Fargo (Kansas City - Series 4)

Fargo (4th series) is a 2020 Tv show broadcast on FX.  The program adapts the sensibility of the Coen brothers 1996 film, although, nodding, as well to other pictures made by those directors.  Joel and Ethan Coen are named as executive producers and their quirky perversity and stylistic tics are on display in the TV show.  The movie Fargo, of course, was not set in that place but rather Bemidji and Minneapolis.  Although the first three TV series, written by Joshua Hawley, were nominally set in Minnesota, although obviously filmed somewhere else -- for instance, the third series was shot mostly in the area around Calgary. -- the fourth iteration of the show abandons even the pretense of a Minnesota location.  Fargo (IV) takes place in Kansas City.  All of the episodes that I have seen in each of the four seasons involve sly references to Coen brothers' films, take place in snowy settings, and feature, at least, one character who speaks in the Scandinavian-influenced dialect that the Coen's imagine to be echt-Minnesotan -- this was the lingo spoken by the pregnant cop (and many others) in the original movie. The four series are all crime dramas involving various sorts of highly deviant families..  Plots are complex to the point of being sometimes unintelligible and the rationale for the shows is to highlight prestige actors playing flamboyantly eccentric characters and to stage periodic and showy massacres -- in keeping with series' inspiration, Fargo  (I - IV) episodes have been uniformly very violent, often to the point of absurdity.  An example is a machine gun battle at the Kansas City union terminal in Fargo (IV) -- two female bankrobbers have busted out of prison and stolen money from the one of the two gangs competing for control over the rackets in Kansas City.  The women, an African-American and Native American, are cornered -- we understand them to be lesbian lovers.  Seeing that they are trapped and doomed, the women blaze away at an army of cops swarming down the steps of the big Roman-imperial scaled train station  (The imagery comes wholesale from Brian de Palma's The Untouchables).  The show cuts away after the first fusillade.  A few minutes later, we rejoin the action with the camera panning over a battlefield of about forty bloody corpses, including a dozen of so civilians, most women and children, caught in the crossfire.  The whole thing defies probability and the scale of the carnage is ridiculously epic, particular for a show that faithfully recites an opening title from the original Coen brothers inspiration:  "This Story is True."

Although the movie Fargo is the TV show's titular source, the FX program is most closely related to another Coen brother's picture, the extremely complex and ultra-violent Miller's Crossing, a film that, itself, harkens back to the long tradition of gangster movies made in this country, flavored it should be noted with a little seasoning from Japanese samurai pictures  As with Miller's Crossing, the TV shows display a certain ostentatious pretense -- these shows are supposed to be about something deep, disturbing, and perdurable in the American psyche.  The tag-line for Fargo (IV) is a showy aphorism:  "The reason Americans like a crime story is that America is a crime story."  This assertion, although it sounds good, really doesn't mean anything at all -- it's interpretation is in the eyes of the beholder and, as with the opening title assuring the audience that "This Story is True", in fact, the statement isn't true at all.  To the extent that the aphorism suggests that important parts of American history involve greed, violence, and corruption, then, I suppose that the same could be said of every other country on earth.  

Fargo (IV), which I'll call KC henceforth, broadly pivots around the concept of "fostering".  In former times, peace was kept in certain violent societies, for instance, among Scandinavian and Germanic war lords, by exchanging children between feuding factions -- if the enemy is entrusted with raising a child from the enemy clan, then, a fragile sort of truce may hold between adversaries.  The idea of raising the heir of an enemy clan as a foster-son is a kind of clammy peace overture that partakes in equal parts of kidnapping and holding hostages.  In KC, this baroque tradition began with conflict between the local pioneer (Protestant) gangsters and Irish immigrants -- two children were exchanged to seal the peace.  Italian gangsters then infiltrated the city and more  turf wars arose -- by this time, the original pioneers had died out and the Irish controlled the crime in the City.  Accordingly, an Irish lad was exchanged for an Italian kid and, again, a truce was negotiated.  As of 1950 when  KC takes placed, the Irish have now become largely middle class and no longer victims of protection rackets and, so, their gangs have faded out of sight, only to be supplanted by African-American organized crime.  Once again, a Black boy is traded for an Italian kid -- the Black youth is raised in the home of the Capo of the Italian gangsters and an Italian lad goes to live with Black crime family.  It's this relationship between warring gangs that results, at least, to some degree in the mayhem in KC.  When the treaty collapses, both sides believe that the foster-children have been murdered.  And, this leads to an all-out gang war.

A number of subplots are strung on this narrative scaffolding.  A redheaded nurse from Minnesota works at a local hospital.  She's a frightening psychopath and poisons a number of people in the show (she also smothers several of her patients).  This woman embodies "Minnesota Nice" in a particularly lethal way -- she's perky and talks with the exaggerated Scandihoovian accent that the Coen brothers highlighted in their 1996 film and she's bedding the boss of the Italian crime family:  she adds a little erotic asphyxiation to her sex games with the gangster.  The Italian crime family has been radically destabilized by the appearance of a beefy thug from the old Country, a former Black Shirt Fascist now fled to Kansas City -- like the red-headed Minnesota girl, this guy is an insane psychopath.  (This character, Gaetano, played lushly by Salvatore Esposito, rolls his eyes, directs unheard opera arias, and kills everyone he encounters, triggering a renewal of the war with Black gangsters -- Gaetano is extreme even by Coen brothers' standards, but he's also someone  you can't take your eyes off.)  Two female murderers who have escaped from prison are on the lam in KC -- they are pursued by a straight arrow Mormon detective (I can't recall why this fellow has been recruited from Utah) who also has psychopathic tendencies -- he's called "Deafy" because if someone curses around him or says something he doesn't like, he squinches up his face, cups a hand to his ear, and pretends not to have heard the offensive words spoken.  This character is paired with an obsessive compulsive local detective who exhibits a whole range of elaborate tics and twitches.  A local funeral parlor is operated by a biracial couple and they have perky highly intelligent daughter who spends her time dreaming in her room and listening to Edith Piaf records.  The funeral parlor folks have run into money problems and have borrowed money from the Black mob, a very bad business decision, indeed.  The undertaking establishment is called King 'o Tears, a formulation used in variants in each series and harkening back to the opening shot of Fargo (the movie) featuring an actual business in West Fargo, a bar called the King o' Clubs.  There are several other subplots, including a series of poisonings in the hospital where the deadly redhead works.  One of the people offed by the Minnesota nurse is the patriarch of the Italian crime family, a killing that initiates the cycle of violence.  

The two lead characters are both cast against type.  Jason Schwartzman, a small, unprepossessing man, plays the part of the Italian crime boss -- he accedes to power after the nurse kills his father who has been hospitalized under her care.  Schwartzman  is about half the size of Gaetano, his brother from the Old Country, and the bigger man beats him up periodically.  Schwartzman is engaged in an extra-marital affair with the redheaded nurse who, unbeknownst to him, killed his father.  His opposite number is Loy, played by Chris Rock.  In my view, Rock isn't very good and the casting against type, in his case, is really better described as simply miscasting.  Chris Rock's voice is too high and boyish to be menacing and he doesn't exude any of the manic energy that made him famous as a comedian -- he just seems weary.  However, his character is supported by a number of authentically scary African-American thugs and so his gang is reasonably frightening even though the boss isn't.  The show can be interestingly digressive and takes its time, a virtue, I think.  The background is populated by weird happenings, including a corpse that seems to be trying to get out of a casket, and there's an odd black-and-white episode in which Ben Whishaw playing Rabbi, the Irish hostage held by the Italian gangsters, although now grown-up, tries to save his counterpart, the Black foster-child, by fleeing from Kansas City into the country.  This episode parodies the Coen brothers's nightmare film Barton Fink involving a squalid hotel that may be the lobby to Hell, but also invokes the terrifying tornado in A Simple Man and with elements of The Wizard of Oz thrown in for a good measure.  After a characteristically violent shoot-out, Rabbi is sucked up into the tornado.

In the final two episodes, lots of people are killed, although the motives for the assassinations are murky.  Because various massacres and ambushes have left the forces of the original two gangs very thin on the ground, outsiders have been recruited to perpetuate the feue -- there's another group Black mobsters, somehow related to Loy, but working for the Italians.  When they are rubbed-out, the Italians are reinforced by some sophisticated Big City criminals from New York City led by a suave and menacing capo of all capos.  The perky teenager who lives in the imperiled mortuary figures out that the Minnesota nurse, Miss Mayflower, murdered the Italian crime boss, Jason Schwartman's father, the incident that has triggered the vendetta.  (Miss Mayflower keeps souvenirs of her depredations and the girl has stolen the dead patriarch's pinky ring from the nurse's morbid collection.)  The girl connives a meeting with Loy and exchanges the ring for the mortgage on her parent's undertaking business.  Loy, in turn, meets with the Godfather from New York and negotiates a truce, demonstrating that his African-American mob didn't in fact kill the old man.  By this time, Miss Mayflower  is in jail, accused of a poisoning that her victim survived (albeit not for long -- the pompous hospital administrator and some other guy who I couldn't identify are summarily executed by Schwartzman's character.)  The New York Godfather bails Miss Mayflower out of jail and she admits to killing the old man but at the behest of Schwartzman, his son -- she has interpreted his words "Take care of the Old Man," somewhat in the way that confederates of King Henry interpreted the ejaculation:  "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" referring to Thomas Beckett.  The New York mobsters take Miss Mayflower and Schwartzman's diminutive, if ruthless, gangster out in the country and kill them -- before she's shot, Miss Mayflower takes care to freshen-up her lipstick.  Loy finds that the New York mob, with whom he has made peace, intend to take away half of his criminal enterprises.  But he's resigned to that fact -- his son, thought to have been murdered while held as foster-child to the Italians, has returned home alive and there is rejoicing in his household.  Just as Loy accepts the fact that peace will mean a reduction of his empire, someone out of the past knifes him to death.  He dies as the son given up as a foster child watches.  In a brief coda, probably ten years later, we see a car speeding across a featureless plain.  The gangster's son is in the car -- at least, I think this is who we see -- playing with a loaded revolver.  (He seems to be zooming into a previous year's series in which, I think, the Black assassin played an important role.)  Along the way, one episode earlier,  Gaetano dies -- the film establishes that the burly Italian is not too good on ice and has slipped and fallen several times, usually with lethal consequences to those who have had the temerity to laugh at him.  Strutting back to his car from a murder (he has just killed the last lawman standing, the guy with the OCD), he again slips on the ice and, falling. his gun discharges, blowing off the top of his head and, therefore, justifying a big close up of his brains spilling out of his shattered skull.  

