NETWORK @ 50

When news anchor Howard Beale gets retired early for bad ratings he announces that he will kill himself on air on his last day. This sets off a chain of events that will leave media practices from the mid-'70s to beyond today in deep question. 

It's a film unusual in that its by line in the title sequence features not the director or producer but the writer. Director Sidney Lumet was already an accomplished veteran with the likes of Dog Day Afternoon and Failsafe (and far too many more to mention here) and while his direction is superlative, Chayefsky takes the big credit deservedly. Never has such an overly talky movie with such wildly unrealistic speeches felt so natural. He'd already had success on Broadway and Network came out of the deep dark well of experiences in early television he'd been through. These words kill presumptions.

So, because Howard's action gets his friend and boss the sack for allowing it, he is prey to the new and viciously ambitious entertainment director Diana Christensen who wants to turn the news hour into a crowd pleasing rabble rousing. She's already in negotiation with a terrorist group to give them an hour weekly. Her boss, pugilistic corporate thug, encourages this as it allows him to set in for greater control. And that old friend and former boss? He gets his job back due to boardroom politics and is predated by Diana (godess of the hunt, after all) for more personal reasons: no, not love (although there's winter/summer sex involved) but as a kind of contact high.

Meanwhile Howard's explosive rants have become the most popular thing on TV. While he's doing all that soaring close to the sun, he must have forgotten what happened to Icarus. One tirade takes him there and piques the corporate generalissimo Mr Jensen who delivers a deafening sermon on the world of money and how it has rendered notions such as nations and individuality into thin veils. Howard's deal-stopping broadside about foreign ownership and the effect it will have on the delivery of the truth was too far. Jensen's opening salvo to him from the end of a boardroom table is: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won't have it!"

Howard, no longer able to tell if his illusion of the face of God and the blast he's just received are separate things, goes back on the air and bums out the nation with Jensen's "reality. The ratings head for the Earth's core. So, what are we going to do about Howard?

Peter Finch as Howard Beale was the first Posthumous recipient of the Best Actor Oscar. There had been other posthumous awards but that death did not prevent the accolade for such a personal-appearance-dependent gong is impressive (considering how the ones who just don't turn up are always thought weird). While he isn't effectively the lead role (that's more like William Holden, more later) his fiery turn is at the centre of every scene. His range from whimpering, drunken pentitence to screaming public admonition is breathtaking. 

A lesser piece would make him cynical but this film doesn't work that way. Beale is convinced of his righteousness to the extent that he is blind to the exploitation that is driving him to broadcast it. Diana delivers a projection of the news hour as rating raking juggernaut in a turn that is unmistakably sexual (even throwing in a quick watch check which I think is quoting Klute). She's only partially doing that for Hackett (though she knows he's impenetrable from that angle) the rest of it is everything else that she is. Mr Jensen's epistle to the idealists is so sincere it could convince the basest of cynics and does, in fact, turn Howard. And Max Shumacher (am extraordinary William Holden) whose own cynicism is jettisoned when he understands what's at stake if he does not act with the purest of decency. The celebrated fight with his wife when he leaves her for Diana (Beatrice Straight's five minutes, here, won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) could be from Strindberg or Chekov (Tolstoy gets a namecheck).

Faye Dunaway won her Best Actress award because, however grotesque her snakedancing turns can get, the moments of vulnerability in her showdown with Max. She grew up on TV. To Max's generation that is hard to imagine but there she is, terrifying proof of ethics drawn from the Wylie Coyote. Intense, yes, but never a caricature. Her other team mate, Robert Duvall is also on eleven, building to explosive outbursts. The moment where he asks a colleague for confirmation and interrupts the answer before it's a syllable old is still funny. As overdriven as things get (and they do) this film never allows its performances to burst the latex into disaster. Nothing gets regrettably whacky.

That is the realm of Lumet's direction. This talky boardroom satire played as straight as All The President's Men (same year) is never less than cinematic. The control room in the TV studio feels documentary authentic. Mr Jensen's lamplined meeting table is a real one. The Manhattan towers visible through office windows are real. Add the conviction of the performances that are rendering speeches that no one would make in real life and you have what a movie looked like at the height of New Hollywood and still does when the crews go into the darkened corners of capitalism's homeground. But then, you also have the escalating scale of the scene where Howard yells his catchphrase, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" and demands his audience at home do so along with him. Teh Schumachers are watching at home and the daughter goes to the window to see. Heads are poking out of the massive apartment block windows, getting soaked by the rain, flashed by lightning as the shots just grow in size. This would never have just been a filmed play with Lumet, it is, as usual, pure cinema.

Since the 2000s Network has been cited as the film that prophesied the future with an accurate prediction of what became reality TV and its instant mass appeal. But it's also a significant timeline point in the dialogue about the notion of the post-truth world. When you think of Howard's rants it doesn't take much to dismantle them. He admits, at several points, that he doesn't have the answers, that, really, he's just angry. All he knows, he says, is that first, you've got to get mad. His stirring speech about the Saudi deal that gets his audience to stuff theWhite House with telegrams of protest works. 

It doesn't need to work because it's true, though, it works because they trust his anger. He cautions them against relying on TV to tell the truth but can give them no better advice than to go to trusted sources. That's still the line in the age of AI, deep fakes, the blurred line between information and the claim of an influencer. The health crisis of COVID-19 was corrupted into a civil rights crisis by people who "did their own research" by plunging into online confrimation bias. Truth as an absolute value is vulnerable to degradation as long as complicity with flattering untruth can hold sway. That's as old as human settlement but it just keeps surfacing. Tim Robbins' satire of a rapidly rising rightist demagogue Bob Roberts in the '90s is forgotten when Network is remembered because Network went as far as that blurring point, the extent where it is genuinely terrifying. We're there yet again. I just know that, first, we've got to get mad.

Viewing notes: I watched the recent Criterion 4K release which has scrubbed up beautifully. They even fixed the weird chorusing in the audio during once scene that I can remember from the movie on VHS and later digital presentations. Beautiful authentic grain with the Dolby Vision pass and audio that keeps things to a controlled vintage state (apart from that unusual for Criterion fix). You can rent it from Prime or watch it already paid for with a subscription and its rentable from Apple. My Criterion was expensive but it's one of my favourite films so I ponied up. For other pyhsical media copies, you could try an online market, chance it at the op shops or one of the online retailers. 

THE OMEN @ 50 (Spoilers)

Diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Rome Robert Thorne rushes to the hospital where his wife has just given birth. Tragically, the baby is dead. A creepy priest at the place offers a spare they have whose mother died in childbirth at the same moment. Bizarrely, Robert agrees and brings the imposter to his wife's bed. She thinks it's the son she's just given birth to. Soon after, Robert comes home and announces that he's just been appointed Ambassador to Britain. Little Damien, playing with his toys on the floor, is already rising up in the world. All going well, he could be installed in hisjob as AntiChrist by his twenties.

Well, no one knows that yet. Actually there are a few who do. A strange priest visits Robert and begs him to take communion and warns him about his adoptive son. Robert still hasn't got around to sharing this with his wife Kathy who still thinks Damien is her natural child. Oh, and at the boy's fifth birthday party, his nanny calls out her devotion to Damien before hanging herself somewhat publicly. And there's a gruff black dog hanging around who seems to be on the same payroll. Damien smiles and waves to it.

The priest begs a meeting with Robert after telling him that Kathy is in danger. This doesn't end any better than the other encounters after the Father recites a verse about theend of the world, kind of pretending that it comes from Revelation (it doesn't, there's nothing in Revelation that rhymes and is phrased so goofily). When the priest moves off heis caught in an electrical storm that seems to be targeting him. He finds a church but the gate is locked and a long iron spike from the roof is dislodged by lightning and impales him before getting struck by lighting to add the coup de grace.

Now that's just strange as a photographer who's been on Robert's case has taken a lot of photos of the priest and all of them feature what looks like a ghostly javelin going through his body. His pictures of the nanny before she hanged herself also have a presaging mark. He meets with Robert and adds a picture of himself with a line going through his neck. Looks like the priest was on to something.

