February 2020 – Page 16 – R. Emmet Sweeney

BOOB TUBE: UHF (1989)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 11, 2014

UHF was released to apoplectic critics and an apathetic public on July 21st, 1989. Its opening weekend box office put it in eleventh place, behind the nearly month-old run of Weekend at Bernie’s. It would disappear from theaters a few weeks later. Today it comes out in a “25th Anniversary Edition” Blu-ray from Shout! Factory, having etched itself into the nostalgia nodes of thirty-something weirdos. I count myself among them. During those awkward pre-teen years (before “tween” made the age period sound appealing) “Weird Al” Yankovic was something of a secular god, his mild pop-culture subversiveness a convenient way to channel my milquetoast angst. In 1979 Yankovic changed The Knack’s “My Sharona” into “My Bologna” and netted a recording contract, those albums introducing the possibility of oppositional thinking into my half-formed brain. Plus he dressed funny and had polka breaks in between tunes. No downside! His crossover moment occurred on the album Even Worse (1988), which spawned the MTV music video staple “Fat”, a nearly shot-for-shot parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. With the success of the album (it was his first to reach platinum) and the ubiquitous video, the brave souls at the now-defunct Orion Pictures gave him the chance to make a movie. Yankovic and his manager Jay Levey conceived UHF as a delivery system for parodies, along the lines of Kentucky Fried Movie. It turned out to be something more like a combo of SCTV and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but whatever it was, people hated it. Roger Ebert called it “routine, predictable and dumb — real dumb”, while Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as “awful by any standard”. But though I no longer listen to Yankovic’s albums, I still find UHF to be uproarious.

The movie presents “Weird Al” as a sad sack dreamer named George. He’s introduced with a fantasy of himself as Indiana Jones, stealing an Oscar from a booby-trapped ancient temple. At the end of it he’s flattened by a boulder, and there’s a cut from his rubberized body to a hamburger on a skillet. He’s a fry jockey at Big Edna’s Burger World, a position from which he and his trusted doofus friend Bob (David Bowe) will be fired. He’s doomed to more hot dog-in-a-Twinkie dinners until his degenerate gambler uncle Harvey (Stanley Brock) wins a dilapidated UHF television station in a poker game. Harvey taps George to be station manager, and right before George runs the place further into the ground, their janitor Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards) becomes a variety show sensation and shoots them to the top of the ratings. This attracts the attention of villainous network affiliate head R.J. Fletcher (a jowl-shaking Kevin McCarthy), who unloads all of his dirty tricks to put George out of business.

The antics to save the station are constantly interrupted by commercials and clips, a series of non sequiturs that are the raison d’etre of the film. These include ads for used car salesman Crazy Ernie (“I’m gonna club a baby seal to make a deal”) and highly specialized department store Spatula City (We sell spatulas/And that’s all!”). These are absurdist miniatures that work as well in isolation as they do in the movie. If released on YouTube today, they would light up aggregators as much as Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks did earlier this week. Each sketch takes a different approach, from the magnificent bad punning of Conan the Librarian (who slices a late book returner in half) to the more direct parody of Geraldo Rivera with George’s apocalyptic Town Talk. Viewing it for the nth time last week, however, I was most amused by the shows that we never see. There is one scene where George is planning the schedule, padding things out around Spadowski’s runaway hit. There are the gross-out moves like “Name That Stain” or “The Wonderful World of Phlegm”, and then the more surreal items like the Friday night quartet of “Druids on Parade”, “The Volcano Worshipers Hour”, “Underwater Bingo for Teens” and “Fun With Dirt”. We don’t see a frame of these shows, but the movie manages to parody the mania for reality television a decade before it happens. Their station’s entire success is based on cheap “reality” programming, whether it’s Spadowski’s in-the-moment spazzing or competitive shows like “Bowling for Burgers” or “Strip Solitaire”.

What cannot be ignored today, though, is its reductive depiction of race. One of George’s neighbors and friends is the martial arts instructor Kuni (Gedde Watanabe), whose humor is supposed to come from his heavily accented English and karate poses. Then there’s “Raul’s Wild Kingdom”, featuring the only Hispanic member of the cast. Speaking like Speedy Gonzalez, he lives in a hovel overrun with animals where he teaches poodles how to fly. It’s, as the kids like to say, problematic. If you can look past it, the film has wonderful performances, and I even found Yankovic to be an appealing presence, though Ebert disagrees:

his physical presence is undermined by bad posture and an indistinct speaking voice. He needs to practice throwing back his shoulders and strutting; he creates a dispirited vacuum at the center of many scenes.

I find this “indistinctness” to be interesting. He is mostly recessive until moments of extreme self-doubt, when he lashes out in violence. He screams at Bob to hit him in the face with a crowbar, and is prone to slamming his head on countertops when depressed. It’s an unstable performance, his slacker schizo something that Adam Sandler might have taken inspiration from for his weirder, more interesting comedies (Zohan, That’s My Boy). Michael Richards exhibits the physical elasticity that made him a star, though he elicits more pity than laughter in this one. His character is something of a tragic one, a lonesome mentally deficient janitor whose best friend is a mop. The true star of the film is Kevin McCarthy, who is clearly having a ball as the red meat villain R.J. Fletcher. He is sexist, sadistic and mean to people from all races and religions. McCarthy works on every variation of scowl, his mouth muscles permanently strained downward. Through all his huffing and puffing and bad mouthing, McCarthy walks away with the movie, his blustering in disbelief that “A UHF station!” beat them in the ratings a line reading whose tenor and bluster is permanently embedded in my synapses.

But then, I cannot be objective about this movie. Some of my fondest memories involve listening to a cassette tape of the UHF soundtrack with my brother. We heard the movie before we saw it, imagining the jokes in our heads. On certain long afternoons in the early 1990s, “Weird Al”‘s twenty second blast of cock rock “Let Me Be Your Hog” was the funniest thing in the world. Divorced of its context (Uncle Harvey listening to it on the radio), it was just a strange man making pig noises and screaming to a soaring guitar riff. It was nonsense, it was bliss.

THE HUNTED: RITUALS (1977)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 4, 2014

Though Halloween has passed, it is still possible to watch horror movies. It’s quite pleasant, too, not being harangued about the best one “you’ve never seen” every other mouse click. I celebrated this freedom from list fascism by attending a twelve hour horror movie marathon at Anthology Film Archives on November 1st. It was an eclectic selection that ranged through low-budget Mexican vampires, classy British omnibus films, and schlocky AIP giant rat attacks. The title that stuck in my cranium and asked to be dispatched in this space is the 1977 Canadian survival horror obscurity Rituals (aka The Creeper). A post-Deliverance male bonding death march starring Hal Holbrook, it pits a group of alcoholic doctors against a psychically damaged ex-soldier in the wilds of Northern Ontario. The film relentlessly strips away the men’s defenses until they are physically and emotionally bare, live nerve endings that become easy targets for the almost entirely unseen soldier. In their profession the doctors have made mistakes, often tragic ones, and their medical ethics loom large when they are forced to deal with their own mortality. The only decent home video version is an out-of-print DVD from Code Red, but it’s well worth tracking down.

