The Prisoner of Shark Island

Warner Baxter and (barely visible, on the right) Ernest Whitman in The Prisoner of Shark Island (dir. John Ford, 1936).



John Carradine.



Frank McGlynn Sr.

The story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, wrongly accused of complicity in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Ford's immersion in the milieu of silent film is still very evident here, not only in the mechanics of blocking and framing and such, but in his Griffith-like treatment of the north vs. south theme, complete with repeated scenes in which negroes are depicted as alternately childlike and animalistic. Although, supposedly, Ford actually toned down the racism of Nunnally Johnson's screenplay quite a bit during shooting. Ernest Whitman does manage to infuse the character of ex-slave "Buck" (what else?) with some dignity, despite being required to jump up and down every so often and shout "Ah do declare." (Whitman played "Pinkie" in Jesse James, also scripted by Johnson: "A darkie named Pinkie on a mule named Stinkie.")

Aside from all that, and in spite of the usual historical distortions, it's a compelling story about government manipulation of due legal process, complete with chilling analogues to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Especially freaky are the pointed hoods placed over the heads of the accused conspirators during the "trial" scene.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter

John Lupton and Cal Bolder in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (dir. William Beaudine, 1966).



Narda Onyx experiencing perverse electrical pleasures ordinary persons can't even dream of.



Estelita Rodriguez taking careful aim.

This rendition of the Jesse James legend includes some notable episodes of the outlaw's life that are omitted by most other films, such as the time Jesse's muscle-builder friend had his real brain removed by a lady mad scientist and replaced with an "artificial brain." The great William "One-Shot" Beaudine's last film (you may remember that I reviewed his modern cattle-rustling yarn Tough Assignment here a while back). The Joe Bob Briggs commentary on the DVD is a blast (and contains some substantive info on Beaudine's career, the actors, etc.).

A minor point, perhaps, but I want to say in response to all those critics who have complained that the Maria Frankenstein character is not actually Frankenstein's daughter, as the title proclaims, but his granddaughter: think about it. Frankenstein's son is a Frankenstein too, thereby making the son's daughter Frankenstein's daughter. No problem.

The Bank Job

Jason Statham, Stephen Campbell Moore, James Faulkner, Alki David, and Daniel Mays in The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008).

Roger Donaldson would probably have been more at home, and more frequently successful, in the old Hollywood. He makes highly conventional, story-driven movies according to formula, and is often very resourceful within those limitations. The Bank Job showcases his talents to their best advantage. Casting Jason Statham strictly according to type, for example, is hardly imaginative, but it's practical, and gets a certain dimension of audience expectation securely in place and therefore out of the way. Donaldson also has the restraint (or lack of range?) to avoid milking the early seventies English setting for its retro-groovy factor: this is not a hip ironic heist film, it's just a heist film. And as such, it's got the right moves. There's the inexhaustible Rififi-esque routine of painstakingly tunneling into the vault area, the mazy network of double- and triple-crosses, the brotherhood of thieves and their fragile code of honor.... And nothing new beyond that. This is just solid, workmanlike genre fodder. And if there were crime movies this solid and workmanlike at the theater every week, I'd be in heaven.

Dead Calm

Billy Zane in Dead Calm (Dir. Phillip Noyce, 1989).

In my discussion of James Foley's adaptation of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet a few posts back, I talked about how being too faithful to a novel can be bad for a film. Phillip Noyce's treatment of Charles Williams's 1963 Dead Calm takes many more liberties with its source, some successful and others not so much. The basic plot remains intact: a man (Sam Neill) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) sailing alone on their yacht (the Saracen) in the middle of the ocean pick up a man (Billy Zane) leaving his own ship (the Orpheus) on a small dinghy. The ship is filling up with water, he tells them, and furthermore everyone else on it is dead from food poisoning. While the apparently distraught man in resting in the cabin, Neill's character (John) takes the dinghy over to the other ship and finds that things are not quite as Zane's character (Hughie) has made them out to be. While he's gone, Hughie overpowers Kidman's character (Rae) and takes over her and John's yacht. For most of the rest of the film, John must try to keep the floundering Orpheus afloat, and Rae must try to figure out a way to overpower her abductor and get back to John.

