Bowen’s Cinematic

The scenario, of a successful black executive (Idris Elba, who deserves better, he makes stability charismatic) hounded by a knockout white temp (Ali Larter), who threatens both his job and marriage to beautiful wife (Beyoncé Knowles) is promising; but Obsessed somehow manages to dodge even accidentally satirical reverberations. This picture has been likened to Fatal Attraction, but that movie, as well as others such as Play Misty for Me and the infinitely superior Audition, is a morally gray sex anxiety tale that implicates the husband (until the deservedly disliked, immoral finale) – it’s about taking what you shouldn’t and getting what you fear you deserve. Obsessed is of the typically less interesting “Blank from Hell” variety, in which the hero is usually morally spotless and faces a threat from nowhere, usually a manifestation of his fantasies/fears as his life shifts to the next socially obligatory gear. We could use a good, nasty/funny thriller about the presumption that racism croaked somewhere when we weren’t looking sometime over the last twenty years, and Obsessed, with the “from Hell” template, could’ve gone there: pinching the sexual assumptions of our certain fantasies of other races, or of the political swimming of the one black man in the comfy, glib white office, or of the trophy fair black wife, once the exec’s assistant (a nice implicative touch that goes nowhere), now alone and bored with child in new empty home. Obsessed is, creepily, scrubbed of any loose screws or subtext, it’s inhumanly rigid and bland, and doesn’t even do much with the shallow surface conventions of the material (and it never recovers from taking the temp out of the office, where we assume she’ll be the biggest danger). We expect several other stereotypes and tropes to deliver at least cheap jolts: the gay confidant, the horny best friend, the vulnerable child, a drugged drink – but they dangle, unfulfilled. Beyoncé has a potentially excessive jealousy streak that doesn’t matter, and the inevitable Larter/Knowles catfight, which we assume will be our reward for 90+ minutes of smooth, pointless diddling around, is a disappointing, puny nonevent. If Obsessed is progressive at all, it’s in the implication that interracial movies are as entitled to boring, please-all impersonality as predominantly white thrillers.

It’s tempting to underestimate the task of making an Elmore Leonard novel, which is nearly always driven almost entirely by dialogue, a movie. He essentially wrote a script to begin with right? Right and wrong; Leonard, maybe the most purely enjoyable great writer working, is trickier than he may at first seem. Leonard’s work moves like greased lightning, but there’s pit stops and diversions and room for plenty of bullshitting (his books are life disguised as genre); and those elements tend to conflict with one another in a movie – you either have to go with the pace or the bullshit. More recently, (Leonard has been inspiring movies for fifty years) the Get Shorty movie went with the pace, and would’ve gotten away with it too if it hadn’t sanded the characters’ viciousness down for a cartoon-balloon effect. Leonard’s characters are funny, but in an offhand, incidental way, to get that humor, and the malevolence, you need to keep the bullshit. Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s film of Rum Punch, comes pretty damn close; but, in closely heeding the bullshit quality, he loses the Leonard pace – the picture, which I love, dawdles, and plays more like Tarantino (who has taken as much from Leonard as any of the European directors critics name). The movie of Out of Sight comes closest – written by Scott Frank, of Get Shorty, and directed by Steven Soderbergh, who keeps the thing moving, keeps the violence, and allows the characters the wrinkles and contradictions that seem so natural and effortless in Leonard’s books.

The easiest way to totally the miss the point of a Leonard book is too strip-mine it for plot. Plot, which Leonard casually subverts all the time, is beside the point – he writes comedies of manners, where failing to read the signs and be hip to the scam and lingo get you killed. I don’t know how much the new-to-DVD Killshot, which has been delayed and monkeyed with for four odd years, represents director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and screenwriter Hossein Amini’s intentions, but the end result is the worst kind of way to miss the point: it’s competent, well-meaning, and dry as a bone. Even the movie of Be Cool, which is as embarrassing as you’ve heard, at least has some sort of train-wreck quality that could almost be called energy. Killshot is a polite USA network movie that hits most of the book’s plot beats in a tidy, ninety minutes and fades. If you do something somewhat stressful after watching it – yoga, a phone call, clipping your nails – you might forget you’ve ever seen it. The cast – Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Thomas Jane, Diane Lane, Rosario Dawson and Mickey Rourke – stranded without any detectable sensibility behind the camera – falls back on their convenient, water-proof personas. Gordon-Levitt does the livid, Ben Foster, method-alien psycho routine that young actors favor in these sorts of movies – it’s his worst work. Thomas Jane and Diane Lane are husband-n-wife in peril, no more, possibly less. Rosario Dawson, whose character, in the book, bed-hopped between the Rourke and Gordon-Levitt characters, is a cheerless casualty here – Leonard has never been this stingy with character. Rourke? He does that autopilot version of neo-Rourke: every line pregnant with penance, studliness, and droop-doubt – he, even in off stuff, which this most certainly is, could make an instance of eating Cheerios more absurd, and dangerous, than the entirety of this Killshot.