England-born director Peter Carter made his career in Canadian television, but first broke through with the independent feature The Rowdyman (1972), about an aging womanizer in Newfoundland. It’s a scruffy comedy that makes extensive use of location shooting, so you get a rich sense of the town, from the loser’s matchbox sized apartment, to the local paper mill, to “Lucky’s Chop Suey House” on the main drag. Writer and star Gordon Pinsent won the best actor at the Canadian Film Awards for his efforts, though I could understand maybe one out of every ten words through his thick Newfie accent. Rituals is Carter’s second feature, and he retains the specific sense of place. Locations are key to the film’s movement, from the lush, fecund greenery of their initial hike to the parched desert land around a man made dam. Whether Carter’s third feature, the Peter Fonda/Jerry Reed AIP trucker adventure High Ballin’ continues this specificity, I leave to my more intrepid readers to discover. Carter died in 1983, soon after making the Christopher Plummer action comedy Highpoint.

The screenplay for Rituals was written by first timer Ian Sutherland, and produced by character actor Lawrence Dane (who co-stars as the whiny Mitzi). It was Dane’s second and final producing credit. This was, for the most part, a film made by newcomers under difficult circumstances. For much of the film the actors are trudging through fly-choked forests or swirling rapids. I found one headline about the production, from the Montreal Star, that reads “Flies major hazard in tough ‘Rituals” shooting.” It must have been miserable for the actors and the crew. But it is a film of great control, though also one of understandable sadism. The effects build slowly, and the payoffs are oblique.

A group of five friends take their yearly vacation in the remote Northern Ontario wilderness. They are all current or ex-doctors, and the trade off who gets to pick the destination. This year it’s DJ (Gary Reineke), who wears a fetching Montreal Expos hat and is rather cavalier with how he discusses the health of his patients. He explains away a botched surgery that he’s just trying to make a living. On the other spectrum is Harry (Hal Holbrook), a by-the-book doctor who extends life spans as long as he can, done with the discipline of his army training (he fought in Korea). Others seem to float in between these two poles, including Mitzi (Dane), who seems to go along to get along, and is more accepting of death as a possibility. At their first night of base camp, there is a sense of hetero male bonding check boxes having to be ticked off. There’s an inflatable sex doll, but she’s mere decoration, as these upper class adventurers pose as partiers but strain to keep their mask of civility as long as possible.

Martin (Robin Gammell), a barely functional alcoholic, quotes the last lines of Yeats’ The Second Coming as they discuss the Native American legend about how the valley was made by the Moon impressing itself on the land: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Martin explains the connection: “-The moon is magic, right? And Yeats was into magic. Yeats was into the moon.” Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization dedicated to studying the occult. As Martin is explaining, the camera takes a roaming POV, lurking in the background as if from the perspective of an onlooker. Martin desires the occult and supernatural as a way to escape his own being – and immediately the camera obliges, providing a seemingly mystical presence to watch them. As the film progresses, this presence becomes more and more violent. It begins by stealing their boots, and ends in unrepentant slaughter. Each man’s beliefs are tested and failed by their attacker. The most damning test is reserved for Harry, who is forced to carry an incapacitated Martin throughout the barren landscape. Martin is close to death, and draining Harry’s strength. But his moral code forces him to soldier on with this burden. Harry sets himself up to be a martyr, but in the end he is denied even that. He is granted survival as his final punishment.

TO SAVE AND PROJECT: THE 12TH MOMA INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF FILM PRESERVATION

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 28, 2014

Late last month, on the outrage machine known as Twitter, Variety tweeted the following: “Most films and TV shows are now available online legally, says a new study”. As with most provocative headlines, it turned out to be incredibly misleading. The “study” was commissioned by NBC Universal and performed by audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG. They only chose to track the most “popular and critically-acclaimed” films, which according to them comprises films with the “highest gross box office receipts” and those that won Oscar Best Picture awards. So this is a highly selective, entirely meaningless 808 film sample that overlooks the majority of film history. It’s not surprising then, that 94% of the films in their report were available on streaming platforms. Essentially it is saying that all the films you have already seen are available for you to watch again. 35mm is becoming an archival medium, more stable than digital in its constantly shifting technologies, but that makes archives more reluctant to ship prints to theaters, as Nick Pinkerton reported in his article on the DCP wars in Film Comment. A situation is growing where studios don’t want to ship prints of rare titles, but neither do they want to shell out the money for a decent HD transfer and clean-up, a very expensive proposition to enact on a large scale. Thus my dream of a 127-film 4K-scanned Edward L. Cahn retrospective will never come to pass.

That is why festivals like To Save and Project are so vital. In its twelfth year at the Museum of Modern Art, the series gathers recent restoration projects from around the world, and was organized by film curator Joshua Siegel, adjunct curator Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, and curatorial assistant Sophie Cavoulacos. For years a redoubt of celluloid, it has had to bow to the prevailing winds and present digital scans, including this year’s 4K restorations of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Fistful of Dollars. But there are also more heroic instances of digital rescue, like the South African blaxploitation soccer-rigging curiosity Joe Bullet (1971, screening 11/8 and 11/13), banned by the government soon after its release but rescued by the Gravel Road African Film Legacy (GRAFL) initiative. I’ve always treasured the festival more for its oddities than its classics, which would emerge elsewhere anyway. Another one is Miss Okichi (1935, screening 10/31 and 11/4), with Kenji Mizoguchi credited as “supervisor”, though elsewhere he is listed as a co-director. It’s a tragic tale of doomed love that feels like a missing piece in Mizoguchi’s filmography, even if more detective work needs to be done about its origins. Then there is the bizarre It’s a Wonderful Life noir Repeat Performance (1947, screening 11/12 and 11/14), in which a murderous dame gets to re-live the year leading up to the moment she kills her husband.

Joe Bullet was one of the first South African films with an all-black cast, a no-budget Shaft that opened briefly in Soweto before being pulled from theaters by the Apartheid government. Though not explicitly political, the image of star Ken Gampu brandishing a gun and enforcing vigilante justice must have struck a nerve. The story revolves around the Eagles soccer team, whose star players are getting attacked by thugs from an opposing squad. When the feud turns violent, the Eagles call on Joe Bullet to even the score. The film has a rough, unfinished quality, with poorly post-dubbed dialogue that was seemingly made up on the spot. But the film has a schlocky energy and DIY vibe, especially in its inventive fight scenes. Mr. Bullet has a sweaty staredown with a King Cobra, opens a door with a bulldozer, and chases the villain up a steel girder in the honest-to-goodness nail-biting finale, complete with a weighted mannequin tossed off the side. Complete with catchy theme song that repeats the main characters name ad infinitum, Joe Bullet has midnight movie screenings in its future. It is also valuable as a document of its own making, capturing the styles, hangouts and cultural scene of black Africans in the early 70s. Gampu sports a checked sportcoat and beige turtleneck ensemble that is the epitome of 70s cool. Gampu was one of the first black African actors to break into Hollywood, he was a “warrior” in The Naked Prey (1965), and later appeared in Zulu Dawn (1979) and The Gods Must be Crazy (1980), again in stereotyped “native” roles. In Joe Bullet Gampu’s unflappable cool was shunted off into shabby locations. The big nightclub scene, with a hard-driving funk band, looks to be shot in a clapboard shack, and the soccer manager’s office looks like that of a custodian’s. There is no physical white presence in Joe Bullet, although their impact is palpable in the economic disadvantages that are etched into every frame.

