Illusion of Competence (Father's Day James Bond Marathon )

He was around from before I was born and will probably survive the coming Iceless Age. All of my life he has been there in times of crisis and conquest; he is the red-blooded American male's last chance. His ability to morph to suit each decade's needs, growing older, then younger, then old again,  and if needed, fake his own death, yet no actor who has played him has yet to die, unless you count David Niven, and I don't. He's immortal yet continually imperiled; through him we learn the best ways to create diversions so you can steal from your enemy, and how to never trust pretty women. He is Bond, James Bond; James like my own father, James Kuersten.

My late dad. My dad, like most dads, loved him, at least in Sean Connery form. I grew up watching those early ones with my dad, thrilled with all I did not understand. I feel close to him now, through Bond and so I dedicate this post to his memory. Father's Day shit. If you get that free trial of EPIX, there's an all-day marathon.

Following a handful of similar but deceptively elaborate plots that seem to bleed across each other (making each particular film hard to remember), Bond films have always rewarded repeat viewing; as we change from children to men our perceptions of the movies change, too, and new fissures of interest are sussed out. As kids the car chases are ripping, the girls hot, the plot incomprehensible; as adults in the digital age, the atomic bomb hijacking minutiae and intrigue grow fascinating in ways that used to be boring - the giant computers and tracking devices are like windows into a forgotten field of technology, like finding the distant relatives of Skynet. In THUNDERBALL (1965) for example it takes about five minutes of real cinematic time to throw a camouflage net over one lousy sunken NATO bomber. Another five to steal a missile and swim it over to an underwater cavern. Now that I'm an adult lost in a world of whiplash editing and every third climax needs to have the world on the brink of extinction and six girls abducted in a closet for us to feel any sense of urgency, I love that the early Bond films weren't about saving the world but stealing code machines from embassies and foiling relatively un-apocalyptic sabotage-blackmail schemes, trying to keep one's wits about them while a seductive Russian spy claims to love you. On pan and scan the copious ocean footage was hard to follow. Now, on the anamorphic, it's a poem.

The widescreen enhanced HD look lifts even mediocre Bonds, for they're generally artful with widescreen deep depth travelogue on-location compositions. We don't have to go now, to Istanbul or Osaka or Las Vegas, we just send Bond, and reach into the screen like a combo diorama and dog door. But Bond needs to go, on our and the world's behalf, even if the world he saves no longer even exists. He takes the risks and endures the long flights and torture and performance anxiety, so we, as men, grant him the good life, the trappings of wealth and power, because he's in the zone. Imagine if your taste buds were so heightened you couldn't even drink champagne unless it was perfectly chilled and just the right vintage and now it becomes clear why we need Bond. A license to kill requires senses so acute you can smell a KGB double agent from a half mile away. Like Roderick Usher, at night Bond can hear the rats scurrying through the walls, or find a bug in his hotel room in under 30 seconds. That's a steep price, the constant upkeep of the body, training, being hit and teased; if we don't have his luck, or way with the ladies, or cat-like reflexes, or perfect hair, we can't begrudge him because he risks his life daily. We can always watch the movies if we need to feel proxy danger, or luxury. But which came first: our impoverishment creating a need for escapism or escapism being used to make us impoverished, making complacent and unquestioning, a kind of slow-motion sleight of hand diversionary tactic?

My first memories of Bond: falling in love with the very kinky edge of THUNDERBALL (Largo beating the naked heaving backside of kept woman Domino [Claudine Auger]) as a little sadomasochistic seven year-old. To me, that was Bond in the 70s, in a wet suit, shooting at a shark or a bad guy with his harpoon gun while a hot girl with a cute mole lounged in the white sand at his side. This was the time of Roger Moore's SPY WHO LOVED ME, which was a colossal hit my parents felt I was too young to see. Then, in the 80s, when sexual harassment was becoming a thing we rented them all from the newly opened video stores at the mall (or from the back room of appliance stores) and saw them over and over, as reminders of the power we were once going to inherit as men, allegedly. My best buddy Alan and I saw them all (MOONRAKER the first one I actually saw in the theater) and when FOR YOUR EYES ONLY came to cable, we must have seen it 500 times. Gradually we learned to appreciate Connery over Moore. The TV game show handsomeness and self-reflexive winking of Moore was reassuring but he lacked the muscularity of Connery, and even Dalton and Lazenby looked like they could handle themselves in a fight. Moore's punches looked like they would hurt only himself, though not in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY! In MOONRAKER, OCTOPUSSY, and VIEW TO A KILL though, he seemed far too old to not be creepy when he gets it on with a girl young enough to be his daughter. He didn't smoke and seldom even drank by then. I had yet to start either vice.

In the 90s,  my whole relationship to Bond changed when our friend Jen (not her real name) brought a rented copy of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE over to our loft one foreboding Friday night in 1997 -- year of my party boy apocalypse. I was so hungover from the night before it carried through the day and into the night - a blackout of shame and regret and paranoia and terror of the idea of going out again, into the night and the swankiness of another expensive bar (we were a hard-partying, very fancy bunch). Once I saw the video rental bag in her hands, I knew it would all be OK. I absorbed the film fully, enraptured in ways I never would have been without her guidance via Lazenby. It was a special event, one we tried to duplicate again and again after, but it never worked, not unlike ecstasy itself, that first big breakthrough is so good you pine for it with a broken heart forever after, never to recapture more than its stale reflection. Meanwhile Brosnan was entrenched, a perfect choice for the Metrosexual Age.

And so Bond became something to drink to, and who could make hangovers or sobriety disappear in equal measure. This was the era of the TNT Bond marathons, so important in staving off looming male impotence they were even cited by Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY. Pierce Brosnan had taken over after a two film stint by Timothy Dalton, who at the time had some big shoes to fill and people weren't prepared for a Bond who could act, or had the physicality and grace to appear like he could actually do the stuff Bond did and still seem actorly and a little wicked. We had to adjust. And then we disliked that he quit on us.

