A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
This is a movie that stages a fight behind a movie screen projecting Stalker, perhaps so the filmmakers can boast that they got people who came to see Charlize Theron beat up people to learn about Andrei Tarkovsky on Google. It's a film that casts Barbara Sukowa in a bit part as if it were a homage to New German Cinema. It is, as I mentioned in passing, a film in which Charlize Theron beats people up, but that doesn't mean it can't be pretentious in its own fashion.
As a movie star, Theron was born in violence. In 2 Days in the Valley she was not just the hot new hottie but the one who got attention for bare-knuckle brawling with Terri Hatcher. She's always been something of an Amazon, and that probably made it easier for her to earn acclaim and awards playing a Ms. Hyde version of the type, an uglyfied man-hating murderer in Monster. It has long seemed like her destiny to be an action star, especially as she advances into her forties past leading-lady territory. She made a move in that direction right after Monster, but Aeon Flux set back her cause for a while. More recently she's become an A-level genre fixture, finally established as an action goddess by Mad Max: Fury Road. I don't know what the hell she was doing in the last Fast and Furious movie, but for her latest star vehicle she's teamed with some of the people who miraculously transformed Keanu Reeves into a midlife badass in the John Wick films. The promise of Atomic Blonde is that Charlize Theron will not only beat people up, but will do so with style and devastating force and little winks to the movie nerds in the audience.
Stuntman turned director David Leitch has filmed a screenplay adapted from one of those obscure graphic novels that Hollywood pays people to read -- don't envy them until you read a few hundred -- by screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, who most recently wrote the second 300 movie -- the really bad one. I don't know whether he or the original writer deserves the "credit" for Atomic Blonde's utterly generic spy story, which depends on that old standby, the List. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbles, the intelligence agencies of several nations are fighting over one of those lists, the existence of which automatically endangers vast numbers of operatives and assets. MI6's contender in this deadly sweepstakes is Lorraine Broughton (Theron), whose sole useful attribute, from what we see, is her versatility in hand-to-hand combat. She replaces a British agent who was killed, presumably by a traitor known as Satchel. She is to be assisted by David Percival (James McAvoy) an agent working on the other side of the Wall as a black marketeer. Percival has a back-up for the list: the German agent who created the list and has memorized all of it. If all else fails, this man is to be smuggled out of East Berlin. Broughton and Percival have a prickly relationship that happily doesn't consummate in romance, as might have been taken for granted a few years ago. Instead, our heroine has her very own Bond Girl in the form of a French agent (Sofia "The Mummy" Boutella). None of this can be told straightforwardly, of course, because this is the 21st century. Instead, the details are related after the fact during a framing-device debriefing that preempts any suspense about Broughton in Berlin. MI6 has been taken over by Hydra, it seems, since Broughton must answer for her actions to Arnim Zola and his U.S. counterpart (John Goodman). Any narrative (or erotic) momentum the film works up is broken up by its constant return to the inert framing device -- but let's face it. The narrative isn't really meant to have momentum of its own; it only has to transport us from one action setpiece to another, and while the story of the film is pretty tedious, and eventually predictable, those setpieces mostly live up to the advance hype. I'm not going to bother describing them, apart from citing one that plays out during a lengthy Rope-style "single take" as the piece de resistance. It will do to recommend Atomic Blonde as an action film that puts Theron over as an opportunistic, resilient brawler in a relatively realistic style. If Wonder Woman is too fantastic for your tastes, Atomic Blonde should end up your female action movie of the year, though it may try your patience at times when it tries to tell a story instead of doing what it's really good at.
As far as most Americans are concerned, the history of martial arts cinema consists of whatever happened before Bruce Lee, then Bruce Lee and endless badly dubbed imitators fighting each other over their masters' deaths, followed by Jackie Chan's more comical, stunt-oriented movies, and finally today's CGI-enhanced fantasies. Chan didn't break into the U.S. mainstream until the mid-1990s, but a decade earlier Hong Kong action films reflected his influence. What we were taught to admire about Jackie Chan was that he did his own stunts, but on the evidence of Corey Yuen's film the stunts themselves mattered more to some directors, if not to audiences, than who actually did them. I hadn't watched a film like Yes Madam in a while; most of my recent martial-arts viewing had been more oldschool. I had been used to an evolution over the 1970s toward a virtuoso standard of martial-arts skills reflected in the movies' increasing emphasis on training sequences, however fantastic those may have been. Watching Yuen's movie after watching a lot of Seventies kung fu is like watching a modern musical after a diet of Fred Astaire. Astaire wanted to show off his skills by having directors showcase his full body in long takes, while in later musicals directors often assert themselves by conspicuously editing dance numbers. The fight scenes in Yes, Madam are all about stunts and editing, but there's more point to the practice than there is in many modern musicals. The individual shots could be compared to the panels of a comic book. Every set-up is framed for the maximum impact from a short burst of action. Individual blows are more devastating than in oldschool fight scenes, as wirework often sends a stuntman flying after a powerful kick from one of the heroines. Slow-motion is employed liberally to emphasize the reality of certain stunts. As a whole the fight scenes are more dynamic and more cartoonish than what you might have seen a decade earlier, and that seems to fit the cartoonishness of the picture as a whole.
Michelle Yeoh is armed and dangerous
Yes, Madam is a cop movie of confusing lineage -- billed on screen as a sequel to a picture that, according to IMDB, actually came out a year later, the two having in common Michelle Yeoh, then still using her original nom d'ecran of Michelle Khan, in early starring roles. What struck me about this particular cop movie is how like a Lethal Weapon picture it was in its overblown goofiness and rambling narrative. It's more like a later Lethal Weapon to the extent that comedy relief characters are allowed to try to steal the movie. A viewer expecting an action-chick apotheosis, since the film teams Yeoh with American karate champion and future B-movie star Cynthia Rothrock, will be surprised and probably appalled to learn that they have no more, really, than an equal share of screen time with three male criminal buffoons, each named after some popular pain reliever: Strepsil, Aspirin and Panadol. They're thieves and counterfeiters, constantly whining at and bickering with each other while earning money to subsidize the retirement of their old master (powder-haired co-producer Sammo Hung). They accidentally acquire frames of microfilm that could expose a vast criminal network after an old Scotland Yard mentor of Inspector Ng (Yeoh/Khan) is killed by gangsters in a hotel they intend to rob. In the confusion the comedy crooks make off with the film inside the victim's passport book -- the real prize as far as they're concerned.
Ng wants to track down her mentor's killers, with the aggressive assistance of British detective Morris (Rothrock), while the killers are trying to find the microfilm that the crooks don't realize they even have until relatively late in the proceedings. Add an angry fugitive who buys the doctored passport from the crooks only to have a shitstorm of hard-kicking justice descend upon him, a pool hustler and his personal band of enforcers, etc. etc. and you have a nice recipe for an hour and a half of energetically stupid mayhem.
