting actors of all time strut their stuff. Eileen Brennan is only on camera here for a few brief minutes. I guarantee you won't forget her.
Perhaps the clearest distinction in the enlightenment that Hollywood believed had engulfed the ticketed audience was that between actors and movie stars. The distinction that with some grace thankfully blurred was between actors and actresses.
As in previous years, all poodles were dogs, yet not all dogs were poodles. A movie star was no longer by necessity considered to be an actor, although the overlap did still occur. But if it were classic good looks that were sought, audiences quickly learned to adjust their dials as to exactly what was beautiful. And what was interesting is what became the new standard: Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, Paul Sorveno, Stacey Keach, Dustin Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle, Elliott Gould, John Cazale, Ned Beatty, Roscoe Lee Browne, Gene Hackman, Bernie Casey, Jack Lemmon, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and John Belushi could all hold their own against the pretty boy actors such as Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Melvin Van Peebles, Jeff Bridges, William Devane and Warren Beatty, to name the first ones to come to mind. Even these latter pretty-boys held an interest beyond their good looks because they did and said things that film stars of an earlier time did not, except maybe Robert Mitchum, who had the respectability of getting busted for grass.
Just as fascinating was the blur between men and women, one which resulted, at least for a while, in both genders being thought of as actors. This didn't happened because of a political movement. This happened because the women involved worked very, very hard to achieve parity. The political movement may have given this hard work a name. The hard work is what accomplished it.
Some of the greatest women actors who made their initial dance into the whirlwind of brilliance in the 1970s were Jane Fonda (Klute), Liza Minnelli (Cabaret), Mia Bendixsen (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), Faye Dunaway (Network), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Ali MacGraw (The Getaway), Julie Christie (Shampoo), Diana Ross (Lady Sings the Blues), Diahann Carroll, Margaux Hemingway, Jill Clayburgh, Goldie Hawn, Isabelle Adjani, Brooke Shields (Pretty Baby), Shelley Duvall (Brewtser McCloud), Linda Blair, Glenda Jackson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver), Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon), Pam Grier (Coffy), Meryl Streep, Gena Rowlands, Lily Tomlin (The Late Show), Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Senta Bergerm Jenny Agutter, Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces), Dyan Cannon, Carole Kane (The Last Detail), Susan Sarandon, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton (The Godfather) and, yes, at long last, Eileen Brennan.
Mother of God, you talk about hard working! Eileen Brennan is the hardest working woman in show business and has been such since her short-lived stint on TV's "Laugh-In" back in 1968. Some of you will recognize her from the recruitment film Private Benjamin (she played Captain Lewis), while others may know her work as Zandra from the TV series "Will and Grace." I guarantee you know her from somewhere, be it The Sting, Reckless, Texasville, Rented Lips, Sticky Fingers, or the more than one hundred television appearances she has made.
One of her best performances was a brief one in a 1973 film calledScarecrow. As was common in those days, she played an attractive, feisty woman of some complexity and, as was also common, she played against a pair of guys who overshadowed her only because their talent was so magnificent, certainly due to no lack of ability on the part of Brennan herself. She simply made the error of being a great actor in a film with a pair of young geniuses, in this case Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Chances are you are less familiar with Scarecrow than you are with Eileen. I hope that by the end of this piece, you will be motivated to watch for both.
Scarecrow is the story of two men who are down but not quite out. Max, played by Hackman, is fresh out of the joint on a six year stretch. Lionel (Pacino) is fresh out of the Navy where he spent the last five years. The world has changed in their absence and because of that Max has developed a plan to which he is determined not to waver. Lionel, on the other hand, wants to make people laugh. He is a good-natured clown and watching the man prove that is one of the treats of this movie, as is Hackman's character's eventual transformation. This movie is about the beauty of the road, the horrible price exacted by vengeance, the stupidity and absolute necessity of being tough, and it is also an opportunity to watch some of the most exciting actors of all time strut their stuff. Eileen Brennan is only on camera here for a few brief minutes. I guarantee you won't forget her.
Hitler: The Last Ten Days
If you took the Velvet Underground, mixed them with the Marquis de Sade, laced them with Lord Byron, stirred in some Idi Amin, blended it up with the more closeted aspects of 19th century English bourgeois sophistication and added the party cast from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you still would not approximate the extreme decadence of Adolf Hitler and company during their last hurrah in the infamous bunker just before the Third Reich was crushed by the Allies. Strangled up inside due to massive doses of amphetamines and hose cement, the Fuhrer and his party of Captain Hoffman, General Krebs, Hanna Reitsch, Eva Braun, Josef Goebbels, Martin Bormann and the others all coalesced in a suicide party of degenerate, absurd, psychotic, racist, delusional, cruel and jolly activities that sharply contrasted with the holocaust and world war raging on above them.
The 1973 film, Hitler: The Last Ten Days, is about this time in the bunker with Adolf, although we are given the occasional relief from the claustrophobic enclave with brief shots of the masses shouting "Zeig Heil!" and with the uninterred bodies of the Reich's millions of victims and as such it would seem that this was an important movie to be made as well as to view.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Alec Guinness gives us an Adolf Hitler with all the deranged intensity we've come to expect and Simon Ward does fine as Captain Hoffman, the man whose notes became the book that became the Ennio De Concini screenplay. Diane Cilenta (aka Mrs. Sean Connery) scares the hell out of us as Hanna Reitsch and Doris Kunstmann as Eva Braun is satisfactorily pathetic. We get a strong sense of the humored confusion these people exercise as Hitler barks out one psychotic order after another and at one point even admits that he knew Germany was defeated two years before it actually happened. No, the acting is fine, the staging is adequate, the claustrophobia works, the horror of the evil comes across as intended.
The problem with De Concini's movie--he also directed--is that there is no character development and hence the decomposition of those characters becomes ultimately meaningless.
I'm going to just sit here patiently until you come up with what's bothering you about that last sentence. Take your time.
