SUMMER OF BLOOD: 1981

It has been more than three decades since Hell Night premiered in the summer of 1981, and it has only slowly developed a cult following over those years. Truth be told, I don't know if even now it has a reputation as generally being a crap slasher film from an era when crap slasher films were ten for a dollar, or generally being one of the most effective of all early slasher films. Since it is clearly the latter, I like to think that history is correcting itself, but not nearly with enough speed. Hell Night, I find, belongs in that rare company of slasher films that aren't just good by the standards of their subgenre, but manage to round the corner to being legitimately good works of horror cinema. But it still doesn't have any kind of reputation or name recognition outside of the genre faithful, among whom I find that knowing it and enjoying it is a mark of particular taste and knowledge. Being a Hell Night fan is, maybe, the slasher film equivalent of being a brandy drinker: any drunk college kid can become obsessed with pounding back the cheap beer of the Friday the 13th series or the decent microbrew of the Nightmare on Elm Streets, but it takes commitment and a refined palate to make it as far as this movie.

And by all means even "the brandy of '80s slasher films" puts an limit on what the film can be. I mean, there's the brandy you get from a really nice wine shop, and then there's the brandy you can pick up at the supermarket alongside milk and Doritos.

The plot is gleaming boilerplate: the Alpha Sigma Rho fraternity chapter at a school in Anytown, U.S.A. is celebrating its annual Hell Night, when that year's incoming pledges have to survive an ordeal in order to be inducted. How, exactly, ΑΣΡ fucntions is a little foggy, given that they only have four pledges, and two of them are women, but whatever, it's a slasher film. Chapter president Peter (Kevin Brophy) describes it to his victims thus: on the edge of town, there is a great estate called Garth Manor, a huge mansion with sprawling, forested grounds, and 12 years ago, this was the site of a brutal slaying. Raymond Garth, the descendant of generations of Garths living in that palatial home, killed his wife and three of their four children, all of them grossly deformed. The only survivor was teenaged Andrew Garth, who witnessed the murder of his family and his father's suicide, and who went missing, along with two of the corpses. And now, Garth Manor is the annual home of ΑΣΡ's final ritual before initiation into the fraternity.

And so Peter leads the four pledges - Jeff (Peter Barton), Seth (Vincent Van Patten), Denise (Suki Goodwin), and last but plainly not least, Marti (Linda Blair), who between her masculine name, her rather dismissive view of the trivialities of the Greek system by this point in the process, her fuller backstory, and above all the fact that she's played by The Exorcist's own Linda Blair, is obviously going to be our Final Girl - to Garth Manor, where they will chat, flirt, take Qualuudes, and think about screwing. And unbeknownst to them, where they'll have to endure a whole night of rather impressively sophisticated haunted house trickery perpetrated Peter, the frat's token nerd Scott (Jimmy Sturtevant), and one of the frat's sisters, May (Jenny Neumann). And unbeknownst to them, the whole lot of them are going to have to survive a night under the watch of a great hulking, groaning man-shaped object, who we don't know is Andrew Garth, but it's certainly where the smart money lies.

Where Hell Night shades into genius - and that's probably a strong word for it - is not, clearly, in how it up-ends the narrative tropes that had already begun to crystallise for the newly-forming slasher genre. Rather, it's how the film deepens those tropes, presenting what might very well be the most richly-characterised group of victims of any Dead Teenager movie of its generation. Marti is perhaps no more layered than any of the other top-notch Final Girls of 1981, though unfairly Razzie-nominated Blair is a strong enough actor to make more of the part than most of the largely anonymous performers filling the same functional role. The surprising thing is that the other three pledges are rather impressively layered themselves, despite Seth and Denise both feeling like they should, by all rights, be grating one-note stereotypes (Airhead Jock and Slut, respectively). First-time screenwriter Randy Feldman, whose next credit wouldn't be until Tango & Cash, eight years later, weaves a surprising amount of character detail into the film, staging actual conversations between the kids, ones that both implicitly and directly reveal all sorts of interesting tangents: Jeff's obvious discomfort with his familial wealth, Seth's apparently willful choice to be a dumb jock to avoid having expectations set for himself. It's a little thing, but it means that once the killing starts, we're going to have a lot more connection to these characters than just wanting to see them die hideously.

And indeed, the film does not show them dying hideously: other than a sickle to the gut, and a decapitation so ginger and brief that it almost registers on a subliminal level rather than a conscious one, Hell Night stays away from particularly explicit violence. Part of that, undoubtedly, was the culture: after the first rush of slasher films in 1980, the moral watchdogs started barking and most of the second-wave films in '81 were toned down considerably (the quintessential example being, of course, Friday the 13th giving way to the comparatively chaste Friday the 13th, Part 2). Even by those reduced standards, though, Hell Night is a violence-averse film, so much so that I wonder if that's part of why it doesn't have more visibility among casual slasher fans.

What it does have, though, is a fairly amazing degree of tension and atmosphere for a cheap genre quickie. This was, as far as I can tell, the first actual movie in the career of director Tom DeSimone, after spending the preceding decade and a half making gay pornography. Without, admittedly, having seen any of them, I think it's unlikely that they were a very good crucible for learning the tricks of making a good horror-thriller in a spooky old mansion at night; and yet DeSimone and cinematographer Mac Ahlberg come up with some very fine lighting ideas and acute camera angles to give Garth Manor an inflated sense of foreboding, scale, and inscrutability. And that on top of DeSimone having tread so lightly on the character scenes, allowing them to breath and give us a decent sense of who the characters are - at 101 minutes, Hell Night is wildly long for an early slasher, and should probably be regarded as criminally indulgent, but the mixture of weird atmosphere and nuanced character drama ends up working so well that it feels far briefer and swifter than many slashers whose only purpose in life was to separate teenagers from money.

There are some absolutely terrific individual scenes: a well-staged Final Girl flight with a climax sold through inductive visuals, and a great sequence where Peter flees through the garden, having found Scott's body (spoiler alert: the secondary characters all die), and Dan Wyman's poundy thriller score drifts off, leaving nothing but heightened nighttime sounds to both comfort us (if the music is done, things must be safe) and unnerve us (why are the crickets SO LOUD?) at the same time. Or the cut from the killer's POV, staring at Denise in bed, to a wide shot that shows his great beefy mass staring down at her blankly, passively.

In fact, I'm tempted to say that the only thing which really hurts Hell Night is that, ultimately, it's just a slasher film: it's just about watching a bunch of kids get picked off. That they are more complex as characters; that the film is more invested in creating tension and mood than in squirting stage blood on actresses' boobs; that the script frequently develops the already clichéd plot points in odd, slantwise directions that come across like they're already deliberate choices, even in 1981, to up-end the audience's expectation for who, what, how, and when in a slasher movie; that all of these things happen is enough to make Hell Night a respectable, greatly enjoyable example of a genre that even in its better moments tends to feel a little slummy and disreputable. But it doesn't quite have the creativity of A Nightmare on Elm Street, or the impact and excellent filmmaking of its 1981 colleague The Burning to actually transcend that genre.

