Reviews
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
A good film but lacks the paranoid dimension of the novel
Ken Kesey's novel is narrated by Chief Bromden, who reminisces lyrically about the Columbia River country where he grew up. He also has insights into what is going on in the hospital, such as microphones in the broom handles, and machinery within the walls. But, then, he is a patient in a mental hospital. So that's our narrator, a paranoid schizophrenic. One of the features of film is that the camera is objective. A few directors have tried to create a subjective camera, most obviously by giving it the point of view of the main character or even the narrator. I seem to remember an Alan Ladd vehicle, The Lady in the Lake I think it was. But audiences generally trust the camera's objectivity. So instead of getting this story from a paranoid schizophrenic mental patient, the film gives it to us as objective truth. That the central message of freedom comes across is a tribute to Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher in particular. But there is a dimension missing, and to my mind it is Kesey's implication that America is a madhouse, and the only sane people might be those considered by the society to be mad. Maybe others see that implication but, having read the book before the film was released, I find the certainty of the narration undermines that dimension.
The Gauntlet (1977)
Devastating stylistic exercise wasted on a bland story
Eastwood has a penchant for styling films way beyond the naturalistic but audiences have an even stronger habit of seeing anything to do with cowboys or cops as necessarily naturalistic. They want realism, Eastwood wants them to see past that to the issues at work. Audiences - and the reviews here on IMDB support me on this - want characters who are amusing or interesting: in Eastwood's high style, the characters represent points of view, philosophies or, in the case of his heroes, principles.
This high style finds its expression in Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter, where the hero has no clear identity. Each story is about a man with no name. He is what he does, in a manner very reminiscent of the two directors who appear to have influenced Eastwood the most, Leone and Kurosawa.
The highly stylised cop in The Gauntlet doesn't appear out of nowhere. In film terms, he begins in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry. People seem to enjoy taking Harry literally - but I think the film works better if you look at what Harry represents rather than who he is.
And so it is with Shockley in The Gauntlet. He represents the American Everyman, the guy who is going to get the job done. He has his flaws: he's not too bright; he drinks too much. He gets paid bupkis and he's not going to win any promotion. But he's honest. And his "superiors" aren't.
He could be Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe, or James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra didn't make those films naturalistic: the private militia of DB Norton in John Doe, Doe's willingness to come back and commit suicide on Christmas Eve; Clarence the angel in Wonderful Life: did anybody ever pretend they were realistic? They are great films presented in a very non-realistic way.
The high point of the gauntlet is, of course, the gauntlet that Shockley has to run. Actually he trundles through it, as slowly as possible, and this seems to offend some viewers who think it's dumb. They just don't get it: it's a protest.
It is a protest that persuades the masses, ie the Phoenix police officers who, initially reluctant to fire upon one of their own, put down their weapons en masse as Shockley survives, in recognition of the fact that he represents the cops they want to be rather than the tools of corruption they sense they have become. His corrupt chief is left alone, futile, and despised as they group around him, in a victory for principle.
It's a daring way to present a moral tale, wrapping it inside a cop movie and giving none of the clues - an angel, for example - that scream "not realism" at the audience. It deserves better recognition.
It also deserved better than Sondra Locke as the prostitute more worthy of Shockley's protection than his corrupt boss, and Pat Hingle as his morally inept friend. William Prince, however, is chillingly brilliant as the centre of corruption. (Old principle of story-telling: a hero is only as great as the villain challenges him to be.)
Unfortunately, this level of movie-making also deserved a story that hasn't been done so many times before.
Murder in the Heartland (1993)
Spellbinding performance by Tim Roth in a disturbing film
Why anybody would want to retell the story of Charles Starkweather so many years after the events that made him notorious is beyond my comprehension.
Perhaps it was just meant to be a character study: Tim Roth dominates the entire show as a passionate, capricious, and utterly fascinating Starkweather.
The film disturbs me because I doubt that the real Starkweather was so interesting. Contemporary accounts suggest he was a sociopath unable to calibrate his responses to all those negative situations of life: envy, frustration, depression. The director has done a great job; the question is, why.
While this film is not well known compared with Pulp Fiction, even Rob Roy, Roth's performance is spellbinding - at least as good as his role in Reservoir Dogs.
It deserves to be seen, as a landmark of late 20th century, one of the really great performances by an actor, rather than a star turn by an overhyped PR product.
Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)
Wicked satire from the one true auteur of American film
More than a comedy, this is a parody on a parody. Based more than a bit on Thornton Wilder's "Our Town", it satirises American middle class values in a much more Rabelaisian way than Wilder himself did. Or could.
OF course, Meyer is the great auteur. He writes, directs, produces, shoots and appears in this film, helped only by a pneumatic cast on screen and Roger Ebert thankfully off it. Even the title screams satire, from the great outsider, poking Hollywood right in its Beyond the Valley of the Dolls/Beneath the Planet of the Apes tunnel vision. Nobody makes films as full-blooded as Russ Meyer. His vision is full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. But it's also sophisticated in structure, with enough dramatic irony to warrant the term post-modern.
I haven't seen it in 20 years but I'll never forget the rollercoaster experience, or the absurd self-referential epilogue. An extraordinary film that deserves acclaim beyond its secretive cult status.
First Blood (1982)
Acting is always a physical art - rarely this good
Let's start with a rule of thumb: no film featuring Brian Dennehy can be a bad film. This is important because Dennehy plays the villain here, and a hero is only as heroic as the villain makes him be.
Then let's look at another principle, voiced by Lord Olivier who once said acting wasn't particularly hard, just a matter of remembering your lines and not bumping into the props. What he was saying, so glibly, was that acting is part cerebral and part physical. Too many critics forget the latter half. You find them praising the films of John Cassevetes, who uses close-ups more than any director I could name, but they think his films are about the dialogue - they are just as much about the facial expressions of the people delivering it. This film has fewer words than 28 minutes of a daytime soap, as a local critic once wrote as a putdown; to me that's high praise.
One of the difficulties is that most critics are highly literate people and, being brought up on books, they tend to think words are the most important element of a story. They downgrade physical action. First Blood is almost like Japanese kabuki theatre in its emphasis on physical action over words. Text-based critics can criticise Stallone for his chest-acting, but I say there isn't a chest - or a pair of biceps - that can act better, and physical acting is what this film calls for. He's great.
Unfortunately, the dialogue that does exist is mostly pretty bad. Its like a sledgehammer driving home points that the action has already made. The speech at the end, especially, is seen by some other users as explaining why John Rambo is mad at the world; I thought the visit Rambo made to an old comrade's home at the start of the film, and the treatment he received from Dennehy's bad guys, was rationale enough for all that follows. In fact, as I suggested, whatever capacity for the lead role Stallone might have lacked is made up for him by the quiet force of Dennehy - just like that little wimp Luke Skywalker being made a hero by the epic evil of Darth Vader.
The scenery is gorgeous - and becomes integral to the action. The long periods without dialogue are refreshingly daring. And I love the fact that the plot calls for John Rambo to be buried and rise again. The resurrection of the hero as an invincible avenger has become almost a staple of action movies ever since.
Action is a much neglected skill in movies, and physical acting is a much undervalued skill, too. I think this film is almost a masterpiece. Had they left out a bit more dialogue, it would have been complete.
Sleepers (1991)
Demotic Capitalism 1 Cold War 0 in hilarious conflict
A clever concept about people left behind - except that they aren't: they have left behind their past, and when they are called upon to act roles ordained in the past, they simply won't. A witty and human subversion of the Ian Fleming/John Le Carre spy story, a tale of what goes right and what goes wrong, of cultural clashes, class warfare (remember that?), identity, politics, greed and happiness. The cultural artefact (I can't spoil it) that sends the storyline spinning into a new orbit is chosen with wit and imagination. Nigel Havers has rarely been so funny although Warren Clarke has always been capable of dominating the screen in comedy like a working-class Jack Nicholson. A mini like no other - because it never flags in pace, intensity, observation or commentary.
Ran (1985)
Kurosawa at his grandest
Ran means chaos in Japanese. Instead of taking the story of King Lear and focusing on the central character as that title does, Kurosawa has chosen to name his film after its setting: a world of chaos unleashed by the pride and ignorance of a former warlord. Discovering what it is to be human, while hurtling around in a universe without rules or borders, is a theme that Kurosawa loved. You can find it most accessibly in Andrei Konchalovsky's film Runaway Train, based on a Kurosawa screenplay. The strength that evil has, if we allow it; the futility of so many things in which people believe; the redeeming power of love: these meant as much to Shakespeare in King Lear as they do to Kurosawa in Ran. Yet there is great beauty here - most of it associated with the pomp and circumstance of battling armies, and most of it belied by the violence they do. The background, the universe in which Lord Hidemoto scuttles like a proud, crippled, spider, is blank; brown and grey in colour, but bereft of landmark. Just as, after Shakespeare's Act I, Lear never sets foot in a building; just as Ahab and Ishmael, having left Nantucket, never set foot upon land; so Hidemoto is cast out into darkness. Music, costume, cast, battle action: so good it's hard to remember you're watching a foreign film. This is film-making at its grandest and most universal. Thank the bold Frenchman, Serge Silberman, who financed it when nobody else would, for one of the great films by one of the great directors.
