Director: Howard Hawks
Stars: Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck
It always seems a little strange when a director remakes one of his own films, but it seems even more surprising when he does it only seven years later. Most surprising of all, in this instance the original was Ball of Fire, a peach of a comedy from 1941 with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, not to mention a whole host of great character actors. Something that good didn't need remaking, but then Howard Hawks gave it a twist and turned it into a musical with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo.
Normally that would mean the kiss of death for me but this story fits the musical form perfectly, the real musical form where the music is integral to the actual story: think Singin' in the Rain rather than Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And I get those. I don't have to suspend my disbelief every ten minutes for a dance number that has precisely no point beyond being a dance number. I can enjoy them as stories and I can enjoy the music that props them up.
What all these means is that Ball of Fire doesn't need to be changed that much to be a decent musical. In Ball of Fire, a bunch of professors were writing an encyclopaedia only for a garbageman to demonstrate to Gary Cooper in no uncertain terms that his knowledge of slang was awesomely out of date. He ventured out to find modern usage and found it in Barbara Stanwyck, a wild nightclub singer on the lam from the DA, eager for somewhere to stay out of the sight of the law.
Here, it's an encyclopaedia on music, of course, and the professors are led by Danny Kaye as Prof Hobart Frisbee and include other characterful actors like Hugh Herbert. They're still totally out of date, even though it's all a little less believably so, given that they know all about Stravinsky and American folk music. But a couple of black window washers played by Buck & Bubbles introduce them to boogie woogie piano and a whole slew of other forms of jazz and blues, none of which any of them have heard of. So out goes Prof Frisbee into the world to experience the jazz clubs and invite the musicians back to their Totten Foundation to help them all learn about these new forms.
And while the story is certainly weakened by the transition from slang to music, the music itself is amazing. Howard Hawks didn't just hire actors to play musicians or pick up a couple of minor names to sling some songs together, he pulled in the best. There's pianist Mel Powell, trombonist Tommy Dorsey, saxophonist Charlie Barnet, percussionist Lionel Hampton, even Louis Armstrong himself along with other varied groups. These jam sessions are great fun and I'm sure that everyone involved had a great time. Here's a film where the outtakes would have been as much fun as the film itself.
Best and most surprising of all there's clarinettist Benny Goodman, who doesn't just join in on these awesome jam sessions, he plays one of the fuddy duddy academics, Prof Magenbruch. Yes, he even gets to have not heard of himself, which is a cool joke, but he plays the comedy card joyously. Had he ever lost the use of his hands he would have had a surefire career as a comedic actor. The only downside is that there just isn't that much of him here.
Luckily there's plenty of Virginia Mayo, who has a ball as Honey Swanson, a club singer who a prominent gangster is trying to marry so that she can't testify against him. He's Tony Crow, played by Steve Cochran, a second rate Clark Gable. She's being hunted by the DA to build their case and she hides out at the Totten Foundation where she succeeds a little too well in seducing Prof Frisbee. This was her fifth of five films playing opposite Danny Kaye, the most prominent being the one before this, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Obviously they got on pretty well.
As a remake this is notably lesser than its original, definitely fluff compared to Ball of Fire. Danny Kaye is an acquired taste, even when he's performing his most skilful skits, and there are far too many holes in the admittedly flimsy plot to completely ignore. Yet there are moments of genius, the chemistry is good and the music is a joy. How often can you get to see musicians of this calibre all jamming together? Certainly not often in the movies and probably not much elsewhere either.
Sunday, 14 June 2009
The Spirit of St Louis (1957)
Director: Billy Wilder
Star: James Stewart
In 1927, air mail pilot Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly across the Atlantic solo, a massive achievement and one that did a good deal to further the age of flight, even if it didn't begin it the way this film claims. He flew from Roosevelt Field in New York to Le Bourget Field in Paris, a distance of 3610 miles that took him 33 hours and 30 minutes. Such are the facts and they're powerful enough to stand on their own. For the story behind the flight it took Billy Wilder and James Stewart, and while that sounds like a great combination, it doesn't hold up to much background checking.
Billy Wilder was already a legendary film director in 1957, with three Oscars to his name and a long string of classics behind him including Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. For those a little less mindful of the same old films that make every list of the greatest American movies, he had a bunch of those too: lesser known classics like The Lost Weekend and Ace in the Hole. He didn't make too many films but the ones he did make were memorable ones with precious few exceptions. Yet whatever style he lent his name and talents to, he'd never made a biopic until this one and he never made one again.
James Stewart was no minor name either; he'd won his Oscar for 1940's The Philadelphia Story, by popular opinion making up for his miss the year before for Mr Smith Goes to Washington. He was one of the biggest stars in cinema, by anyone's reckoning, with a filmography full of titles like Rear Window, Harvey and Destry Rides Again; The Shop Around the Corner, Winchester '73 and It's a Wonderful Life. The catch is that Lindbergh was only 25 when he made his historic flight, but Jimmy Stewart was 47 when he made this film, only a month away from 50 when it was released and of all the stars in Hollywood, he was the one who always seemed older than he really was.
The way this film has it, the story begins with Lindbergh crashing out of the sky in a blizzard and finishing his air mail delivery on the train. A fellow passenger, a suspender salesman of all things, laughs at Lindbergh's profession and can't believe that commercial air flight is even remotely viable. As an example he cites the front page of his newspaper which details an attempt by a couple of fliers to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first successful flight across the Atlantic. They got about ten feet above the ground and crashed out.
As time goes by, others crash out too and they generally die in the process. But Lindbergh wants in on the race to be the first, because he has that pioneer spirit and believes utterly that the attempt has to be made and to keep being made until someone succeeds. He's utterly determined that that someone be him. He manages to convince a group of bankers to finance him to the tune of $15,000, the cost of buying the plane he's planning to use, only to find out that the company that makes it is happy to sell him one but only if they provide the pilot for the historic flight.
Of course he doesn't take them up on the offer, which proved a terrible loss for them but a great decision for him. Instead he ended up in the aerodrome of Ryan Air, not the famous budget airline of recent years but a San Diego outfit rather less slick than the first choice. This bunch have a dog running around the floor and an owner who he finds cooking sand dabs with an oxy-acetylene torch. What they have is the same vision that he does and they immediately feel a kindred spirit. They design and build the Spirit of St Louis from scratch in 63 days, the name that made the history books, became the title of Lindbergh's autobiography and eventually this film.
I think what makes this film special is that it genuinely creates tension, something that is the last thing I'd have ever expected; after all the heart of the film is a 33 hour flight primarily over water. I've made that flight myself, as a passenger, and it's awe inspiring for about five minutes and boring as heck for the rest of the way, and that's speaking as someone with a couple of books to keep me company; Lindbergh has a fly and a couple of sandwiches. And of course we know precisely how the whole thing ends. Lindbergh succeeds in his flight, makes history and lives to talk about it. If he didn't, we'd never have heard of him and nobody would have made this film.
But somehow Jimmy Stewart makes us feel like he's a dynamic driven young man who just might not make it through and needs the encouragement of we couch potatoes. He sets off with an awesomely understated speech: 'Well I guess I might as well go.' he says, and nearly loses in his attempt before he even reaches the trees at the end of the runway, attempting a takeoff in poor weather from the New York mud. This scene is a masterpiece of tension, even though we know that there's precisely no chance of it not turning out as expected. That's good filmmaking. And our Reader's Digest condensed version of the next 33½ hours has him staying awake by talking to a fly, icing up over the Arctic, even falling asleep and heading round and round in circles.
Lindbergh came close to failure a few times, pulling through sometimes by luck and sometimes by skill, often by both. Once across the ocean he manages to locate his whereabouts by identifying the shape of the coastline around him on the maps that he brought along for the ride. Luckily he didn't leave those behind like most things, down to his toothbrush. He navigates from the coast of Ireland to the Paris air field by dead reckoning. Now this was obviously an amazing accomplishment, which is why it sometimes feels like a pulp adventure, but it's well shown here.
The boring parts are skipped over, as you might expect, by some constructive scriptwriting that takes us back to Lindbergh's life and evolution as an aviator in flashbacks. It's clever work, but there's a massive drop off once the Spirit of St Louis touches ground. After an hour of build up to the flight, there's about thirty seconds of relief before the end of the film. This is such a sudden finish that it takes us utterly by surprise and not in a good way. I wonder why, because there are about half a dozen little stories that could easily have been given a nice feelgood completion at this point and they're all utterly ignored which is bizarrely surprising.
All in all, it's a good film but a flawed one that continues a low point in Billy Wilder's career. Of course given that this is Billy Wilder we're talking about, a low point is still higher than most director's high points, but I was underwhelmed by Sabrina and The Seven Year Itch and there are obvious flaws in this one (oh my, that terrible CGI fly, or whatever passed for CGI in 1957). Yet that leaves only one gap left for me, Love in the Afternoon, before Wilder found his power again with a string of some of the best American films ever made: Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.
Star: James Stewart
In 1927, air mail pilot Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly across the Atlantic solo, a massive achievement and one that did a good deal to further the age of flight, even if it didn't begin it the way this film claims. He flew from Roosevelt Field in New York to Le Bourget Field in Paris, a distance of 3610 miles that took him 33 hours and 30 minutes. Such are the facts and they're powerful enough to stand on their own. For the story behind the flight it took Billy Wilder and James Stewart, and while that sounds like a great combination, it doesn't hold up to much background checking.
Billy Wilder was already a legendary film director in 1957, with three Oscars to his name and a long string of classics behind him including Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. For those a little less mindful of the same old films that make every list of the greatest American movies, he had a bunch of those too: lesser known classics like The Lost Weekend and Ace in the Hole. He didn't make too many films but the ones he did make were memorable ones with precious few exceptions. Yet whatever style he lent his name and talents to, he'd never made a biopic until this one and he never made one again.
James Stewart was no minor name either; he'd won his Oscar for 1940's The Philadelphia Story, by popular opinion making up for his miss the year before for Mr Smith Goes to Washington. He was one of the biggest stars in cinema, by anyone's reckoning, with a filmography full of titles like Rear Window, Harvey and Destry Rides Again; The Shop Around the Corner, Winchester '73 and It's a Wonderful Life. The catch is that Lindbergh was only 25 when he made his historic flight, but Jimmy Stewart was 47 when he made this film, only a month away from 50 when it was released and of all the stars in Hollywood, he was the one who always seemed older than he really was.
