1971@50: HAROLD AND MAUDE

Young American aristocrat Harold tries to sieze his mother's attention through staged suicides. The opening sequence under the credits is an elaborate ritualised hanging. For recreation, he goes to the funerals of people unknown to him. There he meets Maude, almost four times his age but with an infectious zest for life that Harold's thawing starts almost the moment she gets his attention. This meet cute happens during a funeral eulogy. This rom com will be unusual.

(NB: there will be spoilers in this article, almost from the off. If you haven't seen this film yet, do so now and stop wasting the time of the rest of the world. Then come back.)

As the romance progresses the satirical image of the world that envelops it remains. Harold's mother continues to overbear and tyrannise with her restrictive responses, delivered with the smarm of the upper crust. Like L'ancient regime itself, she still dresses young but is unaware how dated this makes her look. Her ideas of parenthood are more akin to a headmistress than a mum. The motorcycle cop's strict training has made his drills for human interaction vulnerable to the unexpected which Maude delivers in an unending stream (these scenes are so funny I've had people demand a rewind and rewatch on the spot). Harold's whispering Californian psychiatrist (often in a suit that matches Harold's) coos shaping questions impotently at his patient, receiving either too much or barely anything (at one point Harold on the couch, arms crossed over his chest like a corpse, falls into a gentle sleep during the consult). The absurd military uncle with his uniform's empty sleeve rigged for a salute is the stuff of a Playboy cartoon. The priest delivers his disgust at the age gap between the couple with an ugly unselfconscious relevation of his own lusts. This is a line-up of its era's satirical targets and, on paper, they are as thin and cliche as the ones in more farcical offerings like Cold Turkey and more strident than those in the much bleaker Little Murders. They shouldn't work, at least not across five decades.

But it does and for a few reasons. First the obvious ones that have to do with putting a movie together. The casting throughout is for fit. Ruth Gordon is a blend of her nightmare neighbour in Rosemary's Baby and the dementia-stricken miasma mama in Where's Poppa? with added hippy pontificator. Her sweeping declamations could easily have worn out the hardiest of viewers but her delivery in a kind of singsong stream that suggests both a lifelong confidence in the truth of what she is saying as well as a dark conviction that it had better be. Her moment of vulnerability when stumbling on a memory of a lost love does not ocme out of nowhere but feels part of her personal continuum. Bud Cort is almost in whiteface as the cadaverous Harold. We see his invention and delight at subverting his mother's shoehorning attempts to conform him through a pall of ice. Maude's thawing of him begins with his incredulity at her actions and attitudes. She makes him curious. The last time he was curious is delivered in a monologue which leads to his comparable moment of vulnerability in front of Maude. His character journey is the longest and continues beyond the film's credits, as he walks into them the sole character in the tale who was learned anything. From his whispered responses to the screaming of the word"what?!" near the end span riches of performance.

Hal Ashby organises a San Fransico of natural beauty and artificial opulence, continuing his lead characters' polarity. You can smell the fragrance of the forest and also admire the french polished furnishings of Harold's family home which resembles nothing so much as an extended funeral home. Maude's abode is cluttered with trinkets, gymcracks, trash and treasure. There are many jokes delivered in introductory shots and much of the film's wit lives there but the one that isn't a joke is the cut to the post-coital Harold and Maude in the bed of her rail car as she sleeps contentedly while Harold blows shining bubbles with a toy pipe. The visual energy of this film is constant but also constantly maintained. It is flawlessly paced.

Colin Higgins script was his UCLA master's thesis and it's what brought him (while working as a studio head's pool boy, no shit!) to the attention of Hollywood money. His sale of the script was on the understanding that he would also direct but the studio passed and preferred Ashby, young and hip enough to get it but also a proven orchestrator of image, sound and performances from the successful The Landlord. Ashby, to his eternal credit, insisted on Higgins being with him on set to observe for his future in the industry. Higgins wrote a fable of life and death as a rom com and pushed contemporary satire into each last corner like Polyfilla. Most of that made it to the screen and of that, only the most burdensome of Maude's pontifications were cut. Ashby concentrated on making the continuous wit of the dialogue timed to feel natural here but enjoyably set up there. Mostly, he directed the central performances to be increasingly naturalistic even as the whimsy mounted. But there's more at play here.

And this is the thing that this film's copyists never get right. For all the debt that the quirk in American independent movies of the last twenty-five years owe to Harold and Maude most of them miss its most important instuction: if death is a character in your black comedy you need to keep it centre screen. The age gap that Harold and Maude uses for its most obvious tension is quite swiftly dissipated by their easy interweaving. Death and Life dance well together. But we are given funerals (alive with japes, yes, but they are still sombre occasions), neglected city trees, smothering in carbon monoxide, Harold's own "suicides" which can be very gruesome, Uncle Victor's entire career has been done in close proxity to the reaper on a military scale and even the crumbing veterans, and then there is Maude's concentration camp tattoo and then there is her birthday confession that she has set up her own suicide and the sense that she has earned the right to stop when she wants (whether we agree with that or not, it is what she thinks). This is where Harold as a portrait of Death as a young man has to change his being. There is no possibilty of his staging another suicide after this story ends. Everything about this story, the comedy, the satire and the gut punch of the climax has been worked for and hard.

So, for all the admiration this movie gets, all the warm tributes given by the bright young things of independent quirk, few of its lessons are taken up. It's true that they are hard to achieve; you do need strong skill and real vision to apply them. I have lost count of lazy writing that is plugged by the whackiness of characters, reliance on sudden reversals of character or tacked on moments of gravity dropboxed in from other movies. For your benefit I have tabled a number of examples with helpful snap judgements:

200 Days of Summer - no. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind- yes. Frances Ha - not even close. Punch Drunk Love - big yes. Little Miss Sunshine - no. Nebraska - yes. Garden State - no. Ghost World - yes. Igby Goes Down - yech, no. Donnie Darko - yes, but only the original cut. I Heart Huckabees - nope. Juno - yes. Buffalo 66 - thy name is inept, no. Being John Malkovich - big classic yes. The Future - no. American Splendor - uh huh. Anything at all by Wes Anderson - no, simply, no ... ever.

See, I managed to find among the many qualifying titles a pretty even result. Then again the continued career of Wes Anderson means that the yesses will probably never catch up. Choose from this list anything you have seen and see if you agree and for those you dispute ask why someone might think as they do about them.