Miss Okichi (1935) is also about economic imbalance, and the criminal enterprises it encourages. Isuzu Yamada (Throne of Blood) stars as the ill-omened Okichi, whose parents are dead and whose brother is a wanted murderer. To keep her family’s hotel afloat she signs up with a gang in an arranged marriage scheme. The gang targets arranged marriages, and has the beautiful Okichi pretend to be the betrothed. Then they grab the dowry and disappear. Eventually Okichi gets disgusted with all of the deceptions and runs off with one of her marks. It is a dark, necrotic melodrama, steeped in darkness and death. These are the fatalistic lyrics Okichi repeatedly sings to her beloved: “To meet is when parting begins.” The print of the film was housed at Shochiku and presented on Japanese television. David Bordwell writes that Mizoguchi “codirected it with Takashima Tatsunosuke for Dai Ichi Eiga, the production company he formed with Nagata Masaichi.” The MoMA notes list Mizoguchi as “supervisor”, so it’s unclear how much input he actually had in its production. But it features Mizoguchi settings and themes – female self-sacrifice in a patriarchal web, and, as Bordwell notes, scenes of “chiaroscuro melancholy”. Regardless of whether it can be labeled a Mizoguchi film or not, it’s a tough poison pill of a movie, filled with dark beauty.

Repeat Performance is a noir that borrows the plot of It’s a Wonderful Life, though to different ends. George Bailey saw what life would be like without him. For noted actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) in Repeat Performance, she has to live her life over again, only to see that she while she can change the path of fate, she cannot alter its destination (it’s a film noir Final Destination). The film opens with Sheila murdering her husband, the camera pushing into the grisly scene through the flapping front door in a bravura shot. While mounting the staircase to her producer’s apartment, she wishes she could live the previous year over again. With nothing other than a cut – there is no angel to guide her – she is thrust back a year, and so she begins to try to change the adulterous path of her husband, the transgression that led to the crime. But nothing Sheila does can change her destiny. This rather ambitious project was the first big budget foray by the Poverty Row studio Eagle Lion. Director Alfred L. Werker (He Walked by Night) replaced Jules Dassin just before filming, and it’s a workmanlike job that can’t overcome the repetitious nature of the material. Though it retains a chill for its downbeat closing scenes, where nothing has materially changed – for all of Sheila’s effort and foresight. Everyone is either dead or alone, and nothing can be done about it. Repeat Performance will screen in a 35mm print restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding from the Film Noir Foundation. To Save and Project runs through November 22nd at the Museum of Modern Art, so if you are in NYC make sure to attend and bear witness to some of the fascinating oddities of film history before they escape back into the vaults.

BOWLING FOR DOLLARS: KINGPIN (1996)

February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 21, 2014

Farrelly Brothers movies are akin to family gatherings. They are filled with extreme neuroses, unexpected violence, and deep undercurrents of affection. Their films are even populated with friends and relatives from their Rhode Island home. Listen to any of their audio commentaries and you’ll find that half the actors are bankers and car salesman who grew up with them back east. Every time I see a Farrelly feature I think of how Manny Farber described Howard Hawks’ “weird mother hen instinct.” The Farrellys have it as well, just weirder. Dumb and Dumber was their directorial debut and an enormous hit, a tale of ignorant male friendship that lowered scatalogical slapstick so far it went below lowbrow and out the other side. It’s also their first attempt at depicting the bonds of brotherhood, in which Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels perform a kind of radical acceptance of each other’s flaws — through complete stupidity, but still (they treated the same theme with greater complexity in Stuck on You, their greatest film and biggest bomb). The long-gestating but certainly not maturing sequel, Dumb and Dumber To, comes out next month.

The Farrellys follow-up to the original Dumb and Dumber, though, will never get a sequel, though it did come out on Blu-ray last week. Kingpin is another tale of success-challenged males learning to live with the other’s failure, this time in the lacquered middle-aged crisis world of bowling. Though where Dumb and Dumber is an abstract performance piece, as Carrey and Daniels could have been performing in front of a blank wall to similar effect, Kingpin tries to embed its outrageous characters into a semblance of the real world. Each bowling alley and auto-body shop is lovingly detailed, and essential to the development of its sad sack characters. The lead failure Roy Munson, Jr. (Woody Harrelson) is from the made-up small town of Ocelot, Iowa, a corroded rust belt city where he was once its proudest son as State Bowling champion, while ending up in a pit-stained flophouse in Scranton, PA dodging his scrofulous landlord’s bill. He sees a way out in the smooth stroke of Amish naif Ishmael (Randy Quaid), who he thinks can win the big bowling competition in Reno, and take down his longtime nemesis Ernie McCracken (Bill Murray).

Kingpin was not an easy project for the Farrelly’s to make. Dumb and Dumber’s massive success was attributed to Jim Carrey, and so the Farrelly’s could not get one of their own projects off the ground. So instead they pursued a script by veteran comedy writers Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan (both of The Golden Girls writing staff). As sports fans they related to the material – they always include bizarre athlete cameos, and the one in Kingpin is something else, Roger Clemens as a raging redneck named “Skidmark”. Since disgraced by Major League Baseball’s Mitchell Report for using anabolic steroids, his short scene as a rageaholic gains retrospective…resonance, let’s say. The lead casting was also problematic, with big stars not wanting to dirty their image with the Farrelly’s outrageous material. Peter Farrelly was roommates with Woody Harrelson during his Cheers days, and had tried to get him to act in Dumb and Dumber, but Harrelson thought the script was “too silly”. So on Kingpin Peter tried again, and finally clinched the deal on a pool hall pit – if Peter sank a complicated bank shot Woody would agree to take the part. Peter nailed it, and Woody did the movie. They had targeted Chris Farley to play Ishmael, but he was tied up in another project, so they went with the more offbeat casting of Randy Quaid, who offered an aw shucks gullibility to the role. Farley would have been outstanding but more aggressive – Quaid’s meek interpretation and ungainly gangliness offered more of a match with Woody’s performance of low-key insecurity.

Perhaps the biggest coup to Quaid’s signing was that he had Bill Murray’s direct number. Usually you have to leave a message at some automated mailbox to which he may or may not respond, but Quaid was able to call Murray and relay the Farrelly’s interest in having him on the film to play the womanizing bowling champ McCracken. In his enigmatic manner he agreed, and then sent no more communication until the day of the shoot, when he arrived in character in that teapot-lid comb-over. His hair is one of the biggest characters in the film, though it just makes fleeting appearances. It is pure stringy, thinning magnificence, and when the comb-over tips off his bald pate, it seems to reach three lanes over. Murray improvised all of his scenes, including the oft-quoted inspirational nonsense: “You’re on a gravy train with biscuit wheels”. The Farrelly’s have famously loose sets, aided by their nepotistic ways as well as their belief that the actors should be allowed the freedom to experiment – and look ridiculous.

While the country was experiencing an economic boom in this period, the focus on the rust belt depicts the areas left behind. When Munson returns to Ocelot, they place an emphasis on the town’s decay, from the shuttered ice cream shop to the corroding gas station of Munson’s long-gone father. Movies of third-tier sports have a tendency to capture America in decline, as in Robert Aldrich’s …All the Marbles, about struggling female pro wrestlers criss-crossing the Midwest. Munson’s home of industrial rot is contrasted with the unreal artificiality of Reno, which is depicted almost entirely inside the neon mall of the National Bowling Stadium. Ernie McCracken is the human avatar of Reno, a slick amoral womanizer who is worshiped for his amorality.

