Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock

Surrounded by real-life gang violence during its original release, the 1979 Walter Hill film, THE WARRIORS is probably not the NYC film classic that will be shown anytime soon at the Bryant Park Outdoor Summerfest, and maybe that's why the film is still so vital and relevant, more so--now, at least-- even than the city that spawned it. 

What? How dare I, you ask? Consider that the title above is a line from Lou Reed's last great album, New York, which examined the garbage dump that was New York City at the dawn of the 1990s. For me, graduating school in 1989, moving to Seattle before finally landing on Manhattan's East Side, it was a talisman. An album of anthems about drugs and bitterness and hopelessly high rents, it made NYC cool even if "They wrote a book about / said it was like ancient Rome."

But in Rome they had a coliseum, right? Gladiators, lions, Christians, all that shit to the death, gluttony and orgies. But what kind of movies are shown at the current New York Bryant Park Summerfest? You know, ROMAN HOLIDAY, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. Nothing to rile up the kids with.

Let me hip you to how it was in those days when outdoor summer fests in Bryant Park would have been a nightmare of crime, drugs, and rioting, since this week begins in full the dawn of the mayor's campaign to not even let us smoke cigarettes outside.

Back in 1991-1993 or so, you could still drink on the street with impunity, so long as it was in a paper bag. You could smoke pot all over the street and the street cops wouldn't bat an eye. You could blast music from your trunk and drink beers in class, and 'bridge and tunnel' didn't mean kids coming in to hang out around the multiplex on Union Square and check in with each other via constant texting, it meant coming in to get hammered. Everything below 14th Street became a block party, everything up to 49th Street, a yuppie drunk-a-thon. The Times Square area was still awash in 70s sleaze. If I walked to 1st Avenue down 50th Street to rent (non-X) videos I'd be--depending on if I was wearing jean shorts or not--solicited by various well-dressed dudes in the bushes. And of course, everyone smoked cigarettes ($2 a pack) everywhere (no age limit to smoke - cigarette machines), and danced without cabaret licenses... life was a ball.

All....gone...like tears... washed in rain.

Recently I moved out of my old 12th St. walk-up and into Brooklyn and I miss Manhattan, but even Manhattan's not Manhattan anymore. You can't do any of the stuff I just mentioned and Times Square.... it's a nightmare of WB flagships. 'Children come first' so all traces of vice must be swept away. In the 1970s when I used to drive in with my parents and grandmother to see plays on Broadway, if I'd have imagined that one day all the filth would be cleaned up so as not to traumatize my little head, I'd have--even then--been pissed off, and maybe even pissed in the street to protest. Well, maybe I would have been glad to see it go. I can't remember. But it made life dangerous and interesting. Why go to the city at all if not to see something you can't see in your own home town? Let it scare you into appreciating the simple safety of the small town!

Times Square was a real life horror movie, and we loved horror. Times Square on New Years a magnificent party.

Times Square on New Years is now a family-friendly, drug and alcohol-free zone of 'fun' and standing in the cold for upwards of six hours at a crack, for no discernible reason except to be 'part' of it, to say you were 'there.'

The origin of the ball drop celebration stems from the days when everyone drank, danced, and smoked on the street so it made a lot more sense to be outside in the cold. Imagine Dodge City, a dangerous lawless zone of sin, word gets out how authentic and cool it is, so families start coming to visit, so the new laws forbid guns, drinking, gambling, smoking, prostitution, and anything else that might alarm the provincial visitors and their kids, who bring money galore. Naturally the cowboys leave, so Dodge becomes an empty tourist trap where families can come and pay $10 to look at the chair Wyatt Earp once sat in, while paying $8 for a warm mug of warm sarsaparilla. Then of course they hire actors to play cowboys, shooting cap guns at each other in the street. Even the horses snort at it all. That's New York City under our loathsome twins of anti-evil, Giuliani and Bloomberg.



I remember when THE WARRIORS (1979) was released and the newspaper ran big scary ads with the poster at left, and gang violence was rumored to erupting at screenings. The suburbs were scared!

Here's a description of the violence from People magazine in 1979:

Critical response to The Warriors, a new $4 million movie about New York City street gangs, has ranged from mild disdain to modest praise. Audience reaction, on the other hand, has been far less restrained: Within a week of its release, three youngsters were dead and numerous incidents of violence had apparently been triggered by the film.

"If someone comes to a movie with a gun, who's at fault?" asks Warriors' film editor David Holden. Someone did just that at a drive-in showing on the night of February 12 in Palm Springs, Calif. and killed a teenager. Some 165 miles away, on the same night, an 18-year-old bled to death in a darkened theater in Oxnard, Calif. after being knifed by an unruly gang. And three nights later a Boston high school student was murdered outside a subway station, allegedly by two young men who had just come from the film.

Paramount Pictures, the movie's distributor, has scrapped its lurid advertising campaign (above) and offered to pay for extra security at any of the 670 theaters where The Warriors opened four weeks ago. Yet a mere handful of moviehouses have accepted Paramount's offer, and only about a dozen (including the two in California where the killings took place) have canceled the film. The reason is obvious: The Warriors grossed more than $10 million in its first two weeks.... People connected with The Warriors professed surprise. Co-screenwriter David Shaber says it is "like Sesame Street compared to a film by Sam Peckinpah." Paramount VP Gordon Weaver observes that the violence is "the sort of thing that happens at rock concerts, high school basketball games and any place where diverse groups meet. It could have happened anywhere."

