Music Monday: Nightflyer Edition

Highway Racer (1977)

Original title: Poliziotti sprint

Palma (Maurizo Merli, confusingly enough without any facial hair) is part of the police unit responsible for all the high-speed chase work the police in Rome apparently get up to. Palma’s a tense macho guy utterly in love with cars (so much so, one would not be surprised to see him having sex with one), as well as with the idea of becoming a big shot cop hero driver like his boss, Tagliaferri (Giancarlo Sbragia), was. The problem is that Palma’s all guts and mouth and no technique, crashing cars with wild abandon without getting his men, driving his long-suffering partner and Tagliaferri insane with his bullshit. Add to this how much of an asshole Palma is to everyone, and it’s a bit of a surprise he’s not already tasked with filling out parking tickets instead of endangering the citizens of Rome.

Despite all the man-shouting between them, Tagliaferri does see the potential of a great driver in Palma, as well as something of his own, younger self. So when Tagliaferri’s old arch enemy, the Nicean (Angelo Infanti) reappears as the head of a gang of bank robbers whose claim to infamy is their insane (and actually pretty clever) getaway driving, the old copper decides to take a chance on Palma. He takes the young man under his wing and tries to turn him into the grown-up man he could be, so that Palma can then go undercover with the Nicean and break things up from the inside.

Because this is very much that sort of movie, Palma, already in macho man love with Tagliaferri, will fall equally hard for the man he is bound to betray.

So yes, Stelvio Massi’s Highway Racer (because Rome is full of highways), is very much a prototype for all of those films about men of violence betraying the other man of violence with whom they are in (platonic, because it’s a hetero movie world) violent men love. I wouldn’t be surprised if Katheryn Bigelow had seen this one some time before she made Point Break. And as we all know, the first Fast and the Furious movie is pretty much a remake of that film that replaces surfboards with cars and therefore feels even more inspired by the film at hand, even though it is further removed from it.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean there really has to be any actual direct influence at all, for the story set-up has been done in many a film in-between (and at least partially before), it’s just that the parallels between the second half of this one and the later American films feel particularly striking to me. Especially since the film at hand does quite a bit of what the first F&F movie does with big American muscle cars with small Italian ones, though of course in a late 70s style. These car stunts, even to someone like me who isn’t really into cars, are pretty damn insane, looking dangerous and exciting, and astonishingly real (because, of course, when this was made, they more or less were), crazy and exciting.

Massi shoots the car stunts to the highest effect too, never missing a beat when it comes to make things more dynamic, and at the same time also keeping the audience perfectly informed of what they are actually supposed to see. So there are no cop-out sequences that only go for wheels on the road and hands on the wheel to keep thing together – dynamic clarity is the name of the game.

That’s not the film’s only strength though, for even though its character set-up is of course a bit of a cliché by now, the script by Gino Capone (an Italian genre movie with a single writer credited, honestly) does really understand how to portray its macho characters and their emotional connections, dropping a little jailhouse cupboard philosophy now and then but spending most of its energy in making the guys larger than life in a believable way. I think it actually helps that the film isn’t looking at these men with a raised eyebrow but takes them and their view on life seriously, though never so seriously it isn’t able to call them assholes when it needs to.

The acting’s just as fine, too. Merli seems rather one note here at first, but he actually sells the transition from baby macho (which ironically seems to be what incels think a man should act like) to actual manly man whose macho swagger is so secure he is actually willing and able to admit doubts and weakness very well indeed. His two father/platonic lover (you decide) figures do put the right work in, too. I found myself especially fond of Sbragia’s performance, because of how easily he suggests he knows all the bullshit mistakes Palma makes from his own experience without ever actually needing to say it.

Three Films Make A Post: A tale of the strange and perverse.

G@me (2003): Supposed to be a twisty crime thriller with some satirical elements, Satoshi Isaka’s adaptation of a novel by Keigo Higashino (that may very well be much better) is exactly the sort of thing that gives twist-based movies a bad name: as is oh so typical the plot twists manage to be completely obvious to anyone who has seen a couple of movies yet also make a mockery out of the characters’ behaviour the audience has witnessed throughout. It doesn’t help that we spend our time with two characters (as played by Naohito Fujiki and Yukie Nakama’s respective hair-dos) who are at once deeply unlikeable and terribly boring, nor that their attempts at faking a kidnapping really rather belong in a Coen Brothers comedy, but are played completely straight here.

Some of this is certainly meant as a critique of early 00’s Japanese capitalism, but the bland writing, the one note characters and Isaka’s slick yet uninteresting direction bury that lede rather effectively.

My Girlfriend is a Serial Killer aka Love and Murder of Sheep and Wolf aka Hitsuji to Okami no Koi to Satsujin (2019): Also not as successful as I’d like it to be is this manga adaptation by Kayoko Asakura, about a hikikomori (Yosuke Sugino) who falls in love with the neighbour (Haruka Fukuhara) he has started spying on through a hole in the connecting wall between their apartments, and continues to do so even when she turns out to be serial killer. This one suffers from the weird decision to underplay how perverse its set up actually is and go from there. Instead it plays things off as if this were a pretty traditional romantic comedy, just with more bursts of blood and violence as central problems to the relationship. Even the random murder of strangers is played without any weight, not just by the characters but by the film as a whole.

It’s a much better movie than this post’s first entry, mind you: it is entertaining throughout, it just never gets anywhere interesting or too unpleasant (which we might blame the manga for?) with a set-up absolutely built to.

The Night Digger aka The Road Builder (1971): This British movie by Alastair Reid, apparently adapted from a Joy Cowley novel by Roald Dahl to get post-stroke work for his wife, the excellent Patricia Neal, on the other hand, does know a bit about the perverse, and willingly admits to it. When the film is not a bit of a broad satire of the manners of the country bourgeoisie, this is an in turns sharp and ambiguous movie about loneliness, horrible families, and the way the worst kind of love can worm itself into one’s heart if one has been beaten around by life enough. It’s also a thriller with a nasty streak that still manages to feature little to no on-screen violence, a sleazy bit of exploitation that seems to beam its nastiest implications into your brain instead of showing it, and a heart-breaking character study for Neal.

It’s pretty fantastic in often very unexpected ways, is what I’m saying.

If you post Townes one Friday, you have to post Guy on the next (or vice versa)

In short: Things Heard & Seen (2021)

I know that this overlong tale of marital trouble and visually really badly realized ghosts has quite a few friends among writers online and off, but I very much suspect it’s mostly those people hanging the term “elevated [insert genre here]” on perfectly innocent and great films, a group of critics I find myself very unkindly disposed towards. On a critical level, obviously; on the personal level, one shouldn’t loathe people one doesn’t know as if they were people to actually give one reasons to hate them in the life outside the mind. As happens often enough, I’m showing my age in my digression.

