The Blackened Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

Playing like a midnight car accident between a banned entry in Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code jackboot and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit. Occurring almost in real time over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot, owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie aims for wry spin on the MGM formula of 'cavalcade of stars playing an array of types at a fancy hotel or night club' ala Grand Hotel, or Paramoun'ts  International House, but its way darker than either: murders go unpunished, trysts are planned but never executed and if there's no autogyro to lift you off the roof, well, just walk home as innocuously as you can. Nazism is in der Winde!

There are several interwoven stories and emotions too strange not to unweave and examine separately:

1. The chilling exhilaration of the Russian gambler who lost his fortune gambling the night before, so he's going to kill himself tonight. Clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about the ways he might do it, his merriment in the face of being broke nonetheless recalls Dostoevsky's famous line, "a real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion." As he gives away his watch and remaining moneys to the scantily-clad chorus girls, they don't seem too troubled about his suicide threats either, since if they took him seriously they might have to give his stuff back. And so the morality of the film slips willingly into the murk like a blackened commando with a knife in its teeth. One last stab at ambivalence before the code turned every chorine saint or savage.

2. The love quintanglement between the stars of the show-within-a-show, the ballroom dancing pair of 'the Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him, as if there's one in every bar) played by Ricardo Cortez and his partner, played by Dolores Del Rio, and a whole slew of their former lovers, past, present, and future: rich married woman Kay Francis is after Cortez; smitten songwriter Dick Powell, and the club owner Al Wonder are both into Del Rio (Powell 'knew' her first) who is way to obsessive over Cortez. The way these people crawl and scrape shamelessly after each other is a little worrisome, and way too adult for the code to come. 

3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two party girls, but their matronly spouses are in tow ("There out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris," laments Guy). But the ladies too find their matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos in the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the evening. There's some amusingly smashed interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, though.

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round, forced to rely heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. There's also whips, knives, and double entendres but what lingers most is how Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism and its inverse - our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns first as people and then as abstract patterns, then back again, in a way that's truly relevant to the film's uneasy sense of self-loathing and alienation. The cast's freaky 'otherness' is played up even as they are meant to be identifiable as certain types: the foolish rich wife, the Mexican firebrand, the hicks from Indiana, etc. There's no sense of connection or belonging here, just humanity slipping in and out abstraction.

5.  Al Jolson singing "Going to Heaven on Mule," in blackface.
Yikes, here we go...

Grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through these offensive stereotype settings, Jolson more than overdoes it, cavorting and twisting his face into hideous leering grimaces. One wonders how this was ever popular, though Jolson does grow on you in a trainwreck nostalgia kind of way. Notes the Museum of Family History site:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the troll king of early sound film, the golem who segued between the handsome, effeminate lovers of the silents and the fast-talking toughs of the gangster boom. Jolson was neither lover nor tough; he was insecure and caught in a narcissistic downward spiral through the molasses air, as if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious yet tickled to a childlike, near-Jerry Lewisian fit of jouissance over the attention: "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He's a "borscht belt Pagliachi... a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, most self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

Now there are some who think two wrongs don't make a right, but this ground zero of racism has a train-wreck pull for others, maybe it's wrong to do so, but we seek reasons why we might excuse him. Does it help that Jolson was a big supporter of black entertainers and possibly felt a kinship with oppressed African Americans? A Jew who played up his own Jewishness, Jolson had to struggle with stereotypes himself, and both black and Jews had to constantly depict themselves as humble and naive to avoid racist ire. As if cementing the similarity, behold the above picture, so bizarre it almost seems culled from some Martian TV transmission. The archaic Yiddish characters on the newspaper providing an under-halo to the sunrise of loose straw from his hat, he's a blackface golem from an alternate universe. And the whole Green Pastures satire aspect is eerily soothing: the opiate promise of heading into the sunshine of eternal glory, just like the code had planned for us immediately following this last pre-code moment of a wanderin' in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

 Here's Jolson fan Glenn Kenny on the many questions surrounding Jolson's 'right' to blacken up:

The salient feature of the film, finally, is its ultimate musical number, the notorious "Going To Heaven On A Mule." A few scenes prior to this, the heady ethnic stew from which Jolson concocted his varied performing personae is underscored in a bit where he exchanged patter with "Russian count" Michael Dalmatoff before launching into a quite credible (that is, suitably schmaltzy) rendition of "Ochi chyornye" ("Dark Eyes"). For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward.