Ok, so I don't normally put more plot in these blogs than serves the premise but The Omen is more plotty than The Exorcist and needs a little extra push. Add some high profile actors from the era, a whompingly gothic score by Jerry Goldsmith and you get a perfect example of  The Exorcist's effect on mainstream film culture in the 1970s. It's taken a step further by featuring not a demon possessed child but the Beast of the Apocalypse in child form. 

So, rather than William Friedkin's relatively subtle progression from happy kid to head spinning monster we get yound Damien's rage fit at approaching a cathedral, primates in a wildlife park attacking the car he's in and even mild mannered giraffes fleeing from him. The growling dog still loves him and the replacement nanny (a fearsome Billie Whitelaw) brings the pooch into the house to protect the boy. 

While the pacing might drag for anyone young enough to think that contemporary jumpscare fests constitute cinematic horror, Richard Donner and crew do some fancy footwork building the arc of tension to the heartrending final act. The Omen is a fable of power, of the mighty being brought low and the bespoke paths of empowered chosen folk ever more concrete. Gregory Peck in late middle age brings all of his big voiced gravitas to Robert, containing the same wrath he had after that spit in To Kill a Mockingbird. Once he knows what he must do we see his gut churning dilemma on his stony face.

David Warner as the photographer carries his doom like he's come from an audition rejection. Lee Remick whose screen demise made it into a Go-Betweens song, is the centre of personal strength in the tale as her growing realisation that her son isn't her son and what he is horrifies her. Patrick Troughton, the second Dr Who, as the priest might strike some as overplaying but he is fighting cancer and trying to prevent Armageddon, so ... 

I've been a little lighter than usual as this big ticket horror item doesn't need my help. It is a consummate example of what can happen when Hollywood touches a market pulse and follows through. Then again, between The Omen and The Exorcist, we did get a few generations of mostly blaggy sequels and a trove of copies. And then the no budget Halloween showed all that up and changed everything. When the big end of town regrouped in the '90s to produce more glossy horror they ended up getting twice as embarrassed as the credit card budgeted Blair Witch Project cleaned up. 

My point there is that horror, unlike war movies, action flicks, rom coms and Oscar-worthy dramas, never really stays as scary as it promises the more money that gets hurled at it. The Omen, for all its hokey mythologising, is a solid horror movie, letting the increasingly clear stakes provide their own momentum. It wasn't the last high  profile American horror of the decade but it might have been the last durable one. It can't compete with the likes of Halloween for leanness and raw power but it doesn't embarrass itself  either. Other film markets were busy showing that dream logic and ultraviolence could outrun carefully plotted Apocalypses. But for the Anglophones The Omen suited.

I was too young to see it when it came out but caught up with it in tv and video as a Uni student, along with a bunch of other '70s greats. It got me reading Revelation, if nothing else, and I liked the style of any big movie that could get down and dirty with a big supernatural bedtime story. That's still what it feels like to me.

Viewing notes: I watched my old Blu-Ray of this one which is pretty well presented. It's one of themovies I have where I'll always get the best available. This is its anniversary year so maybe we'll see it come out as a 4K. Otherwise,  Disney+ has this free (with a subscription) and Prime and Apple will rent it to you. It is not available locally on physical media.

GOD TOLD ME TO @ 50

Unrelated murders happen in quick succession across New York, the only link between them is that the killer always says that God told them to do it. Detective Peter Nicholas just keeps finding questions under the answers but then does find another link: all the killers had spoken to a young man with golden hair. They can't describe his face. One witness says that the man had no face. As Nicholas moves deeper into the mystery he finds what might be his salvation or the opening beats of the Apocalypse.

Larry Cohen's genre bending quest film is a police procedural that gets bitten by a supernatural theme before things get really cosmic. This is from the filmmaker who gave us a killer baby in It's Alive, toxic sweets in The Stuff and an ancient winged serpent in Q. Those were all original ideas and Cohen made a career from exploitation movies that were packed with concepts. So, in addition to the procedural thread, Nicholas' odd marital and extra marital situation, his devotion to Catholicism but his claim of detachment from it, we get a plot that riffs on the Von Daniken God is an astronaut idea to play out to the suggestion of eventual cataclysm. Cohen declared the source material for God Told Me To was the Bible, that he had never known a more violent character in literature than God himself.

But this film is an exploitation movie. It was also released under the title Demon. The Exorcist was only three years old at the time and the possession subgenre was cleaning up at cinemas. But the original title has a tabloid force to it that does a lot of the work. And Cohen was careful not to blame the Devil. The scenes where the killers are confessing shows them chillingly calm and rational. They just don't see what the problem was.

Tony Lo Bianco's Peter Nicholas is reckless to begin with but the forces in the tale that give him self-conflict take a toll on him. Lo Bianco demonstrates great stress and pounding frustration as the initial investigation reveals only infuriatingly difficult questions. As he approaches the difficult truth of his journey and a sense of his personal power becomes evident, his confidence warms and ices us down. It's a performance you might not expect in a film like this.

Around this, the plot races, establishing its anchors and pivots rapidly, ensuring a smooth and quick series of developments. Cohen used everything he had as a film maker to do this. The opening traffic sniping was done guerrilla style without permits and the setpiece at the police parade (with a young Andy Kaufmann in an unforgettable walk-on) was matched between documentary footage Cohen shot and close ups deftly shot and inserted. Handheld sequences are used to heighten unease and add more documentarian vibes. One account featuring a UFO was pieced together from the old sci-fi show Space 1999 but doesn't look like it. What does look like itself is New York City and it's the grimy endless metropolis that also played itself in the same year's Taxi Driver. Cohen takes us into a realm of local religious festivals with Catholic fetishism, real condemned high rise tenaments, and streets that never seem to get sunlight. It's like neither more than superficially but this story lives in the same world as The French Connection and The Omen (another 1976 release).

I first saw this as Demon on Brisbane late night TV in the early '80s and marvelled at how the genre turned on a five cent piece but it all still felt like the same movie. When things get cosmic from halfway through, there is no contradiction. The sight of the ethereal (and scary) Bernard Phillips rests as effortlessly in the look and feel as the visit to Sylvia Sidney's abduction victim and implant receiver. Sandy Dennis' exhausted but manipulative wife could be a few blocks away. When the time comes for whizbang special effects we get physical performance and lighting. There is peril inside a burning building which might make you worry for the cast and crew for its authenticity. Cohen might have been judged a B-movie hack but takes the hard road to get this story told.

There wasn't an option for buying a copy of a film wasn't an option then but I vowed to be in the queue of the Schonell or Valhalla or any art cinemas such as they were, to see it for real. Decades later, when the market expected punters to buy the new digital home video movies for themselves, I sought a copy of the Blue Underground special ed. Then, I saw and heard it in as close to a cinema experience as I could have dreamed of. It was a marvel all over again. Larry Cohen left as a few years ago and when I knew of it I garthered a few friends to watch the 4K, some had seen it, others not, and we talked about it all night after the end credits rolled.

Viewing notes: I watched my Blue Underground 4K with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound and luxuriated in this film's look and feel and the weight of its conceits. This is not locally available in physical media but can be bought overseas in fine editions. It can be hired through Prime for $2.99.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 @ 50

When a raid on an outlying police station ends in the theft of assault weapons and the death of gang members, the gang vows revenge. The next morning, newly commissioned Police Lieutenant Ethan Bishop starts his day with the assignment of taking care of decommissioned police station for its last night. A man is driving with his daughter to pick up her nanny through the streets of the same rundown neighbourhood as the station and the gang headquarters. The gang prowls the streets in a car, armed with those assault weapons. The girl is shot dead getting an ice cream. The man escapes the scene and, after some near lethal encounters makes his way, raving in shock to the station. The gang can kill two birds with one stone. Oh, and a group of hard criminals is being transported by bus including a notorious murderer and a very sick prisoner. It's not the babysitting gig Lt. Bishop expected but then he did tell his boss that he wanted to be a hero.