By then the issue of sexism was too pronounced to ignore, so they cast Judi Dench as M, and made post-modern wisecracks about Bond's dinosaur patriarchal cluelessness. But dismissing Bond movies as sexist is a bit like dismissing MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as alarmist. The truth is that being a spy has always been about sex (NOTORIOUS, for example), about being a whore for your country, a master of using sex to convince vulnerable people to confide secrets, then leaving them to be killed while you pursue your quarry, keeping your dance card open for the next girl, who can maybe help you kill, who is maybe a spy too, which means both of you are pretending to love each other, so well you might even be in love for real and not know it. So unless a man is super confident, irresistible to women, inordinately lucky, able to keep one hand on his trigger as well as hers even unto the point of orgasm, as well as a great shot and dogged in determination to chase down his man, even at the risk of massive destruction (all those trashed and probably uninsured third world villages), and the death of the girl you just 'turned', that man doesn't stand a chance.

Save the jokes, Mr. Bond

People make satires of Bond but forget one thing - just because you have spies, babes, and gadgets doesn't make us care - that kind of thing gets old quick when its just in service of itself (ala the first CASINO ROYALE, the Matt Helm series, or the Flint series). For best results it must be played dead straight, with nuclear threats. And one must bear in mind Fleming was a big shot in Naval Intelligence and knew all the true stories no paper would ever reveal. So they came out as fiction. And second, people squawk about how no bad guy ever shoots Bond when they have the chance, but if you study the real spies' exploits you learn that a smart enemy never kills someone they learn is a spy, they either try to turn them into a double agent or feed them false information, or failing both, use them as a hostage for ransom or prisoner exchange (or torture in case they might know something). Also, if the spy dies via 'suspicious circumstances' it's a sure sign to his organization that something major is going on wherever said spy was sent. So next thing to come in would be drone strikes, or whatever the era will allow. But if a spy is found half-eaten by alligators or piranha, or strapped into a stolen helicopter and exploded, then they can conjure it up to mere misadventure.


How does this translate to genuine cinema thrills? One thing I've been studying of late is the importance of tick-tockality or Hawksian/Carpenterian cohesive momentum, which involves minimum time lapse edits and very little cross-cutting to other players to create a sense of immanent danger around our main character, creating a space where time elapses normally and we stay with the same character rather than bouncing around all over a plot, this allows for a deeper connection and sense something might actually be at stake. The first six films are the best for best (Brosnan's GOLDENEYE the worst).

CHRONOLOGY / ACIDEMIC GREATNESS RATING:

DR. NO
1962 - ****
Everything is new and fresh. There's no vocal to the opening theme song/credits, and Bond actually acts in a cumulative manner, super cool most of the time, but unnerved by a midnight tarantula visit, and around 3/4 of the way through he starts to really exhibit the stress of continually fending off attacks on his life. His only gadget is a new hand gun and he shoots and kills a man point blank who has an empty pistol, and nearly breaks a girl's arm for taking his picture. That's what I miss most in the new Bonds, that kind of cold ruthlessness. He's the fire you use to fight fire with.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
1963 - ****
These first four were each released a year apart, capturing a very successful momentum marked by an adherence to tick-tockality of an almost Hawksian level and low stakes games (missile toppling, codex triple crosses, gold irradiation) that are more believable and therefore more engaging. Nothing like a sanely motivated super villain to make the proceedings feel actually possible, like we're learning a bit of what goes on in the world that the media never gets wind of.
GOLDFINGER
1964 - ***1/2
This movie used to annoy me because everyone talked about how it was the best Bond but I thought it was the most illogical. Goldfinger kills a mobster who wants to back out of the deal by crushing him up in a big Lincoln, along with a fortune in gold. Odd Job brings the crushed block back to the horse ranch and then needs to 'extract' his gold. Dude, talk about a waste of time and effort all just to show a car getting crushed into a block.  Just shoot him! My dad loved that scene and talked about the 'great piece of music, horns blaring, I didn't think so, and thought Bond (even though I too was drinking mint juleps) a real snob in this, lecturing heads of MI6 on an the "indifferently blended" whiskey they serve him.
THUNDERBALL
1965 - ***1/2 (see above)
Even with the new anamorphic letting us appreciate the underwater stuff, it still stops the picture dead more than once, as does the dumb shit like the spine stretcher and jet pack. Nonetheless, the tick-tock momentum is still in effect, mostly, with a great evil spy lady.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
1967 - ****
Second to DR. NO and the first film as far as tick-tockality -especially the entire first half which seems to unfold almost in real time, ramping up suspense in knowing who to trust as Bond navigates Tokyo, and the difficulty in separating which spies are on his side vs. the other when everyone's playing so close to the vest.

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE
1969 ****
The idea to make George Lazenby's first appearance 'the one where he gets married' is a bit of a misstep. It makes him seem weak. But the whole down the Alps chase is all so well done it achieves greatness (when Bond's pursuers prove dogged and resourceful, the chase can last half the movie). Lazenby's a bit of a cypher but that works when he goes undercover as a snobby genealogist sent up to Kojack's window on the world. He needs to be a bit of a blank slate to achieve such ease with impersonations. That said, Bond in a romantic montage? Emma Peel and Satchel Mouth or no, it's just not done. 

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
1971 - ***
The song is over quick. The intro finds Bond tracking Blofeldt clones played by Charles RIDE WITH THE DEVIL Gray; Connery's back and looks great, rested, but the 70s has begun. Bond gets slugged from behind with the regularity of old Jim Rockford. And the two mincing coded gay assassins are kind of, what is the word, antiquated?