Aha! It was Hitler! you scream. We all know about him so there wasn't any need for character development and besides the movie was almost two hours long as it was.
Actually this film was sorely in need of character development because whether or not one possesses the historical knowledge to grasp the complexities of these people, because this really is a movie and because the audience cannot help but be aware of that--as opposed to something that is happening in "real time," stock footage of Hitler's victims is somehow inadequate to forming an appreciation for the magnitude of the man's degeneracy.
Here was a man who took corporate backing, who came to power under the auspices of democracy, and who was nothing more or less than a failed artist of moderate intelligence, and he made himself into the most profligate mass murderer of all time. Here was a man who embraced cruelty for its own sake, a man many thought of as a messiah, and a man whose name is synonymous with evil, and his devolution during the last ten days of his life has no historic context whatsoever because we are given no motivation for the actions of the Soviets and the Americans, just as we cannot understand the lust Hitler's admirers had for him.
Whether through the use of flashbacks, dream sequences or masturbatory fantasies, this film needs some means of establishing who these people were so that we can properly despise them for what they have become. After all, if "I am he as you are he as you are me" really is true--as I believe it is--then the so-called defeat of the Axis forces by the Allies led inevitably to the transmogrifying of the Allies into the Axis, a theme frequent readers of Philropost have endured ad infinitum. It therefore behooves us all to understand the nature of this evil in order to diagnose and remove it from our own systems, both personal and public.
What this movie does get right, however, is our sense of disgust at the unimaginable hypocrisy of these German bastards. We very much get it when, near the end, Hitler marries Braun and the cleric who performs the cloistered ceremony is required by German law to ask Hitler if his ancestry is pure and if he has contracted any social diseases. Here is a bunker full of people who dismissed as bourgeois--as in "petty" bourgeois--notions of marriage and other middle class conventions giving into those demands once it is apparent to even the dumbest among them that the end is near. In other words, certain aspects of this film are very effective despite the entirety of the movie being a failure due to the lack of dimensions to the characters. And that's too bad because this is exactly the kind of subject the our contemporary society--with its plethora of parasites ranging from Gingrich to Koch to Romney to Paul and the fetus-worshipping Santorum all vying to be the next Adolf in the sense of luring corporate backers and then taking them over--needs to learn about so we can fathom the present stench of evil the Newts and Mitts spew forth. Hitler: The Last Ten Days should have been that film. That it was not opens the opportunity for you to make your own.
The 1973 film, Hitler: The Last Ten Days, is about this time in the bunker with Adolf, although we are given the occasional relief from the claustrophobic enclave with brief shots of the masses shouting "Zeig Heil!" and with the uninterred bodies of the Reich's millions of victims and as such it would seem that this was an important movie to be made as well as to view.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Alec Guinness gives us an Adolf Hitler with all the deranged intensity we've come to expect and Simon Ward does fine as Captain Hoffman, the man whose notes became the book that became the Ennio De Concini screenplay. Diane Cilenta (aka Mrs. Sean Connery) scares the hell out of us as Hanna Reitsch and Doris Kunstmann as Eva Braun is satisfactorily pathetic. We get a strong sense of the humored confusion these people exercise as Hitler barks out one psychotic order after another and at one point even admits that he knew Germany was defeated two years before it actually happened. No, the acting is fine, the staging is adequate, the claustrophobia works, the horror of the evil comes across as intended.
The problem with De Concini's movie--he also directed--is that there is no character development and hence the decomposition of those characters becomes ultimately meaningless.
I'm going to just sit here patiently until you come up with what's bothering you about that last sentence. Take your time.
Aha! It was Hitler! you scream. We all know about him so there wasn't any need for character development and besides the movie was almost two hours long as it was.
Actually this film was sorely in need of character development because whether or not one possesses the historical knowledge to grasp the complexities of these people, because this really is a movie and because the audience cannot help but be aware of that--as opposed to something that is happening in "real time," stock footage of Hitler's victims is somehow inadequate to forming an appreciation for the magnitude of the man's degeneracy.
Here was a man who took corporate backing, who came to power under the auspices of democracy, and who was nothing more or less than a failed artist of moderate intelligence, and he made himself into the most profligate mass murderer of all time. Here was a man who embraced cruelty for its own sake, a man many thought of as a messiah, and a man whose name is synonymous with evil, and his devolution during the last ten days of his life has no historic context whatsoever because we are given no motivation for the actions of the Soviets and the Americans, just as we cannot understand the lust Hitler's admirers had for him.
Whether through the use of flashbacks, dream sequences or masturbatory fantasies, this film needs some means of establishing who these people were so that we can properly despise them for what they have become. After all, if "I am he as you are he as you are me" really is true--as I believe it is--then the so-called defeat of the Axis forces by the Allies led inevitably to the transmogrifying of the Allies into the Axis, a theme frequent readers of Philropost have endured ad infinitum. It therefore behooves us all to understand the nature of this evil in order to diagnose and remove it from our own systems, both personal and public.
What this movie does get right, however, is our sense of disgust at the unimaginable hypocrisy of these German bastards. We very much get it when, near the end, Hitler marries Braun and the cleric who performs the cloistered ceremony is required by German law to ask Hitler if his ancestry is pure and if he has contracted any social diseases. Here is a bunker full of people who dismissed as bourgeois--as in "petty" bourgeois--notions of marriage and other middle class conventions giving into those demands once it is apparent to even the dumbest among them that the end is near. In other words, certain aspects of this film are very effective despite the entirety of the movie being a failure due to the lack of dimensions to the characters. And that's too bad because this is exactly the kind of subject the our contemporary society--with its plethora of parasites ranging from Gingrich to Koch to Romney to Paul and the fetus-worshipping Santorum all vying to be the next Adolf in the sense of luring corporate backers and then taking them over--needs to learn about so we can fathom the present stench of evil the Newts and Mitts spew forth. Hitler: The Last Ten Days should have been that film. That it was not opens the opportunity for you to make your own.
