1971@50: THE SEVEN MINUTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

1971@50: WILLARD

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

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

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

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

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

1971@50: THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1971@50: COLD TURKEY

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

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

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

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

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

This is currently on available on Stan.

MIFF 2021 Wrap Up

THE TIMES

July. Hey great news! MIFF's going to be in cinemas this year. And look at this program, everything good from the plague year is here, Cannes, Asia, Europe, you name it.

August. Lockdown. Sorry, it's only half cinema, the rest of it will be streamed. Oh, and we're swapping the weeks around so all your cinema sessions will be transferred to the following week. Well not ALL but anyway ... enjoy the online program.

August. Lockdown still. Nope, all online now. We know it's not the same program but we'll be adding more. When? Yes, when. Enjoy. Everyone who wants a refund can ask for it at the box office, yes the one you can't get through to. Enjoy the festival.

August lockdown still and maybe forever. Ok, everyone's getting a refund minus the booking fee because. Oh, here are some more titles on the streaming program. 

Ok, so ... The times are still too volatile to try something like this and MIFF was brave to try. The idea of staving off the cinema sessions by changing the week they were on felt a little reckless and indeed the massive confusion from punters as the total sessions on their passes shrank daily (mine was down to five out of an original twelve by Wednesday. I guessed that tougher limits on seating were the cause of this and preference was given to first-ins. But I had to guess that. MIFF only made a statement about the change, not the fallout. They could have done that without having to commit to anything more detailed than to say they were sorry if some bookings were removed but the regs are the regs. But nothing. This created the fatberg in the box office communications. People had spent their money (and it wasn't cheap) and the people who'd taken it weren't talking. Advising us to contact the box office sounded like that dick from the coalition who went on Q&A last year and innocently asked a questioner why she didn't just call Centrelink.

But then by the middle of the first week this had been dealt with and I'd settled in to the online program, not cancelling my leave as I needed to defray as much stress as I could. Bugger it, lockdown holiday it was. And once I'd settled and everything was in order I did take time to marvel at how rapidly MIFF had regrouped and solved the crisis. I have clear memories from the days of physical passes of much worse stuff ups at the box office (days which also allowed idiots to make their choices when they were buying their passes with hours of queues standing behind them).

THE PROGRAM

Considering the ambitions of this year's fest it was a surprisingly rangey lineup. New Ben Wheatley, celebrated UK horror Censor, a swathe of European and Asian titles and some very enticing doccos. 

High 

La Veronica: Works because we not only get eased into the high concept but become part of it. Magnetic performance from lead. Rises above its own cleverness. My favourite of the festival.

Sisters With Transistors: Does what good documentaries should do, interests its audience from the first moments and probably gets them searching for more after the credits have rolled. I've already ordered music first heard in this film.

Dear Comrades: Lean and mean tale of political difficulty as hard ethics confronts political allegiance. seldom has a two hour running time felt so swift. Delayed heart rending from the closing lines.

The Nowhere Inn: Metamockumentary might falter here and there but is brought off with such pizzaz and blunt commitment that it really can't lose. What happens when you add magnetic talent in your leads to a good, sparky idea.

Poly Styrene I Am a Cliche: Several lengths above the usual rock doc as the personal angle of the co-director, the star's daughter adds a compelling context. Not just a glorified powerpoint. 

Middle

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: Frequently birlliant celebration with gorgeous packaging of examples and interviewees but suffered from having to pack too much in past the halfway mark. I'd prefer it as a series (hint hint, Shudder) 

Queen of Glory: Warmth doesn't have to mean soft as this strong and personable comedy proves. Even at only one and quarter hours it did feel too long, though.

Ninjababy: The quirky comedy worked well and the tansition did, too, just might have needed to be a little earlier or a longer crossfade. Impressive at the end for some risks taken with character that paid off. See Playlist for how to really get this wrong. Liked this a lot but its competition was fierce.

