PERSONAL CANON: NOTHING MORE FOOLISH THAN A MAN CHASIN' HIS HAT

Miller's Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother's "best" movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it's hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most complicated and dense movie, both as a narrative and a character study - I have found it uniformly necessary to see Coen movies twice to fully suss out everything they have going on in terms of mood, symbol, and theme, but Miller's Crossing is unique in that it me two tries just to understand what was happening in the story. There is and has always been a subset of critics that view this complexity as a blind, disguising what is ultimately just a particularly elegant genre riff without much meat on its bones, and that's not a completely baseless accusation; certainly one of the reasons that the film is extra-hard to parse is entirely a function of how much of a genre film it is. It's something of a mash-up of Prohibition-era storytelling with '80s American indie filmmaking (though this film, the Coens' third, was their most studio-bound to that point), and the most obvious element of a very idiosyncratic screenplay is a exuberant passion for '20s slang used in a way that's not exactly period-correct, but is also much too brittle and artificial for it to come across as in any way timeless or fresh, no more in the 2010s than at its debut in 1990.

The most useful way to think of it, in my estimation, is not as a faithful recreation of a vintage gangster picture, nor as a faithful (and uncredited) adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest and 1930's The Glass Key - it's not really "faithful" in either of those capacities - but as something like a performance piece based on those ideas. It is a wildly artificial, mediated thing: nobody has every talked or acted like this in reality, nor even in any other movie. Perhaps the right way to describe it is as pageantry, an act of recreating the idea of a gangster story in a way that calls maximum attention to the artifice of it; other Coen films function in a similar way, as heavily abstracted ideas of a genre film rather than an actual version of a genre film (especially early on - The Hudsucker Proxy, from 1994, is the other clearest example of this tendency), but Miller's Crossing is probably the film where this trick pays the most dividends. It is to a great degree a film about performance, for its central character is a man whose entirely personality is mostly a matter of what he chooses to show to other people, and the somewhat arch brittleness of the whole exercise is a good context for that character to exist in.

That's another point of distinction: Miller's Crossing was the first Coen film that was primarily a character study, though like everything else about the film, it's not immediately apparent that this is the case. But what else do you call a movie in which every scene but one is told from the perspective of one man, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne, in what is by miles and miles the best performance I've ever seen of his), and whose final shot openly invites us to apply what we've learned about him to a stunningly enigmatic expression on his face? It's a character study through and through, and that's not even the weird part; it's also a love story in which this same man devotes all his energy to protecting, destroying, and redeeming the only human being for whom he feels any demonstrated kind feeling. But we'll get there in a minute.

Miller's Crossing is, at its simplest, a Red Harvest-esque tale of a gang war, in which the vivacious Irish mobster Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) decides against the strenuous suggestions of Tom, his closest adviser and seeming best friend, not to let the Italian gangleader Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) kill a chiseling Jewish bookie, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). This is in part because Leo doesn't want to let the uppity Caspar get his way; it's also because Bernie's sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), a noted piece of Bad News, is currently sleeping with Leo, and making him awfully happy. Once Tom fails to keep things from escalating, he splits with Leo and joins up with Caspar, apparently in the hope of entrenching himself high up in the trust of the city's new mob boss, but it's immediately clear that whatever game Tom's playing, Caspar's success and well-being are of only incidental concern.

There's so much going on in the script, in the performances, and in the aesthetic that it's almost impossible to synthesise it all into one simple reading, so I won't pretend that any of what I'm about to say is definitive, but to me, Miller's Crossing is above all about Tom's love for Leo, which doesn't necessarily have a homoerotic tint to it at all, though that's certainly a common enough reading among academic critics. Certainly, Miller's Crossing is unusually concerned with homosexuality, with three men identified as being involved in a destructive love triangle - the centrally problematic Bernie among them - and the word "queer" appearing in the dialogue far too often for it to simply be for period color. After all, while "queer" simply meant "odd and dysfunctional" in the '30s, by 1990 it had definitively transitioned into a synonym for "not-heterosexual nor traditionall-gendered". If the word was merely peppered in for flavor, like plenty of other archaisms, there'd be no point in digging in further, but "queer" is used a lot in Miller's Crossing; it is easily the most common obsolete slang term in dialogue. And with the obvious foregrounding of the gay supporting characters (which could simply be seen as literalising the coded homosexuals in movies like The Maltese Falcon or The Big Combo) in concert, it's really hard to doubt that the Coens meant for the audience to have gayness much on their mind in watching Miller's Crossing.

