Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
September 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
I'm a machine, but I didn't come with an instruction manual or a label on me anywhere.
For his first film after concluding the attention-getting "Vengeance Trilogy," Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park switched gears in a big way with 2006's I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, an offbeat comedy set in a mental institution. Co-written with Seo-Gyeong Jeong, the film follows a disturbed young woman (Su-jeong Lim) who believes she's part robot and whose attempt to plug herself in on the job is mistaken for a suicide attempt and gets her committed to a hospital where people with all sorts of mental problems are in residence. There she meets a compulsive thief (Korean pop star Rain) who frequently hides behind a mask and is an easy scapegoat whenever anything goes missing in the ward. (One patient even accuses him of stealing his ping-pong serve.) Together they search for the purpose of existence, which always seems to be just out of Lim's grasp no matter how hard she strains.
During the course of the film Lim undergoes shock treatments, force-feeding (because, as a cyborg, she has no use for human food) and isolation therapy, and periodically imagines herself going on a cyborg-enhanced killing spree, taking out most of the hospital staff in a spectacularly bloody fashion. All the while Rain watches out for her, even going so far as to devise a way for her to believe that eating food is beneficial to her. (This is probably the only film where the consumption of a spoonful of rice is considered a major, applause-worthy breakthrough.) In the end, neither one of them may be much closer to sanity than when they started, but at least one of them has found their purpose for existing. Coming from a filmmaker who spends most of his time probing the dark side of human nature, that constitutes an unqualified happy ending.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The sport is in the chase, not the kill.
In 1941, after directing two westerns in a row, Fritz Lang returned to more familiar territory with 1941's Man Hunt, a thriller in which he made plain how he felt about the Nazi menace that was threatening the world. Set during the lead-up to the war and based on a story by Geoffrey Houseland called Rogue Male, which was adapted for the screen by Dudley Nichols, the film is about a British big-game hunter (Walter Pidgeon) on holiday in Germany who gets Hitler in his sights one day but is captured before he can pull the trigger. As he tells the monocled Gestapo officer (George Sanders) who questions him afterward, he was only stalking the Fuhrer for the sport of it and never intended to shoot, but Sanders finds this hard to swallow and tries to get him to sign a statement saying he was sent by the British government to assassinate Hitler. Pidgeon naturally refuses, setting in motion the game of cat-and-mouse that they will engage in for the remainder of the film -- with Sanders securely playing the role of cat.
After effecting his escape, Pidgeon stows away aboard a ship bound for England and, with the help of cabin boy Roddy McDowall (in one of his earliest screen appearances), manages to escape detection. Once in London he continues to be pursued by Nazi agents, including a sinister John Carradine, and enlists the aid of Cockney working girl Joan Bennett, who quickly falls for him. The romantic scenes between Bennett and Pidgeon are some of the weakest in the film (and they're borderline soppy to boot), but they're balanced out nicely by the suspense that Lang is able to generate, particularly in the sequence where Pidgeon is pursued through the London Underground. Lang is also on surer ground with the scenes with the Nazis since he has them speak for the most part in German (which goes untranslated, but we can usually catch their drift).
Incidentally, I note that the uncredited actor who plays Hitler is Carl Ekberg, who was somewhat in demand in that capacity since he also essayed the role in Citizen Kane (during the opening newsreel) and two more films the following year. He soon passed the baton to Bobby Watson, though, who chalked up appearances in films such as The Devil with Hitler, The Hitler Gang and Hitler--Dead or Alive. Seems Fritz Lang wasn't the only one who dreamed of offing the guy on celluloid.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Mine, too, are the problems of life and death.
Had a double feature of John Brahm thrillers starring the imposing Laird Cregar, starting with 1944's The Lodger, based on the same Marie Belloc Lowndes novel that spawned Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name 18 years earlier. In it, Cregar plays a research pathologist who takes a room under an assumed name and is suspected of being Jack the Ripper by his landlady (Sara Allgood), even if her husband (Cedric Hardwicke) is a bit more skeptical. Still, even he has to concede that their lodger keeps odd hours and that some of his late nights out coincide with each new murder. One thing is certain: the police may be out in force and groups of vigilantes on the prowl, but that doesn't stop the Ripper from striking.
Top billing on the film went to Merle Oberon, who plays Allgood and Hardwicke's niece, a dance hall singer just back from Paris who attracts Cregar's attention and not in a good way. She also turns the head of Scotland Yard inspector George Sanders, who uses Oberon's connection to one of the victims to get close to her. He even shows her around the Yard's Black Museum, which is a strange place to take someone on a first date, but until the Ripper case is solved it's not like he gets much time off. As with 1953's Man in the Attic, there's never much doubt about who the guilty party is, but Brahm (with the aid of screenwriter Barré Lyndon and cinematographer Lucien Ballard) keeps us in suspense anyway, taking us down foggy London streets where any shadow could hide a killer.
There's also not much of a mystery aspect to 1945's Hangover Square since the opening reveals to us that Laird Cregar, this time playing an intense classical composer who's prone to blackouts, is capable of murdering people without even realizing it. The film not only reunited Cregar with director John Brahm, but also screenwriter Barré Lyndon and co-star George Sanders, this time playing a Scotland Yard doctor Cregar goes to with his concerns after yet another blackout. And he can use all the help he can get when he's set upon by manipulative singer Linda Darnell, a social climber who causes him to neglect his concerto in favor of writing classy songs for her.
Based on a novel by Patrick Hamilton, who also wrote the plays that Gaslight and Rope were based on, Hangover Square features a number of visual tours-de-force, particularly when Cregar is going into one of his blackouts (which are triggered by loud noises). Also quite memorable is a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire where Cregar disposes of one of his victims and the closing sequence where his concerto (which was actually written by composer Bernard Herrmann) is given its world premiere. Despite its highly dramatic quality, one has the distinct impression that it won't be getting an encore.
Friday, September 4, 2009
It's a thing of violence to whom death would be a merciful release.
When it came time to make House of Dracula in 1945, Universal Pictures must have known its classic monster series was winding down for good. The second film to bring Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster together, it doesn't appear to be too concerned with plot continuity. There are also coincidences aplenty since Count Dracula (John Carradine) and Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) both arrive at the door of the same blood specialist (Onslow Stevens) without once revealing how they managed to come back to life after being felled by sunlight and a silver bullet, respectively, at the end of House of Frankenstein. This is probably for the best, though, because when screenwriter Edward T. Lowe (who also penned House of Frankenstein) gets around to bringing Frankenstein's Monster (Glenn Strange) aboard, his explanation for how the monster came to rest in the mud-filled cave beneath the doctor's house is patently ludicrous. Sometimes it's best to just leave things unexplained.