Much of this is not comprehensible as it occurs in real time.  I've suffered from insomnia and worked out a lot of this plot while staring sleeplessly into the dark -- at three a.m., when a man of my years should be saying his prayers.  Many elements of the story are baffling when they occur -- you can't figure out who is killing who or why.  The final murder (Loy) is committed by a character who has not been in the show for four episodes and was thought, at least as far I was concerned, to be long dead.  (Fargo episodes are broadcast back to back, the same show running twice per night -- therefore, the assiduous viewer can sometimes figure out events at the end of the episode by watching for clues in the first ten minutes of the broadcast.  In the case of Loy's murder, the final show begins with an elegiac sequence, a montage of all the cast members who have been butchered in the series appearing while Johnny Cash sings mournfully -- although you don't notice this on first viewing, the figure who kills Loy doesn't appear in the montage and, therefore, an ultra-alert viewer --the ideal viewer as it were -- would grasp that the assassin, contrary to what you recall, is somehow still alive.  Although I was able to figure out who killed Loy, the murderer's motives, which she helpfully states, don't make sense -- it's revenge for a killing in which Loy wasn't involved as far as I can recall.)  The show is too intricate and has too many characters to keep in mind  -- and the format doesn't help:  the show is broadcast in the old-fashioned way, one episode per week -- this time lapse is too long to keep events in mind between shows.  Furthermore, the program is shamelessly chopped up by commercials.  In the last episode, there seemed to be a long series of ads about every six minutes -- this also makes it difficult to retain what is supposed to be happening.  Unlike incoherent messes like Westworld, Fargo does make sense and, in fact, its narrative can be worked-out -- furthermore, the show is well-written in the sense that plot developments are often signaled several episodes before and figures in the show act in a way congruent to their characters.  The only part of the program that seemed hastily, and opportunistically, contrived is a subplot involving a demon slave-trader, a monstrous figure with a mutilated face who intervenes at one point to save a crucial character -- this ghostly apparition is visible from time to time in the background during scenes involving carnage but is not explained until a spooky story is told just before the specter has to recue someone from deadly peril.  This element of the story isn't effective and feels tacked on.

Although my guess is that the writer isn't familiar with these sources, Fargo -- KC is very similar to the old Icelandic sagas, most particularly Burnt Njal.  Icelandic sagas, at least, of the family history variety, involve clans with hair-trigger tempers always poised on the verge of murderous havoc.  In these fantastically intricate stories, something goes wrong and a blood feud results.  The problem with this kind of feud is that there is no way for the families involved to extricate themselves from the killing, the violence just continues for decades as a series of ambushes sometimes enlivened by large-scale skirmishes and massacres.  In Icelandic saga, the story and cast of murderous Vikings regenerates when a new generation takes up the vendetta on behalf of their parents.  Njal covers a genealogy of violence that spans, at least, four generations, with fathers passing vendetta obligations down to their sons and grandsons.  (In Icelandic saga, the women are equally murderous, enthusiastically spurring the men into killing one another.)  KC, fundamentally the saga-like chronicle of a blood feud, takes place in the scope of a single year -- therefore, the plot has to figure out a way to bring in new cannon fodder for the cycle of violence.  This is accomplished by the plot expanding the scope of the feud to involve outside alliances with other groups of gangsters imported to continue the killing-- in KC, the Black Oklahoma gangsters and their counterparts, the New York mob, join the fray about midway through the show to keep up the violence.  (In Burnt Njal, the hero is massacred with most of his family when his farmstead is attacked and set on fire -- this should be the end of the Saga, but, in fact, occurs at the mid-point in the story; the killing just continues, lovingly chronicled by the writer, for another couple of generations.)  As with Icelandic saga, the tone adopted by filmmakers is Olympian indifference -- the follies of the actors in the vendetta are observed with casual contempt and, even, a sort of macabre and sardonic humor.  In both Saga and Fargo, people die in all sorts of amusing ways, sometimes, by sheer accident or misidentification, and there is some supernatural intervention, although it is usually slight.  As in the Icelandic books, the logic of blood feud is clear, if savage, the killing continues until everyone is dead -- hence, all the gangsters active in the violence have to be wiped-out before the show can end.  Loy is the last man standing, but he's killed in the final five minutes of the show.  

Another source relevant to the show is Paul Wellman's A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, a popular history published in 1966 demonstrating that "crime is contagious."  Wellman traces the mobsters active in the 1930's back to the violence inflicted on the Middle Border (around Kansas City) by Quantrill's Raiders -- the point of the book is to show that killing begets more killing and that there is a direct lineage linking the attack on Lawrence, Kansas to Jesse James, the Dalton brothers, and ultimately killers like Pretty Boy Floyd. This theme, I think, explains the series' short coda, establishing that the murders in KC spill over into later generations of violence depicted in Fargo's earlier episodes.  

     

   

Marnie (and You Only Live Twice)

For its first 45 minutes, Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie threatens to be one of the greatest movies ever made.  It can't sustain the icy crystalline perfection of its first half and devolves into explanations that are wholly unnecessary to the movie's dream logic. Hitchcock is too much of a rationalist and feels he has to explain the frigid theorems that his movie poses.  In this regard, the director seems too tightly rooted in the cozy conventions of British crime fiction -- a riddle is posed to be solved.  His greatest films don't have solutions:  there is no accounting for what happens in The Birds and the solution in Vertigo, arriving in the very middle of the movie doesn't explain what happens in its second half and, furthermore, this ratiocinative account is comically delirious itself.   Marnie tries to resolve the problem that it poses -- but the enigma that he film presents is far deeper and more disturbing than the trite resolution featured in the film which pretends to solve all problems but merely shoves them aside for the consolation of a happy ending that is obviously specious.

The film's opening shot is instantly memorable -- some kind of bright yellow vulva is being carried under a woman's arm.  The vulva moves away from the camera as the stylishly dressed woman walks to the center of a eerily silent and still train platform.  This yellow form turns out to be a purse, with phallic keys one of the central visual leit motifs in the film.  The woman is Marnie, a role played with enormous bravery by Tippi Hedren.  She has just stolen a sum of about $10,000 from her employer.  Like Marian Crane in Psycho, she is on the run.  But as Hitchcock's narrative of nightmarish flight and pursuit show us -- ultimately, there's no place to hide:  she can't escape herself and her compulsions.  At the outset, the film shows us something that makes no sense.  At a train station, Marnie puts the purse in a locker and, then, takes the key and drops it onto a grating  in the floor, nudging the little steel phallus into the darkness between the bars with her spike heel.  Why would she do this? The suggestion is that money is not the motive for her crime.  After changing her hair color -- she's naturally blonde -- in a rapturous reveal (it's the first time we see her face), Marnie rides a big black horse in front of Hitchcock's typically dreamlike rear projection.  She bobs up and down as if having sex while a frieze of background unrelated to the lighting where she is moving is dragged along behind her.,  Then, she goes to Baltimore to visit her mother, a woman who lives on a street angling down toward a bizarre-looking harbor where a big ship is always pulled up next to the neighborhood, parked like one of the big cars of the era -- the film was made in 1964.  The scenes with Marnie's mother have a quality of utter clarity and complete horror, a hellish atmosphere of damnation and torment.  In Psycho, we imagine what Norman Bates' relationship was like with his mother -- here Hitchcock stages the thing outright and it's a ghastly spectacle to behold.  (Indeed, in one shot, the shadowy form of the dreadful mother, backlit, occupies a door frame, reiterating a scene in Psycho.)  Marnie's mother speaks with a faint Southern accent, has a bad limp, and alternates between demented denunciations of her daughter for trying to attract men and appeals for love which she, then, rebuffs.  The whole episode takes place with nightmarish intensity.  Marnie has used her sex appeal to seduce men into hiring her as a secretary or assistant -- but, then, she compulsively steals from them and changes her identity before proceeding to her next victim.

The killer returns to the scene of the crime and Marnie is driven by some kind of odd compulsion to seek a job with a man named Mark Rutland, one of Hitchcock's playboy businessmen, although with overtones in his speech of the sinister spy acted by James Mason in North by Northwest.  No less than Marnie, Rutland is a complete puzzle.  He has a Gothic family centered around his father, an old libertine.  (Rutland's family with its strange obsessive emotional crosscurrents seems to mirror in some ways the totally oppressive relationship between Marnie and her demanding, vicious mother.)   Rutland, played by Sean Connery, has previously met Marnie on the premises of her previous victim's business and so the woman's application for work at the family publishing business has a dream-logic -- she is putting herself into a situation where her criminal conduct will certainly be discovered and punished. And, indeed, when Marnie steals from Rutland, he recalls her from the place where she earlier worked and after she has opened his safe and taken another $10,000, he hunts her down, suddenly appearing out of nowhere (again like a nightmare force of retribution) when she is ecstatically riding her big black stallion.  It  is here where the movie slides into delirium too excessive even for Hitchcock.  Instead of having Marnie arrested, Rutland blackmails her into marriage.  He's become obsessed with her and like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo intends to spend the second half of the movie making her into his own creation.  In fact, Rutland's coerced marriage is the worst punishment that could be conceived for Marnie -- she's sexually frigid and can't abide being touched by men (except when seducing them for their money) and her honeymoon with her new husband will be a form of punishment, even torture.  Her husband will demand sex and she will resist until overcome.  Then, her disgust at the sexual act will drive her to suicide.  This seems to be the film's nightmare logic.  Rutland (the name tells us everything we need to know) takes her on a honeymoon voyage to Fiji.  Trapped on the ship, he ultimately rapes her.  She, then, flees the bedroom at dawn and flings herself into a swimming pool. floating face down when her husband rescues her -- but only to inflict further connubial torture on her.  There's an infernal dinner party at Rutland's family mansion in which Marnie has to confront an earlier victim of her crimes -- this is one of Hitchcock's set pieces involving sinister encounters among elegantly dressed people, something like the party in Notorious.  Marnie suffers from some sort of repressed memory that apparently involves the colors white and blood-red.  When she sees specks of red on a white background, the film-image flares into a scarlet haze and she slips into fearsome seizures.  At the house party, Marnie goes riding on a fox hunt, obsesses over the color red on a huntsman's tunic, and, then, rides away, fleeing desperately -- another extravaganza of wholly implausible and hallucinatory rear projection.  She misses a jump and her big black stallion is ruined, legs broken and screaming on the ground.  She pounds on a door of a house nearby, demanding a gun with which to kill the wounded animal.  All of this is observed by another of Hitchcock's strangely eccentric characters -- Rutland's sister-in-law.  This young woman plays the thankless role that was assigned Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo:  she's haplessly in love with Rutland who is, of course, forbidden to her and, so, to get closer to the object of her desires, forms an alliance with her brother-in-law to uncover Marnie's secrets.  "I can be anything you want," the young woman says:  "Guerrilla fighter, perjurer, intelligence agent."  Later, she suggests weirdly that she might share Rutland's obsession with Marnie:  "I'm queer for liars," she inexplicably says.  Rutland wants to cure Marnie, like all men thinking that his penis will be the remedy that she needs.  He confronts her in a bedroom encounter in which she derisively says:  "You Freud, me Jane."  And she plausibly argues that he is crazier than she -- after all, he has chosen a sexually unavailable criminal for his wife.  By this time, Rutland has figured out that Marnie's sexual aberration arises from some kind of repressed childhood trauma.  He forces her to travel with him to the eerie street in Baltimore where the old brownstones are backed up against the icy looking harbor.  There, Rutland triggers a final confrontation with Marnie's monstrous mother in which the source of his wife's derangement is revealed.  This part of the movie is equal measure Spellbound and Vertigo-- particularly, the final scenes in the latter film in which Jimmy Stewart drags the unwilling Kim Novak into the tower to confront her demons and guilt.  Everything is revealed -- sort of.  Marnie has an abreaction that is cautiously orgasmic.  Her mother's eyes are covered with a pale blue film.  Rutland ushers Marnie, who the film suggests might be "cured" to the car and the storm clouds over the nightmare harbor break apart so that bright sunlight can shine on the strange toy-like set.  Little girls jumping rope sing:  Call for the doctor, call for nurse, call for the woman with the alligator purse.   Alligator purse, of course, describes Marnie's sealed and predatory vagina.  Is this a happy ending?  It seems doubtful.

