Sudden Fear

Sudden Fear (1952) is a Joan Crawford vanity picture that manages to be reasonably entertaining, if irritating -- Crawford is featured in almost every shot, frequently in enormous close-up.  The diva acts as if "fit to tear a cat", but she's not really very expressive -- her face is an abstract, mostly immobile wide-eyed mask; as someone once said in another context:  her performance runs the gamut from A to B. The film is extraordinary in some respects -- it's one of the few movies to directly acknowledge and exploit the ghastly appearance of its leading man, Jack Palance.  Palance is a goblin but his bizarre looks are generally taken for granted in other films in which he performs, just part of the equipment of a character actor specializing in heavies (this is the part, for instance, he plays in Shane).  Sudden Fear is a "beauty and the beast" story and Palance's uncanny features are, in fact, thematic to the film.  This is dramatized in the opening sequence in which Crawford, playing the part of an ultra-wealthy heiress and successful Broadway playwright, orders the director of her upcoming romance, in rehearsals, to fire Palance -- "he doesn't look like a romantic leading man," Crawford opines and, indeed, no truer words have ever been spoken.  Palance's character tells Crawford to go to San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor Art Museum to see a portrait of the great lover Casanova -- his point is that Casanova was an unprepossessing man with a large wart on his chin and that great lovers are, often, rather homely and plain-looking.  (Palance isn't just plain-looking; he's as scary as a movie monster).  I characterized this film as "beauty and the beast" but, in fact, it's better described as "the beast and the beast" -- Crawford is strange-looking also with glaring eyes under midnight black eyebrows and a sort of cardboard cut-out figure that is strangely formal and not sexy at all.  Both Crawford and Palance, accordingly, are Hollywood monsters -- it is unchivalrous to note that Crawford was 47 when she ramrodded through this project, an unabashed vanity production.  

Although Joan Crawford and Jack Palance have names in the convoluted plot of Sudden Fear, I can't remember them and, indeed, there's no point to referring to the characters using their sobriquets in the film -- so I'll just retain the usage of calling the stars, in this star vehicle, by their actual names.  After insulting Palance, Joan Crawford leaves Manhattan by train, traveling to her home (actually, at least, two homes) in San Francisco.  Palance turns out to be on the same coast-to-coast train and he courts Crawford, winning her heart during their several days of travel.   The movie is shrewd about concealing Palance's motives -- perhaps, he really loves her or, maybe, this is an elaborate scheme to punish her for firing him from the Broadway show.  In San Francisco, the couple continue their love affair and, in fact, Palance marries the playwright.  But, it turns out that Palance has a hussy on the side, Irene, played by Gloria Graham.  (Graham envisions the role as a sort of pre-pubescent nymphet; she's a sexualized brat.)  Irene and Palance plot to murder Joan Crawford before she can convey her enormous inherited wealth to some kind of non-profit foundation -- she wants to live solely on the proceeds of her plays.  The scheme to murder the playwriting heiress ends up being recorded by a dictation machine in Crawford's mansion and, of course, she hears her husband and his whore conspiring to the kill her.  At this point, the script, never particularly persuasive in the first place, goes off the tracks.  Crawford doesn't flee or report the murder plot to authorities; instead she contrives an elaborate plot of her own to kill Palance and pin the murder on Irene -- we get a fantasy-version of the plot complete with Irene being sentenced to death for the murder of her paramour.  This plan is too complicated to be executed successfully -- it involves carefully forged letters setting up assignations, a written time-table composed in 10 minute increments, Crawford dressing so as to imitate Irene's garb, and all sorts of other tricks and strategems.  At the last moment, Crawford can't bring herself to gun down Palance.  She ends out on the empty, mountainous streets of San Francisco, darting through an elaborate chiaroscuro of expressionistic alleys and lanes with Palance hunting her in a big boat of a car.  This is a spectacular tour-de-force involving glaring lights, dense darkness, canted camera angles, and very deep focus with figures fleeing across the remote background of empty urban landscapes -- all de Chirico's "Mystery and Melancholy of the Street" but with figures playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game in the shadowy arcades and plazas.  

I've called Sudden Fear, a vanity project for Joan Crawford.  There are three set-pieces featuring her emoting in big close-ups.  These sequences are unduly protracted and exist solely to allow Crawford to exhibit her acting chops.  In the first scene, Crawford voicelessly reacts to hearing Palance and Irene plotting to kill her.  Her eyes dilate, she breathes like a creature that is being relentlessly hunted, darting about in confusion, and, at last, simulates nausea (albeit in a very lady-like way) fleeing off-screen to vomit.  In the second protracted sequence, Crawford struggles with herself as to whether she should shoot Palance -- again, she's wide-eyed, anguished, clutching at herself.  The sequence just goes on and on.  At last, in the final shot, Crawford walks toward the camera that tracks with her:  we see her grief and horror become resignation and, then, transformed into something like triumph or, at least, resolute and courageous determination -- it's intended as a showpiece.  The script is overly intricate and profoundly implausible.  There are a number of red herrings or just downright errors in the scenario:  a bottle of poison is introduced into the film but not used and there's a scary winding set of steps without guardrail that lead fifty feet down  from a castle-like villa on the Bay to the stony rocks in the harbor -- but no one gets pitched off the steps.  Palance says that he's never been to San Francisco -- if this is true, how did he know about the picture of Casanova in the museum at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.  Palance's face is one of cinema's great, disturbing icons:  he's like an animate jack-o'-lantern, his taut skin stretched to the breaking point, a caricature of movie-handsome that is, in fact, hideous with a profile that looks like Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.  Mike Connors, credited as "Touch" Connors, later famous as TV's Mannix, has the thankless role of Irene's escort and ostensible boyfriend -- of course, she's really having sex with the monstrous Palance (Connors' cliche good looks are not as intriguing as  the mug on Palance's monster); the poor guy is perpetually teased by Gloria Graham's perverse Irene but, always, comically rebuffed. 