Since the film bears his name, it's fitting that Dracula get the most attention, at least at the start. After being given little more than a glorified cameo in House of Frankenstein, Carradine -- here passing himself off as Baron Latos -- uses his expanded screen time to exude menace and sexual temptation, particularly when it comes to the doctor's beautiful assistant (Martha O'Driscoll), who quickly falls under his spell. The same is not the case with the doctor's less beautiful assistant (Jane Adams), a hunchback who hopes to benefit from his experiments with spore concentrate, which can apparently be used to soften and reshape bones. This comes in handy when the doctor determines that Talbot's transformations are caused by pressure on his brain, which can be relieved by a simple skull operation, but Dracula requires a different kind of treatment and the doctor soon learns the folly of giving blood transfusions to a vampire. The film also features Lionel Atwill (in one of his final screen appearances) as the local police inspector -- the kind of role he could probably play in his sleep by this time.
As with House of Frankstein, the directing chores on House of Dracula were handled by Erle C. Kenton, who made a few more films before jumping to television in the '50s. And as for Universal's monsters, this wasn't quite the end of the road for them since the studio would bring all three back one last time for the 1948 horror comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In many ways the movies were becoming parodies of themselves anyway, so ending the cycle with an outright spoof was only logical.
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Saturday, September 5, 2009
There's no use making a federal case out of a silly prank.
This morning's TCM Underground movie was William Castle's 1965 thriller I Saw What You Did, in which a pair of doe-eyed teenagers (Andi Garrett and Sarah Lane) spend the evening making prank phone calls while Garrett's parents are out of town and make the mistake of pranking a man who's killed his wife and buried her remains in a shallow grave. (Their patter starts out innocently enough, but eventually they work their way up to cooing the line "I saw what you did and I know who you are," which is what gets the killer's attention.) John Ireland plays the psychopath, whose wife was already on her way out the door when he up and decides to stab her to death in the shower, with Joan Crawford as the older neighbor with romantic designs on him who wears an enormously gaudy necklace and learns the folly of trying to blackmail a murderer into marrying you.
At this point in his career, Castle was becoming less and less reliant on gimmicks and was able to concentrate more on things like building atmosphere and eliciting effective performances from his actors. Sure, there are some silly touches like the barn door that slams by itself and then can't be opened (which seems like it should have figured into the climax, but the screenwriter somehow forgot about it), but for the most part Castle showed that he was capable of generating authentic suspense when the occasion called for it. It's no wonder he believed he was ready for the big time when he purchased the rights to Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby two years later, but the studio convinced him to turn the reins over to Roman Polanski instead. Probably the best decision considering how well Polanski's film turned out, but still something of a disappointment for Castle.
I'm starting to think this may have been a mistake.
When it was released ten years ago, Mike Judge's Office Space came and went so quickly that I didn't get to see it in theaters (nor was I particularly inclined to thanks to its mostly middling reviews). A few years back I was eagerly anticipating his follow-up Idiocracy, having caught up with Office Space on video (as did most people), but its token theatrical release didn't even give me a chance. Now along comes Extract, which managed to secure a wide enough release that there was no question about catching it with an audience -- and I'm very glad I did.
Extract is being touted as Judge's return to the workplace comedy and there's very little doubt that it is concerned with the comic plight of people who have to work for a living. Even Jason Bateman, who plays the owner of an extract bottling company that is on the verge of being bought out by General Mills, puts in such long hours that he's never able to make it home before his wife's (Kristen Wiig) eight o'clock sweatpants deadline, after which she has no interest in having sex. He also has to contend with a garrulous neighbor (David Koechner) who never gives him a moment's peace and a hapless employee (Clifton Collins Jr.) who suffers an injury on the job that jeopardizes the buy-out -- and that's even before the arrival of the sexy new temp (Mila Kunis), in actuality a con woman whose machinations could potentially bankrupt the company.
Bateman carries the film in the much the same way he anchored Arrested Development in its three years on the air, but he also has able support from the likes of Ben Affleck (a real treat as his bartender friend who's constantly trying to push harder drugs on him), J.K. Simmons (as his plant manager who calls everybody "Dingus" because he's never bothered to learn any of their names), Dustin Milligan (as the dumbest gigolo on the face of the planet) and Gene Simmons (as a hardball-playing lawyer best known for his TV and bus stop ads). And even if the film doesn't quite knock it out of the park, there are still laughs aplenty, which is more than will be said for the odious I Hope They Serve Beers in Hell, the trailer for which preceded it. I shudder to think about the audience that would like to see that.
Monday, September 7, 2009
You're really overqualified for the job.
As today is Labor Day, I figured a work-related film would be appropriate and found that Steven Shainberg's Secretary fit the bill perfectly. Released in 2002, the film is best known for giving Maggie Gyllenhaal her breakthrough role as a submissive with excellent typing skills who finds the ideal position as secretary for demanding lawyer James Spader. Prone to cutting herself whenever she feels anxious and fresh out of an institution (where she was sent after cutting herself too deeply), Gyllenhaal finds a new outlet for her emotions when Spader starts spanking her for minor typos. This unnerves her at first, but soon she's purposely leaving mistakes in her correspondence so they can get the red pen treatment and Spader is framing typo-ridden letters and hanging them in the hall. Then he moves on to more extreme humiliations and punishments, which Gyllenhaal cheerfully rolls with while falling head over heels for him.
This would all be hunky dory if Spader were comfortable with his role as the dominant party in the relationship, but he's not as in touch his own feelings as he's helped her to be with hers. Or maybe he's just not ready to make a long-term commitment to one underling. (There's a reason why the "Secretary Wanted" is a permanent part of the sign out front.) Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal has to fend off the attentions of her would-be boyfriend (Jeremy Davies, playing against type as the character who represents stability) and her well-meaning but way overprotective mother (Lesley Ann Warren). If only they knew what kind of employee-employer relationship she and Spader have. If only they knew what she and Spader get up to behind closed doors... they'd probably never let her out of the house again.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
It's good for your soul to have one thing you can fall back on.
When Criterion released its "Nikkatsu Noir" box set -- #17 in the Eclipse Series -- last month, I was most excited by the inclusion of Seijun Suzuki's 1960 film Take Aim at the Police Van, but since my library acquired the whole thing I figured it wouldn't hurt to give the other films in it a look. The earliest one in the set is 1957's I Am Waiting, which was the directorial debut of Koreyoshi Kurahara, who had cut his teeth as assistant director on Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit the year before. It's the story of an ex-boxer (Yujiro Ishihara) who dreams of joining his brother on a farm in Brazil and gets mixed up with a cabaret singer (Mie Kitahara) looking to escape from the gangster who has her under contract. It's the kind of film where everybody has a dark secret (Ishihara once killed a man in a bar fight, Kitahara was a classical singer before she lost her voice) and their pasts are intertwined in ways that aren't immediately apparent -- that is, until Ishihara starts looking into his brother's disappearance (something the police are apparently reluctant to do). It isn't too surprising where his search leads him, but Kurahara makes sure the journey is exciting and eventful.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Everyone in this city knows what I did. They look at me and say, "He's a criminal."
