Stillness in Motion: CALIFORNIA SPLIT / TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

Cinema and gambling go together: like hangers-on at the races or Reno craps tables have no problem cathartically sharing in lucky streaks of others, we viewers get lost in the thick of the action, our mood rising and falling with the stacks of chips at our hero's side. And filmmakers are nothing if not gamblers themselves: moving fast and loose with huge wads of other people's cash, tangling with the odds, and making choices moment-by-moment that can make or break the bank.

Some films are just escapism, or a thrill ride away from ourselves but we can see ourselves in other films the way parents see themselves in children. I see old flames in the eyes of cinematic icons and I see my brother Fred in the dull lug wrench work involved with being a drag race mechanic in TWO LANE BLACKTOP, a mytho-poetic saga of masculinity that reverberates to my core, and shit. So how come both BLACKTOP and Altman's gambling drama CALIFORNIA SPLIT are so underseen? Doesn't anybody ever roll the dice no more?

I saw Nicholas Ray's LUSTY MEN (1952)--a story about the manly world or rodeo riding-and BLACKTOP Monte Hellman's COCKFIGHTER (1974)--about the manly world of cockfighting--a couple years back and wrote that I thought neither was on DVD in any reputable form due to their edgy titles (put together they read like a gay porn marquee). The problems besetting TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971 and CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974) are similar, but more of a legal rather than promotional nature, specifically: song rights. Apparently just having a Doors tune be heard while passing a drag strip car stereo can spin your film into limbo for generations to come. A bad spin of the wheel to be sure.

In the case of CALIFORNIA SPLIT, several sequences had to be removed or re-edited for TV prints due to song royalty issues--and then the remixed version caught flak from Altman purists--so on DVD it's practically a no-show. Lucky for us it's available on Netflix streaming along with a few other titles that seem to exist only there, such as LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. I wish Tom Berenger would stop killing Diane Keaton and go after some of these AOR lawyers, though I guess they're dying quick enough on their own.

TWO LANE eventually resolved its music issues and is now on an awesome Criterion two-disc set, decades after failing to get theatrically released in a timely manner to cash in on the high of its predecessor, EASY RIDER, or to overcome the way-too-high expectations and hipster suspicion caused by a jump-the-gun April 1971 Esquire cover (right). Also, the head of the parent studio hated the film, apparently he didn't "get it." He probably would have had it been in French with subtitles, and thus had a better context of artsiness, but as it was he refused to give it any publicity. Then it had a hard time on video due to music rights. Oh brother. What a bad luck streak! And BLACKTOP uses music so sparingly, too! The '55 Chevy has no radio so all music is either heard in Oates' GTO or else playing out of speakers at the various drag spots. When the music does appear your ears devour it. The songs seem extra nurturing after the enigmatic silences and roar of exhaust pipes and V-9201 triple D hydrophonic quad engines...

Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974) is similarly about the world of male bonding via "putting up or shutting up," and "laying it all on the table" and again there's no point digging for homoerotic subtext in a movie where the subtexts have been stripped down and exposed and nobody cares because once a subtext gets exposed it either "puts up or shuts up" and if it doesn't lay down on the table it's because nothing would stop it if it wanted to, and sometimes that's enough. As with much of Altman and Hellman's output, we're immersed in a niche culture with its own insular complexity: we watch the flashing of dollars and hear the overlapping numbers, "Three to one on Egyptian Femme in the ninth by 8 points," / "You got it, Brother," with awe from a distance, like a little brother tagging along.  It seems like chaos, but the grace and quickness with which people willingly hand over huge piles of cash to each other is life-affirming. More than anything as far as plot or money or character, what's most important is the camaraderie, the flurry of activity that makes these guys feel alive.

One of the more artsily respectable of these "flurry of activity" episodes is the Rome stock exchange in L'ECLISSE (1962, above and below). You can argue here that Antonioni is criticizing capitalist greed in these scenes, but he's also marveling at the way idle humans can find something to get passionate about over nothing--for no one passes any actual money around at these stock markets. They just shout numbers: "20,000 Finsider at 20!" The effect is something anyone who's been in a foreign country and not known the language can understand and perhaps that's why subtitles make movies "seem" artsy while a film in English about gamblers or drag racers only "seems" trashy - and when either contradicts that expectation, we don't like it. A common currency breeds resentment, but a special private language shared only by your fellow degenerates creates a special nook. There's no race, age, class or gender distinctions, only who's got the cash to back up their line of bullshit.

