Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies -- March 2009

Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
March 2009

Monday, March 2, 2009
I wish I knew what goes on in that screwy brain of yours.

When I found out somebody had gone and made a documentary about singular singer-songwriter Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, I knew it was one that I would eventually want to see. As a portrait of the artist as an extremely disturbed individual, 2005's Derailroaded unsparingly captures Fischer's paranoid rantings, schizophrenic tendencies and manic-depressive episodes. (He was committed to a mental institution at the age of 16 after threatening his mother with a kitchen knife, and then again a few years later, after which he was effectively cut off by his family.) Good thing director Josh Rubin has plenty of footage -- both contemporary and archival -- of Fischer gleefully performing his idiosyncratic songs to balance things out, otherwise the film would be a total downer.

Rubin also includes copious interviews with such luminaries as Robert Haimer and Bill Mumy (a.k.a. Barnes & Barnes, who produced two albums for Fischer in the '80s), Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, Dr. Demento and "Weird Al" Yankovic (who became the subjects of some of his more bizarre paranoid delusions), and Gail Zappa, widow of Frank Zappa (who produced Fischer's first album, 1968's An Evening with Wild Man Fischer, which failed to make him a famous rock star as he had envisioned). Faced with steadily declining record sales over a period of several years, Fischer finally quit the music business in the mid-'80s (after improbably recording a duet with Rosemary Clooney) and when Rubin's camera catches up with him today he's still very volatile and prone to going off the deep end. It makes for compelling viewing, but his is not the kind of life that lends itself to a happy ending.

Speaking of going off the deep end, when documentary filmmaker William Greaves embarked on an experimental film project in 1968, he gave it the working title "Over the Cliff." When the work was finally assembled, though, it was called Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One -- and that's about the most straightforward thing about it. Directed, produced and edited by Greaves, the film seeks to capture not only a marital squabble between a woman (Patricia Ree Gilbert) and her possibly bisexual husband (Don Fellows), but also the process of filming it, frequently cutting between the three cameras that are going at any given time, both during and between takes. Things really get interesting, though, when the crew decides on its own initiative to shoot themselves talking about the filming process and what they think Greaves is trying to accomplish. Naturally Greaves had no qualms about incorporating this mini-rebellion into the film proper, which benefits greatly from his freewheeling approach to the material.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009
What we're doing now-- We're gonna do another psychodrama.

The closing credits of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One announce that a Take Two is forthcoming, but as it turned out the follow-up was three and a half decades in the making and by the time it appeared in 2005 it had morphed into Take 2 1/2. Made under the auspices of executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi, the new film sees producer/director William Greaves revisiting footage shot in 1968 with an interracial couple (Audrey Heningham and Shannon Baker) playing the scene and then bringing the same actors back 35 years later to enact a new scenario based on how the characters would have moved on with their lives. To this end, Greaves recruits several key members from his original crew and also invites Buscemi to take part in the shoot, which the actor/director jumps at the chance to do. The result is a fascinating companion piece to the first film and a vindication of a sort for Greaves, who doesn't seem quite as far out on a limb this time around.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
It's like a game they're playing with us. You either win or you die.

Before its DVD release in 2005, I knew little about the 1971 film Punishment Park or its writer/director Peter Watkins. In films like the 1965 docudrama The War Game, which dramatized the possible effects of a nuclear war, and the 1964 telefilm Culloden, a reenactment of a 1746 battle between the Scots and the English (complete with mock interviews with the participants), Watkins used documentary techniques to capture events on film that couldn't be documented in any other way. He continued the trend with Punishment Park, in which he presents a United States that is in the practice of arresting political activists, draft dodgers, peaceniks and other dissidents, stripping them of their rights, parading them before a tribunal and forcing them to choose between going to prison for years or taking their chances in "Punishment Park." There they're set free and given three days to cross 53 miles of desert while being pursued by police and military forces that are being trained to deal with radicals such as themselves. Seems to me the deck is stacked against them either way.

When the film first appeared, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War and events like the Kent State shootings were still fresh in people's memories, so reactions at the time were fairly strong. It was also perceived to be more than a little strident, particularly in the confrontation scenes between the counterculture types on trial and the authority figures conducting a thorough mockery of justice. When it resurfaced three decades later, however, it seemed chillingly prescient and more relevant than ever. Since then more of Watkins's work has come to DVD (including The War Game and Culloden), which makes it much more accessible than it used to be. I welcome the opportunity to dive into it.

Thursday, March 5, 2009
I guess it's like being in a war mentality. It's kill or be killed.

One of Punishment Park's progeny -- by way of reality TV -- is 2001's Series 7: The Contenders, which purports to be a three-episode marathon of a reality show where contestants are chosen by lottery, given a gun and a camera crew, and forced to hunt each other down. Written and directed by Daniel Minahan, who had previously co-written Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol, the film is set in a sleepy Connecticut suburb where the show's reigning contender (a heavily pregnant Brooke Smith) grew up and where she's returning for the first time in 15 years. There she finds herself up against a resourceful ER nurse (Marylouise Burke), an unemployed construction worker (Michael Kaycheck), a chirpy high school student (Merritt Wever) and a grizzled conspiracy nut (Richard Venture). Oh, yes. And her high school sweetheart (Glenn Fitzgerald), a terminal cancer patient who may or may not, in fact, be a closeted homosexual. Whoever said you can't go home again probably didn't have exactly this scenario in mind, but it's still very apt.

I recall seeing trailers for this in 2001, but it never made it to my area, so I had to make do with picking up the DVD, which worked out fine since I expect the film works better on the small screen anyway. The way it apes reality TV show conventions is quite uncanny, with frequent recaps and previews of things to come, confessional-style interviews, an omniscient narrator (a pre-Arrested Development Will Arnett), dramatic reenactments of things the cameras didn't catch, and the manipulative use of music to create drama. What's disappointing is that the film spends hardly any time exploring why a society would allow a television show like The Contenders to exist in the first place, but I guess that's a sacrifice Minahan had to make in order to tell the story entirely from the show's perspective. After all, it's not like the producers would want to spend any precious airtime questioning their own motives. That could be bad for ratings.

He's out there considering what seems to him to be the only possible solution.

Director Henry Hathaway was an old hand at streetwise film noir by the time he made 1951's Fourteen Hours, in which a confused young man (Richard Basehart) steps out onto a fifteenth-story ledge one morning and then takes his time making up his mind what to do next. It doesn't take him long, though, to decide that the only person he can really trust is down-to-earth traffic cop Paul Douglas, who's out of his depth but does his best to try to talk Basehart down off the ledge anyway. Meanwhile, a large crowd gathers on the street below to watch the drama unfold and, in some cases, take bets on how long it will be before Basehart jumps. For a man who can't stand people crowding him, he sure picked a very public way to do himself in.

