LABIRENT (2011)

Thanks to Netflix, Americans have readier access to a more complete range of films from around the world than they ever had before. That means not just art-house or cult/exploitation fare, but middle of the road stuff that represents each country's popular cinema. Labirent, for instance, is a Turkish counterterrorism thriller written and directed by Tolga Örnek, and in many ways it's like counterterror thrillers you might see anywhere. Adorned with 24-style split-screen effects, the film shows the complicated hunt for an Islamist terror cell (with some roots in Germany) carrying out suicide attacks in Turkey. What's different about it is a critical but not quite hostile attitude toward the west, here represented by a British spy (Martin Turner) who collaborates with the Turkish heroes but clearly serves his own country's agenda, even when it compromises the Turkish operation. What comes through is Turkish resentment of the western attitude, probably portrayed here accurately, that doesn't really trust the Turks to keep their own house, much less the region, in order. After all, this is the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist of sorts in his own right with alleged authoritarian tendencies. Labirent, however, doesn't appear to represent Erdogan's point of view.

Örnek made his name in part with an admiring documentary film about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who abolished the Islamic Caliphate and founded the secular Turkish republic. A picture of Ataturk is conspicuous in this film's anti-terror headquarters, and perhaps even more conspicuous, if not scandalous in the eyes of culturally conservative Turks, is the prominent heroic role of Reyhan (Meltem Cumbul), a female anti-terror operative who serves as the film's second lead after its more tragic male hero Fikret (Timuçin Esen, who speaks fluent English in scenes with Turner). Reyhan is a generic international superwoman, and I say that with admiration. Captured by the terrorists, she's put to the torture, punched repeatedly in the face, subjected to long electrical shocks, and made to watch a friend executed in front of her. Apparently beaten unconscious, she's only playing possum, waiting for just the right moment to untie herself and beat her torturer to death. For a fleeting, almost fatal moment she comes face to face with her antithesis -- a girl terrorist wearing traditional headcovering and wielding a gun, but in the next moment Reyhan's buddies come to the rescue.

One moment Reyhan is down (above), the next she's up and the other guy's down.

Labirent is a little too self-consciously dour and tragic to be that much fun most of the time, and like many a counterterror thriller it grows repetitive portraying terrorists out on walks being stalked by strolling antiterror agents. It has just enough local flavor and attitude to make it not quite as generic as it could be, but fans of the genre from around the world probably could sit through this without finding anything really alien about it. I'm still not sure if that's a virtue or not.

Z (1969)

There were political thrillers before -- I described the 1935 trifle Secret Bride as one, while a more notable American example would be 1963's Seven Days in May, but Costa-Gavras's international hit gives us the political thriller in recognizably modern form. Based on Greek politics and a Greek novel based on actual events, the Greek director filmed his adaptation with a mostly French cast on Algerian locations, setting the action in some unspecified country with a monarch and parliament. By doing that he guaranteed his movie a certain timelessness that makes it as immediate an experience as ever, well after its original political relevance has faded from memory.

Z is a two-part movie, its first act building up to a speech by a apparently pacifist, presumably leftist politician (real-life lefty Yves Montand), as organizers scramble to relocate the event amid fears of violence from right-wing goons. The buildup is intercut with the misadventures of two lumpen losers, Yago (Renato Salvatori) and Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi) apparently intent on mischief in Yago's kamikaze, his Japanese three-wheeled mini-truck. The storylines converge after Montand's speech, and after he stares down a goon who seems set on slugging him. As Montand crosses the street to confront the authorities, Yago barrels through and Vago smacks Montand over the head with a truncheon. Before you can fully register what's happened, Costa-Gavras segues instantly into a breathless action sequence as one of Montand's allies leaps into the bed of the kamikaze to fight Vago. As Mikis Theodorakis's perfectly thrilleristic percussion sets the rhythm the kamikaze careens through the streets while Vago tries to smash his new enemy's skull against the sides of parked cars. The man manages to toss Vago into the street and tries to smash his way into the cab before quick braking throws him off. A crowd appears before Yago can finish him.

 

Yves Montand is the martyr.

 

 

Marcel Bozzuffi is the assassin.

 

 

Renato Salvatori is the driver.

We finally get our breather during the deathwatch as surgeons struggle against heavy odds to save Montand's life. Once he dies and Irene Papas gets her big scenes as the new widow, and after we see the title invoked by a pro-Montand crowd painting the letter Z in a parking lot, Jean-Louis Trintignant (returning soon and touted for an Oscar in Michael Haneke's Amour) takes over the story as the magistrate assigned to investigate Montand's death. At this point the film becomes a classic procedural as Trintignant picks up the trail of Yago and Vago, linking them to a right-wing goon squad (they don't really rise to the level of a paramilitary organization) called CROC (the acronym translates as Christian Royalists Against Communism). He has a brilliant scene with Bozzuffi, himself brilliant as a comical yet menacing thug, as the magistrate red-baits Vago into declaring his and Yago's membership in CROC as Vago's lawyer looks on in disgust. Along the way, the magistrate has to deal with officials who want either to cover up the truth or simply have the case go away, pressing Trintignant to determine that Yago was a drunk driver who simply blundered into Montand's path and hit him with the kamikaze -- Costa-Gavras films alternate-reality scenes illustrating this theory -- despite the forensic evidence of a shattering blow to the top of the victim's skull. At the same time, conspirators scramble to eliminate witnesses, failing most dramatically during one tensely car-vs.-foot chase.

 

Jean-Louis Trintignant is the magistrate

 

 

Marcel Bozzuffi is the useful idiot.

 

 

Pieds ne me manquent maintenant!