Parts of the film are inexplicable.  It's not at all clear why Marnie's sexual repression has metamorphosed into kleptomania.  We don't really see her getting a sexual charge from her crimes -- rather, the sexual climax associated with theft is transferred to scenes of her riding her stallion.  Money, it seems, goes into the sealed purse of her vagina instead of a man's penis.  Money in a film of this sort, in fact, is the phallus. Although the theme is not well developed, there is a hint that Marnie associates money with sex because, as it turns out, her equally repressed and sexually prudish mother was, of all things, a prostitute.  

Hitchcock's mise-en-scene in this film is extraordinary, far superior to the strangely explicit and implausible plot.  His characteristic effect is perfect clarity that, nonetheless, has something completely and eerily uncanny about it.  Many shots "read" as entirely logical but are, nonetheless, bafflingly strange.  One example must suffice for many:  Hitchcock favors overhead perspectives that are curiously inert and analytical -- the equivalent, it seems, of detached psychoanalytic scrutiny.  Marnie and Rutland have gone to a racetrack so that the woman can admire the horses.  She asks to go to the paddock.  The camera is mounted high over the location and we see an oval field where there are jockeys and horses next to a completely rectilinear grid of parked cars -- the juxtaposition of the round paddock with its chaotic action and the completely still and silent formation of cars is oddly compelling.  I don't know what it means but the lucidity of the shot and its analytical precision requires that it mean something.  Hitchcock dares to film Sean Connery as the movie's object of desire, it's ingenue -- he is shot to emphasize his full sensual lips and seems to be wearing long artificial eye-lashes and dark eyeliner in many close-ups.  Far from seeming powerfully masculine, he appears to be strangely feminine, soft and yielding.  By contrast, Hitchcock lavishes his full photographic scorn on Marnie -- she is shot in ways that make her seem hideous, an impermeable glacial mass of neurosis.  There's nothing attractive about her at all -- we can't even imagine her body under the shapeless flannel night gown that she wears or her androgynous business suits.  The exteriors of buildings have a sort of ominous expressivity in this film.  Throughout the film, Bernard Herrmann's ultra-melodramatic score yearns and sobs and throbs and quivers.  In one extraordinary scene, Rutland is dictating to Marnie on a Saturday afternoon when there is a thunderstorm that envelopes the peculiar barren-looking office building, an ancient warehouse it seems, where his publishing company is located.  Suddenly a wall collapse and a huge withered tree falls into the room, smashing a collection of pre-Columbian art objects that are all that remains of Rutland's deceased first wife.  The huge tree seems to have come from nowhere.  If the establishing shots of the building featured trees around the building's perimeter, the viewer has forgotten this.  The invading tree, black and gnarled, is like some hideous eruption of the unconscious.  Just as the death of the black stallion signifies the possibility that Marnie can be rescued from her madness, the black tree bough inexplicably invading the office represents the power of obsession triggering Rutland's quest to cure her.  There is a lot of bad stuff sloshing around in Hitch's head and it comes out in an uncontrolled gush in this film.

Marnie is shown in tribute to Sean Connery who died at ninety a few days before this note was written.  As part of this tribute, Turner Classic Movies showed several of the actor's James Bond films, one of which, You only live Twice was made around the time that Marnie was produced.  Like George Reeves, Connery fancied himself a serious actor and didn't want to be type-cast as the suave, if brutish, James Bond.  I watched about a forty minutes of You Only Live Twice -- the film is unpleasant and surprisingly bad.  (I wonder what erstwhile admires of these pictures think of them now.)  Bond has been sent to the Orient and cavorts with a small army of geishas in antiseptic white brassieres and panties who bathe him -- it's the exact opposite of erotic, a completely sterile fantasy with no pay-off.  The film is overlit and incredibly vulgar.  Bond's double entendres aren't funny; their just a series of aggressively misogynistic pussy jokes.  The action sequences are ineptly staged and completely unconvincing -- the film, that I expect was expensive, looks like it was made for about $29.95.  Everything is overlit and unpersuasively staged -- there's no suspense and the garish fight scenes are interrupted with inserted shots of explosions that seem to be taking place somewhere else entirely.  (The rear projection in this film makes Hitchcock's intentionally jarring use of that technique seem almost realistic.)  In one sequence, Bond flies an ultralite, a sort of aerial motorscooter equipped with flamethrowers and rockets.  He's chased by a bunch of helicopters over a low mountain range of volcanic cinder cones.  (If I remember correctly, the bad guy's lair is hidden under a lake in one of these craters.)  The weapons on the Ultralite aircraft don't work the way they are advertised to function -- how would you use a flame-thrower in an aerial dogfight anyway?  The sequence is totally unexciting since we know that Bond will simply destroy all of the helicopters in a series of inserted explosion shots.  The whole thing is a mix of sadism and sex with the sadism predominating.  A blonde female assassin has Bond chained to a chair in her boudoir.  She goes to her bedside armoire which, of course, is filled with instruments of torture.  In the drawer, there is a dermatome with which see proposes to skin our hero alive.  But she first has to kiss her victim, becomes entangled in his embrace, and Bond, taking the dermatome, uses its razor-sharp edge to cut the straps of her evening gown, before unzipping the seat of her pants.  One can see the why Connery wanted to escape from this crap.  It's like Ed Wood without the weirdly serious overtones that make his movies interesting.  

  

 

Hollywoodland

When I was a small boy, The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves, was broadcast as reruns on TV.  I remember the blurry grey low-budget appearance of the show -- it seemed archaic and ancient to me, like a faded parchment only partly legible, underlit and ill-focused.  In fact, the shows were only a few years old, but I didn't think much of them.  I've never had much affection for Superman, a hero with exorbitant powers that I always thought too excessive to be interesting -- if a super hero can do anything, then, he might as well do nothing.  I didn't like the show and found it vaguely disturbing, possibly because my father, who was very cynical at that time in his life, mentioned that George Reeves, the star of the show had killed himself out of despair at being type-cast in this ridiculous and cartoonish role.  I never knew if this account of the star's death was true or not -- on the basis of Hollywoodland, I guess that my Dad's version of events was, more or less, accurate.  

Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter, is a 2006 film in which events all pivot around Superman's death, an event that occurred in 1959.  The movie is very well-made with superb acting and very ambitious, a sprawling novelistic work with many subplots and showy histrionic scenes -- the large cast gets to strut their stuff in this film; every major character gets an emotional outburst or a "big scene" of some kind.  The picture is shot in a subtle monochromatic beige and tan -- everything is bathed in a soft slightly greyish light that is curiously redolent of the grim black and white in which the Superman Tv show was initially shot.  The film's structure is very complex involving many flashbacks, at least two of which are intentionally misleading -- they stage as an accomplished fact what is actually merely a hypothesis.  David Bordwell has pointed out that this movie, a complicated neo-noir, in fact embodies many of the baroque narrative strategies that characterized American movie making between 1945 and 1955.  

The film begins with the central event that the narrative seeks to explicate:  George Reeves apparent death by suicide.  In flashbacks, we see Reeves playing guitar for his contemptuous girlfriend and a couple of sinister and louche looking Hollywood types.  Reeves (BenAffleck) is singing a sad Mexican song.  The other younger people in his living room, including his wife, are overtly bored.  She mocks him and puts on "The Girl Can't Help It', a rock and roll tune from a Jayne Mansfield movie and Reeves, making a courtly bow, goes upstairs to bed.  A few moments later, there is the sound of a gun being fired.  The police are quick to assess the death as a suicide.  The film, then, introduces us to Louis Simo (Adrian Brody), a smarmy cut-rate private eye specializing in sordid divorce investigations.  Simo operates out of a grisly-looking apartment building that is more like a motel, with a filthy pool and terrace, than a home.  Simo has a girlfriend with whom he lives.  She is studying acting and turns out to be sleeping with one of her fellow-students.  Simo is divorced and has a disdainful ex-wife and six year old son.  The little boy is distraught that Superman killed himself; he dangerously burns his Superman costume on the couch in his mother's home and says with appalled dismay:  "he (Superman) shot himself in the head with a Lugar -- that's a Nazi gun."  Simo used to work for a detective agency that fried bigger fish -- it tailed and blackmailed Hollywood stars.  One of his colleagues from that agency passes onto Simo a client, George Reeves' suspicious and vengeful mother.  She refuses to believe that her son has killed himself and wants Simo prove that Reeves was murdered.  Simo's modus operandi is to string his clients along, taking money from them at intervals to support himself while, really, delivering no actual results -- he decides to represent Reeve's mother according to this opportunistic paradigm.  (We know how Simo operates because we have seen his exploiting a half-mad man who thinks his younger wife is committing adulterym although there's no evidence of this.)  Simo begins his investigation by contacting the newspapers and telling the journalists that Reeves was murdered, although there is no evidence of this either.  He bribes a morgue attendant and goes through Reeves personal effects uncovering an inscribed watch that leads him to some clues about events leading up to the actor's death.  As these clues are discovered, the film effortlessly shifts into flashbacks dramatizing the circumstances uncovered by the gumshoe.