This is one of those 1980s movies that may leave viewers of a certain age struggling to remind themselves that they actually lived through that decade. Did people thirty years or so ago really dress like that? I suppose it's progressive that Yeoh and Rothrock are hardly glamorized here, but it's one thing not to be treated as sex objects, another to be subjected to the garish baggy costumes they wear in Yes, Madam. Sometimes they look like children on a playdate, or at least like their mommies had dressed them, but there's a point to it. For one thing, those outfits probably provide the ladies some much needed padding for the falls they'll have to take. And while there are plenty of shots that demonstrate that Yeoh, with her dance training, and Rothrock, with her non-combat karate training, are convincing cinematic fighters, Yuen's characters need to make some amazing acrobatic leaps and when they do, the shots are from far enough away for us to assume that these are men, not women, doing the stunts in those conveniently loose, mannish garments. Needless to say, this is where rapid-fire editing comes in very handy.
Some women's skills probably can't be duplicated by stuntmen
Like many a Hollywood cop film of the era, Yes, Madam features mismatched partners. While the thrill of the picture is the idea of two women beating up all the men, the women themselves never really become buddies. Whether a political comment is being made in then British-ruled Hong Kong, or a cultural comment is made on western cop movies, Yuen's movie makes a pointed distinction between Ng's subtler methods with prisoners and Morris's hard-charging brutality. The Brit is more inclined to beat information out of a suspect, but the Chinese does not act differently out of squeamishness. "If that worked, we'd do it," Ng tells Morris after pulling her off a hapless prisoner. Ng is more likely to let a perp escape custody in the expectation that he'll lead her to the next level of the criminal food chain. She's usually right, of course, though the chaotic scheming of the three comics complicates things. It ultimately compromises the picture until Yes Madam is more about the crooks than the cops, closing not with the superwomen sharing a triumph, but with one of the crooks going vigilante on a cackling master criminal. It's an abrupt wrap-up very unlike an American cop movie, and why Yuen and his writers should want to wrap it that way is probably what makes the picture most foreign. The Chinese may not have the same idea of "comedy relief" as Anglophones do, so it may not have jolted them so much to see a film close with a buffoon turned bloody avenger. On the other hand, since this film's master criminal is shielded by the legal system from the fate he presumably deserves yet can't receive at the hands of the policewomen. Even Morris won't shoot a man in cold blood, but a pathetic petty criminal, a man who was a punching bag for most of the picture, pretty well can. It's still an odd way to end the movie, but it may seem less odd to its original audience for reasons I don't fully get yet. But as long as you feel that Yes, Madam has given you the quota of kinetic cinema you were looking for -- and you probably will -- you can let the ending go.
Among the stuff you'll find when you look for free feature films online is a trove of English-subtitled Russian films from the Soviet era and beyond. Mosfilm has its own YouTube channel, while the "PyccoTypucmo" (pronounced "RussoTurismo") channel has even more titles, including Boris Durov's action hit for the Gorky Film Studio (watch it here), a rugged adventure film that compares respectably with grindhouse movies from the capitalist world. Apart from a certain flatness of characters, there's little to mark this as a Communist film, and I'm sure it wasn't made with any propaganda purpose in mind. Brezhnev-era Bolsheviks believed in entertaining folks, and Soviet Man appears to have been entertained by the same stuff that pleased his bourgeois counterparts: violence towards men and women, violence by gun, knife, foot, fist and grappling hook -- the faster paced, the better.
At a few seconds short of 80 minutes, Pirates of the XXth century practices truth in advertsing by showing us modern-day pirates in action. But we start with a Soviet freighter, the Nezhin, picking up a boatload of medicinal opium, bound for Vladivostok and distribution to hospitals. The opening credits promise martial-arts action, as we see a crewmember practicing with his "numbchuks" and breaking boards to entertain his mates. This energetic routine is interrupted when the crew discovers a man adrift in the water. The rescued man, Saleh, speaks no Russian, but some of the crew speak English, and they learn that he jumped a ship whose cargo of cotton caught fire. Next, the Nezhin discovers a disabled ship, the Mercury. Its distress is a deception, as was Saleh's. As he creates havoc on the Nezhin, destroying its radio, pirates from the Mercury -- a crew of terrorists and mercenaries -- storm the ship, slaughter most of the crew, steal the opium and set the vessel ablaze. As the pirates zoom off, a handful of survivors, including two female crewmembers barely saved from drowning, pile into a lifeboat in search of safety.
Fortunately, the survivors find land before long. Unfortunately, they've stumbled upon the Mercury's base of operations. But that actually gives them a chance to recover the opium and bring the pirates to justice. With help from a native girl, the Russians capture weapons and manage to take over the Mercury. But the pirates have mined the bay to deter pursuers, and the Russians can't get out. Worse, their two hapless women -- if anything, the "progressive" Commies were retrograde, on this film's evidence, in their portrayal of women -- have been captured and subject to torture. Happily, the pirates are willing to negotiate and let the Russians leave with their skins intact, though without the opium. The sailors don't trust the offer, since they could obviously lead a navy back to the pirates' lair, but they go along in order to give heroic first mate Sergei (Nikolai Yeryomenko) a chance to take the villains down single-handedly and shirtlessly....
This is undemanding mayhem, impressively staged on locations and on the open sea with real ships. The action is often quite brutal, and the violence against the helpless females is just about as exploitative as anything you might have seen from the "free world," without the compensatory, quasi-empowering revenge. Again, if you think of the USSR as part of a generic global "left," you might expect more female empowerment here, but Pirates is very much an unapologetic "Men's Adventure" type of film, from the modern-piracy theme to the exotic backdrop for torture. It's also indelibly a Seventies film, as the disco-esque score will tell you right away. Wikipedia claims that this was the most popular film of 1980 in the USSR, and I imagine it must be an iconic movie for Russia's Seventies fetishists. It was a great find for me, if not a great film, because I'm always intrigued by what true pop cinema, as opposed to arthouse cinema, looks like in different countries. Pirates of the XXth Century probably isn't the face Soviet cinema meant to show the world, the cinematic commisars probably having something more refined in mind. But it shows us that, even at a low point in the Cold War, the years of the invasion of Afghanistan and the Olympic boycott, moviegoers in the communist and capitalist blocs -- or some of them, at least, spoke a common language.
Sapper was the fitting pseudonym of Herman Cyril McNeile, who served in the Royal Engineers during the Great War and first won literary note for tough-minded stories based on his own experiences. His career took a major turn in 1920 with the publication of Bulldog Drummond, the first of ten novels featuring the title character, who within the decade had appeared on stage and in four films, the last of the decade being the Samuel Goldwyn talkie production under consideration here. I have an edition of the first four Drummond novels, but I've only read the original so far. It's energetic, entertaining trash. Drummond in his original form is an upper-class twit who can kill you with his bare hands. His nickname comes at least in part from his professed yet purportedly charismatic ugliness, and in part from his itch for violent action. His adventures have been called fascistic in some quarters, and he and his pals do sometimes come across as the sort of thuggish war veterans who donned colored shirts in other countries and waged war on alleged bolsheviks, trade unionists, etc. Capt. Hugh Drummond is very much a British jingo, but the political implications of his personality are toned down in the American script by Sidney Howard, as is some of the novel's action. You will not see Ronald Colman fight a gorilla to the death in F. Richard Jones's film.
