The Blue Vial

Day Is Done

2012-02-10T00:55:00.000-05:00

The images above are from Frank Borzage's lovely contribution (one of three he would make) to the "Screen Directors Playhouse" series, entitled Day Is Done (1955). As so often in Borzage, we are presented with a simple love story, played out over a hazy, perilous social backdrop. The backdrop in this case being the Korean War, and the love story being, atypically, not of the romantic male-female variety with which Borzage is so commonly associated, but rather the love of music that is shared by and binds together two male soldiers: a distant, dispirited sergeant (Rory Calhoun) and a green, eager-eyed private (Bobby Driscoll). The pair, each a musician before entering the war, find a bugle on the body of a slain Korean soldier while out on reconnaissance patrol one night, and as they each take turns with the instrument, eyes become glazed over, piercing time and flooding them with memories from what might as well have been a previous life, memories that literally melt onto the screen as the sergeant fondly recalls the crisp pride with which the job of the bugler was once carried out, and it becomes clear that the music produced from the bugle is providing for these men an intimate refuge no less than that of the apartment in Seventh Heaven or the hovel in Man's Castle.

It would make sense to assume that the restrictions of the half hour television format would do no favors to a director who by this point was considered (barring Moonrise) long past his prime, but this is very much a deeply felt piece of Borzage, with his spare, compressed mise-en-scene, his commitment to foregrounding human drama at the expense of supplemental space translating pretty much untouched, as does, more surprisingly given the length, the air of unhurried leisure with which moments and events are normally allowed to play out in his worlds. Though in this world, alas, the reality of the situation does not ultimately give itself over to the transcendent; here a death is a death is a death, with grief finding expression only through a weary, impromptu performance of "Taps", both an act of solemn farewell and the solidification of another memory.

Niagara

2012-02-08T04:50:00.000-05:00

There's something poignant about a movie that sees fit to acknowledge the death of its own aesthetic. Such is the case with Niagara, the frothy 1953 Technicolor noir not so much directed as assembled by Henry Hathaway. Assembled, literally, around an icon in the form of Marilyn-just-as-she-was-becoming-Marilyn; assembled in the sense that the chief stylistic preoccupations on display -- hot, lurid colors in movement and ever-furtive window slat shadows; a simultaneous rebuke and embrace of genre -- are barely allowed to exist without her presence. She is very much the engine for these elements, the sole expressive nexus that swirls them together, giving the film so much of its visual personality. And even if Marilyn wasn't much of an actress at this point, she still slinks around the dusky crevices of this world in her bright pinks and yellows (even shifting into pure shadow at times) with every bit the force and presence of the natural wonder that provides the backdrop, while the likes of the great Joseph Cotton and Jean Peters struggle to do a damn thing with their lots, and it's very difficult to say that the movie does not belong completely to her.

And so after the sheer ludicrousness of the script has guided Monroe's character to the top of a bell tower*, and after she's been murdered by her husband in said location, we are given the relatively loaded compositions shown at the top of this post: the aesthetic spirit of our film, now lifeless, bathed in the features that constantly surrounded her, except now given a decidedly mournful appearance. Giant slat shadows within a splayed container of light that may as well be an exaggerated coffin. An outfit one might wear to a funeral. Color in the form of a bright yellow kerchief, which Monroe had absurdly held onto and flailed throughout her final doomed chase. The kind of kerchief that one could clutch in their hand as they wave goodbye to a loved one. And that's what this moment is, a movie waving goodbye to itself. Sure, there's another act left to go, with Cotton and Peters perilously trapped aboard a gasless boat drifting towards the edge of the raging falls, but the movie's style as it had been established --- having already been given a proper farewell -- all but evaporates, giving way to dingy brownish earth tones and misty, bland blues and a general blah atmosphere of predetermined redemption. This stretch may have more "action" and "closure" than anything that preceded it, but it feels at best like a forced and prolonged coda, and at worst like something stripped from some other, far less interesting film. We have already been given the real climax, and it's easy to sense that the movie agrees.

*The matter of the bell tower, along with a handful of other shared cues, has led some to ponder the possibilities of Hitchcock drawing upon Niagara for inspiration while conceiving Vertigo. I don't see much there personally, but who knows. It is more than a tad interesting to think of Hitch's masterpiece and its boundless obsession as being, in some subconscious measure, a reaction to Niagara and the frank treatment given to the murder of its blonde femme fatale, its sober formal acknowledgement of the loss and of what it means.

(Updated) TAKE TWO: Tarkovsky Blu-ray Giveaway

2012-01-12T12:01:00.000-05:00

The winner of the drawing was Brian B. from Massachusetts. Congrats, Brian! I've sent you an email to work out the shipping arrangements.

Let's try this again, and don't worry, no plethora of screencaps to plow through this time. I have one brand new, factory sealed copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on Blu-ray, released by Kino International, to give away to someone. If you would like a chance to win it, ALL YOU NEED TO DO is send me an email at tosh500@gmail.com. The subject line of your email should say TARKOVSKY and the email itself should contain your first and last name, as well as your state of residence. Only one entry per person please. I will accept entry emails for 48 hours. The cutoff will be 12:00 noon EST, Saturday, January 14. At that point I will have a random drawing to decide the winner, and will be in prompt contact with that person to arrange shipping details. I will update this post with the winner's name at that time. Once again, please enter only if you reside within the continental U.S., otherwise I will not be able to ship you the disc. Good luck!

The Sacrifice Blu-ray Giveaway / Screencap Contest (UPDATED)

2012-01-05T13:45:00.000-05:00

(Updated 1/10/12: I've gone ahead and listed the actual movie title that the screencaps are from below. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to give away the blu-ray, because I didn't receive a single entry! I guess either twenty caps was a bit too unwieldy of a number, or maybe they weren't quite as easy as I thought many of them were. Probably both? Either way, I'll try and think of a different, better way to give the movie away.)

I was recently fortunate enough to come into possession of an extra copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on Blu-ray, released by Kino International. It's one of my very favorite movies, and Kino has done an excellent job with this release, and I would like to give it away on this blog to someone. It is brand new and factory sealed. Below, I have posted twenty anonymous screencaps from twenty different movies. To win, all you need to do is be the person who correctly identifies the most screencaps by the title of the movie. A few things:

1) Right now, I can unfortunately only afford to ship the disc to someone living in the continental U.S. So please only participate if this applies to you.

2) All entries should be sent to my email address: tosh500@gmail.com. Please do not post your picks in the comments section of this post. The subject line of your email should say CONTEST, and along with your twenty guesses in order (only the movie title is necessary), it should include your full name, as well as your state. Please do not send me your address. I will be in contact with the winner after they've been determined to work out shipping arrangements. Only one entry per person please!

3) The deadline to submit your picks by is 11:59 pm EST on Sunday, January 8th. I will post the winner, along with the correct answers to all 20 movies, sometime on Monday.

4) Be sure to include the tiebreaker with your picks. The tiebreaker is listed below the twentieth screenshot. If there are two or more who are tied for the highest number of correct guesses, this will be used to determine the winner.

Here are the twenty screencaps:

Screencap #1
(Strangers on a Train)

Screencap #2
(Dogville)

Screencap #3
(L'enfant)

Screencap #4
(Rebel Without a Cause)

Screencap #5
(Man with a Movie Camera)

Screencap #6
(Helas pour moi)

Screencap #7
(The Ox-Bow Incident)

Screencap #8
(The Yards)

Screencap #9
(Ivan's Childhood)

Screencap #10
(Intolerance)

Screencap #11
(Park Row)

Screencap #12
(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

Screencap #13
(Minnie & Moskowitz)

Screencap #14
(Window Water Baby Moving)

Screencap #15
(Moonrise)

Screencap #16
(A.I. Artificial Intelligence)

Screencap #17
(Vengeance is Mine)

Screencap #18
(Traffic)

Screencap #19
(Ghost in the Shell)

Screencap #20
(Les bones femmes)

Tiebreaker question: I have used a random number generator to select a number between 1 and 1986 (the year Tarkovsky died). Guess this number. In the event that two or more people tie for the most correctly guessed screencaps, then the person who comes closest to guessing the random number will win.

If you have any additional questions or comments about the contest, or anything, you can feel free to either leave them in the comments, or send me an email. Good luck!

My End of the Year Summary

2011-12-28T09:45:00.000-05:00

Last December I posted a Top 25 of 2010 list to round out the year and discuss my favorite new movies. I'm going to be doing something a little different this time around, for a couple of reasons: 1) I enjoyed in 2011 easily the most productive year of movie watching I've ever had (right around 500 total viewings) and 2) despite that quantity, only a small percentage represent new releases. Not to say that I saw no new movies at all, just not quite as many as I normally do (nevertheless I have tacked on my top 10 of the year at the bottom of the post). On the whole, it was for me a year of cinema defined more by digging into the past than swimming with the present, and so it would only make sense to create a wrap-up post focusing more on that experience.

I have organized the below as follows: there is the Movie of the Year, which was my single favorite older film discovery from 2011, followed by a couple of runners-up for that spot. Then there are two categories, The Masterpieces and The Gems, which are also comprised solely of titles I viewed for the first time in 2011. The Masterpieces (and I know some people, myself occasionally included, have a problem with how easily that label can be bandied about, but it gets the point across here) are the movies that were my highlights from the year, the ones that quite simply struck me the hardest, that occupied my thoughts and/or emotions the most, the movies I look forward to living with from here on out. The Gems are the movies that, while not quite "masterpiece" level, made a significant impression on me in one positive way or another, and I feel like giving them a shout out. Some of the Gems could be said to have minimal or dismal reputations, and many of them I came to with not much in the way of expectation, but all of them blindsided me by how much I liked them. I have also imposed on myself a rule of selecting only one film per director between all categories, and in a year where a large portion of my time was spent really sinking my teeth into the vast filmographies of more than a few directors, this can be seen as limiting in a sense, but it's the tack I've decided to take, if only to give this post a measure of economy. So just keep in mind that below when you run across a movie from the likes of, say, Ford, Walsh, Chabrol, Preminger, to name a few, the listed movie is the one I've chosen to put down, but it is also acting in a sense as a stand-in for a good handful of other great movies. Below the Masterpieces and Gems, I also have a few other random categories, where I do things like highlight a few of my favorite acting performances from all my first time viewings, list a few distinguished titles that didn't do as much for me as I'd hoped, and list a handful of my favorite pieces of film writing I discovered during the year.

When I originally set out to draft this post, I did so with the intention of writing a little something about each movie I selected, but as I went through my viewing logs and began assembling everything, it quickly became apparent that such an endeavor would be a much more exhaustive one than I had allotted time for, so I have to be content with simply listing everything sans comment. And in any case I'm not even sure that I could do justice to some of my experiences with these movies at this point in time. Maybe eventually. I guess that's what the blog here is for. Here it is:


Movie of the Year: The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, 1953)


First runner-up: Through the Forest (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 2005)


Second runner-up (tie): Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)

The Hired Hand (Peter Fonda, 1975)

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The Masterpieces (37 total titles; in alphabetical order)

2/Duo (Nobuhiro Suwa, 1997); 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer, 1987); Afraid to Talk (Edward L. Cahn, 1932); Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961); Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998); Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, 1958); Au bord du lac (Patrick Bokanowski, 1994); Betty (Claude Chabrol, 1992); The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930); Claire Dolan (Lodge Kerrigan, 1998); Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983); The Dangerous Thread of Things (Eros) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 2004); Deep In the Woods (Lionel Deplanque, 2000); Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009); Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944); Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971); Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor, 2009); Gertrud (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1964); He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjostrom, 1924); Hell's Hinges (William S, Hart, 1916); The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006); I Was Born, But...(Yasujiro Ozu, 1932); India: Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini, 1959); The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924); Lazybones (Frank Borzage, 1925); Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952); The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942); Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947); The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953); Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009); New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998); Not Reconciled (Straub-Huillet, 1965); Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes, 1991); The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (Budd Boetticher, 1960); The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949); These Are the Damned (Joseph Losey, 1963); Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

The Gems (24 total titles; in alphabetical order)

The 51 File (Michel Deville, 1978); The Beast of the City (Charles Brabin, 1932); Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971); Downstairs (Monta Bell, 1932); Ghosts (Christian Petzold, 2005); Gold of the Seven Saints (Gordon Douglas, 1961); Hotel (Jessica Hausner, 2004); Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987); I Can See You (Graham Reznick, 2008); Just Before Dawn (Jeff Lieberman, 1981); The Letter (Jean de Limur, 1929); Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971); Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955); Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947); Noon Wine (Sam Peckinpah, 1966); Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997); Payday (Daryl Duke, 1973); Quiet Please: Murder (John Larkin, 1942); Scream of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961); Sharky's Machine (Burt Reynolds, 1981); Some Call It Loving (James B. Harris, 1973);

Symptoms (Jose Ramon Larraz, 1974); Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932); Whistle and I'll Come to You (Jonathan Miller, 1968)

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Performance of the Year (female) - Jeanne Eagles in The Letter (1929)

runners-up: Marie Trintignant in Betty (1992), Angela Pleasence in Symptoms (1974), Katrin Cartlidge in Claire Dolan (1998), Makiko Watanabe in 2/Duo (1997)

Performance of the Year (male) - Lon Chaney in He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
runners-up: Jerry Lewis in Cracking Up (1983), Jimmy Stewart in The Naked Spur (1953), Stacy Keach in Fat City (1972), Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh (1924)

Performance of the Year (animal) - Raimu the monkey in India: Matri Bhumi (1959)

Director I spent the most time with in 2011 - John Ford (48 movies, 61 viewings)

Movies with lofty reputations that I didn't connect with - The Butcher (Claude Chabrol), Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr), The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock), Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku), Accident (Joseph Losey)

Movie I previously disliked that I came to love this year - Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

Movie I previously loved that lost a little something for me this year - Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993)

Original score I could not stop listening to - The Hired Hand (Bruce Langhorne)

Favorite film writing/criticism discoveries of the year, both new and old:
- The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Craig Keller on Cindy Sherman's Office Killer
- Depression, Melancholia, and Me: Lars von Trier's Politics of Displeasure by Trevor Link
- Phil Coldiron on Sleepwalk and House of Tolerance
- Crisis, Creation, Compulsion - Dave Kehr on Raoul Walsh
- The Essential - Jacques Rivette on Preminger's The Moon Is Blue
- A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing - transcript of a Pedro Costa lecture
- The Searchers - Dismantled by Ross Gibson
- The Conversations: Terrence Malick pt. 1 and pt. 2 by Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy
- Think But This... David Phelps on Rivette's 36 vues du Pic-St Loup (from Girish Shambu and Adrian Martin's LOLA issue 1 )
- Zach Campbell's Counter Canon: A Viewing List
- Film Socialisme Annotated translated by David Phelps
- The Magnificent Ambersons: What's Past is Prologue by Jim Emerson
- Steven Shaviro on Neveldine/Taylor's Gamer
- "The Tree of Life": Great Events and Ordinary People by Adrian Martin
- The Dynamics of the Image, or Civeyrac Matters by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- Poor, Old, Hollywood - Andy Rector on Losey's The Lawless
- Vertigo Variations by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo - pt. 1 / pt.2 / pt. 3
- Perspective Reperceived: Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night by Ken Kelman (not online; found in The Essential Cinema: Essays on the films in the collection of Anthology Film Archives, Volume One)
- Experiment Perilous by Chris Fujiwara (not online; chapter in the book Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall)
- The Sun Shines Bright by Tag Gallagher (chapter in the book John Ford: The Man and His Films, which can be downloaded here)

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I'm not going to bother listing all of the 2011 releases I still need to catch up with; suffice it to say that there are a boatload, and hopefully it will be sooner rather than later before I get the opportunity to see them all. Out of everything in front of me, I'm most looking forward to A Dangerous Method, Margaret, House of Tolerance and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As it stands now, here is, in roughly preferential order, my ten favorites:

Top 10 of the Year

1) Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
2) The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)
3) You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn)
4) Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
5) Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
6) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
7) Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman)
8) Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
9) El Sicario: Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi)
10) The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)

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I'd love to hear about any of your favorite film discoveries from the year, newer and/or older. Please feel free to post them in the comments. Happy New Year!