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of the Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile.

I like her comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context, noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. On some level I can't agree, though of course she's right --we don't have an adequate grasp of contextual objection. However, for my money the  post-WWI Parisian setting of the film helps - for Paris became home to expat black jazz musicians for a reason: racism was largely absent there -- no Jim Crow-- and yet the spectacle of blackness, of difference, seemed heightened for an avant garde shock value in many stage productions popular there. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up in posters and set decor, or the exotica of Josephine Baker (left). And the connection of Jews and black musicians had always been vibrant and reciprocal. During the Nazi occupation 'Zionists' were suspected of underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notees:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.

In an excellent piece on Django Reinhart in the 1940s, From the Barrelhouse quotes a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing mistrustfully at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons like Coal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television, even seeing Song of the South in the theater, and never thinking anything was wrong about it except that it was boring as fuck and I wanted to get on to Treasure of the Matacumbe, which came on after Song in a 1976 double feature revival, though that sucked too.

Perhaps abjectification precedes awareness, but it forgives nothing. More than anything now, minstrelry is our shame, not Jolson's or anyone else's, but an example of the White-Christian compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent underneath the skin of so much news rhetoric.

A word on Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested gigolo Ricardo Cortez, her beautiful but weirdly taut face creeps me out: the sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones. She's like death incarnate... at least in this film.

In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer (him) sacrifices himself so the plasticine dish can run away with the spoon shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft. In a way he'd be ideal as the evil plastic surgeon in visage... slowly reducing his love's face to a featureless taut skin skull...

This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and/or bad teeth or big nose or wrinkles or thin lips is mostly gone now. If someone wants surgery they have it, but we're intolerant of all hate crimes, even self-hate crimes...

Thus we need to watch the veiled racial hierarchy of whiteness with a grain of tolerance  in 1934, a decade or so before the founding of the State of Israel and 30 odd years before the death of Martin Luther King. Here we have whiter-than-white Dick Powell winning the Mexican beauty while the best Jolson's Russian Jewishness can do is eliminate Cortez's Latin lover and then step nobly aside, just as Del Rio would step into a volcano at the end of her 1932 break-out, Bird of Paradise (so Joel McRae could go back home to his white fiancee).

And the freak otherness doesn't begin to end there, for in addition to Del Rio's oddly skeletal features, there's Kay Francis at her most eerily caricature-like: her alabaster skin, triangle mouth and round fleshy head making her seem like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre melange, trying to nail down the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door.

But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for aberration: we see a pair of men dancing, and Jolson making a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise as he sees them,  (below), the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it. Jolson is, above all, a caricature of his own self, running around from table to table his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a Nerf ball through the deep end of a pool. A user review on imdb, sums his character up best, as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Nazis with Joseph Breen and his Catholic Legions.

Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but for tonight, all these things that the code would put an end to are here at the Wonder Bar, assembled here as if by a mysterious blackmail letter. The most glaring even to the novice will be how Jolson gets away with covering up his lover's crime of passion by letting another man make good on his suicide threats, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so slippery it's still shocking even for a pre-code. Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be able to play for almost 30 years? Even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow an end to what used to be mere innocent decadence--the Weimar era and the jazz age--and the arrival of corrupt, racist, sexist, colonialist  'morality' of the both the Nazis and Joseph Breen's Catholic Legion of "decency." Some joke. If you can take it, and like it, get this movie anyway you can't. And when we go back in time to kill Hitler, let's take out Breen too. In the meantime. Shall we run?

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Bella's Big Bounce - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN - PART II (2012)

To those of us who recognize her special gifts, who know how to appreciate the beauty of reticence, part two of BREAKING DAWN proves a deeply Jungian-delible feast where we get to see a new, ass-kicking side of Kristen Stewart. Now officially a vampire, she looks more alive than she used to. She was meant to be this way, born to become a vampire, the 'I wish someone had tried to save my soul before I too was turned' types complained but she knew what she was doing, like that kid who's compelled to seek out LSD despite the warnings of his friends and finds, in his travels, God and leaves those friends far behind--and since Bella is a "newborn" she can outvamp all those who previously lorded over her. Gone is the usual insecure adrift ghostly-pallored innocent! In her stead, a monster mom.