The way this film has it, the story begins with Lindbergh crashing out of the sky in a blizzard and finishing his air mail delivery on the train. A fellow passenger, a suspender salesman of all things, laughs at Lindbergh's profession and can't believe that commercial air flight is even remotely viable. As an example he cites the front page of his newspaper which details an attempt by a couple of fliers to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first successful flight across the Atlantic. They got about ten feet above the ground and crashed out.
As time goes by, others crash out too and they generally die in the process. But Lindbergh wants in on the race to be the first, because he has that pioneer spirit and believes utterly that the attempt has to be made and to keep being made until someone succeeds. He's utterly determined that that someone be him. He manages to convince a group of bankers to finance him to the tune of $15,000, the cost of buying the plane he's planning to use, only to find out that the company that makes it is happy to sell him one but only if they provide the pilot for the historic flight.
Of course he doesn't take them up on the offer, which proved a terrible loss for them but a great decision for him. Instead he ended up in the aerodrome of Ryan Air, not the famous budget airline of recent years but a San Diego outfit rather less slick than the first choice. This bunch have a dog running around the floor and an owner who he finds cooking sand dabs with an oxy-acetylene torch. What they have is the same vision that he does and they immediately feel a kindred spirit. They design and build the Spirit of St Louis from scratch in 63 days, the name that made the history books, became the title of Lindbergh's autobiography and eventually this film.
I think what makes this film special is that it genuinely creates tension, something that is the last thing I'd have ever expected; after all the heart of the film is a 33 hour flight primarily over water. I've made that flight myself, as a passenger, and it's awe inspiring for about five minutes and boring as heck for the rest of the way, and that's speaking as someone with a couple of books to keep me company; Lindbergh has a fly and a couple of sandwiches. And of course we know precisely how the whole thing ends. Lindbergh succeeds in his flight, makes history and lives to talk about it. If he didn't, we'd never have heard of him and nobody would have made this film.
But somehow Jimmy Stewart makes us feel like he's a dynamic driven young man who just might not make it through and needs the encouragement of we couch potatoes. He sets off with an awesomely understated speech: 'Well I guess I might as well go.' he says, and nearly loses in his attempt before he even reaches the trees at the end of the runway, attempting a takeoff in poor weather from the New York mud. This scene is a masterpiece of tension, even though we know that there's precisely no chance of it not turning out as expected. That's good filmmaking. And our Reader's Digest condensed version of the next 33½ hours has him staying awake by talking to a fly, icing up over the Arctic, even falling asleep and heading round and round in circles.
Lindbergh came close to failure a few times, pulling through sometimes by luck and sometimes by skill, often by both. Once across the ocean he manages to locate his whereabouts by identifying the shape of the coastline around him on the maps that he brought along for the ride. Luckily he didn't leave those behind like most things, down to his toothbrush. He navigates from the coast of Ireland to the Paris air field by dead reckoning. Now this was obviously an amazing accomplishment, which is why it sometimes feels like a pulp adventure, but it's well shown here.
The boring parts are skipped over, as you might expect, by some constructive scriptwriting that takes us back to Lindbergh's life and evolution as an aviator in flashbacks. It's clever work, but there's a massive drop off once the Spirit of St Louis touches ground. After an hour of build up to the flight, there's about thirty seconds of relief before the end of the film. This is such a sudden finish that it takes us utterly by surprise and not in a good way. I wonder why, because there are about half a dozen little stories that could easily have been given a nice feelgood completion at this point and they're all utterly ignored which is bizarrely surprising.
All in all, it's a good film but a flawed one that continues a low point in Billy Wilder's career. Of course given that this is Billy Wilder we're talking about, a low point is still higher than most director's high points, but I was underwhelmed by Sabrina and The Seven Year Itch and there are obvious flaws in this one (oh my, that terrible CGI fly, or whatever passed for CGI in 1957). Yet that leaves only one gap left for me, Love in the Afternoon, before Wilder found his power again with a string of some of the best American films ever made: Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.
Saturday, 13 June 2009
No Way Out (1950)
Director: Joseph L Mankiewicz
Stars: Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Stephen McNally and Sidney Poitier
I guess if you're going to start out in movies, a Joseph L Mankiewicz film is a pretty good place to start. Admittedly he wasn't quite the name at this point that he'd very quickly become (his next directorial effort, made the same year, was All About Eve) but he still wasn't nobody. He was a Mankiewicz after all, and he had a number of major films under his belt as a writer and producer, not least The Philadelphia Story. It's with his directing that he made a major mark though and this sort of story illustrates why.
One actor here was precisely nobody at this time. He's a minor little name in film called Sidney Poitier and this was his first real part, after an uncredited role as a night club extra three years earlier in Sepia Cinderella. Given the camera hardly leaves him and, well, he's Sidney Poitier, he certainly wouldn't be nobody for long. He's very young, literally as young as you'll ever see him on film. In fact he was 22 and lied about his age to Mankiewicz, telling him he was 27. He certainly made his mark as he meant to go on and the rest of the cast have to play pretty hard to keep up with him.
He's a doctor, a new one but an eager one, and he's assigned as an intern to the prison ward of a county hospital by a chief resident who trusts his judgement and really doesn't care what colour he is. Of course being Sidney Poitier, Luther Brooks is a black man and he's faced with a couple of patients who are rabid racists, what the film calls 'negro haters'. They're Ray Biddle and his brother Johnny, two thieves caught holding up a gas station, and shot in the process. It falls to Brooks to fix them up, which he does regardless of the taunts.
The catch is that Johnny has more wrong with him than just a bullet. He floundered around while attempting to evade arrest, even walking into a wall, and on his hospital bed he doesn't even notice a cigarette fall into the palm of his hand. Dr Brooks thinks that this may be due to a brain tumour and promptly operates, giving Johnny a spinal tap. And he dies right there on the bed, no doubt from the massive blood loss he'd already suffered. But rabid racist Ray blames the black doctor, of course, and refuses to grant the family approval needed to allow an autopsy, just to spite him.
This is a gift of a part for Poitier and he does precisely what you'd expect if you'd seen him in, well anything else. He's headstrong and capable, but very eager to be right. He knows that he did the right thing with Johnny Biddle, but the possibility that he was wrong plagues him, especially in the vehement opposition of a white man who hates him for no better reason than his colour. And that's where our real story lies: not in how sleazy Ray Biddle can get, in the way Biddle's ex-wife gets played by all sides or in how easy it is to escalate a racial conflict; it's in what goes on in the head of a black doctor in a white world who just has to be sure and ends up causing what he hopes to avoid.
Now this makes the whole film sound like Poitier is the star, but this was his first film and he only rates the second page of the title credits. The first page carries the stars: people who aren't the names that Poitier would quickly become but who nonetheless do a solid job. The top name on the list is Richard Widmark who plays Ray Biddle as a waste of space of a man from a slum called Beaver Canal who relishes the seediness of it. This is still early for Widmark, but he'd already made his name in films noir like Kiss of Death and Night and the City and he's a manipulative villain here, but he's just not bitter enough. He's too nice at being evil. Apparently he even apologised to his new friend Poitier after some of the takes.
Linda Darnell plays Johnny's ex-wife who becomes as much a pawn as Dr Brooks. The doctors want her to persuade Ray to allow the autopsy, playing up how she's fought her way out of Beaver Canal and made something of herself. As someone so obviously above such things, she should try to do the right thing. But Ray twists it all round and tries to persuade her to kickstart a race riot because she has Beaver Canal in her blood and, hey, the nigger doctor killed her ex-husband. Darnell plays it like a noir, like she's a femme fatale and she does a great job at that. She's not as good as a racist and she's no great drunk, which is surprising as she was an alcoholic for most of her short life, but she carries disgust and regret well.
The third star is Stephen McNally as the hospital's chief resident, Dr Wharton, who provides the real grounding to the story. He's a good guy but he's not interested in affirmative action, political correctness or positive discrimination. He simply wants to be around people who can do the job as it should be done and really doesn't want anything to do with all the idiotic prejudices that everyone else seems to harbour. And the film is pretty fair at that. There are as many prejudiced black men here as there are white men. However it's notable that Hollywood hypocrisy meant that such a fair film about race saw black actors in the race riot paid less than their white colleagues.
The supporting cast are pretty variable. Some are highly memorable, like Amanda Randolph as Dr Wharton's housekeeper and Harry Bellaver as another Biddle brother, this one highly intelligent but deaf and dumb. Others, like many of the good ol' boys in the race riot, have much less going for them. Mostly though it's the story that matters, a more subtle story about race than some of the more famous ones that Poitier soon racked up, for all its moments of violence and vitriol. It has impact, not overt impact like the kitchen sink dramas but not restrained polite impact the way of something like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? It holds its own ground and it holds it well. I wonder why I'd never heard of it.
Stars: Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Stephen McNally and Sidney Poitier
I guess if you're going to start out in movies, a Joseph L Mankiewicz film is a pretty good place to start. Admittedly he wasn't quite the name at this point that he'd very quickly become (his next directorial effort, made the same year, was All About Eve) but he still wasn't nobody. He was a Mankiewicz after all, and he had a number of major films under his belt as a writer and producer, not least The Philadelphia Story. It's with his directing that he made a major mark though and this sort of story illustrates why.
One actor here was precisely nobody at this time. He's a minor little name in film called Sidney Poitier and this was his first real part, after an uncredited role as a night club extra three years earlier in Sepia Cinderella. Given the camera hardly leaves him and, well, he's Sidney Poitier, he certainly wouldn't be nobody for long. He's very young, literally as young as you'll ever see him on film. In fact he was 22 and lied about his age to Mankiewicz, telling him he was 27. He certainly made his mark as he meant to go on and the rest of the cast have to play pretty hard to keep up with him.
He's a doctor, a new one but an eager one, and he's assigned as an intern to the prison ward of a county hospital by a chief resident who trusts his judgement and really doesn't care what colour he is. Of course being Sidney Poitier, Luther Brooks is a black man and he's faced with a couple of patients who are rabid racists, what the film calls 'negro haters'. They're Ray Biddle and his brother Johnny, two thieves caught holding up a gas station, and shot in the process. It falls to Brooks to fix them up, which he does regardless of the taunts.
