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Full of genre commonplaces as it may be, Anton Corbijn's The American eventually does get to the individual and interesting place it wants to be, thanks in no small part to one of the finest performances George Clooney has ever had committed to a screen. I'm already eager to see it again. Further of my thoughts on the film can be found, as you might expect, in my review of it, for MSN Movies.
In commemoration of the soon-to-commence principal photography of Peter Berg's Battleship (which I know about because a couple of my luckier confreres are going on a junket to Hawaii to observe the set, which sounds like a working vacation a certain blogger of my acquaintance could use, thanx fer nuthin', Universal), I examine one of the greatest and most underseen and underappreciated of sea-battle movies, Powell and Pressburger's 1956 The Battle of the River Plate or The Pursuit of the Graf Spee. Under either title it's a winner, and it's this week's Foreign Region Report, at The Daily Notebook, as ever.
My post below, inspired by a happenstance viewing of Michael Curtiz's great 1939 Dodge City, inspired some astute commentary both on and off its thread. Some readers were moved to cite their own favorite dissolves. A particularly persuasive citation, drawn from Orson Welles' 1941 Citizen Kane, by commenter Charles Hartney:
"The scene in question occurs during Kane's first encounter with Susan Alexander, when she provides him hot water and he the necessary comic relief to alleviate her toothache. He starts to question her about her age, her occupation, what she wanted to be when she was little - "A singer," she responds sheepishly - and then asks that she sing for him in the parlor.Susan begins to sing as Kane regards her approvingly, though her voice is tinny and her piano-playing unintentionally dissonant. It is here where Welles inserts a dissolve, and the resulting scene is very familiar: Susan at the piano, singing the same song, and Kane rapt with attention. But the scenery is changed: we are no longer in Susan's claustrophobic parlor, but in a more refined, capacious environment. Susan has changed as well: her dress is more elegant, her piano playing and singing smoother, more melodic, confident.
These elements suggest a number of narrative developments: a significant passage of time; that Susan has been given the freedom (see: money) to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a singer; and not only the continuation but the deepening of the relationship between Susan and Charles - he has obviously moved her into more luxurious surroundings.
Watching Kane for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time, it struck me what a formal marvel this transition was. To communicate so much with so little...astonishing."
Here are screen captures of the, let's say two-and-a-half shots in question:
Indeed, a whole dissertation could be written on the change of interior lighting apparatuses alone...
In an e-mail, my friend Joseph Failla notes quite a few things: "One of my favorite dissolves (can you believe I have favorite dissolves?) is in SEVEN CHANCES [1925] when Keaton gets behind the wheel of his auto and instead of driving off, the background dissolves to the location of his destination without any movement at all. It's a weird moment that at first feels very disorienting but actually makes plenty of sense in an absurd kind of way..."
"...If this simple technique doesn't get one to think of the possibilities of the medium, I don't know what would." Joe continues:
So I'm on the treadmill at the gym (six miles in a little over sixty minutes—thanks for asking), and I've got TCM on, on two monitors at that, because that's how I'm able to roll when there's hardly anybody there. And TCM's got Michael Curtiz's Dodge City on, always a good time. Now granted, when I'm running I'm always listening to music—in this case a not-bad iTunes "Genius" mix extrapolated from Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" and featuring among its many highlights Alice Cooper's "Is It My Body?" and Mountain's rendition of the awesome Jack Bruce tune "Theme From An Imaginary Western," as it happens—so the TCM just sorta functions as a visual wallpaper and is reliably a lot less offensive than the shit other patrons tend to leave on, like Joel Osteen or Keeping Up With The Kardashians, a.k.a. Brains<Tits. But that's not to say I don't notice stuff. And one thing that struck me in Dodge City, kinda outta nowhere, was a particularly eloquent dissolve. Errol Flynn's sheriff Wade Hatton horns in on a saloon poker game trying to get some dope on a murder out of tough guy Bud Taylor, played by Ward Bond. The shot of Hatton facing Taylor at the poker table pans into a closeup of Taylor as he begins his pro forma denials that anything untoward took place at the time in question; see the two screen captures below:
Taylor's in a particular mode that Bond was pretty good at; stolid, only peripherally defiant; an excellent bluffer, if you will. As he clams up, the dissolve begins...
and in the shot it dissolves to, he's talking and he can't really shut up...