Finally, Trintignant manages to implicate numerous generals in a conspiracy using CROC to eliminate a political enemy -- but this apparent victory for justice only delays the inevitable, as an epilogue explains that the military would shortly take over this supposedly fictional country and crush civil liberties, banning (among many, many other things -- including the music of Mikis Theodorakis) the letter Z, which in Greek serves as shorthand for "he lives."

Modern political thrillers come in two modes: paranoid and procedural. While the conspiratorial element in Z suggests that it might be a bit of both, the decentered all-star nature of the production and the investigatory emphasis of the second half put it firmly in the procedural camp.  In a year when Alfred Hitchcock bungled the genre with his own adaptation of a novel, Topaz, Costa-Gavras managed a more successfully Hitchcockian picture, succeeding equally in building and sustaining suspense and in filming exciting action. But in its lack of a single protagonist who carries through the whole picture Z seems less Hitchcockian than a precursor of modern political thrillers like Syriana where no one character dominates the entire story. That gives it more of a quasi-documentary flavor compared to the more paranoid films that focus on the ordeal of one person. Z's procedural format probably makes it more palatable for those who might object to the filmmakers' politics if they knew about them, since Trintignant is less concerned with political struggle than with solving a crime. In its own time, Z may have been a rallying point for fashionably leftist moviegoers, but by now its politics are practically irrelevant and it can be appreciated simply as a great, groundbreaking genre film.

On the Big Screen: ARGO (2012)

After three films Hollywood seems ready to proclaim Ben Affleck the next Clint Eastwood, the latest star to show true career-worthy talent as a director. Comparisons with Eastwood seem apt because Affleck is getting praise for an unpretentious, meat-and-potatoes narrative style in the classical tradition. I missed his two previous film but the historical subject matter of Argo attracted me. The film recounts the stranger-than-fiction story of how a CIA agent smuggled six fugitive Americans out of Iran at the height of the Hostage Crisis by posing as a movie producer scouting the country for locations. As the publicity emphasizes, Tony Mendez (Affleck) worked with known Hollywood talent, most notably Oscar-winning Planet of the Apes makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who had collaborated with CIA in the past. Mendez and Chambers realize that they first have to convince Hollywood that they intend to make a movie before the Iranians will believe them. With help from a crusty old producer (Alan Arkin) they craft an elaborate pre-production publicity campaign, including a public read-through of a script by actors in fantastic costumes. In early 1980 Iran is still in the early throes of revolution, but the country still wants to do business with foreigners, so Mendez can get his foot in the door. He somehow bamboozles the Iranians into believing that he has a six-person production team following him, but those six will actually be the Americans hiding in the Canadian embassy, whom he must rapidly train for their new roles. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Guard is close to realizing that they're short six Americans at the captured embassy, while the skeptical Americans are poised to shut down the Argo operation at any moment....

From what I've read, part of what made the actual Argo operation stranger than fiction was how easy it was. It was too easy for fiction, it seems, since Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio do everything in their power to turn the story into a race-against-time thriller. The proverbial clock is set ticking right at the start when a mob storms the American embassy. Diplomats shred documents identifying embassy personnel, but the Revolutionary Guard sets children to work carefully pasting pages together so that it'll only be a matter of time before the Iranians realize that six people got away. So of course the kids finally piece together a picture of one of the fugitives just as Mendez is herding them onto a Swissair flight, and just after the Iranians acquire reference photos of Mendez's production team from their visit to the Tehran bazaar. The timing is just too neat, too conveniently suspenseful, and Argo's efforts to juice up the story only make everything seem less plausible. By the time a Revolutionary Guard goon is placing a call to Mendez's alleged Hollywood office while Chambers is held up by a film shoot from returning from his lunch break to answer the phone and "verify" the existence of Mendez's production company, the Argo viewer is either uncritically captivated by it all, or he is grumbling, "Oh, give me a break!" The overdramatization of events undermines the climax by making it too climactic. Since the Iranians in this account actually realize that fugitive Americans are on that plane, they send jeeps and cop cars after the jet in a futile (but impressively shot) attempt to stop its takeoff. But if the Iranians knew then what was going on, and felt so strongly about Americans trying to escape, why didn't they send some fighters up to force the plane to land? They can't because we know the Americans made it home; the script can't change that.

But if Argo errs in overdramatizing some parts of the story, it may have been too reticent about fictionalizing other parts. One of the big selling points of the film was the idea of using Hollywood tactics against the Iranians, and that makes it disappointing to see the Goodman and Arkin characters relegated to the sidelines as worried cheerleaders once Affleck is off to Iran. If the film is going to deviate from what actually happened to any extent, why not go broad and entertain us with the oldschool Hollywood hucksters going head-to-head with gun-toting religious fanatics? But Argo ultimately takes itself too seriously as a life-and-death historical drama to be comfortable with the inherent humor of the Argo conspiracy. The uncertainty of tone comes through most clearly in a montage crosscutting between the in-costume read-through in Hollywood and a mock execution of American hostages at the embassy in Tehran. There's an irrepressible absurdity in the juxtaposition, but Affleck tries to smother it by having composer Alexander Desplat score the scene with lugubrious, lamenting music, foregrounding the agony of the hostages rather than the heroic ridiculousness of the Argo reading. When Affleck goes wrong, it's nearly always when he tries to humanize his characters with moments of feeling and sharing. None of it does much to make the fugitive Americans interesting characters. Affleck treats it as a big deal when the fugitive most skeptical toward the scheme and scared of exposure and execution proves the most adept and enthusiastic deceiver at the airport, but it only comes across as another arbitrary plot twist.

