For the Love of Film III: Alfred Hitchcock's Spy Anti-Thriller

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—[This is my contribution to the currently ongoing third annual For the Love of Film blogathon hosted by Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films and This Island Rod. You can read more about what this year's blogathon is funding—something Alfred Hitchcock-related; thus this post—here and donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation here.]

In trying to figure out what I’d contribute for this year’s For the Love of Film blogathon, I knew I wanted to do something Hitchcock-related—but what? So much ink has been spilled on his behalf over the years that, unless one felt confident that one had a fresh angle to take, it would be overkill to write the umpteenth piece on something by-now-canonical like Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho or The Birds. So I decided to see if I could perhaps come up with something to say about a less widely celebrated film by the Master of Suspense. Immediately, I thought of…

Though some of his late films—Marnie (1964) and his swan song Family Plot (1976)—have been critically rehabilitated since receiving indifferent or cold receptions upon their initial theatrical releases, his 1969 film Topaz remains a problem child for even the most diehard of Hitchcockians, especially coming on the heels of his even less fondly remembered 1966 thriller Torn Curtain. Personally, outside of that one agonizingly drawn-out murder sequence midway through that film (a scene Ang Lee may have had in mind when he staged a similar death scene in Lust, Caution), I can’t even summon up much enthusiasm for Torn Curtain. Topaz, on the other hand…

The disappointing thing about Torn Curtain is that, up until that murder scene, Hitchcock is able to sustain a tone of moral inquiry that lends initial intrigue to missile scientist Michael Armstrong’s mysterious decision to defect to East Germany. What are his real motives for doing so, and even if we knew those motives, would they turn out to be worth all the trouble he subjects himself to? That brutal murder sequence brings those hovering questions home in a deeply sobering way; unfortunately, after that point, the rest of the film becomes a standard chase movie, with Hitchcock showing the barest minimum of interest in the narrative.

Topaz, by comparison, shows Hitchcock in fuller control of his material—material that, like Torn Curtain, deals with espionage, politics and morality. The film’s form, however, is more inventive than the far more straightforward narrative of its predecessor. Screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor’s adaptation of Leon Uris’s bestseller takes a vignette-like structure in depicting this Cold War world of intrigue and deception; there is a central character running through the plot—French intelligence officer André Deveraux (Frederick Stafford)—but the screenplay isn’t shy about straying from Deveraux in order to follow other characters, like French intelligence agent Philippe Dubois (Roscoe Lee Browne) and son-in-law Francois Picard (Michel Subor), for lengthy periods of time. Heck, the whole film begins not with Deveraux, but with Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius), a Russian who defects to the U.S. with his wife and daughter. (Taylor’s screenplay, for all its emphasis on plot complications, isn’t above the occasional colorful character detail, as in the way it makes Kusenov a bit of a hardass, especially when he castigates an American intelligence agent after he’s extracted from Russian clutches by saying “That’s not the way I would have done it.”)

But the film’s cold-sober demeanor isn’t just a matter of the script’s exploratory narrative structure. A sense of omniscient detachment hangs over the film; Hitchcock, for the most part, seems more interested in the bigger picture than in the individual human dramas that play out. Admittedly, some of the dispassionate feeling the film inspires may have as much to do with the uneven performances of its cast than in anything Hitchcock does as a director; it must be said, for example, that, as Deveraux, Frederick Stafford is a black hole as far as charisma goes, making it hard to get too worked up in whatever happens to him. And yet, the stiffness of some of the acting is paradoxically a boon to the film's cumulative effect as something of a deliberate anti-thriller, taking the romance out of these spy games the way that one brutal death scene in Torn Curtain gave lie to the usual quick and easy movie murders. (If anything, casting a major star on the order of a Cary Grant or a Jimmy Stewart would most likely have detracted from that effect.) Thus, even scenes where characters reveal fancy new gadgets—the kind of sequence that would be a source of near-fetishized wonderment in a James Bond picture—are treated fairly matter-of-factly. There’s nothing “cool” about them in Topaz; these are just part of the job.

None of that is intended to suggest that the generally calm and collected Topaz is itself bereft of cinematic pleasures. The film has its share of virtuoso setpieces—most notably a lengthy sequence in which Hitchcock methodically details Philippe Dubois’s attempt to steal important missile documents from Cuban strongman Rico Parra (John Vernon). As is the case with the equally masterful opening sequence involving three KGB agents tailing Kusenov’s family, this section is mostly wordless: We’re not allowed to overhear Dubois’s dialogue exchanges with his Cuban contact, forcing both Deveraux, and us in the audience, to track his progress simply through body language and gestures. (Hitchcock primes us for this stylistic approach when, in a greenhouse, he has Deveraux deliver a big batch of inaudible exposition to Dubois behind a closed door.)

