With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .
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Monthly Archives: May 2014
SORCERER
When William Friedkin’s Sorcerer came out in 1977 I was a film fanatic who went to see just about everything, but I didn’t go see Sorcerer. It had a kind of bad odor — you got a feeling it wasn’t just bad but bad in an uninteresting and unimportant way. That was the buzz, at any rate.
I’m sure I felt I should see the movie, just to keeps tabs on what Friedkin (below), an interesting filmmaker, was up to, but I put it off until the film disappeared from theaters, which happened very quickly, since it was a total box office bomb. It was re-released in a shortened version, which fared no better with the public.
Since that time the film has acquired a mystique, deepened by the fact that in recent years it has become difficult to see in any form, due to some confusion over rights. Friedkin remained proud of the film, however, and many people have opined that it is an unjustly neglected masterpiece. Finally, the rights have been untangled, largely through Friedkin’s efforts, and a new Blu-ray edition has just appeared, with Friedkin’s blessings and under his supervision.
So now, at long last, I’ve had a chance to see the movie I missed when it was originally released. It’s not an unjustly neglected masterpiece — it’s not a masterpiece of any description. The bad buzz it got when it first came out is more than justified — but that’s not to say it’s uninteresting.
It’s biggest problem is that it looks so bad. It’s has no discernible visual style beyond the standard zoomtastic clichés of 70s American filmmaking. A film so totally lacking in visual craft and imagination, so dependent on the knee-jerk aesthetic conventions of its time, ages as quickly as an unrefrigerated mackerel.
There are two exceptions to this observation — a couple of action set pieces that transcend the sloppy look of the film as a whole. The most famous of them is a sequence involving two trucks trying to cross a swaying rope bridge in a driving rainstorm. The rigging and stunt work involved in this sequence are brilliant and help create a bravura passage of pure cinema.
The film’s biggest asset is a riveting story told at a leisurely pace. The first 24 minutes sketch out the back-stories of the four principal characters, explaining why they’ve all ended up as desperate fugitives in the unnamed Latin American country where the narrative is set. Another half hour is devoted to showing us the misery and hopelessness of their lives there.
The film was initially criticized for taking so long to get going, but I found the set-up totally effective as a way of justifying the risks the four men take in the main section of the tale — transporting some unstable high explosives by truck 200 miles through the jungle. No modern film would ever dare to present such an elaborate and extended set-up, but it’s involving and suspenseful — it prepares you for the harrowing events that follow. It’s old-fashioned storytelling at its best.
The film is not exactly a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages Of Fear, but it’s based on the same novel Clouzot adapted. Clouzot’s film is tighter and more focused on the central suspense elements. Friedkin was interested in making something more like an existential epic — a grim vision of the human predicament, huis clos except for a perilous gateway that can only be navigated by nearly superhuman courage and perseverance, born of despair. And of course it’s a gateway that leads only to a deeper rung of hell.
The script is by Walon Green — at the time Hollywood’s resident dime-store nihilist. He was also responsible for at least some of the dime-store nihilism of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which he co-wrote with the director.
Why Friedkin thought this even bleaker exercise in dime-store nihilism would make for a commercial film is anybody’s guess. Maybe he thought he could do no wrong after the phenomenal successes he had with The French Connection and The Exorcist. Maybe he wanted the cultural prestige Peckinpah got from The Wild Bunch, despite the fact that The Wild Bunch didn’t make any money. In any case, Sorcerer pretty much demolished Friedkin’s career in Hollywood and in retrospect one can’t say he went out with even a moral triumph.
Still, one can admire his ambition and his presumption, and one can enjoy Sorcerer as the sort of eccentric folly that Hollywood has leaned how to avoid like the plague. It’s not a great film, or even a particularly good film, but it’s better and more exhilarating than anything you’re likely to find playing at your local multiplex this weekend.
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HALF A MILLION
Since I changed blog hosts in April of 2012 this site has had over half a million page views. Thanks to everyone who’s come by for a look!
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THE BEACH
I first saw the Pacific Ocean on the coast of California in 1968, when I was 18 years-old. I spent a lot of time in California in the ensuing years, and had a lot of beach adventures.
At 19 I was feeling melancholy one day, living in a small house in La Honda, in the hills above Palo Alto, and took off hitchhiking south along the coast towards Los Angeles, where I’d never been. One ride dropped me off somewhere in Big Sur at dusk and I made my way down to a campfire on the beach where there were about 10 or 15 people spending the night. They weren’t a group — they were just all on the road for one reason or another, and too broke to stay at a motel.