The catch is that Johnny has more wrong with him than just a bullet. He floundered around while attempting to evade arrest, even walking into a wall, and on his hospital bed he doesn't even notice a cigarette fall into the palm of his hand. Dr Brooks thinks that this may be due to a brain tumour and promptly operates, giving Johnny a spinal tap. And he dies right there on the bed, no doubt from the massive blood loss he'd already suffered. But rabid racist Ray blames the black doctor, of course, and refuses to grant the family approval needed to allow an autopsy, just to spite him.
This is a gift of a part for Poitier and he does precisely what you'd expect if you'd seen him in, well anything else. He's headstrong and capable, but very eager to be right. He knows that he did the right thing with Johnny Biddle, but the possibility that he was wrong plagues him, especially in the vehement opposition of a white man who hates him for no better reason than his colour. And that's where our real story lies: not in how sleazy Ray Biddle can get, in the way Biddle's ex-wife gets played by all sides or in how easy it is to escalate a racial conflict; it's in what goes on in the head of a black doctor in a white world who just has to be sure and ends up causing what he hopes to avoid.
Now this makes the whole film sound like Poitier is the star, but this was his first film and he only rates the second page of the title credits. The first page carries the stars: people who aren't the names that Poitier would quickly become but who nonetheless do a solid job. The top name on the list is Richard Widmark who plays Ray Biddle as a waste of space of a man from a slum called Beaver Canal who relishes the seediness of it. This is still early for Widmark, but he'd already made his name in films noir like Kiss of Death and Night and the City and he's a manipulative villain here, but he's just not bitter enough. He's too nice at being evil. Apparently he even apologised to his new friend Poitier after some of the takes.
Linda Darnell plays Johnny's ex-wife who becomes as much a pawn as Dr Brooks. The doctors want her to persuade Ray to allow the autopsy, playing up how she's fought her way out of Beaver Canal and made something of herself. As someone so obviously above such things, she should try to do the right thing. But Ray twists it all round and tries to persuade her to kickstart a race riot because she has Beaver Canal in her blood and, hey, the nigger doctor killed her ex-husband. Darnell plays it like a noir, like she's a femme fatale and she does a great job at that. She's not as good as a racist and she's no great drunk, which is surprising as she was an alcoholic for most of her short life, but she carries disgust and regret well.
The third star is Stephen McNally as the hospital's chief resident, Dr Wharton, who provides the real grounding to the story. He's a good guy but he's not interested in affirmative action, political correctness or positive discrimination. He simply wants to be around people who can do the job as it should be done and really doesn't want anything to do with all the idiotic prejudices that everyone else seems to harbour. And the film is pretty fair at that. There are as many prejudiced black men here as there are white men. However it's notable that Hollywood hypocrisy meant that such a fair film about race saw black actors in the race riot paid less than their white colleagues.
The supporting cast are pretty variable. Some are highly memorable, like Amanda Randolph as Dr Wharton's housekeeper and Harry Bellaver as another Biddle brother, this one highly intelligent but deaf and dumb. Others, like many of the good ol' boys in the race riot, have much less going for them. Mostly though it's the story that matters, a more subtle story about race than some of the more famous ones that Poitier soon racked up, for all its moments of violence and vitriol. It has impact, not overt impact like the kitchen sink dramas but not restrained polite impact the way of something like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? It holds its own ground and it holds it well. I wonder why I'd never heard of it.
Monday, 8 June 2009
Human Desire (1954)
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick Crawford
I'll take any opportunity I can get to catch a Fritz Lang movie and this is one that isn't too easy to find. Luckily TCM sneaked it in amongst with a host of his films that are more frequently shown as part of their focus on directors in the month of June. Apparently he wanted Peter Lorre to play the lead character of Jeff Warren, but Lorre refused given how hard Lang had been on him during the filming of M no less than 23 years earlier in Germany. Curiously, like M, this one opens with a lot of sound but not much dialogue.
Warren is a railroad engineer who has just spent three years in the service in Korea. With Lorre's refusal, the part went to Glenn Ford, who to be honest looks more like a railroader and probably fits better for some of the romantic side of the role. That said, I'm a confirmed Peter Lorre fan and relish those odd parts he landed that fell outside the routine stuff; this would have been one of those. After leaving Korea, Warren comes back home to his old town, his old job and his old lodging with a colleague, Alec Simmons, who has a daughter. When Warren left she was a kid but now she's all grown up with a big crush. There years can be a long time.
Now Warren is only one of the three players in this story. The second is Carl Buckley, who works at the same train yard and the third is his wife Vicki. Buckley is good enough at his job to get promoted up to a position of responsibility but he's enough of a hothead to get fired when he gets argumentative with the yardmaster. He thinks up a way to get his job back though: his wife knows an important man called John Owens who has clout enough to pull the strings, so he asks her to make it so. She manages it too.
The catch is that when she does, using the sort of persuasion that women have used successfully for such ends for centuries, he gets all bent out of shape about it. So Owens ends up dead, murdered by the Buckleys with a knife in a train to Chicago. There's an inquiry of course, but nobody works it out except Warren, who was also on the train, catching a lift, and he met Vicki in the coach around the time of the murder. But this is no whodunit and this is where our story really starts. It's all about power.
Carl has power over Vicki because he keeps the note he made her write to Owens to get into his compartment. Warren has power over both of them because he knows precisely what they did. Vicki doesn't have power over anyone, except what she can build through being a young and attractive woman, one that the other key players are drawn to. And the tension and the anger and the frustration build, in the able hands not just of Fritz Lang but of the actors involved. Warren wants Vicki and Carl wants Vicki, but Vicki just wants her letter and out of this mess.
As much of a Lorre fan as I am, Glenn Ford is well cast as Jeff Warren and he does an good job as a decent man but one who can still happily try it on with his friend's wife. Gloria Grahame isn't quite as young and beautiful as I was expecting Vicki to be played but she's a desirable and feminine thing who is very believable in the part, manipulated throughout but able to do some manipulating of her own. This film reuinted Ford and Grahame with Lang, who they had starred for a year earlier in The Big Heat. Most obvious of the three is Broderick Crawford as Carl Buckley, a bluster of a man whose temper drives the whole thing.
The story comes from a novel by Emile Zola called La Bête Humaine or in translation The Human Animal, and it lives up to such a generic title because of the sheer span of emotion we run through. The central trio are drawn entirely in shades of grey, though the degrees are of course different. They all make bad decisions and are sucked through their own failings into worse ones. While there are no great revelations after the murder to shock us, we're kept hooked right up to the end to find out just where on that sliding grey scale each of these three characters are going to end up at.
While not a flashy film in the slightest, it's very solid indeed and it's still a real honeypot of a film, playing with our morals and sensibilities and keeping us guessing. Unfortunately Fritz Lang followed it up with a couple of lesser films, Moonfleet and While the City Sleeps, though I may be in a minority when it comes to regarding the latter as such, but he'd be back on top form two years later for Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. This one fills in a gap for me in Lang's filmography, but there are still too many gaps that I wish TCM would help me fill. Here's to hoping.
Stars: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick Crawford
I'll take any opportunity I can get to catch a Fritz Lang movie and this is one that isn't too easy to find. Luckily TCM sneaked it in amongst with a host of his films that are more frequently shown as part of their focus on directors in the month of June. Apparently he wanted Peter Lorre to play the lead character of Jeff Warren, but Lorre refused given how hard Lang had been on him during the filming of M no less than 23 years earlier in Germany. Curiously, like M, this one opens with a lot of sound but not much dialogue.
Warren is a railroad engineer who has just spent three years in the service in Korea. With Lorre's refusal, the part went to Glenn Ford, who to be honest looks more like a railroader and probably fits better for some of the romantic side of the role. That said, I'm a confirmed Peter Lorre fan and relish those odd parts he landed that fell outside the routine stuff; this would have been one of those. After leaving Korea, Warren comes back home to his old town, his old job and his old lodging with a colleague, Alec Simmons, who has a daughter. When Warren left she was a kid but now she's all grown up with a big crush. There years can be a long time.
Now Warren is only one of the three players in this story. The second is Carl Buckley, who works at the same train yard and the third is his wife Vicki. Buckley is good enough at his job to get promoted up to a position of responsibility but he's enough of a hothead to get fired when he gets argumentative with the yardmaster. He thinks up a way to get his job back though: his wife knows an important man called John Owens who has clout enough to pull the strings, so he asks her to make it so. She manages it too.
The catch is that when she does, using the sort of persuasion that women have used successfully for such ends for centuries, he gets all bent out of shape about it. So Owens ends up dead, murdered by the Buckleys with a knife in a train to Chicago. There's an inquiry of course, but nobody works it out except Warren, who was also on the train, catching a lift, and he met Vicki in the coach around the time of the murder. But this is no whodunit and this is where our story really starts. It's all about power.
Carl has power over Vicki because he keeps the note he made her write to Owens to get into his compartment. Warren has power over both of them because he knows precisely what they did. Vicki doesn't have power over anyone, except what she can build through being a young and attractive woman, one that the other key players are drawn to. And the tension and the anger and the frustration build, in the able hands not just of Fritz Lang but of the actors involved. Warren wants Vicki and Carl wants Vicki, but Vicki just wants her letter and out of this mess.
As much of a Lorre fan as I am, Glenn Ford is well cast as Jeff Warren and he does an good job as a decent man but one who can still happily try it on with his friend's wife. Gloria Grahame isn't quite as young and beautiful as I was expecting Vicki to be played but she's a desirable and feminine thing who is very believable in the part, manipulated throughout but able to do some manipulating of her own. This film reuinted Ford and Grahame with Lang, who they had starred for a year earlier in The Big Heat. Most obvious of the three is Broderick Crawford as Carl Buckley, a bluster of a man whose temper drives the whole thing.
The story comes from a novel by Emile Zola called La Bête Humaine or in translation The Human Animal, and it lives up to such a generic title because of the sheer span of emotion we run through. The central trio are drawn entirely in shades of grey, though the degrees are of course different. They all make bad decisions and are sucked through their own failings into worse ones. While there are no great revelations after the murder to shock us, we're kept hooked right up to the end to find out just where on that sliding grey scale each of these three characters are going to end up at.
While not a flashy film in the slightest, it's very solid indeed and it's still a real honeypot of a film, playing with our morals and sensibilities and keeping us guessing. Unfortunately Fritz Lang followed it up with a couple of lesser films, Moonfleet and While the City Sleeps, though I may be in a minority when it comes to regarding the latter as such, but he'd be back on top form two years later for Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. This one fills in a gap for me in Lang's filmography, but there are still too many gaps that I wish TCM would help me fill. Here's to hoping.
