Uncategorized – Page 14 – R. Emmet Sweeney

THE SHOW MUST GO ON: 42ND STREET (1933)

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May 12, 2015

When sound came to cinema, the musical came along with it. The tremendous box office returns of The Jazz Singer (1927) had producers reeling, and the market was soon flooded with song and dance. But the Depression-era audiences began tuning them out, preferring the patter of William Powell to the tapping of another chorine. By 1931 the studios had slashed musicals from their slates and were brainstorming what went wrong. In the May 1931 issue of the Motion Picture Herald, Paramount’s Jesse Lasky was optimistic about the future of the genre:

A gradual but inevitable return of music to the screen is predicted by Lasky. He believes the future will bring a sprinkling of operettas, a reasonable number of musical comedies, dramatic pictures with backgrounds of symphony orchestras. Citing the public’s attitude toward musical comedies, he contends that picture audiences were given something before they were prepared for it. “There is merely a need of a little more skillful technique and a better understanding on the part of the public”, explained Lasky. “The public was not prepared for the license of the musical comedy. For years we had trained the public to realism. The stage naturally had a dramatic license which was impossible in pictures. Audiences could not get used to music coming from nowhere on the screen. Nevertheless, musical comedies will come back and the public will become accustomed to that form of entertainment. In the next two or three years they will have forgotten that there ever was any question about musical comedies.”

In 1933 all questions were dropped after the massive success of WB’s 42nd Street, a snappy, streetwise backstage musical that introduced the world to the symmetrical spectacles of Busby Berkeley’s dance choreography. Now out on a sparkling Blu-ray from the Warner Archive, it’s clearer than ever why this was the film that brought the musical back into the spotlight.

Warner Brothers hitched itself to to the coattails of FDR, and in the publicity for 42nd Street declared the film “A New Deal in Entertainment!”. The studio pitched their films at the working class, with James Cagney their pugnacious stand-in (he would star in WB’s next musical, Footlight Parade (’33)). These films depicted musicals as acts of labor, as groups of dancers, actors, singers, stagehands and directors worked together to make the show sing. Every character in the movie is looking for work, even the show’s star Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) who remarks early on how the Depression has ruined her career. On the opposite end of the class spectrum is “Anytime Annie” (Ginger Rogers), who dresses up as an upper class twit, monocle and all, in order to fool the casting directors into hiring her (they see through her ruse – but cast her anyway).

Darryl Zanuck was the man who set it in motion. Studio head Harry Warner was still opposed to the musical genre after a series of flops, but Zanuck convinced him to take a chance, and assigned Rian James and James Seymour to adapt Bradford Ropes’ unpublished novel into a screenplay. Daniel Eagan suggests, in America’s Film Legacy, that Zanuck may have “fooled Harry and his other brothers into thinking the film would be a drama without songs and dances.” Whatever his rhetorical tricks, he was able to get the project greenlit. The story was about a director who risks his health to mount an expensive Broadway production. For the role of the hard-driving director Julian Marsh, Zanuck borrowed Warner Baxter from Fox, who had won the Best Actor Oscar in 1930 for In Old Arizona. The rest of the cast was filled out by WB contractees. Marsh’s leading lady Dorothy Brock was played by Bebe Daniels, who grew up on the stage, while the young ingenue role of Peggy Sawyer was given to Ruby Keeler, who was then married to talkie pioneer Al Jolson. Keeler had been offered the lead alongside Jolson in Fox’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, but turned it down because Jolson, according to Keeler, “would be worrying about my part as well as his own.” There was no such concern with 42nd Street, which made her a short-term star. Familiar, welcome faces like Guy Kibbee, George Brent and Dick Powell lent their inimitable support.

Julian Marsh is a sick man, but powers through a fraught rehearsal period to get the musical revue “Pretty Lady” into shape for the opening. But when star Dorothy Brock gets into a spat with the producer and source of cash, the whole production grinds to a halt. It’s up to fresh-faced newbie Peggy to step into the leading role, and it’s up to her whether “Pretty Lady” ever gets beyond previews.

The director was originally intended to be Mervyn LeRoy, but he got ill like Julian Marsh, after exhausting himself on the set of I Am a Fugitive on a Chain Gang (1932). Lloyd Bacon sat in the director’s chair instead. One of Zanuck’s cost-cutting maneuvers was to split up production – Bacon would handle all the dialogue scenes, while Busby Berkeley would get his own production unit for the musical sequences that would close the film. They worked different days on different stages, but both shared DP Sol Polito. Berkeley was coming off a trio of films choreographing dance numbers for Samuel Goldwyn, but it was at Warner that Berkeley would develop his soon-to-be famous style of overhead shots of abstracted gams moving in patterned unison. His routines in 42nd Street are fairly tame compared to what came later in his career, staying tethered to stage musical reality. Though he and Polito manage to wend a camera through the legs of a throng of lined up models, and in the final “42nd Street” number recreates the fabled NYC block with a cutout skyline and a remarkably realistic apartment block, complete with stabbings.

The movie was a huge hit, and though it is filled with enthusiasm and sunny can-do spirit, there is an undertone of resignation veined throughout, present in the character of Julian Marsh. In one of the biggest downers in backstage musical history, instead of wrapping up with the triumphant opening night performance, it ends with a slumped over Marsh, sitting half dead on the back stairs, listening as the theater goers praise Peggy and demean him, crediting her with the show’s success. Future entries in the backstage cycle always sync the culmination of backstage romance with the on-stage performance, with both narrative strands uniting in a super-happy climax. But in 42nd Street there’s a disorienting disjunct between on and off stage, admitting that during the Depression hard work might not get you anything.

FIGHTING SPIRIT: KUNG FU KILLER (2015) AND SKIN TRADE (2015)

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May 5, 2015

The summer movie season seems to begin earlier and earlier every year. 2015′s blockbustering began on April 3rd, when Furious Seven started fueling its way to a billion dollars. Avengers: Age of Ultron opened this past weekend, and from now on men-in-capes will be throwings fists at green screens from now through August. I’m looking forward to a few of these behemoths, namely Mad Max: Fury Road and San Andreas, but for the most part I prefer to to retreat to action films more human-scaled during the sweaty months. Which is why Teddy Chen’s Kung Fu Killer is my summer movie of the year. Garnering a limited stateside theatrical release from the invaluable Well Go USA, it’s a cleverly conceived Hong Kong fight film in which Donnie Yen is released from prison to track down a serial killer of martial artists, each victim a master of a different fighting discipline. This allows for a relatively uninterrupted series of brawls in a variety of styles, honoring the whole tradition of HK martial arts films. It’s very self-consciously looking back, as it contains a who’s who list of cameos of HK film legends, from stuntman Bruce Law to the founder of Golden Harvest studio Raymond Chow.

In the English-speaking world, direct-to-video (or now, direct-to-VOD) films are the lone remaining source of action with more practical stunts than CG. So I took a chance on Skin Trade solely based on the cast: Dolph Lundgren, Tony Jaa, and Michael Jai White. Lundgren and White are stalwarts of the DTV cinematic universe, while Jaa is the popular Thai daredevil from Ong Bak, The Protector, and, making inroads into Hollywood, a small role in Furious 7. Indifferently directed by Ekachai Uekrongtham on what was undoubtedly a tight budget and tighter schedule, this Thai-Canadian co-production has the feel of many DTV films where all the money went into paying the stars and acquiring explosives, with little left for the actual movie in between kabooms (it is receiving distribution from Magnet, Magnolia’s action imprint). If you skip past the first hour of exploitative sexual trafficking drama there are some formidable fight scenes in Skin Trade that pit the smaller and quicker Jaa against lumbering powerhouse Lundgren and the nimbler giant Jai White. Plus there is the pleasure of Ron Perlman, as the main mobster heavy, chewing into his Serbian accent with brio. But it’s no Kung Fu Killer.