The second film in the "Nikkatsu Noir" set is 1958's Rusty Knife, which, like I Am Waiting, marked the debut of its director, Toshio Masuda, who co-wrote the film with I Am Waiting scribe Shintaro Ishihara. The film also reunited I Am Waiting stars Yujiro Ishihara (who plays a former gangster who's since gone straight) and Mie Kitahara (who plays a TV reporter and the daughter of a murdered city councilman). As the story opens, yakuza boss Naoki Sugiura is being hauled in on an assault charge by prosecutor Shoji Yasui, who's looking to pin something more serious on him. His opportunity arrives in the form of an anonymous letter from someone claiming to have witnessed the councilman's murder, which was made to look like a suicide. That someoneis future Nikkatsu superstar Jo Shishido, whose attempt to get more hush money out of Sugiura leads to his untimely demise, but not before he alerts the police to two other witnesses: bar owner Ishihara and his buddy Akira Kobayashi, who went straight with him but is less apt to stay on the straight and narrow.
As in I Am Waiting, Ishihara has a killing on his conscience and he dreams of moving someplace where people don't know him. (This time, though, he's only planning on going to Tokyo.) Initially reluctant to help the police and dismissive of Sugiura's attempt to pay him to keep quiet, he eventually comes around to the side of law and order when he finds out who was responsible for his girlfriend's suicide (which is what prompted him to kill a fellow gang member in the first place). As one character told Ishihara in I Am Waiting, "You shouldn't let the past consume you. You must forgive yourself and move on." For Ishihara, that's exactly the sort of thing that's easier said than done.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Dirt sticks to everyone in this line of work.
Seijun Suzuki's Underworld Beauty isn't part of Criterion's "Nikkatsu Noir" set, but it might as well be since it's cut from the same cloth. Made in 1958, it's the earliest Suzuki film available in the States, having been released a few years back by Home Vision Entertainment (which also put out Kanto Warrior and Tattooed Life). It stars Michitaro Mizushima
as an ex-convict fresh out of jail after a three-year stint who has some stones to unload (the booty from the diamond heist he was sent up for) and a crippled partner to pay back. Unfortunately, things get complicated in a hurry when they're double-crossed by the yakuza boss he makes the arrangements with and soon everybody and their sister is after the diamonds.
As if he doesn't have enough to worry about, Mizushima also takes it upon himself to straighten out his partner's younger sister (Mari Shiraki, who had a supporting role in Rusty Knife), who does nude modeling for her artist boyfriend and entertains American sailors on the side, among other things. As it often does in these movies, everything comes to a head during a climactic shootout, only this one's somewhat unusual as it takes place at the Turkish bath where the yakuza boss (who is unfortunately not credited on the IMDb, nor is anybody else in the cast) has his base of operations. Some of it even plays like a warm-up for the hyperkinetic gunplay to which Suzuki would gravitate toward the end of his tenure at Nikkatsu. He still had a ways to go before he would reach that point, though.
One step along the way for Suzuki was 1960's Take Aim at the Police Van, which is the centerpiece of the "Nikkatsu Noir" box and also happens to star Michitaro Mizushima and Mari Shiraki. This time out, Mizushima is a conscientious prison guard who is suspended for six months after the van in which he's transferring some prisoners is ambushed and two of them are killed. Of course, how their deaths could be said to be his fault is beyond me, but Mizushima doesn't grumble too loudly about it. Instead, he takes it upon himself to find out who was behind the ambush and why, which turns out to be a lot more complicated than he probably anticipated. Shiraki co-stars as the stripper girlfriend of ambitious ex-con Shoichi Ozawa, who is Mizushima's gateway into the convoluted plot, and Misako Watanabe plays coy as his would-be love interest, whose involvement is likewise a bit murky. Still, the plot moves fast and at 79 minutes the film doesn't have time to wear out its welcome. A solid addition to Suzuki's filmography.
Friday, September 11, 2009
It's a fine line between a stray dog and a wolf.
The fourth film in the "Nikkatsu Noir" set -- 1964's Cruel Gun Story -- is by far the most fatalistic one in the bunch (unless, of course, 1967's A Colt Is My Passport trumps it, and I won't find that out for at least a couple weeks since it appears to be the most in demand at my library). Directed by Takumi Furukawa, the film stars Jo Shishido as a smooth criminal sprung from prison so he can carry out a daring robbery for his former boss. The target is an armored car that is transporting 120 million yen from the track (which brings to mind Kubrick's The Killing) and the plan relies on split-second timing (ditto) which gets fouled up by unforeseen complications (ditto ditto). (Somebody should have thought to let the guards know what their part was.)
It really shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that the plan has a few hitches since the crew Shishido is saddled with seems to come to blows every other scene. In fact, the only one he really trusts is his right-hand man (Yuji Odaka), who mentions visiting his sick mother about as often as Shishido brings up his crippled sister (Chieko Matsubara), who won't be able to walk again no matter how many expensive operations he pays for. He certainly can't trust his boss, who sends the alluring Minako Kozuki to keep an eye on the crew and whose motives become more and more ulterior with each passing scene. By the time the film reaches the requisite gun battle the situation is explosive enough that the addition of dynamite is almost redundant.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
You can start a war with Capone, but you're not going to win it.
In 1967, after operating independently or for AIP for his whole career, Roger Corman got to make his first film for a major studio, namely 20th Century-Fox, which produced The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a fact-based account of the events leading up to that fateful February 14th. Written by Howard Browne, who was something of a gangster specialist since his other two screenplay credits are for 1961's Portrait of a Mobster (about Dutch Schultz) and 1975's Capone (about guess who), the film starred Jason Robards as a cigar-chomping Al Capone, who's eager to shut down "Bugs" Moran (Ralph Meeker), the upstart head of Chicago's North Side mob and a major thorn in his side. Throughout the film (and with the help of the voice-over narration), we're introduced to the other major players, including George Segal as one of Moran's enforcers, Jean Hale as Segal's trampy wife (who gets a sandwich smashed in her face over an expensive fur coat), Clint Ritchie as the architect of the massacre and Bruce Dern as a mechanic for Moran's organization who picks the wrong day to do some auto repairs. And since the events depicted in the film are a matter of record, in lieu of suspense Corman and Browne use the narrator to reinforce the inevitability of what will happen when seven of the characters reach "the last morning of his life."
With a major studio's resources at his disposal, Corman was able to successfully evoke the period setting on a scale he hadn't been able to previously, with lots of classic cars and clothing helping to bring late-'20s Chicago to life. He was even able to get realistic-looking snowfall for the day of the titular event, which must have seemed like pure extravagance to someone accustomed to filmmaking on the cheap. Speaking of which, he was also able to hire some of his old cronies to play uncredited supporting roles: Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller are two of the hired gunmen from out of town, and Jack Nicholson (who turned down Dern's role because he wanted to be on the shoot longer) is their getaway driver. As well-mounted as the end result is, though, Corman chose to return to the world of the independents where he could be his own boss. Still, at least he proved he could play with the big boys and come up a winner.
What a turkey. This plot has been done so many times.