All We Imagine as Light

 Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is a deceptively simple film, an example of poetic realism, examining the lives of three women who work at a hospital in Mumbai.  The film has rough edges and, for 2/3rds of its 115 minute length, approximates a documentary --there are many hand-held shots, tracking scenes shot from subway cars, and images of monsoon storms in which the sky turns to a blue flood over the forest of high-rises.  Mumbai is shown in images that emphasize its claustrophobic aspects -- the tiny apartments and crush of people on the streets.  Lovers petting in a park appear against a backdrop of boys playing soccer just beyond a tattered veil of trees.  The subways are crowded to the point of appearing suffocating.  On the soundtrack, voices describe Mumbai as chaotic and lonely, a sort of funnel into which all the villages of south India have poured their people to make this thronging ferment -- everyone in the movie is a stranger and they are homesick for the impoverished rural places from which they have come.  But the last third of the movie, filmed along the Kerala coast, is bucolic and takes a strange turn into something like magical realism.  This part of the movie is integral to its meanings and, although describing the plot twist near the end is a spoiler, I don't know any other way of doing justice to this unique and wonderful film.  So, readers, beware...

Prabha is an efficient, experienced nurse at a teaching hospital in Mumbai.  Her husband, whom she barely knew (it was an arranged marriage) has emigrated to Germany where he works in a factory.  For a time, he called her and sent money home, but, now, has gone silent.  When Prabha calls him in Germany, she gets a woman's voice on the answering machine.  Prabha is isolated, like most of her associates, a refugee from a small, poverty-stricken Malayalam-speaking village somewhere a half day's train ride from the big city.  She repels invitations to go to the movies with her colleagues and rebuffs men who tentatively attempt to encourage her interest in them.  She seems sad and remote.  One day a rice-cooker arrives in the mail, a product of Germany -- during the monsoon, with sheets of water falling outside the window (and through as well since the shutters have blown open) she squats on the floor to embrace the fire-truck red cooker; it's all she has of her husband.  Prabha's roommate is Anu, an attractive nurse probably about fifteen years younger.  Anu is carrying on a forbidden affair with a Muslim boy, Shiaz.  All the other nurses know about this liaison, except perhaps, Prabha, who has turned a blind eye to the matter.  Prabha is trying to help Parvaty, a matronly lady also from the Malalayalam-speaking hinterlands.  Parvaty has lived for 22 years in what is called a chawl -- that is, a one-room apartment with an open balcony in a tenement building.  Mumbai is under construction and huge high-rises are being built everywhere, including on the tract of land where Parvaty's chawl is located.  The landlord intends to evict her without compensation since her papers are not in order and she can't even prove that she exists -- the lease was in the name of here deceased husband.  Prabha finds a lawyer to represent Parvaty in the landlord-tenant dispute but the attorney can't do anything to help her -- she's officially a non-person.  The first two-thirds of the movie documents these women's daily lives -- we see them on the subway, the lovers wandering in a night market or embracing by a soccer field, Prabha training young nurses who turn up their noses at a placenta that the women are studying in class.  The doctor whom Prabha serves tries to flirt with her very, very tentatively -- Prabha is teaching him the local lingua franca, that is, Hindi.  When Prabha discovers that Anu is involved with Shiaz, she insults her as a "slut", but, later, apologizes and makes Anu's favorite dish, fish curry -- Anu is also from a Malayalam village near the coast.  A cat is about to give birth.  The monsoon rains drench the city.  When it is apparent that the lawyer can't help Parvaty, Prabha and the older woman go out and throw stones at a billboard advertising the soon-to-be-built high rise resulting in the destruction of her chawl.  Anu is invited to visit Shiaz's home with his parents in a Muslim neighborhood.  Shiaz' parents are about to leave town for a wedding and the lovers will have the house to themselves.  Meanwhile Anu's mother keeps sending her pictures of possible fiancees.  Anu buys a burqa so she visit Shiaz' Muslim neighborhood.  But, then, he calls to tell  her that the subways are all flooded and that the wedding has been canceled as well.  A religious festival is underway -- earthmovers and tractors tow towering religious floats through the streets and there are fireworks.  This sequence, involving the appearance of something like the gods, marks the transition to the last third of the film that takes place far from the big city along the coastline with its rocks, coastal mountains, and beaches.  Parvaty, who is a cook at the hospital, has found a job cooking at a beach-front hostel in the village where she still has a house.  With Anu, Parvaty and Prabha go to the coast where they take rooms at a resort on a beach. Shiaz has come also and is hiding out somewhere in the environs.  He takes Anu to a sea-cave filled with ancient, eroded carvings of gods and goddesses -- Anu says that the voluptuous goddesses look like Anu.  We see a sheet or blanket spread out in the cave, apparently where Shiaz hopes to have sex with Anu.  In fact, they do have sex but the film is conspicuously vague about the location -- their mostly naked bodies are bathed in light; it is as if they are making love in a great torrent of bright light.  Prabha who has gone off into the brush to relieve herself, sees Shiaz and knows that Anu's lover has also come to the seaside resort.  A man has drowned in the sea.  Prabha runs out onto the beach where she applies CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the man who slowly revives.  There is no hospital anywhere nearby and so the man is taken to a hut where a wizened, tiny old lady lives.  The little old lady thinks that Prabha is the man's wife and she asks her to stay by his bedside as he revives.  The man wakes up but has no recollection of where he is, or how he came to be in the sea.  Prabha feeds him and washes a large wound on his side and, then, recognizes that the man is her husband, somehow, returned from Germany.  (This is the remarkable event that animates the last part of the film.)  She caresses the confused and injured man and, then, in an eerie voice-over accompanied by shots of twilight blue hills fading into mist says that she never wants to see him again.  Parvaty and Anu are sitting on the beach.  Prabha joins them and tells Anu to bring Shiaz to their beach shack.  In a long shot, under a sky resplendent with stars, we see the beach shack lit up, with music, and people dancing.  

