Three Notes (weekend viewing)

The horror anthology can be a tricky, frustrating subgenre to navigate. The truly great ones are few and far between (and even those are largely more a matter of consistency rather than ingenuity), but the promise inherent in all the others of finding a gem in the rough (a common enough occurrence, in my experience at least) can lead to even the most discerning of horror fans wading through piles of shit in search of a segment smacking of real creativity and ideas, if not out of anything other than the same sense of exploratory pleasure/fervor that any genre adventurer is well acquainted with.

The wraparound is of course an essential ingredient in most worthy anthologies, simultaneously tasked as it is with standing outside of the individual stories and acting as its own mini-narrative, while also providing the context and connective tissue for the tales taking place and, in the best of cases (see: Creepshow, Dead of Night, any of Roy Ward Baker's work for Amicus) establishing the thematic and stylistic trends to be followed. It's not very common that these wraparound framing segments emerge from any given anthology as the highlight, but such is the case with The Theatre Bizarre, a 2011 anthology that I'd been looking forward to for some time given the names involved. It's unfortunately largely terrible, but the framing story, titled "Theatre Guignol" and directed by Jeremy Kasten, is a pretty striking accomplishment: a crazed young lady wanders into a desolate, baroque theatre and becomes the sole audience for a paper-mache Udo Kier, who stands on stage and waxes cryptically on the transformative potentials of fiction. It's a clear homage to the Club Silencio sequence from Mulholland Drive, and even directly apes some of Lynch's mise-en-scene, but is distinctly stylized in its own right (utilizing a mixture of both static shots and jagged handheld, for one) and is able to conjure up its own uneasy sense of mystery, if not quite the same well of deep oneiric emotion achieved in the Lynch. The progression of this framing story - Kier becomes more human as the female audience member takes on his theatre puppet characteristics - relies on the ellipses provided by the other separate stories, but taken as a whole this little film constitutes one of the better horror shorts to roll around in recent memory.

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This Man Must Die (Claude Chabrol, 1969) is a perfect title, clearly and starkly expressing the vengeful mindset that engulfs its protagonist, with the same sense of forceful determination that drives its story ahead. As a dramatist, Chabrol tends towards a lot of open narrative space - his M.O. is generally to establish a milieu and then calmly observe the plots and dualities creep into being. Here however, the inciting incident - a small boy is fatally struck in a hit-and-run - occurs before the title card is even punched onto the screen. The father vows to find his child's murderer, and from there on exists not one sequence that doesn't either up the emotional stakes of the pursuit, or shove it along its course in an almost fatalistic compulsion; it's quite easily the most single-minded film from Chabrol that I've seen to date. One scene in particular suggests the determined tone: the father, leaving the house of the murderer deflated after having his revenge plan foiled, stops off at a restaurant to grab a bite, only to be met by a television with a news reporter who is calling him by name, entreating him to return to the location he's just left. The act of watching television is of course one of the great throughlines in Chabrol's oeuvre, a signifier of empty bourgeois leisure. In this film even the TVs won't let you forget; respite is simply not an option.

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I also watched Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) again this weekend. I saw it in theaters when it originally came out and was impressed, but was surprised to see how well it holds up, and I would even venture to say that it's a significantly better film than my initial viewing suggested. It does everything right that the vastly inferior Moon fell well short of - beautifully paced, formally sharp and on-point, and never allows itself to get swallowed up by its silly ideas and obvious genre antecedents. Instead, rhythm, emotional beats and even bits of poetry are consistently foregrounded as the high concept cogs away in the background, rearing its head only to move us from point A to point B (or, given the film's structural reliance on repetition, point A to point A) but otherwise staying the hell off to the side. There's a real quality of gamesmanship evident in the way Jones doles out pieces of the bigger picture while holding others back, and while something resembling a tension/release pattern emerges from within this flow of information and the way it collides with the more immediate suspense of the happenings on the train, it never feels overly schematic in any way and is almost always carried out with a ruthless, lean efficiency. It's in this way that Source Code feels like something more from the school of Anthony Mann or Richard Fleischer than it does the crop of other Hollywood time travelers or beat-the-clockers released in the past decade.