Sunday, 7 June 2009
The Sugarland Express (1974)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stars: Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks, William Atherton
Back in 1974, Steven Spielberg was brand new. He'd made three TV movies including the superb Duel, but this was the first chance he had to make a theatrically released feature film. It's based on a real event he read about in the newspapers, that happened in 1969 in Texas. The studio gave him the green light on the condition that he find an honest to goodness movie star to appear in his film and sure enough, he managed to land Goldie Hawn, who had only made six films at this point but landed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for one of them, 1969's Cactus Flower.
She's Lou Jean Poplin, a headstrong young mother who's incensed at the fact that the authorities are keeping her child in foster care, even though she's now three weeks free from a women's facility. Now this is hardly surprising, given that she's been locked up for a while and her husband still is, but by this point is just isn't her call any more. Now all she wants to do is get her baby Langston back and she has a plan to do it too. Her husband Clovis has been moved from the federal penitentiary to a pre-release facility and she's all set to mastermind his escape as step one of her plan.
Clovis is played by William Atherton who I've seen in a whole host of movies, from Ghostbusters to The Last Samurai via Mad City and a couple of Die Hard movies. He isn't very prolific though and he's racked up only 33 films from a small role in 1972's The New Centurions to 2008's Black Crescent Moon. He even played studio mogul Darryl F Zanuck in a TV movie called Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a quarter of a century after this film saw him play screen father to Zanuck's grandson, who is baby Langston here. This was his first major role and unfortunately for him he's dancing to his wife's tune from moment one, mostly complaining about how much trouble he's going to be in.
And yeah, that's a lot of trouble. Beyond walking out of his low security prison a mere four months before he was going to be released anyway, circumstances lead them into stealing a car leading a chase from the law, and when they crash, kidnapping a young police officer and forcing him to drive them to Sugarland to get their boy. The longer they run the more trouble they get into, but it's a pretty unique sort of trouble, especially as the cops know precisely who they are and where they're going.
There's much to watch here, mostly of course the origins of possibly the most important film director of the modern era. He definitely knew what he was doing and he'd obviously studied the work of others: this looks and feels effective and accomplished for someone so new to the industry. Sure enough, his next film would be Jaws and he hasn't looked back yet. The fact that there are scenes here that are memorable even amongst the rest of his screen output is a major point. I really liked what must be one of the slowest and most sedate car chases in history, one that literally comes to a halt on more than one occasion.
When their vehicle runs out of gas, they get moving again by having the police chief and lead pursuer push them all the way to a gas station. They have a portaloo driven in when Lou Jean gets caught short. They even stop for food and eat in the car before getting moving again. And throughout, a whole train of cop cars is following in their wake. In fact this chase is so slow that it becomes something utterly different, something we would recognise now as a media event, something that is exacerbated when a couple of idiot local cops think they can make a difference all on their own.
This event takes over the film really, eclipsing whatever Goldie Hawn and William Atherton do, though they do their jobs well. Michael Sacks is the patrolman who ends up their unwitting kidnap victim, Maxwell Slide by name. He's a nice guy who understands the mess his kidnappers have got themselves into and does his best to bring the whole affair to a peaceful close. Ben Johnson does a very subtle job as the police chief trying his best to do the same thing, bringing the whole thing to an end without anyone getting hurt.
The problem I had with the film was that it just ran on too long. I was hooked for an hour but by then the ending was inevitable and how we got there didn't really matter too much. It wasn't anybody's fault in particular but it became harder and harder to pay attention. There was some character building going on but it didn't seem to have a lot of point. I'm not generally someone who calls for shorter movies, there's usually something else I want to see that there wasn't time for. This one could have done with a half hour cut out or more and I'll take Duel any day. That kept my interest a lot more with a lot less to do it with.
Stars: Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks, William Atherton
Back in 1974, Steven Spielberg was brand new. He'd made three TV movies including the superb Duel, but this was the first chance he had to make a theatrically released feature film. It's based on a real event he read about in the newspapers, that happened in 1969 in Texas. The studio gave him the green light on the condition that he find an honest to goodness movie star to appear in his film and sure enough, he managed to land Goldie Hawn, who had only made six films at this point but landed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for one of them, 1969's Cactus Flower.
She's Lou Jean Poplin, a headstrong young mother who's incensed at the fact that the authorities are keeping her child in foster care, even though she's now three weeks free from a women's facility. Now this is hardly surprising, given that she's been locked up for a while and her husband still is, but by this point is just isn't her call any more. Now all she wants to do is get her baby Langston back and she has a plan to do it too. Her husband Clovis has been moved from the federal penitentiary to a pre-release facility and she's all set to mastermind his escape as step one of her plan.
Clovis is played by William Atherton who I've seen in a whole host of movies, from Ghostbusters to The Last Samurai via Mad City and a couple of Die Hard movies. He isn't very prolific though and he's racked up only 33 films from a small role in 1972's The New Centurions to 2008's Black Crescent Moon. He even played studio mogul Darryl F Zanuck in a TV movie called Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a quarter of a century after this film saw him play screen father to Zanuck's grandson, who is baby Langston here. This was his first major role and unfortunately for him he's dancing to his wife's tune from moment one, mostly complaining about how much trouble he's going to be in.
And yeah, that's a lot of trouble. Beyond walking out of his low security prison a mere four months before he was going to be released anyway, circumstances lead them into stealing a car leading a chase from the law, and when they crash, kidnapping a young police officer and forcing him to drive them to Sugarland to get their boy. The longer they run the more trouble they get into, but it's a pretty unique sort of trouble, especially as the cops know precisely who they are and where they're going.
There's much to watch here, mostly of course the origins of possibly the most important film director of the modern era. He definitely knew what he was doing and he'd obviously studied the work of others: this looks and feels effective and accomplished for someone so new to the industry. Sure enough, his next film would be Jaws and he hasn't looked back yet. The fact that there are scenes here that are memorable even amongst the rest of his screen output is a major point. I really liked what must be one of the slowest and most sedate car chases in history, one that literally comes to a halt on more than one occasion.
When their vehicle runs out of gas, they get moving again by having the police chief and lead pursuer push them all the way to a gas station. They have a portaloo driven in when Lou Jean gets caught short. They even stop for food and eat in the car before getting moving again. And throughout, a whole train of cop cars is following in their wake. In fact this chase is so slow that it becomes something utterly different, something we would recognise now as a media event, something that is exacerbated when a couple of idiot local cops think they can make a difference all on their own.
This event takes over the film really, eclipsing whatever Goldie Hawn and William Atherton do, though they do their jobs well. Michael Sacks is the patrolman who ends up their unwitting kidnap victim, Maxwell Slide by name. He's a nice guy who understands the mess his kidnappers have got themselves into and does his best to bring the whole affair to a peaceful close. Ben Johnson does a very subtle job as the police chief trying his best to do the same thing, bringing the whole thing to an end without anyone getting hurt.
The problem I had with the film was that it just ran on too long. I was hooked for an hour but by then the ending was inevitable and how we got there didn't really matter too much. It wasn't anybody's fault in particular but it became harder and harder to pay attention. There was some character building going on but it didn't seem to have a lot of point. I'm not generally someone who calls for shorter movies, there's usually something else I want to see that there wasn't time for. This one could have done with a half hour cut out or more and I'll take Duel any day. That kept my interest a lot more with a lot less to do it with.
1941 (1979)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stars: Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Lorraine Gary, Bobby Di Cicco, Murray Hamilton, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates, Robert Stack and Treat Williams
Everyone in my generation knew Steven Spielberg before he started making serious films like Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List and Amistad. We know him from comedies and light hearted action material, something that he did very well indeed (yeah yeah, there was The Color Purple too, but we never saw it). In fact with Jaws, one of the best such films ever made, he single handedly invented the Hollywood blockbuster. So when this opens seriously with a historical note about 7th December, 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Fleet took out Pearl Harbor, my generation doesn't expect a serious war film.
And then we begin. It's now the 13th, almost a week after Pearl Harbor, and we're at the coast watching Susan Backlinie strip naked and swim out into the Pacific Ocean. We could be forgiven for wondering if we're in the wrong Spielberg movie even before that memorable John Wiliams shark theme kicks in. But no, this isn't a shark, it's a Japanese submarine, and stuck naked on the crow's nest she overhears these Japs and Nazis talk about how they've ventured too far into American waters. They decide to try to find something honorable to destroy in Los Angeles before heading home and the only thing they can think of is Hollywood.
Now after something unprecedented like Pearl Harbor, California was understandably next on the Japanese target list in the minds of many of its paranoid residents. But hey, paranoia is pretty justified when they're really out to get you. And who plays these residents is how we really discover the real tone of this film: they're people like Tim Matheson, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, even John Belushi, who arrives in the film by landing his plane next to a Death Valley gas station and asking the owner to fill it up. Of course even though he's Capt Wild Bill Kelso, he's also John Belushi a year after Animal House and so the gas station doesn't last long.
This is very much the missing link between Animal House and Raiders of the Lost Ark: the humour of the former thrown into the traditional filmmaking of the latter, all stunts and old school special effects. Spielberg had the integrity to attempt the film with only effects from the time which makes it look a lot better today than if it had been crammed full of 1979 CGI. What is crammed full of is stars, more stars than can comfortably be imagined. Whole scenes full of small parts are full of people we know and I didn't even find Dick Miller, John Landis, Mickey Rourke, James Caan and Sam Fuller,
Up in the skies there's not just John Belushi but also Tim Matheson trying to get it on with Nancy Allen, which single minded objective causes much of the chaos in this film. The rest comes through waiter Bobby Di Cicco trying to win a contract with RKO by winning a jitterbug contest at the USO Crystal Ballroom with his best girl who has been stolen by Treat Williams. The ensuing riot is a peach, with Dan Aykroyd famously breaking it up by hurling out a patriotic speech about not wanting to see Americans fighting Americans.
One scene has a bunch of mechanics deliver a large gun to a house in a strategic location on the coast: that's John Candy, Dan Akyroyd and Treat Williams delivering to Ned Beatty. Another has a couple of guys getting sent up to the top of a ferris wheel to look out over the ocean. It's Lionel Stander (Max from Hart to Hart) sending up Eddie Deezen (the quintessential nerd from movies like Wargames and Teenage Exorcist) and his ventriloquist's dummy. Out in the desert at the 501st Bomb Disbursement Unit is a lunatic colonel reminiscent of Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove. This time out he's played by Warren Oates and he's convinced that the Japs have a hidden airfield in the alfalfa fields of Pomona.