In recent months Donnie Yen has mentioned that Ip Man 3, now in production,may be his last action film. Now fifty-one years old, he is in a retrospective mood, and may be ready to ease the beating his body has been taking since he started as a stunt double in the early 1980s. Kung Fu Killer (aka Kung Fu Jungle) has the feel of a greatest hits routine, and the fight scenes are all killer no filler. Donnie Yen plays Hahou Mo, a martial arts master and former police instructor who was imprisoned for beating his opponent to death in a duel. In jail he follows the story of a serial murderer who seems to be targeting fellow martial artists and slaying them with their own specialty: whether it’s strikes, kicks, weapons or grappling. Hahou detects a pattern in the killer’s targets, and begs Detective Luk Yuen Sum (Charlie Yeung) to release him to help the investigation. She does, of course, and together they track down Fung Yu-Sau (Wang Baoqiang), driven mad by his wife’s sickness. One of Fung’s legs is shorter than the other, and through brutal training has overcome his physical limitations to outfight the greatest kung fu masters in the country. Wang nearly limps away with the movie in a sneeringly emotive performance that reminded me of Lon Chaney in The Penalty.

The story is a delivery system for the fights, and they are all spectacular down to the slightest detail. When you get to a close-up of Yen or Wang’s knuckles, they are bruised black-and-blue. Whether this is makeup or achieved the hard way is irrelevant, but they are established in a world where flesh is vulnerable, and that is enough to heighten the stakes of each battle. To get the attention of the prison guards, Hahou initiates a brawl against seventeen inmates. Against such a large group, Yen employs the Chuy Li Fut martial art, which involves a whipping of the upper body. According to the infallible Wikipedia, Bruce Lee said it was “the most effective system that I’ve seen for fighting more than one person.” Teddy Chen has a penchant for using too many swooping master shots that blur the action, but when he gets closer to the fight itself each impact registers with clarity.

Fung Yu-Sau’s second murder is against the kicking master (Shi Yanneng), which occurs atop a massive art installation of a fictional dinosaur. This quick imaginative bout starts on top of the animal’s spine and travels through its ribcage before it’s neck snapping conclusion. For the grappling expert (Kang Yu) fight, you see the Eagle Claw style of gripping and attacking pressure points, which here occurs in a modern apartment, smashing through aquariums and windows. There is a lot of jockeying for hand position here, and Chen does a good job of matching the close-ups of the grips with the general flow of the action as Fung eventually fells another master. Fung’s fight against the weapons master (Louis Fan) occurs on a movie set as they are preparing a motorcycle stunt. Fung arrives with a saber, stabs an extra through the shoulder, and the director (Joe Cheung, a character actor from In the Mood For Love and dozens of others) skedaddles. This leads to a beautifully orchestrated fencing duel goosed by wirework by exaggerate impacts.

The film uses CG too much for purists, especially in the awesome final showdown between Hahou and Fung, which takes place on a highway at night, as the duo spars with bamboo reeds in between rolling under semi-trucks. I was too wrapped up in the physical feats to ding it too much for lower rent CG. The Hong Kong studios just don’t have the money to get the processing power of Hollywood FX outfits, but I’ll take Donnie Yen with some CG blood spurts if it saves him from injury and on my screen.

HORSEPLAY: BLACK MIDNIGHT (1949)

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April 28, 2015

In June of 1949, Roddy McDowall was twenty years old, and it appeared his acting career was winding down. He had been in the business for over a decade, having first appeared on screen at the age of nine in the British production Murder in the Family (1938). At twelve he signed a contract with Twentieth Century Fox, and in 1941 appeared in both Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt and John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. The studio saw money in pairing the cute kid with animals, from the horse in My Friend Flicka to the collie in Lassie Come Home. Fox dropped him from their contract in 1945, as adolescence started dimming that innocent young boy glow. McDowall recalled that, “My agent told me I would never work again, because I’d grown up.” In this uncertain period, he took on parts at independent Poverty Row studios, including a part in Orson Welles’ Macbeth, for Republic Pictures, and a few “grown up” animal films for Monogram. One of these was Black Midnight (1949), directed by Oscar (not yet “Budd”) Boetticher. Released on DVD by Warner Archive, it’s a 66 minute programmer that pairs McDowall with an unruly black stallion that he befriends, tames, and defends against a murder charge. Filmed in the windy mountains of Lone Pine California, it emphasizes McDowall’s open, easy charm, and his awkward, spindly body. Almost every sequence ends in a pratfall – into a creek, party punch, and a pond. But by the end he’s reached something approaching adulthood, in a trial by fists.

Oscar Boetticher (he would adopt the Budd for 1951′s Bullfighter and the Lady) completed his service as an Ensign in the Photographic Science Laboratory of the US Navy during WWII, and, like McDowall, was making the rounds of Poverty Row. He directed a couple crime films for PRC (Assigned to Danger and Behind Locked Doors (both 1948)) before moving to Monogram, which Boetticher described as “really second rate.” He made three films for them and producer Lindsley Parsons, starting with Black Midnight. With Roddy McDowall in tow, Monogram provided whatever animal-related script they had lying around (credited to Erna Lazarus and Scott Darling). McDowall plays Scott Jordan, who lives on a farm with his uncle Bill (Damian O’Flynn). They work the land and flirt with the neighbors – Martha (Fay Baker) and her daughter Cindy (Lynn Thomas). But when Bill’s wayward son Daniel (Rand Brooks) returns, their balanced ecosystem is upended. Daniel eyes Cindy and distracts Scott with a wild stallion named Midnight. Scott soothes and trains the horse, while Daniel sulks and generally acts suspicious. When Midnight accidentally kills one of Daniel’s friends, Scott has to resort to extreme measures to save the stallion’s life.

Though the plot is packed with incident, Boetticher somehow makes this hour-long drama seem leisurely. Time is spent establishing the rhythms of Bill and Scott’s daily life, of feeding the chickens, cleaning the house, and training the horse. DP William Sickner doesn’t have time to set up many close-ups, but captures all the work in odd, oblique angles, out of boredom, creativity or a combination of both. McDowall still has a spring in his step, seemingly happy to be outside and working, despite the swirling winds that very clearly bedevil the actors in most takes. Every outdoor shot sends everyone’s hair whipping. Bigger budgeted productions would just wait for the wind to die town, but on such tight schedules the shots had to proceed – and they clearly loop the audio in post-production. Each of these location shots seem like a battle, and gives these sequences an air of mounting tension, as if building up to a storm that never arrives.

Boetticher is continually pushing the camera in swift, punchy movements to keep the images interesting, always sidling around corners in a vaguely voyeuristic manner. Roddy McDowall, as in his career, is caught between beatific kid and hormonal teen. His flirtation with Cindy is kept chaste and non-threatening, as every chance at intimacy is interrupted by a McDowall pratfall in which his desires are doused by varieties of H20. But there is a clear attempt to give McDowall more “manly” scenes, none more so than in the epic brawl he has with Daniel that spills out from their country home out into the Lone Pine mountains. It’s a brutal knock down drag out scrum that has Roddy narrowly escape a knife to the face and proves, if nothing else, that he can take a good beating and deliver a believable punch. In Hollywood action movies, this passes for a sign of growth.

Boetticher remembered McDowall fondly: “I just loved him. He always had his mother and father with him on the set, but he was just about to have his 21st birthday [on the set of Killer Shark (1950)]. So we went out on location on purpose, so he could get out from underneath their jurisdiction and see some girls here and there. So we made the picture in Baja, California, and Roddy was no virgin after that.” Boetticher was a raconteur/serial exaggerator, so whether or not this story is true, it reflects his affection for the young actor, and that affection is all over the screen. This movie is a small one with modest ambition, but there is a looseness and happiness apparent in every frame.