Even some of the dialogue scenes in which speech is heard are somewhat enlivened by Hitchcock’s direction of them. Note, for instance, this first encounter with Deveraux and fellow spy/adulterous love interest Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), in which these two extreme close-ups of the characters in their romantic bubble...

...opens up when Deveraux moves away from the camera, the camera still in the same position, when he’s forced to discuss job-related matters with Juanita.

And of course, there’s this shot, arguably the most famous in Topaz, of Juanita’s death at the hands of Rico after he discovers her treachery to the Cuban cause:

As Juanita falls to her death, her dark-purple dress extends from under her as if blood was spreading around her. Eventually, we see her actual blood marking the scene:

Topaz ends on a note of resignation that may, in the moment, strike you as unduly rushed and disappointing. It wasn’t the ending originally planned; after the original, more dramatic but similarly bleak ending tested negatively with early audiences, Universal forced Hitchcock to shoot a different one. Nevertheless, to my mind, coming on the heels of a purposefully deglamorized take on the spy-movie genre, the ending acquires its own fitting perfection. Despite the jaunty Maurice Jarre score underscoring its final moments—the same bombastic cue that plays under the film's opening credits—Topaz ends with a shrug rather than a sense of triumph. It may be a triumph for the world at large, but for these characters personally, it's merely the end of a job—"the end of Topaz," as Deveraux says in a bit of winking self-reflexivity, being that that is the film's own final line of dialogue—with all the baggage that entails.

Now, I'm not making the case here that Topaz is some undervalued masterpiece that deserves to be considered on the same exalted level as, say, Vertigo (still my favorite Hitchcock film, and an all-time favorite). It's a wildly uneven, deeply flawed film, afflicted at times with slack pacing and indifferent acting. But if you are able to get on its near-defiantly un-sensational wavelength, there is still much to admire and even a fair amount to truly enjoy. Of all Hitchcock's late films, this one strikes me as arguably the most deserving of reassessment.

White Elephant Blogathon 2012: Preying for a Trash Masterpiece

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—[This is my contribution to the White Elephant Blogathon. What is the White Elephant Blogathon, you may be wondering? Well, here are some details.]

After accidentally missing the deadline to submit a title for last year's edition of the White Elephant Blogathon, I made it a point to participate this year.

Considering how many people have or have not wasted their time watching crappy movies assigned to them for this blogathon, why did I want to commit myself to it this year? Probably because I got a doozy of an assignment two years ago when I contributed to this online event, a film directed by Death Wish auteur Michael Winner called Scream for Help (1984), and one so bad in so many genuinely fascinating ways that, yes, I would actually go so far as to place it in the "so bad it's good" pantheon reserved for other legendary pieces of celluloid waste like Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. (I'm serious when I say that it really is something to see; I refer you all to my review of it here.)

I was hoping that lightning might strike twice this time around, that I might get a chance to cut my teeth on something that was dreadful in ways that might actually inspire something like actual critical analysis. Did it happen?

Well...yes and no—mostly no, I'm afraid, though it does have one moment towards the very end that almost makes sitting through the rest worth your trouble.

This year, I was assigned to watch an action film called Deadly Prey (1987). You can tell this is from the 1980s right from the get-go with a wide shot of a silhouetted figure running up a hill and pumping a gun in the air, which leads into an opening-credits sequence that intercuts title cards with shots of all manner of weapons being loaded one at a time. 

An opening suspense sequence sets up the premise of director David A. Prior's film. A bunch of mercenaries—led by jacked-up sunglasses-wearing second-in-command Lt. Thornton (Fritz Matthews)—are hunting after some random chubby guy, looking to kill him. They eventually accomplish their mission, but not after the guy resourcefully knocks out one of the mercenaries; Thornton eventually kills this member, presumably for his failure to measure up to this covert army unit's high standards.

The next scene fleshes this opening scene out some more. We are introduced to Thornton's superior, Col. Hogan (David Campbell); we learn that the chubby guy was some random dude picked off the street for, essentially, target practice for these mercenaries-in-training. Now they need a new victim for their game. That's where our hero, Mike Danton (played by Ted Prior, David A. Prior's brother), comes in.