The question could easily be asked, though, if genre is really something that needs transcending. The problem with slasher films, after all, is that they're typically shoddy and sleazy, exploitation made with more mercenary instinct and lazy storytelling. None of those apply to Hell Night at all: it does not pander with either violence or nudity (the sex scenes are well-grounded in story logic and possess no nudity to speak of), it makes something close to sense if you never remember to ask yourself why it took 12 years of frat hazing for Andrew Garth to finally decide that this was the day to start killing pledges, and it's fairly obviously the work of a filmmaker who wanted to put all of his creativity and care into something that wasn't another gay porno, and proved that he had no mean amount of talent in the process.

I am tempted to call it, on account of all that, a slasher film for people who don't like slasher films; but it's really even more like a slasher film that could make a person like slasher films that never did before. It is not ashamed of what it is, and it is the absolute best version of that thing possible.

Body Count: 8, a decently robust number for the period.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1954: In which one of the greatest visual storytellers in the medium's history tries his hand at its hoariest gimmick

The first wave of 3-D did not last very long. The first film to showcase the new Natural Vision technology, Bwana Devil, was released in November, 1952; in 1955, only one movie, Revenge of the Creature, was released in the United States in 3-D. In between those two points was a flurry of activity that saw literally dozens of 3-D films fling themselves out at the audience like a paddle ball aimed right at the camera lens.

Compared to our current, undying wave of 3-D, the '50s fad went from gimmick to cheap exploitation film trick to yesterday's new so fast that almost no A-list filmmakers had a chance to try it out. There's one major exception: no less a master filmmaker and cinephilic icon than Alfred Hitchcock was able to make a 3-D movie in the vanishingly brief window when it might have been possible for him to do so. Though that window closed fast enough that his film, Dial M for Murder, was released after the unreliable process had lost enough of its appeal that it wasn't even put into general release in that format. Not until revival screenings starting in the 1980s did most audience members have a chance to see it in all of its dimensions. Even closer to home, it became the very first movie from the '50s to be released on a 3-D Blu-ray, for those of us in the fraction of a percent of people who've actually invested the money into home 3-D to enjoy whenever we want, secure in our knowledge that even if we're spendthrift geeks whom no-one will ever love, at least the ghost of ol' Hitch is nodding approvingly.

Coming in the middle of a run of absolutely stunning masterpieces, Dial M for Murder honestly is hard to describe as a major film in the context of the director's career; it came out the same year as Rear Window, with which it shared a leading lady, and that comparison alone is sufficient to prove that the earlier film doesn't find the filmmaker at his best (and it proves the same for the leading lady, when it comes down to it). But minor Hitchcock, especially minor '50s Hitchcock, is hardly disposable in the same way that, say, "minor Renny Harlin" would be, and the 3-D version of Dial M for Murder is especially a worthwhile and I might even go so far as to say important piece of work. It's arguably the leanest Hitchcock film since Rope, six years prior (which is his other major gimmick-driven film, for that matter), with only one major set and five (arguably even just four) significant characters to keep track of; its plot consists of really just one thing, which is presented in a narrative structure that resembles an essay. First the concept is explained, then we see the concept put into execution, then we see the concept re-explained, then the concept is deconstructed. It's about a murder plot: it is, I want to repeat and stress, about a murder plot. And really nothing else.

There's a pleasing purity in this, and a certain reduction to an essential Hitchcockian core: the whole movie becomes the explication of a man, who has been unmistakably slighted but in no particularly egregious or unusual way, reacting in the most cold-blooded, psychopathic and sociopathic way against the woman in his life. Or viewed from the other direction, it's about having the most theoretically sanctified and precious place in the world - the home that one's own money has bought and paid for - turned into a chamber of horrors designed to kill oneself. Specifically, the script which Frederick Knott adapted from his own play centers on Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), a retired tennis star living in London with his wife Margot (Grace Kelly), and largely on her money. Margot, we learn first, is all excited to resume a year-old affair with American mystery writer Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings); we learn second that neither of the Wendices were all that happy with the marriage almost immediately after it started, though Margot seems at least slightly more interested in making it happy; we learn third that Tony knew about the affair almost immediately, and has been biding his time all these months carefully setting up all the pieces for a flawless murder. This involves coercing a vague acquaintance from university, C.A. Swann (Anthony Dawson), through blackmail and money, to act as the human cog in a perfectly-timed series of events that Tony describes to his patsy and the audience with monstrously detached pride.

One teeny fuck-up gets in the way, though: a busted wristwatch puts Tony's timing off by a few minutes, which is enough to put Swann off his rhythm, and an errant pair of scissors that happens to be in exactly the right place allows Margot to kill her killer first. That brings us right about to the film's halfway point, with Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) investigating the crime scene on the obvious assumption that Margot committed murder; but Hubbard is obviously a clever sort, and the improvisation Tony was forced to engage in has quite a few holes in it.

Thanks to the exact order in which details are presented, Hitchcock and Knott lay before the viewer a rather spectacular series of whirring gears to behold: we know everything that any character might possibly be aware of from the get-go so the thrill of watching the film has nothing to do with the question of what happened, and everything to do with the question of what Tony will do to deal with what happened. It's beautifully tense, and Milland is absolutely suberb, playing his anti-hero as being just clever enough that his mental acrobatics are legitimately admirable and exciting to behold, without ever giving the character even an ounce of charisma or warmth. He's just pleasant enough to Margot that, give or take a certain brittle Britishness, it's not impossible to wonder that she'd trust him and want to have some way of either salvaging the marriage or letting it die peacefully; but that's the same tone he takes when idly discussing how he's been stalking and manipulating Swann, and it's the same tone he takes in the story's final moments, when it's his own freedom in the balance. He is perhaps the most perfect sociopath in Hitchcock: he has absolutely no interest in morals or the wellness of humans, up to and including himself.

That being said, the film's superlative moment is one where Milland is barely even a presence: Swann's skulking through the apartment, his attack on Margot, and her frenzied struggle to escape. It's a terrific scene for a thriller, and in 3-D it becomes one of the all-time great sequences in Hitchcock, particularly during a jarring moment when Kelly thrusts her hand straight at the camera in a gesture of helplessness and terror. This is the one and only "something pops out of the screen" gag in the whole movie, which makes it stand out more; it's also a shocking moment of implicating the audience and our space during a particularly intense fight scene. Dial M for Murder is a film almost exclusively about the space of the home, with only one scene and a handful of cutaways taking place outside of the Wendice apartment; this becomes even more pronounced in 3-D, when the space becomes tangible and we can begin to notice just how much the blocking and the position of objects in the frame (to take advantage of the added dimension, the filmmakers loaded up the foreground with furniture and knickknacks), and especially how much the physical space seems to diminish and contain Margot. It's a threatening place for her even before the attack, but that's when it becomes the stuff of nightmares: harshly lit by cinematographer Robert Burks with a single key light designed to look like it's in a different room, the parlor becomes a chaos of angles and shapes, less a home than a pit of traps and blockades.