None of which proves, or even implies, that Tom is lusting after Leo, or that his affair with Verna is sublimating his desire to sleep with Leo, though that's a fine and durable reading. What it does absolutely demand is that we look at the film and see in it a muddying of gender constructs, and this is certainly something that we can see in Tom, right there on the surface. Compared to the usual gangster picture or film noir hero, he's not very "masculine": one of his defining traits is a tendency to be badly beaten in any physical altercation, even those with old men and women, not least because he typically doesn't even move to defend himself. He's a spectacularly incongruous figure in the hard-boiled surroundings, with people spouting out florid lines of dialogue that verge on self-parody, and multiple people dying in wide-eyed, unblinking machine gun barrages. He's passive, thoughtful (the only character who both thinks clearly and comes to the right conclusions), soft-spoken, and turned off by violence, none of them "tough guy movie hero" tropes, and certainly none of them shared by the other straight men in the movie. Even Verna (the only prominent women) and two of the three gay men act in more traditionally-male ways than Tom does.

This leaves him a dislocated protagonist, genderless and sensitive and physically weak in a genre that is one of the most quintessential masculine in the history of American film - doubly so if we allow that this is as much a noir pastiche as a gangster film pastiche. It is a universe which Tom can manipulate more easily than any other character, filling the role of a seer or wiseman or god among the rest of the cast (the much-repeated phrase "Jesus, Tom" is irresistible in suggesting that he is in but not of the world he walks in); but it is also a universe where he doesn't fit and isn't happy. Leo is a protective figure and focus of Tom's kindly feelings - prospective lover, prospective father, prospective friend, it's largely immaterial. Leo is the thing that enables Tom to function well in this environment, and he repays Leo with all of his love. The tragedy of the thing - and it depends a lot on how one reads the hugely ambiguous final scene, but it fits my interpretation - is that by fully giving himself over to Leo, Tom enables the exact unconscious betrayal by Leo that leaves him without a home or meaning in the end.

It's a sign of how much Miller's Crossing has going on that I can have wandered about for that many words and said so little about so much of it. Not even a word about the exquisite craftsmanship! That includes an absolutely perfect opening scene that rivals only the mini-movie at the start of Raising Arizona as my favorite sequence in the Coen filmography, a perfectly-timed tour of Polito's sweaty anxiety and Finney's blunt authority (both men are terrific throughout the film, but at their best in this scene), introducing Tom slowly and methodically; the sound design guiding our attention with laser precision; the dialogue warming up the film's strange vocabulary, plunging us into it but not without a guidemap; the driving editing by the film's namesake, Michael R. Miller (I believe this was the last Coen film that the brothers did not edit themselves). The Carter Burwell score is hands-down my favorite of his many glorious Coen soundtracks, drawing from Irish folk music, traditional Hollywood, and Italian influences to tell the entire emotional story in a way that you can follow without any other cues. And Barry Sonnenfeld's luminous cinematography is both beautiful and psychologically flawless, depicting the claustrophobic city with menacing but chiaroscuro-free shadows, and reaching masterpiece-level work in the nightmare setting of the eponymous woods, a hazy place of flatness and danger that deliberately quotes The Conformist without in any way copying it. It was his second to last project as director of photography, before jumping into the director's chair; and as much as I love some of his movies (and despise others) Miller's Crossing is all the evidence we need to know what a fantastic alternate career was cut short.

It is, if I may crudely try to wrap things up, the most thoroughly inexhaustible movie the Coens have ever made. It says less about humanity than Fargo, explores the boundaries of cinema less than Barton Fink, and is less altogether flawless than No Country for Old Men, but I'd reach for it ahead of any of them. It is complex and deep and slow to reveal its secrets, but I have consistently been thrilled to do the work necessary to pull them out, and am wholly content to call this my favorite, if that has any value, among all the Coens' films.

Read More

PERSONAL CANON: SEA-CROSSED LOVERS

You know Tay Garnett? You probably haven't heard of Tay Garnett. The fact of the matter is, Tay Garnett really isn't a terribly important film director, though there are those among us who perk up at checking out what promises to be yet another '30s or '40s programmer, and unexpectedly find his name attached. I think that in order to be such a strange and rare creature as a Garnett fanboy, one must have come to two very particular films first in his whole canon, though I don't know that the order within those two matters very much (this was, at any rate, the way I did it): one of these is The Postman Always Rings Twice, the most frustrated and fatalistic of all early films noirs, and the other is One Way Passage, a hyper-melodramatic weeper from 1932 that nobody has seen, and everybody who has seen it seems to adore beyond measure. Which, I want to make clear, is absolutely the correct response. This isn't just a top-notch "women's picture" or "4-hankie movie", as they used to call torrid romantic melodramas back in the day: catch me in a mood to make hyperbolic, definitive statements, and you might well find me calling it the very best women's picture of the 1930s.

