1974 « Bowen’s Cinematic

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6.

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Watching Jeff Bridges shamble, bearded and bellied, through Crazy Heart a month or so ago reminded me of Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which in turn reminded me of one of the most beautifully “right” song placements in director Martin Scorsese’s career: of Alice (Ellen Burstyn) and her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter III) driving down the road listening to Elton John’s “Daniel” on the car radio. I had remembered this as traditional shorthand: of a pop song emphasizing a moment of quiet empowerment for characters that were, until this point, stuck. It turns out that I had remembered it somewhat incorrectly, as Scorsese was a little more original and truthful: alternating between silent medium and long shots of the lonely, quiet, desert road and close shots in the car with the song playing. Most directors would allow us a more omnipotent perspective so we could seamlessly enjoy the song betweens cuts, but the jarring, disruptive stop-n-start of “Daniel” says quite a bit with just a little: these two are on the road, but aren’t escaping anything – with the little, every day banalities of life such as traveling with a bored child all but inescapable.

There are all sorts of touches like this in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which is basically a 1940s/1950s “women’s picture” with a current of shaggier 1970s irresolution. The sensibilities shouldn’t cohere, but Scorsese and writer Robert Getchell (who would write the 1990s update of Stella) are unusually playful – their characters are notably weird oddballs bouncing off of one another. The picture follows the 1940s/1950s scheme – mother suffers a number of bad men (usually for the child) until finding (or not finding) the right one – but lets human bits bleed through. Those older pictures – which had a habit of featuring Stanwyck or Crawford or Davis – usually reflected a guilty man’s view of women: as saints. Burstyn was a guiding presence on Alice though, and she gives the picture a less condescending dimension (until the end): her Alice is allowed to be eccentric too. (I love how she twists a line that goes somewhere to the effect of “Don’t be rude to your mother who just bought you a cheeseburger.”)

Alice is primarily a duet between Burstyn and Lutter, and it’s to the picture’s credit that Tommy is one of the most realistic, and authentically irritating, children I’ve ever seen in a movie. Tommy isn’t troubled, he’s troubled, an intelligent boy lashing out; shaken by the discovery that life is flawed, dangerous, capable of upturning. Alice and Tommy play out a routine frequent to broken families – they treat one another as buddies, confidants, making matters of discipline confusing – you can tell Alice doesn’t buy her orders any more than Tommy. (There’s a wonderful, telling line from Tommy near the end of the picture, in reference to his friend played by Jodie Foster: “She’s not mature, she’s nice.”)

There are memorable bump-in-the-road episodes (particularly one featuring a volatile Harvey Keitel), and the picture has an editing rhythm that’s clipped and nervous – the scenes are nipped before their proper conclusions, at least until Kristofferson enters the picture in the last third, and cools everything with his distinctive brand of containment and non-actor effortlessness. Kristofferson is a relief from the palpable (and admirably convincing) economic anxiety of the picture, but he also turns Alice too far in the direction of formula – you don’t buy anything that happens in the last twenty minutes.

Is it blatant wish-fulfillment, unintentional sexism? Yes, because the picture gives Alice everything it pretends she doesn’t need, and sentimentally accepts her desire to be a “singer”, which everyone else can see is absurd. Are Scorsese and Getchell being meta? Potentially (and the Wizard of Oz opening suggests that), but I think they were most likely interested in making a formula picture patterned after ones they liked, and were content to make one that updated the types without seriously challenging them. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has tension between the sensibilities of the differing eras and between the characters, it is well-performed, and it has Scorsese’s expressive, amazingly empathetic camera (he has a very distinctive curved-sideways pan, also in Mean Streets, that conveys a character’s glance towards someone he’s put out with) but it still fades…pleasantly yet somehow disappointingly. There’s enough in the picture to warrant more. Still, one misses a Scorsese this raw, this spontaneous.

Posted in 1974, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Thieves Like Us (1974)

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

Last Tuesday a new bells and wells anniversary edition of Bonnie and Clyde was released, and while I bought it with little thought, I’m afraid I haven’t gotten the opportunity to watch it yet. I probably wouldn’t have tackled it anyway, chances are if you’re interested enough in movies to read my humble blog, then you know Arthur Penn’s justifiably legendary masterpiece. Perhaps you also know Robert Altman’s similarly themed picture, Thieves Like Us, too, but the odds of you not are at least a bit greater.

This week was the first time I had seen Thieves Like Us and, having seen most of Altman’s films, you’d think I’d cease to be surprised by the very particular mojo that that American master was able to work in any given project. Altman’s intuitiveness, his humanity, and his versatility are all beyond reproach; the man excelled in virtually every genre, with the possible exception of the horror film, though a case can be made for the underrated The Gingerbread Man as almost belonging to that genre. Gingerbread Man is certainly the only Grisham movie with any real tang, with Francis Coppola’s appealing, leisurely The Rainmaker coming in second.

