In short: Chandler (1971)

Embittered and depressed private detective Chandler (Warren Oates) gets back into the game when an old acquaintance working for some kind of government agency asks him to shadow the moves of one Katherine Creighton (Leslie Caron) for reasons as vague as what Chandler is actually supposed to do.

The viewer knows this is all part of a plan to bring down a highly positioned member of a large criminal organization by another member of said organization. Katherine, you see, was the lover of the former man, but has grown tired of the violence and him (one supposes, the film’s pretty vague about this as well) and has used a vaguely defined opportunity subtly provided by the latter man to flee. The whole conspiracy is built on Katherine’s ex-lover following her to the West Coast where he is supposed to be easier to kill (for reasons the film never makes clear, of course). Chandler is, we are told, meant to be a decoy, but for whom, the film never bothers to make clear.

Be that as it may, Chandler does what everyone expects of him and tries to protect Katherine from the conspirators who are repeatedly trying to kidnap her because…honestly, you got me there. I also have no clue why the bad guys are using Chandler at all.

Which, as the vagueness and illogic of this plot synopsis hopefully already has suggested, brings us right to the core problem of Paul Magwood’s Chandler: it makes no lick of sense whatsoever, and not in the way of, say, a Raymond Chandler novel, as the too clever idea of naming the hero Chandler might suggest, where the plot is only a method to move the protagonist from one interesting encounter to the next, but in that of a film made by people who hire Warren Oates to play an old school private dick moving through the early 70s and are too dense to make good use of that.

The problem isn’t just that the plot makes no sense, the script as a whole is a complete mess. The dialogue consists of one third total non sequiturs, one third of the villains gloating in mock-educated manner (in scenes which are probably supposed to fit into a typical 70s conspiratorial mind set but are in actuality stupid, tedious and slowing the film down for no reason), and one third horrible clichés presented without charm and conviction. There are more ellipses in the dialogue than in a manga from the 90s.


I suppose the film is attempting to make some clever comment on the Chandler style private eye – a product of a different decade – colliding with the 70s and existentially suffering under it. Unfortunately, nobody involved in this production seems to have had any clue how to actually go about this, beyond casting the perfect actor for the main role, so what we actually get are ninety very tedious minutes of pointless movie. It’s not even interesting enough to call it pretentious.

In short: Race with the Devil (1975)

Frank (Warren Oates) and Roger (Peter Fonda) and their wives Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Lara Parker) set off for a tour through the USA to Aspen in Frank’s and Alice’s hypermodern RV. Alas, quite early on in their travels, somewhere out in the sticks, our protagonists witness a satanic ritual including human sacrifice and a bit of mild nudity. Thanks to some ill-advised shouting, the satanists witness them right back. After some excitement the vacationers escape to the nearby sheriff’s department, but as it quickly turns out, spilling the beans to these officials just gives the bad guys more information and probably convinces them that it would be much better to get rid of this meddlesome quartet.

This starts the protagonists off on an RV chase through much US backcountry, where our heroes encounter many a broken phone line (there was a strong wind up north, you know) and a huge amount of satanists. Seriously, turns out there’s basically none but satanists out and about in the country.

Despite the satanist angle, Jack Starrett’s Race with the Devil is a horror movie in name only. Mostly, this is a fine low budget action movie in a style that could only have been used in the 70s, with some excellent car stunts, a handful of crude but highly effective suspense scenes and a huge dollop of very 70s style paranoia. Even though the writing suggests something of an upmarket TV movie, Starrett’s direction is highly energetic, the stunt work is quite wonderful, and the pacing spot on. Add to that Fonda and Oates being Fonda and Oates in their respective primes, and I can’t imagine anyone not dead not enjoying the ride at least a little.

