APOCALYPSE NOW @ 45

A beach lined with coconut palms shimmers in the heat. Helicopters drift across, circling, as the mesmeric stirring of the Doors' epic The End lifts. When Jim Morrison comes in with his stern croon, "this is the end, beautiful friend," a flood of napalm swipes across the view which is now made of sticky fire. Lap dissolve to Captain Benjamin Willard naked on his hotel bed in Saigon, floating on cognac as his voice tells his story. Everyone gets what he wants. He wanted a mission and for his sins they gave him one.

In a scene that I find creepier every time I see it, he is briefed by senior officers over lunch. He is to take a patrol boat up river and assassinate a U.S. officer, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz for unsound methods. Shocked, he accepts and gets on the boat. After this mission, he would never want another.

Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam opus was considered a massive folly at the time, its then forty million dollar budget and interminable production time were considered part of the bloated decadence of the New Hollywood decade of star directors. It seemed destined for the jokes of history folder (to perish in the last paper office fire of the '90s). Not only did it defy expectations by handing Coppola his next timeless classic but has travelled down the decades with a quietly persistent reputation for cinematic power and awe-inspiring scope. That its creator keeps fiddling with it does nothing to damage the basic text of the thing which remains robust. 

Oh, that's important: if you see this for the first time, it shouldn't go for more than two and a half hours. Avoid the Redux and Final Cut versions until after you see the 1979. As with The Exorcist, Amadeus and a host of others, the original, while it can be costly to find, remains the definitive one, regardless of what Coppola himself says.

Willard's journey up river knocks him into the American war effort in Vietnam with its gigantically wasteful devastation and self-indulgence. Colonel Kilgore runs his helicopter unit like a posse of surfing cowboys, destroying a beach with napalm so he can watch his men surf. A huge fairy lit entertainment event in the middle of the jungle goes nightmarishly out of control while trying to bring a little Las Vegas to the boys. A bridge, kept open despite constant successful enemy destruction, is maintained in a Boschian hellscape just so the generals can tell their bosses that the road is open. And then there's Kurtz, rogue military muscle with a mind heated by delirium. These really aren't spoilers. They add to Willard's weird and damaging journey to the war and America's heart of darkness.

Oh, you can also read about it. This film is quite closely based on Joseph Conrad's forbidding short novel Heart of Darkness, based on his sobering experiences in the Belgian Congo under the new imperialism of the late  nineteenth century. That tale's hero, Marlow, is sent on a similar mission to control an administrative loose canon and comes into contact with the worst excesses of a darkness visited on native peoples. Change a steamboat for a patrol boat, ivory harvesting for cold war aggression and you're there.

I'll say little more of the plot here, or of the great rumbling monster of the production. You can see the movie yourself and read any of the masses of content about how it was made. My more pressing concern here is the film's resonance. 

But we'll need to say something of the resonance of the Vietnam War. The U.S. withdrew from the conflict in 1975 and it was popularly considered a defeat. Unlike the returning veterans from previous wars, Vietnam vets were yoked with the guilt of American hegemony in Asia and were despised. In film culture, the gung ho attempts from the '60s like John Wayne's own Ballad of the Green Berets gave way to far more cynical efforts like The Boys in Company C or Go Tell the Spartans. By the later years of the decade there was a sense of a need to tell the story rather than keep it repressed. Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was celebrated for its approach of showing the soldiers as ordinary citizens first, emphasising the trauma they suffered with a more thorough examination.

When Apocalypse Now appeared it changed the game of depicting war from a representation of history to something more like a grotesque or grand guignol. Everything on screen looked as expected, uniforms, hardware the movement of  conflict but things were odd from the off. The helicopters of the prelude scene move more like birds of prey than military hardware. The spinning ceiling fan and gravel voiced narration of the opening suggest an intense film noir. We get glimpses of Willard's life back home but one of them is a photo of his wife which he burns through with a cigarette. The drop needle music that had haunted New Hollywood since Easy Rider was also different. The Rolling Stones sequence is diegetic but the closest the film will come to jukeboxing the soundtrack. The opening swirl and whispers and drones and croons of The End are offered almost as sounds rising from the glare and humidity. Apocalypse Now wasn't interested in humanising the stigmatised vets, that's a given, he wanted to show the trip of it.

At some point in the epic preproduction, Michael Herr's compounded journalistic account of the war, Despatches, was absorbed into the thinking and it was he who wrote Willard's voiceover. This travels from the hard boiled detective cynicism of the hotel room to the musings on his dark and bizarre mission where it takes a flavour more like an Americanised Marlowe from Conrad's novel. This does flow from Herr's own prose style in which his observations of military life in-country read like a Lewis Carroll story with napalm.

And that's a major point of resonance: this film is supremely quotable. Decades on, saying you love the smell of napalm in the morning could refer to burnt toast or even something pleasant, the value is napalm and the joke, if it's a one-off, is always good. See also "terminate with extreme prejudice" when you need to be firm or "Charley dont surf!" when an objection is trivial. When I found myself in the blinding glare and heat of the family home on a holiday, I'd peer through the louvres in the morning and rasp: "Townsville, shit, still only in Townsville." The lot of us who saw it at the time, and especially at Uni, knew the movie line by line and, until, we got sick of it ourselves, that's how we'd watch it.

Ok, so, lefty students in the early '80s, you must have really dug the history of it. Nope, Apocalypse Now doesn't even state its setting year. There are no mentions of Tet or Rolling Thunder. The canvas is crammed with the reality of the war as an inescapable claustrophobia of noise, colour, lethal air, smoke and constant danger. Even if you had no idea that the Americans were involved in a war in Vietnam, even if you thought it was fabricated for the movie, you would still register it as war and war for no good reason. So, no history lessons beyond a chance to hone our young adult cynicism. 

The point is that any major power does this, puts the hooks in lesser geopolitical entities to gain influence, flex or plunder the way they always have. Coppola wanted to show this latest iteration with newer hardware and rock and roll attitudes. It's as much a shopping war, a series of skirmishes and war crimes of opportunity whose chaos could not but engender the kind of transgressive monster of Colonel Kurtz. The casting comes in handy here.

Willard is our tour guide and Martin Sheen gives him an unerring intensity, never smiling once, His narration keeps you in the centre, whether you agree with him or not. His power brought up the joke that he was heading up river to despatch the former king of The Method, Marlon Brando whose Kurtz keeps to the shadows displaying the sole humane trait he has kept is the shame for all he has done. He fought and ranted at the head of his devoted band until even they, extreme as they became, ended up looking like rat race white collars. Brando uses his Buddha-like physicality to dominate his scenes and keeps his mumbling lines special enough that we don't notice that we're bending our own ears toward him.

This was my first encounter with the music of the Doors. There's just that one song of theirs on the soundtrack of the film but it's the one that hooked on to everyone under thirty who saw the movie. There was a rerelease campaign for the band, all the Morrison albums. We got into them because there was no hippydom to them. It was wordsalad mysticism, sure, but there was nothing Summer of Love about the monologue in The End. The playing could get daggily bluesy at times but mostly kept to that '60s compaction. The Doors were perfect for a post punk revival.