I was also quite struck this time around by the ending, which played to me originally as something of a cop-out, an unnecessary extension towards conventionality after a darker, more resonant closing point had naturally presented itself minutes earlier. On further reflection though, there is something bold about the way the movie seems to press the parameters of the cliched happy ending, how it must move completely out of the movie we've been watching and jump into an alternate one in order to appropriate the veneer of optimism. It's tonally much more complex than I'd given it credit for, and I'm now not sure I'd change a thing about it. This is a great movie.

Off the wall

There's something kinda beautiful about the way shadows are used in Silver Lode. They're a constant striking presence; not the distorted, oppressive exaggerations of a Nic Ray, but balanced, sharper, given real weight within the frame and often hung in the center, reducing their human counterparts to equivalent compositional elements, like in Tourneur (though more utilitarian than in either of those directors, it should go without saying). Two-shots become three become four as dusky patsies and collaborators and witnesses splinter off from the corporeal main players, all but diminishing the rare moments of privacy afforded by the rather hectic thrust of the narrative.

Opening sequence from Allan Dwan's Driftwood (1947)

Capsule Reviews 5/31/12

The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950) 
The pitfalls of auteurism: no one has much use for Henry King these days it seems, so I've been long content to throw him on the backburner and leave it at that. The Gunfighter has me seriously doubting the merits of that decision. It's a wonderful film, one I'm very sorry to have not seen much earlier, and while there are numerous remarkable things about it, what struck me most on my first (and certainly not last) viewing is simply the delicacy and intelligence with which King depicts realization of the end of a way of life. The way the camera (and thus the world) subtly collapses in and smothers Peck's Ringo between cuts of his confrontations (or what amounts to variations on the same, ceaseless Confrontation); the way Peck's figure is placed contrapuntally in crowded shots that often and quickly disperse, leaving not the image of a lone man but the ghost of a myth, barely tethered to his surroundings. When Peck asks Helen Westcott to run away from it all with him, it registers with so much emotion precisely because it's not the result of some vague, sudden epiphany, but rather the logical endpoint of this series of weary, fleeting impressions, all not so much screaming as whispering this is no way of life. The depth of feeling here is present in nearly every scene, and there's a terse compactness to the way King lays out and maneuvers the geography and population of this contained community that ensures the emotional vibrations of any given moment are constantly spilling over into the next, a quality that reminded me specifically of some of the work Gerd Oswald would do in the genre a little later in the decade.

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Her Man (Tay Garnett, 1930)
In a film that could in a sense be defined by its offhand details and tangential nature, Tay Garnett's dizzying pre-coder starts off with a doozy: a hard luck case (Marjorie Rambeau) is caught ticketless onboard a ship while attempting to sneak into the States and is sent back to Havana, the camera first following only her feet and then finally her full distanced figure in one beautifully sinuous tracking shot as she makes her way through the smoky, stylized Cuban alley corridors before arriving at her destination - a slug of liquor from a gruff bartender who informs her that she "ain't no bargain." All this before the story proper kicks in, which has to do with Helen Twelvetrees (here displaying a saucy, jittery way of throwing her entire body into her words that suggests she learned a thing or two from Jeanne Eagles) running a con racket in this same saloon with her pimp boyfriend, and eventually falling for one of the American sailors who wisens up to her scam.

Like so many early talkies the drama is hindered by the stilted, awkward dialogue delivery, but the camera displays a restless sense of creativity that's consistently exhilarating, prone to experimentation in its static shots (a lie told during a hug in front of a mirror - two isolated faces in an embrace allowed expression within the same frame, animating the power structure of the relationship) just as often as it is bobbing and weaving in and out of the ragged crowds, capturing the behaviors and movements of a particular time and place with an almost blatant disregard for the presence of narrative. Andrew Sarris said that critic Ray Durgnat preferred Her Man to Hawks' similarly themed A Girl in Every Port because of, rather than in spite of, its period sentimentality, and it's an easy position to sympathize with; much as I like the Hawks (and believe me there's no one here to stand toe-to-toe with Louise Brooks), there's a certain richness forsaken in its insulated world that's opened up here by acute attention to detail, such as the protracted swing of the saloon door (a character itself), or the tactililty of the bowler hats everyone wears, constantly being passed around and pulverized and, in the film's funniest bit, rescued instead of its drowning owner. Everything leads to a massive barroom brawl worthy of some choice Walsh pre-coders to come, and then to a traditionally happy ending that manages to subvert itself by returning back to the Rambeau character for the final words, bookending the story with the presence of this almost totally annihilated person and insisting on a sense that within this loose, playful atmosphere lies something of a prison.

