Three Films Make A Post: War. It's A Dying Business.

Nightshot (2018): This French POV horror piece directed by Hugo König concerns the misadventures of an urban exploration streamer played by Nathalie Couturier, and her camera dude when they do a nightly visit to a creepy old sanatorium and asylum with a history of dubious experiments on its patients. The film does try to stand out from the dozens of other POV sanatorium indies by taking on a one take gimmick. Which also shows an admirable willingness from the filmmakers to put extra work, given that the choreography needed to pull something like that off is considerable.

Unfortunately, the one take/one shot business doesn’t really achieve much for the film; on paper, it’s “more realistic” for what is supposed to be a live stream but in practice, there’s little here that makes much of a difference between this and other POV sanatorium movies, so things never get terribly exciting. To be fair, there are couple of pretty clever shocks, and the practical (and live) effects are certainly fun to behold.

Sleepwalk (1986): This is the tale of a woman whose life is slowly being made weirder thanks to an ancient Chinese manuscript she is translating for a dubious Chinese doctor (whose henchmen is a young Tony Todd). In tone and style, Sara Driver’s movie is a very typical piece of mid-80s New York independent filmmaking, so expect a sense of the surreal, good taste in music, and a lot of beautiful shots of dirty city streets, as well as a floating and meandering plot carried by actors – in this case it’s mostly Suzanne Fletcher doing the work – who love making strange, deadpan acting decisions.

Too Late the Hero (1970): A few years of a wonderfully idiosyncratic career after The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich returned to the men on a mission style of war movie. Where some viewers – not me, mind you - read the brutal finale of the earlier movie as pure action movie glorification of violence, really nobody will be able to interpret this war movie that way. Too emotionally brutal is Aldrich’s portrayal of a group of soldiers (including Michaela Caine, Cliff Robertson as the mandatory American, Ian Bannen and Denholm Elliott) to get confused about the film’s anti-war stance here. Apart from being honest and bitter about the way war compromises all human ethics, this is very much a meditation on fear, the concept of Cowardice, and the sometimes necessary irrationality of heroism committed by cowardly men.

It’s not a film that judges cowardice and fear like certain old-school war movies would have, but seems more interested in understanding what these words actually mean, and how different the breaking points of different men are.

In short: Man on a Swing (1974)

Lee Tucker (Cliff Robertson), the chief of police in an American small town, encounters one of the worst crimes his home has ever seen. A teenage girl has been murdered and later disposed off in a somewhat ritualistic seeming manner. Tucker – clearly a professional – starts on a methodical investigation that does not seem to be leading anywhere. Normal proceedings are very much interrupted when a man called Franklin Wills (Joel Grey) contacts the police. Factory worker by day and psychic in his free time, Wills has a strange charisma, and even stranger habits. He also seems to know details about the crime nobody but the police and the killer know about, which is of course the sort of thing Tucker is bound to notice.

Tucker begins to treat Wills like a puzzle to solve, at times using him like a genuine source, at times as a suspect, always as the sort of object that doesn’t quite fit into any category he – or anyone with a rational mindset – can completely comprehend.

On paper, Frank Perry’s Man on a Swing is a police procedural “based on true case”. The direction most often emphasises the detail-oriented elements of Tucker’s style of police work with a near documentarian eye, really focussing camera and audience eye on the way lines of investigation are arrived at and explored. Perry’s doing his best not to bore with this, though, often getting in and out of scenes with some kind of elegant or clever edit or another, never wasting his or our time on the details that have no bearing on cases or characters.

It’s only around Wills when the film seems to loosen its nearly documentary belt, music and camera work becoming much more consciously dramatic; that same contrast is mirrored in the acting styles of the film’s main characters: Cliff Robertson is all laid back and thoughtful, with small, precise gestures, where Grey is all nerve and shaking, quaking and jittering, mood-swings and tension.

These contrasts in style seem to me to be rather the point of the film, a successful if not always easy to watch attempt to portray a moment where two very different views of the world – a practical materialism and irrationalism – come into contact and onto a collision course. Throughout the film, there’s always the impression that Tucker and Wills can’t come to grips with each other because their respective toolboxes for viewing the world are simply not made to comprehend one another. So as much as Tucker tries to rationally understand Wills, and Wills tries to emotionally manipulate Tucker, they never do manage to get the other really as deeply into their grasps as they want to, not even with the film’s cold reveal at the end that suggests so many serial killer media to come.

In short: The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

Sometimes it’s still surprising how damned strange 70s revisionist westerns could become, resulting in films like Philip Kaufman’s version of the James-Younger gang myth with Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger and Robert Duvall as Jesse James, a film that really lends itself to the question where the money to make it might have come from.

Surely, even in 1972, the idea of a cinema verité inspired, sometimes magically realist, sometimes ironically naturalistic western that spends its running time demythologizing the old myths about the old west while at the same time working hard to create some all of its own must have been a hard sell to the people holding the purse strings, post-hippie-dom or not. Because it is that sort of movie, Kaufman also finds space in his film for a slapstick baseball match, various digressions to emphasise the point that the USA of the time were country of immigrants (which means a lot of what the movies have taught us the West was about is wrong), satire against the rich and powerful, the absurd, the bizarre, and the lovingly observed quotidian. Kaufman shows such a good eye for the last one, as well as for the telling historical detail (even if it’s made up) that all of Raid’s disparate elements manage to fit together, if not as a narrative (just look at the people on the IMDB complaining about the film’s plot holes, missing the point of the film we’re talking about by miles), but as a strange yet believable world the characters inhabit.

It’s a film I find much easier to watch than to describe, an artefact of its time, trying to talk about its past and its present at once, yet still finding time for human warmth, humour and a sense of place that seems stronger exactly because the place Kaufman describes can’t ever have existed in the way he and his film pretend it has, just as the other, earlier movie idea of The West never existed.

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