1971@50: CAT O' NINE TAILS

A break-in at a genetics lab appears to have happened without anything being taken. One of the scientists knows who did it, what really went missing and why and plans blackmail until he falls in front of a train. This last bit is contradicted by its newspaper photo when uncropped so the would be blackmailed got in first and last. A reporter is on the case and acts more like a detective and is aided by a blind crossword compiler and his young niece and so on as we glimpse the Roman underworld and more people are knocked off for discovering things. Whodunnit? Doesn't matter, it's a Giallo, show me the kills and the deductive thinking.

Dario Argento had already hammered at the boundaries of the Giallo film with his debut The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. It was more kinetic and complex than the genre demanded but it was a genre (Italian murder mysteries) that had already had its fair share of cinematic dandies like Mario Bava. Argento gave it even more flair and ever nastier violence, bringing it stridently into the '70s. 

Cat o' Nine Tails feels almost like an apology by comparison with its lengthy dialogue scenes and muted pallet, as though Argento were telling us he felt less like proving himself and that he can play trad as well as bop. As pacey and bold as Bird was Cat applies its Hitchcock more decorously. His American import stars Karl Malden and James Franciscus are from the character actor end of the industry and do much to keep our focus on a plot that is less twisted but deeper than he had done or would do. It's often left off fans' lists or put low on them because it feels less showy. The conceits that so thrillingly explain the titles of Crystal Plumage and the third film Four Flies on Grey Velvet are absent here. The nine tailed cat is a metaphor derived from the threads of inquiry. Cat is about patterns and what they tell us. And it's also about kills and Argento brings them, mostly strangulations but there is one involving the skin of hands and a rapid descent down a metal cable that will have you wincing. It's still a Giallo.

A friend of mine remarked that he doesn't really see Suspiria anymore, having watched it so often. I understand what he means, especially with that film as, while a lot can be made of the story of Suzy Banyon and the nightmare logic of its odd narrative, it is composed of little beyond its kills, colour and music. Nevertheless I don't share the sentiment as I quite regularly rewatch the film and enjoy it in a similar way to how I listen to a favourite album. It works every time. But I can't do that to Cat o' Nine Tails or Deep Red as both require attention and commitment that Suspiria, however wonderful I think it is, never needs to.

I was glad to have a reason to see it again (this blog series). While it is nothing but an Argento movie it's also proof that his filmmaking was not limited to spectacle and gore with the plot sense in the bin. It's a working thriller, supported by another score by Morricone in avante mood and a strong cast. A few of my favourite filmmakers have one of these and it's always a pleasant surprise to revisit them. The Dead Zone, The Straight Story, That Cold Day in the Park, The Trouble with Harry, and so many more that are not full canon but not quite anomalies that provide both surprise and comfort. Well, that's what it felt like last night.

1971@50: LITTLE MURDERS

Born in the national unease in the wake of the JFK assassination, Little Murders is the result of  its author's years of stewing over where his nation was headed. Jules Feiffer, the biting cartoonist for the Village Voice wrote the play as a means of dealing with the sense of helpless he felt and shared with his fellow Americans after Kennedy's dispatch and the years added the Vietnam conflict, the rise of the counterculture, the  momentum of civil rights protests, more assassinations (including another Kennedy), campus protests and police reprisals and Nixon. This is his '60s remembered angrily because he was there.

Arthur  is a product of his time. Pushing thirty, he has relaxed his prowess as a photographer so that he only depicts faeces (and not just figuratively). He is discovered under a scrum of streetkids by Patsy whose grasp on life is firm and unquestioned. Arthur's non-zen compliance with the violence of the world troubles her so much that she pursues him until he complies with that, as well. Meeting the family is more of the same with Patsy's parents on the brink of their own breakdowns and her imploding brother a constant worry. The wedding collapses into a mass fist fight and Arthur goes missing. Though there is a kind of reconcilation following this, the increasingly bloody and darkening city around them becomes more like a reinforced concrete jungle by the hour. The finale's deflation ends on a note that seals the sense of hopeless order for the decade to come.