Is Harold and Maude so perfect, then? No, nothing is. There are moments of cuteness that belong back in '70s sitcoms like Maude's exaggerated reckless driving. Some of Harold's "suicides" would be impossible for one person to so quickly set up. He makes a Jaguar E-type into a hearse, presumably with a blowtorch. The matching doctor and patient suits are funny but, however unfairly, they make me think of The Royal Tenenbaums. The prank with the colonel would not work in the real world. The Odorific recording is pure fantasy. However, none of these are pivots for the plot or characters but points at which the film stretches into a kind of magical realism. And sometimes they are just old hat and long ineffective.

It's hard to gauge how well known Harold and Maude has become in the age of the tappable classic and remastered physical copy for the home. I can recall showing it to a small group of millennials who left the experience with a new entry in their top ten films of all time. This film still works with anyone but I just don't know how many have sat through it in the past twenty years. The importance of this question has to do with its influence on the makers of those quirky films listed o'erhead and the audiences who, unaware of what they were starting, made Rushmore a hit movie. At that time Harold and Maude was a rarity, lucky to be caught at one in the morning on a commerical channel. People seemed to think Wes Anderson had created his breakthrough from whole cloth.  To give him credit, there are more influences on show that Hal Asby's classic but that's the one that dominates and that's the one that still leads the derivation list in every single film Anderson has released. I don't hate Wes Anderson because he copied Harold and Maude, I hate that so few seem to know it. Sigh. Anyway...

Sorry for ranting; this is one of my favourite films. I've owned a copy of it on every home video medium since VHS and the Criterion Blu-Ray I watched again last night proved that it still works, perhaps now in my maturity even more than it did when I was more like Harold. Before those home versions I would see it on late night tv when late night tv allowed that kind of unofficial film studies education. Before that I had only my sister's account of it, seen at a Townsville arthouse I have red-facedly forgotten. It was made at a time when movies were huge and wonderful to me if I saw them, as a child at a cinema. I was too young to see this when new and it never seem to make it to any of the arthouses in Brisbane or Melbourne that I went to. But the name was strong and its utterance in conversation drew smiles from the others.

(Edit: I can't believe I forgot to mention the sourced score. Ashby had wanted the then emerging Elton John to provide songs but John was touring and couldn't do it so he recommended Cat Stevens. Cat Stevens' songs used in this film come from two albums but include two written for the film (so it's not strictly a sourced job. This is a film with an essential musical association. Stevens' gentle melancholy and pain, mostly folky, acoustic arrangements fill the experience of Harold's delayed entry into the human race and Maude's departure from it. Mostly plaintive (and downright tear-producing in the "Trouble" scene) but also light and life affirming like the film itself, they are essential. The opening ritual scene played to the song Don't Be Shy is a moment of mutual momentum between music and filmmaking. If you become a fan of the film you will probably want more of the music. There is a soundtrack album available quite accessibly. Go fot it.)

It is untrue to suggest that they dont make 'em like this anymore or that our times are beyond such cinema when this one still works so very well and I see many strong movies every year, defying even global pandemics and cinema closures. My recdent viewings of Titane and Lamb remind me of how I love to be ambushed by cinema and, as I've gone through these anniversary revisits this year I've noted the power of the strongest of them. I've had to miss out on a few due to lack of availability or time but from the dodginess of Pretty Maids All in a Row to this classic of macabre romantic comedy I'm already thinking about what came out in 1972....

Hope everyone who reads this enjoys the turn of the year and can have some relief from the microbes in 2022. I know what I want different about the next twelve months but I won't say for fear of jinxing. See you on the flip side. (Oh, there will probably be a few more reviews here but I thought the end of this series was the best place for a seasonal call.) bye till then.

1971@50: 10 RILLINGTON PLACE

A middleaged man with a soft voice is making a woman feel comfortable with a cup of tea in advance of a procedure of some kind. A home made kit of rubber hoses, jars and such are on the table and he is explaining how he will use them, taking care to reassure her that the process is safe. Soon she puts down the tea and tells him she's ready. He moves in, covers her face with a homemade mask attached to a hose which will be feeding her gas from the mains. She struggles but he forces her and soon she is unconscious.  He had promised her an abortion but is about to sexually assault and strangle her. Next scene she's buried in the back garden. It's post war London, a grimy part of it, he's John Reginald Christie and he's part of history.

When a young couple with a newborn take his sublet upstairs rooms, Christie can't stop thinking about them and, small incident by small incident, they are embroiled in his next scheme which he plays by opportunity and involves more detail of his M.O. It's rough and it only gets rougher. By that I do mean towards some grisly images but more to grisly gaslighting and manipulation as Christie steers everyone around him into compliance.

Richard Attenborough in the title role stood back from the authority figures and farcical conspirators to adopt a role from living memory and present one of the scariest serial killers ever to own a screen. Yes, that includes the '90s rash of them which I'll get to. Why? Because, apart from a scant few moments when his menacing expression is overplayed, he looks at everything and everyone as either a target for the rages inside him or an accessory to escape its actions. When he brings a shouting match between his tenants to a halt it is with the quietest of whispers. If he smiles here or jokes there it's as though he is lifting them from a stockpot. While his accounts of himself are concealing fabrications he himself is not prey to his own fantasies. He is deliberation and control, id and ice. And he reaches out over the decades to deliver his horror just as he once did.

Judy Geeson stepped down from her young woman in progress in To Sir With Love and landed as a much more worldly thing, born and raised in the sooty terraces of the London blitz. She doesn't like what her life has dealt her but her street smarts guide her through. Her husband, John Hurt's Tim Evans, is crushingly self-deluding. Illiterate and clueless and possessed of far less native wisdom than his wife, he is a fallguy waiting to be approached with a quiet solution. The brittle tension between the two, their bickering and outright fighting have a anxiety-producing bluntness which makes their scenes in the cramped sub-let feel imprisoned and hopeless.

Richard Fleischer and his screenplay writer used the Ludovic Kennedy book of the same title as their source and a title card clearly claims that the dialogue is derived from official sources where possible. This is always a ploy when anything is presented as fiction but there are ploys and ploys. If you see any film that uses phrases like "real events" or "true story" you might well be getting a feast of researched substance or just Conjuring 3. In this case, however, you get a sober replay of the timeline tightened and finished with muscular skill. Fleischer was an allrounder in cinema but he had been here before when he delivered the impressive Boston Strangler. That had mixed procedural with an attempt at a psychological p.o.v. of  the killer and, while it plays more as a thriller, did its job with deadly focus. Rillington Place gives you the day to day of domestic atrocity and enough mounting atmospheric suffocation to lodge it permanently in your mind. It's not just the violent scenes; the courtroom cross examinations are serious and exacting, the scenes of officialdom are worrying and intimidating.