But back to the movie at hand. This thing must be one of the most bourgeois pieces of filmmaking I’ve encountered in a long time, one that clearly wants an audience that understands the sheer horror of being a failed artist having to have turned to teaching (gasp!), and not even getting a cushy job at Cornell (double gasp!) but having to teach at a more provincial (triple gasp!) place. And no, the film isn’t a Chabrol-style dissection of the kind of life that thinks that’s an actual problem an audience will easily empathize with but really seems to want us to nod sadly to the male protagonist’s plight. Female protag (Amanda Seyfried doing her best to make gold out of crap, as the poor woman so often seems to be tasked with, and really making her co-lead James Norton’s performance look even blander than it already is) has a vaguely defined eating disorder that’s so generically realized, nobody should ever confuse her with an actual human being suffering from such a thing.

Of course (unless you’re that kind of Marxist) you don’t need to skewer the bourgeoisie in your movie to use so deeply bourgeois characters as these, but if you want to go the other route, you really need to turn them into actual human beings with specific human character traits and sorrows other human beings not exclusively of their own class will believe in and understand. Unfortunately, specificity and depth are not the forte of director/writer duo Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini here at all. Characters are flat and feel nearly abstract in their lack of actual humanity; they’re there to make the impression of humans, that’s all.

Keeping to form, the supernatural parts of the film seem to be very proud of someone involved having read Swedenborg but do very little with their reading, instead using Swedenborg, his version of spiritualism and the ghosts (well) as the bluntest metaphors you an imagine, turning all of this into intellectual posturing with little more than the pretence of weight and depth.

Does it surprise that the film looks slick but is also devoid of any stylistic personality?

In the Earth (2021)

Warning: there are structural spoilers coming your way!

During a global pandemic outbreak, biologist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) comes to a scientific outpost bordering a humungous arboreal forest. He is tasked with helping with the sample work of Dr Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires). Though that’s not the only – or central – reason he has come, for, as we will eventually learn, he once had a relationship with Wendle, and was still exchanging regular letters with her. Letters that some day just stopped. Which, as it turns out, is not the only thing that has stopped in the last six months or so: Wendle hasn’t had any contact with her colleagues at the border of the forest either, except for dropping off samples in collection boxes in the woods, and has spent the time smack dab in the middle of the forest in her own camp.

That’s where Martin is bound now, accompanied by park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia). For city guy Martin, having to travel two days through the forest would be bad enough, but on their first night, someone attacks them, smashes their radio and steals their shoes. Fortunately, they soon meet Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who apparently lives in the woods as a hermit. He seems helpful enough with food, drink and shoes, but you know how these things can go.

And that’s really not at all everything Ben Wheatley’s COVID lockdown-production has to offer. In fact, for much of its running time, In the Earth shifts and transforms between or through different horror or weird subgenres, until it eventually arrives at looking at folk horror through a somewhat Nigel Kneale-ish lens.

At first, all this shifting and not quite committing to sub-genres and their respective tropes makes the movie somewhat hard to grasp. In fact, I did initially get the impression of a film not quite willing to commit to anything and mostly interested in going through a kind of scrap book of Wheatley’s pop cultural interests and obsessions. Once the film arrived in its final stage, all that shifting through different genres actually began to make sense as absolutely necessary part of the film’s structure, for this is one of those folk horror movies that really aims to funnel its audience through the concrete stages of the enacted ritual together with the characters, where everything we see is indeed part of a calculated ritual. Though, unlike in Wheatley’s other great folk horror film Kill List, this ritual is not necessarily one enacted through and by human agency, even when the human agents seem to think that it is. Audience and characters alike are in the hands of something bigger and more difficult to understand, and something most certainly not human. Which, in the case of this film doesn’t necessarily mean it to be a destructive or malevolent power – just one whose interests may be very different from our human ones.

Tellingly enough, the genre shifts here are always moving away from the more human centric interests of survival horror and torture porn towards the weird and the abstract, through the sort of psychedelic trip footage Wheatley so obviously loves until we arrive at an evocation of the isolation and strangeness of nature and the dangers of trying to explain it on human terms. Particularly the second half of the film is full of brilliant shots, making use of very simple visual techniques (strobe lights, limited lighting, and so on), a great Clint Mansell soundtrack and pretty fantastic old school British science fiction sound design, all in service of emphasising how strange the natural world and what might be behind/below/in it actually are.

All of which is of course like catnip to me, and pretty much makes this my favourite Wheatley movie since Kill List – and most of his films in between were great.

In short: Web of Violence (1966)

Original title: 3 notti violente

Walter (Brett Halsey), has lost his job as a journalist because he tended to dig a bit deeper than politically wanted. As the film shows it, this has turned him into a bit of mope, driving his girlfriend Lisa (Irán Eory) into the arms of rich and rather old Dr. Fassi (Julio Peña).

Walter does get out of his mope zone when Lisa suddenly disappears without a trace, and he learns that she was trying to contact him directly before. The shock clearly lets his old newshound instincts kick in again. Soon, he and Lisa’s best friend Christina (Margaret Lee) – of course madly in love with Walter and often acting so suspiciously she just has to be innocent – have to make their way through various mysteries and secrets surrounding Lisa’s hidden life. On the way, they encounter suspicious cops, mysterious horse-faced guys, feuding gangsters, and a secret drug running mastermind.

I have seen Nick Nostro’s mid-60s termed a giallo, but unless you feel the need to identify every Italian thriller with an amateur detective as one, I don’t see much use in that genre term applied to this film. This is really a rather straightforward Eurocrime thriller that mostly uses the more traditional mystery elements in its plots to get its main character into trouble. Aesthetically, it isn’t giallo-esque at all. Nostro mostly prefers more straightforward techniques, juggling merry 60s style action scenes – a particularly simple yet fine car chase being a stand-out – and Walter’s investigations rather well, and then add a touch of post-Hitchcockian suspense via certain sense of paranoia where really nobody seems completely trustworthy. The film is really rather good at creating a bunch of suspicious pulp characters for Walter to drift between, leading our hero not just from one fun and exciting situation to the other but also from one memorable (if not spectacularly so) side character to the next.

It’s all very good fun. Halsey sells the moping as well the two-fistedness of our hero, not turning him into an unconquerable hero, but a man driven by genuine emotion, sometimes desperate, sometimes angry. Which is rather more than you usually get from the protagonist in films like this.

All of this adds up to a fine little addition to its genre, and a pleasant surprise on a rainy Sunday morning.