Sickner reflects this shift in Scott’s importance in a rhymed pair of compositions. In the opening of the film, there is a shot of Bill and Martha in the foreground on a couch, chastising Scott and Cindy in the background, who mimic their elders positions by the fire. Near the end the shot is reversed, with Scott and Cindy commiserating on a fence in the foreground, blotting out the obsolescent Bill and Martha, who are off in the middle distance. Make way for tomorrow. McDowall would go on to acting school and add another fifty years in show business to his resume.

ORGANIZATION MAN: ODD MAN OUT (1947)

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April 21, 2015

Odd Man Out has an absence at its center. It stars James Mason as a revolutionary in Northern Ireland, but he is either missing or comatose for the majority of its running time. A scattered group of fringe players search for his body, from IRA fellow travelers to middle-class families to eccentric bird merchants. What emerges is a portrait of a stunned post-WWII Belfast, tired of violence but in no hurry to pass Mason off to the cops. It is either sympathy or indolence that keeps him alive, as his husk is passed from alley to bar and finally, to the docks. The city’s cavernous, emptied out streets are the setting for Mason’s absolution. For though he is a murderer, Mason’s beatific, radiant performance gives his character a saintly aura, as if taking on the sins of the post-war world. Though it has overshadowed the lower-budgeted Brit-noirs of this period (which are in need of reclamation), Odd Man Out is more than worthy of its reputation. Earlier this month it received the Criterion treatment, released in a new HD restoration on DVD and Blu-ray, with their usual array of copious extras, including a new essay by Imogen Sara Smith.

Odd Man Out was produced by Filippo Del Giudice, a pivotal figure in postwar British cinema. Raised in Rome and educated as a lawyer, he fled Fascist Italy for London in 1933. He founded the Two Cities Films production company with his partner Mario Zampi four years later, the name reflecting his journey. He received monetary backing from Ludovico Toeplitz de Grand Ry, the scion of an Italian banking family living in London. Their first films were the musical Stepping Toes (1938) and the war drama 13 Men and a Gun (’38, directed by Zampi), which netted them enough respect to hire director Anthony Asquith (Pygmalion (’38)) and star Ray Milland to adapt the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears in 1940. But Italy would enter the war in June of 1940, whereupon both Giudice and Zampi were arrested and interned on the Isle of Man for possible Fascist sympathies. The duo was released after four months after proving their bona fides – and Giudice bore no ill will towards his adopted country. He would go on to produce the most popular British war movie of the era with In Which We Serve (’42), written, directed and starring Noel Coward.

Giudice didn’t consider himself an artist, and was known to give his filmmakers free reign over their projects. David Lean recalled that “He used to call himself ‘The Butler’, meaning, ‘I am your butler.’ …He really was a producer. He produced the money, he ironed out all sorts of troubles.” In 1944, in an attempt to raise capital for Laurence Olivier’s expensive Henry V, Giudice sold a controlling interest in Two Cities to the Rank Organisation. Two Cities would become production unit under their umbrella. It was this arrangement under which Odd Man Out was made. Giudice was the point man, officially credited as “in charge of production”, while Carol Reed received a “producer credit”. Reed, as with most Giudice films, received a free hand. He hired Robert Krasker as his DP, the man who had just shot Henry V and David Lean’s Brief Encounter. He had his regular composer William Alwyn write the score in advance (each character granted their own leitmotif), so his actors could adapt their performances to the grandly mournful music. Reed wanted F.L. Green to adopt his own novel for the screenplay, and hired veteran scribe R.C. Sherriff (most famously the author of the play “Journey’s End”) to assist him, as Green had never before written for the movies.

The film takes place over one doomed evening in Belfast following the fate of Johnny McQueen (James Mason), leader of a revolutionary group mentioned only as “The Organisation”, though it is very obviously a stand-in for the IRA. In an effort to raise money, the group robs a bank. The early sections of the film unfurl as a heist film set a sleepwalkers pace. The men stroll through the bank with studied nonchalance, and get out at the same slow lope. There is no one left who would try to be a hero, except one nosy guard on the bank steps, who accosts Johnny and gets a bullet in the gut instead. Dumbstruck at his own act of violence, and having taken a bullet through the shoulder himself, the getaway car gets away from Johnny as well, who is left wandering the streets. These early sequences are strange in their affectlessness, and their refusal to engage with McQueen’s politics. His wound is immediately worked as a symbol of humanity at large, and the specifics of the IRA’s struggle are a casualty of this symbolism. James Agee thought the film buckled under the ponderousness of its symbolism in his 1947 review in The Nation: “As an image and allegory, the whole film loses much of its possible force: it is not a tragic poem but a series of passive elegiac tableaux with a certain suggested relationship, generally inferior, to the Stations of the Cross. The tone of pity for man is much too close to self-pity.”

The passivity of McQueen after the robbery is striking – he stumbles from place to place with seemingly no will of his own. He is completely at the mercy of strangers. The local children ignore him as he cowers in an alley — he isn’t part of their game. A comfy middle-class home is shocked to discover that the injured man they are aiding is the wanted criminal McQueen. But instead of calling the cops, they simply let him loose, wanting him gone without the guilt of the informer hanging over their heads. John Ford’s The Informer (’35) hangs heavy over this film, as it is another atmospheric story about a political outcast wandering the streets of Ireland, seeking absolution. Where Victor McLaglen is despised for his naming names in The Informer, McQueen is regarded with wary respect as a man of principle. The few citizens most willing to exploit him are a painter-on-the-skids (Robert Newton) eager to paint a portrait of the dying rebel, and an eccentric bird collector (F.J. McCormick), who is eager to deliver McQueen to the local priest for a modest fee.

McQueen survives somehow, being passed along as a hot potato from kind to not-so-kind strangers. The film turns more and more abstract as it goes along, those “passive elegiac tableaux” gaining in resonance as McQueen’s survival becomes more and more pointless. This is a city that has continually expelled him from its hearth and onto the unforgiving streets. Though unwieldy and obvious in its themes at times, it remains a painfully melancholy film about nighttime in the city, with Krasker bouncing a few rays of light off the cobblestones to illuminate McQueen’s perambulations to nowhere.

THE REALITY PRINCIPLE: ART OF THE REAL AT THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

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April 14, 2015

Before the start of his heartbreaking rural romance True Heart Susie (1919), D.W. Griffith asks in an intertitle, “Is real life interesting?” He implies that the answer is yes, expecting that you’ll sit through the ninety minutes to follow based on its adherence to the facts of everyday life. But there is no expectation of documentary truth, since the star is Lillian Gish and and the writer of the story, Marian Fremont, are named front and center. Instead, Griffith said, “I am trying to develop realism in pictures by teaching the value of deliberation and repose.” The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s second annual Art of the Real series, a wide-ranging survey of non-fiction (ish) cinema that runs through April 24th, is one that privileges the contemplative and dreamlike over works that only admit to one truth. Like Griffith’s work, the Art of the Real films (over twenty shorts and features), co-programmed by Rachael Rakes and Dennis Lim, think along with you, offering multifarious pathways to the “real”. The series will feature the North American premiere of the Lebanese portrait film Birds of September, Luo Li’s environmental doc/shaggy dog mystery Li Wen at East Lake and Luísa Homem & Pedro Pinho’s epic observational documentary of the Cape Verde tourist boom Trading Cities. Not to mention sidebars on The Actualities of Agnès Varda (with Varda introducing her films in person) and Repeat as Necessary: The Art of Reenactment, which takes the abused reenactment form and traces its storied history in documentary art.