F is For Fake
In 1969, a young writer named Clifford Irving wrote a book published by McGraw-Hill entitled Fake: The Story of Elmyr de Hory: The Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. The story was phenomenal, recounting the life and times of the man with sixty names who supposedly could reproduce paintings by anyone--and do it before lunch. While monumentally versatile, his specialties included Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Renoir. A story goes that he presented Picasso with a forged painting and asked the artist if he remembered painting it. "Oh, yes. I wondered whatever happened to that!" His work was so good he could even fool the subject of his falsification.
The following year, Clifford Irving, who had written Elmyr's biography, contacted his publishers to let them see handwritten letters from Howard Hughes that authorized Irving to assist with the rich recluse's autobiography. A team of handwriting experts in the hire of the publisher declared the letters genuine. The writing process began and in January 1971 the book was released, startling the public with stories about a man with nine inch fingernails and hair to the floor.
What happened next came as something more than a mere shock. A man purporting to be Hughes contacted some friends in the news media and on live TV decried the book to be a pack of lies, the letters of authorization to be forgeries and his association with Mr. Irving to be nonexistent.
But that could not be, screamed the lawyers for McGraw-Hill. They had deposited three-quarters of a million dollars into a Swiss bank account under the name H. R. Hughes as payment to the subject for release of his story. What the publisher did not know at the time was that Edith Irving--wife of said story forger--had opened a bank account in Switzerland under the name H. R. Hughes. Whoops.
Enter Orson Welles, a man who got his own start in radio with a faked resume, one which got him into a position with John Houseman to co-create the Mercury Theater, a company in whose employ he did involve himself in the creation of a radio broadcast of another Mr. Well's works, this one called "War of the Worlds," transplanted as it was in this broadcast to the jungles of the state of New Jersey. Orson Welles, the man who would go on to star in and direct Citizen Kane--that Orson Wells--the Orson Welles of The Third Man and F for Fake, among hundreds more--in 1974 released a movie about Clifford Irving writing a book about Elmyr. In other words, we had the third greatest charlatan of modern times filming a movie about a man who, as the second greatest charlatan, wrote a book about the all-time greatest charlatan. The mathematical possibilities alone were staggering. With Welles brilliance with a camera and a brain, the possibilities for fun were indeed endless.
I feel a bit uncomfortable using the word "greatest" so much in one sentence because, as a much brighter man than I--I think it was the Chamber of Commerce--once said, "Art is not a competition." Of course, having given that matter a bit of thought, I see that art is very much a competition in the sense that artists consume platitudes and flattery the way a fat man with a red nose consumes wine: thirstily.
The following year, Clifford Irving, who had written Elmyr's biography, contacted his publishers to let them see handwritten letters from Howard Hughes that authorized Irving to assist with the rich recluse's autobiography. A team of handwriting experts in the hire of the publisher declared the letters genuine. The writing process began and in January 1971 the book was released, startling the public with stories about a man with nine inch fingernails and hair to the floor.
What happened next came as something more than a mere shock. A man purporting to be Hughes contacted some friends in the news media and on live TV decried the book to be a pack of lies, the letters of authorization to be forgeries and his association with Mr. Irving to be nonexistent.
But that could not be, screamed the lawyers for McGraw-Hill. They had deposited three-quarters of a million dollars into a Swiss bank account under the name H. R. Hughes as payment to the subject for release of his story. What the publisher did not know at the time was that Edith Irving--wife of said story forger--had opened a bank account in Switzerland under the name H. R. Hughes. Whoops.
Enter Orson Welles, a man who got his own start in radio with a faked resume, one which got him into a position with John Houseman to co-create the Mercury Theater, a company in whose employ he did involve himself in the creation of a radio broadcast of another Mr. Well's works, this one called "War of the Worlds," transplanted as it was in this broadcast to the jungles of the state of New Jersey. Orson Welles, the man who would go on to star in and direct Citizen Kane--that Orson Wells--the Orson Welles of The Third Man and F for Fake, among hundreds more--in 1974 released a movie about Clifford Irving writing a book about Elmyr. In other words, we had the third greatest charlatan of modern times filming a movie about a man who, as the second greatest charlatan, wrote a book about the all-time greatest charlatan. The mathematical possibilities alone were staggering. With Welles brilliance with a camera and a brain, the possibilities for fun were indeed endless.
I feel a bit uncomfortable using the word "greatest" so much in one sentence because, as a much brighter man than I--I think it was the Chamber of Commerce--once said, "Art is not a competition." Of course, having given that matter a bit of thought, I see that art is very much a competition in the sense that artists consume platitudes and flattery the way a fat man with a red nose consumes wine: thirstily.
Regardless of the official ranking of the frauds involved in the telling of the film F for Fake, it must be admitted that one of the requirements for a great film--if perhaps not the greatest--is a brilliant concept. One may chock it all up to coincidence that Welles, Irving and Elmyr all gathered in Mallorca at the same time and seem quite cosy in one another's company. This is, after all, a film about coincidence, which can be understood to be just another word for trickery.
In this movie, Welles performs all types of magic--another word for coincidence--from making a key disappear to popping coins out of a child's head, from interviewing Joseph Cotten to making his long-time girlfriend Oja Kodar disappear, presumably so he could hang out with the throng of female sycophants who appear unable to disgorge themselves from Welles and the other glorious frauds.
In and of itself, this film does not make sense. Within the historic context of 1969-1973 it still does not make sense. In retrospect or hindsight, the film makes even less sense than it did upon release. And that does not matter at all. Perhaps what the viewer--then and now--must decide is a definition of entertainment. Back at the end of December in this blog I quoted Sean Penn as stating that "If you want entertainment, get two hookers and an eight ball." Within the context of the conversation he was having with James Lipton, the actor went on to say that generally speaking there are two types of entertainment: diversion and engagement. This seems prescient. At a time within the human epoch when the value of something can be called into question because of dueling experts, at a time when creationism is purported to have as much validity as evolution and is merely competing with it in the so-called marketplace of ideas (in which case agoraphobia, or "fear of the marketplace," feels an appropriate reaction), and at a time when the nature of objective reality can be pursed out with a wild collection of lights on a computer screen, or movie screen, or cave wall, then it is possible to look upon the work of Internet people and understand that SOPA, PIPL, and Google's new rules all indicate a huge lack of understanding of what the world wide web is all about. That, or they just don't give a damn.
