Young and Innocent - Alfred Hitchcock - 1937

The British period of Hitch’s career often finds itself boiled down to a case of The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) (i.e. the two with Criterion Releases) considered as must sees, the rest, essentially throwaway. This of course is far from the case and solid arguments can be made for the greatness of The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), Sabotage (1936) and the film that gave this blog its name, the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Many feel that Young and Innocent too deserves a more respected place within the Hitchcock canon; alas I’m inclined to disagree to an extent.

The film, whose title when mentioned in casual conversation sounds considerably less wholesome until mention of its directors name, actually fits safely within the mode in which we find a good percentage of Hitch’s output, that of ‘the wrong man’ thriller. Following the murder of a renowned actress, a friend of hers Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) finds her body and is himself accused of the murder, with a flimsy case of motive placed upon him due to money being left to him in her will.

He manages to escape custody and proceed to go on the lam, coercing the local police chief’s daughter Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam) into aiding him in escaping the manhunt, and to help in his quest to find a tramp who has in his possession (wait for it... *cough*), a raincoat of Tisdall’s which was stolen by the murderer, had its belt used in the murder and was then given to the tramp and which will thus prove Tisdall’s innocence and lead to the capture of the real murderer... right... Not that I have any problem with outlandish plots from Hitch, a man whose oeuvre often features credibility stretching macguffins in order to progress matters, but a used raincoat?

The film actually opens in a startling fashion; we immediately bear witness to a raging domestic argument while a thunder storm thrashes away in the background, in an unusual turn, our murderer is revealed right away in an oppressively atmospheric scene transported from the bleak noir this film never manages to become. The following ten minutes manage to retain some of this downbeat vibe, as Tisdall finds the victim’s body washed up on the shore, and soon finds himself accused and fingered for the blame by a seemingly corrupt police force wishing to close the case quickly despite a paucity of strong evidence.

Once Tisdall makes his rather farcical escape from custody though, the film becomes more a comedy road caper than intense thriller. Those hoping for a Bonnie & Clyde hit the Home Counties scenario will find themselves rather disappointed. A lot of the blame for this can be attributed to De Marney’s performance, his Tisdall comes across as so smug and self assured that his innocence will be proven that the audience is never really given to worrying for his fate. Pilbeam’s ‘Jolly what-ho’ attitude towards the situation is also rather more Enid Blyton than Hitchcock, further reducing the suspense.

Pilbeam’s Erica has the makings of an interesting character, she appears to have taken over the maternal role for her large family (the actual mother an unexplained absentee), and as the eldest child suddenly betraying her chief of police father to go on the run with Tisdall, this makes for an intriguing act of rebellion against her re-positioning within the family hierarchy that is never fleshed out.

Once we can gradually accept this as one of Hitch’s lighter pictures though, there are small rewards to be garnered. Edward Rigby’s turn as the sought after tramp ‘Old Will’, is a humorous one, and the closing set piece features one of those classic ‘Hitchcockian’ virtuoso camera moves that we see at least once a film. In this case an audacious pan and zoom across a ballroom as Hitch zooms right into an extreme close-up on the face of the murderer revealing his presence within the room (in a scene that also has an unpleasant reminder of a world before 'The Black and White Minstrels' were considered tasteless...).

Fluffy, throwaway, and with slight central performances, Young and Innocent may be second grade Hitchcock, but it still manages to entertain just enough in its brief 80 minutes to make it worthy of inclusion in any personal ‘British period’ Hitchcock retrospective you may be planning.

By the way if you embarrassed to ask for a copy of the picture at your local DVD retailer due to its misleading title, why don’t you try its alternative American title of The Girl Was Young? Hmmm actually.....

When too lazy to add a new review...

Just redesign the page a bit instead!

You may notice a new header at the top of the page, the theme is that it's meant to recall the opening credit fonts and colours of Late 60's/Early 70's Italian Giallo pics and other such exploito classics of the era.

The background pic you may recall from my old review of Chris Petit's Radio On (1979).

Hope y'all can dig it.

More review soon I swear to ya, I am determined to make the title of this blog less ironic.

Cheers

Lee

Duel - Steven Spielberg - 1971

Ahh 1971, a landmark year for the ‘New Hollywood’ crowd by anyone’s estimation. Billy Friedkin released his first masterwork with The French Connection, Peter Bogdanovich released what is arguably his only masterwork with The Last Picture Show, a young beardy future mega-lo-maniac made THX 1138, not to mention Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller, Ashby’s Harold and Maude, Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, Alan Paluka’s Klute, Richard Sarafin’s Vanishing Point..... well you get the picture. In the midst of all this, a young California State dropout was stuck doing episodes of Night Gallery and low budget TV movies. Given a project to direct a quickie adaptation of a Richard Matheson short story out in the California desert, the youngster just happened to create a genre masterpiece, and the breakout that would soon make him the world’s most bankable director. This of course was Steven Spielberg, and the little TV Movie in question Duel.

This is hardly an early example of the Spielberg we know and erm... love? today though. Duel is instead a film with such a studied minimalist framework and structure that I feel you can comfortably place it alongside the more radical studio funded works of the period, such as the aforementioned Two Lane Blacktop.

The plot can be described within the briefest of synopses, a white collar salesman named David Mann (Dennis Weaver), is driving across southern-eastern California when he suddenly finds himself terrorised by the unseen driver of a large tanker truck. After initially toying with Mann, the truck driver begins to attempt to kill him, forcing Mann to have to eventually fight back.

This barebones approach to the plot is complemented by Spielberg’s minimal usage of dialogue, which finds itself trimmed down to exclamations of disbelief from Mann together with the occasional (and somewhat unnecessary) inner monologue. The soundtrack is equally minimalist, largely making use of the diegetic, such as the truck’s roaring diesel engine and the asinine radio talkshows that emit from Mann’s car stereo.