The 1990s saw a flood of serial killer films that flowed from the Oscar winning Silence of the Lambs and kept the pressure up for a whole decade. Each year there was a new one and an arms race ensued which saw the killers go from methodical criminals to humanoid aliens made of CGI and the filthiest ideas from the writers' rooms. Despite exceptions (Seven, The Ugly) these movies traded in the kind of sleaze that both encouraged and dissed their welcoming audiences. The monster is evil but you do like seeing his victims get it all the same but when the FBI bash through the door it's all, "finally!"Between the few peaks there are probably none that deserve your revisit (including Lambs - sorry, I just think it's over-manipulative garbage). And none of them have a gram of the power of this disturbing and exhausting film. If you want to see it (I hired it from Google Movies) either add an intermission at half time or have an oxygen tank handy. But you'll ultimately be glad you saw it. 

1971@50: A NEW LEAF

Aging playboy Henry Graham, finds himself broke and contrives to marry well and then dispose of his bride and keep living as he has. He meets clumsy and dowdy Henrietta Lowell at a high society tea and recognises his target immediately. Their courtship is brief but effective and soon they are wed and he prepares immediately for the final act. But then things start happening that give him pause. Will a newly developed conscious override his native cold sarcasm and change him? You might be surprised at how this resolves.

In an era of kooky romcoms like Little Murders or Where's Poppa, A New Leaf takes a step further into the realm of the brightly lit end of the street and, looking every inch the '60s meet cute, starts out as a tought, kicking satire with an unexpected heart. This is down to good casting (more later) and the mind of its adapter and director Elaine May. May was known to American audiences for her partnered satirical dialogues on current events on radio and tv. Her partner was Mike Nicholls who also went on to a career in film as a director. The black humour of this early success is threaded all through this fable of conscience as its central antihero is continually tested with opportunities for power or good. That makes it sound like a cardboard pageant but A New Leaf is a constantly engaging  and laugh out loud funny trek through the conflict between intelligence and virtue.

Walter Matthau is far too old to be the playboy that he is. His push through to make us believe that he still considers himself one impresses us and we let him in. His strong and nasty wit make him welcome and, for all its vileness, his scheme to improve himself strikes us as funny and we respond easily to its tension. The brilliant George Rose stands in for Henry's conscience as his man servant, his own bullet-dodging wit delivered and both character and actor are up for the task when Henry's own conscience appears to slowly wake (though as what we won't know until the very end). However, it is Elaine May herself (too beautiful to conceal behind dowdy costuming and klutziness) who carries her creative input to the centre of the screen. Her phsyical humour (the nightgown scene is far more effective that you would imagine at this age: I'm laughing as I type this) plays a committed sense slapstick against her character's unawareness of her clumsiness. The remainder of the cast will be recognisable to anyone who has seen and treasured US comedy cinema from the era with one exception. May roped her old comedy partner Mike Nicholls in for an extraordinary scene as Henry's accountant struggles to convince Henry that the well has run dry while Henry circles back to his demand that one of his cheques be paid.

The story behind the production and release of this infectious comedy is that May attempted to publicly disown it after the studio Paramount cut it down from an intended three hours to just over a hundred minutes. As the original long edit has never been released we can only surmise. I will say that the excesses that made Mikey and Nicky feel like a stretched cover version of a John Cassavettes movie and the (studio-assisted) public ridicule of her later comedy Ishtar might indicate that she's a less is more director, even if that snipping comes from above. It's too hard to say with such a little rap sheet. May is more frequently credited as a writer or script doctor than as a director or actor. I could do with a few more New Leafs but then the longer I've seen comedies stretch their running time the more they fall into dullness. At fifty A New Leaf works and at one hundred and two minutes it seems to work fine. I wonder if we could have this shown to everyone who makes a romcom now to show them the power of stars who are willing to simply clown it over consolidating their brand.

1971@50: WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Reclusive Willy Wonka decides to open his chocolate works for the winners of five golden tickets and award the winners a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie Bucket dreams of this and buys as many Wonka bars as he can to see if there's a ticket in one. Charlie's family is so poor that this totals at two, both duds. Meanwhile the tickets are being found the world over in a global wildfire of FOMO. The winners go to the undeserving rich and the overindulged. But nothing for deserving poor Charlie. It's not really a spoiler to reveal that he does find one and joins the other winners on the day of the event. Wonka appears before the eager crowd with a prank that pretty much sets his character key as a mischevious wit and the factory tour begins.

I'm going to be spare with the details as this film is worth watching clean the first time or with ready surprise the next. The Chocolate Factory is a magical place where a kind of dream logic seems to have designed the attractions and features like lickable wallpaper, or a chocolate river. Despite the psychedelic colours and Heath Robinson contraptions and the whimsy of their host the children are being put through tests and those who fail are eliminated in ways that might please both the readers of Lewis Carroll and Dante. The fact that keeps this movie from just being a sunny honey bunny kid's fest is the thread of darkness woven through it. Greed, entitlement etc. most of the children meet punishments that fit the sin (however secular that sin is).

Gene Wilder is perfect casting for the flamboyant Wonka, one minute PT Barnum the next a kind of snide Mad Hatter, grounding the surface lightness. His voice, almost always on the verge of a scream is well known to comedy fans of a certain age and the edge it provides is deep from every utterance of callousness coming from the children and parents of the children. There is a kind of unreconstructed Grimm's cruelty about him that reminds us that fairy tales were meant as warnings.

The rest of the cast also shines. Julie Dawn Cole as Veruca Salt is infuriatingly spoiled. Paris Themmen's Mike Teevee is almost disturbingly given over to tv/media. Jack Albertson is a flawed but warm and supportive grandpa to Peter Ostrum's Charlie who convinces us of his troubled goodness.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory remains a warm and wicked warning to the spendy first world. The technology and effects on show are kept to an era-spanning credibility. In fact, if a remake were to be made I could think of no one better to update it than ... Oh, he did. Well, he tried. Tim Burton made the scenes and loopiness slicker but completely forgot to strengthen any of the characters. Willy Wonka becomes a kind of simpering Michael Jackson whose slinky coldness alienates everyone on the screen and everyone in front of it. We love Gene Wilder's creation but cautiously, knowing his pranking nature. We are only spooked by Johnny Depp's. The coda that offers an explanation for Wonka's darker side is an implosion of cuteness. It tells the difference between using darkness as an undercurrent and giving things a dark look. Willy Wonka at fifty is as strong as it was at conception, a sturdy fable of conscience.

I saw the 4K restoration and marvelled. If you're starting a UHD collection, add it.