BLACKTOP stars James Taylor and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and the idea of having two non-actor musicians as the stars may seem odd at first, but only if you're not a musician who's ever been on tour. Let me tell you, most of being a musician is a lot like this film: you pull up to some gas station for a rest and while one person takes care of the pump, the other 3-8 people pile out of the van, use the bathroom, steal some candy, buy some soda or beer if the store is open, and wander around the grassy shoulders of the off-ramp, sneaking one-hits, peeing in the bushes, stretching, shaking the fuzziness off, staring vacantly out in space. Then you round everyone back up and then when you finally get to your venue, you set up and then wait around until 11 PM when the show starts. Then you sleep on someone's floor or in some girl's bed if you're lucky, or just stay up and drink until suddenly it's morning. Then you hit the road again. It's all uncertain and unknowable, and if you've got the guts to coast that way, and the cash, you can do it forever.

Basically, if you're a musician everything you do all day is just preparing for showtime, and until then you just kind of keep yourself in a calm, alert state. You try to avoid getting too drunk or too stoned or too tired to play well, not just for you, because you're a team. The people who rely on you are right next to you and the personalities interlock: the dynamic of the mechanic and driver in BLACKTOP is similar to, say, the drummer and guitarist, or roadies and singer. Taylor and Wilson are eerily calm as befits the type who has learned to spend these idle stretches deep within. They are road-tested traveling troubadours who know how to focus in one one thing and let the rest of the world flash by. They talk about cars if they're racers or "how'd we sound last night" if they're musicians... you have to put up with hearing how each of them sounds on the soundboard tape as its played in the car all day long until the next gig, and you forced to listen to every little bass guitar fuck-up you made because you were too drunk and trying to show off, Erich!

By comparison, Warren Oates' GTO-driver is hopelessly insecure, challenging Wilson and Taylor in a race, apparently for friendship rather than monetary interests, but of course neither team can admit that. Oates' idea of taking "the girl" and going somewhere like "Chicago or New York" is the plan by which all his dreams will come true--the "We're retired in Florida now, Mister" dream of EASY RIDER, but she's not buying it, just as Captain America didn't--and neither, once the dust of his bullshit settles, is Oates himself.

Existence on the road is all these people seem to have - they have no address, no home other than their car, or-- in the girl's case--someone else's car. Stretched out along Route 66, they're vagabonds on wheels, sleeping in shifts or just hanging out in some no-horse town at the best time to be hanging out in such towns, dawn. GTO's patter indicates he's aware of this perpetually displaced vagrancy while fundamentally unable to "accept it" and stop the idle chatter. He tells his disinterested hitchhiker passengers that these boys he's racing with "get hysterical... They run right over ya if they get the chance; but they can't stand up to the 455 no way." As if anyone even knows what that is, as if even he knows.

Some movies can portend to be about everything cosmic and cool, but really be about the director's insecurity, like Woody Allen's. Monte Hellman's are the reverse: they're about male insecurity burying itself in a spiritual discipline -- Zen and the art of the Chevrolet, and at their core reveal only a transcendental quietude worthy of Ozu or Bresson. And much as I love EASY RIDER, you can see the difference as clear as night and day between the judgmental redneck bashing of Hopper's film and the way Wilson quietly changes his license plate when driving through the deep south because he doesn't feel "safe," letting you infer deep suspicion towards out-of-staters, but sparing us any actual redneck violence.

The film's focus on the art of driving is a spiritual thing that the truly enlightened, deranged, or anyone experiencing a mid-life crisis or lysergic epiphany can understand: the thing in itself doesn't matter so much as the doing - in this case the fast-talk distraction that comes from winning money, watching races and fights and admiring each other's vehicle or poker chips. Anything can become poetry with the proper attention: the roosters fighting in slow motion in COCKFIGHTER for example. The beauty of the road is the way constant motion can breed deep inner stillness, time and responsibility escaped through some motorized loophole.  Who wins the race or fight hardly matters to Hellman? All we know is: destinations are for chumps.

Foreign films' subtitles create the same disconnect as the intense focus and foreign-ness of "carspeak" or "cockspeak." We need to be plunged into foreign situations, like kids greedily absorbing the strangeness with no intention of judging it. Make it too unfamiliar to ever breed contempt, and its art.

But it's lost, a lost art. The only ones who've come close to being believable in carspeak in the last few decades is Vin Diesel--who was able to carspeak for most of FAST AND FURIOUS without it sounding tacked on, and Heath Ledger as a zonked board waxer in LORDS OF DOGTOWN.  But look what happened to them? Five to one Diesel never makes it back, either; I'll put 35 at five to six he doesn't - even money he does but grows hair on that bald dome and gets pudgy and starts playing street thugs. Yep, I won that bet. Won it flat out, in a poker game, used to fly jets... for pink slips. It don't mean nothin' either way. Fade to Burn, George. And don't roll no post-op credits.