Reindeer Games

2011-12-16T02:00:00.000-05:00

I'll say it: I'm a pretty big fan of Frankenheimer's Reindeer Games, and I'd even go so far as to call it one of my favorite Christmas movies. It's not a great movie, not at all, but it's not trying to be, and in fact it's one of those odd cases where the glaring weaknesses and the stuff that really works seem inextricably bound, in the sense that the creative and logical potholes of Ehren Kruger's ludicrous script seem to at times quite literally be feeding the intense charisma and attention to expressive tone and form that Frankenheimer brings to the table throughout. He directs the hell out of the thing, giving the quieter moments a certain warm modesty that throws the explosions of over-the-top violence into stark contrast, creating a certain animated rhythm of oscillation that one wants to call bold if only for the sustained energy of its fitfulness (the longer, vastly superior director's cut is the one to see in this and every respect).

There's also the spirit of Tourneur lurking about at times, not just in the odd angles, and the similar spatial and compositional ideas at work (in particular a certain way of stacking faces and bodies in the frame that brings out the emotional dynamics of a given moment through a layering of postures and expressions) but also in the keen sensitivity to weather. Nightfall seems to be an obvious touchstone, and the plot of Frankenheimer's film even suggests an inverse of Tourneur's excellent snow blasted noir: Nightfall deals with a man who unwillingly falls into a web of treachery revolving around a large amount of stolen money, in which he is forced on the lam and into a new identity in order to extricate himself, while Reindeer Games follows a man who voluntarily claims a new identity, and because of it finds himself entangled in a scheme revolving around a large amount of stolen money in which he is compelled to act out a perpetuating cycle of destructive behavior as he sinks deeper and deeper into the muck.

Happy Holidays!

The Great Performances: Pascale Ogier in Eric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris (1984)

2011-12-13T01:35:00.000-05:00

The Little Things

2011-12-05T17:05:00.000-05:00

It's funny how sometimes a little moment will sneak itself into a movie and completely change the way we experience it. The film in question: Wellman's Across the Wide Missouri (1951), a visually stunning frontier tale shot almost entirely in the Rocky Mountains. The spectacle of the backdrop outsizes and upstages the drama at pretty much every turn, but this is undoubtedly more to do with the studio's butchery - they not only chopped an hour off Wellman's original cut, but retrofitted a voice-over narration that turns everything into a flashback - than it does with any paltriness of directorial vision. As is, at a mere 78 minutes, it's an interesting enough movie, and aside from the gorgeous photography, there is an unusual amount of careful attention paid to depicting the richness of Indian culture, and no less than three languages spoken at regularity throughout. There's also a bit of a playful streak present (uncharacteristic for later Wellman in my experience) punctuated by moments of stark cruelty: it contains without a doubt one of the most cold-blooded, out-of-left-field murders of a major character I've ever seen.

Anyway, the alluded to moment occurs around two-thirds of the way through the running time, during a scene between the fur-trapper played by Clark Gable and his wife (María Elena Marqués), a Blackfoot Indian he originally married to gain access to bountiful beaver land, but has since fallen in love with. He is telling her about the land he comes from (Kentucky), and teaching her how to say "bluegrass", and at the end of the scene he bends over the table she's sitting at to deliver a kiss. Wellman cuts to a shot from behind this kiss, placing the elbow of Gable (who was 50 when Across the Wide Missouri was shot) near the center of the frame as it bears the brunt of his body weight. As Gable is coming up from the kiss, his arm slightly but very noticeably begins to tremble under the strain. It's tough to tell whether or not Wellman intended to have a visual signifier of the aging process be the star of this scene, nonetheless the effect of the moment is undeniable: Gable's character, who up until this moment had been portrayed as nothing short of the essence of bluster and opportunism on two feet, becomes a bit rickety, a bit vulnerable, much more human. A few scenes later, after his wife tells him of her pregnancy, we can't help now but detect more than a hint of poignant desperation as he races around his little community feverishly delivering the news. And because he has from this moment become, in a way, a much different character, so too does the movie becomes a different movie, one not so much about a poacher who discovers tolerance and love, but about a man who can sense his own mortality, and who slowly begins giving into the quiet, vital impulse of ensuring that his house is in order for everything that will remain and come after him. It gives moments like the one below, with Gable staring at his wife and newborn through the doorway, a very sad, almost Fordian resonance - moments concerning everything but the moments themselves:

Capsule Reviews 12/2/11

2011-12-02T04:50:00.012-05:00

Up the River (John Ford, 1930) - This early sound Fox comedy finds its strengths in leisurely pacing and breezy tone, and features entertaining early performances from both Tracy and Bogart (in their first and second film roles, respectively) as a pair of cons from very different backgrounds who befriend one another in the hoosegow and loosely glide around a plot involving love, scams and baseball. As was often the case with Ford comedies of the era, it relies heavily on vignette technique and is generally less concerned with matters of landscape and atmosphere, though dabs of expressionism seep through occasionally, such as in the excellent opening prison break sequence. The result is pleasingly winsome, loony comedy, far from Ford's forte but more than adequately rendered here, interspersed with the usual reflective Fordian touches, including a melancholic neighborhood hay ride (the best scene in the film), as well as heavy and affecting use of the parade-style music the director would return to so often throughout his career.

The Lost Patrol (John Ford, 1934) - A meager British patrol traipse aimlessly about the Mesopotamian desert during World War I after their commander is killed by an Arab sniper. The troop eventually reaches shelter in the form of a desolate oasis, setting into motion their slow, methodical eradication by the faceless death that surrounds them from seemingly every direction. Ford's vision for the material is lean, dreadful and hallucinatory; he clearly conceives of this increasingly unhinged community as a portrait of terror, and in everything from the rhythmic pattern of deaths to the arc of McGlaglen's "final girl"-esque character, the film can pretty accurately be labeled a proto-slasher, and it's easily the closest thing to a true horror film Ford ever made (the casting of Bela Lugosi in a particularly maniacal role is not happenstance). But the actual Fordian moments are few and far between, and writer Dudley Nichols' deathly banal dialogue and schematic scenarios hold it back from every really taking off. To top it all, Ford had wanted the movie completely musicless, but at the eleventh hour Max Steiner was commissioned by the studio to compose one of his truly abysmal Mickey Mousing scores; it completely saps the images and sequences of their emotional tension, and for that it was awarded the Oscar.

Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) - In this micro-budgeted cult horror fave (the sole feature from industrial filmmaker Herk Havey) a young church organist survives a fatal drag race crash and treks off to Salt Lake City for a new job, hounded by terrible visions at every step. What is lacking in direction and veneer is more than made up for with a genuine sense of desolation, and a particularly firm grasp of one simple but oft-overlooked Horror truth: that creepy architecture and atmosphere are almost entirely dependent on the human presence. Only in the compressed nightmare logic of its final sequences does the movie give form to its most scattershot impulses and begin to resemble something of an authentic vision, but as an overall mood piece its effectiveness and eeriness if difficult to deny. The striking on-location photography (in and around Salt Lake City, in particular the creepy Saltair Pavillion) and unconventional casting of non-professional locals go a long way towards instilling the movie with its distinct, lasting character, and its influence over a certain kind of low-budget horror filmmaking - beginning with and epitomized by Romero's Night of the Living Dead - can still be felt strongly today.

The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980) - The opening scene is in effect a litmus test of one's appreciation for what's to come: over Denny Brooks' bittersweet ballad 'San Antone', images of moons and spaceships and fog-shrouded gothic castles and grieving men fill the screen, a strangely stirring cornucopia of discordant emotions and tones that acts as a microcosm for the utterly unclassifiable two hours to come. Here Blatty adapts his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the tale of a madman on a personal pilgrimage in an experimental military psychiatric residence, and it seems that for many critics the film stands as an exercise in the dangers of granting a writer privilege over the cinematic vision of his own material. However it is precisely Blatty's rough-hewn, personal urgency behind the camera that gives the movie so much of its mysterious power; one gets the sense that a more objective, surer hand would have resulted in a far less interesting result. A cast of formidable character actors and an award-winning screenplay have done nothing to salvage Configuration from obscurity over the years, and Blatty would go on to direct only one other feature, 1990's Exorcist III. If the latter stands as the more successful effort (indeed it's one of the better horror films of the 90s), it's because Blatty brought to it a more orderly, formalist approach that better served both his weighty concerns of faith and sacrifice, as well as his gestures toward the surreal. The seeds of a personal omniverse are scattered between the two movies, resulting in some interesting criss-crossing references, however they are united most prominently perhaps by Blatty's overt love for the patter of rain against a window.

The Killer Is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956) - After a single viewing I'm tempted to dub The Killer Is Loose both a small masterpiece, and perhaps the most undervalued entry in Boetticher's oeuvre. A cop (Joseph Cotton), while arresting a crooked bank clerk (Wendell Corey), accidentally kills the latter's wife. Years pass, and the psychopathic criminal escapes from prison to exact his revenge on Cotton and his wife, leaving behind a slew of bodies as he inches closer toward his ultimate targets. The thing that jumps out most is how harsh and tactile the violence here is: a prison driver is murdered by Corey for his vehicle, but his body isn't simply dumped out of the truck, the camera follows closely as it splashes raggedly, sloppily into a filthy ditch of mud; in the scene where Corey visits and eventually murders his former army sergeant (the best in the movie, a model of ominous, sustained tension), a body isn't simply shot and killed, it flails violently, with milk bottles shattering and kitchen cookware exploding. A fairly jarring depiction for its day, and one that clearly anticipates the stark, brutal mode of bloodshed found in Boetticher's later work. Corey is fantastic through all this as the deadpan, volatile killer, and in his possessed, post-murder proclamations of helplessness and his climactic excursion into cross-dressing, he acts as a walking perversion of the famous credo that proliferates the Ranown cycle: "A man can do that". There is also fascinating use of sound and off-screen space to heighten the ever-present sense of anxiety and to construct moments of pure portent: Corey staring up into the cloudless sky and being met with a large rumble of thunder after escaping prison is one of the most haunting moments in all of Boetticher. This was the last feature the great director would make before jumping into the Westerns that inarguably comprise the apex of his career, and if those films represent an unusually rarefied level of B-movie craftsmanship in the history of American cinema, The Killer Is Loose as their antecedent deserves at least a passing mention in the conversation. It's lean, expressive, gripping stuff, and I can't wait to sit down with it again.

"Just try not to think about it" - Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan

2011-11-29T03:15:00.001-05:00

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With its icy formalism, its laconic, flat dialogue delivery and despairing piano dribblings, Lodge Kerrigan's extraordinary Claire Dolan seeks to inhabit its protagonist's dire psychic milieu as intensely as his previous debut Clean, Shaven. That excellent first film utilized the meshing of a disconcerting editing style and abrasive sound design within a rigorous compositional framework to thrust the viewer into a subjective account of chaotic and self-destructive mental illness. Fragments of a story hover around the periphery, bits of character history is doled out, but Clean, Shaven remains much more a sensory experience than a narrative one.

And so it should again be said that if we are presented with a somewhat more traditional sketch in Kerrigan's followup, it is not because we are dealing with a lesser sense of headspace. Claire Dolan is a prostitute, has been for a long time, and in fact indications suggest that she inherited the profession she grew up around. In short, a human thoroughly entrenched in a system that operates on the currency of hollow gestures and sentiments. Words in her life have become meaningless, nothing more than deadened sounds of barter, cold poker chips. And the spaces around Claire, far from forgiving, are sleekly ominous modernist prisons that enclose, fragment and abstract her time and again with their reflections and frames within frames within frames. Cold neutral areas within which meaningless fucks and news about sick loved ones are delivered and carried out equally with the same cool nonchalance. Just as the filmic sounds and textures of Clean, Shaven were founded in Peter's hallucinations and erratic desperation, so too does the mise-en-scène of Claire Dolan account for, in the most precise and effective of ways, its title character's isolation, disenchanted communication, and the profound loneliness and sadness that defines her neutral march towards death.