Music Monday: Haint Edition

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Up to this point, the Monsterverse US kaiju movies have been rather reluctant to fully and openly embrace their chosen genre’s silliness, playing things more or less dramatic, an approach that has resulted in at least one of the best giant monster movies ever made (that would be Kong: Skull Island, for the barbarians among my imaginary readers), but also in the idea that Kyle Chandler looking as if he had very bad case of constipation makes for an engaging human anchor.

Chandler’s still in this movie, but you might miss him if you blink, for the only human character from the last Monsterverse film this one cares about is Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison, which seems to be a fair assessment of the situation. And while Brown’s subplot here doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense, and suggests that Evil Elon Musk (yup, that’s our human villain) has never even heard of the concept of operational security, or just plain security, it does go through a lot of the sort of conspiracy and weirdness human subplots the non-monsters in a kaiju movie are supposed to go through. With a smile on its face and whistling a merry tune.

The other humans of note are Alexander Skarsgård as the rogue geologist version of Fox Mulder – and the way Skarsgård plays it, he knows he’s Mulder – and Rebecca Hall trying to chat with a very huge gorilla with the help of an honest to gosh Kenny. Well, because we now live in 2021, the Kenny’s actually a mute little Inuit girl (Kaylee Hottle), but that’s certainly an improvement over a little Japanese boy in short trousers. Also eventually involved will be a little trip into the Hollow Earth. That old Fortean chestnut is presented through some genuinely beautiful and bizarre effects, and seems like the logical next step (before the alien invasion I hope for in the next film) for the series to take.

So this time around, those pesky humans do get some interesting stuff to take part in again, but Adam Wingard’s (coming off his terrible Death Note thing for Netflix and the dire Blair Witch swinging) film is pretty clear about what’s the main event (see the title of the damn movie) and goes all in for the big damn kaiju action in lovingly staged fights that lay waste to quite a few pretty cities this time around. There’s a wonderful sense of abandon to those fights, comparable to that phase in the Showa era when the films were becoming sillier but were still using that silliness to put their audience – kids at heart, sometimes in body – in a state of awe and wonder and the sort of giddy excitement that can come about when movies show you something that just can’t be seen in real life (cf., why the movies are better than life) – just with a different style of special effects.

Speaking of those, whoever is responsible for the motion capture and animation of Kong here is an absolute genius, providing personality and weight in spades; only in comparison does Godzilla look like a grumpy old lizard.

Three Films Make A Post: Hard work never killed anyone. Until now.

Boys from County Hell (2020): This Irish horror comedy by Chris Baugh has quite a bit to recommend it: the – really very Irish, going by other Irish comedies I’ve seen – black humour often hits very well indeed, not necessarily being kind to its characters but also not using them as punching bags. I’m also very happy with the surprisingly clever (and creepy) twists it makes to some of the mechanics of vampirism. The cold open is a scene of two elderly people’s blood coming to the vampire instead of the undead coming to suck for a reason.

I – and I know quite a few people disagree with me there – am not always as happy with the way the film’s comedy and its more naturalistic emotional side interact; in fact, the film seems to use its humour to distract from its darker, personal elements, like an awkward guy afraid of his own emotions.

The Wanting Mare (2020): Sometimes, I use these three movies/one braincell posts to mark a film I’m not sure I’ve quite come to terms with as interesting, wonderfully made, or important. Case in point is this multi-generational weird science fiction film by Nicholas Ashe Bateman that tells a story of yearning and hope carried by a dream over three generations, casting it into dream-like yet precise imagery that belies its low budget. I’m not sure I’ve quite been able to penetrate its metaphorical level, so I can only say it’s a fascinating and beautiful film most certainly worth returning to, made by a filmmaker clearly worth watching.

The Bloodstained Butterfly aka Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (1971): This sort of giallo by the always interesting Duccio Tessari is a very peculiar film. On a plot level, this is more of a police procedural with a sharp, socially critical edge (as nearly always in this kind of film, towards the rich and people in authority positions, and the failures of the older generation bringing the younger to ruin) that focusses on all of those things giallos usually don’t focus on: a systematic police investigation and courtroom shenanigans, with only little time spent on the things you’d expect going in.

However, stylistically, this is absolutely a giallo, using all the visual and acoustic tics and tricks of the genre, but applying them to a narrative space they are not usually applied to, turning the dry and the sober strange through it.

Townes Friday

In short: Justice Society: World War II (2021)

The Barry Allen Flash (Matt Bomer) is vibrating too hard (or something) while trying to catch a kryptonite bullet meant for Superman and finds himself sucked into what he first assumes to be the past, World War II. There, he teams up with a JSA version led by an - apparently Eastern European going by her accent - Wonder Woman (Stana Katic).

Theoretically to kick Nazi butt, but the weird, episodic plotting of this animated movie eventually provides other butts to kick.

The whole thing, as directed by Jeff Wamester, is a rather middling affair, animated with a kind of cell-shade look that never quite commits and ends up looking weirdly generic for the approach, decently – but not better – voiced, and which suffers from a pretty weak script by Jeremy Adams and Meghan Fitzmartin. There are several problems here: first, there’s the whole Future (actually SPOILER) Flash angle that adds exactly nothing to the World War II business, has no pay-off except one of those interminable valuable lessons to be learned (that is to say, an anti-payoff). Hell, Barry doesn’t even have anything of import to do in the grand finale at all, and is probably only in the movie because someone higher up in the development ladder became afraid the audience might be confused by a film headlined by Wonder Woman (I am being sarcastic here). The Barry business takes up quite a bit of valuable space, too, so there’s not enough left for the short hand characterisation of most of the rest of the cast beyond Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, so that their supposed character arcs all seem to have a beginning and an end but no middle whatsoever, destroying the impact of something like a less heroic becoming the Superman, and killing most of the emotional beats in the climax stone cold dead.

There’s little dramatic flow to the narrative in general, and the second half of the film seems to belong to rather a different movie than the first one altogether. At least it’s one with more interesting set pieces.

Trouble Man (1972)

A man generally known as T (Robert Hooks) – that’s Mr. T (no relation) to you and me, or we’ll have to suffer the consequences, I suppose – is working as a bit of a problem solver in an urban black neighbourhood, keeping one leg on the line of the law and one casually crossing over, meting out justice where it is needed, going into macho postures and keeping the peace as best as one can without actually trying to change the world.

When minor crime bosses Chalky (Paul Winfield, in that stage of his career before he started to project distinction as his basic mode of operation and did instead slimy very well) and Pete (Ralph Waite, so sweaty he’s gotta smell, probably not welcome on a certain farm this way) ask T to help them capture a group that has been robbing their craps games, it looks like just another day in the life of a cool dude. However, T soon finds himself confronted with attempts at framing him for murder as well as  a convenient scape goat for your typical gangster business.