The last part of the film is very delicately handled.  The transition from realism to dream-like fantasy is gradual.  At first, there is no electricity in the shack, but, then, miraculously there is power.  The lovers in the cave seem to be making love on the beach in bright daylight.  The strange, eroded gods watch over the young lovers.  The half-drowned man is confused about his identity and we have no way of knowing whether, in fact, he is somehow Prabha's husband who has abandoned her.  (This part of the movie reminds me of Lijo Jose Pellisery's Nanpakal Nerathu Majakkam, a film in which religious pilgrims find themselves stranded in a tiny village when their bus breaks down -- gradually, the pilgrims become disoriented and experience memories of their reincarnations; the little town is almost completely devoid of men who have all gone to Europe or Dubai for work.)  We have seen that Prabha is a kind of ghost herself, estranged from others due to her marriage to a man who has abandoned her.  Her profession is that of a rescuer and, when the nurse resuscitates the man on the beach, she perceives him as her lost husband -- she has rescued him and so, now, can escape from his baleful influence...at least, this is my interpretation of the film's ending.  The drowned man says:  "It will be different this time," but Prabha rejects him -- is this a sign of her growth?  Or just more evidence of her isolation? The pace of growth in Mumbai is irresistible; the city is being transformed into something not recognizable by its generations of immigrants from the poor villages in the area.  Parvaty says "the future is here but I'm not prepared for it."  She remarks that  she feels "scared"; Shiaz is scared by his love for the rather frivolous Anu.  An inhabitant in Mumbai says in Marathi:  This is a city of illusions.  Another woman says in Bengali:  "Even if you live in the gutter, you must not be angry.  This is the spirit of Mumbai."

The film resembles Jean Renoir.  It is very tenderly made and inexplicably moving.  In Malayalam, Shiaz writes on the wall of the cave, among other grafitti:  "Our love is like the endless sea."  And, it is from this endless sea of love, that the drowned man is pulled from the waters.  All We Imagine As Light was awarded the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.

A Very British Scandal

 A Very British Scandal is a 2018 BBC three-part series based on a non-fiction book about a celebrated political contretemps and criminal trial.  The program is very slightly opaque to American viewers because it involves aspects of the British class-system that are unclear on this side of the pond.  However, the series is so expertly and vigorously directed by Stephen Frears, so robustly and pungently acted by its principals, that the rather exotic subject matter is, at once, fascinating and gripping.  In fact, the show develops a sizeable emotional charge in the viewer -- the whole thing is so childish, unfair, and, ultimately, unreasonable that the audience feels a tangible sense of grief at the outcome.  