The most affecting work in the series, though, might be its simplest. Masa Sawada’s I, Kamikaze is a seventy-five minute interview with the ninety-year-old former kamikaze pilot Fujio Hayashi. Hayashi sits behind a table, his glasses traveling up and down his nose, as he dredges up the memories from his time in the Japanese Imperial Navy. One of the original volunteers for the air suicide attack units, he was, and remains, a good soldier. He lost his mother at a young age, and the few words he spares for his father depicts a neglectful, distant figure (after he returned from WWII, he said, “I’m back. I’m sorry for losing the war.” His father did not respond, and they barely spoke the rest of their lives). Hayashi poured his soul into the unit, and was willing and able to give up his life for his country. Instead he was tasked with training the young kamikaze recruits, ordering their missions, and hence, their deaths. Hayashi takes long, considered pauses before many of his answers, opening up blocks of time to study his face, his posture and his too-large suits. These are silences filled with thought, for Hayashi and the viewer. His expressions are almost entirely impenetrable and thus open to interpretation, a stonewall even when discussing his good friend Nishio, whom he had to order on a suicide mission. His military bearing is still intact, emotions attaching to the meaning of the words, but none in the inflection of his steady, phlegmy voice. Hayashi is comfortable with death, and has lived with it all his life. He keeps repeating that for long stretches of his life living or dying made no difference to him. He was, in this sense, the perfect kamikaze -though he was never able to achieve his intended destiny. He describes that period as “memories bathed in light”, and that when it is his turn to leave on his final mission, he will have a smile on his face, just as the kamikaze pilots did on theirs as they were heading out into oblivion.

Trading Cities depicts a journey of material and capital into and out of Cape Verde, the island country that lies off the coast of West Africa. The island has few natural resources, and the local government as been promoting itself as a tourist destination for Europeans. They joined the WTO in 2007, built a new international airport, and started developing beachside resorts. But they started to run out of sand. This essential element for creating concrete was being stripped bare from their beaches, turning sand thievery into a source of petty crime. Construction ceased while trade routes opened to import the concrete from nearby Mauritania, which in turn received boats from Lisbon. For Trading Cities, Luísa Homem and Pedro Pinho take an observational, direct cinema approach with their 16mm as they document this circulation of material. The film stars in Lisbon on a cargo ship, goes to Mauritania to depict the collection of sand and the firing and molding of concrete blocks. They pay close attention to the process of labor, the particular skills and peculiar rhythms that emerge in any workplace. The slow journey of a cargo ship, which has the abstracted beauty of one of Peter Hutton’s Hudson River films, is contrasted with the slow camel-ride a white European couple takes on their way to one of the resorts. This is where the concrete comes to rest, in the static packaged splendor of a middle-class resort, designed to channel the country’s colonized past. The majority Italian, German and Portuguese tourists laze in wading pools as a black African plays a native string instrument. Another Cape Verdean sings a canned “Redemption Song” to a group of bored tourists uninterested in freeing themselves from mental slavery, while in another show the locals paint themselves in tribal-looking make-up for some community theater Lion King knockoff. The Cape Verdeans put their kitschy colonial-burlesque work in and go home, where the old subsistence farming economy proceeds at its edges, slowly fading into the future of the service economy.

Sarah Francis is after a more stylized kind of city portrait in Birds of September. She constructed a “glassed van”, a kind of vehicular bubble into which she invited random people from Beirut’s streets. She recorded interviews with them as the bubble drove slowly around the city, the locals’ daily anxieties percolating on the soundtrack as the city reveals itself behind their heads. Francis said she made the film because of “a claustrophobic feeling I had towards Beirut. I have always lived here and yet I always felt like I was not always fully part of things.” She is using the bubble to break the city down into component parts. She even separates the interview audio track from the video track, so the subject’s words play over their silent faces. Each element is only partially graspable – it’s possible to focus on the words, the face or the city behind them, but usually never all at once. At times it feels like tapping into Beirut’s unconscious, the streets and sky merging with anxieties about work, relationships and religion. The concept is stretched thin over its 100 minutes, but it’s a provocative and promising work.

Luo Li is another young artist on display at Art of the Real with Li Wen at East Lake, an shapeshifting shaggy dog thing that begins as a documentary about developers illegally filling in a lake to build the “Happy Valley” amusement park. About 35 minutes in it changes into a narcoleptic mystery as two misshapen detectives track down a vagrant who may or may not be spreading tales that a dragon will soon rise from the lake in anger. The investigation gets sidetracked into Cultural Revolution history, the detective’s fear of castration, and real estate conspiracies. It’s a series of dead-ends and false leads that recalls the proliferating melancholic mysteries of Inherent Vice. What lies beneath is the state’s micromanaging fear of the old, weird China. The McGuffin of this whole enterprise is a young eccentric who believes all the old timers’ myths about the lake – about its personality and the dragon who protects it. The whole state apparatus springs into action to shut this harmless guy down. The cop’s obsession with Cultural Revolution paraphernalia suggests the current era has replaced Mao’s little red book with technocrat babble.

Art of the Real is formidable, ear and eye-worm kind of programming. These are movies that burrow up into your cortex, laying eggs that will hatch for weeks afterward. Each film gets at the “real” in their own way, through unvarnished interview, direct observation, stylized portraiture or fictionalized documentary. Regardless of the process, they each glimpse their own facet of reality, which is, as D.W. Griffith must admit, interesting indeed.

ON THE TOWN: TCM CLASSIC FILM TOUR OF NYC

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April 7, 2015

I am constitutionally opposed to guided tours. I am slow and stubborn, preferring to linger, wander and find my own path rather than walk down the pre-determined route laid down by an unfamiliar mind. In my particular mania I’d prefer to be ignorant in my own way than knowledgeable as determined by another. So I tend to avoid all tours, by bus, by foot, or by dirigible. I have been married to a ghost tour operator for almost ten years now, and still have managed to hold my illogical ground. Until now, anyway, when along with my wife, I took the TCM Classic Film Tour, a three-hour guided bus ride around Manhattan, operated by On Location Tours in concert with TCM. Yes, this is a review of a TCM branded tour on a TCM site, so feel free to read the rest of this review with a raised eyebrow, though the following thoughts are indeed my own. I went in skeptical, but I was happy to discover it did not pander to popular taste but attempts to present the full scope of NYC film history, from Edison to film noir and up through (no comment) You’ve Got Mail.

On Location Tours had operated a classic film tour earlier in the decade, though eventually interest waned and it was discontinued. In 2013 TCM came on board as a co-presenter, and revived the tour with their input and imprint. As it was being planned, Robert Osborne rode on the bus to make sure the sites were varied and true to the spirit of the channel. Our guide, the affable and informative Jason Silverman, informed me that Osborne was insistent that one of the first clips shown on the tour be one from Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950), to prove to tour-goers that this would not be all Ghostbusters and Woody Allen (though they are still well-represented). Ma and Pa Kettle get on a bus at Columbus Circle, while a scene from It Should Happen to You depicts Judy Holliday fantasizing herself onto a billboard at the same location. What dreams would be possible at the TimeWarner Center today – the current location of Holliday’s imaginary billboard? It is now the site of some of the most expensive condos in the world, purchased by anonymous shell corporations the New York Times spent last fall trying to penetrate. Ma and Pa Kettle could not afford to visit NYC today, and Holliday would not be dreaming of a billboard but a pop-up ad on Buzzfeed.

One of the narratives of any tour of NYC is the changing face of the city. The fate of The Emerald Inn bar is one such example. Opened in 1943 or 1944 at 203 Columbus Ave. at 69th Street, it was a remnant from the Upper West Side’s working class past, from the period before the construction of Lincoln Center pushed out 7,000, mostly Hispanic and African-American, families. The Emerald Inn gained part of its fame from being used as a location for Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It is the bar where Jack Lemmon gets ripped on Christmas Eve. Due to massive rent hikes threatened since 2009, the bar finally had to move in 2013, and still operates at 250 W. 72nd St. Where the original bar stood is now a Kate Spade handbag store, as Jason ruefully pointed out during the tour. Then there is Meg Ryan’s “Shop Around the Corner” in You’ve Got Mail, the Lubitsch-themed bookstore that her character owns. That was shot at Maya Schaper’s Antiques and Cheese on West 69th St., open since the mid-90s and closed down in 2008, again due to rising rents. Today that location is an “organic” dry cleaners.