Forgive me if I sound enamored of it all. I'm now almost old as Bella's dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), was at the start of the series (2008) so my view of the series has changed, from bemused, slightly intoxicated outsider fondness (and nostalgia for my year of living in the Pacific Northwest) to mopey adoration for NEW MOON's whole 'Baby Jane-en-verso' aging ur-text to weary respect. Now with the final installment I am already way past the point of feeling a direct connection to my old awkward high school passions. See, when I was Twilight-appropriate age I was all in the comic book Elfquest, and had fantasized my way into a very similar tribe, the Wolf Riders. I tried, really tried, after one achingly perfect, mystical dream, to disappear into the Elfquestverse, the way I'm sure kids do today with the Twilight; they're similar tribal fantasias of belonging with the cool weird beautiful people clique but enough time's passed that the dream belongs to someone else, some different assemblage of cells and thoughts, one still strung-out by public school days and lonesome comic book night teen trauma. Now all I want is a comfy coffin. I'm like the world-weary seen-it-all Volturi member, Marcus (Christopher Heyerdahl). But I still kind of an in love with Alice, the psychic vampire who wins over Charlie and effortless makes every moment special.

With my  first praiseful post on the Twilight series, over at Bright Lights in 09,  I felt I was was a defense lawyer for the series, trying to justify my intellectual curiosity against the pooh-poohing of my critic peers, culminating in my opus "Someone to Fight Over Me."  But all that gazing into the pool of youth left me aging rapidly and the generations of hyper-evolved youth just keep coming, as do new apps and platforms and operating systems for my Mac; the technology grows at an exponential rate and I can no longer keep up. I'm a reverse vampire, aging faster than a regular mortal, crumbling to dust like David Bowie in THE HUNGER.

That's why in this last and final incarnation, the TWILIGHT saga is no longer a contrast or fantasy or escape but a breath of misty old growth forest air. I appreciate that ADD trendiness is ignored by these teen Methuselahs. Their every... sentence... takes whole Antonioni films to come out... but... the molasses pace... can prove a dreamy kick and Robert Pattinson is a master at making certain phrases twist and turn in the waves like frogs. One has time to wrestle with the Big Issues of life, not just as a teen girl or old man in a young man's body, but both rolled into one immortal soul, a Benjamina Button conjoined twin set, one aging chronologically the other the reverse, until they meet as grandparent and newborn child, and then disappear beyond the veil.

In this fifth and final installment the Cullens assemble a host of quirky vamp clans to stand firm against the onrushing Catholic stand-in, the Voltari, who plan to wipe out said Cullens. The clans are all ageless of course, so include hunks from the Civil War to the days of the ancient Romans, allowing a vast new array of options as far as fantasy-adoptive families. The film is carefully crafted to create just such a sense of belonging, the 'teams' of Edward and Jacob have just expanded to a whole league, and they would never say a word like 'yolo'. Every character in the clan is unique: creepy, hot, or creepy-hot; as long as the viewer stays unseen in the vampiric dark he or she fits right into the mix.

I may not be able to see the youth clearly now... the world in my ball has gone dim... their outlines alone shimmer in the glow of their digital screen surroundings and my glasses seem to work less and less well with each passing film--but I can still meet them halfway, at the forest of one of their own primal mythic worlds, where everyone is centuries-old and frozen at youth on TCM, or how I still see myself as 21 in the bathroom mirror when the Baby Jane clarity is fogged by the steam of showers. I can still meet them at the halfway point where those who strive for eternal youth settle for an early death. Call my deconstruction of the series dangerous to its intended youthful demographic if you prefer, but there is a rich modernist ancestry to that subtext, as I've pointed out in a past post, particularly to films from the 1930s like DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, THE WIND, and MOROCCO.

Any true horror fan knows, that real ambivalent attitudes towards life and death are rare even in the classics. So many filmmakers looking for a quick signifier mistake gore for subversion. In Meyers' work, moral ambivalence isn't avoided just because the Cullens are 'vegetarians' - i.e. hunt only deer and cougars. The parallels with some kind of cult or drug scene are never avoided and parents should be scared that their impressionable TWILIGHT fan daughters will be predisposed to roll with the next pale, good-looking junky clan that happens by, and soon they're learning all the tips of how to not seem stoned out of her gourd when having 'serious talks' with her parents (the other vamps have to remind Bella to blink once in awhile and to wear non-red contact lenses, the way stoners use Visine.