The series begins with a couple of MP's, apparently members of the House of Lords, dining on beef tartar and discussing their sexual conquests with Trump-style "grab 'em by the pussy" bonhomie.  The two upper crust gents claim to be bisexual and boast about experiences with both genders; the show's protagonist, a politician named Jeremy Thorpe is, however, homosexual.  Thorpe is played by Hugh Grant who is endlessly resourceful is dramatizing the MP's sense of entitlement, the impunity with which he exploits lower-caste young men, as well as the character's noblesse oblige and his virtues as a politician.  It seems that Thorpe has embarked on a torrid affair with a sweet young thing, Norman, played by Ben Whishaw.  Norman seems to be a bird with a broken wing, a melancholy victim whose demeanor suggests a damsel in distress, someone much in need of rescue.  Thorpe smitten with Norman's haplessness takes him home to his mother's house where he nonchalantly gets out a jar of vaseline, sets it on the nightstand and tells Norman to keep quiet (so as not to affright his mother) and "assume the position."  Unfortunately for Thorpe, he falls in love with Norman, sets him up in a London apartment, and nicknames him "Bunny" is letters that his sends to his boyfriend.  Of course, an unequal relationship of this kind can't persist and so Thorpe discards Bunny.  To his amazement and to the shock of the show's audience, the effeminate and timorous Bunny turns out to have a spine of steel -- he has hidden resources and, when spurned by Thorpe, aggressively seeks revenge, ultimately blackmailing him.  Thorpe brazenly tells his political cronies to have Bunny killed -- it's not clear whether he's serious or just joking but several shady demi-monde figures take the MP at his word and plot to murder Norman.  These co-conspirators are complete morons and comically inept -- they fail at their half-assed attempt to kill Norman.  The police are called upon to investigate and they easily discover evidence implicating Thorpe in the murder plot.  The bulk of the third and last episode is devoted to a spectacular trial in the Old Bailey.  Thorpe has hired a barrister named Carmen as his defense lawyer and there are plenty of fireworks in the best style of the old Rumpole shows -- witty asides, a curmudgeonly and prejudiced Judge, and scathing cross-examination.  Everyone betrays everyone else.  The MP to whom Thorpe confessed  his sexual exploits, Thorpe's best friend, is summoned to court where he give testimony against his former pal.  Norman gives an impressive speech about the travails of being homosexual in England during the era of the laws forbidding sodomy.  Further, people always underestimate the effete Norman -- he massacres Barrister Carmen during cross-examination.  Of course, a conviction of a former MP is unthinkable.  Thorpe is acquitted but his political career lies in ruins.  Throughout the film, Norman has said that he actually loved Thorpe and that his only motive in bringing the affair to light is to force the government to provide him with a National Health card expropriated by an offended former employer.  At the end of the show, we are provided glimpses of the real protagonists involved in these scandalous transactions -- Norman is the only one of the principal protagonists still alive -- and he still hasn't received a viable National Health card.  

The show is extremely witty, well-written, with lots of biting repartee in the manner of G. B. Shaw or Oscar Wilde.  The acting is beyond reproach and the complex plot moves along at a gallop.  Frears doesn't linger on scenes and cuts from place to place with aplomb, keeping the audience at his elbow with titles that tell us where the scene is playing out.  It's all exceedingly lucid, very funny, and, yet, ultimately tragic.  Curiously, in a film that is about male homosexuals, there are many excellent female parts.  Most notably, Thorpe has a plain matronly wife who absolutely refuses to be shocked or, even, judgmental about her husband's sexual exploits -- she notes that she "was raised with Benjamin Britten" and worked as an opera singer:  "I've seen things you can't even imagine," she tells her straitlaced and formal husband.  Her loyalty in the face of the awful scandal enveloping her husband is one of the most touching things in the program.  Norman also has a wife who supports him through thick and thin and the show wends its way to its courtroom climax.  Stephen Frears has always been an excellent director -- I recall his early films including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie get laid (1987), both very fine pictures involving themes.  This program, available on Amazon, is exquisitely directed and memorably acted.  I recommend it highly.  

Black Bag

 Apparently, Great Britain is infested with top-secret, amoral, nihilistic secret service agencies for whom the end always justifies the means.  In The Lazarus Project, time-traveling agents re-set the world clock every time there is a nuclear holocaust or armaggedon,  Lazarus Project operatives are globe-trotters always in hot pursuit of purloined nuclear weapons.  The Lazarus Project is a cleverly written TV series produced in London; Black Bag, which has a similar premise, is a spy movie also set in the UK.  In Black Bag, the agents are engaged in murder and mayhem to stop a Ukrainian terrorist from planting something called "Severus" in a nuclear power plant.  Severus will bore through the shell of the reactor to set off a cataclysmic chain-reaction, predicted to end the war between Russian and Ukraine but at the cost of 20,000 civilian casualties.  (Severus is a pure example of what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" it's the object of intense efforts but nothing more than a plot device with no significance in itself.)  In both The Lazarus Project and Black Bag, the agents who are attractive young men and women have no real outlet for their super-confidential secrets and confessions and all suffer guilt at their misdeeds -- therefore, the characters solace themselves by having incestuous in-house love-affairs.  After all, there is no one else with whom they can share the violence and tragedy of their existences.  

Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) begins with an elaborate and wholly pointless Steadi-cam shot following the hero, George, a stiff fellow with black hornrimmed glasses, into a club after passing through a labyrinth of corridors to encounter a fellow operative who tells him that there is a mole in the group of agents charged with neutralizing Severus.  George is supposed to ferret out the traitor, a problematic task because his own wife, Katherine, (also a spy) may well be the double-agent.  George stages a dinner party for the members of the Severus team and laces the chana masala with truth serum.  This leads to a noisy, and recriminatory, gathering that plays like something from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The couples commence bickering, sexual infidelities are disclosed and ferocious insults exchanged.  George orders the participants to play a game in which they have to announce a resolution, not for themselves but for the person seated to their right.  This leads to more vicious fighting among the various couples until Clarissa, the tech who is expert in surveillance satellites, pins her boyfriend Freddie's hand to the table with a butcher knife.  (Not to worry -- he forgives her.)  An elaborately complex plot follows in which various clues are collected, all of which lead George to the reasonable suspicion that his wife is the Judas.  In this world, when anyone asks a question that is inconvenient to answer, they simply respond with the evasion:  "It's in the black bag."  George, who loves his wife, is met with her denials but, also, the "black bag" evasion.  A satellite is used to gather high-tech evidence and there's an extended scene involving a polygraph test that is confounded by Clarissa "clenching her anal sphincter" -- I have no idea whether this would work, although I assume the screenwriter, the  redoubtable David Koepp, has researched this issue.  (Koepp is a very famous Hollywood writer -- the Jurassic Park films are his scripts as are a number of other Spielberg projects including some of the Indiana Jones pictures.)   After many twists and turns, some aerial bombardment accomplished by a drone in a showy sequence, and several more revelations of sexual misbehavior, George and Katherine order their team to another dinner party, a reprise of the first horror-show in which the identity of the culprit is finally revealed.  Since all evidence points to Katherine, the viewer can be pretty much assured that she is not the mole.  