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Ich liebe dich so, Anita Pallenberg

I love Anita Pallenberg, extra much today. I've always loved the Nordic blonde goddess types, not the bland automaton types but the ferociously alive yet cold-at-the-core Teutons. As I listen to Rolling Stones' "Angie," I think about what the Stones would have been without Anita and Marianne Faithful to guide them, the twin muses of the twins Glimmer. The allure of Faithfull lay in her archetypal depth, her timeless beauty, both dating back to Camelot and the Celts. Pallenberg's appeal was/is more elusive; you can't even really remember what she looks like because her face is so liquid, so alive from second to second with crazy emotions, artistic freestyle, Brian Jones, ferocious carnality, sensory exultation, long teeth, and innate fashion sense. She's a wolf and 18 djinn poured into a German model's body. All I can do is offer screen captures culled from PERFORMANCE to try and hang some random adjectives on her clotheshorse from Valhalla appeal:

 

With the arrival of James Fox's gangster into their psychedelic love den, Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger launch a series of wigs to conceal the hooliganism of Chaz (Fox) so he isn't found by his old gang. Anita initiates the red wig and against the red decor she seems like a whole new character, but it's just a mirror of Fox's original disguise, a hideous red shoe polish hairdo, and he will eventually wear the red wig himself... and lipstick.

 

Drugs play a huge part in this transformation. Though many contemporary shamen and Buddhists don't think drugs are needed, shaman Anita swears by them, and without those shrooms, Fox's transformation would be incomplete -- like trying to reach Nevada on foot instead of in an air-conditioned limo. To choose to walk instead may add 'authenticity' but smacks of puritanism and dogma. To paraphrase Ed Wood, if God had meant for us to walk, he wouldn't have given us wings... and to insist on always walking is just as dogmatic and dorky as never walking. Taking the van to go down the driveway for the paper, for example, smacks just as bad... but hurts so good.

Films of the late 1960s and early 1970s were full of political incorrectness and drug orgies but PERFORMANCE was directed and written by Donald Cammell, a man who lived and breathed drug orgies. The difference is like night and so much later that night that it's the breaka dawn.

Speaking of which, why am I letting yet another nice day go by writing blog entries? I'm  scared of all the tourists outside, and would rather be up in my own bescarved den of creativity, hiding from the world til it's dusk and the tourists are gone, the year of the Cat. I'll leave you with a link to my earlier PERFORMANCE piece and the beautiful ode to the song, "Wild Horses" by a writer with many of Pallenberg's alluring qualities, Sunset Gun's Kim Morgan.

And check her black wig in BARBARELLA (1968)!

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Leperello on the Uke: ROAD TO SINGAPORE (1940)

I just watched THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN (1948) starring the great Errol Flynn--perfect casting of course considering his reputation--and it managed to be thrilling despite winkiness. I'm a fan of the Mozart opera, DON GIOVANI (which is to say I can tolerate more than most operas) so I was sad to see the Flynn version skips the "Hell" ending (see pic below) and fails to take advantage of the unique opportunity of exploring the complexity of Juan/Giovanni's manservant and drinking buddy Leporello, who waits outside with the horses for a quick escape beneath m'lday's boudoir window. There's not been near enough characters like him: the Juan and Leporello pair bond is a fundamental archetypal myth which today survives only in the form of "the wingman" or else falls into disrepair via the "Bromantic Comedy."

The true measure of a man when you're trying to hook up with a woman is whether said man be a wing man or cock blocker. And we know this. But oft times they are one in the same. Once the class divide is erased then the issue of the rich kid footing the bill for his poor but hilarious confidente is mussed up and endangered. Such a Leporello-Juan relationship is nowhere better expressed than in ROAD TO SINGAPORE, with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. 

The Bob Hope-Bing Crosby "road" movies are all sublime. The third, ROAD TO MOROCCO is commonly considered the most hilarious and inventive, but I'll take ROAD TO SINGAPORE (1940), which gives us the boy's full back story and thus a better idea of class demarcations (Hope is the poor sailor friend to rich kid Crosby). Paramount knew comedy, and it seems the studio most permissive regarding improvisational canoodling and futzing around in what Manny Farber would call 'termite art.'