Such worries by parents are perhaps dispelled, allegedly, originally, through the popular press's misinterpretation of the series as advocating celibacy, but celibacy isn't always adherence to a restrictive social order. It can be a renouncement of societal expectations and a stand against the impetus towards unconscious reproductive urges, marriage, peer pressure, and male desire. Not only do Edward and Bella wait for their wedding to 'do it' but once 'it's' done 'it' triggers an accelerated pregnancy that kills the mortal Bella. Not since SPECIES (here) has a fantasy film so cleverly tapped into our secret revulsion towards the Cronenbergian biological express train nightmare underbelly of sexual desire. Once you slow down time you can speed it up too but God drags pregnancy out as long as possible so the full horror of it doesn't have time to settle; it moves along to slow to defend against. In her brilliance, Meyer floors it, so the full monstrousness of the 'right to life' idea is revealed.

And you can fault the mopey teen trappings all you want, but this last installment especially has the guts to go deep into the more taboo realms of mating and pair-bonding: Much time is spent explaining that Jacob is not a pedophile just because he's 'imprinted' on Bella's baby girl, Renesme. It's "not like you think!" he explains over and over as all react in understandable disgust. A normal film would prove just how much 'it's not like you think' by cutting out that whole sub-plot, lest any unsightly criticism be drawn. But with the substantial heft of Stephanie Meyer's franchise behind it, the ickiness goes unfiltered, and that's so punk rock!

Another punk element is the scene with Bella at he first hunt, crouching up on a rock like a feral stalking beast, and later coming home and trying to explain why she's not dead to her one-note worrywart dad Charlie. He doesn't like it, but what choice does he have? Where can you find a deprogrammer in rural Washington State? In the 00s? Meanwhile, his granddaughter grows way too fast, and Bella's cold to the touch and has weird eyes, or uses eye drops so he won't see how red they are, like any good daughter grass smoker. But if Charlie says anything to anyone about how weird it all is, Bella's going to do an even bigger bounce and he can't deal with that and thus it is yet again that Bella uses her dream child to dominate not just Edward (she forced his hand so he had to turn her into a vampire, finally, at the end of Part I) but her father as well. To create a situation where your father has no choice but to allow you freedom to be stoned and/or stone, to leave you and your bad boy alone as immortal statues left for centuries in overgrown gardens, hidden from his meddling overprotection, is devoutly to be wished by any and all 6-17 year-olds.  Bella has indirectly attacked Charlie via nightmare screaming in previous films, and attacked Edward via a reckless pursuit of danger (the only thing that makes a phantom image of Edward appear as if a symptom of adrenalin-poisoning) but nothing beats a miracle gro baby as a tool for moral high ground. And besides, dads in coming-of-age myths exist mainly to be ignored.

Understanding the lost ability of these kind of 'child as tool of revenge' sagas can shed light on our darker instincts and help us in understanding just why American folk heroines are so different than Europe's Red Riding Hoods and Gretels. Through myth we can embrace the irony: America's population is composed of wanderers and the descendants of wanderers: Ellis Island, Vikings, colonialists, and slave-owning ex-Irish penal colonists. The rest of the world is full of people willing to stay where they are, their fidgety neighbors who used to ramble on about their plans for exploring are all long-since moved to America. And so it is that we in the USA find fantasizing about wandering an unrewarding use of time. We have to do it for real, as our ancestors did, or not at all. Our fantasies are of staying still, but surrounded by cool peers-- Hogwarts, the Shire, Forks--as long as parents aren't there. Those who paint the best fantasy homes get visited by others, until a world beautiful is created online, only to have marauders break in and slaughter everyone during the big wedding.

This is our history as a nation and a world, but for vampires it's history without the forgetfulness that goes on as generations snake forward through the tunnel of time, shedding memory skins with each incarnation, leaving only bad habits and alcoholism, and debt. In the Twilight realm, the original explorers who left Europe in the 1800s are all still here, and still look like they're in their early 20s, and willing to be friends with your sorry ass, thus elevating you to some Wagnerian height of 'belonging' ecstasy, a height missing from your usual high school experience. Here at last those troglodyte wallies are devoured and forgotten. If each successive generation is just a little more slackjawed than the last, gone soft from suburban slovenliness, then these vampires and shape-shifters represent a chance to undo them all, to clean house, to eradicate the slow moving herd members.