Affleck does a good job evoking 1980 with everything from hairstyles to Star Wars toys to the authentic period Warner Bros. logo, but it would go too far to say that he successfully imitated Seventies thrillers -- too many of those turn out badly for this happy-ending true story to fit the paradigm. As an actor Affleck is solid if not stolid as a stalwart agent, but as a director he can't make the scenes with Mendez's family seem more than obligatory yet superfluous.  Apart from Desplat's limpid score the film has an interesting soundscape dominated by the authoritative voices of the TV anchormen of yore. Affleck has a good pictorial instinct but his pacing is transparently mechanical and risks awakening viewers to awareness of being manipulated. Yet I heard people in the multiplex theater with me responding just as Affleck would want, so at least he knows how to push the right buttons -- which is more than might be said for many more experienced directors. But let's not rush to label Argo a masterpiece. It's no more and no less than an entertaining journeyman entertainment with more than the average political conscious and a touch of political correctness (taking pains to note anti-Iranian violence in the U.S.) as well. It's too soon to say that Affleck has fulfilled the promise he'd already shown as a director, but despite its faults Argo proves that the promise is still there.

COLD EYES OF FEAR (1971)

I'm trying to get into a Halloween mood, but this wasn't a very good start. I launched Enzo G. Castellari's Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (the English title is a literal translation) expecting something like a giallo, but the closest we get to that is an opening gag that seems to give us what we're looking for -- a scantily clad woman menaced by a man with a knife -- only to pull back and reveal one of those morbid cabaret shows that Europeans were fond of in those days.

 

Karin Schubert stars in the live giallo within the film

This is England, actually, and Cold Eyes of Fear is yet another Italian film that imagines the sceptred isle as the land of dark doings. My hunch is that we're seeing the influence of Edgar Wallace and the German films (often themselves set in England) made from his novels in these Italian movies. In many ways, Cold Eyes is an old-fashioned thriller, if not necessarily the kind Wallace wrote.

In any event, among the audience for the sex-&-violence show are young lawyer Peter Flower (Gianni Garko) and an expatriate Italian prostitute, Anna (Giovanna Ralli) who romp through Swinging London a while before heading to the home of Peter's uncle, a highly respected judge (Fernando Rey). Little do they know that an intruder has already broken in and killed the butler. Julian Mateos plays the intruder, but the dominant performance is by whoever dubbed the role into English. While the rest of the dub artists play things straight, or dull, Mateos's dubber heads straight for cartoonland, issuing the sort of Cockney accent you might hear from a drunk anglophobic American.

The intruder is only setting the stage for his partner and mastermind, who arrives disguised as a policeman, having taken the uniform from a victim sent to the house by the judge to give Flower instructions for finding certain documents. It becomes apparent quickly that the home-invaders are working at cross purposes. Quill (Mateos) is only after money, while Welt (Frank Wolff) is after different kinds of papers. As delusional flashbacks reveal, Welt was sent up the river by the judge while his accomplices got off. Ever since, he has suspected that the accomplices bribed the judge to escape justice, and he hopes to find the proof in the judge's house. At the same time, he has booby trapped the judge's office to blow up should the official pull his door open to leave. Presumably he intends to publicize whatever evidence he expects to find to show the world why the judge deserved to die.

 

The majesty of the law: Fernando Rey presides; Frank Wolff protests

 

Cold Eyes is basically a cat-and-mouse story made occasionally interesting by the contrast between a fearless, defiant Anna and the feckless weakling Flower. Take Gianni Garko out of his Sartana costume and he's a lot less formidable, but his character hardens the more he comes to believe that Welt might be right about the judge, until he's at last ready to take violent action against his tormentors. Death by JB bottle is sure to be a highlight for certain fans of Italian genre cinema. Meanwhile, there are strong insinuations that Quill is a misogynist homosexual, though it's unclear whether Welt is that kind of a partner with him. This sort of story really isn't an ideal vehicle for an action specialist like Castellari, who entertains himself with Welt's fantasies of destruction and his persecution-complex flashbacks. The film definitely becomes less linear once Welt takes center stage, as if giving in to the villain's madness, but that description may make the film sound more interesting visually than it actually is. I dug the neon-lit night scenes actually shot in London, but otherwise it's a fairly uninspired film. Not even Ennio Morricone can do much to jazz it up. It must have seemed like an old-fashioned film even at the time it came out, because there's something timelessly tired about it.

DVR Diary: VIOLENT ROAD (1958)

William Friedkin's Sorceror is the best-known American remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic road thriller The Wages of Fear, but Howard W. Koch's B-movie is the uncredited first. Don Martin didn't claim to base his story, nor Richard H. Landau his screenplay, on the French film from a few years earlier, but come on, people. A disparate group of drifters and losers haul explosive cargo across dangerous terrain. Please. This time it's rocket fuel, which has to move with a test base after a launch goes bad and the missile crashes into a school. If Violent Road is one part Wages of Fear, it's also part noir. The most noirish thing about it is that, unlike in Wages of Fear, the drifters and losers don't have to leave their own country to have their dangerous adventure. Noir is arguably a looking-inward after World War II closed off most of the possibilities for adventuresome exile in exotic parts. There's no going away to forget for Violent Road's protagonists. Probably the best adjusted of them is top-billed Brian Keith's hard-boiled drifter. Others include a broken-down veteran who never adjusted to civilian life, a young man hoping to redeem his alcoholic ex-football hero brother, and a rocket technician who lost his wife and daughter in the disaster. Tempers are nearly as combustible as the cargo, but Violent Road never really ignites the way a Wages knockoff should. The actors, including Dick Foran as the sarge and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as the rocket man, do what they can with their roles, but Koch (who got his start as a director collaborating with Edmond O'Brien on Shield For Murder) doesn't deliver the jolts. On the most literal level, to spoil things a bit, none of the trucks goes boom. I don't know if that's a Code-dictated copout or if Koch couldn't spring for an exploding truck. Instead, he offers perils in the form of minor rockslides -- one of the crew saves a truck by drop-kicking a boulder to change its course -- and an out-of-control school bus crossing the convoy's path. Not everyone makes it, I must admit, but when your one fatality results from chemical burns to someone's hand, you're not really operating on Wages's level of intensity. There's decent location work and stunt driving throughout, but someone unaware of Wages's influence on this film would probably feel very little sense of peril, since most of the suspense I felt came from expectations based on my awareness of the source material. No set piece in this picture comes close to the tension of the bridge scenes in either Wages or Sorceror. In fact, the Violent Road convoy never crosses a bridge with anything at stake. That may be another failure of budget or simply a failure of nerve. The first half hour of the picture seems to set up a worthy imitation of the original, but the talent runs out of gas long before the trucks reach their destination.

