1971@50: SUMMER OF 42

It's 1942 and most of the male role models are in uniform and far from the serene Nantucket Island which is sighing with pleasure through a bright summer. That leaves the friends Hermie, Oscy and the still childlike Benjie free to roam the dunes and town to prank and hang out until school's back in. Barely pushing back the hormones their entire conversation is composed of sex: how to do it, what does it feel like, what to do when it happens, and everything else that a virginal male mind can think to ask. Apart from the ancient instructional tome Benjie has swiped from his holiday house, all they have to go on is their own fantasy. As far as the statistical grab of their imagination and philosophical concern go this telling gets it right. But what happens when sex, the real thing, comes knocking and things have to be done?

I read Summer of 42 as a teenager and like it's characters I concentrated on the sexual bits in it but I was a deep reader for my age and did manage to get the rest of it. While the novel is couched in a lot of sentimentalism and told entirely from a male perspective the notion of coming of age is both signified and fulfilled by sex is dismantled through a quite honest examination of the pre and post coital thinking of adolescents. There is a kind of Lord of the Flies of scale going on as the parentless boys fashion mythology and then are confronted with reality. If Hermie's initiation is set in tragedy, a confusing mix of lust and pity and what feels like a stunning transcendent rite, Oscy's banging gratification leaves him whingeing and as malcontent as a grownup: Hermie has met love and responsibility, Oscy is learning how to manage a supply of body parts.

I refer to the book primarily as the film adapts it very faithfully to the screen. To look at the title sequence now, a slow slideshow of life on the island as Michel Legrand's wistful score tinkles along you might think you're in for a Hallmark reminiscence. Then there's the voiceover: "when I was fifteen and my family came to the island for the summer ..." It's the exact Waltons style smooth-over that launched a million coming-of-age epics for screens of any size. But the first dialogue is competitive, collaborative and on the only subject that most of it will be throughout the running time. This is a coming of age story but its focus on what drives that part of the rites of passage hits the mark: these boys might come across as horny kids but their built for purpose speech renders them into cyborgs.

That's not to say that this is a swing between setnimentalism and science. If Hermie's obssession with the adult Dorothy feels like adolescent idolatry his hilariously clumsy attempts at sounding grown up undercut the worship going uncriticised. If Oscy's boisterous hormonal explosions seem like youth running wild there is also a mechanical feel to him. The sense that he cross as many bridges to adulthood as he likes but he's still going to wander the earth until his control buttons wear out or stick. If Dorothy is the goddess in the castle by the sea she is also a person who lives in a house day by day. The teenage girls Aggie and Miriam are neither pushovers or teasers but individuals. And if the soft focus and dreamy theme music feel like a French New Wave piece the influence of the war within the boys and the one thundering beyond the horizon bring it out of danger.

Last night was the first time I'd seen the film in full and I'd been expecting a soft serve apology for male entitlement but I kept wondering what it would have felt like to watch at around fifteen (which I was a few years after the release date) when the frustration in Hermie and Oscy would have been matched by my own. Honestly, while I would have recognised the improbability of Hermie's path I would have accepted it as an ideal, I would have been watching Oscy and anticipating my own iteration of it, given time and circumstances. My own conversations were not just about sex but it wasn't ever far from the chat and my imagined anatomy and mechanics would have delighted the likes of Salvador Dali and Hieronymous Bosch. 

The adult voice that adds the opening and closing narration might seem like needless schmaltz, given all of this, but it reminds us that we are witnessing a memory with all its nostalgic numbered colouring and smoothed jags: if it seems sentimental here there is a clear sense given of the unease that demands the sheen. And that's the worse thing: if I then also imagine the kind of authoritative narration I would provide for my own version of this as I fashioned the awkwardness, clumsiness, fear and anxiety that led eventually to some form of ease, how would I say these guiding statements to relax anyone at all for the tale? How would you? Yeah, same: keep the focus soft and the music sighing, you can get to the tough stuff easier and still face the mirror the next day.