But I digress. Thieves Like Us is, in broad terms, Altman’s outlaw thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Edward Anderson, which also inspired the Nicholas Ray picture They Live By Night, which I have not yet seen. The film’s set-up is traditional to the genre: it’s Mississippi in the 1930s, and three criminals Chicamaw (John Schuck), T-Dub (Bert Remsen) and Bowie (Keith Carradine) escape prison and go on the lam, robbing banks and getting famous in the process. As with much of Altman’s work, the scenario is only a framework, and appears to be of little actual interest to the director. Thieves Like Us is a day dream of tangible, dialed down, lived in little nuggets, a story of the life the idealized criminal lives in between the idealized portions.

As with most outlaw pictures, Thieves Like Us revels in a certain conflict of sympathy. We’re lured into rooting for Chicamaw and Co., despite the fact that Chicamaw is a remorseless killer, and that the other two have no real problem going along with it so long as it continues to pad their pockets. Many of these films have a more innocent criminal, perhaps the male embodiment of the hooker with the heart of gold cliché, and in this film that responsibility falls to Carradine.

Keith Carradine is an unusual presence of largely 1970s American films that I’m sad to see gone, he’s a rare specimen: a man of star charisma and fascination blessed with a character actor’s lack of baggage. As memorable as Carradine has been in many pictures, many of them by Altman, I find it nearly impossible to associate those parts with whichever part I’m watching him in at the moment. It’s insane and impressive to think that this is the same man who would play a callow, self-absorbed heartbreaker in Altman’s Nashville the following year, or that this is the same man who appears in the most terrifying scene of Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller a few years before, or that this is the man who would duel Harvey Keitel a few years after all of these.

Carradine has an eerie malleable child-like sensuality: it can be creepy and manipulative one moment, authentically naive the next; and that serves his Bowie well. Bowie is one of the more convincing criminal naïfs I’ve seen in a crime picture: he feels less like a device to divide our sympathy and more like the kind of authentic contradiction that can confuse and break a man, and that contradiction powers the poetic final few images of Thieves Like Us.

The entire picture is poetic though, this is one of the most sensual pictures Altman has ever made, and that is saying something. Thieves Like Us captures that hazy daydream of Southern summer that children who grew up in that part of America probably find themselves fantasizing about from time to time. The film, as I mentioned earlier, is about fantasy, idealization, but it also finds the day to day surreality that many viewers will be able to recognize as being in sync with their own lives. This consistent ability to merge the stylized with the day to day might be the key to Altman’s genius, and the very thing I spent many, many paragraphs laboring over in my Short Cuts review last week.

Because the plot doesn’t matter, it’s the little episodes of loneliness, love, and connection that people will hold from Thieves Like Us, the connective tissue fading into distant memory. Bowie’s lonely night under the bridge, using a dog as a blanket, will linger, just as how quickly he pretends to disregard that dog when it wanders away will linger. The men drawing straws to decide the getaway driver when they’ve already decided the getaway driver will linger. T-Dub’s vaguely incestuous, strangely innocent love for the sister of his brother’s wife will linger. The drunken pretend heist with children as extras will linger.

And Shelly Duvall will linger, this is perhaps, next to The Shining and Popeye, her strongest work, and most certainly her fullest collaboration with Altman. Her elusive thin vulnerable flaky quality compliments Carradine wonderfully, and when they exchange that Altmanish shorthand movie dialogue they appear to be sharing our deepest movie dreams of instant understanding and attraction. When they kiss and make love for the first time as a radio broadcast of Romeo and Juliet plays in the background (the radio is a constant wry comment of the overstatement of most grand on the run movies) you feel, in a way that romantic films rarely get across, the odd perfection of their union. Carradine and Duvall lend the picture its broken heart, which in turn imbues that painterly Altman atmosphere with meaning.

The film doesn’t have the raw genre force of a Bonnie and Clyde (though Chicamaw has his moments) nor is it meant to. This is the picture for people who watched Bonnie and Clyde, or Gun Crazy, and wanted more of the scenes between the lovers in the motels, wondering what they wonder. This is a picture for curious people who want just a little bit more from a familiar genre. Thieves Like Us is, in short, a picture for the Robert Altman fan.

★★★★

Posted in 1974, Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

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.