Before we get to Danton, however, allow me to draw attention to two things I noticed in these first two sequences:

1. Was some of the dialogue of this film recorded in post-production and synchronized after the fact? It sure sounds like it to my ears; there is a disembodied quality to some the line readings that sounds like something I usually hear in, say, old Italian films, when post-synchronized sound was the norm. So it may not just be the acting itself that's bad. (Was the budget for this film so low Prior couldn't even afford to record sound directly throughout the whole production?)

2. There's nothing technically wrong with the editing in the opening suspense sequence...and yet, strangely, the filmmaking still feels like pure amateur hour. There are barely any shots in which the predators and their prey occupy the same frame; for all I know, Prior could have shot the mercenaries and the chubby guy in two entirely different parts of this forest. Heck, even I've done that! Years ago, back when I was living in central New Jersey, I picked up a video camera one time and tried to make my own slasher flick, discovering quickly that, on a budget of zero dollars, all I needed to do to suggest someone getting killed was just juxtapose a shot of a sharp object with the pained expression on a victim's face. (And because I was under the influence of the Friday the 13th films at the time, I destroyed a fair amount of strawberries to simulate blood splattering.) It's the Kuleshov effect at its finest! It would be miraculous if it turned out the auteur behind this film and Killer Workout (1987) knew who Lev Kuleshov was; alas, when you see mercenaries shooting at the chubby victim and, in the next shot, hear no gunfire as the victim falls to the ground in pain, you realize that perhaps there are limits to Prior's grasp of continuity after all.

All right, back to Mike Danton.

Danton is introduced as an ordinary man struggling to get out of his bed (a water bed, by the way; people actually sleep on those things?) and taking out the trash before he is randomly kidnapped by two of Hogan's men for this deadly venture. Naturally, though, these men have no idea what they've just gotten into; Danton, it turns out, is a Vietnam veteran who has a way with, say, turning tree branches into weapons and staying alive by eating worms and cooking rats.

In essence, he's John Rambo redux, and Deadly Prey could be seen a low-rent variation on First Blood (1982), even if its good-versus-evil setup places it in more of an uncomplicated Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) mindset than in the more intriguingly ambiguous mold of Ted Kotcheff's original. (There's one shot of Danton pointing a machine gun up in the air and firing off a bunch of rounds that recalls a similar shot towards the end of Part II, except without Stallone's howl of testosterone-fueled frustration while he does it.) And just as Rambo's last name reminded Pauline Kael of his "namesake" Arthur Rimbaud, Danton's last name recalls Georges Jacques Danton, the Frenchman who is often credited for being one of the pivotal figures of the French Revolution. You could say that the Danton of Deadly Prey initiates his own revolution against Col. Hogan, Lt. Thornton and the rest of this sadistic band of mercenaries—though this Danton is hardly the more morally ambiguous Danton of French history (Georges Jacques was eventually convicted of financial corruption and killed by guillotine).

Beyond all that, alas, there isn't a whole lot to say about the rest of the film once Danton begins to fight back against his captors, one by one. There's little sense of geography or continuity underpinning the action sequences, and thus precious little in the way of coherence or sustained suspense; Danton just seems to materialize whenever and wherever he wants in that forest. Deadly Prey has the requisite macho action-movie misogyny, featuring a mere two female characters—Danton's helpless wife Jaimy (Suzanne Tara) and mercenary super-bitch Sybil (Dawn Abraham)—both of whom eventually meet ignominious ends.

It also features two legendary Hollywood actors among the cast: Actors' Studio veteran Cameron Mitchell, as Jaimy's policeman father; and former teen heartthrob Troy Donahue, as the rich backer of Col. Hogan's mercenary operation. Putting aside the predictable and not particularly interesting question of why these two actors bothered to appear in this junk in the first place, I would like to point out that, though the role these actors play in Deadly Prey both amount to glorified cameos, both are given top billing in the opening credits! Not even Glenn Ford was granted that honor when he appeared in the 1981 slasher film Happy Birthday to Me! Mitchell and Donahue do have one scene together, in which Mitchell delivers a speech decrying Donahue and the rest of his rich, inhumane ilk before blowing him away; maybe David A. Prior found the prospect of putting these two famous actors together exciting, but unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot in that scene worth writing home about, other than the fact that Mitchell brings more convincing emotion to that scene than Ted Prior brings to any one line reading as the hero.

And onward to that aforementioned one memorable moment of Deadly Prey. Should I spoil it? Let me put it this way: This may be the only film where you will see a man's arm being used as a bludgeoning weapon after it has been dismembered from his body. It's the only time in this cheesefest that I found myself laughing out loud, and possibly the only bit of inspired awfulness in what is an otherwise just plain bad, bad movie—and not even all that fun bad, either.

Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Musical Dreams

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

On this day, in 1893, the great Russian composer Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died under circumstances that continue to be a bit of a mystery today (cholera or suicide?). To commemorate the 117th anniversary of his death, I took a look at Tchaikovsky, a Russian biopic from 1969, and wrote about it for Fandor, a new paid-subscription film site that looks poised to possibly give the by-now-well-established MUBI a run for its money.

It is, in many ways, not a particularly good movie; it's fairly worthless as biography, for instance, scrubbing away much of the man's more troubling aspects (his suppressed homosexuality, for one thing) in order to present what feels overwhelmingly like a squeaky clean, government-approved official history of one of its most famous artists. Nevertheless, it has its isolated moments of visual and aural interest, and not even Dmitri Tiomkin's enthusiastic rearrangements of Tchaikovsky's music can kill its impact.

If you're a Fandor subscriber, you can watch it on the site. Otherwise, it is available on Kino DVD.

In the meantime: How about a concert clip? Leonard Bernstein (yes, him again, 'cause I love him so) conducting the New York Philharmonic in the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, which premiered nine days before he died:

The Ghostly Splendor of Rouge

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—I initially had a whole long blog post planned for Halloween regarding the taste for cheesy horror flicks, most of them made during the 1980s, that I cultivated in my younger years of cinephilia—years in which I went to a local video store and went straight to the horror section to gawk at some of the wonderfully freaky and creepy VHS box art on display, such as this...

...and this...

...and this:

Alas, I found myself surprisingly busy with assignments both within and outside of work as last week progressed, and my weekend was so packed with activity (and so wonderful, in ways I will explain in probably more than one post later) that I just never found the time to work on that post as much as I had wanted.

And now it's Halloween.

So perhaps next year at this time, I will delve deeply into the beginnings of my cinephilia through the horror genre (of which the above posters give a taste). This year, though...allow me to grace you all with a particularly haunting and evocative image from one of the best cinematic ghost stories I've ever seen:

This image comes from the unsettling climax of Stanley Kwan's wonderful 1988 film Rouge, in which the divine Anita Mui (of whom faithful blog readers will know I have quite the fondness for) plays Fleur, a prostitute who, in the 1930s, makes a suicide pact with a wealthy and rebellious son, Chen (Leslie Cheung), and follows through with it...and then returns as a ghost roaming modernized Hong Kong looking for the man who promised to kill himself for their love.

In the first half of the film, Kwan gets a lot of mileage out of the ways he contrasts past and present Hong Kong, with Fleur seen reacting in a bewildered fashion to how much the region has changed since the '30s; she is seen, at one point, marveling with confusion at how her old bordello has turned into apartment housing. In addition, he puts a great deal of emphasis on the modern-day couple (Alex Man and Emily Chu), both of whom work at a newspaper, that eventually helps Fleur track down her beloved; he contrasts the more mundane ways they express their love for each other with the intense (naive?) romanticism underpinning the passion between Fleur and Chen in the 1930s. These literal and visual contrasts suggest a surprisingly thoughtful and resonant secondary theme in Rouge: the ways modernization has affected not only physical locations, but traditions and behaviors over generations.

Rouge, though, is, first and foremost, a deeply romantic ghost story, mixing in elements of historical drama and detective procedural in its surprisingly ambitious brew. And then [possible spoiler ahead] we get to the resolution of this supernatural procedural and discover what really happened—or, rather, what didn't happen—to Chen...or, more precisely, what he didn't allow to happen. And Fleur's bloody but unbowed reaction to her realization—and Chen's own realization of the great love he has spurned—leads to an ending that, I think, can rank proudly alongside another great Asian ghost story, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953), in its genuinely haunting evocation of deep personal loss intertwined with an alternately uplifting yet tragic sense of people moving on from said loss, whatever the cost to others.

And really, who else in '80s Hong Kong popular culture, at least, could portray "bloody but unbowed" better than Anita Mui? At the time, perhaps, one would not have thought that Mui had it in her to play an essentially submissive character, at least on the basis of the flamboyantly sensual persona she cultivated as a pop-music superstar. Yet here she is in Rouge, exuding all sorts of delicately shaded yearning while nevertheless maintaining an inner strength that ultimately gives her the power to disappear into the night, in the image above, heartbroken but with her dignity fully intact.

Rouge may not be "scary" in the sense that it jolts you out of your seat and shocks you with over-the-top sequences of gore...but, in its visual splendor (courtesy of Bill Wong's beautifully evocative and graceful cinematography) and thematic and emotional depths, it carries a far greater, longer-lasting power than any number of gory 1980s slice-and-dice flicks that caught my eye back in my formative years.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. Rouge is available from Yesasia.com on a region-free DVD from Fortune Star.