Here is a report on three places where it did:

Admission was only $1 at the Esplanade triplex in Oxnard, Calif. the night Tim Gitchel, his brother and two friends drove 10 miles from Ventura to catch the 10:10 showing. Just as The Warriors came on, the four youths suddenly found themselves battling at least 15 blacks who were suspected of drinking and smoking grass during the previous show. The fracas spilled into a walkway while Ed Treiberg, a patron who has worked with juveniles, looked on in horror. "They were caught up in a battle fever," says Treiberg of the assailants. "They just had the look of crazy in their eyes." Two of young Gitchel's companions were stabbed and Tim died from a knife wound to the heart. An 18-year-old construction worker, he was ambitious and hard-working and planned to attend college to study law. "Tim didn't hate anybody," recalls his mother. "He loved life." His family plans to file a civil suit against Paramount and the theater complex.

Four hours before Gitchel died, Marvin Kenneth Eller and several friends drove into the Palm Springs Drive-In to see The Warriors. At the movie, 19-year-old Kenny argued with a youth who blocked the way to the bathroom. Garbage cans flew; several shots were fired from a small-caliber handgun. A bullet went through Eller's skull, and after four days on the critical list he died. The unmarried father of a one-year-old son, Kenny worked for his father as a roofer.

Martin Yakubowicz, 16, a high school sophomore, left his $2.90-an-hour job in Back Bay Boston—putting bindings on skis—half an hour early that Thursday so he could be home in Dorchester in time to bring his mother a surprise gift. He boarded the subway near Symphony Hall and changed trains at a transfer point, where he encountered six youths—two of whom were friends—who had just seen The Warriors. They left the subway together, and, as Marty headed for a bus, a fight broke out and he was fatally stabbed.

The Warriors is still going strong at Boston's Saxon Theatre, which, says the assistant manager, "hasn't done such good business since My Fair Lady."(3/12/79)

In 1981, John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was released and though the film hods up extremely well today, it paled at the time in comparison to THE WARRIORS, which has defied all odds to become one of the best action films of the 1970s.

My mom rented both films for us one Halloween in 1981 when I was around 12 or so and living in Central NJ suburbs. It's hard to believe now, but my friends and I were scared to watch them! Can you dig? Being 15 and scared to watch films like THE WARRIORS and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK? But that's what life pre-cable did to you. It was hard to see stuff with gore and nudity so you grew up kind of intimidated by it.

We saw THE WARRIORS again and again after that, but if you told me I'd ever move to NYC or Brooklyn I would have laughed in disbelief while quietly pissing my pants. This was the place that SNL was introducing as "the murder capital of the world." This was where Sliwa's Guardian Angels protected innocent locals from murderous psychos and muggers; where garbage strikes and unregulated health codes led to a stench unimaginable; drugs, prostitutes, X-rated book stores, drunken drag queens and raincoat-wearing perverts the norm; cinemas were crumbling edifices with grisly triple bills of films often shot in the same neighborhood, carrying their violence outside into cartoonish arias of serial murder, brutal rape and cathartic, insane revenge. It was a place where humanity's basest instincts dissolved into oily messes of profit and pain, and the films from there carried a queasy cachet.

Who would ever want to move there? One went by train for a Saturday afternoon, to drink underage, score some oregano, see a rock show at the Ritz, go into grindhouses on a dare, well-armed with a buzz and friends, and then when the novelty and drinks wore off one got back on the train,  fast. That was New York in the 70s-early 80s, its sleazy magnetism well-captured in dozens of films from TAXI DRIVER to EYES OF LAURA MARS, but none of them quite appealed to us younger teens, not like THE WARRIORS.

We tried to love ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) as much but there's something about it never quite clicks. All the ingredients are there, it trades on New York City's mystique at the time of being a dangerous place overrun by crime and strutting gang youths, like a grim sequel, imagining Cyrus didn't die and gangs took over. Like THE WARRIORS its grim facade portends much traumatic violence and grit, makes it seem like you would be taking your life in your hands even to dare to go see it, then says ah I was only kidding, grab a brew. I revere Carpenter's films for that brew, but ESCAPE never quite takes off.  It gets hung up on details, locations, the technicalities of landing a glider on top of the World Trade Center. It loses the NYC dread factor.

 It does however only get better with repeat viewings. It's the perfect post-WARRIORS film, when the expectations are down and the buzz is coming on fast. They're the ideal double feature to take a break from all the bare life nanny state supervision this fun summer, and to remember a time when Manhattan was so grungy it was almost condemned and turned into a maximum security prison run by Lee Van Cleef. As Snake Plissken put it to Harry Dean Stanton, "Keys! Map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! Hey!"

 

And remember, when you're at that outdoor screening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S this summer, you may be having fun and earning points with your rom-com other but you're a disgrace to your uniform; warum schläfst du? Put down that book and start a gang. Spike that Snapple with a slug of bourbon! Smoke cigars and blow the smoke in the face of a child in a stroller! All tends towards chaos and this little sneeze of righteous nanny-state micromanaging we're mired in too shall pass... just as the ex-meek have inherited the earth, so too will the noveu-meek re-inherit, and the summer will be electric... and the city shall be sleazy.... and crime-ridden once more. Til then, boppers, I guess all we can do is play you a song.

Read More

Great 70's Dads, Memorial Day Special: Gene Evans in THE STEEL HELMET ('51)

"He got up on easy red beach,. and said 'there are only two types of men on this beach - those who are dead and those who are about to die, so let's get up off this beach and die inland' - and that officer I give my steel hat to any day."

There's few genius auteurs who are legitimate tough guys, survivors of war, genuine witnesses of fucked up shit like liberating concentration camps and Warsaw ghetto uprisings and whatnot. I can only think of two offhand, and both are, interestingly enough, Jewish: Roman Polanski and Samuel Fuller.

This is isn't a post about Jewishness, but more of a reference to Fuller's auteur character's qualities, which are miles from the saintly self-righteous sheepishness of Spielberg's Jewish stand-ins in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and SCHINDLER'S LIST. In short, the real survivors of war and oppression are free from having to depict anything but their firsthand observances, while those who come after can only nose amongst the wreckage and monuments like guilty bystanders. Fuller barely mentions his own Jewishness when addressing the horrors of the concentration camp he helped liberate - for him it's a crime against humanity... as a whole.