Martin Sheen made it into one of the new Cronenberg movies a year or so later, playing a ruthless, self promoting presidential candidate which suited fans of Apocalypse fine, especially as young adults indulging in the wish that their favourite people share all their views.

And the movie hung around the art houses, getting several screenings a year. It was one of the big hits on home video, managing to survive the crop from panavision to 4x3 visual molasses. By the time I took a friend to see it at the newly established Northcote Valhalla, I had seen it twenty times, mostly at cinemas. I'd written something like ten thousand words of undergraduate analysis on it and considered Coppola a bona fide genius of cinema.

And that's the last big point I'll make here: Coppola had an outstanding 1970s after which it all just flattened out or got embarrassing. That's why I'm writing an anniversary blog about it now instead of tomorrow onwards, as it wasn't released in Australia until the following year. I know there many who count the zero year of any decade the end of the last one (boy, they were fun at Y2K New Year's) but I still prefer starting with them. This keeps Francis and his best in the '70s.

I saw two versions in 1980 when it was released in Australia. I was later to learn that the 35 mm cut was identical to the 70 mm one but for the end credits air strike credits. I quite enjoyed these but will admit that the way the film ends without them allows for a punchy silence that they can only over egg.

As I say, I saw it twice. First at a cinema with friends in Brisbane and then at the end of the year with my father, while I was at home for the holidays between finishing high school and getting into Uni. We went to the drive-in as he was more comfortable there than at a cinema. We spoke very little which was normal. I wanted to show him this movie as, even with the dawning home video market at the time, there was little for the adventurous movie goer in Townsville outside of student film club screenings or rickety 16 mm prints. This was a mainstream film I thought he'd take something away from.

After the usual ads for the fast food kiosk and the trailers (can't remember one that was shown) the screen darkened and then the slow threatening choppers faded in against the beach that looked like so many around that part of Queensland. There were the usual flyovers of army helicopters which we'd almost tune out because we were so used to the sound. Halfway through, the monsoonal drizzle fell and kept falling until well after midnight. I had seen it in Hoyts in Brisbane with surround audio which was such a blast but there and then, with the normal military sounds rising in the air around us and the creeping humidity of the tropical night, we had happened on perfect conditions.

Viewing notes: I watched my now out of print Lionsgate anniversary 4K bought from the U.S. It's a crazy beautiful package. If you can find the original cut in 4K with dolby vision and atmos, get that, it's the closest it looks and feels to the original screened at a cinema. If you can't afford that, it is my pleasant duty to relate that there is a Blu-Ray release of the 1979 and redux versions that you can pick up for under twenty dollars in Australia. This movie has always looked great on home video, so if you haven't leaped to 4K the Blu-Ray will bring the goods.

FIGHT CLUB @ 25

A white collar drone who has just turned thirty lacks purpose in his life of work and consumption that his conscience has given him insomnia. By inadvertent recommendation, he finds that attending support groups for people with real problems forces emotional catharses from him and, by their release, he sleeps like a baby. Returning from one business trip to find his apartment has been blown up he calls the strange guy he met on the plane who offers to put him up for as long as he likes on one condition that they fight. If the misery groups got him sleeping again, they as nought to the power of violence. Rapidly, the word gets out and each city starts its own fight club. The disaffected men are on the rise. All that energy and aggression and nothing to do ...

Fight Club had almost the same kind of viral campaign as Blair Witch back in 1999. No one was as canny as the team from that one but when ads for Tyler Durden's soap appeared in community papers with some fine print about the movie, you could say the campaign was in the spirit of the pranksters in the movie. Then when it arrived we felt its intensity, thrilled to its audacity and sharp humour and were left reeling by its violence. It worked and worked better than expected. That, oddly enough, reminded me of waiting all year for the Sex Pistols album, tempering my anticipation, to find that it was much better than expected. I was still laughing at some scenes weeks afterward (particularly the priest scene) but had a growing concern about how it played with the kind of men's groups that made me feel uncomfortable. Tyler Durden has a plan. It's not the movie's plan but its articulate and forcefully stated.

The more obviously satirical aspects are not a problem. The guy hates his job and the culture of consumers that it feeds, the micromanaging bosses and the falsehood of order in the greater world. The constant wit in his narration. His parasitic relationship with the support groups is an extension of that consumerism and his rival in the leisure activity, Marla, is happy to make it clearer: it's cheaper than a movie and there's free coffee. And then, when the fight clubs start with their rules and rationales things take turns, heading to a momentous conclusion. Some of that would find unanimous agreement from the audiences and that is woven tightly in with the more violent and megalomaniacal thoughts. The tough paternalism of the clubs houses gristly narcissism and the notion of cultism comes out of the shadows.

The film makes no bones of this. If it were remotely interested in earnestly nurturing real fight clubs it would work harder to avoid ridiculing them to the extent that it does. I recall in one of the Usenet groups I was part of that a major contributor reacted against the film by saying he'd never felt like that without once considering that it was neither directed at him nor, after it ramps up, to anyone outside of its cult mindset. Add that to how ugly the violence is with its splattering gore and unglamorous injury.

So where are all the women? Her name is Marla Singer and she does a lot of work. A sexy self-survivalist and funster, she is everything that the modern city can accommodate. As the pranky fight club members are hardening their gluteal muscles and shaving their heads, she's having wild and wonderful sex with their leader, drinking however much she wants, gargling with coffee on the morning after and walking across traffic. She is in neither the white collar salary drudge nor the oiled bicep brigades and never will be as long as her life grasping strength shall serve her. The fight clubs cannot admit her with all that potential threat she brings. If Fincher were to be tokenistic and suggest that only men would be stupid enough to want to join such cults the attempt would fail its audience. That she would see through their bullshit immediately is more to the point.

The thing that struck me the most about the Space Monkeys as they emerge from the fighting basements as militant operatives, is that, while this played as whacky comedy in 1999 but increasingly has come to resemble ultra-right men's movements around the world. In the U.S.A. alone, the new decade has featured the raising of the profile of extremist groups who recruit from the disaffected, the majorities who cry victim, anyone weakened by the turning world of capitalism, Nazis, Incels, barely veiled fascists. Tyler Durden's soliloquy about returning to killing your own food and dressing in its skins feeds straight into the vein of fantasists. The film presents this as delusional (I'm not going to spoil quite how) but if you're watching and hearing the bits you want to hear ...

I can recall, early the following year, hearing of midnight screenings of Fight Club at local art house cinemas and immediately thought: the first cult movie of the century is for a real cult. Really, though, I have no idea; it might well have been some of those support groups going along to feel communal. I do know the thought amused rather than frightened me.

Perhaps I've just ranted here. I should close with some appreciation of the film itself. David Fincher had more than proved himself equal to the task of producing thrilling cinema with the likes of Seven up his sleeve. Fight Club is a marvel of constant information feed with subliminal flashes both alluded to in the screenplay and demonstrated on screen, as well as a sales catalogue of cheeky sleights, audio cues, pop culture references ("run, Forest, run!") and contemporary culture canniness. While some music cues are obvious, most of the score rests below the action as an endless carpet of trip-hop flavoured cool. The ironic use of the Pixies track in the finale is as perfectly judged as the opening rush through the brain under the opening titles. Everything visual, from lighting effects, colour timing, crank speed seems judged frame by frame to both appear deliberate and unnoticeable. Fincher's M.O. to stuff as much as he could into the confines of the screen and the air that the speaker system moves.