Katrin Cartlidge's empty stare represents a soul slowly shaved down by the years, yet Claire finds solace in the sight of a child in a park. Children are redemptive forces in all of Kerrigan's work (an estranged daughter in Clean, Shaven; the proxy of one in 2004's Keane), and the idea of one here is enough to inject Claire's face and actions with fitful gleams of that which may only hesitantly be called longing. Her first impulsive attempt at escape early in the film is doomed from the start, but a child paves the way for a clean break, for a new life. But people don't change overnight, and Kerrigan, a trenchant, honest humanist, does not give us the pat ending we first suspect. In fact, if Kerrigan's other two movies can be said to resolve with ambiguities that feel conclusive, or tidy untidiness, then Claire Dolan, in its final fade out to white, offers up a deep uncertainty under the veneer of resolution. It's a tremendously complex and open ending, a loving look away, a tacit admittance of skepticism that, in its sheer lucidity, lacks in his other two films. It feels like the most honest, daring moment in any of his movies, the one that was simultaneously the most painful and gratifying to shoot. And the short coda that follows it, at first seemingly insignificant, now feels perfect and perfectly composed, both affirming and potentially shattering. What is clear is that as a mother, Claire Dolan has no less than the entirety of herself to give. How much of that remains, and whether or not it's enough, that's what we're left with.

(If the above thoughts seem rather scattershot, I apologize. I watched Kerrigan's three features only in the last week, but they have stuck with me a great deal and I've been thinking about them all, particularly Claire Dolan, quite a bit. This post was just an attempt to get some of my brief and immediate thoughts down in writing. I look forward to wrestling with these movies further for some time to come. Kerrigan is an excellent filmmaker.)

I'll Be Damned

2011-11-18T05:40:00.002-05:00

These Are the Damned came a solid decade after Losey remade Lang's M, but it bears strong evidence that the German master never left the brain. You can look at the thoroughly Langian treatment given to the peaceful subterranean class of radioactive children - particularly in the way that Losey shoots their faces - for all the proof a reasonable person would need, but the smoking gun comes during a climactic scene where Losey seemingly beats Fritz to his own punch by a couple of years. Well, Fritz's doppelganger at least. The moment where Viveca Lindfors' character, artist and lover of a radical military scientist, awaits her impending and self-imposed annihilation (surely something the director who remade La Chienne would sympathize with) by continuing to create her eccentric art on a scenic cliff top overlooking the ocean is framed in much the same way one imagines that shot of Ulysses we see being filmed at the end of Contempt coming out. Actually, I like to think of it as a glimpse at the film the alternate Lang shot right before taking on the infernal project that provides the canvas for Godard's masterpiece.

The Great Performances: Don Cheadle in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

2011-11-06T02:05:00.003-05:00

Absolute Freedom?

2011-10-16T18:48:00.000-04:00

Around ten years ago (maybe more), while shopping at a massive used-book store with my family, I ran across a series of books titled Projections, which served, according to the cover, as a forum for "Film Makers on Film-Making". There were ten volumes in total, and I bought all of them, immediately drawn to cover images such as De Niro as Jake LaMotta and Wallace & Gromit, despite the fact that the actual contents wouldn't really appeal to me until much later on, when names like Resnais and Fuller and Almendros meant something. When I eventually rediscovered these books while cleaning out my old room one day (they were quickly forgotten about after the initial purchase), I wiped off the dust and devoured all ten volumes in short order. Edited by director John Boorman and Walter Donohue and released annually (for how many years I'm not sure, I know there are at least 5 volumes past the 1-10 that I own), these books were veritable potpourris of literary content related to international film-making: profiles on and conversations with various directors, cinematographers, screenwriters and scorers, directors writing essays on various aspects of the art and their careers, published diary entries from the productions of movies, and so on. One volume is colored blue, with an image from Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels on the cover, and is almost entirely devoted to criticism, with many essays on the state of criticism as well as classic writings from various notable critics all compiled together. That one is probably my favorite.

Anyway, my favorite recurring feature in these books is one called "The Burning Question", where a rather grand and open question is posed to and answered by a number of different directors. One of the Burning Questions that I found most interesting was the one from Projections 1, dubbed " Absolute Freedom?", which posed to directors: what would you create with an unlimited budget and no obligation to distributors? Naturally, many of the directors evade the question with the concession that indeed limitations play a critical role in the creative process. With those who indulge the premise, it is interesting to see where their aesthetic, political, biographical, and revisionary priorities lie. Still, others answer with more frugal, practical solutions of what to do with this unheard of freedom. The bottom lines of the question however remain fascinating: where is the division between freedom and limitation in inhibiting and feeding creativity? Is there worth in a film no one will ever see? With the recent creation of Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film - unseen by me, but by most accounts a Great and important work, made and smuggled out of Iran under intensely repressive conditions in the face of Panahi's recent jail sentence - the role of freedom in the process of cinematic formation is certainly a topic that has been in the air of late. I've scoured around online, and have not come across any Projections content provided anywhere, so below I offer a full transcription of this particular Burning Question entry. I think it's an interesting read.

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(from Projections 1, edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, first published in 1992 by Faber & Faber)

The Burning Question: Absolute Freedom?

It is often said that film is the art of the possible. Budget limitations, our concern for the audience, for the financiers, and for the critics shape and define the movies we make.
   But suppose the situation was otherwise. Suppose a film-maker had an unlimited budget, and no obligation even to distribute the completed film. What would he or she do with this freedom?
   We are seeing at the moment the dilemma of Eastern Europe, where the collapse of the state subsidy structure has forced film-makers to confront the whole question of artistic freedom. Before the collapse of Communism, film finance was provided by the state, but they were restricted in what they could say. Now they have freedom of expression, but are constrained by the demands of the market. As Milos Forman has said about the difference between working in Czechoslovakia and in the United States, 'In Eastern Europe it is like being in a zoo -you are kept in a cage, but you have a roof over your head and someone feeds you every day; in the US it is the jungle -you are free to go where you like, but everyone is trying to kill you.' Does being freed from the cage, or protected from the jungle, freeze the imagination or set it free?
   We asked a number of directors from all over the world the following question: If you were given an unlimited budget, and were under no obligation to distribute it, what film would you make?

The response was ...

Arthur Penn

Not unlike the prisoner long confined to a solitary cell, when confronted by your postulation of a film with unlimited budget and no necessity of distribution -the door of the cell flung open and freedom offered -I cling to my tiny, familiar prison space. My imagination refuses to venture forth to freedom.
Vague voices: 'tennis without a net', 'the art of the impossible', 'set out to make a masterpiece and halfway through all you want is to finish'.
But wait. If I goad it and shame it, my imagination finally slips into the light and produces a

vague image of a film.

It is a film about the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, AD 1000. Widespread fears of the End of the World and the Last Judgement abound. Desperate efforts made to cleanse souls and expunge records. New religious intensity burns fiercely. Destroy any infidels that come to hand. Pilgrimages to the highest mountains in order to be 'the first'.

And then the day, and the day, and the day and then the day ends.

   Oh well. We have another thousand years. What shall we do with them while we wait? Perhaps we have failed in our zeal. Let's kill more infidels.
   'Knights Ho! Let's have a crusade! OK, all you guys in armour up on those horses. No, no kids, we don't want any kids now. OK, lower Sir Knight on to his steed! No! Tell those kids if they behave themselves they can have their own crusade, but they have to behave! All right, forward! We ride east! No, east!'
   OK, so we lost the crusades, but wait till the next to last reel when we have the Gulf War. We'll get back at those guys. This movie goes on until we win - or lose!
   Listen, Boorman and Donohue, you were the ones who gave us licence to make a film of unlimited budget and no obligation to distribute. In me it produces a movie without end. I can't stand the freedom..

   No, give the obligation to wrap an actor by a certain date, a time to finish, an insistence of choices. 'Wait for this light and those clouds to clear or use that time to devote to a fragile scene yet to be shot' - that decision makes my heart beat faster and my armpits damp.
   I can suffer the fools and their finances. Give me choices to make and I can begin to force a film into existence; carve out of chaos some vestige of order and allow it to declare its form.
   I need restraint, limits; above all choices.
   We all want more time and money and 'freedom', but give me unlimited quantities of any, and I sneak back into my cell and blink the harsh light out.
    My movie goes away.

Samuel Fuller

The Lusty Days - Romantic action-comedy

San Juan - Action-comedy

Jane Campion

With my unlimited budget and obligation-free distribution I would explore portraiture. First, a self-portrait; then, if I enjoyed doing that and thought it revealing and curious, I might move on to others. I'm mostly interested in what's a Human, and what sort of one I am - for starters.
Finally, I would finish with an adaptation - first for the stage - of A Portrait of a Lady, then do a film version. I'd do it as a play first because I think it's a very performance-intelligent novel and I'd like to get a sense of its overall dramatic strength and delicacy, as well as a feel for length and dramatic adaptation. I'm in love with novels. I particularly like the last third of A Portrait of a Lady. I am chastened, however, as many adaptations don't thrill me.

Costa-Gavras

In such Draconian conditions, it is, I am sure, impossible to be able to choose a subject or to direct a film.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

I don't believe in absolute freedom. In practice it is impossible, philosophically unacceptable. We direct ourselves to get freedom and every time we realize we can't reach it. And, looking at it in this way, the goal is not as important as the means of attaining it: it is not possible -thank God! - to achieve our goal. So it is obvious that I am favourably disposed to compromise. And not because it is useful. First of all, because I don't know the answers, and in making films I ask questions. Questions and doubts, lack of self-confidence, curiosity and amazement that everything goes on in a natural way - all this puts me in the position of an observer and a listener. I change my script very often - the scenes, dialogues or situations - because I can see that people around me have better ideas, more intelligent solutions. It doesn't disturb me that these are other people's ideas. When I have accepted and chosen them, they become mine.
As a film director I am realistic. I am using the world of events and the world of thoughts, and I

treat them equally. I am also realistic in my approach to the work. I respect my producer, money and, above all, my viewer. Not just because I have to. I do so because I want to. In my opinion, the production of a film - however costly - has its own morality. And I am trying to obey this morality, because I want to obey. A cup of coffee may cost 1 1/2 dollars, may cost 3 or 5 dollars, but when it costs 120 dollars, drinking this coffee is immoral. It is exactly the same in the production of films.
The film I want to make is the film I am able to make. There are no others. I don't think of other films. I don't have a million viewers waiting at the entrance of the cinema, but I need to feel that someone needs me for something. And even if I make films - like all my colleagues - for myself, I'm looking all the time for somebody who tells me, like a fifteen-year-old girl in France, 'I saw your Double Life of Veronique.' Then I want to see it several more times. For the first time in my life I have seen and I have felt that there is something like 'soul'. So, if I were not concerned about this girl's opinion, there would be no reason to take the camera out of its box.

Claude Miller

Ulysses by James Joyce.

Francesco Rosi

Orlando Furioso by Ariosto.

Kevin Reynolds

I have always been fascinated with war as a human creation and how each generation perpetuates it. In particular, I am fascinated with the scale and tragedy of the Second World War. I think in centuries to come the Second World War will take on the epic proportions of the Trojan War or the Crusades and I would love to do the quintessential Second World War movie as I think it would be portrayed, say, 500 years from now.

I would take one character - a young American paratrooper - and watch him leave home, train, cross an ocean for the first time and then experience the entire conflict through his eyes. It would be almost surreal in style and choreographed to the achingly poignant music of Shostakovich's 7th, 8th and 9th Symphonies. It would take months to shoot and cost fifty or sixty million dollars.

Denys Arcand

Before shooting anything I would need to do some research. In fact, a great amount of research. This research would imply months - make that years - of skiing in the Alps, the Rockies and the Andes. Then I would have to do some scuba-diving in the Red Sea, near the coast of Belize and in the Philippines. I would also need membership privileges at Wimbledon and a box at Salzburg. I would have to be permanently accompanied by a Thai masseuse, an Italian mezzo and several other stunning beauties. A private aeroplane would probably be required, and a yacht would be nice also. At this moment, I cannot reveal the exact nature of the research itself, but since the film is not going to be distributed and the budget is unlimited, why are you worrying?

Istvan Szabo

I would most like to make a film of the story of my family during the last 150 years. Their fate shows exactly the birth, development and systematic destruction of Central Europe's bourgeoisie and intelligentsia by the twentieth-century dictatorships.

Magical love and career stories reveal changing morals, desires, passions and purposes under the various social systems.

Ken Russell

A film called 'Space Gospel'. I wrote it in collaboration with Derek Jarman, revealing the New Testament as Amazing Science Fiction.

Sydney Pollack

It will perhaps seem strange for someone who usually makes big-budgeted, large studio films to say that it would be impossible for him to make a film with an unlimited budget. Frustrated as I may be with whatever limitations there are, it is, for me, those very limitations that serve initially to point me in a direction to solve the creative problem. I'm afraid I would find my imagination not up to the challenge of working with no limits whatsoever.

Mike Figgis

Unlimited budget? What a terrifying idea. Big budget equals large crew equals a sea of unknown faces on a never-ending pay cheque equals loss of artistic control because it is hard to exchange intimate ideas with strangers. It is hard enough to relate to a small crew.

It has been my observation that small projects are harder to finance and distribute than larger ones.
Unlimited budget? OK, very low. Enough to pay a small, dedicated crew and some unknown actors. I'd probably shoot Super 16mm.

No obligation to distribute? This is a tough one. I'd see no point in making a film that wouldn't be seen.

As I move from project to project the truth becomes clouded. There is a seemingly logical idea that each film should cost more than the one before. In fact, there is no real connection between the ability to say something with a camera and the idea of unlimited budget.

Louis Malle

Pretty much what I am doing now. Unlimited budget would give me the opportunity to reshoot everything I've done if I didn't like it.

Ettore Scola

I've made low-budget films and ones with high budgets, but I am not concerned with cost: my imagination is not fired up nor dampened down by the financial aspects of film-making. At this moment, if I had an unlimited budget, I might use it for many 'small' films.

Vincent Ward

Would an unlimited budget and no obligation to distribute the film freeze my imagination or set it free? (Your very question leaves me writer's-blocked! But this, I suspect, has much to do with a fear of hexing any project truly close to my heart.)
I'd love to make Apocalypse Now 2 (and call it Apocalypse Later). Or do one hundred episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude - and make it in Virtual Reality (especially the scene where everybody in the village loses their memory). But most of all, I want to make Perfume - in Odorama.