This doesn’t mean the Farrelly’s stint on their patented body-horror comedy – wringing endless jokes out of Munson’s prosthetic hand, which ends up in as many sticky situations as the Addams Family’s Thing. Their movies are ones of extremity, in which bodies and psyches are broken down. Whether it’s idiots in Dumb and Dumber, disabled drunks in Kingpin, schizophrenics in Me, Myself and Irene or conjoined twins in Stuck on You, the Farrellys are obsessed with both physical and psychical deformity. There is a bit of the freak show in their work, something confrontational in how they present these debilities without a shred of pity or condescension. They are full fledged people with the equal ability to screw up as any of us. One of their favorite character actors was Danny Murphy, a quadriplegic who appears in Kingpin as a smirkingly violent goon who flicks on the bowling ball return that cuts off Munson’s hand. When you watch him in Kingpin, he is not “the guy in a wheelchair”, but “that asshole who chopped of Munson’s hand”. And that’s how he preferred it. Murphy appeared in all of their films from then on in a variety of roles, from sympathetic to villainous, until his death this past August.

The exception in Kingpin’s parade of unusual physical specimens is Claudia (Vanessa Angel), a hard-bitten blonde who escapes her abusive hustler boyfriend to join Roy and Ishmael on their journey to Reno. She is unique because of her supposed physical perfection, which for Claudia ironically also keeps her outside of proper society. She is somehow too beautiful, so that no one can act normally around her. She then naturally uses her looks to manipulate people, since they are already manipulated before even speaking to her. She uses her body as a weapon throughout the film, to distract opposing teams, and then to beat the stuffing out of Roy in one of the film’s slapstick highlights.

Kingpin is a great bowling movie because it is a movie about failure. Neither Roy or Ishmael wins the big match in Reno. All of the training montages and team building exercises were for naught. At least by traditional metrics of success. But in the Farrelly world, the trio has endured each other’s flaws and accepted them, through ritualized exchanges of humiliations, mostly hook hands to the face and kicks to the balls. Translated through Farrelly slapstick-sentiment, it’s something like love.

LONELY RODEO: THE LUSTY MEN (1952)

February 20, 2020December 21, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 14, 2014

The Lusty Men is haunted by the Great Depression. It’s about economic displacement, wandering the countryside to make a buck at podunk rodeos, and where the dream of owning a home seems forever out of reach. As with most Hollywood studio projects, The Lusty Men was built out of compromise and circumstance, starting as a Life magazine article on the rodeo by Claude Stanush, and turning into a largely improvised character study by director Nicholas Ray and star Robert Mitchum. In between were a series of scripts, the first by David Dortort, and the second by Horace McCoy, who had made his name writing about Depression desperation, most famously in his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? None of them satisfied Ray or producers Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna, so they often worked without a screenplay. It is a vulnerably acted film, as Ray teases out the fragility in Mitchum and co-stars Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward. It is a love triangle of sorts, but one enacted with complete honesty and forthrightness. The question is between the stability of Arthur Kennedy or the soulfulness of Mitchum, and while aesthetically it’s an easy decision (Mitchum has never been so beautiful), for characters raised dirt poor it’s a heart-wrenching choice. The Lusty Men, recently restored on 35mm by Warner Brothers, The Film Foundation and the Nicholas Ray Foundation, has finally been released on DVD by the Warner Archive (it also airs 11/4 at 1:30PM on TCM). Ever since the restored print screened at the New York Film Festival last year, I was patiently awaiting a Blu-ray release, but this will have to do. Luckily the DVD is in fine shape, aside from the beat-up archival rodeo footage which sets the stage for the drama to come.

The producing team of Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna had a distribution deal with Howard Hughes’ RKO to make sixty films in under six years, according Bernard Eisenschitz’s essential Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. The Hollywood Reporter called it “The biggest independent transaction in industry history”. They made four: Behave Yourself! (’51), The Blue Veil (’51), Clash By Night (’52) and The Lusty Men. Hughes’ legendary indecision led to projects dragging on for years. One of these was the comedy thriller Macao (’52), credited to director Josef Von Sternberg, but much of it was re-shot by Mel Ferrer and Nicholas Ray, who telegraphed Sternberg to gain his permission for the re-shoots. Sternberg responded, “I’m here in New Jersey with my rose garden, I’m close to Wall Street and my art gallery. Go ahead.” Unhappy with the results, Sternberg later told Kevin Brownlow: “Nicholas Ray is an idiot. He did terrible things to Macao.”

But Ray was in Howard Hughes’ good graces for that carpenter job, and Wald and Krasna considered him for the director on Clash By Night, since Ray was acquaintances with writer Clifford Odets from their Group Theater days. But they also needed someone to take on the Cowpoke project (later re-titled to The Lusty Men), as Robert Parrish had bowed out after seeing the Dortort script, and Wald/Krasna failed to lure Raoul Walsh or Anthony Mann. The job was Ray’s, and he threw himself into the research that Stanush provided. Eisenschitz lists “50 pages on ‘Western dialogue and colloquialisms’, 75 on ‘drought and grass problems’, 120 on ‘general research, ranching and rodeo’, plus a collection of notes…on the modern cowboy.”

The opening sequence consists of archival footage of a small town parade, followed by the local fair rodeo. These sections are scratched up, possibly from old newsreel footage, and then it cuts in to Robert Mitchum perched above a bronco, read to hang on for eight seconds. It’s a brash intrusion of the mythic into the mundane, but Ray immediately cuts to an insert of Mitchum’s hand being tied to the bronc’s hide, an image attending to the technique of the rodeo rider’s art. That cut is an example of the simplicity and clarity in which Ray and his collaborators combined the everyday and the dramatic. The story is also simple. Wes (Arthur Kennedy) and Louise (Susan Hayward) Merritt are saving up money to buy a house. Wes works on a ranch, but is lured into the rodeo by Jeff McCloud (Mitchum), a former champion rider who agrees to train Wes for a cut of any profits he might win. Wes quickly becomes a star, and his dream of home fades. Louise continues to desire that stability more than ever, and can no longer stand to endure the rodeo’s constant near-death experiences. So as Wes and Louise distance themselves, Jeff inserts himself into the gap, seeing in Louise an alternate path not taken, a safe harbor in his self-destructive life. Louise has to make some kind of choice.

There is a lot of choreography in the frame to establish their shifting relationships. Early on they invite Jeff to dinner. Afterward is the clean-up, with Louise cleaning, Wes sitting on the counter and drying, while Jeff standing coyly in a corner with a mug of coffee, undomesticated and alluring. This arrangement is repeated outside, with Wes seated on a fence, Jeff standing, and Louise pitched in between. Wes looks like a kid, and Jeff a man. Cinematographer Lee Garmes sets up the flashiest version of this composition, with Louise seated in her vehicle while Jeff and Wes are reflected in the windshield. This all sets up the dramatic arc of their characters, as each goes through a different kind of maturation. Mitchum claimed that Ray didn’t give him any marks to hit. In his usual self-deprecating manner, he described their working relationship: ”

Well, you know, a lot of directors will give you the marks. When I act, I come in and say: what page is it and where are the marks? While the director is talking to the other actors, I check out the marks, and I hit ‘em. But Nick is a fellow who likes to discuss the scenes with the actors, what they mean, what my background was…. So while he would talk to me about those things, I’d be looking for my marks. He would usually end up these speeches by saying, And also, improvise. But I couldn’t improvise the marks. Since Nick usually told the cameraman to be on the actor who had listened the most when he was telling them about their background, about Stanislavsky and those people, a lot of times I wasn’t in the scene…

So maybe it was Ray and Kennedy improvising Wes always being seated, but it’s clear much of the film was worked out on the fly, scene by scene. Since they didn’t know where they were going, each sequence has a lived-in feel. This is epitomized in the melancholy sequence when Jeff visits his old broken down family home. He crawls underneath the eaves and pulls out his childhood toys – a dime paperback, a gun, and a tobacco tin that holds two nickels. In this silent act of remembrance a whole childhood flashes by, and an outline of the man we see on-screen, enacting the Wild West fantasies he had as a kid, fantasies that wear poorly on a man pushing 40. While fondling these talismans, he is rousted by the current owner, a crusty old loner (Burt Mustin, making his film debut at age sixty-seven) who visibly softens when he hears it’s the McCloud boy. They commiserate on their lives of solitude before Jeff departs, two generations of men too frightened to settle down, build a family, share anything of themselves. While Wes learns something of humility over the course of the film, Jeff develops empathy. Having been a direct man all his life in pushing the world away, he is just as straightforward in embracing it. The close-up of Susan Hayward when Jeff declares his feelings is one of trembling astonishment. It is one of the glories of the cinema. Her lips part slightly, as if ready to throw off her ordered life. But she is a practical woman, and a poor one, and there are other things to consider.