 On the plus side, two of the most voluptuous Bond girls ever:  this is one of the first movies my brother and I ever taped on our dad's new VHS, and Jill St. John's sexy double agent gave me a lifelong love of chokers above plunging necklines. Sporting a similar looks is another hottie, Plenty O'Toole (Lana Wood - right), a cooler for the casino owned by Willard White. Together they became my feminine ideal and that's why I've never been drawn to the skinny models preferred by my old roommate. Other than that there's a great car chase around real Vegas streets and overall a certain Rat Pack swagger, with good use of tick-tockality and Bond actually uses teamwork with the CIA. Still, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, and St. John's voice lacks musicality.\

LIVE AND LET DIE
1973 - **3/4
One of the weakest climaxes ever, just voodoo, tarot readings, piranhas, gators, and Yaphet Kotto as a heroin distributor named Kananga inflating like a balloon, though before then there's a great boat chase my brother and I used to watch endlessly (the second thing we ever taped), and we still talk like the tobacco-chewing Louisiana sheriff ("what are you some kinda doomsday machine, boy?") And the Bond girl is interesting as she's a psychic whose powers will disappear once she loses her virginity, a pleasure Kananga intended for himself. Heh heh.

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
1974 - * /?
I've never really given this a full chance, too boring - I mean this rich killer constructs an elaborate funhouse just to chase Bond through so he can use a golden gun? A little effort, people! Christopher Lee is the only redeeming feature. Plays like a long episode of FANTASY ISLAND rather than a real Bond movie. (Or so I dimly remember) and not just because of Herve Villachez.

SPY WHO LOVED ME
1977 - ***1/2
The producers realized they should take their time rather than deliver another glorified TV movie, and the result is easily the best of the Moore Bonds. I was eleven years old when THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was in theaters and it was an aching sweet thorn in my side. It was PG but my parents figured Bond was too risque for us. The cool kids and parents all went on dates with their wives or others to see it and then came back and told us all about that underwater car and Jaws. Torture. I imagined Jaws with a monocle and a Prussian hat and black gloves, like the one-armed prefect of police in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. I was disappointed he just looked like a big dumb German farmer. He's a novelty and a fine comic actor, but not menacing. Now when I see it I'm constantly fascinated by how my childhood imagination of this film, based on word of mouth recounting, as was the style of the pre-internet, pre-VCR, pre-cable time, differed. But that doesn't mean it's not great. And Moore's perfectly tailored. 

MOONRAKER
1979 -  *1/2
Rated G. Am I right? Now my parents had no more excuses. I missed the party, though. Bond seems very old and tired suddenly, like he should be home watering his garden not being spun around in a G-force simulator or pretending he could punch a grill like Jaws' and not break his hand. The girls he meets and seduces seem like Valium-zonked call girls, paid to pretend he's a spy, tagging along as he goes from room to room, uncovering little clues his butler sets up around the mansion. It's G so Bond doesn't even carry his own gun, Drax has to supply him with hunting rifles and lasers as needed. He doesn't even drink or smoke. Not even tea.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME had been such a huge hit, so popular, the underwater sports car thing so cool, so perfectly in tune with the vibes of JAWS and STAR WARS, that for the follow-up they made the mistake of trying to deliver more of the same instead of doing something new. Now instead of a car that becomes a submarine, it's a gondola that becomes a comical parade float. Richard Kiehl returns as Jaws and gets a Pippi Longstocking girlfriend and becomes a good guy, like Arnold in T2. The biggest crime, so rare in any Bond movie, is that the filmmakers and Moore presume our love and laughter without bothering to really earn it. And Drax is a dreadfully dull villain. The girls are all in that later 70s mode, wearing dowdy old peasant blouses or LOGAN'S RUN and ZARDOZ cast-offs, waiting around for old rich dudes to just start making out with them, like WESTWORLD for guys with British spy fantasies. Dumb sight gags abound and repeat: an old, coughing man sees a floating coffin and throws his cigarette away; the password to get into the secret lab is the notes from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. That's just off the top of my head.

Thank god the 70s were almost over, and all the variety show schtick that resurged from its watery Vaudeville grave would descend once more. With cable there was no longer a need to appeal to the elderly, children, and everyone in between all at the same time. Rated G would soon mean strictly for children. But it's still the 70s here and we have the sort of movie where we get a tour through a priceless antique glass exhibit and know in a few scenes it's gonna be trashed in a moving brawl. And bouncy music plays after every lame innuendo, and Kiehl survives everything with a flustered genial slow burn like Wiley Coyote after his latest trap backfires. Still there's one great moment: a slow Carnivale clown stalk that in its weird shambling silence recalls the previous year's HALLOWEEN!


FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
1981 - ***1/2
Return to basics! Smart move, Mr. Bond. A very welcome resurfacing of one of the lost Bond archetypes, the ultimately good-natured rogue with criminal connections who helps Bond against a bigger threat, here played with robustness by Topal.
OCTOPUSSY 
1983 - *
Louis Jordan looks way too old and tired to be a convincing villain. Was he cast to make Moore seem vibrant? More than anything, Jordan seems like he just wants a nap, not world domination. All the lessons of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY are forgotten. Maude Adams was hot in Playboy but dull as dishwater as the titular circus spymaster. Half the film is wandering around some Turkish harem, like Bond and Jordan are two rich old sex tourists. The other half is incoherent nonsense on a circus train with a cache of pilfered Russian baubles, and some swipes from the Hitchcock playbook, fumbled.
A VIEW TO A KILL
1985  - **
Long considered the worst Bond, I'd argue it's only the third worst - mainly since Christopher Walken is great as the bad guy, and aquamarine-eyed Tanya Roberts is in it, over whom I have always been delirious (I was of the right impressionable age when she had a Playboy cover spread with photos from BEASTMASTER in 1982) And there's a zeppelin!

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS
1987 ***1/2
LICENSE TO KILL
1989 - ***
Timothy Dalton's Bond has been slighted over the years but we've forgotten why now (at the time we felt he betrayed us by walking away after only two films) but his time has come. DAYLIGHTS especially is a stripped down Bond with real and strange escapes and KILL makes hilarious use of Wayne Newton as a preacher using yoga as a kind of mind control for a MOONRAKER style conglomerate of hottie New Age chicks and there's a great down the mountain tumbling car wreck climax.