Bob and Bing have a relationship that mixes constant fraternal antagonism (and backstabbing) with a post-modern detachment that never quite falls into the abyss of narrative disruption, which is a PBS fancy-pants way of saying you still get absorbed in the plot, even as the boys constantly eat the script. They dance on the lip of complete chaos but never fall in; they are classic "bad influence" friends of the sort weary sets of parents meet over drinks to figure out how to separate; and their worst enemies as far as getting girlfriends are each other as they cockblock every chance they get, but all while being perfect pals, both madly in love with the sweet and demure and ever-so-vaguely 'ethnic other,' Dorothy Lamour (left).

Bing always gets the girl, because he can sing. And man, he can, can't he? I generally hate when some guy starts crooning onscreen, but der Bingle brings such a smooth tone no feather can stay ruffled. Even if you leave to go get popcorn during his romantic numbers, he forgives you. All I have to do is remember Mel Blanc's (?) impression of him and Sinatra as dueling roosters in Swooner Crooner, a cartoon I saw countless times through childhood, and I too swoon.

Usually we see only the evil versions of bad influence buddy friends onscreen, as in the girls of HEAVENLY CREATURES or DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL or the lads of BUTCHER BOY. But Hope and Crosby are the other end of the moral spectrum: they're knights of Camelot in vagabond clothing and mouths washed of poesy talk. Even if their gallant behavior is solely to placate the era's sharp-eared censors and strict codes, their de-sexualized lust strategies are calming, endearing examples of what Lao Tzu might call "the pursuit of emptiness." Neither one is going to "do" anything if they win Dorothy Lamour. They can't stay separate long enough, like comedic magnets, to get beyond first base, or even stay there long. 

It's possibly due in part to Hope's baby face and Bing's glassy-eyed ease in his own skin. What's Dorothy Lamour without Hope around, and vice versa? They're all 'mates,' Bob and Bing, married to each other the way young straight guys or a pair of outcast young male lions can sometimes be, freely wandering the savannah together, growling in good-natured antagonism, vowing 'no women' even as they fight over each flash of legs through the sarong of Lamour, who refuses to pick one over the other for more than a few minutes at at time, and even if they think they're winning, that in turn prompts them to remind each other where that train of lustful thinking leads: children and nagging! Round and round they go!

While eternally free, Bob and Bing's path is one of flight; reacting against the terror of returning 'too soon' from the idyll of boyhood. In the beginning of the film, Bing's dad (Charles Coburn) admonishes his son to settle down: "Your galavanting is over, young man!" But we've not seen any of this previous galavanting - there is no past when you live in the moment! Bing's barely begun the picture; he's not about to settle down so soon after the opening credits. The boys would seldom be back in the states after this first outing. I don't think Bing ever saw his dad again. They just kept running!

Their rapport is always the same: Bing is the leader in the end by virtue of his sharp wisdom, calm demeanor and his singing; Hope's always been excellent at mirroring and playing off his fellow actors, using his natural heterosexual nervousness around hot babes as electricity that juices him into flurries of action and barking. Bing meanwhile seems much more calm around the ladies, playful and relaxed, waiting for the meat to drop so he can grab it, and Bob uses this space to become a great meat dropper. The tension Hope works with centers around babes, or food, or money. His need for whatever's lacking is unending; he's 'fear and desire,' and Bing is more the calm, cool, Zen center.

In an earlier post I discussed my deep appreciation of the "Thanks for the Memories" number that serves as a quiet show-stopper in the otherwise ROTM film BIG BROADCAST OF 1938.  That was Hope's first big picture and how interesting it is that only two years later he slammed this home-run, ROAD TO SINGAPORE, kicking off the immensely popular road pictures and displaying that great range of cowardliness and courage, a two-fisted Romeo and conniving goofball, immature layabout and solid citizen. In the first few reels, Hope even looks kind of handsome in his black sailor sweater and cap. (The scene represented by the picture below, however, is a whole post in and of itself):

Yes sir, racist, perhaps, but would you admonish children if they're up in their bedroom wearing bedsheets and pancake mix, pretending to be native tribesmen? Jokes reflect their era and stereotypes run rampant, but it's all just for laughs... like Stanley Cavell writes about screwball comedy in his essential Comedies of Remarriage, the core of post-code 'screwball' comedy is the play-acting of children, such as 'house' and 'dress-up' and the 'paddy cake / paddy cake / baker's man" chant that comes right before the boys start punching cops (but in a fake fighting way, like brothers do). The censorship code kept everyone locked in their room, grounded in pre-sexual juvenalia, bu--like Cary Grant or Groucho Marx--Hope and Crosby seem to find a special way to use libidinal restriction to make the world edgy, alive, and full of laughs -- and sexy almost as a side benefit. Rather than all the strident leering and wolf drool of say, Frank Tashlin or 80s sex comedies (wherein the sexier it tries to be the less sexy it actually is), Hope and Crosby are sexy because they never try to get past first base.