Whilst Spielberg himself refers to the film as a simple chase picture and nothing more, the framework allows us to place our own subtexts onto the film. Certainly European critics of the time (upon seeing the extended 90 minute theatrical European release) saw the film as variously an ‘indictment of machines’, or a film of ‘Father’s failing and women taking control’. Most famously some critics read the film as a battle of the ‘middle-class bourgeoisie vs. the working classes’. This is the thesis with which my own view of the film aligns most closely.

I personally read the film along the lines of the other road movies being made by youthful directors of the period, films which were consumed by a sense of displacement, disillusionment, and anger. I see Duel as channelling this countercultural anger into a pointed attack on the white collar Middle American bourgeois. Where most of the other road movies of this period, despite their generally downbeat tone, still managed to exude a certain romanticism towards the freedoms of the open road. Duel instead sees the road as a purely hostile and dangerous place.

The film’s protagonist ‘David Mann’ can be seen as a stereotypical symbol of mid-scale corporate America. An everyman salesperson under pressure to meet targets, white collar, conventional tie, driving one of the best selling 4 door family saloons of the period in the form of the staidly designed Plymouth Valiant, and with a malcontent wife and two children at home in a detached house on a quiet suburban street. Weaver brilliantly embodies Mann as stuffy, uptight, a heart-attack waiting to happen and nothing if not emblematic of the revised ‘American Dream’ that the good capitalist American of the 1960s should aspire to.

If we see our protagonist as a symbol of white collar America, our antagonist, the unseen driver of the grime ridden, seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that terrorises him, can be seen as a twisted descendent of the pioneer spirit. A primal road man whose unwillingness to conform to societal values, can be seen as the corrupted offspring of Tom Joad back for revenge on a system that denied his own American Dream.

If the counterculture had taken a certain satisfaction in ironically embracing symbols of the American pioneer spirit (for example, Billy & Wyatt in Easy Rider (1969)), as defenders of the right to a spiritual freedom oppressed by modern American attitudes. Then Spielberg appears to take pleasure in turning this in its head. The displaced wanderer of the American highways is now the aggressor and oppressor, with Mann now the victim in what has been quoted as “a Kafkaesque world in which seemingly random and inescapable acts of psychological torture flourish and thrive”.

Spielberg emphasises the towering presence of the truck roaring up to Mann’s rear bumper with intimidating close-ups. Something we notice at these times is that the trucker’s front bumper is covered in licence plates from other states across the country, displayed like proud trophies from his previous victories. This destroyer of conservative normalcy and decency is gradually swallowing up the nation, picking it off state by state.

So if we can see the truck as a symbol of bourgeois fear, we can take this further and consider Spielberg’s own suggestion that, rather than Mann being scared of the trucker attacking him, it is more a fear of loss of control. This proves for the most interesting reading of the film on a contextual level. This is a Middle America scared of losing control of the stability and prosperity it had enjoyed since the economic boom of the 1950s. American conservative values were being challenged by the counterculture, political dichotomies seemingly dividing the nation in two.

Spielberg refuses to provide any comfort for Middle America, and so the film concludes with Mann having to resort to his own sense of primal instinct, a complete ‘loss of control’ of his own restrained conservative demeanour, he can only attempt to guarantee his survival by ridding himself of his white collar symbol (his car) in order to defend against his aggressor. Spielberg suggests that Mann has had to resort to the mindset of his adversary in order to survive, resulting as Ryan Gibley has stated in the "crumpled defeat of the middle-American male".

Oh yeah, the film’s a bloody exciting thrill ride too...

The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner - Werner Herzog - 1974

If we can procure one thread that manages to run throughout the twisted catalogue that forms the 40 plus year career of everyone’s favourite German madman Werner Herzog, then it surely that of the wilful outsider, people who transcend societies self imposed boundaries in some form of euphoric personal odyssey. People who stumble along the fine line of genius/fevered craziness, inebriated by their need to push the limits of personal endurance. People who we can’t help but see as varied series of reflections on Herr Herzog himself.

We don’t have to look far to find examples of this, from his infamous exploits with Kinski bringing to life egomaniacal adventurers bounding along the Amazon and through the jungle in Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), to his documentaries charting the lives of people who choose to outcast themselves in some of the world’s most inhospitable places such as the Sahara in Fata Morgana (1971), Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and in Alaska with a shit load of hungry Bears in Grizzly Man (2005).

The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner proves to be one of the greatest examples of this auteurist trait. Following an astounding opening sequence in which we see a ski ‘flight’ played to us at 1/20th speed set to the mesmeric tones of regular Herzog collaborator Popol Vuh. We meet the titular Walter Steiner, a gangly and unassuming young Swiss man with a penchant for woodcraft and throwing himself 170 metres through the air off ramps with only a pair of sticks on his feet for protection.

Here we enter the mad world of Ski-flying, that’s right, not ski-jumping, but its altogether more extreme offshoot ski flying. Rather than attempt to contextualise the event for us, and attempt meaningful psychological examination of those who take part, Herzog explains it all with the previously mention super slow speed camera footage. This stunning imagery captures perfectly the sheer euphoria (or ecstasy) the competitors feel upon embracing the closest we can come to the grace of flight without evolving ourselves a pair of wings.

Unfortunately, the graceful flight is often not met with an equally decorative landing, and we also get to witness what happens when it all goes horrifically wrong upon returning to terra firma. Though rather than some garish ESPN style ‘When Ski-Flights go wrong!” exploitation, Herzog even lends these scenes an elegiac touch.

It is this conflict of the ecstasy versus the danger that we find Steiner caught it. Steiner was at the time the most amazing ski-flyer the world had ever seen, other top competitors it seemed even avoided events he was involved in, as whatever length the pack would set, Steiner would throw on another 30 metres. This leads to an event in Yugoslavia where Steiner crushes previous records to such an extent that he is left with little safety run off, culminating in him having a bad fall, leaving him bloodied and concussed.