1971@50: THE SEVEN MINUTES

A young clerk at a bookshop gets stung by detectives for selling obscene material. D.A. gets on to a hotshot lawyer and they work out a deal where everybody wins. Then the D.A. is courted by local political heavyweights who want to make an example of the book and raise their electoral profile. And then a savage rape occurs, implicating the son of one of the political shakers and the book is in the crosshairs and the deal is off the table. Hotshot is compelled by the social injustice and gets his slingshot ready for the stage entrance of Goliath.

This courtroom procedural has a few things on its plate that speak to its time. On the surface it's about the place of putting literature on trial like the titles it namechecks like Lady Chatterly's Lover or Tropic of Cancer. Just under that, though, is the suggestion that political pursuits can veil themselves in morality and, given enough clout, can steer a show trial like a speedboat. And through all of this is the intriguing pursuit of the author of the novel (which shares its title with the film) who committed suicide thirty years before.

All of that and it still manages to look and feel like a colour ad from a contemporary magazine, a kind of post-Manson Rennaisance man who dressed well and smoked the best and earned the love of the babe on his arm while leaning on the bonnet of the sleekest car available. Wayne Maunder as lawyer Mike Barrett makes that figure talk and move and care. It might sound sarcastic written out but there is a real gravity to his quest to prevent the damage of the sinister conservatives. While the steamy sexuality of his relationship with his fiance (seen while he is taking the call about the case in the beginning) has the sense of a living men's magazine, his later courtship of Maggie Russell feels accidental and so more genuine. You don't just want his case to be won you want him to win ... at all of life.

This is a Russ Meyer film which might have you imagining a clipshow of buxom nudity and exploitation but you might find yourself pleasantly surprised (or crestfallen) at seeing the film, after that phone call/sex scene, suddenly sober up and get to work. The rape and goading Wolfman Jack montage soon after begins salacious but quickly turns intentionally sickening, outrunning any preconceptions we might have about Russ's old tricks. If there is a fault here it is that the earnestness of the good or the naturally moral is played a little too dryly, as though the early sauciness needed an equal and opposite balance. It can get like the letters page of an old issue of Playboy that might run a goofy one about drugs next to a stark one about Vietnam. The courtroom tactic Barrett tries of extracting the word "fucking" from the coyness of a witness has the feel of the elder lords of liberalism scoring a touchdown.

I was hanging out to do this one for this series as it has a personal appeal for me. When I was a kid and joined the family in trips to the drive-in I saw the trailer for this movie. It mostly consisted of characters speaking the title in a snarl, including a clip from a quite poignant scene of one man assaulting Barrett for defending the book. I was completely intrigued. The title (which is explained in the end credits) posed a real mystery. A short space of time was revving people up so much they came to blows? What could the Seven Minutes be about? It bugged me but the movie was way out of the range of the kid that I was (though I think I would have enjoyed the trial) and I had no way of finding out what it was about. Later, as a media student with more resources at my disposal, I saw the Rus Meyer by line and left it where it was. It was only in the past few months, compiling a list of films released in 1971 that I saw it and said out loud: Bingo!

So, I was ready for trash and happy to sit through it if only for the pleasure of writing something snide and self-delighting. I did not expect the seriousness that I found nor the colour-blind casting nor the complexity of the women's roles. Even the lightly archaic solemnity of the cause was acceptable. And why not? This piece about bad politics and genuine decency, played with such appealing verve, gave me the kind of slap in the face I might have expected from being a touch too cheeky at a university party, a gentle affectionate pat that yet says: watch it.

1971@50: WILLARD

Young Willard Stiles still lives with his mum and gets daily bullied by his oaf of a boss. When his mother throws a birthday party for him she invites her own friends. He walks out and goes to frown at his life in the back of the crumbling mansion where they live. Seeing a rat he flinches but then feeds it some of his birthday cake and then as the rest of its pack arrives they get the rest of the slice. His mother isn't so open minded and wants him to kill them. Well, they're just rats so he organises a trap with food, a plank and water. It works until the water level stresses them and he puts the plank back so they can escape. It's possible they are the closest thing to friends he has ever had and he sets up a home for them in the cellar, training them to follow basic commands. Not so powerless and mild mannered now.

Daniel Mann, directorial all rounder, approached this horror scenario by underplaying its threat. Ernest Borgnine's sadistic boss is more terrifying than the rats and when his party is invaded by a pack of them at Willard's command we feel its just desserts. It's when Willard's personal impotence breaks against the force of his rage and he leads the rats to ever darker territory that we begin to feel uneasy and wonder how much he has come to love the animals and how much he just likes the power. The horror here doesn't have paws and tails.

And it wouldn't work without Bruce Davison's realisation of the title role. His Willard isn't just some sap who lets people walk all over him. He understands that he lets this happen and is most likely the way of a  world he will never be able to change. Even the possibilities fowarded by Sondra Locke's Joan seem unreal to him as he treats her sympathy more casually than he might if he were more of a Travis Bickle. Willard's conversations with Joan have a refreshing pleasantness but it's one that allows us to see the potential that his life has done its best to crush. So, while Travis' clunking misjudgements with Betsy make us cringe and he starts to look more and more like what we'd now call an incel, Willard really has only missed the opportunity. He really is a believable nice guy and knows the gravity of his deeds as much as the joys he might find with Joan.

The mansion sits in the ugliness of a part of the city that could be anywhere in the world. It's all forgotten glory and overgrowth, ruled by Elsa Lanchester's monster of need and bitterness. It is familiar rather than homely, a kind of Baby Jane meets the Addams Family on Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps a two bedroom flat might have provided more narrative stress but the old house does such a good job at being an escape worse than the world escaped from. Just as we groan for a little pushback from Willard we also might shiver from the mutual loathing between him and his mother.

At the end of a decade that destabilied confidence in a system and exposing it for the fantasy it always had been Willard's horror is that of the compliant Vietnam draftee, the whipping boy, the cipher. We might freeze at the torment of a Norman Bates but Willard knowingly won't give us the satisfaction. It's not the suspense of a psychological timebomb we fear in him but the patience of life's undeclared saints who, given the chance, might well lead armies of rats.

1971@50: THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN

WARNING: Potential spoiler in second last paragraph. I don't give away the ending but if you haven't seen the film and want to, you should skip over it to the final par.

A toy tank buzzes across the ground. It rolls over a toy car.  A real tank rolls over a real car, crushing it and the young family inside. A little boy walks up to the wreckage, inspects it and strolls off to meet some other kids. Titles.