Welles made his movie. I watched his movie. I then wrote these words about his movie. You read my words about his movie and were inspired to do something else, something that as of this writing has not logically happened yet but which undoubtedly will. That, friends and family, is the Internet. An artist creates something he thinks of as art. He produces that thing and publishes its likeness upon the Internet, just as someone utilized YouTube to carry the film called F for Fake. Is that an infringement of intellectual property? I would say no and here is why I say that: The Internet has changed the concepts of larceny just as Irving changed them, except in a more multi-dimensional way. When something appears on the Internet and is experienced by others, those others are not necessarily stealing it when they copy it--and I can say this in spite of the fact that copying it may in fact reduce the income of the corporation that claims to own the rights to the original material. The act of redistributing the work in question is called file sharing for a reason. It is sharing a file. The person who put the thing on the Internet knew there was a good chance this would happen, just as the person who made the original work knew there was no reliable way to prevent forgeries of his work. That's right. The production of the film we are discussing which I watched again last night was a forgery. It was not the original. It was a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, although it takes a very discerning eye and ear to tell the difference and ultimately made no difference to me in terms of my enjoyment of the experience, one which was tremendously engaging rather than distracting in the sense of some crap on television. Once the greedy bastards in the entertainment industry introduced compact discs and DVDs, they were consciously and deliberately opening themselves--and by extension their artists--to forgery, to pirating, to theft and impersonation.
None of that should be taken to mean that I support the idea of ripping off the artists. I do not. What I do mean is that in my opinion, ripping off means you charge someone else for something that you had no hand in creating. Yep. That's it. If the free and uncharged reproduction of an artist's work is given in good faith to someone via the Internet, that is not larceny because the reproducer and transplanter does not gain monetarily.
What has this to do with F for Fake? One might as well ask what the movie has to do with itself. If you are looking for a clear story here, you will be disappointed. If you are instead seeking some beautiful cinematography, some startling images of Welles and friends, some fascinating trickery, then this is a film--or a reasonable facsimile of one--that you will treasure forever.
In this movie, Welles performs all types of magic--another word for coincidence--from making a key disappear to popping coins out of a child's head, from interviewing Joseph Cotten to making his long-time girlfriend Oja Kodar disappear, presumably so he could hang out with the throng of female sycophants who appear unable to disgorge themselves from Welles and the other glorious frauds.
In and of itself, this film does not make sense. Within the historic context of 1969-1973 it still does not make sense. In retrospect or hindsight, the film makes even less sense than it did upon release. And that does not matter at all. Perhaps what the viewer--then and now--must decide is a definition of entertainment. Back at the end of December in this blog I quoted Sean Penn as stating that "If you want entertainment, get two hookers and an eight ball." Within the context of the conversation he was having with James Lipton, the actor went on to say that generally speaking there are two types of entertainment: diversion and engagement. This seems prescient. At a time within the human epoch when the value of something can be called into question because of dueling experts, at a time when creationism is purported to have as much validity as evolution and is merely competing with it in the so-called marketplace of ideas (in which case agoraphobia, or "fear of the marketplace," feels an appropriate reaction), and at a time when the nature of objective reality can be pursed out with a wild collection of lights on a computer screen, or movie screen, or cave wall, then it is possible to look upon the work of Internet people and understand that SOPA, PIPL, and Google's new rules all indicate a huge lack of understanding of what the world wide web is all about. That, or they just don't give a damn.
Welles made his movie. I watched his movie. I then wrote these words about his movie. You read my words about his movie and were inspired to do something else, something that as of this writing has not logically happened yet but which undoubtedly will. That, friends and family, is the Internet. An artist creates something he thinks of as art. He produces that thing and publishes its likeness upon the Internet, just as someone utilized YouTube to carry the film called F for Fake. Is that an infringement of intellectual property? I would say no and here is why I say that: The Internet has changed the concepts of larceny just as Irving changed them, except in a more multi-dimensional way. When something appears on the Internet and is experienced by others, those others are not necessarily stealing it when they copy it--and I can say this in spite of the fact that copying it may in fact reduce the income of the corporation that claims to own the rights to the original material. The act of redistributing the work in question is called file sharing for a reason. It is sharing a file. The person who put the thing on the Internet knew there was a good chance this would happen, just as the person who made the original work knew there was no reliable way to prevent forgeries of his work. That's right. The production of the film we are discussing which I watched again last night was a forgery. It was not the original. It was a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, although it takes a very discerning eye and ear to tell the difference and ultimately made no difference to me in terms of my enjoyment of the experience, one which was tremendously engaging rather than distracting in the sense of some crap on television. Once the greedy bastards in the entertainment industry introduced compact discs and DVDs, they were consciously and deliberately opening themselves--and by extension their artists--to forgery, to pirating, to theft and impersonation.
None of that should be taken to mean that I support the idea of ripping off the artists. I do not. What I do mean is that in my opinion, ripping off means you charge someone else for something that you had no hand in creating. Yep. That's it. If the free and uncharged reproduction of an artist's work is given in good faith to someone via the Internet, that is not larceny because the reproducer and transplanter does not gain monetarily.
What has this to do with F for Fake? One might as well ask what the movie has to do with itself. If you are looking for a clear story here, you will be disappointed. If you are instead seeking some beautiful cinematography, some startling images of Welles and friends, some fascinating trickery, then this is a film--or a reasonable facsimile of one--that you will treasure forever.