★★★

Posted in 1974, Reviews, Thriller | 4 Comments »

Day Thirty: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Tobe Hooper’s film opens with a bit of narration (courtesy John Larroquette) and then fades into a series of news reports explaining a bizarre series of grave robbings. We then fade into an image of a corpse real close, and pull out to reveal that the corpse has been perversely dug up and rearranged on top of a tombstone. We then cut to the title: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

No further than three minutes into his picture, Hooper has set the mood, and established a tone that he will masterfully maintain for another seventy nine minutes. I haven’t read the script, but I would imagine that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would read like a slightly above average example of the kind of movies that have been popular ever since: A group goes where they shouldn’t, receives a little off the track vengeance, the end. Hooper’s film though is one of the masterpieces of the genre, and that’s because it’s an unusually precise, evocative exercise in pure terror.

The characters continually talk about the unforgiving heat, and Hooper makes you feel it. You can feel the sweat beading up on the character’s skin, the filth under their collar. You feel the clutter, rot and chaos in the deranged Sawyer family’s house, you feel the weeds blowing in the scant wind the environment will allow. Like many films that would follow, Hooper takes his time setting up the carnage the title promises, but it doesn’t feel like he’s padding a slim running time. The deliberateness of the film sets us up for a fall, leaves us vulnerable, with the title we obviously know we’re in a horror picture, but we don’t know when we’re going to get a horror picture.

Ten minutes in, the lead characters, a group of early twenty somethings, pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Hooper plays with us here, we feel that we’re meeting one of the villians of the picture, but we can’t be sure, it may just be one more stop on the seemingly unending tour of backwoods weirdness. The dialogue is natural and unforced, the dread mounts with an unsettling lack of calculation. Then, before we’ve caught up, we realize that we’re in one of the scariest scenes of the movie, and a scene that will come back to haunt the characters in surprising ways.

This Texas town feels like no other weird little town in the horror genre. We don’t sense an art director high fiving a cinematographer immediately outside of the camera’s periphery. We wonder why the hell these dumb kids want to see their grandparent’s old house so bad. When an older gentlemen says “You may want to be careful, some folks don’t like you poking around, and aren’t afraid to let you know about it”, you laugh at the delirious understatement. This is a chaotic, apparently lawless town that’s inspired, not by hundred other movies, but by an authentic fear of the tearing of social fabric. Some people just don’t fucking like you, and they’re not afraid to show it.

Let’s go back to word authentic. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so damn good because it feels real, uncalculated, unscripted, untested against a hundred age groups to see if it’s the next Saw, it just feels like it’s always existed somewhere waiting to be found. Thank God it was found before the idiotically overused catch phrase “torture porn” was coined.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably a happy accident, Tobe Hooper certainly hasn’t made a film ever again of it’s caliber, but that doesn’t matter. Hooper probably set out to make a little shocker that would get his foot in the door, and he accidentally made true art that remains relevant and unshakably disturbing, regardless of how many times it’s ripped off or remade. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cathartic, relentless, black comic realization of the most familiar of nightmares: the one where you are chased by people you don’t know for no reason, and you can’t ever seem to get away.

★★★★

Posted in 1974, 31 Days of Horror, Horror, Reviews | No Comments »

Day Twelve: Black Christmas (1974)

Friday, October 12th, 2007

Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is a sort of feature length reworking of the urban legend (that also inspired When a Stranger Calls) where a maniac continues to call a woman. Eventually she gets the call traced and the caller’s location turns out to be a little too close for comfort. Clark’s film is set in a soriority house right before Christmas, so its several women hearing the strange, barely coherent calls. We can make out a few things: the names Billy and Agnes, and a whole lot of gibberish and vicious sexual threats. The ladies, boozing and excited about the Holidays, brush it off, but the calls continue, and the ladies’ plans begin to seperate them from one another.

Slasher films are usually too rigid and predictable for my tastes, but Black Christmas is not just a great slasher film, but a great horror film in general. The film, maybe its because its set during the holidays, has a certain sadness. The deaths feel remote and lonely, the corpses of friends shut off in the attic or the bedrooms as everyone else goes about their plans. A subtle wail of winter wind can be heard throughout the soundtrack and that only exasperates the melancholy, and the relentless calls of the killer who seems to refer to himself as Billy.

A sort of plot eventually arises amongst the soriority girls (Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder are the most famous of the ladies) but that’s primarily there as a red herring that we never fully buy, and to set up the absurd but perfect ending. The ending would never happen, but as the credits roll you find yourself wondering, what if it did happen?