This is a well-made movie that is always exciting.  The acting is good:  Michael Fassbender plays the mild-mannered George -- he looks like a surrogate for Soderbergh himself.  Cate Blanchett is good as Katherine, a sort of femme fatale.  Much of the script is written in intentionally unintelligible jargon.  This is a  phenomenon that I call the Succession effect.  In the HBO series, Succession many scenes were composed in a rebarbative, nightmare lingo that is spoken so swiftly and confidently that the audience doesn't have time to figure what is actually being said -- you can generally get the tone of the remarks but not their precise meaning.  This is how Koepp has written the script for Black Bag -- people says stuff like "The Sat handover is 3 minutes and 20 seconds just long enough to gather several sigs."  Big chunks of the movie have that tone which the viewer has to interpret as hyper-technical spy-speak for high tech data gathering.  The use of this sort of impenetrable jargon was annoying in Succesion and it's no less annoying (if better justified) here.  The movie is fairly civilized, with intelligent nasty dialogue in the Albee manner, and I thought it was entertaining.  But there's not a lot of there there. 

The Witches of Eastwick

 George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is a lavishly produced, operatic comedy starring Jack Nicholson in a menage a quatre with three women played by Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon.  The actresses are not ingenues but exhibited in this picture at the very height of their mature beauty.  The camera wielded by Vilmos Szigmond loves them almost as much, or, even, more, than their devilish gentleman-caller played by Nicholson.  They are filmed with supernatural radiance infusing their tangled locks of hair, posed like pre-Raphaelite Madonnas or Tuscan angels -- sexual love, it seems, makes them shine like icons in candle-lit niches.  Although deeply erotic, the film never really sexualizes its leading ladies -- there is no nudity and they are always dressed, more or less, in a lady-like if glamorous way.  Eros, in this film, is palpable but, also, somewhat abstract, almost Platonic in its manifestation.  At times, the film veers unsteadily into horror but Miller is so accomplished that he manages to juggle the ghastly with the romantic and comical in a way that doesn't rupture the tone of bemused adoration directed at women in the cast -- they are goddesses and not to be besmirched.  (I can understand this film better having seen Miller's most recent, highly feminist-inflected, iterations of the Mad Max movies -- the heroines of The Witches of Eastwick are earlier versions of the indomitable women warriors that we find portrayed in the post-apocalyptic road warrior films.)  Although there are several scenes set in a strait-laced Protestant church in the hamlet of Eastwick, the film is fundamentally and exuberantly pagan --  the picture pits the voracious energy of the masculine Devil against the serene and complacent trinity of the three goddesses, clearly muses for both Miller and his director of photography.  

Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been deserted by her husband who has absconded leaving her with six daughters (whom miraculously all seem to be the same approximate age). Sukie works for a small-town newspaper that mostly retails local gossip.  Janey (Sarandon) is shown in the film on the first day after her divorce --she teaches music at an elementary school and is sexually harassed by the bombastic Principal.  Alexandra (Cher) is a sculptor who makes clay figures of fertility goddesses to sell in the local gift shop catering to tourists to the picturesque sea-side village, located apparently somewhere near Cape Cod.  Alex's husband has died.  At a Fourth of July picnic, the loathsome Principal makes an elaborate and boring speech.  The three women daydream and imagine the oration cut short by a violent thunderstorm -- and, no sooner thought than done.  A storm boils out of sky and sends the crowd scattering with bolts of lightning.  Later, when the women meet for drinks -- a weekly custom, it seems -- they muse that their wishes came true to bring a precipitous end to the Principal's tedious speech.  As they get drunk, the three women talk about their desire for a mysterious stranger to arrive in town, woo them, and bring sexual passion to their presently celibate lives.  Out of the storm, a long black vehicle appears, rushing through the tempest to their town.  Jack Nicholson playing a sinister figure called Daryl Van Horne is riding in the sedan driven by his servant, the uncanny giant Fidel (he looks a bit like Lurch on the old Addams Family shows.)  Van Horne buys the Lenox Mansion, said to be built on a seaside bluff where witches were executed, and fills the place with objets d'art and musical instruments -- the interior of the mansion is an elaborate, opera set with filigree, plaster bas relief and the huge blue lagoon in an enclosed natatorium.  First, Van Horne seduces Cher's character, Alex.  He is unremittingly vulgar, obscene, and lascivious.  Alex tells him that she despises him, thinks he's dressed like a fool (he lolls on a bed in pajamas like Hugh Hefner) and, even, smells bad.  But Van Horne, who describes himself as a "horny little devil", prevails on her and she becomes his lover.  He, next, consoles Janey to improve her musical skills by encouraging her to play with more passion.  Delicately, he parts her thighs to place her cello between them.  As he accompanies her, she plays with such unbridled passion that the cello and its strings ignites and burns up on the floor.  Alex and Janey, who learn that Van Horne has had sex with both of them, go to his mansion to confront him.  They find Sukie lounging around, sitting in a sort of caparisoned tent on the front lawn under the Downton Abbey-like facade of the mansion.  Van Horne summons the women to a game of doubles on his tennis court -- he uses magic to make the ball hover in the air, dart here and there, and fly into the sky where it ruptures a cloud to cause another downpour.  The women come to accept their roles in this Devil's menage -- we see them hovering in the air over the swimming pool, eating cherries out of a great floating bowl, and flying through clouds of pink balloons to the music of Puccini's Nessun dorma.  Meanwhile, another woman, Felicia, the newspaper editor's wife, (played by Veronica Cartwright) senses that deviltry is afoot in Eastwick.  She plays the part of Linda Blair in The Exorcist -- she seems entranced, possessed, spouting admonitory obscenities about the devil and his "whores".  (Characters vomit cherry pits somehow transferred to their gullet from the orgies at Lenox mansion.) The three heroines wish Felicia gone and, once again, this wish is fulfilled -- her husband, the mild-mannered newspaper editor beats her to death with a iron fire poker.  Appalled at what has happened, the three women vow to end their relationship with Van Horne.  Although Van Horne has played the part of the cynical caddish seducer, in fact, he has fallen in love with each member of the trio.  He's miserable that he has been rejected and tries to re-ignite his love affairs with them.  By now, the balance of power has shifted to the three women.  Van Horne tires to coerce them back into bed with him by various devilish tricks and, in fact, tortures Sukie, causing her extreme pain.  Alex and Janey fight back and, ultimately, make a wax voodoo doll representing Van Horne.  Sukie is cured and she joins her sisters at the Lomax mansion for the final showdown with Van Horne.  This is a noisy spectacular affair, involving all sorts of picturesque mayhem.  In the end, the Devil is defeated.  But the women are now all pregnant.  In a short coda, we see them bathing their sons, all of whom are, of course, the spawn of Satan.

The movie is very impressively shot, with fabulous locations, and wonderful action sequences -- parts of the picture are reminiscent of the Road Warrior films with Nicholson wildly crawling over the top of his sedan as its spins out-of-control down a winding seaside highway.  There is a sequence in which Janey's fifth grade band plays Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik with satanic inspiration -- the kids throw aside their music and perform like demonic infant prodigies.  Nicholson is fantastic, strutting around cock-sure with banter of this sort:  "I like a little pussy after lunch".  He wines and dines his prey in an oriental-looking Saracen tent set up on the front lawn of his vast manor.  The characters are always gorging sensuously on exotic fruits, whipped cream, chocolates.  In the last 15 minutes, Nicholson gets to pull out all the stops and reverts to the character he played in The Shining seven years earlier -- he rolls his eyes, grunts, and bellows and runs around like an enraged chimpanzee:  "all I want is my family all together," he laments.  I don't know the extent to which the film adapts and follows John Updike's source novel.  Nicholson gets to howl some spectacularly misogynistic harangues:  "When God makes mistakes, we call it nature.  Woman is a mistake."   Notwithstanding the Devil's misogyny, the power in this film is decidedly female -- it is the women who summon Van Horne; he doesn't call them.  And, when they find him inconvenient and dangerous, they don't hesitate to cast him aside notwithstanding all his wiles.  In the end poor Satan is desperately enamored with three heroines -- and this makes sense, we are also.   

The Way Back

The Australian director, Peter Weir, has not made a movie since The Way Back released in 2010.  I recall that the film was released to lukewarm reviews and failed to make any money.  It's a handsome production with strong performances but the picture is harrowing and unpleasant to watch.  Furthermore, there's a weird aspect to the script -- the movie seems to be a paean to Polish nationalism with a curious reactionary aspect.  Even the villains in the picture go out of their way to praise Polish patriots.  I assume this strange feature originates in the book on which the picture is based Slawomir Rawicz' The Long Walk (1956).  Peter Weir has been an acclaimed filmmaker -- he made The Year of Living Dangerously (with a young Mel Gibson), Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness (with Harrison Ford), The Truman Show, and a film version of Master and Commander (based on the Patrick O'Brien historical novel); his pictures have been intelligent fusions of thought-provoking and challenging narratives with star power and popular appeal.  Weir's instincts seem to have deserted him in The Way Back -- there's something impalpably wrong with the movie; it may be that the subject matter is too grim to be entertaining.  