A young family group at a multi-family picnic packs up when it starts to rain, and heads west in their car. The radio is getting weird. They pass the wreckage of the car at the beginning and drive to the next town to report it. No one at the sheriff's office is interested, not even to talk to them. The sheriff himself appears outside, marvelling at the newcomers. A small crowd of locals does the same, swamping the family car. They are not particularly sinister, just in wonder that anyone got through. Times are strange.

Stranger still, the town's kids are vanishing. We see them stop what they're doing and walk away in scene after scene. When the newcomer family try to leave to get help their borrowed car breaks down and it's back to square one. Meanwhile, the local charismatic retiree is marshalling up the elderly of the district, well thirteen of them, for some peculiar rejuvenative procedure.

This oddity of a supernatural horror film in a western setting is of its time in that it really isn't of anyone's time. Somewhere between the game changing Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist (with a a sprig of Rosemary's Baby) the genre rules of horror were in tatters and its practitioners again had to work out what might scare or at least disturb the modern viewer. The three films I just mentioned were remarkable for finding the darkness in the light of day, the evil in the every day. Romero's zombies weren't created in voodoo rituals they just appeared. Rosemary faced witches but they were the nice old couple in the next apartment. The gothic would reappear later as it's pretty dependable fun but for now the horror was as real as a flat tyre or a vending machine, it lived where you lived.

And there in the sheriff's office with the injured and the dead the remainder of the people of the town slowly figure out what is happening and what they need to do about it. They are as nonplussed as we would be to find a coven forming in our neighbourhood that had real earthly power. The coven is in the process of changing its skin and is as fascinating and horrifying to behold as a snake doing the same thing, and the more you look the more natural it seems. This is how this film works, despite the shocks in the infreuqent violence, the terror lies in the fact that this act of supernature will happen regardless of their inertia or resistance. I read in a book about the confronting northern Rennaisiance painter Hieronymous Bosch that to the theistic medieval mind the notion that God might be no match for the Devil. If you can put that in your thoughts and assume such a postition it will feel like a waking nightmare. Now imagine it as an earnest thought, day after day, for the rest of your life and beyond it.

The widescreen canvas and plain-as-day pallette serve this end, bringing the horror of the potential defeat to the doorstep. By contrast, the extended Californian gothic palour/lair of the coven is virtually psychedelic, the juxtaposition of the old folk revelling in what looks like an acid rock band's cover art shoot would have rubbed roughly. And then there are the children themselves, normal whiny American kids who would have played with the likes of Sonny from Skippy or anyone from Flipper or Gentle Ben. Their plain faced atrocities remind us of how casually our own peurile tempers could seize us at that age. What better vessels for the leathery old witches of the gulch? In fact, it is the breathtaking expressionlessness of their faces that crawls into our eyes as the credits roll and the sickly music box score kicks in.

While it doesn't have the universal love of a Harold and Maude or even the cultish adoration of a Little Murders, The Brotherhood of Satan is unjustly obscure, an underplaying but solidly performing tale of horror in a genre that was back in gestation at the time and didn't really look like anything predictable. If it refers to gothic imagery here and there, the constrast with the ondinary world is pleasantly jarring. Cinema would return to churning out more gothic and contrived fare in the name of horror and even the Venn diagram overlap in the '90s of crime and horror in the serial killer movies took on an increasingly old school spookfest look and feel. It wasn't until the end of that decade when The Blair Witch Project fulfilled for the genre TS Eliot's thought that any revolution in poetry should start with a return to the banal. That doesn't mean it should be featureless or bland, just that it should feel like home and that home should not be trusted.

1971@50: COLD TURKEY

Big tobacco takes a risk for a better profile by challenging any town in America to give up smoking for thirty days. If they do it they get a very cool twenty-five million in 1971 dollars. If they don't, smoking wins. The pastor at the small town of Eagle Rock, Iowa leads the local campaign and his charismatic ways prevail but will everyone go the distance? The air force is also knocking on their door for a use of the town that will expand the community and bring the government contracts.

This enemble satire comes at the end of a decade packed with social revision and a newly feisty protest culture faced off against a digging-in conservatism. It's 1971 and everyone, right or left, smoked. Remove the gaspers and you have a community going through a kind of Lord of the Flies series of transformations, from cranky, to violent, to horny to anything else that was kept under control with the hit of nicotine. Things thicken up as the media gets its foot in the door and parodic versions of figures like Walter Cronkite appear. There's even a kind of representation of Richard Nixon. In the town itself the local radical right are given the jackbooted role of policing the abstinence as the packets and cartons fill the collection pen to be taken away forever. The young left leaners stage a kind of generalised protest for the sake of it and the new normal emerges as a kind of short-fused control is achieved. The pirze money is counted pre-hatch and everything starts tightening up again. This is the USA of the future as it looked in the past: no jet packs or ray guns, just amped up versions of everything already on the ground.

Norman Lear's only feature film was held up for two years post production and perhaps had more to say about the America or Woodstock and My Lai. The year after its release was Watergate and everything changed after that, even the movies. In this corridor of time you could not only still have the kind of Frank Capra poke set among the common folk but you could make it more grown up. Lear was a career tv writer and director with work on the Alf Garnett clone All in the Family at around this film's production time, and the bizarre Mary Hartman Mary Hartman from the mid '70s. He also worked pretty closely with the Parker and Stone team who gave us South Park. The gags of acceptable addiction are constant, the media circus has an almost psychedelic zing to it, the baring of the extremities of human good and evil are paraded with what starts to feel like pageantry. While it's kept to the better side of cute but just short of alienating earnestness, the control over this massive allegory is impressive and reliable. By the time the final image takes its place in the landscape we're allowed to feel a little crushed under our laughter.

While the writing and performance is consistently ensemble Dick Van Dyke at the centre of operations gives us a fallible good man. Careful to add some grown-up stress to his small town preacher he brings what might have the Jimmy Stewart role in the 1930s version he's also not above shoehorning this concept or sweeping this incorrigible character out of town for a "vacation", and is clearly interested in his church's brass promising a cushier position. Everyone is needy and greedy just like the whole nation clamouring to get out of the '60s. While he's in no danger of assassinating his musical comedy roles here he seems grateful to get the chance to expand on them.

From the Randy Newman theme song to the full page magazine cartoon image at the end this one works. Big cast satires weren't as much on the way out as heading for the change that the likes of Robert Altman would render. The Mad Mad Mad Mad .... World era could no longer squeeze American life after Manson. If you wanted your satire more sharply focused you hunted it down among things like Network, Smile or Shampoo which could get very tough; no one wanted to see Magic Town take another beating and the post Watergate nation was readier for the shadows of The Parallax View and the outright horror of The Exorcist. If Cold Turkey's machinations feel on the gentle side it's worth recalling any time you had to keep your cool when you felt like exploding. That's what's on screen here.