GOLDENEYE
1995 - ***1/2
After a lengthy absence, a new Bond for a new decade. Famke Janssen makes her mark though her dumb name 'Onnatop' demeans an otherwise furious and crazy (and aptly named) Russian assassin who gets off on machine gunning and spine crushing. Pierce Brosnan makes his debut and he's devastatingly handsome with mussed dark black hair that he inherited from his predecessor Dalton. We also see the first 'hacker' in Bondland (played by Alan Cummings). After being used to Russians or SPECTRE agents in lab coats and ties we've got lollipop sucking nerds as legitimate threats to national security and use of EMPs (Electro-Magnetic Pulses) and Joe Don Baker is a believable CIA agent, bringing grumpy ex-military crime drama resonance to where it belongs. Not a lot of forward tick-tockality though. Lots of scenes inside the KGB as it's undermined by a villainous general, and the final girl wandering around a remote spy satellite control station enduring the juvenile antics of Alan Cumming. There are some actually witty lines ("That's close enough" Bond says after Onnatop jumps up and starts climbing on him) and I dig that the bad guys are colorfully diverse, allowed to be human, and witty rather than simply cardboard megalomaniacs.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES 
1997 **1/2
This used to be one of my favorites, saw it in the theater with one of my aforementioned Faxy friends whilst getting sober, and when you're getting sober you really feel the action deep in your gut. But nowadays parts of it irk me: Jonathan Pryce--great in BRAZIL--is a colossal bore (and sports terrible socalist dentistry) as a prissy media mogul in the Charles Foster Kane- Rupert Murdoch vein, crafting a war with China for the nefarious purpose of filling a 24 hour news channel (which is why the paranoid amongst us know CNN cover the missing Beijing airliner so much). Pretty clever, but sunk by Pryce's way-too-pleased with himself delivery as he says awful things like "what kind of havoc shall we create with the world today?" and "I'm having fun with my headlines." At least he says, "Thank you," to his aides instead of just shooting them. Meanwhile, as if Moneypenny on her own wasn't bad enough, Dench's M delivers terrible puns like "you always were cunning linguist, James,  (and Q looks so old and rheumy he should have retired 20 years ago) and clunky expository dialogue abounds. For another thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe--the one who always dies early--as the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch lavender wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Brody's wife in HOMELAND is sexy. I don't, but mainly because they both remind me of the same ex-colleague - j'recuse! Michelle Yeoh is great in the fight scenes but speaking perfect English distracts her from adding any kind of sexuality (though we fans knew her and loved her already from SUPERCOP 2). She's a lithe dancer-action star, not a buxom love machine. When she rubs noses with Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH -
1999 ***
My problem with Brosnan in this one mainly is the hair, and the Panama suits, it being the 90s only excuses so much. I saw this opening weekend with my very first AA sponsor when I was counting days. I loved it! But if your hair is still perfectly moussed after a knockout brawl, Mr. Bond, I would suggest you avoid work that requires such regular proximity to open flames.

But this is also the one with Sophie Marceau as the deliciously evil villainess. Her stylist is without peer. Playing a Turkish-Serbo-whatever national oil baroness, Marceau ably melds styles from the west, east, north, south, and middle into a fabulous modernist wardrobe, my favorite since Jane Birkin's in SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE! And I don't care, Denise Richards IS a believable atomic scientist. She's so hot she should be handled with specially insulated tongs.

 DIE ANOTHER DAY
2002 - ***
 Halle Berry tends to be fierce only in dramas, and mousy in action films Too much 'good' acting only gets in the way of a Bond film. But there's a good plot about genetic alterations that turn a North Korean army brat into a posh Brit using conflict diamonds and reflected sunlight in a bid to invade South Korea before his father finds out. There's a nice visit to the Ice Hotel, and a sword fight that tracks all around a posh British fencing club, providing such a nicely emblematic mix of privilege and destruction that not even Madonna's leaden presence, or the cliche'd use of the Clash's "London Calling" can detract from its splendor. And Miranda Frost looks great in fencing gear!

CASINO ROYALE
2006 - ****
I was blown away at first sight--Craig is easily the best Bond and most believable killer since Connery. With those haunted sunken eyes and scowl, he seems genuinely dangerous and competent. But as an 'origin' story, CASINO ROYALE becomes harder to enjoy as years pass, the way it pains me to watch young teenagers make the same mistakes over and over. I can't save him myself)=. At least we learn why he would never trust a dame from now on (Eva Green redefines sultry as British treasury agent Vesper Lynde). "Does everyone have a tell." - Everyone has a tell - everyone except you, which is why you suck at poker, Erich, unless you're freshly unlucky at love. This also has a bit of ball torture which delivers 50 years later or whenever on the threat of Goldfinger's space age gem-cutting laser and makes us fear for his future erections (did it leave him sterile which is why he never worries about protection?) Never trust a girl who doesn't have a tell. Now it pains me to imagine him getting it on with Vesper after his balls are smashed numerous times by the evil Le Chifre.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE
2008 - **
This might have been a good Bond movie once, but some insecure editor whittled it down, shortening nearly every shot and cross-cutting like coked-up Eisenstein between bullfights, races, post-modern operas, and rich men and women taking off their coats at a coat check. There's also some vile sexual assault undercurrents and political disillusionment very out of place for a Bond film. Disillusionment with the system and our hatred for sexual violence is why we turn to Bond! We don't need to hear there's no use fighting evil! Disheartening. Don't ask me to pick between RIO BRAVO and THE SEARCHERS because it will be RIO BRAVO every time. Every fucking time.