Reading that, it's a ton of plot but watching the movie it never feels like it. John Carpenter's second feature film but first that didn't begin as a student film finds him ready to rock. All those narrative threads above are woven seamlessly through a personable first act which ends in atrocity. The seige story that follows forms the pattern for Carpenters next decade finds place here as a compelling play of tension and character development. Assault is overshadowed by both the cheeky space adventure prior to it (Dark Star) and the horror masterpiece that followed it (Halloween) but it offers great rewards for the repeat viewer.

A significant debt, aside from Carpenter's confessed Rio Bravo, is the independent source point Night of the Living Dead. This might well have guided the casting of a black actor for Lt. Bishop (Carpenter doesn't mention it in his commentary) but it definitely suggested the middle act discusison of whether to go upstairs or to the basement for best defence. While the gang members are not zombies (the sleek choreography of their movements gives them an extra spike of threat) the sense that they are as relentless drives their scenes. They are also, poignantly multi-racial. Closing in on an ethnicity would have distracted from their purpose as pure antagonists.

However, once you understand these precursors any overriding influence of the history of cinema vanishes under Carpenter's confident helming of the action and tension. If you think of Dark Star as the college film that escaped, Assault emerges as among the strongest of debut features. This is also where Carpenter began his practice of shooting in the widescreen ratio of 2.35:1 to add a sense of cinematic value. At no point, however pulpy or B-movie it gets, the film never looks less than prime.

Then there's the world building. The Los Angeles invented suburb of Anderson is all bungalows and dried untended lawns. The gangs have driven everyone indoors and the paved empty streets look post apocalyptic. The comparative cosiness of the station offers visual sanctuary until it becomes a target and the quarry of the gang and then it resembles something more like a disintegrating prison. The sense of abandonment by the rest of the city's law enforcement adds a clear saddening hopelessness as the night progresses.

On characterisation, this is a film with dual leads. We have already met Lt. Bishop but it is his nominal antithesis who takes co-ownership of centre screen. Napolean Wilson, the mass murderer accepts his judgement and potentially lethal punishment and it is strangely disarming. He is the chief wit in the film and the moment of respect that passes between him and Bishop gets us hankering to see them bounce off each other.

Austin Stoker's Bishop is a strong leader but beset by doubts on his first job as an officer. His fluent physicality deepens his openness. Darwin Joston as Wilson manages to squeeze charisma out of his every dialogue exchange and maintains a strange mix of effortlessness and intensity. Laurie Zimmer as Leigh is Carpenter's first properly drawn female character. Zimmer plays her as someone discovering the reason she has bravery and confidence when faced with lethality. Carpenter would get Jamie Lee Curtis to do to opposite in Halloween two years later. In this early go, Zimmer gives Carpenter an early win. She's magnetic on screen and the swelling connection between her and Wilson feels deliciously dangerous. 

So, if John Carpenter's first fully fledged outing as a feature film maker stepped beyond good for a rookie to announce the emergence of a stylistically easy action guy where did he have to progress. The next decade would be a career yoyo with global hits like Halloween but anti-zeitgeist flops like The Thing. Cartoony adventure with Big Trouble in Little China but ideas-heavy sleepers like Prince of Darkness or the prescient They Live filled his screens. His self-effacing blu-ray commentary leaves his description of Assault as an exploitation film but we are looking at an engaging, characterful action feast that can be gripping and eerie by turns. Oh, it's also one of his strongest music scores, fully synthesised, brooding, menacing and relentless. When weirdo trip hopper Tricky used it for his Bomb the Bastards rap, he just let the theme music play without adding anything more than his own vocals. That's a bow of tribute.

Viewing notes: I watched my excellent Umbrella Blu-Ray of this film and hope that someone puts out a 50th anniversary 4K. Meanwhile it can be rented from Apple, Prime and YouTube. Umbrella's BD (which includes a director's cut of Dark Star as an extra) is out of print. 

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST @ 50

R.P. McMurphy engineers himself out of a prison stay for what he thinks is an easier way of doing his time, in psychiatric custody. He spends the first few days sussing out the navigation but comes up against Nurse Ratched who leads the troubled therapy circles. A little testing and error later he pits himself against the nurse to the point where things just have to bend or break. Who's going to win?

Milos Forman's first Anglophone and Hollywood feature after his defection from then Czechoslovakia (how's that for exposition stuffing) is an adaptation of a popular novel of the same title by Ken Kesey. The 1962 book of authority and dissent, of institutionalism and individuality appealed to a generation waking to the controls and state paranoia of their parents' generation. Kesey avoids overcooking his characters' fealty to these sides to provide a more difficult story for deeper reading. Between the book and the film, Cuckoo's Nest also succeeded as a play. This took Broadway with its star powered Kirk Douglas as McMurphy and visionary casting of the young Gene Wilder as chronically twisted Billy Bibbit.

Forman's adaptation of the book and play was the end of a decades long attempt by rights owner Kirk Douglas to bring it to the screen. This is a good story and worth your time. It involves Douglas' son Michael taking the production reins and Forman's defection to get a movie made (not that simple but you get the idea). The thing that Forman brought to the table was his life experience of Soviet oppression that allowed him to not just pit but understand the authority of Nurse Ratched. That made the difference. Even the once touted Hal Ashby as a director could not provide such comprehension.

With this, we don't just get the breakthrough of Jack Nicholson as JACK but a counterpart that is not only solid but rounded and more difficult to battle. This won Louise Fletcher her Oscar and the film its reputation. Without it, the film would have collapsed into the kind of schmalz of Dead Poet's Society in the next decade (which thinly veiled populist authoritarianism). The daily constraint in the beige world of the hospital, the paternalism of its bosses and the intimidating gentleness of Nurse Ratched create a quietly terrifying world that, with a very few tweaks, had been Forman's. I know that most commentary about this film centres on the performances and their impressive dynamics from warmth to violence but my most recent viewing brought out so clearly what Forman added.

One such is the meticulous feed of the score. The diegetic Mantovani strings music intended to calm the patients (but really to mask their sound) rolls out like the whitewash of the walls. Glass panels might add sunlight to the ward but they also promote observation. And then when rebellion and violence break the score tap gets suddenly shut off and we mostly hear a documentary cacophony. It's unsettling. 

Oh, of course I have to talk about the central opposing performances. 

Jack Nicholson had already found the screen persona that he moved into permanently. There are hints in his Roger Corman roles but Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces in 1970 saw the finishing touches applied to the agent of danger he became. Cuckoo's Nest was where that emerged for the biggest audience he ever had. To criticise him for adopting a single career-long performance is to criticise Christopher Walken or Laura Dern. When Nicholson works as JACK it's because he's in a role that exploits that (as opposed to an absorber like De Niro). The difference here is that the Jack role is given more than its usual two dimensions. It's not the constant crazy on 11 that we get in The Shining (which works there, to be honest) but a constant, restless self-restraint that is sure to disintegrate into explosion. It works as a complex role because we know (even if retrospectively) that he's making JACK! Jack.

In the blue corner, Louise Fletcher is what Americans call a character actor and what all other cultures call a good actor. She gives Nurse Ratched the deceptively pleasant control mania that serves middle managers the world over, a kind of fragile benignity that masks incurable contempt. Fletcher said that she based her performance on the way white matriachs treated black people in her native Alabama. There is an extra chill that comes from this knowledge but it's gravy when you see it play out in this film. She pegs MacMurphy as a disruptor and, as scenes progress, she learns to play the others against him, recognising that his success is entirely dependent on their approval. By the time chaos pushes this strategem off the screen she is left unmasked and cruel, her drive to control in command despite herself. It is a performance which you temporarily bypass your apathy to industry awards and start cheering with the rest. It wasn't just an Oscar; she got a BAFTA and a Golden Globe to boot. (I had the same reaction to F. Murray Abraham's big win for Forman's Amadeus a decade later). 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a cuckoo's egg of a film, one that, amidst a decade of disruption during the New Hollywood of Scorsese and Coppola etc., it quietly reset a Young Turk bravado through values like dignity and individuality. These qualities frame Forman's big canvas The Fireman's Ball but even there he exercised restraint this time, knowing it was more important than making a loud entrance. It did more than just forge a good movie, it made his career.

