The Cameraman's Revenge

You may or may not recall this post. Suffice to say I haven’t exactly been active in remedying these “blind spots”, but it’s time to strike at least one item from that list… and it seemed suitable to follow the Fairbanks box with this, the star-making film for one of his chief heirs. I don’t know if Errol Flynn had actually improved much as an actor in the two years since In the Wake of the Bounty (what a terrible film that is, and how bad is he in it), but he works in the lead role somehow despite that. Neither he nor romantic interest Olivia de Havilland were really known quantities in Hollywood when they got the lead parts in the film, so it did represent a fair gamble for Warner’s, but it paid off… Anyway, Peter Blood is an Irish doctor inadvertently swept up in a revolt against King James II in 1687, sold into slavery in Port Royal, and eventually escaping into a life of piracy. Flynn’s accent admittedly gets in the way of fully believing in his character’s Irish origins, but the other American actors sound about as English as Flynn sounds Irish, so. The key thing is that he gets the basic insolence of the character, his anger at his servitude and all of that; it may not always be the best delivery of lines, but it’s a fine performance. I only wish there’d been more actual piracy, as Blood’s pirate career is mostly dealt with in a montage; although I’m not usually prone to wishing a film already lasting two hours were longer, I could definitely have gone another half hour of this, especially if it were as good as the hugely thrilling climactic battle between Blood’s crew and the French ships bombarding Port Royal. It is ludicrous that it’s taken me so many years to finally see this. Worth all the wait.

The Nut (1921): At this point the box breaks the chronological continuity it’s otherwise maintained, and probably rightly so; by this time Fairbanks had already unleashed The Mark of Zorro but was evidently still unsure about pursuing that direction any further, and so produced this one last attempt at his established style. His expectations of it being a hit like his earlier works were unexpectedly dashed, and only confirmed that the Zorro model was what he should actually continue with. I have to say, though I’ve enjoyed this collection by and large, the films haven’t really benefitted from being watched all in a row like this, and The Nut was evidently the point where audiences back in the day had seen just one reiteration too many of the Fairbanks formula. This time he’s an eccentric, not altogether competent inventor trying (and failing) to help his love interest with a project of her own, has to save her from the evil clutches of another very bad man… yeah. It’s minor, though probably not actually bad as such; it actually does have some rather good moments. But after all those other films in which Doug does much the same thing, it probably looks weaker than it actually is on the whole. Fortunately he had enough sense to realise he should call time on his proto-Harold Lloyd character and let Lloyd himself take over while he moved elsewhere…

The Mark of Zorro (1920): Where we finally take our leave of Doug as he embarks upon the second stage of his career. Though what’s interesting is that, to some extent, Don Diego/Zorro isn’t too far removed from his earlier characters, there’s still a kind of “lamb into lion” moment at the end when he finally reveals that the hapless fop Don Diego was Zorro the masked avenger all along… it’s just that this time the lamb seems to be more of a mask for the lion. Whatever way you want to look at it, this is tremendous stuff, to the point where I’m left wondering why audiences in 1920 might have a problem with him changing tack in this manner; he’d clearly let himself get into a rut and his contemporary comedies were evidently starting to wear thin with him and his viewers, and this seems like the best thing he could’ve done to get out of that groove and into a new one. Plentiful action, a nice bit of romance, all of that, no wonder it was a major hit back in the day and kind of invented its own genre (plus, by Bob Kane’s admission, we wouldn’t have Batman without it, so here’s something for the Christopher Nolan mafia to look back to). A suitably triumphant end to the Douglas Fairbanks box.

The plan to spend January doing rewatches of old stuff hasn’t really worked out, has it? Other project getting in the way and all that. Still, couldn’t let the month go without this one… alas, my delight at finding it on DVD (I got the recent Dragon Dynasty edition) has been tempered somewhat by the rather mediocre quality of the visuals, interlaced to buggery (apparently a PAL>NTSC conversion to boot) and looking worst of all during the big action scenes (after all these years, Weinstein still fucks up Asian cinema). And the big action really is what this is all about, even if it’s not quite as hyperactive as I recall it being. Indeed, it’s about 15 years now since I first saw (almost to the very day, I think), and what struck me most about it was how, well, “80s” it is. Something about it shouts “1989!” a little more loudly than it did when I first saw it, but then again 1997 was a lot closer to when the film was made than it is to 2012, it wouldn’t have looked so of its time back then perhaps… Still great, of course, still mighty stuff that I’m sure continues to define John Woo; though a comparative flop at home, it exploded him into the attention of western filmgoers and indeed into the Hollywood film industry, where he’s never really succeeded in matching his HK output, probably because for the most part (Face/Off being the notable exception) he hasn’t been able to go over the top as he does here. The gunfire is big, but the emotions are bigger; nobility, honour, all of that stuff, men on either side of the law forming friendship as they both find themselves adrift in a world that no longer respects the old values like they do. (On which note, isn’t it great to watch this knowing there’s not a frame of CGI in it?) I don’t know if I’d still call it the best action movie ever made, I’m no longer keen on such absolute statements, but any competitor would have to go really fucking hard to beat it for the title.