During World War Two, a resistance fighter for the Polish underground is captured by Stalin's thugs.  The man is asked to sign a confession but refuses.  Then, the commissar confronts our protagonist with his wife who has been tortured into informing on him.  The resistance fighter, Janusz, is sent to a labor camp in Siberia, a hundred or so miles north of Lake Baikal.  The labor camp is a hellhole in which the prisoners are beaten, forced to work in subzero temperatures cutting down trees and breaking rocks, and systematically starved.  The Gulag is run from the inside by a group of malign career criminals led by Valka (Colin Ferrell) who plays a homicidal gangster -- he knifes a man to death in order to take his sweater which he, then, gambles away.  The work detail gets caught in a blizzard and a number of the weakened prisoners freeze to death.  Janusz, who is skilled in outdoor survival, saves the company by retreating into a forest (notwithstanding threats by the panicked guards to shoot him) and constructing a wind break.  In retaliation for his resourcefulness, he and his comrades are sent to a mine, visualized as a chaos of explosions, falling rock, and steamy shadowy darkness.  In the mine, Janusz hallucinates the door to a dacha with flowers on the sill that he staggers toward but can't reach.  The situation becomes increasingly dire and, so, Janusz with six other inmates plot their escape and flee from the camp in the snowy darkness -- the blizzard will cover their tracks.  After a desperate chase -- they are pursued by dogs -- the convicts elude the guards but, then, are trapped in the Siberian wilderness.  (Like Trump's "Alligator Alcatraz", geography not walls and guards are the main security measures confining the prisoners to the Gulag camp.)   One of the men has night blindness, wanders off while gathering firewood, and freezes to death.  The men become increasingly weak -- we see them eating bugs and contemplating cannibalism -- but, at last, reach Lake Baikal where there are remote and scattered villages from which they can steal food. Upon reaching the border with Mongolia, the fierce convict, Valka, refuses to leave Mother Russia -- he is a Russian patriot and, in fact, an admirer of Lenin and Stalin.  The escapees have picked up a wan, wraith-like Polish girl wandering in the woods near the great lake -- it's never entirely clear why she is alone in the wilderness and, as it happens, she is also a liar so her explanations must be discounted.  Because Mongolia is also a Communist country (and this film is avowedly anti-Communist), the characters continue to avoid villages and roads, walking cross country until they reach the Gobi desert.  They, then, stagger across the desert for hundreds of miles gradually perishing from thirst and inanition.  The Polish girl dies and others perish as well.  Only four survivors reach Tibet where they are met by some monks who assist them, demanding that they wait for Spring to limp over the Himalayas.  But our heroes are anxious to get back and, so, they hike across the Himalayas in mid-winter, ending up in the terraces where tea is grown in Bhutan.  This is effectively the end of the trek and the film doesn't really explain what happens next.  There's a montage involving the vexed history of countries behind the Iron Curtain progressing from the end of the Second World War through the Fall of Communism.  In the final scene, Vulka, who is now, an old man sees the dacha that he has envisioned for the last forty years, finds a key under a peculiar honeycomb-shaped rock and, then, enters the cottage where he is reunited with his aged wife.  

All of this is filmed with great conviction.  The protagonists starve, are frozen half to death, fall into water and run across fracturing ice; they are swarmed by mosquitos until their eyes are swollen shut and, then, crawl across an infinity of bright, hideous desert -- they drink mud and eat insects and fight with wolves for fragments of a rotting bloody carcass.  Their feet are scabbed, swollen, blistered and the sun burns their faces.  It's mostly horrific and utterly without drama -- it's almost impossible to make a movie about a hike of this sort:  what are you going to show?  people walking doggedly through all sorts of landscapes -- they just walk and walk and walk, quarreling sometimes, and, then, collapsing and dying.  Movies about people perishing of thirst in the desert don't have much appeal.  It's the same problem with the Titanic -- do I really want to see a bunch of people drowning in frigid water?  Parts of the movie are gripping and the landscapes are spectacular, huge vistas with tiny figures limping over the peaks or glaciers or sand dunes.  But the movie seems somewhat pointless.  Ed Harris plays an American prisoner haunted by grief; he is anguished over bringing his family to Russia where he was employed as some kind of engineer and, therefore, blames himself for his son being shot by the Communists.  The film's entire orientation is aggressively pro-Polish and anti-Communist.  A good comparison to this film is Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn about American POWs escaping through the wilderness from a hellish prison camp in the jungle -- somehow, Herzog makes a picture that is febrile, a visionary nightmare from which the viewer feels distanced due to the movie's beauty and feverish alienating intensity -- he aestheticizes starvation and misery.  Weir, who was also one of cinema's notable visionaries (I am thinking of The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock) can't quite figure out how to make walking interesting -- it's like The Lord of the Rings without the monster spiders, horror-horsemen, and orcs.  I wanted to like this picture because it's an honorable effort, but I can't recommend it.  

(The book on which the movie is based has recently been revealed to be a hoax.  There's no evidence that the protagonist and author actually completed the titular Long Walk  and there are, indeed, certain implausibilities in the story.  Knowledge that this grim trek never really happened is both reassuring but fatal to the movie, which seems completely pointless in the absence of a documentary basis in fact)_