While I'm in a massacring mood, I figured I'd check out the "Chilling Classic" Drive-In Massacre, which has been on my radar ever since Joe Blevins mentioned it as a film of interest. Released in 1977, when the drive-in market was still going strong, this must have played like a sick joke when it was booked into one since it concerns a maniac prowling around a California drive-in with a sword decapitating random patrons (that is, when he isn't stabbing them through the throat or skewering them like a shish kebab). Naturally this attracts the attention of the police, here represented by the brain trust of John F. Goff (billed as Jake Barnes) and Steve Vincent (billed as Adam Lawrence, a name he previously used when he played Montague in the soft-core film The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet in 1969), who have no shortage of suspects but very little on the ball.
Said suspects include slow-witted janitor -- and former carnival sword-swallower -- Douglas Gudbye (playing a character charmingly named Germy) and irascible drive-in manager Newton Naushaus, not to mention the drive-in's absent owner, who apparently has a private sword collection from the days when he owned the carnival that employed both Gudbye and Naushaus. And there's also the drive-in's resident peeping tom (Norman Sherlock), who is apprehended at his home by detectives Goff and Vincent and then released during a cutaway, presumably because the director couldn't afford to shoot the scene where his innocence is revealed. Finally, there's Random Guy with Machete, played by George 'Buck' Flower (who co-wrote this turkey with Goff, based on a story by director Stu Segall), who is discovered holding a little girl (played by his own daughter Verkina) hostage in a warehouse that looks like a Home Depot after hours.
Shockingly enough, the ploy where a major plot point is revealed in voice over form actually crops up again near the end of the film, by which time the killer has claimed six victims (all couples engaged in some variety of necking) and has a few more to go before the classic non-ending ending, in which the filmmakers helpfully warn moviegoers that the drive-in killer is still loose and could strike anywhere at any time. In fact, he could even be at the drive-in where you're watching this right now! Ooga-booga! Of course, anybody who's sat through Drive-In Massacre knows what the moral of the story is: don't go to the drive-in with your significant other if you're having relationship issues. If you do, you're only asking to have somebody come along with a sword and cut your head off.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Fancy words and old ways don't cut it now. We need something with a fresh nip to it.
First up for me this week was Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit, the prototypical "Sun Tribe" movie about Japan's idle and reckless youth. Made in 1956, it was the first film written by Shintaro Ishihara, who followed it up with I Am Waiting and Rusty Knife before making his directorial debut with 1958's The Young Beast (which I would like to see someday). It stars Yujiro Ishihara and Masahiko Tsugawa as two brothers who become obsessed with the same young woman (Mie Kitahara), who they meet by chance upon their arrival at the seaside resort where their family keeps its boat. There they also drift into the orbit of half-Japanese, half-American rich kid Masumi Okada and his friends who make boredom their credo. For all the money and free time they have at their disposal, it's telling that they never have anything constructive to apply themselves to.
This changes when first Tsugawa (the innocent younger brother) and later Ishihara (the more worldly hedonist) fall under the spell of Kitahara, who doesn't really discourage either of them despite her clear preference of Tsugawa, who remains in the dark about the true nature of their love triangle until the end of the film. (Actually it's more like a love rectangle since it turns out Kitahara is married to an older American man, which calls into question how serious she could be about either of them.) Throughout the film Nakahira repeatedly returns to the sea, where the brothers water-ski to the accompaniment of languid horn and Hawaiian guitar music and where the fates of the three lovers are forever sealed. Far from celebrating their lifestyle, the film ultimately illustrates the adage about happens when hands remain idle.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
You want to go on with the game.
Some of the same nautical imagery is also invoked by Roman Polanski's feature debut, Knife in the Water, which takes place during a couple's Sunday boating trip in Poland's lake district. Made in 1962, the film follows an overbearing writer (Leon Niemczyk) and his much younger wife (Jolanta Umecka), who pick up hitchhiker Zygmunt Malanowicz on the way to the marina where they keep their sailboat. Seemingly on a whim, Neimczyk invites Malanowicz to join them on their outing, which doubles as a battle of wits/wills between the two men. Everything is a competition with them and one-upmanship the name of the game, with Umecka acting as the uninvolved spectator. Some of the sailing scenes feature similarly languid music (scored by frequent Polanski collaborator Krzysztof Komeda), but the ending is much more enigmatic. Unlike Nakahira, Polanski was less interested in passing judgment on his characters -- or letting his audience off the hook.
Without the family you're nobody. The end for the family means your end, too.
My third film was Kanto Wanderer, the last of four films Seijun Suzuki made for Nikkatsu in 1963. With its story of a yakuza (the stoic Akira Kobayashi) caught between the old ways and the new it resembles 1965's Tattooed Life but is much less straightforward. Dressed in traditional garb, Kobayashi tries his darnedest to live by the yakuza code, but this is made difficult by his attraction to a woman from his past (Hiroko Ito) who is married to a much-practiced swindler (Yunosuke Ito) who has more tricks up his sleeve than he has sleeves. Kobayashi is contrasted with the more modern Diamond Fuyu (Daizaburo Hirata), an underling for a rival clan who becomes smitten with a schoolgirl (Sanae Nakahara) who's fascinated with yakuza to the point where she doesn't seem to mind much when one of them sells her into prostitution, thus setting up the conflict that will lead to Kobayashi's downfall.
The film as a whole is highly stylized, with Suzuki making use of theatrical lighting effects, bold color schemes and obviously fake sets that serve to reveal and heighten the emotions of the characters. This is especially helpful since most of them keep their feelings in check, prompting one character to observe, "You can't tell how a woman feels just by looking on the outside." The trouble is, none of them make it easy to see what's on the inside. That may be what prompted Suzuki to make such female-centric films as Gate of Flesh and Story of Prostitute in the years that followed. (Then again, knowing Nikkatsu's production methods, he probably didn't have much choice in the matter.)
Thursday, September 17, 2009
We were trying to get them to talk. That's all.
Out of the all the films that came out in 2008 that I didn't get to see in theaters, the one that probably sticks in my craw the most is the Errol Morris documentary Standard Operating Procedure, which laid bare the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Using still photos (many of which are quite infamous), excerpts of letters, dramatic reenactments, impressionistic details, grainy video footage and interviews with many of the MPs that were involved (as well as civilian and military interrogators and one of the criminal investigators), Morris looks past the sensational aspects of the story to uncover the roots of how it came to happen in the first place. As one of the interviewees asks, "How could all this go on without anybody noticing it?" That's exactly what Morris wants to find out.
In a lot of ways it's the logical follow-up to his 2003 film, the Academy Award-winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, which was at least party about how we came to be involved in Vietnam. The main difference here is Morris has to cross-index the stories of a dozen different individuals in much the same way the CID sorted through the thousands of photos that were taken by the participants in order to determine which ones depicted criminals acts and which ones were merely standard operating procedure. All in all, it's pretty chilling stuff, and the score by Danny Elfman (subbing for Philip Glass) neatly complements the work of cinematographers Robert Chappell (who previously shot The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War) and Robert Richardson (who shot Fast, Cheap & Out of Control). How this film didn't even get nominated for Best Documentary is frankly beyond me.