Though how convenient this particular choice of goat will really turn out to be is questionable, for our hero combines unflappable coolness, a sharp mind, a disinterest in working things out in a lawful manner that would probably get him killed or arrested for something he’s completely innocent of, with a talent for all things two-fisted.

More people will probably know Ivan Dixon’s Trouble Man for its (unfortunately more workmanlike than great) Marvin Gaye soundtrack than will actually have seen it. That’s a bit of a shame, for the film is a great example for the less exploitative, less crazy arm of blaxploitation cinema. In fact, I’m not even completely comfortable calling it blaxploitation instead of simply treating it as crime movie with a black protagonist. But then, trying to define genres, sub-genres and marketing labels too closely will only give a guy a headache, and blaxploitation can mean very different things to many different people at the best of times.

After a stint as an actor on “Hogan’s Heroes”, Dixon – one of the actual African Americans directing movies in the genre – became a clearly well-respected and hard-working TV director. This and the excellent spy movie The Spook Who Sat by the Door are his main feature films, and they certainly suggest a man with quite a bit of talent. Sure, Dixon isn’t one for obviously sexy stylish flourishes, but he manages to provide the handful of sets and locations he’s working with here with a genuinely lived in feeling, presenting the a bit too cool and competent to be likeable T as a part of an actual community, suggesting all the ways an at best ignored part of a population goes about building their own support structures when the rest of society ignores their needs (again, at best).

It’s a low budget movie kind of community, of course, but Dixon is genuinely good with the broad stroke characterisation that comes with that, and the actors are all the sort of pros that do well with a set-up like this.

Speaking of set-ups, while not terribly plausible (it may make sense to try and frame a guy who might genuinely be able to get away with murder, but T’s obviously the man you simply want to keep out of your business completely), the plotting works well. T’s way of finding out what’s going on follows a classic private eye film structure (and methods) in a satisfying way, until things do climax in the appropriate amount of gunplay, so there’s little about Trouble Man that isn’t at the very least satisfying to watch.

In short: The Train Robbers (1973)

Aging, upright gunfighter Lane (John Wayne), his – also not exactly fresh - buddies Grady (Rod Taylor) and Jesse (Ben Johnson) and their new, comparatively young, hired help Calhoun (Christopher George) and Ben Young (Bobby Vinton) are hired by widow Mrs Lowe (Ann-Margret) for a rather interesting project. Mrs Lowe knows where her late husband hid quite a bit of gold he robbed from a railway company, and needs some experienced gun hands to get it for her. Or really, as it turns out, to accompany her to the gold, for she’s not that trusting. She’s not planning to keep the stuff, mind you, but wants to return it to the railway company to wash her husband’s name clean in the eyes of their son.

The gold is hidden across the border in Mexico, and obviously, Mrs Lowe and her men aren’t the only ones interested in it, making their little project rather dangerous. And that’s before you add the natural dangers of crossing the desert where the gold is hidden and the – pretty mild – tensions in the group to the mix of dangers.

This Burt Kennedy joint isn’t the kind of Western that goes terribly hard or terribly deep, playing a bit too nice with its characters for my taste. Everyone here resolves their conflicts a bit too easily and too pat, and apart from some leering at Ann-Margret and the usual Wayne bluster, there doesn’t seem to be a mean bone in any non-bandit’s body here. From time to time, there are some pleasantly off-handed moments concerned with the plight of being an old man in a young man’s job (certainly something gun hands and our actors have in common, exceptions notwithstanding) that add a bit of melancholy to the mix.

This doesn’t mean the film isn’t a entertaining time – Kennedy is after all an old pro with the genre and knows how to keep this more amiable style of Western far from the Italian style or the revisionist Western (some of whose predecessors were ironically enough scripted by Kennedy with rather more depth than this one) engaging and fun.

There are also some pretty spectacular nature shots, and – eventually – some fine action set pieces to keep the willing viewer diverted, again keeping The Train Robbers fun throughout, though seldom more.

Music Monday: Pour Over Edition

A Thrilling Development: Nurse Will Make It Better (1975)

“Thriller”, season 4, episode 2

Charley (Linda Liles), the daughter of Edgar Harrow (Cec Linder), an American diplomat in England living in quite the country manor, is a bit of a firecracker. She’s breaking hearts left and right – particularly those hearts her more seriously minded sister Ruth (Andrea Marcovicci) seems invested in – and goes through life with the clear conviction everything in it belongs to the rich and hot like her by rights.

So it’s not much of a surprise that she can’t cope at all when a riding accident she’s at least half responsible for herself leaves her paraplegic. In fact, her behaviour is so extreme, it’s not terribly easy to feel much compassion for her. It is also driving away one nurse after the other.

Until, that is, Bessy Morne (Diana Dors) arrives. Bessy easily – and with a bit of magic – manages to build a rapport with Charley, and, like an evil Mary Poppins, soon starts to exert a rather negative influence on the rest of the household, too, particularly the youngest sister Susy (Tiffany Kinney). And look, if Charley is a good girl, reads the nice big book of witchcraft dear old Bessy is going to provide and agrees to a certain pact, she might even manage to walk again.

Only Ruth and Harrow’s chief of security Carson (Ed Bishop) seem to understand that something very bad is going on, but they won’t really start to do something about it once the body count starts. On the plus side, there’s also an alcoholic priest (Patrick Troughton) in play who might eventually come in useful.

In the coming weeks or months (I’ve never been too great at planning, I have to admit), I am going to dip into episodes of the British 70s TV show Thriller (not to be confused with the US 60s show, of course). Produced and to a large degree written by the great Brian Clemens (of the Steed and colleagues Avengers and so much more fame), this was an anthology show with episodes of about seventy minutes length each, usually with some American actors involved to make it easier to sell the show there, and generally with thriller (what a surprise) and – more irregularly – supernatural horror plots. There’s an obvious debt to Hitchcock style thrillers on display, of course, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised by an influence of the – often great - non-supernatural thrillers made by Hammer which were of course themselves inspired by Hitchcock.

This being a British TV production of its time, the show does tend to some of the visual weaknesses TV production in the country was already starting to lose when this was made, namely the often slightly confusing contrast between 16mm exterior shots and interiors shot on video, which does tend to make even the best set look a bit more flimsy than it should.

However, thanks to usually fun acting and clever and unapologetically pulpy scripts, that sort of thing is rather easily overlooked in the better half or so of the episodes I’ve seen by now.

Nurse Will Make It Better really is a case in point there. This is one of the absolutely supernatural entries in the series, with no improbable last act reveal to make things “realistic”. Instead, this one ends in a scenery chewing duel between Patrick Troughton (in what feels like a bit of dry run to his character in The Omen) and Diana Dors absolutely made-up as evil Mary Poppins (though she is in truth the devil herself, which is pretty awesome). A duel that Dors absolutely wins with a performance that manages to be so camp and silly that it actually becomes creepy again.