NYFF: THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951)

February 20, 2020August 17, 2025 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 7, 2014

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

For director Michael Powell, The Red Shoes was “mostly a sketch for The Tales of Hoffmann“. So far the sketch has eclipsed the full painting, with The Red Shoes a repertory film staple that plays regularly around the country (you can catch it in my cinema-starved hometown of Buffalo on November 17th!), while The Tales of Hoffmann has endured decades of neglect and chopped up film prints. Its relative obscurity should begin to lift, now that a new 4K scan of the original camera negative has been performed by the BFI, with support from The Film Foundation and StudioCanal. The stateside premiere of the restoration occurred at the New York Film Festival, introduced by superfan Martin Scorsese and his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who was married to Powell until his passing in 1990).

The Tales of Hoffmann is a deliriously beautiful film about male fantasies of female perfection. Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville) invents women to match the romantic ideal he has of himself, all of whom emerge from a mediated perceptual and meta-cinematic schema. Olympia (Moira Shearer) is a mechanical doll who looks human when Hoffmann views her through ornate (3D?) glasses. Giulietta (Ludmilla Tcherina) is a devil’s handmaiden who steals Hoffmann’s soul by having him stare into a mirror. Antonia (Ann Ayars) is a thwarted opera singer whose mother’s statue comes to life. Absorbed in his own vanity, Hoffmann is not granted unmediated sight, and so ends up drunk and alone.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were after something they called a “composed film”, a gesamtkunstwerk of music, dance and film that grants each their individual freedom but operates in concert, working without dialogue, but through purely expressive gesture. Their test of this concept was the climactic dance in The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffmann was to be its fruition. The choice of subject matter was brought to them by conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. According to Powell the original idea was to record with him “a wonderful performance of the singers of the opera, and then make a film of it with dancers . Simple as that.” They adapted the Jacques Offenbach opera into a new English translation (by Dennis Arundell), and hired both voices and bodies for each character. Powell wanted “a performance, not a recording”, so he strayed from operatic singers and chose singer-actors for the vocals to which the actors would lip-sync. Only Rounseville’s Hoffmann and Ann Ayars’ Antonia sung their own parts. They recorded the score separately, and then shot the film according to the music’s rhythms, giving the director of photography and actors more freedom than they had since the silent era. It is not just the camera movement that is calibrated to the music though, but equally the actor’s movement inside the frame (dance choreographed by Frederick Ashton), as well as the rhythmic editing of Reginald Mills.

Instead of trying to mitigate the artificiality, of the enterprise, they emphasize it, with painted backdrops and fantastical set designs by Hein Heckroth. This overt “staginess” attracted significant criticism. Siegfried Kracauer called it “nothing but photographed theater”, and that seemed to be the prevailing viewpoint until the film became nigh impossible to see. Distribution was nonexistent through the 60s, and when prints did get out, they were in B&W and missing the third act. That’s how Scorsese first saw it on the “Million Dollar Movie” on local NYC television, beginning a lifelong obsession. He named Robert Helpmann’s face as an influence on Taxi Driver. Schoonmaker related how Scorsese would screen the film endlessly during the editing process of Raging Bull, and would get enraged when MoMA would ask for the print back, because another director was requesting it. It turned out George Romero was another Hoffmann fanatic, and was analyzing it in the run-up to his film about traveling renaissance fair/ motorcycle gang , Knightriders (1981).

Act 1, “Olympia”, takes place in a mechanical doll studio that Hein Heckroth gave a Fauvist explosion of color. Hoffmann is agog at the ingenuity of it all, lost in his own perceptual whirlwind. The inventor Coppelius (Helpmann) twirls him through demonstrations of his amazingly lifelike puppets, which come to life underwhen Hoffmann dons garish glasses, some with pearls stringing down. They are a cinematic talisman, allowing the inanimate objects to come to life under his gaze. The camera rises up into the rafters to display the puppet master pulling the strings – but what are wooden dolls up there turn into prancing humans on stage – and one in particular catches Hoffmann’s eye. To him she is too real to be fake, or simply too beautiful not to reflect his idea of reality. In any case, it’s Olympia (Moira Shearer) reclining on a hammock, her aquiline features and aerodynamic limbs lying still in anticipation. It is clear this is a body that can do damage. And she does, swirling like a top but needing to be constantly wound up by her handlers. Shearer is a marvel, not just as a dancer but a comedian, able to execute lithe ballet maneuvers at one end of the stage, and then collapse like an accordion at the other. Hoffmann is helpless at her cold, inanimate beauty, a dumbfounded idiot who thought he found the perfect woman. He is humiliated at the revelation of her not-aliveness, and she is eventually torn limb-from-limb in a scene of sadistic doll violence.

Act 2, “Giulietta”, gets supernatural, and begins to bring out the German Expressionist strains in Heckroth’s designs and Robert Helpmann’s Nosferatu garb. It takes place in Venice, and Giulietta is a leggy siren luring Hoffmann towards her. In a disorienting sequence, Powell and Pressburger cut back and forth between Giulietta’s disembodied head superimposed on the canal singing a ghostly tune, and Giulietta’s physical body in a gondola rowing for home. Here again is the spirit/body split, the woman multiplied into parts that Hoffmann can then separate and filter through his own ego. In this fable of betrayal she steals his soul for a neck full of diamonds. His soul is taken when he looks into a mirror, and his image disappears. His sight is blinkered and uncertain, his love a delusion. It’s only when he skewers a man with a saber and cracks the mirror in two, that his soul is restored to him. It did not, however, give him intelligence.

Act 3, “Antonia” is Hoffmann’s best shot at capturing reality. There are no disruptions of his sight, only his empathy. Antonia is in ill health, and has been advised not to sing for fear of her weak constitution. Her father isolates her in the bedroom, alone with a statue of her late grande dame mother, once a famed opera singer. Hoffmann arrives to declare his love and burst into song, and the satanic Dr. Miracle (Helpmann, again, with his menacing widow’s peak) has similar designs to nefarious ends – he wants her to sing until she dies, so she can join her mother. Miracle is a weird amalgam of Dr. Caligari madman and Dracula force of nature, able to summon Antonia’s body to instantaneously appear at his examining couch when she is off in another room – yet more imagery of the segmented female body. She is not in control of herself – and her mind starts cracking. Her hallucinations escalate until she is sharing a duet with her dead mother in a medieval wood, sharing a mournful duet before suffering the same fate – a brutally beautiful escape.