Think of RYAN for a minute, a film I used to love but is starting--with the passage of time--to seem ridiculous: Jeremy Davis hides in back in the rear during combat then runs up like the ghost of liberal pansy ass future, trying to stop Hanks from shooting prisoners and Ed Burns almost deserts because "this mission is FUBAR!" Dude, what mission wasn't FUBAR? Without getting shot on the spot. RYAN was the movie that made FUBAR a household name. Well my buddy John's bar was called FUBAR and it was destroyed by a falling crane, Mr. Spielberg! Look at this picture I have in my hands, Mr. Spielberg!

I actually admire Spielberg's directorial skill and desire to tell an important story, but we don't watch and love Spielberg's harrowing D-Day action set piece that opens RYAN for deep analysis of memory and observational detail, we love it for duplicating the sickening trauma of actually landing at Omaha; Fuller's is the trauma of remembering landing at Omaha, zig-zagging along Omaha beach, ducking machine gun fire and hopping over the corpses of bodies washing in and back out in the tide. Fuller didn't feel the need to 'duplicate' the experience in our minds, as much as record it. His war films, such as STEEL HELMET, FIXED BAYONETS and THE BIG RED ONE are chronicles of remembered anecdotes and observations. Like any good journalist he trusts these copious real details will be enough to garner the 'right' response from the audience: that war is more complex than mere conservative patriotism or liberal ashen dismay can encompass, that it is man at his best and worst all at the same time.

Then there's the issue of a character acting his biological age: these guys who died on the beach or survived were young and in Fuller's films they act their age: they talk trash while acting courageously, saintly in deed, foul in speech, not the reverse. And you see how survivors have battles have their trauma volume turned way down. You can see this in the voracious way Gene Evans devours a melon while debating whether to retrieve a set of dog tags from a fallen soldier in a minefield. That's how it has to be, if you are to survive, ala NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, forgoing the dubious comfort funerals (and liberalist hand-wringing) can provide. You can imagine Spielberg deciding Evans is the bad soldier for not crying and pounding the sides of the foxhole when he realizes his buddy is dead, dead dead! Instead, Evans just lights another cigar, and finishes his melon. But it's only because he knows pounding the sides of the foxhole will only draw the attention of the enemy and is useless, and without that toughness survival is unlikely.

Fuller's actual war experience makes his spirituality move far beyond religions or borders, or even life and death. When Sgt. Zack (Evans) watches his young war orphan guide Short Round (Spielberg used the name for Indy's sidekick in TEMPLE OF DOOM in Fuller's honor) turning a Buddhist prayer wheel for example, you can feel Zack's respect for even this simple gesture, his awareness of the power that little motions like this can have--butterfly wing tsunami-style--in the greater scheme of war. In a situation where every movement might be your last, everything is imbued with profound significance, and in this the American soldier of Zack's integrity begins to understand how the Asian Buddhist mentality works.

But none of this is enough to make Zack 'break' in the emotional, manner of Spielberg's "The Mission is the Man" heart-bleeders. I think there is a lot of great moments of emotional group acting in RYAN, especially in the scene when they're gathered around the dying medic played by Giovanni Ribisi, and Tom Sizemore's character seems inspired a bit by Sgt. Zack, though the idea of lugging around 'dirt' from different countries in an already heavy pack seems like something made up by a screenwriter.

For Fuller, though, humanity outflanks mere respect for each others' differences - especially around the varied reactions to the Buddha statue in the temple where the second half of the film plays out. Though eventually when Zack jumps on the the statue and uses at as cover during the climactic firefight, you realize that when  push comes to shove, it's just a statue. That's the difference, again, between Spielberg's queasy sentiment and Fuller's iron-clad compassion. 

I love the casual way these guys bump into each other, light matches off each others' helmets, using them as hand railings when climbing over each other like a litter of puppies, sticking cigars in each others' mouths, guiding their progress with hands on their chests, saying cool stuff like "I'd be crossing the army if I brought you luck." -  a whole code of issues about the best jobs to have and various companies are seamlessly integrated into daily talk. I noticed this when having lunch with a bunch of rangers headed for Iraq about five years ago. Their favorite word was 'jihad' -  "I'm putting a jihad on this waiter if she doesn't bring us more coffee" -- Zack has that same hard-won, hard-bit sense of humor too, as with his insistence on the splendor of infantry life. When a soldier in his ragtag outfit complains, "when I get out I'm gonna join the air force, no more beetle-crushing for me." Evans replies "in war there's nothing like infantry. You get hit and, dead or alive, at least you're on the ground." It's a good point that indicates knowledge of countless stories of drifting at sea on life rafts for weeks, or getting eaten by sharks, or burning to death in a plummeting B-17. To a soldier for whom every minute of life is a grace (the hole in his helmet a reminder he should be, and maybe is, already dead), the presence of the ground beneath his feet is a constant reassuring miracle.

In war normal boundaries are dissolved and boundaries between soldiers seems (in Fuller's films at least) the first thing to go, as when Zak comes tumbling into a ravine with a bunch of pinned down soldiers, all clumsy and awkward, then pops up completely relaxed, like a love-in version of a mosh pit. The one bow to Christianity is the mock-solemn way Evans examines and blesses his crew, Short Round particularly, finally tapping their helmet in the third eye, like a benediction. This kind of hands-on camaraderie creates intimacy without weakness. Like a good 70s dad, Evans creates the space for the others to enjoy and relax; he takes pride in making some sense of safety possible, without bothering to participate in it directly. His natural grumpiness serves him well. His love is tough, and if it wasn't, he and his charges would already be long dead.

As Fuller notes in his autobiography, producers first wanted John Wayne and then Larry Parks for the Sgt. Zack role, with Fuller threatening to quit each time (Evans was a combat engineer in WW2). A decorated war veteran, Fuller even had business meetings with the army brass over elements like Zack shooting a Korean prisoner of war, shooting up a Buddha statue, and mentioning Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps in the soldier's dialogue. The North Korean officer they caught even has an American accent, and bad teeth. And Fuller fought his way through to having it all included.