This excellent scene notwithstanding, Dial M for Murder doesn't do much with Margot, which feels like a wasted opportunity: we know from her other Hitchcock collaborations that Kelly and the director had a terrific rapport that he very rarely reached with his actresses, and while in her limited way she's able to make Margot seem real and plausible, Kelly simply doesn't have the material to make her interesting. She's the MacGuffin in the story of how Tony bloodlessly plots a perfect murder and then dances around trying to fix it when its perfection turns out to be not quite all there. And that's certainly fine, though it makes the film a little bit cooler and more remote than most of Hitch's thrillers, where the protagonist is also sympathetic. There's nobody to root for here: Tony is too obviously and persistently amoral, Margot is barely present, and Mark only slightly more than she. And as for Hubbard - well, we never root for the police in a Hitchcock film, do we?

All of which leaves Dial M for Murder feeling just a touch too much like an exercise to rank alongside the unflagging likes of Strangers on a Train or Rear Window or North by Northwest. Though as those titles imply, it's an exercise made by an enormously talented constructor of thrillers in the most fertile period of his career, and while it has a handful of damaging flaws, among them a rather bland Dimitri Timokin score, and a final scene that depends on one character acting in ways that seem a little too beholden to the writer's contrivance for comfort, this would still be at or near the top of many solid director's filmographies. It's stretched as tight as it can possibly be, and merciless in the execution of its perfect machine of a story, and it incorporates a gaudy gimmick that deepens both the human interest and the intensity of the thriller, and it's undeniably a work of genius, even if it's not that genius's finest hour.

Lastly, you know how some (all) Hitchcock films with rear projection make it look kind of hackish and bad? Oh my God, you don't know how bad Hitchcock rear projection can be until you've seen what it looks like in a 3-D movie, where it is literally just a flat pane behind three-dimensional people.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1954
-Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, is a watershed moment for African-Americans appearing in mainstream cinema
-Disney's live-action work reaches its first peak with the lavish adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
-Nicholas Ray turns the Western on its ear with the strange and magnificent Johnny Guitar

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1954
-In Japan, Honda Ishiro sees Americans our giant monsters and raises us, with the iconic Godzilla
-The very first British animated feature is released, an adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm
-Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders take a Journey to Italy under the guiding hand of Roberto Rossellini

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1953: In which new technologies and ancient storytelling forms are uncertainly wed

The thing about the Bible epics of the 1950s is... I don't even know what the thing is, other than that they're one of the most curious, weird genres that ever existed, in no small part because of how aggressively they eschew being weird in any minute way, shape, or form. It's as square as any genre ever has been, which is of course the point: so square, so rigidly traditionalist and old-fashioned, that even in the better-made examples of the form, we seem to have pushed beyond mere aesthetic conservatism into something more akin to accidental primitivism, like the tradition of medieval religious plays had evolved separately into its own medium that just happened to function like the movies do. The stiff, declamatory dialogue and stiff, declamatory performances that serve as the bigot's idea of what these movies look like is based entirely on reality, and the effect isn't that of watching poor cinema, but of watching non-cinema.

Bible epics came in two flavors: Jewish stories and early Christian stories. The former are almost invariably better, having as they do more zesty narratives (issues of theology and faith aside, who can honestly deny that the Old Testament makes for more enjoyable reading than the New?), and they frequently subscribe to a trick as old as movies, in which filmmakers use Serious Intent ("we're making an adaptation of the Bible! It's faith-driven!") as a blind, while the usual spectacle and naughtiness are smuggled in ("Well, of course the Queen of Sheba has to be played by an internationally famous Italian sexpot, that just makes sense"). Movies about the travails of early Christians, though, are joyless trudges of glum-looking people glumly eschewing anything that might accidentally give them pleasure. When these films accidentally manage to be openly good for a scene or two it's almost exclusively because of the salacious, earthy, immoral Romans, who look more interesting, do more interesting things, and boast more layered performances - as for example in 1951's Quo Vadis, where Peter Ustinov's slimy Emperor Nero manages to be the single best thing in the entire subgenre.

The whole mess of Bible epics, on the whole, are so yawningly respectable, so brutally committed to a calculated non-aesthetic, so urgently denuded of humanity, they play at times - most times, in fact - like they were made by artists whose knowledge of Christianity began and ended with Jacobean Puritanism, with the assumption that this whole "audience of faith" thing consisted of people who only ever smiled or felt anything other than burning shame when they were considering the most arcane points of theology. They are the least fun things ever, really, no matter how much money was spent to make them as lavish in their pageantry as all the powers of Hollywood (and later, Italian) film studios could manage.

This combination of lavish production value and extreme sobriety gives the whole genre a peculiar dual identity that never manages to resolve itself, and oh, I should just start fucking talking about The Robe already. It is the essential Early Christian Times movie: not because it is best, nor the campiest, for it is far from being either. But it is, of all the ones I've seen, the most representative in almost every imaginable way. But that's not its chief point of historical interest, and if it was, I am sure that I wouldn't have caused myself to watch a second time in order to write this review. No, on top of everything else, The Robe was the very first movie released in 20th Century Fox's new format, CinemaScope, making it one of the key movies in the history of modern widescreen. It was not, bear in mind, the first film made in CinemaScope; that would be How to Marry a Millionaire, a light comedy that was finished well in advance of The Robe, but not premiered till November, 1953, nearly two months later. And for this we can likely credit studio president Spyros Skouras, for knowing that the way to best show off his new toy was with a grand historical epic full of giant sets and crowd scenes, and not a New York-set movie whose biggest innovation with the format was to find that you could use it to put three people in the frame at once.

We'll stow the technical discussion of CinemaScope, except to point out that in '53, its advantages were obvious: unlike Cinerama, which debuted the year prior, it required only converting a single projector, instead of Cinerama's three projectors and custom curved screen; unlike 3-D, it didn't require the viewer to wear glasses; unlike the more straightforward method of matting a film frame to a widescreen ratio (a technique introduced earlier in '53, with Paramount's Shane), it still added a sense of scale and depth to movies. That's a whole lot of gimmicks all coming out at one time, you might observe; the reason why, as has been acknowledged for years, was the dreaded television, a peculiar new device that people purchased and installed in their homes, allowing them to watch moving images in the distracted, overlit privacy of a room which they only shared with their family, or perhaps friends, instead of having the remarkable experience of sharing emotions and sensations with many other people in a shared moment of artistic transport.

Despite the seemingly obvious limitations of television compared to the cinema, it took an immediate and obvious bite out of the audience, one that has never reversed itself in more than six decades of filmmakers doing their god-damnedest to make one of a kind experiences that demand to be seen on the big screen. The film industry threw everything it could at movies to try and win those audiences back: hence the technological gimmicks, hence the opulence and spectacle of things like the Bible epics, providing a panoply of grandeur that you simply couldn't get at home, not in the '50s anyway.

So The Robe, anyway, was the vanguard of that movement: it is a movie that sums up everything the mainstream film industry was going through and trying to become in 1953 about as perfectly as any one film has ever summed up any one year, and accordingly, it was one of the year's most giant hits, behind only Disney's Peter Pan. Which is pretty impressive for something such an unendurable slog. I should mention that The Robe was actually filmed twice: on the same sets and with the same script, the entire movie was made both with the anamorphic lenses that created its characteristic 2.55:1 aspect ration, and with standard spherical lenses that produced a 1.37:1 print. These were not different versions of one movie; they were, effectively, two different movies, shot in tandem but not in the same order, with different blocking and different choices made by the actors. By virtually all accounts, the 1.37:1 incarnation of The Robe, the one more familiar to an audience that grew up with its Easter Sunday screenings in the '60s and '70s, is absolutely better: the acting is improved, the directing is tighter and clearer.