Ladyhawke (1985)
Beautiful, preposterous, haunting
The leads are physically beautiful almost beyond film comparison. Their moral-spiritual characters match, which should make the film corny. The plot is preposterous, but the main characters, Isabeau and Gaston, prosecute their roles with such unfailing intensity you can't help but accept the nonsense. What is Ferris Bueller doing in medieval France, though? Perhaps the film needs some salty leavening, and at least he makes the plot work a little more efficiently. Overall, I don't have a rational judgement to make but a purely emotional one: I can never forget this film. It has haunted me since the first time I saw it. And that is all down to the pure intensity of Hauer and Pfeiffer.
I Was Happy Here (1966)
Heartfelt Irish nostalgia
The lovely Sarah Miles at her best, with good support (underplayed for once) from Cyril Cusack. Irish girl goes to almost-swinging London, marries rugger-bugger English doctor, finds life unbearable boring and runs home to get in touch with her land and her people, including the boyfriend she left behind. Boyfriend still miffed, doctor in pursuit. A sense of place is important, and Miles plays the carefree girl wonderfully in numerous flashbacks. Story told in non-linear time, ie chopping from Irish girlhood, penniless entrapment in big city, to return and denouement.
L'agression (1975)
haunting
I have seen this twice, and only on television but found it haunting in the same way as The Vanishing, or Passager de la pluie - I just can't forget it. The revenge element is not so strong as the mystery, and of course the three leads are enthralling, convincing actors. One I would dearly love to see again because it stays in my memory like a tune you can't get out of your head.
The Parallax View (1974)
Visual metaphors clarify a confusing conspiracy
As others have said, Pakula's paranoid tale subverts the Hollywood paradigm. Creating an unreliable hero is only the beginning: it is difficult to tell who is lying, who is telling the truth - or how much of the truth they know. It's a lot more "real" than one-track plots which leave no room for doubt. I have always thought it was influenced heavily by Costa-Gavras's magnificent film Z, where conflicting versions of the central event are on display. Nevertheless, in Z, it adds up to a clear-cut conspiracy, even though not all the conspirators will be punished; here it adds up to a depressing - but again "real" - failure to get the evidence where and when it is needed (like Silkwood).
What sets it apart in my viewing, however, is the way Pakula deploys visual metaphors throughout the story, and I am disappointed that other commentators obviously haven't picked up on them. The most important of these is the setting of the central event, the assassination (on 4 July!) atop the Space Needle in Seattle. It's a circular venue. That means that each witness sees the event from a different angle: that is the very meaning of parallax. It's also why different versions of the event emerge and continue; and why some people telling the "truth" can't be reconciled with others. The opening sequence doesn't merely define "parallax" it defines the whole film.
There are many other examples, such as the hypertrophied attempt the wash the conspiracy clean by releasing a flood from a dam. Don't mistake this for a naturalistic film: it's as highly stylised as Eastwood's The Gauntlet, or Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
A collection of great writers - Lorenzo Semple Jr, Robert Towne (Chinatown)among them - put together this narrative, which is deliberately fuzzy. Many so-called film-makers would be satisfied to simply relate a script as good as that, but Pakula's films always had a visual vitality that adds a further dimension. It's supposed to be why we watch films instead of reading books. In this film, there is a valuable visual commentary on the plot, which will take the tale to the attentive viewer on another level.
Z (1969)
Pulsating, compelling and moral thriller
One of the all-time greats, without a doubt. Just as the regime of the colonels in Greece, which is the real-life foundation of the story, was the precursor to impudent right-wing government cover-ups, so this film is the precursor of films like The Parallax View and All the President's Men.
While Montand has the stature to play the assassinated political leader, Perrin the puppydog energy to ineffectually crack the conspiracy open, and Trintignant the cool to see justice effected, what really sets the film apart is Costa-Gavras's re-telling of the central incident through flashbacks, his canvassing of different versions given by witnesses, and above all the incessantly building pace.