Never try and fight with a veteran! No 20th Century Fox mogul can ever hope to be scary to a guy like Fuller unless he's got a fleet of Panzers or German 88 artillery. The end result of it all was worth the fight; there are things here about war you will learn nowhere else. Evans' relative anonymity helps his Sgt. Zack character resonate as 'real'- as does his no nonsense authentic veteran movements. Neither Evans nor Fuller needed military experts to tell them how it really was, and if, after all that gritty authenticity, Evans still emerges as a hero it's an honor due not just our medal-winners but every survivor of war.

At the end of RYAN, Matt Damon's elderly grandfather asks his wife "am I a good man?" While I never fail to cry at that moment, I still think it's not a question Sgt. Zack would ever ask himself. War is not a place where dying for a friend requires a pre-agreement to 'earn it.' War is just a fucking bloody mess, and the idea of 'earning it' implies a core sanity or rightness which is the death of true courage.

Read More

You Dirty Desert Rats: PLAY DIRTY, RAID ON ROMMEL

Late May, summer vacation, Memorial Day. a time to embrace the inner WW2 past life veteran. Where were you when you fell? If you had a past life in North Africa, running raids against Rommel's fuel dumps, and maybe died under the treads of Rommel's esteemed Afrika Corps, you will love Netflix streaming for desert warfare is amply represented.

Desert warfare has long captivated the cinematic imagination - a harsh, unforgiving playing field, where strategy is everything and both sides can get lost just trying to find the front. There are ample opportunities for stealth and skullduggery as front lines are hundreds of miles across. It's where scrappy outlaws and cunning commandos undertake missions where they wear any country's uniform but their own. 

 First: RAID ON ROMMEL (1971) with Richard Burton as a British commando taking out the shore guns of Tobruk. There's some icky misogyny with Danielle De Metz as an anachronistic jet set Saint Tropez Italian courtesan (see how she's sandwiched in the poster atop), as if the whole movie resents some producer's edict his girlfriend be included, and no one bothered to ask her to change into something from the period. There's even a nasty crack about white slavery when she's shot up with heroin, and hip early 70s rage at high gasoline prices, making a great show of exploding fuel dumps and unlucky Germans lit ablaze in the Tobruk night thanks to Burton with a flame thrower. It's such a mounting orgy of explosions by the end that it starts to resemble some surreal demolitions-porn video. Turns out it's all lifted from an earlier film, TOBRUK, in fact. 

PLAY DIRTY (1969) goes for the existential vibe where that's concerned: tire repair, hauling trucks up a mountain, weathering a sandstorm, and other SORCERER waiting for Godot-style existential tomfoolery. Michael Caine is the by-the-book officer, Nigel Davenport the hardened cynic, Nigel Green the dissolute, cynical and well-worn Colonel who plans the mission (another fuel dump, by Jove!) Together they shoot unarmed Red Cross workers, (nearly) rape a German nurse, kill innocent bystanders and otherwise commit egregious deeds in the name of the mission. And they listen to lots of blaring music on the jeep radio. The acting is all good but the existential vibe a bit souring. Part of my yen for war movies is that they provide a rare chance for male camaraderie in the service of a genuinely good cause and PLAY DIRTY denies that fantasy, trying to shoehorn post-1969 bitterness into pre-1945 history.

When I see a war movie I want more than the begrudging respect of a few salts and an innocent German nurse nearly raped and then stabbed for no discernible reason. I want more than WAGES OF FEAR-style men in trucks minutiae. Hitler and Japan were the be-all and end all of ruthless evil. We can try to fathom the depths of soullessness we are all capable of, but even the cynical air of the late 1960's-early 70's Vietnam era which infuses both these films can't argue with that level of horror. Why bother souring us on the last chance we ever had to be truly the good guys? There's a time and place where we actually won the war, and no amount of Vietnam disillusion should cloud that up. Only on the Military channel.

Read More

Long and Tall XXL in the Saddle

The way John Wayne rides a horse is the closest thing lazy big and tall men have to their own form of liquid poetry. Always bumping our heads going down basement steps, cramping our legs in ordinary airplane seats, dangling over edges, looking apish in hand-me-downs from normal size cousins; we're often light-headed from being head in the clouds all the time and John Wayne is all these things, but turns them upside down through sheer moral charisma. He's so tall he seems like he's outgrown the pony below him, even if its a roaring stallion. He forces us to re-examine the sheer surreal strangeness of a man riding a four legged animal like some strange Martian centaur. He's the father who is both fearsome, protective, loving, and just a wee bit of a jokester. All that adds up to perfection, so when Wayne goes rogue on us, like halfway through RED RIVER, we're traumatized in a way we're just not when the diminutive James Mason loses it along similar lines in BIGGER THAN LIFE.

I'd been avoiding John Ford's cavalry trilogy (FORT APACHE, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, RIO GRANDE) my whole life, smarting from the childhood terror of Henry Fonda's stern anti-Indian policies and the mix of honor, tradition and whiskey-besotted sentimental blarney that is life in Ford's patriarchal colonialist west, and instant tedium to any kid who doesn't yet know the sweet soul-stirring taste of the 'water of life.'

But I should have known better not to just glance at labels and mustaches. (Wayne's mustache spooked me away from SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON). The problem with assumption means you're always predicting the lowest result. Period westerns with frilly bonnets and well-meaning old matrons stirring pots and yelling at young Jeff Carson to come in from the fields for dinner can be dull, but that doesn't mean Ford's are dull. In fact every aspect of every Ford movie would be dull in the wrong hands. In Ford's hands, however, it's poetic. The iconography comes to life. As he probably invented most of it, I guess that makes sense

To me it's proof that the conservatives and liberals are all mixed up - the neo-cons should making more movies and the liberals saving their sermonizing for the senate floor. And for god's sake, more drinking. If you look at the films of the 1970s compared to the films of now, it's clear what made them cooler, earthier, more poetic, dirty, cool, and real: more Valium, cigarettes (indoor smoking), booze, casual sex, long hair, and whatever the hell else.