Which really is the way the script handles most of its business. Clemens is not at all afraid of using every simple and cheap (that is, affordable on his budget) trick in the books to make his tale of a sexless seduction of the not so innocent interesting and fun, first building the family up in short and deft strokes, and then letting it implode via the obvious fault lines once Bessy gets her claws in.

There are some genuinely creepy scenes here, in particular most everything concerning Bessy’s influence on Susy, a couple of cleverly staged murders, and some neat business where characters see something horrible Bessy hides in a little chest, but the audience can only go by their reactions on what it actually is, making a virtue of the fact the show couldn’t effort many special effects. The acting is very on point, too. Marcovicci makes a very likeable heroine who wins out in the end because she loves a family that gives her a lot of reasons to hate them, and channels this love into practical action, and Liles and Kinney really seem to have fun witching it up.

While the direction – by Shaun O’Riordan, a British TV stalwart – certainly can’t go all giallo or 70s cinematic horror on us thanks to the problems of mostly shooting on video under very constrained budgetary circumstances (the lighting in the show as a whole tends to be rather bland, too), there’s quite a bit of clever blocking and framing to produce tension or demonstrate the lines of influence here.

It’s a fun little film – given its running time and structure, that does seem the proper word rather than episode – giving dear old Bessy her due very nicely.

In short: Red Screening (2020)

aka The Last Matinee

Original title: Al morir la matinée

A rainy night in the early 90s. Engineering student Ana (Luciana Grasso) certainly has not expected the night she gets when she takes over the night part of a double shift for her projectionist father. The cinema is nearly empty – one suspects “Frankenstein – Day of the Beast” isn’t quite the attraction – so it should be a quiet enough night, but a mysterious killer (Ricardo Islas, godfather of Uruguayan indie horror as well as the director of said “Day of the Beast”) is murdering his way through the audience that is there in increasingly gory ways. That’s what you get when you light your cinema in the reds and greens of Italian horror, I fear.

I’m often not terribly fond of films like Maximiliano Contenti’s Red Screening that mostly seem to exist to pay very heavy stylistic homages to other movies, but then, many films of this kind never manage to reach the aesthetic joys of the films they are looking up to. This one, on the other hand, would have been a major entry into the later, most gory parts of the giallo if it had been made thirty, thirty-five years ago. It not only presents increasingly insane and surreal gore gags with just the right gloopy and unreal quality to make them interesting as well as parts of the mood of the film, but even before the first drop of blood falls, Contenti uses all the best elements of the Argento-style giallo to build a dream-like mood of artificial rain, strange colours and a spot-on soundtrack, and uses a certain nostalgic view on the bad sides of the cinema going experience to great effect. It’s a bit like one of those French or Italian elegies on the cinema, just with an eye on better movies, and more eye mutilation. And yes, apart from the homage, the film does quite obviously have a thing or two to say about the act of seeing and watching in horror movies.

Of course, it’s not just Italian horror and US slashers and Bigas Luna the film is built on. The double homage to Islas is rather wonderful, not just including one of his films (that looks much better on the screen of the movie house than in the version I’ve seen) but also using him as the increasingly inhuman and bloodied killer (final girls can be rather brutal). Islas is great in the role, giving a physical performance that really makes the panic of his victims perfectly believable.

Contenti’s direction is often spectacular, doing the classic low budget filmmaker trick of turning the need to keep the number of locations and characters into a virtue, using a lack of resources to produce a tightness of space and time. Though, really, Red Screening doesn’t make the impression of lacking anything at all – the production design, the look, the whole aesthetics feel exactly as they should be and are meant to be.

In some regards, it's a rather successful ghost hunt

Because it is that kind of week, let me point any weird fiction friends among my imaginary readers towards Jim Moon's (of Hypnogoria Podcast fame) wonderful adaptation of the classic H.R. Wakefield story, whose content quite clearly demonstrates that media ghost hunting isn't an invention of some Americans in tacky shirts:

In short: Ramblers (2003)

Original title: Riarizumu no yado

Some wild plan by their common actor acquaintance – and apparently money man – Funaki sends indie filmmakers Tsuboi (Keishi Nagatsuka) and Kinoshita (Hiroshi Yamamoto) off to a pretty run-down looking, and most definitely pretty cold, coastal town. Funaki is supposed to be waiting for them there and to have prepared accommodations in a local inn. Funaki’s late, though, and the inn is closed. The two virtual strangers will have to fend for themselves for several days, because Funaki’s not only very very late but also stops answering their calls altogether.

So there’s nothing to do for the two but to ramble and amble around town, talk about stuff and encounter various mildly strange people. For a time, a young woman named Atsuko (Machiko Ono) who may or may not have tried to commit suicide takes part in their misadventures.

As the description will probably already have made clear, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s (of Linda Linda Linda fame) Ramblers belongs to the quiet and deadpan type of Japanese comedy where the utter oddball craziness of other Japanese comedy seems to have been suppressed with help of the calm and quiet demeanour of the indie hang-out movie. There is situational comedy in the movie – actually quite a lot when you think about the actual situations and less about their presentation – but the film plays these things as calmly and quietly as its protagonists.

If they want, Yamashita and his cast can present a straightforward punchline as effective as the best of them, but the film is really much more interested in controlled non-reactions to the minor travails the guys have to go through. Often, both of them seem trapped in politeness, repressing authentic emotion not to be a bother to anyone, even when somebody else is at fault, or these emotions really should be expressed.

From time to time, on the other hand, in its worst moments, Ramblers is a bit too happy to let its characters express even their most banal thoughts, all too well emulating the experience of being trapped in some social situation with the most boring man (and it’s most definitely a man) possible. That, one can’t help but assume, it does on purpose, too.

In short: Mortal Kombat (2021)

There’s really no excuse for a film with a budget this big to be as dreadful as this adaptation of the traditionally gory fighting game series directed by Simon McQuoid turns out to be on a technical level. Let’s start with the script: apparently believing that every viewer will have a sound base in the lore of the Mortal Kombat games, the film doesn’t even bother to explain what the motives of the good guys and the bad guys are (or indeed who the good guys and the bad guys are – am I supposed to root for “Earthworld” or for “Outworld”, and why?). There’s some stuff about a prophecy concerning a magical martial arts tournament “Earthworld” has apparently been losing nine times in a row, and where a tenth win would allow “Outworld” to invade (why? how? who knows?), but people carrying the “Blood of Hanzo” (an old-time Japanese guy killed off in the prologue) will save the day.