Paul Verhoeven

Art is communication. Without distribution - without an audience - any form of art is senseless.
An audience is necessary, but that should not be translated into 'concern for the audience'. I've never felt any concern for the audience, which has sometimes pissed off the audience, but that's communication too. Budget restrictions can be a bit of a strain, but generally speaking a movie gets the budget that it deserves - the remaining restrictions induce creativity.

So: an unlimited budget is as much nonsense as a symphony of ten hours. How much art can we stand?

I strongly feel that in due time you can make any movie you want for a realistic budget - minus 10 per cent.

Michael Verhoeven

As I was never in the situation to really do a movie like I want - because of constant lack of money - I would feel free free! And I would do my next film as always ...

David Byrne

The way in which the question is phrased forces one to imagine something out of the ordinary: a very expensive film that the public never sees. I guess these things exist. I imagine a documentary on atrocities 'produced' by Hitler and Goebbels. A very boring epic mini-series on atomic testing produced by the United States Department of Defense (we've seen the standard stockshot of a building being blown away and 'observers' watching a Nevada test ... but there is lots, lots more ... and worse). Obscure medical tests and clinical films. Industrial films. Huge productions shown only to potential investors and stockbrokers.

But what would I do?

For me, the constraints have always been an essential element in the creative process. Whether those constraints are budgetary or my own limitations, it doesn't matter. They force one to make something where there was nothing. The limitations become advantages. An itch that must be scratched.

And, although we constantly push against those constraints, and complain and feel put upon, most mega-budget spectacles (but not all) impress us only with their audacity.
I have avoided the question.

Zhang Yimou

I would like to make a film about the Yellow River - about the people who live and work on it. It would take me at least ten years to make it. I have no idea how long the film would be, probably as long as the Yellow River.

Gus Van Sant

My relation to budget is a funny one, in that the less money that I have, the more creative I have to get to overcome limitations. Actually, the limitations themselves make a film look a particular way. So far the budgets that I've had have been enough to do what I want to do. I imagine that if I were given an unlimited budget, and was under no obligation to distribute it, I would get horribly out of control and make a mess of things, then try to buy my way out of my mistakes.

Richard Lowenstein

All forms of creative expression involve a degree of compromise. The mere process of bringing an ethereal thought process into the physical world must involve some degree of compromise, whatever the medium might be.
   Film, along with most art-forms, is unshakeably bonded to the desire to communicate, the desire to touch another person in some way. This bond rigidly fuses the need to distribute to the need to create.
   These days creative elements involving cast, script, music, subject matter and the like tend to be influenced, if not controlled, by those who hold the purse strings and those who control the distribution outlets.
    Freedom from the constraints of distribution is, therefore, more importantly a freedom from the bureaucratic vagaries of certain funding bodies and distribution companies.

Liberation from this would, indeed, be a liberation of profound proportions.

The removal of budget restrictions, however, is an invitation to egomania. A budget has a responsibility not only to the script, the film and the creative talent involved in the production, but also to the state of the society around us. The budget has a moral responsibility not only to reflect what the script, film-maker and crew are attempting to do, but to also reduce the level of compromise to a reasonable level.
The most obvious advantage would be the availability of adequate amounts of time for the actual processes of the film-making. Acting, lighting, camera, sound and script development all tend to suffer in the low-budget area of film-making.

So, to answer the question - without distributors or budget restrictions, my themes and ideas wouldn't change, it's just the ability to bring them out into the real world with a minimum amount of compromise that would be improved.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

Unlimited freedom of choice can paralyse the ability to choose. Often limitation is a spur to the imagination. But, playing along with your impossible game, here is our impossible desire:

To have enough capital to secure the services of the team - actors, technicians, etc. - for two years. This would allow us to shoot at our leisure; to rethink every detail from one shot to the next, like our master Charlie Chaplin; to look at the film a year after it has been finished and reshoot anything that falls short of perfection.
This is our impossible desire ... Yet the film that is closest to our hearts is San Michele aveva un gallo, which we shot in four weeks, with 14,000 metres of film.

Terry Gilliam

I consider myself one of those fortunate film-makers who have never been given all the money they want to put their ideas on film. I have always preferred to work within financial limitations. I realize this sounds like rubbish coming from the maker of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but it's true.
   From the beginning, I haye been convinced that I have always been saved from mediocrity by lack of money. When we embarked on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we planned to make a 'real' Knights of the Round Table film. We were keen to be proper film-makers, showing that we, too, could make the kind of epics we had grown up watching - Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, Camelot - with knights swashbuckling around the place on great steaming chargers. But, because we didn't have the cash for a spectacle on that scale, we had to get rid of the horses and, in their place, substitute coconuts, banged together by each knight's over-worked page, clip-clopping behind his master who, in turn, pretended to be riding an imaginary horse in the way children do. With that one desperate leap, the film took off into its own world, freeing us from the need to compete with other medieval epics on their terms, allowing us to create our own twisted version of the Middle Ages. I'm certain that with horses and our inexperience we would have become bogged down in logistics and the need for a 'normal' reality and would have produced a less unique and funny film.
   Budgetary limitations also helped make Brazil far more intriguing and disturbing than it would otherwise have been. We had to try to create another world by adapting existing objects we could buy cheaply, instead of designing our ideal world and then building it. With 'found' objects there was always an element of surprise and a constant need to adapt preconceived ideas. Familiar objects took on new shapes and meaning. The world became a distortion of our present world, not some distant place which could be brushed aside easily as a fantasy. Because of a lack of loot we used posters to create the world beyond the immediate view of the camera. We could imply what else was out there without having to show it.
   A kind of claustrophobia could be maintained while still creating the feel of a complete world. With sufficient money I would have built incredible flying machines, extraordinary trains, fantastic boats which would have looked wonderful but, in the process, would have distracted from the atmosphere that proved to be so critical to the effect of the film.
   The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was different from my other films in that, for the first time, I was working with a producer who claimed he would provide everything I ever wanted. The fact that he couldn't and didn't created a living hell. I was, and still am, very literal about taking people at their word and holding them to their promises. However, when, as is inevitable in these situations, the shit hit the fan, we were forced to close down while Charles McKeown and I attempted to trim the script. The pain was quite unbearable at the time but, when you are forced to destroy your work in an attempt to save it, certain creative magic occurs.
   Originally, the moon sequence involved thousands of giant characters all with detachable heads. It was conceived as a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza with great crowds, much singing and dancing and feasting - all during an eclipse of the moon. The yearly eclipse provided a chance for everyone to forget everything and start again with a clean mental slate. Unfortunately, the celebration resulted in a lot of heads becoming separated from their bodies and then being unable to remember where they belonged. The sequence ended in a grandiose, outrageously spectacular slapstick chase with the Baron and friends riding and attempting to control a giant palace guard's headless body as the eclipse and the King pursue them.
   Attempting to keep the film alive, we cut the moon's population down to two, King and Queen. In doing so, it concentrated our attention on the detachable head phenomenon and resulted in a very bizarrely literal interpretation of the problems of Cartesian mind/body duality. What was originally a lot of ideas jumbled together in a slightly rambling, but spectacular, sequence became one very clear and much funnier idea that was exactly to the point, and far more original.
   You might ask, "Why didn't we see these "better" solutions when we were writing the script?" Answer: 'Because we didn't have to.' There was no pressure to limit our imaginations. We were creating a world where anything was possible. Our imaginations soared, but not necessarily towards the best possible film. That's why I'm happy trying to work within a budget
   With all my films, but in particular Brazil and Munchausen, I have been able to work completely free from restrictions at the script stage. It is only the reality of making the films within financial restrictions that creates the catalyst that triggered some of our most creative work. It also provides the excuses for why the films aren't perfect.
   Total freedom would put an unbearable onus on me to make perfect films and that, in turn, would freeze me creatively. Backed up against a financial a wall, I can dare to take outrageous chances and daring leaps that are far too intimidating when all the money in the world is available. I need a budget to fight against: it makes my imagination work twice as hard.

Signature Shots: Raoul Walsh

2011-10-05T21:30:00.007-04:00

One of Raoul Walsh's signature shots is a medium two-shot with the actors cut off around the waist, and favoring a lot of gazing and some occasional bold body language. It's a shot that's continued to assert itself with a shocking amount of personality over and over again in varying contexts throughout my steady diet of Walsh pictures over the last handful of months, and the moment it pops up on screen, there is no doubting the author of the picture being viewed. It's become something of a minor obsession for me lately - the question of what gives this fairly common, simple setup such a unique presence and vitality in the hands of Walsh? I suspect it is connected with the idea of Walsh's cinema being one of the individual, or to be more accurate, runaway individualism. Characters drawing from an endless and unexplainable well of restless, eccentric determination repeatedly populate the Walsh oeuvre, so much so to the point that a great number of conversations that take place in the Walsh world can barely be considered conversations, so littered are they with agendas and selfish motives. Thus, it becomes something of a rarefied mini-event in a Walsh picture when a pair of characters actually engage with each other in an honest and meaningful way through language, instead of simply talking past one another, and the frame of this signature shot seems constructed around this awareness. Additionally, as Tag Gallagher points out in his Senses of Cinema piece on Walsh, "Walsh’s cinema is not presentational like Griffith’s, or self-reflexive like Godard’s. It is interactive." Walsh's actors make a point to cheat their chests out towards the camera during these special scenes, giving the viewer not so much the impression of eavesdropping, but of participating in - or, more accurately, of being asked to participate in - a conversation of which their inclusion seems imminent. The actors consistently seem, through this deliberate blocking strategy, on the verge of turning their gaze towards the camera at any moment to address the viewer. Similar to the sing-a-long at the end of The Strawberry Blonde, or Jackie Cooper firing his slingshot at the camera in The Bowery, these moments are gestures towards the audience, acts of inclusion. An interactive cinema of the individual. In other words, a remarkably generous cinema.

Images from top to bottom: Sailor's Luck (1933); The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945); The Bowery (1933); The Yellow Ticket (1931); Me and My Gal (1932); Under Pressure (1935)

Five from a Favorite - The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

2011-10-04T14:15:00.003-04:00

Tangled Up in Blue: Claude Chabrol's Betty

2011-09-29T17:40:00.002-04:00

Spook Town (1944) / Scream of Fear (1961)

2011-09-28T16:37:00.000-04:00

Elmer Clifton's 1944 PRC Western Spook Town opens with a foreward informing the viewer that the film is "Dedicated to the law officers of the Old West, who led the fight for law and order in the pioneer days of this country in 1880", and this rough, ragged cheapie is indeed some kind of beautiful poem to the mechanics of dutiful action in the Wild West. Ostensibly framed around a convoluted plot involving the recovery of a strongbox containing funds for the development of an irrigation program, Spook Town is at the same time so vastly stripped down and distilled to the pure essence of movement and gunfight that it often unfolds with the condensed logic of a dream. It is always fascinating to watch a nimble director maneuver within the constraints of the B movie, and while Clifton here doesn't quite subsume his budgetary restrictions into formal creativity (as an Ulmer would), he at least utilizes them as a guiding hand towards clarity and precision. The primary action consists of the passing around and chasing down of the valuable strongbox, but similar to the only other Clifton movie I've seen to date, 1949's The Judge, central action is routinely backgrounded in order to give precedence to effect and reaction, which means Clifton is markedly more interested in the pleasures and urgencies of horseback riding than he is in the destination; more interested in the crackle and somatics of a gunfight than he is in the motivations. These actions take on such ritualized splendor through their momentum and recurrence that the more confused I became at the unfolding plot (the abysmal condition of the audio and video from the copy I watched surely played a large part here), the more I was drawn into the experience. Clifton however is also generous enough to grant an unusual amount of freedom within his spare mise-en-scene, as characters - whether on horse or on feet - often determinedly move in and out of the frame at free will. His modest compositions are also ones of options, with decisions actively being made and carried out within them, and there is something gratifying and pure in such an approach. And then there is also the wonderfully granular voice and presence of Guy Wilkerson, here playing one of the Rangers named Panhandle, who utters the final, telling line of the movie, as the rather large group of survivors ride out of the ghost town together: "For a town where nobody lives, this has sure been a busy place." Nothing more than a troupe of Old West entertainers, moving on to the next performance, even if it's for only themselves.

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While I am not quite inclined to agree with the many who feel the situation of modern American horror is in something resembling dire straits (Zombie, Aja, Romero, Reznick, Ti West are among a handful of names who still give me hope), it is nevertheless almost impossible to argue that a sizable bulk of the genre's films being released these days is dominated by and reliant on crude and exploitative techniques that have been slowly mastered over the past few decades. If I have to sit through one more picture where the single-minded goal is to make the audience jump three feet into the air every five minutes with something random flying into the screen accompanied by "The Chord", I think I may pull the hair out of my head.

It is in that frame of mind that dipping back in time and discovering for the first time a film like the remarkable, Hammer Studios produced Scream of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961) provides for such a refreshing experience. Here we have a director who exercises an admirable amount of deliberation and puts complete trust in his images and atmospheres and ideas for effect, and one who takes a wholly organic approach towards startling his audience (the one "jump" moment in the film - and it's a biggie - contains only diegetic noise and involves an object that's been inanimately present in the composition the entire time). The plot concerns Susan Strasberg, a depressed cripple en route to visiting her long estranged father at his opulent French mansion. The film attaches itself to her subjectivity for a large portion of the running time, tracking her paranoia as she slowly becomes entangled in either a titanic psychological breakdown or an elaborate conspiracy to cover up her father's death, who has mysteriously vanished with no clear explanation it seems. Though the majority of the narrative unfolds within the quiet confines of the mansion, Holt is able to pack in a staggering amount of style, through both a bevy of expressive camera movements, as well as the creation of some chiaroscuro compositions that would have made Tourneur proud. The movie tips (most of) its hand with an entire act left to go, and at this point it rather fascinatingly morphs from a psychological horror piece into something resembling a Preminger noir, with everything taking a step back to calmly observe the reconfigured scheme of identification and slippery dynamics as they play themselves out to their natural, fateful ends. Also worth mentioning is that Scream of Fear contains perhaps the single most chilling shot of a dead body underwater this side of The Night of the Hunter. Brilliant film.