Five Easy Pieces
Bob Rafelson's beautiful Five Easy Pieces holds up as well as any picture released in 1970. What there is of a story is timeless, I suppose, but again we find that the new breed had a way of doing things that simply shattered previous preconceptions about how the world works. This movie was not Liz and Dick with Paul thrown into the mix just to complicate matters. On the contrary, this was Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea, a gifted pianist who rejects the ultimately insubstantial upper-class life that afforded him the means to become aware enough to shun that very lifestyle. Instead, he takes up with a waitress--we always love a waitress, don't we, guys?--named Rayette, played famously by Karen Black, one of the most self-aware actors of the Seventies. Bobby wanders from oil rig to oil rig, bowling alley to bedroom, swagger to swoon, all in search of the nothingness that refused to elude him back home. Informed that his father is fading fast, he returns home, first without bringing Rayette into the main house and along the way encountering some folks who are so human it hurts. Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil (later of "Mickey" fame) are a pair of coupled lesbians looking to move to Alaska where things are clean. Along the way, Bobby, Rayette and these two stop into a restaurant, the scene from which of one of the most famous in all cinema.
Bobby Dupea's predicament rings true, not just to folks who have had trouble getting what they want in a truck stop diner, but with a country too stupid to make things easy on itself.
President: What is it you want, son?
Student: I want us the hell out of Vietnam.
President: Sorry, son. I can't do that.
Student: Why not?
President: It would make us look weak. Then every tyrant in the world would try to invade us.
Student: Okay. Here's what you do. You pull out all the troops and you tell the rest of the world that the reason you're doing that is so you can drop a nuclear bomb on the country without endangering any Americans.
President: I like your thinking, but--
Student: Then you just never quite get around to dropping it.
A young Carole Eastman, writing under the name Adrien Joyce, worked with Rafelson on the screenplay. This was an excellent pairing and has as much to do with the artistic success as the acting. Eastman wrote the script in such a way as to liberate the actors rather than tie them down. With so much talent around her, she understood--as did Rafelson, who knew Nicholson from Head--that the best thing to do was to focus on behavior rather than story. Putting people ahead of plot is risky unless the people are exceptionally interesting and played by actors who understand how to free themselves up inside so as to capture the essence of the character without worrying too much about nuance. Nicholson and Black dance through this film as if they instinctively understand that their gifts have been liberated by a benevolent system and the interaction between the two slaps at the heart again and again.
But let's not kid ourselves. This is Jack Nicholson's show from start to finish. Stuck in traffic, barking back at a dog, banging Sally Struthers, besting Ralph Waite at pig pong, being taken in by Catherine (Susan Anspach), or defending Rayette against the aggression of intellectualism--Wouldn't you love to hear Pat Benatar sing "Stop using your brain as a weapon"?--Nicholson mesmerizes even as we sense his final descent, a scene you will not like but which you will recognize as entirely appropriate.
President: What is it you want, son?
Student: I want us the hell out of Vietnam.
President: Sorry, son. I can't do that.
Student: Why not?
President: It would make us look weak. Then every tyrant in the world would try to invade us.
Student: Okay. Here's what you do. You pull out all the troops and you tell the rest of the world that the reason you're doing that is so you can drop a nuclear bomb on the country without endangering any Americans.
President: I like your thinking, but--
Student: Then you just never quite get around to dropping it.
A young Carole Eastman, writing under the name Adrien Joyce, worked with Rafelson on the screenplay. This was an excellent pairing and has as much to do with the artistic success as the acting. Eastman wrote the script in such a way as to liberate the actors rather than tie them down. With so much talent around her, she understood--as did Rafelson, who knew Nicholson from Head--that the best thing to do was to focus on behavior rather than story. Putting people ahead of plot is risky unless the people are exceptionally interesting and played by actors who understand how to free themselves up inside so as to capture the essence of the character without worrying too much about nuance. Nicholson and Black dance through this film as if they instinctively understand that their gifts have been liberated by a benevolent system and the interaction between the two slaps at the heart again and again.
But let's not kid ourselves. This is Jack Nicholson's show from start to finish. Stuck in traffic, barking back at a dog, banging Sally Struthers, besting Ralph Waite at pig pong, being taken in by Catherine (Susan Anspach), or defending Rayette against the aggression of intellectualism--Wouldn't you love to hear Pat Benatar sing "Stop using your brain as a weapon"?--Nicholson mesmerizes even as we sense his final descent, a scene you will not like but which you will recognize as entirely appropriate.
The Parallax View
If you even partially resemble the average sentient earthling-type humanoid, you have two functioning eyeballs. If so, you give one of those two vision receptacles some degree of preference or domination over the other. There's no meaningful connection between one's right-or-left-handedness and the domination of one eye over the other. Yet two-thirds of us are right-eye dominant, while the rest of us (especially those with Williams-Beuren Syndrome) favor the majestic left eye. Neither eye tends to be completely ignored when we are looking at things, a fact that accounts for our evident ability to perceive objects in three-dimensions. Yet you may have observed that when someone is learning to, say, parallel park, or perhaps has not done so recently, he or she will involuntarily close the recessive eye so as to "more precisely" evaluate the scene and thereby not crash into the vehicle behind the rear bumper. A good test for ocular dominance is to extend an arm and point your thumb skyward while covering one eye completely. When you uncover the eye, if the thumb appears to move, the dominant orb is the other eye. This "coming together" of perceptions is a very simple example of the parallax view, a phenomenon which can be defined as the apparent displacement in the apparent position of an object (in this case, the thumb) viewed along two different lines of sight (in this case, the two eyeballs). In this definition, I have chosen to italicize the word apparent because, from an epistemological perspective, we might be forgiven for wondering if the object in question really exists at all, or whether the object has been placed where it is to fool us, or perhaps whether we ourselves are being looked back at by the object. Even from a somewhat less philosophical vantage, anyone who has ever begun walking toward a mountain which appears to be only a mile or two off in the distance and which, as it turns out, gets imperceptibly larger even as we walk more than fifty miles in its direction will know what this apparent displacement feels like to aching feet.
(Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek--sort of the Theodor Adorno of our time--wrote a book a few years back in which he discusses the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. Anyone who enjoys rethinking dialectical materialism, Marx Brothers movies, or dirty jokes would be well-advised to order a copy from MIT Press.)
In 1974, movie director Alan J. Pakula released the second installment of his so-called Paranoid Political Trilogy. Starring Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss and William Daniels, The Parallax View, despite a marked absence of character development, makes a worthy attempt at recreating the essence of how the processes of our perceptions are manipulated in the furtherance of economic gain. Joseph Frady is a sharp and tricky reporter for a third-rate newspaper who was among those nearby a political assassination at the Seattle Space Needle. His ex-girlfriend (wife?) comes to him three years later because she is convinced that she will be murdered because of something she witnessed that terrible day. She does not know what it is that she witnessed that would make her a threat to the conspirators. All she knows is that six of the eighteen people present have died under suspicious circumstances, any one of which could be explained away, but which, taken together, suggest something nefarious at work. Frady rebuffs her. She dies. Frady is now convinced something wicked this way comes. He heads out to a small town called Salmontail, where he encounters a redneck deputy whose ass he duly kicks, a wily sheriff who tries to kill him, and a secret box containing paper applications for a Los Angeles-based company called Parallax. We get a quick look at the questionnaire and observe disquieting statements that the applicant is expected to react to, such as:
(Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek--sort of the Theodor Adorno of our time--wrote a book a few years back in which he discusses the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. Anyone who enjoys rethinking dialectical materialism, Marx Brothers movies, or dirty jokes would be well-advised to order a copy from MIT Press.)
In 1974, movie director Alan J. Pakula released the second installment of his so-called Paranoid Political Trilogy. Starring Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss and William Daniels, The Parallax View, despite a marked absence of character development, makes a worthy attempt at recreating the essence of how the processes of our perceptions are manipulated in the furtherance of economic gain. Joseph Frady is a sharp and tricky reporter for a third-rate newspaper who was among those nearby a political assassination at the Seattle Space Needle. His ex-girlfriend (wife?) comes to him three years later because she is convinced that she will be murdered because of something she witnessed that terrible day. She does not know what it is that she witnessed that would make her a threat to the conspirators. All she knows is that six of the eighteen people present have died under suspicious circumstances, any one of which could be explained away, but which, taken together, suggest something nefarious at work. Frady rebuffs her. She dies. Frady is now convinced something wicked this way comes. He heads out to a small town called Salmontail, where he encounters a redneck deputy whose ass he duly kicks, a wily sheriff who tries to kill him, and a secret box containing paper applications for a Los Angeles-based company called Parallax. We get a quick look at the questionnaire and observe disquieting statements that the applicant is expected to react to, such as:
- I am a healthy person.
- I like high places.
- I am often frightened when I wake up in the middle of the night.
- The person who [sic] I most admired as a child was a woman.
- Sometimes strange men follow me.
- I am never embarrassed.
- I have never vomited blood.
- I know who is responsible for my problems.
- Sometimes a little thing will run through my mind for days and days.
- I would like to be an actor.
The images come at us--and Frady--in such a way that a kind of psychological manipulation takes place, compelling us to respond honestly, despite any attempts at concealment. This is relevant because later on, when the reporter is framed and killed as an assassin, we may decide to suspect that the Parallax people knew right away that he was faking it.
Indeed, the levels of obfuscation that The Parallax View employs whispers to us that the distance between what we think we know and the truth is a far piece of space. As with physics and astronomy, one can use this displacement to quantify reality, such as the distance between stars or the orbits of planets. In this instance, the reality is political assassination and how it has been trivialized into the misguided actions of the omnipresent "lone nut." John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Alberta Williams King, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Leo Ryan, Judge John H. Wood, Bill Gwatney, Medgar Evers, Lee Oswald, George Lincoln Rockwell, Fred Hampton, Marcus Foster, Anna Mae Aquash, Don Bolles, Orlando Letelier, Alan Berg, Alex Odeh, Huey Newton, David Gunn, John Britton, George Tiller--it is comforting to share the media-controlled illusion that these men and women were slain by unaffiliated and singular individuals who were acting alone. That way our obsession with proving our national character to be supreme is unimpeded by any type of rational thinking. The mere fact that it is conceivable that even one of these people was murdered as the result of a for-profit operation at the behest of the highest-bidding secret agency means that our national character is a sham we have bought and sold to ourselves, a fact the rest of the world has known about us for decades. If forces within our system are willing to overthrow foreign governments and pay for the extermination of foreign leaders, why would those same forces hesitate to assassinate their domestic enemies? Patriotism? Good God, there is no patriotism in economics. Read any macro or micro economics textbook you can find and I defy you to locate a chapter that encourages the reader to forego that house in Southampton because of loyalty to country or government. The real force, of course, is within the nature of power itself. The name of the economic system is completely irrelevant today. What matters is the fact of those who are able to coerce, mandate, persuade or impel others to do something outside their own interests and the willingness of the few to exercise that power. Because good assassins tend to be expensive and are not especially trustworthy if and when they are apprehended, the forces that actually run things have chosen to buy and control the six (five, four, three?) media conglomerates and to use those outlets to "politically" assassinate their opponents in ways far more egregious than with a train of bullets from a high-powered rifle.
The movie itself troubles us even today. The acting is unremarkable and might as well have been telegraphed in. The pacing is occasionally without purpose. And Pakula should have known better than to have contrived some of the ways his characters moved in and out of scenes. But there is an underlying sinister metabolism boiling this pot, one which keeps the viewer believing he or she knows what's happening, only to realize three seconds later that the "truth" of this movie is as elusive as in the real world. The extended and visually sophisticated scene of the Senator near the end of the movie is worthy of a blend of Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, with images of Washington turning into Jefferson, into Lincoln into Teddy Roosevelt into the Senator, fronted in an auditorium with tables clothed in red, white and blue, tables into which the shot-and-killed Senator slams as his cart mindlessly deposits him among the sterility of his own demise. So forget character development. That's for kids. This is a grown-up movie for world travelers. A beautiful adventure in a world made ugly.