1971@50: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

In a year that boasts Harold and Maude as well as A New Leaf and Little Murders we could be forgiven for thinking that we'd exhausted the violent inversion of the rom com tally for the twelvemonth. Then comes They Might be Giants. Justin Fairplay has been struck so profoundly by the atrocities he has known as a judge and then the death of his wife that he has fled into another identity, presenting himself as Sherlock Holmes. His brother, after control of Justin's fortune, seeks to have him put into lifelong care. Cue the entrance of psychiatrist (a Dr Watson ... you knew that had to be it, didn't you?) and one of the funnier meet cutes you're likely to see if you're coursing through the history of romantic comedies: Justin draws a voice from a non speaking patient at the clinic through deduction. Watson is on the case and the rest could go into inspiration or slowly deflate into indulgent whackiness.

Happily, while neither quite happens, the best of this film sustains what lets down later imitators like Michael, Little Miss Sunshine, or Wes Anderson's entire output: the darkness in the depths. Justin's condition is the product of the stress from witnessing the worst of humanity and what would have felt like the unfairness of his wife's death. All the whimsy and quirk his Holmes expresses and enacts come from the futile wish to solve and repair the cruelty of the world around him. The suggestion that he is destined for a life of chemical stupor is as constant as the memento mori of Harold and Maude, the threat of homicide in A New Leaf and the social entropy of Little Murders: They Might be Giants is anchored. This is what allows the constant loopiness of Justin's pursuit to find its comedy rather than have it stamped clumsily on the surface, and it is why the scenes of painful, torpid self realisation do not feel like they come from nowhere.

But none of this would work if the fragility of the thread binding the two leads snapped or was too thin to hold. George C. Scott, fresh from his barnstorming turn as Patton plays Justin and his protean identity phasing with a real sense of danger, as though one admission or pretence too far and he really would slip into psychic perdition. In his character's approximation of a posh British accent (as distinct from the actor's) he demands that other characters stop indulging and patronising him as they play along and there the plummy tones crack and the stony demeanour falls, if only for a second at a time as though it were a slipping beret. Perhaps it's the vulnerability but Scott, here at fifty-one, looks younger than he did in Dr Strangelove, seven years before. Perhaps it was the actor's own sense of liberation in this once-only performance.

As his foil, a frankly aging Joanne Woodward plays resistance and a careful play at dominance over her patient before understanding that her journey is towards clarity, self-acceptance and potential. As composed as she begins, there is a palpable bitter relief when she tries the phrase, "I am adequate." As she is given example after example of this force of life drawing invigorating rebellion from switchboard operators, security guards, cops and anyone else they encounter, she gradually understands that for all her professionalism her own time is slated to be soon. By the time they are leading their army of quirky desperados to meet what must surely be a great void of disappointment, she is front and centre, still herself but given to a cause. Beside Scott's rampaging turn Woodward's is a thankless task of making us believe in his charisma and, in effect, be the Watson, but it bears close attention and rewards.

Neither as bleak nor as screamingly funny as the trio I've mentioned a few times here, They Might be Giants yet holds its own as a piece of cinematic civil disobedience. Its immediate ancestors like Barefoot in the Park leaned away from middle America. By 1971 this was a grinding rejection of the endless war and the cloud of Richard Nixon. A judge whose professional life breaks him into pastiche which, as strong as it gets, cannot withstand the grounding of reason against the world that must break through. Without the initial indulgence and then a grave and courageous nod of support by his Watson he would be the Don Quixote he invokes to give the film its title (windmills and giants) but he becomes the Holmes he needed to be.

PS - I struggled to find this film through various channels until I stumbled on it while making up an order for videos on an online shop. There is a decent blu-ray for under ten bux at JB.