The film features a veritable parade of New York character actors and up-and-coming stars, including Barbara Bel Geddes as Basehart's ex-fiancée, who doesn't know why he broke it off with her, Agnes Moorehead and Robert Keith as his divorced parents, who may have something to do with it, Debra Paget and Jeffrey Hunter as a couple of strangers who have what amounts to a meet-cute down on the street, Grace Kelly (in her film debut) as a woman whose divorce is delayed by the hubbub, and Jeff Corey as a police sergeant, with uncredited turns by John Cassavetes, Ossie Davis, John McGuire and John Randolph, among others. The film was nominated for an Oscar for its arts direction/set decoration, but lost to A Streetcar Named Desire, which (unlike Fourteen Hours) was shot almost completely in the studio. Hathaway preferred to shoot on location as much as possible and that really helped bring this story to life. If there's any film where the City of New York is a major character, it's this one.

Friday, March 6, 2009
I'm used to going out at three in the morning and doing something stupid.

It's been while since I braved the crowds to see a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster on opening night, but I felt Watchmen warranted it. One of the most anticipated films in recent memory (the only other one that comes close is The Dark Knight), it's had a long and bumpy road from the seminal 12-issue comic series Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons co-created in 1986 to the big screen in 2009. Over the past two decades the project has gone through numerous directors (most notably Terry Gilliam, who declared it unfilmable -- and based on the Sam Hamm script he was given to work with I don't blame him), but none of them were able to crack it until Zack Snyder came along and impressed the producers by insisting that the screenplay (by David Hayter and Alex Tse) hew as closely to the original story as possible. Of course, there were still some story elements that had to get altered and things that were eliminated entirely in the transition from page to screen, but overall I'd say they did a decent job of translating a complex and densely-layered work into a mostly satisfying cinematic experience. It won't supplant the book in any way, shape or form (at least not for me), but it's not a travesty like a certain other Alan Moore adaptation.

For the benefit of those who haven't read the book (and if you haven't, you should really get on that), I'll refrain from going into too much detail about the plot, which is set in motion when retired costumed hero the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is murdered. This leads some of his former colleagues -- in particular misanthropic vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) -- to believe that somebody may be targeting them for some unknown reason. During the course of his investigation, Rorschach looks up his former partner Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), who retired quietly when masked crime-fighters were outlawed, the godlike Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is working on an alternative energy source alongside billionaire industrialist Adrian Veidt, formerly Ozymadias (Matthew Goode), and Dr. Manhattan's frustrated lover Laurie Jupiter, formerly Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), who followed in the footsteps of her mother (Carla Gugino). Rorschach also has reason to call on one of the Comedian's former foes, Moloch the Mystic (Matt Frewer), but more than that I choose not to say. Like all good detective stories, Watchmen's twists and turns are best discovered in the telling, not a brief recap.

I'll also leave it to others to delineate all the differences between the book and the film. Suffice it to say, I missed many of the things that got lost in translation and I look forward to some of them being reinstated when Snyder's director's cut (which apparently runs an hour longer than the theatrical version) is released to DVD, but I had a good time at the movies tonight and isn't that what it's all about?

Saturday, March 7, 2009
When a man's riding high, the ground comes up and hits him harder when he falls.

In the wake of Watchmen, I decided to lay off the cheese for one week and instead took in a double feature of Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott westerns, both of which happened to be written by Charles Lang. First out of the stall was 1957's Decision at Sundown, in which Scott rides into the titular town gunning for John Carroll, the man he blames for the death of his wife. Killing Carroll will be no easy feat, though, since he essentially runs the town and has the crooked sheriff (Andrew Duggan) in his back pocket. And furthermore, he's getting married to Karen Steele, daughter of one of the local bigwigs, but she starts to have her doubts about him, as do the rest of the townspeople when Duggan guns down Scott's partner (Noah Beery Jr.) in cold blood. That's the sort of thing that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.

Scott's agenda is considerably less dark in 1958's Buchanan Rides Alone, on which screenwriter Lang had an uncredited assist from Burt Kennedy. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Lucien Ballard, the film finds Scott riding through a California border town on his way home to west Texas, where he's aiming to get his own spread. He runs afoul of the trio of greedy brothers who run the town, though, and his sense of justice prevents him from leaving without the $2,000 stake he arrived with. The film also features L.Q. Jones (who was soon to be a fixture of Sam Peckinpah's films) in an early role as a fellow west Texan who grows disenchanted with working for the crooked sheriff, but finds it isn't so easy to switch sides.

My face isn't made for romance. If it happened, it'd be a miracle.

In 1959, two years after appearing in adaptations of Shakespeare (Throne of Blood) and Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths) for Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune made Samurai Saga, which transposed the plot of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac to 17th-century Kyoto. Written and directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, who is best known for directing Mifune in the Samurai Trilogy in the mid-50s, the film places Mifune in role of a cultured samurai with a "grotesque nose" who acts as a romantic go-between for the beautiful young lady (Yoko Tsukasa) for whom he holds a candle and the handsome young country samurai (Akira Takarada) who has captured her eye but lacks the poetry to ensnare her heart as well. Anyone's who seen any version of Cyrano knows how that turns out, but I'll bet this is the only one that pauses for the occasional samurai duel.

Sunday, March 8, 2009
You are the beauty that was Greece. You are the reason I came to Greece.

In 1960, Jules Dassin traveled to Greece to make Never on Sunday, a film he wrote and directed about an uptight American intellectual on vacation who tries to reform a free-spirited Greek prostitute. As the prostitute he cast his future wife, Melina Mercouri (who went on to win Best Actress at Cannes and was also nominated for an Academy Award), and as the intellectual he cast himself. (For his part, Dassin was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, which was another sign that the specter of the Hollywood Blacklist had passed. With his string of successes on continent, though, Dassin was not about to be lured back.)

Dassin gets a lot of mileage out of the clash between their personalities and his character's fundamental misunderstanding of modern-day Greece, which he would like to see return to the grandeur of ancient times. Seeing in Mercouri -- a fallen woman -- the embodiment of a fallen culture, he tries to impose his logic on her and eventually wears her down, but her spirit proves much more resilient than his lessons in civilized behavior and thinking. One would be forgiven for seeing more than a little bit of Pygmalion in this scenario -- as a matter of fact, it's referenced right in the dialogue. Dassin's would-be Henry Higgins is definitely lying to himself, though, if he thinks he's not going to end up falling for his charge.

Monday, March 9, 2009
It's a pure shame, ain't it? How a man'll push himself for money.

The last of the seven Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott westerns -- as well as Scott's penultimate film after a screen career that spanned over three decades -- was 1960's Comanche Station. Written by Burt Kennedy, who was soon to turn director himself, it starred Scott as a man who barters with the Comanche for the safe return of a woman (Nancy Gates) he doesn't even know and then sets about returning her to her husband. Along the way they encounter a scalphunter (Claude Akins) and his two partners (Skip Homeier and Richard Rust), who decide to ride along, but not for strictly altruistic reasons. Seems Gates's husband has put out a $5,000 reward and Akins intends to collect, but Scott was never the type to roll over for anybody. Never would be, either. (And now I'm ready to take another look at his final film -- Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, which came along two years later and sent him off into the sunset in style.)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
My baby can handle a Tommy gun like most men can't even handle an automatic.