The restored Tales of Hoffmann will screen at NYC’s Film Forum in early 2015 and presumably tour the country after that. It’s a bewitching, profoundly strange work, both radically free and conservatively stagebound. Kracauer wrote that it is both “a spectacle that transcends the possibilities of the stage”, but “built from miraculous studio effects, it shuts out any miracle the camera may reveal. The ripple of a single leaf suffices to denounce its treacherous glamour.” It’s a gorgeously suffocating work, and there’s truly nothing else like it.

THE 2014 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: GONE GIRL AND TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

February 20, 2020February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 30, 2014

The New York Film Festival opened this past Friday night with the sadistic comedy of remarriage Gone Girl (which is released nationwide October 3rd). It trails success in its wake, adapted from Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel, which has occupied the majority of bedside end tables in the United States. It is the second straight bestseller that director David Fincher has adapted, following his glacial Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Gone Girl is another story of female victimhood and bloody revenge, except this time the narrator is highly unreliable. If you are one of the zeitgeist-less few not to have read the story, it concerns the unraveling marriage of struggling writers Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamunde Pike). After Amy goes missing after an apparent home invasion, a massive investigation is launched to find her, with the evidence continuing to pile up against Nick. What follows is a thorough autopsy of their lives together, their union a sustained performance of mutual denial and dishonesty, an act that Amy internalizes to such a degree that she stages a much larger, more entertaining production in response. Fincher and Flynn jettison the balanced 50/50 POV split from the novel and filter the majority of the narrative through Nick’s perspective. This simplifies the story but also flattens Amy into a sociopathic cipher, one who can too easily be dismissed as a hysterical female. But Rosamunde Pike’s performance is ferociously controlled, betraying no loss of agency. If men want Amy to play a part to salve their fragile egos, she will oblige only until a better role comes along, whereupon she can trash their script and obliterate them.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night depicts a different kind of determined female. Sandra (Marion Cotillard) returns to work after a bout with depression, only to find her job at a solar panel factory will be eliminated. In an either/or vote, the union chose to receive a 1,000 EUR bonus over Sandra keeping her job. Sandra successfully lobbies for a re-vote after rumors of tampering, and has a weekend to convince each individual employee to forego the bonus and keep her on staff. The film is a kind of moral procedural, the question re-framed through each employees’ personal circumstances. Sandra troops through the Dardennes’ terrain of Seraing, Belgium on foot, bus and car, continually wilting and re-forming under the stress and humiliation of her position. The handheld camera sticks tight to Cotillard (who, with this and The Immigrant is in perpetual close-up this year), whose face is a Richter scale of emotional tremors.

Gone Girl is a David Fincher movie and is thusly a very good-looking one, working again with DP Jeff Cronenweth (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, Fight Club). Though it opens and closes with a shallow-focus close-up, the majority of the film emphasizes maximum visibility, with a lot of long shots that encompass glass, television monitors and security cameras. Much of the film has to do with the media frenzy that accompanies Amy’s disappearance, as she was the model for a popular children’s book series written by her parents. The tabloid talk shows push the trashiest and most outrageous narratives of the case, including at one point speculating on Nick and his twin sister Margo (an acerbic Carrie Coon) engaging in “twincest”. And though the movie runs a robust 150 minutes, Fincher and editor Kirk Baxter utilize a clipped editing style that always cut a beat or two before I expected. Even the opening credit titles flash on and off far quicker than usual. This clipped style kept me off balance – as if the film was proceeding ahead of me and I was scrambling to catch up. It was fun to feel that off kilter, though the tempo distends in the climactic latter stages into something more conventional.

The acting tends to be as controlled and clipped as the editing, especially the investigative team led by Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney. Dickens is a superb no-bullshit cop, forever with an oversized styrofoam coffee cup in her hand and a bloodhound twitch in her eyes when clues passed her field of vision. She has no wasted gestures, words or syllables. She leaves those to her assistant (Patrick Fugit), who seems to speak entirely in pithy putdowns. The only one in the cast who lacks this tightness is Ben Affleck, whose Nick floats in a boyish fog. When Amy disappears he doesn’t so much as shrug, while at the station he speaks to the police with distanced deference, as if arguing a speeding ticket rather than helping a search for his missing wife. It is an impressive bit of smarminess for a major star, but he doesn’t manage to sustain it. As Nick takes on the mantle of victimhood, Affleck becomes a genial joker, instead of the self-regarding a-hole the movie needs to balance its battle of the sexes. When the couple reforms, the movie becomes less about how spouses deform themselves to sustain relationships, but about the subjugation of Affleck’s good ‘ol boy to Rosamunde Pike’s world-devouring wife.

In Two Days, One Night Sandra is no Amy. Living in a healthy relationship with husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), she has no ability to dissemble in front of her fellow workers. It takes her entire force of will to knock on each door, and put herself under their pitying, guilty glares. She knows that her question will instill guilt, and each bonus voter is a fount explanations and justifications, some understandable, others not. Each encounter has the tension of a heist sequence, just that the stakes are much higher. Money is tight all over, and Sandra is asking these people to give up a year of gas bills. It is the rare film where bills have a physical weight, that conveys the suffocating anxiety that money problems can instill – the complete helplessness. Her path through the town in Two Days, One Night is stop-start as that force of will crumbles, having to be built up again by Manu or her few encouraging co-workers. Then there are the brief moments of happiness. Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev) weeps at getting a chance to reverse his vote to Sandra – and as she walks away breaks into uncontrollable smiles, Cotillard’s body a brief lightning rod of joy. The other burst occurs inside of Manu’s car, as Van Morrison’s “Gloria” crackles over the radio. The whole car bursts into song, Sandra giving herself up to the chorus, trying to escape into the tune.

THE 2014 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: HILL OF FREEDOM AND JAUJA

February 20, 2020August 17, 2025 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 23, 2014

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

The fifty-second New York Film Festival begins this Friday night with the world premiere of Gone Girl, the David Fincher adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s ubiquitous spousal murder mystery. But the early highlight of the thirty-film main slate concerns another missing woman, although in a less-outwardly-thrilling scenario. Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom, which screens the evenings of 9/30 and 10/8, concerns an unemployed Japanese intellectual in Korea, searching for an absent woman he once loved. It’s another variation on Hong’s recent string of films about travellers and transitional spaces (Our Sunhi, In Another Country, The Day He Arrives) where drinking is the main form of communication. Hill of Freedom works hilariously well as a fish-out-of-water comedy, but also contains pockets of melancholy about time’s passage, professional failure, and the inadequacy of language. It is currently without a distributor, and unlikely to acquire one, considering how poorly his sparsely distributed output has done stateside.

There is another gone girl in Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (screening 10/7 and 10/9), when the daughter of a colonial Danish military engineer (Viggo Mortensen) scampers off into the Patagonian wilderness. In his three features La Libertad, Los Muertos and Liverpool, Alonso has chosen landscapes first and built narratives around the spaces and the habits of its people. Jauja is his first period piece, and an imaginative leap from the patient everydayness of his previous films. With nods to The Searchers and Heart of Darkness, Jauja follows the engineer as he plunges deeper into a country he doesn’t understand, ending in hallucinations and a legacy of confusion.