On the other hand, the whole 'who can you trust even after they show you the right code signs' harkens back to the Connerys as does the idea that a pretty girl who invites you into her car might be CIA, SPECTRE, KGB or anyone else pumping you for information to bring back to their handler, so don't presume anything even after you sleep with them. Lastly, the post-internet and cell phone age has changed Bond in ways both good and bad, but inexorable, and the film itself seems to miss the old ways. I don't mind the ping pong around the globe bit because that's the way the internet age is - information flows so fast it's at the risk of outrunning our boy if he doesn't keep it at Jan De Bont levels.

That said, part of the escapism of Bond is to imagine that actual smart, brave, good people are at the helm of our intelligence organization. Here both the British government and American CIA are hopelessly corrupt, in bed with 'Quantum' a world conglomerate of third world puppet topplers. But there is a lot of fire in the climax, and a great airplane through a canyon chase. This is the movie where I first fell in love with Gemma Arterton, even if she does have only five fingers on each hand (she was born with six!) but of course she gets three scenes before she's offed cruelly to make yet another harsh un-Bondian statement.

SKYFALL
2012 - ****
In SKYFALL there's not even enough time for a second, nonkilled Bond babe; M and Javier Bardem are the closest we come. It's a shrinking network, but the return to the old ways pined for in QUANTUM are unleashed with a cathartic vengeance. Try not to muck it up, 007. Things are looking good for the next film, with a new M and a new Q, both of whom seem well-suited to the post-cheeky age.

Non Salzman-Broccoli Bonds:
CASINO ROYALE - *
NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN *
One's a lame overdone 'everything but the chicken soup' disaster, the other a remake of THUNDERBALL with age and urine jokes, a balding Bond, and Kim Basinger at peak lusciousness (she is shown in wet negligees and almost sold at auction to a slavering Arab). Stravinsky's Rite of Spring plays on the soundtrack and James Fox is a very cranky boss who only cares about budgets and reigning in Bond's drinking. Similarly cliched and idiotic plotlines abound and Klaus Brandauer, a fine actor in his own right, ranks with Louis Jordan as far as looking too old, tired, and generic as the villain, and the idea of putting video arcades into the ritzy parties, casinos, and hotel lobbies is really ill-conceived. Both films are worth seeing once though, just to realize how many mistakes the main Bond films avoid as they blast their way to boffo box office. Reign on, Cubby and Harry, and James. The future may be written on silicone chips, but the credits are still on bouncing silhouettes of guns and girls. And we'll always need a real man to kill the rich, even in our dreams.

SEE ALSO:
The Amnesiac Bond (Bright Lights 11/11/08)
"One of the many things which makes Daniel Craig the best Bond since Connery is his pain. He’s aware of the lost sense of intimacy that came with having license to both kill and “be a sexual heel.” Connery’s Bond was always civil to the bad guys until they killed a friend or a girl of his, then his steely eyes hardened and the insults started flowing; underneath the tough veneer he genuinely cared. The later Bonds by contrast put up a caringveneer in addition to a tough veneer; they were all veneer. Daniel Craig comes to us with all veneers smashed; the pain of crushed innocence and the rage of a wounded orphan child in his big deep gray eyes, the “non-venerial” toughness returned. "
James Bond Rides the Strip (Bright Lights 1/21/07)
"The nifty thing about this new Bond approach is the way it remains conscious of the Moebius strip upon which it runs. It is aware, for example, that the entire cycle of Bond films–which stretch from the Cold War straight through to the future–actually involve the surpassing of technologies in real life that were created in the older films as sci fi devices. Consider for example the “full circle” of our post-modern nostalgia over the gigantic “futuristic” computers of the old Bond villains like Dr. No–with their reel-to-reel computer tapes and punch cards–which we watch on plasma screens from super deluxe DVD sets or ultra slim laptop computers. And now Bond is actually younger and the futuristic gadgets he thought were so nifty have not just been invented but have been over-promoted to the point of un-coolness, and promptly forgotten, and his boss has become a woman, and suddenly he is newly promoted to the job he’s had all his life, and he is ready to meet the only woman he will ever love… for the SECOND TIME!"

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Real Between Curtains: John Huston and Bree Daniels, Gamblers (KLUTE, THE MALTESE FALCON)

Checking out The Maltese Falcon (1941) again--every time it's a different movie! Last time I wrote about it I saw it right after In a Lonely Place and was shocked by much that film's unflattering portrayal made Bogie and Astor each seem as monstrous and misshapen as Joel and the Fat Man. Mary Astor's twisted rococo hair styles made it scan like some Martian transmission from the bowels of one of my old-school delirium tremens. (see Bride of Bogartstein, Acidemic August 2011)

This time around, a slim three years later-ish, there was none of that but another facet, one equally rare in a noir or detective film: a concise expense account, i.e. money. The film is almost completely obsessed with it but not in a big brass ring way--though that is what the falcon represents--but also in a hundred dollar way - the money never gets lower than hundred denominations but even that is unique. It starts with the two hundred given to Miles Archer and Spade by Brigid O'Shaughnessy ("you gave us too much money if you'd been telling us the truth and enough too much to make it all right") and culminating in the envelope of ten thousand dollar bills with the delivery of the dingus. Spade gives the cops the thousand dollar bill (see title of this post), but pockets the rest at the end. After all, he has to keep the office running.

Paradoxically, if the money amounts were larger, they would be less relevant. It reminded me of the few times I ever did large (to me) drug deals, handing over five hundred dollars to a hippie on trust. There's an electric cord of adrenalin clear-headed focus associated with such sketchy large cash outlays that are completely unregulated by lawyers or bankers. When some big deal cokie brings a briefcase of thousands to a drug deal in a modern gangster film it seems to mean a lot less, refracting down to mere MacGuffin status by contrast --but in Falcon every hundred dollar bill has clout, it's power on a printed piece of paper. A C-note buys Spade's loyalty, to a point and it's never really clear whether he's just faking his lack of morals to solve his partner's murder or is just faking his faking when it becomes convenient. This is a movie where even we don't get to see the hero's cards. Dashiell Hammett's dialogue is always realistic in the sense that detective work is a business and, like a lawyer, a fastidious record of retainers, per diems, and expenses must be kept. After his second meeting with Brigid, Spade relieves her of another five hundred, compelling her to hock her jewelry; he then calls his lawyer when he gets back to the office and says into the phone, "I think I'm going to have to tell the coroner to go to blazes, Sid." He asks if he can hide behind his client's privacy, "what'll it cost me to be on the safe side?" another pause as Sid surely lays out an estimate (for what filing injunctions, paying off inquests? We never know). "Well, maybe it's worth it. Okay go ahead."