There’s a moment that pops up about half-way through Tell No One that had me laughing – a little giddy at what I was buying into. Our hero, Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet), having recently come to suspect that his long thought dead or missing wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) may, in fact, be neither, breaks into a sprint – something occurs to him, and it has something to do with hearing U2’s “With or Without You”. The co-writer-director Guillaume Canet allows the song to play through, and we watch as Alex runs toward a computer lab – his years of desperate longing giving way to a bit of hope. Why don’t more pictures acknowledge how we catalogue our lovers with pop music? How we relive our loves with pop music? No other medium quite serves the same function – we, of course, can remember our past heartbreaks with film and books and so forth – but there’s something intangibly purer in popular music. Perhaps it has something to do with our love of movies after all – they’ve conditioned us to soundtrack our lives – to rationalize pain with, usually, the most banal distractions available. Tell No One, for the four or five minutes that U2 is allowed to comment, gets at this confusion, this pain, this search for comfort -in a funny, loose, relaxed way. And the scene has been, for the better part of the past hour, built to beautifully. Alex has been in a funk – morose, yet touchingly un-self-pitying, and we see how this macabre adventure has ironically allowed him to bloom again.

Cluzet is terrific in a role that’s trickier than it may appear to be. Cluzet has the every-man at the wrong place at the wrong time role; the helpless, at the mercy of everyone else in the movie kind of role that can be thankless, or dull. Or, if trusted to a superstar, unbelievable – stars normally have too much ego to convincingly convey desperation, or helplessness, or pity – they must continue to prove they have the biggest cock in the room, regardless of the circumstances. Cluzet manages to be convincing and charismatic; commanding, yet dialed down and average enough to allow for pathos – but in a graceful way. Cluzet gets our sympathy because, as the saying goes, he doesn’t ask for it. But Cluzet isn’t even self-conscious about not asking for our sympathy. Cluzet is a new generation Hitchcock hero – an everyman without the irony of the everyman being played by a God – such as Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Tell No One derails just as you totally give yourself over to it, but I wouldn’t dream of advising you to skip it. Our thrillers are generally so impersonal and divorced from any interior drive that one performance, and one true poppy-flakey moment, has to qualify as at least a partial success – even if these filmmakers seem to always insist in getting in their own way.

De Palma’s great thrillers are great because they understand (even if the audiences don’t) why audiences actually seek them out – that resolutions are beside the point. We seek empathy; we want something that connects to our inner drives in a down-home way. We want something to rile us up and get us tittery – laughing at the human acknowledgement that we’re all, more or less, scared and turned on by the same things. We don’t need complicated resolutions because that’s just shallow justification – mechanics that were dreamed up seemingly long ago, but that serve no logical function. George Sluizer’s original The Vanishing remains one of the greatest horror pictures ever made because it understood that the truest explanation is the simplest, the most obvious and boring, or that there isn’t an explanation. David Lynch understands that resolution only dampens the mood – perhaps too well, he sometimes ties himself in knots trying to clear himself of the obligation; but Sluizer pulled a far more organic hat-trick – he turned the yearning for explanation into the ultimate black kick of his picture – he punished his hero for trying to cook up something where there’s nothing to cook.

I go on about this because I’m not really interested in recalling the proper plot of Tell No One. I’ll give you a hint – imagine watching the first half of The Vanishing on TV, and then having your cable box go out. You manage to turn it on again, only to get the wrong channel, The Vanishing having, at an instant, given way to some sort of ludicrous, labored, John Grisham-flavored conspiracy thriller. Grisham, as dull as his novels and pictures tend to be, at least bothers to pave the way for his revelations as he goes. Canet doesn’t have the storytelling instincts for that, he trips up (he may have felt too obligated to the Harlan Coben novel that’s inspired him). The missing/dead wife’s disappearance has something to do with her job, and, for the life or me, I don’t think I was aware of her occupation until it was introduced as the Explanation for Everything That Has Transpired. Canet, after a brisk first half, gets bogged down in the introduction of one expository character after another, and One Big Explanation doesn’t suffice, we hear parts of it over and over. The picture becomes so unwieldy that I wondered for a moment if Canet was, perhaps, working toward the kind of resolution that was briefly in vogue a few years ago – the kind of ploy that would cancel two-thirds of the picture out as merely Alex’s grieve-stricken fever dream. I normally don’t go for that (it worked in Mulholland Dr. – beautifully) but it would have given Canet, and us, an out.