We also passed Sherman Square, situated between Broadway, Amsterdam Ave. and 70th St. Once known as “Needle Park” in the 1970s for the rampant drug activity in the area, it was the setting for Jerry Schatzberg’s Panic in Needle Park (1971), starring Al Pacino. At the north edge of the park is Apple Bank, and two decades before Pacino was shooting up, there was more of a high energy criminality in a car chase from The Naked City (1948) right around that same square. It is impossible to conceive a gritty crime film being filmed there today, unless it’s a Lifetime movie-of-the-week about a rich doctor poisoning his wife.

Though I didn’t treasure the recycled air of the otherwise cozy bus, there were plenty of stoppages to get outside, grab some food and look at the sites, whether it’s grabbing some chocolate babka at Zabar’s, or going to the front steps of Audrey Hepburn’s apartment from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (currently on sale for a cool $8 million). Jason also brought us to the spot next to the Queensboro Bridge where Gordon Willis composed the iconic bench shot for Manhattan. Woody Allen generally makes me queasy, so I was grateful that the tour also supplied the fresh air of My Man Godfrey, with the bridge peeking out of Carole Lombard’s window.

Probably the most pleasant surprise in terms of programming, though, was after the requisite clip from King Kong as we were passing the Empire State Building, Jason presented a scene from Love Affair (1939), the greatest of romances and still far too unknown today (due to its languishing in poor PD editions). The sight of Charles Boyer waiting patiently on the lip of the Empire State Building’s roof, expectant of a delayed reunion, was enough to bring tears to my eyes in a matter of seconds. I was transported out of the packed bus, the clogged streets, and the packed sidewalks of a holiday spring weekend in NYC, and into the spiritual plane of McCarey’s masterpiece. Not bad for a bus tour.

SILENTS ON DEMAND: FLICKER ALLEY’S MOD DVD PROGRAM

February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

March 31, 2015

Pity the poor DVD. Its death has been foretold for years, yet it soldiers on, providing pleasure for those not yet hooked into the HD-everything ecosystem. DVD sales have declined overall, but it remains the lifeblood of boutique distributors like Flicker Alley. Makers of luxe box sets of Chaplin’s Mutual comedies, Mack Sennett shorts and Cinerama travelogues, Flicker Alley is trying to get the good stuff out there. They’re our kind of people. But the shift to higher resolutions abandons films that have never had expensive HD transfers, making them cost-prohibitive for Blu-ray. This is the case for a huge number of silent films now out-of-print on DVD. In an admirable effort to get classics out on disc, in good transfers superior to the muddy messes on YouTube, Flicker Alley has partnered with the Blackhawk Films library to release nineteen classics (mostly silents) on manufactured-on-demand DVD – the same route the Warner Archive has gone to plunder their deep library. They plan to add two new MOD titles every month. Flicker Alley doesn’t have the deep pockets of WB to back them, but with the help of a modest crowdfunding campaign were able to get the program off the ground. From their initial slate I sampled D.W. Griffith’s tale of plainspoken rural heartbreak True Heart Susie (1919) and Ernst Lubitsch’s sophisticated urban bed-hopping roundelay The Marriage Circle (1924).

This past December Flicker Alley began an IndieGogo campaign to raise $5,000 for their MOD program, ending up with $7,510. In their initial push, they explained the reasons behind their turn to on-demand DVD: “The unfortunate reality of our current home-video market…necessitates a high initial investment for the mass production of each individual title. These upfront costs mean that Flicker Alley can only afford to mass produce a limited selection of films each year. Meanwhile, more and more previously-published gems of cinema history are currently unavailable.” Take a film like Griffith’s True Heart Susie. It has been released on DVD before, but is now out-of-print. With its market already diminished,along with the fact it’s a lesser known Griffith title, it would be difficult to release at the minimum numbers required for regular manufacturing of authored discs. But it deserves to be available, for it contains a Lillian Gish performance of sublime tension. She is an innocent country girl playing at being an innocent country girl, believing it to be the clearest path to a stable, comfortable life. But when she notices her presumed fiance eyeing a worldly perfumed woman from Chicago, you can see her crumble and reconstruct herself before your eyes, under the impassive close-ups lensed by DP Billy Bitzer.

It is a performance of impeccable control, the supreme model for what Griffith was attempting when he said, “I am trying to develop realism in pictures by teaching the value of deliberation and repose.” As James Naremore wrote in Acting in the Cinema, Gish employs “a variety of acting styles, creating a complex emotional tone within Griffith’s otherwise simple story. Thus, although Susie may be a ‘true heart’, her identity…is created out of disparate, sometimes contradictory, moments, all held together by a name, a narrative, and a gift for mimicry.” Naremore uses one reaction shot as an example, occurring in the blink of an eye in an early schoolroom scene. There is a spelling bee, and Susie and her boyfriend William (Robert Harron) are competing. Susie looks girlish and oblivious, her head cocked to her right, mouth pursed open in a pose of oblivious boredom (i.e. cute). Then William is asked to spell “Anonymous”, and struggles. In a shot-reverse shot from the teacher back to Susie and William, her expression changes radically. Now her head is held straight, her lips pursed thin, and eyes cocked skeptically at William. In another cut that knowing, condescending gaze is again replaced by cutesy posing. But it is a tell. Susie is constructing herself according to William’s concept of womanhood, letting the mask slip only when he’s otherwise occupied. Tom Gunning has described Gish’s “soliloquy of facial expressions” in moments of disappointment – when William turns out to be less than she had hoped, and when her sturdily built concept of femininity (plainness > perfumed; country > city) is challenged from within and without. Griffith and Bitzer were credited with popularizing the close-up, but it would have been forgotten if not for the gradations of feeling that Lillian Gish could convey with the flutter of an eyelid.

“My desire was to create a story that would reflect life as it is lived by thousands of married couples — just everyday people you meet all around us.” Though it still sounds like him, you are no longer in Griffith country, but with the cosmopolitan Ernst Lubitsch as he discusses The Marriage Circle, his hit comedy from 1924, the second film made in Hollywood. Lubitsch’s conception of “everyday people” differs just a tad from Griffith’s. Instead of rural farm life we get bankers and doctors and their garden parties. Though he operates in a different class milieu, Lubitsch was after similar things as Griffith – he wanted to slow things down and emphasize the presence of his actors. It’s instructive to compare the rather stately pace of The Marriage Circle to the manic machinations of his Berlin comedies like The Doll or The Oyster Princess. Scott Eyman wrote that, “Before, the audience could only see Lubitsch’s characters move; beginning with The Marriage Circle, we can see them think.”

In December of 1923 Ernst Lubitsch viewed Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris and detected something new. He said it was, “a great step forward…It did not, like many plays I see, insult my intelligence. So often in pictures one is not allowed to think by the director. But — ah! — in A Woman of Paris we had a picture that, as you Americans say, left something to the imagination.” The major action in The Marriage Circle occurs behind closed doors, under the sheets, and between the ears of the characters. It is a minuet of marital dysfunction following two couples: the already miserable Josef Stock (Adolphe Menjou) and his wandering eyed wife Mizzi (Marie Prevost), and the initially lovey-dovey duo of Dr. Franz Braun (Monte Blue) and his devoted spouse Charlotte (Florence Vidor). Their situations are sketched in shorthand by the objects that surround them. One of the first shots is a close-up of the hole in Josef’s sock, his big toe wriggling free. One of the next is an empty drawer filled with collars but no shirts. Nothing quite fits together in the Stock household, a mishmash of parts they bitterly try to match together. The Braun home is one of harmony, with Charlotte playing Grieg’s “I Love You, Dear” on the piano while each spouse’s wardrobe is elegantly, meticulously arranged. Then there is a chance meeting of Mizzi and Franz in a hansom cab, and both couples are enmeshed in a circle of affairs, pseudo-affairs and jealousies that unravel both marriage bonds for good.

