Sweet Revenge

On the evidence of Sweet Revenge (1976), director Jerry Schatzberg had all the impulses of a first-rate maker of drive-in exploitation films.  Sweet Revenge involves car theft, has an appealing mixed race cast jiving in funky urban settings, and inserts gratuitous tits and ass into the proceedings.  Early in the film, the heroine, played by Stockard Channing, gets busted for theft.  She's transported to a jail where nasty-looking matrons literally hose down writhing naked girls -- there's about a half-dozen nude prisoners on display.  Channing herself is coy about nudity, but she's always stripping down on the edge of the frame and slinking away into Vilmos Zsigmond's murky gloom.  So Schatzberg's got the chops and, in fact, his reflex is to go lurid.  But the picture has pretentions to be something more than a car crime film and, in fact, was entered in the competition at Cannes -- and, therein, lies the problem.  Channing plays a delinquent girl who yearns for a Ferrari.  The film is a lame parable about false values and the script makes it blindingly obvious that the Ferrari symbolizes middle-class respectability to the poor waif.  And, so, the heroine concocts an elaborate scheme to steal and, then, re-steal the same vehicle four or five times -- her plan is to sell the vehicle after each theft and accumulate enough money to buy the car outright.  The girl has a dimwitted boyfriend with whom she casually shoplifts -- he pesters her about sex but she remarks "the screwing part is over."  A public defender played by the very young Sam Waterston yearns to mentor the girl -- this "mentoring" involves lots of lectures and stalking, Vertigo-style cruising around in sordid neighborhoods.  The cast is jam-packed with amusing low-lifes, a demi-monde of hustlers and thieves of all sorts and this cadre of Luftmenschen  lives in squats of various kinds in the old Native American ghetto on Bunker Hill,  a milieu picturesquely lensed by Zsigmond -- decaying Victorian mansions perched over vacant lots with the monuments of the city arrayed across the polluted basin below.  The movie goes nowhere and it's so laid-back that the narrative is, more or less, invisible.  Zsigmond seems determined to shoot as many scenes as possible with as little light as practicable -- the movie's locations are a congeries of cavernous parking ramps, dark bars, and dimly lit interiors, rooms always about to be demolished and so with water and electricity cut off to them.  Whenever possible, Zsigmond complicates the picture plane -- the entire first sequence introduces the main characters as a translucent reflection on the showroom glass behind which the Ferrari is displayed.  Like much of the camerawork, it's impressive and symbolic to a fault (the girl's features resting a like pinkish haze over the Ferrari behind the glass), but not particularly dramatic or expressive.  This is the problem with the entire picture -- it's only moderately interesting because the impulses of the characters and narrative are always entrapped in the schematic exposition of false materialistic values that the film dramatizes.  The story yields to allegory -- almost never a favorable development.  Channing is suitably feral and, certainly, not at all attractive -- she looks heavy-set and fiercely determined and wears unattractive clothes:  she's a kind of girl mechanic, a ferocious tom-boy.  It's hard to imagine her as a Hollywood star, but her next role was as Rizzo in Grease.   

TCM presented the picture as a package of films featuring Vilmos Zsigmond's camerawork.  The movie preceding Sweet Revenge was Spielberg's maiden feature film, Sugarland Express, a much more impressive picture.  Since Sugarland Express  (1970) is a road movie, it is more brightly lit and, therefore, feels more open and intelligible.  In both pictures, however, Zsigmond shows an unseemly fascination with reflections on glass and chrome and each movie ends with figures silhouetted against bright light, orange flame in Sweet Revenge and the glittering water of the Rio Grande in Sugarland Express.  It's interesting to compare John Williams' score for Sugarland Express with the movie music in Sweet Revenge.  At least, in the climactic chase in Sugarland Express, Williams music is an inextricable part of the mise-en-scene -- the sequence feels choreographed to Williams' score and part of the sense of inexorable doom embodied in the film's last ten minutes derives from the way Spielberg locks the images to the music.  It's an airless, if exciting and brilliantly orchestrated, Gesamtkunstwerk.  By contrast, the music in Sweet Revenge is generally Muzak-filler, elevator music that you aren't really intended to notice except as the vaguest and most general cue toward an emotional response -- minor means plaintive; major means happy.  Often the music in Sweet Revenge seems inordinately cheery in contrast with Zsigmond's moody and dark images.  The music in Sugarland Express is timeless in that it doesn't signal an era -- by contrast, the score in Sweet Revenge is mid-seventies and recognizable as such in the course of one or two bars.