Three Films Make A Post: There's the first one. There's the right one. And there's the one you never forget.

Goodnight, My Love (1972): This TV movie set in the classic hardboiled private eye era of the 1940s in Los Angeles prefigures the kind of humour writer/director Peter Hyams – here at the beginning of his career as a feature director - would perfect a couple of years later in Busted and some of his following films. In the film at hand, it’s not quite there yet: the coarseness needed couldn’t really be injected into a TV movie, and the lighter parts of the humour never quite land. What’s left is an atypical role for Richard Boone (with Michael Dunn as his sidekick), a couple of moments where the genre homage actually sings, and quite a few shots that look better than the budget should have allowed.

Baby It’s You (1983): This romance is about as straightforwardly commercial as the film of John Sayles as a director ever got, which is not to say the bad kind of commercial at all. Rather, Sayles’s sensibilities allow him to take a very typical romance set-up and fill it with the kind of life that complicates things while still keeping to the core tenets of the genre (something Sayles always has been particularly good at). So this is a sometimes comedic romance that also talks about class divisions but never lets its interest in the politics of class get in the way. Instead Sayles uses his understanding of these things to strengthen and deepen the story and its characters, thereby getting a stronger emotional resonance. Add two pretty damn great performances by Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, as well as some of the best use of later pop music in a period piece you’ll encounter in a movie life, and you simply have a great film, a romance that’s honest but never wants to be something horrible like an anti-romance.

Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (2005): I’m not sure if I should call this a formally atypical documentary or an experiment in narrative filmmaking. Director Sumiko Haneda (who has quickly become a favourite around these parts) retells the story told on one of the most important picture scrolls in Japanese art history with the help of voice work, traditional Japanese ballad storytelling, slow, closely-framed pans over the fantastic art of the scroll, nature shots to establish locations, and some narrative about the life of its creator and how the scroll might mirror some of it.

It’s a fascinating and immersive way to tell a story and the story of the story, turning this into a captivating deep dive into a piece of art and culture that’s also, very quietly and thoughtfully, formally daring. Which appears to have been one of Haneda’s particular talents.

Some Thoughts About After Hours (1985)

This one’s Martin Scorsese’s weird one, apparently made when he had his Last Temptation of Christ project yanked out from under him just before shooting was supposed to begin, and before he had found a new home for it. Obviously, the next logical step when confronted with the failure of a project of particular personal importance is to make a bizarre comedy about white collar worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) visiting a pretty woman (Rosanna Arquette) in Soho only to drift into the bizarre dark comedy version of a Hitchcock plot about an innocent man hunted for something he didn’t do. There’s a bit of suicide and the threat of a lynching to make the stakes high in a way that does remind of Jonathan Demme in this stage of his career a bit, but predominantly this is a film about utter confusion, our protagonist having stumbled into a night world whose social cues he just isn’t able to read, and whose godhood (I’d bet on the good old cruel humorous universe) really has got it in for him tonight.

Paul gets stripped of money early on, and bodily safety quickly follows. Every offer of help only leads to another cruel twist that slowly begins to erode his sanity too, with the obstacles he encounters becoming in equal parts increasingly absurd and threatening.

What makes After Hours special – and a rather difficult film to actually enjoy watching – is how much effort Scorsese puts into making the audience feel just as violently ripped out of the world they know and – presumably – understand as Dunne’s character is. While this is a comedy, it is very much one that’s out to disquiet and unroot the viewer, and as such, it’s not the kind of fun you’d usually seek in films called comedies. The trick Scorsese uses is to film the comedy with all the stylistic elements of a classic thriller (poor old Hitchcock comes to my mind again), using the genre assumptions certain ways to edit, pace and stage scenes carry against the audience’s sense of security until, just like Hackett, every situation feels wrong, potentially dangerous, and impossible to understand.

In short: Black Rainbow (1989)

Is there an official explanation for what happened with Mike Hodges at the beginning of the 80s? Sure, we can explain Flash Gordon with the kicking powers of the Horrible Boot of Camp (a creature I can only imagine being drawn by Jack Kirby), but why is the rest of Hodges (small) output of that decade equally messy and confused, and - alas - not equally entertaining? I don't dare to take a guess.

Anyhow, Black Rainbow is pretty much what you can expect from the director in that decade; in the spirit of the film's non-structure, let me describe it in a single, ridiculously long sentence with lots of parentheses, for that's exactly how it plays out. Black Rainbow is written with a lack of coherence that makes most giallos look logical (let me get that straight, a medium nobody in a position of authority believes foretells the identity of a murderer, so the bad guys send a professional killer after her, whose success will be the best way to ensure people will believe what she said?), sees Hodges frequently preach at the film's audience through the mouths of his characters (and hey, Mr Hodges, sir, you can't let your medium criticize her public's willingness to believe in a better afterlife and give her actually working prophetic powers and still make a sensible argument), contains the sort of scenery-chewing performance you get when you tell Jason Robards to put out all the stops (if that's a plus or a minus depends on your love for Robards; mine was tested), has an ending that is probably supposed to be ambiguous but just looks as if the writer didn't have a clue about how to actually end the convoluted mess, is overloaded with narrative elements that just don't fit together and sure as hell don't have a function (it's a Southern Gothic, so there must be a mad dead mother and implications of incest in Rosanna Arquette's background, plus what's up with Tom Hulce's marriage? Now that I think about it, why is his character even in here, seeing as he doesn't do anything a newspaper headline couldn't), and annoys me personally with a handful of scenes that suggest that Hodges might have made a fantastic piece of (tourist-y) Southern Gothic here, if he'd just had used the precision and ability to be clear even when backstories and characters are complicated his 70s films demonstrated again and again.

As it stands, Black Rainbow is a highly interesting mess.

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