In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton: Solid attempt at telling the tale of an under recorded musician who influenced everyone she met but whose personal demons kept her from the spotlight. Poignant but undercooked. 

Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time: Stalkercom lifts itself above the '90s thriller promised in the premise and treads a fine line well. I think I just needed a little more sharpness in the protagonist's focus.

Freaskscene: Competent rockumentary about noise melodists Dinosaur Jr works as well (and the same way) all of them have since the early 2000s when the subjects lives were well covered by home video, recording etc. This is the way they appear now. This is a notch above many but does only what it needs to.

The Night: Lean and effective redemption horror in compelling setting might have turned up the eeriness.

Hopper/Welles: Enjoyable but non-essential record of the meeting of two cinematic mavericks exceeded low expectations.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky: Romcom meets magical realism in post war Georgia with pleasing results but what a slog. The film suggests its own intermission which I took it up on.

Wife of a Spy: Too long innured to the softer, post-horror KYoshi Kurosawa to mind that he still hasn't gone back there but this drawing room intrigue did suggest some of the old parallel universe the best of his horrors featured.

Low

Playlist: If you really expect us to empathise with sociopaths like this one you really need to do more work or people will just wish the movie was about her friends. Pointless cover version of Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson and that lot.

Coming Home in the Dark: If you are going to learn from people like Hanneke, Noe or Miike you really need to go the extra kilometre and offer a reason to sit through your extremity horror. 

Rose: A Love Story: If you are going to go for an iconoclastic depiction of a classic horror monster look at a few others and note how hard it is to get working. Fell over itself trying to avoid genre until a too sudden finale risked everything it had worked for.

THE APP ... s

The standard app updated as soon as I fired up the old one in July. Easy to use, if you didn't mind exploring the program on a small screen that was all you'd need. For almost ten years this aspect of MIFF has added a lot of ease to proceedings. While I haven't bothered with the printed one for ages I still prefer having a larger screen and multiple windows to organise my sessions. The calendar view of the wishlist on the website does this really well. I can see at a glance if one day is too busy or there is too big a gap between screening days etc and I can also use it to maximise my favourite venues (I like to start and end at The Forum)

The MIFF Play app could not be used to buy tickets but your selections appeared instantly in there once you'd paid. As this was the only way of getting to the festival it had to work. Work it did and how. I hasten to add here that my home setup includes a new smart TV plugged directly into the ethernet and has a built-in chromecast. Last year I lugged a laptop into the lounge and connected via HDMI to a TV with wifi. If I closed the laptop the screen shut down (that's a laptop setting but I have to have it that way most of the time) and if I wanted to pause it took some buggerising around. This time I turned the TV which activated the soundbar, opened my phone, tapped the app, tapped casting, tapped the thumbnail of the movie I wanted and it started with the best quality I was likely to get as the TV and its connection took over from that point. Completely trouble free. If these two apps could be integrated in the future it would be a dream.

EPILOGUE

Well, that's it. A bunch o' good MIFF at home films and the inevitable handful o' stinkers. No queues to worry about but also no Forum or Capitol, no meeting friends for coffee on freezing afternoons or wine-quaffing after movie pub sessions. Despite my whingeing I did appreciate how quickly and effectively MIFF dealt with the crisis that threatened to shut it down but will still whinge about the poor communication in that crucial period when the really drastic changes were effected which might have been explained quite simply and openly, assuaging the stress that the punters were also feeling. Anyway, a good time was had by me. Now if we could stop those Neanderthals marching in protest at lockdowns their plague-spreading demonstrations are extending we might get to see next year's MIFF in real cinemas where it needs to be. 

MIFF Session 18: QUEEN OF GLORY

Sarah is getting through her PhD in Oncology and excited to move states to Ohio with her married lover when her mother dies, leaving her a Christian bookshop and a house. She has to organise the "white people's" funeral and then the Ghanaian one before she can uproot and leave and some of this is proving difficult. Harder still, she goes to the bookshop to look around before listing it on the market and meets the mountain-sized and face tattooed ex con her mother hired to help out. It's just easier to keep the shop open until everyone has paid their respects and the mourning is over. Her estranged father arrives from Ghana and moves into the house until the funeral is done. They have one of the subtlest awkward hugs I've seen.