The film moonlights as an incredible time capsule, a living embodiment of the mid-70s, every moment and every detail in it soaked through with the taste and smell of the time it was made in, be it in the portrayal of the satanists (who by the way have Aztec roots as a helpful library book our heroines steal explains), that darn RV and the beatings it takes, the fashion (oh, the fashion!), and even the particular kind of horror movie bullshit ending it features. Unfortunately, 70s machismo does rear its ugly head too, with the female characters mostly relegated to screeching, whimpering, book stealing and in Parker’s case to making frightened eyes at the camera while the menfolk fight around them. There’s a reason I introduced the characters the way that I did.

However, I’m not going to blame a time capsule for being one – you gotta take the awesome with the annoying with this sort of thing.

Barquero (1970)

Outlaw Jake Remy (Warren Oates), his very French Lieutenant Marquette (Kerwin “Frenchman” Mathews) and his merry band of crazy murdering bastards have just destroyed a town somewhere in the Old West, killing the whole populace, stealing three hundred Winchester rifles from the US cavalry, and taking everything else that took their fancy. To make a decent escape before the cavalry realizes what has happened to their rifle transport and the town it went through, the band of arseholes needs to cross a river on the only barge for a good hundred miles.

That’s where Remy’s problems start, for the barge is owned by Travis (Lee Van Cleef), an ill-tempered frontiersman who has grudgingly turned ferryman to a bunch of settlers slowly coagulating into a town around his barge whom he sees as squatters. We’re never sure what Travis thought what his building a barge would otherwise result in; nor does the man himself seem to know.

Travis, now, isn’t the man to do any barging at gunpoint, and once his ire is raised, he’s certainly not helping Remy even a bit. Instead, the barquero, his rather mad mountain hermit friend Mountain Phil (Forrest Tucker), and the not exactly happy settlers are holing up on the side of the river Remy would so very much get to. A cat and mouse game between the two men and their respective cohorts develops that sees Travis getting rather protective of his squatters, and Remy slowly losing control of his men as well as of his sanity, becoming so obsessed with his enemy/mirror image on the other side any thought of crossing the river somewhere else becomes tantamount to treason for him.

Quite a few American directors with a past in more traditional US Western movies had more than a little trouble when it came to adapting their styles to the pseudo-Spaghetti Western ideal the companies who hired them rather wanted them to make when the Spaghettis hit it big, often resulting in films that are boring, or ill-advised, or both at the same time.

At least going by Barquero, Gordon Douglas didn’t have that sort of problem. While his direction style here is a bit less experimental and dynamic than typical of the higher tier Italian and Spanish films of the genre, he hits the combination of off-beat humour, off-handed brutality and plain weirdness the Spaghetti Western so often revelled in without a hitch, and even seems to enjoy the plain weirdness the script by George Schenck and William Marks is filled with, instead of looking down on it.

To my eyes, it’s not always clear if the film is joking with any given idea it shows, or if it just believes existing at a frontier (one of the many parallels between its two central antagonists) must turn everyone involved crazy in a manner that makes it all too easy to fluctuate between ridiculousness and physical threat. Definitely, there’s a vibe of deep mental un-health surrounding everyone involved, not just on the side of the outlaws, but on that of their enemies too, a madness that seems to be catching the longer anyone is involved with Remy or Travis. Because this is still an American Western, the men’s madness is understood as belonging to the kind of man you need to widen your frontiers but whom you’ll want to get rid of as soon as possible once things become peaceful enough for civilization to hold sway, which is one of the basic arguments of US Westerns since at least the 50s.

In Douglas’s film, though, this typical, and typically unsolved problem is framed in a way that makes the question itself look as pathological as the people asking it (or shooting it out violently). The whole film is shot through with violence so sudden and bizarre it becomes surreal, and so much off-handed strangeness – everything Mountain Phil does or says, for example, be it discussions of ant life or the polite little chats he likes to hold with men before he shoots them – it at times feels as if were just getting its breath for a parody of this old question of Western filmmaking, one the Italian films Barquero is oriented towards very often (outside the works of Leone, at least) do not care about or for at all. However, the film never quite arrives at parody, not even when it shows a weed-smoking Remy having a vision of his violent past. Instead it floats between the poles of parody and a just very strange interpretation of the real thing.