PPS - This disc is missing a scene. Reading about the film I've found that most subsequent presentations of it have omitted a scene I thought crucial enough to remember vividly and anticipated seeing again when I pressed play. We only see the beginning of it when Justin and Mildred walk into the after hours supermarket with the surly checkout teen and tranced out announcer murmuring about the specials. From what I've read this is difficult to find so I'm going to spoil it. This is the second last scene and serves as the climax. The pursuers of Justin and Watson track him to the shop and make a move on the pair. Justin creates a diversion   by announcing specials that no one can pass up so the teams of heavies heads for the shelves as the mistfit army storms in, creating chaos. I remember it was hilarious when I saw it and the perfect cap on all the whimsy that could veer too close to cute. I worried that it might not match up to my memory. When I realised we were not going to get it I felt more upset than if it had disappointed. It meant that the big march in the third act really was for nothing, that all that anti-normal energy just blew away in the breeze. It also robs the eerie quiet of the final moment by the absence of its noise. The excision takes a few minutes off the running time but it wasn't exactly an overstayer to begin with at just ninety-eight minutes. I'll be on the look out for a restored version. Still, this was a refreshing revisit for something I'd only ever seen after midnight on an old black white tv from the Salvos. Anway....

1971@50: WAKE IN FRIGHT

One of the most significant films in Australian history was made by a Canadian. While Ted Kotcheff has since made some other notables like the bleak comedy Fun with Dick and Jane and kicking off the Rambo franchise with First Blood, Wake in Fright is the one he is best remembered for here in the Yabba. While First Blood might have stabilised the staggered post-Rocky career of Sylvester Stallone, Wake in Fright got an entire culture thinking about itself and asking tough questions that might yet be posed today. The film took the boozy, backslapping mateship image we cultivated, held it up to show its warts, violent and confrontingly primeval to a degree that allows little wonder as to why the film was allowed to languish for decades before a recent revival. Wake in Fright is beautifully produced but as rough as the morning after a bender.

Young teacher and debt slave John heads off on the train to a distant airport for not enough R&R in Sydney before he heads back to the Venusian landscape where he lives and works until some clerk of the City of Dis shall free him. In the town where he has to stay until the hook up with the plane can happen he drops by the pub where the local cop binds him into endless rounds of beer until the flag flies and a severe ANZAC remembrance ritual imprisons him in a cage of thick patriotism. Getting back to his room his now addled fancy looks at the money he wasn't able to spend back in the plains of Abaddon and thinks if he only wins enough to break free of his government contract he could hop in one of his reveries about gambolling on the beach forever. So he takes the cash, gets into the den and loses the lot. He'd been getting some kip in before time with his girlfriend in fabulous Sydney but now he is at the pleasure of a town full of sweating orcs with bulging muscles and a hunger for anyone a hair's breadth astray from the norm. 

John's trek through this has more social obstacles, wrong-footing and outright violence than a weekend at Dostoyevsky's. If you've ever pulled an allnighter with friends, particularly when around the teen to twenties range, and you find yourself accepting a stubby after daylight is long out of the gate you will recall how vile that beer tastes. What began last night as a pleasantly bitter buzz-maker is now a kind of urinous choler drawn from a corpse but by now you're doing it from habit, having gone well past any need for peer pressure. It tastes like chilled salt water and will only get worse after you've escaped from your dear friends and are vomiting in the comfort of your own bed. That's what a lot of this film tastes like. 

After John has entered a kind of undeclared indentured servitude with the locals his progress through the sludgey days gets so slow it looks like he's moving with a ball and chain around his ankle. It might be the explosively bilious end to a suggested sexual encounter or the Boschian nightmare of a midnight roo hunt or back at a shack where he no longer knows or cares about his host's identity or intentions. I'm not going to spoil the final act of this story but if you do watch it for a first time maybe leave the beer in the fridge and pretend the soda water you've had there from the last dinner with friends is alcoholic. You won't want to drink after this piece.