The American film is a superficially faithful adaptation of Sapper's first novel. Drummond starts at basically the same point: bored out of his mind by peace, he impulsively places an advertisement in the Times of London.
Many responses arrive, but one is particularly compelling. Phyllis Benton (Joan Bennett) wants Drummond to rescue her uncle from a "hospital" where he's supposedly being confined against his will by a corrupt doctor and an odd pair of criminals: Carl Peterson (Montagu Love) and his protege Irma (Lilyan Tashman). Drummond breaks into the facility several times to rescue the innocent and harass the guilty, thwarting the Peterson gang every time and eventually earning Phyllis's love.
Bulldog Drummond (Ronald Colman, right) reads his advance fan mail as Algy (Claud Allister) listens with amusement.
Missing from this is the geopolitical backstory Sapper establishes before even introducing Drummond. In his novel, Carl Peterson is the ringleader of an international conspiracy of German and American (!) businessmen who hope to subvert the British economy, thus advancing their own interests, by inciting a socialist revolution. The conspirators need another wealthy donor to finance their scheme, but that man proving unwilling, he is taken prisoner and more or less treated as we see in the film. The stakes are much higher than in the Goldwyn film, where the Petersons and their ally, Dr. Lakington (Laurence Grant) simply want to drain their victim's finances.
Here, too, is a rare instance of a pre-Code Hollywood film toning down some salacious sexual subject matter. In Sapper's novel, Irma is identified as Carl Peterson's daughter, but hardly anyone believes in that relationship. Instead, despite Irma's efforts to seduce Drummond, it is assumed by anyone who knows them that Irma and Carl are lovers. This isn't confirmed one way or the other, and the possibility is left open, I suppose, that they are all of the above. For Sam Goldwyn's purposes, Carl claims that Irma is his sister, but it's established pretty quickly that they are lovers rather than family. In the novel, Irma intervenes occasionally in the action but Sapper may already have been consciously saving her for a time when she'd be the principal villain of the series. In the movie, she seems to be the dominant partner at times, more bold and more willing to see things through than either Carl or Lakington. If anything, Irma and Carl's romance redeems them somewhat. Since they're just crooks here, not subversives, we're practically invited to root for them to make good their escape at the end.
More typical of pre-Code Hollywood is the film's use of Dr. Lakington. The dramatic climax of the Goldwyn film is a scene in which Lakington has Drummond and Phyllis captive. The sinister looking doctor taunts our hero with hints of what he'll do to a heavily drugged Phyllis in the privacy of his lab. He'd tortured her uncle in there earlier, and torture and more appear to be in store for the girl this time. A few years later a film couldn't have a villain declare so obviously his intent to rape someone. Fortunately, Phyllis revives ahead of schedule and unleashes Drummond to beat Lakington to death in a brutally suggestive shadowplay fight scene.
One other big change from the novel is the elevation of Algy Longworth (Claud Allister) from only the most memorable of Drummond's pals who arrive to help him mid-novel to Bulldog's principal sidekick and comedy relief for the entire film. Allister serves up an exaggerated caricature of a severe upper-class twit, perhaps to make Ronald Colman look more rugged by contrast. My recollection of the novel was that Algy, like the rest of Bulldog's crew, were fellow war veterans, but the film's Algy looks like he was nowhere near a trench, however enthusiastic he appears about aiding his friend. The novel's humor comes largely from Drummond's proto-Bondian put-downs of the villains. The movie's comic relief is more forced, more theatrical, and ultimately more annoying.
Dramatic production design by William Cameron Menzies gives Bulldog Drummond a proto-comics visual flavor.
A certain theatricality is probably inevitable in an early talkie, though Bulldog Drummond was praised upon its release for setting new standards in naturalness in dialogue. Colman definitely earns his right to carry on as a sound star here, if he hadn't talked on film already. He makes a dashing hero, even if he doesn't really match the image of Drummond from the novel. That would be a Clive Owen or maybe even a Jason Statham; establish the brutality before you polish it with class. In any event, while Colman handles his dialogue with ease, others are more tentative, pausing awkwardly in the middle of lines for no dramatic purpose. I'm tempted to blame that on the director. F. Richard Jones was a nobody to me before this; that may be because he died the year after the film came out. He was a veteran of Mack Sennett shorts, with his most prominent silent feature probably being Douglas Fairbanks' The Gaucho, which I haven't seen. Here, Jones was doubly overshadowed by William Cameron Menzies's production design and the overall Goldwyn Touch. As an early talkie the film stands out for being slick and briskly paced. It must have looked and felt like a "roller coaster ride" to 1929 audiences. Even today, I think it'd entertain most viewers, even if it isn't as outrageous as a more faithful adaptation of Sapper could be.
It's easy to label Kim Ji-woon's Koreans-in-Manchukuo action epic an homage to spaghetti westerns; there's a guy running around through the film in a cowboy outfit, after all, and the English title obviously references Sergio Leone's most famous film. It's also tempting to compare Kim's movie with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, since both films graft spaghetti-western motifs onto a World War II playing field. But Kim's choice of location brings to mind a wider, older range of associations. The Chinese setting as a stomping ground for foreign freebooters (not to mention the Japanese invaders) reminded me enough of Terry and the Pirates to make me think the grand old comic strip could yet be made into a movie -- maybe by Kim himself. We're also in the same general geographic and chronological neighborhood as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Kim's film partakes of some of the same pulp spirit, above and beyond the obvious spaghetti influence.
The story, however, is straight out of spaghetti-land. A badass mercenary with anime hair is hired to take a treasure map from a Japanese official on board a train. The money man can put him on the train with a ticket, but Mr. Bad, Park Chang-yi, says bandits don't use tickets. Instead, he's going to stop the train and sack it with the help of some rough customers. It's a fine plan, but our mastermind didn't reckon upon another bandit getting on the train earlier on the route. This is Yoon Tae-goo, "the Weird," the earthy, occasionally bumbling but always dangerous counterpart of Tuco and other "Ugly" characters in Italian westerns. He ends up with the map, with only a vague idea of what it means, after a tense standoff with the Japanese and their collaborators that has a literally jolting climax when the train finally hits Mr. Bad's obstacle. The chase begins with the Bad guys in pursuit through cities and deserts, along with the aforementioned cowboy, "the Good" aka Park Do-won, in pursuit of the Bad. The cowboy's a bounty hunter, of course, who suspects Bad of being the infamous "Finger Chopper." Along the way Weird and Good join forces for a time before all three protagonists gather at the map's destination for one big plot twist and the archetypal three-way showdown.