Charles Bronson had been knocking around Hollywood for close to a decade (occasionally acting under his birth name Charles Buchinsky) when Roger Corman gave him one of his first starring roles as the title character in his low-budget gangster film Machine-Gun Kelly. Released in 1958 (the same year as Corman's similarly themed I, Mobster), the film portrays Kelly as a bank robber with a short fuse, ready to pull out his Tommy gun or rough up his accomplices at the slightest provocation. He also likes to talk tough, but easily gets unnerved by reminders of death (he bungles one bank job when he's spooked by a coffin) and is essentially under the thumb of his pushy moll Flo (Corman regular Susan Cabot). At her urging, he graduates from bank robbery to kidnapping, but he doesn't really have the temperament for it, and eventually one of his spurned partners dimes him out to the cops, whereupon he shows his true colors. Without his machine gun, Kelly doesn't have a whole lot of nerve.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
The moon is getting very powerful. This may get worse.

The second werewolf film of 2007 to get a theatrical release was the Canadian-made Skinwalkers, which was actually completed before Blood and Chocolate but came out after -- likely the result of the need to get whittled down from its 110-minute R-rated cut to the leaner (but definitely not meaner) 92-minute PG-13. (Incidentally, the DVD I borrowed from the library claims to the longer cut, but it's actually the shorter one, which was just fine with me.) Directed by Jim Isaac, whose previous genre effort was Jason X, the film features decent-looking creature effects by Stan Winston Studio, but all too often they're obscured by flash cuts and camera-speed trickery that was probably intended to make the action scenes seem more exciting, but all it really does is detract from them.

The plot is centered around a boy named Tim Talbot (I wonder which of the three credited screenwriters came up with that name) born of a human mother and a skinwalker (which is a fancy Navajo term for werewolf) father who is on the cusp of his thirteenth birthday, when legend says he will be able to break the curse of lycanthropy -- that is if he lives that long. Seems one group of evil skinwalkers (led by Jason Behr) has developed a taste for blood and wants to go on indulging their bestial natures, while another (led by Atom Egoyan regular Elias Koteas) seeks to protect the boy (Matthew Knight) and his skeptical mother (Rhona Mitra, who went to play the vampire love interest in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) at all costs. At one point they hit the road in a converted RV that is incredibly easy to spot once you know to look for it (and which reminded me a lot of the fortified vehicle in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead), and eventually wind up at an abandoned factory (that favorite locale of action directors) where the survivors of both groups duke it out and occasionally shoot at each other. (Did I mention there's a lot of gun play in this movie? No? Well, there is.) Then comes the most unintentionally amusing moment in the whole film, when the two main werewolves square off against one another and the filmmakers quickly flash on the actors' faces so you know which one you're supposed to be rooting for. I guess it didn't hit them until they were in the editing room that guys in furry werewolf makeup tend to look somewhat similar.

Anyway, in addition to the distracting editing tricks, the film also features plenty of digital effects that don't do a whole lot to advance the story. Sure, they can make the moon look red and show extreme close-ups of animalistic yellow eyes, but are they doing anything at all to make me believe in the reality of what's happening onscreen? (Not that realism is necessarily the first order of business when one is making a werewolf movie, but still.) One of the things that I did take away from the film that showed the filmmakers had actually put some thought into their premise, though, was the design of the restraints that the good skinwalkers voluntarily put themselves in when they know the change is coming on. Looking at them, one can imagine how they would have been handed down and modified over the centuries. Of course, with this film's paltry box office take, there's little chance of seeing a Skinwalkers 2: Rise of the Skinwalkers.

Thursday, March 12, 2009
Some are born to fail, others have it thrust upon them.

Charles Bronson was well-established as an action star by the time he headlined Walter Hill's directorial debut Hard Times in 1975. In it, he plays a Depression-era bare-knuckle street fighter of few words who arrives in New Orleans in a boxcar and hooks up with fast-talking manager James Coburn, a compulsive gambler who's up to his eyeballs in debt. Coburn's eager to enter into a partnership from the get-go, but Bronson does things at his own speed and in his own time, which is illustrated by the deliberate way he courts the emotionally distant Jill Ireland (a.k.a. Mrs. Charles Bronson). The most colorful member of the cast, though, is Strother Martin as a genteel fixer (and unfortunate opium addict) named Poe who claims kinship with his namesake.

The New Orleans setting gives Hill the opportunity to soak up plenty of atmosphere, which he does with the assist of director of photography Philip Lathrop, who also shot his next film, The Driver. Hill also sends his characters out into Cajun country at one point, which is not only a good dry run for his 1981 film Southern Comfort, but also includes a brief throwaway bit of Bronson looking at a caged bear that recalls his standoff with a caged cougar in Machine-Gun Kelly. And it prefigures the moment when he's locked in a steel cage with a formidable opponent -- and a huge crowd of spectators gaping at the spectacle of two grown men punching each other's lights out. The argument could be made that there are better ways to earn a living, but probably not when there's a Great Depression going on.

Friday, March 13, 2009
You're weirdly close to what I visualized for this character.

One of my biggest disappointments of 2008 (film-wise, at least) was that I didn't get to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York in theaters. I wasn't necessarily expecting it to come to Bloomington (although that would have been nice), but I had kind of hoped it would stick around Philadelphia long enough for me to catch it when I was back home for the holidays. Sadly, it took its final bow the very weekend before I made the trip and my best friend Kevin had to see it by himself. (If it had still been playing, we would have gone on Christmas Eve, but as he wrote in his LiveJournal, that might have been the wrong time to see it. Having just finished watching it, I can't say I blame him for thinking that.)

Strangely passed over by the Academy Awards (which should have at least given it a screenplay nomination), Synecdoche, New York did manage to win two Independent Spirit Awards -- for Best First Feature and the Robert Altman Award for its ensemble cast. The latter was richly deserved since the cast is uniformly excellent, led by Philip Seymour Hoffman's bravura turn as a morose theater director who wins a MacArthur grant and uses it to stage a wildly ambitious play about life, love, death and despair -- and everything in between. Using his own life as dramatic fodder, Hoffman hopes to use the play to better understand his relationships with his artist wife Catherine Keener (who becomes famous for her miniature paintings), hero-worshiping lead actress Michelle Williams and flirty box office manager Samantha Morton (who eventually becomes his assistant after initially turning down the job), but things get complicated in a hurry when Hoffman casts stalker Tom Noonan as him, Williams as herself, and Emily Watson as Morton. The film also features Hope Davis as Hoffman's therapist, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Keener's companion when she takes off for Europe, and Dianne Wiest as one of the last -- and most important -- additions to Hoffman's cast.

All in all, this is precisely the kind of directorial debut one would expect the restless mind behind such inventive (and fundamentally melancholy) scripts as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is, of course, not to say the film is in any way predictable -- unless your prediction is that it's going to be densely layered, intellectually challenging and at turns absurdly funny and heartbreaking. That can be a hard sell for some people, and the film's poor showing at the box office certainly reflects that, but even if Kaufman never gets another chance to direct a film on this scale again, at least he was given this one.

Saturday, March 14, 2009
A real revolutionary goes where he is needed.