There were hippies, like me, and an ex-serviceman just back from Vietnam. He said when he returned from his tour his wife had kicked him out of the house. When I asked him why he said, “She just didn’t want me anymore.”
There were a couple of small-time dope dealers heading back from San Francisco, who offered to drive me down to Los Angeles the next day and let me stay in their house, an offer I took them up on. I was crazy back then, or maybe just 19 — I didn’t think anything bad could happen to me, and nothing did. The dealers were nice guys.
People shared joints and wine and whatever food they had.
This was my first real experience with The Beach, which, when it’s capitalized or spoken in a certain tone of voice, means only The California Beach. Not just a place — another world.
MOM
. . . loves to sew and smock, so heaven for her is a vast and well-stocked fabric store. She visited one recently with my sister Libba, who took the picture above.
Go, Mom!
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ESSENTIAL
As Pauline Kael once noted, some of the greatest of all movies have been follies — grand, overly ambitious projects that teetered on the edge of chaos yet became enduring monuments to the possibilities of cinema.
Intolerance was such a folly, and so was Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed, though only a fragment of the latter survives. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was another.
Coppola mortgaged almost everything he owned to make his Vietnam war epic. He headed off to The Philippines without a finished script, hoping to find an ending for his movie somewhere in the course of shooting it, which took him over a year, during which production costs spiraled out of control amidst disastrous weather conditions and Coppola’s gradual mental meltdown.
He was lucky to get out of it alive, and he never quite found his ending. He threw everything he could think of at the wall, hoping something would stick — a bit of T. S. Eliot, a Doors song, the on-screen slaughter of a water buffalo — but none of it really did. The drama just sort of implodes at the end without really resolving. But the journey to that amorphous denouement is one of the great cinematic adventures of all time, breathtaking to look at, with passages as powerful as any ever created by any director.
The film was a hit, Coppola got his investment back and a personal profit of about $15 million. Things rarely end that well for the directors of grand cinematic follies.
There are two versions of the film currently available on DVD and Blu-ray — the original release version and a re-release version from 2001 which restores about 49 minutes of footage that Coppola cut prior to the original release. I think the original release version is distinctly superior — the cut scenes, while fascinating, slow down the film’s momentum, lessen the suspense, and don’t accord with the tone of the ending Coppola settled on, drawing undue attention to its deficiencies.
In any case, the Blu-ray of Apocalypse Now belongs in the home of anyone who’s passionate about movies.
AND GOD CREATED WOMAN
With thanks to Fabrizio del Wrongo . . .
BIG WEDNESDAY
The epic of California’s beach culture has never been properly recorded. We’ve gotten flashes of it in the music of The Beach Boys and Dick Dale and the waves of shitty instrumental tracks that are what surf music is really all about. We’ve gotten parodies of it in the teen beach comedies of the Sixties.
None of these things begins to scratch the surface of what the California beach scene has been and has meant — the poem it has written in our collective hearts.
John Milius (above center) grew up in the surf culture of California in the early Sixties — saw it wiped out by the dislocations of the Sixties, the Vietnam War and the rise of the counterculture. In Big Wednesday he tried to write its epitaph, an elegy for a peculiar phase of the endless epic of the California beach.
He never finds the right tone for his elegy, or can’t sustain it. The movie is a kind of hodgepodge of Milius’s own obsessions, his conflicted psyche. It is by turns sentimental, cartoonish, puerile, boorish and gracious — but the sentimental and gracious elements come close to being a fitting tribute to his subject.
His love for the beach, everything the California beach has meant to him and to America, is alive in the movie. The California beach deserves more, but it has always taken what it could get, whatever the sea was granting on any particular hour of any particular day.
Maybe that’s as it should be — you can only ride the waves that are rolling in. If the swells and sets aren’t cooperating, you build a fire in the sand, drink some beer and wait on the sea’s pleasure. It will be different in the morning with la mer toujour recommencée . . . always starting over again.
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR
This is a very modest film inflated in prominence and extended in length (to a running time of almost three hours) by several long and graphic sex scenes. The purpose of the sex scenes seems to be to tell us that . . . the characters have sex. Well, o. k., that’s clear enough.
I don’t mean to be prissy or prudish about it — watching beautiful naked young women thrash about in bed is always charming — but if you take those scenes away you have a very conventional story about young love which ends sadly and wistfully, as young love often does. It’s sort of a Lesbian version of The Way We Were, though without the grand passion, outside the bedroom.