Forrest Gump (1994)
Story of a nation
Despite the title, it's not the story of Forrest Gump, blank slate; it's a story told by Forrest Gump, clear mirror. And the story he reflects is of America and its journey through the late 20th century, its failings and its growth. It isn't a totally glorious story. Nor is it the story of wealthy, clever people (and their shrinks) from the cities - that's for the Woody Allens of the world, and their admittedly important and valuable studies of interior worlds. This is an expansive survey of what makes America what it is. Zemeckis's answer is the nearest thing to Frank Capra's deeply democratic concept of America as a collection of ordinary, not-too-bright, people who are sometimes misled by their "leaders", sometimes beguiled into temptation, who make mistakes but collectively stumble and fumble to a generally benign destination guided by wisdom and good intentions that few of them possess consistently as individuals but which comprise the collective sum of their histories. Tom Hanks must be a genius to play the Everyman, Mr America. It seemed to be the role Dennis Weaver was destined for after Duel; it's the role Dennis Hopper achieved once in Easy Rider; it's the role Gary Cooper and James Stewart filled in Capra's films; but none of them had to carry quite so much of a film as Hanks does here.
Pretty Woman (1990)
Prostitution is OK as long as you get rich doing it.
If it weren't for one scene where Julia Roberts laughs, and looks like she means it - that's called acting - I'd call this the worst movie of all time. Instead I'll have to leave Cocktail unchallenged in that position. The moral of this tale appears to be that if you are a cute enough hooker to attract the attention of a sleazy maitre d', then a world of sleazy opportunities called Rodeo Drive will be open to you.
If all the prints of this film were chopped into guitar picks, the world would be a better place.
Cocktail (1988)
Pointless celebration of trivia and mediocrity
One point for the soundtrack, especially Ry Cooder's All Shook Up. Apart from that, what was the point of this film?
To tell us that being a barman is a great career path in a world full of talentless yuppies waiting to be entertained by trivial talents? That even a barman can make up doggerel? That Elizabeth Shue does more acting with her boobs than her face? That the Caribbean is a better place than New York because girls with big boobs wear fewer clothes there? All of these may be valid, but are they of value? My countryman Roger Donaldson has made some good films - Smash Palace, for instance - but this...this is an inexplicable waste of celluloid. Good album, though.
Le salaire de la peur (1953)
Out of nowhere, a fearless film of timeless appeal
How can a b/w film in French, by a director never mentioned in the same breath as Truffaut or Godard, Clement or Clair, beguile audiences for nearly half a century? Not through a big budget or special effects but through classical film-making.
The setting is nowhere. The characters are from a community of human dregs. Their journey is a chance at redemption.
How do you make a highly allegorical film and keep it taut, suspenseful and naturalistic? Great acting is part of it; John Ford once said the most interesting thing in the world is a human face, and Clouzot uses close-ups, particularly of Yves Montand, to great effect. He also keeps a tight rein on the pace, paying cinematographic attention to tiny details. This heightens the suspense while recalling Hemingway's early short stories, in which a man survives the nihilistic world around him by focusing on the details of work. Clouzot suggests tensions among the characters, then expands on them, and we watch them change under pressure - the pressure of the perilous task they face, and the pressure they exert on each other - not unlike his film Les Diaboliques. The power of this unique film lies in its frank study of humanity battling a hostile universe - but its appeal lies in its ability to keep the whole story balanced and rolling along in an exciting, naturalistic style. A film of tight editing that highlights its expansive vision: there aren't many like it.
Le passager de la pluie (1970)
More than suspense - inspiration
The film that prompted Jim Morrison to write Riders on the Storm - and his plural indicates what this film is about: a cop and a killer both arriving with the rain. Marlene Jobert is unforgettable as the woman central to the film but incidental to the cat and mouse game the men are playing.
Sebastien Japrisot who wrote the screenplay is one of the great French mystery writers - Compartiment Tueurs (The 10.30 From Marseilles)La dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil - that's The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun to those in California who want to criticize French films without speaking French. Clement is one of the great French directors. His En Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), based on the work of another great mystery writer, Patricia Highsmith,is a masterpiece, largely because of his stunning young star, Alain Delon. This film is the grainy, rain-driven counterpoint to that sundrenched piece, both essentially downbeat and redolent of their period. Jim liked it, anyway.