This is currently on available on Stan.

1971@50: KLUTE

John Klute goes in search of a missing industrialist who has vanished from his patrician life leaving only a dirty letter written to a sex worker. Klute's conduit into the life and likelihoods of the missing man's life is the latter, Bree Daniels, now freelancing to pay her psychotherapy bills and attempts to go legit on the stage or the catwalk. Should also say that an adulthood spent subject of the worst of malekind has left her a barely controlled cyclone with too much intelligence to indulge in denial. She really isn't giving anything away. While this sets up a dark thriller it serves up more of a warning.

America was still numb from a decade of high level assassinations, confronting protests about its own order, a futile foreign war that increasingly verged on the criminal and, a few ad breaks away, even corruption at the highest level with Watergate. The rot at the top in this story is more of a background. We learn who the perp is about halfway through. What we are witnessing on that score is the actions of corporate monsters, schoolboys with the power of pharaohs, grinding their way through anyone below who might provide some nervous relief. Increasingly, we care about the slow and difficult negotiation between Klute and Bree. The expected whodunnit tale has already been binned and there's no clear suggestion that the pair are destined to cohere. We want them to but also might settle for the respect Klute affords Bree who has known so little (as her therapy sessions attest). There is a clear sense that their union might just give us some hope in such a compromised realm.

The two leads got a lot from their roles. Neither was strictly a breakthrough but both were significant in the career timelines. Fonda was plagued by a mix of anodyne roles (the one before this is an exception; look it up) and a nation that didn't want to forgive her for being outspoken and inconveniently political. This role landed her an Oscar which in the USA , for better or for worse, allows enough cache for an actor to start making the movies they want. Sutherland broke free of a trio of roles that might have typecast him in weirdo parts for the balance of his hours (recent examples are Jeremy Davies and Paul Dano). Both enjoyed a very distinguished 1970s and more.

Sutherland, like Fonda, is playing firmly against his recent past by giving us a sober and straight minded figure, someone who needs to meet the chaos of these shadows with strength. Some might find his performance too sober, perhaps even wooden but the only way he was going to meet Fonda on her terms was to step back. He plays it nuanced, allowing silences and sparse expression to tell his thoughts. And then when he must break into violence it is with a surprisingly free physicality which both shocks and relieves us.

But this is Fonda's film. At first, she comes across as a displaced middle class slummer whose diction and vowels don't match her character and this gives an impression that the actor herself is slumming. However, there's a crucial scene that addresses this and does so with plaeasing obliqueness. Bree auditions for the part of Joan of Arc in GB Shaw's Saint Joan. She chooses an Irish accent which is called "interesting" by the director. She is not going to get the part. Fonda is playing Bree as angry, regardless of her origins, and it is an anger built of others' cruelty, subjugation and hatred. What she is left with is a means of expression which is strong and impeccable, it might sound middle class but there is no mistaking her testimony. Bree has made the choice; it is another panel of her armour.

Outside of that hers is a constantly physical performance. Almost all of this has to do with the currency of physical intimacy in light of her trade and how it differs beyond it. Her problem is with how others perceive and misconceive this. She must be constantly alert of what a caress or a hug might mean, what value they might preesage on the part of the other. She lets us see how loaded human contact is to her. This is less anger than a survivalist's constant alertness. The warmth of her clear personal strength allows us to make it through most of her scenes where the idea of touch or avoiding it unsettles us. It is a solidly committed performance made from corageous decisions.

One element I self-shamingly omit from these blogs on movies is the score. I won't be able to pass it by this time as it's such an important one, even though it is made of a lot of brief visiits rather than carpeting scenes from top to toe. Michael Small provides a tinkling shiver without bass registers, tiny clouds of  whispering doubt. I hate comparisons but the closest cousin I can think of for this is the unhelpful suggestion of a much more obscure film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage which blends a late '60s sweetness with a spinechilling range of scrapes, glissandi, musique concrete and so on to give us a realm like this one where the danger could lie in a passing whim or distant whisper (an atypical Morricone electronic score). Small went on to create one of the finest film scores ever for the same director's The Parallax View, combining an unsettling mix of patriotic hymn and horror movie dissonance. This almost feels like a first draft of that.

Klute is the first of the informally titled paranoia trilogy by director Alan J. Pakula. While distinct from each other this, The Parallax View and All the President's Men yet share a sense of malaise, the feel of a physical trouble we let in through an inability to recognise it, painted in dank brown hallways, sterile privilege, flat corporate aesthetics and the public dressing of order in the red white and blue. This in other hands might have fallen to blunt satire or clinking allegory but these films don't. Down there in a Manhattan plagued by sleaze, a D.C. roped by conspiracy and a whole country being hollowed by complacency. In the wake of these the modified political thriller  took form for the decade of New Hollywood as the discreet lighting of boardrooms and the dripping pipes of alleyways took over as the locations for the exchange and complication of power. To look at these films again in their middle age is to enjoy the pleasure of their gravity and to miss the same in mainstream films of the twenty-firwst century. This is not to say that cinema has lost its power (that hasn't changed) but perhaps could do with the kind of comittment that allowed the scary figure in Klute to begin his confession with: "I've no idea what I'm going to do. I'm so deeply puzzled." When the serpent is this freely whimsical you need to run. That's what I miss.

1971@50: DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS

Stefan and Valerie, two eloping newlyweds avoid parental disinheritance by faffing about Europe in the off season, settling on a guest free hotel in Ostend. Hey, the place to themselves, hot and cold running room service, not a bad honeymoon at that. There is an unsettled edge to their relationship in Stefan's itchy violence. It takes him to nearby Bruges where the couple rubberneck around some recent ghastly murder sites before getting the jolly bus back to the hotel. 

When they get back they find they have company. A platinum blonde Countess Barthory, a kind of Dietrich at her peak but a vampire and her young and beautiful companion Ilona. The concierge has already nutted out the Countess' identity and danger and tries through her glamour to send this message to the newlyweds who only see sophistication and style. Sounds like a holiday worth at least one good postcard. What can go wrong does and that's this movie.

Daughters of Darkness is a chapter in Belgian director Harry Kumel's bridge from documentary to feature films. At first glance it might remind the Eurogenre fan of the likes of Jess Franco or Jean Rollin with its lush visuals and confident erotica. While there is the Sadism of both and the melancholy of the latter, this stands out from both as an entry in the lesbian vampire side genre (sound like a joke but it's true). The seduction at the centre of the film is not just a path to the actors shedding their kit as much as a fable of the violence or parasitism of the act. A scene in which the Countess literally massages an account from Stefan or the ugly deeds of the ancestral Countess Barthory shows her tasting and savouring Stefan's violence while his new bride screams for them to stop the story. And her reaction is not just for the details to end but the clear carnality in the telling: she's furiously jealous.