Viewing notes: For this watch I gladly put my recently bought Warner's steelbook of the film and watched it is splendid 4K. Don't want to pay that much? It's streaming for rent on four services. You need this one among your notches.

TOMMY @ 50

All of The Who mime to the audio of Elton John's band in the
Pinball Wizard scene. That's Elton in the background.

Tommy suffers a childhood trauma so profound that his senses shut down. Doesn't end there. He's bullied by his cousin and molested by his uncle. None of the gurus, psychedelic shamen or medical experts can draw him from his sensory isolation. Then again, he's developed an inner life that none of them could dream of. He travels and plays inside his head, past all the abuse, and finds that his skill at pinball can connect him to the world. Is there hope for him to find his way back? What will happen if he meets the world again, strengthened by his inner vision but seeing and hearing the world of his abusers?

Pete Townshend's rock opera changed The Who's career from its place as a second tier British rock players to the heroes of festivals and stadium tours. They toted the song cycle for years of touring. There were theatrical adaptations with casts and music rearranged rearranged for orchestra and the mystique of the opera, aided by the trend that entered similarly esoteric territory like Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell. The original album and the adaptations sold by the million. The next step of putting it on the big screen was not only inevitable, it had already been written and rewritten by co-manager Kit Lambert but relations between him and the band had deteriorated and his screenplays were adjudged failures.

Enter Ken Russell, enfant terrible of British Filmmaking, whose biographies of great composers could turn geefully anachronistic or vulgar and whose adaptations of literature like Women in Love pushed the by-then D.H. Lawrence back into the public imagination. And that's before you get to The Devils. Russell liked the messianic story of the second half and imported ideas from his own unproduced Poppy Day into the adaptation. He also plugged the many holes in the narrative that Townshend had left in the too hard box to keep the narrative flowing. 

Russell did not like rock music but threw himself into what he did understand which was opera. And just as Wagner or Verdi did, he stuffed this opera full of pop and classical references and as much colour as he could throw at the screen. From Frankenstein to Teddy Boys, from Warners cartoons to sombre animation, from mimed rock performance to proto music videos, all he knew and much he didn't made it, brick by brick into this extravaganza. If Jesus Christ Superstar had Roman soldiers in U.S. issue helmets, Russell put Tommy in a hang glider in a scene of ascension. If King Herod could sing a ragtime number, the pinball champion could play a small keyboard at his machine while wearing gigantic Doc Martens lace-ups. TV commercials, dream sequences, hallucinatory set pieces and even, poignantly, a minutes-long cut to black as Tommy is sexually assaulted by his uncle. If Townshend wanted justice for his brainchild he could not have chosen better.

But does it, reaching through five decades, still appeal the way it did as a mega hit at the cinema on first release? In parts admirably with use of physical effects like the Cousin Kevin sequence or (more simply and affectingly) the image of the boy Tommy swirling playfully in the shallows with his head literally boxed in. The iron maiden drug injection machine that the Acid Queen confines him to is saved from a contemporary drugs-are-bad tone because of its clear ritualistic purpose. The Healer's church of Marylin is as creepy as that sounds. Ok, it's time to talk about the cast.

The Acid Queen is played by a possessed Tina Turner either dominating the attic room or her trade or spasming with a decidedly non-sexual energy. Elton John's turn as the pinball champ shows him shining in the role, in a costume that constains him to standing still (one wrong move in those boots would have ended in hospital for months). Even Eric Clapton whose impassive delivery as the Healer (with the Gibson guitar and The Who playing around him) gives him a duplicitous sincerity. Arthur Brow's screaming assistant at least seems to believe in the garbage he's spewing. As for Uncle Ernie, Keith Moon was form fit for the role of the leering reprobate, being disgusting and funny. And that's just the rock stars!

Oliver Reed struggles with his pitch but provides us with a modern Neanderthal Man whose brutality is more than masked by an innate sexiness. Anne Margaret is, against type, the providor of gravitas, adding pathos and fury to her torchy vocals. Of all of them, she is probably the one we get closest to. Paul Nicholas, at the time an actor with aspirations to pop stardom, overplays Cousin Kevin to perfection as an overgrown school bully.

And it is Roger Daltrey, the central and title role, who does manage to make the mostly impassive Tommy emote from within his closed self. He had described the character and his performance of the music as being the point at which he stopped just being the singer in the band and proceeded to build characters from a solid stage persona. His vocal performance throughout is, of course, stellar and goads his on screen incarnation to something like real acting. His is a poignant presence, placed fragilely at the peak of the story and its operatic claims. There might well have been singing actors who could take the role into more lofty places but Daltrey as the one who embodied the role in front of the Woodstock crowd and the masses at American mega venues, feels right and ready.

Ken Russell brought cinema to serve to fans and curious cinemagoers but was held aloft with great rock music, reimagined by Townshend to the kind of synthesiser-rich mid '70s rock without a note of nostalgia. It was a triumph and remains so. The band's second continuous narrative was realised a few years later when Quadrophenia came out. It was a different film more interested in the social drama of subculture than Townshend's grand scheme (more puzzling that Tommy). No one sang on screen and the sound of the tracks chosen for the score underlined rather than wove. Tommy, Townshend and Russell had probably already said as much as could be said for the collision of rock and opera. What was left to say? Grease? I'll take Tommy.

Oh, yes, I am aware that Cousin Kevin and Fiddle About were written by John Entwistle, not Pete Townshend. 

Viewing notes: I watched my Umbrella Blu-Ray of the film with a surround audio (not the quadrophonic original that had appeared on the old Superbit DVD). I think it's still available. Not available on local streaming, though. 

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW @ 50

After an opening when a pair of red lips against a black background sings Science Fiction Double Feature we jump straight into Brad and Janet who introduce themselves in song. A friend's wedding has inspired Brad to propose and she accepts. They then set off on a trip to visit their old high school science teacher (in whose class they met). The night is stormy and the road screams with motorcycles speeding past. Brad's car tyre bursts and they get out to find a phone. But where? Well, there is a light over at the Frankenstein place which is where they head to be changed irrevocably from the clean cut, Nixon voting suburbanites they are to .... Now, that would be telling.

Richard O'Brien's brainchild stage musical ran with sustained success for seven years on the London stage with continued performances from significant cast members. And that was the state of the cast and director (also from the original production) when the time to turn it into a movie came around. This was after the show flopped on Broadway and while the original run galloped on. Considering the fragile state of those circumstances, the production went ahead. Maybe, just maybe, a movie would do better in the land of movies than a stage play with roots in London glam rock.

Because of the glam kitsch and camp of the science fiction/horror approach (the opening song namechecks the stars of the '50s B-movie-verse freely) the setting is an ambiguous 50s/70s middle America but one where a character can casually mention a castle they passed while driving on a stormy night. Most of the stage cast were British but Brad and Janet needed to convince as American. Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon fronted up and the casting was done. The production was entirely U.K. based. The manor house was real (but constantly hazardous) and in two months of shooting, they had the makings of one of the most durable cult hits in cinema history.

With Bowie's Ziggy persona still in memory and the arrival of Queen, the Brit rock culture diaspora (which included Australia) was ready to peep around the curtain at something like this. The music fits perfectly into the era with its clear glam derivations flaunted and then dangerous gender notions front and centre. And, strangest thing, it worked. It took its time but, by the next two years, were getting requested on local radio. There was a series of display cards I remember from record shops that played on the eras megahits with slogans like "A Different Kind of Jaws" and "Another Kind of Rocky". This solidly flamboyant taunt of a flim had penetrated the "no p**fters!" epoque of Australian culture (heavily distilled in my native North Queensland) and it was here to stay.

I saw it at the drive-in toward the end of 1976 when my sister and her Uni friend Penny thought I'd like to come along. This was about a year after the initial release (strictly arthouse) muletrained its slow way up north to where we were but we knew of it from Penny's original cast recording from the London Show. A small disparate group also went along to the Norline to witness and we raved about it at school, with the conversational notes of elder siblings strudied to the syllable. We were months away from punk's horizon. This would feel like a do-what-thou-wilt appetiser for the coming times.