It is here that the film becomes especially interesting, as Steiner wishes to leave the event, but the organisers begin to apply pressure, demanding he perform again for the paying audiences. Here the film begins to raise questions of an athlete’s responsibility to his fans, as Steiner becomes convinced that they only come to watch because of a car-crash mentality bloodlust, waiting for the moment when he pushes the limits just one step too far. We leave Steiner as a melancholy character unsure of his future within the sport.

In a back catalogue peppered liberally with must see pictures, I’d go as far to say that The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is right up there with the very best of Herzog’s oeuvre. He always seems to be at his best when he transcends the sometimes quotidian seeming nature of the subjects he chooses and wraps them in a dreamlike weave, blurring lines between documentation of an event and artful romanticism. Nowhere is that better found than here.

Possession - Andrzej Zulawski - 1981

If ever an argument can be made against generic pigeonholing then surely exhibit A for the prosecution would be Andrzej Zulawski’s apocalyptic horror/art-house/thriller/drama/surrealist domestic dispute picture Possession. The film is often advertised as a horror film in the vein of the European demonic possession films that were released in the wake of Bill Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and one of the film’s region 1 DVD releases even sees the film unceremoniously dumped into a ‘Drive-In’ double pack with the late career Mario Bava Repulsion knock off Shock (1977). If there is one place Zulawski’s picture explicitly does not belong, it’s that ye old home of American teenage mating rituals.

The film begins with images of a decrepit late cold war era Berlin. Zulawski casts the action primarily in streets that surround that omnipresent image of government control and repression in the form of the Berlin Wall (it should be noted here that Zulawski is very much a victim of government oppression, he has, since this picture spent his career making films in France following suppression of his work in his native Poland).

We immediately find ourselves in the company of Mark (Sam Neill) who appears to work for some shady government agency, and is just returning from an extended assignment. He arrives home and is immediately caught in a domestic argument with his spouse Anna (Isabelle Adjani). With this Zulawski throws the audience immediately off kilter. The argument refers to many things we are not privy to, and tensions between the pair have clearly been building for some time, exploding before our eyes without clear exposition within the first minutes of the film, leaving the viewer confused in medias res.

For the first thirty or so minutes, the film comes across like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) recast with mental patients. Both central performers give such extreme performances that it’s amazing that they remained stable following conclusion of the picture. Sam Neill, not a stranger to psychological horror, flits wildly between Somnambulistic calm and hysterical rage, whilst Adjani (who deservedly won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance) provides a stunning mental collapse that soon becomes deeply uncomfortable to watch. Previous to this picture my primary experience of Adjani’s work had been her ‘kooky’ turn in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) and her purposefully muted and ethereal performances in Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) and Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu (1979), which made the impact of her performance here all the more overwhelming.

After this opening half hour, and Mark’s subsequent hiring of a private investigator to find out what his wife is up to, the film’s previous preoccupation with the breakdown of a family unit makes way for surrealism and symbolism, as it is revealed that as well as conducting an extra-marital affair with the sinister bi-sexual kung-fu loving Terrence Stamp alike Heinrich (Heinz Bennett). Anna is also shacked up in a dilapidated squat with a creature that appears like the half formed afterbirth of a H.R. Giger creation (actually created by Carlo Rambaldi, who would go on to operate ET!) . A mess of phallic tentacles and goo, could this creature be a result of Anna’s frenzied insanity? (ala Cronenberg’s 1979 divorce catharsis The Brood) And holy shit is it slowly evolving into something more human possibly? (Clive Barker was surely taking notes).

The film descends further into delirium as Anna appears to miscarry in cinema’s most disturbing subway passage scene outside of Gasper Noė’s Irreversible (2002). Bodies begin to pile up, Mark gets involved in a relationship with an idealised doppelganger of Anna, the government agency decide they need to ‘terminate’ Mark’s contract, and all the while Anna’s secret lover begins to evolve as the plot moves towards complete Armageddon.

If this all sounds like unbridled chaos, that’s because it is. Fortunately Zulawski somehow manages to keep control of proceedings and directs with the assurance of someone who truly believes in his work. The opening half of the film is played out in cramped modernist apartments that seem to be as much made up of tight corridors as rooms. Zulawski’s camera prowling round the abodes with a frenzied abandon complementing our protagonists increasingly fractured states. By the second half though, he cools and we seem to be in a Berlin more akin to the Lower East Side in the early 80’s, large old spaces crippled by a decaying ghettoisation. He then turns everything on its head and creates an action cinema pastiche to conclude proceedings. By this point it is more than evident Zulawski is one of those precious mad fuckers who laugh in the face of the ‘language’ of cinema.

Zulawski has continued a career of defying generic expectations he has gone on to subvert such areas as science fiction, the period drama and the musical. A one of a kind maverick, enter the world of Zulawski with an open mind and reap the benefits of a disturbed and fevered imagination.

Detour - Edgar G. Ulmer - 1945

When we think of the locations in which the classics of film noir were set, usually a combination of stygian back alleys and pernicious drinking dens come to mind as our gumshoe protagonist finds himself way out of his depth in a city of hard knocks. The genre did though create a small niche in its appropriation of the road movie, changing the highways of the United States from a never ending vista of self discovery to a place of fateful self-destruction. The roots of this sub-genre can be seen in the likes of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), a tale of an ex-convict on the run for a murder he did not commit, and Raoul Walsh’s Bogie starring trucker flick They Drive by Night (1940). Today though, the most renowned cult classic of this period is a $30,000 poverty row quickie that goes by the name of Detour.

Despite its impoverished birth, the film is not without the previous form to suggest that it may be worthwhile, namely émigré director Edgar G. Ulmer. Though by this point he had been reduced to knocking out ‘made in a week’ b-movie fodder, Ulmer had wandered the hallowed hallways of UFA during the 1920’s, adding his production design talents to such classics as Der Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1927) before joining the Diaspora of German talent that headed for Hollywood following the election of the National Socialists. In Hollywood he most famously brought his expressionist talents to the direction of the Lugosi/Karloff picture The Black Cat (1934) before gradually falling out of favour with the major studios.