Lastly, perhaps there's no more common dream archetype than that of the instant, fast-growing baby. By putting digital transplants of one actor's face (Mackenzie Foy) over the younger and older versions, she seems truly creepy, all the more so for being cute. Her smiling face adheres to various younger bodies as she grows so that by the time she's actually wearing her own face the damage is done and she's still creepy cute. The total effect works to make her every appearance as uncomfortable as stumbling onto a baby skeleton in the lowest ebb of the uncanny valley. It serves the story, though, as well as in a probably unintentional but nonetheless valid metatextual frisson. The drama centers around the child having to prove it's not a full vampire but she's also a hybrid between digital and 'real; her CGI-edged face all but matrixes out of the screen in some 3-D Final Cut-layered feedback... even in the simulacrum she's a devouring simulacrum, the kind of child born to make haunted videotapes and project images onto film even from the bottom of the well.

If you've read the book, then you know what happens and then doesn't happen never happened, but it's still a pretty great surprise, a Sam Peckinpah / Walter Hill style bloodbath even Kate Beckinsale and Milla Jovovich franchises at their bloodiest couldn't match. There's an eerie silence that results when characters you've spent the movie getting to know are suddenly absent, with a snap or a blam, as final and startling as an introduction to the finality of death as any child could hope to find. If you do manage to become involved in the Peckinpah-ish finality of it, and if you know the sad desperation of the lonesome teenage suburbanite for whom no amount of friends and super powers can compete with that Truman Show sense of isolation, then you know how such blanket cold can radiate so warmly, like a wedding cake corpse cooling in an unheated winter theater. In our lonesomest hours we'll risk our lives just to feel connected, even if that connecting involves the sacrifice of the last few vestiges of reality on the altar of the fantasy franchise, as long as you both shan't live.

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"I'm not afraid to die..." Tony Scott and Dangerous Women

The news of Tony Scott's unfortunate death, which floored all fans of ballsy film, came this Monday afternoon when I was already moping to my saddest Spotfiy mix at work, mulling over the last full season of our old Mayan calendar existence... to this I easily added morning for the first fallen soldier in the first day of fall, Awash with all the sad chicks in my headphones, I knew I needed to revisit DOMINO (2003) when I got home. It may seem an odd choice from his impressive repertoire, but I think it's his most personal film, almost a righting of the wrongs of one of his first films, THE HUNGER, from 20 years prior (1).

Scott's films tended to be both overrated and underrated in equal measure, at the same time. Like his older brother Ridley, he's a master of light and sound who'll go the extra distance for just the right shot, and that's not always a good thing.  Often self-hamstrung by second-guessing and over-editing, each has a style that indicates roots of insecurity and the sinking feeling they get lost in possibilities and completely lose sight of what their original vision was in the first place. That said, Tony's films deliver consistently and he leaves behind a legacy of beautiful and true moments in film even if the films around them didn't completely hang together. He was a courtier of reckless abandon in life and in cinema, like John Huston, Sam Peckinpah, Abel Ferrara, and almost no one else. It's rarefied company, and he deserves his place among them.

Perhaps he's right now up in the crazy clouds, carousing with the real-life Domino Harvey, who died at 35 of a possible drug overdose (ruled as heart attack) the year their film was released. Maybe she's waiting at the bottom of the ocean (in my conception of the afterlife, the bottom of the ocean and the highest clouds are on the same level), with a devil's bounty hunter badge for him. If you ever see him in the DVD extras to his films he always seems like he's got one eye on the exit or the horizon, half-fully engaged (if it's possible, and with him I think it was), half recoiling from the acres of hangers-on and crew and cast all wanting something from him all the time, always talking about, and filming films about, ducking off into the sunrise with nothing but a gun, a suitcase of money, and a Hawksian woman. If you have the gun and the Hawksian girl, why do you even need to make a movie? Because he still can't get away from himself, except by working.

It's important the girl is the right girl and is not afraid to wear lots of black eyeliner or kill a man execution-style. They mustn't preach anti-gun violence / non-smoking / condom-conscious moral reform code or credo as so many A-list stars do in their smoke-free films. Scott never bowed to the PC reformers: in his films everyone smoked, because he liked to film the way sunlight through half-open blinds and cigarette smoke intermingle, and he knew the profound bond created by sharing cigarettes, and that they're cool regardless of killing people, and if you thought it was wrong to smoke indoors on a film set, for the health of the crew and the easily influenced kids watching at home, then go fuck yourself. Art with Scott bowed not to PC thuggery. Words can't express how rare or wondrous that attitude is in a land where everyone talks about being bad and subversive while having fainting spells and calling their lawyers if the road takes them even remotely close something like a genuine edge.