Most of the changes from the book can't be discussed in depth without giving away crucial turns of plot, but there are two which are especially striking: one concerning the number of major characters, and one concerning the extent of Hughie's sociopathy. With regard to the latter, let's just say that whereas in the book Hughie is a troubled and potentially dangerous young man, in the film he's a murderous psycho. The problem is that although we see graphic evidence of his lethality, Hughie is still written pretty much the same way he is in the novel: it never quite makes sense that he is supposed to be a total monster, especially as the interaction between him and Rae depends on us accepting a certain naively trusting quality in his personality that feels out of sync with the aforementioned changes in his character. It's not hard to see why the filmmakers would want to make these changes: the Hughie of the book is just not that scary in and of himself. Aside from the obvious race against time with the sinking boat and all, the tension comes from the relationship between Hughie and the other characters who don't make it all the way into the film. This leaves Noyce nothing to work with but standard mad-killer suspense tactics, and as I've said, Hughie still seems more like a spoiled, unstable kid making a big mess of things than a true cold-blooded slasher. These uneven elements lead the story into all the predictable cliches of the genre, which is too bad, because the movie has an overall feel that really works at times.

Here, then, in abandoning crucial story elements from the book, Dead Calm may seem to make the opposite mistake from the one made by After Dark, My Sweet; but from another perspective, the mistake is the same: that of retaining elements from the book that it can't make work cinematically. Billy Zane makes a very good Hughie, but he's playing the Hughie of the novel, not the Hughie they forgot to write for the film.

Someday maybe someone will release however much was completed of Orson Welles' late sixties version with Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau, The Deep (no relation to the Peter Benchley novel/ Peter Yates movie), before Harvey died near the end of shooting.

The True Story of Jesse James

Robert Wagner in The True Story of Jesse James (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1957).

An engaging enough remake of King's 1939 Jesse James. Not only is it based on Nunnally Johnson's original screenplay, but some of the shots from the earlier film are directly recreated, such as the bandits scurrying across the top of the train at night with its interior all lit up, or the horses leaping off the cliff into the water (I just don't like to see that).

Wagner tries to give James an ambivalent, dangerous edge, but he's even more fundamentally clean-cut than Tyrone Power. Jeffrey Hunter is almost too believable as his brother Frank--that is, sometimes I had to strain to tell them apart. Other admirable cast members include Agnes Moorehead, Hope Lange, John Carradine (who played Robert Ford in the 1939 film, here a preacher), Frank Gorshin, and Alan Hale, Jr. Despite all this talent, and despite a story that combines generic elements of two of Ray's best films--They Live By Night and Johnny Guitar--Ray only infuses it with his distinctive directorial aura here and there, in an isolated shot or exchange. The lead-up to the inevitable "picture-straightening" scene is a beautiful superimposition of 50s suburbia onto the western past, complete with picket fence and children playing outlaw in the front yard. This too, however, was already set in place by King's film.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

Akihiro Tomikawa and Tomisaburo Wakayama in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

More literally, "Perambulator Against the Winds of Death." I really don't know what to say about these Baby Cart movies. They're masterfully put together, and always gripping, but the codes--both filmic and ethical--are often opaque to me. Sometimes I get caught up in the unflagging emphasis on samurai honor before it occurs to me that this honor is depicted in an utterly incoherent way. Sometimes Ogami Itto steps in and does chivalrous things for damsels in distress (mostly prostitutes), and sometimes he just stands there with that sour, blank expression on his face (yes, it's both sour and blank) and watches the bad guys raping and killing innocent women. And there's just so much rape. Rape, rape, rape. Rape and killing. Lots of killing. Killing and honor. Every once in a while, when there's a lull in the carnage, li'l Daigoro looks around in wonder at scenes of natural serenity and beauty. At least I think it's wonder; his gaze is as blank and pitiless as his father's.

The Return of Frank James

Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James (dir. Fritz Lang, 1940).