His talent for the hallucinatory atmospheres of expressionism are still in evidence even here in the story of downtrodden New York dive bar pianist Al Roberts (A permanently perspiring Tom Neal looking not unlike Michael Rooker’s Henry). Roberts becomes disconsolate when the singer in his bar (and his ‘gal’) Sue (a barely used Claudia Drake) decides to leave New York and take the much clichéd stab at fame in Hollywood. Roberts soon decides to follow her, but must make his way across the country by thumbing rides. Once he reaches Arizona, Roberts, whose existence has become increasingly transient, thinks that he has finally found some luck when Charles Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) a shady pill popping bookie in a sleek convertible offers him food and a ride all the way to Los Angeles. His luck is soon out again though when Haskell appears to have a heart attack and upon trying to help him, Roberts becomes convinced that he may have inadvertently caused his death. Fearing police reprisals Roberts decides to hide the body and assume Haskell’s identity until he arrives in LA.

This plan appears to work out until he foolishly picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage, an apt name for a hellcat performance). Vera acts standoffish with Roberts and soon drops the killer line “What did you do with the body?” Vera it transpires had earlier ridden with Haskell and is well aware she is now in the car of a dead man, and so becomes Roberts bête noire, as she makes increasingly ludicrous demands of him in order to secure her silence. The film soon decamps in a Los Angeles of cheap motel rooms and car lots, with Vera thundering around the screen like a fireball hurtling towards the sun, as the film heads towards its bleak denouement.

The film clearly provides an intriguing premise, but the most interesting aspect is Roberts, who as our first person narrator comes across as untrustworthy. His story comes across as the increasingly subjective ravings of a possible madman. This is a guy who despite playing in dive bars, has a David Helfgott like talent for the piano. A man whose girlfriend leaves him to find fame, but then agrees to his on a whim decision of marriage. As his bad luck story continues, Roberts is almost pleading with the audience to believe his increasingly farfetched tale.

Set with knocking out 68 minutes of main feature seat warming fodder, Ulmer somehow created an embittered slice of classic noir, a world where everyone is on the make. Where the only person we are meant to trust may just be the loosest nut of the lot of them.

It seems that this film is now public domain and can be watched or downloaded for your viewing pleasure here http://www.archive.org/details/Detour, completely gratis! You now have no excuses not to check this king amongst b-movies out.

Dead Snow - Tommy Wirkola - 2009

It may just be the self-righteous Guardian reader that exists within me, but is it not right that we call time on the hackneyed usage of Nazis as an irredeemable evil, free to be killed off as violently as possible and without remorse “cause the tenets of national socialism ‘n’ Hitler ‘n’ the final solution ‘n’ all that” makes it ok. This argument may hold little water but whilst many Nazis were of course rather unsavoury types to say the least, many were simply ordinary German soldiers conscripted to essentially defend their country, just like the Brits, just like the Russians etc. In years past with the horrors of the Second World War as still a fresh and haunting memory, the use of the Nazi’s as a voiceless evil unit of übermenschen to be wiped out was somewhat more understandable, a catharsis if you will. Therefore the sub-sub-sub genre that is the ‘Nazi-Zombie movie’ found its genesis in films such as Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977), a film worthwhile purely by merit of it including both Hammer hero Peter Cushing and the king of Poverty Row John Carradine slumming it for quick bucks, and Zombie Lake (1981) a film by Jean Rollin at his ‘poor man’s Jess Franco’ worst. Well I say poor man’s Franco but then the Spanish soft focus merchant made the equally poor Nazi brain muncher Oasis of the Zombies in the same year.

In this age of supposed enlightenment though, several generations removed from those who fought in the battlefields of Europe, Africa and Asia. Do contemporary German viewers of cinema really deserve the indignity of being told that their grandfathers made up a nation of purely malevolent beings just ripe for beyond the grave butchery?

Bah, whatever you fucking hippy Lee etc. Anyway, whilst such shenanigans have continued to mine a rich vein in computer games such as the Castle Wolfenstein series and the recent Call of Duty 5. It has taken Norwegian horror buff Tommy Wirkola to resurrect this dubious tradition for the cinema screen with Dead Snow.

After opening with a typical pre-credits first victim gets felled with a cheap scare scenario, the film has us following a group of young medical students on a doomed skiing vacation in the mountainous landscapes of northern Norway. As the film presents the opening half hour of exposition we are made aware that this is a post-Scream generation of disposable teens, very much hip to the tenets of slasher cinema. In the case of one of the gang, the filmmaker’s inspiration is quite literally worn on his sleeve as he parades around in a t-shirt bearing a poster for Peter Jackson’s comic grue tour de force Braindead (1992).

The film proceeds to lay on the self-aware slasher film clichés as thick as possible. With tongue wedged firmly in cheek, we witness a creepy wizened stranger arrive at their cabin to spout local histories not generally provided by lonely planet guides, as we find that the area was during WWII a shipping channel for the allies which the Nazi’s attempted to unsuccessfully blockade. We then witness members of the group foolishly split up to search for missing friends, false scares chalked up and a promiscuous pair sign up as the first victims by choosing to copulate in a freezing outhouse. After half an hour of this post-modernist pastiche though, tedium does begin to set in as the whole enterprise threatens to slip into banality.

Thankfully we soon see the proper arrival of the zombies, as the film’s uneasy balance of seriousness and comic homage gives way to pure ‘splatstick’ and thus proceeds to go batshit insane for the final 40 minutes. All previous attempts at developing character arcs and creeping dread are thrown off the mountainside in favour of Raimi/Jacksonesqe farcical carnage as creative dismemberment becomes the order of the day, and cliff side zombie fistfights, snowmobile massacres and wilderness survival techniques that would turn Ray Mears a whiter shade of pale take precedence. All set in the sort of scenery that would usually be reserved for the grandeur of a Bond ski-chase set piece rather than zombie intestine wrestling.