These kind of details reflect a savvy gambler's awareness of how money predominates discussions when no one is copping to their real motives or who they really are, i.e. in a game of poker. Money talks while bullshit walks as it does in gambling or with Brigid and Sam's love affair, who can say if either is really in love with the other? Who knows what the other guys are holding? In most films we're encouraged to forget we're watching actors play characters --we're not watching the truth. But not seeing the truth implies there is a truth, somewhere outside the frame - the truth is actors are making a film and you're watching it; but great movies like The Maltese Falcon call the idea that there is such a thing as truth at all into question.

A lot of film directors are gamblers by nature, borrowing money to try and break the bank, so they troll through the world collecting philosophies that help them deal with losing huge amounts of money, whether through a hand of poker or a roll of the critics' pens and the public's wallets. In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Walter Huston's cracklin' pappy gold prospector and Tim Holt realize the entirety of a year's work on the mountain is lost in the Mexican desert wind as easily if shooting the works on a spin of the roulette wheel --and Holt is dejected but Pappy knows just what to do, laugh it up! God's joke on us! So laugh they do. And the fact that Holt is able to let go and shrug it off is the real 'treasure' he finds, for Pappy it's the nearby Mexican village where his rudimentary healing skills make him a hero. And in Maltese Falcon it's about being so good at bluffing, at seduction, at manipulation, that even we, your movie audience, don't know what you're holding. Hell, maybe even you don't. A busboy once told me how his wife was so good at reading tells in that he no longer even looked at his hand in Texas Hold 'Em, just took his chances. Now that's a deadpan gambler!

Not to be trite, but for real gamblers, like Huston, a fortune is something meant to be won and/or lost - its table stakes - the stakes get larger, the table grander- but it's still a game --and the measure of a man is how gracefully he can lose his skin on a toss of the dice, as per Huston's beloved Kipling. I know this poem of Rudyard's must be like holy gospel to old John H.:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!  

I've never been much of a gambler myself --if I win big I turn arrogant, if I lose big I turn ashen, my son. Kipling wouldn't have much use for me. I faint in desert heat and wither in the jungle and my wrists are too thin for my punches not to hurt my hand far worse than my opponent's chin. But if I was thicker skinned, say from a lifetime of adventure as a soldier and boxer like old John Huston, or if I could still drink whiskey like I could in my early twenties, I bet I'd go for gambling - why not? I don't think there's anything immoral about it - unless your children are starving because you lost their lunch money at the track. For me, just getting through the day without cracking up, winding up arrested or run over or in the hospital or fired or broken on the wheel, you get the point. But overall I ascribe to the Great McGonigle's 'never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump' philosophy--a good trimming can be as valuable as four years of NYU if the chump be naive enough to be trimmed. Casinos create valuable service industry jobs and remain meccas for performers. And what's a bigger stakes gamble than filmmaking? A few million dollars is considered a low risk gamble compared to the titanic bloated budgets of normal multiplex fodder. If gamblers didn't know how to laugh off catastrophic losses, Michael Cimino would have wound up wearing cement shoes after Heaven's Gate. Shit, son. He singlehandedly killed our once strong studio system! And he's still walking around... even making movies.

I also resonate with the gambler because I have addictions of my own, and knowing these I've been wary - casinos, like strip clubs, always seem very sad and suspicious to me, like pushy salesmen. The lap dance is okay to receive if part of some academic study, but I know if I surrender to its allure I'd wing up broke and pathetic within a matter of months and no closer to any kind of permanent fulfillment with a woman. Gambling too is okay for research and participation on some minor scale, to get a flavor for it so you can write about it later, but why When Sky Masterson laid down that line about sasparilla in one's ear I took it to heart. Casinos wouldn't even be in business if a right-brained scattershot like myself could beat them.

But beating them is not really the point: Every true gambler is always either rich or broke, it keeps them on an even-keel. Huston was like that, filling his unforgiving minute with guts and glory-- and part of what makes his films work is that few other directors convey such an accurate vision of what it is to be broke enough to understand the sign of class that is giving up your last cigarette to a near-stranger when you can't afford another pack, or the victory of getting a peso coin handout twice from the same American tourist, or quietly benefitting from the two day period involved in finding your partner's murderer to the tune of approx. seven hundred dollars:

Brigitte's initial retainer -         $200.
Brigitte's second cash outlay    $500.
Joel Cairo's 'small retainer' -     $200.
Less the lawyer fee for Sid to keep
her name out of it -- guestimate - ?? est. $200.
-TOTAL est $700!
--------------------
And solving two murders = priceless cred.

Lastly the thing that stuck with me this viewing was the impossibility of knowing whether or not Spade really loves Brigitte or is just a gent since he shagged her and any gent can feign being into a girl for at least 24 hours after shagging a broad. We get his clear-eyed list of all the things that would go wrong if he trusted her - "but look at the number of them!" - Love Bogie's eyes when he says "look" as if he's mentally really looking at the list and shuddering with withdrawal reptilian self disgust -- and on the other side

"Maybe you love me and maybe I love you"
"You know whether you love me or not!"
"Maybe I do."