In Ford's cavalry pictures we actually see (heaven forefend!) a situation where drinking, dancing, and killing are all socially condoned rituals. Most boys today find themselves stricken as social outcasts, hunted by the cops, the minute they sip their first beer or toke their first joint. Rather than an initiation into the social order with its laws, values, and common enemy (outlaws, Injuns), the first beer or toke casts us forever outside the social order - we become the outlaws.  Is it the drugs that are to blame, or the laws, those nanny state control freak tantrums that result when laws are passed but Americans don't instantly fall to their knees and renounce whatever it is the hysterical old people see fit to demonize? The sentences are lengthened, the fines stiffened, and still Americans cling to their freedom. Whether hurling tea into Boston Harbor, rising up against the whiskey tax, or growing dope in your parent's upstate New York basement, you're a true patriot! And you know who would agree with me? Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, you heard me, and John Ford, John Wayne and BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS star, John Agar, before, that is, the evil brain took over his body.

And especially if you're tall and heavy and don't move so well, let Wayne show you how it's done - and remind you that you don't have to do it. Summer's here, so soak it up the way the west was meant to be, in the dreams of a TV,  with Irish in your air conditioned blood finding itself warmed in every song The Sons of the Pioneers sing to their holy Shirley Temple.

Read More

Gialli Ressegne II: SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE, SEVEN NOTES IN BLACK, FIVE DOLLS OF AN AUGUST MOON, SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS, CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS

SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE
1973 - ***1/2
This international-Italian/French co-production stars yeh-yeh girl Jane Birkin as a plucky ingenue possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics, like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy. With photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair has the beauty of Sissy Spacek's in BADLANDS, this film  bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. The only remaining flaw is a truly ridiculous gorilla suit, which is anyway a nice souvenir from the age of the old dark house mystery, which someone in this film loved.

One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr, and not letting Jane B. do her own voice in English (She was English, after all, despite singing in French for hubby Serge). I kept thinking, hey! She's Charlotte Gainsbourg's mom! and imagining Charlotte even being conceived during this shoot, though that's maybe a stretch. Still it would fit with Charlotte's career choices, and thus this would be a great double bill with ANTICHRIST! Meee-yow!

SEVEN NOTES IN BLACK
(AKA THE PSYCHIC)
1977 - ***1/2
Lucio Fulci may be a lot of things, but boring ain't one. Sure, he's a fan of cheap-ass gore, nightmare logic, and jarringly placed schlock pop ballads, but THE PSYCHIC proves he can deliver an elaborate mystery and all the giallo elements: there's some Poe motifs, and the very 70s trend for ESP and telekinesis made so swinging by the popularity of CARRIE and THE EXORCIST. The music will rattle the lamps off your table and the ending is incredibly tense. Great use of a musical pocket watch as a gimmick, ala the sing-song la-la-la tape in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. You'll scream! You'll cry! You'll think Jennifer O'Neill is a goddess. Her facility with mental powers made her ideal to appear in Cronenberg's SCANNERS four years later.

FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON
1970 - **
Movies like this early Bava effort live and die by the score and the sleazy organ at work here makes you remember the old Shadow radio show, not in a good way... Who knows what Ennio might have done with a few electric guitars instead? The plot's a typical Ten little Indians thing (the number sliced in half) and occasionally the score gets much too jaunty as the bodies are stored in the freezer next to the freshly killed pheasants. Since the house is all modern and stark white there's little opportunity for Bava's deep red and purple gel color schemes. Luckily the women are hot, the clothes are foxy, and there's lines like "death makes you feel dirty." and "houseboys come and go but there's always the bottle." There sure is...

There's also the cast, led in spots by Edwige Fenech, looking more than ever like some strange kid sister to Tura Satana, and Ira Von Furstenberg (Diana's ex sister-in-law). If you're in the mood to fall asleep on the couch go for it. I'll stick with KILL BABY KILL! Still, this film has a fan in a woman who's opinion I trust over my own, Tenebrous Kate:

These jet-setting millionaires may be a generally oily and unlikable lot, but don't think for a minute that this means they're not incredibly well dressed.  The costumes are drool-worthy, from Edwige's scanty white petal bikini to the slim-cut hep-cat trousers favored by the gents of the cast.  Spangles, gauze, colorful lacey undergarments, and pop art fabrics abound.  The house where much of the action goes down is the seaside equivalent of the Frank-Lloyd-Wright-esque mansion at the end of "North  by Northwest," with its cliff-side perch and vast expanses of window.  Everything is circa-1970-sumptuous, right down to the rotating round bed and the ritzy glassware.  And yes, in case you were wondering--these folks ARE drinking J&B. (more here)

 Yep, can there be any doubt that J&B is the official scotch of the genre gialli?

SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS
1971 - **1/2
An ornate title with objectifying noun; Jean Sorel as a soft butch version of Franco Nero; the drab atmosphere of communist Prague; a sinister classical music club and elaborate conspiracies worthy of David Icke, it all adds up to a potentially interesting Eastern European giallo knock-off. Aside from a great last ten minutes, however, GLASS DOLLS puts the drag in draggy. Even Ennio Morricone's score lists at half-mast, limiting itself to some screechy panic attack drones, somewhere between Bernard Herrmann and an orchestra tuning up. I had the soundtrack on a Morricone CD long before seeing the film and used to love to listen while walking through Prospect Park at night with just a dog, a frisbee, and a Discman --every shadow on the stone bridge walls like death incarnate.