Statements like that need backing up, and I shall do so presently, though part of the joy of One Way Passage is that it offers so many avenues for praise. It is a magnificently sophisticated piece of filmmaking for 1932, coming right at the end of the early sound period and demonstrating how infinitely far technique had come in the three-and-a-quarter years since The Broadway Melody (or hell, in the year-and-a-half since Dracula). It is a mercilessly crisp act of storytelling, plowing through scenes at an unflagging pace without ever feeling rushed, and coming in at an exactly correct 67 total minutes. It mixes wry humor, blowsy comic relief, sudsy tragedy, and swoony romance in exactly the right measure to keep the tone balanced such that we're never encouraged to stop and think about how ludicrously histrionic the scenario really is (this worked well enough to net the film an Oscar on its sole nomination, for Best Original Story). It offers a chance to see William Powell in a slightly rougher, more curt incarnation than the luminous playboy of The Thin Man, paired with Kay Francis in the best of the (too, too few) performances I've seen that unjustly overlooked ex-superstar give. It has an ending that has every reason to be the corniest thing you could imagine and no reason at all to be so gloriously beautiful and moving and elegant.

When I tell you what the notion is behind the film, you will instantly understand what I mean with words like "torrid" and "histrionic" and "hyper-melodramatic". The shortest version of the movie: Dan Hardesty (Powell) and Joan Ames (Francis) have a glorious love affair during their four-week voyage on a liner traveling from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Neither of them knows that the other has a secret: Dan is an escaped murderer in custody of policeman Steve Burke (Warren Hymer), and he's being brought back to the United States to face his executioners, and Joan has a disease so terminal that her doctor (Frederick Burton) isn't convinced that she'll make be alive long enough to see the sanitarium that she's notionally sailing to.

Is that overwrought and shameless? YES! Is it hokey and campy! ABSOLUTELY NEVER! Certainly the most unexpected achievement of the film is that Garnett manages the film's tones so mercilessly, creating a film that could not be more unabashedly a weeper, but is entirely free of the perceived cheesiness that makes so many people disdain '30s melodrama (quite unfairly, in my estimation, but there are some fights you can't win). Partially this is because of its efficiency - I've already mentioned that it clocks in at 67 minutes, but it's worth repeating, because even in an age when movies were so much shorter than they are now, 67 minutes was a pretty damn short feature, and it leaves no chance to linger on moments, or more to the point, to wallow in them. Partially, it's because of the comic relief con-artists Skippy (Frank McHugh) and "Barrel House" Betty (Aline McMahon), colleagues of Dan who are both on the boat for entirely unrelated reasons, but decide to pool their resources and help keep Steve off his back - the policeman has given him some freedom of movement onboard, thinking that Dan's attempt to drown him was actually a fearless attempt to save him from the sea - and who keep things light without ever tipping over into fatally unbalancing the movie, though McHugh's shrill way of delivering lines is lot harder to defend than any other individual element of the film.

Mostly, it's Powell and Francis, who are both unbelievably wonderful. One Way Passage is essentially a star vehicle, though to a viewer eight decades gone, it's a weird one, given that Francis's star power has been mostly lost to time, and Powell remains familiar for playing a very different kind of person in a very different way. Nevertheless, it has all the functioning of a routine star picture, in terms of the way that the actors are privileged in the shot and in the drama, the roles written around them more than they are adapting to the roles (and if he's miles away from Nick Charles in the elegance department, Dan Hardesty is still awfully fucking dapper and suave for an escaped killer who has run three-quarters around the globe).

Most importantly, though, neither Powell nor Francis were given, at any point in their careers with which I am familiar, to pleading for the audience to like them. As a result, there's never a moment in this most tragic scenario where either of the leads plays the tragedy, and Francis particularly has a few wonderful moments scattered throughout where she very conspicuously isn't playing a woman haunted by the encroaching shade of death. Seven years later, Bette Davis - who I love - played a similar arc in Dark Victory - in which I especially love her - and gave full expression to her character's awareness of mortality; it makes a good comparison for what Francis is up to is, which is if possible even more impressive. For Francis, without ever letting a scene imply that Joan has forgotten her affliction, plays a lot of scenes in which Joan is happier now than she is worried about the future, and not because she's opportunistically using love as a distraction from death, but because she is genuinely and enthusiastically in love.