There is an unintended poignancy to the sloppiness of Canet’s construction. Tell No One has, even in its shakier passages, a consistence – that empathy that we seek from thrillers. Tell No One has a fragile, completely un-post-modern quality, the picture captures grief; and its ultimate, regrettable, absurdity only reinforces the strength of the picture’s relation to its hero. Tell No One feels like the film Cluzet watched to soothe himself the night after he lost his wife – to loose himself in mechanics. You damn near buy the ending in spite of yourself, because Canet and Cluzet have poked through the rules of rationality we use as our defenses against nonsense. Simply, you want Cluzet to find her.

Bart and Annie have one of the best meet cutes that I’ve encountered in the noir. Bart (John Dall) tall, handsome, but withheld and gawky, hits the carnival with a couple of friends to blow off a little steam after back to back stints in reform school and the army (I think I’d want to blow off more steam than a carnival could accommodate, but to each his own I suppose). The opening, awkwardly, establishes that Bart had a habit of letting his childhood obsession with firearms run away with him, but the Army, it would seem at least, has straightened him out and given him the kind of structure that the institution tends to claim is best for troubled adolescents.

That is until Bart gets a load of the appropriately named Annie Starr (Peggy Cummings), who shoots like Annie Oakley and very definitely resembles a star. After a few demonstrations, Annie’s announcer challenges the audience to a shoot-off with the Starr. Bart, transfixed, allows his friends to nudge him up unto the stage. Annie, clad in full rear-hugging cowgirl regalia which she compliments with a little Catholic school girl smile that barely disguises her naughty thoughts (the content of these thoughts representing the chief misunderstanding between men and women in the noir, men think it signals angry sex, women know it to actually be active fantasizing of ill gotten gains) is quite a sight as she blazes through her targets, but its Bart’s reaction to Annie that turns the scene on.

Many men of the noir are stupid, sexist pigs that get exactly what they deserve; Bart is more of an innocent. The trouble we’ve seen him get into so far has only been about a childish urge to possess that didn’t involve any harm, and he looks at Annie in the same way. He needs to have those feverish, pistol firing hands on him, but, and this is key, he actually likes her, is even in awe of her. Annie, of course, initially sees Bart, and thinks “schmuck”. The poignance of Annie and Bart’s first scene, and still yet another part of the turn-on, is that Bart would readily agree with Annie’s assessment of him…until he picks up the pistols for himself and beats Annie on her own turf. The carnal heat of this scene is considerable, but it also carries something more innocent, the fantasy of not only bedding the forbidden woman but being simpatico with her.

And so, inevitably, after a short courtship of sex and needling for money, Annie talks Bart into going along with a plan that she’s always had in the back of her mind, which, to me, bore a strong resemblance to your garden variety stick-up, though perhaps I’m blind to some intimate subtlety. Bart has one condition, and that’s that they absolutely do not kill anybody. Whether Annie violates this rule or not I’ll leave for you to discover but with a film called Gun Crazy I’m only giving you one guess.

Like The Narrow Margin, Gun Crazy is a scrappy, fast, surprisingly modern thriller. Director Joseph H. Lewis (working from a script co-written by an aliased Dalton Trumbo) makes the most of his clearly low budget, capturing the heists in immediate, hand held camera work that works in fleeting suggestion, feeding the audience just what they need and leaving the rest unsaid. The most effective bank robbery in the film, tellingly, doesn’t even show any of the bank robbery, just Annie’s mounting anxiety as she finds herself leaving the getaway car to distract a cop at the last tangible moment.

Gun Crazy even more notably withholds the judgment that was a prerequisite in crime films at the time. As in Bonnie and Clyde (and over fifteen years earlier to boot), the film has an uncomfortable empathy with its heroes, despite the innocent people who die (sorry), as Bart points out, “so we don’t have to work.” Cummings and Dall paint an interesting, more realistic than usual for the genre portrait of a relationship that swings back and forth like a pendulum, changing roles in a way that actual couples might recognize.