Hong Sang-soo has been paring his films down to the essentials. Never one for excess, in recent years his films have limited themselves to a few city streets, a few self-loathing men and women, and a narrative built on repetition. Hill of Freedom constricts itself to couple of blocks in Seoul, mainly taking place at a guest house and at a coffee shop. Mori (Ryo Kase) is a Japanese visitor staying at the guest house, and is searching for Kwon (Seo Young-hwa). Mori met Kwon two years before, but is only now convinced of his love for her. But unbeknownst to Mori, Kwon is off in the mountains for health reasons, so he is forced to mope around town, communicating in limited English with his deep-in-debt guest house buddy Sangwon (Kim Eui-sung) and the profoundly unhappy owner of the coffee shop (named “Hill of Freedom). The story is told in flashback, from letters that Mori wrote to Kwon after his departure from Seoul. As Kwan is leaving the post office, she drops the letters on the stairs, shuffling them out of chronological order. The film proceeds in the order Kwon reads the letters, so they jump back in forth in time during Mori’s stay. The ghost that haunts the film is the one letter Kwan leaves on the staircase – perhaps the one that reveals the truth of Mori’s intentions, but more realistically documents another night of inebriated rambles.

Mori carries a dogeared book with him throughout his visit, which he seems to treat as a sacred text, or maybe more as a binky to calm his nerves. In one of his many awkward, flirtatious conversations with the coffee shop owner Youngsun (Moon So-ri) he informs her that it is a philosophical treatise that claims “time is not a real thing.” But that “at the end, you cannot escape this frame of mind, because our brain evolved this way.” He believes that time is an illusion, a construct of our consciousness, that perhaps in reality, outside of ourselves, events occur in the shuffled manner of the narrative. It is our brains that constantly seek to arrange them in order. Mori is a failure at this kind of arranging, and at this order. He is an unemployed loner wandering Seoul, his only hope a woman he last saw years ago and who might want nothing to do with him. And in some ways Mori seems to live in his own pocket of pre-Internet time. The settings are clearly contemporary, but no one uses a cell phone, Mori hand writes his letters, and there is nary a computer in sight.

Then there is the film’s blunt use of language. The movie is almost entirely in English, the common ground for Japanese-Korean relations in this film. But this limits their vocabulary, so each conversation is abrupt and direct. Every conversation seems to begin with the question, “Business or pleasure?” Mori hems and haws through each iteration, his visit having possibly to do with neither, ending up as more misery than pleasure. When his guest house manager tells him the banality, “I hope you will enjoy your stay”, Mori cannot respond in kind. Instead, he says, “It’s not always easy to enjoy, except when I am lucky.” The bemused manager replies, “You know, I was just saying that”, implying it was a rhetorical question. But Mori is incapable of deflecting or armoring his meanings with the subtleties of his native languages. He is forced into direct statement, as are his interlocutors. Sangwon insists that Mori admit to being sad. Mori considers people to be “great” or “poison”, with no shades of grey in between. This forced directness creates quick bonds between Mori and Sangwon, who get blitzed and dream of happiness, as well as between Mori and Youngsun, whose attraction seems to be borne out of mutual melancholy. It ends as it has to, in the middle, unresolved, our minds having to put all the broken pieces together.

Jauja is equally concerned with blowing minds as puzzling them. With its pulsing colors and immersive deep focus cinematography, it’s cinema-as-sensorium. There’s a vibrant interplay in Alonso’s frames (in the old 1.33:1 aspect ratio) between background and foreground, usually with Viggo Mortensen in the front, his visage staring out beyond the horizon. It is 1882 on the Patagonian coast, during the “Conquest of the Desert”, a bloody campaign to drive the indigenous peoples out of the jungle, to make the region safe for European settlers. Mortensen plays Dinesen, a Danish engineer who will plan the future European-style cities that will replace the wiped-out cultures. He is there with his daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjork Agger Malling), who soon absconds into the jungle with a young soldier. As Dinesen follows her deeper into the country, rumors persist that an ex-soldier, Zuluaga, has gone mad and gone “native”, slaughtering the Europeans he comes across. Fugitive signs of Ingeborg emerge and dissipate, but Dinesen trudges on into something like madness. He is like Ethan Edwards in his metastasizing hatred of the indigenous population, and the obsessive chase for his lost girl that is less an act of courage than of bloodlust. The deformity of the European colonial project seems to alter the landscape as well as his body, from watery shores crenellated with rock formations, to the dried out gray of the mountains. By the end Mortensen is a ragged wandering ghost, led by an undernourished dog to some kind of afterlife. The ending is a time-and-space shifting mystery that lays beyond my grasp, images of a fecund forest overgrowing the past, drawing me back in.

DEATH’S DESIGN: FINAL DESTINATION (2000)

February 20, 2020February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 16, 2014

John Waters wishes he directed Final Destination. At the recently completed John Waters retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, there was a sidebar of films Waters was “Jealous I Didn’t Make”. One of them was Final Destination, the 2000 horror film about five teens who cheat death – for which Death itself wants bloody recompense. It spawned four sequels (the most recent was Final Destination 5, released in 2011), having created the ideal machinery for the mid-budget franchise. The main character was non-corporeal, with Death’s presence represented as a light breeze or a trickle of water, so there was no worry of escalating salary demands. Then they could replace each iteration of the cast with unknowns, as Death plucked them off one by one in “accidents” of savage everydayness (a slip in the bathtub, a mug springing a leak). In his introduction to the screening (in blessed 35mm), Waters reminisced about his time in Baltimore grindhouses, bonding with the brood of rats that scrambled under his feet while marvelling at the depravity on-screen. He considered Final Destination worthy of that heritage, a resourceful exploitation film with shades of Ingmar Bergman. These are teenagers who are grappling with their morality for ninety-eight minutes, though on the genre level. So instead of playing chess with Death, they try to outsmart it as various pointy things hurtle towards their fleshy areas. Waters repeatedly stated that he was not being ironic, that the film is not camp, but a well-crafted fright film. I agree with the distinguished Mr. Waters.

The original conception for Final Destination came from Jeffrey Reddick, a budding horror aficionado who sent New Line Cinema a treatment for a Nightmare on Elm Street prequel when he was fourteen years old. In 1997 he wrote a spec script for The X-Files where Scully’s brother has a premonition about his own death, and escapes it. The spec was never submitted to the show, but it got Reddick an agent, and encouragement to turn the idea into a feature. Reddick got the idea while flying home to Kentucky. He read an article about how a mother called her daughter the night before she was to fly home from vacation in Hawaii, warning her not to fly home the next day, that she has a “bad feeling about it.” The daughter postponed her flight, and the one she was originally booked on crashed. Glen Morgan and James Wong were long-time writers and producers on The X-Files, and took on Reddick’s story for their first theatrical project. Morgan would write and produce, and Wong would write and direct.

Their version of Reddick’s story concerned the survivors of a plane crash headed for Paris. A high-school class boarded the plane for their class trip, but Alex (Devon Sawa) began suffering terrible visions of an impending explosion, and demanded to be let off. Six others were hustled off the plane as well in the commotion. There was the Henry Miller-reading, iron-sculpture welding goth Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Alex’s motor mouthed best friend Tod (Chad Donella), the roided up jock Carter (Kerr Smith), his perky blonde girlfriend Terry (Amanda Detmer), the slackjawed doofus Billy Hitchcock (the Seann William Scott) and one of the teacher advisors Valerie Lewton (Kristin Cloke). They are the lone survivors of the original passengers, but they start dying off in elaborate accidents. Alex begins to suspect that their survival undermined death’s design, and that Death is now trying to wrench things back in place, to restore the proper order. Which means they all have to die.