Before that, however, comes the highlight of the picture, a stupendous mounted and motorized stunt-happy chase scene that transcends the spaghetti signifiers to remind you for a moment of The Road Warrior, a moment later of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and later yet of Stagecoach. It may also remind you of Tarantino for a moment when Kim borrows music from anachronistic sources as the cowboy intervenes. Like everything in this film, the chase through the desert goes on a little too long, but there's so much going on, such constant inventive activity, that you wouldn't want to take a chance cutting footage. Certain films should be allowed to err on the side of excess, especially when excess seems to be the point of this particular project.
Despite the wartime setting, when Korea was still ruled by Japan, Kim's film doesn't have a deep thought in its dear little head. It does strike the requisite cynical note for a spaghetti homage when the Weird falls in with an avowed independence leader who only wants to sell the map back to the Japs. The characters are ciphers, the acting exercises in fashion, except for Song Kang-ho as the Weird. In his motorcycle outfit and goggles he comes the closest to period authenticity, and Song (who played the Catholic priest-turned vampire in Thirst) really taps into the exuberant exasperation actors like Eli Wallach and Tomas Milian brought to the original "ugly" template. He also seems to be the audience-identification character, rebelling against the absurdity of some of the situations and eager if not desperate (with good reason, we learn) to avoid the obligatory shootout finish. I've seen Song in two films now and liked him both times, and this is now the second Kim Ji-woon film I've seen (after A Tale of Two Sisters) that I can recommend. The Good, the Bad, the Weird is not profound, and it never quite taps into the cruelty that some say defines the spaghetti genre, -- and it cops out on its ending, which would have been perfect otherwise -- but when you're in the mood for energetic action in a different-yet-somehow-familiar setting, this will make two hours pass pretty easily.
Here's an English-subtitled trailer, uploaded to YouTube by hyxr.
There was a time, perhaps, when Jean-Paul Belmondo was the poster boy of global art-house cinema. He was a major star for about forty years, and is still semi-active today after recovering from a stroke, but he'll probably be remembered most when he passes for a handful of films from early in his career. In all likelihood the headlines will identify him as the star of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, a reminder that he was specifically the poster boy for the French New Wave of fifty years or so ago. Before long, however, Belmondo was eclipsed as the global face (male division) of French cinema by his occasional co-star Alain Delon. In the United States there are Delon box sets and collections; I've never seen a Belmondo collection in a local video store. Delon did more international work and remains an icon of cool for movie buffs thanks to his work for Jean-Pierre Melville and others. Like Delon, Belmondo could move easily enough from pop cinema to art-house fare, but his star vehicles don't seem to have traveled or endured as well as Delon's. He definitely doesn't seem to have the same following in America that Delon does. I've wondered about that for a while and was curious to see some of Belmondo's later work to see if I could figure out an explanation.
Lionsgate has done me a service by issuing a very affordable DVD of this action thriller starring a 48 year old Belmondo. The DVD uses an English title (and includes an English dub along with the subtitled original) but I'll stick with the French tag to avoid confusion with another French film, Luc Besson's Leon, that's already known here as The Professional. Director Georges Lautner co-wrote this adaptation of a novel with the father-son team of Michel and Jacques Audiard. It's one of the first writing credits for the junior Audiard, who went on to direct last year's instant-classic prison film, Un Prophete, and nearly the end of the line for his father, a frequent collaborator with Lautner.
Le Professionnel is definitely a film of its time, bridging the Seventies' suspicion of the state and the Eighties' emphasis on completing the mission (see Rambo, etc.) with a revenge storyline. Belmondo is Joss Beaumont, whom we first see on trial in an African court for attempting to overthrow the government of Malagawi by killing its President. He's been doped up in an effort to make him a compliant witness, but that (along with torture, one suspects) leaves him barely able to stand in the dock to hear his sentence. When he faints, he's dragged to an antechamber for more drugs; he puts up a fight but is overwhelmed and sedated anew. President Njala shows his mercy by sparing Beaumont's life and sentencing him to prison.
Joss adapts well enough but can't stand seeing other prisoners beaten up. Finally he and another con contrive a bloody escape on an isolated patch of road. They flee through a small village, warning the villagers that the army is hot on their heels. This is the right thing to do, since Njala's forces will destroy anything in their path to smoke out the fugitives. While Joss's comrade can't resist the temptation to fight it out with the army, Joss himself makes good his escape and makes his way back to France. Revenge is on his mind. He informs important people that he's returned, because he wants them to come after him. That's the easiest way for him to get at them.
Here's where we begin to learn the real story of Joss's misadventure in Africa. The French government had sent him to Malagawi with orders to kill a vicious despot, but a change in policy or personnel caused a change in plans. Rather than recall Joss, the government ratted him out. Now he's out to settle scores, not just with his superiors but with Njala, who is coming to France for a state visit. He still intends to see Njala dead; what he intends for his erstwhile bosses is unclear. Having all of this explained long after the fact hinted at something wrong with the movie. It seems to me that if we're watching a revenge story and we're supposed to empathize with the revenger, we should see his betrayal up front so we can appreciate his grievance. There's little sense of outrage in Le Professionnel, compared to what we might see in an American version of the same story, and I couldn't shake a feeling that director, writers and star didn't really take the situation very seriously.
Belmondo: Le Roi des Winos
That brings us to Belmondo. We're on his side from the start because of the kangaroo-court treatment he receives in Malagawi, but once he reaches France the revenge story becomes something of a lark or a romp, with action on a comic book level. One of the first things Joss Beaumont does is befriend a bunch of hobos so he can dress up as one, create a scene with them to distract the cops staking out his wife's apartment, and sneak inside. It's the sort of scene you'd expect to see in a silent comedy and it plays like an excuse for Belmondo to act goofy. Maybe I'm being humorless as a critic, but Belmondo often seems too humorous for his subject. Later, he invades the hotel room of an ice-cream soda magnate in order to meet Njala's European wife, with whom the magnate is having an affair. Belmondo asks if the man facing him is in the ice-cream soda trade, then identifies his own trade as "espionage and brawling" in the subtitled version, "espionage and knuckles" in the dub. Here the star tips his hand and exposes the entire story as no more than an excuse to show Jean-Paul Belmondo beating people up, or occasionally killing them. The fights are more like gags than important points in the plot, though his showdown with a particularly nasty official (Robert Hossein) is more like a spaghetti-western showdown in the middle of Paris.
Hossein's character, Inspector Rosen, is built up as Joss's arch-enemy, but the most vicious thing he does in the picture, as far as I could tell, was to bring a lesbian policewoman with him to interrogate Joss's wife. Rosen plays the good cop while his sidekick strips Mme. Beaumont and promises to show her what she can do with a bar of soap. The payoff is when Joss saves his wife from bathroom rape by choking out the evil woman in the bathtub. It struck me as the most unpleasant scene in the film for its flaming homophobia, but I can't help suspecting that it was one of the most crowd-pleasing scenes for its original audience. It highlights the crass nature of the entire project, a trashiness that comes through despite Ennio Morricone's effort to give the film some musical gravitas.