The source novel of Wake in Fright is Australian and the film is close to it. This is Ted Kotcheff's adaptation of established material rather than the rage of an Auslaender. He is aided by his star Gary Bond's foreign status (British). Apart from Donald Pleasance as the quietly terrifying Doc (also British but you wouldn't know it from this role) everyone else is a local, not to the Yabba but to the bigger version of it that ends at the three mile limit in the drink of the surrounding oceans. At an early screening one irate bloke got to his feet and yelled, "that's not us!" Cast member Jack Thompson yelled back and louder, "It is us. Sit down!" 

If you were to watch this and think that the Australia depicted here might have shamed us into a kind of social sobriety you should probably stay away from this one. A year after its release the Whitlam government was taken to victory in the federal election and began a scouring program of reform that brought the country out of the nineteenth century for the first time. Whitlam didn't last and as long lived as his legacy was its erosion by the worst of us continues to this day.

Sorry, got political. But that's the kind of response this film demands. Where are we now in relation to this corrosive culture? Your answer might not please you. I can at least recommend the Blu-Ray brought out in the last decade of the restored film. It's a stunner, compelling its viewers to feel the intense heat of the landscape, the breathless closeness of the pub and the mental haze of days sunken in ponds of beer and waste. There's a moment early on where a pre-ruined John is in the pub with Jock the cop (a bravely anti-type Chips Rafferty) and finishes the beer that the cop has bought him. Jock fixes him in a look that will not break until the ritual action is complete. John gets another round. He will not be sober again for what will feel like a lifetime.

The last one of these anniversary articles I did was on Walkabout. That is a film that could have been set anywhere with a wilderness but happened to be Australia. If Wake in Fright had been set on Mars it would still be about Australia.

PS - I mentioned the real animal violence in Walkabout. The roo hunt in Wake in Fright is also real and is worth reading about before you press play.

1971@50: WALKABOUT

I hate the term overrated. Also, I hate the term pretentious. Both are too often used as a means of creating a kind of pop cultural taboo over something like a movie, a book, or the entire output of an artist. You're meant to shrink from it lest you should be tainted by the pretention spirit and languish with lesioned skin in the shadows of the great mediocrity. These terms get hurled at names like Antonioni, David Lynch, Tracy Emin and a host of others. When they get tossed at Nicholas Roeg, though, things get a touch complex. You are allowed to kind of like everything he did but you need to be quiet about it. That's because of films like Walkabout.

Two uppercrust white kids evade their father's unexplained attempted murder of them (before his own suicide) and have to fend for themselves in the primeval wilderness of an outback that changes its character with almost every scene, now a red desert, now lush grassland. The point is not about how real this is but how the tale is told. The pair of siblings meet up with a young aborigine who proves to be their guide and saviour, providing food and direction through the punishing territory and this itself gets complicated. Beyond that there be spoilers.

The problem is that while the allegorical approach taken by Roeg is clear he also takes pains to give it an apparently realistic setting. There is a lot of violence to native animals in this film. The suggestion is that they are all destined to be food (except for some white hunters seen later) but if you were curious about this movie but dislike any real animal violence you need to be wary.

The trek taken by the trio is where the realism is not meant to be held as a standard. The aboriginal boy's appearance has been heralded in a title card explaining that his walkabout is a rite, part of his passage to adulthood. The Euro kids have no such culture to their predicament which has come from cruelty and violence. We see the girl at the start in a class of what used to be called Speech where blazer school kids learned the Queen's English. Roeg's depiction of it shows a typically alienating routine where the girls are huffing as though learning childbirth but it's just to get them forming their mouths, teeth and tongues correctly for the rain in Spain falling mainly on the plain. The closest it gets to a rite is the implicit suggestion of social status, something bought and not earned. In the First Nations boy's world we find him earning his life with skills and knowledge of nature. Perhaps mindful of the audiences of the time Roeg carefully avoids the suggestion of the boy posing a sexual threat. When sexuality does appear it, too, is framed by ritual.