Friday, September 18, 2009
He's got to stop talking to people.
This has been a very good year to be a Steven Soderbergh fan. First, I got to see the roadshow version of Che in March. Then came The Girlfriend Experience in May. Now it's September and here's The Informant! (exclamation point part of the title, but even if it wasn't I probably would have added one anyway). I tell you, it's like 2000 (the year he put out Erin Brockovich and Traffic) or 2002 (Full Frontal and Solaris) all over again -- only more so.
His most assured and breezily entertaining movie in a decade (outside of the Ocean's films -- little surprise, then, that it was cut by their editor, Stephen Mirrione), The Informant! stars a paunchy Matt Damon as a biochemist-turned-executive for a major food corporation who turns whistle-blower and proceeds to turn his life upside-down without ever seeming to comprehend what he's doing. As he goes about his business -- with his frequently hilarious internal monologues laid over top -- we watch as he enthusiastically throws himself into the job of ratting out his bosses to the FBI (represented by special agents Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, who never quite know what to make of their man on the inside). Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who also co-wrote The Bourne Ultimatum) get a lot of mileage out of the contrast between Damon's ostensibly noble motivations and the myriad ways he nearly bungles things, especially once the FBI starts wiring him to collect evidence. (Fittingly, the opening credits are shown over a reel-to-reel tape being spooled up like something out of a late-'60s spy flick, which is reflected by Soderbergh's decision to have Marvin Hamlisch do the score.)
In addition to Bakula and McHale, the uniformly sharp supporting cast is anchored by Melanie Lynskey as Damon's devoted wife. Among his friends and business associates (who he also considers his friends even after he starts betraying them) are Thomas F. Wilson (as the head of security), Eddie Jemison, Scott Adsit, Joe Chrest and Tom Smothers (as one of the corporate bigwigs); and on the side of the law and order are Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, and Dick Smothers (as a judge). Throw in Tony Hale as Damon's increasingly out-of-his-depth lawyer and you've got yourself a cast that is positively stacked with comedic talent. No wonder I laughed so much and so hard.
This was also due in no small part to Hamlisch's jaunty score, which often recalled the ones he wrote for Woody Allen at the start of his directing career. One of the cues even sounded like a re-arrangement of the theme to Bananas, which definitely undercut the self-importance of Damon's mission -- at least the way he describes it to himself. He may think he's living a Michael Crichton or a John Grisham thriller (at one point we even see him watching The Firm in a theater, which is appropriate since the the bulk of the film takes place in the early '90s), but he really has more in common with Fielding Mellish than Tom Cruise. Of course, that would be just one of many things this informant would have to admit to himself.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
I keep having the sensation that we've crossed the frontier between the real and the unreal.
Well, these "Chilling Classics" won't watch themselves, so today I stumped for a double feature of Spanish shockers from 1972. The first was The Murder Mansion, which Mill Creek thought enough of that they also put it on their "Drive-In Movie Classics" set. Directed by Francisco Lara Polop, the film is about a group of people -- some of whom know each other and some are total strangers -- who get waylaid by the fog and are forced to stay the night at a murderous mansion. But before they get there we get to learn a little bit about our characters by the way they drive.
First we're introduced to a prime example of an offensive driver (Franco Fantasia) with the most annoying car horn imaginable who tries to run down a motorcyclist (Andrés Resino) and picks up a beautiful hitchhiker (Lisa Leonardi) who won't put out and winds up on the back of Resino's cycle instead. Then there's the perpetually bickering couple (Eduardo Fajardo and Yelena Samarina) who inexplicably decide to speed up when the fog gets too thick to see through. Finally there's a hysterical heiress (Analía Gadé) who practically drives headlong into a cemetery wall and apparently awakens the restless dead (specifically a menacing chauffeur in knee-high boots and his ghoulish passenger) inside in the process. All of the travelers eventually take shelter in the mansion next door, which is owned by a morbid young woman (Ida Galli) with a taste for demonic artwork and tales of her aunt's witchery and the vampires that turned the nearby village into a ghost town.
As our weary travelers settle in for the night we get a number of extended flashbacks to Gadé as a not very convincing co-ed whose lecherous father (George Rigaud) has an eye for her college chums, which naturally causes her to withhold sex from her husband (Alberto Dalbés) later on in life. Meanwhile, everybody keeps leaving their rooms to explore the house (including the basement which had previously been declared off-limits), the undead chauffeur prowls about frightening people, Galli's long-dead aunt makes a number of appearances, and everything turns out to have been staged by Dalbés in order to drive his wife insane so he get his hands on her inheritance. In the end the mansion lives up to its name since nearly everybody inside winds up dead save for Resino and Leonardi, who hop on his bike and ride off into the sunrise. One thing is certain: the authorities they summon will have quite a mess on their hands.
Next up was The Witches Mountain, which didn't have apostrophe on its title card so I'm not giving it one, either. Directed by Raúl Artigot, who was one of four credited screenwriters, the film opens with special collaborator Mónica Randall arriving home to find a gray-haired wig stabbed on her lawn and a dead cat in her bed thanks to a creepy little girl who chides Randall for having a cat in the first place and winds up getting immolated in her garage. Randall then hightails it over to porn-stached ex-boyfriend John Gaffari's house and tries to interest him in a trip for two to Brazil, which he turns down in favor of taking a magazine assignment photographing a remote mountain. Gaffari still likes the idea of having company, though, so he picks up topless sunbather Patty Shepard on his way to the mountain and drives her to her house where he waits in real time outside while she packs for the trip.
This is the point where things start getting weird since Gaffari suddenly hears loud, reverbed vocal music, which Shepard doesn't pick up on at all. Then they check into an inn run by a walleyed weirdo (Víctor Israel) who's deaf as a post, which makes ordering dinner more of a hassle than it's probably worth. Then the next morning Shepard finds herself out in the woods with no knowledge of how she got there. Determined to complete his assignment, Gaffari drags Shepard up a hill and is dismayed when somebody steals his jeep down below. They eventually track it down to a seemingly abandoned village (which, like the roads in The Murder Mansion, is prone to being enshrouded in fog) where a gray-haired woman is the only remaining resident, and this time it is Gaffari who finds himself out in the woods by himself overnight.
The next day the young couple is reunited and strange occurrences mount (including a scene where Gaffari investigates a cave and, apropos of nothing, is lunged at by a greasy, bare-chested hulk chained to the wall) until the two of them get fogged in and have to pitch a tent in the woods, at which point they're abducted by a coven of witches and the soundtrack is hijacked by blaring music for a poorly lit and choreographed ceremony of some kind that results in, I don't know, something. I think Shepard gets betrothed to the guy in the cave, but that doesn't pay off since she just winds up jumping off a cliff to her death. And Gaffari escapes the coven's clutches only to wind up back in their clutches at the end. Oh, well. You can't win 'em all.