Belmondo's treatment of a lesbian antagonist may not seem politically correct, but rest assured that he believes in keeping people closeted regardless of their sexual orientation.
I don't mind crass and I don't mind trash, but they somewhat undermine Lautner's attempt to sustain tragic suspense at the end. For a seeming eternity after he's settled scores with Njala, Joss strolls toward a helicopter he's arranged for to take him to freedom while bureaucrats dither over whether or not to kill him. It should be tragic if they do, but if Beaumont dies, it won't be like when Belmondo's character gets it in Breathless. I had a feeling that it would be more like when a cartoon character dies, but you know he'll be back in the next picture. Le Professionnel is such a star vehicle (you should see the worshipful opening credits: nothing but Belmondo iconography) that any pretensions to any deeper purpose look silly.
As a mindless action film, Le Professionnel is fairly entertaining. I do not mind seeing Jean-Paul Belmondo beat people up, and Lautner films a nice car chase in the neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower. But I did expect something more from the star. Breathless and Pierrot le Fou, Le Doulos and Classes Tous Risques, to mention some of his early films that I've seen, set a standard that Belmondo apparently didn't try to maintain. He remained a star on the strength of his raw charisma, I assume, while sticking to crowd-pleasing action films. I ought to go easy on the assumptions after seeing a single film, but I can't deny my disappointment with what I saw. Maybe I should write it off as a mismatch of star and subject matter. I'd definitely be willing to give Belmondo another try (and I'll accept recommendations, please), but if my original question was why he doesn't have the reputation or the legacy Alain Delon enjoys, Le Professionnel does look like the beginning of an answer.
You may be able to figure something out for yourselves from this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by AmberChiaCasting:
It's one part The Prophecy, one part Night of the Living Dead, one part Terminator (or its sequel) and one part The Petrified Forest. A dead end diner in the desert called Paradise Falls is ground zero for the End Times, only things aren't playing according to Scripture. God's in one of those moods again and has decided to wipe out mankind. But forget about that "fire next time" crap. The divine plan this time is to have his loyal angels possess the weak-willed, turn them into sharp-toothed, ceiling-crawling critters, and set them to attack the strong before they presumably wipe one another out. But before all else the hordes must hasten to that desert diner, where a cigarette-smoking pregnant waitress must decide whether or not to keep the baby. They would rather she didn't, but the Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) arrives with a pro-life message. He's defied God and torn his wings off in order to save mankind, the stipulation being that the big guy will back off if this baby gets born. Fortunately, Michael looted an LA gun shop before dropping in, because there's a few hundred folks outside who need to die.
It's not quite the standard collection of types -- I missed the little old Jewish man -- but some things are still done the old way. The two black characters die early, and both pretty pointlessly, for instance. I suppose the creators think they're being badass by giving everyone a potential character arc, only to cut some short until we're down to a final two. Problem is, this is the sort of film where you assume that most of the cast will die, and that makes it hard to invest any emotion in any of the characters. A really daring film of this type would be the one where everyone sticks together and a majority actually survive. This film, despite its pretensions to sacrilege, isn't that daring.
Scott Stewart's film does have a few interesting moments. I dug the angel combat, when a swing of a wing can deflect a bullet or rip a belly open. There were a few presumably intentionally funny moments, like when beery diner owner Dennis Quaid challenges Bettany at gunpoint to "show your goddamn teeth!" But it's basically a collection of influences, a movie made of parts of other movies that doesn't quite live. It's not even inspired enough to be truly bad. You may even find it passable company for 90 minutes or so if you're in the mood for a shoot-'em-up with some fantasy thrown in. But you'll probably find it less memorable than its various source materials.
As a longtime comic book reader, I'm used to picking up a monthly title and finding myself in medias res. Buying a single issue and getting a self-contained story is pretty rare these days. Even if you get one, the issue is usually so thick with subplots carried over from previous installments or foreshadowing of future events that a casual reader might get frustrated when he's expected to be hooked into buying future issues. I don't think this is a good idea, but I've grown accustomed to the convention to the point that it doesn't bug me too much. So I was prepared for the narrative approach of Jon Favreau's new film, which is not merely the sequel to his own Iron Man but chapter three (following The Incredible Hulk) of a larger story that doesn't have a formal title yet, and for which at least three more chapters are planned, not counting the possibility of Iron Man 3. Of course, in those innocent days of 2008 most people didn't know that Iron Man was chapter one of anything but its own franchise until after the end credits. Two years later the sense that there's something basically incomplete about the new film is inescapable, since Samuel L. Jackson is parading around with his eyepatch and his ridiculous jacket in the main body of the film. And he exposes the fundamental cheesiness of the, for want of any other name, "Avengers Initiative" concept with his performance. Because he isn't giving a performance in the sense of playing a character. He's simply doing "Samuel L. Jackson," and while that may be the only way he can stand up to Robert Downey Jr, the blatancy of his cliched presence makes it hard to regard the "Avengers" thing as anything but a corporate mandate that compromises the integrity of anything it touches. This subplot (or metaplot) is hardly advanced in Iron Man 2, so that Jackson's interventions fill the film with dead rather than hot air. They add to the impression that there's too much going on for Favreau and writer Justin Theroux to wrangle into proper narrative shape.
But don't you suppose that Tony Stark has an eventful life and many enemies? If you do, then you shouldn't be surprised if things seem to hit him from several directions at once. Iron Man 2 actually does have a narrative structure; it's built on the magnetism of Tony Stark, his knack for attracting trouble and disaster to himself. It seems to lack focus because we're still used to superhero movies being focused on a supervillain or an extraordinary threat. But the Iron Man films are star vehicles in a way, arguably, that no other superhero film has been before. The drama of the new installment is to see how he copes with all the crap coming his way. Let's see: a crazy Russian genius is out to kill him, not knowing that Tony's own technology is doing the job pretty well; the federal government (or specifically one powerful Senator) wants him to turn over the Iron Man technology, and will use Tony's somehow-transformed pal Jim Rhodes to do it; his business rival Justin Hammer is tight with the Senator and the military, and later recruits the crazy Russian to his side; and Pepper Potts is jealous of Tony's new personal assistant "Natalie Rushman" and more exasperated than ever, despite his promoting her to CEO, at his reckless behavior. It's not for you to make sense of it all; your job is to watch Robert Downey roll with the punches and throw some of his own.
Favreau's Iron Man films are a breath of fresh air in the superhero genre because they dare speak the truth that even the best Batman films, for instance, sidestep: the main reason the hero does what he does is because he can. And in this case the hero openly enjoys doing it. But what you might expect to come off as insufferable arrogance comes across as honesty instead. Neither the man nor the mask is a put-on or a penance. Tony Stark is not just an alter ego; he is the hero of the movie, and Iron Man is just a suit he wears. That's why this film can get away with having him in the suit relatively rarely -- and they could actually have done without at least one suit scene this time. These films are also unique to the genre for embracing a political context, even if the politics of the sequel are dubious or muddled. Parts of Iron Man 2 sound like Ayn Rand with a sense of humor, but it's unclear whether Stark has recanted some or all of his "privatized world peace" viewpoint by the film's close. In any event, Tea Partiers are likely to dig this movie, but don't hold that against it.
