Shoot the Sun Down (1978)

Going by a mention of the Alamo late in the movie, I think this is supposed to take place in 1836. Variations on various Western stock characters converge in Santa Fe. At this point in time the town still belongs to Mexico but in the practice of the film takes a kind of liminal place between the US and Mexico. It’s a classical melting pot in the American style, where people of many cultures attempt to kill and rob each other. Our main characters are a guy calling himself Rainbow (Christopher Walken), a conscientious deserter from some massacres or other committed on the Native American population, but still a highly competent killer when that ability is needed; a Scalphunter (Geoffrey Lewis) and his gang of cutthroats; a former sea Captain (Bo Brundin) who supposedly wants to open a trading post in the desert and travels with a woman (Margot Kidder) who says she’s a British upper-class daughter but is actually a former maidservant to the upper-class the Captain has bought (rented?) for five years; and the Navajo warrior Sunbearer (A Martinez), soon to be in a debt of honour to Rainbow when the gunman helps out in a gambling incident.

Eventually, it will become clear that the Captain has a line on a gold treasure. Rainbow’s initially not interested at all but will be drawn into the affair nonetheless, particularly thanks to the Woman; the Scalphunter is very much interested but is not the kind of man anyone will want to trust, yet he is also inescapable; Sunbearer is going to get drawn into the mess too. As you can imagine, the characters will play through versions of the old trust and betrayal game, Rainbow eventually showing the character of a classic western hero, but not exactly the talent for anything but killing the classic western hero does usually have.

Shoot the Sun Down is the only film directed (as well a written and produced) by one David Leeds. It’s a western influenced by the Italians, ideas from the revisionist western and perhaps the more conventional moments of Jodorowsky, but is not as good at fusing these elements as it could be. The film certainly demonstrates a tendency towards abstraction and the abstract, shaving off character names here, scenes that would be exciting and adventurous there. The problem with this approach is that the film doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with the elements it has left after it has removed much what people expect of a western. It clearly wants to say something about America, but it is exactly its abstraction that makes it rather difficult to say what its ideas about America are, exactly, beyond the very obvious territory mined better by the Italians and the revisionists.

The problem with abstraction in genre movies is of course that it tends to deny an audience the joys of the genre it has come to see. It’s not the political assumptions underlying these joys - those you can change as much as you want if you know what you are doing – but the plot tropes that constitute a genre.

The film, for example, lacks the classical shoot-out in the finale, but it seems to do so for no good reason but for Leeds wanting to make it difficult for his audience; one imagines the director standing in a corner grumbling “I don’t wanna!”, while not putting much thought into what he actually wants to do to replace the tropes he clearly doesn’t like with. Just leaving them out, it turns out, really doesn’t lead him anywhere.

In visual style and mood, this really does its best to be poetic (there are some very fine shots of the moon, and the frozen desert in the end is very moody but not as metaphorical as the film seems to assume), mildly trippy and very, very slow, but the slowness only seems to have an actual function about half of the time. The rest of the movie, the slowness seems to keep with the film’s motto of denying the audience genre joys without wanting to come up with anything useful to replace them.

The cast, on the other hand, is pretty brilliant, with Christopher Walken, Geoffrey Lewis, A Martinez and Margot Kidder all lending the film what it otherwise lacks completely in its love for abstracting things away: personality.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Somewhere in the US Midwest. A cucumber-cool criminal we’ll call Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), a nom de plume bestowed on him by the newspapers in lieu of his actual name, has to leave his hideout position as a preacher rather hastily when two former associates (Geoffrey Lewis and George Kennedy) find him and try to murder him. We will later learn it is all on account of a misunderstanding, as well as the George Kennedy character being one of those “shoot first, ask questions never” guys, but right now, Thunderbolt is lucky to stumble into the arms, well, freshly stolen car of a young gentleman who goes by the name of Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges).

Lightfoot, apart from being a bit of a smartass, is also perfectly willing to help a guy out, so he and Thunderbolt go on a bit of a road trip together. Their of course ensuing misadventures lead to a friendship between the two despite their differences in age – Thunderbolt’s a Korea vet, Lightfoot most certainly not – and temperament. Eventually, Thunderbolt manages to convince his – by now their – pursuers that there’s really no reason to murder one another, and everybody teams up to rob the same bank whose first robbery got Thunderbolt his name.

Apart from Quentin Tarantino, I can hardly imagine many directors living today trying to make something comparable to this comedic road movie/serious bank heist film by Michael Cimino. Current scriptwriting dogma (which is, as dogmas tend to be, wrong) would never accept a film giving itself so much time and its characters so much room to breathe before an actual plot sets in, for one, and where’s the hero’s journey in here!?

Of course, the film’s relaxed pacing, its loose yet thematically coherent structure and Cimino’s willingness to let the audience learn what his characters are about by simply letting us watch them in various interactions with one another and the slightly eccentric or crazy characters peopling this America are not exactly en vogue today either. Instead of that one inciting incident that explains everything about a character, this is a film about guys – alas in classic New Hollywood style there’s little room for female characters here – whose characters and personality have accrued over time in a way that makes flashbacks superfluous. You simply wouldn’t get at the cores of these people that way.