The Great Performances: Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

2011-09-21T18:50:00.000-04:00

Hardly Working (1981) / The Judge (1949)

2011-09-20T03:20:00.013-04:00

Hardly Working (Jerry Lewis, 1981) - When Jerry Lewis made Hardly Working (filmed in '79, released in '81) it was his first movie in a decade, and you can sense it in nearly every minute of the running time. Watching it, one often gets the vibe of observing a man returning to his old workplace to do the exact same job later on in life - a little heavier, a little more serious, a little more deliberate. I've often heard the word "pathos" used in discussion of Lewis and his work, but I'd never seen it much myself, not until the early scene here where Lewis sits in silence, tearful and in clown makeup, staring mournfully into the mirror at what might as well be a stranger: call me crazy, but it is one of the saddest, most personal images I've seen in the movies in some time. This sadness continues to coast at a low level throughout - and that's not to say that Hardly Working isn't still as expressive, uncomfortable and funny as any other Lewis I've seen; it is - only to elevate itself again towards the end in the form of a poignantly staged accumulating street procession, as well as in the overly-determined-with-a-hint-of-bitter "happy ending", two elements which called to mind Ford's devastating magnum opus The Sun Shines Bright. And in the two films' depictions of "doddering relics" for whom history has all but drifted by, there are some interesting parallels to be made. For my money though, the most compelling sequence in Hardly Working involves Lewis's first (and only) day of work as a gas station attendant. Having just witnessed his newly hired and utterly incompetent employee single-handedly reduce a mother and child's car to a disheveled mass of wheezing smoke and metal, the uber straight-laced bossman (Britt Leach) begins carelessly knocking over a methodically mounted pyramid of oil cans, while a look of both bemusement and puzzlement dances across his face. It's a disconcerting and mysterious moment, and one that further develops a pet theme for Lewis which occupies much territory in his final two films: the nature and transfer of chaos, portrayed here as an almost free-floating contagion, and then finally in the climax of 1983's masterful Cracking Up as a kind of invisible soul-hopping specter.

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The Judge (Elmer Clifton, 1949) - Similar to that of Raoul Walsh, the career of Elmer Clifton included early collaboration with Griffith (with acting roles in both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance), before branching off independently to rack up a prolific directorial career whose features (some counts put it at over 100) swung freely between various genres. Very little of Clifton's output however is currently available to the public in any capacity, and it seems as though even among more seasoned cinephile circles his main claim to fame is suffering a heart attack in the early stages of filming the 1949 noir Not Wanted, allowing star Ida Lupino to step behind the camera for her first proper (if uncredited) directorial gig.

The Judge was my first foray into the work of Clifton, and it's a completely oddball and strangely fascinating film, one that initially teases a sobering look at legal ethics before morphing into an EC Comics-like tale of a secretly demented character in good social standing becoming outlandishly consumed with a morbidly grandiose plot. That character is Martin Strang (Milburn Stone), a successful public defender with a dark past and an unhappy marriage, who concocts a twisted scheme to affirm the course of his life after becoming increasingly disillusioned with his job of setting one murderer after another free onto the streets. There are many interesting touches present in The Judge, the most striking perhaps being the completely unorthodox choice of music, a mixture of both haunting gothic choral and eerie solo violin, music which freely hops in and out of the diegesis and even appears to inform the rhythms of Clifton's editing in certain key sequences. There is actually very little camera movement present here at all, and Clifton relies frequently on this rhythmic style of editing - which borders on becoming a musical presence itself at times - often favoring setting up a scene with a long or medium-long static shot, and paying little attention to dialogue delivery while cutting to and creating a circuit of various human reactions and the handling of objects. Clifton also displays a dark, witty sense of humor at times, particularly towards the end with a dream sequence that entails a simple, mundane domestic quarrel, emphasizing the absurdity of the events the main character has painted for himself in his waking life. If The Judge is any indication at all of the measure of artistic freedom and creativity Clifton was able to enjoy throughout his career, then I very much look forward to digging around in his basement further and seeing what other treasures are there to be unearthed.

The Act of Looking: Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue

2011-09-16T04:50:00.001-04:00

I'm a Creep

2011-09-13T16:55:00.017-04:00

If David Lynch did in fact - as Jacques Rivette once posited - create the creepiest set in the history of cinema with Dorothy's apartment in Blue Velvet, then he designs the human counterpart in Wild at Heart with Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru. With the worst face in the history of anything, Peru straddles the line between the more abstract Lynch villains (Bob, Mystery Man) and the corporeal ones (Frank Booth), because he has a human enough name (after a country no less) and a somewhat sketchy bio (he was in the marines), yet he hails from nowhere (or "all over" as he tells Dern), laying claim to no land, and he for all intents and purposes still might as well have materialized out of thin air, or maybe more appropriately a subconscious.

Bobby is compared by others to a natural disaster, obese porn stars laugh at him as he walks by, and in a room with a puddle of fly-covered puke on the floor, Bobby is still the least attractive option. In short, he just doesn't fucking belong anywhere. "He has a way" Pruitt Taylor Vince's anonymous cowboy hat-donning trailer patron puts it, and that's the understatement of the century. And what separates Peru from Frank Booth - probably the only Lynchian creation that can give him a run for his money - is that Booth still, you know, had friends, and even if they were only cavemen and weirdos who sang into lights, they still moved him, and there was always a communal aspect with Frank, a sense that he would actually feel it were he not surrounded by these people. And so while, at one point during Blue Velvet, Frank drives down the road doing well over 100 completely wasted out of his mind, he at least has it in him to eventually put the brakes on. Bobby Peru, on the other hand, drives the gas tank off the edge of the cliff the first possible moment he can, taking everyone with him into hell and laughing his twisted ass off the entire time.

Ten

2011-09-11T03:45:00.006-04:00

♫ ...but I'd give the world to be where I used to be ♫

The above image, which brought me a great chill recently, is from Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939). Ten minutes later in the same film, in some anonymous dive, Gladys George's character gives a quiet, touching performance of In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town. Slowly circling the place, she momentarily pauses by the weary, ragged, fallen shell of James Cagney, gently taking his hand into hers and giving it a hopeful squeeze, as if to say hang in there, keep your head up, things will get better.

Five from a Favorite - Murder, Obliquely (Alfonso Cuarón, 1993)

2011-09-08T03:30:00.007-04:00

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Fallen Angels was a short-lived noir anthology series that aired on the Showtime network in the early 90's. Tapping an impressive array of talent both in-front of and behind the camera, the series as a whole was rather uneven, its primary shortcomings stemming from its knack for overly-convoluted screenplays, as well as the hiring of celebrity directors (among them Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks) who far too often struggled delineating the complex crime plots, and who favored a rather uncreative and on-the-nose approach toward the genre's signature visual and atmospheric qualities.

There were however a couple of utter triumphs buried within this curious series, and my favorite among them is probably Alfonso Cuarón's haunting episode Murder, Obliquely, based on a Cornell Woolrich short story and starring Laura Dern and Alan Rickman. The story takes place in the 1940's, and centers around Dern's character Betty, a timid, attractive and single store clerk whose main hobby is socializing with her married friends and wallowing in her own self-mythologizing sense of elusive love. A perpetual fifth wheel, Betty seems bound to the idea of sitting in a quiet corner like a ghost and watching passion play out in front of her, until one night at a small gathering she meets and obsessively falls for the brooding, wealthy Dwight (Rickman), an equally wounded romantic with a dark streak in a troubled marriage. The idea of love for Betty is portrayed as an illness with no cure - she even wishes for an "antibiotic for love" at one point - and her disembodied, foreboding narration throughout lends a tragic weight to her increasingly slavish infatuation.

Impressively directed by Cuarón and shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life), the immensely striking visuals (borderline miraculous by the television standards of the time) are rich in their attention to lighting, color, composition, and the smokey textures of the period. Dern as always makes the most of an interesting role turning in a subtly intense performance, and Rickman is operating in a particularly intriguing mode, blurring the lines between the romantic lead and devious villain-types he was so often flip flopping between in the late-80s & early-90s period. Murder, Obliquely clocks in at only 27 minutes, but it is a carefully crafted mini-masterpiece of stylish, fatalistic romance that warrants rediscovery.

Walsh & Wind

2011-09-04T21:30:00.006-04:00

One thing White Heat tells us: that Walsh would have made a damn fine Val Lewton picture. Specifically in the scene where Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran are holed up in a big empty house, having just received the news of Cagney's prison escape. Mayo stands poised against the wall and fidgety, eyes darting and ears tuned in anxiously to every harsh, tiny house sound. Thorny editing creates an ambiance of paranoia, sinister radio music hums at a low level, and all of a sudden we are in the middle of a monster movie ("It ain't just like waitin' for some human being who wants to kill you...Cody ain't human!") Mayo retreats to her room, only to bolt up out of bed with terror-filled eyes and make a doomed break for a car parked in the barn, her jaunt through the shadowy, tempestuous yard playing as a mini-version of the famous stroll through the reeds in I Walked With a Zombie. Walsh insists on wind in both audio and visual terms all throughout White Heat, and it is almost always bound to the volatility of Cagney's iconic sociopath Cody Jarrett. Cagney is in fact most menacing in this masterful sequence of suggestive horror, where he's largely absent and yet still very much present, abstracted into wisps of pure mania whipping through the trees.

The Great Performances: Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964)

2011-08-26T04:15:00.007-04:00

3 short reviews + tumblr. link

2011-08-18T03:10:00.014-04:00

It's long past time that I got a new post up here, so here are a few short reviews, followed by a link to my new Tumblr page, which mostly consists at this point of movie/tv stills that have struck me in some way.

Chandler (Paul Magwood, 1971) - An intended star vehicle for Warren Oates after his breakout role in Monte Hellman's seminal Two Lane Blacktop, Chandler stars the legendary character actor as the titular former gumshoe (yes, named after Raymond) who as the movie opens has quit his menial security guard job to jump back into the PI saddle, only to immediately become entangled in an increasingly harebrained plot involving the protection of a mysterious woman (Leslie Caron) with ties to dangerous racketeers. The picture was heavily muddled with by MGM executives in post-production (the most notable change likely being the absence of an intended throwback noir soundtrack in favor of a very rote contemporary thriller score), which can account for much of the awkward editing and unintelligible plotting, but that aside there's still nothing here to suggest that the movie even in its ideal form was destined to be anything other than a dry run for Altman's vastly superior The Long Goodbye, which would come a couple of years later and operate in many of the same genre margins. Yet there are still charms to be found in Chandler, most of which can be charted back to Oates' wonderfully salty performance, brimming with a kind of pathos and weary dignity and habit of turning blinks and half-smirks into a peculiar kind of poetry that only reinforce the notion of the actor being perhaps the most singularly captivating American screen-presence of the seventies. The key moment in the entire film comes when Chandler and the Caron character, on the lam, break down on a pastoral stretch of road - a setting not too dissimilar from one Oates would picnic on with Isela Vega in Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia three years later. Chandler - a self-professed "urban lowlife" - observes his surroundings quietly, and traipses about like a dinosaur in his domain before pronouncing "This isn't really my mode of living". But the inclination is to not believe him, as it's by far the most comfortable he appears in all 87 minutes, a function of the natural beauty surrounding him. The suggestion is that of a character mired in the illusion of instinct and an uneasy sense of self, who actually can see the forest for the trees, all too well in fact, and seems on the verge of something epiphanic before the screenplay sucks him back into silliness. It's a wonderful scene, probably the best in the movie, and an indication that there were at least some real ideas brewing around at some point in the process. There is also some striking use of the 2.35 frame, most notably in an early sequence involving Chandler tailing Caron through a midday L.A. cityscape, as well as in a surprisingly thrilling car chase along the beautiful Monterey coast. The movie was a commercial and critical bomb, and so ashamed of the final product supposedly was director Paul Magwood that he notoriously took out an ad in the Hollywood Reporter that apologized to all who paid to see Chandler. It was the first and last feature film he would ever direct.

Dead of Winter (Arthur Penn, 1987) - The story goes that as a personal favor to a friend, Arthur Penn took over directorial duties mid-shoot on Dead of Winter, an occasionally clever but more often senseless thriller that tasks Mary Steenburgen with three separate roles: the hapless, naive aspiring actress who finds herself cast last minute in a shady independent production in wintry upstate New York after the former leading lady supposedly had a nervous breakdown, and also as the mysterious pair of twin sisters whose torrid relationship forms the backbone of the blackmail plot that lies behind the phony film production. The vast majority of action unfolds in the snug mansion of the "director" (Jan Rubes, in the film's only tolerable performance), and out of this I continuously thought of three different movies while watching Dead of Winter: the first two being both Mankiewicz's 1972 Sleuth and Branuagh's 2007 pseudo-remake; the former because of a certain claustrophobic sportsman-esque fervor, the latter due to of an almost obsessive preoccupation with decor. The third movie is Jacques Tourneur's forgotten masterpiece Experiment Perilous, not only in terms of the broad strokes of the plot (both movies deal with the copping of a lower-class female by a bourgeois male intent on using house arrest and psychological manipulation to a sinister end), but also because of Rubes' wheelchair-bound low key villainous performance, with dialogue spoken softly amidst unusually cramped mansion interiors; it's a performance that could have been ripped right from some unknown Tourneur chiller. Unfortunately those comparisons to three (far) greater films is I believe more a testament to the extent to which my mind wandered while viewing Dead of Winter than it is anything to do with its actual merits as cinema. The writing is often cringe-inducingly awful and almost always bordering on full-blown camp, and the obscurities played with the nature of the central mystery - lasting more or less the entire running time - drop off into tedium quickly. And then there's Mary Steenburgen, who forgoes the route of subtlety and decides to pitch each of her performances at one of various extremes, ensuring that the viewer at any given moment is well aware within a nanosecond which character she is inhabiting, an effect which also at times rather clumsily undermines intended suspense. Penn's impressive direction and eye for striking economical compositions is very much present however, and manages to salvage an admirable amount of movie, most notably in the climax which takes place in a secret upstairs room and sees awesome use of light, shadow and reflection. By far the most pleasurable aspect of the film is the way in which Penn methodically parses out the deceptively sneaky mansion's architectural secrets bit by bit, subtly building atmosphere and surreality as the viewer's spatial orientation is subverted and expanded. As such, Dead of Winter stands as an intriguing study on how architecture and decor can effectively inform the thriller genre, while providing very few actual thrills itself. It can clearly be considered only as a minor work, but still bears enough of Penn's stamp and strengths to warrant viewing from anyone exploring the later years of the great director.