Some guy played by the woefully underused Joe Taslim who has been murdering people for centuries – and is the Hanzo killer - explains that he is no longer Bi-Han but now Sub-Zero, without the film ever having bothered to actually call him Bi-Han (or to explain why I should care about his name one way or the other). Characters are introduced and killed off in the next scene. There’s no definition to the narrative at all, everyone involved apparently believing that you can get through mainstream effects cinema by simply mumbling something about the Hero’s Journey and ignoring everything else, despite now more than a decade of blockbusters that do actually give the impression of being made by filmmakers who care for what they are doing.

On the direction level, this is ridiculously bad: action and effects sequences show no creativity and little style, and everything around them looks overdesigned and underthought. Once things and people don’t explode in ways I’ve seen much better done on TV budgets, the director proves he has not even the tiniest idea how to direct a dialogue scene, or what a reaction shot is for. This is indeed the braindead, artless nonsense too many mainstream film critics pretend all effects heavy mainstream cinema is; it also manages to look surprisingly cheap and ugly.

In short: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

So, if you go into this origin story for beloved smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) with the proper mind-set, adjusting your expectations towards a film that’ll not rock your world but may possibly entertain you very well; if you only keep its tortured production history in mind half of the time; if you can survive Donald Glover’s embarrassing performance as Lando coming over like a little kid playing dress up; if you set aside Ron Howard – you might probably find a perfectly enjoyable bit of SF heist blockbuster cinema.

Sure, the film has a sometimes troubling difficulty with hitting the proper emotional beats, despite a game cast that’ll hit whatever note you ask them to it, and about a fifth of the action sequences look surprisingly naff. However, the other four fifths are pretty great – the train job and the big space chase being the obvious stand-outs – showing off some lovingly designed Star Wars places and ideas while using them for some damn fun set pieces.

Quite a few of the space opera heist elements work rather well, too. The film only falters there when its tone makes one of its peculiar shifts into too broad comedy instead of keeping with the slightly silly irony and the space adventures. Or when elements appear and disappear that thematically clearly come down from a much different version of the script than the one the film ended up with.

Being a modern Hollywood film, this does of course also feel the need to explain the origin of as much as it can of what we know about Han Solo, but most of that is fun enough and well enough integrated into the pleasantly episodic flow of the affair. It’s a bit of a mess, sure, but it’s an often very fun and usually never less than entertaining mess.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,sf,crime,ron howard,alden ehrenreich,joonas suotamo,woody harrelson,emilia clarke,donald glover,thandie newton

Music Monday: Bathroom Edition

Mio on the Shore (2019)

Original title: わたしは光をにぎっている

Quiet and socially awkward orphan Mio (Honoka Matsumoto) has been helping her aunt and her grandmother with the family inn in Nagano. When her grandmother is hospitalized (I assume in the Japanese version of a hospice) and her aunt decides to sell the inn, she is sent to Tokyo to get on her own feet there. Until she can afford it, she is living with an old buddy of her father’s, Kyosuke (Ken Mitsuishi), the owner of a traditional bath house. He’s rather rough around the edges, and clearly desperately sad, so the first encounters between the grumpy older man and the painfully shy young woman are difficult. It doesn’t help the situation that Mio’s really not made for the kind of part time jobs she can get, lacking in confidence and social courage.

Eventually, she starts helping Kyosuke out in the bath house, slowly winning confidence, a new social circle, and perhaps the perspective on a future and a life that fits her.

Mio on the Shore by Ryutaro Nakagawa is so quiet and unassuming in its manner – not unlike its protagonist though not as awkward - one might easily overlook just how good it actually is. In fact, it may very well be one of the best coming of age movies made by anyone, not grasping for the bizarrely heroic tone the genre can sometimes take on particularly in American hands, but treating most of what’s happening in it with a calm eye for the tragedies and small triumphs in the lives of people that don’t quite fit into the modern world, for reasons of class, of personal character, or simply of bad luck, without going the poverty porn route or having Frances McDormand go around interviewing amateur actors.

It’s a film all about small gestures, except for that one moment when it suddenly goes into a rousing diatribe against gentrification, which I found confusing but not unfitting and that scene of transcendent insight Mio is granted eventually, both of which are treated so personally and intimate, they never feel like the wrong grand gestures for the film. Otherwise, this really is a film all about small changes, the shift in Mio’s posture when she starts dare talking to people as if she started recognizing herself as one of them, the way her eyes start to meet those of others, if only a little, and sometimes. Which is as honest a way of treating her and her developing view of the world as you’d encounter in a movie, lacking all the kitschy patronizing this sort of thing can all too often end up with. Matsumoto is fantastic in the role, using glances, and body language that I found nearly painfully authentic, all the while avoiding the threat of turning Mio into a caricature instead of a living human being.

Typically for a Japanese film, Mio is very interested in the culturally specificity of people and places, not out of conservatism, but because these specifics are what have shaped its main character, and built the society in where she looks for a place not so much to fit in as for one to belong. There’s a quiet insistence on the social aspects of life here too, as well as a realization that it’s not enough for any human to find a place and people that allow her to fit in, but also one she wants to belong to, and feel at home in. There’s a pretty obvious criticism of modern life (in Japan and elsewhere) here, but Mio on the Shore isn’t a polemical, nor a didactic, film. Rather, it is one that uses the personal and the specific to open up an understanding of the world.

In short: Mean Johnny Barrows (1975)

Dishonourably discharged from the army after he punched out a white guy who tried to murder him with a landmine (seriously), Vietnam war hero (and former nearly football star) Johnny Barrows (Fred Williams), soon finds himself homeless on the streets of his old home town. Early on, Johnny meets Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), a football acquaintance who offers him a job. But it’s clearly doing dirty work for the mafia, and Johnny has his principles. But as it goes, principles can be washed away by poverty and the general shittiness of one’s surroundings, so after further travails, Johnny will eventually take on the role of a hit man for Mario’s clan during an attempt of the aggressive Da Vinces (with Roddy McDowall of all people playing the youngest son) to muscle in on their territory. Don’t worry, the Racconis are the good Mafiosi, though, who only ever made money with numbers games and fought against drugs. Insert humungous eyeroll here.

This is the first of Fred Williamson’s twenty or so direction credits, and for its first twenty minutes or so, it actually feels like a minor highpoint of blaxploitation filmmaking. Williamson shoots as well as plays Johnny’s downward movement in the first act with great strength and conviction, bringing the shittiness of the black experience to life through fine direction and a performance that expresses much of the unfairness of the character’s life without any need for speechifying. It’s still not subtle, mind you, but it’s not about subtle things. As a bonus, there’s also a short cameo by Elliott Gould in which he dresses like a lost version of The Doctor – and calls himself the Professor to boot – teaching Williamson the ins and outs of being homeless by acting really, really weird.