The model for every Lubitsch comedy to come after, emotions give themselves away despite the characters’ best efforts to conceal them. There are masquerades, impostors, and impossible coincidences. The world conspires against the Braun’s love – until it doesn’t. Their affection is charged through gestures and objects – in the destiny of a straw hat, the impulsive arrangement of a seating chart, and the refusal to believe in a stolen kiss. Their love is a beautiful delusion, so the Brauns choose to believe what they must to keep it going – and they will be the happier for it.

UNINVITED GUEST: STRANGER AT MY DOOR (1956)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

“For me salvation is a clean pistol and a good horse.” – Clay Anderson (Skip Homeier) in Stranger at my Door

William Witney directed over ninety serials and feature films in his career, and he considered Stranger at my Door (1956) to be his favorite. One of the great unsung action directors of the American cinema, Witney virtually invented the job of stunt choreographer. In the mid-1930s he was inspired by watching Busby Berkeley rehearse one high leg kick until “you could have shot a bullet down the line and not hit anyone.” From then on he worked out each shot of a fight sequence with his stuntmen, making sure each movement would match the next, creating an unbroken ribbon of action. He was able to hone his craft for decades at Republic Pictures, starting on adventure serials with friend and co-director John English (Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939) is the prime cut from this period), and transitioning to Roy Rogers Westerns after serving five years in a Marine Corps combat camera crew during WWII.

Stranger at my Door was a fifteen-day Western quickie produced at the end of his 20-year run at Republic, as the studio would cease active production in 1958. Made outside of the bankable series Witney usually worked in, it is a psychologically intense feature about preacher Hollis Jarret (MacDonald Carey), who believes he can save the soul of wanted bank robber Clay Anderson (Skip Homeier), putting his wife Peg (Patricia Medina) and son Dodie (Stephen Wootton) in mortal danger in the process. The self-sacrifice inherent in proper Christian practice is pushed to uncomfortable extremes as Hollis privileges Clay’s soul over the lives of his family. The fulcrum of the story is a terrifying sequence in which Rex the Wonder Horse goes feral, trying to stamp out the eyes of the preacher’s cute kid. Witney and horse trainer Glenn H. Randall Sr. worked with Rex every morning of that fifteen day shoot until they captured the authentic animal fury they were seeking. No director exhibited bodies in peril with more visceral impact than Witney, and Stranger at my Door pairs that talent with the finest script he was ever assigned (by Barry Shipman), which ponders what happens when a man of the cloth puts God before his family. Stranger at my Door comes out on DVD and Blu-ray next week from Olive Films, which will hopefully introduce Witney’s work to a wider audience.

The film opens with a close-up of a bank window getting smashed. Clay Anderson and his gang knock over the establishment, and instead of a clean getaway, try to burn the whole town down, dragging a flaming tumbleweed behind them. During his escape Clay’s horse twists an ankle. He wanders onto Hollis Jarret’s farm, greeted by a church under construction, Jarret’s young second wife Peg slicing watermelon, and freckle-faced kid Dodie gabbing nonstop about horses. It is Americana kitsch, which soon proves to be nothing more than a veneer which Clay begins to pick away at. Pretending to be a friendly traveler, Peg agrees to house him in their barn until his horse gets well. Clay begins needling her, asking if she was the preacher’s daughter, and upon finding her true role, advances upon her with a leer. He insists that she doesn’t belong on this isolated spread, alone, rotting on the vine. You can see the flickerings of doubt on Patricia Medina’s face. She is revolted by Clay’s aggression, but the truth of his statements are as plain as day. She is too young, Hollis is too old. She is not a devout believer, while Hollis practices a severe, self-abnegating Christianity. Clay’s poison begins its work. The Anderson character was originally intended to be Jesse James, but was changed, according to Richard Maurice Hurst in Republic Studios, due to “legal complications”. Skip Homeier was a child actor (billed as “Skippy”), and he still looks like he is outgrowing his adolescence here, now a gawky 26-year-old trying to appear menacing.

It is this youthfulness that attracts Hollis. When the preacher returns home from a trip to town and sees Clay out by the barn, he immediately knows this is a lost soul from the robbery. Instead of turning him in or urging Clay to leave, he insists that he stay. Hollis has taken a passage from St. Luke’s to heart: “There shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.” Hollis accepts Clay’s appearance as a challenge from God – to lead this lost lamb back to the flock, regardless of the consequences. The longer Clay stays, the more aggressive his pursuit of Peg becomes, and his paranoia at being caught has him pulling his pistol on every random visitor. It is as if Hollis has invited Death himself into his home. Peg becomes disgusted with all of them – at Clay’s boorishness and Hollis’ self-destructiveness, pushing herself towards the edges of the frame. But the men proceed onward to the inevitable violent endpoint.

Clay deflects all of Hollis’ attempts at preaching, treating his elder with contemptuous scorn. After another entreaty to turn to Christ, Clay ripostes, “”For me salvation is a clean pistol and a good horse.” Hollis, unperturbed, sees this as instruction. He purchases an unruly wild horse from a reluctant Slim Pickens, and believes that if this horse can be broken, so can Clay. Hollis names the horse “Lucifer” (played by Rex the Wonder Horse), and the beast lives up to the appellation. Dodie sneaks into the stable in an attempt to calm Lucifer himself, but instead the animal goes wild, bucking and attacking with the single-minded bloodthirstiness of a slasher movie monster. When Dodie slides underneath a cart, Lucifer goes down on his knees and tries to attack him with his teeth. It is the most terrifying equine performance in cinema history. Witney recalls the performance in a video from the 1994 Knoxville Film Festival:

“Rex, King of the Wild Horses. This was one of the most animated, wildest horse you’ve ever seen. He had come out of a boys’ school in Flagstaff, Arizona. The trainer discovered that this horse would charge him when he cracked a whip. And I mean charge him. And you got out of the way. They were crying on the set, “Rex is loose!” I saw him chase a little actor under a car, get down on his knees and try to get to him with his teeth [laughter]. It wasn’t funny. Being a horseman myself I really appreciated this horse. There will never be another horse with the animation of this big bay, a thoroughbred Morgan horse, strangely enough.

Witney spent many of his early years at Fort Sam Houston with his uncle, which is where he learned to ride and jump horses, a passion and a skill he would carry with him the rest of his life. This led him to become friends with many of the stunt riders he worked with over the years, including the legendary Yakima Canutt. But for Witney, “the finest horseman ever to step on a horse bar none” was Joe Yrigoyen, who came up making pennies in Mascot Pictures serials, stayed on when the studio merged into Republic Pictures, and continued taking celluloid tumbles into the late 1970s, in Blazing Saddles and The Prisoner of Zenda. He was the stuntman for Clay Anderson in Stranger at my Door, given the task of calming down Rex during the freak-out sequence. In an effort to distract the horse from Dodie, Clay leaps onto Rex’s neck and wrestles him to the ground. It is a supremely athletic and dangerous feat, as Rex swings Joe around on his neck like a reverse rodeo rider.

The white-knuckle sequence proves Clay’s humanity, as he leaps in to protect Dodie. So Hollis’ plan is a success, though only after Dodie and Peg were almost stomped to death. For Peg this proves to be the end of her last frayed nerve. With the entirety of the film taking place on the Jarret farm set, there are a limited number of setups that Witney can use to generate tension. So instead of repeating another image of the stable, he flicks off the studio lights. While the rest of the family is asleep, Peg snags a shotgun and stalks towards the stable. She levels the sights onto Lucifer, ready to blast it into Kingdom Come, and her relationship with Hollis along with it. Poised there in low light, the gun raised, and the industrial fans tousling her hair, she is the closest thing the film has to an action hero. But she doesn’t have the nerve to take a life, and there is a storm brewing. The local sheriff stumbles into view, and the final shootout occurs in flames, the farm now an adjunct of hell. In the light of day the family is reconstituted, and Clay has discovered a measure of peace. But the question of whether all of the blood and thunder has been worth it is a question between Hollis and his God.