Just when I thought I was going to have to wait for DVD to see Che, Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic of Ernesto Che Guevara, the Landmark Keystone Art Cinema & Indie Lounge brought the roadshow version of the film (which is split into two parts, both of which are over two hours long) to Indianapolis, so I made the trip up today and was very happy I did. Directed and photographed by Soderbergh -- who hasn't made a film this ambitious since 2000's Traffic -- Che starred Benicio Del Toro as the Argentine doctor-turned-revolutionary who literally wrote the book on guerrilla fighting. It's such a lived-in performance that I'm not surprised he won Best Actor at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival (as well as this year's Goya Awards in Spain).

Part One covers Guevara's involvement in the Cuban Revolution from the early days laying the groundwork in Mexico City in 1955 alongside Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) through Guevara's controversial address to the United Nations in 1964. In between, we watch as he fights his way through the jungles of Cuba, struggling with his asthma and proving time and time again to be a capable leader (and one who feels it every time one of his men is injured since he's generally the one who patches them up) and a champion of the poor and oppressed (he stresses the need for literacy, especially among the recruits who want to fight alongside him). Echoing Traffic's multiple storylines, Soderbergh opts to jump around in time, shooting the New York scenes in grainy black and white to keep the viewer oriented. He also ends where he began, with Guevara telling Castro in Mexico City of his desire to bring the revolution to the rest of Central and South America. Naturally, that's where Part Two picks the story up.

In addition to moving the setting from Cuba to Bolivia, Part Two differs stylistically from Part One in a number of ways. For one thing, the size of the screen shrinks from 2.35:1 to 1.85:1 to emphasize the greater peril Guevara is in. For another, it tells its story strictly chronologically and rather ominously advances day by day, which lets us know right off the bat that his revolution in Bolivia will not last as long -- or be as successful -- as the one in Cuba, which took several years to come to fruition. And finally, Soderbergh gives the film a bleached-out look to contrast with the lush Cuban jungles that held more promise and peasants who were willing to support the cause.

Part Two also features some familiar faces in the supporting cast, including Franka Potente as Guevara's contact with the outside world, Lou Diamond Phillips as a Communist Party leader who is against armed struggle, and Matt Damon as a foreign missionary. (I'm glad I checked the program during the intermission, otherwise I might have been thrown momentarily when he showed up onscreen.) Speaking of the program (which was necessitated by the fact that the film was shown with no credits), since this was a special roadshow presentation, there were no trailers or other pre-show bullshit. I don't know if that's the norm at this venue, but I am definitely going to have to keep it on my radar.

Monday, March 16, 2009
Looks to me like you've been riding a long time but not getting very far.

Randolph Scott hadn't made a film since Comanche Station when director Sam Peckinpah coaxed him out of semi-retirement to star in his second feature, 1962's Ride the High Country. In it, Scott played an opportunistic character far removed from the upstanding men of virtue he pretty much patented in his films for Budd Boetticher. Instead that role went to fellow western vet Joel McCrea, a former lawman who takes a dangerous job transporting gold bullion from a remote mining camp and hires Scott (his former deputy) and his young partner (Ron Starr) for added protection, little realizing they plan to steal the gold for themselves.

Things get complicated when, on the way up to the camp, they stop at the farm of deeply religious widower (and overprotective father) R.G. Armstrong, whose daughter Mariette Hartley is eager to break free from his clutches. Accompanying the men to the mining camp (which has the evocative name of Coarse Gold), Hartley rushes into marriage with her fiancé James Drury, little realizing that his four uncouth brothers (who include Peckinpah regulars L.Q. Jones and Warren Oates) have designs on sharing the matrimonial bed. Then again, she should have realized something was amiss when she found out the marriage ceremony was being performed in a whorehouse. Needless to say, Drury doesn't take it too kindly when she refuses to consummate their union.

Ride the High Country packs a lot of incident into its 94-minute running time and it builds to a terrific climax where Scott and McCrea find themselves fighting side-by-side against Drury and his brothers (who aren't even after the gold, they just want Hartley back). The shot of the two of them striding forward together is one of those quintessential western moments that Peckinpah (with the aid of cinematographer Lucien Ballard) knew just how to capture. As far as farewells to the Old West go, you would be hard-pressed to find one better.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009
As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive.

One of the few women in the vanguard of the French New Wave was writer/director Agnes Varda, whose 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7 is one of the finest to ever ride in on it. Unfolding in real time, the film follows an anxious French singer (Corinne Marchand) as she kills time waiting to get the results of some medical tests. When she isn't reassured by a fortune teller, she meets her superstitious maid (Dominique Davray) at a nearby restaurant and they go to a hat shop where Marchand tries on several and buys one that's out of season. After a taxi ride home, during which she hears one of her own songs on the radio, Marchand is visited by her inattentive boyfriend and then auditions some new songs by her composers (one of whom is Michel Legrand, who wrote the music for the film) before striking out on her own.

After being appalled by some street performers, she eventually finds her way to a sculpture gallery where one of her friends (Dorothée Blank) does nude modeling and they drive to a movie theater where Blank's boyfriend is the projectionist. There they watch a silent short (which just so happens to star Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine) before Marchand and Blank take a taxi to the park, where Marchard strolls by herself to see the waterfall. There she encounters a soldier (Antoine Bourseiller) coming to the end of his furlough who offers to accompany her to the hospital -- as long as she then sees him off at the train station. The funny thing is by the time their bus trip is over they've made enough of a connection that it's bittersweet for them knowing how soon they'll be parted.

During the final section of the film I was reminded of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, which must have been influenced by it to at least some degree. And throughout I was frequently astonished by how creative Varda's direction was for someone who hadn't seen that many films before she started making her own. Then again, there's something to be said for not knowing the rules you're about to blithely break.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009
In this business, you either end up a bum or full of lead.

I purchased Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 film Le Doulos when Criterion put it out on DVD last fall, but I'm only just now getting around to watching it (for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on). Written for the screen and directed by Melville, Le Doulos (which was called The Finger Man when it was first released in the States) stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a suspected informant who earns the ire of recently-released gangster Serge Reggiani after the police receive an anonymous tip about a safe-cracking job he's put together. We've already seen Reggiani gun down a former associate in cold blood -- and seemingly without provocation -- so when he announces his intention to find Belmondo and kill him, we tend to believe him. That's why it's so curious when, after Reggiani gets picked up by the police, Belmondo turns around and starts working to clear him of the shooting. Then again, that's not so curious once it comes out that Belmondo's looking to frame the mid-level gangster (Michel Piccoli) who's taken up with his ex-girlfriend (Fabienne Dali).

Melville was quite enamored of American crime films of the '40s and '50s and that influence definitely showed in this film. Belmondo doesn't deliberately ape Bogart the way he did in Breathless, but that connection was probably one of the reasons why Melville cast him in the role. (The fact that he had played the title character in Melville's previous film, Leon Morin, Priest, probably didn't hurt, either.) Belmondo also doesn't seem too concerned about his image since in one scene he knocks Reggiani's girlfriend out, ties her to a radiator and revives her by pouring a bottle of whiskey on her head. Even in his later films, I don't think Bogart ever got away with anything quite like that.

Thursday, March 19, 2009
Hands -- amazing things when you think about it.