Elliot Gould (Arthur in the film) optioned this tale from the glow of its off-broadway success (don't knock it, it really did well away from the big strip) and wanted to carry his role to the big screen. At first he was in talks with Jean Luc Godard but that fell through. As a fan of JLG I'm glad this didn't happen. It's wasn't the Godard of Vivre sa Vie but of Vent D'est who would let none of the nuance among the explosions of anxiety through. It needed a native to get there and actor Alan Arkin (who also took the role of the   detective) proved to be a good choice. While he can let the shrillness and play of the crazier scenes stretch their own bounds he generally lets the pugilistic dialogue make its own impacts and steps back just enough for the best of it to work. 

I first saw this on Brisbane tv almost ten years after its initial release with family members and found it a blackly comic delight. At the other end of the '70s, after the end of Vietnam and the fall of Nixon (and the suggestion of U.S. involvement of the dismissal of Whitlam) our cynicism was ready for it. At the end of the next decade, on video, I still found it powerful but appreciated more of the craft of it. Finally, showing it to a decent turnout at Shadows I finally saw it with a receptive audience and delighted in the screaming laughter of the wedding scene with Donald Sutherland's dizzying turn as a hippie priest and descended in soft silence after the final line of dialogue. This, more than most of my favourite films, really does work best in the dark with strangers.

I still think this is one of the best films of its time but I understand that if watched without complete support of where it's going and its violent-minded comedy it will be a chore. Some of the stretches of physical humour will grind. If you are bothered by the smiles on an extras face or a too mechanical escalation of crowd violence then those things are going to feel like fingers in your eyes. If, on the other hand, you counter-intuitively go in with a relaxed mind and let the shrill and uncomfortable ruptured pacing of the first act past you will find riches. You might even understand why variants of its approach in later decades like Search and Destroy or Buffalo 66 (or anything that confuses freefloating quirk for black humour) fall so flat and feel so contrived.

Little Murders is difficult but it's also naturally funny and if that strange combination turns you away you should stay away or try and watch this with someone you don't know well. Also, recall, this is not an indy piece that just made it out of the margins, it was a 20th Century Fox title and though it might not have taken as well as M.A.S.H. or Catch 22 it endures as a whispered recommendation and probably lives happiest there.

Review: STOWAWAY

Three person crew heads to Mars for a science mission when they discover a fourth for bridge unconscious behind a panel. Getting the injured one out coincides with Co2 scrubber so they are now also running out of air and they are too far away to turn back. So that's months ahead of a stressing captain, humanitarian doctor, a despairing biologist (whose work is the point of the mission) and the little one in the bed who says roll over so that one falls out.

I was skeptical about this 'un as it looked like a number of other VoD originals that use a sci-fi setting for stories variously bland or try hard. But this one was recommended by a trusted source, comes with a great cast and promised a solid core of ethics and the future of Earthlings. So I clicked play.

This is a survival story in space like Gravity was but where Gravity was a great ride in 3D at IMAX I don't know if I'd bother with it in the privacy of my own living room. It's action packed and features the space-set story's baseline of the annihilation beyond the door. But it is content to do that without challenging us as well as its protagonist. Stowaway dunks our heads into a difficult question: mission or murder; suffocation or sacrifice. Are the stakes so high that there can be no question or can the ingenuity that brought these bodies into the great black sky be called upon to save them from it?

This scenario would work with competent unknowns (which might have been an idea) but here we have a rangey Toni Colette in command, a heavily controlled Daniel Day Kim at the centre of the mission, the sheer warmth and intellect of Anna Kendrick as the doctor and a deeply pressured Shamier Anderson who, like his character, has to hold his own among the better known. All that happens.

The weirdness of space travel is constant. The newcomer's shock at rising from his concussion and seeing not the world of his job out the window but a spinning starfield is palpable. It is similar to the sense vertigo I feel when I look up at tall buildings from the supposed safety of the footpath. Not only does it mean he is soon to be millions of kilometres from home but everyone else in his tiny constrained tin can world knows that he shouldn't be there.

So, this is less a hard sci-fi workout than a space procedural (there's a superb spacewalk scene that makes a lot of play about the artificial gravity) where the driving motivator is not an alien hostility but one born of mother Earth. The ending of this one might not surprise you but it will resonate deeply. A really good and deceptively modest effort.

Currently on Netflix.