Reeves, we learn, had been an up-and-coming actor who had worked with Sinatra and Clark Gable.  He's handsome and intelligent although a drunk.  Reeves is picked-up by Toni Mannix, the disgruntled wife of the famous studio executive Eddie Mannix.  Eddie has a Japanese mistress (she speaks no English) and Toni, a beautiful if somewhat faded movie star type, seduces Reeves, initially it seems out of lust and a desire to  revenge herself on her overtly adulterous husband.  (Toni Mannix is expertly played by Diane Lane; Eddie Mannix is acted by Bob Hoskins.)  Toni falls in love with Reeves and sets him up in a nice house in Benedict Canyon.  She gives him expensive gifts and helps him out in various ways -- recommending him for parts at the Studio.  It's through Toni's efforts that Reeves gets the part of Superman, a role that he finds very demeaning.  The humiliating aspects of the part are demonstrated in a couple of memorable scenes -- because the show is shot in low-grade black and white, Reeves costume is not red and blue, but rather grey and brown (the contrasts are better for the murky Kinetoscope stock); in one scene, Reeves is flying but the apparatus fails and he thuds heavily to the floor of the studio.  Reeves tires of his older mistress, Toni Mannix, and, while trying to establish himself as a theatrical actor in New York, picks up a girl whom he later installs in his home in LA.  Toni Mannix is enraged and there is an implication that she may have killed Reeves -- in fact, we see a murder scene with her staged as an ostensible flashback.  Eddie Mannix, who cheats on Toni but still loves her, sees his wife sobbing inconsolably in her big luxury car.  He tells Toni that he will always protect her and,  maybe, hires someone to kill Reeves to punish the man for upsetting his wife.  Finally, we are shown a flashback hypothesizing that Reeve's selfish girlfriend from New York accidentally killed Reeves in a fight in his bedroom.  These various hypotheses as to how Reeves died are imagined by Louis Simo and arise from his investigation.  Simo has become increasingly obsessed with the investigation and is drinking heavily.  Ultimately, the studio buys off Reeves' mother by promising to build a statue of her son at the Grauman's Chinese Theater.  Simo, who now has no client, continues his investigation.  Mannix' henchmen beat him up and, with his face all battered and drunk as well, he goes to see his little son who is terrified of him.  Simo's girlfiend has now left and the PI sits around listlessly drinking.  Finally, he interviews Reeves' agent.  The agent shows him a Super 8 film showing Reeves' practicing to become a professional wrestler.  Superman has been canceled and the actor can't find work.  In the Super 8 footage, we see that Reeves is obviously injured and grimaces with pain as he postures, tucks and rolls rehearsing to be a professional wrestler.  This evidence implies that Reeves was pressed into a corner and desperate at the end of his life and, probably, committed suicide although the truth will never be known.  

The movie is notable for many small, if indelible, bits of business.  When Toni gets George Reeves a role in From Here to Eternity, the audience at the screening laughs at him, people whispering  derisively "It's Superman."  The studio boss gestures to cut the footage from the film. (This misrepresents the truth:  Reeves' part was not cut from the Oscar-winning movie.)  A disturbed little boy at a public appearance points a loaded revolver at Superman and threatens to shoot him.  Simo's client who distrusts his wife, finally, murders her brutally.  There's a scene of appalling emotional cruelty in which Toni, offended by Reeves' new girlfriend, insults him in the most vicious imaginable terms.  Later, we see the brutish Eddie Mannix gently caressing his wife's face and telling her how beautiful she is -- in fact, she has never looked worse in the movie.  All of the minor characters are fully realized and the bit parts are brilliantly acted -- there's a whole rogues' gallery of crooked publicists, minor henchmen and thugs, vicious studio executives and the like.  I can't find anything to fault in this movie.  The script is excellent full of Billy Wilder-style one-liners and superb tough-guy stuff -- at one point, for instance, a tough dame says to Simo:  "You couldn't nail me with roses and a trip to Vegas."  The very complex plot and structure is lucid throughout -- you're not confused unless you're supposed to be.  Something indefinable is lacking from this movie; perhaps, it's not wild enough and too cautiously directed.  But I don't know and there's no doubt that the picture is technically superb on all levels.    

(Toni Mannix supposedly confessed that her husband sent a mafia man to kill Reeves.  This was a deathbed confession and made when she had Alzheimer's disease and, therefore, questionable).  

Intruder in the Dust

 Intruder in the Dust (1949) is a noirish murder mystery set in the Deep South and based on a novel of the same name written by William Faulkner the year before.  The picture is most remembered for its indictment of Southern racist bigotry -- although, in truth, this element of the plot is subordinate to its crime film elements.  The picture is not a tragedy and, even, has a happy ending of sorts.  I expected the picture to be much darker than it was -- in fact, at a mere 87 minutes long, the movie has has some of the breezy characteristics of an escapist film for young adults.  The protagonist is a teenage boy who forms an unlikely alliance with an old lady (and his lawyer-uncle) to save a Black man from being lynched for a crime he did not commit.  Aspects of the film are a bit like a Hardy Boys mystery.

A Black man named Lucas Beauchamp lives on a ten acre parcel landlocked within an old plantation.  Beauchamp is fantastically proud, indeed, to the point of being insufferably arrogant.  He struts around in a high boots and an archaic plantation-masters garb with a huge Colt revolver tucked into his blouse.  His family has owned tide tract of land for a long time -- it was a gift resulting from some tangled Southern Gothic family relations between Beauchamp's grandfather and father and the plantation owner.  In any event, Lucas is wholly self-sufficient and beholding to no man and he strives maniacally to keep things that way.  

As the film begins, the Black population of the rural county seat where the action takes place (it's Faulkner's hometown Oxford, Mississippi) is hiding.  A Black man has been accused of murdering a member of a prominent, if disreputable, White family.  A mob has gathered around the courthouse and the dead man's brother declares that he will lead an attack on the jail, drag out the Black defendant, and burn him alive with gasoline.  The Sheriff appears with Lucas in custody.  The suspect is dragged past a gallery of hate-filled faces, enraged rednecks looking forward to the lethal festivities.  Lucas recognizes a teenaged boy named Chick in the crowd and shouts out to him that he wants to hire the kid's uncle, John Steele, a local lawyer.  Then, the man is dragged into the jail.  Chick runs across town to see his Uncle at the family home where everyone is gathered for Sunday dinner.  (These White people don't approve of the declasse lynch mob, but regard the extrajudicial killing as a fait accompli and intend to look the other way.)  In the first of several flashbacks, Chick tells John Steele, the lawyer, how he met Lucas.  He was rabbit hunting and fell into an icy creek on the Black man's property.  The man fished him out of the drink and gave him dry clothes and a warm meal.  When Chick tried to pay his benefactor, Lucas was offended and wouldn't take the money.  Chick, then, sought to humiliate Lucas by having him stoop and bend to pick up the money.  He dropped the coins on the floor but Lucas refused to pick them up.  Later, his attempts to make gifts to Lucas also failed, convincing him of the man's singular, even self-destructive pride.  Chick pleads with his Uncle to represent Lucas.  He says:  "they're gonna make a nigger out of him for once in his life" -- referring to the imminent lynching.  Steele and Chick go to see Lucas and he reminds arrogantly hostile, implacably (and inexplicably) rebuffing his own lawyer.  He refuses to tell the attorney about what he knows about the crime for which he is accused -- shooting one of the Gowrie twins in the back during a brawl.  (There are aspects of the film that undoubtedly made sense in the Faulkner novel that don't translate well to film -- you need Faulkner's famous rhetoric to put across some of these effects and that sort of diction doesn't work on-screen,  For instance, Lucas' reticence is based on his sense that it is debasing to tell the truth to a White man and, then, be disbelieved and so he doesn't even make the attempt -- this might make sense embalmed in the sugared molasses of Faulkner's oratory, but doesn't make seem plausible in the context of a late forties film noir which is, in effect, what this picture is.)  Enigmatically, Lucas says that if Chick exhumes the corpse of the dead Gowrie boy, the murder mystery will be solved.  Chick goes to tell this to his uncle who happens to be meeting  on a car crash case with an elderly spinster, Miss Haversham.  The old lady is intrigued by the situation and assists Chick and Steele in their efforts to prove that Lucas didn't fire the fatal shot that killed Gowrie.  In the dead of night, the old lady and Chick with a teenage Black boy dig up the casket where Gowrie was buried -- but it is empty.  The next day, the corpse is discovered in quicksand near a river crossing.  Gowrie's elderly father, a one-armed man named Nub dives into the quicksand to retrieve the muddy body.  Sure enough, the bullet extracted from the corpse doesn't match the ballistics of Lucas big Colt 45.  By this time, the mob has surrounded the courthouse and the dead man's brother tries to break into the jail.  But the door is guarded by the formidable Miss Haversham who is knitting in a rocking chair and blocking the way into the jail.  The dead man's brother pours gasoline all over the floor and strikes a match but the old lady is indomitable, won't yield, and, in fact, just tells him to move so as not to block her light.  The mob retreats.  A little later, the crime is solved and Gowrie's actual killer apprehended.  The lynch mob, ashamed of itself, simply melts away into the darkness.  The next day, the Black folks are back in town celebrating.  Lucas pays his lawyer's fees in small coins, mostly pennies, and, then, stands motionlessly, a big man towering over the lawyer.  "What do you want?" the nonplussed lawyer asks.  "I'm waiting for my receipt," Lucas says.   We last see him strutting like a rooster through the crowds of Black people on the street.

The film has some of the nasty and macabre ambience of Faulkner's As I lay Dying with its rural graveyard and empty casket and the subsequent discovery of the cadaver buried in the quicksand.  Nub Gowrie is a frightening figure, an old man who keeps a revolver tucked under his arm -- to remove the gun, he has to laboriously unbutton his shirt and open his tunic to remove the big pistol (like Lucas') that he carries everywhere.  We see him delicately brush the mud off his dead son's face before covering it with his own hat.  The movie is full of small, but memorable details:  Nub's pride in his coon hounds, the Black people hiding in their cabins as cars and trucks whirl by on the way to the lynching, two Black prisoners in chain-gang garb recruited to dig up the casket of the murdered man, the dirt lane to a rural farm rutted and grooved by erosion so that it looks like a ravine in the Badlands of South Dakota.  Most impressive is the performance by Juano Hernandez playng Lucas Beauchamp.  When we first see Lucas, the camera pans from Chick's perspective up his shiny boots to riding trousers and his barrel chest in a loose-fitting blouse tunic and, then, the man's ebony head, gleaming next to a big ax that he has slung over his shoulder.  Beauchamp is a man who can not be intimidated and his self-reliant pride is offensive to everyone that he meets -- he's a hero to his fellow Blacks but an inconvenient kind of hero, the sort of fellow who gets innocent people killed.  It's an uncompromising performance, a portrait of a man who's insane arrogance doesn't even make sense to himself.  Hernandez plays the part straight and make no effort to  "humanize" or "soften" the character -- he's willfully proud, insensitive, and insufferably arrogant.  It's a very brave performance, particularly in that Hernandez also shows the man's desperation and, even, fear at facing fiery slaughter at the hands of the mob.  As it happens, the reason Lucas Beauchamp has to be saved by a 15-year old boy and an 80 year old White woman is that he'd too proud to be helped by those capable of offending him.    