That scene is one of the few really successful moments in the fable level of the film. There is a great energy in one character and an uncomprehending fear in the other and its conclusion has the brutality of mythology. But it really is one of the few. The reason I find it so difficult to love Roeg's films is not in the audacity of his ideas nor even in how short he falls from them. I don't care if he's pretentious, in other words (probably most of the art I like can be legitimately called pretentious as it boldly goes beyond). 

No, it's that the movies end up being so calculated and stiff in construction that they feel like they've had the warmth squeezed out of them. There is almost no humour ever in a Nicholas Roeg film. I don't mean they need to be laugh riots but without that crucial reach of welcome the symbolism and metaphor always feel academic rather than organic. Images of the rat race in the city are dominated by the sound of the digeridoo. A brick wall is used as a kind of stage curtain to reveal first the urban sprawl and then the outback. The boy's hunting and slaughter of  the animals is intercut with an urban butcher who might never have been to an abbatoir. John Mellion's dad figure falls dead at the start in three or so different angles to put a bit of Eisenstein in there. He later resurrects through some Steenback magic as the shot rolls backwards (along with a water buffalo later). All of this ends up feeling over punched. None of it feels like it has come from the world of the movie.

All this despite the interplay of Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg and a very young David Gulpilil which is uniformly engaging, all of whom seem to be genuinely moving through their strange new nature for real. I wonder if the Italian research team in the desert with the leering hunks and sexy young meteorologist is meant as a dig at Antonioni. The strings heavy score is John Barry's and swings between sublime esoteric moodiness and supermarket muzak (not intentionally, though). Too much to tell but so little to care about. In the end it's watchable, never boring and occasionally stunning. That's Nick Roeg for you and if anyone tells you how overrated or pretentious he is, return with a smile and find your way to the mini spanakopita plate.

1971@50: CAT O' NINE TAILS

A break-in at a genetics lab appears to have happened without anything being taken. One of the scientists knows who did it, what really went missing and why and plans blackmail until he falls in front of a train. This last bit is contradicted by its newspaper photo when uncropped so the would be blackmailed got in first and last. A reporter is on the case and acts more like a detective and is aided by a blind crossword compiler and his young niece and so on as we glimpse the Roman underworld and more people are knocked off for discovering things. Whodunnit? Doesn't matter, it's a Giallo, show me the kills and the deductive thinking.

Dario Argento had already hammered at the boundaries of the Giallo film with his debut The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. It was more kinetic and complex than the genre demanded but it was a genre (Italian murder mysteries) that had already had its fair share of cinematic dandies like Mario Bava. Argento gave it even more flair and ever nastier violence, bringing it stridently into the '70s. 

Cat o' Nine Tails feels almost like an apology by comparison with its lengthy dialogue scenes and muted pallet, as though Argento were telling us he felt less like proving himself and that he can play trad as well as bop. As pacey and bold as Bird was Cat applies its Hitchcock more decorously. His American import stars Karl Malden and James Franciscus are from the character actor end of the industry and do much to keep our focus on a plot that is less twisted but deeper than he had done or would do. It's often left off fans' lists or put low on them because it feels less showy. The conceits that so thrillingly explain the titles of Crystal Plumage and the third film Four Flies on Grey Velvet are absent here. The nine tailed cat is a metaphor derived from the threads of inquiry. Cat is about patterns and what they tell us. And it's also about kills and Argento brings them, mostly strangulations but there is one involving the skin of hands and a rapid descent down a metal cable that will have you wincing. It's still a Giallo.

A friend of mine remarked that he doesn't really see Suspiria anymore, having watched it so often. I understand what he means, especially with that film as, while a lot can be made of the story of Suzy Banyon and the nightmare logic of its odd narrative, it is composed of little beyond its kills, colour and music. Nevertheless I don't share the sentiment as I quite regularly rewatch the film and enjoy it in a similar way to how I listen to a favourite album. It works every time. But I can't do that to Cat o' Nine Tails or Deep Red as both require attention and commitment that Suspiria, however wonderful I think it is, never needs to.