The performances fit the film’s peculiar tone quite nicely, with Van Cleef making shifty eyes and looking pissed off in a manner even more exaggerated than usual, Mathews faking his horrible French accent like a champ while still maintaining is role as the straight man to an Oates performance so broad, one could believe he could have crossed the damn river on it without Van Cleef’s barge. What would be destructive in other films fits Barquero’s approach perfectly.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,western,gordon douglas,lee van cleef,warren oates,kerwin mathews,forrest tucker

The Split (1968)

Career criminal McClain (Jim Brown) comes to Los Angeles looking for the opportunity for a big heist. His old acquaintance and money woman Gladys (Julie Harris) soon points him in the right direction. There's a lot of money flowing in a big football game, so if one could somehow skim off all of it, one could make half a million dollars with comparatively little effort.

Of course, this sort of job needs more than one participant, so McClain goes on the lookout for partners. Because he's apparently not a people person, he secretly tests his prospective partners' abilities before he makes them any offers, which doesn't exactly endear him to anyone. Still, once McClain has disclosed his plan and the potential loot to strongman Clinger (Ernest Borgnine), driver Kifka (Jack Klugman), racist electronics expert Gough (Warren Oates), and professional gunman Negli (Donald Sutherland), they're in. Once the heist is done, the money will be deposited with McClain's ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) to be split up a few days later. Ellie of course still loves McClain so much he has no problem taking advantage of her in this way.

Yet even with the best of plans, a heist of this dimension isn't easy, and even if the team should get away with the money, they'll still have to cope with their mutual dislike, and a lot of trouble caused by Ellie's crazy neighbour (James Whitmore) and a corrupt cop (Gene Hackman).

Sometimes, all you really need to do is to point at a cast, the year a film was made in, and the writer of the book it is based on, to tell a film is worthy of a viewer's time. Of course, it's also a mixture that can promise more than it delivers, but that's not a problem I see with The Split.

The film was directed by Gordon Flemyng, whom I know best as the director of the two Doctor Who movies with Peter Cushing whose mere mention results in classic Who fans foaming at the mouth; which is a peculiar reaction to two perfectly entertaining films, but hey, what do I know. Much of Flemyng's work was for TV, and as is typical for TV directors of that era, there's really not much you can say about him based on his work there. Going by The Split, Flemyng as a director is more slick than stylish and more straightforward than flashy. This sort of direction seems ideal for a fast-paced and lean heist flick like this, particular one based on one of Donald E. Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker novels. As always, The Split renames the character and makes him less sociopathic.

It is, in any case, very nice to see Parker portrayed by Jim Brown here, without any great gesture of "turning the character black". A ruthless bastard is after all a ruthless bastard quite independent of his skin colour. Brown's performance as Parker/McClain is quite fine, too, giving the deeply amoral character not-Parker is here a certain degree of allure without making him too sympathetic. The rest of the cast does the classic character actor job of turning their mostly rather one-dimensional characters into believable ciphers. Not that I have a problem with the characters being ciphers - this is a movie that thrives on leanness, and everything here standing in the way of its flow is radically pared down.

That technique works well for most of the time. Despite the leanness, most characters do not feel like the mere plot devices they are and rather like organic parts of the film's world. The big exception is Carroll's Ellie, whose only reason for existence is - in what alas isn't exactly a first for a supposed female lead - to look soulful into the camera and die to get the film's final acts running. A few more, or just some more convincing scenes, to build up her and McClain's relationship would have done wonders for an actual emotional effect, I think.

Still, if you ignore this flaw, The Split is an excellent example of the type of heist film that is just as interested in what comes after the heist than the heist itself.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,gordon flemyng,jim brown,diahann carroll,ernest borgnine,julie harris,gene hackman,jack klugman,warren oates,donald sutherland