On the Big Screen: DRIVE (2011)

Late as I am to the party, I'm probably saying nothing new if I mention that Nicolas Winding Refn's new thriller, which has become perhaps the most divisive movie in the blogosphere this year, is very much a backward looking film. If anything, commentary to date has understated Drive's retrospective scope. Masters of the obvious note the film's debts to crime cinema of the 1980s, particularly the works of Michael Mann and Walter Hill, and Mann provides a jumping-off point to trace Refn's influences back to Jean-Pierre Melville, a fellow European. But we can go further back yet. I saw hints of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in the hero's nighttime shoreline showdown with an enemy, for instance, and that takes us back to the 1950s. Beyond that, this is a film so soaked in history that Frank Capra's grandson is one of the producers. But let's draw the line at Capracorn; Drive has none of that, though its hero is, for all intents and purposes, a John Doe. Nevertheless, the Capra family tree takes us all the way back to the silent era, and in the skeleton of its story and its aspirations to pathos, Refn's film, adapted by Hossein Amini from a James Sallis novel, is like a silent film -- like many a silent comedy, to be more precise. A nameless denizen of an underworld pines for a woman and the family life she embodies, but renounces his desires, first to secure a future for the woman and her husband and then, after that doesn't quite work out, solely for the sake of the woman and her son, before he hits the road one more (or last) time -- but not until some spectacular gags (as movie stunts are often called) take place. I don't mean to say that Drive is funny -- it's not even unintentionally so. But it's more evidence for my contention that the modern action film evolved from silent comedy (Buster Keaton's The General being the proto action film). Everyone notes that the anonymous driver, whom I'm tempted to call Scorpion for the design on his jacket, has little to say in the picture, but they trace that to Mann and Melville's brooding antiheroes. I'm just saying you can go much further back to sound the depths of Drive's influences. But to get to the meat of the matter, you might not have to go so far back in time. Refn may have tipped his hand slightly when he (or Cliff Martinez, who's credited with the soundtrack) went to the Tarantino well to score the scene where a masked Scorpion lurks outside a restaurant where Ron Perlman's gangster is partying. I feel certain that I alone in the afternoon audience recognized those lyrics as they played, and I practically marked out. Let me show you why. Take a look at the first three minutes of this clip that dmovie27 uploaded to YouTube.



Riz Ortolani wrote that tune for the late Gualtiero Jacopetti's 1971 magnum opus Goodbye Uncle Tom, a time-traveling trip to the days of slavery in all its squalid and intimate cruelty. Ortolani made a specialty of composing soaringly romantic music that served as counterpoint to cinematic brutality, the other great example of his approach being his sublime theme music for Ruggiero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. Including Ortolani on the Drive soundtrack is arguably an assertion of the actual "European" character of Refn's film, as opposed to whatever Albert Brooks's film producer-turned-gangster means when he notes contemptuously that critics had called his '80s action films "European." Like many Euro directors and composers, Jacopetti (with Franco Prosperi) and Ortolani juxtaposed soundtrack lyricism and visceral violence in a manner that remains offputting to many Americans. Likewise, some American reviewers this month have been taken aback by a sudden eruption of ultraviolence in Drive after a relatively non-violent first half. I can understand the objections to some extent because it comes as an abrupt shock, not that the story turns gory, but that Ryan Gosling's driver proves so capable of extreme brutality. It's not that he's too pretty or too bland to be a killer, but that he appeared to have been established as not a killer, just a driver. Had he been shown as a man of violence from the beginning -- had he played a hitman rather than a driver, and had the ultraviolence been a constant rather than a sudden change in the picture -- the violence wouldn't have the jarring and in some cases deal-breaking effect it's had so far. But there seems to be a point to the violence arriving late and suddenly. The scorpion on Gosling's jacket tells part of the story. He alludes to the fable of the scorpion and the frog at one point, but the script assumes our knowledge of the tale, which in moviedom is most identified with Orson Welles. In the fable, the scorpion invites the frog to ride across a stream on his back, despite the frog's fear that the scorpion will sting him. In midstream the scorpion does sting him, which seals his own fate as well. As the frog protests and they both sink, the scorpion reminds him that stinging is simply his nature. In Drive, the driver's (or Scorpion's) nature is violent, even if he could hope otherwise and dream of Hollywood stuntwork, stock car racing, or the love of a good woman. Violence marks the nameless man as the permanent outsider who can never have a settled life, just as it often marked the silent clown who could never avoid trouble with the cops or miss an opportunity to wreck stuff.  The synthesis of aspiration and disillusion is pathos, and pathos is one thing Drive has that can't be traced to the Eighties.