Good Time

 Connie, a penny ante hoodlum in Josh and Benny Safdie's Good Time (2017) makes a lot of poor decisions in the course of this 101 minute film.  The movie's plot mirrors his fecklessness -- it strings together one absurdity after another.  This is the sort of movie in which the characters behave with incomprehensible stupidity against a scrupulously observed, and seemingly, clinically realistic background.  For the movie to work emotionally, the viewer needs to be invested in the deeds of the film's hero, Connie.  But the guy is such a fool that the audience just watches his antics with bemused horror.  The movie is so energetically manic that viewers can't catch their breaths -- and this means that the film's ridiculous plotting isn't really evident until you think back on the whole thing.  

Connie's brother is mentally challenged.  He's hair-triggered emotionally, cries and rages at the drop of a hat, and seems to have mind of a dimwitted six-year old.  In the opening scene, we see this guy struggling to interpret such axioms as "Don't count your chickens until they hatch" and shedding tears because he can't figure this out.  Connie shows up at the Social Worker's office and "rescues" his brother from what he characterizes as abuse.  The film, then, barrels into motion with its first and supreme absurdity -- Connie enlists his brother, who can barely talk, as his accomplice in an ill-fated bank robbery.  Of course, things go wrong.  The money bag is booby-trapped with a charge that sprays both of the idiotic robbers with red dye -- actually a kind of stinging red dust.  In the ensuing chaos, Connie's mentally defective brother gets arrrested and is sent to a holding cell on Riker's Island full of vicious criminals.  The hulking manchild gets into a fight and is slugged repeatedly in the face.  Meanwhile, Connie, a man of limited means shall we say, is trying to raise $10,000 to bail out his brother.  The cash from the robbery is all stained with dye and useless.  Connie gets his hysterical girlfriend to loan him a credit card, but her mother (who heartily and justifiably dislikes the criminal) has shut off the money spigot.  Connie, now, has learned through the ugly bail bondsman, some kind of Honduran Jew, that his brother is in a Queens hospital.  He rushes to the hospital and, in the film's second big improbability, manages to abduct his unconscious, heavily bandaged brother.  Hitching a ride on a bus transporting people home from the hospital, Connie and his unconscious brother seek refuge with a kindly Dominican woman.  In the another absurdity, the woman allows Connie and his brother slumped over in a wheelchair to stay in her apartment with her sixteen-year-old granddaughter.  Connie dyes his hair a fetching blonde and tries to statutorily rape the little girl.  The unconscious man wakes up and, when the gauze covering his face is removed, we find that Connie has kidnapped the wrong man.  Indeed, he's managed to abduct the only person in the Five Boroughs of New York City who is even more frenzied and stupid that he is.  The injured man turns out to be a dealer in LSD who escaped from a police custody by diving out of a speeding cop car, unfortunately, landing on his face at 40 mph.  The drug dealer is either high or crazy or both.  He recalls that he's stashed some money, enough to bail out Connie's brother, in an amusement park, specifically in some kind of ride featuring a chamber of horrors.  Connie and the drug dealer go to the amusement park and look for the money but the dope addict is too strung out to recall where he put the cash.  There's a confrontation with a security guard.  They beat him up and pour a half gallon of LSD down his throat for a good measure.  Then, when the cops show up, Connie dresses in the man's security guard outfit and blames the gibbering victim for the break-in.  The junkie and Connie go to his apartment.  And, then... here I fell asleep for a couple minutes, exhausted by the film's hectic style.  I woke up to see the junkie scaling a wall about sixty feet above the ground -- this doesn't end well.  Connie goes to jail.  Connie's brother, presumably determined to be non compos mentis, ends up where the film started -- he's in a Group Home setting where a nice therapist is working with a number of mentally challenged individuals.  The Social Worker at the beginning of the film makes an appearance and wishes the man well -- Iggy Pop growls some morose lyrics over the closing credits.  

In most classic Hollywood pictures, close-ups are used sparingly.  In this film, everything is shot in a huge in-your-face close-up.  The first two-shot with a discernible background occurs about ten minutes into the film.  The effect is initially frenetic and gripping, but, as the hysteria continues (and increases), the film's hectic shot/counter-shot editing, all  in huge close-ups, becomes fatiguing and monotonous.  The effect is somewhat similar to being buttonholed by a crazy drunk in a bar and, then, harangued with conspiracy theories -- it's fascinating for the first couple minutes but, then, you just want to escape.  The movie is crammed with picturesque low-lifes and the family dynamics on display would make the master of dysfunctional families, Kira Muratova, blush.  Everyone spits insults at everyone else, sobs and weeps and screams.  (A very hardened-looking Jennifer Jason Leigh is excellent in the role of Connie's longsuffering and hysterical girl-friend.)  Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, is handsome but obviously a cretin and its enormously difficult to sympathize with a man who would bring his mentally retarded brother along with him on a bank job.  Connie lies about everything and the film raises the question of whether a successful movie can be made with a cockroach in human form as its protagonist (This statement is unfair to cockroaches who are industrious and intelligent bugs.).  The Safdie brothers resort to an unfair tactic:  the Social Worker therapist in the opening scene looks ridiculous -- he's an old man with an elaborate perm and looks a like an scarecrow-like Nicholas Ray.  The man's appearance is so strange that we're put off by him and feel relief when Connie comes to rescue his brother.  But, of course, the rescue results in hideous problems for the childlike man and, at the end of the picture, we're relieved to see the Social Worker with the weird hairdo re-appear.  Clearly this therapist and the woman conducting group activities with the other simpletons are intended to be the real heroes in the film -- the trick has been making us sympathize (if only just a little) with the loathsome Connie.  There are many things to admire in the film --- the acting is good, if monotonously manic -- and there are several clever plot twists that, although improbable, are cunning and surprise the audience.  The audience's reversal of sympathies is similar to the trick that Bertolucci uses in 1900 -- we see Donald Sutherland being murdered horribly by peasants with pitch forks in the film's opening scene.  But three hours later, we have come to understand that Sutherland's character richly deserves  his fate -- we see the same footage but have a wholly different emotional response to it.  On a minor scale, the Safdie's accomplish something similar here -- far from being his brother's rescuer, Connie exploits him and is the instrument of his doom.  A clue to the film's hepped-up style occurs in the very first shot -- we see a typical drone image of Manhattan, but the camera, instead of slowly approaching the buildings, rushes toward them so swiftly that we fear that there will be a collision that will smash the lens.  

Fear

Made with the most limited means, Alfred Zeisler's 1946 Fear accidentally accomplishes a strangely effective, if monotonous, fusion of form and meaning.  A Poverty Row (Monogram) rip off of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the film seems an exercise in squalor -- the masochism and self-abasement intrinsic to the Russian novelist's subject matter is here represented by the film's shadowy and desolate camerawork, its threadbare acting, and its dishearteningly shabby sets and mise-en-scene.  In a limited way, Crime and Punishment is a depressing narrative about a nasty, meaningless crime.  (Of course, there's much more to the book, but the writer does, indeed, dwell on poverty and misery).  Fear is shot in a way that manifests this depression -- the poverty of its cinematic means mirrors the poverty of the main character and his destiny.  In a way, the film is so cheap and so barren that it creates an avant-garde effect -- this is the lower depths shot in a way so bleak as to achieve an almost perfect unity of means and ends.  This is not to say that the film is any good.  It's unintentionally nightmarish -- sort of like an Ed Wood picture without the wit and glib self-assurance.  This movie knows that it cost next to nothing and its ashamed of itself.

A medical student has run out of money.  He tries to pawn his father's wristwatch.  In a bizarre plot turn, the man to whom he offers the watch is one of the medical school's professors.  The young man goes to a campus hang-out where he meets a dame.  Then, he returns to the professor's apartment and beats him to death with a poker.  (Several of the other students have suggested that the professor, who is intensely disliked, is not a  human being but just a "black beetle.")  The young man is summoned to the police station but only for the purpose of returning to him his father's watch, found at the murder scene.  The murderer is tailed by a cop and it becomes pretty clear that the inspector suspects him of the killing.  The medical student becomes distraught and confesses the killing to his girlfriend.  It turns out that the murder was meaningless -- the day after the kid kills the professor, he receives a thousand dollars from "a professional periodical" for an article about "the man above the law".  This is the term the film employs for the Nietzschean Ubermensch, an idea that inspired Raskolnikov's crime in the Dostoevsky novel.  The inspector hounds the medical student and he fantasizes a montage involving nooses under a big enigmatic sign that says "Death is Around the Corner".  The murderer stands on a railroad track to allow a train to kill him but a railroad worker pushes him out of the way at the last moment -- this is fortunate because the murky rear-projection locomotive couldn't hurt a fly..  A little later, with the authorities closing in, the medical student darts across a road and is hit by a car.  This jolt wakes up the student and he discovers that it's all been just a bad dream.  