Indeed, the levels of obfuscation that The Parallax View employs whispers to us that the distance between what we think we know and the truth is a far piece of space. As with physics and astronomy, one can use this displacement to quantify reality, such as the distance between stars or the orbits of planets. In this instance, the reality is political assassination and how it has been trivialized into the misguided actions of the omnipresent "lone nut." John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Alberta Williams King, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Leo Ryan, Judge John H. Wood, Bill Gwatney, Medgar Evers, Lee Oswald, George Lincoln Rockwell, Fred Hampton, Marcus Foster, Anna Mae Aquash, Don Bolles, Orlando Letelier, Alan Berg, Alex Odeh, Huey Newton, David Gunn, John Britton, George Tiller--it is comforting to share the media-controlled illusion that these men and women were slain by unaffiliated and singular individuals who were acting alone. That way our obsession with proving our national character to be supreme is unimpeded by any type of rational thinking. The mere fact that it is conceivable that even one of these people was murdered as the result of a for-profit operation at the behest of the highest-bidding secret agency means that our national character is a sham we have bought and sold to ourselves, a fact the rest of the world has known about us for decades. If forces within our system are willing to overthrow foreign governments and pay for the extermination of foreign leaders, why would those same forces hesitate to assassinate their domestic enemies? Patriotism? Good God, there is no patriotism in economics. Read any macro or micro economics textbook you can find and I defy you to locate a chapter that encourages the reader to forego that house in Southampton because of loyalty to country or government. The real force, of course, is within the nature of power itself. The name of the economic system is completely irrelevant today. What matters is the fact of those who are able to coerce, mandate, persuade or impel others to do something outside their own interests and the willingness of the few to exercise that power. Because good assassins tend to be expensive and are not especially trustworthy if and when they are apprehended, the forces that actually run things have chosen to buy and control the six (five, four, three?) media conglomerates and to use those outlets to "politically" assassinate their opponents in ways far more egregious than with a train of bullets from a high-powered rifle.
The movie itself troubles us even today. The acting is unremarkable and might as well have been telegraphed in. The pacing is occasionally without purpose. And Pakula should have known better than to have contrived some of the ways his characters moved in and out of scenes. But there is an underlying sinister metabolism boiling this pot, one which keeps the viewer believing he or she knows what's happening, only to realize three seconds later that the "truth" of this movie is as elusive as in the real world. The extended and visually sophisticated scene of the Senator near the end of the movie is worthy of a blend of Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, with images of Washington turning into Jefferson, into Lincoln into Teddy Roosevelt into the Senator, fronted in an auditorium with tables clothed in red, white and blue, tables into which the shot-and-killed Senator slams as his cart mindlessly deposits him among the sterility of his own demise. So forget character development. That's for kids. This is a grown-up movie for world travelers. A beautiful adventure in a world made ugly.
The Boys from Brazil
Imagine a movie that has nothing to do with blowing up buildings or exploding car chases or sons undergoing sex changes so they can work in the strip club to put themselves through cosmetology school. Instead, imagine that these three male stars, each a tad long in the tooth, convey their respective roles with a modicum of understatement, knowing as they must that their very presence alone will be enough to muster public interest in the project, and yet each of the performances is so engrossing that you'd pay good money just to watch them breathe hard. Got it? Okay, now imagine that two of these three senior stars play very high-ranking Nazis who escaped from the Third Reich to South America where they plot world domination while the third big star represents a tired old Jewish man who has heard every stupid conspiracy theory in the book, and yet who has himself stared true evil in the eye and brought enough visceral strength to bear on the situation to restrain himself from blinking. I know that's a tall order to demand, but while we're there, imagine that one of these escaped Nazis has a viable plan for producing nearly one hundred Adolf Hitler clones and unleashing those young men on a planet which will be, to say the least, unprepared.
With all this imagining going on, the engaged reader may suspect that contemporary audiences might scratch their heads and mutter, "Adolf who?"
Right. Also correct.
Such bespeaks the tragic nature of our contemporary malaise. None of that, it must be understood, reflects poorly on The Boys From Brazil(1978), the subject film in question. The reality is that while this film falls more than a tad short of excellent, it still avoids the putrid reek of other doom movies of the time, of which The Omen was the most unctuous. Based on the novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby), the movie stars Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and James Mason. We are also treated to a very early performance by Steven Guttenberg. He plays a young idealist with his hands and face down in the dirt in Paraguay where none other than Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, has gathered together a number of well-dressed henchmen to murder ninety-four male civil servants throughout the planet. None of the conspirators understands why. Niether does Guttenberg, who gets on the phone to Olivier to let him know there are Nazis in Paraguay.
"What a news flash," Olivier smirks with condescension. "Nazis in South America. Let me write that one down."
I would wager a year's pay that less than half the college students in America would have known that following World War II, several thousand Nazis were aided by European and American allies in their escape from justice, in some cases through the auspices of ambitious yet despicable operations such as Project Paperclip, and in other instances "ratlines," as they were called, sometimes facilitated by the Catholic church, and in others by the financial and tactical support of the Office of Strategic Services.
As to some ready data on Josef Mengele, we turn to the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum:
Approximately 30 physicians served at Auschwitz during the period in which Mengele was assigned to the camp. As a requisite feature of their “rounds,” medical staff performed “selections” of prisoners on the ramp, determining from among the mass of humanity arriving at Auschwitz who would be retained for work and who would perish immediately in the gas chambers. Known as the “Angel of Death,” or sometimes as the “White Angel,” for his coldly cruel demeanor on the ramp, Mengele is associated more closely with this “selection duty” than any other medical officer at Auschwitz, although by most accounts he performed this task no more often than any of his colleagues. Undoubtedly, this association is partially explained by his postwar notoriety, but the ubiquitous image of Mengele at the ramp in so many survivors' accounts has also to do with the fact that Mengele often appeared “off-duty” in the selection area whenever trainloads of new prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, searching for twins.