I believe it. The CinemaScope version of The Robe is a dog, about which the best thing I can say is that compared to other early anamorphic widescreen filmmakers, director Henry Koster and cinematographer Leon Shamroy only infrequently left conspicuous, hanging dead space in the humongous frame. Though it's still the case that most of the important action has a tendency to bunch up in a squarish window. As far as the acting goes, the 'Scope film - and I'll henceforth stop bothering to identify it as such, I've only ever seen this one and as long as it has the same script, I don't think historical curiosity will ever send me out to find the 1.37:1 version - boasts a lead performance from Richard Burton that is really and truly shockingly bad. I'm not the actor's biggest fan, but there's still a level of British stage-trained competence that's easy to expect from him. He's painfully wooden here, only coming alive in moments where he can shout things angrily, and even that he does without altering the pissy glare that he wears like a kind of shield. It wasn't a project that the recent import to the U.S. was terribly fond of, and in after years he would describe it as one of the worst things he'd worked on; but it's rare to see an actor telegraph their inner disgust with the movie they're making so openly. Frankly, at times he's working at such askew angles to anything that would serve the character and the drama that it's easy to suppose he was trying to ruin the film from within.

On the other hand, much of The Robe is the story of a man who deals with a situation he desperately hates by remaining constantly drunk. And viewed in that respect, Burton was the most perfect casting choice in the world.

Burton plays Marcellus Gallio, a Roman military tribune in the 30s who, on one of his strolls through the capital, bumps into the beautiful Diana (Jean Simmons), a childhood friend he has not seen for many years, since they play-acted at being in love. It's no longer play-acting now, though, but it also puts Marcellus on the wrong side of Caligula (Jay Robinson), Diana's unofficial fiancé, and also the adoptive grandson and regent of the reigning emperor, Tiberius (Ernest Thesiger). The potential for a conflict between the men doesn't take long to erupt: at a slave auction, reacting to a deliberate slight from Caligula, Marcellus angrily outbids his rival for a Greek slave named Demetrius (Victor Mature), in whom Caligula is far more openly interested than we ever see him being towards Diana. This is enough to send the regent into a fit, and he arranges for Marcellus to be transferred to the worst hole in the empire, a rebellious backwater east of the Mediterranean called Jerusalem. Through Diana's intervention, Marcellus doesn't remain very long; he's really only in the region long enough to help crucify a rabble-rousing Jewish prophet, and win the dying man's robe as he and some centurions play games of chance at the foot of the cross.

Up to this point, The Robe is a competent if not particularly enjoyable tour of Roman politics and backstabbing, brought down by its dismal acting: Burton is checked out, Robinson goes to some astonishingly tacky lengths to play Caligula as the gayest gay man that '50s moral codes would allow for, Simmons is as checked out as Burton, but only because she wasn't a terribly good actress, and there's none of the weird anger he has to compensate for it. Only Mature actually puts across any real depth of character and interesting motivations (he ends up entranced with the Christians from the moment Jesus enters Jerusalem), and when Victor Mature is giving the best performance in a movie, that movie has problems. And the film is likewise hampered by generally shabby costumes that look like they came from a high school production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or would if that show had existed yet; the gulf between the costumes and the elaborate, wonderful sets is certainly striking, at any rate. And the sound mix - CinemaScope was also accompanied by some of the first stereophonic sound in the movies, you see - is all the hell over the place, with two people facing each other from a distance of three or four feet sounding like they recorded their lines several days and cities apart from each other.

So maybe not "competent" and not particularly enjoyable, but it gets the job across. Once Jesus's robe enters the picture, though, things just get absurd, with Marcellus finding himself going insane with guilt, and suffering apparently physical pain every time he touches the robe; when Demetrius steals it before the tribune returns to Rome, this sets us up for a very lengthy story arc in which Marcellus journeys the length and breadth of Palestine, encountering the new Christians and their leader, Simon Peter (Michael Rennie, who at least has the presence of mind to play Peter as a kind man, and not a saint-in-the-making), and eventually being converted to their religion, not through conviction that it is true and beautiful and moral - indeed, the more evidence he sees that Christianity is charitable and kind, the more it repels him - but because the robe essentially magics him into faith, during a scene where a bug-eyed, screaming Burton outright decides that he's going to play things in the campiest way possible, before camp was even a thing.

It's hard to actively hate anything as deeply earnest as The Robe, but it is a long, tough sit, with a 135-minute running time that's not even particularly notable by the genre's standards dragging itself out through scene after scene of Burton and Mature and Dean Jagger (as the leader of a local Christian community) and eventually Simmons intoning Philip Dunne and (uncredited blacklist victim) Albert Maltz's surface-level dialogue about religious philosophy. There's not even really a story behind this - something to do, vaguely, with the new Emperor Caligula punishing every Christian he can get his hands on, but that doesn't really drive much besides the final ten minutes - just depicting early Christians going about their business, which apparently involved doing virtually nothing else besides talking about being early Christians.

As dramatically inert as it is, at least it does manage to be fairly effective at spectacle. The costumes, I've said, kind of suck, but the sets are frequently amazing, and Koster has enough sense of the new format he's using to show them off in all their scope. The compositions are all functional, at best, but the simple act of looking at stuff is, by itself, enough to keep the movie afloat, visually. Because the stuff is awfully lovely.

Beyond that, there's a pretty fantastic score by Alfred Newman that basically wrote the book on how all future epics would be scored (and not just epics: John Williams pretty clearly had The Robe somewhere in the back of his mind when the time came to score the Indiana Jones pictures, at least), and combined with the generally extravagant visuals, that's enough to give us the sense that we're watching something Mighty and Impressive. Which, I suppose, it is - there's no question that this was a major production, Fox's big prestige release of '53, with all the seriousness of purpose and moral gravity that you could ever hope to stuff into a prestige picture. That it doesn't work is practically incidental.

Listless as it is, The Robe still impressed the hell out of people, kicking off a sequel built around Mature, Demetrius and the Gladiators, that was in production before the original was already released (as it was and ever shall be). That film is at least energetic enough to be fun, though it's still pretty lumbering, as all of these behemoths were lumbering. But profitable. Between grandiose historical epics, and the huge war movies and mega-musicals that succeeded them, Hollywood was quickly learning the economic appeal of throwing a lot of resources into huge productions that appealed above all on the level of spectacle; that spectacle would, over the next 15 years, grow more and more bloated and alien until the only thing that saved the industry was burning it down to the ground and starting fresh. It's not the last we'll be revisiting that story as we go along, but it sure is something to think about.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1953
-Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr have sexy surf sex in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity for Columbia
-Ward Kimball and Charles A. Nichols oversee the CinemaScope short Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the most aesthetically audacious thing ever made at the Disney studios to that point
-Warner Bros. introduces the world to giant monsters from the ocean depths, and the peerless work of effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1953
-Ozu Yasujiro creates the greatest depiction of family dynamics ever put to film, Tokyo Story
-Henri-Georges Clouzot's Franco-Italian The Wages of Fear raises the bar for all thrillers ever since
-Luis García Berlanga, and Spanish cinema generally, explode into international prominence with ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 7 POLL: 1981

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: HELL NIGHT
Thanks to everyone who voted!