After that, the film unfortunately spirals pretty quickly out of control and turns into a series of, sometimes weird and awkward, sometimes pretty fun, mafia meetings where the actors seems mostly to be farting around, horrible martial arts fights, long and badly written speeches told with soulful facial expressions quite in contrast to their badness by Williamson, a couple of decent action sequences and pointless plot twists, where nothing hangs together thematically or as a narrative anymore, the film losing all momentum as well as showing little of the impressive filmmaking chops of the first act.

(Definitely) Funky Friday (Again)

In short: Demon Lover Diary (1980)

In this verité style documentary, Joel DeMott shoots the troubles and travails that occur when her boyfriend Jeff Kreines hires on (well, since he isn’t initially meant to get paid, “volunteers” might be the better term) as a director of photography for The Demon Lover, the very first film of Donald G. Jackson, who would be come so indefatigable a filmmaker of indie genre movies, he’s still getting production and direction credits nearly two decades after his death. If no possessed spirit mediums are involved, I don’t want to hear it.

As you know Jim, Jackson would go on to direct kinda-sorta classics like Hell Comes to Frogtown and an absurd amount of rollerblade based post-apocalyptic films (some of which genuinely manage to be incredibly boring and mind-blowing at the same time). At this point in time, he is apparently pretending to be sick so he can shoot his movie while still keeping his employment in a factory, partnering on the direction side with the clearly much more defatigable Jerry Younkins, who, going by what the film tells us, has hacked off a couple of his fingers on his job to get insurance money to finance their film.

As you can imagine with this kind of backstory, DeMott’s film, looking as rough as it really should be, is full of scenes of passive aggression, very active aggression, and of people losing their shit for very minor reasons indeed while shrugging off much more complicated parts of what’s going on. The production is in a state of chaos, barely held together by wheedling and said passive aggression, with basically nobody involved seeming to have much of a clue of what they are doing, and doing this on little sleep (which explains a lot of the passive aggression) and no money. There are great, teachable moments for budding filmmakers here too, like the reason why directors don’t carry equipment, why one shouldn’t ask their teenage actresses to improvise, why one might want to avoid Ted Nugent (cough, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, cough), and so on and so forth.

While this may sound a lot like a “point and laugh at these idiots” kind of affair, I really prefer to read it as a paean to a particular kind of insanity, that filmmaking bug that can look like hubris, or a way to make a quick buck, yet in truth is something very special indeed, a thing of awe, wonder and utter ridiculousness. And really, look at this horrifying mess, and just stand in awe at the fact that Jackson never really seems to have stopped making movies afterwards – not even after his death. Please also spend a thought for his mom, who was clearly hoping her son would put that filmmaking business behind him after this whole affair had run its course.

Stryker (1983)

The apocalypse has come and gone, and the survivor fashion goes for leather, hot pants and big hair. Dune buggies are back en vogue, as usual. Large parts of wherever this film is set are dominated by the evil pocket empire of evil Kardis (Mike Lane). It’s one of those warrior and slave castes affairs Spartan fans fantasize about, controlled by Kardis’s rationing out of whatever water his “warriors” can steal.

But water is very scarce indeed. Things become heated indeed when Kardis learns of a hidden spring of fresh water under the control of a people with a decided number of warrior women, though not exactly the numbers or the arms to fight off a guy who even manages to field (and fuel) three tanks. Ironically, Delha (Andria Savio), the woman whose actions inform Kardis of the existence of the water, was trying to make a pact with the nicer, gentler warlord in the area, one Trun (Ken Metcalfe), exactly to protect her people – whom she didn’t ask about any of this – from Kardis.

Eventually, Kardis’s arch enemy Stryker (Steve Sandor), a former leading man in Trun’s group turned embittered wanderer of the wasteland by the death of his wife or girlfriend by Kardis’s hands (one of which Stryker later managed to hack off), will get in the bad guy’s way and grumpily do some good.

As long-time imaginary readers of this blog know, I’m not too fond of most of the films of Filipino exploitation king Cirio H. Santiago. They rather tend to drag for my tastes, and Santiago’s treatment of the more exploitative elements tends to the unpleasant.

So colour me surprised when I actually enjoyed myself with this Mad Max-alike quite a bit. Obviously, I could have survived rather well without the sexual violence in form of an aborted-by-Stryker-hulking-out rape scene, but the rest of the film is actually rather neat, and the film is certainly one of Santiago’s better ones.

It moves somewhat sprightly, even, or rather, it fills its, ahem, minimalist plot with more than enough cool stuff and fun incident to turn into a very enjoyable genre entry. There’s hardly a minute going by without some cheep yet cheerful action bit, filmed with experienced eye and hand, or an atmospheric shot of the same three sand dunes.

In a surprise turn, there are even some clever touches to the writing. Stryker (the film, not the man) shows an unexpected interest in the politics of its post-apocalypse, actually building a working idea of how Kardis’s evil empire works, how Trun’s differs from that in theory, and how that theory might look rather less exciting in practice. These aren’t realistic political bodies in any way, shape, or form, of course, but as metaphorical stand-ins for certain great powers from the viewpoint of a filmmaker coming from the sort of place these powers really rather like to misuse for their own agendas, they’re surprisingly effective.

Not surprising in this context, Santiago and/or writers Howard R. Cohen and Leonard Hermes  have some actually plausible ideas on how difficult it would be for a small power with some valuable resources to find a more powerful ally that would actually not rob them of their independence. Admittedly, the film does wave this away with a pretty classic hand of god moment in the end, but this is not really the sort of subtext you typically find in Santiago’s filmography – as far as I’ve dug into it, obviously, so I may very well be missing something here - and it’s actually organically integrated with all the beautiful nonsense of leather-clad people killing each other in the dust.

If there’s one thing that isn’t quite up to my standards – low as they may be - in cheap post-apocalypse flicks about Stryker, it is the film’s general lack of the sort of crazy stuff most other films of the genre are full of. Sure, there are the usual genre standards of silliness when it comes to fashion, but otherwise, the craziest element of the film is the unexplained tribe of little people (I hope that’s still the non-offensive term, otherwise please someone correct me) wearing cut-rate jawa robes who will eventually fight on the side of our heroes. And that’s obviously not particularly crazy for this sort of thing.

But that’s a minor complaint in a genuinely entertaining and surprisingly clever movie.