I've got to hand it to Mill Creek Entertainment, they sure do know their "Chilling Classics." Today I essayed two American films from 1962, starting with The Devil's Hand, which announces its schizophrenic nature by playing surf music over a painting of a voodoo ceremony during the opening credits. Then it jumps straight into the story of leather vest-wearing snark machine Robert Alda (father of Alan), whose dreams are troubled by a mysterious woman dancing in the clouds. The curious thing is his dreams continue even after he's woken up and he is able to carry on a conversation with the woman (Linda Christian), who's much more enticing than his present girlfriend (Ariadna Welter). He's also compelled to visit the creepy doll shop of Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon on the Batman television series), who turns out to be the high executioner of the cult of the Great Devil God Gamba (and you should see what Gamba can do today).

The film was directed without much flair by William J. Hole Jr. and was based on a screenplay by Jo Heims, who later went on to co-write Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me. In some respects they make joining a satanic cult look pretty enticing -- once he's in, Alda starts winning at the track and making good stock picks -- but there's also a downside in the form of monthly human sacrifices (on the night of the full moon, naturally) and treachery within the ranks is dealt with most harshly. (B-movie fixture Bruno VeSota plays the sponsor of one such traitor, whose death by model car going off the road is unintentionally funny.) And then there's the interminable conga drumming they're forced to listen to at their meetings, which causes some members (namely the non-Caucasians) to get up and spontaneously dance around and others (namely the pudgy white people) to just sort of sit there and sway awkwardly. Who wouldn't want to join a with-it group like that?

Next up was Hands of a Stranger, which was written, produced and directed by Newton Arnold, who was apparently too busy hogging the credit to acknowledge that he based the story on The Hands of Orlac by Maurice Renard (which had previously been filmed as Mad Love with Peter Lorre in 1935). The film starred Paul Lukather as a testy surgeon who gets the chance to perform a risky, unethical operation when concert pianist James Stapleton's hands are mangled in an auto accident and there just happens to be a fresh corpse with a strong pair of replacements handy. It's only after the deed is done that he has to deal with Stapleton's hysterical sister (Joan Harvey), who has sacrificed everything to make his career possible, and goggle-eyed police lieutenant Larry Haddon, who's as much given to ironic remarks as Robert Alda was in the last film.

Like the last film, this one is all over the place. From its noirish opening to the concert hall where Stapleton performs in front of a reverse silhouette of a mangled tree to all of the close-ups of hands, it shows that Arnold at least had some notion about how to run with a theme. Unfortunately he also has a tendency to let his characters run off at the mouth and repeat themselves endlessly. (The first time Lukather says that 3,000 years of research has been leading up to his breakthrough you sort of let it pass. The second time he says it you can't help but wonder just how he arrived at that number.) The film has its bizarre touches, too, like the fact that assistant surgeon Michael Du Pont (who also produced the film) has a picture of Stapleton's mangled hands at the ready when the young pianist freaks out after the bandages are taken off. (And if he hadn't been played by the producer, I doubt such a minor character would have gotten a kissing scene with a young Sally Kellerman.) In the end, I'll go with the lieutenant's assessment that this film is "a series of tragedies with one thing in common -- the human hand."

There is little one can do to prepare for the unknown.

Like a lot of people, I was taken aback by the sudden death of actress Natasha Richardson. For a day or so there I was surprised by all the coverage her skiing accident was getting, but then it became clear that it was more serious than a simple accident and then the word came down last night that she had died. Over the years I've only managed to see a few of her films (Gothic, The Handmaid's Tale, The Favour, the Watch and the Very Large Fish), but I've actually had one -- 1988's Patty Hearst, in which she starred as the kidnapped heiress -- on tape for about a month, so I figured there was no time like the present. Directed by Paul Schrader and based on the book Hearst wrote about her experiences, the film follows her from the day in February 1974 when she was abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army from her home in Berkeley, California, through her capture by federal agents a year and a half later and the subsequent trial and media circus.

Since the film is told almost entirely from Hearst's point of view, Richardson has to work overtime to convey her changing states of mind as she first endures her time as a hostage, then becomes indoctrinated by the members of the SLA holding her, and finally joins the group in earnest, taking part in a bank robbery and passing up numerous opportunities when she could have conceivably walked away a free woman. It's during this time that we actually get to know some of the other members of the organization, including self-styled field marshal Ving Rhames, their tactical and ideological leader, blustering loudmouth William Forsythe (who desperately wants to be black) and his barely tolerant wife (although that means little within the ranks of the group) Frances Fisher. As it turns out, Hearst isn't the only one who's been brainwashed: they've also done a number on themselves since all of them are operating under the delusion that the people are with them when in actual fact the people they encounter are just scared shitless. (If somebody waved a gun in your face and said they had to "borrow" your car in the name of the SLA, what would you do?)

I have to confess I didn't know a whole lot about Hearst's life before I watched this movie. I knew the broad strokes of what she had gone through (thanks to a brief explanation my mother once gave me about the Hall & Oates song "Rich Girl"), but was hazy on the particulars. As a matter of fact, I know Hearst more from her later work with director John Waters in films like Cry-Baby, Serial Mom and A Dirty Shame, which of course came after this film was released. As for the pardon she sought for so many years, she had to wait until Bill Clinton left office in 2001 for it to be granted. Still, I'm sure that must have been a load off her mind.

Friday, March 20, 2009
I only hated you until I met you. Now I'm crazy about you.

Jules Dassin's follow-up to Never on Sunday was another film steeped in Greek culture -- in fact, it's a modern-day retelling of the Greek myth of Hippolytus. Co-written, produced and directed by Dassin, 1962's Phaedra once again starred Melina Mercouri, this time as the wife of boorish shipping magnate Raf Vallone, who is always flitting about from one business deal to another. He has plans to bring his grown-up son from an earlier marriage into the business, but the son -- a typically sensitive Anthony Perkins -- would much rather be left alone to paint. That becomes impossible when Vallone dispatches Mercouri to London to convince Perkins come to Greece and she winds up falling for him. To say he reciprocates would be something of an understatement since they wind up consummating their burning passion with a night of unbridled, soft-focus lovemaking. Then comes the regret -- she is, after all, his stepmother -- and a great deal of awkwardness around Vallone, especially after he lures Perkins to Greece with a fast sports car and sets him up with the daughter of one of his business partners. Will the love that dare not speak its name tear this family apart? Does Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens wear a funny hat?

Saturday, March 21, 2009
It all began when my niece received a charm bracelet...

Just as he had done with Psycho in 1961's Homicidal, William Castle attempted to replicate the success of Disney's The Absent-Minded Professor with his own Zotz! in 1962. Based on the novel by Walter Karig, which was adapted for the screen by Ray Russell (who had previously penned Castle's Mr. Sardonicus), Zotz! starred Tom Poston (two decades before his defining role as George Utley on Newhart) as an eccentric college professor (he drinks sauerkraut juice and reads on his bicycle -- what a kook!) who comes into possession of an ancient relic that gives him supernatural powers. Good thing he's an expert in ancient Eastern languages, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to read the inscription on the coin to activate them. The bad thing is his powers are somewhat mundane. By pointing at people, he can make them double over in pain, by saying the word "Zotz!" he can make Castle film something in slow motion, and by pointing at things and saying "Zotz!" he can kill -- just like Paul Atreides in Dune. (Hmm, I wonder if Frank Herbert got that idea from this movie...)