And this is not that generic a genre piece as becomes clear as soon as we realise that we won't be seeing how they do the fang thang. There is more trauma in the call Stefan makes to his ex and it is made of deadly conversation. As a battle of wills or good and evil there's less goth on screen than personal politics: it's less Count Yorga and more Knife in the Water. And while ploit details might seem sparse here I won't go further than I have with them. In any case the strength of this horror of manners piece is the atmosphere that allows the multilingual cast to perform capably in English.Around them is the freezing beach and the big, hibernating resort they are in. It might even be an exhausted Europe. A long direct look by the Countess later in the film straight into the camera and into us suggests that her own bloodied immortality might be weighing a little too heavily, like a supermodel or a rockstar who has heard one too many nitpicks about her advancing years taking her from her trade.

This film sits comfortably beside a reef of arthouse horror from its time that steered a reckless course between cinephilia and exploitation. The best of these are easy to rewatch and the worst are forgettable but for a good decade filmmakers in that niche of Europe were staging a gentle stylistic coup. Compare and contrast the past fifteen years of the belly slashing and skin flaying screams of the New French Extremity. Those ones pretty much never get (or need) a second view. Meanwhile there's a swag of these, as beautiful as they are troubling which never stops being a flavoursome mix.

1971@50: LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

A woman sits in a rowboat near the shore of a lake. She faces away from us and we hear her thoughts ask if what she has just been through is real or imagined. Cut to days before as she, Jessica, is being driven along with her husband and a friend to a family house in the country for some rest and rec. Authentic rest n rec, actually, as Jessica is just out from a spell in a mental health facility and needs some seriously fresh air. Along the way and on approaching the house she has glimpses, phantasms, of things that make her doubt herself. Figures in the landscape that disappear on a second look. Something just under the surface of the lake. When they get to the house she sees a pair of legs at the top of the stairs that run off. Her husband, Duncan, assuages her, "I saw it, too" and runs after the intruder along with the friend, Woody. They catch up with a young woman, a hippy drifter who was just going to stay until she rested up. She's not so threatening so she stays for dinner and the morning after the vote is to let her stay. Oh, she's Emily.

The rest of this is detail as we find out more about Emily and why someone in a family portrait from generations before looks exactly like her. Oh and why the locals are bandaged and blissed out as well as honking rednecks. Oh and who the eerie girl from the turn of the last century is trying to get their attention. This film does not claim to be anything other than a horror movie but the lack of tension as some of the more violent moments happen, whether through ineptitude or by design, gather a numb (not numb-ing) mesmerism.

What tension there is lies in how much of this is taking place in Jessica's fragile awareness as her head gets louder with whispers. Emily who might be a strange form of vampire or succubus is also disconcertingly of the present time and convincingly everyday, however seductive. Duncan does seem to care deeply for Jessica but a few phantasms later also seems to be using that as a mask for his steady drift into lust for Emily. The pace is slow. Sometimes that feels like art and sometimes it feels like inexperience. 

But then there are aspects which are deliberate. The electronic score variously shrieks, charms or weighs down with a stark drone or pulse, nothing like you'd expect from the rustic setting, however steeped it is in genre. The somatised yokels in the town seem to value their plasters and bandaids like a village of proto-Cronenbergian  new flesh zombies. Bingo! That, as I write it, is what I'm looking at: this film from 1971 looks like Shivers, Rabid or Videodrome from years later. 

It's on par with another anomalous horror film from the same year The Brotherhood of Satan which blended a pre-Exorcist occultism with a rough realism to great effect. The sense that this population-wide malady or cult effect will just keep spreading is only barely suggested but is present on screen. But then we end with Jessica still wondering about what she just experienced and if she didn't just concoct it with her brain chemistry. And you feel, when you see it that it only needs the tiniest flick of a Cronenberg for this tale to bloom into proto body horror - the close ups of the wounds you do get to see are ghastly for looking genuine rather than like fang punctures - and a cinematic revolution, however quiet.

1971@50: BILLY JACK

A western town at the dawn of the '70s. The local honcho rustles mustangs with the aid of some good ole boys and a local deputy. Well he would if Bill Jack would let him but the trim ex-green beret peacenik who appears on horseback with a particularly persuasive manner and shuts it all down. Not before the big guy's son has humiliated his dad in front of the totin' rustlers by refusing to take a shot at one of the horses. Meanwhile that deputy has to take delivery of his runaway daughter, back and knocked up from a year in the post-Manson Haight Ashbury. Her dad is so enamoured of her plight that he slaps her around and she's a runaway again. This time she heads to the local free school in the desert, initially to hide out but soon gets into the groove of the place. It's run by an old earth mother called Jean who both lived through the '60s and remembers it. That's why she is running the school. Vietnam is still on and the draft is still on. Nixon's in the White House and the '70s are about to rewrite America.

Over the credits comes a staccato flute figure which blooms into a pop fable about a brutal village that wages war with another for a treasure that is just a piece of paper that says "peace on Earth". We've already seen Billy Jack and we've also seen the guy who really runs the town and even his malcontent son. The song tells us what to expect. So, the plot here is a lot less to the fore than its character elements. Hippy vs straight, if you like. Rebel vs conformity. New vs old. 

And this is just a hair past the Woodstock generation and its more grounded than the freedom trek in Easy Rider. There are things at stake. Sometimes they are drawn with a broad and sloppy brush but sometimes we get nuance, detail and some real cinema to tell the story. Billy Jack is like a lot of loner western heroes in that he seeks his own way but is drawn into others and has to confront that with violence. As with Shane he does it to protect the vulnerable. But it's 1971 not 1871 and there's no way of getting on a chestnut mare and riding over the horizon. It's the era of war and unrest on the news and iconic demons of the establishment in faceless riot gear. We can cheer all the small victories we want (and there are some glorious such moments on screen here) but we know how the battle ends and that, like the war that never seemed to end over in South East Asia, the big guns are backed by big money and power. That admission is what lifts Billy Jack from the mass of hippy vs cop exploitationers that rubbed shoulders with the bikie movies and the rest of it. Antonioni had had a decent stab at suggesting a new kind of American legend in the then recent Zabriskie Point but this one dragged the old mythology from the screen that gave birth to it and placed it around the corner on the day you saw it.