A small insufficient tribute, here are three of Scott's dangerous women, in reverse chronological order:

Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey - DOMINO (2003)
You can badmouth Tony Scott but if you do, and someone bashes a high contrast emerald beer bottle over your head, DOMINO is the proof you had it coming and that a lot of punchy fashion models might be healthier mentally if able to work bounty hunter jobs instead of just drug habits. Knightley is in good company with Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez as bounty hunters scrounging around L.A. All three have no problem being balls-to-the-wall badass and Tony Scott takes every opportunity to bash and savage the whinin' boys of the Hollywood industry when these bounty hunters get their option picked up. Knightley is so good that when she says "I'm not afraid to die," you believe her. It's not just idle MTV boasting.

Even if you've seen it and it just gave you a headache, watch it again, and then again, and you'll still be soaking up the details. Maybe Domino doesn't actually kill anyone (that I recall) but she does break an actor's nose just 'cuz he's a douche and deserves it and maybe the big mob stand-off climax seems like cliched overkill and much too similar to Scott's earlier TRUE ROMANCE but you can bet he tried the script and plot a dozen different ways before realizing this was the best and most cinematic way to go, and was full well aware of its derivative Hong Kong-ishness and it being ultimately unlike the real Domino, but as she says in the film, if she told us the full truth it would have to be sanitized so she wouldn't go to jail or have mobsters on her ass, and Scott knew it would be better to just lie bigger than truth smaller.

And anyway, they do way too much mescaline very convincingly. That forgives a lot, in the Acidemic lawbook.

Plus, Knightley's white satin beauty and adamantium razor cheekbone toughness is backed up by a strange and effective roster of side players: Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, Tom Waits, Mena Suvari, Macy Gray, Jacqueline Bissett, Dabney Coleman and Lucy Liu. Even against all these hard hitters, Kierra kills it.

Patricia Arquette as Alabama - TRUE ROMANCE (1993)
It's both hard and too easy to dig up misogynistic subtext in Tony Scott's films, but he loves showing super strong women who love their man and aren't disgusted if he still reads comic books, stays indoors watching kung fu on a sunny day, and kills people.

An example would be the way Alabama finds Christian Slater's murder of her pimp incredibly romantic... when we in the audience and Slater, like any PC-era antihero, are expecting a long moral harangue about the wrongness of violence, like Liz Hurley might lecture Austin Powers on safe sex, or John Connor his Terminator about "you can't just go around killing people." And we love the way Alabama faces off against hulking mob goon (the future Tony Soprano) in a fearless deadpan. Letting her bag of womanly tricks and feints run empty with a chuckle; mixing coy laughter and sudden, brutal, outside-the-box retaliations; it's a triumphant bit of acting and a ballsy move on the part of the director to film it so artfully and savagely.

I personally like TRUE a lot better than QT's directorial debut, RESERVOIR DOGS, which gets better as it goes along but has a painfully overwrought beginning (after the awesome diner scene) with much too much of Tim Roth yelling in pain like a little punter and fake blood and monotonous grey concrete decor. Alabama is ten times tougher than the whole damn lot of those dudes, save, naturally Lawrence Tierney; you can imagine her getting gut shot and just laughing about it while never trying to deny her mortal terror. That sort of chutzpah we really don't see again until Daniel Craig finds a way to laugh uproariously through his ball torture in CASINO ROYALE. Scott saw that women had to be tougher and stronger than men every day, and loved them for it, as we love them always now through his eyes.

NOTES:
1. The Hunger- a postscript, 8-13 - this was just on TCM - it's pretty upsetting because parts are amazing, especially everything with David Bowie, who modulates his rapid aging so superbly you forget what age he even is. Deneuve is also superb but Scott's vision really fails him, not least because the next lover Deneuve chooses is Susan Sarandon, a bad choice as she is in full moral piety mode, sabotaging the whole damn thing because she objects to killing people three times a week for the next 300 years, and as if the whole 'bad faith' angle wasn't bad enough (it's sunk better films than this: Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys) Scott cranks up the jump cuts back and forth across time and space so now you can't even kill a person without intercutting ceiling fans, Bauhaus videos, and a crazy baboon. Good lord Tony, why make a lesbian vampire film just suck the fun out? 

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