It's a disappointment that Fritz Lang's first western is not quite as good as the film it is a sequel to (Henry King's Jesse James). Not as good, that is, at being the kind of film the first was: a big romantic crowd pleaser with lots of action and glamor. This would be fine if it were as good as other Fritz Lang films, but that's not the case either, although there are some attractive visual arrangements in which you can spot his emotive signature of brooding and dread. Henry Fonda reprises his performance as Frank James, and he's good, but he never delivers fully on the promise of wraithlike sternness he showed just standing in front of the camera in Jesse. Gene Tierney doesn't make much of her movie debut: all she gets to do is be a perky kid reporter and make a few concerned noises. John Carradine is a pleasure to watch as Robert Ford, but here as in the first film, he has sadly little screen time. The Jackie Cooper character (gung-ho kid tagging along after Frank) is useless. The color is dramatically more muted than in the first film, and that would make sense if Lang were consistently true to his downbeat aesthetic, but the screen captures I've posted above nearly exhaust the moments when this is the case, so a lot of the time things just look dull. There's a brief but mildly inspired scene where Frank walks in on the Ford brothers doing a heinously false cabaret "reenactment" of Jesse's murder, with the delightful help of career extra Barbara Pepper as Nellie Blane, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the West."

Jesse James

I am a fugitive from a James gang: Tyrone Power as Jesse in Jesse James (dir. Henry King, 1939).

Is "Tyrone Power" the best name ever or what? If ever there were a moniker you would think for sure had to be dreamed up by an agent, there it is--but the Powers are actually a venerable old family, and Tyrone was named after a long line of fathers and grandfathers. The next thing you'd think is that this guy was just a cardboard cut-out with a nice physique and smile, but he's convincing as Jesse, especially when he's got a few days' growth of beard to cover over the look of pampered innocence. I really want to believe that the following quote I found attributed to him on IMdB is genuine, but my confidence level is low: "Some day I will show all the motherfuckers who say I was a success just because of my pretty face. Sometimes I wish I'd have a really bad car accident so my face would get smashed up and I'd look like Eddie Constantine."

The movie is pure Hollywood: unrepentant historical distortion, anachronistic hair and makeup, endless schtick of all sorts. It's also a fun ride, and has some nuance here and there. There are even a few moments when the technicolor popcorn-fest darkens to admit some chilling vignettes, as when some neighborhood kids play outlaw in the front yard, pointing sticks at little Jesse Junior and shouting "You're Jesse James! You're dead!" "I'm dead," he agrees quietly, with hands folded across his chest, as his father looks on in consternation--moments before going to live out the scene in earnest himself.

Home from the Hill

"How a man lives": Robert Mitchum in Home from the Hill (dir. Vincente Minelli, 1960).



George Peppard and Luana Patten.



Eleanor Parker.

They don't make them like this anymore. Specifically, the grand genre of Hollywood melodrama is all but extinct, at least in its pure form, although there are decadent vestiges of it in things like As Good as It Gets, The Ice Storm, or even a mess like Crash (Haggis, not Cronenberg). Spike Lee and David Lynch, to name just a couple, still pay visual and structural homage to the genre here and there. Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven is a loving facsimile of high Sirkian melodrama, but in such a self-consciously conspicuous manner that it only reinforces my point: that the genre can exist fully now only as pastiche. It's not just that the codes and conventions of the form now convert instantly into irony; that irony was always there, generating much of the beguiling tension that thrummed beneath the exaggerated color and statuesque human posturings. Part of the irony of the irony then was that the picture would still make hearts swell and break whether the irony were missed or not. Now if it is missed, the drama falls flat, and if it is caught, the drama either falls flat or wasn't meant to stand up in the first place. We have not, in truth, grown more ironic as a culture; we have stopped learning how to integrate our irony with other modes of consciousness. When we single something out as "ironic" now, it often means either that we are being lazy in not accounting more inclusively for the strangely mediated pathos to which we are responding, or--perhaps, sadly, more frequently--that a flat, simplistic travesty of irony is all there is to respond to.