Mengele used his time in Auschwitz to experiment on twins. He was fascinated with the genetic and environmental factors unique to twins, so he performed all manner of surgical experiments on them, sans anesthesia, typically agonizing in the extreme, with a particular fondness for removing limbs. Mengele also developed a fascination with the irises of children's eyes and maintained quite a collection of them, extracted as they were from his murdered victims.
The Boys From Brazil extrapolates from all this and posits that Mengele had holed up in Paraguay to unleash his genuine Hitler youth (young boys cloned from the blood and flesh of Hitler) upon the world. To affect this, he recreates the environmental conditions under which his mentor thrived: a father much older than the mother, the former deceased, that latter extremely doting.
In point of fact, Mengele escaped justice by settling in Argentina, then Paraguay, and eventually Brazil. He was fascinated by eugenics and some evidence exists that he inseminated hundreds of eggs of concentration camp women with cells from Aryan men. But it is not the viability of the scientific possibility of this plan that matters. We live in an age, good or bad, when damn near anything is viable. The real issue is whether or not the United States, or any other country, would be susceptible to the wiles of snotty young Hitlers. And it is here than the movie fumbles its opportunities. Putting aside any moral quagmire that the movie makers wish to convey, the real horror is not whether something of a scientific nature can be created. We skipped over that Rubicon with nuclear weapons a long time ago. The issue is one of desire. What conditions would need to present themselves in the world in order for a Fourth Reich to take hold? To that, the movie makes not even the slightest nod of recognition. The only reference we get is when Gregory Peck, as Mengele, yabbers on about watching films of Hitler on late night America television. "The time is ripe!" he cheers. Maybe so. But you'd never get a clue about that from this otherwise persuasive film. In short, a lot of talent and not a small amount of work is wasted on a concept that could have been the movie of the decade.
With all this imagining going on, the engaged reader may suspect that contemporary audiences might scratch their heads and mutter, "Adolf who?"
Right. Also correct.
Such bespeaks the tragic nature of our contemporary malaise. None of that, it must be understood, reflects poorly on The Boys From Brazil(1978), the subject film in question. The reality is that while this film falls more than a tad short of excellent, it still avoids the putrid reek of other doom movies of the time, of which The Omen was the most unctuous. Based on the novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby), the movie stars Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and James Mason. We are also treated to a very early performance by Steven Guttenberg. He plays a young idealist with his hands and face down in the dirt in Paraguay where none other than Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, has gathered together a number of well-dressed henchmen to murder ninety-four male civil servants throughout the planet. None of the conspirators understands why. Niether does Guttenberg, who gets on the phone to Olivier to let him know there are Nazis in Paraguay.
"What a news flash," Olivier smirks with condescension. "Nazis in South America. Let me write that one down."
I would wager a year's pay that less than half the college students in America would have known that following World War II, several thousand Nazis were aided by European and American allies in their escape from justice, in some cases through the auspices of ambitious yet despicable operations such as Project Paperclip, and in other instances "ratlines," as they were called, sometimes facilitated by the Catholic church, and in others by the financial and tactical support of the Office of Strategic Services.
As to some ready data on Josef Mengele, we turn to the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum:
Approximately 30 physicians served at Auschwitz during the period in which Mengele was assigned to the camp. As a requisite feature of their “rounds,” medical staff performed “selections” of prisoners on the ramp, determining from among the mass of humanity arriving at Auschwitz who would be retained for work and who would perish immediately in the gas chambers. Known as the “Angel of Death,” or sometimes as the “White Angel,” for his coldly cruel demeanor on the ramp, Mengele is associated more closely with this “selection duty” than any other medical officer at Auschwitz, although by most accounts he performed this task no more often than any of his colleagues. Undoubtedly, this association is partially explained by his postwar notoriety, but the ubiquitous image of Mengele at the ramp in so many survivors' accounts has also to do with the fact that Mengele often appeared “off-duty” in the selection area whenever trainloads of new prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, searching for twins.
Mengele used his time in Auschwitz to experiment on twins. He was fascinated with the genetic and environmental factors unique to twins, so he performed all manner of surgical experiments on them, sans anesthesia, typically agonizing in the extreme, with a particular fondness for removing limbs. Mengele also developed a fascination with the irises of children's eyes and maintained quite a collection of them, extracted as they were from his murdered victims.
The Boys From Brazil extrapolates from all this and posits that Mengele had holed up in Paraguay to unleash his genuine Hitler youth (young boys cloned from the blood and flesh of Hitler) upon the world. To affect this, he recreates the environmental conditions under which his mentor thrived: a father much older than the mother, the former deceased, that latter extremely doting.
In point of fact, Mengele escaped justice by settling in Argentina, then Paraguay, and eventually Brazil. He was fascinated by eugenics and some evidence exists that he inseminated hundreds of eggs of concentration camp women with cells from Aryan men. But it is not the viability of the scientific possibility of this plan that matters. We live in an age, good or bad, when damn near anything is viable. The real issue is whether or not the United States, or any other country, would be susceptible to the wiles of snotty young Hitlers. And it is here than the movie fumbles its opportunities. Putting aside any moral quagmire that the movie makers wish to convey, the real horror is not whether something of a scientific nature can be created. We skipped over that Rubicon with nuclear weapons a long time ago. The issue is one of desire. What conditions would need to present themselves in the world in order for a Fourth Reich to take hold? To that, the movie makes not even the slightest nod of recognition. The only reference we get is when Gregory Peck, as Mengele, yabbers on about watching films of Hitler on late night America television. "The time is ripe!" he cheers. Maybe so. But you'd never get a clue about that from this otherwise persuasive film. In short, a lot of talent and not a small amount of work is wasted on a concept that could have been the movie of the decade.