But there's something else I noticed this time. My resolutely ok home system more than acquitted itself in this latest screening but I understood something this time that I hadn't before. Fight Club was made for cinema viewing, for crowds of strangers in the dark connecting through belly laughs and gasps. On the screen as the projected film did display the "cigarette burn" indicators of the ends of reels you were free to notice the meta reference. The office is paper heavy in a way that real offices already were not. It's another film from the '90s which would be changed by mobile phones. The Y2K issue was at its eleventh hour yet not alluded to in the story (which might have solved a lot of problems for the Space Monkey campaigns). For a film that encouraged the use of its techniques into the future, Fight Club is yet a farewell to the era about to end with the old century.

The film gave the leading trio of Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter signature roles that they could retire on. At the time, these were absorbed by filmgoers as a kind of comedy group as their performances were so effectively funny. That is not forgotten about Fight Club. While it is never quite promoted as a comedy, nor is it sold as a political thriller. Either might serve but in a year of genre bending and breaking it worked on its own terms as a display of cinematic virtuosity and a bloody funny satire.

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH @ 25

Craig is a self employed puppeteer married to Lotte who wants a baby and needs Craig to get a paying job. He does, at the bizarre business led by Dr Lester from the 7 1/2 floor of the Mertin-Flemmer business, winning the job for his nimbleness with his fingers which helps with filing. During his job induction he is immediately smitten by the beautiful and sassy Maxine. One day a folder he needs falls behind the cabinet and, moving the cabinet to retrieve it, he discovers a small door. It opens on to a tunnel which his curiosity cannot resist. Once in, he is suddenly propelled into the brain of John Malkovich. Craig is a passive observer of Malkovich's experience, seeing him read the newspaper and crunch on morning toast. After a few minutes, he is ejected and falls on a patch of grass on the New Jersey Turnpike. He tells Maxine about this, hoping to interest her in him. She immediately thinks business. The pair, with Lotte who is suddenly and mutually smitten with Maxine. That's all in the first half hour and I'm leaving things out.

Even less of it was in the trailer and every time I saw it or even recounted it to others, I'd laugh just at the ideas. 1999 was a year of game changing with the likes of The Matrix, Fight Club and the Blair Witch Project adding bold new approaches to narrative and film making that are still resonant. Being John Malkovich was the feature debut of writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonez both of whom had had a very good '90s with noticeable tv jobs and some standout music videos. Kaufmann's ideas had led him to write his own screenplays for challenging source material like Phillip K. Dick, among others, favouring approaches with strong mind bending narratives. BJM began life as a love story. It's still that, just a very peculiar one.

The casting and its presentation were also key to this convoluted story's works. Teen star turned dramatic lead John Cusack uglied down for his depressing Craig, having a boyish enthusiasm that never gets to override his dowdiness. Catherine Keener, an indy star who usually played poignant characters with quiet intellect, is credibly inverted as the loud and sexy Maxine. Cameron Diaz, the decade's edgy sex pot is unrecognisable under an explosion of frizz and layers of jumpers and trackie dacks. And John Malkovich himself goes exponentially beyond sporting in the title role of the shell of celebrity who, when he is confronted with a feedback loop of identity plays everyone in a restaurant, reacts with the horror we realise it would create but hilariously.

The management of this, making extraordinary ideas acceptable, is about pacing and depth of performance as much as effects or technical film making. While there are hints by the second in the few introductory scenes they fall flat as quirk until the characters interact with real stakes, until the movie really kicks in, it feels like it could collapse under its own cuteness. This is why Cusack and Diaz have to look so plain and unlovable and communication at the office is so frustrating, we need to want to change everything to something, to anything else. So far, that's pretty standard for a rom com but Maxine's glamour is so toxic that the scheme cannot work without the first couple trying to break it. That is what forms the plot when it does start and then gets to the extent that it must be done through control of living third party. That and its drama and its comedy is why this film with its cosmos of tiny weird ideas still feels like a classically narrative movie: the strangeness isn't being smuggled in, it's the big loudly screeching exoskeleton on the surface.

When I saw this with friends at a cinema in 1999, I was as receptive as anyone around me in the dark to its weird ideas (that trailer really had done its work properly) and I was invaded by its near constant brilliance. We couldn't stop talking about it at drinks afterwards and it was one of the movies of that year that stayed with us. But then I found that I couldn't watch it a again. I'd start it and think I had to laugh out loud in those first few minutes which seemed to fall flat reliably. This effect went deep enough for me to shut it down and remember the first viewing and let it stay as funny as it had been. Watching it again for this anniversary review, I had to course through the whole thing and did. Yes, it not only works but if you start it dropping the expectations of a comedy, you'll get a lot more out of it.

Kaufmann and Jonez never quite repeated this triumph. Kaufmann found a match in Michel Gondry but Eternal Sunshine's melancholy rises too early and strongly to approach the genreless Being John Malkovich. Jonez has made a mass of music videos and perfectly good features but nothing as dizzying. The pair's second and so far final collaboration Adaptation is fine but should be allowed to be different. There's no great tragedy here. Being John Malkovich is an exalted one-off and would only be diminished by comparison as though every thing every artist did needs scrutiny for standards they didn't declare themselves. All I'll say to that is that Kaufmann's directorial debut had him plunge into the kind of feedback distortion that gave us the restaurant scene in Being John Malkovich but was presented unironically as a constantly unfolding despondency which turns two hours into what feels like four. But for this moment, surrounded by other great moments that formed one of mainstream cinema's best years.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD @ 20

Shaun is still young but time is ticking. As someone who has holidayed in Greece but prefers the confines of the local pub, he is terminally under motivated. His girlfriend Liz, credible but weary, all but delivers an ultimatum (in the pub): get moving or get another girlfriend. So, with work conditions squeezing in and plagued by his flatmates' mutual antipathy, the potential loss of the love of his life, his dour stepfather emotionally blackmailing him into appearing at their place with flowers, he writes a note to himself on a white board to improve. Just in time for a zombie outbreak across London. Doesn't crisis mean opportunity in some language?

Edgar Wright's 2004 film was described by its co-writer Simon Pegg (here also playing Shaun) as a RomZomCom. It's a cute line but that it's also an accurate description of this film ensures its durability and popularity. The central rough-shod romance works from the off and develops fluently. The zombie crisis is all out of the great Romero. The comedy is non-stop, even when the action calls for tension. The concept brought in to a smooth landing makes this film a rarity: a horror comedy that is both.

The opening titles shots of people moving through their normal '00s lives like the checkout chick whose permanently downcast eyes don't seem to be aware of her hands sliding items over the barcode reader, or the group of head bobbing earbud isolators roaming the streets, or any number of droolers texting or reading. Modern London (or any city) is a zombie outbreak waiting to be announced. This is after the prologue in the pub where Liz is trying to draw some life out of Shaun and, in a shockingly funny series of reveals where the people being talked about are in the same scene, we get a lot of exposition which we don't even notice. Soon after, when Shaun is going to the shop, completely oblivious to the carnage surrounding him, walking past monstrous figures, whose stumbling motion doesn't alarm him, back home where his flatmate Ed points out the girl outside whom they first take for a drunk. This is not a comment about denial but the crushing confrontation with the familiar.