...and the camera dollies out...
...and we see we're no longer at the poker table (not that we would think that we were anyway) but rather in the sheriff's office, and that somehow Taylor has been persuaded to give up what he knows. His whole demeanor has changed; his stoicism has turned to deep regret. He is giving Hatton the key to bringing down the film's villain; as such, this is a crucial point in the picture.
What's also conveyed here, very convincingly, is that Hatton possesses sufficient power was somehow able to break down Taylor's bluff. We don't see how and we don't necessarily want to ask, because the simple elegance of the transition makes us believe that it was a given that Hatton would get to Taylor. All in a simple pan, followed by a dissolve, followed by a dolly back. But it's the dissolve itself that speaks volumes, I think, and that's what makes this an example of Hollywood classicism at its most effective; the function here is not just of a perfectly placed ellipsis, but something more, something uniquely cinematic. Dissolves seem to be a bit of a lost art these days...the ones I cited in a scene in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World existed mostly to create a sense of formal difference/otherness within the scene of Scott's attempted breakup with Knives. And then there are the dissolves-in-semi-rapid-succession that distinguish, if I recollect correctly, one scene in the lousy The Last Exorcism, and are meant to denote Eerie Creepy Weirdness. And don't. But dissolves serving narrative function in such a multivalent way: pretty rare. To the extent that it takes you aback when you see one. Kudos to Curtiz, editor George Amy, writer Robert Buckner, and, of course, The Genius of the System.
Regular readers of this blog, and those generally familiar with my work, may have inferred by now that I am, at the very least, somewhat predisposed to like horror movies. I mean, I think of myself that way. Which is one reason I was kind of taken aback by how much I disliked The Last Exorcism. But I disliked this film, intensely; and, I believe, for a very valid reason, e.g., it su-uuu-uuuu-uuuu-uuuu-uuuu-cked. Like, really. Details, or some details—there wasn't enough room for them all—in my review of the picture, for MSN Movies. I have to admit I'm rather puzzled at some of the rather respectful notices thisthing has been getting...because, as I said, it su-uuu-uuuu-uuuu-uuuu-uuuu-cks. As in not scary, not shocking, not formally coherent or consistent, lazy, and...sucky. I mean, really, an exorcism movie with a PG-13 rating? Why not just put on the poster, "This is gonna su...[etc.]?"
The only explanation for the respectful reviews I can think of, seriously, is some liberal media conspiracy or something. Really. The film's that bad. Bad enough to make The Exorcist look like...The Exorcist. Bad enough to make Beyond the Door look like...Beyond the Door. And so on. Netflix The Devil Rides Out, you'll save some money and have a much better time. Trust me. We can discuss it a little more below, if you're so inclined.
From Tokyo Godfathers, 2004
I am late in noting the great filmmaker's passing because his death came as such a bolt-from-the-blue shock; I had every complacent expectation that he would continue creating galvanic work until we were both in our respective dotages. To say that he will be missed is a massive understatement.
There are useful links, as always, from David Hudson at The Daily Notebook.
"...carried away by his re-creation of the past..." From von Sternberg's The Last Command
Surrender (1927) represents the only American appearance of the famous Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine (né Mozzhukin, 1989-1939) whose romantic swashbuckler roles were much admired by adolescent Nabokov (1912016). Mosjoukine made his own miraged appearance in the first stage of young Nabokov's life as exile. After the Revolution his family moved to the Crimea, where Nabokov senior became Minister of Justice in the hopeful Regional Government. One morning in the summer of 1918, with real battles raging in thenorth (the Civil War), Nabokov suddenly met on a mountain trail
a strange cavalier, clad in a Circassian costume, with a tense, perspiring face painted a fantasitc yellow. He kept ferociously tugging at his horse, which, without heeding him, proceeded down the steep path at a curiously purposeful walk, like that of an offended person leaving a party. I had seen runaway horses, but I had never seen a walkaway one before, and my astonishment was given a still more pleasurable edge when I recognized the unfortunate rider as Mozzhuhin, whom Tamara [his first love, the model for Mary—A.A.] and I had so often admired on screen. The film Haji Murad (after Tolstoy's tale of that gallant, rough-riding mountain chief0 was being rehearsed on the mountain pastures of that range. "Stop that brute [Derzhite proklyatoe zhivotnoe]" he said through his teeth as he saw me, but at the same moment, with a mighty sound of crunching and crashing stones, two authentic Tatars came running down to the rescue, and I trudged on, with my butterfly net, toward the upper crags where the Euxine race of the Hippolyte Grayling was expecting me (Speak Memory, p. 247).