Minelli's luxuriously blighted saga of the Hunnicutt family is brimming with irony, but it is an irony that never hardens into self-negation. Nor does it overwhelm its characters with what is, up to a point, its earnest contempt for their surface glamor and carnality. Robert Mitchum's Wade Hunnicutt is a swaggering, callous rogue, a cheater and neglecter, a bloodthirsty feudal throwback. His lust for life and even love is a sort of grace, but not really a saving one. In the end, we feel close to him without admiring or respecting him. Similarly, his two sons--one (Theron, played by George Hamilton) legitimate and acknowledged but plagued by self-doubt, the other (Rafael or Rafe, played by George Peppard) a bastard swept under the rug but possessed of ambition and vitality--are just out of the reach of our affections. Each is likeable in his own way, but not fully loveable: they are too neurotic, too chained to the repressed agon of their origins. Wade's wife Hannah (Eleanor Parker) has been sexually and emotionally unavailable to him for years, nursing an unwavering resentment of his infidelity. Her passive resistance to his demands for warmth reads at first as frigidity, and her closeness to Theron as manipulative and smothering, but these stereotypical qualities are gradually revealed as surface tics. Theron (the name itself is ironic, at least at first--he starts off as anything but a "wild beast") falls in love with young Libby Halsted (Luana Patten), and for a short time becomes confident in himself as a man, but the weight of his family history intrudes, and Rafe must become his surrogate. It's complicated, as they say on Facebook. But what marks all this as hardcore melodrama is not the convoluted and grotesque web of troubled relationships per se. It is an implied attitude toward these travails, a mood of fatalistic lyricism. The objective correlative to this mood, here as in all great cinematic melodrama, is distributed across the entire mise en scene of the production. It is in the set decor, the lighting, the music, the near-absurdly rich color, the almost exaggeratedly elegant composition in the frame. Life, this look and feel seems to say, is the grandest and most sweeping of hollow spectacles. Its sorrows and sweetnesses are all the sharper for being so easily mocked.

Young Mr. Lincoln

Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln (dir. John Ford, 1939).



In the courtroom.



Facing the stormy future.

When cinema was still wet and lumpy as river clay, directors like John Ford took huge gobs of it in their godlike hands and sculpted fluid monuments to the noblest and most moving dreams of humanity. Hell yes, I'm mythologizing, and so were they, magnificently. Like you, I don't trust such legend-mongering on a basic ideological level. Also like you, I hope, I need at times to be susceptible to what it offers: a vision of ideals that may always already be corrupted, but that nevertheless represent the heights of our imagination as a democratic culture, and deserve to be given expression, if only as a reminder of what a painful abandonment of such ideals our cynicism demands.

Henry Fonda's Lincoln is truer than true. He looks nothing like him until about ten minutes into the picture, at which time the force of his embodiment causes you to readjust your notion of the historical man, to replace his face with the one in front of you. The story itself is slight, a quaint and tangential courtroom drama, in and around which the more significant historical figures--Mary Todd, Stephen Douglas, even Lincoln himself in some ways--hover as detached observers, or phantoms. The young Mr. Lincoln is mercurially buffoonish, melancholy, gallant, mischievous, inscrutable, more like a trickster hybrid of Paul Bunyan and Mr. Deeds than a president-in-the-making. He splits logs, wolfs down alternate bites of peach and apple pie, cheats at a tug-of-war, mopes over graves, goes into reveries over rivers. He cuts an endearingly absurd figure in his stovepipe hat and frontier boots, riding a mule into Springfield to begin his practice of law. At a moment's notice, he clouds over with an inconsolable darkness, lost in his private apprehension of bleak truths too painful for words.

Sergei Eisenstein said that Young Mr. Lincoln was the dearest to him of all American films (his essay on it is included in the liner notes to the Criterion DVD, along with an appreciation by Geoffrey O'Brien). This will not surprise those who see the obvious affinities between Eisenstein and Ford, most notably their reliance on the stirring historicized tableau as the central visual force in their work, Eisenstein's pioneering approach to montage notwithstanding. In addition, however, he is responding to what so many others have responded to in the movie: its sweetness that is never saccharine, its wistfulness that obliquely foreshadows events beyond the frame of the story.

The brief two-part Ann Rutledge episode near the beginning acts as a sort of reverse coda, a setting-up of the overall mood, with its juxtaposition of youthful blitheness and fatal disappointment. Like so much else in the film, it does not resolve into the main plot. It is there for us in the same way it is for Lincoln himself, as part of what is real and inescapable, what colors all other everyday events with its memory and implications. It takes a few moments to sink in that this movie, with all its vitality and grace and light touches, is a death hymn.

Oh, if you haven't yet, see it at once!

Top Ten Films of 2007

With the Oscars coming up tomorrow evening, this seems as good a time as any to list and rank my favorite films from 2007. One problem with trying to do so is that I only saw about twenty or twenty-five new films total, so inclusion on this list is not in itself a guarantee of top quality. On the other hand, with the exception of the number ten slot, I didn't have too many problems deciding what went on the list, and I didn't have to hold my nose too much.