While Wright keeps the pace high and the jokes constant he is paying a continual debt to the films of George Romero. Romero redefined the zombie film in 1968's Night of the Living Dead in a few crucial ways that ensured its influence over genre cinema across the decades to the future. First, he removed the Voodoo or magic or religion from the premise. Zombie movies used to be about local wizards using magic to manipulate the living. Romero intentionally kept the cause of the outbreak vague. When the news report suggests an extra-terrestrial cause it fades as the latest guess. The crisis is banging down the doors as the newly risen dead come looking for living flesh to eat. The other contribution was to heighten the sub-text of the zombie sieges whether it was racism, unpopular wars, consumerism, unethical scientific research or (in the case of the undersung Land of the Dead, refugees). Horror cinema had always used sub-text but now it could be acceptably writ large in monsters numerous enough to resemble the whole culture. Those shots of automatic behaviour by non-zombified Londoners are funny when you first see them. So is the response of Shaun an Ed to the zombie girl outside. It is very easy to absorb the fatigue of the crisis and burp it out as a joke.

And what jokes! Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg had already collaborated on the dowd humour of Spaced. Pegg was also a regular in the cast of Big Train. There are major parts and walk-ons from the spectrum of that golden moment in U.K. TV comedy. The casts of the aforementioned join those of Black Books, The Office, and The League of Gentlemen. The mix of absurdism and satire was constructed of these performances for a good half decade and Wright managed to cast the lot who, even if they really are just there to be recognised, add such spice to the proceedings.

Also, the humour throughout is unrepentantly British. The gag about Ed pleading to keep being the driver because he adjusted the seat would have been sarcasm from Bill Murray. His reading is earnest and casual, a detail of everyday life rising into present day crisis and as impossible to argue with in either context. The completely reset line, "Coming to get you, Barbara," is a direct lift from the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead. There is a Fulci restaurant in the phone book. But mostly, the comedy arises from astutely crafted scenes where the interaction of characters all but allows the humour to form more or less naturally. When the action turns dark, this only needs to keep going.

Even with the TV players and influences on Shaun of the Dead, it plays like cinema. It's a London that might as well be shot on location. Its streets shuffle with zombies whose gore filled mouths are shown to be a short step away from detached urban life. The bromance of Shaun and Ed and the romance of Shaun and Liz feel real and get to poignancy without force. It would take the obscurity of some of the local references to diminish most of what's on screen here but almost all of it would survive that particular zombie onslaught. It wins its night, dawn, day and land, ready to rise again and strike terror and belly laughs in all who look upon it.

Viewing notes: I watched my 4K disc of this which features an impressively detailed HDR video pass and DTSX audio. It's available locally in this form but also on a few streamers. Do yourself a favour.

GHOSTBUSTERS @ 40

Paranormal team gets evicted from their university lab and starts a business: the Ghostbusters. Across town, Dana comes to them for a supernatural pest job. They get a big break from an uptown hotel and they're working. Could the galloping sightings and incidents be connected to Dana's ancient god squatter? Will Peter Venkman get Dana into the sack before she gets possessed by an ancient demigod? Are these the end times?

Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis wrote a script for themselves that combined the kind of deadpan comedy of the early '80s with sci-fi action and horror, hired a tight-ship director and rising funnyman to create one of the most durable mixed genre movies ever. Ghostbusters keeps its pace high and the jokes flowing but knows when to turn the mix on one down in favour of the other when it's time for third-act action. Add a super catchy theme tune that jetted to number one and you've got a summer hit.

In a field that included Police Academy, Spinal Tap and Blame it on Rio, any kind of comedy was battling grossout, satire and things that didn't quite know that the seventies had ended. Ackroyd and Ramis wrote a core of supernatural thriller and added a joke for everything that could be heckled. They hired a tight-ship director in Ivan Reitman and a rising funnyman and created one of the most durable comedies ever. Add a theme song that rocketed to the top spot and stayed there and your summer hit movie has a place at the cinema, the video shop right up to streaming and ultra high definition for the collector o' today. It's still around and needs to be.

Bill Murray has cruised through the decades with his mischievous schtick, leaving milestones whose titles alone can elicit delight: Groundhog Day, Scrooged, Stripes and Ghostbusters. He's also weathered charges of bad stuff but always seems to roll back up and head into the next thing. He's a personality comedian and his first scene, rigging an ESP test to land a female student, shows him as both clever and sleazy, effective enough to get us on board but creeping enough to reveal his flaws. It's an impressive turn and without it, this film would lose the charm it needs to function outside of its declared genre.

There is nothing about the rest of the cast that displeases except the over stiffness of William Atherton's EPA zealot. His humourless ranting and psycho eyes are in line with the period's caricatures of authority figures and he was probably under strict direction to provide his role with definition but you do get to see the actor behind the stereotype here and there.

And lest we should overload the praise, we do need to remember some things that just cannot cut it now. Dan Ackroyd has a dream of getting a blowjob from a beautiful female ghost. At the time it was just a knowing wink at young adult audiences but now it feels like a how-about moment in the writers' room that got left in. It's not entirely one for the lads as this film is careful to provide a counter to every strike it deals which can allow some edge through and cover it with balance. Bill Murray's oversexed observations in Dana's flat are met with knowing resistance from Dana herself and while his charm is advancing, she does let him know that he still has a fight ahead of him. Recall, Dana is played by Sigourney Weaver, still freshly known for the tough intellect she brought to Alien's Ripley: Murray is given a real challenge.

I saw this at Hoyts in Brisbane in late 1984 with a flatmate. We noticed with a look away a kid smoking a cigarette. We both smoked but the kid was really small. The movie played and was good fun. A schoolage girl to one side of us tried to lead a clap in time with the Lionel Richie theme tune. It wasn't taken up but it injected me with the kind of irrational embarrassment that you only stop feeling after about thirty. I was twenty-two and felt old.

These days Ghostbusters is my Christmas film. It's not set at Christmas nor carries a yuletide theme. It's just the one I won't have to think about as I tuck into a leftovers pie and possibly venture a small drink to placate my hangover. I stopped being Christmassy over a decade ago to the point where I'll invite friends around on the eve and stay well away from the rest of the world for the day itself. Some people think that's a sad admission but it's a ritual I've grown to treasure. The rest of the  year I will be happily sociable but that one day of sanctuary with a small measure of spirits and a goofy classic sets every bad thing right until it has to be dealt with the morning after. Who else am I gonna call?

THE WOMAN IN BLACK @ 35

Arthur, a young solicitor, is tasked with settling the deceased Mrs Drablow's affairs out on the west coast of England. On the way to her funeral, he steps in to save a child from death via a trucking accident. Then, having been told there would be no mourners, spies a woman in black in the church who vanishes as quietly as she appeared. She's there at the burial and the walk through the cemetery. When he points her out to the local lawyer he refuses to look, falling into a panic. Local carrier Ketwick gives Arthur a lift to the  deceased woman's house, across a causeway, mostly submerged in seawater. He goes to the house and starts work among a mess of papers. Then he hears the sounds of a carriage crashing into the water and a child's screams. When the fog lifts there's nothing there. And he thought it was going to be a boring routine job in the country.