It also becomes evident that the usage of Nazis as the enemy here does admittedly work rather well. The eternally sharp uniforms of the Wehrmacht make for a wonderful contrast against the snowy backdrops, and for once the concept of athletic and savvy zombies works in the films favour, as they really do proceed to work with military precision, frequently outflanking and outthinking our young protagonists.

Whilst never destined to join the ranks of classic zombie cinema. Dead Snow overcomes it’s stiffly directed slavish adherence to cliché in the opening half and does enough to make you enthusiastically recall the copious claret and freeform butchery of the latter half in recommendations to friends. Worthy popcorn fodder for the gorehound, and returning to my original point, I just saw Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) since I wrote the opening paragraph, and excitedly revelled in 2 ½ hours of the wildest Nazi bloodlust. Colour me hypocritical scumbag!

Deathdream - Bob Clark - 1974

It’s a well established notion that the horror film is a primary visual means by which to incorporate a subtextual representation of, and commentary on, the times in which it was made. Reaction to real world traumas channelled through the cinematic medium can be seen from the post World War I doppelgangers and distortions of German Expressionism to the Cold War “the reds walk among us” paranoia that found itself a staple of the 50’s drive-in B-Movie. If the relative sanity and prosperity of the early Sixties therefore saw somewhat of a lull in horror cinema, then the unbridled chaos and loathing of the fallout from the countercultural implosion saw horror return to the forefront of cult cinema at the tail end of the decade.

From George Romero’s watershed Night of the Living Dead (1968) onwards, we can easily play ‘spot the allegory’ as references to the counterculture, civil rights movements, Nixon’s politics and the Vietnam War abound. A good overview of how this era would go on to influence the 1970s careers of Carpenter, Craven, Cronenberg et al, can be seen in Adam Simon’s documentary An American Nightmare (2000). One film from this fruitful period that isn’t provided with an overview in the documentary though is Bob Clark’s Deathdream (also known by the even more generically 42nd street grindhouse title of Dead of Night).

Clark (who mined a rich vein in cult horror during the mid Seventies with this, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Black Christmas (1974) before finding infamy in 1982 with the teen sex ‘n’ slapstick romp Porky’s) boldly takes on the issue of veterans returning from the Vietnam War, tapping directly into the uneasiness of the period.

The film at an intrinsic level is essentially a contemporary retelling of W.W. Jacob’s famous short horror fable The Monkey’s Paw. Here a fresh faced infantryman Andy Brooks (Richard Backus) is seemingly killed in a striking low budget fever dream recreation of Vietnam in the film’s opening scene. We then cut to his family who are informed that he is M.I.A. and presumed dead. His mother’s refusal to accept this leads her to pray for his safe return, which duly takes place the following night. Except now rather than the vivacious all American apple pie eatin’ young gun that left them, he instead returns as an anaemic and disturbingly somnambulistic young chap with a sideline in casual canine slaughter and family friend butchery.

It is finally and unsurprisingly revealed that Andy is now a slowly decaying member of the undead (make-up for which is provided by a debuting young war Veteran named Tom Savini) who needs human blood to keep himself relatively ‘fresh’. The film never attempts to play this for laughs, thankfully averting any images of Weekend at Bernie’s esq. scenarios. Nor though does the film particularly attempt to force cheap scares upon us. Clark instead envelops the viewer with a creeping dread, a fatalist approach that makes it clear we are not in for a happy ending. Everything in the film hints towards misery, from the mise-en-scene of the middle American mundane, in which our protagonist’s hometown is everywhere and nowhere, a world of identikit prefabs and greasy spoon cafes, through the wonderful lighting of the family home’s hallway, the staircase lit like a shadowy representation of their collective mental disintegration, to a minimalistic soundtrack so intensely coarse it sounds like it’s being scratched across the celluloid.

So to return to the subject of horror as allegory, Clark here paints a picture of the difficulties faced by veterans returning from war, attempting to return to normalcy after witnessing months of shocking atrocities. Throughout the first half of the picture Andy is like a pent up ball of post-traumatic stress, finding himself unable to communicate the horror of his putrefying form with those he loves. The scenes of his self-preserving attaining of blood from people by using syringes (in a clear precursor of Romero’s Martin (1977)), and watching his eyes roll back in a hit of junkie lust clearly reminds us that for some the only way to escape the war still raging on in their minds was to turn towards narcotics. While Deathdream is hardly Born on the Fourth of July, it is still a film that resonates far beyond its current undervalued position as a cheapo early seventies fright flick.

Los Angeles Plays Itself - Thom Anderson - 2003

The image of the cityscape in cinema has long been a personal obsession of mine, from classics such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s preeminent montage document Man with a Movie Camera (1929), through to recent exponents of the cinematic city, such as Michael Mann, who never lets a films plot get in the way of presenting his ultra-modernist visions of sleek and cold-hearted corporate glass dome cityscapes, or to reference a very recent and particularly wondrous example, we can consider Terence Davis’ feisty homage to his home town of Liverpool with Of Time and the City (2008). Davis uses historical council documentarian footage to aid in building a picture of his youth as a sepia-toned poem. With Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson has no need to visit local councils for such footage in order to present the city he once knew, instead the city he knew can still be found documented in hundreds of thousands of homes around the world.

As “the world’s most photographed city” Los Angeles is a place whose history seems to have been created through the lens of the filmmakers who chose to decamp there. As a resident Angelino, Anderson looks to dispel many of the myths that seem to have become part of the regular vernacular when considering the city, and searches for an image of the city lived in by the “39 out of every 40 residents of Los Angeles who aren’t part of the movie industry”.

Therefore rather than a personalised poetic elegy like that presented by Davis, Anderson (usually a tutor at CalArts) presents a heavily politicised audio/visual dissertation that considers the ramifications of living in a city whose double identity has helped in the deformation and reconstruction of large swathes of it, helping create the misshapen segregated beast that the “City of Angels” can be seen as today.