For Refn, as for his European (usually Italian) forebears, extreme violence is a kind of reality principle that subverts the idealistic mood of their films' upbeat, romantic music. A perverse kind of pathos evolves, for instance, when Ortolani uses a more insistent, rocking instrumental of his Uncle Tom theme to score a horrific rape scene. Drive's violence serves the same disillusioning yet deliberately pathetic purpose. We ought to note that the violence here isn't as extreme or blatant as it could be. When Scorpion stomps someone's face in, we get one horrifically suggestive shot when bone appears to cave in, but Refn doesn't keep his eye on the destruction the way Gaspar Noe does when a man's face is staved in with a fire extinguisher in Irreversible. There are other moments when Refn turns or cuts away from the worst we could see. That may have been to avoid an NC-17 rating, but it also tells us that the violence isn't really an end unto itself. It simply signifies the irreconcilability of Scorpion's world with the world he longs to join. Drive isn't a gore film, but a thriller, and it works well as that. Refn (who supposedly doesn't know how to drive himself) stages a number of nice old-school car chases as well as tense moments of pure waiting and anticipation. It has a couple of charismatic yet convincing villains in Perlman (whose buffoonish brute made me think of a Will Farrell assembled from dead bodies) and the stunt-cast Albert Brooks, who continues an honorable tradition of comics-turned-heels that recognizes an inherent viciousness in comedy. As the object of Scorpion's adoration, Carey Mulligan may as well be Edna Purviance, but that's not a rip on the actress; it's just the nature of her role. As for Ryan Gosling, I'm not sure yet whether I really liked his performance or not. He doesn't really look the part, though I'm hard pressed to tell you what Scorpion should have looked like. I guess I can't shake a feeling that Gosling's benign-bordering-on-bland visage is part of a cheat on the film's part, a concealment of its true nature -- but on the other hand, Gosling's character is practicing a kind of self-deception when he dreams of domesticity and fatherhood, though we may not realize this as soon as we should. On some level he's a cypher, on another a pathetic striver, almost Keatonesque in his taciturnity. He's at his most chilling when he covers his already-sort-of masklike face with an actual mask, the bald movie-star mold (Vin Diesel?) he wears when stunt-driving, to become a Michael Meyers-like stalker -- and maybe that scene, in which he drives his enemy into the sea like an implacable figure from some other fable, shows us the driver's true self. That scene is eerily evocative and one of the best in a picture that has a multitude of powerful moments but may not quite add up to the sum of its parts. Few films released this year have been as potently evocative as this one, though, and my experience proves that you don't have to be enamored of Eighties cinema or Eighties culture to enjoy Drive.

LES FELINS (Joy House, 1964)

Blame the hard-boiled author Day Keene for the American title of Rene Clement's proto-erotic thriller: that's what he called the book it's based on. It pretty convincingly fails to convey the sinister mood of the piece; despite the hothouse hype M-G-M applied to selling the picture, that title can't help but make you expect something happy, or perhaps something musical. And with Lalo Schifrin composing the score it is a pretty musical picture, but that telltale harpsichord should tell all but the most obtuse that something decadent is going on here.

Alain Delon plays Marc, a crook caught sleeping with the wrong woman, the property of a big man in the Mob. Taken out to the Mediterranean coast of France to be whacked, Marc manages to escape by commandeering a car and driving it over a cliff, then hopping across some railroad tracks just before a train roars by. Ragged and bruised, he hitchhikes into the nearest city and hides among the homeless in a mission shelter. Meals are provided by a glamorous pair of American women: Barbara (Lola Albright), a widow who owns a mysterious mansion, and her cousin Melinda (Jane Fonda). They just happen to be looking for a new chauffeur, too, ideally a guy who looks good in a Kato uniform.

Delon: from frying pan to fire

It's a good deal for Marc since it keeps him out of town, where the mobsters are still looking for him. He doesn't want to stay for long, though; once he earns enough money he wants to reunite with the girlfriend with whom he started all the trouble. That doesn't fit with Barbara's plans or Melinda's -- it develops that they are not the same. Both women want to keep Marc on the estate, but Melinda's motivated by possessive lust, while Barbara has an ulterior motive. It's up to Marc to figure that out -- it may have to do with the secret wing of the "neo-gothic" mansion -- before it's too late for him. That means playing the women against each other if necessary, with sex as a weapon, but Marc is not the only player on the premises, and his isn't the only game. It may have been too late for him the moment he took the job....

Jane Fonda as Melinda

Lola Albright as Barbara

"Neo-gothic" is right, right down to the gimmick of the secret room and its possible occupant. It's only fitting, too, since film noir is arguably crime cinema with a gothic tinge, while Clement's film of Keene's story is a "neo-gothic" way station from noir to something else, something closer to the "swinging gothic" style of the giallo. It puts Delon in an extreme noir situation, caught between two rival femmes fatales, on top of an ultimately familiar noir plot. It ends up feeling like a cross between His Kind of Woman and The Beguiled, and in cocky gigolo mode Delon makes the perfect mark for the story, confident of his manly power to master the situation while someone is almost always a step ahead of him. As the femmes (the felins tag extends to Delon's character, described as a "wildcat"), Albright (best known as Peter Gunn's love interest) and Fonda control the tension between them quite nicely, letting it build gradually as you wonder which will backstab the other first. Also worthy of note is Sorrell "Boss Hogg" Brooke as a picturesque mobster shutterbug stalking Delon.

The prisoner of "Joy House"

Les Felins is slick and sleek throughout, thanks to Schifrin's moody music and Henri Decae's sharp cinematography. Clement keeps things moving with the occasional burst of action while slowly building the tension in the main triangle. There's nothing profound here but it'll keep you entertained and perhaps a little chilled by the end. I recommend it most for fans of Fonda and Delon and Euro-thriller enthusiasts in general.



Here's a French "Les Felins" trailer with English subtitles, uploaded to YouTube by icsprks.