This adaptation of Susan Hill's early '80s novel was produced by the ITV network in the U.K. in 1989 and remains the best filmed version. The 2012 take with Daniel Radcliffe retools the subtleties of the source material to feature angry local yokels and chucks unearned jump scares at a rate of something like ten minute intervals. It was made to fit its time and feels far more dated than this older version. Watch it after you've seen this and you will never watch it again.

Nigel Kneale's adaptation of the novel compacts much but provides a clear logical narrative line. Kneale is a past master of mixing perceptions of time and history and manages to solve the epistolary form of the novel's middle section by using era-appropriate recording technology, wax cylinders, to allow Mrs Drablow's voice to provide essential narration. Adding electrified light to the 19th century house in the mid-'20s shows Mrs Drablow's wealth and canniness. She is not a fanciful witness to the supernatural incidents she reports. This adds veracity to what might have otherwise been a standard if effective haunting story.

Director Herbert West piles on the atmosphere, offering some enjoyable urban period detail, a cosy stream train journey, market town with all but smellable livestock and pubs and a location of a haunted house in a forbidding setting. The electricity that Kneale gave to the story offers comfort by joining the early '20s to the viewer fifty and more years later. After one chilling encounter, Arthur goes through the house, turning on every light he can find and we're glad of it.

The look and feel is uncinematic and claims no greater level than broadcast but the intensity of the staging is powerful. There's a broken family graveyard outside the house that Arthur inspects as a kind of curiosity. In a single shot, he responds to an intense sensation and turns around to find the woman in black standing behind him, close but metres away. Sure, the actor was hiding behind one of the headstones and popped up when the shot covered her to "suddenly" appear, but it works and how. I was so wary of seeing this after my first viewing (on home video) that I'd tense up if I showed it to anyone else. The sound of the carriage accident in the fog also works and intensifies later when it is shown not to depend on the fog or even time of day. The notion that ghosts might only be triggered playbacks of elemental records was something Kneale had based a whole television play on over a decade before. Here it links up to the wax cylinder recordings and discomforting incidents in the house. This adds up to a terrifying closed world and continues beyond its bounds.

The lesson here is big ideas working even with scant means. I have twice missed the theatrical version of this story in which a heavily minimised cast is used to great effect. That this television telling is so effective will come as no surprise to anyone who has schooled themselves in the BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas which remain effective and always punched above their weight. The problem is that this is hard to get in front of, these days. For a long time there had only been a U.S. DVD available on online platforms due to discontinuation. In 2020, I took delighted delivery of a special edition but that label (Network Restoration) went bust. There is vague news of that edition resurfacing next year through another label. I hope that's true. In the meantime, there is the possibility of the play turning up near you. I'll recommend the novel. The 2012 James Watkins directed waste of time is a series of jump scares and cliches not present in the source material. It's the only film version currently available but must not be pursued. Somehow, I hope readers can find themselves in front of this, effective, spooky and satisfying tale.

ZOMBIE @ 45

Call it Zombie Zombi, Woodoo, Zombie Flesh Eaters, or Zombi 2, Lucio Fulci's parallel response to George Romero's all conquering Dawn of the Dead began the same kind of groundswell in Italian cinema that Romero's did in the U.S. The Italians went nuts for zombies, making the movies and seeing them. Fulci, who had done the lot as far as genre went, including giallo thrillers, took to zombies so much that he peppered the screen with them for the next few years.

A sweaty doctor on the Island of Matool shoots a hooded corpse that has begun to rise back to life and tells someone that the boat can leave. In New York harbour that boat, a sailing yacht, drifts without crew and is intercepted by harbour police who quickly get dispatched by the monstrous figure that has emerged from the ship's bowels. Meanwhile, a journalist is sent off to the boat to investigate the mystery which has just deepened as one of the cops comes to life in the morgue and kills a doctor. Meanwhile, the daughter of a scientist who was performing research on Matool is also investigating the mystery. Soon, the pair touch down on the closest charted island and hitch a ride with a pair of American adventure tourists who think they can take them to Matool. They get there. Zombies.

Ok, so it looks like I'm having a cheap laugh here but the significant thing about Fulci zombie movies is that that's all they need to be. Romero removed the magic and added subtext. Night of the Living Dead was about racism with Vietnam War harmonics. Dawn of the Dead was about mindless and corrosive consumerism. And so on. Fulci put the religion back in because it was easier to understand and left he subtext to plain survival. But this allowed him to work with a ton of style.

The widescreen imagery of Zombie is far more beautiful and vibrant than you would ever expect a film with that title to have. Even the opening shots of New York Harbour have a dreamlike glide to them. The zombies themselves are all teeth and maggots, made as emaciated and ugly as they can be, and their attacks are effectively yucky gorefests. You also get weird what-ifs, the kind of scenes that come about after a night of boozey talk. A young female character goes scuba diving topless (with plenty of camera fixation on her crotch area while the reporter gazes on with a look that goes way beyond objectivity) AND she gets stalked by a shark AND gets chased UNDERWATER by a zombie who then wrestles the shark AND WINS. The most infamous scene is of a woman gripped by a zombie hand that has bashed through shutters and draws her, eyeball first, into a sharp and thick splinter. We watch in profile as the spike goes right through her eye. That's what this movie is. Who's got time for subtext?

Is it silly? Of course, but it's also genuinely stomach turning and, if you meet it on its own terms, it delivers its payload with consistent power. Fulci's next few films took supernatural themes and points to ever more fantastic and bloody extents but Zombie at least plays fair by keeping to a single threat and survival, all happening in scenes of firmly established atmosphere. As goofy as the dialogue gets, and as absurd as some of the situations are, Zombie offers you a world. Take a walk. You might just like it.

Viewing notes: I watched Blue Underground's 4K of this with its magnificent transfer that boasts rich colour and great depth to some of Fulci's near visionary compositions. Dolby Vision and Atmos seal the deal. This is probably available to rent online but I don't know if even Shudder offer it for streaming by subscription.

MY BEST TO WORST 2024

Closing in on a bad news year, there is still cinema. It was good for magical realism, startling horror and some decent genre-bending. Whether it confronted the influence of the bad guys at the top or provided shelter from their storms, the worlds on screens in the darkness provided some special moments and comfort.

BEST

The Substance: In which a fable about aging keeps its points open and punchy so it can get into the nuance and detail through characterisation. It's not the gruelling scenes of sci-fi body horror where the gravity lies but the scene where she prepares to go on the first everyday date of her life post fame. Coralie Fargeat proved she could manage the collision between symbolic magic and tough gore with Revenge; this is the apotheosis. Film of the year.

The Zone of Interest: The horror of Nazism told as a hollowing indifference as a family privileged by atrocity look inward, away from the crimes they are compliant with which drift over the wall as the sounds of pain. 

Love Lies Bleeding: Writer/director Rose Glass went from her strange earthly martyrdom tale to this bold gay noir collides with magical realism to produce something of its own kind but welcoming at the same time.