I am proud that my birth year of 1981 was such a great one for horror. For reasons that can be partially explained, I think, by its key position early in the slasher wave but not so far along that lazy indulgence and formula-humping had set in, that year produced more interesting, complex, genre-defying slasher movies than any other. Let us now pay tribute to that marvelous span of 12 months by considering one of the varied slasher and slasher-influenced films to which it bore witness.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (October, TV)
From IMDb: "In a small town, a wrongfully killed man exacts revenge on those who murdered him beyond the grave."

Hell Night (August)
From IMDb: "Four college pledges are forced to spend the night in a deserted old mansion where they get killed off one by one by the monstrous surviving members of a family massacre years earlier for trespassing on their living grounds."

There Was a Little Girl AKA Madhouse (November)
From IMDb: "Julia, a teacher in a school for the deaf, has a hideosly disformed and deranged twin sister that resides in the local looney bin."

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STANLEY KUBRICK: YOU WILL FIND US ALWAYS ON THE JOB, THE UNITED STATES MARINES

Everybody thinks everything is overrated or underrated. That's the fun of it: it's why we get to latch onto certain books or movies or video games or whatever as the objects of our special, private passions, and why we get to feel superior to all the people who like... that.

In the career of Stanley Kubrick, a director whose mature work I tend to adore (though to disprove what I just said, I think his reputation is just about perfectly rated, if we take it as an average between the loudest internet fanboys and the more dubious humanist critics who see him as too icy), my pick for his most overrated film is A Clockwork Orange, a technically flawless work of audience manipulation at its most unrelenting, yet which I find to be a little bit too smug in its satire and exaggerated in its cruelty. And my pick for his most underrated is Full Metal Jacket, a movie that's often described even by Kubrick lovers as a fantastic opening 45 minutes with a concluding 70 minutes that simply aren't up to the task of following that opening (actually, it's often described in terms of a first and second half; but the time imbalance is to stark for me to let that slide). So underrated and mis-read; I might go so far as to propose - though quietly and hesitantly, so nobody gets too mad at me - that the second part of Full Metal Jacket is actually the better part, and that the opening is there to give context and background to the rest, not to serve as a self-contained mini-movie.

Of course, the opening 45 minutes, which follows the eight weeks of boot camp for a platoon of new recruits to the United States Marine Corps, at Parris Island in 1967, is a lot more energetic and easy to like, particularly if one elects to view R. Lee Ermey's star-making performance as the foul-mouthed drill instructor Sgt. Hartman as largely entertaining. And certainly, appreciated in a vacuum, lines of dialogue (many of them invented by Ermey, a former drill instructor himself; others are taken verbatim from Gustav Hasford's semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers) like "I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around!" or "God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see! He plays His games, we play ours! To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls!" are nothing if not quotable. But it's also more than a little terrifying, and the fact that Hartman chokes a recruit in the first scene for daring to grin at the sergeant's apparent buffonery, I think the film's intentions are clear enough. The training segment of Full Metal Jacket is not entertaining: it is savage, and it helps to remember that it's not even really an exaggeration of reality.

I am not, mind you, trying to downplay how well the film's opening act works; I merely wish to deny that it's somehow a different and vastly superior movie to what follows. It's all part of one great long arc that presents the most interesting variation in Kubrick's career on one of the theme he nurtured from 1956's The Killing onward: the breakdown of systems. Perfect crimes, military justice, nuclear fail-safes, artificial intelligence, 18th Century European social codes: over and over, Kubrick tells stories about what happens when a stable system is infected by sloppy human emotions. The system in Full Metal Jacket is spelled out in dialogue by the unfailingly blunt Hartman: it's the program of training that breaks down human beings and turns them into warriors, perfect killing machines with no trace of whatever resistance - the film's not sentimental enough to invite us to call it "morality" - prevents normal people from going to war and feeling good about killing people by the handful. And we see the breakdown of this system from two directions: first, what happens when it works too well, and the removal of a subject's humanity goes all the way 'round the other side and turns into an inhuman madness; second, what happens when these flawless devices, these Marines, are dropped into a crazed environment of the purest unfathomable chaos.

Kubrick, fairly or unfairly, has been typically defined as a filmmaker with detached, chilly style that takes a remote, objective stance to his characters; a God's-eye view, I have seen it called. That's truer of some of his movies than other, but it is most true of this film, which is the most observational and least-invested movie of the director's career. Of his ten canonical films (the ones he didn't later reject), Full Metal Jacket is the only one that found the famously diverse Kubrick return to a genre: it is his second war film, thirty years after Paths of Glory. But the two are about as different as war films could be. Paths of Glory is a righteous howl of moral frustration, one of the most direct and piercing anti-war arguments ever filmed. I honestly don't know that Full Metal Jacket could even be described as anti-war; it's certainly not pro-war, but more than anything else, it simply attempts to comprehend war, even as it admits repeatedly that war is inherently incomprehensible. Far less interested in critiquing the dehumanising effect of military training and the noisome brutality of combat than in documenting it, Full Metal Jacket is focused entirely on "what"-oriented questions: what kind of person fights, what makes them that way, what does it do to them? And if in proffering its inconclusive answers to those questions, it manages to argue that war is wicked, and breaking a man's soul till he can perform that wickedness is wickeder still, I'm sure Kubrick and his co-writers Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford himself (there was a whole conflict over working together and if Hasford would get a credit) weren't trying to hide from being called anti-war

It is, in the main, a very clinical film, which I mean to be a description more than a criticism. It's an interesting mood for a relatively mainstream film about a very prominent political and social event to adopt; light years away from Oliver Stone's heated Vietnam picture Platoon, which came out the preceding year. The two make for an illuminating contrast in how cinema was ready to start processing the trauma of Vietnam; they're so distinct in approach and motivation that it's barely worth comparing them, and yet they compliment each other so well that they make about as natural a double feature as I could imagine. Kubrick's film is more detached, of course, and far more methodical in its aesthetic, as should hardly be surprising. Indeed, "methodical" is almost too general a word: it's repetitive and mechanical in exactly the ways it attempt to dramatise within its characters, repeating movements and echoing shot set-ups in multiple locations and contexts, using the visual structure of the film to imply and demonstrate the burned-in training of the well-oiled fighting machine.

And while the very precise construction of visuals implies order, the narrative destroys that order, and maybe this is what makes people so antipathetic towards the film's second portion. Full Metal Jacket has the weirdest narrative structure of any Kubrick film, even more than 2001: A Space Odyssey: it can't rightly be called two, three, or four acts, though it mimics elements of all of them. The first 45 minutes play like a classic second act with only a single scene to function as a first act, and the remainder of the film ends like it had a three-act structure but doesn't build up to it, instead allowing the narrative to shuttle around from one stop to another without forming any kind of arc of events, and barely chaining things together outside of the fact that they take place in chronological order and all involve Private "Joker" (Matthew Modine), the recruit from the first half the film selects as its protagonist for no reason. The interchangeability of the recruits is, in fact, heavily insisted-upon in the first sequence, with its unbelievably deep focus that refuses to foreground any one character. Most of the invidividual men are seen in identical, repeated shot set-ups, and only the wild card Private Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio, giving one of the great performances in all of Kubrick) is consistently shot in different angles from odd directions. And he ushers us into the film's pointedly aimless, messy second half by killing himself, in a scene of wonderful tension amped up by D'Onofrio's performance and Vivian Kubrick's scraping, mechanical music.