P.P.S. As usual with most Hong Kong productions in the 1980s, Rouge features a pop song that itself became a hit. This one, sung by Mui herself, is particularly lovely (it plays at the end of the film):

Video for the Day, Friday the 13th Edition

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—It's Friday the 13th today, and what better way to mark yet another Friday the 13th than with...Friday the 13th?

I know, I'm being super obvious and predictable here. But still. The Friday the 13th films were a part of my earliest days of cinephilia, so I have a certain attachment to them, as unapologetically trashy as they are. Beginning first as intrigue at what illicit pleasures potentially lay behind the tantalizing VHS boxes of those (and many other horror) films, becoming full-blown fascination when I taped a bunch of the censored-for-TV versions of the films during a marathon on the USA cable network, and then finally having my curiosity sated when I sat down and watched the unedited versions on premium cable/VHS/DVD. Seeing an arrow getting rammed through Kevin Bacon's throat in the original Friday the 13th (1980)—yeah! Witnessing Crispin Glover get a corkscrew through his hand and a butcher knife in his face in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)—awesome! And what about seeing Jason Voorhees rip the heart out of Ron "Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter" Palillo in the literally thunderous opening of Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)? That satisfied me as well, I'll freely admit. And don't forget the sex and the breasts!

Obviously, I'm older, wiser and more humane now. Maybe. (Or maybe not. I recently got my hands on a DVD copy of that 1987 Hong Kong action flick Eastern Condors that I wrote about here, and all I feel like doing these days is watching Sammo Hung, Joyce Godenzi, Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah kick people's asses in various balletic maneuvers.) Back then, though, I was fairly easy to please, at least in the gross-out movie department.

All of this is a nostalgic preamble to this video, courtesy of the folks at Cinemassacre.com, which counts down one person's 13 favorite moments from the Friday the 13th series. There are many others I could list, but this covers a lot of the more memorable high points—high bloody points.

Enjoy...if you dare!

***

On that "red-not-blood" note, this particular week in my life and My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second ends. Posting has been lighter than usual, I know. I've got one interview on deck, so I've been working on that on-and-off this week; in addition, the search for a New York apartment has soldiered on in spite of some unexpected setbacks (I won't go into those now; maybe later). Worry not, faithful readers; I'm planning an early return to blogging form on Sunday with a post on a subject that fascinates me. 

What could that subject be? I guess you'll just have to come to my place on Sunday and find out, won'tcha? (Hint: It has to do with something many people like to do/express in a public place on Sundays.)

What It Means for a Film to Be "Revelatory"

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Sure, I love to be touched and entertained at the movies as much as the next moviegoer. But when I come across a film that, by virtue of its artistry, refreshes the way I perceive something in the world in which I live and breathe...well, that kind of film is, to my mind, something that deserves to be treasured above many others.

One of the many reasons that I love Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) as much as I do (even without having seen it in its original 70mm format, granted) is that, in his immaculate reconstruction of a modern metropolis, the great French comic filmmaker manages to construct a world so close to our own that he makes it all but impossible for us not to take notice of the looming skyscrapers and chilly modernist architecture whenever we find ourselves in a big city. I know that after every time I've seen this film, I always find myself walking around in midtown Manhattan and looking up more often to take in the sheer vertical majesty of the skyscrapers that loom above me.

(Courtesy of DVDBeaver)

This past weekend, I finally saw Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert, and only five minutes into it, with its opening blurry and non-blurry shots of factories and industrial waste enveloped in a fog, I knew that this would be another one of those kinds of cinematic works of art. Surely everyone has seen or perhaps even walked amidst an environment such as this: coldly industrialized, uniquely modern, bereft of humanity. But Antonioni, with his distinctive eye for landscape and architecture, visualizes his images in a way that snatches an unexpected grim beauty from the air of general dehumanization.

(Above three "screen shots" were captured from the Criterion Red Desert Blu-ray via the "Glenn Kenny method" of taking photographs off my LCD television monitor. Obviously, I do not yet have a computer with a Blu-ray drive installed.)

There is plenty more to Red Desert than mere visual beauty, of course: It is of a piece with Antonioni's previous examinations of spiritual isolation (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse), but this time on a grander and more overtly expressionistic scale. But ultimately the factories, the landscapes, the architecture and Antonioni's ravishing use of color are what I cherish most about this film.

And Monica Vitti...of course.