While this unexpectedly pleasant and not-at-all strident love affair is playing out, Garnett and his crew were busily employing some of the most accomplished technique of 1932 to give the melodrama an opportunity to make its fullest impact. The shot I always remember, both for its impressive craft and for its emotional impact, is a POV shot from Dan, down in the water where he's pushed himself and Steve, noticing Joan on the boat's deck, watching the commotion with several other people (they've already met, at this point). The camera pushes up and towards Francis, looking for all the world like a routine zoom, except that zooms weren't even close to existing yet. It's impressive in its own right, but also the perfect way to indicate how magnetic the attraction is between the two lovers, and how Dan's perception literally blocks out everything but Joan, thus explaining why he immediately throws away his freedom to be with her.

Beautiful stuff, in a movie full of beautiful stuff: it starts off on that foot, in fact, with a glorious opening tracking shot that suggests the multinational polyglot of Hong Kong by drifting across a bar divided into international segments based on what kind of drinks are poured there. There's also a fantastic visual motif that starts in this same scene (following an unbelievably literate and sexy flirtation over liquor between the two leads) in which the lovers break martini glasses and lay the stems over each other. It's a crafty enough way to visualise physical and romantic connection, but the real pay-off comes at the end: we've seen the same basic shot set-up three times, always on the customer side of the bar, looking at the glass stems, but the film's last shot looks from behind the bar down on them, an inversion that nicely compliments the out-of-nowhere but totally earned gesture of romantic anti-realism of the last scene. Which I will not further describe, because it's a gorgeous ending and worthy of being seen blind, the first time.

It is, all in all, a crisp, clear-headed, adult movie, selling its heightened conceit so smartly and sincerely that it barely even registers as a contrivance by the 15-minute mark. There's a kind of earnestness to the melodramatic action here that is entirely unlike anything American filmmakers would even dream of doing today, but even by '30s standards, not that many films are as effective at all levels both artistic and narrative as this; it's a masterpiece both of cinema and of its genre, two things that are not necessarily the same achievement, and as worthy of rediscover as any lost classic from that period which I can name.

Read More

PERSONAL CANON: SKULL AND BONES

The word "gimmick" almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result. This is not a hard-and-true relationship. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be reasonably summarized without heavy reliance on the word gimmick, for nearly all of his best films are noteworthy not just for having gimmicks, but for how those gimmicks are in many cases the most defining element of the whole: entire movies where you get the feeling that an entire plot was built around finding a way to justify putting electric buzzers in the theater seats. And yet Castle's best work, which I'd consider at a minimum to include The Tingler (Percepto, the aforementioned buzzing seats), 13 Ghosts ("Illusion-O", polarised lenses revealing hidden spectres), and our present subject, House on Haunted Hill, are all very close to perfect versions of what they are. Namely, exaggeratedly unserious horror films finely tuned to appeal to a matinee audience of kids looking to be entertained more than spooked.

Of all these, House on Haunted Hill is perhaps the best, and one of the most entertaining for reasons that have nothing to do with its gimmick, unless you consider the casting of Vincent Price in a movie like this to be a gimmick. Which wouldn't be a terribly unreasonable argument to make, given the nature of his roiling, campy, hambone performances in movies of this sort. Price, more than anything else, is what gives this film and The Tingler their sense of heightened fun, for even when he's playing a sour, miserable shit (as he is in House on Haunted Hill, more than just about any of his other roles), he's doing it from a place of warped, spiky fun.

The particular role that Price plays in this film is Frederick Loren, a wealthy industrialist hosting a "haunted house party" at the suggestion of his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). "She's so amusing", says Price twice during his opening narration, in a rancid & ironic tone of voice that makes it clear that Frederick does not regard Annabelle as amusing, or anything else that's terribly affectionate. In fact, the Lorens are a pair of mostly hideous people, the kind whose marriage presumably did not start out in a healthy place ("I wanted to marry you" she reminds him at one point, Ohmart's expression neatly filling in the unspoken "because you had money"), and has since turned into something of a bloodsport; he has chased away all of her friends after a string of infidelities, she has tried to accidentally poison him on at least one occasion, and both of them talk freely about how delighted they'd be if the other dropped dead on the spot. Castle's career isn't wanting for corrosive marriages, but the Lorens' might well be the most toxic he ever depicted, and Price and Ohmart dive into their scenes together with unseemly relish. It's an odd focal point for a haunted house movie - and an even odder one for a supposed kiddie matinee flick - but damned if it does give House on Haunted Hill the exact sardonic note that gives it a special personality totally unlike the vast majority of the late-'50s B-movies that have remained so much less fresh and entertaining than this one.