Anyway, Castle exhausts the comedic (not to mention dramatic) possibilities of having Poston wander around campus pointing at things and saying "Zotz!" very quickly, so he introduces a professional rival in the form of Jim Backus, who's bucking to replace the outgoing Dean of Languages (Cecil Kellaway). Then there's the matter of the new language professor (Julia Meade), who shows up on Poston's doorstep stark naked during a freak thunderstorm (don't ask). At a cocktail party given by the Dean and his wife (Margaret Dumont, in one of her final film appearances), Poston attempts to show off his powers but instead wacky hijinks ensue when he lets a cage full of white mice free (it's zany!). And after a fruitless trip to the Pentagon to try to interest the military, he winds up at the center of some international intrigue, but thankfully it's the kind that can be cleared up in a matter of minutes. A few amusing in-jokes aside (at one point Poston's niece and her date go to the drive-in where they see Homicidal), this is pretty tedious and lightweight to boot. I know I shouldn't expect Shakespeare out of a William Castle movie, but I also don't expect to be bored.

Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?

Ten years ago today, Shakespeare in Love had the unrelenting gall to win the Oscar for Best Picture, thus earning the deathless ire of countless malcontents who believe it stole the award from Saving Private Ryan. At the time I was very much on Shakespeare's side, having seen it twice in theaters and bought the published screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard so I could soak up the clever dialogue. I even read Romeo and Juliet all the way through between viewings so I could pick up on all of the echoes and resonances that run through the film. Then it won Best Picture (and six more Academy Awards besides) and I haven't watched it once in the decade since. This is no fault of the film itself, which I even owned on DVD for a time before I gave my copy to a dear friend -- I've just had lots of others that I wanted to see instead. And while Ryan's stock has continued to rise, Shakespeare regularly lands on people's lists of the most undeserving Best Picture winners, which I find terribly unfair.

Truth be told, its spectacular Normandy Invasion sequence aside, there really isn't much about Saving Private Ryan that would make me want to revisit it ten years later. I had considered doing so in order to compare and contrast both films, but they're apples and oranges, really. One is an Elizabethan romantic comedy with dramatic undertones, the other is a tough-minded war film that tackles weighty issues about honor and sacrifice. Both do their jobs exceedingly well, they're just different jobs. And quite frankly, if given the choice between them, I would still pick Shakespeare, as I did this afternoon. Call me what you will, I just appreciate it for what it is: a well-written, well-directed and well-acted film about what it means to be a creative artist. In love. Is that really such a terrible thing?

The first thing my men will find when they do awake is the enemy on them, cutting their throats.

It's hard to believe that a film as uncompromising as Culloden was ever shown on British television, let alone in 1964, but it was and for that the BBC is to be commended. Written, produced and directed by Peter Watkins, Culloden calls itself "an account of one of the most mishandled and brutal battles ever fought in Britain" and anybody who watches it would be hard-pressed to disagree with that assessment. Using modern documentary techniques, its reconstruction of the lopsided 1746 battle between exhausted and grossly outnumbered Scottish Highlanders and a well-equipped and better-organized English army is most sobering indeed. (At the end of the day, there were 50 English dead to the 1,200 Scotsmen strewn across the battlefield -- with more to come in the aftermath.)

With its liberal use of voice-over narration, on-the-spot interviews and even a play-by-play announcer of sorts, it makes me think Terry Jones and Michael Palin must have had Colluden in mind when they were prepping their short-lived 1969 show Complete and Utter History of Britain (which directly preceded Monty Python's Flying Circus and looked at historical events in a similarly modern fashion). The difference, of course, was that Jones and Palin were mucking about in history in order to have a little fun with it while Watkins had a much more serious agenda. And it should go without saying that any History Channel show that features recreations of Civil War battles and the like owes a tremendous debt to this film, whether it is acknowledged or not.

Sunday, March 22, 2009
This could be the way the last two minutes of peace in Britain would look.

If Culloden was sobering, then Peter Watkins's follow-up -- 1965's The War Game -- is positively devastating. Written, produced and directed by Watkins, the docudrama posits a situation (in this case, a tense standoff between NATO and Soviet forces in Berlin) that could potentially lead to thermonuclear war and the effect this would have on the average British citizen. Like Culloden, The War Game was produced by the BBC, but unlike Culloden it was deemed unfit for broadcast because of its violent content and subsequently banned. This didn't prevent it from being released theatrically, though, and it went on to win the BAFTA for Best Short Film in 1967 and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature the same year. Not bad for a film about an event that didn't actually take place.

In the early part of the film, Watkins uses man-on-the-street interviews to gauge the British public's preparedness should thermonuclear war break out. For example, when asked what they know about the effects of radioactive fallout on the human body, most of them draw a blank. And when given instructions for how to build a bomb shelter, it is shown that few would have the funds or access to the materials needed to make a proper one. By the time the bombs do start flying, Watkins is saying, there's little hope that people would know what to do. Taking it cues from the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The War Game paints a bleak picture of the aftermath of such a catastrophic event -- bleak enough that I had decided to administer the antidote (namely, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) even before the legend "Would the survivors envy the dead?" had appeared on the screen.

We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, do we?

There. Antidote administered; positive response noted almost immediately. Oh, sure. I'll still be haunted by some of the things I saw in The War Game, but watching George C. Scott bluster away about the security of the Big Board sure helps take the sting away.

Now, as for Dr. Strangelove, what is there for me to say about it that hasn't already been written a thousand times over in the last 45 years? Precious little, I would expect. I will say that this is one of those films I will never get tired of, though, and that I manage to notice something new pretty much every time I watch it. Tonight's discoveries: the messages "NUCLEAR WARHEAD -- HANDLE WITH CARE" and "THIS SIDE DOWN" that can be seen on the bombs when Major Kong goes down into the bomb bay to try to get the doors open. And I recognized Jack Creley (who went on to play Dr. Brian O'Blivion in Videodrome) as Staines, the President's aide. Good for him.

Monday, March 23, 2009
You can't just go around killing people whenever the notion strikes you. It's not feasible.

I've got a few noir films from 1947 backed up, so I figured I'd burn them off this week. First up is Born to Kill, which Robert Wise directed for RKO soon after graduating from working with producer Val Lewton. The film stars Claire Trevor as a woman at the end of a six-week wait in Reno to get a divorce when she discovers a murder scene and keeps quiet about it because she doesn't want to get involved. Besides, she has a rich fiancé (the bland Phillip Terry) waiting for her back in San Francisco and he wouldn't like it if she got mixed up in murder. This being film noir, that's exactly what happens when she chats up impulsive charmer Lawrence Tierney on the train ride home, little realizing he's the one who committed the crime. By the time she learns this, though, he's already wormed his way into her life by marrying her rich foster sister Audrey Long, and he's also somewhat improbably taken up residence in her heart, which is why she tries to protect him from the private detective (the slyly mercenary Walter Slezak) who comes snooping around. Elisha Cook Jr. rounds out the cast as Tierney's friend who tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, but it's an uphill struggle and one he's bound to lose one of these days.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
I dressed up like an owl and I fought crime because it was fun. And because it was the right thing to do.