1971@50: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

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

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

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

Ok? Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1971@50 PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

Year 12 student Ponce (yes, really) rides through a credit sequence on a scooter eyeing all the beautiful girls that the early '70s can offer but his gaze is deflected by every one. Mortally embarrassed by the hardon that his sexy substitute teacher has inadvertently given him he begs excuse and goes off to the boys' to soften down and discovers a dead girl draped over the pedestal, a note taped to one of her buttocks. Ponce sounds the alarm and brings the rest of the school and local cops to rubberneck as he tries to insist everyone (including the rozzers) to keep to the point who is still lying in the cubicle. They stop talking about football long enough for Telly Sevalas to come in as a proto Kojak and take over. Uberhunk Rock Hudson, school counsellor canoodling with a student, stirs at the sight of the cops outside, emerges from his publicly funded man cave to handle the kids and takes young Ponce aside for a debriefing (no, not that kind). Ponce can't stop getting erections but no girl will come near him. Counsellor Tiger (yes, really) sees an opportunity to make Ponce a man and knows how when the substitute teacher (a young 'n' hawt Angie Dickenson) happens by to express her concern. Tiger returns to his den whereupon his secretary's clothes fall off and she gives him that look. And that's the point you really go UH?

See, the credit sequence (set to the tune of a faux folk ballad by Lalo Schifrin and sung byThe Osmonds - yes, really) promised a cute and warming coming of age as young Ponce (I laugh every time I type that) clearly needs a shot of Man-Up so he can vault over the heartbreak and learn love. The scene in the gents' plays like the kind of black comedy that Robert Altman or Elaine May were making their own. The bizarre love-generation romping between staff and students (it's not just Tiger) are a tiny flick away from cringe sex-comedies from the mid sixties. The murder trail of female students gets longer and is not played for laughs. One of the first names you see in the credits is Gene Roddenberry. The creator of Star Trek who took American TV to where no TV had gone before with fables on the evils of warfare, arms races, colonisation and the first American onscreen interracial kiss, also wrote this. The last name you see in the credits is director Roger Vadim.

Now, Vadim is no slouch as a filmmaker but if you make one Nutty Naughty Chateau that's how you get pegged. If you keep making them it won't matter how many earnest pieces you can boast it will be the T&A that will get you hired. So it was that Roddenberry's dark social satire grew leggy and raunchy under the watch of the same guy who made sci-fi sniggeringly naughty in Barbarella (a film I sometimes love and sometimes cringe at). It's 1971 and New Hollywood is soon to rise and tear itself from l'ancien regime irrevocably but, as we'll see in this blog series, until that happened we had a mainstream that was growing increasingly curious and playful. 

Vadim's importation for the director role and his clear hand is smearing his prints over every scene. The thing is that none of it plays well as comedy. The timing is all off and the performances aren't allowing it (they're good just not comic). Rock Hudson's Tiger (also the school's football coach) is straight out of a vintage "What kind of man reads Playboy?" marketing ad. Not even the dependable Hudsonian charm can lift him out of looking like hippy never happened. Vadim's self conscious sex-first zeitgeist is like May '68 never happened. That scared the likes of Godard away from narrative altogether as he dived into the underground (kind of). But Rog? Hey, maybe I can bring a better class of sex to America. And I don't need to change my M.O. Hell they're paying me for it. (You know, even Benny Hill toned it down for his brief comeback in the '80s.)

If, however, you are patient there is a reward to all this and it feels like the writer's intention was too strong to dismiss. The final sequence is an inversion of the opening and carries a suggestion, cold and mechanical, of how the social order is maintained. It is expertly judged and chilling. I guess there were a lot of pretty maids before we got to the row.

Review: SUPERNOVA

We open on a vast night sky. One star near the centre briefly expands with light before shrinking into the darkness. Two men entwined naked in a bed. Then we're on a road trip through a damp English view, the passenger quietly poring over a road map and the driver asking questions that are gently ignored. Change the situation for this scene and the location for that and you have the entirety of this film. That sounds like a bad thing but really it should only suggest a subtheme of the story unfolding: patience. Something is coming to an end. The passenger, Tusker, has early onset dementia and his spouse Sam is coming to terms with what will be a much shorter future than they planned. For the nonce the pair reconnect with friends and family in the country and, quietly, the signs of Tusker's decay make their way to the surface.

Sounds like a tearjerker? Sure but when you have a script with poignant wit like Tusker saying he's no longer the guy Sam fell in love with, he just looks like him and performances that render the words to their appropriate weight and a screen time that clocks in under ninety minutes, you've got something you can stick with and you'll happily spare a few tears. Stanley Tucci as Tusker brings his dependable charm but the constant struggle for control within him undercuts that with a dark realism. Always, a welcome screen presence, here he shows us someone whose containment has become the battle. Colin Firth as Sam gives us the fretting Brit who is struggling to show strength when his source for it is withering.