I haven’t seen this since, oh, probably the late 90s, and that was the version with the re-recorded music. Which I always thought was ethically dubious, but unfortunately I now find the Criterion edition doesn’t have the unadulterated soundtrack either (Russian end credits seem to suggest a 1986 restoration, wonder if that’s when it was fiddled with). Irritating, but not much to be done about it. Consider the film itself and when it was made, both in terms of Eisenstein’s career and the USSR as a whole. By this time, Eisenstein hadn’t finished a feature since 1929, with aborted projects in the US, Mexico and at home, and the cinematic landscape wasn’t the one he’d left behind in 1929; he had to prove himself all over again. Solution? In a time of Soviet fear of Nazi Germany, make a big historical epic about Russia kicking German arse in the 13th century. It’s been so many years since I saw it that I’d kind of forgotten just how bluntly propagandistic Nevsky is; we’re light years from the comparative humanism of Potemkin (not just because it’s also more about individual figures rather than the mass hero). I don’t think this is as good a bit of filmmaking, but it obviously worked well enough as propaganda that it had to be hidden away after Hitler suddenly became friends with Stalin. And, to be fair, it does still bear reasonably favourable comparison with later films of its action-historical ilk, because it’s in that sort of chest-beating monument vein that Hollywood likes to do… and like some Hollywood films I could name (particularly looking at you here, Black Hawk Down), its careful focus upon one event lets it be dishonest about broader history (no hint here that the historical Alexander later wound up subordinating Russia somewhat to the Mongols). Not my favourite Eisenstein, but still nice to see it again after all these years.

Much to my own surprise, Silent Sunday returns for its second epic week (though I’m thinking after this I may reserve it mainly for rewatches rather than first viewings, since I have a fair bit of unwatched stuff that I don’t want to drag out over weeks and months, though we’ll see how that goes; at the moment I’m just impressed I’ve stuck to it into a second week. This idea might actually work). Continuing, therefore, with the second disc of Kino’s selection of David Wark’s early work…

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The first 20 minutes or so are pretty good and do a nice job of establishing the characters—two couples going on their first vacation in years, driving through Texas in a great big motor home—and the situation they find themselves in—being pursued by a cult of indeterminate but probably Satanic nature after they inadvertently witness the cult holding a human sacrifice. The last 25 minutes or so are pretty good too, offering a terrific road chase as various vehicles, evidently driven by various cultists, try and run them off the road. All of this is fine. It’s the 40-odd minutes in between that are more problematic, being too concerned with trying to build tension and suspense to really do anything… but the film’s biggest problem is its PG rating; for whatever reason 20th C. Fox seem to have decided kids needed to potentially be able to see this, and so it’s nowhere near as hard as an R-rated film might’ve been, or as hard as it kind of needed to be (was it just me, or was the brief bit of nudity in the sacrifice scene actually blurred? I was watching an AVI rather than the DVD, but even so…). As the wives, Loretta Swit and Lara Parker primarily contribute food, screaming and unease rather than anything useful to the story, with the real action being carried out by Warren Oates and Peter Fonda as the husbands, and they’re really good (especially Fonda, who seems to really enjoy the action stuff when he get to do it). It’s just a shame that there’s not much actual action to be done; the film is more interested in making the characters nervous about how many of the people they encounter thereafter are part of the never clearly explained cult (answer: most if not all of them). The business with the rattlesnakes popping out of the RV cupboard and the big road chase made me wish the whole film had been made of that stuff.

The Criterion Collection contains a few baffling titles, but this may be the most baffling (though The Rock isn’t far behind). You can make the argument (cf. this gentleman) that it’s fair enough for them to include it as an example of 90s Hollywood studio filmmaking given that the collection is chock-full of studio product from other decades… but it’s a thin argument when we’re considering the respective quality of the films involved. It was on TV tonight, so I thought I may as well watch it to see if I’d finally understand… and while I was oddly amused by the recurring bottom-of-screen promos for David Koch’s Sunrise analysis of how the current European economic crisis will  “impact” you (terrific choice of words considering this film’s plot about an asteroid coming to blast the Earth), I’m still a bit bemused. Matthew Dessem’s review (linked above) says the film exemplifies “the big, dumb, loud, critic-proof summer blockbuster”, which really does kind of say it all. What it further supports, of course, is every argument about the post-70s blockbuster just being a “B” film with an “A” budget. I could totally imagine this film having been made about 20 or even 15 years earlier than it was, and I wish it had been; the budget would’ve been a fraction of the $140m spent on this thing and, crucially, it would’ve run about 90 minutes rather than 150, retaining the cheese while ditching the slo-mo and the padding and adding a degree of narrative efficiency. The end result might still have been crap, but at least it might’ve still looked like it was made by someone interested in making an actual movie rather than just a 150-minute demo reel for CGI explosions interspersed with shouting. Maybe the cynics who say Criterion released Armageddon purely to make money and offset the costs of their less revenue-raising titles are right…