In short: The Marksman (2021)

Denouncing illegals to the Border Patrol, losing his ranch to the bank and drinking too much is all in a day’s work for embittered ex-marine Jim (Liam Neeson). He is coming up for his spot on a redemption arc, though, when he encounters Rosa (Teresa Ruiz) and her son Miguel (Jacob Perez). He does his customary denouncing bit, but when some cartel soldiers from the other side of the border show up, he does defend the two. Rosa doesn’t make it, and asks the rancher to get her son to her family in Chicago with her dying breath, promising him all her earthly goods. At first, Jim doesn’t realize that said earthly goods include a sack full of dollars and hands Miguel over to his stepdaughter (an underused Katheryn Winnick) from the border patrol – his wife is of course dead because this is that kind of film.

On finding said sack and seeing a car full of cartel people waiting for Miguel to be transported away by the Border Patrol, Jim does change his mind about what to do about the child. As you can imagine, this isn’t going to stay about the money for him.

After the abomination that was Honest Thief, this unassumingly competent film directed by Robert Lorenz (better known as a producer for various Clint Eastwood films) is rather a step back up for our lead Liam Neeson, who here finds himself again in a film with an actual, mostly coherent script (by Lorenz, Danny Kravitz and Chris Charles). It’s also a script completely devoid of any surprises and full of well-worn clichés if you know the genre/have seen other films from Neeson’s Man of Violence career stage. But then, not every film needs to reinvent the wheel (or invent a new wheel), as long as it manages to actually cover its genre standards decently.

Which The Marksman does in an unhurried tempo, seemingly genuinely interested in its characters even though they aren’t original, and spending a lot of time with them before the shooting starts. Even though the chemistry between Neeson and Perez isn’t anything to write home about, the actors elderly and very young do put effort in, never letting the character building devolve into the film shuffling its feet.

Once the violent denouement arrives, it is shot with the same workmanlike craftsmanship, leaving The Marksman a perfectly watchable movie.

Music Monday: Beautiful Day Edition

Maru Maru (1952)

Salvage diver Gregory Mason (Errol Flynn) is living and working in the Philippines with his behind the scenes work partner and friend Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). Or really, former friend, for Mason’s exclusively commerce-driven (or really, money-grubbing) agenda with a ruthless streak fathoms deep seems to have put so much pressure on Callahan, he has fled into the life of a binge drinker. The friendship is certainly not strengthened by the fact that Callahan’s wife Stella (Ruth Roman) is a former girlfriend of Mason’s and clearly still has feelings for him, because we all know that hateful glowers in 50s movies always mean romantic and sexual passion, and she’s quite the glowerer. Though she also tends to defend Callahan against Mason. There’s really only one good point on Mason’s books at the beginning of the movie: that he’s basically adopted his “house boy” Manuelo (Robert Cabal) as well as Manuelo’s little brother, treating the kids rather more fatherly than you’d expect from the guy, or a white colonialist boss towards brown people.

Still, it is not a complete surprise that Mason is the police’s main suspect when Callahan is suddenly murdered. We the audience know he’s innocent though. Mason is the kind of bastard who still does have some things he won’t do, even for money.

For as it turns out, there’s a lot of money connected to Callahan’s death in form of a treasure sunk during the war. Various people shady (Raymond Burr in his patented screen heavy stage projecting an impressive amount of sleazy punchability) and not so shady (Georges Renavent) are interested in that treasure, obviously, and so will be Mason.

While most people who think about the director at all will connect him with great Westerns and the best US giant monster movie (perhaps of all time, most certainly the 1950s), Them!, Gordon Douglas was the kind of classic journeyman filmmaker who made all kinds of film in all kinds of genres, typically doing them very well indeed.

Sometimes, as in the case of Maru Maru, he even made films that collected all kinds of genres in a single movie. This is a colonialist diving adventure movie, mixed with quite a bit of noir, melodrama, and thriller tropes, culminating in a redemption with not very subtle religious overtones (which, on purpose or not, really fits the Filipino setting very well). It’s also a film made by a filmmaker who had no problems whatsoever to take all the bits and pieces of diverse genre tropes and make a coherent – sometimes exciting, usually at least interesting – movie out of them. As is only logical, Douglas does this by focussing on the overlaps between the genres he’s using here, finding the character types they share and letting them interact in a sensible manner, leading the audience through the plot via Flynn’s redemption arc.

Visually, there’s a lot of noir on screen here, so the Philippines become a place drenched in more shadow than light, populated (as is traditional in colonialist adventure and to me always suggesting a silent admittance to the hypocrisy of colonialist betterment rhetoric) by people who are haunted by mistakes, greedy for money and generally shady or at least morally ambiguous, quite independent of their skin colour. Douglas’s treatment of his non-white (who are mostly even played by actors of colour, if not always the exact right one) characters is better than you get in most of these films, at least in so much as he treats them as like everyone else on screen – characters that stop being complete genre tropes because director and script bother with giving them enough dimension to let them breathe like people.

In short: Le Doulos (1962)

aka The Finger-Man

Burglar Faugel (Serge Reggiani) has just been released from prison, and becomes involved in a needlessly complicated game of betrayal, revenge and trust, that has him – and the audience – doubt his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) while trying to escape the attention of the police and some nasty colleagues.

If you go into Le Doulos having mostly experienced the final four or five movies of director Jean-Pierre Melville, you might be in for a bit of a shock. Sure, the characters’ fashion sense and Melville’s at once cynical and romantic view of their world is there and accounted for, but where the late films show a focussed sparseness in their plotting, and a slowness that’s also fastidiously detail-oriented, Le Delous is all over the place.

It’s slow alright, but this slowness finds the characters meandering through the kind of painful overplotting that needs ten minutes in the end to explain at (and it’s really at, not to) the audience what was actually going on; before that, the film is mostly characters wandering around, talking a lot, sometimes entering the sort of scenes of stylistic magic you usually expect from Melville but soon enough going off again into directions of little interest or filmic power.

Speaking of the talking, after having seen Le Doulos, I can’t help but wonder if the sparseness of dialogue in later Melville films isn’t a result of the man realizing that he has no hand at all for staging dialogue sequences. At the very least, the film at hand regularly comes to a complete standstill in dialogue sequences that take double the time they should – even if you keep the general more wordy nature of French films and cinema of its time in mind – Melville seemingly having no idea how to get out of any scene whatsoever, and so just staying there, and staying there, and staying there forever. Let’s not even talk about how inelegant and awkward the whole plot twist and long, long detailed explanation at the end of the film is.

It’s all very peculiar particularly since other early Melville films don’t show this massive load of flaws at all; young Melville certainly had his own ideas about pacing, but they actually felt like ideas, unlike here, where they suggest incompetence, or a director trying to share his feeling of boredom with his audience – not things I otherwise connect with Melville’s films.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,in short,gangster,crime,jean-pierre melville,jean-paul belmondo,serge reggiani,jean desailly