Which can also be a bit frustrating to a viewer in the 2020s, of course, when we get no actual background about Lightfoot at all, simply because he’s a bit of an innocent who hasn’t accrued all the damage and lifetime of the other men, and we are watching him in the process of doing so.

Cimino’s great at this phase of the film, too, providing ample space for Eastwood and Bridges to do their things, yet also filling the space around them with things and people of interest, as well as many beautiful location shots (cinematography is by Frank Stanley) for everyone to be dwarfed by. People being dwarfed by landscape seems to be rather important for the film’s, perhaps Cimino’s, worldview also, fitting a sensibility that’s not quite nihilist yet certainly contains the sort of absurdist view of peoples’ place in the world it very well might end up there later (spoiler alert: it does), even though right now, it treats its own view of the world still as a bit of a joke. Particularly the ending, when a very good turn of fate comes with a very unfair price, points rather obviously in that direction.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t exclusively a loose road movie, though, and once the bank heist plot starts in earnest, it and its director show they can do tight as well as loose, presenting a grubby, often funny but also focussed and actually exciting heist that packs everything what I want from a good heist movie into about half of its running time, until things become very 70s indeed.


All of this combines into a film that stands in many ways in marked contrast to the structure and rules obsessed style of filmmaking en vogue today (which also produces many a great movie, don’t get me wrong), suggesting exactly the kind of maverick outlaw spirit New Hollywood mythology so loves to praise this era of filmmaking for, through a willingness to simply let its hair down.

Out of the Dark (1988)

Life at the LA phone sex, I am sorry “phone fantasy”, hotline of Ruth Wilson (Karen Black) is good: Ruth is genuinely nice to her girls, business is buzzing, and the girls seem to be having quite a time making fun of their customers. That is, until a madman in a clown costume calling himself Bobo starts to kill them off in bizarre and increasingly improbable ways. Unfortunately, the cop concerned with the serial killings isn’t the glorious Detective Langella (Divine in a pretty funny cameo in full film detective regalia including a moustache) but the rather less exalted Lt. Meyers (Tracey Walter) who is bad at his job even by horror movie cop standards. Just wait until he manages to come up with a stake-out that gets a woman and one of his cops killed!

Meyers starts suspecting photographer Kevin Silvers (Cameron Dye) – tasked to make glamour shots of the phone sex ladies for a magazine article for some reason - early on, but he’s of course more into threatening his suspects and ranting at them instead of committing to anything like an actual investigation, so this guy’s not gonna find out either way. The photographer at least insists on his innocence, roping his phone sex worker girlfriend Kristi (Lynn Danielson-Rosenthal) into various attempts to prove other peoples’ guilt. And it’s not as if there aren’t a variety of sleazebags and weirdoes around who might dress up as a murderous clown. Geoffrey Lewis, Bud Cort – there are character actors aplenty for this sort of thing around.

Even if it weren’t as entertaining as it is, Michael Schroeder’s Out of the Dark would still be a very interesting film, seeing as it seems to stand at a point just before the Cinemax-style “erotic thriller” truly happened, clearly demonstrating quite a few of that genre’s sleazy sensibilities. However, where a lot of the later erotic thrillers mostly put the off-screen sex of the noir on the screen and ramp it up until it buries everything else under silicone breasts, to my feeling, Out of the Dark comes to its sleaze and nudity by way of the giallo while integrating a nice slab of slasher elements as well as a sense of genuine fun.

That kinship to the giallo brings with it quite a bit of visual style; this is never blandly shot but full of clever little flourishes in the use of light (often artificial and blue, of course), clever little moments of suspense, and so on. The plot and most of the kills are absolutely preposterous, mind you, but then, they are not supposed to be anything but. In fact, the film often shows quite a bit of glee over its own weirdness, with Bobo not just wearing the clown mask but actually putting all kinds of efforts into being a decidedly evil clown. Particularly joyful is the scene in which Bobo is finally unmasked, granting us great put-down lines like “No extra business in Bobo’s act!” (which happens not to work as useful armour against a shotgun blast), as well as useful musings about what they do to killer clowns.

In general, the film seems to have a blast with its cast of weirdoes, sex workers, and thriller movie cliché characters. Better still, and not terribly typical for a genre that’s very much about showing tits and dead female bodies, Out of the Dark seems to genuinely like its female characters, and enjoy the humour they use to distance themselves from what must be a pretty dispiriting job. There’s no moralizing bone in the film’s body. Of course, the killings are still filmed to be enjoyable – it is supposed to be a fun, sleazy horror flick after all - but this one very clearly isn’t working off anybody’s problems with women.

The cast of character actors, soap opera actresses and playmates is a joy to watch, providing good natured humour, choice overacting (I’m particularly partial to Divine’s cameo, as well as the scene where the killer finally shows their true colours) and generally likeable presences even when blouses and shirts stay on. Even when the plot isn’t particularly riveting, it’s always fun to spend time with the characters and whatever the film comes up with for them to do or say next.


So, if you’re not afraid of a bit of sleaze, you just might find yourself enjoying Out of the Dark as much as I did.