Note that she doesn't even bother to wonder if her own feelings are real or if she's just scared to death because she too can visualize horror and reptilian self-disgust. Her tears fall so hot and fast you can see her whole persona begin to melt off even if her make-up never runs. She's an off and on again great actress, is Astor, which perfectly suits the material - not unlike Elizabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas or Jane Fonda in Klute - they convey the complexity of performance by in essence dissolving the metatextual difference between good actresses who are sexy by nature (as we well know based on her infamous journal) acting sexier to appeal to men but also trying to be sincere like all actors who value honest sincerity (probably as the result of acting teacher input) because as Mildred Plotka - once put it, regarding the "genuine" tragedy of realizing sincerity is impossible-- "we're not people, we're lithographs. We don't know anything about love unless it's written and rehearsed. We're only real in between curtains."

The triumph of Fonda's Bree is that though she doesn't really feel too attracted to Klute it's the very fact that he doesn't ask or need to be loved or adored that proposes the actorly challenge for her. It's his renouncement of any happiness for himself (including masochism or martyrdom) that ensures her winding up living in Bumfuck PA with this hangdog snoop will be like rehab, or prison, where one can no longer escape the fish bowl confessional that is finally looking at a too-long unregarded self. Such a choice seems like the last thing a girl of Bree's 'drinking wine in the dark and nursing a roach clip'-cool levels would find endurable. But she can at least realize that bored frustration is a unique paradise compared to the nonstop living in sexual twilight and feigning interest in unattractive guys. Klute demands no expression of even minimal interest on her part, and sees through all artifice as his job demands so it's sincerity or nothing, a bit like the court-ordered rehab worker who believes not a word his scamming patients say, he trusts only their urine.

This kind of endorsement can come verily close to being a pro-sexist post-code patriarchy soap opera sanctification of woman's 'choice' to be a barefoot pregnant servant of any man who'll marry her.  Man can't force her, but if she chooses to renounce her freedom then she is the only girl in town who will know true happiness. Looking at these kinds of films now can make one feel dirty - like our most cherished ideas of self-sacrifice were being exploited like we were goddamned Viridiana or Candy Christian. In the end, it may be prostitution, but there is one idea you can trust above all others --not steel, as it was for Conan, it's not even cash, it's that the best possible kind of secret agent doesn't even know he's an agent and that there is no discernible difference between a real person faking being in love and a fake person in love for real. In fact, at a certain halfway point they are indistinguishable -- if that's too harsh a truth then don't play poker, don't fall in love with your prostitute, and don't ever fuck with Roy Rogers' horse. Shit's POTENT, son. Love will not be trifled with, and we fake it at our own risk --but the payoff is all around us, choking the Earth with its relentless distracted appetites. One Tin Actress rides away... yeah, ride it.

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Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO (1995)

Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling, which is almost meta to begin with, since moviemaking is an intensely expensive venture (CASINO cost $50 million, enough to build a casino or two all its own) and no one knows for sure when they lay down big cash like that the film won't bomb and they'll lose it all, baby. It's a roll of the dice. And the mob's been associated one way or another with Hollywood since the beginning, from Al Capone's boys acting as technical advisors on the 1932 original SCARFACE to "this is the girl" in MULHOLLAND DR. Wherever there's big money and trade unions, the mob is there, and Hollywood has both, so rolling the dice on a film about rolling dice is so meta it can't fail.

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as casino sites like http://www.jackpotcity.co.uk let you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. Robbery of a casino meant as a lark is far less, somehow, evil than the actual operation of one. But Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling, to  keep your tells in check and your sense of the odds present without resorting to card counting or cheating, you must be unlucky at love. And what in the end, is a priority? The smart gambler may deliberately sabotage his chances at a happy love life. Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO, in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes it's not just that he's too stupid to succeed.

I've already covered the delights of the here-and-gone beauty that is Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here). But what about 1995's overseen CASINO? A fine metaphor for the allure of gambling, and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys in suits smoking big cigars, who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers, and glitzy lights are the height of elegance. Their Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, or life. Who wouldn't want that kind of rush? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia, then the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds, grateful to not be lucky at cards after all?

Giddy rushes aside, CASINO is fraught with problems, none more glaring than the curse of its predecessor, GOODFELLAS. From the punchy wiseguy narration to the long tracking shots packed with period rock music and beautifully craggy old Italian faces, the Scorsese aesthetic we all fell in love with is back, but there's been so many imitations in the interim it seems like Scorsese is just imitating himself.  Joe Pesci is now so typecast the only he can escape his legendary role as Joey (see one of my very first-ever posts on Acidemic, 'That Joey, he's a wild one) is to up the ante. He doesn't drop the ball so much as hold it so tight it deflates. He looks older and stockier, his make-up oranger, belly paunchier, sneer frozen, and when he throws massive tantrums he's not scary-fun like he was in GOODFELLAS, just alarming, as trapped by the irresistible momentum of Scorsese's period gangster rhythm as a fly on an express train, the gravity seems to weigh him down, broaden him around the edges as he sinks into self parody's disheartening mire.

Sharon Stone, critics dutifully adoring her all the while, falls into the same hole in the desert, turning a sad vixen's marriage into a brilliant if overly shrill and humorless bid for Oscar respectability. Do you think Barbara Stanwyck ever 'tried' to blow us away with her raw force? She merely released what was always inside her, the tigress. Stone just wants us to see how Joan Crawfordianly hard she's trying to be a sad vixen Stanwyck knew that before you get to the raw tigeress force you need modulation, dynamics, some laugh. Hardness without softness, darkness without lightness, what is that? Whatever it is, it doesn't deserve the acres of tantrum space Scorsese carves out for it in the final act of CASINO. Verhoeven in BASIC INSTINCT, and TOTAL RECALL, knew how to use Stone's Bette Davis imperiousness and Jane Fonda insecurity combo as part of a comic book tapestry, a delicious villainess rather than an 'identifiable' heroine. A director like Sidney Lumet or Nicholas Ray, or George Cukor might have helped Stone to reign in some of her less successful ideas and enable her to win an Oscar, but without a genius who loves and can direct powerful women and knows how to get them to retract their claws and let down their hair, she falls into the same morass that snared Annette Bening in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the morass wherein female rage against the patriarchal machine comes out as abrasive, ineffectual spite, all while the infantile, unconsciously misogynistic director smiles and nods.