Brad and Janet are a '50s couple who seem airdropped into the '70s. They might have seen Disney but not Taxi Driver. They are more than primed for the shock of Frankenfurter, given all the stage force and more by Tim Curry who remains principally known for this one role. But it's a corker of a performance that gleefully draws from the best of rock frontmen from Jagger to Bowie and further. His corsets and fishnets and raven black bouff as well as his Cleopatra clownface ran a direct current to the future Siousxie Sioux. His vocal performance was modelled on QEII, recognisable as a Regan-like disconnection for all of his audiences. Rock Horror, is of course an ensemble show and we cannot omit kudos for the lilkes of Little Nell, Patricia Quinn, a pre-fame Meatloaf and Richard O'Brien himself whose Riff Raff makes for a meaner kind of Alice Cooper. 

The film shows clear benefit from years of stage success and the transition to the cinema feels effortless. Whether it's the splendour of Frankenfurter's entree in drag that feels more rockstar than stripshow and his gleefully baritone declaration of being a sweet transvesite from transexual Transylvania is so commanding I would bet that any Northerner like the ones that surrounded our car who would have roared off in his panelvan was so captured by Curry's command that the magnetism alone kept them there at the speaker stand, perhaps feeling without registration, a drop of something other than recognition for the art of acting. 

Yes, the farcical scenes inject a bawdy note that the threats of the dinner scene renders vague. The middle act does spread out more than it should to the point where it's hard to tell motivations from identities but by the end credits there are some clear thinking points among the reeds of the comedy and campiness that spoke to their time. Now, we might baulk at terms like transvestite or transexual but they were the ones to use before the dialogue was culture-wide and the syllables to sing for maximum effect.

By the end of the decade the songs and scenes were better known than the ones in Grease and the phenomenon of sing and play along screenings (evenmaking it into a scene in the hit Fame) was a regular event. I didn't go to any of those because by then I was too cool for school and deep into the mire of the post punque demi-monde. But they did happen and might even still happen. There was, I was delighted to observe the other phenomenon of fellow NQ-er boys, who were better known for their turns in the cricket and rugby teams, happily doing the time warp at parties, knowing the identifications in the movie. It might have happened but I don't recall any card carrying bogan storming out of such a sight. A movie won't change any ingrained reaction to difference in culture but the sighs, the preens and sheer force of this one can remind us that it can die trying. If you haven't seen it for awhile, put it on again. Drink something. Nibble something. And yell along.

Viewing notes: I have a DVD of this which features the option of the originally intended first act in black and white (turning to colour for The Time Warp) but I wanted to keep it as original as I could and chose the HD one on Disney (current subscription) but it's available for rent or ownership on a few streamers.There is a 4K available but you'll have to but that one online.

BARRY LYNDON @ 50

Naive Irish boy Redmond Barry is swindled into leaving town so that his rival can claim the woman they both fancy, then he is victim to highwaymen who strip him of all the wealth on his person, so he joins the army, doing well enough in it to desert and impersonate an officer whose meeting with a Prussian counterpart ends in exposure and back to the ranks of the Prussian army and .... you get the idea. It's the 18th century and Stanley Kubrick wants to take you for a holiday there as you watch a figure rise and then fall in such a way that you will feel caressed by the art of it and engaged by its lessons for the late 20th century. How'd that go?

Well, the reason this title is condemned, along with Lolita, to the bottom of the pile, below the early noirs and even his debut which he himself derided, is largely due to his great faithfulness to his source and its era. He added plot points and altered the person of the narrator but the real star was, having convinced us he'd shot a film out near Juptier, the journey back to 18th century Europe. Kubrick was expected to get that right. If wooden cameras with supersonic oil paint masters inside them had been possible that's how he would have done it. But what we get is an intriguing mix of contemporary technology (including from NASA again) and an appreciation of the look of the era as evidenced in the painting of the time, served, as always with music of place and perfection.

It's important to remember (or be informed) that Thackeray's original novel was itself in fancy dress. It was done in the style of a Fielding or Smollet, a beefy mix of fortune soldiery, knavery and gentility for a readership eager for the lot. By setting his story among the high born powdered wigs when he'd never worn one himself allowed him to indulge in a near endless judgement of both noble and humble players after their death. Thackeray wasn't born until the 18th century was dead eleven years. He could thus take literary pot shots at anyone contemporary with the distraction of a wildly unreliable narrator (Barry himself) moving among a costumed cast of characters. Who'd care to sue?

For Kubrick, the themes beckoned of frustrated sons and father figures, self aggrandisement and the old stalwart of fate and opportunism that filled the pages of Tom Jones and Roderick Random back i' the day. Also, he was charged with outdoing the massively successful Tony Richardson adaptation of Tom Jones. He not only did that, he might well have killed it as a setting.

For his vehicle-in-chief Kubrick chose the celebrated fence post Ryan O'Neal, an actor who needed an extraordinary director to draw him out beyond his native beauty. O'Neal's counter in the role of Lady Lyndon was Marissa Berenson, one of the ubermodels of the mid-70s. The rest of the cast is almost entirely every British RADA graduate from the previous decade up to the production year who serve as strongly as the massive paintings in the lofty halls of the rich in many scenes of this film.

The music would be a series of adaptions of the works of the composers of the Late Baroque/Classical period like Handel and the only-just anachronistic Franz Schubert. With the harpsichord piece Sarabande expanded to an orchestral scale for the voice of fate and the aching lilt of Schubert's piano theme from a his trio in E-flat to celebrate love among the syllabubs and candles, as well as a host of less modest blarings of fanfares and symphonic movements, the constant music of the time, blanding with the more poignant bucolic folk for the rustic scenes, the sound stage is set.

And, of course, this film doesn't just look good it is almost constantly as gorgeous as a gallery of period correct landscapes and opulent interiors. The latter are often served by the use of the NASA-developed lenses that offered the widest aperture in film history so that the candlelight is just that, candlelight, not electric lighting  supplemented by a host of pretty wax sticks. It took a moon landing to make the 18th century convince us.

So, pretty scenes and powerful music aside, is it any good? Well, those themes of fatherhood and aggradnisement persist and always work. The scenes of military fighting feel documentary as do scenes of emotional and physical violence. When the peaks are reached, they impress. The problem is that there are too few peaks. There's a lot of ogling of beautiful landscapes and ostentatious houses but so little of anything else to allow us to forget we are in for three hours of this.

Ryan O'Neal's impassivity is deliberate, his face's perfection can allow us to write upon it what we get from a particular scene, remembering, as Barry does, his class predicament. He does allow enough through to show us a performance but he is intended, though the title character, to be one to whom things happen more than driving his own story through his strengths and weaknesses. Kubrick's gamble on our draining empathy with Redmond Barry does not pay off. If we then accept the slog of over half the film watching him scoundrelise his fortunes, knowing full well where he is headed, then it works. But we don't accept it, it's too hard to care. Even his enemies who might at least give us something to emote against, fall into their positions as narrative cogs and we just wait for the credits.

If you are unfamiliar with this film, perhaps making your way through Kubrick's ouvre, I will recommend splitting it up into hour long episodes, a kind of limited event television. This won't drive away its problems but it will serve to bright the highlights into greater focus and allow a richer experience. 

That said, later excursions into similar territory like Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract and Milos Forman's Amadeus are very much the beneficiaries of Barry Lyndon's splendour and Kubrick's determination toward authenticity. The film is also illserved by its place between the incendiary A Clockwork Orange and the solidly creepy The Shining (at least the shorter cut, the longer bores almost as badly as Barry). If you are going film by film this one might well be your last. But if you make it through, its tale of a disintegrating ethical being attaining power despite not deserving a skerrick of it, might have a more contemporary appeal.