Loren's guest list for the party consists of five desperate people who all stand to make $10,000 each if they can survive the night: psychiatrist David Trent (Alan Marshall), newspaper columnist Ruth Bridgers (Julie Mitchum), test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), a secretary from one of Loren's companies, and Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the house's owner, who hasn't set foot in the place since a terrible night many years ago during which his brother died at the hands of whatever supernatural forces inhabit the building. The whole thing, including its title, is an evident knock-off of the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, later turned into the genre film masterpiece The Haunting, but whereas that book was a sober account of paranormal terror, House on Haunted Hill, even at its most scary and intense (which I'd take to be the scene where Nora finds a head in her suitcase), is still quite a flippant lark, barely even bothering to stitch the various scenes of people (mostly Nora) poking around in dark corners and getting the bejeezus scared out of them together using narrative, when it can just as easily rely on having Price swan in, chomp on the scenery while passive-aggressively humiliating his wife, and swanning out. And once the film arrives at its conclusion and all things are explained, it's even more flippant than one might have thought to give it credit for as it was all unspooling. I would not dream of giving it away, mostly because it is way too goofy to believe, bringing in a rational motivation for all the things that happen that frankly makes less reasonable sense than "it was all the work of ghosts" ever would have.

The important thing to note is that it's plainly meant to be goofy - from the moment that Elisha Cook's head comes swooping at us against a black background to deliver the first of two expository monologues, certainly from the moment that the opening credits are presented in a font that would be better-suited to the adventures of a bunch of teenagers on a beach than anything with the word "haunted" in the title, this is a fllm anxious not to be taken seriously. It's a film that understands that spooky old buildings with hidden corridors and vats of acid in the basement are ultimately more fun to think about than scary to experience, and that's never clearer than in the final five minutes, when the Castle gimmick finally shows up: a living skeleton appears onscreen and at that exact moment, a skeleton is whisked from some shadowy corner of the auditorium to hover eerily above the audience. This was called Emergo and it was prone to not working, which I think only adds to the silly charm of it *. That's the level of knowing silliness this movie operates on, and it taps into the feeling of being a 10 year old in a rickety but well-intentioned local haunted house, pretending to agree that everything is scary when in fact it is just cool, because skeletons! Who doesn't love a good living skeleton when they're 10? Nobody that I'd want to chat with at a cocktail party, that's certain.

Key to all this - to all of this, it is the reason that William Castle was one of the all-time best purveyors of junk food horror movies, and why House on Haunted Hill is one of his masterpieces, if not, indeed, his overriding masterpiece (I go back and forth with his other "Vincent Price in a terrible marriage" film, The Tingler, which has the all-time best gimmick of his career) - is its sincerity. There are many people who've made crap B-pictures that plainly just wanted to take a job and cash a paycheck; there are people who've made high-budget A-list horror films who clearly thought that they were above such tawdry nonsense (AKA "everyone who directed an Exorcist film besides Renny Harlin"). The number of people who have made B-pictures and seemed to genuinely love that they were doing it is a small list indeed, and rare indeed is the B-movie artist whose work suggests such enthusiasm for his job - it puts Castle on a rarefied level next to the like of John Carpenter, a director you could not otherwise compare him to. House on Haunted Hill might be dumb and corny and reliant to a ludicrous degree on Price's withering sarcasm, but it not only knows what it is, it loves being what it is, and that's enough to make it one of the very best "boo!" movies that I have ever seen.

Read More

PERSONAL CANON: THE HUNGER GAMES

Even among those who love it, there's no real consensus as to why the 1999 horror film Ravenous is great. Because it is a punchy black comedy? Because it is an intelligent attack on social constructs of bravery and masculinity? Because it's a satire of American expansion in the West? Because it's one of the few movies to treat on the wendigo, a malevolent spirit out of Algonquian folklore? Because it's just a damn impressive gory horror movie that jumps with both feet into cannibalism, a subject most relatively big-budget American movies are far to squeamish to openly consider?

Any and all of the above can apply in more or less different combinations, based on the reviewer, and I do not doubt that I missed some of the possibilities. The point being, Ravenous is sufficiently broad to include some borderline-exclusive readings, which might arguably be just a way of saying that it's too vague to actually mean anything besides "shock value! stage blood!" But I will certainly not be the person to go there.