Fighter Squadron (Raoul Walsh, 1948) - The material for Fighter Squadron - a technicolor tribute to the American Air Forces operating in wartime Europe of the early 40's - is not very good, its rah-rah patriotism often sticking its foot out to trip up what could have otherwise been an intriguing character study on the type of man who lives to bide his time, waiting with a well of hidden emotion for his next trip into the cockpit. The plot involves a particularly distinguished air squad - one that proudly boasts the most kills and fewest casualties - and its top ace hotshot pilot (Edmond O'Brien), a reckless malcontent who soon finds himself in the unlikely position of commanding the unit. As simply a war actioner it is quite serviceable, though the real interest comes from Walsh's impressive arranging and handling of the visuals. On the ground, everything is drab and slightly rustic, the uniforms and living quarters and offices all painted in the same monotonous earthy browns and greens. The comic subplots move around in circles with nobody really going anywhere, and everything adds up to the picture of stasis. The squad is in need only of men who live to fly, and so when the time comes for action, the film turns into a ballet of movement and ritual. The single most glorious shot of Fighter Squadron, one worthy of Ford, is the alignment of fighter jets on the airfield, great big mythic machines of war, each one painted with a ring of primary color around its nose. One by one the propellers begin to whir, and off they go into battle. The combat scenes are a fascinating mixture of real war footage and stuff shot by Walsh; the real footage is quite raw and visceral and aggressive, and drives home the destructive nature of war, while the cockpit interiors shot by Walsh display an expressionistic attitude towards space and color, with the windows often taking up as much room in the frame as the pilot, showcasing a swirling canvas of blue sky, white clouds, orange fire and black smoke, peppered with the occasional blood and grey splashes of carnage, giving these moments an unusually felt psychological component. Walsh also, as per usual, has fun experimenting with deep focus and the expressive use of smoke, the former occurring most sharply in the opulent office of General McCready (Henry Hull), probably the most striking and complex interior set I've seen in a Walsh picture to date. For a director who apparently prided himself greatly on the quality of the material he chose, Fighter Squadron stands pretty far from being a crowning achievement, but it nonetheless displays with great verve the kind of spirit and artistry Walsh so often brought to the table.

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Feel free to check in on my Tumblr page, which can be found here: mcintosh.tumblr.com

Blackouts and Shout-outs

2011-06-12T20:45:00.002-04:00

"Godard says 24 frames a minute, or is it a second? It's a second, isn't it?"

"It's video man. Video is the future."

"Put this on."

Images from The Blackout (Ferrara, 1997), Prénom Carmen (Godard, 1983), Numéro Deux (Godard, 1975), Contempt (Godard, 1963)

The Great Performances: Jean Peters in Anne of the Indies (1951)

2011-05-24T05:10:00.007-04:00

I wish to encourage so true a love. The only kind I've known was made of lies. A phrase at first uttered in sullen contempt, and then finally embodied in a booming, blazing act of self-sacrifice. It's not difficult to see why Jacques Tourneur's Anne of the Indies thrust Jean Peters into stardom. Peters denied, as best she could, glamour and sex-symbol status throughout her career, and she finds a kindred spirit in pirate captain Anne Providence, who spent a life at sea denying femininity, evading desire, accumulating scars and dirt and blood on her hands. When she finally does come into contact with desire in the form of Louis Jordan, her instincts and eyes concede to it, but her brain cannot, and thus every look from Peters, every word spit out with that special brand of raw emotive force she mastered, betrays the deep inner conflict with perfect and pitiful candor. When she is spied trying on a dress, she reacts with the vulnerability of a child being caught with a hand in the cookie jar. When she is faced with the ultimate betrayal, one she does not even fully understand, a lonesome, desperate plea supplants comfortable wrath. And in the throes of something bigger than herself for the first time in her life, fear and anxiety ensures immolation as the only answer. A better role for the great Jean Peters I can't possibly imagine, and a more tragic screen character, well, it would take some stretching of the mind to find.

Images - 5/17/11

2011-05-17T05:15:00.001-04:00

Dealer (Benedek Fliegauf, 2004)

The Black Watch (John Ford, 1929)

Great Day in the Morning (Jacques Tourneur, 1956)

Machorka-Muff (Straub-Huillet, 1963)

Cosmic Slop (Reginald Hudlin, 1994)

Symptoms (José Ramón Larraz, 1974)

Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta, 2007)

Man's Gentle Love (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 2002)

Rischart (Kurt Kren, 1978)

The Irrefutable Truth About Demons (Glenn Standring, 2000)

Trees/Scream/Curtains

2011-05-13T16:20:00.000-04:00

Images from Hotel (Jessica Hausner) and Twin Peaks (David Lynch/Mark Frost)

Five from a Favorite - Dream Work (Peter Tscherkassky, 2001)

2011-05-05T04:15:00.002-04:00

Images - 4/28/11

2011-04-28T04:50:00.000-04:00

Mods (Serge Bozon, 2002)

Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Wild Side (Donald Cammell, 1995)

Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)

Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

Riley the Cop (John Ford, 1928)

I Saw the Devil (Kim Ji-woon, 2010)

The Phantom Light (Michael Powell, 1935)

Jackass Number Two (Jeff Tremaine, 2006)

The Shamrock Handicap (John Ford, 1926)

2011-04-26T00:15:00.005-04:00

John Ford's The Shamrock Handicap (1926) is a near-masterful silent film from the great director, one of many thought to have been lost for good before re-emerging sometime ago to the great delight and interest of film lovers everywhere. While the prospect of any John Ford film being permanently lost is a disheartening one, The Shamrock Handicap in particular would have been a travesty to lose, seeing as how it is the first film to deal with one of Ford's most personal themes, his Irish heritage. Similar to what was to become one of his most successful pictures, The Quiet Man, The Shamrock Handicap is a romantic comedy set in Ireland. The story concerns Sir Miles O'Hara (Louis Payne) and his daughter Sheila (Janet Gaynor), who rent out living quarters to a poor family, the O'Sheas, who cannot pay rent on time. Sir Miles, out of kindness, accepts sweets from the family as payment, however the tax collectors catch up with him, and so Sir Miles and the O'Sheas are forced to sell their stable of horses to a buyer named Finch (Willard Louis). Finch woos the family's jockey Neil Ross (Leslie Fenton), who is in love with Sheila, to return to America with him and try his hand at becoming a successful full-time jockey. Neil moves quickly up through the jockey ranks, before suffering a serious injury in a big race, unbeknownst to the O'Shea/O'Hara clan, who have made the trek to America with their sole remaining horse Dark Rosaleena, in hopes of entering the prestigious Shamrock Handicap, and claiming the $25,000 prize.

While Ford's visual style in the 30's was to be largely dominated by the expressionist influence of F.W. Murnau, the visuals in The Shamrock Handicap look forward to the more picturesque, spacious, classical compositional style that would come to define Ford's 1950's films. While much of the second half set in America is comprised of uncomplicated interiors, the first part of the movie set in Ireland is stunningly gorgeous, utilizing space and angles, as well as heavy foliage and the poetry of light and shadows to give many of the outdoor shots a heavy impressionist feel. Ford also flirts with the use of foreground objects as well as utilizing diagonal lines to bring out the dynamics of a shot and give it depth, techniques he would master and return to over and over in later films, and the result here is simply some of the most ravishing images I've seen from Ford's silent period work. The story itself is nothing that special of course, the mood is light and the pace brisk, with the heroes winning the race at the end and returning triumphant back to Ireland with money troubles alleviated and the Neil and Sheila characters ending up together. But the titular race is a genuinely exciting visual spectacle to watch, and gentle humor and slapstick (occasionally dicey territory for Ford) is used in measured doses to charming effect.

The most interesting character in The Shamrock Handicap is one named Virus Cakes (!), a black valet at the ritzy American horseracing club, played by an actor named Ely Reynolds, who according to IMDB has only two acting credits to his name*, this and another recently unearthed Ford silent, Upstream (1927). The character of Virus Cakes likely qualifies as one of Ford's "fool characters", or characters who reveal social values through comedy (see: Andy Devine in Stagecoach, Hank Worden in The Searchers, Francis Ford in almost everything). But, similar to another atypical Ford fool, the oft-misunderstood Stepin Fetchit, the Virus Cakes character is played for more than (or maybe not at all) simple laughs, and is consistently and compassionately given, throughout his surprisingly bulky amount of screentime, a subtle complexity and unique point of view. Take for instance the scene where the O'Hara clan first arrive in America: Neil and Sheila embrace on the dock after much time apart, yet Ford frames Virus in the left third of the screen, watching this loving act between two people as basically a complete alien, even guiltily looking away in moments as though he has no business observing such a thing. It is obvious from his framing that Ford is going for something beyond a simple, joyful reunion, and it's an incredibly sad little sequence. Also take as example the scene where Virus is instructed by the owner of a horse to exercise the animal in an area next to a cemetery. It's a sequence that gives the impression of being played merely for laughs - Virus fails in spectacular fashion - however Ford, through close-ups, seems to be unusually sympathetic to the effort made by Virus, while also highlighting the brusque treatment given to him by the horse's owner.

Easily the craziest sequence involving this character, and indeed one of the most surreal sequences I've stumbled across in the entire Ford corpus, involves Virus Cakes becoming lost in a hospital during a trip all of the jocks make to visit an ailing Neil after his injury. He roams aimlessly around the hallways with his sad bouquet of flowers, bleakly watching as nurses roll covered bodies by him repeatedly. Virus stops at a random door, decides to enter it, and views (as the camera takes his POV) three surgeons raising their heads slowly and simultaneously, much like monsters in a monster movie. Ford cuts to a reverse shot of Cakes appearing hypnotized as his bowler hat slowly begins sliding over the top of his head all by itself. Another shot of the surgeons sees their forms slowly become unfocused and warbled and twisted into three ominous, amorphous white figures (they might as well be wearing hoods). Ford then slowly (and I mean in extreme slow motion) shows Cakes turn and run out of the door, giving one last caustic glance back behind him. It is such an utterly bizarre and disconcerting scene, one that manages to conjure up racial anxiety in a wholly unique and impactful manner, while also giving off the vague impression that this story is as much about Virus Cakes as it is the O'Hara family, Neil the jockey, or any other character.

The Shamrock Handicap was based off of a story from American author Peter B. Kyne (who Ford also adapted for his 1948 picture 3 Godfathers) and shot by cinematographer George Schneiderman, (one of Ford's most essential collaborators in his early years, who also shot the classic Ford silents 3 Bad Men and The Iron Horse, as well as the Will Rodgers starring Judge Priest and Steamboat Round the Bend), and it is often as visually impressive as any Ford that I've seen. Also of note in this picture is the deft manner in which Ford juggles the fairly sizable cast, who is introduced in rapid fire with (typically) little exposition. A charming and occasionally mysterious work of great visual beauty and subtle complexity, The Shamrock Handicap is the product of a master near the peak of his profession, and sees Ford both working out personal themes and fine tuning his visual craft to a typically fascinating end, one that makes me mournful to think of all the great Ford films (and films in general) that have been lost forever, and thankful for those that have been found and saved.

* Since writing this I have also identified Reynolds in a bit part as a shoeshiner in Ford's 1928 silent Riley the Cop. Hopefully more will be discovered and written about this interesting early Ford regular at some point.

Five from a Favorite - A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)

2011-04-20T13:55:00.003-04:00

Cinematic Alphabet

2011-04-14T19:35:00.002-04:00

Here is my contribution to the Cinematic Alphabet même that's been floating around lately. I ended up spending more time thinking about this than I had anticipated, and as my buddy Jake Cole mentioned in his recent post, for such a simple and meaningless game it was pretty agonizing trying to whittle the many, many options for most of the letters down to a sole choice. I have also abided by the rule of only selecting one movie per director, but even with that it pained me to have to leave off some of my favorite directors, names such as Jacques Tourneur, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Terrence Malick, Jean-Luc Godard, Powell/Pressburger, David Fincher, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Renoir, Eric Rohmer, Josef von Sternberg and it goes on, people who have all made some of my very favorite movies, but for whatever reason didn't manage to find a spot on here.

As it stands I'm pleased with how the list shaped out, but it goes without saying that for many of these letters there could have been any one of many titles chosen. However, as of right now, these are my favorites - minus X, which was only filled in for the sake of completion.

A is for All the Vermeers in New York (Jon Jost, 1990)

B is for Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

C is for Cemetery Man (Michele Soavi, 1994)

D is for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)

E is for eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

F is for F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1975)

G is for Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995)

H is for Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)

I is for The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)

J is for Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)

K is for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

L is for Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)

M is for Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

N is for Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)

O is for Out 1, noli me tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

P is for Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)

Q is for Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967)

R is for Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962)

S is for The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, 1953)

T is for Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

U is for Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

V is for Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

W is for White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

X is for X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000)

Y is for Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Z is for Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

Mamet & Objects

2011-04-12T03:45:00.007-04:00

What makes David Mamet's best films - those being his con films, and namely House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner - so fascinating is the delicate balance he manages to maintain as a director between constructor and giddy spectator. Mamet has had a lifetime fascination with magic - or more appropriately, illusion (just see his casting of Ricky Jay in, well, pretty much everything he's ever done as evidence), and thus he views the world of cons less through a jaded, cynical lens than through that of a wide-eyed, intensely primal curiosity. Mamet's plots are surface-smooth, intricate clockwork constructs, and yet he is so much more interested in feeling out and exploring the nuances of these richly insulated facade worlds and the inhabitants created by illusion than he is in bare, cold mechanics. To Mamet, a good con is like a good magic trick, and just underneath the sting of deception lies a transient exhilaration. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that a great desire of Mamet's is to one day be taken for a giant ride.

Objects in particular take on an almost talismanic significance in Mamet's con worlds. Emphasis is often put on both their tactile presence and potential for mental provocation, and like with any magician performing a trick using trinkets, mini-mythologies are occasionally ascribed to them. They are never just there, rather they exist with gravity and function, and whether it's to advance plot or to reveal deeper truths or ambiguities about a character, their presence may dominate in any given scene. And the hands handling an object at any given time are often just as important as the object itself. We know everything we need to know about Campbell Scott's character in The Spanish Prisoner from the way he manages the multiple books of importance that pass through his possession, just as we also feel the dark liberation of Lindsay Crouse's psychiatrist merely from the way she fondles a gold lighter. Keep your eyes on the hands and objects in a Mamet film. They do the real talking.