The film's spaces are shapeless -- they look like partitioned spaces in a grim warehouse:  a bar is a counter with some bottles; at the police station, the cops are always working -- this is nightmarish in itself:  at any hour of the day, you can find the inspector smoking a pipe like Sherlock Holmes and trying solve crimes.  When the hero takes his girl on a date, the park is represented by some shabby-looking shrubs and a painted backdrop that is supposed to look like a meadow.  The acting is wooden or feverish.  The medical student, a handsome little fellow with sharp features, is violently brusque, insults everyone, and swings between unmotivated fits of hilarity and, then, grief.  The images are all monochrome, a murky, shabby grey that seems always a bit out of focus -- everything is not exactly dark in the film, just a listless grey as if the characters and sets are enveloped in fog.  The camera sometimes jerkily dollies forward to encounters between characters.  When the hero first visits the professor's house, the camera tracks the man up three flights of stairs, cutting between each landing.  The viewer wonders why we need to be shown the character traversing every single step in the rooming house.  But it turns out, in the murder scene, that there are obstacles to escape on each level and so this preliminary (and unnecessary-seeming tour of the staircases) pays off in suspense immediately after the killing.  Parts of the movie are strangely funny -- we hear a saxophone playing in the night, a typical film noir, convention but here the camera tilts down to show an actual saxophonist practicing in the garret below.  There's some Ed Wood-style haranguing when the hero observes that Thomas Alva Edison believed that the end justified the means and that to achieve the light bulb, the inventor "would gladly have eliminated people who stood in his way."  Street scenes are wrapped in perpetual gloom with a man and woman couple crossing in front of the camera dollying inward to establish notionally that we are outside on the pavement.  There's a  weird proliferation of extras in the penultimate scene in which the hero seems to be hit by a car.  All of sudden, there's about twenty people, possibly friends of the director, standing around as if hypnotized.

Zeisler, the director, is an odd case.  He was born in a German neighborhood in Chicago but returned to Germany during the Weimar period.  He directed the famous 1932 film Viktor oder Viktoria, later remade by Blake Edwards as a Julie Andrews vehicle.  When the Nazis seized power, Zeisler came back to Hollywood where he worked as director on about a dozen films, all of them made on Poverty Row.  Fear isn't very interesting but its only 68 minutes long and, in a certain way, it's sheer cheapness contributes to an eerie dreamlike effect,  The movie accidently achieves atmosphere that it couldn't produce if it tried.  And it also somehow manages to be so inconsequential and dismal that it is instantly forgettable -- you can't recall how the film started or its original premises long before the movie is over.  

The Good Lord Bird

The Good Lord Bird is a Showtime mini-series, consisting of 8 episodes.  The program adapts a celebrated recent novel by James McBride.  The story contains the violent career of John Brown, the abolitionist, as viewed through the eyes of a young man, a slave who is accidentally enlisted in Brown's increasingly quixotic attempts to emancipate the enslaved people in the South.  The show is compelling and has some very fine scenes, but it doesn't exactly succeed.  McBride's novel was hailed for originality with respect to the voice in which the story is told, first-person narrative provided by Onion, the young man who provides his commentary on John Brown's doomed crusade.  The book was compared favorably to Twain's Huckleberry Finn and acclaimed for its humor and wit.  As presented on Showtime, the series isn't particularly funny -- in fact, the show's dominant tone is rather mournful.  The ultimate failure of Brown's efforts, culminating in the raid on Harper's Ferry, seems assumed in advance and the picture is more elegy than picaresque romp.  The concept on which the book is based is to provide a sort of worm's eye view of historical events, a perspective on Brown's terrorism and his guerilla war for emancipation that is true to the sordid details, but respects the man's fundamental heroism.  In form, the approach is similar to Thomas Berger's Litter Big Man and Arthur Penn's film based on that book -- the wars with the Plains Indians recounted through the memories of a 103 year old man, not prone to mythologizing and with an eye toward the ridiculous and farcical.  The problem that The Good Lord Bird faces is apparent from my mention of Berger's Little Big Man:  since Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum and Dog Years, novelists have been devising oblique angles from which to view tragic and celebrated historical events.  The Tin Drum, for instance, views World War II through the eyes of a dwarf with magical powers who has refused to grow beyond the body of a small toddler; Dog Years tells the story of the Nazis and Hitler through the lens of the Fuehrer's German Shepherd.  This device, the narrator who incidentally happens to be present at famous events (while foraging for food or sex or simply trying to save his own skin) has become, accordingly, a shop-worn technique that has lost its original frisson.  Earlier works in this genre, most particularly Little Big Man worked on the basis of undercutting as specious or, even, vicious, the heroics of famous figures in history -- but we no longer believe that the great men of the past were particularly heroic and have become all too aware of their human foibles or worse.  Thus, The Good Lord Bird has nothing to de-glamorize -- we start with the proposition that historical events arise from squalid motives that are worked-out in a series of sordid, or, even, ridiculous actions.  In the popular media, John Brown has generally been regarded as a madman or a ranting terrorist -- he appears in this form in Stephen Vincent Benet's epic poem on the Civil War, John Brown's Body as well as in the Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland spectacle Santa Fe Trail (where he is impersonated by Raymond Massey).  Therefore, John Brown has never been universally regarded as a hero and, so, a program of revisionist history about his life doesn't make any sense.  No one really regarded Brown as much of a hero post-Civil-War (of course, he was a hero to Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson)-- in fact, the 1940 Santa Fe Trail (which has nothing to do Santa Fe) is actually a pro-slavery film and, therefore, regards Brown with contempt.  So it's hard to make a revisionist history about a figure who has been treated with derision for the last 150 years.  This is a shame because Brown's wild-eyed plan to raise a slave army and equip them with pikes is actually comical, at least, viewed in a certain light.  In fact, a funny and disturbing black comedy could be produced on the subject.  The Good Lord Bird is not that movie.  Indeed, after a few skeptical moments  in the first couple episodes, the film becomes increasingly hagiographic -- John Brown comes to appear as a kindly, saintly fellow willing to sacrifice himself for a cause that is unreservedly noble.  Indeed, his unwavering commitment to emancipation as shown in the series, even, affronts most of the Black characters -- even Frederick Douglas recoils from his insane effort to raise a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry.  In the first couple shows, we see some of the violence in "Bleeding Kansas" and Brown's murderous attacks on pro-slavery planters might be interpreted as a form of terrorism.  But the film makes Brown's victims, with a couple of exceptions so loathsome as to soften the scenes in which these villains are killed.  The pro-slavery forces are so vicious and benighted that we don't really feel anything when they are gunned down or beheaded (off-screen) -- the White victims of Brown's fury deserve what they get.  Later, the film hardens into glorification of Brown and the scenes at Harper's Ferry, although very accurate in the broad sense, are too pious to be particularly engrossing -- by this point, Brown has become some kind of corn-pone Jesus.

Nonetheless, there are many things to admire in the show.  Ethan Hawke's portrayal of Brown, although monotonous, is very effective.  (However, Hawk's performance becomes increasingly sentimental as the film proceeds -- it's as if Hawke who co-produced the series can't bear to appear as a vicious killer:  rather, his political views seem merely eccentric.)   Most of the violence in the first episodes is shot for comic effect -- people run around in confusion, posturing for the camera with mock-heroic gestures before their gory deaths.  The show's portrait of the Middle Border in 1858 is compelling and the scenes at Harper's Ferry have a gloomy verisimilitude.  The last comic flourishes wither away after Frederick Douglas is side-lined -- he's a Falstaffian figure with a virtuous Black wife, a saucy White mistress, and, always, concerned to self-aggrandize himself.  When Douglas refuses to support Brown's raid on the armory at Harper's Ferry, some of the energy is leached out of the film.  Onion, the movie's point-of-view, is condemned to wear girl's clothing because, for some reason, John Brown thinks he is a young woman.  This idea probably seemed good on paper and may be funny in the novel, but movies are too literal and it's impossible to believe that this handsome young man is plausible as a pretty young girl. The film's title sequence, a vigorous animation reprising the major themes in the show, is excellent -- it looks a little like the art work of the African-American Jacob Lawrence and has a raw zest that is absent from much of the program.  There's an excellent soundtrack mostly comprised of spirituals, although performed in modern-sounding renditions.  The White slaveholders are uniformly despicable.  The Black characters are enterprising, resolute, courageous, and much smarter than the nasty, pallid Caucasian slave owner -- a lot of them have bad hairdos and are overweight.  There's a recent convention that has ossified into a tendentious cliche -- this is the full-frontal shot of Black men or women (or children) emphasizing by the hieratic rigidity of the pose, the dignity and portentous gravity of these figures.  The people stare at the camera unmoving as if scrutinizing the audience and demanding their due from us.  It's an effective technique, first used by Werner Herzog of all people in his short documentary about a Black preacher, Brother Huey's Sermon.  (Spike Lee makes use of this sort of portrait footage in both Da Five Bloods as well as his rendition of David Byrne's concert in American Utopia.  Here the film features shots of what are called in today's jargon, "enslaved people", handsome figures who stare at the camera.  But, of course, these people aren't slaves and, in fact, are good-looking Hollywood actors paid to look brave and downtrodden in these shots -- it would have been far more effective to show actual shots of enslaved people at the end of the movie to make these points about the essential humanity and dignity of the African-Americans in the film.  In a film like this, one expects there to be lots of rambunctious action -- the first few episodes go from one slaughter to another at a swift pace, but it's neither rambunctious, nor comic, nor, even, effectively savage.  Curiously, the film becomes better when devoted to speeches.  In about the fourth or fifth episode, we see two back to back speeches, one by John Brown and another by Harriet Tubman, whom the Black characters call "the General."  These speeches, which one might think would slow down the film, in fact, enliven it considerably with the sense that this material means something -- that it has historical force and dignity.   

The Ritual

Some nights, you're not in the mood for Orson Welles or Abbas Kiarastomi.  In fact, sometimes even a well-crafted film noir from the forties or fifties has too many sharp edges to readily assimilate.  You're too tired for something with an intricate plot or complicated mise en scene.  Best, then, to watch a low budget Netflix-produced horror film -- in this case The Ritual (2017) directed by David Bruckner. The movie is okay for its modest aspirations and horror films, as a great anthropologist once said of animals, are "good to think with," allthough, of course, thought is not the objective here.  

Everything about The Ritual is predictable.  Five young men in a pub are discussing where they will vacation next year.  Someone suggests a hike along the "King's Trail" on the border between Norway and Sweden -- "it's like the Appalachian Trail except without the hillbillies" one of them says.  (I assume this is a reference to Deliverance.)  No decision is made.  A few moments later two of the young men go into a liquor store to buy a bottle of vodka.  Of course, the viewer can predict what will happen:  a robbery in underway.  One of the men is killed while the other man cowers behind the racks of bottles.