In Brief: GIALLO (2009)

Dario Argento has disavowed his latest film and star Adrien Brody is suing its producers. I can't blame either man, but I don't think they're blameless, either. While I've never really been a fan of Argento's -- I find Suspiria overrated and I walked out of Opera in the director's presence, though I recently saw The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and liked it -- I still expected something auteurial or idiosyncratic from him, especially in a film named after the genre he's credited with inventing or perfecting. It's as if Sergio Leone had made a film called Spaghetti Western, or John Ford just plain Western. But there's an all-too-literal subject to which the title refers; a BTK-style menace dubbed "Yellow" by one of his victims because of his jaundiced appearance. He's a villain for torture porn, and the last sort you might expect in a giallo homage. He's almost something out of a Tod Browning film, tormented as a child for his color and grown into an ugly man. Insults are his weakness, in fact; he has a hard time getting into his groove with a victim when she recklessly (I'd say suicidally without benefit of hindsight) insults his looks. Without a proper giallo killer the homage aspect of the project doesn't extend much beyond some handsome shots of typical genre milieux: a fashion show and an opera, for instance. But Argento doesn't invest any of his directorial personality into these actualities, nor in any other part of the film from what I could tell. Even the gore is relatively minimal. Worse yet, while Argento's films are noted for their music, from the likes of Morricone, Goblin, etc., Giallo's score is so utterly generic you'd be excused for thinking it was library music. Worst of all, the story is simply dull when it isn't actively stupid, and the acting is dull (Brody) when it isn't obnoxiously shrill (nearly everyone else). The star sleepwalks through his role as an Italian-American police detective with a sensitivity to serial killers because as a child he'd seen his mother murdered and as a teen murdered the murderer. He was found red-handed by a policeman who apparently became his mentor, but did not make much of a detective of him. Fortunately, clues tumble into his lap. A corpse dumped on the street proves to be not quite dead, living long enough to call her killer Yellow, and it's up to our hero's hectoring tagalong (Emmanuelle Seigner), the sister of the latest kidnap victim, to deduce that Yellow might mean jaundiced and hence a hepatitis patient. Once they realize that the suspect must depend on prescription drugs, the movie can only keep itself going by literally throwing obstacles in Brody's path. The only reason he doesn't catch the killer in a hospital, having shown up serendipitously just as he's filling his prescription, is that he trips over a janitor's mop and bucket. It's that kind of film, i.e. lousy. No one had a heart in it. It's an insult to its own title, and to Argento's own legacy.

On the Big Screen: INCEPTION (2010)

Here's a James Bond film for the age of "millennial unreality," a quality only enhanced for Christopher Nolan's new picture by its appearance in the same year as Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, another film featuring a fraught, partially repressed relationship between a character played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his wife and kids. Inception has it both ways, sending its characters around the real world and to still more exotic locales in their dreamscapes. It can't quite have it both ways, however, when Nolan must choose between making a dream film and a thriller. This is one movie that can't be accused of resorting to "dream logic." Its dreams are quite undreamlike in many ways because they must conform to the requirements of the thriller genre. Thrillers operate by strict rules that add up to a logic of their own: time limits, specific physical problems to solve, and so forth. For Inception to work, we have to accept that dreams work the way Christopher Nolan says they do, and you could argue that the artificial dreams imposed on "extraction" targets by DiCaprio's crew could well work exactly that way. As a thriller, the film works fairly well, though the crosscutting between several simultaneous dream states grows absurd eventually. The constant cutting back to a van's protracted plunge into a river is begging to be parodied, and it left me wondering why Nolan never felt it necessary to include in the crosscutting an occasional check on the actual people dozing away on their trans-Pacific flight. The crosscutting is dazzling at first but once the pattern was set the mind tends to wander a little.

There are plenty of powerful, massive images in Inception, as you'd expect. Nolan's visual imagination is weighed down less by his generic commitment to the thriller than by two cliched character conceptions. One is our old nemesis, the Audience Identification Character who is introduced into a fantastic environment so that everything can be explained to her, and us. In Inception this is the insufferable, meaningfully-named Ariadne (Ellen Page), and this is the sort of film in which no one's ever going to call her Ari. She's our AIC for expository purposes only, because otherwise she's a genius (which is why she's recruited in the first place) and also insufferably wise. She manages to suss out all the secrets DiCaprio's Cobb is keeping, and ends up lecturing him constantly on the right choices he needs to make. The other cliche is Cobb himself with all his guilty secrets. He starts out separated from his children and exiled from America, and we're given strictly rationed bits of explanation for these facts, and for why his wife (Marion Cotillard) constantly intrudes on his invented or shared dreams to sabotage his work. Cobb's personal issues overshadow the dream-espionage plot to the point that the latter becomes a Macguffin, a problem exacerbated by Nolan's teasing revelation of the rules of extraction and inception. A situation we'd been shown was no problem before (what happens when you die in a dream) suddenly becomes a big one when another element is added, but we don't know that when the element is added, only when the problem arises. You can have suspense either way, but the option Nolan chooses feels cheaper somehow.

For some viewers, the inception-plot will matter less than the question of what was "real" and what was dream. Some people will leave wondering whether the ending is real or dream. That'll be the fun of it for them, but I found myself not really caring. I don't say this to knock Inception; while a bit overlong it still worked as a thriller for the most part. But as far as I'm concerned Nolan's new film is not an advance on The Prestige or The Dark Knight. It felt cliched in ways those films weren't, and the Batman film in particular had a real tragic power missing amidst the new film's sturm und drang. Inception is a fun film with many amazing visuals that are almost worth the admission price in their own right, but Nolan is a talented enough director to have done better already.

FLAMMEN & CITRONEN (2008)

If murder is just killing without a license, as Arthur Wilson says, that begs the question of the authority to license killing. In Ole Christian Madsen's film, the protagonists -- red-haired "Flame" (Thure Lindhardt) and sweaty "Citron" (Mads Mikkelsen) get their license from the Danish underground resistance to the Nazi occupation, and their boss, Aksel Winther gets his from London. With the pretense of a license come rules: the team can kill Danish collaborators, but not the German occupiers themselves. But one day Winther changes the rules and orders our heroes to kill three Germans, including a woman. Here Flammen draws the line; his personal code won't let him kill women. Citronen is willing but less expert; he wounds the woman in the arm but can't follow through. Flammen has to go in and finish her, but he has to turn her head away so he doesn't have to look at her face.