Bob Clark’s work here is stylish, and economic. Our characters are no richer here than in any other slasher film, but they are convincing and devoid of any major expositional howlers. No “This reminds me of the story I read about the guy who got out of the insane asylum” type crap here, the girls are too drunk, and they never know they’re in a horror film. One of the girls eventually finds out, and that’s fifteen minutes before the picture ends. Until then, Black Christmas has an appealingly loosey goosey catch as catch can structure, our characters are all over the place doing a variety of things, but they eventually always have to go back to where they sleep, where Billy can kill them.

I said the characters don’t have any expostional howlers, but it should also be noted that there’s really no exposition at all. The murders could be random, the sorority house could have been picked out of a phone book or just the first stop in the neighborhood. Our opening shot is the now de rigueur killer’s POV shot, and he just walks into the house by climbing through the window on the side. That’s it. Black Christmas is so airy, so surreal, that it could just as easily be a haunted house film, only the spectre is one very deranged human that we are never able to see.

The ending has the primal terror of an Edgar Allan Poe story. The superb final shot returns us to the corpse of the first victim, frozen mid death cry, wrapped like a dime store mummy. The red Christmas lights and easy access (the characters could see her if they looked up) mock her demise. She was celebrating Christmas a day earlier, now she’s another forgotten relic of the attic. No overly mannered directorial ticks here. This is unlanced, true dread. Black Christmas is easily the most unnerving slasher movie I’ve seen.

Black Christmas would also work as a nice double bill with the 1970s anthology film Tales from the Crypt, which also features a Christmas that goes belly up at the hands of a madman. Both films also have a certain ’70s, clammy cinematography that looks partially like embalming fluid. If you don’t like that idea, you could also pair Black Christmas with Clark’s other Christmas film, A Christmas Story and tell your little nephew that Black Christmas is the sequel and that Ralphie is the guy making all the funny calls to all those pretty girls.

Posted in 1974, 31 Days of Horror, Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »

Day Nine: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

The musical that most people watch around this time of year is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but, excluding the Meat Loaf number and Tim Curry’s performance, I always found that film to be better in theory than reality. Phantom of the Paradise is that reality, a pop culture blender imbued through and through with director Brian De Palma’s pure cinematic fervor.

You may exhaust yourself trying to play the game of spot the reference. Here’s a head start: The Phantom of the Opera (clearly), Faust (also pretty clear being that the film, typical of its super reflexive nature, works it into the plot), The Picture of Dorian Gray (tied to Faust in an amusingly ludicrous way), Edgar Allan Poe, German Expressionism, Glam Rock, The Twilight Zone, Folk, The Beach Boys, Psycho, etc.

Those were the things I caught watching it myself, I read a few reviews after watching the film and they mentioned others, but I will be fair and not include those here. The most remarkable thing about Phantom of the Paradise is that these references don’t bog it down. The film is a lean, hellfire 88 minutes, and the references fuse and compliment one another in ways that mark De Palma as a swifter and more inventive screenwriter than is generally acknowledged.

The film’s more contemporary at the time musical numbers may be dated, but De Palma’s central black theme is as ageless as a certain someone’s portrait: our infinite moral and artistic flexibility in the pursuit of fame and money. De Palma’s film isn’t weighted down by this though, its a joke, and its underlined by how many people in the film are revealed to have made a Faustian pact (at least three characters, and there aren’t too many more characters in the movie.)

The Faustian pacts ultimately bring our three characters down though, because one of them, Swan (Paul Williams, who also wrote the music, and is very effective here), has an ego too large to properly protect his contract with Satan. It’s hidden along with other records and documents helpfully labeled: Contract. Our hero, Winslow Leach (William Finley), now the Phantom, finds it and turns the tables in a garish climax that’s a comment on garish climaxes, but is still a garish climax in its own right.

The third character is Phoenix (Jessica Harper, from another genre milestone, Suspiria) and she is the object of Swan and the Phantom’s rivalry. Swan seems more interested in her as an instrument to torment the Phantom, and the Phantom is the sort of perpetually hung up artistic putz who thinks she’s the only one to sing his music. Phoenix sells out too, gets hooked by Swan on various drugs, and becomes the embodiment of everything the Phantom loathes, though he doesn’t ever seem to realize it.

De Palma’s techinique can sometimes drown the story he’s chosen to tell (though that’s the point most of the time), but Phantom of the Paradise is the kind of reflexive hall of mirrors that perfectly suits his masturbatory, speed demon cineast tendencies. The film is one of De Palma’s fastest and surest, and works confidently as musical, slapstick comedy, post modern art, and, at times as a straight piece of intense operatic melodrama. It’s also, and this is important, not afraid to be a little silly. It’s a Brechtian Mel Brooks horror film, which, in short, means its a classic Brian De Palma film.

Posted in 1974, 31 Days of Horror, Comedy, Horror, Musical, Reviews | 3 Comments »

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