The film begins with the lads having recently come back from an ocean voyage, watching from on deck as their sailor brethren are corralled and abused by their waiting spouses. No sooner have they badmouthed marriage than a hick shotgun wedding party tries to corral Hope because he kept a girl named 'Cherry' out "half the night" at the movies. The implied sex or pregnancy is never addressed: it all being a crazy misunderstanding - and we believe it - as the pair have the impish charm of eternal youth that makes sex seem a vulgar impossibility. One of my favorite Hope moments comes when his face lights up at the name 'Cherry' only to suddenly slowly drain into dead seriousness before looking them in the eye and slowly shaking his head no, no idea who that girl is. A couple of brawls later and they've escaped to Singapore and a life of ease. The boys may or may not be innocent but really, as long as we don't see it, did it really happen? What does happen is that someone needs to chase them to keep the party moving, and no one does that better than Anthony Quinn as the whip wielding Lothario who 'raised' Dorothy Lamour as his daughter and now, her time to be married, she has come.

The magnetic pull of Lamour is enough to drive a wedge between the our heroes, because Hope isn't Crosby's servant--this is America, buddy!---and yet neither Hope or Crosby is apparently ever sexually intimate with her. Hope and Crosby sleep together in one room and she in another. When Hope tries to go to her in the middle of the night, Crosby stops him and vice versa. They never think to share her, as she shares herself with them, and when either gets a chance to be alone with her, he can only either badmouth the other or sing a song. Thus they are like fishermen who throw whatever they catch back as they don't really like fish. Theirs is the 'boyfriend/girlfriend' of childhood wherein there's no sex or kissing and any actual contact is usually antagonistic. The relationship often exists more in conversation with your second grade buddies than in actuality. In their constant jostling for top dog position, Lamour becomes the ultimate McGuffin, but sheesh, is she ever oven-fresh!

Bob had shown flair for this sort of hokey adventure-comedy-romance picture--usually tangling with Martha Raye--in GIVE ME A SAILOR and BIG BROADCAST (1938), while Bing held his own against Raye in WAKIKI WEDDING (1937) and subjugated a hoiti toiti Carole Lombard castaway in WE'RE NOT DRESSING (1934, which included the Raye-ish Ethel Merman). But when they weren't busy chasing off the brass belters and orbiting around the timid torchers, they always seemed a bit lonesome, like no one in the room could match their insouciant wit. They were like those kids with no one their own age to play with at the beach. But when Bob and Bing were put together they both lit up with a magic instant best-friend chemistry. Every good parent knows that if you want the kid to have a good time at the beach, you have to let him bring a friend. Though if they both like the same girl, look out, brother!

Call me crazy but comedy took a one-two punch with the success of THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and later THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. They brought scatological humor out of the bathroom and onto the dinner table and comedic civilization has since crumbled into balls and scrotums. Hope and Crosby were from a different era: Vaudeville, and their charm had to work on the whole, loud family in the back of the theater, from the kids to grandma. These guys got class! They're peppy! Fun for the whole family, sure! They're not exactly modern, even hokey on occasion, and yet, I'd rather hang out at a hep party with them than the all the dick-wagging navel-gazing schmucks of today. Hope and Crosby didn't need to talk about their dicks, they just plowed the chorus and kept it quiet, feigning a sexual naivete that only the well-laid can feign.  Only a real man can make childish behavior ennobling, it's all in the energy you manifest. You have to grow up to grow back down the right way, to paraphrase Cavell again.



I turn to Cavell in times of need, his analyses are like the friends who never fail to take you back into their inner circle even after you blew them off for the last three years to be with your girlfriend. Now you're back--wrecked and sad--and they take you in like you never left. They are the cool uncle who takes the pain away with a single deadpan smile. They are the hearth; the earth father; our Iron King; our blue mood saviors. They are every moth-eaten Romeos chance to start again, with an unslain Mercutio, ten cents, and a zauberflote carved from a sweet potato. And now a word from the folks at PBS...

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Acidemic Mother's Day

I recently re-read a 2004 popmatters review I did on ORCA (1977) and it's definitely the wellspring from which my 70s Dad series flowed. You should read it but wait, tis Mother's Day, I need to do a sequel to my Cinematic Blonde Moms of Death!