Iron Man 2 has plenty of flaws. Its best action sequence, the Russian's attack on Stark at the Grand Prix of Monaco, comes way too early in the movie, and none of the CGI armor wars that follow can match that scene's flair and inventiveness. The scene I would have gotten rid of is a rock-em sock-em slugfest between a drunken Stark and Rhodes in stolen armor. I expected someone's helmet to come flying off to end it, but they did nothing that clever in the whole fight. In fact, the only other really good action sequence is "Natalie's" demolition of a dozen or so security guards, humorously intercut with actor Favreau's desperate combat with a single flunky. Scarlett Johansson is welcome to return in future Marvel movies. There does seem to be an inherent limit to creative fighting for armored characters. Meanwhile, both villains were underwhelming. Mickey Rourke as the Russian is built up as the main menace, but has to yield the floor for the middle third of the picture to Sam Rockwell's flamboyant idiocy in the role of Justin Hammer. Rockwell is far over the top here. He made me think of Dana Carvey doing Gary Oldman; too infantile to be threatening, though I grant that the film's comedic nature doesn't require a very high threat level. Rourke is a menacing physical presence, but his character is just a collection of quirks (e.g. fond of birds) and the actor is slightly unconvincing as a Stark-level technical genius. He seems more like someone who, instructed by Rockwell figuratively to "take a dump on Tony Stark's front lawn," might obey him literally. Finally, the film just stops instead of having a proper ending, probably because Marvel insists that the real ending is what comes after the credits roll, the now-traditional extra scene that sets up more Avengers continuity. I won't spoil it but I will say it's not really worth waiting for as long as you know what the next films are on the Marvel schedule.
But I liked the film because there's still some novelty to Favreau's approach and mainly because of Downey's dominant performance -- though Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper really picks up the fast-talking romantic-comedy pace this time as well. I paid my eight bucks to see him play Tony Stark and I was not disappointed. Maybe I've reached the point where I'll tolerate a lot for his sake (I liked Sherlock Holmes too, some will recall), but I found Iron Man 2 easy to tolerate. I'm less demanding here than others may be, and I'm not going to go out of my way to defend it from its critics -- I think I've been critical enough myself to give people who aren't comic-book or Downey fans warning. Both Iron Man films are among the better superhero movies, but I worry that the Avengers imperative can only compromise the integrity of future films and the Favreau-Downey conception of Tony Stark. For all I know, this might be the last good Iron Man movie, so let me savor it a while.
Bud Spencer is getting a lifetime achievement award from the Italian film industry at this year's Donatello ceremony, Italy's equivalent of the Oscars. The man born Carlo Pedersoli will be sharing the honor with his frequent screen partner, Mario "Terence Hill" Girotti. In the U.S. Spencer is probably best known, to the few who know him at all today, as Bambino, the hulking sidekick of Hill's Trinity in the series of cowboy comedies that for many sounded the death knell of the spaghetti western. Spencer teamed with Hill in a wider range of films, including contemporary stories after westerns finally went under. He also earned opportunities to star in movies without Hill, which is where things get interesting for me. Terence Hill has the sort of face you want to slug, and his shtick gets old really fast by my clock. Spencer, by contrast, is just a big oaf, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. So why should he suffer by association with Hill? With that generosity of spirit I recently acquired the latest Spaghetti Western Bible collection from our old friends at Videoasia. This fourth volume is the second devoted to Hill and Spencer, and while it's dubiously labeled in that only two of the ten films included are spaghetti westerns (Damiano Damiani's A Genius and the infamous spaghetti musical Rita of the West) it does include all four films in the Piedone series of police comedies Spencer made between 1973 and 1980.
A closer translation of the first film's title would be "Bigfoot the Cop," but you can imagine the confusion that'd create in the U.S., however sasquatch-like Spencer may seem at times. "Flatfoot," meanwhile, is good old American slang for a cop and signals the somewhat comical nature of this series. All four Piedone films are directed by the mononymous "Steno" (Stefano Vanzina), who directed many films for the popular comedian Toto. He launches the series with a dynamic action scene that sets the tone for the first episode.
A black American sailor has gone crazy in the middle of Naples. He's made his way to the top of a tall building and has started taking potshots at the crowds below while raving about hating white people and being free. Steno films this on a massive scale with extras fleeing the sailor's gunshots as snipers move into position atop nearby buildings. He films from below, with the sailor a speck high above, and from the roof as the gunman commands a vast expanse of cityscape. Nobody wants to shoot the sailor, but there's no reasoning with him, and an American officer leaves his fate to the police. At that moment, as a cop on street level raises his rifle, a big foot comes down on top of it, and from a low angle we see the full bulk of Bud Spencer as he finishes a cigarette. Who's this guy? the American officer asks. "That would take a long time to explain," a cop replies.
As the credits roll over a jaunty theme by the the de Angelis brothers, Inspector Rizzo -- Piedone -- makes his way patiently up to the roof. He spies the sailor reloading, then waits for him to empty his gun again before charging. A brief battle follows, with the American putting up more of a fight than Spencer's fans might expect and nearly throwing Rizzo off the roof. Eventually Rizzo doesn't so much knock the man out as he knocks him back to his senses. After he surrenders, the inspector finds a telltale white packet on him. Cocaine has come to Naples.
Rizzo is a policeman who refuses to use a gun. He appears to despise all weapons, later dismissing a knife as a child's toy unfit for men. He's confident in his ability to settle matters with his fists, but he's not just a primitive brute, appearances notwithstanding. One reason he avoids guns is that he strives to keep situations from escalating into violence as much as possible. He's developed a rapport, a modus vivendi even, with the Sicilian Mafia, which this film presents as a conservative force in a society that finds itself under siege by the drug menace. Piedone lo sbirro is a reactionary, populist film, the sort that probably isn't meant for viewers outside Italy. It reminds me of Japanese movies with its ambivalent emphasis on the presence of Americans, and it teases briefly that they might be the source of the new drugs. The truth is a little closer to home: gangsters from Marseilles (i.e. "the French connection") are moving the drugs with help from a sleazy, flashy pimp called "the Baron." His men are handing out free samples outside schools to get kids hooked, including the son of Rizzo's landlady. "Flatfoot" takes a paternal interest in the boy (and a potentially matrimonial interest in the mother) that extends to slapping the brat when he catches the kid stealing to pay for more dope.
Tough love from Flatfoot. "So, I'm not your father, eh!" Actually, he's not, but he feels entitled to slap anyone, anyway. I'd say, "Bad cop; no donut," except I don't think he eats donuts. Can you imagine if he did???