A year later, the four surviving friends are on the trail in northern Sweden.  One of them, Dom, sprains his knee when he falls into a hole.  (The other men mock him and say that he's shirking the hike, but, in fact, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that he has really injured himself -- his meniscus is torn.)  The hikers are about one day's walk from a lodge but, as one expects in this kind of film, they decide to take a shortcut through a forbidding dark forest.  This, of course, is a very bad decision.  A monster lives in the forest and also a cult of monster-worshipers.  In this sort of movie, you don't really bother to learn the names of the characters because it's pretty clear that they are going to be killed before the end of the film.  The trek through the forest becomes increasingly grim and, during a thunderstorm, the boys take refuge in a sort of timber block house used for the evil rites of the monster-worshippers.  There's a strange effigy in an upstairs room, a tree trunked hacked into the form of a headless torso with antlers for hands.  (This thing looks something like effigies of woodland gods that the Sami people of northern Scandinavia erected in holy places in the northern woods and tundra.  I saw several of these in the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm and they are, indeed, very scary-looking artifacts.)  To say that that the lads have a bad night in the blockhouse chapel in the woods would be an understatement -- one of the boys ends up naked praying to the eerie artifact; the others have horrible nightmares -- one pisses himself in fear.  The hero, as it turns out, keeps flashing back to the night in the liquor store when he failed to rescue his buddy.  Things go from bad to worse and the film ends with a confrontation with both the deadly creature and his worshippers.  (The monster is said to be "the bastard son of Loki" and some kind of Jotuenn -- that is, a Frost Giant.) 

Most horror films involve sexuality repressed and displaced in perverted ways.  This picture is an exception -- there's no sex involved at all and the monster, a very abstract creature, doesn't seem to represent female genitals or anything else on that order.  Instead, the film seems to be about fear.  The shadowy monster, not revealed until the last ten minutes, symbolizes anything that frightens you.  The hero keeps seeing the woods opening up into the brightly lit liquor store where he failed his friend.  The monster isn't particularly daunting -- it turns out he just wants to be loved.  As long as you bow down before the baleful beast, he will leave you alone.  Therefore, it seems reasonably clear that the monster symbolizes fear and that if you face your fears -- something that occurs very literally in this movie -- all will be well.  Ultimately, the hero stands up to the beast and, indeed, defiantly bellows in its face (or lack of a face) and this cows the creature.  The movie isn't overly gory and it even has a modestly inspiring theme.  The wan and cowardly monster-worshippers don't add much to the movie --they are pretty easily slaughtered by the hero.  

Most of the film involves men hiking around in woods, huffing and puffing.  There's lots of limping and groaning.  The creature is very well-designed and interesting to behold.  In some shots, the creature, a chimera comprised of a giraffe and a moose, looks like a bare tree or, even, the weird effigy in the blockhouse.  Most of the movie is shot at night.  But this is a problem.  You can't hike in northern Sweden except in midsummer.  And in midsummer, there's no night -- even in Stockholm, it's bright at 10:30 and the sun rises at 3:00 am.  Farther north there is simply no night at all.  (In fact, the movie was shot in some National Park in Romania -- it's an impressive landscape but nothing like northern Sweden.)   A little Internet research verifies this observation -- the Kungsleden (King's Trail) is so far north that much of the trail system lies within the Arctic Circle -- so there would be no real night here.

 

 

The Wicker Man (1973)

 The subject of a cult following, ironic because the film itself is about a pagan cult, The Wicker Man is actually as good as its reputation.  Made in 1972, but not released until a year later, the picture is sui generis -- it's remarkable, extremely entertaining, and one of a kind.  Many horror films build slowly to an unsettling "reveal".  The Wicker Man is all "reveal" -- within about ten minutes, the audience is shown enough bizarre imagery to account for a half-dozen horror movies and the steady accumulation of startling events continues right up to the film's famous fiery climax.  Most astonishing is the picture's matter-of-fact tone -- here British understatement creates a mood somewhere between Monty Python and a totally deranged crime thriller.  The picture is cheaply made, using local players, and the camera-work is just serviceable -- there's no dark shadows:  everything occurs in overlit rooms and sunny meadows.  The film is disturbing, in fact, because it makes no effort to create a spooky atmosphere -- strange events simply occur as if they were totally natural.  Ari Aster's Midsommar clearly owes an enormous debt to the bright, direct horror imagery pioneered in this picture directed by Robin Hardy.  (The film has a fantastically witty script by Anthony Schaffer).  An example of the Monty Python style grotesquerie is an early scene in which the hapless copper, Howie, invades a room where a dozen teenage girls are sitting at desks under the tutelage of a beautiful blonde teacher.  The teacher asks the girls:  "What does the Maypole mean?  What does it symbolize?"  One of the girls stutters and seems embarrassed to answer.  The teacher is annoyed.   "You all know," she says.  "The Maypole is the phallus.  It represents the penis."  The girls all sagely nod their heads.  Howie, of course, is unutterably alarmed.  He calls the attractive blonde school teacher aside:   "Why are you telling them this?"  "It's our way," she says.  Indeed.

At the film's opening, we see Howie piloting a one-man sea-plane over some gorgeous if desolate islands.  It's the coast of Scotland and Howie has been summoned to Sommerisle, a craggy island a few miles from the mainland.  A child has gone missing and Howie's mission is to investigate her disappearance.  Upon landing his sea-plane in the harbor of the village, the locals immediately suggest that he leave.  Everyone seems to know about the missing girl, but no one is willing to admit that they even recognize the picture that he shows them.  Everything on the island is strange --there are candy shops that seem to feature confectionary shaped like corpses, dead girl cakes, apparently, and, even the missing girl's mother seems to not care too much about her daughter.  Another daughter draws a hare, possibly dead, and says that this represents Rowan, the girl who has vanished.  Howie is a devout Christian and, although he has a fiancee, he has been saving sexual relations for marriage.  On his first night in the village, he checks into an inn and all the barflies sing a bawdy song offering him sex with "the landlord's daughter."  This is followed by an amazing scene in which the "landlord's daughter", played by Britt Eklund dances naked in her room and tries to lure Howie into her bed -- he resists temptation but just barely.  May Day is approaching and the villagers are erecting a large Maypole.  Howie is taken by cart to Lord Sommerisle's castle, a forbidding manor with chalk-grey walls and brooding battlements.  Lord Sommerisle is played by Christopher Lee, dressed in a vulgar tartan suit and very tall -- he looms over everyone.  Sommerisle says that the island is a sort of experiment.  His grandfather came to the place to plant fruit orchards --  there's apparently a warm current that washes the island's rocky shores.  (The place has seaside gardens of roses with palm trees -- it looks very much like the island featured in Joanna Hogg's excellent Archipelago, a film that strangely enough exploits some of the imagery in The Wicker Man, for instance, the sea-planes and the exotic palms growing on the coastal promenade, although to a completely different effect.)  Sommerisle's grandfather was a libertine and he encouraged the islanders to abandon Christianity for some kind of Celtic pagan nature worship.  The Christian church has been abandoned and the islanders all seem to subscribe to a species of pantheism that periodically requires human sacrifices -- at least, when the apple harvest fails.  And we know that the apple harvest has recently been abysmal.  Sommerisle's weird matter-of-fact account of the history of the island is accompanied by images of stark naked girls jumping over a bonfire in a sort of Stonehenge temple.  Sommerisle says that the girls are trying to get pregnant by the fire-god.  Everything in the picture is clearly shown but off-kilter.  For instance, the plot is driven by musical numbers -- old folk songs, for instance, a tune about getting pregnant by fire, are performed one after another both on the sound-track and also by people singing and playing instruments on-screen.  (In some ways the film suggests a musical gone mad.)  All evidence points to the notion that Rowan has been made a human sacrifice.  And all the sinister locals suggest that Howie get out of Dodge before  May Day when there will be a general orgy.   Howie defiantly continues his efforts to find the girl and, in fact, searches many of the homes and shops on the island -- he finds lots of very strange stuff in people's houses, including a casket with a dead crone with her hand, apparently, cut off. Later, when Howie takes a nap, he wakes up to find the crone's amputated member burning with flames at each finger-tip, a "Hand of Glory."  By this time, the May Day festivities are in full flourish -- a man in a big tub-like costume with a dragon head wanders around town and everyone is wearing grotesque animal masks.  Howie puts on the costume of a Pierrot or Punch figure, a kind of hideous harlequin and he marches with the townsfolk out to the seaside where the pagans apparently plan to sacrifice the girl.  Rowan appears at the mouth of a cave and Howie, shedding his mask, rescues the girl and flees through the hillside, emerging on a cliff above the sea.  The townsfolk are all gathered on that barren hill and they seize Howie.  Here it is revealed that Rowan was merely bait to lure to the island "a virgin Fool who is a Man of the Law" -- in other words, the true objective of the scheme has always been to sacrifice, not the girl, but Howie, a more suitable offering to the pagan Sun God.  Howie is dragged into a forty-foot high effigy of a man made from wicker.  The towering wicker giant is filled with sacrificial beasts -- geese and ducks and some pigs.  Led by Lord Sommerisle, the pagans light the wicker man on fire, first congratulating Howie on becoming a true martyr for his faith.  As the pigs and geese scream in the fire, Howie prays to the Christian God.  He's enveloped in fire and the wicker giant's head falls down into the inferno, the camera shooting through the smoke into the red orb of the sun setting over the sea.  

The film is very funny, although the ending is more than a little disturbing.  In one shop, Howie finds a large jar full of foreskins, neatly labeled to that effect.  When a little girl has a sore throat, the doctor puts a living toad in the child's mouth.  Removing the toad, the doctor cheerily says -- "now the toad has your sore throat."  Lee's Lord Sommerisle is smarmy, like a garishly dressed used car salesman, although in the final scene, his face painted stark white and his long hair black and stringy, he's an alarming apparition.  When Howie flees the bawdy song at the Inn ("the Green Man"), he ventures onto a beach where a dozen couples are having sex by the sea.  Entering a deconsecrated graveyard to look for Rowan's grave, he encounters a woman nursing a child, seated on a tomb.  The film is full of small shocks on this order.  It's pretty much a perfect horror film, filled with disturbing imagery, and, yet, extremely funny.  This is a cult picture that is as good as people say it is.  An amusing touch is a proto-Coen Brothers title at the outset of the film (somewhat like the claim in Fargo that everything you see really happened) -- here the film's director thanks "The People of Sommerisle for sharing with the filmmakers their religious customs."  

Nightfall

Jacques Tourneur's 1956 Nightfall starts at the magic hour -- a big lummox wanders the streets of LA as the sun sets and the neon lights flare against twilight.  A news vendor plugs in s string of lights.  A businessman waiting for a bus talks to the big man, idle chitchat, and, then, gets on the transport when it arrives.  The big blonde fairhaired moose goes into an Italian restaurant, meets a woman at the bar who asks him to lend her some money.  They eat dinner together and, then,she seems willing to go home with him.  Perhaps, the drifter's luck is changing.  Then, two thugs appear, dismiss the scared girl, and force the protagonist into a car that speeds away into the darkness.  It's a promising beginning, better than most of the rest of the film which turns out to be short (78 minutes) and mostly mediocre.  Even trivial films, cinematic ephemera, as it were, sometimes include moments that are poetic and beautiful -- here the gesture of the news vendor as he turns on the string lights over his wares immediately cut into shots of neon suddenly blazing in the darkness on the lonely boulevard is something remarkable, a lovely graceful instant that redeems much of the rest of the movie, some of it pretty good but mostly forgettable.