That said, at least this much is as objectively true as it gets, the punchy black comedy is terrific, and we're introduced to it long before the movie has set itself up as a horror film at all, or even clarified that its setting puts it denotatively, if not emotionally, in the wheelhouse of the Western. The very first thing that happens, in fact, is a title card with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche (misspelled "Nietzche", a fact I point out because even for movies that I love, I do not pretend that they are perfect), stating-

He that fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster

-which has less to do with the content of the film than the script thinks, but it gets us close in, anyway. Playing underneath is a military march that feels so solemn, especially with the appeal to Nietzschean authority, that the whole thing feels ripe for a piss-take, and this is confirmed when another quote pops up on the same card, credited to Anonymous-

Eat me.

-which would be quite obviously enough a sarcastic "fuck you" even without the cartoon sound effects that accompany its appearance.

My point in all this, anyway, is that opening gestures matter, Ravenous uses its opening gesture to tell us that it is a comedy, or at least that juvenile undercutting of very serious-sounding things will be a major part of its game. Now, this mood doesn't hold - in fact, beginning with its most goofy moment and end with its most subdued, Ravenous spends its entire running time growing progressively more serious, which is one of the things I like best about it, and best about Antonia Bird's gorgeously controlled directing. Incidentally, I could bring this bit up anywhere, but I shall get it out of the way now: in a just world, Bird would have been given all sorts of high-profile opportunities on the strength of what she accomplished here. Instead, Ravenous was the last theatrical feature to date out of just a handful for her, following which she returned to the world of British television, where she started. Maybe that's how she wanted it, I have no idea; certainly, it is a known fact that Ravenous had a contentious shoot in which producer Laura Ziskin got all up in everybody's business, and Bird was in fact the third director attached during production. But Ravenous is as good a calling card as you could hope for; however good it is in many ways, it is consistently and specifically great in its directing, which navigates quite a minefield of shifting tonalities and does it so smoothly that you have to actively remind yourself that this was a bloody, warped comedy before it got to be so savage and nasty.

But I believe I left things at the opening title card. From here, we are carried to a military state dinner honoring Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) for acts of heroism conducted in the Mexican-American War, and as predicted, the film is awfully eager to suck the pomposity out of the Army's stately self-regard, between the over-the-top juxtaposition of a super-earnest (but under-orchestrated) march with very prim compositions, and the even more over-the-top depiction of the Army brass devouring their fine steak dinners with disgustingly moist sound design and gross-out close-ups of food being messily chewed. For one of the other things that Ravenous can be said to do thematically is to link meat-eating with savagery that thinks itself civilised, which is not at all what I'd personally claim. But you can't pretend that it's not there, and even as an unapologetic carnivore, I salute the film for committing to its message that way.

Boyd, we'll find out in the course of some chronologically-shuffled flashbacks, is both a hero and a deserter; he survived a bloody onslaught that took out the rest of his regiment only by pretending to be dead the instant that the Mexican soldiers arrived, and after being carted back to their base camp in a pile of corpses, single-handedly killed every last one. It's not clear that this is significant yet, but this only happened after he inadvertently swallowed the blood of his commanding officer, who was positioned directly over him in the corpse wagon, and dripped over him the whole way.

Gen. Slauson (John Spencer) has no idea what to do with a case like Boyd's, so he packs him off to the Island of Misfit Toys: an outpost way the hell out in California, Fort Spencer. He arrives in the dead of a cold winter, to meet the rest of the people the Army couldn't slot someplace nicer: Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones), a meek, poetic soul; Maj. Knox (Stephen Spinella), a hopeless drunk; Pvt. Reich (Neal McDonough), a gung-ho and possibly psychotic soldier; Pvt. Toffler (Jeremy Davies), a religious to the point of distraction; and Pvt. Cleaves (David Arquette), a stoner. That there is a stoner puts us on the path to teasing out what Ravenous has in mind, for one thing that comes through strongly in its first act is a flippant, '90s sense of humor (certainly, Jones's performance is as mired in the late '90s as a Fiona Apple album), constantly puncturing anything that resembles serious place-building, and making it clear if nothing else could that Ravenous is not actually about cannibalism in the 1840s, however much it's about cannibalism in the 1840s.

One of the things that chiefly serves to drift the film away from its sardonic opening is the arrival, soon after Boyd, of a desperate, starving Reverend F.W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle). He spins a Donner-esque story of a wagon train gone awry above the snowline, and the mad Colonel Ives, who got such a rush from eating the dead members of the party that he started getting a little murder-happy when the corpses weren't coming fast enough. To George (Joseph Running Fox) and Martha (Sheila Tousey), the native siblings who serve as general staff for the fort, this suggests the legend of the wendigo (which is, theoretically, from the wrong side of the American continent), the demon that attaches itself to a man who eats another man, giving him power but also an insatiable desire to kill again and again to keep himself strong. It shades a little bit into European notions of vampirism as it plays out in the movie, but on the whole this first-ever wide-release wendigo picture does a fair job of exploring the concept.