The aesthetic in the second half attempts to retain the rigid compositions and precise, right-angle camera positions of the opening, but events keep pushing it in off directions; Kubrick and Douglas Milsome's cinematography imposes order, the action and sound mix and Martin Hunter's editing keep violating it, and so it goes on and on. It's the best kind of cinema, unifying everything that makes a movie a movie into creating its message of the chaos and confusion of war.

And yet, it never sentimentalises that chaos, making us feel for the poor soldiers caught up in them; it simply diagnoses it. It is as remote and chilly as Kubrick gets, with exterior lighting that's hellbent on making the sky seem as blank and white as could possibly have been achieved. It makes the world look blank, and it flattens things out - and that's the other thing, this is a flat movie, with action occurring on multiple planes without depth, and with people lit to seem two-dimensional. Like nearly all of Kubrick's films, it even had a mono sound mix initially, that later home video releases have unwisely converted to 5.1 surround; it's not a huge bother in most cases, though it's unquestionably one of the worst of the many ways that Warner Home Video has mistreated Kubrick on DVD and Blu-ray. In Full Metal Jacket, though, it's an absolute crime: the mono mix is absolutely suberb, rendering everything from speech to bullets to the devilishly ironic music (all upbeat pop from the period, along with a lacerating use of the "Mickey Mouse Club March" in the finale moments to drive home how divorced the film's Marines are from their actions) in a single wall with every sound clearly audible, but incapable of emerging from the greater morass of disordered noise.

There are enough individual moments that don't quite work that I wonder about tempering my overall enthusiasm for the film slightly - the death of one Marine, in slow-motion, is weird sensationalism and much beneath the film's dignity, and I don't really know that we needed two hooker scenes - but that would be silly. Full Metal Jacket has always been, to me, one of Kubrick's foremost triumphs, a genuinely challenging and uncomfortable war film that follows through on all of its ideas even when cinematic convention demands that it find something, anything humane to lean back on. It's not cruel, and it's not nihilistic, but it's harsh as anything; it creates an experience of constant abuse of one sort or another that does not let us or the characters out of hell for one minute, but this approach is so fully supported by the material that even at the film's bleakest, I still love it as one of the greatest English-language films of the 1980s.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1952: In which we find that the classically boyish genre of the Western has decided to grow up

The next time you're at a cocktail party, and the hostess stands up tipsily and imperiously like Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame to demand that everybody share their favorite actor-director team,* I want you to do me a favor. Overlook the obvious (De Niro and Scorsese), the tasteless (Depp and Burton), the snobby (Ullmann and Bergman), the classic (Flynn and Curtiz), and the snobbily classicist (Dietrich and von Sternberg). Even if your head happens to be in a Western state of mind, I'd ask you to check the impulse to say the Johns Wayne and Ford. Instead, I would be so bold as to gently nudge you in the direction of all-American Everyfella James Stewart and lean, muscular genre master Anthony Mann, who made eight films together in the 1950s, five of them Westerns, and those among the most starkly modernist, elegantly savage films that genre would ever know until the Italians started in with their displays of hyperviolence in the mid-'60s.

We shall not in this moment recount the entire history of their collaboration, tarrying to mention only that their first work, 1950's Winchester '73 was something of a watershed moment in both the development of the Western and in the evolution of Stewart's career. Prior to serving as a highly-decorated bomber in World War II, the actor had played a lot of breezy, charming, idealistic roles in a breezy, charming, idealistic way, but the shock and horror of what he encountered during the war years changed him immensely: his first movie back was It's a Wonderful Life, everybody's favorite heart-warming Christmas parable about hanging on through a potent fit of suicidal depression, and most of his movies remained tinged by death, psychosis, and suffering forever after. Teaming with Mann, already establishing himself as the creator of blunt, masculine films depicting and anatomising human cruelty, was perhaps not the inevitable nor natural next step, but it worked out splendidly: Winchester '73 is both Mann's first unassailable great film and the first role for Stewart that actively flaunted and mocked his kindly persona, suggesting that being an Old West hero took the kind of tough asshole that circumstances only, and not morality or decency, permitted to emerge as "heroic".

It's a great film and it made a good showing for itself at the box office, so a follow-up was inevitable. It came in the form of 1952's Bend of the River, a film that generally plays things a bit more respectfully, with less complicated morality, a more conventional story, and lavish Technicolor cinematography to capture the lush Oregon shooting locations, in place of the lightly noir-flavored black-and-white in Winchester '73. All of which makes it feel less of a live-wire than the other Mann/Stewart Westerns, and I don't see much of a way around declaring it the weakest of their five collaborations in the genre. Though that says much more about the superlative quality of the other films than it points out any particular weakness in Bend of the River itself: on its own merits, this is still a top-notch movie with a clear method to its surprisingly bleak depiction of violence, however beholden Borden Chase's script (great name for a Western writer) is in some places to genre clichés that do it no favors as a story or as a depiction of a society (the casually racist "the Injuns are attacking!" scene, in particular, stands out as a lazy crutch that only exists to advance a single plot point, and makes it clear just how much more progressive Ford's films of the same vintage could be than they're typically given credit for).

The film opens east of the Rockies: here we find Glyn McLyntock (Stewart), a weathered trail guide leading a wagon train of Missouri farmers west to Oregon, where they plan on building a little slice of domesticity for themselves. McLyntock is a transparent Man With A Past, though the nature of that past is only slowly revealed to us, and then almost purely through innuendo and implication. But the hints start immediately, when he happens upon a lynch mob during one of his scouting trips: a group of trappers are in the process of hanging Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) for stealing horses, and without even stopping to figure out whether this is true, McLyntock interrupts this swift country justice with an authoritative snarl.

Cheyenne attacks and nascent romantic triangles between McLyntock, Cole and Laura Baile (Julie Adams) fill up the rest of the trip to the rough frontier town of Portland, where the farmers buy the first wave of supplies to overwinter; Laura has to stay behind to nurse a shoulder wound sustained in the attack, and Cole drifts away to seek his fortune in California. McLyntock joins the riverboat trek through treacherous waters to the fertile lands around the …wait for it… bend of the river, but when winter looms and the back-up supplies doesn't show, he and Laura's father, and the de facto leader of the farmers, Jeremy (Jay C. Flippen) head back to Portland, where they find that a gold rush has transformed the peaceful, rural West into a hellhole of greed, lust, and violence. McLyntock, who we've sussed out by now was a border raider during the Civil War, has enough of the killer left in his soul that he's equipped to deal with this situation, and even when he hires a transparently shady team of ruffians to help sneak the farmers' supplies away from an avaricious mercantilist, it's clear that he's well aware of the possibility that a bit of betrayal and violence might erupt on the way, to be dealt with however they must.