What redeems it to a a degree and makes it worth watching is a brilliant performance by Adèle Exarchopoulos (above), 19 years-old when the film was made. She exposes herself fearlessly, both physically and emotionally, in the role, and she’s consistently riveting to watch.
After the film was released her co-star Léa Seydoux (above) said she felt the director had exploited Exarchopoulos and herself in the sex scenes, but the issue is bigger than that to me. Exarchopoulos was exploited artistically on every level by a director who asked more of her (or took more from her) than he had the talent to repay.
The film is not particularly interesting visually, and the story feels shopworn, apart from the Lesbian angle. During a garden party scene, there are images of Louise Brooks projected onto a wall as part of the party decor, perhaps attempting to link the film to some sort of venerable cinematic tradition. In fact, the film falls into the tradition of the ABC Afterschool Special — apart from Exarchopoulos’s stunning work it’s an Afterschool Special with an NC-17 rating.
STANWYCK
I think that Barbara Stanwyck is the greatest actor who ever worked in movies. Other actors, at their best, have given performances as fine as her finest performances — some have, on very rare occasions, given finer ones. But in terms of consistent brilliance over time, in terms of unfailing artistic courage, emotional commitment and erotic daring, no other actors have come close to Stanwyck, and it’s unlikely that any ever will.
Stanwyck was not classically beautiful, by the standards of her time, or any time — she knew this and accepted it. This acceptance freed her from the petty narcissism of many female movie stars — allowed her to be “ugly” in the display of emotion. At the same time, though, she knew she was a figure of deep erotic fascination, and she knew how to exploit that fascination.
She had a body built for carnal pleasure, and she was smart — smart enough to know that her intelligence was in itself an erotic attribute. You got attractive bits and pieces of feminine allure from other great movie stars, but from Stanwyck you got it all, a woman in full — because she didn’t have the perfect mask for perfect close-ups, she had to give you everything else in spades.
If you think that Hedy Lamarr, just to take one example, is more beautiful than Barbara Stanwyck — if you think that any actor in cinema history is more beautiful than Barbara Stanwyck — then you don’t know what beauty is, you don’t know what makes a woman beautiful.
But don’t despair — Stanwyck’s genius can educate you about these things.
MACBETH (1948)
Orson Welles’s adaptation of the Scottish play is a fascinating film, not one of his greatest but full of magic. It’s a magic, however, that comes and goes. It was shot in 23 days on a shoestring budget, and it shows. The sets look cheesy — many of them were left over from Westerns made at the studio — as do the many process shots. There are obvious lapses in continuity between shots, and lines have been looped in for actors who are obviously not speaking those particular words. Focus is not always precise, and there are a number of optical zooms to create shots that Welles wanted but didn’t have in the can.
The magic comes from Welles’s performance — a corking rendition of the doomed Scot, very theatrical but inventive and well considered. There’s even more magic in Jeanette Nolan’s Lady Macbeth. She was a radio actress who’d never worked before on stage or screen, but she’s brilliant here. She conveys a furious sexuality and an erotic rage that chill the blood.
Many of the shots, and the choreography of camera and performers within them, display Welles’s bravura style, and many of the images are boldly and beautifully lit. There are a couple of long scenes involving complex movement by the actors that play out in single shots — something Welles loved to do when he had the time and resources for it.
The film is really quite impressive considering the time and budget he did have for it. Welles hoped it would encourage Hollywood to take chances on similarly adventuresome projects that could be made cheaply, but it didn’t help that the film was a critical and commercial flop on its initial release, with many people complaining that the thick Scottish burrs Welles had the cast use made the dialogue incomprehensible.
Republic later re-released the film in a shortened version with the dialogue re-dubbed without the accents, and made its money back, but the film’s reputation never fully recovered. In fact, it’s a more than respectable work, with many fine things it. Welles’s original version is now available in a decent Blu-ray edition from Olive Films — well worth a look.
SWEETWATER
I felt a sort of foreboding as this film opened, with its spare, moody, vaguely ominous music over the titles and an early scene featuring a mad-looking preacher spouting synthetic Victorian gobbledegook — Cormac McCarthy lite. I thought it might be one of those arty Westerns for people who hate Westerns.
It turned out not to be quite that bad, but a failed Western all the same. The dialogue stayed artificial and unconvincing, and much of the acting was mediocre, and while it had a story to tell — a pretty good old-fashioned Western story of revenge, of shame and injustice and honor redeemed — it decided not to tell that story.