10. I’m Not There (dir. Todd Haynes). I thought it was a disaster overall, but the music was great, and Cate Blanchett's performance was superhumanly good--good enough that the film was able to edge out Children of Men, Cloverfield, Gone Baby Gone, Superbad, Zodiac, The Darjeeling Limited, American Gangster, and Michael Clayton, the only other possible contenders. OK, Cloverfield and Michael Clayton never had a chance.

9. Grindhouse (dirs. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino). Arguably, this is two movies, and Rodriguez' Planet Terror wouldn't cut it on its own, but it's just enough fun as a double feature that it bumps Tarantino's Death Proof up past what would probably otherwise be the number 12 or 13 spot.

8. 28 Weeks Later (dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo). Really not much more than your garden-variety, fast-paced, stone cold zombie movie with a depressing subtext of global hopelessness. I.e., a shoo-in.

7. The Mist (dir. Frank Darabont). See above, but substitute creatures from another dimension for zombies. This movie pissed me off for days. I found myself having mental arguments with it and losing. It still pisses me off. How dare it end up on my list.

6. Inland Empire (dir. David Lynch). Demanding, disjunctive, and dark (I mean literally, as in optically--I made the mistake of trying to watch it first in the daytime, and over half the time there was no way to get the room dark enough to make out anything on the TV screen). Careful out there: when I hear the word "self-indulgent" I reach for my existential rabbit sitcom.

5. Eastern Promises (dir. David Cronenberg). Cronenberg at his most Hitchcockian--something about the way Naomi Watts zips around on that little scooter. I love the way Cronenberg goes out of his way at key moments to make it look like his budget was even lower than it actually was, especially when it comes to the wound makeup. I can't believe Viggo Mortensen got an Oscar nomination for this. He'll never win, but the mere fact that some Academy members even saw the film gives me a tiny scrap of faith in humanity.

4. 3:10 to Yuma (dir. James Mangold). I can't help it. Parts of it are terribly corny, and there's a little too much "production value" at times (Mangold somehow gets a shootout with nineteenth-century firearms to feel like a scene from Die Hard), but this is good ol' western stuff.

3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik). Another western, but this one paced and plotted more like a Russian novel. Just a beautifully realized piece of cinema, with the best performance Brad Pitt has yet given.

2. There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson). It was a close call between this and the number one film--I waffled several times. Daniel Day-Lewis is almost too good: he threatens to implode into dark matter and generate a black hole that annihilates the rest of the film and the audience and theater and solar system with it (go ahead, laugh at me, you people who know how to use "dark matter" correctly in a sentence). The little imperfections, mostly revolving around Paul Dano's character, are at worst mildly distracting, and cannot seriously diminish the cumulative impact of the film. Perhaps the most damaging criticism that has been leveled against it is that it shies away from fully engaging the political content of Upton Sinclair's novel, but I see this as one of the film's most impressive accomplishments: what might have been didactic and heavy-handed emerges as a parable in which the personal and the political are packed tightly together into an enigmatic, rock-hard core of devastated values and visions.

1. No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen). Another film that I found myself arguing with. I'm still not completely down with the "literariness" into which it lapses, or lurches, in its final moments. On balance, however, this is some of the most viscerally astounding moviemaking of the past couple of decades. That Josh Brolin didn't receive a Best Actor (or even Best Supporting Actor) nomination from the Academy is a disgrace.

Vantage Point

William Hurt as a fake president in Vantage Point (dir. Pete Travis, 2008).

Someone by now must have come up with a special term for movies like this one, where it's basically our world, with our history, except that in the present there's some totally made-up president. I mean, it's nice to imagine having a different president from the one we've got, but it's always sort of distracting. The mind wanders, trying to reconcile the fiction with reality: let's see, they mention Reagan in the film, so it seems safe to assume that in this world, as in ours, Bush 1 succeeded Reagan, and Clinton followed Bush 1, and they mention 9/11 too, so it stands to reason that Bush 2 was in the mix there at some point ... but then what? Is this supposed to be the near future? No one named "Ashton" is running in this election that I know of, in either party. The whole alternate universe thing is just too silly when there's just that one little detail--the leader of the free world--that's changed (wait, I forgot, there's always also a major cable TV news network you've never heard of). Or, if one were able to look more closely into this other dimension, would one find other little discrepancies as well? Say, that grapefruits are poisonous, or that dogs can talk, or that Woody Allen is governor of Arizona? And if we do have a different president, why does he have to be William Hurt, for Christ's sake?