But everyone knows romance and female characters (ALICE aside) aren't Scorsese's strong point. He lives and breathes cigar smoke from the boys in the back room. His films about dangerous hoods work because he truly 'feels' the threat of violence, knows the streets, hires actual Little Italy characters (including his own mother) and makes effective, occasionally sickening use of cattle prods, spittle, baseball bats ("lots of holes in the desert") and beatings over owed vigs. Don Rickles, for example, as the pit boss, is like a bouncer from hell, his insult comic genius held in check like a pit bull on a leash. In the scenes where De Niro's narration takes us through the process of the skim, the film takes off into the blissful realm of pure cinema, and a solid hour of running time evaporates like crack.

But by the home stretch of the film, the tantrums of Sharon Stone in her Big Oscar Bid bogs it all down. Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen). We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy, then collapsing into tantrums. De Niro wouldn't seem such an unmitigated fool then. Instead he doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she can't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start-- bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't, even after having a kid. The only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.

While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for at least a good hour of CASINO, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him to a gunfight in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.

That's why CASINO is De Niro's last brilliant film, as well as the first of his bad ones. You can feel the gambler's luck turning halfway through, right around the time De Niro fires Joe Bob Briggs, nephew of a Nevada gaming commission bigwig, and refuses to even hire him back "somewhere farther down the trough," though the politician makes it clear De Niro's going to wind up losing his license if he doesn't comply.  How did someone so smart get suddenly so stupid... twice? Why would De Niro fuck up a good thing with the gaming commission just by insisting on firing a dopey relative of a high end Nevada politician? De Niro then seems surprised when he loses his license appeal, just as he's surprised when Ginger tries to run away.

By the same token, why did Marty think his next project after GOODFELLAS (and before CASINO) should be AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)? I'm not saying one should never wander from one's own back yard, but if you can't find anything new to talk about within it, maybe your just not looking hard enough. If a man can find Shakespeare within the language of a Brooklyn gangster movie, does he really need to do actual Shakespeare to prove himself? It's like with 'these' you don't know how to kill the bunny! 

For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and drive for petit-bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their mix of boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING.

Sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. His house is packed with freeloader wannabes like BLOW, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice), and everything by Guy Ritchie.

And that's that.

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PLUNGE! Dr. Mabuse vs. Ameritrade

 

If you're adverse to silent films, maybe you're like me and really just adverse to their usually trite orchestral or piano scores. The trick to enjoying DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922 - avail. on DVD and Netflix Streaming) is to turn down the sound (no comment on the included score, which I've not heard) and connect your ipod on shuffle. Surrender to the possibly synchronistic juxtapositions rather endure the banal orchestral or piano score that tends to underlines even the smallest of gestures without a whit of counterpoint or ironic distance, to the point that even John Williams might accuse you of overdoing it.

Fritz Lang films can move like molasses at times, but this silent two-part event is never dull with the random counterpoint of your ipod. If you trust in the process you're bound to get at least a few songs worth of real, eerie synchro-connect through this random collage process. I had the theme from John Carpenter's Escape from New York: Main Theme start right as the action shifted to a big night club where a crazy woman was dancing on top of two giant wooden noses. It became Lynchian, this Lang-Carpenter synthesis, like two rights canceling each other out and leaving only 'Silencio'. Meanwhile hypnosis and staring eyes and disguises pervade the film - paranoia and shiftiness, the mad rush to get rich obscuring all instincts for self-preservation. You know how those Germans were, and how we are... driving over a cliff as we argue over whether or not seat belts are important.

The big day trader moment comes early: Mabuse's agent looming like a spectre over the Berlin stock exchange, kidnapping briefcases to drive stocks down and then releasing them to drive them back up. The timeliness is never far off, but now, more than ever, it's hauntingly relevant. America's credit rating has plummeted! Mein Gott! We're not far off from that Expressionist moment of post-WW1 Weimar Berlin when the mark was devalued and Americans went over to celebrate how far their dollar could get them thus birthing the era of Weimar decadence. Don't forget that the Great Depression was years way, partying was in high effect and blonde prostitutes cheaper by the dozen.

The recent bouncing of our national worth along the stock exchanges of the world has a lot to do, in my opinion, with the day traders who think they're actually doing something important with their lives by their slot machine-like hunkering over the E*Trade accounts, guys who wear khakis and high five a lot, so their beer ads claim. They must still be out there, but they're not the true Mabuses. They got took by the master behind the scenes, the sneaky pete conservatives who deliberately shorted the market for their own sinister agenda. They sold out their own country in a lemming stampede. The less self awareness they have, the easier they are fleeced, according to Mabuse's supernatural theology. It's in clinging to the illusion that you are normal, a 'regular guy' that you befoul the world by funneling the treasure you never knew you had into the pockets of criminal cartels.

Mabuse would return under Lang in 1932 with TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, albeit confined to a mental ward and using his fierce Teutonic will alone to control sabotage. Like The Gambler, the film mirrors its dire political present very well -- Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail, after all, and European nations grossly misunderstood Germany's ability to sneak around the post-WW1 economic and military constrictions.

Lang hated the common man as much as anyone and you can see him siding with the sinister cash-hungry Mabuse during this stock sequence. You could probably stop watching, for awhile, right after the poker game that follows (scored by my ipod to Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg's La Chanson de Prevert) as I did, and then watch again later, in 20 minute chapters of your ipod's choosing, but even as strictly a random collage of great expressionist images Mabuse is awesome. Weimar evil had seldom looked so inviting, so artsy, so terrifyingly expressionist, and Lang never seemed to be having as much fun as he is here, venting cobra venom with the mechanical cool of a cuckoo stock ticker.

Thanks to Lolita Kane's awesome blog post.

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