Best of all are the scenes with the lost Japanese submarine trying to find Hollywood. With their instruments shot, they kidnap the first man they can find to give them directions. Through some of the most genius casting in the history of filmmaking, that means that we see Japanese sub commander Toshiro Mifune and resident Nazi Christopher Lee interrogate Slim Pickens, playing a lumberjack by the unfortunate name of Hollis 'Holly' Wood. Whoever was responsible for this screen magic deserves an Oscar all on their own.
Now when Warren Oates shouts at John Belushi, 'To Hollywood and glory!' he wasn't forseeing the success of the movie. It bombed. Big time. And to be brutally frank there's very little story here and from one perspective not much beyond a lot of recognisable faces and a lot of explosions. There are lots of explosions here, along with the fights and riots and chaos: we even get a ferris wheel rolling down a bridge and a house falling into the sea. Anyone who believes that action films should have explosions should watch this. Maybe we can blame it for the eighties.
But today it plays out very well indeed as a live action cartoon. The cast are only part of the success, because after all the cast don't really count for a heck of a lot in a cartoon. What it really works as is that stop gap I mentioned: the precursor to Indiana Jones. Raiders of the Lost Ark took the scale of this but focused it; kept the stunts and the explosions but took them to the next level; and more than anything else it added a real story and made a film that works, like this, as a ride, but also has other dimensions that this one lacks.
Stars: Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Lorraine Gary, Bobby Di Cicco, Murray Hamilton, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates, Robert Stack and Treat Williams
Everyone in my generation knew Steven Spielberg before he started making serious films like Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List and Amistad. We know him from comedies and light hearted action material, something that he did very well indeed (yeah yeah, there was The Color Purple too, but we never saw it). In fact with Jaws, one of the best such films ever made, he single handedly invented the Hollywood blockbuster. So when this opens seriously with a historical note about 7th December, 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Fleet took out Pearl Harbor, my generation doesn't expect a serious war film.
And then we begin. It's now the 13th, almost a week after Pearl Harbor, and we're at the coast watching Susan Backlinie strip naked and swim out into the Pacific Ocean. We could be forgiven for wondering if we're in the wrong Spielberg movie even before that memorable John Wiliams shark theme kicks in. But no, this isn't a shark, it's a Japanese submarine, and stuck naked on the crow's nest she overhears these Japs and Nazis talk about how they've ventured too far into American waters. They decide to try to find something honorable to destroy in Los Angeles before heading home and the only thing they can think of is Hollywood.
Now after something unprecedented like Pearl Harbor, California was understandably next on the Japanese target list in the minds of many of its paranoid residents. But hey, paranoia is pretty justified when they're really out to get you. And who plays these residents is how we really discover the real tone of this film: they're people like Tim Matheson, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, even John Belushi, who arrives in the film by landing his plane next to a Death Valley gas station and asking the owner to fill it up. Of course even though he's Capt Wild Bill Kelso, he's also John Belushi a year after Animal House and so the gas station doesn't last long.
This is very much the missing link between Animal House and Raiders of the Lost Ark: the humour of the former thrown into the traditional filmmaking of the latter, all stunts and old school special effects. Spielberg had the integrity to attempt the film with only effects from the time which makes it look a lot better today than if it had been crammed full of 1979 CGI. What is crammed full of is stars, more stars than can comfortably be imagined. Whole scenes full of small parts are full of people we know and I didn't even find Dick Miller, John Landis, Mickey Rourke, James Caan and Sam Fuller,
Up in the skies there's not just John Belushi but also Tim Matheson trying to get it on with Nancy Allen, which single minded objective causes much of the chaos in this film. The rest comes through waiter Bobby Di Cicco trying to win a contract with RKO by winning a jitterbug contest at the USO Crystal Ballroom with his best girl who has been stolen by Treat Williams. The ensuing riot is a peach, with Dan Aykroyd famously breaking it up by hurling out a patriotic speech about not wanting to see Americans fighting Americans.
One scene has a bunch of mechanics deliver a large gun to a house in a strategic location on the coast: that's John Candy, Dan Akyroyd and Treat Williams delivering to Ned Beatty. Another has a couple of guys getting sent up to the top of a ferris wheel to look out over the ocean. It's Lionel Stander (Max from Hart to Hart) sending up Eddie Deezen (the quintessential nerd from movies like Wargames and Teenage Exorcist) and his ventriloquist's dummy. Out in the desert at the 501st Bomb Disbursement Unit is a lunatic colonel reminiscent of Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove. This time out he's played by Warren Oates and he's convinced that the Japs have a hidden airfield in the alfalfa fields of Pomona.
Best of all are the scenes with the lost Japanese submarine trying to find Hollywood. With their instruments shot, they kidnap the first man they can find to give them directions. Through some of the most genius casting in the history of filmmaking, that means that we see Japanese sub commander Toshiro Mifune and resident Nazi Christopher Lee interrogate Slim Pickens, playing a lumberjack by the unfortunate name of Hollis 'Holly' Wood. Whoever was responsible for this screen magic deserves an Oscar all on their own.
Now when Warren Oates shouts at John Belushi, 'To Hollywood and glory!' he wasn't forseeing the success of the movie. It bombed. Big time. And to be brutally frank there's very little story here and from one perspective not much beyond a lot of recognisable faces and a lot of explosions. There are lots of explosions here, along with the fights and riots and chaos: we even get a ferris wheel rolling down a bridge and a house falling into the sea. Anyone who believes that action films should have explosions should watch this. Maybe we can blame it for the eighties.
But today it plays out very well indeed as a live action cartoon. The cast are only part of the success, because after all the cast don't really count for a heck of a lot in a cartoon. What it really works as is that stop gap I mentioned: the precursor to Indiana Jones. Raiders of the Lost Ark took the scale of this but focused it; kept the stunts and the explosions but took them to the next level; and more than anything else it added a real story and made a film that works, like this, as a ride, but also has other dimensions that this one lacks.
Robo Vampire (1988)
Director: Godfrey Ho
Stars: Robin Mackay, Nina Watts, Harry Myles and Joe Browne
Kung Fu vs Yoga was an awesome kung fu movie but it hinted at hopping vampires and then didn't deliver, so I just had to rush home and watch a hopping vampire movie and this one has been on my list for a while. It's a Godfrey Ho movie, he who made the most awesomely bad ninja movies ever, and I'd used it to test a stack of old DVD players with. Flipping through the chapters to make sure that the remotes worked OK showed me clips of stunning weirdness that are simply irresistable to a fan of bad exploitation movies.
Our bad guy is a nasty heroin dealer called Cole. When we first meet him he takes off his nasty heroin dealer sunglasses and complains about 'Tom, the goddamn anti-drug agent'. His henchmen naturally want to know what he's going to do about such a thorn in their side, so he points out that he's hired a Taoist to sic vampires on him. Now if you've seen any Chinese vampire films, you know that Chinese vampires hop and you stop them by fixing Taoist scrolls to their foreheads. Being dressed in traditional Mandarin garb, they also don't tend to appear in crime thrillers set in the present day, making this a curious anomaly. What's more the anomalies keep on coming.
First we get to play with the traditional stuff a little more. We're treated to a scene where the Taoist priest gets ready to demonstrate to a couple of western drug dealers the coolest of his bevy of vampires: the one called Peter who wears what looks like a gorilla mask. But before he can conjure him to life, a white clad ghost called Christine breaks up the affair by leaping into the fray through extreme wirework. She complains about what's going on in dialogue that's as blissfully outrageous as anything in Dead Men Walk.
'How dare you take my lover's corpse, Taoist,' she cries at the priest, 'and turn it into a vampire beast? Now he is condemned to a living death and we can never be together in the afterlife!'
The priest replies, 'But he is from the east and you the west. How can you explain this?'
Naturally she's happy to explain, in scary amounts of detail. 'Orientals are a stubborn race. Both his parents opposed our marriage. It was then that we decided if we could not be together in this life, Peter and I would be together forever in the afterlife. You have robbed us of this by turning him into a vampire beast! Now my thoughts are of revenge!'
Awesome stuff, huh? Well we haven't started yet. After we leave the traditional side of the film with the nice western drug dealers recommending that they be married in a Taoist ceremony to unite their souls in the afterlife, we head over to find what Tom's up to. In case you'd forgotten, he's that goddamn anti-drug agent that Cole is so obsessed with, and sure enough he's so indestructable that it takes one whole scene to take him down. And that's the end of Tom: as a nurse who's fond of redundant comments points out, 'It was a fatal wound. He's dead.'
Well, that ought to be the end of Tom, but no! His friend and colleague is completely unphased that their star agent is dead, and turns to their boss and says, 'Since Tom's dead I want to make use of his body to create an android like robot.' Naturally there's no objection from the boss and so an Eastern ripoff of RoboCop is born, costumed entirely in silver fabric pretending to be metal, and going by the name of Robo Warrior. Naturally whenever he moves in the slightest the sound effects thud and clang and the hydraulics kick into play for every subtle movement that takes place outside of a fight. And of course he heads out solo to take down Cole.
Meanwhile somewhere in the mix is another bad guy called Young, who is tied up in the same racket and who kidnaps and tortures one of Tom's fellow agents, a woman named Sophie. So a bunch of mercenaries get hired to rescue her. This section is fun because of a cute Asian chick with an Australian accent and a destroyed village where all the locals are wiped out and tied upside down to crosses, but it really can't compete with the main half of the film, the one with Robo Warrior, the ghost and the gorilla masked hopping vampire. It's utterly surreal: 'You can kill us, but wait until our love's consummated!'
Now any exploitation film fan worth his salt has to see this film but knows that it's going to be truly awful. I should point out that it utterly refuses to follow the rules even of the games it takes to merge together in an awesomely unholy union. These aren't your run of the mill Chinese hopping vampires and I'm not just talking about the gorilla mask. These hopping vampires have zombie makeup and eat flesh. They are talented at wirework martial arts and are so acrobatic that they can even teleport. The don't just hop relentlessly forward, they even hop sideways or rapidly in circles. They breathe smoke and launch fireworks from their fingertips. The Taoist priest can even conjure them out of a jar he carries with a few ritual waves of his hand.