As you can tell from the Hitchcock and Val Lewton name drops, Wong, Morgan and Reddick were eager to flaunt their horror knowledge. The two FBI Agents who are investigating the crash (and which seem transposed Mulder and Scullys from the spec script) are named Weine [sic] (Robert Wiene directed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and Schreck (the actor who played Nosferatu). There’s also a “Murnau” and a “Dreyer” listed in the credits. It warms a film obsessive’s heart to see all these great artists name-checked in a mainstream movie, but spot-the-reference games only go so far. Luckily the movie is more concerned with logical mechanics of its scenario, and presenting each Rube Goldberg-esque death with blunt clarity. The plane crash itself, highlighted by John Waters as one of his favorites, is built up by an accumulation of ominous detail picked out through Alex’s POV. There is a spot of rust in the entrance doorway, and then he looks down to see a large gap between the ramp and the entry to the plane itself, a baggage truck seen cruising down below. All the connections are slightly off – even the seat tray lock snaps off in his hand. The coming inferno has strong practical effects work making the destruction look truly hellish, the passengers attacked not just by fire but the blunt force of their own suitcases. It’s the largest set-piece in the film, one that probably used up half of the budget.

The other deaths are less grandiose. The whole series is built on the banal ways in which the human body can expire. Death is vaguely embodied as a liquid that slips up Tod, as he entangles himself in a threaded steel wire that holds up the shower head. There is a distant echo of the Lewton style here, of hiding the menace instead of showing. The line of blood trickling under the door frame in the Lewton-produced, Tourneur-directed The Leopard Man as an analogue in the slowly advancing liquid advancing on the tile floor. In both cases they indicate death – only in Final Destination the end is depicted in explicit mechanical detail instead of poetic abstraction. In the Final Destination series the tension of the films arise in the how of the deaths, not in the why. It rids itself of the lugubrious backstories and motivations of traditional slasher films, and cuts to the chase (or the evisceration, or what have you). The series works because of this pared down simplicity, which was almost ruined from the beginning. According to Reddick, New Line wanted to give Death human form at the end of Final Destination, to have that “big bad” to peg a marketing campaign around. But Morgan and Wong defended the concept, and lent the series its exploitation integrity.

RENOIR NOIR: NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS (1932)

February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

September 9, 2014

“Every detail, every second of each shot makes La Nuit du carrefour [Night of the Crossroads] the only great French thriller, or rather, the greatest French adventure film of all.” -Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema (December 1957)

Night of the Crossroads was the first film adaptation of Georges Simenon’s phenomenally popular Inspector Maigret novels, and was lent a thick, hallucinatory atmosphere by director Jean Renoir. Yet, sandwiched as it is between Renoir’s classics with Michel Simon, La Chienne (1931) and Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), it has escaped much serious critical attention. It does not even get an entry in Andre Bazin’s collected writings on Renoir. Anthology Film Archives arranged a very rare screening of the feature this past weekend, with Simenon’s son John in attendance to discuss the production beforehand. It’s a traditional whodunit, except all of the motivations are missing. Instead of attributing the crime to a single perpetrator, the whole town becomes culpable through their xenophobia and greed. As Renoir’s character Octave says in The Rules of the Game, “everyone has their reasons”. To that Night of the Crossroads would add, “for murder.”

This narrative opacity was originally attributed to missing reels. Godard wrote that Jean Mitry “lost three reels after shooting was completed.” Renoir was asked to confirm the rumor, and said, “It’s possible, but even at the time, you know, it wasn’t very clear. I don’t think anyone of us understood anything. Least of all me.” As Renoir implies, the legend is not necessarily true. In Richard Brody’s article on the film for The New Yorker, he reports that the “fragmentary construction” was due to “his running out of money during production.” The project was all improvising – working around the financial limitations. Andre Brunelin wrote that the production was “a business of make do and mend. Decor had to be made out of anything at hand, it was all painting and knock-up.” This was no unauthorized fly-by-night operation, however. It had full support of Georges Simenon, who was friends with Renoir and collaborated on the screenplay.

The story concerns a murder in a small town outside Paris. A local insurance agent (Jean Gehret) discovers his car has been swapped with another. When the locals search the neighborhood, they find his vehicle with a corpse behind the wheel. It is stowed inside the garage of a Danish brother and sister who are already despised in the community for their eccentricity and foreignness. Inspector Maigret is brought in and stirs up all of the local resentments, putting more lives at stake.

It was shot from January – March of 1932, three weeks at a crossroads near Bouffemont, outside of Paris, and the remaining time at the Europa Films studio in Billancourt. The location was choked with fog and rain – perfect for the tale of secret identities and cloaked motivations. Before the screening, John Simenon confirmed that his father approved of the project, and especially of the casting of Pierre Renoir, Jean’s brother, as Maigret. He had the right height and bearing, if not the described muscularity of the book’s Inspector. With his prominent widow’s peak and hawk like face, Pierre Renoir strikes a strange figure, one of bookish, watchful intensity. His role is an observer that lets the villagers stumble into their confessions. His main move is to listen attentively, his interrogation method one of waiting out silences. The Danish man is Carl, a gangly Frankenstein’s monster type with an appropriately ghastly artificial eye, who happens to paint commercial art for a living. He keeps house for his sister Else (Winna Winifried), a hothouse flower quick with come-ons. One of the more perverse shots has a her flirting with her pet tortoise in an overhead shot. Their house is a dusty catacomb of ash, useless tchotchkes, and secret hiding places. One of them slides open when Else leans in to to kiss a nonplussed Maigret. Her shoulder pushes a painting across the wall, revealing a bottle of Veronal and a gun.

The street is hidden in fog, drugs are secreted behind paintings, and whole backstories are missing because of the budget shortage. But this expository lack fits the whole theme of the film – one which renders the last act revelations truly surprising, since we don’t know who half the characters are. Renoir uses this chaotic situation to experiment with a variety of techniques. There are deep focus shots with characters posed in background doorways in windows, winding tracking shots executed by mounting cameras onto cars, and a grand experiments in sound, in which audio acts as a kind of metronome. In his interrogations, Maigret knows the time is up when his empty glass is filled up by his dripping office faucet. To compress the time of the original investigation, Renoir cuts back and forth from Maigret running down leads to shots of commuters feet shuffling in front of a newspaper vendor. Their yelling out of “Morning edition!”, “Afternoon edition!” and “Evening news!” keeps the timing down. The abstracted shot of legs is then rhymed later with the hidden assailant, seen as a pair of feet stomping through mud puddles, and as an arm placing a poisoned beer onto a table. Some of these spy game machinations recall Feuillade, which Renoir was undoubtedly familiar with, though on a much simpler scale.

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Renoir also had the advantage of more mobile cameras, and he used them to the fullest extent. There is a camera-mounted car chase sequence of unbelievable beauty. All is shrouded in darkness as two Model-Ts chase each other around the turns, the brightest illumination provided by the exploding muzzles of gunfire. It is thrilling to be plunged into darkness, and felt like I was riding Space Mountain at Disney World for the first time. Except this thrill is not a celebration of modernity, but a resigned condemnation of it. All of the town is implicated in the murder. The bourgeois insurance company family , the artistically inclined Danes and the group of working class mechanics all pursued their self-interest into criminality.Maigret offers some hope – telling Else, “in two years [of jail time] you will be truly free.” Though what she will do with that freedom is seriously in doubt. All Maigret can do is grin and bear it, and wait for the next case.