Bart initially plays the patsy as we expect, but the heists key into his meticulous, introverted nature, and bring something out in him. Annie thinks she’s the boss, but her hot head would be nowhere without Bart, and, by the middle of the film, she recognizes that. There’s a moment toward the end when Bart and Annie agree to separate, wait a few months, and then reunite with the cash. I resigned myself to Annie’s inevitable betrayal but the film surprised me, the lovers don’t even make it to the end of the road before reuniting. Bart’s mind, quicksilver trigger finger, and unyielding devotion have melted this intimidating blonde force of destruction. At the end, lying in an atmospheric, perfectly foggy swamp, Bart says that he’s happy; it’s a testament to the strange, convincing pulp power of Gun Crazy that I believed him.

★★★½

We’ve somehow managed to initiate an informal “dangers on a train” mini-marathon here at Bowen’s Cinematic. Earlier in the month we covered Hitchcock’s peerless The Lady Vanishes, yesterday we looked at The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and so today is The Narrow Margin, the noir classic directed by genre veteran Richard Fleischer. The film’s box (courtesy of TCM Noir Set Vol. 2) actually likens Margin to Lady and it’s a testament to Fleischer and screenwriter Earl Felton’s work here that that comparison isn’t laughable, the two pictures would, in fact, make an ideal double bill.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, The Lady Vanishes is a parfait: a light, masterful medley of tones. The Narrow Margin, on the other hand, is a big, gooey, probably under-baked chocolate brownie that really needs milk to properly dislodge from the throat. Both are delicious, but pleasurable in altogether different ways. Hitchcock’s film is graceful, The Narrow Margin is lean and merciless, a disarmingly blunt, nearly flawless thriller.

By minute five of Margin, we know the good guy, Det. Sgt. Brown (veteran Charles McGraw), the reluctant heroine, Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor) and the task at hand, which is to get Mrs. Neall on a train to Los Angeles so she can testify against several of her dead husband’s associates. By minute twelve we’ve killed the good guy’s partner (obligatory even in the 1950s) and shoved the good guy and heroine aboard the train, which, needless to say, contains a few boarders that aren’t so sympathetic to Neal and Brown’s plight.

The remaining hour (totaling a svelte 71 minutes) is pure gravy: narrow escapes, double crosses, and red herrings. Charles McGraw is an ideal embodiment of square-jawed, incorruptible valor, the sort of Dick Tracy-Joe Friday thing that I normally have trouble relating to (they generally strike me as the sort that were bullies as kids, or Republicans as adults). McGraw gets around that, I think, because the film successfully stacks the deck: Brown’s odds are so laughably horrible as to render his determination poignant, even naive. Another key to Brown’s unexpected appeal is McGraw’s wonderful voice, that nothing new to the genre gravel cut with a slight, barely tangible, withheld pain: maybe Brown stepped on a tack before showing up for work that day.

The film’s humor humanizes Brown too, repeatedly scoring points off his self-righteousness. Mrs. Neall isn’t played as a clueless tramp, as many pictures would, she gets some good chewy tough girl dialogue, and McGraw, spittle nearly visible, throws it right back at her. There’s no heat in the movies like that great no-budget, 1950s noir heat, and Fleischer doesn’t go and ruin it by having his characters fuck.

Fleischer’s film is also a remarkable work of common sense, there is one great scene, toward the end, that finds a bad guy cornering a woman in her room and about to shoot the lock off. Many films, even good films, would have the bad guy blow the lock away without giving it the slightest of thoughts. THIS bad guy, however, looks around, sighs, realizes he can’t fire a weapon in a cramped train without stirring chaos, and instead appeals to the boy’s curiosity in the room next door.

The proper climax of the picture that follows a few minutes later is just as ingenious: Brown, powerless for the first time in the picture and still thrown from a clever twist earlier in the film, finds himself having to finally rely on the kind of person he thought he detested, and on the kind of fate he thought didn’t exist. Who knew a tired “don’t judge a book by its cover” sound bite could go down this good? You can’t tell me Hitchcock didn’t see it and, when no one was looking, didn’t smile.