Rizzo thinks he can crack down on the drug trade by getting tough on the Baron -- he may have a code against killing but he's not above using his ham fists to torture folks -- but he's held back by a by-the-book new police commissioner who frowns on our hero's unorthodox tactics and his semi-cordial relations with the Mafia. Rizzo gets suspended after the commissioner catches him in the middle of an unauthorized beatdown of the Baron, but he carries on the fight with still more help from the Mafia and some crucial assistance from his new friend Jho, the cleaned-up American sailor, and some of his fellow gobs. Things get further complicated when one of his favorite informants and the Baron are killed, leaving Rizzo to wonder who the real villain is. Could it be one of his quasi-allies in the Mafia? Could it be the commissioner who seems to do everything possible to impede the investigation? It all gets very confusing, and as Rizzo tells the commissioner, "You know what Flatfoot does when he's confused." If you don't, he punches people, and if he punches enough of them, he may find out the truth in time....
The stakes can be high in Flatfoot, as a dwarf informant learns, but the film maintains a lighthearted tone throughout.
Flatfoot seems designed as a family-friendly poliziotteschi movie, free from extreme gun violence, nudity and other distinguishing traits of the adult version of the genre. At the same time, its emphasis on choreographed unarmed combat makes it look like an attempted Italian answer to Asian martial-arts films. In this respect, the film is pretty good. Spencer is a convincing brawler and he's supported by a game stable of stuntmen who sell well for him. Steno keeps the different fight scenes lively, particularly one in which Rizzo routs an entire motorcycle gang with just a borrowed chain for a weapon.
Steno can pull off the kind of car and cycle chases you expect from the Italian cop genre, but Flatfoot's unarmed combats are its highlights.
The regrettable exception is the major comic set piece, a melee set on a fishing boat pitting Rizzo and the three Americans against drug smugglers. The problem isn't that the scene is shot for laughs, but that it goes on too long after it runs out of invention. It's amusing to see Spencer swatting people with fish, but Steno clearly runs out of ideas at some point. Worse, one of the Americans is an acrobat. Does it strike any of you that Italians have some odd obsession with acrobats? They seem to like to see guys turning backflips and somersaults without appreciating that stunts like that only make their fight scenes look more fake. I can't suspend disbelief with some idiot tumbling all over the place, but for an Italian audience all that matters is that it looks funny. But that aside, I found Flatfoot fairly amusing just for its peculiar approach to material I'm used to seeing handled in a far more brutal fashion. I'd recommend it to any fan of Italian police movies just for the sake of variety.
Inspector Rizzo becomes a globe-trotter in the three later films, which take him to Hong Kong, South Africa and Egypt. I assume that someone in Europe released the Piedone series on DVD, since Videoasia probably wouldn't have them otherwise. Piedone lo sbirro looks a little battered in spots but comes, as do all the sequels, in nicely letterboxed format. The new collection, deceptively titled Trinity:Hands Up! Eyes Down! Pockets Out! teams Spencer with Terence Hill in two Africa-set adventures, All the Way Boys and I'm For the Hippopotamus, while Hill stars in the two westerns as well as Renegade (which first appeared in Grindhouse Experience Vol. 2) and Virtual Weapon. I'm looking forward to the other Flatfoots and to the two spaghettis, so expect to read more about them in the near future.
Here's an English-language trailer for Flatfoot aimed at the American market, uploaded to YouTube by spencherhilltrailer.
If you are looking for a proper mystery plot, forget it. If you're looking for a film of Victorian manners, you'll be but partially satisfied. But for all the fuss about how much Guy Ritchie's new film is inappropriately an action film, it seems to me to partake of the spirit of popular literature from the period from which the original Holmes emerged. And I think that Robert Downey Jr. gets to the essence of the character as a brilliant eccentric who disturbs the repose of his environment. He is probably the most articulate action hero there has ever been, and fully convincing in his dialogue (by three writers) as a creature of Victorian England. Holmes has been reimagined as someone who suffers from sensory overload and a compulsively analytical mind, a consciousness he must repress with drugs, drink, or the occasional round of pit fighting in the film's one truly gratuitous scene. This is an elaboration rather than a transformation of Holmes; in practice the detective is the same wizard of ratiocination as ever, except when Irene Adler is in the room or, almost generally, when the subject turns to women.
Encountering Watson's fiancee for the first time, he nearly perfectly maps her past from the evidence before him, but his one error earns him a face full of wine from the indignant woman; he had assumed a mercenary motivation when the true explanation was more tragic. He is uncertain around women due either to misogyny or inexperience, and this has fueled speculation about his relationship with Watson, who here is his roommate but on his way out to live with the fiancee. Some reviewers are drawing inferences about the roommates from a modern frame of reference, but a little cinematic literacy leads one to conclude that Holmes and Watson have no more or less of a "bromance" than the three protagonists of Gunga Din. As Watson, Jude Law is in the same position as Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the 1939 film, except that this being a little less of a Boy's Own story than that quasi-Kipling saga, the good doctor gets to have things both ways, with an indulgent wife allowing him continued adventures with his friend.
I am no Sherlockian and have never read a word of Conan Doyle. My standard of authenticity is the Jeremy Brett TV series from the 1980s, and as I've said, I see a consistency between Downey's bits of brusque arrogance and bursts of belittling wit and Brett's domineering manner. I do know that for all that Doyle himself succumbed to spiritualism after World War I, he kept Holmes a strict skeptic, and I was relieved to see that all the supernatural elements of the new story are properly debunked by the end. The one point I see as an injustice to Doyle and his creation is the scene in which Adler has to inform Holmes of the existence of Professor Moriarty (a vocal but facially unseen presence here). This undermines what I took to be Holmes's gradual, obsessive discovery of the Napoleon of Crime, which could have been a subsequent movie unto itself.
But as no Sherlockian I didn't mind at all this being an action film, especially since Ritchie pulled off the challenge of balancing period flavor and a frantic modern pace. This film is as much a CGI-a-rama as any action film, but it keeps the actors foregrounded, and they prevent the effects from upstaging them. In one scene a half-built steamship has been accidentally sent sliding into the Thames, nearly crushing Holmes and Watson on its way. But as the hulk splashes into the river Downey un-ducks his head and pops his eyes wide to steal the scene. He has learned how to master the CGI screenscape and may now have two ongoing franchises in which to refine that mastery. He commands the screen like a silent film star, and some of Ritchie's images and furious montages have the primal power of that period. One sequence that crosscuts from Holmes and Watson battling an Eric Campbell-like menace (Robert Maillet)to Adler attempting an escape through sewers with pilfered goods to chaos in the House of Lords and closeups of the glowering villain, all to the even more furious beat of Hans Zimmer's score, may seem attention-deficient to some eyes, but to me, and maybe because of the period, it was more reminiscent of D.W. Griffith than Michael Bay. My overall impression is that Ritchie has established continuity with the old tradition of genre cinema rather than breaking with it in any offensive way. Why, he even has a scene with a heroine on a conveyor mechanism menaced by a saw! In simpler terms, he's made a kick-ass movie that, in my view, doesn't really violate the spirit of Holmes -- not that Arthur Conan Doyle ever cared about that, anyway.