(Courtesy of DVDBeaver)

One of the functions of great art, I firmly believe, is that it has the power to sharpen your senses and increase your awareness of what is around you. Now, I have a feeling that whenever I find myself looking at a factory or walking in an industrial area, Antonioni's eye-catching depiction of these landscapes in Red Desert, and the way those landscapes correspond with Monica Vitti's desperation for human connection, is the association I will make in my mind. Antonioni's way of viewing the world has been seared into my mind's eye. This is what I consider "revelatory"—perhaps more viscerally so than intellectually, but either way, it's profoundly beautiful.

If any of you dear readers of mine have films, or other kinds of artworks, that affect you in this way, by all means, shout out your praises for such works in the comments section of this post!

Beyond Inception This Weekend: An Unofficial Triumvirate

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Though it was by far the biggest box-office attraction of the weekend, Inception was hardly the only film I saw. In fact, the three other films I saw (I would have seen more—I was planning to catch up with both Winter's Bone (2010) and Alamar (2009) in addition to the rest—but social events, fatigue and minor computer issues prevented me from indulging in my usual weekend movie binge) could be said to form an unofficial triumvirate addressing what it is I missed from Christopher Nolan's mind-bending epic.

1. From Shadows (1959): a sense of humanity.

I'm finally making an effort to explore the work of legendary independent American filmmaker John Cassavetes, and in this initial encounter with his groundbreaking debut feature, I was surprised to find myself feeling more genuine exhilaration throughout this modestly scaled, wonderfully acted/improvised and poignantly evocative work than throughout the loud, graceless spectacle of Nolan's film. Obviously, comparing Nolan's narrative contraption to Cassavetes's low-key human drama is an apples-to-oranges comparison if I've ever seen one, so of course I won't say one is automatically superior to the other. But with Shadows, I felt like I was basking in a relaxing oasis of humanity after, merely hours before, sitting passively through an inelegant, if occasionally awe-inspiring, narrative machine. In other words: Wow, there are honest-to-God people in this movie that I actually care about!

2. From I Am Love (2009): a sense of visual beauty.

Wally Pfister once again does some handsome work for Nolan in Inception, helping to impart a sense of scale to the writer-director's grand visions with his shot selections and framing choices. But there is only so much even the most imaginative cinematographer can do in bringing a film to life for a filmmaker who simply isn't all that great at thinking in pictures. On the basis of I Am Love, Italian director Luca Guadagnino has what Nolan lacks: a distinctive eye for using images to tell a story. With the help of his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, he turns standard melodramatic boilerplate into one lush visual wonder after another: Settings glow and brood depending on the mood of the moment, Tilda Swinton's skin gleams in the sunlight in an approximation of visual afterglow, and the dully lit environment of the upper class contrasts vividly with the ravishing brightness of the outdoors. All of this isn't merely for the sake of "blowing your mind" with eye candy; it works beautifully in concert with the film's narrative of one repressed woman's sexual awakening. It's expressive, not just impressive.

3. From The Circus (1928): a sense of humor.

Not that I think Inception suffered from its general humorlessness; as Roger Ebert said in his most recent blog post addressing critical reactions to the film, he "didn't crack a smile while watching the film because Nolan didn't call for one." But when, in isolated moments, Nolan does see fit to inject some humor into the film—mostly from Tom Hardy's smart-ass master of deception, though Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page share one throwaway moment of comic gold involving an impromptu kiss—the momentary cracking of a smile feels almost like someone farting during a church service. It felt almost wrong to laugh amidst the solemnity.

Charlie Chaplin's films, of course, operate the other way around: They are designed to be funny and entertaining, but that doesn't prevent them from having their serious moments. Somewhat like what Nolan tried to do with the Cobb/Mal subplot in Inception, Chaplin introduces a romance-tinged emotional thread in The Circus to provide some pathos along the way: He falls in love with the stepdaughter (Merna Kennedy) of the circus troupe's abusive ringmaster (Allan Garcia), but then finds himself filled with jealousy when the stepdaughter becomes enamored with the new tightrope walker (Harry Crocker). I'll leave the sublime resolution of this thread for you all to discover for yourselves; suffice it to say, it involves an act of selflessness that is melancholy yet uplifting—in short, profoundly moving in ways Nolan can only, well, dream about.

Yes, folks, this is exactly the kind the movie in which, as the popular ad slogan goes, "You'll laugh! You'll cry!" And it's that kind of wide-ranging emotional experience that I often crave from the cinema. For all of its visual and narrative wonderments, that scintillating variety of emotions is something I sorely missed in Inception.