What's more not a single one of these actors seems to have done anything else. The highlighted stars are Robin Mackay, Nina Watts, Harry Myles and Joe Browne and according to IMDb each of them has been involved with precisely one movie: Robo Vampire. It's apparently a USA/Hong Kong production, but there are certainly Aussies involved and Sorapong Chatree is Thai. Really it doesn't feel like something from any of these countries: it just feels like a Godfrey Ho movie.
Ho was a master (or maybe that's not the right word) of taking two separate films and editing them into one new one. Often he didn't even make the source films, buying them in from other Asian countries, whether they had been finished or not. In this way Richard Harrison, who made a mere handful of movies for Ho (the real number seems to be nigh on impossible to find, but I'm guessing at one or two), but ended up edited into about twenty of them. This patchwork approach is fascinating to watch, often utterly ludicrous but somehow with its own charm and the more you watch, the more you have to keep watching.
Stars: Robin Mackay, Nina Watts, Harry Myles and Joe Browne
Kung Fu vs Yoga was an awesome kung fu movie but it hinted at hopping vampires and then didn't deliver, so I just had to rush home and watch a hopping vampire movie and this one has been on my list for a while. It's a Godfrey Ho movie, he who made the most awesomely bad ninja movies ever, and I'd used it to test a stack of old DVD players with. Flipping through the chapters to make sure that the remotes worked OK showed me clips of stunning weirdness that are simply irresistable to a fan of bad exploitation movies.
Our bad guy is a nasty heroin dealer called Cole. When we first meet him he takes off his nasty heroin dealer sunglasses and complains about 'Tom, the goddamn anti-drug agent'. His henchmen naturally want to know what he's going to do about such a thorn in their side, so he points out that he's hired a Taoist to sic vampires on him. Now if you've seen any Chinese vampire films, you know that Chinese vampires hop and you stop them by fixing Taoist scrolls to their foreheads. Being dressed in traditional Mandarin garb, they also don't tend to appear in crime thrillers set in the present day, making this a curious anomaly. What's more the anomalies keep on coming.
First we get to play with the traditional stuff a little more. We're treated to a scene where the Taoist priest gets ready to demonstrate to a couple of western drug dealers the coolest of his bevy of vampires: the one called Peter who wears what looks like a gorilla mask. But before he can conjure him to life, a white clad ghost called Christine breaks up the affair by leaping into the fray through extreme wirework. She complains about what's going on in dialogue that's as blissfully outrageous as anything in Dead Men Walk.
'How dare you take my lover's corpse, Taoist,' she cries at the priest, 'and turn it into a vampire beast? Now he is condemned to a living death and we can never be together in the afterlife!'
The priest replies, 'But he is from the east and you the west. How can you explain this?'
Naturally she's happy to explain, in scary amounts of detail. 'Orientals are a stubborn race. Both his parents opposed our marriage. It was then that we decided if we could not be together in this life, Peter and I would be together forever in the afterlife. You have robbed us of this by turning him into a vampire beast! Now my thoughts are of revenge!'
Awesome stuff, huh? Well we haven't started yet. After we leave the traditional side of the film with the nice western drug dealers recommending that they be married in a Taoist ceremony to unite their souls in the afterlife, we head over to find what Tom's up to. In case you'd forgotten, he's that goddamn anti-drug agent that Cole is so obsessed with, and sure enough he's so indestructable that it takes one whole scene to take him down. And that's the end of Tom: as a nurse who's fond of redundant comments points out, 'It was a fatal wound. He's dead.'
Well, that ought to be the end of Tom, but no! His friend and colleague is completely unphased that their star agent is dead, and turns to their boss and says, 'Since Tom's dead I want to make use of his body to create an android like robot.' Naturally there's no objection from the boss and so an Eastern ripoff of RoboCop is born, costumed entirely in silver fabric pretending to be metal, and going by the name of Robo Warrior. Naturally whenever he moves in the slightest the sound effects thud and clang and the hydraulics kick into play for every subtle movement that takes place outside of a fight. And of course he heads out solo to take down Cole.
Meanwhile somewhere in the mix is another bad guy called Young, who is tied up in the same racket and who kidnaps and tortures one of Tom's fellow agents, a woman named Sophie. So a bunch of mercenaries get hired to rescue her. This section is fun because of a cute Asian chick with an Australian accent and a destroyed village where all the locals are wiped out and tied upside down to crosses, but it really can't compete with the main half of the film, the one with Robo Warrior, the ghost and the gorilla masked hopping vampire. It's utterly surreal: 'You can kill us, but wait until our love's consummated!'
Now any exploitation film fan worth his salt has to see this film but knows that it's going to be truly awful. I should point out that it utterly refuses to follow the rules even of the games it takes to merge together in an awesomely unholy union. These aren't your run of the mill Chinese hopping vampires and I'm not just talking about the gorilla mask. These hopping vampires have zombie makeup and eat flesh. They are talented at wirework martial arts and are so acrobatic that they can even teleport. The don't just hop relentlessly forward, they even hop sideways or rapidly in circles. They breathe smoke and launch fireworks from their fingertips. The Taoist priest can even conjure them out of a jar he carries with a few ritual waves of his hand.
What's more not a single one of these actors seems to have done anything else. The highlighted stars are Robin Mackay, Nina Watts, Harry Myles and Joe Browne and according to IMDb each of them has been involved with precisely one movie: Robo Vampire. It's apparently a USA/Hong Kong production, but there are certainly Aussies involved and Sorapong Chatree is Thai. Really it doesn't feel like something from any of these countries: it just feels like a Godfrey Ho movie.
Ho was a master (or maybe that's not the right word) of taking two separate films and editing them into one new one. Often he didn't even make the source films, buying them in from other Asian countries, whether they had been finished or not. In this way Richard Harrison, who made a mere handful of movies for Ho (the real number seems to be nigh on impossible to find, but I'm guessing at one or two), but ended up edited into about twenty of them. This patchwork approach is fascinating to watch, often utterly ludicrous but somehow with its own charm and the more you watch, the more you have to keep watching.
Saturday, 6 June 2009
Kung Fu vs Yoga (1979)
Director: Chuan Chen
Stars: Yuet Sang Chin, Alan Hsu, Mi Suet and Dupar Singh
What an awesome title for a movie. How can you go wrong with a 1979 martial arts flick called Kung Fu vs Yoga? Well, it turned out to be a pretty standard kung fu comedy storyline enhanced by a huge amount of innovation, mostly but not entirely during the fight scenes. This innovation makes it a must see for kung fu fans and even as a curiosity for others. What really doesn't work is the dubbing, which is utterly English, to the degree that I'm sure I recognise the voice actor from British TV but can't place him. It's like watching a martial arts film voiced by the Geico gecko, meaning very surreal.
Of course we start off with a traditional battle between a couple of martial arts fighters, one dressed in black and one dressed in red. The older one is Tiger and the younger is his friend and student whose name sounds like Mun Ching but apparently is really Wu Shing. The actors are respectively Yuet Sang Chin and Alan Hsu, who I've both seen in smallers parts in other movies, such as John Woo's Last Hurrah for Chivalry. They're very much from the early Jackie Chan slapstick school of martial arts comedy, the sort of characters you're never quite sure are supposed to be gay or not.
Tiger is beating Wu Shing but eventually loses out to his Hen's Claws technique and then wakes up. Yes, this is all a dream, because Tiger is such a martial arts afficionado that he even dreams about kung fu techniques. Unfortunately in waking up he ends up knocking out his father and because there's no water around, he saves him up by throwing urine all over him. And somehow his father has the temerity to kick him out of the house for such a transgression!
Incidentally, for the uninitiated it's utterly unsurprising to find urine in eastern movies; it's omnipresent in comedies and horror movies, hopefully for opposite reasons: toilet humour in comedies and a representation of the water of life in horror films. The continual potty jokes here mean that it isn't difficult to gauge the level of humour in play and we even get a point where we see Chinese actors in blackface just like an old Boston Blackie movie. And that doesn't even come close to the Muslim joke which in another time and place could have warranted a fatwa!
Anyway, Tiger's father is surprisingly really upset to wake up covered in piss so he kicks him out to go live with his uncle in the city. Uncle Pang runs a pottery shop and isn't really important in the slightest but his pots are because they provide great material to practice kung fu with. Kung fu films can be rated entirely on how well the martial arts interact with whatever props happen to be sitting around, and on that front this one rates very highly indeed. In Uncle Pang's pottery shop, Tiger throws the pots around so Wu Shing can practice balance and this impresses the customers. Tiger is very popular, it seems, however poor he remains.
Now before we get to the real story, we have a quick side story to work through, and that's for Tiger and Wu Shing to expose a band of unscrupulous monks who are ripping off the locals by selling them medicine to supposedly save them from danger from passing coffins. Nobody ever accused locals in kung fu movies to have brains. This scam is being run by a kung fu master called Blind Snake who lives in an underground lair in the forest, or something like that. And when our heroes investigate they find hopping vampires! This is definitely my sort of movie!
However I then missed a few minutes to get drink and popcorn because the lines were crazy before the movie started, and so missed out on the discovery that these hopping vampires disappear without a by your leave. No fair. At least Tiger is kicking everyone's ass on stage in some sort of martial arts competition, which makes up for it at least a little, especially as his last opponent is a good looking young lady hiding behind a veil. It turns out, as he beats her too, that she's not really a contestant, she's a prize: she'll marry the winner of the contest and she's more than a little upset that someone as poor, albeit popular, as Tiger.
So here's where our real story kicks in. While her father insists that the marriage has to go ahead, young Lady Ting won't sleep with her new husband until he's completed three tasks for her to prove his worth. Naturally all of them are designed to be impossible but just as naturally Tiger takes her at her word and works his way through the bunch. And this is where the fun lies: the inventiveness of the scriptwriters and choreographers in working through these three tasks.
The first involves stealing a kung fu manual from a monk who sleeps on a bed made of pots, leading our heroes to attempt ways to move him off them without waking him up. The second is to steal some jade from the dress of a prostitute, who turns out to be a martial arts master transvestite. Finally and inevitably, given the title of the film, the third has to do with stealing a ruby from a yoga master who sells sex oil. And yes, they're still our heroes and we root for Tiger even though these tasks all involve stealing things from their rightful owners.