For aye, there really is a wendigo, as the bulk of the soldiers find out when they go up into the mountains to stop Ives and save the last of his victims, but it turns out to be Colqhoun himself, who brought them up there to catch them unawares and stock his larder with hardier meat than the starving settlers that he's been eating on all winter. Long story short, it's soon down to Colqhoun versus the coward Boyd, who once again tastes human blood when he timidly picks at the dead Reich in order to stay alive over the course of a bitterly cold night. And once again, he has a sudden flush of courage and strength, and this is enough to get him back to Fort Spencer and to the very sudden shift into the last act of the film, that I will not spoil, though oh, how I shall have to work to talk around it.

It's primarily in the end that Ravenous crystallises as more than just a gory horror film in period dress, though it bears saying over and over again that even as a simple Western-horror hybrid, this is pretty great; the single biggest problem with the first hour is in a chase scene between Colqhoun and Pvt. Toffler, with a strenously wacky banjo score playing underneath (probably by Michael Nyman; he and Damon Albarn are the credited composers, but they did not work together, each contributing around half of the music. I find that Albarn's electronically-created, ironic riffs on period style to be the far more effective at creating the weird mood the film likes to inhabit, especially his repeated theme "Boyd's Journey"), the kind of miscalculation so vast that it has left people with the idea that the whole film is scored like a bluegrass hoedown. Still, the first part of Ravenous, gooey fun that it is, and as giddy as Carlyle's monstrous performance becomes, it's not remotely as interesting as it becomes in the end, when the whole thing turns into a referendum on how men demonstrate strength and virility, while dismissing as low cowardice the desire not to die and the desire not to kill others. Bird and screenrwriter Ted Griffin (the first completed project of a scattershot career that nevertheless includes Ocean's Eleven) don't belabor the point, and Ravenous came out a couple of years too early to be a full-throated attack on American militarism (still, a scene explicitly linking the cannibals' philosophy to Manifest Destiny is a little too much on-the-nose), but you can't fail to notice that it's there, and what began as a snotty bit of fun had against military men turns into a much more brutal (as the film itself grows increasingly brutal) indictment of the culture of masculinity not just within militaries, but anywhere that men goad each other into foolish attempts to prove who is stronger.

That, on top of some gorgeous location photography that makes the Czech Republic a pretty fantastic surrogate for the Sierra Nevadas, excellent performances by all involved but Pearce and Carlyle especially, and some wonderfully horrifying imagery (the interior of the cannibal den is perfect), and whate we end up with is a terrific horror movie all around, one of the absolute best of the 1990s. And being one of the best horror films of the '90s is an easy thing to achieve, but still, Ravenous is too damn good in too many ways to languish in any kind of obscurity.

Read More

PERSONAL CANON: THE AIR IS CRISP, THE LEAVES ARE CHANGING COLORS, THE BODIES ARE DEAD

Alfred Hitchcock is probably the closest thing to a consensus pick for the greatest film director of all time, between critics, historians, general audience, and hardcore film buffs, but even he was a mortal, and could not do every thing he applied himself to. Notably, and predictably for a man promoted as "the Master of Suspense", he wasn't much of a hand at comedy, at least not at straight-up comedies. Comic relief he could do as well as anybody you've ever heard of, as anybody who's ever seen North by Northwest can attest. But his "pure" comedies are rare, generally underseen, and not generally regarded among his best films by those who've seen them. And while I'll agree that 1941's Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a problematic late screwball put over largely by Carole Lombard's strength of will, and 1976's Family Plot (which I do regard as being particularly under-appreciated) is certainly a perverse enough piss-take on Hitchcock's whole career, particularly as it was his very last movie, the man did direct one comedy that works on just about every level for a movie to work, and which I do think rates somewhere around the very peak of his career: The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955 during Hitchcock's greatest period of influence and popularity. Rear Window was just a year old, To Catch a Thief wasn't even two months old, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents had just begun its indescribably iconic run on TV. It was, in short, during the half-decade period in Hitch's career when he was most able to do absolutely anything he wanted, and what he wanted to do was this.