Images - 4/6/11

2011-04-06T07:20:00.010-04:00

I've been in a bit of a blogging funk of late, but hope to get back to my regular occasional posting sometime soon. In the meantime, here is the first of likely many posts to come simply displaying some images that have connected with me in my movie viewing lately:

When It Rains (Charles Burnett, 1995)

Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)

Les Bas-fonds (Jean Renoir, 1936)

The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

Halloween II (Rob Zombie, 2009)

Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)

Five from a Favorite - Flesh and Fantasy (Julien Duvivier, 1943)

2011-03-06T03:05:00.003-05:00

Minor but highly entertaining and mildly haunting, Julien Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy was the director's follow-up to his previous successful anthology film Tales of Manhattan (1942). For Flesh, six stories are chopped to three, with the social commentary and comedic edge of Tales giving way to more horror and supernaturally slanted elements. The first story, starring Betty Field as an ugly duckling who has an encounter with a mysterious mask during Mardis Gras, takes place at a party completely flooded by streamers and rambunctiousness which sets the stage for some cat-and-mouse romantic games to play out, the entire thing having more than a hint of von Sternberg flavor. The second story, adapted from Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, stars Edward G. Robinson as a lawyer who becomes obsessed with a psychic's prediction that he's going to kill someone. Robinson has to my eyes rarely been better than he is here, ravaged with a cool and increasing paranoia on his way to complete madness, surrounded by a moody, shadowy, fog laden atmosphere of dread that often evokes the 40's chillers of Jacques Tourneur. The third story I can't quite connect to another director, but it stars Barbara Stanwyck and Charles Boyer, and involves tightrope walking and abstract premonitions. It's able to sustain a dreamy and dire vibe while conjuring up sequences of heightened tension through close-ups and eyelines (Siodmak?), and is purposefully vague in a pretty interesting way. While the whole thing doesn't quite stack up against Duvivier masterpieces such as Pépé le Moko, it is a personal favorite, and deserves at the very least a Region 1 release of ANY kind, something it's sadly been denied so far.

The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998)

2011-02-23T18:00:00.007-05:00

(This post is a contribution to the Iranian Film Blogathon hosted by Sheila O'Malley at The Sheila Variations. This blogathon is celebrating Iranian filmmaking in light of the imprisonment of Iranian director Jafar Panahi. I encourage everyone to check out Sheila's wonderful site and read more.)

My familiarity with Iranian cinema pretty much begins and ends with the great Abbas Kiarostami, and though I've only begun to explore his work in the past year or so, he currently stands as one of my very favorite working filmmakers. The Kiarostami film that has arguably had the greatest impact on me and the one many call his masterpiece, 1990's Close-Up, is a fiction-documentary hybrid dealing with an unemployed cinema-obsessed man by the name of Ali Sabzian who, with motivations that remain murky, dupes a family into believing that he is filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, with Makhmalbaf himself making an appearance during the film's remarkably touching climax. Makhmalbaf's career and vast influence in Iranian film culture is touched on quite a bit in the wonderful commentary from Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum that accompanies the Criterion release of the film, and it got me quite curious to delve into the man's work at some point. And what better opportunity to do so than for this blogathon, with the film of his I selected being 1998's The Silence.

The opening scenes of The Silence ease us into the world of a blind Tajik boy named Khorshid (Tahmineh Normativa) who lives in a small apartment with his mother (Goibibi Ziadolahyeva) and works in a nearby town as a lute tuner for an old man's music shop. As we are introduced to him, Tajik sits alone in his room listening intently to the buzzing of a bee trapped inside a glass jar, and prays for the goodwill of the insect before letting it free. There is a rapping at the door from the landlord, bringing bad news that the mother has five days time to pay the rent or she and her son will be thrown out. And so Khorshid's job, which he is quite good at, becomes more critical than ever, but getting him to the music shop, as we come to find out, is a whole task unto itself. Khorshid is reliant on the help of a slightly older girl, Nadereh (Nadereh Abdelahyeva), to get him to and from the bus terminal, however his world is one of such intense textural and aural pleasure that something as simple as a pretty voice or instrument will capture him and lead him astray from his route, often making him late for work and putting his job in increasing jeopardy. On the first morning after the news of possible eviction, such an incident occurs when Khorshid becomes lost in a marketplace after hearing intoxicating music playing in the distance, and in a beautiful scene pitched with an overwhelming tenderness that will pervade throughout the movie, Nadereh searches for him by closing her eyes and allowing her other senses to take over, a poetic and instinctual act that eventually does lead her to the location of Khorshid.

Makhmalbaf has a real poet's eye for the sensual beauty of nature and its ambiance, and The Silence is rife with moments where this is on display. Perhaps the most striking among them occurs when Nadereh, having delivered the boy to his job, visits a nearby spring and accessorizes herself with pieces from the surrounding forest, taking a pair of cherries that share a stem and draping them over her ears as earrings, and mashing bits of colorful flower petals onto her nails, while the spring water shimmers in the foreground, reflecting the towering trees that surround. She then visits Khorshid in the shop with her new getup, performing a little dance as the boy tunes one of the horribly out of tune instruments, and the rhythm of Khorshid's strumming along with the hypnotic movements of the girl transforms the jangling discord of the unpleasant strings into something beautiful. This type of playful spontaneity is echoed in later scenes when Khorshid finds himself wandering through unfamiliar parts of the city, and instead of asking for directions, he asks the young children pounding pots for a living to pound them in a more rhythmic fashion, something which foreshadows the film's rapturous, orchestral climax. The theme of making malleable our everyday surrounding sounds into something more palpable and pleasurable is further highlighted in a scene where Khorshid rides a young boy's wooden pushcart to follow a musician he has heard on the bus, and Makhmalbaf, as he is prone to do, plunges us into the subjective world of Khorshid. He takes in all of the sounds of the street - the wooden clanking of the cart wheels, the young boy's panting breath, the passing horses and their clapping, and the passing automobiles - and swirls them together, forming a grandly enchanting contrapuntal orchestra being played out right in the middle of the road for anyone who so chooses to tune in.

The loving attention to detail in scenes like those is remarkable, and Makhmalbaf even extends this sentiment towards the supporting characters in the movie as well. If only through brief snatches of dialogue, Makhmalbaf fleshes out his minor players with backgrounds that shade the spare story with complexities, such as in a late scene with the mother, who up until now had only popped in the story briefly to tell Khorshid when the money is due, where she shares with a friend the situation surrounding her son's father's departure from the family, and why the pair are so strapped for cash. There is also a moment when we learn that the old man who owns the music shop had a son who was killed in war, which could go some ways towards explaining his cranky spirit, one that eventually leads to the firing of Khorshid. But despite the fact that Khorshid does get fired, and that the family's bleakly depicted condition doesn't appear to be on the upswing by the end, The Silence is a movie that nevertheless teems with hope and vitality. It's a loving, gentle, sensuous ode to life, one that depicts a world experienced through the prism of an interaction with and a passion for both music and the natural world. It was a wonderful introduction for me to Makhmalbaf's work, and I look forward to further exploring the films of this important and exciting director.

Five From A Favorite - The Underneath (Steven Soderbergh, 1995)

2011-02-19T19:45:00.001-05:00

The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948)

2011-02-16T06:00:00.003-05:00

(This post is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon, which is being hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren. You can go here to read more about the Film Noir Foundation and its efforts to preserve important films for future generations, and you can go here to make a donation.)

The first image is a cluster of New York buildings standing in front of the night, cloaked in shadow, with Victor Young's moody, haunting jazz score in the air. The camera pans up and over the constructions as they become taller, darker, more ominous. Black smoke billows desperately from the chimney of one. The camera finally settles on a specific building, this one well lit, and we sense correctly that it will be the hub of most if not all of the activity that is to follow. It's a brilliant opening, all at once conveying the existential loneliness of the night-time city and the many seedy stories it surely contains, eventually halting at the entry point for the very story it intends to tell us. The building is Janoth Publications. The movie is The Big Clock. And off the top of my head, I can't think of a more sublimely noirish opening scene.

The camera pushes in through a window of this building, a towering publishing empire named after its founder Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), where we catch up with a man named George Stroud (Ray Milland), sneaking around in the darkness and evading night watchmen as he maneuvers his way towards the company's signature giant clock, which sits in the lobby, synchronized to tell time from all over the world. And from here he will recount the events that led up to his current predicament, one which has him cowering in fear of being shot on sight in the very building he works for.

George, we find out, was editor for the popular Janoth publication Crimeways, where his talents for utilizing throwaway facts from the street help him build up profiles that allow he and his detectives to sweep up criminals who for one reason or another have evaded the police. It's a job which unfortunately brings very little family time, and under the domineering thumb of his tyrannical boss, George has been forced to flake out on his wife and son time and again, not even having as much as a honeymoon to show for his year-long marriage. One day George, fed up with the lack of personal time he is afforded, stands his ground and as a result is fired. He soon finds himself at a bar getting blotto with one of Janoth's mistresses, Pauline (Rita Johnson), where seeds of a blackmail plan against the wealthy mogul are planted. George eventually passes out at Pauline's place (no infidelity is implied), before being roused from sleep and forced to leave quickly. Janoth arrives, and is able only to make out the vague shadow of a man leaving his girlfriend's place, but that's more than enough to create a heated argument between the couple that ends with Janoth bashing Pauline over the head, killing her. The plan is to pin the murder on the shadowy figure Janoth saw leaving that night, and so he re-hires George to help Crimeways catch this mysterious "murderer". Thus, George finds himself in the unfortunate position of conducting a manhunt against himself, and what develops from there on is a rousing psychological cat and mouse game between he and Janoth, who each have everything to lose and little time to spare.

The screenplay by Jonathan Latimer (adapted from a Kenneth Fearing novel, which was also basis for the 1987 Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out) is lean and nasty and darkly humorous, with typically bleak twists and turns, as well as instances of - as Detour's Al Roberts would say - fate sticking out a foot to trip its characters up. The cinematography from legendary John F. Seitz (whose massively impressive body of work includes noir classics Sunset Blvd. and Double Indemnity) is consistently crisp and stylish, his nimble and patient camerawork an excellent meld with Farrow's proclivites for capturing the simple and routine rhythms of daily life in a large publishing company with as much interest as he does the naked existential fear exhibited from his characters. In fact, as suspenseful as the plight of the George Stroud character becomes, for me the most intriguing aspect of The Big Clock is the visual flair given to the large Janoth Publishing building. It is a business atmosphere that quite literally revolves around the precision of time in the form of the titular universal clock, and that same neat precision manifests itself in the characters trim pinstripe attires, as well as the modern architectural designs of the building, where seemingly every room, office, lobby and elevator displays clean rectilinear motifs in the form of patterned walls, furniture and drapes, some of which frequently cast shadows that give off the appearance of prison bars, an analogy that becomes particularly salient once George, having been identified as the murderer and unable to escape, literally becomes a prisoner trapped inside the building. The sleek, meticulous visual world of Janoth Publications and its inhabitants is continuously contrasted against the messier, more humanized outside world, one dominated by smoke, booze, emotional shadows, and the physical and mental clutter of domesticity.

Milland is fantastic in his role as the suffocating protagonist, trapped by the truth, whose intelligence and charm can only get him so far before a whole world of witnesses and various incriminations begins to twist in on him. And the wonderful Charles Laughton is never less than riveting as the slimy and eccentric business tyrant, whose fate is to become literally swallowed into the dark, empty stomach of his empire.

There are those out there who discount the notion of The Big Clock as a true noir because of its lack of femme fatale, its comedic elements and the tidy ending. It's true that there's no incendiary femme fatale present in the movie, but couldn't one easily argue that Laughton's character - duplicitous and destructive, with implied sexual hangups - qualifies at the very least as a twisted version of an homme fatale? And if there is indeed a lack of any fatale-type character, isn't it in service of focalizing with exceptional intensity on one of the most crucial noir character types of all: the innocent male victim, framed for a crime uncommitted, whose life whirlwinds so quickly out of control? And yes, the prevalence of dark comedy present is uncharacteristic of the genre, but it's fluidly integrated into the story and never undermines the tensions of the drama, nor does it ever come across as gratuitous. And as far as the ending goes, and to the extent that it can be called "tidy" or "happy", I would ask one to keep in mind the domestic issues of the characters remaining, and how far they actually are from being solved, as well as this Orson Welles quote: "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story". The Big Clock remains a unique and impressively crafted entry in the noir canon, one that explores in its own distinctive ways many of the techniques, themes and preoccupations that make up the genre so many film lovers can't get enough of.

Five From A Favorite - The Burning Secret (Robert Siodmak, 1933)

2011-02-12T19:15:00.001-05:00

The Jacket (John Maybury, 2005)

2011-02-09T18:40:00.010-05:00

Take a look at the images above. They are examples (among many) of what makes The Jacket so interesting at times. They are from the quick montage sequences that play out as Adrien Brody's character Jack Starks "travels through time". I put that in parenthesis because it's never quite apparent whether the character actually time travels, or whether he's merely experiencing an illusion (or delusion) of the concept; all possibilities pretty much remain open. But what is interesting here, regardless of what is actually going on, is the way the concept of time travel is contextualized in these fleeting, almost subliminal moments in a way that so many movies dealing with time travel neglect entirely or gloss over: they convey the sheer abysmal, abstract horror that the experience of such a process would likely reap on the human psyche. Too many movies, ones more concerned with sprawl and gamesmanship, are saddled with lame, pat side effects accompanying their time travel: nosebleeds, earbleeds, headaches, whatever. But in The Jacket, you might as well lose your mind.

The plot of the movie ostensibly deals with Brody's character Starks, a Gulf War veteran living in Vermont in 1992 after surviving (or did he?) a gunshot wound to the head from a child during combat, for which he was thought to be dead before miraculously blinking back to life on the medics table. As we catch up with him he is hitchhiking the snowy Vermont roads, and stumbles upon a little girl and her mother stranded on the side of the road with car issues. The mother is babbling incoherently and throwing up, clearly either intoxicated or heavily medicated. Starks helps the girl rev the car back to life. He forms something of a close bond with her in the few minutes they spend together on the road, and Starks gives her the dog tags from around his neck before making his way on. Soon after he hitches a ride with a young redneck (Brad Renfro), and eventually blacks out and and suffers a bout of amneisa - a side effect of his brush with death during war - before waking up to find that he's being arrested for the murder of a cop who was shot to death in the middle of the street.