Civil War: People who didn't get this complained about the conceit of Texas and California as political allies, ignoring the point it made about how drastic the times had become. A muscular scenario that fit its times. Not so much mockery of this after the U.S. election result.

Furiosa: Constant action and substantial characters supported by good performances and Miller's usual flair made this one of my favourite Mad Max movies.

Birdeater: A friend described this as a woke Wake in Fright (the better joke would be Woke in Fright but, of course, I didn't say that at the time) and I almost disowned him ("woke" as a put down is a goofy old bloke ploy, IMHO). It's much more about control within relationships and goes pretty deep. A distraction with a stripper in bushland does it no favours but the central trauma is well examined.

Blink Twice: A brash slap in the face to entitlement culture with a satisfying, rounded finish.

I Saw the TV Glow: A deft and subtle combination of adolescence and magical realism deliver a poignant portrait of adult panic. Quietly effective.

Longlegs: Its detractors responded to the hype campaign but the central ideas, once clarified, fit the bill for genuine resonant horror.

Red Rooms: The kind of morbid compulsion that draws us to true crime media is examined with a cold stare that allows the horror of the motivations to bloom. Devastating.

Azrael: Intriguing premise about civilisation after an imagined rapture and the horrifying costs of the rule of ignorance. Then the finale happens. 

In a Violent Nature: Something scarcely imaginable was the freshening of the teen slasher but here it is.

MIDDLE

Abigail: A credibly cheeky vampire themed comedy which was ruined by its own advertising which let the cat out of the bag, deflating the major plot point early.

Immaculate: An Omen style supernatural tale handled well with a solid performance from Sidney Sweeny. Much better than the soggy First Omen but still too old-timey to quite work on me.

A Quiet Place: Day One: Effective prequel that sensibly opts out of outdoing the original in favour of building a real emotional core.

Alien Romulus: Ok. Not bad. Not good. The franchise that never lived up to its first installment just seems stuck in a loop or goes into uninteresting origins sagas that just end up looping like the others. 

Oddity: Very effective, atmospheric and enjoyably absurd, like a Peter Strickland film, but I wanted more from it.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: First time was fine. This was ok but unnecessary.

Wicked Little Letters: Nice setup but, for all its basis in reality, kept falling short of credibility.

Milk and Serial: Highly accomplished found footage horror on YouTube out gunned so much taking the same approach but didn't quite add that extra.

MADs: Like found footage, I don't care that much if something was all done for the camera in one take. The presentation of it that way will do. A hell of a ride.

Maxxxine: Having triumphed with Pearl in the middle of this trilogy, Ti West opted to make something resolutely ok instead of something wilder and less rounded. 

Dune Part 2: Lovely, big and thrilling but overlong. If you're going to invite unfortunate comparisons with Life of Brian as you depict devotees beatifically recognising signs of the messiah, then the counter theme of dissent should be pumped harder than here.

WORST

Rumours: I don't know if its the collaboration with the brothers Johnson but Guy Maddin (never thought I'd be putting one of his down here) has been losing touch with what made him humbly great and might never recover. Also, if you admit that the title of your movie is just from an old Fleetwood Mac album, you never have me on side (to be fair, it wasn't Maddin who said this).

Imaginary: A goofy idea that gets progressively worse with every scene. By the end when it thinks it's getting all surreal on us an exposition character appears to rattle off an over complicated spiel we neither asked for nor felt like living through. Waste of time and resources.

Heretic: Very good setup with a strong central trio of performances but collapses into self-conscious cleverness which by the end just feels trite. 

Black Cab: Too many ideas colliding in a progressively confused mash of supernatural tropes. 

Midas Man: How to make The Beatles boring when concentrating on their genuinely interesting manager who is rendered ineffectual and bland. For two and a half hours!

V/H/S/Beyond: Entertaining but nowhere near the best of the franchise with too many so-what level entries.

The First Omen: Goofy attempt at a prequel with uninteresting characters and tie-ins. 

House of Spoils: If it had been released as a magical realist piece with even less of a supernatural story I might have liked it.

Daddy's Head: A stark style with unlikeable characters and a quirky premise cannot a horror movie make. Also, I am sick of horror movies that begin with extreme high shots of cars driving through forests.

DISTRICT 9 @ 15

After an alien mothership appears in the sky above Johannesburg, the insect-like inhabitants are taken in with a humanitarian perspective. Soon, their rehousing solution turns into a shanty town and a project to move them into more constrictive quarters, further away from sight is underway. At its head, the responsible department boss puts his son in law to see the transition through, with the idea that he might klutz it and disappear from family life altogether. The film picks up as Wikus starts his supervisory role with the zeal of the new boy, getting his hands smudged at the ghetto itself. He comes across a tube that has been developed by the aliens and panics when it splashes all over his face. That's what it takes. After a few tests he is told that he is transitioning to an alien.

Neill Blomkamp's 2009 action satire looks like it was made before the CGI was properly dried and suffers from more pacing problems than it should but it rings as true today as it did then, especially after a nine year run of bad government and a decay in the perception of helping the needy here in Australia. If the racial groups of South Africa could reconcile after over a century of eye popping oppression by one of the others, having a new other on the block just sends them down the same crushingly depressing path.

But District 9 has more on its plate than this ever repeating scenario. The aliens (called Prawns by the humans, and not pleasantly) have weapons genetically matched to their species. When they discover that Wikus can use them with his mutated arm the mission changes to harness the power of the new devastating guns and set to work on finding a path to military mutation. While this seemed like empty commerce as a target of satire in 2009, it feels all too horrifying now. The martinet soldier despatched to recapture the now escaped Wikus who has increasingly sided with the aliens, is a two dimensional bad guy but this is completely necessary for this plot. This is a character who would intentionally render himself without complicating sides to his own let alone an enemy.

Wikus' character journey from everyday bigot to committed anti-authoritarian fighter is largely made through his increasing acquaintance with the alien called Paul and Paul's son. Walk a mile, indeed. This might be deemed a little too sermon-like but Blomkamp's Peter Jackson like fervour for gore, action and sheer cheek add too much for that to stick. Sharlto Copely measures his performance into credible portions until his change feels natural and the meaning of the final shot gains its gravity.

Fiction doesn't change governments nor can it stop international aggression but if audiences can leave films like this, feeling as though they have shared a change of mind as it happened as they witnessed it, a gentle effect is legitimate as a greater one is untenable. When Tim Burton made Mars Attacks as a kind of cancelling tone to the oafish Independence Day he presented all he could, which is to say, he made a goofy comedy whose theme of tolerance was easily lost among the gags. District 9 is the better riposte. 

BLOOD SIMPLE @ 40

Bartender Ray is driving his boss's wife Abby home and their talk leads to revealing their attraction to each other. The photographs of their night in a motel are given to the boss Julian by the private detective he hired to straighten out his suspicions. When Ray shows up at the bar Julian, barely under control, warns him that Abby is playing him and they part in dark moods. Time for action, Julian calls the detective back and orders a hit. The chain is on and wound tight. The line on the poster read: The thriller is alive and well in Texas. Who knew what film noir meant in 1984?