★★★½

Being a movie enthusiast (I’ve always disliked the term “film buff”; that sounds as if I’m assembling model planes in the garage) requires, like anything else, dedication that isn’t immediately apparent to those on the sidelines. It takes a bit of time to be able to bore a girl at the coffee shop (that is unless you actually MAKE movies, then the tables are turned). I loved what Quentin Tarantino said, I think, in a commentary track for True Romance, filmmakers have their films, movie enthusiasts, or geeks, have their knowledge, which, if I may add, they defend with the fervor of a knight approaching his joust.

Movie geeks, assuming I rate as one and can comment, go through stages of intense consumption of genres and filmmakers, suddenly they need to know everything they can find about X, preferably before the week ends. That task is impossible of course, no one knows everything about everything, or anything, but that quest stands as the constant, elusive windmill of the movie geek, particularly a movie geek in his twenties, an age group that has its demands of insecure pursuit of self-improvement anyway, regardless of target interest.

My recent insecure pursuits of self-improvement have been Jean-Luc Godard, motivated by the recent release of Pierrot le fou; Ridley Scott, inspired by the recent Blade Runner, and crime/noir in general, aided immeasurably by the wonderful boxed sets produced by TCM (and thank whomever you believe in for TCM, have you watched AMC lately? Spike TV plays more legitimate films these days).

Here’s a recent example of my crime/noir investigation: I watched a very slim, dangerous, terrific Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger and Born to Kill, which prompted yet another viewing of Reservoir Dogs (been on a Tarantino bender lately too, as you no doubt guessed). The criminals of Reservoir Dogs‘ use of colors as aliases reminded me, alas, that I had never seen The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

This brings us to the proper point of this post. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a heist picture set in New York in which four hoods decide to steal the titular subway train. The hoods, with refreshing lack of pomp and circumstance, take over the train, disconnect it, keep eighteen of the passengers as hostages, and radio back to the station demanding that they be given one million dollars in non-sequential bills for their trouble. If the City of New York doesn’t comply, then the passengers will be executed, one for every minute over the hour deadline.

We know how this picture works. The good guys huff and puff, and try to stall the bad guys. The bad guys, cool, collected and merciless, hold tough on their specifications. Most of the good guys are clueless baboons, with the exception of the First Star, just as most of bad guys are vicious, clueless hotheads, with the exception being, of course, the Second Star. But we can’t make that deadline, the good guys usually say. Then everyone’s going to die, the bad guys usually counter.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is as pulpy and crude as it sounds, and thirty years of rip-offs haven’t increased its novelty. For awhile, the irritating, ceaseless Neil Simon-ish back and forth threatens to steer the viewer’s sympathies toward the psychopath of the piece, Mr. Blue. Mr. Blue may be attempting something unforgivable, but, at least he doesn’t assert his clichéd New York lout entitlement every second of the picture. For one thing, he’s British, which would probably make him suspect enough for the majority of the occupants of the subway control station, whom we’re supposed to be rooting for.

Saving us from ironically cheering immorality is Walter Matthau, whose contributions to this film should not be under-estimated. I hear that Tony Scott is preparing a remake with (who else?) Denzel Washington. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Denzel can be a terrific actor but, by this point, he might as well be Superman. We don’t look at Denzel and wonder whether he was able to pay his taxes last year, or if he had trouble getting coffee stains out of his blazer (that he probably wears to work everyday). We don’t look at Denzel and hope that he’s able to make his alimony payment this month. We look at Denzel and we say “that’s a fucking bad ass.” And that’s perfect for certain pictures, you’ll never hear me saying that Walter Matthau should’ve played Denzel’s part in Training Day, but in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Walter Matthau is perfect. Tony Scott should cast Paul Giamatti in the Matthau part, that would show that he understands (or cares about) the material that he’s remaking.

We root for Walter Matthau because Walter Matthau doesn’t belong; he isn’t the guy that we imagine handling a ruthless hostage imbroglio. He’s the guy that sneaks a beer at lunch, or is entrusted with thankless chores such as giving a tour of the station to a group of Japanese visitors. He, like us, just wants to get. the. fuck. along. But then Mr. Blue, embodied by an intimidating, classic Robert Shaw, happens to screw everything up.

The film carries on exactly as you expect from there. Director Joseph Sargent doesn’t seem to have much in the way of finesse, but he at least has the good manners to move things along at an urgent clip so that you don’t notice too much. The script is showy and irritating, but that’s all forgotten when Shaw or Matthau are on the screen. These two icons lend the final showdown a human gravity that drives the thing into the realm of true suspense; you’re authentically afraid for the undeniably vulnerable, human, Matthau as he delves down into the subway to find Shaw, who has a wonderful, chilling, unexpectedly curt exit.