Monday, September 21, 2009
I assumed, in the best possible situation, that we would all be arrested.
Started the week off with a pair of documentaries about phenomena particular to the '70s, one of which won Best Documentary at the Oscars. (See if you can guess which one.) First up was 2008's Man on Wire, about French wire-walker Philippe Petit's mad quest to walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 (this was after first warming up with Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Directed by James Marsh, the film at times plays like a caper with its reenactments of the lengths to which Petit and his crew had to go to smuggle their equipment into the buildings (which were still under construction at the time), hustle it up to the roof, avoid being caught by security, and rig the wire so he could perform his stunt (relatively) safely. All the while, we see contemporary interviews with everybody who was involved (even those who initially agreed to help but then bowed out for whatever reason) interwoven with archival footage of the months of planning and preparation.
By the time Man on Wire reaches the actual morning of the walk, the event has been built up to such an extent that it's a shame Marsh has to mostly rely on still photographs to depict the 45 minutes that Petit spent crossing between the towers before giving himself up to police. With this one act, though, he achieved the sort of thing that hardly anybody else would have even dreamed of attempting. And once you've walked between the tallest buildings in the world -- which Time Magazine called the "Artistic Crime of the Century" -- what do you do for an encore? The film doesn't say, but in the end it shows that Petit hasn't lost his way with a wire -- even if they're no longer as high as they used to be.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
This band wasn't about making people happy. It was attack. Attack, attack, attack.
Film number two was 2000's The Filth and the Fury, the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of the Sex Pistols in the late '70s. Directed by Julien Temple, who had previously helmed 1980's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (which was largely told from the point of view of manager Malcolm McLaren), the film acts as something of a corrective to the record since it relies on contemporary interviews with surviving members Paul Cook, Steve Jones, John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) and original bassist Glen Matlock, with Sid Vicious by necessity represented by archival footage. Temple also places the Pistols in the context of the social and political unrest that plagued Great Britain in the late '70s and even incorporates numerous clips from Laurence Olivier's 1955 film of Richard III, which are not as incongruous as one might think.
How much one gets out of a film like this may depend on how much import one ascribes to the Sex Pistols' place in music history, but I never found it to be anything less than fascinating. Still, whereas End of the Century spurred me on to dig into the Ramones' back catalog, I feel like I can continue to do without Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. If I can go 36 years without having it in my collection, there's no reason why I should feel obligated to add it now.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
You need to connect things so that they make us feel something.
Having worked on a good number of his father's films -- mostly notably as second unit and visual effects director on 1992's Dracula -- it's only natural that Roman Coppola's feature debut CQ is as steeped in the world of film as it is. Written and directed by Coppola, who has yet to make a follow-up but that doesn't mean he hasn't been busy, the 2001 film stars Jeremy Davies as an American editor in Paris working on a futuristic (well, the future as envisioned in 1969) science fiction/action/spy picture patterned after the likes of Barbarella and Diabolik that is troubled because its director (Gérard Depardieu) doesn't know how to end it. All the while Davies is shooting his own personal film, which he hopes will capture something "real and honest," but all he's really doing is pushing away girlfriend Elodie Bouchez, who isn't as committed to the project as he is.
Eventually Depardieu is fired by hotheaded Italian producer Giancarlo Giannini, who hires hotshot wunderkind Jason Schwartzman (who's busy helming a vampire film called Tomb of Satan's Blood) to replace him, but Schwartzman's involvement is fleeting and it's ultimately up to Davies to pull everything together, which means coming up with a credible ending. Meanwhile, Davies develops a crush on leading lady Angela Lindvall (who's most alluring as sexy space kitten Dragonfly), which must make it hard on him when he has to look at her love scene with revolutionary leader Billy Zane (whose group has naturally set up shop on the dark side of the moon). The film also features John Phillip Law (star of both Barbarella and Diabolik) as the main baddie in the film-within-the-film and Dean Stockwell as Davies's father, who manages a short visit with his son while he's passing through Paris on business. Sofia Coppola even appears briefly as Giannini's mistress, which shows that brother Roman is following in their father's footsteps in more ways than one. Right now, though, the thing he appears to be emulating most is the decade-long hiatus the elder Coppola took between The Rainmaker and Youth Without Youth. It remains to be seen how that will shake out.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Are you some kind of nut?
I didn't know a whole lot about Jeffrey Dahmer going into David Jacobson's 2002 film Dahmer apart from the fact that he was a gay serial killer who targeted young men. I didn't even know when he was active or for how long. And outside of the title card at the beginning that gives the date of his conviction on 15 counts of murder and the one at the end that says when he was killed by a fellow inmate, this film doesn't deal too much in cold, hard facts (unlike, say, Matthew Bright's Ted Bundy, which was made the same year). Instead, writer/director Jacobson has something more impressionistic in mind, fashioning a story around certain events in Dahmer's life rather than trying to tell the whole thing from beginning to end.
Regardless of how accurate (or inaccurate) the film may be, it's hard to argue with Jacobson's choice of Jeremy Renner to play Dahmer, who is working the graveyard shift at a chocolate factory when we first meet him and cruising young men at a department store in his off hours. We watch as he puts the moves on a cute Asian guy (Dion Basco), who really should have listened to his gut instinct, and later brings home a black guy (Artel Kayaru) he picks up in a sporting goods store after a conversation about fishing that is rife with double meanings. Eventually we get flashbacks to his teenage years (in which we learn that Jeffrey was a child of divorce with serious anger issues) and young adulthood (when he developed his m.o. of drugging his victims so he can have his way with them), but we never find out why he has such a predilection for minorities (unless that's one of the things the film distorts). What we do get is a taste of his strained relationship with father Bruce Davison, who has a way of prying into his business mercilessly, and a ringside seat to his first tentative pass at a straight high school wrestler (Matt Newton) who becomes his first victim. It's hard to say whether his life would have turned out any differently if that encounter had gone better, but it certainly didn't help.
If you go in the woods, be very careful.
When Eli Roth's Cabin Fever was released in the fall of 2003, I must not have been in the mood to see a gory horror film about loutish college students because I completely gave it a pass. When Roth's follow-ups turned out to be the torture porn standard-bearers Hostel and Hostel: Part II, I didn't feel so bad about skipping his debut (even if I was amused by his Grindhouse trailer Thanksgiving, the full version of which is apparently in development along with the inevitable Hostel: Part III), but thanks to the Independent Film Channel, I have finally gone back to see what all the fuss was about.