All rehearsals concluded, both actor and carefree lepidopterist would soon become permanent emigrés; Surrender starred Mosjoukine as a White Army officer who losed everything in the CIvil War that had provided a backdrop for the actor's unreal meeting with Nabokov. A publicity photograph poses Mosjoukine with Edward Sloman, Surrender's director, and some of those dazed Russian emigré extras "whose only hope and profession was their past." The theme is memorably orchestrated in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command, (1928), in which Emil Jannings plays an ex-tsarist general who, now a poor old man in Hollywood, applies for work as and extra and is cast to replay his former self in the film-within-the-film. The cruel, dizzying commission and that film's Communist director (William Powell) combine to drive Jannings insane. (Sternberg's scenario was inspired by a "true story" rather than, say, Pirandello's play Henry IV, 1922.) Still photos often fail to communicate the essence of a tragic performance or, even worse, freeze what seems to be an overblown expression (always a possibility in the context of the more stylized "theatrical" action of the silent cinema).
The haunting quality of The Last Command, however, is preserved in several stills: Jannings about to don his "costume" in the extras' common dressing room; Jannings being inspected like a young recruit by the assistant director and prop man, ready with a box of authentic medals; or the spectacle of Grand Duke Jannings, imprisoned by mirrors and carried away by his re-creation of the past as he bravely confronts a mob of revolutionaries or arrogantly reviews the troops of his last command, many of them played by actual Russian emigrés. "I had fortified my image of the Russian Revolution by including in my cast of extra players an assortment of Russian ex-admirals and generals, a dozen Cossacks, and two former members of the Duma, all victims of the Bolsheviks, and, in particular, an expert on borscht by the name of Koblianski. These men, especially one Cossack general who insisted on keeping my car spotless, viewed Jannings' effort to be Russian with such disdain that I had to order them to conceal it," writes Field Marshal von Sternberg in his autobiography, Fun In A Chinese Laundry (1965).
—Alfred Appel, Jr., from Nabokov's Dark Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1974
The DVD event of the week, or rather the month, or quite probably the whole year, is Criterion's Three Silent Classics By Josef von Sternberg, which collects the seminal films Underworld, The Docks of New York, and the above-discussed Last Command. (Incidentally, while I could not find the publicity still from Surrender described in the above passage, on the left here is a shot of the actor Mosjoukine.) Mr. Dave Kehr, in his superb assessment of the set and the movies therein for The New York Times, gets down to cases and nails them right away: "In a sense, Sternberg was an avant-garde filmmaker who found himself, by fluke and only for a short while, at the controls of the Hollywood machine, then operating at the peak of its otherworldly artificiality." I should hope to perhaps elaborate on this idea on this blog some time soon. In the meantime, I am hoping that the hereafter, where some believe the good Professor Appel (whose work moved and inspired me in so many ways) travelled to in May of last year, has a very good home theater system.
Who was the last completely unself-conscious American exploitation filmmaker who was any good? As in, who turned out to be a genuine artist but couldn't really be said to have been in the least bit fussy about it, if you follow me? George A. Romero? Let's, just for the sake of this particular argument, say George A. Romero. (UPDATE: Phil Freeman's comment below compels me to clarify here: I mean the Romero of Night of the Living Dead, which I place in the tradition of Carnival of Souls; not, finally, the Romero of, say, the very self-conscious Land of the Dead or even the more immediate Dead sequels. And by unself-conscious I do not mean "not smart." Again, just to clarify.)Because it's an interesting thing. It's not much written about, but the world of low-budget, exploitation movies did get its own version of what some call the "movie brats" working within its ranks to a slightly different purpose than the guys who had come out of those ranks in the late '60s and early-to-mid '70s. Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and a bunch of other vital American cineastes had come up out of the Corman system, and once they were out, their replacements were a talented but somewhat more self-conscious breed. Where someone like Scorsese would try to bring genuine self-expression to a genre piece while hewing closely to both the conventions of the genre and his producer's predilection, a director such as Joe Dante got his personal rocks off by sending up genre pictures from within in order to make slyly subversive satirical points.