One thing that the Watchmen movie left me wanting more of was information on the Minutemen, the original superhero team that sparked the costumed vigilante craze. In the early issues of the comic series, much of their backstory was covered by the inclusion of chapters from Under the Hood, the autobiography of the original Nite Owl, Hollis Mason. I knew going in that this material was unlikely to make the transition to the big screen, so I was pleased when I learned that it was being adapted as a companion piece to Tales of the Black Freighter, the pirate comic that runs as a counterpoint to the action of the main story (and which was likewise excised from the theatrical cut of the film). And after picking up the DVD this afternoon I knew which co-feature I would be gravitating to first.

Presented as a vintage segment of a 60 Minutes-like newsmagazine program called The Culpeper Minute, Under the Hood features interviews with the retired Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie) and the original Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), which build on their roles in the film, and it also makes more time for weird-eared villain Moloch the Mystic (the always-welcome Matt Frewer) and the pint-sized Big Figure (Danny Woodburn), not to mention a number of other supporting players we didn't get to see much of on the big screen. (Hello, Captain Metropolis! Nice of them to give you some lines this time!) And I was amused by the inclusion of vintage Seiko watch and Sani-Flush commercials along with the one for Veidt's Nostalgia perfume. My only real complaint is that at 38 minutes it's well short of how long a program of this sort would have run in 1985 and there was more of Under the Hood that they could have used to extend it. (Personally I could have done with more on Hooded Justice, but as he was such a secretive character I can understand why he wouldn't have spent much time parading around for newsreel cameras back when he was active.) Then again, they probably didn't want this to upstage the 26-minute Black Freighter too much. That is what's meant to be moving this release after all.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009
It seems incredible, but in your town and my town these things actually happen.

Acclaimed stage director Elia Kazan had only made a couple films before he tackled his first film noir -- 1947's Boomerang! -- for 20th Century Fox. Based on a real-life murder case that inspired Richard Murphy's Oscar-nominated screenplay, the film takes place in a small Connecticut town where a beloved priest is gunned down on Main Street, sending the whole town into an uproar. Almost from day one the citizens and the newspapers are on the backs of the police and city officials -- in fact, the editor of one paper effectively turns the story into a referendum on the reformers in power. This puts a lot of pressure on state's attorney Dana Andrews and police chief Lee J. Cobb, both of whom are anxious for a break in the case that doesn't seem to be coming until a drifter who matches the description gets picked up and is positively identified by the eyewitnesses. Something about the evidence doesn't sit right with Andrews, though, and he goes out on a limb to make sure that justice is done.

The film features Jane Wyatt as Andrews's not exactly long-suffering wife (their relationship is only slightly strained by all the brouhaha), Arthur Kennedy as the unlucky suspect who seems have the deck stacked against him, Sam Levene as a crusading reporter doing his best to stick it to whoever it needs to be stuck to, Ed Begley as one of the reform party bigwigs with a personal interest in the outcome of the case, and an uncredited Karl Malden as a police lieutenant who bears the brunt of Cobb's frustration. It also leans heavily on the stentorian tones of narrator Reed Hadley, who authoritatively sets the scene at the beginning of the film but refrains from explaining its somewhat arbitrary title. Andrews comes close a couple times when he's describing how hard it is for him to get a handle on the case, but maybe the filmmakers should have picked one that wouldn't be confused with an Eddie Murphy vehicle several decades down the road.

Thursday, March 26, 2009
Please forgive me, but it all seemed so real, so terrible.

Today I watched two Italian horror films from 1963 -- one in color, one in black and white -- both of them "Chilling Classics" set safely in the past. The first, The Blancheville Monster, takes place in Northern France in 1884 and follows a young woman (Ombretta Colli) who returns to her ancestral home after being away at college for several years to find that her father is dead and all of the servants have been replaced. Furthermore, she's on the cusp of her 21st birthday, when some ancient family curse -- which her brother the count (Gérard Tichy) is eager to sidestep -- is due to kick in. Accompanying her are a brother and sister (Vanni Materassi and Irán Eory) who are supposed to be Americans (can't you tell?) and who fall for or are courted by Colli and Tichy, respectively. Toss in a secretive doctor (Leo Anchóriz) and a suspicious-acting maid (Helga Liné) and you've got a lot of actors with accents in their names.

Director Alberto De Martino (who's credited under the name Martin Herbert and whose later work includes the MST3K staple The Puma Man) and his four screenwriters clearly favor atmosphere over coherent plotting, as in the repeated scenes of a beautiful woman walking around the castle in her nightgown, frequently carrying a candlestick. Naturally, this activity leads to the inevitable "dropping the candlestick on the hem of the nightgown, revealing the skimpy negligee underneath" routine. There are also numerous instances where the music builds to an intensity that absolutely does not match the drama onscreen, as in the scene where the count very deliberately sits down at the piano and then... wait for it... starts playing. There's a lot of foolishness leading up to the Scooby-Doo-type reveal of the villain (early on a tortured scream is passed off as the howl of a dog, at another point the doctor diagnoses Colli as being in a "hypnotic coma"), but at least it's stylish-looking foolishness.

My third and last film noir of the week is 1947's Possessed -- not to be confused with 1931's Possessed, which also starred Joan Crawford. In the earlier film, Crawford played a factory worker who falls in love with rich lawyer Clark Gable. In this film she plays a nurse who falls in love with aloof engineer Van Heflin, who unceremoniously drops her when he finds out how much she's stuck on him. Thus begins Crawford's slow descent into madness (a descent that earned her a Best Actress nomination, her first of two after winning for Mildred Pierce), which ends with her lapsing into a coma and being wheeled into the Psychopathic Dept. at a Los Angeles hospital. There she's given a miracle drug that restores her power of speech -- all the better to allow her to tell her story, which unfolds in flashback form.

It would be simple enough if all Crawford had to worry about was her doomed relationship with Heflin. Complicating matters is the fact that she has another man in her life, wealthy industrialist Raymond Massey, who had initially hired her to care for his invalid wife and then, after the wife takes her own life, asks her to stay on to take care of his young son. Crawford agrees and even accepts his marriage proposal despite the fact that she doesn't love him. This doesn't sit well with Massey's college-age daughter (Geraldine Brooks), who starts seeing a lot of Heflin despite (or perhaps even because of) Crawford's objections. The film gets more than a little overwrought at times and director Curtis Bernhardt gives Crawford free reign to ramp up the crazy, especially in the scenes where she lets her imagination run wild, but whatever she does, it only serves to reinforce the notion that you're watching an actual mental breakdown in progress. In the world of film noir, sometimes the darkest place is inside the human mind.

Saturday, March 28, 2009
If you eat matango, you become inhuman.

In the history of strange Japanese films, you would have to search far and wide to find one that could top Ishiro Honda's 1963 film Matango, which was known as Attack of the Mushroom People when it was first shown in the States. One of the more notable things about it is while the mushroom people don't actually start attacking in earnest until the movie is nearly over, it manages to hold the viewer's attention by slowly building tension and maintaining a sense of realism, both in its treatment of the situation and the characters who find themselves in it. Put simply, this is the most serious-minded film about people turning into mushrooms you will ever see and that may be the strangest thing about it.