Viewing notes: I watched Barry Lyndon in Warner's 4k steelbook package and was rewarded with sumptuous visuals and audio. As aforesaid, I split the experience into managable episodes of about an hour each. This has also been well served on Blu-Ray. Even the initial DVD is a good presentation. The expensive steelbook is the only edition available in Australia. It has both 4K and Blu-Ray copies. There are several online outlets for purchase or rent, but only SBS on Demand offers it for free (with ads).

DEEP RED @ 50

Mark, a young jazz maestro in Rome, witnesses the murder of a co-tenant of his building but is powerless to stop it. As the killer progresses through everyone who gets close to making an identification, Mark is drawn into an investigation of his own as he, too, is now under threat. This takes him on an intriguing journey through darkness.

The Giallo genre, a series of crime films popular in Italy from the '60s to the '70s, was on the wane in its native country. Dario Argento had made his start as a film maker with one only five years before (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) and had contributed two more, neat and deadly entries. Whether he was wanting to revive the flagging genre or finish it off with a cinematic mountain, what he achieved was one of the most articulate and ranging examples of it with sumptuous sets, eyepopping kills, arresting music and solid central performances.

David Hemmings is paired with Daria Nicolodi (co-writer of the later Suspiria and future spouse of Argento) and they have a ball colliding with each other until the sparks turn into arc lighting. The closest Hemmings had come to the slapstick antics on screen here was the mime scene in Blow-Up. In Deep Red his character endures frequent indignities at the hands of the impossible new-feminist Gianna, her difficult car with the glove-box filled with airline booze bottles and whose power at arm wrestling leads to some hilarious embarrassment. 

This plays against a frequently grim series of murders. No one in Gialli ever seems to get shot. They get decapitated, pierced by shards, knifed, sliced by sliding doors, alright, but I can only think of one case where a gun is used for a kill in the decades of the genre. The medium at the start is despatched by knife and then finished off with the glass of a broken window. There is death by boiling water, death by impact with a marble fireplace and a range of others as this high strung movie gets on with it.

Goblin's score tread a fine line between insistent electronic motive and outright prog rock. Both fit perfectly. There is also the eerie lullaby that plays over the mid credit sequence that pits the sharp violence against its disarming major/minor tonality. The motif was a direct influence on John Carpenter's theme for Halloween with its pressing grind and pealing piano figures.

As to plot, Gialli never boasted particularly tight examples, preferring to mix cultural shock value of "deviant" sexuality and decadence. Argento writes a coherent story and (you'll see this on a repeat viewing) plays fair by matching an early, easily missed detail, with a later revelation.

Now, all this gush aside, it should be noted that by current standards, Deep Red is a snail of a thriller. Personal investigation stories will, by necessity, have stretches in the middle act where everyone has to stop and take stock of the mystery and its dangers before racing to the finish but the Italian genre liked to ask its audiences in for a coffee or a drink, a red herring on toast and then a big finish followed by a coda no one saw coming. Deep Red's middle act is a lot of chemical bickering between the leads as the kill setups get more elaborate. This makes for a fascinating atmosphere but it doesn't hurry. 

What it does do is widen the style, growing increasingly baroque in detail. The location of an old murder case that might be pertient is found through horticulture. A victim is distracted by the sight of one of the ghastliest walking puppets you are ever likely to see. He is a target because he discovers something hidden on a bathroom wall. When Mark discovers the child's horror drawing of the historical murder behind the plaster of an old house, he is led back to the scene to investigate a detail he missed only to discover an even more horrific scene. 

All of this actually does add up. If his next film (Suspiria) threw narrative cogency out the window in favour of heavy violence and even more style, Deep Red plays like the highest that Giallo ever got as a rational film genre. I'm leaving out the treatment of the character Marco's gayness as it deserves more attention than I can give it, here. I will say that, along with other LGBTQ depictions in Argento's films, it is far too easy to characterise him as othering these characters in order to execute a Hollywood style punishment. It's not advocacy but it is live and let live. It wasn't all Fellini.

It is, as the saw goes, a pleasure to live at the beginning and end of an era. You could do worse, assuming you can find them (probably only on physical media now) than Deep Red be paired on a film night with Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace. Both are strikingly visual and bracingly violent crime thrillers with aesthetic sensibilities more attuned to the realm of old master painters and Jacobean revenge playwrights than 20th century filmmakers. If that sounds good to you, track these down. You will be holding on to them, if you do.

Viewing notes: I watched Arrow Video's stunning 4K presentation of Deep Red in its extended cut. I could have chosen a 5.1 audio track in Italian of the cobbled English/Italian hybrid. This is a splicing of elements discovered long after the first edits were released, a reassembly that meant that a number of scenes suddenly go into an Italian dub. I have always found this easy to get used to and highlights David Hemmings' full performance (he dubbed his own part at the time). It's only offered in 2 channel but it's worth it.

SHIVERS @ 50 (SPOILERS)

A marketing slideshow for exclusive apartments and subsequent tour for a couple of potential buyers is intercut with a young woman unsuccessfully trying to evade a much older man's pursuit in the same building. When the man catches up to the woman it looks like sexual assault until he strangles her and cuts her abdomen open and pours in a corrosive acid. He then commits suicide. Welcome to Starliner Towers.

David Cronenberg's debut feature includes everything that would contribute to his name being in the dictionary. The police investigation reveals that the older man was a medical researcher whose experiments in engineering a parasite to solve organ transplants have resulted in the creation of a sexually transmitted creature that can drive its hosts to libidinal mania. Guess what happens when that gets loose in an exclusive apartment complex. 

Epidemic horror like The Satan Bug or The Andromeda Strain built tension through the threat of mass panic. On the other side of that was the force of law and science that could save the day. Cronenberg took the problem's point of view. STDs don't punish sex, they encourage it. He also made it an unlovely thing that looks something between a penis and scrotum and a turd. It is ickily transferred through kissing but can also chose any orifice available.

Outside of the monstrous appearance there is then the extended effect of the parasite. Victims variously enjoy their sexual benefits, become smoothly seductive or in the creepiest moment, speak like spacey cult members. Forsythe's monologue about her dream is so flinty and chilling it borders on AMSR. The subsequent orgy in the pool as everyone is infected is simply the end point of the virulence. The real chill happens when the final stage takes over and the residents leave the isolation of the building and drive in a cortege across the bridge to Montreal, smiling like they've all had full body lattes.

David Cronenberg had come to a very limited notice with two films too short to be features (both around sixty minutes). As a Canadian, his break came from government funding. Unlike the funding that led to Picnic at Hanging Rock to herald the Australian film renaissance, Shivers found its fortune and mass distribution in the drive-ins of the USA. Known variously by Roger Cormanesque titles like The Parasite Murders or They Came from Within, the tale of a massive deadly sexual contagion was a hit. And we thought we were clever with eerie schoolgirls in the bush. That's the other thing about Cronenberg revealed here: he has zero problem with genre cinema, sleaze or grindhouse aesthetics, as long as the idea survives, he's happy. 

Survive it did, through a string of ever slicker projects like Rabid, Scanners, The Brood and Videodrome all produced without a care of achieving conventional accolades, all affecting their audiences profoundly by stacking compelling ideas on top of the sensationalist action. When you go back to Shivers, though, you start to understand the struggle to get to the mainstream polish of The Fly. The effects work is of its time but still top shelf and the action is fluid. The problem is with the performances. Apart from the dream monologue and some of the dialogue about the effects of the parasite (the old man saying he could move them around had me grimacing for days after my first viewing) almost everyone is planky. The exception is genre goddess Barbara Steele whose bug eyed seducer is note perfect. Until you get into the film's rhythm you are constantly frustrated at how all of the future genius auteur was spending all his energy on the effects while surrounded by wooden zombies. 

This is not something that affected his contemporaries to the same degree. John Carpenter had his performance approach nailed during his quirky debut Dark Star. By the follow up it was set. David Lynch produced such committed weirdness that there was no room for shortfall in acting (seriously, there isn't a slight performance in Eraserhead). Cronenberg's problem for Shivers and the next few was that he needed to warm up. That would take a few goes.