Actually, Denzel’s intimidating, suffer no fools bravado/resentment could make for a credible Mr. Blue opposite a hunched, self-loathing Paul Giamatti. Though I will have to cross-reference thirty or forty various Tony Scott, Joseph Sargent, Paul Giamatti, Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau offerings and get back to you before I can safely commit to that line of thinking.

★★★

Alfred Hitchcock is obviously an institution, part of the essentials, the canon, and, as such, subject to a certain reverse underrating. Yeah, yeah, Hitch is great, we learned that in Elementary school and have moved on to other filmmakers of greater ambition and less tangibility. I’m probably prone to the “yeah, yeah, yeahs” sometimes myself; uninspired, who gives a shit Hitch can be tedious and impersonal, but Hitchcock at his top-tier, full throttle best, is still one of the great pleasures of the cinema. The Lady Vanishes, recently released by Criterion in a nice double disc, is a reminder of this basic truth. No one that I’ve encountered can deliver the same smooth blend cocktail best of a prime Hitchcock comedic-thriller-mystery.

Truthfully, with the exception of a few films such as Vertigo and Rear Window, even good Hitch films feel relatively impersonal. Compare him with his most frequent cover artist Brian De Palma; De Palma’s films, even usually the frequently God awful ones, are intense and feverish, they feel NECESSARY, they have to exist for their creator to continue walking down the street and drinking coffee and breathing and fucking.

Hitch’s films feel like a particularly macabre tea party, a bunch of geezers wondering what it would be like if a finger appeared in their cucumber sandwich. I’m not being disrespectful, Hitch knows this, Hitch relishes this and Hitch has even inserted variations of that scenario into his films (look at the famous near strangulation in Strangers on a Train). Hitchcock’s great films are (usually) Art of a different key, they are Art not (again usually not always) in their personality or their reveal, they are Art because they are restrained, brilliant, couldn’t be better examples of the form, the thriller. Hitchcock elevates the thriller to the level of Kabuki.

The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest examples of this idea, Hitchcock shifts tones in the film like a particularly smooth stick shift (he had indeed already been directing pictures for thirteen years at this point). The film opens in a railroad station/hotel somewhere in a purposefully vague European country, I didn’t catch the name at all, but the IMDB reveals it to be the fictional Bandrika, a land much beloved by the quaint looking, courtly, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty). Miss Froy strikes up a conversation with two very British gentlemen, Caldicot (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford). Caldicot and Charters are bent out of shape because the train to England has been delayed and they are at risk of missing an important cricket match. Miss Froy is sad to be leaving her beloved Bandrika.

Meanwhile, (yes, it’s that kind of movie), Iris (Margaret Atwood), a privileged young lady about to be married, gets into a scuttle with the lodger above her, Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) over the noise he’s making trying to record some obscure national folk song. She bribes the manager to have him thrown out, he retaliates by bunking in her room and refusing to leave until she bribes the manager to have him un-thrown out. Meanwhile again, Miss Froy, who has the room next to Iris, listens to music by a lone musician just outside her window. That is until the musician is strangled and hidden without her knowledge. In a typical Hitch touch, she tosses a coin as a tip, only to have it land on a deserted street corner.

The film is 95 minutes long, and it takes the better part of thirty of those minutes to get these and other characters on the train that I thought dominated the picture. The pleasure of the first third is the openness, the possibility of it. Hitchcock is known for the rigid planning of every shot, but The Lady Vanishes feels alive and human; funny in an uncalculated way. The first thirty minutes could just as easily be the beginning of an It Happened One Night style romance, and the ingenuity and pleasure of the film is that it never totally ISN’T that.

Then we get on the train to Britain, and Hitchcock begins to pile on the little bits that have made him a legend. I love the hum of the kind of picture that does this right: introducing a collection of seemingly desperate details and anecdotes that will have a very clear importance sometime before the final reel. As the film slips further into the second act, we notice that a very clear chill has entered the air, and that the fantastic is about to intrude. A magician shows his son a disappearing trick: POOF! A woman loses her glasses. An adulterous couple discuss the need to stay hidden in their compartment. The creepiest though is Froy and Iris’s tea; the last time they see one another before one of them disappears. Iris tells Froy her name, but a whistle goes off just as Froy tries to tell her her name. Froy responds by writing “FROY” in the condensation on the window. The next morning a woman is gone, but no one on the train seems to remember her being there to begin with.