Which is why Billy Jack survived the worst of my uniform anti-hippy stance during the punk wars: it works and keeps working despite me wanting it to fail. I saw it as a kid in a family that seemed to be half hippy (upper middle class hippies, like they all seemed to be but still...) and the notions of social justice were welling up around us. I was indulged to grow my hair enough to be taunted by a pair of pencil sharpened local kids who taunted me with the word hippy as though that was going to work. I can remember stopping in the holiday Kombi by a beach and a posse of the local crew cuts came to stare at us longhairs in the front seats. The appearance of being on the other side was enough for them. We were the flagrant enemies of the great Australian way and our punishment was to receive the stares of cretins for the term of our natural lives. Well, that lasted until the late '70s when all of them had long hair to go with their neat casual attire and I started cutting mine to declare myself gleefully back in the margins. It wasn't just hair, of course, it was the whole damn culture and that's what got us roused in the cinema when this movie was on and then again when it ran on late night tv. You can get rady to scoff at the hamfisted message of peace but as soon as you see how it's really turning out you have to ditch all that.

I hung around the radio if One Tin Soldier came on and I wished you could get it played more. My sister sang the song that even in my not-yet-ten mind was a cringe: "When will Billy Love Me?" And now, most recently, watching it again as a fifty year old movie, I sat up and followed the moments of the story, the acting that was better than I recalled and the fable that worked a treat however much it was compromised by hokey ritual or vintage jive talk. The two stoners skit and the role reversal improv with the town elders are still funny. The end is still sobering. And way back, the sound of my voice along with everyone else in the hip Miss Samson's music class on a lazy afternoon at school as the glare burned out the North Queensland scenery:

Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend

Do it in the name of heaven. You can justify it in the end

There won't be any trumpets blowing come the judgment day

On the bloody morning after 

One tin soldier rides away

Nothing, whether I admitted it or not, got me readier for punk rock than that hippy chorus.

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: 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.

1971@50: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Mum shook at the memory of the gang rape. Dad didn't believe in the treatment but considered it typical of government programs. There was a tension in the room when they talked about it with dinner guests. One of those, a man old years old (I was nine and couldn't tell) defended the film for its irony but I couldn't tell that either so all I registered was that he was being wicked and grinned a lot. It was my first experience of a controversial film and I wouldn't see it for over twenty years.

For the meanwhile please imagine the speedy synth version of William Tell Overture. Kubrick: I get Dr Strangelove when it plays on TV but my focus is Peter Sellers; the tv ad for Clockwork Orange intrigues me with its adjectives from reviews making it sound indescribable; people praise 2001; Barry Lyndon promos are among the most boring I have seen; I am unexcited by The Shining and then Full Metal Jacket so don't see them until they're on video; Clockwork comes out on video in the '90s and I watch it with Swedish subtitles; a Kubrick retrospective brings all the disciples out of the woodwork and they out themselves as bores, replaying what journalists have said; DVD and then Blu-ray bring the movies into clear definition and I watch Clockwork as a 50 year old film.

Burgess: at my sister's encouragement I read the novel (local library's copy has glossary and extra chapter - more later) and then everything else by him I can find. At the time I was going through dystopian books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. I ricochet from Burgess' novels to his promotion of James Joyce. When I think on't I find the comparison between Kubrick and Joyce helpful (if not always complimentary to the former). 

Ok? Good.

So, at the end of Easter 2021, I slip the Blu-Ray of A Clockwork Orange into the ol' player and sit back to enjoy. Picture on the newish TV is deep and rich. Sound is ace. I love the Carlos synthesised classical music and how it plays under the West-Side Story style blue and red fields of the opening. And it's the same movie I've got used to. No better, no worse.

It's not the old process shots. I prefer them original. The driving scene looks like back projection and only gets worse with higher resolution. The pop art modernism of the club and interiors is more of its own time than futuristic but that's more a conscious comment on the classism of the society in the film. All that is fine.

The film is reasonably close to the novel and maybe that's the issue. The sets and scenes offer solid cinema with bold choices and technical virtuosity. The casting is spot on: McDowell is as perfect as Alex as David Bennent was for Oskar in The Tin Drum. We follow Alex's progress from his ultraviolent youth, through the alienating prison life, the institutionalised violence of his "cure" and so on and all of this goes to Burgess' blueprint. But where the novel is compelling the film gets colder by the minute. There is so much detachment on screen, so much distance between Kubrick, his work and us that the film itself seems to develop its own sociopathy. Is this method-filmmaking? Maybe, but that just comes across as a little desperate. We are meant to be horrified by the final shot and Alex's parting line but the horror is of the film rather than Alex.

The flawless face of A Clockwork Orange is that of the obsessive compulsive rather than the auteur (patience, patients, I'm aware of how clumsily I'm lifting those terms from real medicine), the colourless perfection of the narcissist rather than the self-reflection of the sage. If you think I'm missing the point about the film being as cold as its anti-hero read the novel. The approach works well in the later Full Metal Jacket when the military realm is examined and is apt for the horror of The Shining. But here (and in the unnerving sheen of Barry Lyndon) it resists its viewers.

The original edition of the novel had a twenty-first chapter that showed an aging Alex and his droogs slowing down and ready to move on into the all consuming grey of normal life. The U.S. publisher insisted on its removal for that market and the copy Kubrick read ended with Alex's arch assertion. Burgess was writing about mods and rockers, teddy boys, gangs and subcultures and their inevitable absorption by the great flow of nowt that will keep them alive. It was both a candid celebration of the freedom of youth in extremis and an admission of the weight of age (I don't say wisdom, mind).

But here's another thing. As exalted as Kubrick was and however he might have enjoyed his place on Olympus he was still making films for his time. What did A Clockwork Orange look like in 1971? How did it feel? Did its punters stagger from the cinema numb from assault, dazzled by the virtuosity? A Clockwork Orange in 1971 was, apart from anything else, like the novel and the phenomenon that nourished it, rock music and like Kubrick still himself, young. Who among us sits down in the comfy cushioned seat thinking they are about to watch one for the ages? You might think it afterwards but you don't expect to, you're just seeing a movie. And here in my Victorian era living room with the glorious delivery of Blu-Ray am I, passing sentence on a cry of youth as though it would ever sound fresh at fifty. It's not just that all films are not equal they're not conceived of equally either. I could go on about how much warmer Paths of Glory or even Eyes Wide Shut are (I am one of the very few people I know who really likes that one) but A Clockwork Orange and Alex were not trying to be warm. Kubrick had previously taken us to the moon and then beyond the infinite; we could at least let him take us to Leeds. Is it cold? So it's cold. It'll live without my love.