I first saw this on VHS where it felt comfortable. I had a routine of catching up with movies I had never seen in the '90s and made Saturday afternoons the time for it. I'd go to Smith St and get a treat or maybe make a pasta and take it all in. I put myself on a course of Cronenberg and recall the effect of the more troubling aspects repeating in my thoughts for weeks after. By that stage, new Cronenberg films had veered from the strident shock and awe of the early films and, while I still went to see them at the cinema, I pined for the rawness of them. For all the sheen and elegance of something like M. Butterfly or Crash, I missed the rough lighting and action of the infected maniacs of Shivers. This might be a punk thing; I have never preferred the slicker option in anything because of the slickness since that democratising ethos. I  can even get a kind of corporate training video vibe in the stiffness of the acting. I still love Cronenberg but I'll take that frisson any day.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK @ 50 (Spoilers)

St Valentine's Day, 1900. The students of an exclusive girls school go to a local geological feature for a celebratory picnic. When the coach comes back to the school it's minus three girls and a teacher who have vanished without a trace. An extensive search returns empty handed. An unsettling sense of mystery descends upon the land.

This is a story about place and time, about empire and invasion, certainty and conundrum as much as it is about purehearted young women from a bygone era. Beginning with a foreboding image of the rock itself, brooding behind haze and segueing to the sturdy Victorian architecture of the school, we are being prepared for a few collisions. 

The first of these has to do with the toy Europe that colonisation was still trying to make of Australia. The girls in the opening montage, helping each other into corsets or whispering poetry in fragile voices are going to visit an imposed tradition on a place formed millions of years before. The British empire, of which the girls are part is an unnoticeable dot on the geological timeline. One of them, Irma, whimsically observes that all those millions of years of formation was "just for us". 

At the rock itself, they pass the setting of a aristocratic family so enervated by their surrounds that they are virtually reduced to decoration. At the picnic ground where the girls and their wards settle, there is a cake to be cut in a rite that feels more pagan than Christian and the post lunch drowse settles in. The watches stop and the small group of friends who split off to explore, seem drawn by unseen forces which render them into slow motion Botticelli figures. Then they vanish into the rock itself, never to return. The rock was won.

But this is English Australia at the very end of the Victorian eon that grabbed the rest of the world as though entitled. This is not a part of the world where the Eurostralians acknowledge the people who were already there. The following year, 1901, saw Australian federation and a change in the crown but as far as First Nations people were concerned these things were cosmetic. The disengagement with the land by these daughters of the urban rich and squattocracy as they bear their constricting clothing (February in Victoria can be punishing) and shade themselves with parasols, looking progressively less like conquerors of the land than intruders.

That said, the girls are not just presented as animated lace. Sarah the sponsored orphan is a scapegoat, propped by alpha girl Miranda. Her infatuation with Miranda is forgivable for her age but also allowed a kind of creepy intensity. She is barred from the picnic and pressed into learning a stifling epic poem when all she wants to recite is her own ode to Miranda. What might have been permissible teen crush or even genuine love is thus mangled into such corseted constraint that Mrs Appleyard's news that the school will have to do without Sarah due to non payment of fees drives her to suicide.

Mrs Appleyard, a kind of bunheaded precursor to Gary Oldman's Count Dracula, is a brandy soaked authoritarian who would have understood Sarah's claim of love with enough expertise to be horrified by it. Her clumsy attempt to promote it sideways by catapulting Sarah out of the picture resulted in Sarah doing that by herself. Her funereal attire appears deranged in context. The voiceover that tells us the school matriarch was found dead at the base of the rock adds a sliver of ice to an already chilling mystery.

Peter Weir soaks his film in dreamy aesthetics, slow motion, haze and a uniformly gentle pallet while eerie music plays around the sub bass of earthquake recordings. The rich interiors of the established order are rendered with such warmth that it is impossible to see them without wanting to live in them. The contrast with the threatening stillness of the rock with its conquering ants, tall ghost gums and worrying faces in the rock formations. The impenetrable crevices that the heroic males often fail to explore are vaginal but forbiddingly adamant and scratchy. This is not the nature of European art, it is the nature of prehistory, formed on a geological timeline on which the British empire is too insignificant to warrant as much as a dot. Every time we are reminded of the ethereality of Miranda in slo-mo, swirling her curls and smiling enigmatically, we are reminded of how the girls seem to move into the rock itself at the point of their departure.

The mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock defies solutions. The chill of it arises from its impossibility despite its occurrence. The notion that the story was based on fact bled into the greater community and I can clearly recall people positing theories of what happened as though they were talking about the Marie Celeste. We are watching this very thing enacted on screen and our own urges to have it explained haunt us. Just as Irma pays for the absence of her memory when she returns to the school to bid her old classmates farewell and they set on her with screaming demands for explanation. By the final image of Miranda before the credits, by now a motif as canonical as a Florentine angel, we know that we will never know.

Picnic holds a unique place in Australian cinema. Revered for being the ignition of the Australian film Renaissance and considered the first post war homegrown classic, it has become unassailable. Weir's own director's cut went against the grain by removing material rather than bloating it, as though applying the final touches of mastery to perfection. It has even evaded the kind of damaging hyperbole that has knocked Citizen Kane off the apex position and this is not because it is seen as perfect but rather definite and evidential. We know it exists the same way we know Uluru does.

But it is just a movie. I'll argue that it's a good and durable one. Whether it's the greatest Australian film is a question I don't care about as I prefer the subjectivity that might also forward any other title to the same evaluation. But its place in the culture has determined that the audio commentary on the disc that I saw, by two of this country's leading film academics, not only jokes about deportation for any adverse opinions they might have but that they spend over half the running time talking about the film's context before venturing anything resembling a real time commentary on the action (save for a brief note at the beginning). 

I chose to watch the theatrical cut for this blog as that is the one having the anniversary. Weir's cut really did tighten the film and while we might be deprived of a short subplot toward the end, scenes of emotional release and more indicative scenes of Sarah's fate, it does play a lot smoother. Rising above version squabble, though, the shorter cut does allow more shape and bulk to the maddening mystery of the girls on the rock and the weird, almost interplanetary, results of cultural collision as it played at the end of the first phase of colonialism in Australia. And, did I mention, it's still a great movie.

Viewing notes: for this blog I watched my copy of the 4K presentation of the film from Second Sight. My copy has UHD versions of the theatrical and director's cuts. I watched the theatrical or original as that was how I saw it fifty years ago, though I prefer the shorter director's cut. As far as I know there is no locally available presentation of this edit. I could find no current physical media disc of any cut and only one streamer provides the film. This odd situation where an Australian classic is not available in Australia is less unusual than you'd expect. 

ROLLERBALL @ 50

A darkened velodrome slowly wakes as staff prepare it for use. The heavy grind of Bach's Toccata and Fugue blares. Teams assemble in uniforms that borrow from gridiron and hockey except that the players are wearing rollerskates while others are on motorcycles. The audience is restless behind Perspex barriers and a group of the suited privileged make themselves comfortable at an elevated viewing room. A hush descends for the announced corporate anthem. As it plays, the captain of the Houston team Jonathon E.  impatiently thumps a metal ball against his leg. The siren sounds and the ball is fired from a cannon. There are goals and rules but fatality is penalised only by time out. This is the future where there are no wars but there is Rollerball.

Norman Jewison's realisation of William Harrison's source novel and then screenplay ticks all the boxes of '70s dystopian sci-fi: a global government, a cultural distraction for a docile public, a take on computers of the future, and a strident anti-individualistic oppression. Details like the corporate anthem and the slick brutality of the game of the title wrench us out of the present day by depicting such as normality. So, why, out of a field that includes Logan's Run and ZPG, would I put this among the peaks of the sub-genre? Because it commits to all of those tropes and pushes character further forward than any of them.