I won’t spoil whether the lady existed or didn’t, disappeared or didn’t, but Hitchcock manages to continually ratchet the tension and the comedy to the point that we totally believe that a train could be re-routed and train-napped at the drop of a coin, and that a remarkably laid back shoot-out would be unavoidable should that situation arise. The explanation is satisfyingly creepy, absurd, and just vague enough (like many Hitchcock Macguffins) that we don’t really think about it too much.

In case you’re in risk of taking Hitchcock’s low throb ease with tone for granted, watch the Jodie Foster picture Flightplan. That film is a re-working of the “someone disappearing in a confined area” story that drives The Lady Vanishes, and is actually better than I thought it would be…for the first half. Flightplan plays, cannily for a while, on the “is it real” principle, working in a bit of parenting guilt to further up the creeps. The film is effective for a while, but the resolution is silly and needlessly convoluted. I didn’t realize until a day or two later that The Lady Vanishes is just as silly, but the particular grace and wit of Hitchcock’s slight of hand makes all the difference.

★★★★

Director James Wan (of Saw and Dead Silence) can never be accused of taking his time. The foreboding uh-ohs of his newest, Death Sentence, come fast and furious. We open on home videos of a family cuddling and bonding in a way that never happens outside of The Wonder Years. The dad (Kevin Bacon) talks about the future with his Promising Son. The dad has an Ironic For This Genre occupation (risk assessment) where he one day carelessly remarks that all things make sense in the world. That last one was a major, major UH-OH.

A few minutes later, the father and son are driving around in the city where they run out of gas and have to stop by Thunderdome to refill. The son’s throat is slit, and Bacon’s world is thrown topsy-turvey, and a typically careless legal system has nothing but jargon and compromise to offer. The catch here is that Bacon successfully offs the scum in question by about minute twenty. The scum happened to be the brother of even bigger scum though, and Bacon soon finds himself collar deep in urban warfare.

No one who thinks seriously about movies seems to like the Saw movies, but I admired the ingenuity of the first picture. James Wan and his writer Leigh Whannell managed to make a not quite competent Seven rip-off for a million bucks and ten days of shooting time, and got their feet in the door of industry in the process. The result may be questionable, but to have accomplished that at all is a bit of a feat. Dead Silence, their second picture released earlier in 2007, had an admirable Universal Horror fetish going on and little else.

Death Sentence, Wan’s third picture, and first without Whannell, works on its own terms. Yes, the script is absurd. Yes, Wan is still a show-off, turning every other scene into an elaborate CG assisted pan through some inanimate object (he’s still riffing on Fincher, without any of the finesse or much of the ambition.) Yes, the film is lit in such a way as to make The Crow look subtle. But the film has a blunt power, and that’s because Wan has an actor who can dive into the genre without compromising himself or looking sheepish.

Kevin Bacon is consistently underrated, and I think it’s because he’s too convincing exploring that coiled, bitter fuck you intensity that he does so well. There’s nothing self-conscious, or actorly about an angry, scary Kevin Bacon character: he’s angry, he’s scary, and he’ll blow your head off when provoked. He’s polishing a gun, not a mantel piece, and his work has consistently elevated films that would otherwise be forgettable. Check out his psycho in The River Wild if you haven’t already. The film plays things way too safe, but Bacon, Streep and Strathairn are a testament to what good acting can do for a just ok picture. Also watch Bacon’s work in Mystic River. He was the only of the three traumatized characters NOT to get awards recognition, and he was the only one I actually believed.

And you believe Bacon here when he morphs from accountant to Travis Bickle Rambo at the drop of a hat. You believe his indestructability because you find it impossible to believe that a man that enraged would allow himself to die. That’s absurd of course, but that’s the kind of logic you need to enjoy Death Sentence, and I did enjoy Death Sentence. Wan also, after three pictures, finally pulls off a legitimately exciting, suspenseful set piece. It begins when the gang spots Bacon and pursues him on foot through a crowded neighborhood, and ends in a brutal battle on a multi-level parking garage. Bacon soon finds himself shaving his head and ending the feud because Wan can’t resist cramming in a Taxi Driver rip-off. The film, after countless bloodless thrillers, is refreshingly nasty, with a still hypocritical but more convincing than you’d expect anti-revenge tang.

★★★