To Live and Die in LA

 The logic of big business popular movies is the logic of advertising and publicity.  If something is successful, then, there must be enhancements, improvements to make it even bigger and better than before. William Friedkin seems trapped in this logic with respect to his film To Live and Die in LA (1985).  Friedkin's assignment, it seems, is to remake The French Connection in Los Angeles and amplify the effects in the former film until the audience is deafened and beat into submission.  Fundamentally, the picture is rooted in 40's and 50's noir, a humble B-picture genre.  Both The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA are variants on the tough, rogue cop picture, films like Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and just about anything with Sterling Hayden (Crime Wave, The Naked Alibi and others down to Captain McCluskey in The Godfather.)  For better or worse, Friedkin aspires to something like art and kicks everything into high gear.  Characters can't walk down a corridor without the camera breathlessly rushing forward on a collision course with the figure; a simply colloquy at a desk, turns into a swooping 280 degree camera movement and, when someone enters a studio or a multi-room robber's roost, the camera zooms alongside, recording the entire space as if Friedkin had forgotten that he could cut to elide the space between opening the door and the cop's destination -- I guess Friedkin wants to show-off both the proficiency of his director of photography, the great Robbie Mueller, as well as the kinky and lush detail designed by his set decorator.  (Clearly, Friedkin wanted Mueller to replicate the extraordinary twilight effects and night photography in Wenders film noir The American Friend -- many sequences are shot at dawn or sunset, the magic hour and fast motion photography of the sun setting or rising makes the palms tremulous with a sort of wild hysteria -- Mueller loves the palm trees and fast forwards them so they writhe in the red light like souls in Hell.  I attribute to films like To Live and Die in LA, the annoyingly ADHD-style mise-en-scene in many of the films directed by Ridley Scott and his brother, pictures in which the camera is never still, but constantly flitting back and forth, hither and yon...

Friedkin begins the movie with a montage redolent of 40's (or, even, 30's) Hollywood productions showing bad guys corrupting the currency with counterfeit bills.  Some Secret Service guys are on the track of the villains.  One of the cops, a case-hardened veteran, is three days from retirement.  His young partner Rick Chance salutes him for his courage and commitment.  Needless to say, the older guy has tracked the counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe as Masters) to a remote gulch in the Mojave Desert where the villain is printing cash.  In this isolated venue, the senior cop, who is inexplicably working on  his own, is murdered.  Chance vows revenge and is willing to bend the rules to get his man.  The film tracks the talented, if evil, Masters as he frolics with bisexual models and kisses his boyfriend and periodically terrorizes and thrashes various folk whom he encounters.  Chance has a female informant to whom he is casually vicious -- he's also sleeping with her between bouts of bullying. For some reason, this girl, who seems a glamorous type of trailer trash (she works in a topless place as a cashier), is privy to all sorts of top-secret underworld gossip. Chance and his new partner, a straight-arrow named Jon Vulkevich, go undercover and negotiate with Masters.  The mastermind demands $50,000 upfront for some vast amount of counterfeit currency.  Chance can't get the department to advance the funds and, so, acting on a tip from his girlfriend and informant, the two cops stage a robbery of another con who is carrying $50,000 down from San Francisco.  They ambush the con, called in the film "a Chinaman", and shake him down.  The Chinaman gets killed by a sniper and all hell breaks loose as a small army of armed men and souped-up vehicles pursues Chance and his hapless partner.  This sets up the film's prinicipal set piece, a spectacular car chase which begins in a railroad yard full of moving locomotives, progresses through a fruit market where dozens of trucks are making deliveries in an extended alley about 15 feet long; the boys evade the obstacles in their way, drop down onto the empty bed of the LA river channel where they engage in a demolition derby chase for another few miles before evading their pursuers by driving the wrong way against rush hour traffic.  (Friedkin is clearly attempting to outdo himself with respect to the famous car chase in The French Connection, vehicles carooming between pillars of an elevated train.)  There are a few unproductive subplots involving another thug who pretends to turn informant but, then, escapes -- this is a very greasy-looking John Turturro -- and some complications ensue with respect to a crooked lawyer who has pocketed a big chunk of counterfeit dough.  There are raids, counter-raids, some sex scenes with beautiful depraved women, and, ultimately, a fiery climax.  The straight-arrow partner, Vukelvich, has been thoroughly corrupted and, in the last scene, he's calling on his partner's sleazy informant girlfriend to bully her before forcing sex upon the woman.  It's all unsavory and picturesque.  Friedkin films LA as a port city and most of the action takes place near the harbor or among the infernal refineries of City of Industry.  There's no trace of Hollywood in this picture, except that the molls are all registered with the studios and looking for work in the film business.  Friedkin makes LA look like one of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno.  And the picture has a throbbing sound track by the duo Wang Chung, including some songs that were once famous in the 80's.  

Nothing much changes in this genre; the bad guy has a drop-dead gorgeous moll who runs around in the 1985 equivalent of the lingerie these dames wore in the forties and fifties.  Because we are more sexually adventurous today, the bad guy and his girlfriend are bisexual -- in 1985, bisexuality was deemed to be the height of post-modern decadence.  (Today, a film like this would feature glamorous transsexuals.) The rogue cop casually beats everyone up and cheats with respect to evidence and, indeed, ends up engineering a robbery (involving the Chinaman) against fellow law enforcement -- this explains the army of cops who chase them after the poor undercover Asian is gunned down.  Friedkin's players are fantastically attractive -- the young Willem Dafoe is pretty as a Cosmopolitan model.  (In recent films he looks like his haggard face has been set on fire and the blaze put out with a rake -- but, in this movie, Dafoe is more beautiful than the leading lady.) The only person even more gorgeous than Dafoe is William Petersen, the rogue cop.  He's so preternaturally gorgeous that Friedkin saves a luminous close-up of him for the very end of the credits -- stick around to see it.