A definite throwback to the extreme splatter films of the '70s and '80s, Cabin Fever also cribs scenes directly from George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies (what with all the ominous close-ups of people drinking contaminated water), not to mention Herschell Gordon Lewis's Two Thousand Maniacs! (which may explain why Roth appeared in its remake). Written by Roth and Randy Pearlstein, the film follows five college friends -- one couple (Joey Kern and Cerina Vincent), one would-be couple (Rider Strong and Jordan Ladd) and one jerky fifth wheel (James DeBello) -- up to a remote cabin in the woods (shades of The Evil Dead) where instead of being possessed by evil spirits, they succumb one by one to a flesh-eating bacteria that gets into the water supply. Roth himself shows up (under the name David Kaufbird) as an extreme skater who happens upon the fivesome and is an unwelcome presence until it is revealed that he is bearing weed. After all, it's not enough for your protagonists to have premarital sex; they also have to be enthusiastic potheads if they're really going to earn their horrible fates.
That said, since I didn't care much for any of the characters, it was especially hard for me to care what happened to any of them. Sure, DeBello was set up to be an insensitive jerk from the start, but even Strong (our ostensible hero) does some dumbass things that nobody with a brain in their head would ever do, even under duress. I recognize the folly of expecting the characters in a horror film to act logically, but to make them constantly do idiotic things just for the hell of it is counterproductive. Doesn't Roth realize an audience needs somebody to root for?
Friday, September 25, 2009
You've gotta get out of here. There's nothing good here.
Never let it be said that Lodge Kerrigan makes films that are easy to watch, but they do offer plenty of rewards to those who are willing to stick with them. His most recent effort, 2004's Keane, is -- like his debut Clean, Shaven -- about a man battling with mental illness while looking for his daughter. The difference here is the girl in question was abducted from a bus station over a year ago and the man acts like it just happened -- and believes that any small clue he digs up could lead to her recovery, or at the very least the apprehension of the man who took her.
As portrayed by Damian Lewis (who's mesmerizing throughout), William Keane is a real piece of work. When we meet him he's casing the bus terminal obsessively, keeping up a running commentary in which he verbalizes every step of his tortured thought process. Eventually he finds his way back to the run-down hotel where he's staying, which is when we start to learn some things about the man we've been following around. For example, he's on federal disability, which is understandable considering his mental state. Also he's a heavy drinker (it's very telling that the song he picks out on the bar's jukebox is "I Can't Help Myself" by the Four Tops) and occasional coke-head, which explains why we see him fruitlessly looking for work later on. By the time he returns to the bus station, we know he's trapped in a self-defeating cycle that's bringing him no closer to the answers he's desperately seeking.
It's at this point that Lewis stumbles into the lives of single mother Amy Ryan and her seven-year-old daughter Abigail Breslin (who is the same age Lewis's girl would be). At first Ryan keeps him at arm's length, but eventually lets her guard down, allowing him to get closer to Breslin. Ryan even entrusts him with her for a few hours one night and he defies our expectations by staying pretty together (although he does threaten to come unglued for seemingly no reason when they're out the next day). Naturally this means he has to wind up back at the bus station with her, where they replay his personal tragedy with what he hopes will be different results this time. No matter what, though, Ryan's bound to have her own child-abduction trauma. That'll teach her to not get references before getting a babysitter.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
In some things, the old-fashioned ways are better after all.
As I was watching CQ this week it occurred to me that I've never actually seen Barbarella, which was the main inspiration for its film-within-the-film, Dragonfly (which, as I suspected, was pretty spot-on). A perfectly pleasant way to pass 98 minutes -- especially if one enjoys seeing Jane Fonda cavort about in various states of undress -- Barbarella was based on the adventure comic by Jean-Claude Forest and written for the screen by Terry Southern and director Roger Vadim (in collaboration with six other gentlemen) under the aegis of producer Dino De Laurentiis, whose name in the credits generally betokens a campy good time. From its opening weightless space suit strip (which takes up five minutes of screen time) to the destruction of the model of evil city SoGo at the end, Barbarella lets you know that it's not taking itself seriously for a second, which is fortunate because otherwise it would be pretty laughable.
The plot, such as it is, sends five-star double-rated astro-navigatrix Barbarella (Fonda, who is eternally innocent despite her frequent, coyly-hinted-at nudity) on a mission to find missing scientist Durand-Durand and his Positronic Ray, which is the first weapon to be created in a society that has not known war or any kind of conflict for centuries upon centuries. Upon crash-landing on the system where Durand-Durand's ship was last seen, Fonda is set upon by a band of creepy children who knock her out (not that last time that will happen), tie her up (ditto) and set vicious dolls on her that eat at her clothing (ditto ditto). Before she succumbs, though, she is rescued by child-catcher Mark Hand (Ugo Tognazzi), who introduces her to the old-fashioned way of making love and, amusingly enough, proves to be just as hirsute under his hair suit. After repairing her ship he then points her in the direction of SoGo, but she winds up crash-landing again and upon exiting her craft gets knocked out again (are you sensing a pattern here?).
This time when she comes to she is in the presence of blind angel Pygar (John Phillip Law) who has lost the will to fly and has been exiled to the labyrinth outside the city. He takes her to the brilliant Professor Ping (Marcel Marceau), who sets about fixing her ship for real, and after a bout of implied lovemaking Law is able to fly Fonda to SoGo, where they have a dickens of a time getting past the city's debauched citizens, not to mention the evil queen's Black Guards (leather-armored men who have a way with a whip but no actual bodies). Soon enough they fall into the clutches of the queen's Concierge (Milo O'Shea), who rescues them from a suicide room only to deliver them to the Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg) herself, who wishes to corrupt Law and gives Fonda over to the birds.
Now, anybody who's seen Hitchcock's The Birds knows how terrifying a mass bird attack can be onscreen when done right. What Vadim unleashes on Fonda, though, is a flock of mostly docile parrots and finches, which sit on her back and halfheartedly peck away at her outfit. But before they can do much damage, Fonda is rescued by buffoonish revolutionary Dildano (David Hemmings, who seems to be one of the few actors deliberately playing his scenes for laughs), who gives her the means to defeat Pallenberg in exchange for the weapons his ragtag group needs to storm the city. Ah, but who is the mysterious Durand-Durand and will his Positronic Ray figure into the climax of the film? And will De Laurentiis revisit the well 12 years later in the form of 1980's high-camp Flash Gordon? I wouldn't dream of telling.
You're so funny when you're sexually frustrated.
While I'm in a cult movie mood, I figured I'd follow Barbarella with another film set in the future (albeit a not so far-flung one). Set in 2024 in the aftermath of World War IV (a war which lasted all of five days), 1975's A Boy and His Dog was a movie I first encountered on the shelf at Pennington Video back when I was in college (and towns still had independent video stores). I was drawn to the cover art, which depicted a mushroom cloud with a smiley face on it, but put off by the presence of Don Johnson in the leading role. At the time I wasn't familiar with the work of Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original novella, or Sam Peckinpah regular L.Q. Jones, who wrote and directed and film version, so I never even brought it up as a candidate when my friends and I were searching for something to rent. It took Danny Peary's inclusion of it in Cult Movies 2 for me to give it a second thought and my library's recent acquisition of it to get me to sit down and watch it.