The 4th Annual White Elephant Blogathon: Screaming For A Trash Masterpiece

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—(The following is my contribution to the White Elephant Blog-a-thon.)

Yes, fellow cinephile bloggers: This year, I decided to throw my hat into this four-years-running annual blogathon and take on whatever random piece of possible cinematic junk I got randomly assigned. And boy, I got a real doozy for my first time out!

For those of you who don't know what this particular blogathon is all about—or what the hell blogathons are in the first place—see this post by Paul Clark over at the blog Silly Hats Only which inaugurates this year's installment. Once you've absorbed that, come back here and read about what I got to see for this one-day event over the weekend.

***

Okay, back now? Here it is:

 

Scream for Help is a 1984 film from director Michael Winner, a British hack best known for helming the first Death Wish (and, um, Death Wish II and 3). It appears to have fallen through the cracks since its release; as of now, it's available only on used VHS, via a torrent download or on YouTube in nine parts. But it doesn't deserve to be; this one deserves a place in the annals of movies that are so bad they end up being almost kinda good.

It begins with our young heroine (Rachael Kelly), shot in silhouette as the sun sets behind her, ominously intoning in voiceover: "My name is Christina Ruth Cromwell. I'm 17 and I live in New Rochelle. I think my stepfather is trying to murder my mother." Right then, the film cuts to an exterior shot of the Cromwell household at night...

...and composer John Paul Jones's melody for the opening credits literally crashes through. Oh boy, listen to that music! As Winner and cinematographer Robert Paynter try to ease us into the mood with a montage of establishing shots, here is this bombastic melody blasting away on the soundtrack, a music cue that plays like a second-rate imitation of Bernard Herrmann-esque swooning romanticism. (By the way, yes, that is the same John Paul Jones who played bass for Led Zeppelin.)

If you thought that was an oddly misguided directorial choice, check out the sequences about 10 minutes later in which Christie rides around town in her bicycle tailing the suspicious stepfather (David Brooks): This time, during these supposed moments of mystery suspense, Winner has called upon Jones to provide...big-band jazz music? What the heck???

The cheesiness doesn't end there. The acting in Scream for Help is generally pretty crummy, or in the case of some of the actors, laughably campy. (I assume Winner recorded the sound live; I say "I assume" because the dialogue often sounds dissociated from the actors speaking them, that's how dreadful the acting is.) Does the indifferent acting fail scriptwriter Tom Holland's dialogue, or is the dialogue already lame as it is? Considering Holland's later credits—writer/director of Fright Night (1985) and cowriter/director of Child's Play (1988), both films that straddle the line between intense horror and witty comedy/satire—I can't help but wonder...but then, maybe lines like "Don't listen to me; just wait until he kills you" and "Kissing you made me want to vomit" wouldn't do even the most experienced of actors any favors. Most damagingly, the storytelling is so brisk and choppy that attempts at sustained suspense barely register; all Winner provides in his direction is the sense of a storyline whizzing past you on a motorcycle.

So just on a technical level, this film is often plain embarrassing to watch. And yet...when you consider it on some of the bigger-picture levels—of plot, theme and even style—the film is, I submit, actually rather fascinating in its trashiness.

This is not a film that lacks ambition. From its simple premise, Holland's script wades into, among other things, matters of teenage sexuality, throwing its virginal heroine into the maelstrom of immoral adult sexuality to the point that she eventually expresses disgust with sex altogether. This unspoken moralism, of course, was a common thread among most slasher films made during that decade, many of which took perverse pleasure in punishing teenagers who acted on their horny impulses. Surely none of those slasher flicks, however, feature the image of a recently deflowered girl reacting to the sight of vaginal blood on her hand, as seen below:

Scream for Help also aims to be tonally and stylistically ambitious. Horror, mystery, teen-angst drama: Winner and Holland attempt to mix them all in, and just when you think there's nowhere else the film can go, in its second half it becomes a kind of low-rent Desperate Hours, then evolves further still into a Straw Dogs rip-off, with our heroine forced to play the Dustin Hoffman role in protecting her mother from harm. Much of this ends up registering as unintentional comedy, by the way—but the film so rapidly devours its plot points and tonal shifts that that almost doesn't matter.

But there's one particular angle that offers a tantalizing way of looking at this film, one that almost explains away its many, many shortcomings.

Christie, it is revealed early on in the film, previously had to be treated by a psychiatrist in the wake of her mother's divorce from her father, and so the film generates a bit of intrigue with the possibility that her suspicions about her stepfather's murderous intentions may well be all in her head.