It's a straightforward story of redemption: never really asking whether a violent man who is regretful in his heart can actually succeed at being moral and just, but more than slightly unsure if such a man will ever be trusted by the Nice People. That's the actual tension between McLyntock and Cole: not whether a former border raider can change his path, but whether the cynicism of others will cause him to change it right back. It's giving away very little that Stewart doesn't clearly foreshadow through his calm, level performance that Bend of the River adopts a mostly optimistic attitude towards this topic, but getting there requires a shocking amount of on-screen bloodshed for '52 (figurative bloodshed: we see bodies, but never the red stuff), and a cold-bloodedness from Stewart that's intensely shocking coming from the face and voice of Jeff Smith, Macaulay Connor and George Bailey.

There's a moment, late in the movie, that represents perhaps the exact moment that the Early, Pleasant Stewart is finally and irrevocably dropped in favor of New, Harsh Stewart, a moment that competes with anything in Vertigo for thoroughly undoing any viewer who comes into the movie with visions of Midwestern optimism dancing in their heads: "You'll be seeing me. You'll be seeing me. Every time you bed down for the night, you'll look back to the darkness and wonder if I'm there. And some night, I will be. You'll be seeing me!" McLyntock hisses, with venom on his tongue and ice-cold hate in his eyes. It's like Stewart was pouring every negative emotion he felt over the past ten years into that one moment, his whole body arched like a big cat ready to pounce, and his words delivered with no emphasis or size, just low boiling menace. If there's one single instant in the Mann/Stewart films that crystallises the theme of all of them - there are times and places where only the real bastards can possibly survive, and the best bastards are simply the ones with enough humanity to recognize their own incivility - this is that moment.

That moment is houses inside a film that is, all in all, a little bit less complicated than one might wish it to be. It is a terrific Western, but it feels constrained by the genre in a way that Winchester '73 doesn't, and the later The Naked Spur and The Man from Laramie really especially don't. The music by Hans J. Salter does it no favors: all stock-issue "This here is the Wild West, and them thar's Indians!" cues, fine for getting the pulse racing but not really for teasing out the nasty moral complexity in the central characters. And meanwhile, that moral complexity is only in the central characters: the plainspoken nobility of the farmers, and their dogged determination to carve out a home on the unforgiving frontier is given lopsided prominence in every possible way over the venal, greedy, violent, whoring miners: the script implies it, the beatific performance of Flippen contrasted with just about everybody else in the film insists on it, the lighting - Portland as the den of gold rush hedonism is shot in pitch nighttime blacks, while the farming scenes, and Portland as the cozy last sign of civilisation, take place in broad daylight - demands it. Not that the story really would benefit from muddying that morality anyway, in blunt narrative terms, but the greyness and ambivalence baked into the McLyntock/Cole story makes the stark "farm good, gold bad" depiction of the background story seem disappointingly unadventurous and square.

There are also the inevitable representational issues that one can't help but expect from a film, in a white man's genre, from 1952. As is not uncommon with Mann, women serve as totems rather than personalities; the whole movie knows that it's occupying a mythic space in which characters tend to function as representatives of a concept, and this keeps it from being quite as unpleasant to modern tastes as plenty of other Westerns throughout history, but thoroughness demands I mention it. Girls are props and trophies and symbols of the men's development; there's no way around it. Far more inexplicable (because after all, if you're surprised by the presence of patriarchalism in a 1950s movie, it's because you are not paying even a tiny bit of attention) is the film's outdated racial depiction: it's not for very long, but Bend of the River actually sees fit to haul out Stepin Fetchit, the most notorious of all professional embodiments of the ugliest stereotype of the cringing, lazy black man, after that actor had been out of commission for well over a decade, as far as features for a white target audience went. And sure enough, he slinks, and warbles nervously, and chomps all over English in the most servile, scraping way, and it's so completely unnecessary to film in any way - the scenes in which he appear are literally just there to add, I beg you to pardon the expression, some local color - that it's far more uncomfortable than most garden variety '50s movie racism.

I don't know how to walk back from that, so I won't bother trying, and shall instead just bodily wrench the review back on track: though it is the most flawed and maybe the least interesting of the Mann/Stewart Westerns, Bend of the River is still great, cunningly and gorgeously made, and impressively unyielding in its physical brutality. It lingers intently on its characters, with cinematographer Irving Glassberg always favoring shots that emphasise the humans, either in relationship to each other or to the wilderness that constantly looms as a promise and a threat. For all its glorious Technicolor tourism of the Cascades, the movie never favors sweeping vistas and spectacular landscape photography: wide shots always serve a strictly narrative function. And the most important thing the mountains ever do is to contrast with the people, never show off their rocky grandeur.

Its preference for psychology over all other concerns puts Bend of the River in the early wave of a new kind of genre filmmaking: maybe most prominent in the Westerns, given how dramatic the discrepancy between the most and least sophisticated examples of the form, though it's certainly visible in the evolution of film noir and the gradual development of science fiction from idiot nonsense to social commentary. In the dawning years of the Cold War, the American Empire, the Post-War World, whatever the hell you want to call it, cinema as a whole began to grow very obsessed with the inner workings of the mind; I am no sociologist and cannot say what this says about the changes in society beyond its art. But it's as real as anything, that movies began to grapple with psychological interiors like never before. It's always easiest (and I tend to think, most rewarding) to see those kinds of shifts in the most innocuous pulp; Bend of the River is so accomplished that we might not want to use a word like "pulp" to describe it, but it still fits, and it showcases the need to acknowledge difficulties with individuals and societies in a deep, probing way, right at the start of the period in American history that's generally considered to have been more anxious to paper over those difficulties than any before or since. There's something really special to me about movies whose lessons and art are timeless, but whose interests and obsessions are particularly attached to a single, specific context; Mann's Westerns are both agelessly classic and irrevocably dated to the '50s in just that way, and they're able to do double-duty as time capsule and top-notch entertainment alike. Even when it's not perfect, it doesn't get much more rewarding than that.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1952
-United Artists releases Bwana Devil, igniting the first 3-D craze, while This Is Cinerama introduces the most gimmicky possible version of widescreen
-John Ford makes Ireland look even lovelier in the romantic comedy The Quiet Man
-The year's biggest hit, and the Best Picture Oscar winner, is Cecil B. DeMille's peculiarly unwatchable circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1952
-Mizoguchi Kenji's magnificent feminist period drama Life of Oharu is released in Japan
-After making movies throughout Europe, Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti makes his first works back at home, Song of the Sea and Simon the One-Eyed
-Future Italian master Federico Fellini's makes his solo directorial debut, The White Sheik

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MARKY MARK AND THE ROBOT BUNCH

There comes a time when you start to think, "Am I really going to start ranking the Transformers films?", and the answer turns out to be "apparently". Because there's a lot of chatter out there about how Transformers: Age of Extinction is so godalmighty awful, and it's really not, actually. Now, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, that's the franchise's second film, from 2009 - that's a godalmighty awful motion picture that, five years after I saw it, still makes me reel from the aesthetic savagery of it, the complete refusal to function in the most basic terms as a work of cinema or piece of narrative. Age of Extinction isn't very good, for it is still a Transformers picture, but it comes at least kind of close; I'd put in on par with/above the original Transformers from 2007, and a hair below 2011's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The latter of which remains, after 613 minutes worth of franchise, the only one of the movies that was able to put together an entire action sequence that's actually worth a damn.