But dude, where are the hot clothes? The hot girls? Barbara Bach's sexy lame' dress is left behind in the first ten minutes and there's seldom any swankiness after that. Only Ingrid Thulin (WILD STRAWBERRES) as a sex-hungry fellow journalist gets any color, and then only via headscarves that only make her look older than she already is.

Expertly summarizing the film's distinct old vs. young generational conflict as analogous to Eastern Europe politics is James from Behind the Couch:

The film also serves as a sly allegory addressing the destructive nature of totalitarian governments, like the one in power in Czechoslovakia at the time. The weird socially elitist members of the cult represent overpowering authoritarian systems in which the higher classes literally suck the life out of younger generations, those less well off and anyone else who opposes them. The older generation is depicted as inherently sinister in this film. The disdain and suspicion of the elderly middle class is exhibited clearly in the scene in which Gregory sneaks into the goldsmiths building and into a room full of elderly people in evening dress listening to a classical concert. They sit motionless and look uncannily like the undead ghouls in Carnival of Souls. 

That sounds creepy all right, but is it any fun? Without the pop art colors it's just dispiriting, man! There's not enough J&B in the world...

CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS
1971 - ***
When it comes to soundtracks, Bruno Nicolai is no Ennio Morricone, but he's literally awfully close (he conducted Ennio's early Argento scores), so what is the deal with the trite muzak in IRIS? Oh well. Star Edwige Fenech compensates as the heroine escaping a bad group marriage and moving into a high rise apartment with some models already in the midst of being knocked-off. Everyone's a suspect, including Fenech (or it all could be her imagination). The killer is the official giallo type: androgynous in black stocking mask, raincoat, fedora and gloves. In this instance, alas, the gloves are a sickly looking yellow rubber variety. A real turn-off!

I'm not giving anything away by mentioning the main culprit is Fenech's mysterioso architect boyfriend, or wait, is it her jealous ex-husband, the one who drew her into the Wildflower Group sex club from which the title 'perhaps' gets his name? An hour after watching you won't be able to remember who any of these people are, but is that really so bad?

The real stars of IRIS are the elevator and stairways of the old-school high rise where many a murder and moment of tension doth occur. Could this film have been seen by Brian De Palma? What's that? You don't care? You can't leave me, Carmen! I'm bound to you, do you hear? Body and soul. Yes, shit dubbed dialogue abounds but some parts are pretty kinky-creepy and Fenech is great as always, her soul battling her corrupt body like a one-man show reflecting Catholicism's whole trip wrapped up in a voluptuous wiggle.

Read More

Fourteen or Fight! WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)

In today's environ of political stagnancy we may no longer remember how it could even be possible, but between 1967 and '70, the establishment was seriously concerned about being overrun by its own children. The suits were scared, the politicians saw the size of the crowds at Woodstock, the small cities worth of people who would appear within a week of some rock star announcing a free concert, and they knew no army could stand in their way. And we have WILD IN THE STREETS to prove it. This is the film that made good on the ever-looming urban myth, that the hippies wanted to spike the water supply with LSD, lower the voting age (the age to vote didn't get lowered to 18 until 1971), and send everyone over 30 off to camps for 're-grooving' (1). The only old guy in the film is the original Ed Begley as a youth-hating politician advising California senator Hal Holbrook not to make a deal with the devil, or a young rock star, in this case Max Frost (Christopher Jones, who looks like James Dean's reincarnation times Martin Sheen).

Max is handsome and charismatic, and has a fine drummer in Richard Pryor; Kevin Coughlin is his 14 year-old queer super genius accountant and guitar player; Diane Varsi is the ex-child star resident free spirit. Shelly Winters is the broad comic mom and her schtick has not aged well. Songs include "Shape of Things to Come," which was a real-life hit. There's also "We're 52%"  and "Fourteen or Fight!" both encouraging youth to go on a rampage if the voting age isn't lowered. Eventually it is: Frost is elected prez, baby and the organized jihad against the older generation begins in earnest.

What's interesting is that this film came out a year before Woodstock and Altamont, but it's already prefigured in "the biggest block party in history" that narrator Paul Frees calls Frost's Sunset Strip demonstration. Frees also adds that the older "people die of shock just watching TV." Oh if only, man, if only.  The songs were written by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann who wrote songs in the following year's ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO, which would have been more of a hit had the whole charismatic hippy cult leader thing not have suddenly gotten a terrible rap thanks to the Manson murders (WILD would probably have been pulled from release had it come out a year later).

But that was then, let's focus up on 1968, the year this film came out, hitting a nice little nerve during a very turbulent and hopeful time. Up until this point in history the youth had a pretty serious voice, especially on campus, where they regularly made local and even national news protesting and holding sit-ins. It was the year that battles against sexism, racism, censorship, and sexual taboos raged and groups like the Rolling Stones could gather hundreds of thousands at the drop of a hat, and no cop on earth could make them disperse. If they wanted, these bands could start a real revolution with their long hair and their rock music.

But the fear that they would has soon evaporated, overdoses and ennui saw to that. In the end it's really all about Altamont and the fearful way Melvin Belli and assorted city planners are forced to accommodate the crowds and not the other way around. You can feel the unease as the old powers bow to the whims of the young in GIMME SHELTER. And the way the wild anarchy of druggie California weirdness in turn overwhelms the music itself.

On that note, it's to the credit of TV director Barry Shear that he can depict Max's massive shows of youth revolt via tinted stock footage of the Sunset Strip, a bonfire, parked motorcycles, stalled traffic, random shots of crowds dancing, tinted windows, blinking signs, other rock concert and earlier love-in crowds, skylines, and the Capital Building. In other words, nary a farthing spent on crowd scenes. An assortment of faces from the counterculture come and go, as is their wont: Bobby Sherman, Peter Tork, Gary Busey. As with most AIPs, there's less than a dozen people in the whole movie but if you're drunk or ten years-old it can seem like the most dangerous, expensive movie in the world.