This is a film set and shot in rural Vermont (as opposed to bustling, hectic, urban Vermont), where two locals, a recent transplant, and a visitor all cross paths with a dead body. For that, you see, is the trouble with Harry Worp (the immaculately still Philip Truex): nobody's quite certain what killed him, and they're damned if they know what to with him now. Old Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), who was hunting illegally the morning of Harry's death, the first to find the corpse, is certain it was one of his errant bullets that felled the man, and he's anxious to hide the body before the law comes snooping. This turns out not to be the case at all, and then it's the turn of Harry's estranged wife, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) to think she done the deed, smacking the abusive bastard on the head with a milk bottle when he tracked her and her son Arnie (Jerry Mathers) to ground. The very charming spinster Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) is equally sure that she must have done it, clonking him in the head with the heel of her shoe when he tried to attack her in his bottle-dazed state.

Even just putting that little bit down is arguably spoiling too much for a movie that stubbornly refuses to be watched and appreciated as widely as it should be, but The Trouble with Harry is far more about the tone with which its plot toddles along than the actual details of that plot. The sense I have, every time I've seen it, is that's a quintessentially Vermonter kind of story: it's about four people (the fourth is visiting painter Sam Marlowe, played by John Forsythe) being mightily inconvenienced by a corpse, but not actually finding themselves particularly upset by it. Or made even the littlest bit nervous. It's about likable, friendly, gently quirky people behaving in a briskly pragmatic way about death, without an ounce of gravity or "respect for the dead" involved: Harry is buried and dug up so many times over the course of slightly less than 24 hours that even Jennifer, recapping it all at the end, admits that she can't remember why it happened the third time. And this information plainly causes her no distress at all.

As a result of all this, it ends up being one of the most perverse films in Hitchcock's catalog, and what a terrifically perverse collection that is. Death is traditionally held to be sacrosanct in some way; nice people treat it with a kind of gravity and awe. Well, the people in The Trouble with Harry are unfailingly nice, and they are also quite unimpressed with Harry's corpse as anything but an object. An object that is, incidentally, framed by Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks with an unfailingly puckish sense of humor, such that simply seeing bits of Harry poking into frame results in some of the biggest laughs in the whole movie. Whatever Hitchcock's affinity with comedy, there should be no doubt that the filmmakers behind this image, for example, new exactly what they were doing:

Besides tweaking one of the biggest taboos out there, the film's other chief attempt to thoroughly discombobulate the audience lies in its tone. Basically, this is a weird comedy: structurally, it cannot be regarded as anything but a farce, with repetition and piled-on misunderstandings and a third act struggle to keep things held together in the face of a dubious authority figure. But the momentum is so laconic and slow that it's practically asleep (this is the part that especially feels Vermont-ish), and that is, itself, part of the joke - the film is hilarious, often, because of how coolly everybody is under-reacting, and the deliberate pace of the characters is exactly what makes them such amusing oddballs. It's a dry, subtle form of humor altogether, and Hitchcock was lucky to have performers able to meet him at exactly the right sweet spot: Gwenn is particularly great at playing in this relaxed mode, but MacLaine - making her uncommonly assured feature debut - is right up there with him, and she lands all of the very best line readings, talking about death and abuse with a kind of bored wisdom.

It's too low-key and restrained to ever result in huge, heaving laughs, and maybe that's part of why the film has never found an especially enthusiastic audience, but it's still one of the absolute funniest movies of the 1950s, not least because it is perhaps the most puckish; the best kind of comic film for the trickster Hitchcock to release onto the world. In the meantime, it's also a consummate piece of moviemaking: capturing the Vermont locations (and the locations recreated in a Vermont gym following bad weather) with eye-bleeding beauty, and especially the impossibly painterly feeling of a New England autumn. It is, in fact, one of the best movies about autumn I can name, despite the number of interior sets dressed up with spray-painted leaves.

The best part of all is that even with its frivolous tone and comedy, it's still tangibly a Hitchcock film, with the director demonstrating how thriller principals can be applied to humor, and for the same reasons: the longer a payoff that we're fully expecting is deferred, the bigger the release when it shows up (there's a magnificent scene where we're on pins and needles waiting for Harry's body to fall out, and then just at the last minute, it doesn't fall out, because it turns out not to have been there - fucking glorious filmmaking). It's an unusual application of technique, but it works flawlessly, and the whole movie is both absurd and tense for its entire running time, despite none of the characters ever noting that it's either of those thing.

On top of everything else, the film was the first teaming between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, and the bouncy score, with all of its half-formed marches in unusual keys, is one of the very best things that man ever wrote, for Hitch or anybody else. So, you know, it's delightful, offbeat, beautiful, and it's historically important. Pretty fantastic all around, and a movie that continues to surprise and entrance me no matter how often I see it.

Read More