Like a cinematic equivalent of Grandmaster Flash and 2ManyDJ’s, Anderson builds his documentary through the (un-commissioned) employment of hundreds of film clips remixed together to paint a picture of a city whose cinematic representation has distorted it’s geography, history and even its name (though Anderson’s complaints about the abbreviation of the city’s title to L.A. does come across as overly fastidious). Voiceover commentary is provided by Encke King, whose relaxed and muted tone always threatens to veer towards dull though somehow contains just enough bite to keep you attentive for the near three hours duration.

The range of clips employed by Anderson is expansive and to be honest quite superlative. From the obvious and much revered documents of the city seen in the likes of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) via unexpected delights such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s chimerical Zabriskie Point (1970), Peter Bogdanovich’s debut Targets (1968) and Hal Halicki’s car destruction orgy Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), through to even referencing trash that would be otherwise consigned to an unloved eternity at the bottom of supermarket sale bins such as Virtuosity (1995), Death Wish 4 (1987) and Sly Stallone’s self penned ego massage Cobra (1986).

Anderson gradually layers depth into his essay, beginning with the shallow surface examination the use of Los Angeles’ famous art-deco architecture within films. Before really hitting its stride with a fascinating dissection of the history of downtown’s Bunker Hill district. Anderson finally bares his teeth in the second half with an angry deconstruction of the false histories created for the city.

Even with a running time that makes the documentary seem as sprawling and over-bearing as the city itself, Los Angeles Plays Itself inevitably contains omissions. The most obvious cinematic omission would seem to be Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) a film that like Tarantino’s other early work, happily charts a Los Angeles that lives lights years away from the Hollywood Hills crowd. Though it’s representation of the city as one of small time crooks, bric-a-brac store dwelling rapists and pop-culture hitmen will probably still make Anderson’s blood boil.

As the film draws to a close one also begins to feel there is a large hole in the documentary with its lack of in-depth reference to the multi-ethnic make-up of the city outside of brief reference’s to the Watts riots and the Rodney King beating. This is made up for though with a fantastic closing segment that rather than taking the obvious route of examining what Anderson feels to be the exploitative and unfair representations of south-central Los Angeles as urban guerrilla warfare zones as seen in Boyz in the Hood (1991), and the post ’92 riot crowd such as Menace II Society (1993). He instead pays loving tribute to the black independent cinema movements of the 1970’s, covering such films as Charles Burnett’s much admired Killer of Sheep (1977).

Far from attempting to appeal to the masses Anderson has created a document by a film fanatic and very much for film fanatics. If the subject matter may occasionally appear daunting, a dry as Death Valley humour helps the film along, from comparing the punctilious production of hardcore right-wing cop show Dragnet to the methods employed by Art-House deities Bresson and Ozu, to even admitting the documentary’s title is lifted from an early seventies gay porn flick. Anderson has created a work that any self-respecting film student really should hunt out*.

*and hunt out you will have to do, as due to the abundance of unlicensed film clips this is unlikely to ever see a DVD release. Of course searching the darker more legally dubious corners of the internet may help in yielding positive results, not that I could ever promote such ideas.....

Just Admit Your Pathetic Lethargy Lee

Hello!

At the small chance there is anyone out there, as is clear, this site hasn’t been updated in a good three months, alas a final year dissertation and several essays got in the way of me being able to dedicate spare time to much else.

Thankfully said work is now out of the way and I’ve finished my film degree! Rejoice! And I intend on returning to this blog with many more reviews in the next few weeks, until the first reviews begin to appear I shall attempt to appease you with a still from the film that inspired the name of this blog.

Super cool Lorre stylee!

Cheers
Lee

Escape From Hong Kong Island (Mak Dau Sin Sang) - Simon Lui - 2004

A little known satirical comedy from China, Escape From Hong Kong Island follows a ruinous day in the life of Hong Kong stock market trader Raymond Mak (Jordan Chan), a despicably cruel hearted yuppie who arrives at work to find that he has been fired as his colleagues can no longer bear to work with him. He arranges another job with a rival firm that is his as long as he makes it to their offices for 5pm that day to sign the contract. This rival company’s office happens to be across the bay in Kowloon. What should be a simple trip across the harbour turns into a catalogue of disasters as he is mugged of his cash and identity and struggles to acquire the money he needs to make it across. Will he make it in time? And more importantly, will he learn a valuable life lesson along the way? (I can’t believe I just wrote that...)

Most of the humour in the film derives from the fact that our character has such a simple task that he cannot complete, all he needs is a few dollars to make it across yet his crippling character fallacies prove to cause him countless problems in even acquiring this minute amount of cash. Jordan Chan succeeds in making Raymond a seemingly irredeemably cold hearted bastard. This is a man who upon finding out that his mother (whom he hasn’t seen in years) is virtually a vegetable after suffering debilitating Alzheimer’s disease, is only concerned as to whether she left any change lying around for him to steal.

The film also succeeds in its broad satirical stabs at post colonial Hong Kong life, we are presented with a hyper modern westernised city suffering the worst excesses of dog eat dog capitalism, where vacuous materialism is the key to social acceptability and friendships are based purely on what can be financially gained from such acquaintances. The film makes clear the ever widening gap between the Island’s Dom Perignon quaffing, $200 lunch eating elite and the underclass of 6 to a room squalor. Raymond also sees himself constantly held up by the frustrating petty bureaucracies of state officialdom and the absurd red tape and rule systems of corporate holdings.

Unfortunately the look of the film sometimes comes across as rather cheap, as director Simon Lui chose the make the film on low quality DV, and pays for it with that classic washed out look leaving all white background images to suffer from retina scaring flashes of blinding light.

Also as the film proceeds you get the uncomfortable feeling that the film will eventually give in to saccharine melodrama, and the last ten minutes does indeed allow the worst excesses of Hollywoodised ‘life lessons’ and A Christmas Carol esq moral redemption to come into play. Also its representation of the neon swirl of the contemporary Hong Kong metropolis pales when placed next to something like Christopher Doyle’s stunning work on Wong-Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994).

Still though for the first 80 odd minutes this makes for an entertaining slice of classic shadenfreude, and is well worth an evening’s entertainment.