If it's open season on Germans, Flammen and Citronen would like to whack Hoffmann, the local Gestapo commander, but Winther places him off-limits. Meanwhile, one of the three condemned Germans persuades Flammen to spare him by declaring himself a member of the German resistance to Hitler. Winther calls Flammen a dupe and sends him back to do the job right. What is the truth? Does it matter? Is there a logic or a strategy to Winther's inconsistency, or are the targets chosen on an arbitrary basis? Or are they chosen with an ulterior motive? As they discover greater cause to question Winther's orders, Flammen and Citronen approach the moment when they'll authorize themselves to kill Hoffman or whomever their own sense of the national interest dictates. They begin to see themselves above the law in other ways. Citronen has a hard time supporting his wife and daughter as a resistance assassin. Eventually he decides to rob a collaborating grocer (though he refuses to take money from the register) so he can put food on the table and give his daughter presents. When he delivers the goods, his wife confesses to an affair. That's the sort of film this is. It develops an almost oppressive momentum; if anything bad can happen to our heroes, or if something can further tilt their moral balance, it will. Flammen falls in love with a woman who acts as a courier for Winther. Will she be a spy for the Germans? You'll at least be strongly invited to think so.

This movie, based on actual resistance fighters, grows in the shadow of one film in particular: Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969), a film condemned in its time for telling a resistance story in the manner of a gangster film but rediscovered to universal acclaim in the new millennium. Melville's film is a grim, suspenseful affair in his characteristic manner. Madsen can't match Melville as a thriller, but he can try to top the grimness and place more emphasis on the ethical dilemmas confronting irregular killers in wartime. This he does quite effectively, if he does also go on too long, nearly to the point of overkill.

What Madsen does most effectively is question the entire purpose or relevance of his heroes' exploits. He duly notes the postwar honors conferred upon the real men, but the film itself leaves you wondering what Flammen and Citronen actually accomplished. The director expresses this most forcefully when he portrays the Copenhagen uprising of late June 1944. For once it looks like actual warfare on screen, even if it's only street fighting, but the thing you really notice is how Flammen strolls through the action without lifting a finger to help his fellow Danes. He's under orders to do nothing until he gets further orders from London via Winther. This is what World War II is supposed to be: people fighting Germans. But it's the sort of showdown Winther has been at pains to avoid. If Winther and Flammen and Citronen seem to be fighting their own private war at times, I'm sure that impression was intentional. In our age of terrorism, privatized warfare and the idealized ruthlessness of special ops, this side of the "good war" seems more relevant than ever. Leaving aside temporary relevance, Flammen & Citronen is worth seeing for anyone interested in the ongoing cinematic exploration of the enigma of killing.

The English-subtitlted trailer from IFC Films was uploaded to YouTube by rando14.

On the Big Screen: THE GHOST WRITER (2010)

When a woman hands a man the confidential manuscript of a memoir and tells him he has a limited time to read it, I don't need to see the white pages turn into a snowy landscape to know that the spirit of Orson Welles is in the room. Roman Polanski's new film is Wellesian in theme if not in style or structure. If it hints at Citizen Kane at some points, it points to Mr. Arkadin in others. One can only imagine what Welles might make of the situation Polanski has adapted from Robert Harris's novel, in collaboration with the author. The title character is an unnamed writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to polish the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the politician's original collaborator dies. The previous ghost writer got separated from his car and the ferry that bore it under circumstances that grow increasingly suspicious, while the pressure on the present ghost to finish the book grows more urgent as his subject faces an International Criminal Court indictment for war crimes. Adam Lang (meant as a stand-in for Tony Blair, though Brosnan attempts no imitation) is accused of placing four alleged terrorists into the hands of CIA torturers. Is there a connection between his legal jeopardy and the death of his previous ghost writer? Does the project put the present writer in jeopardy? It wouldn't be much of a thriller otherwise.

McGregor's character is a kind of doppelganger for Lang and may be set up to die for Lang's sins if he isn't careful. As he comes to question the official version of his predecessor's demise, he stumbles across some supplemental research the first writer had undertaken on Lang's rise to power. As he traces the first ghost's fatal steps, the new ghost puts himself in danger of ending up in the same place, setting up some nicely handled set pieces of pursuit and escape. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a potentially dangerous relationship with Lang's wife (Olivia Williams), who's jealous of hubby's closeness with his chief assistant (Kim Cattrall). All of this is handled very well by the sure-handed director. The film betrays nothing of the constrained circumstances of its final assembly, Polanski having edited it in jail while extradition to America for an extended stay seemed likely. The acting is good all around, possibly excepting Brosnan. He doesn't strike me as the sort of wonky politician I expected Blair or a fictional counterpart to be, but in his defense the movie politician is supposed to be less than meets the eye; that's part of the plot. Polanski gets the most from limited use of such American character actors as Timothy Hutton, Jim Belushi and the mighty Eli Wallach. Someday, at the end of the world, Wallach and Ernest Borgnine will face each other as the last men standing, and while Wallach looks a little frail here I wouldn't count him out.