Okay, enough preamble. What about the film? Well, it's about a boy named Vic (Johnson) and his telepathic dog Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire and played by Tiger from The Brady Bunch) who roam a post-apocalyptic wasteland (identified as Phoenix, Arizona, which has been leveled along with every other major city in the world) foraging for canned food, avoiding the radioactive "screamers" and prowling for females for Johnson to rape. The division of labor is that Johnson finds the food and Blood locates the females, but there's plenty of competition in the form of roving bands of hooligans, so Johnson has had to go without for many weeks. That's probably why he ignores Blood's warnings when they stumble upon a beautiful girl (Susanne Benton) from "down under" and he insists on chasing after her instead of going with Blood to the fabled land "over the hill" (where food still grows in the ground, among other miraculous things).
After Johnson leaves Blood topside, he finds himself in a vast underground facility that is ruled over by an autocratic Committee chaired by none other than Jason Robards who, like everybody else there, wears clown-white makeup with rosy cheeks. Calling itself the State of Topeka, the community doesn't tolerate behavioral deviation of any kind -- especially the failure to obey authority -- and the Committee comes down hard on all rule-breakers, which would mean curtains for Johnson if they didn't have other plans for him. What those other plans are I'll leave you to discover for yourself. As rough around the edges as this film may be, I believe it is worth seeking out and definitely deserves its cult.
Monday, September 28, 2009
If you want to stay alive, don't get too attached to your guns.
Completed some unfinished business tonight in the form of 1967's A Colt Is My Passport, the last title in Criterion's "Nikkatsu Noir" set. Directed by Takashi Nomura, the film starred Jo Shishido -- who was primed to play the lead in Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill later that year -- as a jaded hit man hired by a yakuza boss to kill the head of a rival gang who finds it more difficult to get out of the country with his accomplice, getaway driver Jerry Fujio, than he expected. Unable to fly out, they hole up at a rundown motel where they catch the eye of chambermaid Chitose Kobayashi, who also longs to escape her dreary existence, but it isn't long before the slain gangster's men come a-calling, which naturally complicates matters.
One of all the films in the set, this one is probably the best. (At the very least, it's a welcome change of pace after the extremely downbeat Cruel Gun Story.) As one would expect, Shishido is the best thing about it, especially in the scene where Fujio is driving them away from the hit and asks, "How did he die?" Shishido's bored reply -- "No special way. Same as they always do." -- tells us more about his character than pages and pages of dialogue could have. Also, his ability to improvise his way out of seemingly impossible situations where the odds are stacked against him is quite astonishing. I don't know if Criterion has any more Nikkatsu releases waiting in the wings, but I for one would gladly welcome them.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Exciting little life we lead, don't you think?
In the '60s it seemed like everybody was required to make at least one spy picture, which could explain how 1968's A Dandy in Aspic came to be Anthony Mann's swan song in the director's chair. (When Mann died in the middle of shooting, star Laurence Harvey took over directing duties but didn't take a credit.) Based on the novel by Derek Marlowe, who also wrote the screenplay, the film stars Harvey as a Russian double-agent working for MI-5 who wants to return home, but this becomes difficult when his superiors assign him the task of eliminating the enemy agent (i.e. himself) who has infiltrated their ranks. Throw in an off-center love interest (photographer Mia Farrow, whose English accent is mostly up to snuff) and a distrustful British agent (Tom Courtenay) who hates his guts from the word go, and poor Harvey's got his work cut out for him.
The real draw for me is the supporting cast, which includes Harry Andrews as the head of MI-5, Lionel Stander as Harvey's Russian controller, John Bird as his supposed contact in Berlin, and Peter Cook as his actual contact, a self-professed "sentimental lecher" who is constantly hitting on beautiful young women regardless of whether he speaks their language or not. (He brings such a lift to the film whenever he's onscreen, one comes away wishing he had been given more to do.) The other standout performance is by Per Oscarsson as Harvey's Russian connection, who likewise has grown disenchanted with leading a double life but has a different means of escaping from it. Also worth mentioning is the score by composer Quincy Jones, who seemed to be one of the go-to guys for these kinds of films for a while. Hey, as long as there was a market for them, right?
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
What are you doing so far from home without your husband?
Following his ill-fated stab at making a big-budget Hollywood musical (1968's Finian's Rainbow), Francis Ford Coppola formed his own production company (American Zoetrope) and set out on the back roads of middle America to make an independent feature that was, in diametric opposition to Finian's huge cast, essentially a three-hander. The result was 1969's The Rain People, which attracted a cult audience and set him on the path that would lead to a string of successes throughout the '70s. It's a film I've wanted to see ever since I got Danny Peary's first Cult Movies book, but I didn't want to settle for the pan-and-scan video that would have been my only recourse until TCM aired it letterboxed earlier this month. (And for anybody who wants to add it to their collection, Warner Bros. has also released it as part of its Archive Collection. Personally I don't feel the urge, but I'm glad the option is out there.)
As the film opens, restless housewife Shirley Knight quietly slips out of bed and out of her husband's grasp (both literally and figuratively), showers, leaves him a note and sets out from their Long Island home in their Ford station wagon to escape their stifling marriage. When she calls him from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, her husband is beside himself and all she can tell him is that she "just had to get away for a while." Oh, yes. And she's also pregnant, but she's not sure if she wants to keep the baby. She doesn't even know where she's going exactly, but west seems to be the general drift and it isn't long before she picks up hitchhiker James Caan, who blithely tells her his nickname is "Killer." The first sign this film was made in 1969: a woman picks up a hitchhiker named "Killer" and doesn't bat an eye.
The longer they travel together, the more Knight finds out about Caan, who turns out to be a former college footballer who received a debilitating brain injury during a game and has since been cut loose by the school with nothing but a thousand dollars to his name and the unfortunate tendency to flash it around. This troubles Knight, who doesn't want to be responsible for him but can't help but feel protective of him all the same. Eventually she leaves him at a roadside reptile ranch, but almost immediately gets pulled over for speeding by Nebraska highway patrolman Robert Duvall and has no choice but to return to pay her fine. Having failed to find a suitable lover in Caan (she lost interest when she found out he wasn't all there upstairs), Knight finally ditches him for good and tries to initiate an affair with Duvall but is put off by the presence of his headstrong pre-teen daughter in his cramped trailer. It's enough to make even the most independent-minded woman rethink her life choices.
It's hard to pinpoint how much of The Rain People was scripted and how much of it was improvised on the spot. In a lot of ways it feels like Coppola and his actors made it up as they went along, starting in New York and heading west until they found a place for the story to end. Throughout the film, though, there are signs that Coppola knew what he was doing the whole time, like the brief flashbacks to Knight's wedding and early days of marriage, Caan's big game and Duvall's great tragedy. (Suffice it to say, there's a reason why he can't control his daughter.) A spirited rebuke of Hollywood's production-line mentality, it's the unpredictability of the story and the richness of the characters that draws you in and keeps you watching right up until the last frame.
Back to August 2009 -- Onward to October 2009
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