Crash - David Cronenberg - 1996

David Cronenberg adapting the work of J.G. Ballard was always a combination that made a lot of sense. If you look at Cronenberg’s debut Shivers (1975), the similarities between that and the same years High-Rise by Ballard are unmistakable. Thematically they both choose to represent technology as the next logical step in human evolution, often presenting worlds where the human body morphs with machinery in a transgressive creation of a ‘new flesh’. A world where sexuality is usually represented as a bourgeois bating series of perversions and is censor worryingly often presented as a consistent partner to violence. Therefore it goes without saying that Crash will unsettle many viewers, and it did of course suffer a campaign of attempted censorship in the UK by that bastion of wholesome goodness and righteous indignation that is the hateful rag The Daily Mail.

The film follows one James Ballard (played by everyone’s favourite cinematic sexual deviant Mr. James Spader) as he and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger carrying the look of a haunted femme fatale accidentally transported into the 1990’s) find that their sexual relationship has descended into an emotionless series of extramarital affairs, tales of which they regale each other with in an attempt to bring some excitement back into their relationship. This world is changed when James is involved in a major car crash, in which the husband of Dr. Helen Remington (an unusual casting for Holly Hunter) is killed. James forms a tentative relationship with Remington which sees them becoming increasingly involved with a car crash fetishist cult led by Vaughan (The much underused Elias Koteas, making the most of his opportunity to bring a wild eyed fervour to the film).

Whilst there was every chance that the film could have turned into a sex ‘n’ pyrotechnics exploitomess, in the more than capable hands of David Cronenberg it becomes a captivating study of modern day disinterest and isolationism. The decision to relocate the film from the novel’s original setting of the motorways surrounding London’s Heathrow airport to the nondescript freeways and underpasses of Cronenberg’s hometown Toronto proves to be an inspired one. The film feels like it is taking place nowhere and everywhere, as I mentioned in my recent review of Radio On (1979), the car can prove to be a perfect site for examining technology as self imposed segregation. There are no open freeways here, just the busy soul destroying gridlock of inner city travel. We often see the city viewed from the Ballard’s high rise apartment, a vista of grey tower blocks separated into grids by interchanges and intersections.

Cronenberg also takes the decision to leave the characters as largely emotionless blank surfaces, this purposely leaves the viewer with little to connect to, we never find out the reasons for the malaise of the characters or why they find themselves sexually drawn to the body destroying viscera of the car crash. It is this refusal to demonise or even attempt to rationalise their actions that often brings about uncomfortable feelings in the viewer, especially in the case of Catherine, who due to lack of exposition on her characters part, makes her compliance in some of the more forcefully sexual scenes somewhat ambiguous.

Anyone complaining about the films lack of character driven depth would be missing the point though. The refusal to elucidate any plot points is due to the films preoccupation with surfaces, from the metallic sheen of a showroom Mercedes, to the car part tattoos that James and Vaughan chose to cover their bodies with. The only interior Cronenberg is ever concerned with here is that of the body violated, a thematic concern seen throughout his entire oeuvre from the low budget head explosions of Scanners (1981) to the body as site of disintegration and decay seen in the relatively big budget reworking of The Fly (1986). Here we see it as evident as ever, most infamously in the provocative scene featuring a sexual liaison between Patricia Arquette’s Gabrielle (a perfect physical embodiment of the man/machine transgression) and James, in which her leg scars are put to... interesting... use... Though it should be noted that the films risqué subject matter does prove to be more restrained and suggestive than the more sensationalist types would have you believe.

Ballard’s warped increasingly retro-futurist visions found their perfect outlet in Cronenberg’s odd simulacra of existential modernity, in a fascinating film that is all style, no substance, and all the better for it. A fine addition to the Cronenberg canon.

Woodstock - Michael Wadleigh - 1970

To pigeonhole Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock as merely a ‘concert film’ would be to do it a great disservice. The documentary only spends around 40% of its running time showing some of the acts playing at the festival, the other 60% devoted to capturing the atmosphere and attendees of this return ‘to the garden’. The film as viewed from a perspective of almost 40 years after the fact, acts as an insightful time capsule into the fears, exigencies and aspirations of a supposedly sanguine generation whom have taken on a mythos of misinterpreted romanticised conjecture as the years have passed.

As we see the festival organisers and attendees spout their peace will out rhetoric, as well as the humour now evident in their naivety of a music festival as statement of cultural rebellion, there is a sense of melancholy in seeing all this hope and righteousness that would soon waste away (head down to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco today to see the crushingly gentrified and strung out remnants of the scene).

If all the legends were believed, then it would seem that the second half of the 1960’s for American youths was nothing but a big love in of flowers, good drugs and free love, where any problems could be resolved with a harmonious sense of vicissitude. Yet in reality by this point (July 1969) the bubble had burst on the ‘hippie’ ethos; the Vietnam war was at its appalling peak (the horrors of events such as My Lai still fresh in the mind). Many contemporaries were being imprisoned for protests and avoiding the draft. Promoters of the mind expansion ideals such as Timothy Leary were being revealed as frauds. Richard Nixon had ushered in a new era of republican rule following the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the build up to the 1968 presidential elections, and just days before the festival took place The Manson Family committed their famously brutal murders of Sharon Tate and friends, for many signalling a death knell for the idealistic commune family scenarios. We could therefore take the rather pessimistic (but not inaccurate) view of Woodstock as the wild last stand of the ‘free love’ generation.

In fairness whilst Woodstock does not refer explicitly to the wider context of troubles outside the festival setting (other than Country Joe & the Fish’s comic karaoke rendition of scathingly anti-Vietnam war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag”), Wadleigh doesn’t attempt to disguise the fact that the festival’s “3 days of peace, love, music” was beset by many problems.

Therefore we see torrential winds and rains pounding the site on the first day, turning the site into a virtual disaster zone (which much to the chagrin of the attendees no doubt, had to receive aid from ‘the man’ in order to cope). We see that many of the young attendees weren’t completely at peace with their world, inside they were disillusioned, frantic and just wanting to be accepted for what they were in an America that still looked upon non-conformist lifestyles with considerable disdain.