Joel and Ethan Coen did and how.  Their debut feature did modest business at the cinema but was held up to the heavens by critics who recognised its taut construction, black humour, pace and characters as one for the future. And the Coens became a brand. By the end of the decade with the likes of Miller's Crossing and Fargo in the near future, citing the team as a favourite to people you didn't know outed you as one of the warmer cinephiles who did know what noir was but wouldn't correct you on details.

The Coens' cache was a rarity for film making teams, getting the auteur stamp early. A scene where the camera, moving along a bar and then lifts over the body of a collapsed drunk and back down again in this film is the kind of takeaway nugget that anyone could donate to a party conversation when new movies came up. It illustrated the kind of knowing humour reserved for the quietly adept in the previous decade and wasn't a spoiler. The Coens made their own cache, happily wearing cult status until their titles started paying for themselves and all that brand power starts. Just shy of the kind of rote admiration garnered by Stephen Spielberg, who peaked early and stayed there, the Coens added cool.

Cool is what Blood Simple bleeds. Instead of the by then old hat means of suggesting links to past genres and shooting in black and white (that would rise again in the '90s) the Coens chose the contemporary pallet of hard neon and soft light and thick colour like Michael Mann's decade-defining Thief from 1980. They knew they were making a noir and didn't want to distract their audiences from it, they wanted it to look like a noir if made in the mid '80s when it was. Apart from the diegetic Same Old Song played in the bar jukebox, the music is brooding and electronic, keeping a tight grip on the tension.

The cast was largely unknown but fit exactly into their roles to the extent that they appear both as essential components to the narrative but also the art direction. John Getz seems chiselled out of oak, a guy who falls into his gravity and never needs to do more than mumble, sexily macho. Frances McDormand's first film role shows her as a femme fatale who offsets natural beauty with Texan deadliness and practicality. She, of course, has gone the furthest of the cast from this faux ingenue to the potty mouthed harridan of her gleeful maturity. Dan Hedaya wasn't new to any size screen and keeps his constantly threatening emotional combustion barely under control. The least forgettable turn of them all, here, is M. Emmett Walsh as the detective with his gymnastic voice drawling around a stream of southern wisdom and his dodgem car physique. It's one of the decade's most durable performances.

The Coens don't rate their own debut highly. It displays their style, leanness of writing, and clarity of vision perfectly but it ranks low with them. Of course, when your rap sheet includes Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou among many bangers, they can afford to dump on a few (though there are still The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Intolerable Cruelty and more of those, of course. Nevertheless it was the expectation of more of the tension and white knuckle comedy that kept us lining up for the next one. When they broke through it was with that cool intact which kept them on the indy side of approval long after their budgets and returns moved them into the mainstream. Blood Simple didn't start American arthouse cinema but it did embolden the style of it for over a decade as the Hal Hartleys and Quentin Tarantinos rose in the following decade.

I saw this on second run after my move to Melbourne. A bunch of us went down to the Richmond Valhalla cinema on Victoria St. After the usual quirky sketches and quirkier trailers for upcoming indy movies, this spectacle came up and we thrilled to its almost overcompetent finish, the perfectly timed visual gags, the noir intrigue and gleeful abandon to the sharpening and polishing of crime genre tropes from the '40s. It's movies from this time that I'd see in places like the long departed Valhalla that match electronic scores with edible colour visual pallets and will forever give me shivers of nostalgia. Blood Simple, the lean, little neo-noir that threw in a fable about capitalism along with its bleak adventure and belly laughs, will always be near the centre of my affection for the '80s. That it's still good apart from that makes it the same as an old stone building, beautiful on the outside, dependable shelter on the inside.

RUN LOLA RUN @ 25

 

Lola Jaeger, 20 something and punky, gets a fevered call from her boyfriend Manni. He's a bagman for a local gangster and he's just finished a job. It went perfectly except for the part where he left the bag bursting with cash on the train. As the homeless guy who helped himself to it strides gleefully away, Manni calls Lola for any ideas at all to get 100K marks in twenty minutes to him before he crosses the road and holds up the supermarket. So, without a clear plan, Lola runs.

So begins the film that conquered the world in 1999, the year when little movies with big ideas beat the odds to carpet the cinematic world. Fight Club, The Matrix, South Park, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project, the list just stretches out, including this outlying comedy of anxiety from Germany whose big idea was an old one but with an execution as hip and up to date as could be had.

The O. Henry story Roads of Destiny tells of a traveller who chooses different directions on coming to a forked intersection that lead him to different fates made of the same elements. Lola's improvisations while physically on the run feature parallel routes where wildly differing fates await herself, Manni, and people she bumps into while running. From winning lotteries to dying lonely and overdosed, the effects of chance rule the universe. But for a single break in the scheme (hint: gun) Lola has no memory of running the course in other circumstances; this isn't the constant self-improvement of Groundhog Day but rather a blocked system whereby every different iteration of the single action is played without cross reference. That exception is thrown in as a cheeky wrong footing. There's another whereby a character Lola keeps meeting seems to be aware of the other run-throughs (sorry, these puns are compelled).

These different plays are, of course, for the benefit of the audience and we both warn Lola through gritted teeth to avoid this corner or not to run down there in gleeful futility. That we also are fed a massive amount of information about Lola's life and that of the people around her further fuels this effect of our feeling godlike in vision but with no control. That element is left with Lola herself and she doesn't always make the decisions she should. The story is punctuated by her own screams of frustration which rip out at different points in the play-throughs, reminding us of every single time that we felt ourselves caught in knots of malfunction or unwelcome surprise.

The young Franka Potente as Lola, whose squeezed out mop of dayglo hair, cargo pants and army boots were rendered iconic with a look that was a gift to poster art across language and cultural boundaries, holds the electric centre of the film. As the mixed media flashes around her from ugly home video grind to gleamingly perfect 35mm cinematography, she either runs at an Olympic pace or is frozen in rapid thought, as still as a figurine as time and the rest of the world move around her. The few moments of apparent calm where flashbacks to post-coital pillow talk are offered in infernal red light and feature trains of conversation that do not conclude. Manni's shocked chaos on the initial phone call reveals the worst that desperation will push forward. By the time Lola notices the casino our hearts sink but we're so invested we almost yell at her to enter. Add the constant pulse of the EDM electronic score which either throbs beneath the action or rises to a gurgling acceleration of it that  crosses over the frequently frenetic editing and you have a film guaranteed to surprise its viewers that it's only eighty minutes long.

In 1999, if your work made it into a scene from the Simpsons you had not only arrived but were probably influencing costume parties. As Lisa ran along the road to the strident gobbles of techno, everyone knew what those few seconds came from. Run Lola Run is remembered for its action rather than its dialogue but it has bucketloads of talk. Most of this is exposition but we're surprised with each new viewing that we forgot it. One thing that occurred to me this time, though, is technological. This film's events would only be hampered by mobile phones. The phones we see are no longer much in evidence anywhere, rotary diallers and booths. But hand-held communicators would remove Lola's invention, her readiness to meet the crises that pop up like a kinetic obstacle course throughout. This is not just about her superhuman sprint but how long a second is in a human brain. It's also about how fresh the contents of time capsules can appear to us. And fresh it remains.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST @ 65

Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill is abducted from a business meeting and taken to a country mansion where a sinister crew interrogates him, using a different name. Puzzled and miffed, he resists and then survives an attempt on his life. This is already action packed but from this point on, he's about to get thrown into Alfred Hitchcock's most kinetic thriller adventure. Along the way he is accidentally in the frame for the murder of a U.N. official and persistently mistaken for a secret service agent and takes time to fall into mutual fascination with the beautiful, urbane and young Eve Kendall. All that is well before the hour mark in this over two hour film.