The Ghost Writer is an effective, entertaining film that I readily recommend, but it left me wondering whether the conspiracy thriller genre is going obsolete. Thrillers of this kind work by withholding and gradually revealing information in a process that doesn't seem realistic in the current information age. Without spoiling anything, let me note that The Ghost Writer saves a major piece of circumstantial evidence for its final revelation. That revelation is meant to have you suddenly think differently about a major character. In retrospect, however, you sense that the writers had manipulated you into an artificial presumption of innocence. Given the internet research our hero undertakes to discover the sinister ties linking other characters, it seems unlikely, given that final revelation of a detail that seems to have been public knowledge, that the ghost would not have stumbled onto something online that at least suggested the association that so floors him later. When you consider that one tidbit he learns from a single website is accepted by an important person as decisive proof of a monstrous, decades-long conspiracy to manipulate British politics, his failure to find anything to warn him of a more dangerous truth seems even more unlikely. Movies are simply falling behind the ability of the conspiratorial imagination to draw inferences. As a result, it was in its final minutes when The Ghost Writer suddenly seemed most old fashioned -- and its extra revelation of a hokey secret code didn't help. But overall, Polanski's film is old-fashioned in good ways, and many people may not feel the same way about the ending as I did. Maybe I'm just too conspiracy-minded -- but that's just what they'd like you to believe....

TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS (1969)

This is going to be more of a photo essay than a review because the appeal of the first film in Jesus Franco's "Red Lips" series (also known in some quarters as Sadisterotica) is primarily visual and, to be frank, the plot doesn't bear much analysis. Here's the situation: "Red Lips" is the sobriquet of a notorious masked cat burglar of the kind that infested 20th century Europe, but for our purposes denotes a two-woman team who can be thieves, spies or private detectives, depending on who pays them. In an enlightening interview on the Blue Underground DVD, Franco explains that his notion was to cross Abbott & Costello with the Sixties comedy-thriller genre, with Bud and Lou reimagined as battling Euro-babes.

In uniform.

Out of uniform.

Sophisticated voice scrambling techniques.

If looks could kill she wouldn't need that gun, though actress Rosanna Yanni could have used such a weapon to shoot her way out of White Comanche a year earlier.

Diana the redhead (Janine Reynaud) is the bossy Bud type and the brains of the group, while Janine the blond (Rosanna Yanni) is proud of her stupidity because that's what men like. But it doesn't take much to be the brains of this outfit. In the English dub Diana is saddled with a horsey sort of voice, somewhere between Carol Burnett and Miss Jane Hathaway, that undercuts her sex appeal, while both voice actresses are stuck with tin-eared English dialogue to read. For instance: the Red Lips have just received a ticking bouquet of flowers from a pretend admirer. After running around with the bomb nearly as long as Adam West did in the Batman movie, they finally dump it into their pool just in time for it to explode and douse them with a spout of water. Their response: "Such a dirty deal!" But then they have to dive into the pool to dodge a drive-by, so at least the dialogue doesn't linger in your mind. It isn't meant to.

For the sake of arguments, the story has the Red Lips stealing a painting from one Napoleon Boulevard (Franco at his most Lorre-ish, protesting that "I don't like it any more than you do."), the subject of which resembles a missing woman whose husband is willing to pay amply to recover her. Negotiating by raiding his house in the middle of the night, RL arranges to be paid $50,000 for the missing girl's delivery, dead or alive. As Diana theorizes a link between the violent artwork and a wave of disappearing women, she sends a skeptical Janine to find out more about the elusive artist, Ernst Tiller.

We already know Tiller's technique: apparently a student of the mad painter from The House With Laughing Windows, he has women kidnapped and tortured by his "good friend" Morpho to incite his muse. It will take Janine time to learn this once she overcomes her natural laziness, prodded by Diana's promise that their take will make a trip to Vegas and a tryst with "Frankie" and "Dino" possible. There will be interviews with elderly lecherous gallery curators who are killed by blow darts, trips to a trippy nightclub where Diana is hit on by an ardent blond, and other adventures that need not detain us now.

Unusual reticence for Franco: Diana doesn't take up the blond's proposition. A few years later, who knows?

Janine is Two Undercover Angels incarnate: dumb as a bag of hammers but oddly attractive to look at. This film finds Franco in a pop-art phrase that gives us bold, colorful images with an almost instinctual eye for cinematography and art direction. He deals in iconography more than polished composition, the screen reflecting his own engagement with provocative situations and symbols. Concepts and characters recur in his films: Morpho, for instance, will reappear in other plots and contexts despite his apparent demise here. The image of the hairy minion has a power over Franco, as if the equivalent for young Jess of Jacinto "Paul Naschy" Molina's encounter with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or the fictional impact of Frankenstein on the little girl in Spirit of the Beehive was a viewing of Return of the Vampire. Though Morpho is all evil in the present picture, his bushy visage and dark clothes remind me of Andreas, the pitiable lycanthropic servant of Return who switches sides several times in that movie.

Of Morpho (left), his creator (in the picture, not Franco) says: "Through the science of psychiatry and the use of psychotropic [or is that psychothropic?] substances he became so, and believe me, it wasn't easy."

That's what I mean about evocative imagery and Franco's iconic use of actors. You see the same thing in the eyepatch-sporting mad painter Tiller (who also dons a fez while sojourning in Ankara) and most obviously in our miniskirted gun-toting heroines. They aren't meant to be characters in the conventional sense; their meaning is in the way they look, the clothes they wear and what they do on screen. That can still be meaningless depending on your sensibility, but for me the movie works even if the story and the acting don't. It appeals to my pseudo-nostalgia for a Swinging Europe that I never knew and may never have actually existed, that I only had hints of from the old magazines I used to collect or read at the library and the rare movies that turned up on local TV on weekend afternoons and evenings in the good old days. It's a place and a time I would've loved to visit, and films like this (and better ones, too) are as close as I'll get. Maybe you'd like to visit, too....

And here's a trailer, uploaded to YouTube by thisoydmon. I should perhaps be more critical of the dubbing, but my memory of Spirited Killer is too fresh for me to be judgmental toward anything else.