We also see music wise, that not every performance was a classic. Some of the bands perform way under their standards (Jefferson Airplane), others seem oddly out of place (Sha-Na-Na), and humorously it reveals that the festival’s most celebrated performance (that of Sir Jimi of Hendrix) was only actually witnessed by a small remaining crowd on the last day, with most of the attendees having packed up and left by that point.

There are of course some stunning performances to see, the aforementioned Hendrix performance is as ‘electric’ as the legend goes. At the other end of the guitar spectrum, Richie Havens creates wonders with just an acoustic to hand, and credit must go to Santana’s young drummer who is quite possibly the most amazingly gifted, grunting, gurning, drumming wunderkind I have ever seen.

Viewed as a documentary, the film does not attempt to pose or answer any of the wider contextual questions that could have been posed, or even that of why people would want to spend three days together caked in mud. Wadleigh is happy to present an observational account of events, often making appealing use of split screen in order to show interviews and present a wide array of images at the same time.

And it’s these images that give the answers to anyone looking to question this ‘cultural happening’, people were looking for a communication in a world of increasing isolation, even in the eye of the storm, creed, colour, sexual orientation, personal presentation, none of this mattered. Essential viewing and an essential cultural artefact, you dig?

INLAND EMPIRE - David Lynch - 2006

Whilst one of the most critically regarded of the post ‘New Hollywood’ generation of American Auteurs, the work of David Lynch has always divided audiences. This is a man whose films carry such a distinctly subverted sense of scenario and logic that they have their own stylistic term (‘Lynchian’ now being pretty much a blanket term for any film considered “dark and weird”). Wading through his oeuvre, you get the increasing sense that only studio forced commercial imperatives have stopped Lynch from jettisoning such archaic forms as ‘narrative’ and ‘structure’ in favour of just completely discharging the cruel, grotesque and aberrant worlds that clearly inhabit his mind onto film.

Now freed from these fetters of studio imposition, and armed solely with a Sony PD150 (I’m no expert but understand this is only one notch above a standard commercial digital video camera), this is Lynch the painter and sculptor set free. INLAND EMPIRE presents us with Mr. David Lynch uncensored, unabashed and unbridled, the purest ‘Lynchian’ universe yet, mainlined uncut straight into our retinas. An experience that is by turns confusing, surreal, maddening, frightening, disturbing and hilarious.

Trying to define the film in terms of a brief synopsis is an unenviable task, but essentially the film concerns one Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), a Hollywood actress who receives her dream role in a film titled On High in Blue Tomorrows. This turns out to be a remake of a Polish production never finished due to the mysterious deaths of its two main stars. For the first 45 minutes or so this makes up the plot that we manage to loosely grasp on to. Beyond this point though we appear to enter the subjective world of Nikki’s apparent mental breakdown, as the film breaks off into strands way too numerous and sinuous to mention here as we delve deeper and deeper into planet Lynch for the next two hours (the finished product falling some eight minutes short of three hours).

Whether intentional or not, Lynch has created a provocative piece of work with INLAND EMPIRE. When cinema usually attempts to break free from the burdens of its status as the bastard child of literature, we find it confined to the margins of art installations. Lynch’s film attempts to defy such rules, the world he has created here does not have any obvious precedents in literature (an argument could be made for the great provocateur Joyce, but let’s not bother). This swirling sense of dream logic leaves the viewer with questions as to the nature of cinematic purity. Is INLAND EMPIRE in its staunch refusal of traditional storytelling devices, a final realisation of the language of cinema?

This unwillingness to compromise his vision unfortunately leaves the viewer having to do so at the cost of their own enjoyment. For example, our struggle to comprehend the events unfolding leaves us unable to fully appreciate the nuances of Laura Dern’s finest moment so far. In an unforgiving performance, Dern is forced to embody many difference characterisations and does so brilliantly. A bewildered film starlet, downtrodden housewife and destitute streetwalker, Dern embodies all the characters convincingly and with an empathy that lends a definite emotional resonance to a film that could otherwise appear too incorporeal to accommodate any sense of gravitas.

The new future world of digital Lynch also leads to a series of compromises. The freedom such small scale shooting has granted him comes at the cost of the lush cinematography we usually associate with Lynch. The PD150 gives the film the occasional look of a film student dissertation project, yet Lynch somehow largely works this to his advantage. The camera seems to spend 90% of its time in unflatteringly obtrusive medium close-ups with lighting rigged up with all the subtlety of fluorescent tubing in a late night takeaway. Lending the film a cold, paranoid, voyeuristic and increasingly claustrophobic look, it’s perfectly 21st century.

Continuing this theme, rather than the noirish Los Angeles pictured in Mulholland Drive (2001), here Lynch gives his adopted home town short shrift, there appears to be no middle ground between the opulent plasticity of the Beverly Hills highlife and the ragged boulevards of broken dreams around Hollywood and Vine. This makes for another fine addition to the ‘city of angels’ many unflattering portraits.

One area which undeniably remains strong is the soundtrack, despite the lack of compositions from regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, the music still carries the evocative ambiance we associate with Lynch, here appearing in the form of Eno like ambient passages and haunting chanteuse numbers (ala Julee Cruise). Lynch’s tendency to subvert pop standards remains solidly in place as well, this time “The Locomotion” being the track forevermore tainted with a certain seediness.

And so to finally return to my initial point, if Lynch as a director divides cinemagoers, then INLAND EMPIRE is the film that divides Lynch fans, while some will decree its unsettling fevered breakdown nightmare as his finest and truest work to date, an equal amount will no doubt see it as an overlong step too far into surrealism at the cost of structured enjoyment.

Personally I found the best method is to adjust to the film’s inner rhythm, start to get bored regardless, then find yourself drawn back in by a moment of pure audaciousness, repeating every few minutes for three hours.