Starks is sent to a mental institution, where he becomes the subject of experiments performed by Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), involving Starks being injected with various drugs, tied up, and shoved into a morgue drawer, where haunted memories flood into his head through some Brakhage-ian filter, and seemingly form a portal that allows his conscious to travel 15 years into the future while his body remains in the morgue in 1992 (it plays very similar to what Lost would do with its Desmond character a short time later). These scenes are among the best in the movie - effectively claustrophobic, utilizing tinny acoustics and various cramped angles that lend a greater sense of urgency and dread. And Brody has the perfect eyes for this kind of scene.

In 2007, Starks (or his conscious, or whatever) meets Keira Knightley's character, a bitter, unpleasant alcoholic with emo tendencies, in front of a coffee shop, and hikes a ride with her. He ends up back at her place because he has nowhere else to go, and discovers (by finding his dog tags) that she is the grown up version of the little girl he met on the road back in 1992. He also comes to discover that he is to be murdered on Januray 1, 1993, only a couple of days from the time where he's still laying in the morgue drawer, and so the thrust of the second half of the movie becomes finding out how Brody's character is killed, by who and under what circumstances.

But the movie isn't really a murder mystery, and neither is it really a time travel thriller. It's not even really a romance either, which it basically positions itself as when Brody and Knightley begin sleeping together. I mean it certainly takes all of those elements of the story seriously, at least on its surface, but what does one make of the many obscure seeds and signs of something else entirely afoot that are planted with consistency all throughout? There are way too many of those to tie the movie down into any one particular reading or genre, creating an elusiveness that only adds to the movie's overall oddity. Obviously the prospect of the whole thing being a Jacob's Ladder-like dying fever dream of a man killed in war hangs over the proceedings (an alternate ending on the DVD confirms this), and then there is also the strangest scene in the movie, where Dr. Becker relates to Starks the story of a former patient who raped and strangled a seven year old girl, and convinced the courts he was sick by climbing into the trees and howling after his heinous act. Throughout Becker's story, the camera is intently focused on Kristofferson's mouth and eyes, sometimes laying them over top of each other, giving the story an air of having far more importance to the narrative than it should. Also during the story Starks acts particularly nervous and twitchy, his eyes rolling around in the back of his head as he makes some ambiguous gestures with his hands. Becker's story ends with this line: "I asked Ted then, if he could remember what the little girl he'd slain was wearing. "Oh yes," he said. "I remember it. I remember it well." And in light of this piece of dialogue, perhaps the movie's title makes a little more sense. The vague creepiness that lies behind the idea of Brody's character romancing a girl he befriended when she was a small child comes into focus a little more. It almost seems in this scene that the filmmakers are setting the movie up to be some sort of Lost Highway-esque psychogenic fugue taking place in the head of a man coming to terms with his illness and horrific crimes, but aside from one ominous shot later on when the camera catches Brody peering up at some trees, it's never suggested again. It's simply one of many transient nuggets that exist in the story, present one minute and gone the next, seemingly designed solely to open the movie up to as many interpretations as possible.

Of course this approach means that it's difficult to discern whether the movie actually has anything to say or not, and I'm not sure that it does at all, but at least it manages to offer up some interesting twists and ideas on the genres it's playing with. Late in the movie, some of the pretzel logic that generally accompanies all time travel movies sneaks its way in, and the scene has to do with Starks - still trapped in the morgue drawer in 1992 - confronting Dr. Becker in 2007, determined to learn how he gets murdered. Becker claims to know nothing of how Starks got (or gets) killed, and he in fact only has one sole memory of the man, but it's one that haunts him. The memory is of Starks emerging from the morgue drawer one day and whispering the names of men who Becker had failed to cure during his career. "Well who do you think told me about them?" says Starks to the '07 Becker. "You did. I'm in that drawer right now. You're haunting yourself, old man." It's a haunting exchange and scene, again highlighting only eyes and mouths, and in it the movie offers up one of its most interesting ideas - the notion of time travel not as the opportunity for knowledge or repair or destruction, but as a form of psychological self-abasement.

The Jacket was released in theaters March 4, 2005 to a tepid critical reaction and very poor box office numbers (the other two movies released the same day, Vin Diesel's The Pacifier and the Get Shorty sequel Be Cool, got just as bad if not worse reviews but made boat loads of cash), and quickly faded away into that ever growing belt of unoriginal, processed Hollywood cinema that comes and goes year after year and is all but forgotten about. It's better than that. Whether the movie is at the end of the day a success - that is to say, whether it ultimately amounts to much more than a jumble of intentional ambiguities and half-formed schemes - I'm still not sure. But it's slyly haunting, never uninteresting, and not without ideas. It's nearly equal parts hackneyed trainwreck and pure inspiration, and that alone makes it more interesting than many movies.

Five From A Favorite - Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, 2007)

2011-02-04T16:15:00.001-05:00

Ford & Faces

2011-02-01T08:00:00.015-05:00

Lately I've been working on filling in some holes in my John Ford viewing, which there are sadly way too many of, and one of my most pleasant discoveries yet is his 1933 film Pilgrimage, starring Henrietta Crosman as a crotchety and bitter small town Gold Star mother who makes the titular trek to France to visit the grave of her son who died during combat. It's quite a nifty and frequently enthralling piece of filmmaking, switching modes often and at the drop of a hat, morphing from domestic chamber drama to tragic love story to an overseas comedy of manners to finally becoming a redemption piece, Ford's deft touch and Crosman's endlessly witty performance giving the whole thing a remarkably cogent feel. Aside from the motley narrative, there are plenty of interesting things going on visually in the movie, and in particular I found the opening 15 or so minutes, taking place on Crosman and her son Jim's (Norman Foster) Arkansas farm home, to be the most arresting. Aside from the evident riffs on Murnau that take place, there is an incredibly odd, almost insular bubble-type quality to the way Ford shoots the pair and their neighbors working on the land, as if they are the only humans left on the planet or something.

Anyway, my favorite moment in the film, the one that struck me the most and the one that the three shots above are from, takes place about 20 or so minutes in. Jim, after having already been shipped to war, gets a quick visit with his girlfriend Mary (Marian Nixon) during a brief stop at a train station. Mary reveals that she's pregnant, and Jim pleads with his superiors to give him additional time to go and quickly get married, which he is denied before promptly being wrestled back onto the train. And here the camera cuts to Mary's face as she stands alone on the platform, anxiously watching her lover board the train. He screams out that he's sorry, she screams back not to worry and to write when he can. Neither of them know it will be their last time seeing the other. The camera continues to stay on Mary's face as the commotion reaches a pinnacle, and the train begins to chug. The chugging accelerates, and we can hear the train moving along now, but the camera stays on Mary. She clutches her face and seems overcome with grief - maybe she does know it's the last time they'll see each other. We now hear the train moving along even faster, horn blowing as it shoves off further out from the station, and a weird tension quickly develops because it really feels like the editing should cut to a shot of the train departing, but Ford is relentless, and the camera stays on Mary. Tears have welled up heavily by this point, and just as it reaches an almost unbearable level, the train - way off in the distance by now - toots its horn one more time, as if to give a final goodbye, before Ford finally relieves the suffering with a fade to a war bunker.

Ford's impulse to fix the camera on Mary's face for the entire duration (nearly a whole minute) is brilliant and heartbreaking, elevating into the realm of aching poetry a moment that in the hands of most would serve as mere melodrama. What a scene, what a movie. What a director.

Five From A Favorite - I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

2011-01-29T04:00:00.010-05:00

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As essential a horror film as there could ever be, I Walked with a Zombie is the finest achievement from both legendary producer Val Lewton - whose crop of creepy, atmospheric horror movies produced for RKO Pictures in the 40's have made him an unlikely but enduring icon of the genre - and the great maverick director Jacques Tourneur, whose multi-genre flexibility and impeccable sense of style left behind one of the most overlooked and important bodies of work to come out of the studio system.

Zombie is a rousing triumph in many ways, but perhaps what amazes me most about it is how the elusive nature of the story - which picks up after the most pivotal events have already occurred - is so perfectly mirrored by its pervading atmosphere of heavy gusts and gloomy dimness, remote drums and skies that crackle with that special electricity of a calm before the storm. Narrative and ambience coalesce in a rare way, both elements keeping the viewer at bay from the main event, providing not much more than whipping winds and wisps of suggestion while Tourneur's sublime shadow language and mastery of mood and detail fill in the blanks with pure, poetic dread.

In the Shadows

2011-01-20T16:50:00.001-05:00

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Fuller loved his shadows. Here are two men from two masterpieces - Richard Kiley as the scheming communist boyfriend Joey in Pickup on South Street (1953) and Paul Winfield as the dog trainer Keys in White Dog (1982) - sitting in silence, faces half obscured, riding out the calm before their respective storms.

Five From A Favorite - Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)

2011-01-13T15:50:00.002-05:00

An Index of Primary Colors in Polanski's The Ninth Gate

2011-01-03T02:15:00.010-05:00

The Ninth Gate isn't Roman Polanski's greatest film by any means, but it's certainly one of his most fascinating. Adapted from the novel The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Polanski's film tells the story of duplicitous rare-book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), who is slowly drawn into a dangerous conspiracy involving multiple shadowy parties attempts at recovering the three known copies of Aristide Torchia's book The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, books reputedly authored by the Devil himself that contain the power to summon the supernatural entity when used properly. Not exactly new territory for Polanski, whose previous classics Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant played with similar themes of conspiracy and Devil cults. Gate is for the most part stubbornly ambiguous with its plot and chock full of thoroughly detestable characters, and seemed to turn off most critics and admirers of Polanski, who are content nowadays shrugging off the movie entirely and relegating it to minor status at best.

I have not much interest at this point in defending The Ninth Gate from its detractors; if you buy into the hokum and get on the movie's wavelength, its an enormously fun, sinister, well constructed thriller. But it's quite easy to see how it wouldn't be someones cup of tea, and the fact remains that in some notable respects it doesn't quite stand up to Polanski's more regarded work. What I do want to do here is point out and present (in an admittedly haphazard manner) the movie's most intriguing aspect: Polanski's persistent use of primary colors - those being red, blue, yellow and green - within the context of the rest of the film's dingy, earthy, dry color pallete. To what end are these colors used? Is it simply meaningless stylistic twaddle? Could be, but I doubt it. For a director as compositionally deliberate as Polanski, the colors feel important and thoughtfully placed, and so frequently pop out amongst the typically bland look of the film as to almost beg for further examination. Could the use of these colors be evidence of some deeply encoded aesthetic, a visual skeleton key to be used towards unlocking some of the narrative ambiguities? I would lean more in this direction then towards them being meaningless. Some of the colors are clearly more bound to specific characters/causes, but they also present themselves in entirely discordant manners at times. In short, I don't know what's going on here or what in the world Polanski is up to, but I find it all fascinating and feel compelled to lay it out, unformed thesis and all. So here it is, an index of primary colors used in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate (it should go without saying that major spoilers abound) :

Examples of the predominant, earthy color pallete of The Ninth Gate:

The primary colors Blue, Yellow and Red begin sneaking their way into the frames:

Product placement even gets in on the action:

Notice the sandwich of Yellow and Blue directories on the right of the window sill that sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the abundance of dingy, old-fashioned tomes that make up 'Bernie's Rare Books' :

A close-up a little later:

An echo of the above image, this with time Depp holding a copy of The Nine Gates wrapped in a Yellow cloth, positioned between two earth Blue airplane windows:

Our introduction to Boris Balkan - evil bibliophile and driving force behind Corso's quest to track down all copies of The Nine Gates - begins here in his Blue lecture room . Balkan will be closely linked to the color Blue throughout the movie. An agent of Blue, if you will:

Corso first catches sight of the mysterious character played by Emmanuelle Seigner in Balkan's room, and gets a glimpse of her appropriately Blue socks:

Corso later runs into the Seinger character on a train, and feeling like he's being followed, has a brief exchange with this mysterious, vaguely supernatural person (entity?) of ambiguous origin, who is credited in the movie only as The Girl. The Girl, while physically adorning each notable color at one point or another, is inexorably linked to Green throughout, both in her ever-present green jacket, and her piercing green eyes. "What's your name?" "Guess." "Green eyes?" "That'll do."

Fun with Blue, Red, Lucifer, Death, Fish, Pencils and Sleep:

Corso is trapped in Blue. The Girl's socks are now Red and Green:

Remember what Godard said about there being no blood in his movies, only red? One gets the sense while watching The Ninth Gate that a similar mentality is at work. Since colors exist as an elemental force as much as anything else in this movie, there is no smearing of blood, only the transference of Red:

Shortly after, Corso is nearly run over by a Blue car...

...before The Girl swings by in a bright Red Viper to escort Corso to his next destination...

...a mansion where Liana Telfer (Lena Olin) is heading a satanic ritual using one of the Nine Gate books. Corso observes the Red curtains from the outside before infiltrating the ceremony.

Corso snatches a glance at The Girl, who appropriately enough has located herself near what appears to be the only hint of non-Red decor in the whole joint. Of course it's Green:

Agent of Blue, Boris Balkan (note the dark blue tie, pale blue shirt), breaks up the proceedings, murders Liana, and retrieves his lost book...

...and exits back into the currently Blue-tinged world of the early morning:

Corso, chasing down Balkan, hops on board a livestock vehicle, and though there has been no trace of rain, is met with a perfectly axiomatic rainbow of vibrant primary colors hanging above. The image explains itself better than I ever could:

Corso tracks down Balkan in a secret keep where the Nine Gates must be assembled. The building tinted Blue to reflect its occupant:

That occupancy doesn't last particularly long:

Corso has sex with The Girl, or gives himself to Green:

No escaping now, a quick stop at a gas station proves...

...before walking into, well what exactly? His destiny? His doom? Who's to know. Corso is enveloped by the Golden-Green burst of light. Color as journey. Color as destination. The answer is in the colors: