SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 11 POLL: SLASHER-ADJACENT FILMS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: THE HITCHER
Thanks to everyone who voted!

Film producers, a cunning and savvy lot, are never prone to ignore a bandwagon to jump on if there's money to be made in it. This is, of course, the reason for the massive glut of slasher movies released between 1980 and 1984 (they were cheap and had enough of a steady fanbase that it was hard to lose money on them) but the impulse spread beyond the limits of the genre at its purest. Slasher-like storytelling and slasher tropes became depressingly prominent in all horror subgenres in those days - and in certain respects, they still are - and even found their way into some non-horror places. This week, I offer up three very different movies with entirely different audiences in mind, made at three different levels of prestige; the only thing that unites them is that all of them aren't quite a slasher film, yet all of them clearly emerged from the same crucible that resulted in Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees cutting their way through the world.

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)
From IMDb: "Suddenly Laura Mars can see through the eyes of a serial killer as he commits his crimes."

The Hitcher (1986)
From IMDb: "A young man who escaped the clutches of a murderous hitch-hiker is subsequently stalked, framed for the hitcher's crimes, and has his life made into hell by the same man he escaped."

Silent Rage (1982)
From IMDb: "Dan Stevens is the sheriff of a small Texas town who checks out a disturbance which turns to murder."

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THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS

To begin with, Lucy is dumb as all hell. It's quite impossible to lose sight of that fact. It's easily the dumbest movie of the summer of 2014, and there was a Transformers picture and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the running for that title, so y'know, it's not a little achievement.

If Lucy is somehow still more palatable than those are - and I think it is, but I haven't the slightest inclination towards changing the minds of anyone who thinks otherwise, because I'm very likely wrong - it's thanks in no small part to writer-director Luc Besson's very unique relationship to dumb cinema. Besson was, as we all recall from spending the '80s in France, one of the key figures in the Cinéma du Look movement, a theoretical development in youth-oriented filmmaking that privileged the immediacy of style over any kind of depth of psychology or narrative, providing an emphatic sensory experience built around the disenfranchised youth of '80s France with more spectacle than sociology. I am frankly a bit skeptical of the whole conceit, given that the three main figures in the movement - Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and Leos Carax - are comparable only in that the French critical establishment disliked all of them very much. But that being said, Besson's work especially has always had a tang of le Look to it: a deranged, candy-coated explosion of movement, color, and bodies that exists mostly as a sensual singularity without any strong attempt to extrapolate meaning beyond "feel things in this moment".

Lucy is definitely candy, if it's anything: it feels like the cinematic equivalent of dumping a dozen Pixy Stix into a an extra-large Coke and guzzling the whole thing down in one go. First you get the manic energy, then you get the feeling that your whole head is vibrated, and at last you're worn out and a touch nauseated. But it's fun while it lasts, and it's kept aloft by the sheer brassiness and creativity of its stupidity. For the first 15 minutes, as Lucy establishes its titular heroine (played by Scarlett Johansson in a popcorn variation on her Under the Skin role), surrounded by untrustworthy sorts creeping up on her from all corners, Besson throws in non-diegetic cutaways to antelopes being stalked by cheetahs (all while Johansson is wearing a leopard-print jacket, mind you), in a hopelessly silly gesture that's too clever to to hate, while being impossible to take seriously. And while Lucy certainly projects a desire to be taken seriously, with its stoned undergraduate take on human evolution and biology, Besson treats these subjects with such facile inattention (it plows through a 2001-esque "dawn of man" scene in about 10 seconds) that even the most heavy philosophical conceits recedes into the same buzzy rush of colors and momentum as the action sequences.

Not that it matters, anyway, but the plot involves Lucy being forcibly turned into a mule by a Taiwan druglord who sews a new drug into her abdomen; one beating later, the bag has split and given her an overdose of a growth hormone that causes her brain to kick into evolutionary overdrive. And so she begins to have access to more and more of her brain's carrying power - it's a whole movie based on that hoary "10% of your brain" legend, and too insistent about that as its gimmick to write if off as a generic "supersmart!" fantasy on the order of 2011's Limitless. No, it's married to its absurd pseudoscience, and one of the biggest problems with the film is that it slows down, surprisingly often, for expository monologues (themselves spiked by a random array of stock footage cut at the speed of light) by Morgan Freeman in the thankless role of a movie scientist, the kind specialising in all of human knowledge; and for a film that lives and dies on the strength of its gonzo commitment to showing Lucy gaining all sorts of random telekinetic and energy-altering superpowers, and applying them in glossy, aggressively Cool setpieces, any and all slowdowns are deadly.

When it works, Lucy is entirely dependent on Johansson, whose demerits as an actress both perceived and actual are precisely what the role needs: as she becomes more of an energy being and less human, Lucy is represented as increasingly divorced from emotions or personality or comprehensible internal psychology, and Johansson is good at projecting that kind of shell without a detectable inner life. Which sounds like it can't possibly be a compliment, but it's exactly what the film wants, and insofar as Lucy is pleasurable at all, it's pleasurable because it openly asks us to consider only its surfaces, and never its confused, scientifically illiterate, socially irresponsible undercurrents. Hell, part of me wonders if the point of the nutsoid script isn't to specifically discourage the viewer from engaging with it on any level but that of style and awareness of moving bodies and moving bullets.

This kind of actively shallow filmmaking, close to the platonic ideal of Besson's filmography in its admiration for speed and violence playing out in Europe and perpetrated by gorgeous white women, manages to be entertaining in fits and starts for basically only two reasons. One is that, at 90 minutes, Lucy doesn't succumb to the so very common sin of indulging itself for any longer than it can tolerate (one imagines a version of the film ten minutes shorter, shorn of the scientific gobbledygook, but we can't have everything). The other is that Besson is distinctly good at creating individual moments of viscerally appealing action, color, and shape; the film nears its finale with a bizarre, helplessly pretentious scene in which Lucy finds herself blasting through time and space as her body turns jet black in a featureless white room, and what puts it over is not that it's dramatically sound - Christ know it's not - but that the combination of Eric Serra's feverish score, Thierry Arbogast's chrome-like, saturated cinematography, and Besson's own high-speed, but never incoherent editing push it into a kind of blissful, coked-up place where the basic texture of the images is itself rewarding and pleasurable.

It's still more frenetic than anything else, and for all the immediate rush that comes while watching it, it's an excruciatingly hard movie to retain any sense of when it's down. It's basically a film about the marvels of taking drugs that functions as a drug in its own right; it creates manic visions and when it's done you're a little groggy and resent yourself a bit. But its absurdly slick, wholly surface-level appeal is hard to deny, and at least it has the benefit of being unapologetically in love with itself as a piece of cinema.

6/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1963: In which so much money is spent

Having arrived in 1963, our Hollywood Century project now completes its first half. And it pleases me greatly that such a milestone should be commemorated with one of the quintessential Hollywood films of all time - maybe the single best example of the grand, epic, stupid indulgence that only Hollywood filmmakers could ever fully enjoy. A legendary sinkhole of money (there's never been a completely reliable figure offered up, but it's still among the most expense films of all time, adjusted for inflation), visiting exotic locales that were filmed in the flashiest technology available, with a whole costume shop worth of fussy, glamorous dresses being paraded through massive sets, literal armies of human beings milling around as extras, with the script a hacked-together afterthought that became the victim of the filmmakers' need to work around the unexpected and unwanted by-products of the movie star culture that was primarily responsible for hauling the project off the ground to begin with. It is a perfect storm of Hollywood driven by its uncontrolled id, with all the suffocating grandiosity and astonishingly inept storytelling that could possibly imply. I give you - and please, feel free to keep it - Cleopatra, the infamous Elizabeth Taylor vehicle that very nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

The story of Cleopatra, the most famous queen in the history of the world, has been irresistible to filmmakers throughout history, for all the obvious reasons; indeed, it was Fox's second film of that title, following a long-lost 1917 film starring Theda Bara in the title role (an intervening film also titled just Cleopatra was made at Paramount in 1934, with Claudette Colbert; many other films primarily or incidentally about the Ptolemaic queen came out in several different countries along the way). But there was no epic like a '60s epic, and it would honestly seem inevitable that a major Cleopatra would come out some time between 1955 and 1965. That the Cleopatra we ended up with took the form it does is do to a great many matters: over the course of its tormented five-year production, the film had more problems and internal conflicts than even the costliest epic could endure including multiple stars, multiple directors, multiple screenplays, and a public that watched its journey to theaters more closely than just about any film had ever been scrutinised in those days long before the faintest inkling of the internet. That was, of course, thanks to the legendary torrid love affair between Taylor and co-star Richard Burton that started up during the shoot, and would last until Burton's death.

There are simply too many things that happened during the making of Cleopatra for any one of them to be "the big problem", but in terms of the finished product as a contained narrative drama, I think it's clear enough that everything boils down to a primary cause. That being that Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a greatly respected writer and director of highly literate character pieces about realistic adults, who after inheriting the massive (and already massively over-budget) production from Rouben Mamoulian concluded that the best way to structure the thing to give it some semblance of reason was to divide it in half. His intention was to release two three-hours films, Caesar and Cleopatra, with Rex Harrison playing Julius Caesar opposite Taylor, and Antony and Cleopatra with Burton as Marc Antony (that these titles had already been claimed by George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare, respectively, did not apparently bother Mankiewicz), but studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck reasoned, undoubtedly correctly, that by the time the film was released, nobody would care about anything but watching Liz and Dick canoodle. So Mankiewicz's six-hour two-parter was sliced down to one single bloated beast of four hours and eight minutes, separated by a deeply necessary intermission slightly earlier than the halfway point (in '63, the film was further cut to three hours and twelve minutes for some exhibitors; this version, which was apparently mostly impossible to follow, is effectively invisible today, with the original roadshow cut the only one released to DVD).

Two observations immediately present themselves in relation to this little fact: one of them is that as a standalone film, Caesar and Cleopatra would have been way the hell better than Antony and Cleopatra, but we'll get into that soon enough. The other is that the attempt to carve the movie down resulted in an impressively choppy piece of storytelling which lurches forward erratically in between lugubrious sequences of historical pageantry. It seems positively indecent to say of any movie that crosses the four-hour mark that it's not long enough, but the chronology is so battered (at one point, the narrator voiced by Ben Wright idly mentions that two years happened in between scenes, and it feels like an especially desperate stopgap measure to keep the film stitched together), and it's occasionally unclear exactly why things are happening and how, that I frankly can't see how a longer Cleopatra couldn't help but be a little bit more satisfying. Though I am sure that it would be no less boring, and being even a touch more boring is a fate Cleopatra most certainly cannot afford.

The film has a spectacular variety of liabilities (and, to be fair, strengths as well), but the most visible and crushing is that's an utter dud as a star vehicle, and that's pretty much always the way it has been sold, from 1963 on down to the present day. It's Taylor herself who comes off the worst, naturally enough, if only by virtue of how besotted the film obliges itself to be with her and her character. Judith Crist's magnificent, career-making pan of the film, in the New York Herald Tribune, famously compared Taylor's strident line deliveries to a fishwife, but given some of the ludicrous Historical-Esque sentences the polyglot screenplay requires her to recite, it's hardly fair to blame her or anybody else in the cast for tripping over them (though I still feel crabby towards Hume Cronyn, playing Cleopatra's political adviser, for how openly and dismissively he doesn't even try). But there's more to acting than speaking words, and that's where Taylor really fell apart: playing a woman who has been famous for over two millennia for her commanding presence and ability to make the most powerful men in the world bend over backwards to do her will requires an imperious presence on the part of anybody tackling the role. Clearly, Taylor has more of that native charisma than Colbert (a charmingly counter-intuitive choice for the role if ever there was one), to pick the most obvious example. But she's too glaringly contemporary, ill at ease in her many elaborate costumes (some of which are more dubious than others - some truly moronic hats, like shower caps with flowers sewn on, find their way onto her head) and goofy, cartoon-Egyptian make-up, and stranded by Mankiewicz and DP Leon Shamroy in their lopsided, spacious compositions in the Todd-AO 70mm process. She only ever feels like a very pretty but largely unexceptional woman dumped in over her head, in a grand theatrical spectacle that she never sufficiently modifies herself to accommodate.

The other big problem - and I imagine it must have been magnified in '63 - is that Taylor and Burton make for an absolutely lousy pair of screen lovers. Sometimes, backstage shenanigans translate ti the performance well, and we end up with tangible lust that feels almost dirty to watch it; think the unbridled desire passing between Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Sometimes... that doesn't happen. The very different acting styles that two actors brought to the table meshed poorly, more so when both were individually as bad as they are here; I don't know if it says anything about their home life, or just their screen presence, that their most credible, highly-praised onscreen teaming was playing the toxic marriage in freefall at the center of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? three years after Cleopatra. But between Taylor's insignificant exoticism and Burton's obvious fatigue and hungover eyes, there's nothing credible about their world-altering romance, and the longer second part of the movie, all 128 minutes of it, oozes by all the more slowly since it doesn't even succeed at the level of melodramatic love story in ancient world drag.

Which returns me to my contention that the first half of Cleopatra is better: one of the most important reasons is simply that Rex Harrison acts circles around the other two leads, and he's dead at the midway point (in a profoundly gaudy bit of staging, seen in an augury, with flames surrounding the action and Taylor's aghast face superimposed). He has considerably more exciting chemistry with Taylor; her love scenes with Burton are all grim paint-by-numbers passion, but there's a sparkling naughtiness she shows with Harrison, a sense that these two character really can't wait for the camera to cut away so they can start pawing at each other (favorite money: their dirty little teenagers' smiles when she asks him to keep his laurel crown on while they have sex). Besides, Harrison has the imposing authority of the man who was, for a brief period, the most powerful individual in the Western world; he sells a grand, theatrically imposing Caesar while Burton's Antony is just a puffy old man who barely seems able to impose his will on a group of his closest friends and allies. Which could be an interesting reading of the character, but it's not the one Mankiewicz is interested in.

Harrison is no better than anybody at swallowing the dialogue (only Roddy McDowall, as a haughty, cruel Octavian manages to make every word that comes out of his mouth seem plausible; he's easily the best performance in the movie, though he only appears in the second half, mostly in the very last hour), but he brings ripe, Shakespearean life to the proceedings, and manages to help sell the complicated politics that dominate the story. Take away his crafty ambition, and there's nothing to drive the second half till McDowell shows up in earnest, and that leaves a lot of stilted In Olden Tymes nonsense while the plot takes a nap.

Acting issues are hardly the only thing going wrong: though the film has a huge variety of costumes and complicated sets, it never looks like a richly-appointed historical epic. Everything is too clean and crisp, too obviously new; the Rome of Caesar was an old city, the Alexandria of Cleopatra hardly any younger, but both of them look like immaculately buffed movie sets, and never anything else. Without any other obvious culprit, one is inclined to blame Mankiewicz; he was by no means an intuitive choice for material of this scale, and there's not really any part of Cleopatra where he makes the material come alive like Cecil B. DeMille - hell, like Anthony Mann - could do falling asleep. Mankiewicz was a great director of close-ups and domestic interiors: Bette Davis having her "infants behave the way I do" epiphany in All About Eve, the titular characters trapped with their memories in A Letter to Three Wives. Bombast doesn't suit him, and bombast is the one and only card Cleopatra has to play: erotic bombast in the handful of scenes where Taylor wears hardly anything; emotional bombast in the wall-to-wall lovemaking scenes; production bombast in the high pageantry of the parades (the film stops dead for fifteen minutes of Orientalist dancing around the 90-minute mark) and what little we see of the battles; auditory bombast in Alex North's raging score tinged with bullshit "Egyptian" tones, the one part of the whole movie that I'm completely in love with, purely for its ripe shamelessness and unapologetic emotional manipulation.

It's a movie crying for the gaudy, excessive touch of somebody who will run as far away from anything resembling realism as possible, and Mankiewicz does not, and probably cannot do that. His Cleopatra is sedate and small, and a four-hour epic of heaving emotions, heaving history, heaving bosoms, and heaving audiences trying to keep up the purple nonsense of the dialogue can be many things before it can be sedate and small. It might be the Hollywood film at its most unbridled and opulent, but it is also the Hollywood film at its most slack and ill-managed, and it is far too much drudgery to be camp, to be escapist, to be any fun in any way at all.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1963
-Message movie guru Stanley Kramer switches gears to put every living comic actor into the epic farce It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
-John Ford and John Wayne collaborate for the last time, on the South Pacific action-comedy Donovan's Reef
-Samuel Fuller makes the muckraking journalism psycho-thriller Shock Corridor

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1963
-Federico Fellini turns navel gazing into post-modern art with 8½
-In Israel, future mega-producer Menahem Golan directs his first movie, El Dorado
-It's not "cinema" as such, but no global history could be complete without noting the premier of Tezuka Osamu's Japanese cartoon series Astro Boy, which effectively invented the form of anime

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AUGUST 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

I think it's official, at this point: this has been a pretty solid (in some ways very surprisingly so) summer movie season. I don't believe I've ever said that in all my years of blogging. So hurrah for all the good films that have been, and let's hope that we can add one or two titles to that pile before fall comes and brings with it all the burn-off movies of September.


1.8.2014

The implacable march of Marvel Studios to dominate all popcorn cinema continues with Guardians of the Galaxy, which achieved something that not a single Marvel picture to date has managed: an ad campaign that made me want to see the thing. And admittedly, the more we've seen, the more it looks like a formula-driven "more of the same" type of thing, but it's been too long since we had a good big-scale space opera, and the Chris Pratt Moment in pop culture has been hugely enjoyable so far.

Rather adroitly noting that GotG is tailor-made for white male nerds, Universal has positioned as counter-programming Get on Up, a biopic of James Brown. Starring Chadwick Boseman, who has rather randomly established himself as the guy who plays the lead in movies about famous black people, even those who have as little in common as James Brown and Jackie Robinson.


8.8.2014

They really can't make enough awful Step Up movies for me to stop looking forward to them, after the holy majesty that was Step Up 3D. So I will, thank you, continue to look forward to Step Up All In right up until I emerge, squinting, from the auditorium, depressed about the money I just wasted.

Warner is basically remaking its 18-year-old Twister as Into the Storm, the first honest-to-God disaster movie in years. It's a film I'm going to primarily because I think it will be a nice thing to do with my mom, and I'm 100% not kidding about that. Also, because the first trailer as much as claimed "the sound design is great! the rest, not so much", and I admire the bluntness of that. For those of you with more conventional moms than my own, there's The Hundred-Foot Journey, with Helen Mirren as a sassy French chef squaring off against Indians, as directed by Lasse Hallström, modern cinema's greatest creator of pointlessly inoffensive fables. This one's giving me a Chocolat vibe, which is one of the worst things you could say about anybody.

Lastly, Michael Bay is producing a Jonathan Liebesman film that has to do with turtles. Let's not talk about it.


13.8.2014

How to tell you've aged out of pop culture: watching the trailer for Let's Be Cops, starring Damon Wayans, Jr. and Jake Johnson as two bros pretending to be policeman, and realising that not only do you not have the god-damnedest idea who either of them are, despite the trailer's clear assumption that you do, this lack of knowledge does not bother you in the tiniest degree. Fun fact: it's the only wide release of the month that I'm already entirely sure I won't be seeing.


15.8.2014

FINALLY, Stallone has decided with The Expendables 3 to bring in the action star to end all action stars in one of his big old action ensemble jobs: Kelsey Grammer. As somebody named "Bonaparte".

The cast and director of The Giver tell me that it's got bit more meat on it than most YA adaptations. Tell me in comments if I should read the much-beloved and highly regarded book that I hadn't heard about until earlier this year.


22.8.2014

Speaking of YA, Chloë Grace Moretz, who I increasingly can't stand, headlines an out-of-body teen love story called If I Stay, which whatever, but the trailer is hilariously sober. And after the campy excess of her out-of-control crack whore in Sabotage earlier this year, I will follow Mireille Enos anywhere she wants to go.

Sports movies aren't my bag at all, so if I say that "the longest winning streak in American sports history is snapped, and the high schoolers and coach involved process what that means to them" is literally one of the least-compelling ideas for a movie I've heard all year, I hope you'll take it with a grain of salt. Also, When the Game Stands Tall is a goofy title.

After nine long years in development hell, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For finally is happening, and my 23-year-old self is very confused why my 32-year-old self is so immensely dubious about that fact.


27.8.2014

Pierce Brosnan playing an old spy, as he does in The November Man, is the worst kind of obvious stunt casting. But then, The Matador and The Tailor of Panama were both better than three-quarters of his stint as James Bond, so let's wait and see.


29.8.2014

Between the extremely serious tone with which it appears to treat generic horror content, the ham-handed dialogue in the ads, and above all the catastrophically pretentious title of As Above, So Below, I am not at all too mature to confess that I'm looking forward to hate-watching this one more than anything I've seen in a long, long time.

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EPPURGE SI MUOVE

And now for Fun with Cognitive Dissonance: it is possible for a sequel to to be a lot better than its predecessor, and still end up mostly a huge pile of shit. I give you The Purge: Anarchy, which takes the concept laid out in last year's The Purge - every March 21, the government of the United States permits any and all crime for twelve hours overnight, without any fear of punishment - and manages to do something considerably more interesting with it than a satirically blunt, fuck-all dull home invasion thriller. And yet it is still not interesting at all. It's kind of halfway decent for the bulk of the second act, when it's basically just a clumsier version of The Warriors, but the aggressively strained exposition, and the flailing idiocy of the climax, where the film lays out all its cards and indulges itself in the kind of monumentally dim political commentary that one might expect of a stoned freshman hurrying to wrap up a poli sci paper, keep it from ever rising above a level too dreadful to even meet the minimal definition of "mediocre".

But let's accentuate the positive: better than The Purge. A whole mountain of better than The Purge, so much so that it would be easy to assume that Universal had instituted a regime change, but no: it's still written and directed by James DeMonaco, who is improving at a rate suggesting that around the fifth or six installment of what will surely be a franchise for a good long while now (the films fall in that budgetary range where even the most limited target audience for a wide-release horror movie will guarantee they aways turn a profit), he might finally turn out a genuinely good, socially insightful horror-thriller that works for most, or even all of its running time.

In the meantime, we must make do with TP: Anarchy as best we can. This film takes place a year later than the first, during the Purge of 2023 - the sixth annual Purge, we're told, one that takes place nine years after the New Founding Fathers (apparently a right-wing neofascist governing collective that achieves the impressive feat of making me feel sorry for the Tea Party for being so willfully misrepresented) were democratically elected, and if you do the math quickly, and discover that means the NFF came to power right here in 2014, and all of sudden the Purge universe is literally no longer compatible with our own (since we don't elect a president for another two years, which is clearly the implication), and it's no longer worth nitpicking all of the billion little ways it doesn't add up or make any sense, since the films have now openly conceded that they're outright fantasy, and not legitimate speculative fiction.

In '23, a whole bunch of seemingly unconnected threads are tossed our way, rather bluntly setting up Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul), poor African-Americans who end up thrown out of their none-too-safe home in the projects of Los Angeles when masked vigilantes break into their building and start disappearing people into trucks; and Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez), poor married whites contemplating divorce who end up trapped outside when their car is sabotaged by a vicious gang of masked African-American thugs with much darker skin than Eva and Cali, and fuck the movie right in the face for not even realising that it did so; and a mysterious figure only ever known as Sergeant (Frank Grillo), driving around in an armored sedan and watching the streets nervously. These three groups will all coalesce into one, as Sergeant reluctantly saves Eva and Cali while Shane and Liz, having evaded their tormentors halfway across the L.A. metro area on foot, sneak into the back of his car. And from there, it's all about scrabbling across the city while around them, people are dying by the handful in government-sanctioned murder that allegedly lowers the crime and unemployment rates. Which still makes no sense, though Anarchy has the decency to imply that's just the line the government runs with, while the actual point of purging is just the good ol' pleasure of killing off the poor. Which introduces a brand new bundle of conceptual problems, but that's a rabbit hole it's best not to go down.

As I said, the middle stretch of the movie is basically okay: low-resources genre filmmaking in fine form, as a small clutch of well-defined two-note characters are shuttled from setpiece to setpiece. It resembles a halfway decent pastiche of John Carpenter in his Assault on Precinct 13 mode, plowing from one holy-shit-can-you-believe-that outburst of violence to the next quickly enough that you can't entirely notice that the connective tissue is pretty skimpy, or that the film has a painfully underdeveloped sense of its own scenario (it bothers me a lot more here than in the first film, as the scope of the action has been widened, that the Purgers seem interested only in committing murder, and not in all the other crimes: theft, arson, blowing up cars, pirating copyrighted material, pissing in public). It's not nearly as good as Carpenter, of course: the film's insistence on keeping its sights on junky political commentary prevents it from being any fun at all, and the unrelentingly dour tone manages to stomp on most of what appear to have been jokes in the screenplay.

Still, it has a certain continuous energy that does a lot to wipe up the laborious domino-setting of the beginning, or the absurdly manic finale, with its microscopically short attention span and distracting eagerness to complicate things at the exact moment they're supposed to be winding down. But it does give us a bit more of Michael K. Williams as Carmelo, a magnificently unsubtle Malcolm X surrogate who's the most lively personality the film contains, so I have to thank it for that.

Decent middle notwithstanding, Anarchy is still a pretty dire experience: it feels, for its entire running time, like someone shouting passionate but insufficiently thought-through political slogans. As with The Purge, I am fully in agreement with the things this film appears to be claiming: that old rich white people have built a society wonderfully designed to make things easy on themselves and unnecessarily hard on everybody else, and that things are only getting worse and worse as time goes by. But having that theme built on top of a "what if" scenario that's so perilously rickety at the foundation just won't work: if we're going to see how the Purge comments on our own society, we have to understand how it fits into its own society, and that never really happens, though it comes closer than it did in the first movie. And with all of the best, most functional parts of the film having the least to do with its obvious, urgently-voiced message, it's impossible to take that message very seriously. Kudos to Anarchy for saying things that most mainstream movies would rather remain apolitically neutral on, but it's simply not saying it well at all, and that matters a lot more than simply having good intentions.

4/10

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BEST SHOT: CRIES & WHISPERS

It's 1973 month at the Film Experience, so for this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel has assigned us that year's winner of the Best Cinematography Oscar: the Swedish chamber drama Cries and Whispers, a massively powerful film that's also just about the most depressing thing in the career of director Ingmar Bergman. Who might well be the most depressing major filmmaker in history, so "the most depressing Bergman film" isn't a tiny claim to make, but it well suits a drama whose plot contains the following beats:

1) A woman is dying;
2) She's visited by her sisters who hate her and each other;
3) She dies;
4) Things get worse.

It's the last thing anybody would turn to because they wanted a breezy time at the movies, but it's rich, potent psychology executed by four world-class actors guided by one of the finest directors of women in cinema history: Harriet Andersson as the dying woman, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann as her cruel sisters, and Kari Sylwan as the maid who alone brings any measure of warmth and comfort to the film's stark world. Between them, and the great Sven Nykvist, whose greatest work of cinematography this represents, Cries and Whispers becomes, to my mind, the single best film in Bergman's canon, merciless but profound, bleak but beautiful.

The film is notable for its harsh, monochromatic palette, all brown and black and violent fields of blood red, bringing anger and destructive passion to the sickly world of the film. And oh, how I felt like I should focus on one of the images that best exemplified how the film uses red, for there's not another film of the 1970s where color is so specifically and deliberately applied. But along the way, I came up with a little joke for myself: "I should find the happiest shot in the movie, tee-hee", thought I, because this is very much a film where you don't just find happy moments. You have to mine for them.

And yet, there is a moment in the film that meets the exact fake criterion I came up with for myself. There's not a trace of red to be seen, and the emphasis of the moment is on connection and love, not on isolated terror and spiritual deadness. It's a perfect counterpoint to the rest of the film, and while I ordinarily like to pick shots that exemplify the movie that contains them, it felt like the contrast this image offered is exactly what made it a wonderful choice.

That's Anna the maid, coming to the dying Agnes in one of her moments of agony to provide comfort and warmth, offering her naked breast as a pillow for the sick woman to rest on, to feel warmth and flesh and safety. There are both homoerotic and maternal overtones to the gesture, both of which are equally valid and important in a film that is otherwise specifically devoid of either kind of love (the only other meaningfully sexual scene in 91 minutes finds Thulin's Karin mutilating her genitals with a broken wineglass to keep her husband at bay). But it's the maternal element that I'd rather focus on, not least because the composition, with Anna arched over the dying woman, cradling her, recalls to my mind the Pietà, the classic motif of Mary holding the dead body of Christ. This is not the only time that Agnes is associated with Christ, either, though it's typical of Bergman's "God is silent" period that Agnes-Christ does not end up proving a transcendent, redemptive figure.

But the main import of the moment is that it is the one place of real tenderness and love in the movie: the kindly, comforting kiss on the forehead, the way that Agnes has placed her hand on Anna's other breast, as though to reassure herself that this other person providing warming shelter is really there. Even though her skin is damp and sallow, her face is calm and peaceful, more than anywhere else prior to her death.

By virtue of being the only protracted kind moment in the film, this lands with a great deal of force that it might not have if the film was more evenly split between hope and despair. As it is, this is one of the most striking examples of love that I have seen in a movie; much more powerful for how dramatically it stands out from the surrounding misery, much more hopeful because of how desperately the universe of Cries and Whispers needs even the smallest measure of hope.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1962: In which an appreciation for film history shades into outright grotesquerie

There has never been a time anywhere in the history of commercial cinema that was terribly easy on aging women, but for a stretch of the 1960s it was perhaps slightly easier. For that decade bore witness to the brief flowering of the dubious genre of "hagsploitation" in which famous actresses in their 50s and 60s played psychotic crazy people. It wasn't the most dignified way to wrap up a career, but it was a living, and it's easy to see how it might even come across as somewhat flattering. The explicit texts of these films might have demanded women of a certain age to stand in as emblems of the terror that the young feel for the old, parading around as living proof that the older you get, the more freakish and ungodly and unreliably demented. But there existence also validated the timeless fame of the women at the center of the plot: it was the spectacle of seeing a genuine living icon playing a psycho that was the draw, not just watching some random nutty old lady, and however backhanded, it was a compliment to the stars' fame and presence and status in the annals of film history.

Hagsploitation has its obvious origination in a film that was itself hopping on a bandwagon: for it's unlikely that 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? would exist without Psycho having paved the way. It's structure echoes the earlier film (mostly at the end; there's no mid-movie twist like in Hitchcock's picture), it uses black and white cinematography to much the same ends - cost-saving but also creating a particular mood of chiaroscuro nastiness that turns relatively normal-looking everyday settings into something visually obscene - and of course, there's the whole crazy psycho deal...

Baby Jane Hudson, in 1917, was a child vaudeville star (played in this era by Julie Allred); and she was an epically spoiled one, humiliating her mother (Anne Barton), manipulating her father (Dave Willock), the subject of all her sickly-sweet, psychoanalytically suggestive ballads about little girls loving daddies, and above all else, being horribly, pointlessly cruel to her sister Blanche (Gina Gillespie), whose drained, haggard expression speaks volumes about how much shit she has to eat every single day. In 1935, the tables have turned: Blanche is now a huge success in the movies, and Jane is a pathetic has-been. But the words of their mother have made Blanche kinder to her sibling than she ever received; despite how in-demand she is, she'll only star in a movie if another vehicle can be arranged for the spectacularly untalented Jane to shoot at the same time. This all comes to an end when Blanche has her legs mangled in a car accident.

Everybody automatically assumes that the jealous, alcoholic Jane was responsible, but there was apparently not enough evidence to convict, because we finally arrive in 1962 to find the Hudson sisters living together in the grand old Hollywood house purchased at the height of Blanche's stardom. Here Jane (Betty Davis) begrudgingly tends to her crippled sister, while Blanche (Joan Crawford) lives in hopeless isolation, always nervous about her resentful, drunken caregiver's short temper and capacity for meanness. The film properly begins (after an enormously long pre-credits sequence, especially for '62) with Blanche's old movies having found new life on TV; this is enough to put Jane over the deep end entirely, and her latent hatred of Blanche's bigger fame, success, and talent begins to boil over into constant emotional abuse and torture of a most colorful, inventive sort. And while she's busy driving off the maid Elvira (Maidie Norman) and the inquisitive neighbor (Anna Lee), Jane sets about her own career restoration: not by having her shitty movies sold to TV, but by reviving the old Baby Jane character for the stage once more.

There's a little - or a whole damn lot - of Sunset Blvd. in there, but at his most aggressively caustic, even Billy Wilder couldn't come up with a human gargoyle as captivatingly monstrous as Jane Hudson. It's a pretty terrific film in most ways, but there's really no point in denying that this is Bette Davis's movie: the gimmick of casting two real-life rivals who hated each other with the purity and longevity of the hate between her and Joan Crawford makes for a terrific ad campaign in '62, and remains palpable half a century later in the undisguised loathing that passes between the two women, but we can't ever pretend that this was a balanced match between the actors. Lukas Heller's screenplay hands the film to the Jane character on a silver platter, Robert Aldrich's framing consistently cedes all the power to Jane without hesitation, and Davis's performance is a hurricane of raging madness, violence and histrionic bitterness that Crawford's steely ire can't compete with at all. And I really do like Crawford, generally and in this film. But she gets blown out of the water.

Just look at the way they're introduced: we meet Blanche first, watching herself (in the form of the 1934 Crawford vehicle Sadie McKee), and Crawford's luminous face with that particular glow that only leading ladies in '30s movies from Hollywood ever attained cuts to the weathered Crawford of 28 years later, with crow's feet and tired hair and a wonderfully pleasant, sweet look of contentment on her face, a delicate expression of aging humanity recognising the fact that it's aged with satisfied resignation. A bit later, we meet Jane: Aldrich has Davis saunter into a medium close-up, and there's nothing pleasant, sweet, or delicate about her. Overlit to blast her skin out white (even in black-and-white, you pretty consistently get the impression that Jane's skin is bone white and clammy), Davis is wearing an amount of make-up that goes beyond jokes about Kabuki theater or death masks: she is a freakish terror of puffy blobs of flesh-substance, with lips cut out hard from her face and black rings around her eyes that look like the pits of hell. Blanche, her first shot tells us, is a weary human; Jane, in contrast, is introduced like a blast from the id, the most terrifying nightmare image of an ancient crone made up of nothing but rotted, fermenting malice. Davis was never afraid to make herself look ugly when the role called for it, but her enthusiastic readiness to bury herself in the total monstrousness of Jane is above and beyond everything else in her career. It's an impressive explosion of the very concept of a "star turn", and so potent as an image that absolutely nothing else in the film can pull focus from it; and that's before Davis even opens her mouth to speak her hateful words in a sarcastic, acidic bark. All the attempts to claim the line "But y'are Blanche! Y'are in that chair!" as some kind of iconic moment in screen camp have not succeeded, to my mind, in diluting the sheer horror of it, spat out by Davis with no desire to do anything but keep regurgitating an ancient malice that has long since ceased to feed off of anything but its own momentum.

For this is, after all, a horror film: an astonishingly direct one for the era (when horror was left mostly to the B-movie producers) and the relative level of prestige of the production (it was produced by Seven Arts, which occupied about the same place in the marketplace as Lionsgate today, though at a much higher level of respectability). It is every awful, vile thing anyone ever thought about growing old compressed into one package and blasted out on the strength of Davis's raging performance, Aldrich's fantastic staging, Ernest Haller's hard, high-contrast cinematography, with its tendency to make suburban California look like a pit of toxic shadows at night, and Frank DeVol's twitchy, nervous score, mixing '60s junk pop, Gothic swells, and increasingly deranged orchestrations of "I've Written a Letter to Daddy", Baby Jane's signature number.

There are some genuinely great moments of pre-'68 horror here: when Jane's desperation turns to murder, Aldrich gets around the censors by staging one particularly horrible moment offscreen, staying tightly on Crawford's face as she watches Jane cave someone's skull in with a hammer, and letting her whimpering, bug-eyed fear make the moment land with more force than any amount of gore might. He also lingers on moments to let the weirdness and creepiness and just-not-rightness of those moments bubble up to the top; in one notable moment, he lets us watch as Jane re-enacts one of her routines, Davis allowing herself to seem pathetic and lost in childishness for far too long to be comfortable, before the moment is punctuated by her scream of terror as she catches sight of herself in a mirror. We've already had plenty of time to be thoroughly unnerved by the moment; the scream is a jolt that helps it to hit harder.

Now, all those lingering moments do come at a price: one of the chief flaws of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is that, at 134 minutes, it is unconscionably long for such such a grubby shocker of a horror film, even one that feigns as much psychological depth as this. And that's the other chief flaw, actually: the psychology is just a feint, there to make Baby Jane? seem like a classier thriller than the reality. And by no means do I mind that it's not classy; I mind only that it's attempt to distract from that fact work so clumsily. And I particularly mind the film's twist ending, emphatically played by the actors but entirely unpersuasive on the level of narrative cohesion: Blanche's entire character makes a little bit less sense in light of the climactic revelations, and it's hard to take any psychological thriller seriously when it contradicts its own psychology.

Nitpicks! What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a classic for a reason: it's gorgeously atmospheric in both the visuals and the soundtrack, and it's a marathon of high-impact Grand Dame acting. The film came out in the moment when "film history" was really beginning to find its footing as a discipline, and in some ways, this is one of the great first moments in film nostalgia: it counts on its audience knowing the actors' work and being suitably terrified by their transformation from leading ladies to aggressors in a bleak psychological battle; it is scariest not just because Jane is a terror, but because Bette Davis is the one bringing her to that point, and the gulf between Bette Davis then and Bette Davis now (the "now" of '62, at least) is as shocking as poached rat for lunch. And that place where adoration of film icons' past shifts into bewilderment at film icons' present is where Baby Jane goes from being just a routine psycho shocker to a blunt force attack on the audience. It's a solid film on its own merits: the more you know about Davis and Crawford, their feud, and their past work, the more it becomes actively great. I understand that American horror cinema in the '60s wasn't so terribly great that calling something "one of the absolute best American horror films of the '60s" really means anything, but the film deserves that praise regardless.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1962
-How did Stanley Kubrick ever make a movie of Lolita?
-The only two "true" Cinerama narrative features of all time are made at MGM, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won (the latter does not premiere in the U.S. till 1963)
-Gregory Peck headlines both the deeply earnest To Kill a Mockingbird and the violent shocker Cape Fear for Universal; he is stately and taciturn in both

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1962
-Agnès Varda is the first (and only) woman to join the French New Wave boys' club, with Cléo from 5 to 7
-The Keeper of Promises is the first (and only) Brazilian film to win the Palme d'Or
-Albert "Cubby" Broccoli produces Dr. No, the first (and most certainly not only) big-screen adventure of British superspy James Bond

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: since the Italian genre film began revving up after the Second World War, filmmakers have been putting Greek hero Heracles into some pretty damn dumb movies anchored by mean noteworthy more for their build than their acting, so at least the newest Hercules can claim for itself the merit of a leading actor who has actually done good work in movies before in addition to having a gigantic chest. There was clearly an inevitable place to take this.

There are a handful of movies that, even having seen them and processed them and understood that they exist, you still can't quite believe it. In that august company, we now find Hercules in New York, variously described as being from either 1969 or 1970, but which really comes from the timeless space in the hearts of all children. Because what child, hearing the classic myths of the great Greek hero Heracles, didn't idly think in the moment between waking and sleeping, "fighting lions and boars is all wonderful, but what do you supposed he'd have done if he was on a date with a modern-day lady in Central Park? Maybe he'd fight a bear!" And the child would then drift off into dreams of Hercules punching a bear in the face while his mortal date sat watching, cooing with staged nervousness like Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons. Only it wasn't a bear, but a kind of bear-man; like, it looked like a bear, but it moved like a man trying to feign being a bear. For in the boundless world of a child's dreams, all manner of things are possible.

Anticipating this, the makers of Hercules in New York really did include a scene where Hercules punches a bear in Central Park, and that bear looks exactly like a man in a bear suit doing his best, but it's not very good; and many more delightful things besides. It's a remarkably fucking bizarre movie altogether, to begin with springing from a question that nobody in history probably ever asked, viz. "What would happen if Hercules arrived in New York? Not for any reason, but just to sight-see?" And the form the answer took functions exactly like a star vehicle, except the the people involved were not remotely the kind of stars you'd build a movie around. They being Arnold Stang, the platonic ideal of the diminutive, neurotic New York comic, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the reigning Mr. Universe, an Austrian bodybuilder with no previous acting skill and an impenetrable accent that had to be overdubbed in order to make any of his dialogue remotely intelligible.

Schwarzenegger, credited as "Arnold Strong", is obviously the reason that this very odd little movie remains somewhat infamous down to the modern day; it was to be his only leading role in a movie until Conan the Barbarian, 13 years later, and it's uncomfortably clear that he had no real idea what to do in front of a movie camera, nor did director Arthur Allan Seidelman have much of a sense of what to do with the enormous man-slab in front of him. There's a vacant desperation on the actor's face that's obvious even in the dubbed version that was for a long time the only way to watch the film; when it was released on DVD in 2000, the original recordings were included as an additional audio channel, making it clear that Schwarzenegger's discomfort was compounded by his complete inability to communicate in English, forcibly coughing out phonetically-learned lines that resemble speech in only the most incidental ways. It's certainly a much funnier "let's watch a bad movie!" experience to subject oneself to the unadulterated Arnold, but it's so outlandishly painful to watch that I will confess that I pretty much relied on the original dub; at least it results in a movie where one can follow the plot.

The plot is sheer fever dream madness. Hercules is bored with the passage of changeless eons on Mount Olympus, and over the objections of his father Zeus (Ernest Graves) - the only mythological figure given his Greek name instead of the Roman one (Apollo doesn't count) - he journeys to the mortal places of Earth for the first time in centuries to have a little fun. Not realising or apparently caring that the worship of the Olympian gods has been over for centuries, Hercules openly admits to who he is, but most of the New Yorkers he meets seem to regard it as just some Greek thing, and take him for a socially underdeveloped fellow with a charming personality. He quickly falls in with a pretzel seller, Pretzie (Stang), because screenwriter Aubrey Wisberg has an amazing facility with names. And together, Pretzie and Hercules decide to jump into the world of professional wrestling, which causes him to cross paths with Helen Camden (Deborah Loomis) and her professor father (James Karen). It also, more explicably, sets him on a collision course with the mob. And this wouldn't be a problem except that Zeus's angry wife Juno (Tanny McDonald) arranges for Hercules to lose his powers at the exact moment that puts him most directly in the path of some angry mob thugs. And despite having Schwarzenegger's comically jacked-up body, Hercules has absolutely no residual strength as a mere mortal.

Hercules in New York is a deliberate comedy, which would ordinarily be the kiss of death for a film like this: bad comedies are virtually never fun bad movies. And this is a deeply, unfathomably bad comedy, addicted to hoary ethnic jokes, opening with the most colorfully caricatured old Jewish lady in the annals of cinema gawking loudly at the naked bodybuilder who has just fallen past her airplane window, and never really letting up; any movie that puts Arnold Stang front and center (he's the top-billed actor, though Schwarzenegger certainly gets more face time) would, anyway, have a very hard time escaping from the shadow of ethnic jokes. It's a very Borscht Belt-ey collection of creaking, awful bits that are too labored even to be corny; there's a chase scene with the punchline that a hot dog vendor has been running after his customer to put sauerkraut on the dog that made me want to set my TV on fire.

The thing the film absolutely has in its favor, though, is that it's so damn weird. In far more ways than I have even begun to imply. For one thing, there's the extremely present score, by John Balamos, dominated by various cues of higher or lower energy, all played on solo bouzouki. It's unmistakably Greek, but very modern Greek - very Zorba the Greek, as though at any moment Hercules was going to take his robust love of life and teach Pretzie how to dance, and if that had happened, Hercules in New York would have become my absolute favorite moment of all time. Since that does not happen, nor anything like it, the music instead sits atop the movie in the most bizarrely incongruous way. And you never, ever can stop noticing it.

Also - and this is not a small thing when we're talking about epically bad movies - it's the one of the most shittily-made things ever. There are a few shots where the camera visibly wobbles on an insufficiently tightened tripod, but the really bad stuff is in the audio. This is exacerbated in the dubbed version, where the anonymous fellow providing a thoroughly bland voice for Schwarzenegger is clearly speaking in a studio, and everyone else is clearly speaking on location, but that's the start of the problems, not the end of them. Because most of the dialogue was recorded on set, and most of the scenes take place outside, the ambient noise is all over the place: in between cuts, the volume jumps or plummets by a huge amount, or one person sounds fine and one person sounds like they weren't facing the microphone. Or in one astonishing moment that I will take to my grave as a happy moment among happy moments, Nemesis (Taina Elg) and Pluto (Michael Lipton) are conspiring at the gates of the underworld, and you can't just hear New York City traffic in the background (that actually happens several times): the sound of the New York City traffic actually starts to overwhelm the characters' speech.

And of course, there are the usual problems with low-budget productions: rinky-dink sets (Olympus looks like it was shot in a hurry in a public park), low-talent actors overplaying everything with no sense of scale or continuity (Loomis is especially bad in this regard), no chance to redo moments that didn't go right the first time.

The sheer volume of things going wrong is more than enough to make Hercules in New York an exceptionally bad movie; the outlandishly peculiar concept upon which everything has been strung, married to the almost miraculous lack of basic filmmaking competence is what makes it memorable above and beyond all but the very worst. I haven't decided if it's so bad it's good, or so bad it's really bad - there's a lot of strained comedy - but I am sure of this: it's a completely singular object. There's a fearless madness at play here, and it makes Hercules in New York a magnetic experience far beyond the joy of watching a future celebrity humiliate himself, and beyond simply laughing at the overwhelming awfulness of it all.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD BONUS: AND ANOTHER THING

1951's The Thing from Another World is one of the weirdest cases that we those of us who generally subscribe to auteur theory will ever have to deal with. It's a Howard Hawks production (Hawks was one of the key names when the Cahiers du cinéma crew began formulating the theory), but not a Howard Hawks film; directorial credit was given to Christian Nyby, an editor who had cut several of Hawks's directorial efforts. But it looks for all the world like a Hawks film, and it sounds like a Hawks film, and over the decades, many people have rather casually assumed that Hawks actually directed it, giving Nyby credit as a favor; that, or he simply leaned on Nyby awfully hard, taking the film away from him without openly confessing to it. That assumption, though, runs against the recollections of the cast and crew, who deny that Hawks was more than a particularly attentive producer. Except for the cast and crew who assure us that yeah, Hawks totally took over and Nyby was just there to watch.

It's insoluble (though not quite as much so as the Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg film Poltergeist), but the general consensus is that Nyby was learning by doing on the set of The Thing from Another World, practicing the craft of directing by mimicking Hawks, and constantly checking in with Hawks to make sure he was doing things right, and occasionally handing his producer the reins when things got too difficult. And that results in a Howard Hawks film that was physically directed mostly by somebody else. The results were that Nyby worked almost exclusively in television for the rest of his career, and Hawks never again made something even remotely in the same generic wheelhouse as The Thing, and so it feels like a weird outlier either way. But a good 'un.

So having at least acknowledged the one Big Difficulty with the film, let's turn to the next: any viewer coming to the film in 2014 - or hell, even by like 1956 or '57 or so - is going to be doing it at the significant disadvantage that The Thing from Another World was one of those groundbreaking, genre-defining masterpieces that set out a new litany of rules that proved so influential that everything amazing and revolutionary within it very quickly became indistinguishable from dozens of other movies. If you didn't know that The Thing more or less invented the alien invader genre of the 1950s, but assumed it simply came out alongside all the others, the only things that would distinguish it even slightly would be its more naturalistic-than-usual dialogue and a far more present, effective female lead than just about any other American genre film of the decade that I can immediately recall. But for the most part, it seems every inch as clichéd and dopey as the likes of It Conquered the World or The Deadly Mantis (which isn't an alien movie at all, but the shared Arctic setting has always led me to think of it and The Thing in the same thought), if you just come to it blindly.*

And there's no real way to undo that impression, which makes The Thing from Another World neither the first victim of its own success. Still, it doesn't take strict historical contextualising to see how this is, for all its generic elements, a much better piece of filmmaking than most of movies it's most easily compared to. For it does have that dialogue, and it does have that female lead, and other charms besides.

Based, with very little fidelity, on John W. Campbell, Jr's 1938 novella Who Goes There? - which would be adapted again and much more closely in 1982, with John Carpenter's The Thing (the films are dissimilar enough that I don't want to go on a whole "which is better?" tangent, but if I did, I wouldn't hesitate for a second before picking the one from '82) - the script credited to Charles Lederer with known, and rather apparent, additions by Hawks and Ben Hecht tells of an Air Force detachment send to a remote Arctic research station to investigate the crash of an unidentified flying object. The leader of this mission, Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and the head of the research station, Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) butt heads repeatedly over what should be done with the find: a large flying saucer that is accidentally destroyed in the attempt to remove it, and a giant humanoid body (James Arness) in the ice some way apart from the ship. Carrington desires to study the thing for the Advancement of Science; Hendry mistrusts anything unknown as likely to be dangerous, and he turns out to be quite correct in this doubt. When mischance causes the thing to thaw out, it goes on a bit of a rampage, killing two of the facility's dogs, and losing an army. Carrington and his team are able to determine from this limb that it is in fact a plant, not an animal, and later events reveal that it's a plant that feeds on mammalian blood. And so do its seedlings, which it begins to raise in the station's greenhouse.

The primary conflict of The Thing isn't between man and alien, but between science and action. This is the background of damn near every science fiction film of the era, of course, but few movies are so interested in making it as clear as this one, with its depiction of Dr. Carrington as the worst kind of meddler who speaks of the emotionless thing with awestruck admiration, and whose desire for knowledge leads him to openly confess that he'd rather die along with every other human in the station than allow the thing to be destroyed. Between its prodding dialogue and visual codes, the film makes an explicit connection that scientist = sociopath = communist = homosexual† = the worst kind of insidious Other that wants nothing more than to stop the barreling might of the U.S. military making things safe for everybody. Hard rightwing overtones in sci-fi and horror are nothing new, but the unmissable way that The Thing from Another World says, all but so many words, that anyone who wants to think and use reason is bad news, and should be barred from any position of authority.

Being as I am entirely unsympathetic to that message, I guess I should find the movie problematic, but the thing is, it's such a terrific thriller, with such tight, relentless pacing. Even though the thing doesn't begin to make its presence felt till near the halfway point (of 87 minutes, none too short by '50s sci-fi standards), the control of character scenes is so great that the simple act of watching men discuss strategy ends up being terrifically absorbing. We owe that in part to Nyby's appropriation of the most important of all Hawksian innovations, overlapping dialogue; nothing this side of Hawks's His Girl Friday (adapted by Lederer from an original co-written by Hecht, not coincidentally) shows off the extreme kinetic energy of people talking over and around each other, trying to pull as much attention for themselves and their ideas as possible, recklessly blasting by the stateliness of so much filmmaking and sci-fi filmmaking especially. Oh, how many sci-fi pictures bog down in scenes of grave men gravely describing grave ideas with ponderous import? Most of them, but never The Thing, which is full of messy, vividly human moments of bickering and hashing-out ideas and sardonic asides. It's a movie where the sheer impact of how people talk is enough to make you lean in to absorb it all, making an absolute virtue of the small variety of locations.

The other great Hawksian element is "Nikki" Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan), Carrington's secretary and a failed conquest of Hendry's, who represents one of the best examples of Hawks's women who can best all the boys at their own game. The first thing we find out about her is that Hendry's attempt to get her drunk enough to give in to his advances ended with her outdrinking him, and leaving him in a woozy stupor; as the film advances, she'll tie him up in a surprisingly open admission that BDSM is a thing for a '50s movie, and later gets one of the best lines of dialogue in the genre's history, when an exhausted Hendry announces, "I've given all the orders I want to give for the rest of my life". Without missing a beat, she tosses back, "If I thought that was true, I'd ask you to marry me". She's still ultimately just the Love Interest (her entire contribution to the plot consists of informing Hendry that Carrington has been cultivating thing-seeds on the sly), but there are few women who fill that role, and virtually none at all in this genre at this period, whose fulfillment of Love Interest duties is so clearly on her own terms and at her own pleasure. Sheridan's performance isn't great, necessarily - she's too obviously being coached to ape Rosalind Russell, and isn't quite able to do so successfully - but it's certainly good enough, and an already sturdy, tense film explodes with life every time she enters the frame.

Aesthetically, The Thing is perfect solid without being necessarily brilliant: the early going, with the team investigating the crashed ship, features some great images contrasting the men with the blank tundra, but once the action moves permanently inside, Nyby/Hawks and director of photography Russell Harlan pretty quickly exhaust the potential options for shooting groups of people talking in close interior spaces. Far better are the pace, and Roland Gross's editing; horror as it was practiced in 1951 barely resembles horror today, and I don't suppose most people would find this movie particularly scary anymore, but there's one superlatively-timed jump scare relying on the thing showing up considerably earlier than the beats of the scene would lead us to expect, and the slow accelerations in the speed of cutting let the film move smoothly from its tense opening to its frantic climax. The only problem, really, is the thing itself: Arness looks like a dimestore Frankenstein monster (he disliked the movie immensely, we are told), and while the filmmakers play the usual "keep the creature offscreen as much as possible" game, even the handful of glimpses of the alien we see are enough to puncture its effectiveness. And this isn't chronological parochialism talking: I am a great fan of many '50s movie monsters. The thing just looks damn cheap, is all, and not Corman-style cheap-thus-delightful; just plain and boring and bereft of imagination.

But luckily, The Thing isn't really about the thing, but about how the characters respond to its existence, and the internal friction that come up as a result, somewhat like a latter-day zombie movie only with a more overtly pro-militarism theme than any zombie movie I've ever seen. Still, the main takeaway from the movie isn't "fuck yeah, the Air Force!"; it's about how people deal with a tense, dangerous situation, and how interpersonal conflicts can exacerbate external threats. And also how you can never trust when those damn space Commies will show up next time. It's obviously dated, and it takes some willingness to look past its genre trappings to really appreciate how smartly crafted and beautifully written it is, but it's not the fault of a movie from 1951 that it's a movie from 1951, and the rock-solid core of the piece is just as nervy and insightful as it ever was.

Body count: 2 humans, unseen; 3 dogs, all seen, and possibly more unseen; and 1 thing from another world, plus an uncertain number of seedling things that had not yet emerged as independent life forms.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SOME WICKED THING THIS WAY COMES

Considering how much its visceral, rubbery gore effects, electronic score, the niceties of its lighting and film stock, and especially its position in the center of a maelstrom of controversy about these goddamn violence-driven horror pictures with no characterisations beyond "this guy dies then that guy dies" all mark it out as a quintessential product of the early 1980s, it's going to sound like I'm being deliberately contrary when I say that John Carpenter's The Thing is a gloriously classical piece of filmmaking. But I swear I'm not. And of course, we have now the luxury of more than three decades to reflect on a film that was initially received not only by critics but even the biggest part of horror fandom as pure nihilistic, style-over-substance drivel, and there has been a hard, long fight that has ultimately resulted in the film's canonisation, more or less, as an iconic work of modern horror. If I had tried to claim that The Thing was "classical" or anything like it in 1982, I would have been screamed out of the room, not least because in 1982 I was a baby, and babies talking about films are just about the creepiest.

But classical it is: swooning, romantic classicism. It's no secret that Carpenter has spent most of his career in the shadow of Howard Hawks, cryptically re-making or pointedly reversing that director's Rio Bravo in, like, half of his movies. And with The Thing, he went so far as to explicitly remake the Hawks production of The Thing from Another World of 1951, a film whose authorship is much, much, much too complicated to say something as blunt as "it was directed by Howard Hawks" or the opposite. But at least as much as the spirit of Hawks informs The Thing, with its hotbed of masculine games of dominance and authority, it's a film in thrall to Alfred Hitchcock as well, for The Thing is something close to an absolutely perfect exercise in how to construct a thriller. A thriller, mind you, cloaked in the most thoroughly unnerving body horror that mainstream cinema had ever seen before body horror specialist David Cronenberg decided to mount his own '50s remake a few years later with The Fly.

But it is a thriller where the film's heart lies. Adapted by Bill Lancaster from a novella by John W. Campbell (much more closely than the '51 film, which barely resembles the source material), the scenario is blunt and basic: 12 men are trapped in a remote location with the awareness that some of them are deadly killers, but nobody knows who or how many. Cue the paranoia, which Carpenter elegantly spikes by occasionally punctuating his film with a showstopper sequence of some of the very best practical effects in the more than 100-year history of cinema special effects, which the gives the film an incredibly clever structure by which a steady rise in tension is jacked up at irregular intervals. If most thrillers are like being put in a pot of water being brought to a boil over a low flame, The Thing is a film in which the dial is turned up a few notches every now and then, and left there.

I have no better demonstration of the film's genius than in noting that the very nature of its tension shifts after the first time you've seen it, arguably increasing the film's impact rather than dissipating it, and when a genre film can do that... So the thing that happens - and if you haven't seen The Thing, please do stop reading and go see it. It's maybe the only heavily gory film that I think works so well as a piece of cinema that I'd urge on even the most squeamish and gore-averse with an unsympathetic "it's a masterpiece, you're just going to have to deal with it". Those who aren't squeamish, I surely hope don't need my encouragement.

So the thing that happens, is that the film opens with Norwegians chasing a dog across the Antarctic tundra, firing at it from a helicopter, and it's a marvelously disconcerting opening; eventually they both end up dead, and a nearby American research station ends up with the dog and no sense of what the hell is happening. Carpenter keeps bringing our attention to the dog, with low camera angles favoring its height and frequent cutaways to it simply mulling around, with a little bit more sobriety than typically seen in dogs. The first time you see the movie, the dog is a synecdoche of the first-act mystery: what happened to the Norwegians? What has that dog seen, what has that dog done? The second time, when we know what the dog is up to, it's completely different, but even more tense: what is the "dog" thinking, what is it plotting? Innocuous if slightly disconcerting moments of the dog jumping up on somebody, or following them into an empty room, suddenly become nerve-wracking instances of raw terror: GET IT OFF YOU! STOP TOUCHING THE DOG! If there was nothing better in The Thing than a first act that becomes so greatly deepened in its effect and complexity on second and later viewings, I'd already be prepared to call it a great and timeless thriller. Since The Thing is, instead, a movie where nearly everything is better than everything else, because everything is just that goddamn good, I am obliged instead to call it instead one of the greatest thrillers, on top of being one of the greatest horror movies.

The film sometimes gets shade thrown its way for being too concerned with surfaces, populating its remote station with a group of men no more distinctive than you'd find in any slasher movie of the era, and that's not a complaint that can really be argued against, except to point out that it doesn't matter: the specific men involved don't matter nearly as much as the dynamics between them, and these are precisely and obviously delineated by the uniformly terrific cast, headed up by Carpenter's most reliable actor, Kurt Russell.

I might even argue, in fact that The Thing finds Carpenter for once out-Hawksing Hawks: one of that director's most important recurring themes is his breakdown and analysis of codes of American maleness, and The Thing takes that theme to an extreme end. It is among the best depictions I can name about the group dynamics of men, where the individual psychological details of those men's lives (who has a kid? who is playing two women back at home? who secretly wants to play the violin?) are less important the psychology of the group as a group. And of course, The Thing games this by putting that group dynamic, almost from the beginning in a state of heightened tension and awareness, which gives way at a certain point to outright paranoia and violent mistrust. Carpenter and Lancaster depict the backbiting, misjudgment, and rank-pulling that comes out of such a situation with supreme clarity and force.

That being said, this is still mostly an exercise in pants-shitting terror, and it's a pretty good one. Its depictions of bodies splitting apart, and bodies betraying their owners, and being forced into constant, weary awareness with death lying a split second way if you don't pay enough attention are horror of the best, purest sort: this is a movie whose depiction of the deadly, destructive, and unknown invading the safe, secure, and routine (which is my basic concept of where the borders marked "horror" reside) could not be better, owing mostly to the Lovecraftian extreme of its design of the shape-shifting, body-snatching alien force picking off the men one by one. And owing to its depiction of that force less as a monster to be fought than as a disease exploding through barely-understood vectors and perpetrating foul violence on the carrier. Indeed, with its all-male cast (the entire list of women in the film includes a female-voiced computer program snottily dismissed as a "bitch", someone seen in a videotaped game show, and a drawing of a '40s-style pin-up girl), and its depiction of something inescapable and fatal being passed between them, with the in-group tension that creates, The Thing would be an absolutely irresistible metaphor for the early years of the AIDS crisis, except it was came out too early for that to be anything but a remarkable historical coincidence.

That doesn't necessarily make it "scary" (that has never been my response to it, anyway), but it's one of the highest peaks the genre has ever reached. This is what happens when you give a genius the right mixture of budget and freedom to explore, though I am sure that Universal, who took a bath on the film in 1982, wouldn't necessarily agree with me. What it is, though, is sublimely tense: doling out info just enough that we can see the shape of the next 10 or 15 minutes, but not the details, and letting us sit and wait in agony while the not-quite-predictable shock moment happens - there's a blood-testing scene that's paced with deliberately glacial emphasis, clicking from one close-up to the next with a jagged rhythm (Todd Ramsay's editing is pretty terrific throughout but it especially makes this scene), until you can barely stand it, and then it blows up when we're looking the other way. It's simply one of the great sequences in any thriller made since 1980.

And then we have Ennio Morricone's score, a very uncharacteristic piece of thumping, bass-heavy menace. It feels like one of Carpenter's own compositions in a lot of ways, and it adds to the film a tense, driving heartbeat that becomes terribly agitating as it moves on. And also - I'm cramming stuff in at this point, because with movies like The Thing, you don't run out of things to say, just space to say it in - there's Dean Cundey's brilliant Panavision cinematography, with its uncanny color-tinged lighting (Russell is introduced with a sickly green cast over half his face), its fearless use of negative space, and moments that capture the bleak blankness of the tundra as well as anything in cinema's greatest movie about how snow looks, Fargo. Like this beauty, our first establishing shot of the research station in the whole film, and one that as much as says "oh, and in case you were wondering, this film shall be about the raw hell of isolation and being trapped with your fate".

There's a tendency even among the film's boosters to dismiss The Thing as "just a really great horror/thriller". Which it is. Also, Singin' in the Rain is just a really great musical romcom. Perfection is perfection, wherever you find it. And The Thing? Oh my yes, it's perfect.

Body Count: 11, plus a Norwegian already dead when we see him, plus the corpse of a Thing, plus three dogs (onscreen) and several more (offscreen), plus the dog form of a Thing, which doesn't count, but it's the bloodiest moment in the film and it would feel wrong not to mention it. Also a number of individual Things that would be hard to quantify. And the survivors aren't looking in too good of a shape as things end...

TL;DR Body Count: All of them.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1961: In which things start to get out of hand

The one thing that can never be claimed of the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks is that it's like other movies. Lumbering and bloated, often compelling, always gorgeous, and at times astonishingly bizarre in its attempt to force the psychological impulses of mid-century naturalist theater acting into the framework of a bog-standard Western revenge thriller, I haven't decided whether or not it "works", though I am inclined to say it does. But this is the kind of film in which functioning according to any conventional metric was out of the question long before the filming wrapped and the final cut was issued into theaters, and its considerable fascinations are mostly disconnected from its objective quality or lack thereof.

The film began life as a screenplay by Samuel Fuller, adapting Charles Neider's novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, to be directed by Stanley Kubrick, then just emerging from his enfant terrible years, and starring Marlon Brando. It certainly did not end up that way. When the film entered production in the second half of 1958, Brando's early career as cinema's most famous practitioner of Method acting had just begun its slow but steady drift into the wobbly and weird middle period, where he seemed more interested in indulging unspoken private whims than serving the needs of the picture (for a more graphic depiction of this process, I would point you to the actor's next released film after One-Eyed Jacks, the marvelously clumsy 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty). To put it a little more bluntly, Brando had begun his irrevocably slide into becoming a prima donna of the first order. Kubrick had ego problems of his own, of course, as would shortly be thrown in to the sharpest relief on the production of Spartacus, but in the late '50s, there was no question who was going to win. Brando was one of the biggest names the movies had, and he pulled rank over Kubrick at every turn; eventually, the conflict between the men resulted in Kubrick leaving the production, either because he simply couldn't stand to be around his star any longer, or because Brando demanded that he be fired.

This left a movie with no clear direction and an in-progress rewrite by Calder Willingham, and nobody in charge to make things right; eventually, Brando assumed the role of director himself, for the first and only time in his career, extensively re-working the screenplay with yet a third writer, Guy Trosper (he and Willingham received final credit onscreen). It would be easy to regard the finished product as a vanity project, and in a lot of ways, that's precisely what it is. Undoubtedly, there's no missing that it's a first-time effort by a man who didn't necessarily want to direct (the film's box office failure certainly hurt Brando's future dreams in that direction if he had them, though I feel like a man of his stature could have finagled another directing assignment somewhere in all the years to come, if he'd been inclined), though it also doesn't feel lazy or slapdash. Without having ever seen the film, I had rather assumed it would resemble secondhand Elia Kazan set in the West, Kazan being the director most responsible for shaping Brando into the cinematic figure he became. But there's barely a trace of any such influence in a film that gives itself over to plenty of poetic, narratively fuzzy sequences in which the stillness and peace of the outdoors trumps anything to do with character or plot (and there would have allegedly been plenty more of them in Brando's original cut, running well in excess of four hours; Paramount carved it down to two hours and 21 minutes, and neither the studio nor the actor-director were happy with that process).

Brando was lucky to have a seasoned old vet to help him shape the visuals: One-Eyed Jacks was shot by Charles Lang, a great and varied cinematographer who worked in everything from light comedy to film noir to character drama, and made visual successes out of material that wouldn't seem to require any visual sensibility at all (he triumphed on what must have been the immensely thankless job of filming Some Like It Hot, a screenplay-dominated movie if one ever existed). Westerns are, of course, the exact opposite of movies that don't require strong visuals, and his contribution to One-Eyed Jacks is the glue that holds everything together no matter how badly the drama wants to strain apart or, more often, dissolve into a fog of aimlessness. This is a film with a truly inspiring amount of depth to its compositions and blocking: how much of that was Brando's theater-honed sensibility, how much was Lang's desire to show off, how much was simply the sheer power of collaboration, it's not mine to say. The results are what matter, and the result is a film that constantly offers to pull us in, through the action, into the rooms, and to appreciate the spaces between characters and what that says about their motivations and relative domination of any given moment. It is as impressively three-dimensional as any actual 3-D movie I've ever seen. And that's without even pausing to mention the gorgeous use of color, the penetrating blue of the sky and the dusty, out-of-time feeling to the ground and the interiors.

Anyway, One-Eyed Jacks is something of a visual masterpiece, which I don't mean as a slight, or as a backhanded compliment. Westerns, as much as any genre, tend to live or die on the quality of their images, which often do a lot of the heavy lifting for defining characters and conflict and themes and emotions. And so it is with this movie, where the way that people exist in the context of their environment tell us more about them than what they say or how they say it. And this is useful to the film, since it is in a lot ways a very stiff and unconvincing piece of storytelling.

Anyway, here's the idea behind it: there are two bank robbers, Rio (Brando), and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden, whose casting was a chief sticking point between Kubrick and Brando). They're being chased outside of Sonora, Mexico, in 1880, by the Rurales; Dad promises to get fresh horses and return for Rio, but he simply chickens out, leaving his partner to be taken by the law and imprisoned for five years, till he escapes. At that point, Rio teams up with fellow inmate Chico Modesto (Larry Duran) and the clearly untrustworthy Bob Amory (Ben Johnson), and tracks Dad to Monterey, California, where the turncoat has established himself as the much-loved sheriff, with a beautiful Mexican wife, Maria (Katy Jurado), and a beautiful stepdaughter, Louisa (Pina Pellicer). Eager for revenge on all fronts, Rio plots to steal from the Monterey bank to humiliate Dad and seduce Louisa to symbolically cuckold him, but then he goes and falls in love with the girl instead. And after Dad administers a terrible injury to his hand, and he has a chance to think for weeks while he recuperates, Rio begins to reconsider everything he has planned.

There's absolutely no obvious reason under the sun for this to take 141 minutes, and One-Eyed Jacks doesn't provide any non-obvious ones. It's an indulgent film, is all: full of lengthy, go-nowhere scenes that allow Brando and his co-stars to bat dialogue and situations back and forth in longueurs that I suppose resemble Actors Studio exercises, or something those lines; there's an aimlessness to the rhythm of scenes for which the only possible justification is that it "feels like life", not that it in any way works dramatically. And, too, a lot of the film consists of the camera resting on Brando, doing a lot of small-scale business to show off his character and what he's thinking about. A little bit of it goes a long way, and it doesn't help that Brando's performance is nowhere near one of his best: he strands himself with an accent that's so off-base it's rather more funny than anything, and threads the script with the most bluntly obvious "overthrowing the father" metaphor imaginable (for serious, Malden's character has the given name "Dad"?) that provides very little to play that isn't flat and obvious.

The acting as a whole is a mixed bag, which surprised me a little - apparently, Brando-the-director spent most of his time helping Pellicer into her character and out of her pants, and not to much of an end: she still gives the stiffest performance in the movie with the least modulation of her line deliveries, and only comes alive when she gets to play bigger, negative emotions. The rest of the cast range from excellent (Malden's flop-sweating authority, Slim Pickens in a remarkable reined-in performance of admirable nastiness) to simply mediocre (Brando himself), and given the film's obvious desire to be a modernist psychological drama in Western trappings, the inconsistency of the characterisations is a real problem.

The good thing, then, is that One-Eyed Jacks works best when it's not the film it openly wants to be, and instead can be some kind of weird fever dream of clashing tones and visual abstraction. Especially in its opening quarter or so, the film induces a kind of whiplash in its extreme fluctuations of mood from scene to scene, and cut to cut; it's laid back here, angry here, mildly comic here, tense here, thoughtful here, and all within five minutes. There's a deranged electricity to it that's not exactly the same (or even in the same wheelhouse) as solid genre filmmaking, but it's a movie with real, palpable ambition to find new, challenging, different things to do with the form. Its radicalism has been overstated by its partisans (psychologically deep Westerns, and Westerns fronted by antiheroes, weren't exactly new news in 1961), and so has its effectiveness, but that the film is brassy and unique is pretty much beyond dispute. It's symptomatic in some ways of the bloat and loss of focus that marks so much Hollywood filmmaking of the 1960s, but it would be a lot harder to consider that a problem if every one of those bloated epics of the period had such demented, unpredictable personality as Brando's captivating folly.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1961
-Stanley Kramer contends that the Holocaust was bad, in Judgment at Nuremberg
-John Huston directs Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in the final film for each of them, The Misfits
-Doris Wishman creates the legendary nudie-cutie Nude on the Moon

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1961
-Kobayashi Masaki completes his epic trilogy on one Japanese soldier's experience of World War II, The Human Condition
-French director Alain Resnais combines experimental and narrative film in the unclassifiable Last Year at Marienbad
-Jack Clayton directs Britain's classiest horror film, the psychological ghost story The Innocents

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