The fights are the fun and each of these three extended battles involves one enemy against two heroes, giving the choreographers plenty to work with. Yuet Sang Chin and Alan Hsu are acrobats, comedians and flexible fighters and they spend most of this film, when not practicing against each other, teaming up to be effectively two halves of the same whole. If you've ever been privileged enough to see The Crippled Masters, you'll know what sort of thing I mean, but here both halves are able bodied. The first monk and the transvestite are fun to watch but the real joy comes in watching Dupar Singh portray the Yoga Master, because he is unbelievably flexible.
He's a contortionist, able to wrap his legs round his head and his arms round anything and this makes the fights as bizarre and joyously unpredictable as any I've seen in kung fu cinema. Sure, he's a gimmick opponent just as much as say, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was to Bruce Lee, but he's another really interesting one to watch. The fact that his hands and feet can go places that you simply don't expect means that his punches and kicks come from places that you simply don't expect either. Unfortunately the unpredictability of this wonderful fight sequence doesn't extend to the ending of the film, which is utterly telegraphed. However it's easy to ignore the last minute and revel in the previous thirty to forty five.
Stars: Yuet Sang Chin, Alan Hsu, Mi Suet and Dupar Singh
What an awesome title for a movie. How can you go wrong with a 1979 martial arts flick called Kung Fu vs Yoga? Well, it turned out to be a pretty standard kung fu comedy storyline enhanced by a huge amount of innovation, mostly but not entirely during the fight scenes. This innovation makes it a must see for kung fu fans and even as a curiosity for others. What really doesn't work is the dubbing, which is utterly English, to the degree that I'm sure I recognise the voice actor from British TV but can't place him. It's like watching a martial arts film voiced by the Geico gecko, meaning very surreal.
Of course we start off with a traditional battle between a couple of martial arts fighters, one dressed in black and one dressed in red. The older one is Tiger and the younger is his friend and student whose name sounds like Mun Ching but apparently is really Wu Shing. The actors are respectively Yuet Sang Chin and Alan Hsu, who I've both seen in smallers parts in other movies, such as John Woo's Last Hurrah for Chivalry. They're very much from the early Jackie Chan slapstick school of martial arts comedy, the sort of characters you're never quite sure are supposed to be gay or not.
Tiger is beating Wu Shing but eventually loses out to his Hen's Claws technique and then wakes up. Yes, this is all a dream, because Tiger is such a martial arts afficionado that he even dreams about kung fu techniques. Unfortunately in waking up he ends up knocking out his father and because there's no water around, he saves him up by throwing urine all over him. And somehow his father has the temerity to kick him out of the house for such a transgression!
Incidentally, for the uninitiated it's utterly unsurprising to find urine in eastern movies; it's omnipresent in comedies and horror movies, hopefully for opposite reasons: toilet humour in comedies and a representation of the water of life in horror films. The continual potty jokes here mean that it isn't difficult to gauge the level of humour in play and we even get a point where we see Chinese actors in blackface just like an old Boston Blackie movie. And that doesn't even come close to the Muslim joke which in another time and place could have warranted a fatwa!
Anyway, Tiger's father is surprisingly really upset to wake up covered in piss so he kicks him out to go live with his uncle in the city. Uncle Pang runs a pottery shop and isn't really important in the slightest but his pots are because they provide great material to practice kung fu with. Kung fu films can be rated entirely on how well the martial arts interact with whatever props happen to be sitting around, and on that front this one rates very highly indeed. In Uncle Pang's pottery shop, Tiger throws the pots around so Wu Shing can practice balance and this impresses the customers. Tiger is very popular, it seems, however poor he remains.
Now before we get to the real story, we have a quick side story to work through, and that's for Tiger and Wu Shing to expose a band of unscrupulous monks who are ripping off the locals by selling them medicine to supposedly save them from danger from passing coffins. Nobody ever accused locals in kung fu movies to have brains. This scam is being run by a kung fu master called Blind Snake who lives in an underground lair in the forest, or something like that. And when our heroes investigate they find hopping vampires! This is definitely my sort of movie!
However I then missed a few minutes to get drink and popcorn because the lines were crazy before the movie started, and so missed out on the discovery that these hopping vampires disappear without a by your leave. No fair. At least Tiger is kicking everyone's ass on stage in some sort of martial arts competition, which makes up for it at least a little, especially as his last opponent is a good looking young lady hiding behind a veil. It turns out, as he beats her too, that she's not really a contestant, she's a prize: she'll marry the winner of the contest and she's more than a little upset that someone as poor, albeit popular, as Tiger.
So here's where our real story kicks in. While her father insists that the marriage has to go ahead, young Lady Ting won't sleep with her new husband until he's completed three tasks for her to prove his worth. Naturally all of them are designed to be impossible but just as naturally Tiger takes her at her word and works his way through the bunch. And this is where the fun lies: the inventiveness of the scriptwriters and choreographers in working through these three tasks.
The first involves stealing a kung fu manual from a monk who sleeps on a bed made of pots, leading our heroes to attempt ways to move him off them without waking him up. The second is to steal some jade from the dress of a prostitute, who turns out to be a martial arts master transvestite. Finally and inevitably, given the title of the film, the third has to do with stealing a ruby from a yoga master who sells sex oil. And yes, they're still our heroes and we root for Tiger even though these tasks all involve stealing things from their rightful owners.
The fights are the fun and each of these three extended battles involves one enemy against two heroes, giving the choreographers plenty to work with. Yuet Sang Chin and Alan Hsu are acrobats, comedians and flexible fighters and they spend most of this film, when not practicing against each other, teaming up to be effectively two halves of the same whole. If you've ever been privileged enough to see The Crippled Masters, you'll know what sort of thing I mean, but here both halves are able bodied. The first monk and the transvestite are fun to watch but the real joy comes in watching Dupar Singh portray the Yoga Master, because he is unbelievably flexible.
He's a contortionist, able to wrap his legs round his head and his arms round anything and this makes the fights as bizarre and joyously unpredictable as any I've seen in kung fu cinema. Sure, he's a gimmick opponent just as much as say, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was to Bruce Lee, but he's another really interesting one to watch. The fact that his hands and feet can go places that you simply don't expect means that his punches and kicks come from places that you simply don't expect either. Unfortunately the unpredictability of this wonderful fight sequence doesn't extend to the ending of the film, which is utterly telegraphed. However it's easy to ignore the last minute and revel in the previous thirty to forty five.
Thursday, 4 June 2009
Nowhere to Hide (1999)
Director: Lee Myung-se
Stars: Park Joong-hoon and Jang Dong-kun
The reviews of this film at IMDb are mixed, generally highly positive but with a number of notable detractors. Almost everyone seems to be agreed, however, that the opening sequences constitute stylish action at its peak. Some reviewers go beyond mere praise and rave effusively and all this peaks my interest, especially given that it's a Korean movie and I'm hooked on the things. What I found was highly impressive, but hardly the greatest thing since sliced bread, the catch being that none of it was remotely what I expected. Perhaps the problem is that looking at it all as just action sequences does it a serious injustice.
Sure, we watch eruptions of gang warfare, cops getting into fights with the bad guys and assassins doing their business, but we see surprisingly little of the actual action. Cinematographers Jeong Kwang-seok and Song Haeng-ki concentrate more on the background, showing us some wondrous images of kids skipping down steps and the beginnings of a storm. They leave the action to the editor, Ko Im-pyo, who turns the fights into staccato sets of still photographs or slow motion footage.
There are a number of clever things going on here, mostly visual but also through the highly diverse soundtrack which ranges from rave to punk to metal to avant garde classical, even a Beatles-esque song to back up those early scenes and a quirky flamenco number used a couple of times later in the film. Reading up on other films that Lee Myung-se has directed, he seems to be something of an artist, making an outright action film a strange choice of material for him, but he tends to write what he directs, so it's not like it was thrust upon him by an uncaring studio.
What we end up with is utterly unconventional action. Some scenes are sped up, others slowed down. Often the camera doesn't look directly at the action but shows us its context instead. One brawl is shot from a static camera, relying entirely on choreography; another in silhouette, including floundering around on the floor. One chase scene bizarrely separates two men running very close to each other to play with our perspective and expectation; another is a set of static shots that the characters speed through. Some scenes play with speed like anime, with alternating hyperspeed and static slide. One slow motion scene is the most rushed such thing I think I've ever seen, half a dozen cops springing frantically into action in response to a doorbell ringing: it's like a slow motion explosion.
And in and amongst all this visual styling, we have something of a story. The opening sequences ended with a man murdered at a location in downtown Seoul called the 40 Steps, a name that is highly appropriate. We watch the cops, led by Detectives Woo and Kim, chase down leads, only to find them leading to other leads and so on, their key target Chang Sungmin always eluding them. As you might expect from the title, he can't run for ever but our trek to the finale has plenty of tension.
Woo is played by the highly charismatic Park Joong-hoon, a highly experienced actor with credits dating back to 1986, a long time in modern Korean cinema. He has a ball here playing good cop/bad cop all by himself, quirkily playing both sides of that coin, alternately threatening people and becoming their best friend, effectively moving in with them. Park is great at this double act and he is great at seeming driven. His rages and his realisations are palpable.
Kim is Jang Dong-kun, who was still establishing himself in 1999 so accordingly plays second fiddle here. However since this film he's moved on to a much higher profile career than his more experienced colleague, appearing in some of Korea's highest grossing films, including Friend and Tae Guk Gi: Brotherhood of War. He still only has 13 films to his name but I have another one on my DVR already: Kim Ki-duk's The Coast Guard. Here he's sometimes more subtle and sometimes far more of a poseur, often with head down and eyes up.
This is a strange film to watch because it's not often that you can watch an action film and an art film be the same thing, but this is definitely a film that relishes both concepts. There are scenes here straight out of spaghetti westerns and others from anime battles. There are a few melees and they're pretty wild, as confusing to the participants as they are to us. But when the action is at its most brutal, the soundtrack is at its most balletic, deliberately frustrating our expectations. There are gorgeous shots of snow and rain that match anything I've seen elsewhere and scenes borrowed straight out of Kurosawa: not just The Seven Samurai but Rashomon and Ikiru.
I really liked this film, but I can see why a lot of people don't. It refuses to be conventional, except when it wants to be utterly conventional, maybe just when we've got used to the lack of convention. I think viewers who love action but don't want to venture outside of that genre are going to get seriously frustrated here. Art film afficionados may not like the amount of violence or some of the more trendy stylings. Only people who can really relish both could find this becoming a quirky favourite.