If this still sounds too gloomy or dull for you consider the restraint with the exposure of the symptoms. An Oscar bait version would make the condition the centrepiece and feature at least one explosion of embarrassment by the afflicted before everyone learned and grew (more than one explosion and you've got a Sundance movie trying for Oscar bait). Tucci allows only the tiniest indications of his loss of awareness, slight winces of uncertainty and eyes that sometimes take in mystifying things. Indeed, the closest thing to a loud cathartic moment happens off screen when a couple of dinner plates smash on a kitchen floor. When Sam runs in to check Tusker is sitting at the table staring into the mess in front of him as though trying to see a finished jigsaw puzzle in a pile of pieces. And then he sits at his chair and keeps sinking and his limbs seem to bend like rubber, powerless and displaced. That's Tucci's performance. We really didn't need the big scene when what we have is how it leaves him.

This story of hard acceptance is strengthened by the lightness of its touch, assurance with its language and a trust that its audience will allow themselves along for the ride. Here's an example of that. As the pair are gently bickering while driving, Bowie's Heroes comes on the radio. For a moment Tusker lowers his gaze and listens. It doesn't, (thankfully) suddenly burst into the sonic foreground but sounds like it's playing quietly on the car stereo. That song back in 1977 when he was probably in his teens and excited by the future in his daydreams would have certainly found a place in his personal soundtrack. The moment passes, an ad blares out and the road rolls on.

Review: SYNCHRONIC

A young couple share a trip that starts out like an hallucinogen but quickly becomes real as one descends to a swamp and another falls to his death from a height that isn't the elevator he just entered. A pair of paramedics answer the call but are mystified by the scene. The next case is even more bizarre. Word of a drug trending wildly on the scene called Synchronic coincides with more crime scenes where contemporary New Orleans people are being skewered with ancient swords or dying from snakebites in modern apartments. And then the daughter of one of the paramedics vanishes. Has she reacted to her pain from the trouble in her home by running away? If she did, did she do it with a dose of synchronic? If so, what does that mean and can she return?

Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead have been quietly building a reputation for no-budget movies with sky high concepts like The Endless or Resolution. They have come to be identified as the current face of cosmic horror, extending the kind of world building that made H.P. Lovecraft's writing so durable. There are even offshoots like After Midnight or She Dies Tomorrow helmed by other writer /directors but given production clout by Benson and Morehead. Usually, what happens from here is either the continuation to exhaustion of an underground effort or a breakthrough that changes its field. Synchronic is the latter.

There's a boosted budget visible on screen in the effects and casting (Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, for starters) and the concept is more given to action rather than the mumblecore workshopping of previous entries. Synchronic has more mainstream production values but keeps the darker thinking that made the others so vital. So, if it looks so comfortably commercial and runs on good ideas, why does it get so draggy?

The set up is intriguing. The notion that a means of fleeing one's own time with a drug that only works on younger people is brilliant. The extra work put into the two leads' lives, their friendship and what will have an impact in the finale is all by the book. The trouble is that there is too much dwelling on information we already have which appears to be added depth until it starts getting fatiguing and suggests that the narrative has stopped moving. That might be cute in another time travel movie but in this one it really only looks like a lack of discipline. To my mind Benson and Morehead have misjudged the impact of the mainstream aesthetic to the effect that instead of it allowing them to smuggle in some radical thinking it only stirs a need in the audience for the kind of heightened action they associate with the look and feel. So, do you dumb it down and get it done or bend the commercial look until it works with the sci-fi? Here it's neither, we just know that we want Steve's discovery montage a lot earlier than when we get it, the intrigue over the drug and its infiltration to be speedier, and the already good bromance between the lead characters to be notched up.

That said, if you relax about this stuff and are willing to get to a gripping conclusion you will be rewarded with a compelling sci-fi outing that will take you places you didn't expect (despite what you might prefer to expect). I can report that by the final scenes I'd pretty much forgotten my reservations about the middle act as I got caught up in an action sequence of a kind that was only left as a promise on earlier outings. Benson and Morehead are worth the support of anyone who wants their cinema mixed up with great what-ifs. And I'm already in line for their next outing.