There's lots of theories of the "gaze" or viewer perspective in the mise-en-scene; are we masochists unable to control the stimulus we feel (unbearable suspense in Hithcock, for example) or sadists dominating and controlling through our masterful stare of covetous ownership? I think of it in Buddhist reincarantion terms, as if we've spent countless hours in between past lives surfing through the wormholes of the world, scoping out future wombs suitable to our karmic needs the way we scope out new apartments in "waking" life. At any rate, I get a glimmer of such a feeling during certain movies, such as MULHOLLAND DR., PERSONA and SPECIES, as I've written about. In all these the mother isn't yet a mom, in that sense, but the specter of an unborn child seems to hover around her, literally in PERSONA with the cut-aways to the kid waking up in the morgue; with the momentum of an unborn child's urgent need to be born into SPECIES, raging at the CGI bastard who takes our place; or with the camera as fearful, hesitant child approaching depressed mom in bathrobe in MULHOLLAND.

I talked to my own mom today and can attest that she's actually a pretty sweet and a nice lady, despite all the cold, Nordic things I write. Moms understand that their writer sons need to push them back/elevate them up into larger archetypal symbolic realms to add extra textural resonance to their emotional outpourings into the ether's vast unknowable net. My dad also read where I called him Orson Wellesian and thought I was ribbing him about his weight. Man oh man, some parents just don't understand that to a film lover, Orson Welles is like Shakespeare, Zeus, the devil, Daniel Webster and Colonel Kurz all rolled into one, and if their story is really a confession, then so is mine. Dad, Mom, I love ya.

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Lords of Fliestown (3 capsules)

  THE CHILDREN (2009)

British horror auteur Tom Shankland closes in on Neal Marshall for the title of British John Carpenter with this sweet tale of a tadpole egg-related infectious disease that turns children into coughing, smiling, wan, matricidal maniacs in an isolated English estate on Xmas holiday. 

 

What's really good here--aside from the awesome music--is the film's knowing critique of our fucked up social order in the wake of 1980s conservative "Spielbergism," through which 'cute' children are allowed to literally get away with murder while sulky teens are ostracized for beginning to remind parents too much of themselves. As an eldest child attention-seeker who's had to face being upstaged by cuter little tykes (and with no children of my own), I relish scenes where blind adherence to child-worship  results in bloody death. The seminal archetypal moment in this is perhaps the daughter in the basement rising up to grab a trowel in 1968's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (right). Advancing towards her mom while all mom can do is plead, so crippled by maternal compassion she can't even ward off a single stabbing blow. 

If that's one of your favorite scenes in movies, then you will love THE CHILDREN, wherein moms conveniently forget that their sweet children were trying to stab them just minutes ago, preferring to blame the savvy teenage girl in the group, rather than be forced to re-adjust their sense of the cuteness hierarchy. It's a terrifying thing when your parents won't believe you for no other reason than your little sister is more angelic and less openly rebellious, so you wind up punished for her murders. Shankland creates a great sense of mood, pace and real time amidst the dead winter English countryside, and it's fun to see parents that dare to drink and smoke in front of their kids, as they did in my day. I'm sure there's American audience members who think that if you smoke and drink in front of your child you should be arrested for reckless endangerment, and I'd just love to stick these sanctimonious reactionaries in this movie, so they could cry "Won't someone think of the children?!" as they gently wipe their own blood off their children's mouths and knife edges. Oh yeah. Believe it, for the jealous older sibling in each of us, THE CHILDREN delivers the corn.

SURVIVING CROOKED LAKE (2009)

Or "Anti-Antigone" as this Canadian film (made by three University of Toronto film students) winds up being about a girl's irrational refusal to bury the decomposing corpse of her brother. You don't need a hostile Greek king to pronounce her sentence, she'll do it herself. That's feminism! Steph (Stephannie Richardson) and her three cute blonde friends are lost in the Canadian wilderness. Rather than fight bears, tigers or hillbilly mutant cannibal rapists, the girls have to contend with Steph's obsessively self-righteous "no corpse left behind" policy.

Up until about half-way through the film it's a pretty good bucolic fantasia. Our three student directors keep the shots artsy and the shorts short, with sun-dappled dreamy close-up dissolves from one blonde-haired, nearly-mature beauty to the next. There's a nice film school idyll at work, like the cinematographer really studied PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1973) and maybe even MEAN CREEK (2005). But then the film bogs down into an argument about whether to drag the heavy , rotting corpse of their accidentally dead guide --he is also Steph's dead brother--FITZCARRALDO-style over hill and dale towards what they hope will be the highway. 