Stars: Park Joong-hoon and Jang Dong-kun
The reviews of this film at IMDb are mixed, generally highly positive but with a number of notable detractors. Almost everyone seems to be agreed, however, that the opening sequences constitute stylish action at its peak. Some reviewers go beyond mere praise and rave effusively and all this peaks my interest, especially given that it's a Korean movie and I'm hooked on the things. What I found was highly impressive, but hardly the greatest thing since sliced bread, the catch being that none of it was remotely what I expected. Perhaps the problem is that looking at it all as just action sequences does it a serious injustice.
Sure, we watch eruptions of gang warfare, cops getting into fights with the bad guys and assassins doing their business, but we see surprisingly little of the actual action. Cinematographers Jeong Kwang-seok and Song Haeng-ki concentrate more on the background, showing us some wondrous images of kids skipping down steps and the beginnings of a storm. They leave the action to the editor, Ko Im-pyo, who turns the fights into staccato sets of still photographs or slow motion footage.
There are a number of clever things going on here, mostly visual but also through the highly diverse soundtrack which ranges from rave to punk to metal to avant garde classical, even a Beatles-esque song to back up those early scenes and a quirky flamenco number used a couple of times later in the film. Reading up on other films that Lee Myung-se has directed, he seems to be something of an artist, making an outright action film a strange choice of material for him, but he tends to write what he directs, so it's not like it was thrust upon him by an uncaring studio.
What we end up with is utterly unconventional action. Some scenes are sped up, others slowed down. Often the camera doesn't look directly at the action but shows us its context instead. One brawl is shot from a static camera, relying entirely on choreography; another in silhouette, including floundering around on the floor. One chase scene bizarrely separates two men running very close to each other to play with our perspective and expectation; another is a set of static shots that the characters speed through. Some scenes play with speed like anime, with alternating hyperspeed and static slide. One slow motion scene is the most rushed such thing I think I've ever seen, half a dozen cops springing frantically into action in response to a doorbell ringing: it's like a slow motion explosion.
And in and amongst all this visual styling, we have something of a story. The opening sequences ended with a man murdered at a location in downtown Seoul called the 40 Steps, a name that is highly appropriate. We watch the cops, led by Detectives Woo and Kim, chase down leads, only to find them leading to other leads and so on, their key target Chang Sungmin always eluding them. As you might expect from the title, he can't run for ever but our trek to the finale has plenty of tension.
Woo is played by the highly charismatic Park Joong-hoon, a highly experienced actor with credits dating back to 1986, a long time in modern Korean cinema. He has a ball here playing good cop/bad cop all by himself, quirkily playing both sides of that coin, alternately threatening people and becoming their best friend, effectively moving in with them. Park is great at this double act and he is great at seeming driven. His rages and his realisations are palpable.
Kim is Jang Dong-kun, who was still establishing himself in 1999 so accordingly plays second fiddle here. However since this film he's moved on to a much higher profile career than his more experienced colleague, appearing in some of Korea's highest grossing films, including Friend and Tae Guk Gi: Brotherhood of War. He still only has 13 films to his name but I have another one on my DVR already: Kim Ki-duk's The Coast Guard. Here he's sometimes more subtle and sometimes far more of a poseur, often with head down and eyes up.
This is a strange film to watch because it's not often that you can watch an action film and an art film be the same thing, but this is definitely a film that relishes both concepts. There are scenes here straight out of spaghetti westerns and others from anime battles. There are a few melees and they're pretty wild, as confusing to the participants as they are to us. But when the action is at its most brutal, the soundtrack is at its most balletic, deliberately frustrating our expectations. There are gorgeous shots of snow and rain that match anything I've seen elsewhere and scenes borrowed straight out of Kurosawa: not just The Seven Samurai but Rashomon and Ikiru.
I really liked this film, but I can see why a lot of people don't. It refuses to be conventional, except when it wants to be utterly conventional, maybe just when we've got used to the lack of convention. I think viewers who love action but don't want to venture outside of that genre are going to get seriously frustrated here. Art film afficionados may not like the amount of violence or some of the more trendy stylings. Only people who can really relish both could find this becoming a quirky favourite.
Monday, 1 June 2009
Princess Aurora (2005)
Director: Bang Eun-jin
Stars: Eom Jung-hwa and Mun Sung-kun
I'll take any opportunity to watch a Korean movie I can find nowadays, though I hear that what has been something of a golden age may be ending. This 2005 film from director/co-writer Bang Eun-jin (better known as an actress) begins strongly but strangely, with the vicious murder of an abusive stepmother in a shopping centre bathroom. The strengths are obvious: style and substance. What's strange is that we see precisely whodunit; what's more, it only takes a couple of minutes before we find out her name and occupation: Jung Soon-jung, an imported car saleswoman.
Of course this isn't an isolated event. The murders soon add up, such as a real bitch of a young lady during a facial and her rich married boyfriend in his own wedding chapel. The cops know that these are all connected, because the murderess leaves a sticker at the scene of each murder, a sticker of a children's cartoon character called Princess Aurora. Of course we know they're all connected, because we see them all perpetrated by the same woman, so have something else to work out: is this a murder mystery that has no mystery or something that goes well beyond a murder mystery.
Luckily this one leans towards the latter. The something else is the fact that Jung is the ex-wife of the lead investigator on the case, Oh Sung-ho. She's also the mother of their daughter Min-ah, a girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered at the age of six. But why would she start killing people now, especially given that Min-ah's murderer was caught, why these particular people in these particular ways and why would she flaunt it all in front of the one person she knows can catch her?
It's these questions that keep us watching, rather than the usual one of whodunit. We know precisely whodunit, we just don't know anything else and we have to wait for the story to let us in on the details. Eom Jung-hwa is excellent as Jung, alternating between a kind and sympathetic young lady and an utterly psychotic animal taking on the personality of her dead daughter. Mun Sung-kun isn't bad either as her ex-husband, a cop training to be a priest. How's this setup for a challenge to the presence of God?
At the end of the day this is an effective character study, however many questions it leaves unanswered as a crime thriller. I say unanswered, but they all are answered, merely in an explanatory dream sequence once the main thrust of the story is done and dusted. And here's where I find myself unable to really decide between two competing judgements on the film, because this last twenty minutes is polarising and I think speaks very clearly and strongly to the mothers in the audience.
The male half of my brain has respect for a film that cares enough to tie up its loose ends while being a little frustrated that it all had to be tacked onto the end in a sort of afterthought instead of being woven into the main body of the piece, touching and poignant certainly but clumsy too. However the female half of my brain thinks back through it all and wonders if there was really any other way to play the game. This visualisation of the entire back story answers in one fell swoop all the questions that the rest of the film spent time and effort building up in our minds and sets up one last superb twist.
And I have to end up leaning towards the latter. The point is that this isn't really a psychological drama or a police thriller, but only at the finale do we realise this. It's a horror story for mothers, and this dream sequence is utterly definitive as a mother's worst nightmare come true. While the guys in the audience leave the theatre disappointed or maybe just a little blah, I have a feeling that the mothers in the audience were standing in their seats applauding a woman who had broken the law in horrific ways to do what she as a mother had to do. Kudos to Bang Eun-jin for crafting a very feminine take on a masculine genre without once pandering to Hallmark mentality. No, this couldn't be shown on the Lifetime channel.
Stars: Eom Jung-hwa and Mun Sung-kun
I'll take any opportunity to watch a Korean movie I can find nowadays, though I hear that what has been something of a golden age may be ending. This 2005 film from director/co-writer Bang Eun-jin (better known as an actress) begins strongly but strangely, with the vicious murder of an abusive stepmother in a shopping centre bathroom. The strengths are obvious: style and substance. What's strange is that we see precisely whodunit; what's more, it only takes a couple of minutes before we find out her name and occupation: Jung Soon-jung, an imported car saleswoman.
Of course this isn't an isolated event. The murders soon add up, such as a real bitch of a young lady during a facial and her rich married boyfriend in his own wedding chapel. The cops know that these are all connected, because the murderess leaves a sticker at the scene of each murder, a sticker of a children's cartoon character called Princess Aurora. Of course we know they're all connected, because we see them all perpetrated by the same woman, so have something else to work out: is this a murder mystery that has no mystery or something that goes well beyond a murder mystery.
Luckily this one leans towards the latter. The something else is the fact that Jung is the ex-wife of the lead investigator on the case, Oh Sung-ho. She's also the mother of their daughter Min-ah, a girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered at the age of six. But why would she start killing people now, especially given that Min-ah's murderer was caught, why these particular people in these particular ways and why would she flaunt it all in front of the one person she knows can catch her?
It's these questions that keep us watching, rather than the usual one of whodunit. We know precisely whodunit, we just don't know anything else and we have to wait for the story to let us in on the details. Eom Jung-hwa is excellent as Jung, alternating between a kind and sympathetic young lady and an utterly psychotic animal taking on the personality of her dead daughter. Mun Sung-kun isn't bad either as her ex-husband, a cop training to be a priest. How's this setup for a challenge to the presence of God?
At the end of the day this is an effective character study, however many questions it leaves unanswered as a crime thriller. I say unanswered, but they all are answered, merely in an explanatory dream sequence once the main thrust of the story is done and dusted. And here's where I find myself unable to really decide between two competing judgements on the film, because this last twenty minutes is polarising and I think speaks very clearly and strongly to the mothers in the audience.
The male half of my brain has respect for a film that cares enough to tie up its loose ends while being a little frustrated that it all had to be tacked onto the end in a sort of afterthought instead of being woven into the main body of the piece, touching and poignant certainly but clumsy too. However the female half of my brain thinks back through it all and wonders if there was really any other way to play the game. This visualisation of the entire back story answers in one fell swoop all the questions that the rest of the film spent time and effort building up in our minds and sets up one last superb twist.
And I have to end up leaning towards the latter. The point is that this isn't really a psychological drama or a police thriller, but only at the finale do we realise this. It's a horror story for mothers, and this dream sequence is utterly definitive as a mother's worst nightmare come true. While the guys in the audience leave the theatre disappointed or maybe just a little blah, I have a feeling that the mothers in the audience were standing in their seats applauding a woman who had broken the law in horrific ways to do what she as a mother had to do. Kudos to Bang Eun-jin for crafting a very feminine take on a masculine genre without once pandering to Hallmark mentality. No, this couldn't be shown on the Lifetime channel.
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