While Downey is his present masterful self, and Jude Law may have found the role he was born to play, I must confess that Rachel McAdams fails as Irene Adler. Her dialogue isn't written at the same level as the lead actors', either because that's meant to mark her as American or because the writers knew that McAdams simply couldn't speak the lines otherwise. Whatever the reason, she doesn't come across as brilliantly as Adler should, and the actress looks and sounds like what she probably is, a modern American out of her depth. It's too bad if this role reveals her limitations, since I really liked her in Red Eye, but even some great ones could never do period, and maybe McAdams should restrict herself accordingly.
While I liked the film quite a bit, I understand that the liberties taken with Doyle's creations may make Sherlock Holmes less likable for some if not many other viewers. And while I won't concede the last word to Sherlockians, I can see how the tone of the thing might turn off people who find the crash and bang inappropriate for the material. But I think the crash and bang are well enough orchestrated and kept from overshadowing the actors to make Ritchie's Holmes an objectively good film, whether it's a great Holmes film or not.
Meet Luis Bunuel, action film maker. The way I hear it, the success of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fearcreated a demand in France for hard-boiled adventure films set in Latin America. To satisfy that demand, a French production team went to Mexico to hook up with Don Luis and adapt Jose-Andre Lacour's novel, a gritty tale of greed and unrest in an unnamed banana republic. Bunuel's was but one of several pairs of hands assigned to the adaptation, and it'd be a stretch to call it a personal project of his. But it has some of his characteristic touches and it turns out to be a pretty good adventure film with a very hard-boiled attitude.
The funny thing about it, in retrospect, is that the filmmakers apparently had impeccable leftist credentials, yet La Mort en ce Jardin is a film you could show at a National Rifle Association convention to stormy applause. The setting is a diamond mining camp where the hardworking freelance prospectors, many of whom are French expatriates, are being forced from their claims by the local dictatorship, which has decided to claim all the local resources for itself. What are the expropriated workers going to do about it? They're going to get guns, of course, and as many as they can, even if that means ambushing soldiers and stealing their weapons. After embarrassing themselves initially by being scared off by a warning volley, the miners work themselves up into a small-scale civil war. Maybe it says something about the American left that they don't trust the proletariat with guns. Leftists elsewhere apparently aren't as worried by that prospect, or weren't back in 1956.
Street fighting men in Death in the Garden
Caught in the middle of this conflict are the actual protagonists of the story. Castin (Charles Vanel), an elderly miner with a teenage deaf-mute daughter, claims to be a peaceable man but feels compelled to stand with his fellow miners despite his dream of returning to France to open a restaurant. Chark (pronounced "shark" and played by Georges Marchal) is a drifter who strolls into town during the first confrontation, gives the finger to authority and teases Maria, Castin's daughter, as she tries on a pair of boots in the general store. He has a wallet full of money wrapped around his chest, but stupidly reveals that fact to Djin (Simone Signoret, claiming that the name is an Indian word for a bird), a local prostitute who promptly rats him out to the police, who suspect him of being a bank robber. Castin wants Djin to marry and return to France with him and be a mother to Maria, but Djin wants to know what's in it for her. Father Lizzardi the young local priest (Michel Piccoli) wants the miners (and Castin especially) to stand down for their own good, and is manipulated by Chark into aiding his escape from prison.
Our hero: Chark introduces himself.
As Djin, Simone Signoret perhaps purposefully lacks the glamour of a true femme fatale, but she's the nearest thing this film has to one.
Both Chark and Castin end up accused of being ringleaders of the miners' insurrection, and end up as fugitives on a boat owned by Cenco, a local pimp and informer. The wounded Castin had taken shelter with Djin after a pitched battle, and Lizzardi had sacrificed his reputation to save Castin by allowing townsfolk to believe that he was having a tryst with Djin. The priest ends up on the boat in order to do mission work among the jungle tribes, while Djin comes on board to smuggle Castin without the greedy, reward-hungry Cenco noticing his presence. But eventually Castin and Chark have to boat-jack Cenco and ditch the ship to escape speedboat pursuers. Thus begins a hellish trek through the jungle during which our cast endures lack of food and shelter and Castin slowly goes mad. Chark may be a tough guy (especially when avenging himself on a helpless Djin) and good with a gun, but he's no better at jungle survival than the rest.
Their salvation comes with a grim irony as they end up owing their lives to other people's deaths. They find the wreckage of a passenger plane that crashed in the jungle and had not been found until then. Strewn about are suitcases filled with food -- and high quality food, too, with champagne -- as well as new outfits for Djin and Maria. And not far away is the passage to Brazil and freedom. But this salvation proves short-lived for most of the cast, as at least one of them is too far gone to recover his reason or civilization....
Above, Michel Piccoli finds something terrible to pray over in the plane wreckage. Below, something more terrible preys in the wreckage before the film is over.
The plane wreck may come from the novel, but the idea of these hapless pilgrims saving themselves by becoming parasites and imitating the people whose remains they exploit strikes me as a Bunuel touch. There's something somewhere between surrealism and satire about it that elevates this overall effective adventure to another level. Maybe the general irreverence of the film is also characteristic. When Lizzardi visits Chark in his cell, he tries to give a dying fellow-prisoner the last rites only to be told off by the moribund man. Nevertheless, Lizzardi is a sympathetic character, though consistently shown as well-meaning but either ineffectual or superfluous. In one scene the starving fugitives are trying to cook a snake, but can't find dry leaves or branches because of the last night's rain. Lizzardi tentatively reaches into his duffel bag and prepares to make a great sacrifice. He tears a blank page from his personal Bible as kindling, but finds that the others have managed to start the fire. With visible relief he replaces the page, but then notices that fire ants have swarmed all over the snake meat. Later, he manages to dig up a tuber of some kind and happily shares it with Maria, only to be upstaged by Chark's discovery of the goodies from the plane wreck.
The Bunuel touch?
I wouldn't dare call Death in the Garden a great Bunuel film but it is a solid piece of entertainment, not unlike something you might find in an American paperback original from the same period. It has some nice outdoor cinematography by Jorge Stahl Jr. that reminds one more of The African Queen than The Wages of Fear. In the studio scenes it has the lurid look of many a Forties Technicolor film, and that adds to the pulp feel of the story. Marchal and Signoret are fine as a couple who oscillate from mutual hatred to the sexual attraction of fellow predators, and Piccoli is quite good as the most likely audience-identification character. Bunuel doesn't direct action dynamically, preferring single takes to editing, but he keeps the frame busy with harsh activity in the combat scenes. It may be worth noting that Chark stabs a prison guard in the eye with a fountain pen, but the director of the most famous eye-injury scene in all cinema plays it safe this time, filming the attack from behind the victim's head. Despite that reticence, this really is a kick-ass movie for those with hard-boiled tastes. I haven't seen too many Bunuel's movies, but I imagine it's his most accessible film. As such, it might be a good way to introduce dubious newcomers to one of cinema's great eccentric talents.