In part, it comes down to the human element. A sentence that I'm pleased to have typed out, since I was half-convinced that my keyboard would erupt in flames before I finished it. Not the human element of the protagonists, since they're awful - in fact, screenwriter Ehren Kruger has somehow managed to write leads for the new wave of Transformers movies even worse than the scrawny geek fantasy Shia LaBeouf played in the last trilogy. And the casting director found an actress bad enough to make the model from Dark of the Moon seem modestly talented, and to make Megan Fox seem like an important young actress of exceptional talent and psychological insight. Besides which, any hint of decent characterisation is quite wiped out by a story that proceeds through some insanely convoluted bends for a franchise that requires no more narrative complexity than "Make these robot toys shoot at those robot toys. No, you're doing it wrong! Mooooooom!", and manages to leave damn near every single one of its plot threads, from the biggest to the smallest, dangling without much more than the illusion of resolution at the end. And the most unresolved threads are the ones having to do with the emotional relationships of the main characters, despite the first hour of a movie that ends up stretching to a comically unjustified 165 minutes indulging itself with lots of highly specific and methodical exposition and action setting up those emotional relationships. So when the "overprotective dad & scoundrel-ish boyfriend" conflict seems to have largely taken care of itself offscreen, it's easy to be even pissier at the film than normal.

But I was starting off like I wanted to compliment the movie... so, anyway, the human element. By which I exclusively refer to Joshua Joyce, the film's requisite Bad Capitalist who shifts over the course of the movie from being the secret chief villain to being the foppish secondary villain to being the comic anti-hero sidekick, none of which would augur well for him if he weren't being played by Stanley Tucci, and thus turning into, no two ways about it, the best human-sized thing in any of the movies of the series to date. He brings the same camp/diva hamminess that John Malkovich had in Dark of the Moon, but in a vastly larger role, and while his snitty, prissy bossiness isn't exactly great Acting-with-a-capital-A, and is plainly no challenge for Tucci of all actors, it's absolutely perfect for a popcorn movie, with its big notes and broad strokes and flawlessly-honed sense of fun.

Nobody, mind you, goes into a movie like this expecting to give much if any of a damn about the characters, so Tucci's effectiveness is more of a bonus than anything, but it's still nice to have it. Particularly given that nothing else in Age of Extinction is even slightly better than it has to be, and is often less. For all that the series' defenders like to accuse people like myself of hating movies where you just go and have a good time at the theater, I have to confess that it's not remotely clear what about this is supposed to be a good time. The visual effects are as costly and perfect as ever, and the titular robots just keep getting easier and easier to actually look at as distinct figures and not vaguely anthropoid clusters of sharp, chrome-covered points; the sound mix flawlessly combines several layers of chaotic noise and booming music in a hugely convincing and even coherent flurry of activity and energy. So on a purely experiential level, Age of Extinction works: but what experience is it creating, anyway? Like its three predecessors, it's only really great at pummeling the viewer into oblivion, and if that's really enough to qualify as "fun" these days, I'd prefer to be constantly bored.

Technical polish or not, this still isn't effective action: it's not as dizzying in its incoherence as Revenge of the Fallen - what could be? - but it feels more like an assembly edit than a final cut, with so many tiny continuity errors that you couldn't even make a drinking game out of them. But the bigger problem it that so many scenes and shots simply don't flow: we see a character in the Arctic and then a few seconds later he's in Chicago, or a character is on one side of the road and then manages to be walking down the road on the other quickly enough that it just feels wrong, in some itchy but not quite definable way. I have, I think, discovered something about the cinema of Michael Bay, in this his eleventh feature film as director: he's great at constructing images of violent balletic poetry, of making the most picturesque explosions and iconic moments from what feel like the world's biggest beer commercial (which phrase comes across rather literally in view of the combustive amounts of product placement in Age of Extinction, for both American and Chinese products - a most peculiar psychological disorientation results from watching what are obviously product shots for products you don't recognise), and in this case, he is aided considerably by cinematographer Amir Mokri, bringing some of the cod-Malick tenderness he developed in shooting Man of Steel to the film's Norman Rockwelly scenes of rural Texas. Parts of Age of Extinction, almost solely in the first hour, are actively gorgeous, and there are perfectly-framed shots of chaos and action throughout. But if he is a great maker of images, what Bay can't do at all is to combine those images in a row: every cut feels like it introduces a brand new physical reality. And there are, in fairness, fewer of them: Age of Extinction slows down quite a lot from its predecessors. I was timing it, in fact, and it takes more than two minutes for the first shot with a duration of less than three seconds - that's downright Tarr-esque, by Transformers standards. Even so, the editing is so bad at establishing any relationship between moments that the most stately, long-take Bayhem still refuses to build up any momentum.

Or it could just be form following content: the story of Age of Extinction is, itself, such a clusterfuck of disconnected ideas that don't build on each other, the editing is, in a sense, merely doing its job. There's a shitload going on involving the death of the dinosaurs, an alien metal given the delightfully tacky name of Transformium, the CIA joining forces with a shady defense contractor, a rogue Transformer bounty hunter, and the rural inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg, completely lost at sea) - the most transcendentally fake movie name of this or many recent years; I would expect a particularly low-rent Chuck Norris vehicle to come up with that - who discovers the dusty remains of Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), leader of the good Transformers, in hiding these years since the war between Autobots and Decepticons nearly destroyed Chicago. Cade has a hot daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz); Tessa has a hot illicit older racing boyfriend, Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor), and if you suppose that Shane's skill for tricky driving would come in handy in a movie about robots who transform into cars, you'd be unbelievably wrong. Tessa and Shane exist pretty much for no reason other than to provide attractive people for the adolescent audience to ogle; Kruger provides a nifty very long scene indicating how exactly a 20-year-old can fuck a 17-year-old in Texas and have it not be statutory rape, a narrative dead-end that communicates mostly that the writer has done an amount of research into the fine details of age of consent laws that I am not, personally, very comfortable with. Shane is from Ireland, as Cade points out in mocking his accent, a scene that apparently only exists to make the audience uncomfortably aware that the man mocking the kid for being from "Dublin, Texas" is himself pretty unmistakably from Boston, Texas, and should really shut his trap.

These people find themselves squaring off against the impeccably beardy black ops mastermind Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer, everyone's favorite movie thug), and it ends up involving robot dinosaurs and an exploding terraforming device that turns animals into tranformium, and the late evil robot Megatron endeavors to resurrect himself in the body of the human-build prototype Galvatron, and he now, very excitingly, is voiced by the legendary Frank Welker, whose characters would otherwise be all dead. What Age of Extinction never does, nor even apparently considers doing, is explaining why the hell we care: the basic stakes and conflict of the movie are so murky, shift so frequently, and virtually never have anything to do with the protagonists beyond the fact that they keep being dragged along. Now, not every action movie needs to be conceptually sound, or conceptually coherent, even; not if it has solid, well-crafted action sequences to make up for it. And in the abstract, Age of Extinction has that, but though all the ingredients are readily visible, they haven't been made into an actual, functioning cinematic object. It's the difference between putting flour, butter, and sugar on somebody's plate, or giving them a slice of cake. And Michael Bay has made a pretty damn lousy cake.

4/10

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