As Steph is the insane one who wont bury her brother or leave him, it becomes very hard to not judge her as the villain for her selfish, reckless endangerment of her friends, just so she can save her sibling's rotting corpse from being re-absorbed into nature. When some friendly wolves offer to take the corpse off her hands, Steph shoos them away and you don't know whether the filmmakers want you to cheer her bravery or wish she'd just get eaten, too. In other words, are they weirdos who think the spirit remains in the body after death, crying for legal permission to be buried, or are they recovering from some past trauma of being forced to attend an open casket funeral as a child?

So what's the raison d'etre, then, of this film, which is advertised as being a taut survival in the wilderness thriller with bonding teen chick streaked highlights? Whereas THE CHILDREN seems a veiled critique of modern over-parenting and child worship, SURVIVING CROOKED LAKE becomes an open one on girls who can't let go of their "inability to let go," even with slow death by starvation (anorexia) and constant vomiting from the stench of a decomposing brother (bulimia) staring them in the face. Are Canadians obsessed with dragging corpses around? Is this a national problem the way child obsession is in the states and UK? Something that needs to be addressed? It's certainly far enough outside my own realm of experience it seems made for some weird necrophiliacs-trying-to-get-straight rehab lounge. I hope it's not that someone somewhere secretly gets off on seeing girls regularly vomit from the stench of what was days ago their mutual object of teenage lust! Praise Jesus and King Edward, it ain't me babe.

 PS - If you want to check out another quiet strange "personal" Canadian exploitation film along the lines of CROOKED LAKE, may I recommend PUNCH?  Allegedly about the world of female topless boxing, it's actually the story of a widower trying to ween his daughter off her incestuous desires for him so she'll stop socking his new girlfriend, a timid photo booth worker with a topless boxing sister who may just have to come to the rescue. The director's actual daughter plays the girl and admits in the essential commentary track that the story is based on their true relationship!! In other words, he got funding to make a sleazy late night Cinemax cat fight flick but highjacked it to tell his own perverse confession, ala Ed Wood with GLEN OR GLENDA! Icky but fascinating... read my review here. 

 

 PLAIN DIRTY (2003)

And if you want a good swampy jail-bait exploitation fairy tale that's way off the radar and which the writer/director subverted to his own motive--this time to a loose reading of MACBETH--check out the under-appreciated PLAIN DIRTY (2003, above). It's almost Val Lewton-esque in that it shows you can make art instead of obsessive confessions and still hide it all under a functionally exploitative backwoods sleaze rubric. It does what HOUNDOG could have and Dominique (LOLITA) Swain holds her own as a conniving Lady MacBeth type! Woo Hoo!! Here's an excerpt from one of my first Acidemic reviews ever:

They take a typical swamp and cut off shorts exploitation set up ala Gator Bait (left), Poor White Trash, or Mudhoney, and then go off the deep end with it, into Kentucky-Freud Gothic grandeur. There’s a great, scraping viola and cello score by Nathan Barr, and dark, steamy cinematography by Scott Keven, both of whom worked, along with Verveen, on that last great entry in the redneck genre, Cabin Fever (2002). Keven doesn’t waste any chance to capture muted swampy sunlight trying to break through the filthy windows of these muddy shacks. The performances are all wonderful, especially Verveen’s, who manages to be believable while being simultaneously dirty, poetic, sneaky, charming, and oh so creepy as he woos Inez with lines like: “I wanna see what you look like when you grow old. Is you gonna grow gray or what?” Swain’s untamed Lolita-like energy makes her a believable force of girl nature, running around in her cut off shorts (nowhere near as short as Daisy Duke’s, alas) and cut up, dirty legs, or a filthy summer frock.

MMMmmmm, filthy... isn't there some over-nurturing movie parent out there who can come do her laundry?

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Bright Lights Film Journal #68 online w/ Twilight - Plus Night Nurse!

Bright Lights Film Journal #68 is online, featuring, in addition to a host of fine stuff, an all-new essay by mois, about TWILIGHT: NEW MOON: Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S/M, and the Daemonic in Twilight

And if subversion of the dubious morality enforced by a stuffy bourgeoisie-elite is your thing, you know that pre-code is the place to look, and when it comes to pre-code, there's no gutsier poet auteur than William Wellman, and of Wellman's vast oeuvre, none so daemonic, two-fisted, sexy and brilliant than NIGHT NURSE (1933), which the two-fisted, sexy, brilliant and daemonic Kim Morgan presented recently at an Austin film festival: Provocative Pre-Code Peach: Night Nurse.

Meanwhile, it's Monday, and there's around 800% humidity, and I love air conditioning more than life itself.

And the Big Parade has a nice float coming by on Wellman, and the Mummers are due any minute. 