Subtly awkward is a good description for this whole film, actually. Comedian, writer and director (and star) Nana Mensah takes us through her observational  tale at a gentle pace, allowing all of her characters breathing space where even those with few lines (like her father) can develop until they feel lived in. Sarah's struggle with her circumstances, including the increasingly hopeless plans of moving away, are played quietly but that is not to say they are under-attended: she has clear trouble coping with both the intimacy she craves from her closest and the demands of her extended family and cultural community which she fears might consume her. She'd rather be American as it's easier but easier starts looking shallower.

To call this film warm might also undersell it but its determination to make its viewers feel welcome inside it is unmistakable and never cloying. Warm might also not account for the constantly funny observation gags that leave a treat in almost every scene: this is a very funny film but it's also a very personable one. It reminded me in tone of Smoke or one of those gentle reconciliation movies from the '60s that I'd see on tv of an afternoon off Uni back in the '80s. The control and assurance to produce moods like this is massive as is the talent to make it appear easy. The scene where Sarah can do nothing but finally accept her mother's death is told largely in one long closeup as she is dancing at the Ghanaian funeral and the wisdom of playing it warm rather than quirky is obvious as it means there is less of a reach between the comedy and the poignancy so when the latter happens it feels all the more powerful. That is the way of this film and it is a joy because of it.

MIFF Session 17: WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED

The term folk horror goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, it has been applied to cinema and exemplified by a trio of films known as the Unholy Trinity: The Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. But, as this documentary is here to tell you, it goes well beyond those titles and their time ('60s-'70s) and is indeed alive and well in the already creaky feeling twenty-first century. I am a fan of this sub-genre and was eager to see this vaunted showcase. I was, however, concerned about its running time, a bum numbing three and a quarter hours. Sitting in a Forum seat for that long was not my idea of fun so it was after weeks of umming and erring that I chose it as it might be the only chance to see it. Then the lockdown took the pain from that decision and I was happy to rent it as a streaming feature.

We get right on it with some spooky sounding folk music and virtuoso montage and collage (the latter courtesy of outrider auteur Guy Maddin) and a mix of murmuring soundbites and a final introductory image of little Thomasin from the witch floating naked in the night among the wintry trees. I was in! This documentary is niche enough that it doesn't care that much in conversion, it's made by people who love their subject and are eager to talk about it. It felt like meeting strangers who sounded like life long friends and as the montage kept coming and the discussion kept rolling along with new titles to pursue and old obscurities to celebrate in an extended screening of mighty orgiastic joy.

So what happens then? What happens has to do with the problem of the running time. While great service is given to the Unholy Trinity and a good grab bag of context and theorising it just keeps going and starts (a little after the halfway mark) feeling crushed. It's like those people who begin writing signs without realising they won't have room for all the letters at that size. This is such a bold and sincere effort it pains me to pick at it but I would happily sit through ten hours if the kind of depth of the early chapters were given to the later ones. This would be a perfect mini series for the likes of Shudder. But as it is the later chapters that touch on intriguing issues like race and class in folk horror that are left mentioned more than examined. On the other hand ninety minutes of depth on a declared limited scope might turn the specialised audience off lest they pay to see something they already know. The superb American Nightmare (2000) kept to a decade but its point had to do with the times as much as the content but the material in Woodlands Dark is so far ranging that it wouldn't work so well in the first place. So, break it up, folk, let's have a series.

That said, this will still be hanging around the top of my best of the fest list for the expertise it offers and the luxuriant presentation. And if it does end up on Shudder I'll take it in bits, copying down titles and allowing more time for full absorption. And it will keep me going for years. Celebrations as refulgent as this come seldom and feel like great occasions. If you like your Wicker Man or The Witch you'll dig this like a prize garden.