It's hard to know what to say about this one as it joins Vertigo and Psycho as one of Hitchcock's most written about movies. I'll be keeping this on the shorter side as I'd be here all night otherwise. I did note, as I went through it again for this blog, that it was probably the first time since his WWII movie Saboteur that Hitch would cast his hero into such a thrill ride across the country. The two share a kind of patriotic touch point in this as North by Northwest with its Cold War connotations, makes much of the glorious post war affluence in the architecture of New York City and Mt Rushmore as poster sized adverts for the land of the free.

The casting is noteworthy. James Stewart pleaded with Hitchcock for the Thornhill role. Gregory Peck was also considered. Both men had been in Hitch's movies but the thriller auteur chose against them and banked on the intergenerational sexiness of Cary Grant. In a brief moment when Grant walks through a woman's bedroom and her tone changes from alarm to attraction and Grant wags a finger at her with a pronounced, "uh-uh," he's not only funny but believable. Neither alternative castings could have carried that off. It does ring a little naff, now, but only a little. Grant was in his mid-fifties but physically trim and had a face that aged beautifully. This still happens and the examples of it are easily listed.

The other thing that still happens is the romantic paring of older men with decades young women. Eva Marie Saint was over two decades younger than Grant at the time. Her character describes herself as being a decade younger still, broadening the age chasm. My assumption is that the goodwill of Grant's stardom covered what can only be obvious in widescreen Technicolor as it is, here. Also, Jessie Royce Landis who was a single year older than Grant, plays his mother. Personally, as I'm knowingly watching fiction, I tend to look past age gaps (especially since I know a fair few people younger than me who make more of them) but the Grant/Saint rift is only smoothed by a pair of committed performances.

Hitchcock's 1950s were mostly larger and more lavish productions than he'd been used to, with few exceptions. Here, he seems to gleefully flaunt the big bucks that MGM could still throw at its productions. The setpieces that mix soundstage and location like the crop duster chase, Mt Rushmore scenes, the exterior/interior U.N. building and so on survive the punishing clarity of 4K in a way that some recent films shot that way have not. The final act sequence with the modernist house and the monumental Mt Rushmore heads is given a nocturnal dark blue wash that feels so confidently contrived that we happily accept it.

But that's the thing about these big, bold Hitchcock epics from this time; they have more scope than normal thrillers but less substance than almost any musical. Hitch's famous trope of the McGuffin (an  object that primarily served plot motion) doesn't make an appearance until the third act and feels perfunctory. The triangle of Grant, Saint and the intimidatingly urbane James Mason as Van Damm makes us care more than anything else. There is nothing of the creepy psychology of Vertigo, the stark horror of Psycho or the unease of Marnie on screen, here. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman just like the idea of dummy agents enough to dress it in a plot and cast Cary Grant and some big scenery. In this run of Hitchcock greats, North by Northwest feels like popcorn. But it is deluxe popcorn.

Viewing notes: I watched the recently released 4K, plain edition from Warners which looks astounding all the way through. A puzzling but not displeasing Dolby Atmos soundtrack is on by default which can overstate Bernard Hermann's blaring score but that's not a big issue. Some good extras like the writer's commentary and contemporary promo featuring Hitchcock himself also come recommended.

BANDE A PART @ 60

Franz and Arthur, young and aimless in Paris, add Odile who is in the English class who mentions that her Aunt's tenant has a pile of cash at the house. That turns into a scheme and the rest is hysteria. Well, it might be but this is a film from the early years of the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave in French cinema wherein the heavily American influenced movies of young directors on the rise were beaten out of shape in pursuit of the new. So, when we get to the botched robbery, it neither plays like a well oiled plan nor is a morally redemptive disaster, it just kind of falls into confusion and  heads into inconsequence.

Jean Luc Godard's seventh feature film finds him back in familiar bohemian Paris with bright young folk quoting Rimbaud, hanging out in cafes, staring through the fourth wall and even stopping the action to make points. Along the way, the robbery which would have been at the centre of an audience's attention, is blithely left in the background as the trio negotiates its life, affinities and so on. Sounds twee and precious? It isn't. Some of the dialogue strays into philosophy but there is a greater appeal to popular culture and the three effectively imagine themselves in the movie that we are watching.

While Godard did have serious points to make, having emerged from three much harder films about terrorism, war and fame's exploitation, this outing with its sprint through the Louvre, testing people's tolerance of silence on screen (the duration of which is just over half the claimed minute but feels interminable) and a parade of other conceits that might have ended up cute in the hands of another filmmaker. Godard is yet again showing his audience how fiction is fabricated, how actors are quoting and how the action centrepiece of a noir plot is both farcical and serious.

Anna Karina as the yet again self-illuminating centre provides us with a young woman willing to approach her life as a jam session. She leads an impromptu dance with the boys in a cafe which looks improvised but was choreographed that way. She brings the action to a halt by demonstrating the minute of silence. She struggles with the attentions of Arthur but admits her attraction early. Next to her complexity, the philosophy spouting romantic Franz seems like an overdressed lightweight and the puggish Arthur a directionless drifter. That means that when the robbery comes up, the mishaps are sometimes comic and sometimes grave, all in one extended scene (there are actually two attempts at the robbery but let's relax that for the point). When bumbling action is intruded upon by fatality, the transition suddenly feels natural. After all that whimsy and lightness, Godard has brought it together to give us a high stakes climax.

The film auteur's most popularly celebrated film is his debut feature A bout de souffle (Breathless) which is a playful noir. I much prefer this in the same vein for its confidence and the more assured use of that kind of play. I enjoy Breathless but I'm compelled by Bande a part. Godard had covered musicals in extraordinary fashion with Une femme est une femme, tough politics in Les carbiniers and Le petite soldat and self reflexive cinema production in Le mepris. His return to noir showed him stronger this time around the loop. This would continue until his political commitments drove the narrative out in preference for harder essays from 1966 on to the extent where he collectivised his film production and presented the results of his demolition of conventional cinema (at least for his own work, of course).

That made him a personal hero to me in my undergraduate years when I even started smoking lung ravaging French cigarettes and claiming a preference for the later, less watchable films (while always preferring the easier ones). It also exposed me to a world of ridiculing normies who thought they were being witty when launching attacks on any kind of cinema reset and how feeble the counter argument was and is. Godard's efforts in tearing convention to shreds influenced everything those folks celebrate about the New Hollywood of the '70s or Tarantino's self-avowedly derivative work (his production company name Band Apart is lifted from this movie). If you are familiar with Godard's early career but find it variously too cute or arcane, track this down. Of all the milestones and audacious taunts at convention, Bande a part remains the solid sweet spot. If you can't come out of this something like a sigh of pleasure don't investigate Godard any further, it won't be for you. If you are pleased by it, you have a world of endeavour before you, a lot of it tauntingly difficult but most of it worth every second. Start here.