Aldo Ray plays Jim a commercial artist on the run.  He's pursued by not one, but three antagonists:  two  bank robbers think that he knows where their ill-gotten gains are stashed; an insurance agent for the bond on the stolen money has Jim under surveillance, and, of course, the cops are lurking around the edge of the picture -- they think that Jim murdered his pal, a doctor from Evanston, Illinois.  The story is intricate and told in flashbacks.  Jim's friend, the doctor, was married to a woman twenty-years younger -- the woman wrote some indiscreet letters of Jim and, when the physician is murdered, the hero is suspected of the killing.  In fact, the doc was killed by two bankrobbers who ambushed Jim and his buddy at a fishing camp high in the Wyoming mountains.  The criminals shoot both men, leaving them for dead.  But Jim is still alive and he discovers that the thugs have taken the doctor's medical bag and not their valise full of money left standing in the snow at the campsite.  Jim escapes with the money but, somehow, loses it in a snowstorm.  Then, he goes on the lam and ends up picking up the girl in restaurant.  The girl played well by Ann Bancroft is not in league with the gangsters, but, instead, has been their patsy.  When Jim escapes again from the murderous bad guys at a suitably desolate oilfield near LA, he flees back to the girl's apartment and, then, plans to travel with her to Wyoming to retrieve the money.  Of course, he is pursued by the insurance investigator (played by a character actor later a staple of TV -- he was in Barney Miller for years -- James Gregory).  The killers are also on his tail.  Everything converges at a snowy mountain pass in Wyoming.  Objects have a particular malevolence in this film:  an oil rig is proposed as an instrument of torture -- the off-kilter rotating pump can be used to crush someone's leg; at the mountain pass, there's a snow plow with a particular nasty-looking grin of auger stretched like a mask across its front -- needless to say this auger will be deployed to gruesome effect at the climax.

The film has an impressive set-piece involving a fashion show in Beverly Hills -- that sequence is not inferior to Alfred Hitchcock and the counterpoint between the glacial, indifference of the models and the killers tracking the hero is exploited for maximum suspense.  (As the bad guys approach, the hero and the fashion model played by Ann Bancroft are occupying a taxi-cab that an old lady has just exited; she argues with the driver over ten cents while the armed villains approach.)  The snow scenes in the mountains seem to be shot on location and they are effectively cold and desolate -- some of the camerawork looks like scenes from Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, a film that the movie resembles pictorially.  Some of the movie is sloppy -- the fishing camp next to a big lake in a glacial cirque is not well-integrated with scenes involving the approach of the villains in their jalopy.  Although the lake and the road where the villains are driving are supposed to be contiguous, the two locations can't be fit together in any convincing way -- the geometry of the terrain is all wrong.  Nightfall is most notable for the two villains -- Brian Keith plays the melancholy brains of the operation and he has a dumpy-looking fat sadist for a sidekick.  This guy loves to kill people and he is very frightening.  The sequence involving the murder of the doctor is chilling -- it's understated but really horrific.  Aldo Ray doesn't look like a leading man and it takes a while to get used to his lumpish face and proletarian profile -- but he's also excellent in the movie.

Like many film noir from this era, the movie is replete with good tough-guy lines.  When Jim explains to Ann Bancroft that he's an artists, she asks "Soup cans or sunsets?"  I wonder if Andy Warhol recalled this line five years later when he began painting soup cans as high art.   

Baby Cart in the Land of the Demons

The best thing about Baby Cart in the Land of the Demons (1973) is its surreal title.  The film itself is relentlessly gory with a trite plot devised as means to string together a series of massacres.  There's no suspense in the movie since the hero is invulnerable.  At the end of the picture, the main character slaughters about a hundred enemies armed with various sorts of weapons without even breaking a sweat.  It's ridiculous, but, worse, also weirdly nihilistic.  The taciturn hero, who looks like a fat Clint Eastwood, kills everyone in sight -- when the rest of the cast (and, possibly, part of the crew) are dead, the picture ends.  

The so-called "Babycart" series, also sometimes known as "Lone Wolf and Cub", are based on Japanese manga popular in the sixties.  Itto Ogama (I'll use Western conventions -- that is, surname last) is the retired (or exiled or what?) "shogunate executioner," also called "Lone Wolf".  With his four-year old son, he wanders around Japan killing everyone in sight.  The little boy is called Daigoro or Cub.  Itto pushes the tot around in a wooden perambulator that is surprisingly versatile -- it floats, moves readily even through deep sand, and is equipped with various spring-loaded spears, lances and knives.  The child is completely impassive, numb apparently to the carnage occurring at intervals of about five minutes, violence that ramps up from individul duels to the murder of whole platoons of enemies.  There is only the thinnest of plot-lines since the raison d'etre of the movie is to cram together as many showy killings as possible.  The hero barely speaks and seems modeled on the Man with No Name character played by Eastwood in spaghetti westerns.  There's no love interest -- female characters get slaughtered with the same alacrity as everyone else.  The films are beautifully, if monotonously, shot -- the camera uses an extreme wide-angle aspect with almost continual use of telephoto lenses to squash everything into the ribbon of the picture-plane.  Sometimes, parts of the picture in close range are blurred -- sometimes, the opposite effect is used with the more distant part of the image out of focus.  Most of the film is shot on location, out doors, and, as is typical of Japanese films, the landscape imagery is frequently very beautiful.  As in classical Westerns, the terrain changes from scene to scene -- in this movie, there are waterfalls, mountains, dense elegant forests, and a great expanse of sand dunes along a savage-looking seacoast.  There are usually interesting things to see in every shot and so the film is not too awful to watch, although it is sometimes tedious and, certainly, alienating to a Western viewer.  A typical scene involves a duel next to an overshot waterwheel -- the wheels creaks and turns, a great wooden disk framed by the rickety scaffolding that pours water over its top.  The telephoto lens makes it seem as if the duel is happening about six inches in front of the water-wheel which rotates inexorably during the fight.  The hero, of course, stabs the bad guy through the sternum.  These villains, who aren't really bad guys, just hapless messengers, have a  trick of applying pressure to their mortal wounds long enough to provide the plot information necessary to move the story forward.  Then, they let go, blood  gushes out, and they conveniently drop dead.  The hero frowns and scowls like a Kabuki demon and, then, resolutely pushes his perambulator into the next scene.  There are frequent close-ups of the small boy watching the blood shed -- his head is shaved elaborately (he has various topknots and man buns).  His huge benumbed eyes seem to represent the fascinated, if indifferent, glare of the audience surveying all this carnage.

Land of the Demons was the 5th in a six picture cycle that was, of course, wildly popular.  The film feels a bit exhausted and, certainly, is repetitive.  Five vassals of the Koroda clan are sent, one after another, to assassinate Itto.  Of course, he readily dispatches all of them, but not before they announce to him that he has been hired to retrieve a letter in the hands of an old sinister Buddhist abbot. (They have to assault him with various weapons so he can prove his prowess -- which he reliably does by killing each of them.)  The letter apparently explains that the Koroda clan's warlord has been manipulated into allowing his favorite concubine to substitute her daughter (about the age of Cub) for the rightful prince (who seems to be about seven).  The gender of the little girl has been concealed.  For some reason, this is an outrage and the Buddhist abbot, who has learned of this through the letter, plans to use this information to incite other enemy clans to destroy the Koroda's.  The letter is the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock would call it, an object of no intrinsic value that everyone is desperately seeking.  Midway through the picture, in an elaborate fight scene involves three or four different contending enemies, Lone Wolf seizes the letter after attacking the Abbot when he is crossing a river with his entourage.  (Lone Wolf swims under the Abbot's elaborate barge, cuts a hole in the bottom, sucks the priest into the river and, then,  disembowels him in showy plumes of blood underwater.)  Once, Lone Wolf has the letter, his mission apparently changes -- now, he's been paid to kill the prince regent, the scheming concubine, and the four-year old girl masquerading as a boy-prince. In fact, the letter turns out to be literally meaningless -- some sort of fluid comes through the ceiling of an Inn where Lone Wolf is staying and erases the kanji on the letter; I had the impression that a female heroine pees on the letter through the porous roof, but, probably, this is just a fantasy.  Lone Wolf forces his way into the palace of the War Lord, slaughters everyone, and beheads not only the evil concubine, but her consort, and the little girl.  The happy ending, as it were, is a shot showing the heads of these three characters sitting on a window sill.  Lone Wolf, then, goes to the seashore where some woman has just committed hara kiri -- they talk, she drops dead in the surf, and the hero, with his toddler-son, sails into the setting sun.  Some of this is quite jarring -- a few minutes before she is unceremoniously beheaded, the very cute little princess pretending to be a boy makes funny faces at Cub, who responds in kind; they would obviously like to be playmates except that fatso Dad has the bad habit of cutting off the head of everyone they meet, including women and children.  The gore becomes more and more pronounced as the film proceeds -- the film progresses (if that's the right word) from simply bloody wounds to huge arterial sprays that sound like fire hoses being deployed.  The blood is a strangely syrupy pinkish stuff -- it's not blood, as Godard said about one of his films, but just red accents sprayed here and there to make the images more colorful.  There's a strange sequence involving a comely pickpocket named Quick Change O-Yo.  She gives Cub a purse that she has just stolen and tells him to not tell anyone about what she has done   He gives his word.  She, then, gets captured and to get Cub to confess, a local magistrate beats the four-year old with flail that's bigger that the child.  The scene goes on and on, apparently devised to demonstrate the tot's courage and his stolid adherence to the psychopathic samurai code of honor.  (Of course, Cub doesn't confess or say anything other than "no".)  Much of the film is surreal and idiotic -- scenes of the swordsman running around with his perambulator in open country, pausing now and then to hack to death a couple dozen bad guys, are risible.  In one sequence, a vassal obedient to his thankless assignment of getting himself killed in order to deliver a message to Lone Wolf, gets stabbed and falls into a bonfire.  No worries, he delivers a lengthy bit of plot of information to the silent and impassive Lone Wolf while the fire burns him to a cinder.   All characters in this film, including small children, are tough as nails; they just aren't too smart. 

I'd like to recommend this film as a "guilty pleasure."  Here's some dialogue:  "My son, I have chosen the path of carnage.  We live the demon way in Hell."  But the picture is too irredeemably stupid to be worth watching.