As the economic rationale for the B picture began to implode, and as what were once considered B pictures started being accorded a certain amount of critical respect...and the ranks of production houses began to fill with more knowledgable "movie brats," the exploitation picture began to change. To lose its innocence, as it were...although I understand that's a strange way to put it. Obviously a theory along these lines has to cover a lot more than the Corman "system," as it takes in filmmakers such as John Carpenter and David Cronenberg as well. But it's with the guys who worked for Corman that the self-consciousness of making a "trash" picture took on a particular, affectionately flippant character. The seeds of this character were, of course, there long before, as manifested in such comedy/horror hybrid "classics" as Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. But they come to something of a full flower in a picture such as Dante's 1978 Piranha, an obvious-and-loving-it rip from Spielberg's Jaws, one of whose opening scenes features a "Mr. Patrick Hobby" being called to an airport courtesy phone, casts kevin McCarthy in a hysterical more-or-less reprise of his Invasion of the Body Snatchers role, and features scream queen and Fellini muse Barbara Steele intoning such lines as "fish genetics is a very small field" with an exemplarily straight face.
It is perhaps no accident that the self-conscious exploitation film, or what I'll call for the purposes of this piece the post-trash film, really started to flower around the time that critics began taking the exploitation film seriously. On the highbrow/academic end, there was Robin Wood with his explorations of what he and his fellows called "The American Nightmare;" on a different end of what I never recognized as a particularly valid hierarchy anyway, there was Michael Weldon with his Psychotronic ' 'zine, and later the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, and Bill Landis with Sleazoid Express. Roger Ebert had done some spadework in the mainstream media, and J. Hoberman and David Edelstein did their part in the ostensible "alternative" press. There wasn't necessarily a shared language among these voices—I remember setting up an introduction between Weldon and Edelstein back in the mid-80s, and the two just kinda seemed not to really get each other—but between them they all got the word out that this stuff wasn't just for dumb kids and adult flashers or what have you.
Separate from post-trash, in my mind, is meta-trash, which films tend to take off from the likes of inadvertent (possibly) but nonetheless inarguable pieces of "authentic sadistic cinema," to use Roebert Benayoun's acute phrase. The kind of grindhouse stuff that was so over the line that you wondered who the sicko was who came up with this shit. It is again no accident that most such pictures involve violence against women, and two touchstones in my own personal canon, such as it is, are the gruesome original cut of Fernando Di Leo's 1978 To Be Twenty, in which two post-counter-culture chicks who could be prototypes for Sex and the City characters cavort and tease their way through what seems a slightly-hotter-than-usual softcore Euro sex comedy, until they meet an unbelievably brutal end in a genuinely shocking out-of-left-field finale; and Aldo Lado's 1975 Night Train Murders, a sexually gruesome shameless Last House on the Left rip with none of the, um, redeeming social value. One could cite Lucio Fulci's 1990 A Cat In The Brain, a sort of grindhouse Stardust Memories, in which Fulci stars as himself, trying to figure out just why he makes fucked-up movies like The New York Ripper, as a sort of meta-trash milestone. But as the pictures of Eli Roth have demonstrated, meta-trash is a kind of vexed subgenre; the lengths to which something such as Hostel 2 goes to to reassure its audience that its maker himself isn't really twisted, he's just seen a lot of twisted movies, does nothing to assuage those who would condemn it. Which means it ends up perhaps more "authentic" than Roth actually intends it. Tarantino grapples with this problem a lot more effectively disturbingly in the first half of his Death Proof. But anyway.
