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.
Do you miss cinemas like the Lumiere, the Carlton Movie House and the Valhalla as much as I do? Well come along to Shadows, a screening of unusual and unavailable films every Friday (from May 8th). Bursting with opinions? Stay afterwards for good music and a drink around the bar.
Location: ABC Gallery 127 Campbell St Collingwood (See map at end of post or follow link to Google Maps with street view picture of the Gallery) Melway Ref. 2C G8
Dvds projected on to a white wall. A selection of couches and tables. A bar with reasonable prices and a coffee machine.
All but one of these screenings will be accompanied by an episode from the original Rod Serling Twlight Zone and something from the bizarre verite 90s series The Forbidden Files (or Documents Interdits, if you drink coffee from a bowl in the morning and smoke secretly imported Gauloise cigarettes).
"This ain't multiplex, this is gold class art house!" -- David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (paraphrase).
All that for a gold coin donation? "Holy guacamole in a bowl of ravioli!" Pope Pius XV Celestine Decree (paraphrase)
Friday March 6 9pm.
SECONDS (USA 1966 100 mins) Arthur, an American white-collar fading into old age is called by a long dead friend who offers him a second go at youth. Like a Twilight Zone episode that grew into a movie when no one was looking, Seconds uses the extra time to add depth to what easily might have been left as a fable. While the story does go where you think it will, the ending plays like Kafka.
The film that spooked Brian Wilson so much that he stopped work on the Smile album and didn't see a film at a cinema until E.T. came out almost 20 years later (well there were a few things contributing to that but this was one of them).
Screens with: The After Hours(Twilight Zone episode) 25 mins. The Extra Terrestrial(Forbidden Files episode) 6 mins.
Friday March 20 8 for 8.30.
KOUREI (USA 1999 118 mins) Kiyoshi Kurosawa's take on Seance on a Wet Afternoon saw him inverting the central plot point with unnnerving results. Junco, a genuine psychic, is trying to start a career helping police investigations. This isn't easy as she faces skepticism from all sides including from within her strained marriage. When fortune throws an opportunity into her lap to reverse all of this the slow fuse of disaster is lit.
Another filmmaker might have been happy to plug into the then emerging J-Horror genre and leave it there. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) dug deep into the realistic human side so that when bizarre things happen they look like natural phenomena. Made for TV but you wouldn't know it.
Screens with: Little Girl Lost (Twilight Zone Episode ) 25 mins. The Witch (Forbidden Files episode) 3 mins.
Friday April 3 7.30 for 8.00 pm
THE CONFORMIST (Italy 1970 100 mins) Marcello has a compromising past which he tries to escape by folding himself into respectable bourgeois society. Trouble is that society happens to be Mussolini's Italy. Digging in deep enough to try a career with the secret police his first assigment is to assassinate his old mentor (now living in exile in Paris with one of Marcello's old flames). Toeing the line was never so difficult.
Europe was not quite in the clear in 1970, despite general appearences. Bernado Bertolucci's tale was told within living memory of Italian Fascism and current memory of the May 68 uprising in Paris. The terrorism-plagued Munich Olympics were less than two years away. This film joins The Damned and more extreme fare as Salon Kitty and Salo in offering a tough reminder of what has lain beneath the civilised exterior of Europe.
Screens with: And When the Sky Was Opened (Twilight Zone episode) 25 mins. The Crowns and the Youngs (Forbidden Files episode) 5 mins
Friday April 17 7.30 for 8.00 pm
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE(Spain 1973 99 mins.) Spain late 1930s. Ana and her sister Isabel go to see Frankenstein at the village town hall. Ana is haunted by the scene where the monster first plays with the little girl and then throws her into the lake. Trying to sleep that night she is teased by her sister who tells her that the monster lives in an abandoned building on a nearby farm. So, Ana, five years old like the actor playing her, goes looking for him.
A film as quiet and patient as a child's concentration but with all the colour and wonder as well. Victor Erice's strange tale of childhood is set just after Franco came to power in Spain and made just before his death released the country from Fascism.
Screens with:
TBA
Friday May 1st 7.30 for 8.00 pm
THE UGLY (New Zealand 1998 93 mins) Silence of the Lambs ushered in Hollywood's 1990s and at regular intervals the new(ish) serial killer genre fell into formula with each new entry featuring a viler human monster and a more maverick genius detective. The best of any genre are its exceptions. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer left the police out and kept the realism grim. Seven loved being mainstream but kept the puritanical moralising in the mouth of the monster. And then there was The Ugly.