Takeshi Kitano’s self-titled effort was apparently the cause of much bewilderment upon its premiere at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, and I wonder if that was partly due to him being a right polymath at home in Japan—filmmaker, actor, TV talk show and game show host, stand-up comic, author of novels, poetry and film criticism—whereas in the west we only seem to know him as a director rather than an all-round celebrity. And, to be sure, as the first film he made after having a megahit with Zatoichi, it must’ve come as an eccentric decision at best. Taken by itself, I actually didn’t think it was anywhere near as complicated as others would make out, cos the story isn’t that hard to boil down… Kitano plays two versions of himself, the celebrity “Beat” Takeshi and the humble convenience store worker Kitano, the latter being the former’s identical double except for his hair colour; when the two of them meet at a TV station, Kitano’s life gradually descends into a sort of madness as his reality becomes more and more mixed with the fantasy of being Takeshi. That’s not hard to understand or follow. Which is not to say the film isn’t bizarre, because it is, frequently and fantastically so; actors play multiple roles and the structure of the film is built as a series of dreams within dreams (culminating by making us question just whose fantasy has this been all along) and a cunning use of flash-forwards. But if you’re paying attention, it’s not that difficult, surely. Obviously it wouldn’t be your first port of call if you were new to Kitano, and you probably need to be reasonably au fait with his work to get some of the jokes (I’m sure I missed several, though the riotously absurd violence—particularly the magnificent beach shootout—speaks for itself). I thought it was a lot of fun; now I want to see the two films he followed it with (and re-watch some of the older ones)…

Now this film leaves me in an odd position, or rather the Australian DVD of it does. Cos it promises English subtitles on the packaging, and, well, damned if I can find them. (Mind you, the packaging also claims the film is the shorter version when it is in fact the uncut one. So.) This reviewer claims they are in fact there, but that he only found them by accident (the usual options don’t work) and couldn’t remember how he got them to work. Dear Big Sky Video: what the fuck? And this is important because, well, I had a feeling this would be one of those films that would work better in a language other than English. And the disc handily includes the original French soundtrack as well as the English dub… but no English subtitles. A problem when, like me, your French isn’t good enough to not need them. Still, I watched it in French anyway, just to see if my theory had been right… which I’m still not sure about, though now that I’ve seen it I can’t imagine it being any better in English. This was Just Jaeckin’s attempt at escaping the softcore ghetto, by making an Indiana Jones-style adventure story with a goodly number of bare tits, and so successful was he that he’s never made another film since then. Odd. Knowing the outline of the story, it actually wasn’t too hard to follow, though I expected a lot more pervy stuff given that it was inspired by John Willie’s comic strip. The last act is pretty fetishy stuff, but not as much as I’d thought. And the violence (particularly the unexpected but of cannibalism) sits uneasily with the generally camp tone of proceedings. There’s some quite remarkable production values in evidence, but that’s not really enough to save it… maybe I’ll try it in English one day, or maybe I’ll even find the subtitles and I might be more engaged when I know what’s going on.

It’s odd to think that these two films aroused such critical animus back in the day; critics seemed offended that Fritz Lang had deigned to make such a big populist entertainment, as if he hadn’t spent pretty much his whole career doing just that (not just in his Hollywood period, either). And yet, with hindsight, it looks like incredible stuff; apparently one of Lang’s avowed reasons for making the film(s) was to demonstrate that this sort of thing could be done in Europe on a comparatively low budget ($1m for both films), and if nothing else he should be given credit for making over 200 minutes worth of film actually stand up to that length without sagging too much (which is really remarkable given that these aren’t the fastest films ever made). In the second film there are one or two saggy moments (and something bothers me about the character Rhode, or maybe it’s just the actor’s performance), but not enough to really spoil things, and it may have felt that way cos I’ve been watching it really late at night right after part one. In this one, our romantic couple find themselves recaptured by the Maharajah, who’s building a tomb to bury his erstwhile love in, while insurrectionary forces headed by his brother are building up their own head of steam; the trouble that the first film indicates is impending will erupt here. It’s not a masterpiece of high art, but neither was it meant to be, I suppose; in spite of that Lang treated this pulp exotica seriously and lavished production value and care all over the thing, and whatever money was spent on the films is there on the screen all the way through. These are fantastically handsome films. Even if the animal effects are generally thought to leave something to be desired (and not without some good reason), I’d still take this over most of the modern CGI blockbusters that are its descendants.