As the film opens, we are introduced to a group of passengers that has charted the luxury yacht of a millionaire (Yoshio Tsuchiya) for a pleasure cruise. They include a writer (Hiroshi Tachikawa), a famous singer (Kumi Mizuno), a college professor (Akira Kubo) and a clerk (Miki Yashiro), with the ship's skipper (Hiroshi Koizumi) and a sailor (Kenji Sahara) along to assure smooth sailing. That isn't in the cards, though, for soon enough the yacht is wrecked in a violent storm and the passengers find themselves adrift in heavy fog, cut off from the outside world until they land on what they think is an uninhabited island. There they find that food is scarce (although there are plenty of mushrooms) and it isn't long before nerves are frayed and people start turning on each other -- that is until some of them turn to the mushrooms out of desperation and start turning into them.

Because Honda waits so long to reveal the fully-transformed mushroom people, he and his writers have to find other ways to clue the characters in to the fantastic danger they're in. One way is to have them tour a derelict ship where pretty much every flat surface is mottled with different colored mold. Then, after they take up residence in the ship, they are menaced one night by a kind of transitional human-mushroom hybrid, which turns out to merely be a delusion brought on by hunger and exhaustion. The creepiest image in the film, though, is reserved for the viewer alone. It's a simple shot of a crop of mushroom growing to enormous size before our eyes. When the same shot comes back later, only this time overlaid with some unnervingly childlike giggling, it's safe to say one is fully prepared for the madness to come.

Sunday, March 29, 2009
That was fun. I love robbing the English. They're so polite.

I remember what I was doing on this night twenty years ago: I was staying up to watch the Academy Awards to see if Kevin Kline was going to win Best Supporting Actor for his role in A Fish Called Wanda as the two-timing jewel thief with a inferiority complex. Happily he did and I was able to go to sleep that night secure in the knowledge that comedy could be recognized by the Academy when it was done well. (Sadly, this did not extend to John Cleese or Charles Chrichton, who were nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, respectively. They didn't win in those categories at the BAFTAs, either, but Cleese did win Best Actor and Michael Palin walked away with Best Supporting Actor.)

I have no idea how many times I've watched A Fish Called Wanda over the past two decades, but it still makes me laugh out loud every time I see it and that is no small feat. All of the leads give hysterically funny performances -- not just Cleese, Kline and Palin, but also Jamie Lee Curtis (who had previously shown off her comic chops in Trading Places but not much else) as the triple-timing sexpot stringing them all along. Throw in Maria Aitken as Cleese's haughty wife, Tom Georgeson as a criminal mastermind who spends most of the film languishing in prison, Patricia Hayes as an old woman with some terribly yappy dogs, and Geoffrey Palmer as a judge whose court descends into chaos (not to mention Ken Campbell, John Bird and Stephen Fry) and you've got one of the greatest ensembles in comedy history.

None of that would matter, though, if the actors didn't have a clever script to work with and Cleese (who collaborated on the story with Crichton) provided them with an ingenious one that features one brilliantly conceived and executed comic set-piece after another, all building to a fevered climax. There have been other films before and since that have played up the differences between Brits and Americans for comedic purposes, but few have ever been as witty. And if you doubt me, remember apes do read philosophy, they just don't understand it.

Monday, March 30, 2009
Why did you come to Venice? What were you looking for?

It's hard to know where to begin with a film like 1990's The Comfort of Strangers. I usually dislike talking about films in terms of other films, but in this case it can't really be helped. To begin with, like Don't Look Now before it, Comfort is set in Venice in the off-season and features a couple at a crossroads in their relationship. (They have yet to decide whether to get married or not, and her two children from a previous marriage appear to be a major stumbling block for him.) Like Patty Hearst, it was directed by Paul Schrader and starred Natasha Richardson, who once again finds herself in a situation that quickly spirals out of her control. And like The Handmaid's Tale, which Richardson starred in the same year, it boasts a screenplay by Harold Pinter, this time based on a novel by Ian McEwan.

Another point of reference is Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, which was made two years later and was also about an English couple on holiday that becomes entangled with another couple in what can best be described as an abusive relationship. In this case the English couple is played by Richardson and Rupert Everett, and one night when they get hopelessly lost while trying to find a place to eat that is still open they are approached by an Italian in a white Armani suit (Christopher Walken) who offers to help them. Instead of a restaurant, though, he takes them to a bar where he plies them with wine and regales them with a bizarre story of his childhood. Polite to a fault, when the couple runs into Walken the next day they accept his invitation to come back to his house, where they meet his wife (Helen Mirren) under rather embarrassing circumstances. (If that sounds a little vague, it's because I don't want to give away too much of the story, which depends on the element of surprise for its effectiveness.)

Filming in Italy for the first time (he would return the following decade to make the ill-fated Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist), Schrader gets a lot of mileage out of the Venice locations, which are beautifully shot by cinematographer Dante Spinotti. He also makes good use of Angelo Badalamenti's score, the first of five the composer would write for Schrader. It's just too bad he never got to make another film with Natasha Richardson. They really seemed to work well together.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Dear Diary: My teen angst bullshit has a body count.

Twenty years ago today, the movie Heathers was released in theaters and just about anybody who hadn't fallen in love with Winona Ryder after Beetlejuice quickly fell into line. It's been years since I've seen the film, but as I acquired the "20th High School Reunion Edition" last fall (kinda jumped the gun there, didn't they?), I figured it was about time I gave it a spin. And having done so, I'm happy to report that the film's themes of teen alienation and rebellion still resonate and its satirical barbs are as sharp as they ever were.

Written by Daniel Waters (who went on to pen the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and the Bruce Willis vanity project Hudson Hawk, as well as Batman Returns and Demolition Man) and directed by Michael Lehmann (whose immediate follow-ups were the disappointing Meet the Applegates and Hudson Hawk), Heathers is the preeminent high school satire, perfectly encapsulating what it means to be trapped in an unforgiving microcosm of society and what one has to give up (namely any semblance of humanity) in order to rise above it and be part of the in crowd. At Westerburg High School, that crowd is exemplified by the Heathers, who include ringleader Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), bookish Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), and cheerleader Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), as well as Ryder's Veronica Sawyer, whose ability to forge people's handwriting was most likely her ticket into the clique. It doesn't take long, though, for Ryder to be drawn to the new kid in town, J.D. (Christian Slater), who has a rebellious streak a mile wide and a deadly desire to upend the existing social order.

More that anything else, what sets Heathers apart from other high school films of the '80s (most of which haven't aged half as well) is the knowing way it skewers its targets on all levels of the social spectrum. It also has some of the most quotable dialogue ever written ("Will someone tell me why I smoke these damn things?" "Because you're an idiot." "Oh yeah, that's it." -- "I love my dead gay son." -- "Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.") and an ensemble cast to die for. If I had to pick one, though, I would say my favorite supporting character has to be Glenn Shadix's priest -- mostly for the way he says "Eskimo" during his last eulogy. I also find it telling that his character is named Father Ripper -- a clear callback to Dr. Strangelove if I ever saw one.

Back to February 2009 -- Onward to April 2009

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