For a cheap programmer, the film was enthusiastically received, with Variety calling it an “exceptionally well-done family trade offering”, and The Hollywood Reporter praising it as containing “a theme that lifts it well out of the ordinary class and into a niche where it deserves to be considered with very special interest.” Witney always remembered it fondly, probably because of the positive critical response, not something he was used to in that period in his career. Though he always had a high reputation among serial aficionados and Western obsessives, his reputation never grew beyond these cliques. His most famous fan is Quentin Tarantino, who waxed poetic about him in a 2000 New York Times article (I made my much lower profile case at Moving Image Source a few years back). Stranger at my Door is the first of Witney’s films to be released on Blu-ray, and it might be the last. But even if he never garners a retrospective or a door-stopping biography, his influence reverberates whenever a horse bucks a rider or a punch is thrown on screen.

CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP: RUN ALL NIGHT (2015)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

March 17, 2015

Run All Night is a movie about tired men forced into motion. Ed Harris and Liam Neeson are happiest when sitting down, but their violent past conspires against their leisure, pitting them against each other in a fleet, melancholy NYC thriller. In theaters now, it is the third collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Neeson (following Unknown (2011) and Non-Stop (2014)), and they have proven to be ideal, adaptive collaborators. Unknown was adventurous in its Berlin location-shooting and experiments in POV. DP Flavio Labiano shot with a 35mm and Super 16mm camera locked side-by-side, a prism redirecting the same image to both cameras. They underexposed and force-processed the 16mm, creating a “broken but beautiful, dreamy kind of image” that they could use for Neeson’s amnesiac perspective. On Non-Stop they traded location challenges for the constraints of shooting on a single set — the interior of a plane making an international flight. Since it was an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, Labiano used tilt-shift lenses that would localize focus on individuals that Neeson was investigating. The story of Run All Night is less tied to Neeson’s perspective, so it is Collet-Serra’s most expansive, open-air production yet. With DP Martin Ruhe, Collet-Serra isolates Neeson and Joel Kinnaman, playing his son, in high angle establishing shots and CGI transitions that sweep through most of the five boroughs. Run All Night is a city movie, but it’s more about the old NYC that Harris and Neeson carry in their heads than the current metropolis, passing them by.

In Brad Ingelsby’s script Neeson plays Jimmy Conlon, a former hitman for the Westie gang once led by Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris). Jimmy tries to drown out his past with booze, and has long since become estranged from his ex-boxer/limo driver son Mike (Joel Kinnaman). Jimmy has become a punchline for the remnants of Shawn’s gang, who now hang out at a decrepit Irish Pub called The Abbey, remembering better days. Mike is reduced to playing a soused Santa at Maguire’s Christmas party to keep himself in cigarettes and porn money. But Shawn’s deadbeat son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) gets enmeshed with a track-suited group of Albanian heroin pushers, leading to a gruesome confrontation that Mike witnesses. Soon Mike is the target of Shawn’s whole operation, and the only person who can keep him alive is Jimmy. The cops, the Maguire gang, and an independent killer (Common) are all after Conlon blood. Mike has to bury his resentments against his deadbeat dad long enough to help him survive.

As in the underseen A Walk Among the Tombstones, Neeson has perfected a weary urbanite stroll, his shoulders a little rounded as if expecting shit to be dumped on him. Again an alcoholic (as in Walk and Non-Stop), society has pushed him farther to the edges of society. He lives in an unheated apartment next to an elevated train, warming himself by the glow of the Rangers-Devils game on the TV, the progress of which marks off the time of the movie. Ed Harris, who was acting in eight Broadway shows a week in between shooting, looks even more exhausted and cadaverous, his character rendered moot in modern NYC. Early on he complains that he used to lend money for people to buy a butcher shop, and now that shop is an Applebee’s. There is no neighborhood left, shrunken down to his bar, The Abbey, and his few aging, paunchy friends (including friendly character actor face Bruce McGill). Shawn feels increasingly irrelevant, and spends most of the film reminiscing about what used to be. When circumstances turn him against Jimmy in a battle neither will likely survive, it feels like the two old friends are doing each other a favor. The Neeson-Harris tete-a-tetes are thrilling sequences of underplaying, as decades of friendship are eviscerated in a few words over cocktails.

For a director of disreputable genre pieces, Collet-Serra has attracted an extraordinary run of actors since he was forced to direct Paris Hilton in the still pretty good House of Wax (2005) remake. Aside from Neeson, Orphan featured Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga, Unknown had Bruno Ganz and Frank Langella, Non-Stop cast Julianne Moore and, in a small pre-Oscar part, Lupita Nyong’o. For despite all of the flash of his action filmmaking, his features are very patient, actorly films. They all build slowly, paying attention to the slightest of character details regardless of the outrageousness of the scenario. Orphan is extraordinary in this regard – it is as much a story of a bourgeois marital breakdown as it is a tiny person slasher movie. Sarsgaard and Farmiga give a master class in passive-aggressive sniping and upper middle class liberal self-absorption.

While Run All Night is the most character-driven of Collet-Serra’s films since Orphan, it still delivers a series of exhilarating action sequences. There is a Mike-Danny footrace through back alleys that hurtles along as the camera is pulled back on a cable. Then there’s a white-knuckle car chase through the streets of Brooklyn that manages to maintain match cuts as a cop car hurtles into a deli facade. And the centerpiece is a multi-part mini-movie in a housing project. It begins as a search for Mike’s boxing pupil “Legs” (Aubrey Joseph), a tightly edited montage of door-pounding and rejection. Then it transitions into an escape, as the police converge on the site, the father and son looking through a way out as they maneuver through the bank of stairwells. The final stage is a brutal fight between the hired assassin and Jimmy, held in a burning apartment. Flaming table legs are the weapon of choice as they two men thwomp each other into submission.

Early on Dirk Westervelt’s editing style feels disruptive and disorienting. His cuts occur a few beats before you expect them to, creating a jagged rhythm. It’s unusual, but as the feature progressed I stopped noticing these awkward beats. I’d have to watch it again to determine whether the editing scheme changes, or if I simply got used to the offbeat cutting. In any case, it ceased to be an issue as the story hurtled along and I was subsumed in this amalgamated NYC. The Abbey, in which the penultimate shootout begins, is cobbled together from exteriors taken from Jamaica Avenue and Woodside, Queens, while the interior was shot in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It is a composite city, situated so a subway is always rumbling overhead, moving forward to connect the various nodes of the story.

These nodes converge into at least one ending too many, but Run All Night provides everything it’s title implies: speed, exhaustion and darkness. Jaume Collet-Serra continues to prove himself as a resourceful genre problem-solver, adapting his technique to the demands of the story. While I would be satisfied with an endless string of Collet-Serra/Neeson collaborations, it would be fascinating to see what this elusive, chameleonic director can do with other subjects. He recently told Entertainment Weekly that “I would like to do a movie with every genre. To me, that would be the complete career—do a comedy, musical. Why not?” Make it happen, Hollywood.