Jonathon E. is a superstar. Between games and the adulation of crowds, his teammates and the corporate overlords, he relaxes at his ranch with his latest assigned spouse. What could go wrong? He could. He's aging and has been at the top of the game's culture for too long in the minds of the bosses. He has become greater than the game. The game's purpose is not the promotion of human endeavour, it's bread and circuses and is the only thing standing between the status quo and a repeat of the fabled corporate wars. Heroes are fine for the continuation but they, like all the products made by the corporations, have shelf life. Jonathon resists, knowing he has many years left in him on the rink. The corporation knows that he can be squeezed out and begin to loosen the rules until there is only the mechanism and the players and a game played to the death.

But the thing about this story is the result of the inevitable showdown between the people as represented by Jonathon and the company as represented by Mr Bartholomew: what will it mean if an act of defiance against the corporate order is successful, the breaking of the order, mass rebellion, more oppression? Jonathon himself doesn't know and Bartholomew is confident that the point is moot as he's on the real power team. Jonathon's development has to do with his initial discomfort at the squeeze to a position of awareness. Friends and trusted colleagues are of little help and then even the mighty electronic brain he visits in Geneva breaks down at his query. He's in this alone and has no way to predict his future if he doesn't conform and retire. As concrete as the conclusion is, we are left with a quiet dread.

James Caan as Jonathon starts as someone who barely questions his lot, being so privileged. His resistance begins with the assignment of wives; he misses one more than any and the suggestion that she was stolen by a suit has a sour resonance. But then, as he watches the game get harder as the constraints are progressively removed, he understands that he won't be allowed to continue. This is a clever twist on the usual dystopian scenarios by applying the costs of a command society to one at the top rather than a Winston Smith foraging around the lower depths. That the rule of the capitalists has become an invisible tyranny is also a switch from the more typical military totalitarianism or hard collectivism: there is a constant illusion of personal liberty for the consumer who is entirely bound by the goods and services from above. Caan's macho strong silence is progressively rendered vulnerable with  increased awareness, even to the point of being aware of the trap he has entered.

At the other end of the table John Houseman, everyone's go-to posh intimidator, slimes everyone around him with his unctuous powersleaze. When it is time to render this dark and even sadistic, Houseman brings it and embodies every vocable of his threat. This had already served him in memorable turns like his admiral in Seven Days in May and would again in the film and TV series The Paper Chase. There could have been no better casting.

And Jewison for his part also brings it. He ensured that there would be no glossing over depictions of the game which are white knuckle, constantly engaging and set within a spectacle of brightly uniformed colour, bloodthirsty crowds and a thunderous cacophony of constant threat of injury and death. These scenes thrill today. Back in the designer homes of the players and the boardrooms it's all '70s futurism with trapezoidal screens embedded in walls, primary colours and burnt tones for the suggestion of classiness that the status hungry always chase. 

The massive allnighter parties that end in the fiery destruction of trees for the hell of it show the waste and nervous-system-numbing hedonism the new one percent get to live by. These scenes are like old Playboy ads for whiskey or cigarettes come to life and only need slight pushing to work as visions of the world to come. It's where Jonathon attempts to find guidance and sense in the libraries and computer monoliths that the corporate style simplifies into mammoth clean-lined weirdness of design. Many remarkable public buildings from the time were used for this and the suggestion is that we are looking at the near future, not some fancied one far beyond our mortal grasp. Add some rich classical source music for the scoring and you've got what often feels like a cheekily produced bubblegum Kubrick. The fashioner of the busy anachronistic clashing of Jesus Christ Superstar would have been flattered by the recognition.

At school we all had to find a way to get to see this boy's movie to be in the gang. It was an M but one that cinemas were tight about. You could go with parents but the way to do it was as normal paying customers of the claim thereof. No one felt tipped a moustache or strode in with platform heels but if you went offpeak, in the afternoons when they were most in need of bums on seats, you'd get past, especially if you threw them a couple of bucks for softdrink and popcorn. I went to the drive in with my sister and her friend Penny and no one batted an eyelid. By that time, all the kids were talked out about it but I went on about bread and circuses as I'd been through an ancient Rome phase. That stirred a few chats. 

You were supposed to go on about the percussive violence, and I did, too, but the figure of the hero struck me more. Always having to dodge around what most of the kids liked and how little I cared for it, I treasured the hero as outsider and, while it wasn't a central text for me, it pushed me rightly away from mass muck. The spectres of things like Star Wars and Grease were to come and I did see and at least partially enjoy some of that, I was able to drop it without any pangs. The one commercial channel in Townsville was showing things like Zabriskie Point and Husbands as midweek movies; cute space and cuter '50s were not going to cut it.

I still like Rollerball. It's not timeless so much as still relevant. It's not just about sport (that would never endear it to me) but it makes a story with sport at its centre rivetting. Had a lot of career ahead of him and all of it is worth your time but for me the trio of Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar and this form his strongest output, ending with the tale of frightening familiar gone rogue, the billionaire who acts like a king, and more, and worse.

Viewing notes: I watched my Scream Factory 4K with a faultless vibrant transfer not shy with the grain structure. Not locally available anymore but rentable through the usual online outlets.

RHINOCEROS @ 50

John, an aging bon vivant, chastises his younger friend Stanley for surrendering to a bad life that has driven him to drink. He is about to entice Stanley to grasp his own life when a cacophony outside drives everyone in the restaurant to the window to see a rhinoceros charging down the street. Later, at work, the wife of an absent staff member reports that the animals have not escaped from a zoo but that people, like her husband, are transforming into them. As she rides away on her newly pachydermal husband's back, life choices are being reassessed.

Eugene Ionesco's absurdist fable freedom from conformity and resistance to both is presented with big performances and a lot of stagey overreach. This would have rendered it unwatchable but for the casting of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the second of only two pairings on screen. The first was in the deathless Mel Brooks debut The Producers. The relation between their characters in Rhinoceros is immediately reminiscent of that film, with Mostel's John bullying Wilder's Stanley about his life choices. After that opening, though, the dynamic differs when John faces his own transformation and the mood shifts quickly to panic and then pathos. It's worth noting that Mostel was repeating his role from the play's Broadway debut over a decade earlier. But that, while interesting, does not explain the staginess that can drag this film away from compulsion.

It wasn't a standalone production but part of a series of films commissioned by the short lived American Film Theatre project in an attempt to bring the media of film and theatre together by presenting cinematic versions of modern classic plays. I remember this coming to far off Townsville in the mid '70s as a subscription package which was expensive and gave off exclusivist vapours. I thought it sounded stuck up but I also loved the idea of it. Harold Pinter's The Homecoming was one of them and Pinter himself directed Simon Gray's Butley. This was not something I could easily convince my parents to invest in so I let it slide. Later, I saw Butley at Uni and the ABC played most of the titles in late night spots. I was gratified to discover how good they had been. The project was doomed as it tried to reinvent cinema into a more theatre-like deal with the subscriptions and came across as snobbish bullshit. Pity, though.

This is important in considering Rhinoceros as it goes a way toward explaining the staginess of a lot of the action and how most of it is done in sets with little of the freedom of movement that cinema production allows. While it doesn't feel like a filmed stage production the sets, particularly the apartment interiors are exploited for their claustrophobic pokiness. Director Tom O'Horgan came to the gig from his work on Broadway. While he does allow some breakout and is clever in his use of sound to suggest the rhinos on the streets, he does fall back on the kind of blocking that emphasises physical engineering over cinematic setups when bodies have to move together; we're seeing a movie but we're also seeing the cooking while we watch approach of live theatre. I imagine this was intentional but it can lower the tone even of this broadbrush satire.

But then we can easily fall back on the performances. Mostel and Wilder in the leads but also a bright Karen Black with her heyday energy, the character stalwart Joe Silver and the instant comedy figure of Don Calfa as the waiter. But these are the kind of things that while adding to the enjoyment of the film can also date it. I wonder if the final defiance would be done with such anger and futility as it is here. Is Ionesco's proposition about resistance readable in the post-truth realm? Maybe more than ever. Just, don't remake it, watch it, for all its antiquity, the way it is here. It's from when the truth about misdeeds at the top of American society could bring a Nixon down. It's worth the watch for that thought alone.

Rhinoceros is available through Kanopy which you should join now. Free, and through your local public library system(which you should also join now).