I was glad to have a reason to see it again (this blog series). While it is nothing but an Argento movie it's also proof that his filmmaking was not limited to spectacle and gore with the plot sense in the bin. It's a working thriller, supported by another score by Morricone in avante mood and a strong cast. A few of my favourite filmmakers have one of these and it's always a pleasant surprise to revisit them. The Dead Zone, The Straight Story, That Cold Day in the Park, The Trouble with Harry, and so many more that are not full canon but not quite anomalies that provide both surprise and comfort. Well, that's what it felt like last night.

1971@50: LITTLE MURDERS

Born in the national unease in the wake of the JFK assassination, Little Murders is the result of  its author's years of stewing over where his nation was headed. Jules Feiffer, the biting cartoonist for the Village Voice wrote the play as a means of dealing with the sense of helpless he felt and shared with his fellow Americans after Kennedy's dispatch and the years added the Vietnam conflict, the rise of the counterculture, the  momentum of civil rights protests, more assassinations (including another Kennedy), campus protests and police reprisals and Nixon. This is his '60s remembered angrily because he was there.

Arthur  is a product of his time. Pushing thirty, he has relaxed his prowess as a photographer so that he only depicts faeces (and not just figuratively). He is discovered under a scrum of streetkids by Patsy whose grasp on life is firm and unquestioned. Arthur's non-zen compliance with the violence of the world troubles her so much that she pursues him until he complies with that, as well. Meeting the family is more of the same with Patsy's parents on the brink of their own breakdowns and her imploding brother a constant worry. The wedding collapses into a mass fist fight and Arthur goes missing. Though there is a kind of reconcilation following this, the increasingly bloody and darkening city around them becomes more like a reinforced concrete jungle by the hour. The finale's deflation ends on a note that seals the sense of hopeless order for the decade to come.

Elliot Gould (Arthur in the film) optioned this tale from the glow of its off-broadway success (don't knock it, it really did well away from the big strip) and wanted to carry his role to the big screen. At first he was in talks with Jean Luc Godard but that fell through. As a fan of JLG I'm glad this didn't happen. It's wasn't the Godard of Vivre sa Vie but of Vent D'est who would let none of the nuance among the explosions of anxiety through. It needed a native to get there and actor Alan Arkin (who also took the role of the   detective) proved to be a good choice. While he can let the shrillness and play of the crazier scenes stretch their own bounds he generally lets the pugilistic dialogue make its own impacts and steps back just enough for the best of it to work. 

I first saw this on Brisbane tv almost ten years after its initial release with family members and found it a blackly comic delight. At the other end of the '70s, after the end of Vietnam and the fall of Nixon (and the suggestion of U.S. involvement of the dismissal of Whitlam) our cynicism was ready for it. At the end of the next decade, on video, I still found it powerful but appreciated more of the craft of it. Finally, showing it to a decent turnout at Shadows I finally saw it with a receptive audience and delighted in the screaming laughter of the wedding scene with Donald Sutherland's dizzying turn as a hippie priest and descended in soft silence after the final line of dialogue. This, more than most of my favourite films, really does work best in the dark with strangers.

I still think this is one of the best films of its time but I understand that if watched without complete support of where it's going and its violent-minded comedy it will be a chore. Some of the stretches of physical humour will grind. If you are bothered by the smiles on an extras face or a too mechanical escalation of crowd violence then those things are going to feel like fingers in your eyes. If, on the other hand, you counter-intuitively go in with a relaxed mind and let the shrill and uncomfortable ruptured pacing of the first act past you will find riches. You might even understand why variants of its approach in later decades like Search and Destroy or Buffalo 66 (or anything that confuses freefloating quirk for black humour) fall so flat and feel so contrived.

Little Murders is difficult but it's also naturally funny and if that strange combination turns you away you should stay away or try and watch this with someone you don't know well. Also, recall, this is not an indy piece that just made it out of the margins, it was a 20th Century Fox title and though it might not have taken as well as M.A.S.H. or Catch 22 it endures as a whispered recommendation and probably lives happiest there.