Scot Reynolds' late 1990s film starts so far in formula you can almost smell the packaging it came in. But after the cliches of the opening scene have settled a new film starts to emerge as though coming out of a shed skin. The weedy Simon's account of his crimes is told in an increasingly involved stream of consciousness that is not always anchored by visual references to the present. Soon enough it's difficult to say how much of what we are seeing is intended as real and how much is derangement and, if so, whose derangement. The ending, told with a single old fashioned effect but mostly light and shadow, refuses easy answers.
Screens with La Jetee Chris Marker’s short film told mostly in stills. The inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (France 29 mins.)
Friday May 8th 7.30 for 8.00 pm N E W The Beguiled (USA 1970 105 mins) A wounded Union soldier wanders into the grounds of a school full of giggling southern belles. Sounds like a porno but it’s one of the creepiest westerns ever made. Crime and action director Don Siegel and action hero Clint Eastwood take a slower path here, through a tale of increasingly dark areas (I guess that sounds like a porno, too, it still isn't, but).
The late 60s and early 70s saw a lot of changes made to the western movie. So much that they are considered their own genre, the revisionist western. Films like McCabe and Mrs Miller pursued an iconoclastic path to something more like the real old west at the same time as bringing the moral complexities of the traditional western into the light of the Vietnam War generation. Well, this isn't one of those.
PS -- not that I should know but doesn't Clint look like Wolverine in the still of the clip below?
Screens with:
TBA
Friday May 15 7.30 for 8.00 pm
LITTLE MURDERS (USA 1971 110 mins) Alfred, a young self proclaimed apathist, is wrenched by an overachiever girl into society. He goes along with this, suffering one of the most intimidating meet-the-folks scenes outside of the one in Eraserhead. He even accepts her proposal of marriage. The city they live in is breaking down, power outages take on a kind of rhythm, victims of assault fall down subway steps like litter, and the homicide rate is rising to epidemic levels. Flight or fight? The choice has never been less obvious in a film, even a comedy as black as this.
Directed by Alan Arkin (gloriously over the top as a detective soaring into hysteria)and featuring a young Donald Sutherland as a hip priest. Arkin had starred in Catch 22 the year before and Elliot Gould and Sutherland in MASH (also 1970). These two films heavily criticised U.S. involvement in Vietnam through the filter of other wars. Little Murders might well be thought of as the home front version of those.
Absurdism verite? Romblacom? You decide.
Screens with: It’s a Good Life (Twilight Zone episode USA 1962) 25 mins.
The Picnic (Forbidden Files episode) 5 mins.
Friday May 22nd 7.30 for 8.00 pm N E W Another Heaven (Japan 2000 132 mins) There was once a terrific taut sci-fi thriller called the Hidden in which a young FBI agent pursued a nasty body-hopping entity with a taste for ultra-violence and power. Then a few years after J-horror was born, this film comes out which tells the story of a nasty body-hopping entity with a taste for ultra-violence and power. But this is neither remake nor ripoff as it diverges from the path of the earlier film into far more complex territory. Hell of a ride.
Screens with:
TBA
Friday May 29th 7.30 for 8.00 pm N E W Network (USA 1976 120 mins)
“Because you’re on television, dummy.”
Howard Beale goes from failing news anchor to ratings-ruling prophet in a tale from over thirty years ago that could be about the pre-packaged reality of today’s tv. The reason that Paddy Chayefsky’s tirelessly witty script does not fail as a futuristic scenario is that he wrote it from the anger left him by his past experience in network television rather than anything he had to forsee.
The mid-70s dream cast of Peter Finch (a posthumous Best Actor Oscar) William Holden (elegant gravitas) , Fay Dunaway (connoisseur wickedness and scary vulnerability), Robert Duvall (about the same time as his star turn in Apocalypse Now, a bull in charge) and Ned Beatty (fatherly and terrifying) give everything they have as actors with such a treasury of great dialogue.
This one *is* available locally but as it’s one of my favourite films that less than half of my friends have seen I’m putting it up for Shadows for your delectation. Seen it? See it again. It only gets better.
Oh, and watch for a very young Tim Robbins towards the end of the film.