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My Name Is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945)
Nina Foch emerges from the proto-Gun Crazy rain of the introduction and reads a letter from the one that got away, is then hired for a non-existent job by a crazed bourgeois household and is systematically stripped of her identity and molded to take the place of a dead person. Names like Mankiewicz and Penn would years later take the essential ideas here and refashion them with campy excess and melodramatic trappings to varying degrees of success, but Lewis's effort is the real deal: swift, sharp and sinister to the core. A carousel of hoax spaces and harsh negations (a suffocating pattern emerges in the editing where Foch's reactionary expressions of pure terror are stamped on-camera just long enough to register before being brutally snuffed out by a fade or dissolve) that conjoin with the mercurial logic of the narrative and pronounced expressionism to produce an anxious nightmare on par with anything an Ulmer or Brahm were churning out at the time, and a sopping, rocky beach climax points the way towards many later Lewis denouements that almost ritualistically careen into the hallucinatory. While the director would go on in future films to tackle bigger, more topical themes and develop a more sophisticated formal touch, Julia Ross can stand next to any of them in terms of raw verve and the forcefulness of its vision - which is I guess a way of me saying that despite its undeniable comparative slightness this very well might be my favorite Lewis to date.

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Unlawful Entry (Jonathan Kaplan, 1992)
I wasn't surprised by a recent and long overdue rewatch of Jonathan Kaplan's '92 thriller to find that I still liked it; what did surprise me was to discover a much more frustrating, frustrated and complex film than the one I remembered. It'd be tough off the top of my head to point to many films more exemplary of the conditions forged from the head-on collision between imposed commercial conventionality and an arsenal of deeper artistic impulses. Which is to say that before Unlawful Entry decides in its second half to be merely another relatively well executed entry in that momentarily flourishing late-80s/early-90s subgenre we'll dub the Obsessive Terrorizer (see: Fatal Attraction, Pacific Heights, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female, etc. etc.), it is something far more brooding and difficult and could be called, in spots at least, one of the great films Nic Ray never made. The key to the excellence of the first hour (or so) is the balance Liotta's performance strikes between mounting instability and the intense, quiet sadness from which it springs (and really there isn't enough praise for Liotta in this section of the film; suffice it to say he's one of my favorite actors and this is right up there with his greatest work). It's an undeniably grey shaded character during this time - a cop who reeks of genuine loneliness but whose penchant for poor decisions and reprehensible violence ensure he'll never find or hold onto the intimacy he seeks (needless to say Robert Ryan would have slayed this role) - and the film is all the more fascinating for it.

The culmination of this opening half comes in a superb night club sequence set to Rozalla's moving house anthem "Everybody's Free", a first true stand-off between Kurt Russell and Liotta that toys with identification and emotional depths in ways that other Obsessive Terrorizers - whose baddies are almost always portrayed as essentially abstract entities with the psychological complexity of a rock - would never do. There's a real sadness coursing through this sequence, in what it seems to tell us about Liotta's character merely through looks, but also a non-diegetic sadness at watching a movie reach a point where it can no longer be what it wants to be. After this excellent and emotionally intricate scene you can literally feel a producer mash his Thriller 101 emergency button; the next thing shown is Liotta with a textbook psycho-glaze in his eyes beating up a hooker and, soon after, murdering a fellow cop, and with that all of the nuances evaporate in an instant; the character's previous deeper yearning for what seemed like a more communal companionship is twisted into a purely malevolent sexual obsession towards Madeleine Stowe which quickly becomes the driving force. And while this second half works fine enough as a potent study of pure helplessness in the face of corrupt, abusive power (Rosenbaum called it "an excellent corrective to the shameless celebrations of LA police power and brutality in Lethal Weapon 3"; that's to say the least), the awkward and curt shift from the complex earlier dynamics to those more black-and-white and palatable for the masses is quite lamentable, and ultimately what we're left with is an unfortunate case of a very good film threatening to burst at the seams with a truly great one.

It's in the eyes

Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) from The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and Prof. Lodz (Patrick Bauchau) from HBO's Carnivale