Then there's the whole Rashomon different-points-of-view structure thingy. Its function here as a device that generates suspense via the repeated deferral of key expositional moments has "device that generates suspense via the repeated deferral of key expositional moments" written all over it. It was entertaining listening to the movie theater audience groan every time the clock backed up again.

The who-saw-what business takes up about the first two thirds of the film, and then it switches over to a conventional omniscient perspective, which seems sloppy; if you're going to have this gimmicky conceit, it should at least be presented cleverly enough that it extends over the course of the whole story. Once you clear away all the smoke from the mirrors, here's what you're left with: typical plot about a Secret Service guy trying to get his nerve back after a damaging incident in the past, typical stereotypical terrorists, typical little kid in danger who you're supposed to care more about than all the other innocent bystanders who get blown up, typical car chase (pretty exciting, I'll admit), typical half-assed attempts at social commentary sprinkled here and there like big words in a lame freshman essay.

Joe Kidd

Clint Eastwood in Joe Kidd (dir. John Sturges, 1972).

Do I think of John Sturges' films as "sturdy" simply because his name begins with Stur? Could be, but Joe Kidd, adapted by Elmore Leonard from his story Sinola, is that if not much else. Eastwood is likeable enough in the title role, but is not operating at full power (he had a bad flu for the duration of the shooting). His character seems modeled in part after Dean Martin's "Dude" in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo: the washed-up town drunk who gets his groove back under pressure. Eastwood can do this routine passably, but here it isn't a necessary part of the story, and even if it were, it's not as gratifying as when Martin does it. We don't cheer for him in the same way. We don't want him to shake off his demons; we want him to harness them, as he does in Unforgiven, where there's little doubt he'll go back to hitting the bottle after the credits roll.

Robert Duvall makes a good mean son of a bitch as Frank Harlan, the landowner who pays Kidd to help him go after the rather dull John Saxon as Mexican revolutionary Luis Chama (which Harlan pronounces "Chay-ma"). A lot of the tension is broken about halfway through when Harlan dispenses with Kidd's services and it's clearly established that Kidd is thenceforth on Chama's side. Up to that point, it's interesting watching Kidd trying to wrestle with his priorities, but then it all just settles into a big comfortable shoot-'em-up. You do get to see a train plough into a barroom, which is nice.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx

Akihiro Tomikawa in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

Or "Perambulator of the River of Sanzu." Sword of Vengeance and this film were edited down into one movie and redistributed in 1980 as Shogun Assassin. More stirring samurai adventure as Ogami Itto and son Daigoro battle a troop of female warriors and the "Gods of Death": three brothers who use various metal hand attachments to dispatch their enemies with maximum gore. As with the first film, the appeal is largely in the dramatic contrast between the ultraviolence of the fight scenes and the tender (but desentimentalized) relationship between father and son. I'm still trying to get a fix on Misumi's approach to gender and sexuality: in particular, he has some weirdly ambivalent and perhaps arrested feelings about breasts.

After Dark, My Sweet

Rachel Ward in After Dark, My Sweet (dir. James Foley, 1990).

Director James Foley has amassed a string of semi-noir thrillers since the eighties that fall into that not-quite-classic, slightly-better-than-B-level category--sort of the Tay Garnett of his era. So far, there's not one film among those of his I've seen (At Close Range, Who's That Girl, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Chamber, The Corruptor, et al.) that completely transcends its generic studio-contract milieu in the way that, say, Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice did, but his adaptation of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet might come the closest.

For one thing, the movie looks great. The richly saturated color and elegant widescreen composition evoke Blue Velvet at times (Foley directed an episode of Twin Peaks the following year). For another, the four leads, Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, Bruce Dern, and George Dickerson (another Blue Velvet connection) are all nicely cast. Dern in particular makes you feel that no one else could have nailed the part of "Uncle Bud" so perfectly.

The film's flaws begin, ironically, with its diligent faithfulness to the novel. At times, it feels like you're watching Masterpiece Theater. The story is too lean and bleak to stand up under such reverent literary treatment. With the exception of two slight changes that I noticed, both having to do with the deaths of supporting characters, you could practically read the book along with the film. Those changes, furthermore, are intelligent ones that enhance cinematic effectiveness: there could have been a few more such changes, and it would have helped the production as a whole to escape from its slavishness to Thompson's text. There are one or two characters who could have been removed entirely, and it might have freed up space for more dynamic plot development. I'm thinking particularly of the "wrong boy" who complicates the kidnapping attempt: because we don't learn of his fate the way we do in the novel, his importance is essentially removed. For that matter, that whole episode is one of the strangest parts of the novel in the first place, and I'm not sure it works even there. I'm also thinking of the doctor (Dickerson) who befriends Collie (Patric). One thing the film does that's interesting is to make the doctor's homosexual interest in Collie more palpable; in Thompson, this is if anything only the faintest subtext. But Foley doesn't really go anywhere with this. It stays at the level of surface coloration, a tentatively interpretive gesture rather than an aggressive reworking of the source material.

And then there's Patric's voiceover. Voiceovers, voiceovers. When will directors learn? Yes, there are times when they work, in some movies. But they have to be movies in which the "textuality effect" thus generated has some relevance. In Thompson's novel, the first-person narration is key to the total logical and emotional impact of the novel, in a very specific way that I won't discuss here so as not to spoil it for those who haven't read it. Foley's transplanting of this device into the film does not follow through with the significance that Thompson attaches to it, and so it serves merely as a cheap expositional shortcut. There are plenty of ways that the information provided by the voiceover could have been supplied via dialogue and action. In fact, there a couple of moments when the voiceover would have helped the viewer understand the character's motivation for key choices he makes, and we don't get it. So it's not even consistently applied.

Still worth seeing, especially directly after reading the book--among other things, as a stimulating object lesson in different ways novelistic material can succeed or fail in the transition to the screen.

The Intruder

William Shatner having uncanny intimations of the Vulcan salute in The Intruder (dir. Roger Corman, 1962).

William Shatner gets through his performance as Adam Cramer, a racist agitator who tries to stir up unrest over integration in a small southern town, without lapsing into Shatnerian histrionics once. Instead, he lapses into it about three times. Still, that's pretty good! He's really pretty good! The whole movie is pretty good. It was filmed on the lowest of budgets, using only a small handful of professional actors: the rest were actual townspeople, many of whom had no idea what kind of movie they were appearing in, and who might have helped the angry mob scenes turn real if they found out. Roger Corman took the first financial loss (only a slight one) of his career with this film, but didn't regret it a bit--it was a labor of love, and it deserves to be seen, as dated and stagey as some of its dramatic elements now seem.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance

Tomisaburo Wakayama in Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

I like the literal English title better: Wolf with Child in Tow: Child and Expertise for Rent.

This is the first of six films in the Kozure Ôkami series, adapted by screenwriter Kazuo Koike from his immensely popular manga series. I'm not a samurai film aficionado (yet), so I'll leave it to someone else to chart the influence of these films and ones like them on Tarantino's Kill Bill, which features similar balletic dismemberments and squirting firehose-streams of blood. That is, I don't know if these were the first films in this genre with this particular garish visual style and spaghetti-western-tinged music, but they certainly are impressive. Tomisaburo Wakayama is Ogami Itto, a Ronin or renegade samurai, whose wife is murdered by some Shogun faction or other (I don't even know if I'm using any of these words right), whereupon he hits the road as an assassin for hire, pushing his son Daigoro along with him in a wooden baby cart. His face is stolidly inexpressive at all times, which makes him seem very expressive. And little Daigoro is pretty much the same way, in addition to being so darned cute. When we first meet him, he is being snatched up by an insane woman who force-breastfeeds him while his father stands by patiently. Starting to get an idea of the weirdness here? But, while it is weird, it would be misleading to suggest that the entire thing is a big long kinkfest. For the most part, it's classical narrative film in the adventure tradition, with all the familiar attending humanist themes of nobility and fatalistic grace, tweaked toward a bizarre sado-eroticism ever so slightly.

In this first installment, the events described above occur, and then Ogami Itto takes an assignment that places him in a small village held hostage by a bunch of pirate-like guys who are in some way relevant to the assignment in question, but I'm not sure exactly how. While there, Ogami Itto obeys these guys' orders to have sex with an attractive prostitute, an act she perceives as extremely chivalrous and selfless, which, in context, it is. Why? Doesn't matter. There ensues lots of swordplay and leaping and geysers of blood. Fwwooooooshhhhhh.