It’s too bad, because the film had a couple of great things going for it. The first was the landscape of northern New Mexico, filmed beautifully. The second was January Jones in the lead role. She’s a wonderful actress, with a face that’s beautiful and strong — she’s instantly convincing as a woman of pioneer stock.
[Spoilers below . . .]
When her character’s husband is killed by the homicidal preacher, you expect her to team up with an eccentric but honorable bushwhacker who arrives on the scene, a character played a little too eccentrically by Ed Harris, in order to right the wrongs done to her and to others. It’s a traditional Western theme, found most notably in True Grit, involving a kind of surrogate fatherhood leading to the empowerment of the daughter figure.
Instead, the two never make a real alliance and the woman goes on a killing spree of disproportionate violence, in which one’s sympathy for her is gradually dissipated. There is something satisfying about the woman’s unbridled rage, as there is about Medea’s, but it betrays an unspoken code of traditional Westerns — that violence must always be measured by moral justice. When the woman starts killing unarmed people who pose no physical threat to her, we’re way outside the bounds of the traditions of the genre.
I really don’t know why filmmakers want to fuck with the genre this way — to push it past the expectations and the ideals of people who love Westerns. You have to love Westerns yourself to make a movie like this, which gets so many things right before going off the rails.
As you can tell from their letters and from the transcripts of court testimony, people on the frontier often had a powerful and eloquent command of language, influenced by Shakespeare, The King James Bible and The Book Of Common Prayer. Writers of modern Westerns should read those things if they want to place memorable words in the mouths of their characters, avoiding the post-modern gibberish of McCarthy, which is where Logan and Noah Miller, the writers of Sweetwater, seem to have picked up their notion of frontier talk, along with their Grand Guignol notions of Western mythology. Bad move.
The film showed at Sundance but apparently wasn’t picked for national theatrical distribution. Just as well — it would have sunk like a stone, Miss Jones’s considerable charms notwithstanding.
A SAFE PLACE
Tuesday Weld, Orson Welles, Jack Nicholson — you’d think it would be impossible to make a lame film with a cast like that but in A Safe Place Henry Jaglom makes it look easy.
The film is relentlessly ugly to look at. Jaglom says he’s not much interested in the visual aspect of filmmaking — he leaves all that to his cinematographer. The film is punctuated with aimless zooms and the continuity is fractured — stylistic quirks that may have been intended to make the film seem au courant in 1971 but just feel silly today.
The fractured continuity annoyed critics when the film was released — they called it incoherent, but in fact it’s all too coherent, parading trite psychological insights that the quirky style can’t disguise. It’s basically a portrait of a vexing but mentally unstable woman, played by Weld, and consists of a mixture of her dreams, memories and actual experiences.
Weld and Welles and Nicholson are luminous film presences and brilliant actors — it’s a joy to watch them work, even with shoddy material like this. You have to give Jaglom credit for creating the occasion for this work, even if he’s using it to shore up a half-baked vision.
Weld is the real revelation here — an actor rarely used well by Hollywood but undeniably great. She’s just riveting in this film and more than holds her own with Welles and Nicholson, which is saying a lot. Sadly, those three actors inhabit a different artistic universe than Jaglom’s.
THE ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC
The beauty of this legendary collection of American roots music is that it wasn’t put together as the result of an academic ethnographic study. Its compiler Harry Smith (below) wanted to present an overview of “folk” music, but only folk music he thought was cool. He also chose only recordings that had been released commercially, on the grounds that if a recording had no commercial value, then it couldn’t be a work of genuine folk art, genuine popular art — an insight of genius.
The result is a revelatory survey of American music, much of it forgotten by the time Smith created the collection in 1952, but also a treasure trove of wildly entertaining music. Smith had impeccably good taste.
Much has been written about the influence of the collection on the American folk revival of the 1950s, which really can’t be overstated. Much more could be written about its continuing influence on Bob Dylan, even as he moved beyond the folk revival era.
What counts most, though, is just the magnificence and variety of the music. The six original records of the collection, grouped in three volumes, have just been reissued on 200-gram vinyl by Mississippi Records, supplemented by a fourth volume containing two more records which Smith planned but never released.
They’re already sold out but can still be had at inflated prices from various online sources. Hearing it all on vinyl, the way Dylan first heard it, is a cardinal cultural experience.
B-WESTERNS
I just can’t get enough of them.
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