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Mountain Man in the Middle: Arthur Hunnicutt

He's the craggy cowboy-faced feller who somehow grounds every film he's in--no matter how peripheral the character--with pioneer-style grace and droll aplomb. A Walter Brennan without the fogey sass and twice the steely-eyed mellow. He's just an actor who found a niche playing pioneer-types far older than he actually was, but when he's onscreen you forget you're watching a dude who dropped out of college and joined a theater troupe in Martha's Vineyard before a starring role on Broadway in a hit production of Tobacco Road brought him to Hollywood and low-key fame as a low-key stalwart in westerns. But he's so authentic and natural, he makes whatever he's in take on a fly-on-the-wall documentary air. He's Arthur Hunnicutt, and he doesn't even need our praise. Hell, if he ever got some he'd probably have to quit, he just wouldn't know what to do with it! 

One of his finest roles comes in the sometimes-shown on TCM but criminally-unavailable on DVD-- and a must-burn for Howard Hawksians--THE BIG SKY (1952, above), a poetic, ramshackle film about fur traders who love, laugh, drink, sing, swap tall tales, and occasionally shoot bad guys up in the Pacific Northwest. Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin are the handsomer leads, but it's Hunnicutt who makes it all work with his casual narration. 

Cinema blogger par excellence Ed Howard notes that the central performances of Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin (in the juvenile understudy role Ricky Martin would play in RIO BRAVO) are only so-so (and weren't Hawks' first choices). But that the supporting characters are awesome:

Hunnicutt is especially great in the Walter Brennan-type old coot role. Zeb's outrageous tall tales and deadpan humor — reminiscent of the Squint character from Frank King's great newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley — are consistently funny, especially his anecdote about sewing a friend's severed ear on backwards, so that whenever he heard something thereafter, he always turned in the wrong direction. (Only the Cinema 3/27/09)

Hunnicutt was actually nominated for best supporting actor Oscar for SKY, but he didn't win. In the meantime, he did a lot of western TV shows. But it's three movies in particular which I'll focus on, because they're all classics, and two aren't on DVD and that makes me mighty ornery. The second I'll mention is on DVD, another Hawks' pic, EL DORADO (1966, above). Hunnicutt here is often overlooked when it comes to talking about EL DORADO, and that's probably because John Wayne, Robert Mitchum AND a young James Caan co-star. Ain't much room left on the marquee, 'specially if you add Ed Asner.

But while Mitchum, Wayne and Caan hog the spotlight, Hunnicutt hangs back and steals the show--again by barely entering into it til round halfway down the clock. He's 'Bull,' the deputy of drunken sheriff Mitchum, and he blows on his trusty bugle when he runs into danger down the street on his watch. As in THE BIG SKY, he's the kind of feller who seems too authentic to actually bother to act; he just brings a wit dry and sharp enough to split a hair'n and a deadpan delivery method too smart to be a southern drawl, but too slow to be much else. His is the voice of a man who's spent time enough alone in the wilderness or amongst Native Americans to find himself, and has nothin' much left to prove 'sept he's lived a fair and colorful life and has a jug full of semi-true tales to tell for it.

THE LUSTY MEN, Nicholas Ray's underseen film from 1952, is a very Hawks-style immersion in rodeo culture, and is actually the earliest film on this list, though it seems the most modern. (the pic up top is from LUSTY, and you can tell how relatively young Hunnicutt is).  In true and beloved Nicholas Ray fashion, the film places importance on every minor detail so you can't be sure what's 'foreshadowing' the way you can with more careless directors, who use ominous music cues to show you what guns in the fist act are going to go off in the third, to paraphrase Ibsen. So when Hunnicutt appears, as he usually does, a few reels into the film, you breathe a sigh of relief; if Hunnicutt's there, you know these people are good folks, regular people, but not overly cliche'd, neither. He'll never scare or bore you, neither talk up nor down. He's the guy you first make friends with in a new group of strangers, the one who first makes you feel comfortable, long as you don't mind listening to his colorful tales, which are hilarious but which near everyone else in the pack has heard already twice at least, not that they don't love them, and he'll probably end up borrowing money, but he always has a dram on the hip when you need it most. The role of the 'pappy'-style colorful sidekick was clearly more Walter Brennan's gig, but when you wanted the stealth third man, the 'mountain man' in the middle, a man who'd make it all seem suddenly more real and more relaxing at the same time, there was no one better than Arthur Hunnicutt.

For speculation on why the Lusty Men ain't on DVD, dig my 2008 piece o' passionate masculine brilliance, Lusty Men and Cockfighter.

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