The Missouri Breaks

Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks (dir. Arthur Penn, 1976).



"Is your nerve gone"? Jack Nicholson.

There are things to admire about The Missouri Breaks. Thomas McGuane's screenplay (I see that Robert Towne had a hand in it too, to what extent I don't know) is filled with dialogue that navigates successfully between the grittily brutish and the comically absurd ("The closer you get towards Canada, the more things'll eat your horse"). Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, and others give fine, restrained performances. Other things are not so admirable, such as a sense of narrative inertia at times, a superfluous romance plot, and on an extra-aesthetic note, the fact that animals were badly mistreated and even killed during its making (the AHA condemned the film). The element, however, that is most likely to stick in your memory--an element that renders the categories of "admirable" and "unadmirable" very difficult to keep straight--is Marlon Brando's freakish, sprawling, largely improvised portrayal of Robert E. Lee Clayton, the "regulator" (hit man, basically) who is hired by a Tristram Shandy-reading rancher (played by John McLiam) to come in and pick off some cattle rustlers. Brando does nothing but goof the entire time he is on screen: he mugs, babbles, prances, preens, moues, orates, kisses his horse on the lips, and dresses at one point like an old woman. His Irish (I think) accent is a set piece unto itself. It's impossible to say whether all this "works"; works at what? There is really nothing else to compare it to in cinema. Nicholson had a personal crisis during the filming, feeling that he wasn't worthy to act alongside Brando. The tension shows, but it actually enhances his performance. In the small handful of scenes in which he interacts with Brando (all but the last), we see him doubting his strength, shrinking into inadequacy, losing his nerve--all of which is what the script calls for. The wounds to the actor's pride are also wounds to the character's.

The Panic in Needle Park

Al Pacino and Kitty Winn in The Panic in Needle Park (dir. Jerry Schatzberg, 1971).

A chronicle of the days and nights of a young couple in New York's Sherman Square area, nicknamed "Needle Park" because of its drug scene, in the early seventies. Al Pacino and Kitty Winn are flawless (Winn won the Golden Palm at Cannes for her performance) as Bobby and Helen, whose heroin addictions slowly squeeze their lives into a narrow crawlspace of constant withdrawals, hustling, and betrayal. The naturalistic, docu-style mise en scene is so convincing that it's suffocating. The location shooting and grimy interiors are as much the focus of our attention as the people in the foreground. Put another way, both characters and setting feel so real (some of the supporting cast were in fact actual junkies) that the artifice of foreground and background seems to drop away. The film's only serious misstep is to spend too much time on the character of Hotch, a young narcotics detective: the perspective he represents, of the concerned establishment idealist with his melancholy awareness of how badly these poor kids are messing up their lives and how little can be done to help them, is unnecessary, as the rest of the film conveys this perfectly well on its own.

The Invasion

Nicole Kidman in The Invasion (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007).

Don Siegel's 1956 adaptation of Jack Finney's novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers is perhaps the most eloquent cinematic manifestation of anticommunist paranoia ever: its subtext undermines itself so beautifully that the irony involved in perceiving the film as profound emerges finally as less significant than the perception of profundity itself. (Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake demonstrates the continuing power of the premise minus the specific political neurosis of the original, emphasizing instead the scariness of all cultishness--if anything is lost in the dissolution of the cold war context, it is made up for by the freaky noise the pod people make when they spot a normal person, and by an innovatively poignant use of bagpipes. I don't remember if I ever saw all of Abel Ferrara's 1993 treatment, but from what I can recall, by that point much of the effectiveness of the story had been blanched out. I hear some good things about the recent TV series.)

Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2007 "update" tries to wear its ambivalence prominently, by raising the question whether colonization of our identities by hyper-rational aliens might not be preferable to having the world continue down its present path of mayhem. The problem is, of course, the obviousness of the answer to this question. Bring on the spores. I mean, once they have the news reports of peace in the Middle East and North Korea holding hands with the rest of the world and so on, what possible reason is there to root for Nicole Kidman? Okay, they're going to off her kid because he's immune. Still.

Also, Veronica Cartwright, who had a lead role in Kaufman's film, ought logically not to have played the woman who complains that her husband has changed, but the smaller part of the person running in traffic trying to warn everyone, just as Kevin McCarthy, the star of the original, did in Kaufman's version.