The most surprising thing (at least for me) about Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D is that it's more of a post-trash picture than a meta-trash picture. Given that Aja's best film up to this point, his 2003 High Tension, is, among other things, a meta-trash exercise that winkingly, in its snooty French way, invites audiences to ponder just how homophobic it actually is, and given that Aja had, prior to this, demonstrated precisely zero sense of humor, I expected mostly a lot of eye-popping but sour, crass gore. Now there is a lot of crass gore here, of more later. But the tone, established with an opening that has Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss serving a similar function to McCarthy's in the Dante original, recaptures the affectionate flippancy I cited above very, very well. This continues in the casting department; good God, I'm so old that for a minute I thought that Elizabeth Shue, playing the very beset Sheriff of an Arizona lake resort town now besieged by future fish food in the form of spring breakers, was Cheryl Ladd. Ving Rhames and Christopher Lloyd I recognized right away. That the movie gives with one hand—providing almost overly generous amounts of Page Three girl and porn star nudity (see below—the blonde is Riley Steel, the highlighted brunette Kelly Brooke, and guess which is which)—and takes away with the other—making one of the main human villains an incredibly obnoxious Joe-Francis-style teen-boobie mongerer (Jerry O'Connell is very good here)—is neither, pace A.O. Scott, indicative of the film's to his mind deplorable "insouciant hypocrisy," nor, Eric Kohn, does it make the film "a scathing indictment of America's increasingly blatant obsession with dirty sex." (Jeez, dude, next time why don't you try "a puckish satire of contemporary mores?") It's only just Aja hewing to, and taking full advantage of, the perquisites of the genre, and rather effectively amusingly so, at that. I don't understand why this is so hard for people to grasp. And yes, the penis bit near the end is sub-sub John Waters, but do you really think nobody making the film knew that, or knew that Waters himself is likely to heartily approve of the 3D gloss they threw on the gag?
As I took note of in a post below, the mounting gore at the movie's climax apparently made Christopher Campbell cry, which, as you see, I think is kind of weirdly funny given the cultural condition we all share. Maybe I should lend the sprite To Be Twenty, and give him something to really cry about. I really wasn't too terribly bothered by it; but on the other hand, I think it's probably good to be unsettled by something we've been more or less conditioned to chortle at, out of repressed fear or not. Don't you? Could be an entry point into some meaningful self-examination. In any event, at the screening I went to—a not even half-full Sunday matinee at the Court Street Regal multiplex—the crowd, such as it was, was more grossed out by the fledgling teen romance between the two young leads than by anybody getting sliced in half. What a world, what a world.
Boris Karloff, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Charles Brabin, 1942
Bernard Verley, Love in the Afternoon, Eric Rohmer, 1972
The occasion of the ongoing and entirely splendid Film Society of Lincoln Center Eric Rohmer retrospective inspires me to muse, a little bit, on how sort of interesting it is that a filmmaker who chose one half of his pseudonym in homage to the creator of Fu Manchu would betray very little of that writer's influence in his own work. Or would he? Actually, not so much. At The Daily Notebook.
This retro, incidentally, affords me the opportunity to plug in the scant holes in my experience of the great filmmaker's oeuvre; the other night My Lovely Wife and I delighted in 1993's The Tree, The Mayor, and the Mediatheque, an extremely droll political parable featuring a fantastic complement of quintessentially Rohmerean deliciously self-important and self-deluding characters, including Pascal Greggory as the very well-meaning but almost impossibly condescending title mayor, Fabrice Luchini as a truculent shoolteacher who becomes very exercised about the tree that the titular mediatheque threatens to uproot, and most hilariously, Arielle Dombasle as the mayor's lover, a cheerful chatty whack job novelist. The characterization plays like such a direct continuation of Dombasle's clueless character from Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach that I had to check and make sure they didn't share the same name—they don't. One of this character's best bits is when she yammers on to the mayor about the etymological origins of the word "snob," which is the same in French as it is in English: it derives, she says, from the Latin phrase "sine nobilitate," meaning "without nobility," which of course, she flatters her lover, he himself cannot be. Her character being who she is, she is of course citing a discredited notion about the word, but she does it with all the confidence at her command, which is not a little bit. This made me laugh for a number of reasons, one of them, I have to admit, being some intimations of snobbery and quasi-noble origins having been directed my way recently. But I digress. The film played its final screening earlier this week, and I do hope it comes around again, maybe on video, as it's really a stitch.
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