Writer Robert Thom based the script on his short story, "The Day it all Happened, Baby." Thom wrote a lot of films about overbearing moms and their beautiful Apollonian sons, like CULT OF THE DAMNED (the mom sleeps with the rock star boyfriend of her heavy daughter), BLOODY MAMA (Mama sleeps with her son's gay lover, Bruce Dern), DEATHRACE 2000 (son runs over old lady), LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE (snide old lady gossip columnist hounds Byronic filmmaker) etc. Thom was born in 1929, so you do the math, he was old, daddy, old. Pushin' 40 when this film was made, this film with its groovy finger on the supple ribs of beautiful youth. In other words it's got Sebastian Venable fingerprints all over its subtexts. Come to think of it, has Robert Thom ever written a straight love scene? Like a genuine no-nonsense straight people being genuinely romantic kind of trip? Oh wow... no, there's no sex in WILD IN THE STREETS, and the one moment of intimacy comes with Jones and another boy. Oh Thom. As Diane Varsi notes with a smile, "methinks you boys are fags."

That's all good though, and awesome. There's also plenty of psychedelic light show madness and teeny bopper blonde hair. That said, the music still has traces of AIP's patented corniness; lazy horn sections remind you that the older generation making the film harbor unconscious resentment for their drive-in demographic. Shelly Winters eventually has to bow and gurgle to please them, and methinks we're meant to feel bad for her, or America. But America has always thrived on dissent. Sometimes the greatest patriots are those who would elect a mentally unstable sociopath "just to see what would happen." (you know who I mean).

After WILD was over, I turned cable back on and there was this show on History Channel about '69 - The Sexual Revolution' and Hugh Hefner talking about how he and Shel Silverstein appreciated the free love movement more than the youth because they--he and Shel--had grown up in a more conservative time. And I thought, like wow, dig, my generation is living the exact reverse!! I saw enough of it growing up in the 1970s that I've come to feel I'll never--no matter how debauched I become--ever live that free again, and the younger kids are threatened not by my moral rigidity, but my lack thereof; my preaching of a time before safety, health, environmentalism, and antidepressants (which are a lot like the daily LSD supplements in the re-grooving camps set up by Max). WILD IN THE STREETS reflects a time when the idea of freedom and the banners of sex, drugs, and rock and roll had permanently (we thought) done away with the nanny state Safety First Clydes and Anita Bryants, or at least reduced them to powerless Shelly Winters caricatures. But our nation is nothing if not bi-polar, half terrified family man, half crazed druggie biker.

That's the beauty of America - when you're always fighting yourself, you just can't lose.

NOTES
1) Firesign Theater - Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him

Read More

Lashes by Covergirl...and Centurions: THE TOURIST, MASQUERADE and THE SEVENTH SIGN

Where o where hath my Angelina gone? The one who burned a whole through GIRL, INTERRUPTED, or even the one who dazzled with her mix of mature romanticism and aerodynamic toughness in MR. AND MRS. SMITH?

Like Natalie said in THE BLACK SWAN: "She's gone!!"

In SALT (2010 - see my review," From Russia with Adamantium Cheekbones") we saw the once mighty Jolie beginning to look a little frail. We winced when she fell from high bridges onto highway traffic, for her bones seemed brittle like a bird.  The only wincing in THE TOURIST (recently arrived on DVD) comes from the contrived situations and dialogue, barely audible as Jolie's manipulative narcissist triple financial double-crosser never speaks above a posh British purr she must have borrowed from Eva Green in CASINO ROYALE.

Jolie was only around 35 when she made THE TOURIST but she seems much older thanks to a Joan Collins-level makeover: botox frozen smile, cheeks glossy, deep black layers of smudgy eye liner, and the endless cutaways to rich beautiful younger men looking up from their Rolexes and Cristal flutes, enraptured, parting before her at the ubiquitous ball like a black and white formal sea, nodding in admiration as this old-before-her time diva passes in the latest expensive couture, walking like she's holding a vial of nitro in a place where no lover has ever trespassed; all that's missing is a tag for Godiva chocolate bars, or rejuvenating night creme. If it was 1984 and this was a TV movie called Jacqueline Susann's Venice Nights and Jolie was pushing 50, it would make sense.

Even in her seventies and drunk beyond measure, Marlene Dietrich, for example, could still pull off the trick of shining through such airless luxury and making mass adoration believable. And you might say you can't compare Jolie with Dietrich, to which I'd say, yeah, duh! Jolie could act circles around Dietrich, and is just as hot if not hotter, so why is Dietrich at 70 sexier than Jolie at 35? The truth is, these handsome moneyed guys on these euro-trains wouldn't give the Jolie in this film more passing glance if it wasn't her movie and the script required them to. Her vibe is dour; she seems to expect adoration too much --it's all that keeps her from crumbling into mummy dust. She's a black hole of compliments, and I've known girls like this--drop dead gorgeous but frozen solid in their personae like victims of their own mirror Medusa-- and any man who can afford a Rolex has already learned not to even make eye contact with this type of pretty woman ("it's so expensive!" as Mischa Auer noted in MR. ARKADIN), unless, of course, the director insists. 

When Bette Davis made herself the object of every man's desire in her films, for another contrast, it was fascinating because 1) she wasn't remotely hot (post, say, 1935) and b) she didn't try to hide her psychotic intensity. If she dreaded getting old, she'd just scream at the mirror in full Baby Jane make-up until the madness passed. Bette was so cool she even made films like THE STAR (above, with Oscar and Jim), which spoke to the tragic absurdity of actresses clinging onto juvenile roles long past their prime. In short, Davis embraced her own ridiculousness like a champ, like a boxer who doesn't even flinch when enduring a flutter of sharp jabs to the face.