It doesn't work out that way; Christie turns out to be 100% correct about her stepfather, and in no time he and two others are invading her home, threatening to kill them both and steal their money. There are no last-second "it was all a dream" twists in this one. Nevertheless, is it possible that those jarringly overwrought music cues are meant to call attention to themselves? That the acting is intentionally awkward? That the storytelling is deliberately choppy? That, in other words, Scream for Help as a whole is meant not to be taken at all realistically, but instead seen as a (clumsily executed) fever dream—one that, I daresay, is almost Marnie-esque in its twisted intensity—of one young girl's sexual fears and familial anxieties?

Imagine the possibilities! In such a context, then, of course the scenes of Christie doing her own surveillance work on her stepfather would feature music that seems largely brash and self-confident. Of course the moment she loses her virginity would feature wildly over-the-top throbbing love music. And, perhaps most hilariously, of course the film would end with Christie, having slain the last remaining villain, calling up the detective who dismissed her claims earlier and triumphantly intoning, "Maybe this time you'll believe me," and then cutting to an end-credits roll featuring a godawful tune with these words (I kid you not): "Christie / Don't ever listen to the words they say / You wouldn't have to change your ways / Talking to my Christie."

You see what I mean? Scream for Help is bad in such unusual ways, and with such conviction and fervor, that it gradually achieves a kind of euphoria reserved for only the most special of bad movies. It's some kind of trash masterpiece.

Cinema At A Fury-ous Height

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—When it comes to Brian De Palma's 1978 film The Fury—which was the big notable DVD discovery of this past weekend that I hinted at here, and also the source of one of the two screengrabs in this post (the other, if you didn't know/couldn't guess, was from Die Hard 2)—most people seem to remember its finale: a perverse, orgasmic tribute to the apocalyptic ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 Zabriskie Point, except with a human body exploding from numerous camera angles instead of a piece of architecture.

But for me, this here is the most memorable sequence of this wondrous work:




In it, the telekinetic Gillian (Amy Irving), with the help of a nurse named Hester (Carrie Snodgress), escapes from Paragon, an institute ostensibly devoted to helping people like Gillian, but which harbors people with devious, exploitative intentions of their own. Hester, by the way, is helping ex-CIA agent Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) find his telekinetic son Robin (Andrew Stevens), declared dead by the U.S. government but in fact very much alive at the hands of the villainous Childress (John Cassavetes). Oh, and Hester and Peter are carrying on a love affair.

As far as backstory goes, I think that's all you need to at least halfway appreciate the brilliance of this particular sequence, as De Palma directs it.

The first thing you'll probably notice is the fact that the majority of this scene is in slow motion. Simple enough. But then, listen to the non-diegetic music that initially underscores the moment of Gillian's escape: John Williams's score literally seems to take flight the moment she breaks free from her captivity...

...and Richard H. Kline's slow-motion cinematography draws out this moment of (tenuous) triumph.

But then, cut to a shot of two policemen driving in Gillian's direction...

...and the music suddenly darkens—and soon, so does the chain of events.

Peter, hiding out in a taxicab...

...shoots the driver of the car in question...

...but it's not enough to stop the car from colliding into, and killing, Hester.

De Palma doesn't shy away from showing the senseless brutality of her death; most importantly, though, he doesn't shy away from showing both Peter's and Gillian's devastated reactions.

The horror is especially potent in Gillian's case: She has struggled to keep her telekinetic powers from going out of control, and yet, in a moment like this, her best efforts may not even matter. Gillian still seems to attract danger and death wherever she goes, whether her telekinetic ability is the direct cause of it or not.

By infusing the moment with such weight, De Palma adds another layer of emotional complexity to the moment Peter rescues Gillian from the clutches of another officer by shooting him three times in the chest.

And in this context, boy, you sure can feel each shot as if they were hitting your own chest!

It's this bold mixture of serious moral weight and operatic grandeur that lifts this sequence from merely impressive to utterly sublime. But this isn't an isolated moment of genius; The Fury is chock full of them, in a film that spans a broad range of genres—from action scenes and suspense setpieces to scenes of intimate familial drama and throwaway comedy—and a wide variety of emotions while somehow managing to avoid incoherence. (Bong Joon-ho could sure learn a lot from De Palma in that regard.) De Palma—more so than in his previous film Carrie (1976)—creates a world in the film, but not just a visual one: He practically evokes a whole emotional universe, one keyed intensely into the broiling anxieties of its telekinetic pubescent characters, Gillian and Robin.

The Fury is on DVD. If you haven't seen it yet, get to it. Now! You're missing out on delirious, boundary-pushing cinema at or very near its highest form. Yes, I truly think it's that awesome.