BORDER INCIDENTS: RIDE THE PINK HORSE (1947) AND THE HANGED MAN (1964)

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

March 10, 2015

“He hadn’t wanted to come here. He’d wanted it less and less as the bus traveled further across the wasteland; miles of nothing, just land, empty land. Land that didn’t get anywhere except into more land, and always against the sky the unmoving barrier of mountains. It was like moving into a trap, a trap you couldn’t get out of. Because no matter how you tried, no matter how far you traveled, you’d always be stopped by the rigid mountains. He didn’t like it at all when they moved into this town, his destination. Because this was the center of the trap; it was a long way back to civilization in any direction. The thing to do was get out quick.” – Ride the Pink Horse, by Dorothy B. Hughes

Ride the Pink Horse is a grim procedural of hate. Published in 1946, it was Dorothy B. Hughes’ ninth novel, and second to be adapted into a film, following The Fallen Sparrow (1943). A cynical gunman named Sailor travels to a remote New Mexico town during their yearly “Fiesta”, a Southwestern Mardi Gras. He is tracking down his former mentor “The Sen”, a corrupt ex-Senator, for shakedown money. Sailor is a single-minded racist brute, circling the small town in ritualistic repetitions, until the map of the main square is in ingrained in your head (one of the early Dell paperback editions included a map on the back anyway). Sailor is an outsider, and no matter how often he treads the city’s streets, it continues to constrict slowly around him. Robert Montgomery’s 1947 movie adaptation for Universal-International alters many of the plot details, but captures the doomed fatalism of Hughes’ work. Typecast as a light romantic comedy lead, Montgomery took on greater risks as a director, starting with the POV experiments of Lady in the Lake (1947) and continuing through the elaborate crane shots orchestrated by DP Russell Metty in Ride the Pink Horse. It has been a certified cult film ever since Jean Cocteau programmed it at the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz in 1949, but it has been hard to see until next week, March 17th, when the Criterion Collection releases it on DVD and Blu-ray.

But this was not the only adaptation of Ride the Pink Horse. In 1964 Don Siegel directed the telefilm The Hanged Man for NBC, after his adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killers was pulled from broadcast, deemed too “spicy, expensive and violent for TV screens.” This time he got his project on the air — the second made-for-TV movie ever shown. The setting is relocated to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, emphasizing the choked streets and vibrant colors that Robert Culp and Edmond O’Brien wander through with clenched determination.

The 1947 Ride the Pink Horse would not have been made without the efforts of producer Joan Harrison. Harrison was an assistant and writer for Alfred Hitchcock from 1933 – 1942, but had been interested in the movie business long before. She earned degrees in philosophy, politics and economics at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, but wrote film reviews for the student newspaper. After parting ways with Hitchcock she became a producer for Robert Siodmak thrillers at Universal, collaborating with the talented German on Phantom Lady (1944) and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945). There was a detour to RKO to make the George Raft noir Nocturne (1946, I wrote about it here), she returned to Universal for Ride the Pink Horse. The crew assembled by Harrison and Montgomery for the feature was an incredible array of talent. The script was written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, already legends for Scarface and His Girl Friday. Hecht had just worked with Hitchcock on Spellbound and Notorious, so it’s very possible he was introduced to Harrison through Hitchcock.

Hecht and Lederer’s script compacts Hughes’ narrative, reducing the endless circling of the novel to a manageable few laps around town. They change Sailor’s name to “Lucky Gagin”, and give him a history as a WWII veteran. In the novel Sailor was a street kid raised by crooks. Montgomery was in the naval service during the war, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. For his first film back he gave a steely, dignified, and deeply moving performance in They Were Expendable, for which he had to direct a few scenes while John Ford broke his leg. The war still loomed large in his life and in the nation, so that becomes Gagin’s backstory – a disillusioned soldier disgusted by the decadence of the criminal/capitalist machine, while his friends-in-arms go down abroad and at home. Gagin is going after mob boss Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), who was involved in the death of a friend. Hugo is a smiling monster with a hearing aid and huge chompers and the voice of a radio announcer. He’s a smooth operator – a new breed of criminal. Gagin is done with all of it, so has decided to go in business for himself — to cut ties with humanity. Montgomery gives a very controlled, mannered performance to convey this. As in the novel, Gagin keeps his right hand implanted in his breast pocket, tightly gripping his gun. This inner coil also shows up in Montgomery’s jaw, jutted out as if he’s continually grinding his teeth. Everything in an attempt to get smaller, more invisible.

Gagin is introduced in a three-minute unbroken crane shot in which the world is displayed as nothing more than a tool for him to manipulate. It begins with him stepping off a bus into the station in San Pablo, in which he secures his gun, hides a canceled check, and uses a stick of gum as an adhesive for a secret key. He is a mechanical man. He becomes part of the machinery later on. While knocked unconscious, his newfound friends Pila (Wanda Hendrix) and Pancho (Thomas Gomez, nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) hide him from Hugo’s thugs on the “Tio Vio” (an 1882 carousel imported from Taos). Gagin is covered by a blanket and spun around like an extension of the contraption’s pink horse. As it goes round and round, Hugo’s men start brutally beating Pancho at the controls. Metty mounts the camera on the carousel, setting at towards the children onboard, who keep staring back at the beating as it swings by. Then there is a cut to the hired muscle standing over Pancho, the shadow of the carousel flickering over theirs. Gagin has reduced himself all the way down, and his friends are paying the price.

In this town Gagin is the minority, his white face a giveaway that he doesn’t belong. One of the main motifs in the book is how the Fiesta brings together victims and the conquered in an uneasy truce, though the economic inequality is stark: the Whites frequent the upscale hotel and bar La Fonda, while the Spanish get drunk inside an adobe dive called the Tres Violetas and the Native Americans sit outside selling trinkets. Gagin is one of the few who can traverse all of these spaces. He befriends the operator of the “Tio Vivo” carousel Pancho , as well as a young Native girl who latches on to him, Pila. It is only around them that Gagin unclenches, his posture sags, and looks like a normal human being. They are outside his sphere of betrayal.

Pancho and Pila are both reductive racial “types” give life with muti layered performances. Pancho is the gregarious Mexican drunkard gifted with Gomez’s overflowingly warm, and, to quote Michael Almereyda’s booklet essay, “Falstaffian” performance. His character has no need for material things, just a tarp over his head and a bottle of tequila. To Gagin this looks like freedom. Pila is the “unknowable” and “exotic” Native American who stares at Gagin (and Sailor) with off-putting intensity. But Wanda Hendrix plays Pila as not just a mystic, but also a young, preternaturally self-assured girl. She has the penetrating eyes of Renee Falconetti and the dogged curiosity of Nancy Drew. For the last third of the feature Gagin is near unconscious, and Pila has to drag him from bar to bar evading Hugo’s goons. But the final revelation is that she is still a child. As Gagin disappears over the horizon, the camera returns to Pila, reveling in the glory of being the center of attention. She is retelling the story of Ride the Pink Horse to a circle of her former bullies. It is her story now.

Pila plays a much smaller part in Don Siegel’s 1964 telefilm, a fascinating companion piece to Hughes’ book and Montgomery’s feature. It hews closer to the Montgomery/Hecht/Lederer version, with nods to Hugo’s hearing aid and the bravura bus station long take. An addled ticket taker has a hearing aid attached to his glasses so he “can’t hear without my glasses”. Once the Sailor character, here named “Harry Pace” (Robert Culp) gets to New Orleans to enact his revenge, he hides his canceled check inside of a Christian Science Reading room. Without the resources of even Montgomery’s modest production, Siegel still manages some effective shots, saved almost entirely for the final sequence at the Mardi Gras parade. He gets some kinetic handheld work pushing through the crowds as Pace tries to outrun his fate. While the Hughes novel and 1947 film are both very interiorized, the imagery filtered through Sailor/Gagin’s warped psyche, here there is no time for more elaborate visual planning. Instead it’s objective, straightforward pulp propulsion. Pila and Pancho pick him up hitchhiking and offer Pace a helping hand, but they aren’t the transformational forces as they are in the previous versions. Instead, it’s just another bit of revenge clumsily executed. For as focused as Sailor/Gagin/Pace is, he’s a bit of a dolt. And “the trap you couldn’t get out of” is the one inside his head.