THE TOURIST screams for a Davis! Lacking one, it insists we believe its phony emotional catharses and triple crosses; it prefers we swoon at Jolie's perfume ad acting while it itself remaining steadfastly cynical about its own ambition$ (the final line is as shameless a piece of subtextual vanity as I've ever heard). When the climax of a film involves the heroic self sacrifice of actually paying back taxes, you know you're watching a film made by people who've never flown coach or cooked their own food, or been chased by the cops, or slept on a floor, or drank Piels, a beer so bad you can only drink it ice cold via funnel; but who nonetheless think they know plenty about life.

Maybe that's the alchemical transubstantiatory rub, this is a film where rich people fool each other into thinking they're poor - like internet dating in reverse. But the film itself hasn't fooled anyone (it bombed), least of all the Cult d'Jolie. Our baby is a dinosaur now, with an array of war orphan leeches draining her charisma daily. Will we ever get her back? All signs point to no.We're stuck with the waxwork substitute.

 

Speaking of back taxes and fooling each other with false personae, there's a forgotten, similar film called MASQUERADE (1965) on Netflix Streaming, which is marginally better than the very similar THE TOURIST, if only for its droll William Goldman script and wry performances from British spy movie regulars like Jack Hawkins and Charles Gray (Blofeldt in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER). The plot involves the 'kidnapping' of a young heir to an Arab kingdom who is about to turn old enough to depose the acting emir who's in league with the communists (the heir is pro-British). A coup is feared, and the kidnapping prevents it. Only who hired bungling playa Cliff Robertson to guard the chicken coop?

 Soon the kid is kidnapped from the kidnappers, Cliff finally realizes he's the fall guy and a traveling circus/smuggler troupe led by Michel Piccoli that includes femme fatale Marissa Mell (both were in DANGER: DIABOLIK!) and a knife-throwing dwarf are running the show. Double crosses galore, mes amis! No one is who they seem! Robertson owes back taxes to the British!

At least MASQUERADE has the self-awareness to regard its own facile nature with the same witty acumen it regards espionage and if there is no difference at least they're British enough to admit it. In MASQUERADE if you're not a triple agent with golden parachutes from here to Madrid, then you're worse than a fool, you're a patriot. THE TOURIST would probably smile at the notion of actual patriotism if it could (too much botox).

Luckily THE TOURIST's bombing at the box office showed we don't praise the golden mummy; we sell it on ebay. THE TOURIST will soon reside in the $5.99 rack next to THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE and SHANGHAI SURPRISE... and one day re-emerge from the rubble, like MASQUERADE did, half a century from now, like a memo from a presumed long ago melted-down-and-sold as-black-market-ingots golden calf.

Another Netflix streaming pick for this week is THE SEVENTH SIGN (1988), which as you may have heard is about 'the end of days,' set to happen this week or, failing that, 12/21/12. Excited? It stars Demi Moore as a pregnant Yenta busybody who--while snooping through her tenants' mail--discovers an ancient document: it seems Demi's child is the harbinger of the end of the world and Jurgen Prochnow (la tenant) is the looming 'Lamb,' opening seals and bringing down plagues, rivers of blood, snow in the desert, dogs and cats living together. Michael "I came back in time for you, Sarah." Biehn is the dad, which lets you know their kid is going to save the world from SKYNET or the Antichrist, maybe - that's called associative casting!

A low budget film of the kind that rarely get theatrical releases anymore, SIGN at least has the courage of its bizarro convictions: it's played stone-cold straight, all the while casting some doubt--not too much--as to Demi's sanity, making it the dead opposite of THE TOURIST. In fact, watching both in a period of days was enough to make me realize that Angelina Jolie is the lamb of God;  THE TOURIST a cinematic equivalent of morally bankrupt Sodom; Johnny Depp the hapless lamb led to slaughter at the altar of Jolie's martyr complex. Gone are notions of good guys and bad in all three films. What's left is just the soulless and bejeweled zombies that still walk slowly across the Saks Fifth avenues of the Earth, their souls half-devoured by invisible demons from the Orion constellation, and abetted by personal shoppers. But then of course there's always the mothers like Demi who won't let humanity just die for once. No one, but no one, is allowed to die on their watch. As GODSEND taught (if you never saw it, read my piece from 2004 here), even dying is no escape from their righteous clinging!

 

Semi-SPOILER ALERT--the possible pro-life associations in THE SEVENTH SIGN made me root, as I'm sure many have, for the end of the world, rather than this STEEL MAGNOLIAS / LIFE BEFORE HER EYES/ SWITCH/ soapy martyrish ending. Is Demi serving mankind or just the moral 'majority' by dying for her child? How can you tell if a woman's sacrifice is noble or just a symbolic subjugation? Well, either way, those Christians are gone in just a few more days and maybe Angelina Jolie will be able to resume undermining the status quo of feminine oppression like she did in FOXFIRE and GIRL, INTERRUPTED and stop pandering to rich materialistic women of a certain age on behalf of high-end make-up sponsors. After all, Demi Moore's dating Ashton, and that's ballsy. Why can't Jolie do something ballsy? Adopting endless amounts of orphans is not ballsy. I mean, am I the only one who's jealous of those little bastards? I get the impression they are responsible for both her terrible project choices and her weariness.

Maybe in the future the good guys and the bad will once again be distinguishable based on something other than who's offering who the most money to stab their own unborn grandchildren in the back, and who oppressed the Third World first (the British) vs. who wants to do it now (the Russian Mafia / Zionists, the NWO, the CIA).  THE SEVENTH SIGN at least lets you contemplate your own ambivalence about humanity's inherent goodness and whether your soul's old enough that the end of days seems an impossibly sweet 'get out of eternal reincarnation jail' free card or young enough that all you care about is who will look after the children. Either way you can't help but thrill at the prospect of things changing and all those idiots (whomever they are for you) finally rotting in hell like they deserve. Those bastards!  In the words of Malcolm McDowell as CALIGULA, "If only all of Rome had just one neck!"

Read More