Ferdy on Films, etc.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Director: Andrew Dominik

By Roderick Heath

The first film I’ve seen this year I’ve been tempted to call great, Assassination is an extraordinarily intense study in the savage nature of fate, violence, and false mythology. It’s also a cinematic tone poem that deliberately alludes to that least-popular of genres, the revisionist Western, and in particular the films of Terence Malick, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Robert Benton, and Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), to which it is a virtual sequel. Kaufman’s drowsy, drizzly work studied with moody anti-romanticism the final raid conducted by the James-Younger gang, now long notorious and hunted on all sides. Jesse James, as portrayed by Robert Duvall, was a quick-draw psycho still fighting the Civil War using bushwhacker rules. The film concluded with Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) dead, the gang dispersed, and the James brothers fleeing south to Missouri to form a new crew.

Assassination examines James (Brad Pitt) in his last year, robbing a train with self-aggrandising style and self-serving violence. But he’s worn out, his nerves electric with paranoia and frustration. His gang, a feckless mob of self-appointed rebels, includes Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider), a smooth-tongued, poetry-quoting skirt chaser; Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner), a pug-nosed, Yankee-hating thug and Jesse’s cousin; Jesse’s hardened, cagey elder brother Frank (Sam Shepard); Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell), a garrulous twit; and, new to the group, Charley’s younger brother Robert (Casey Affleck). A strange, drawling, pale misfit, Robert talks himself up as a man of bravery and character, despite coming across as mildly retarded and possibly crazy. Frank finds him “creepy" when he talks to Robert, and Jesse, trying out his practised charm on the 20-year-old, proves unable to fathom this tensely smiling enigma.

Slowly, as Assassination progresses, the impressions reverse. Robert, the youngest of four brothers, socially awkward, and quietly obsessed, is desperate to prove himself and live up to his dreams after a youth of dreary rural rituals and tough, strutting elder brothers who belittle and bully him. His hero worship of Jesse curdles into something like hate, beginning when the outlaw casually disavows the heroic portrayals of him that have proliferated in the popular media in the 15 years of his career, and gathering in intensity at displays of Jesse’s capricious cruelty and distrustfulness that confirm that anyone, even friends and companions, might be targets for his guns.

As the Victorian-marquee-style title suggests, Assassination has removed narrative almost entirely from the story and left a series of confrontations that simultaneously reveal and conceal motivation and character as the question of the film becomes, when, how, and why. The film gathers the deterministic momentum of Greek tragedy played out in its characters’ eyes, principally the war between Pitt’s corrosive blue irises and Affleck’s infinitely obfuscating gaze. Jesse is alternately brooding and brutal, charming and gregarious, a manic-depressive warrior who is astounded and sorrowful over his own capacity for hair-trigger violence. He is torn asunder by the need to be with people made more intense by the need to have trustworthy lieutenants and the fear that those he trusts may betray or ruin him through stupidity or clumsiness. He shoots a member of the gang, Ed Miller (Garret Dillahunt), on the mere suspicion he might have ratted him out and slaps silly an adolescent cousin of the Fords’, precipitating Robert’s gathering determination to destroy Jesse.

The nature of Jesse and Ford’s psychic pas de deux is compelling as each man—and we—attempt to discern what is being communicated. Is James sure Ford is set to betray him? Robert makes contact with a Pinkerton agent connected to the state authorities. The agent assures Robert James will find out, but Jesse never lets on. Does he know—even want—this bullet in the back? Is he trying to precipitate a death that will come on his own terms? Or does his intuition fail him? Can he really not decide if Robert will betray him?

An irony resolves out of the title; it is precisely Robert’s lack of cowardice that presents him an opportunity to take out the outlaw. Jesse’s merciless gaze unnerves everyone around him to the point where he can tell swiftly if they’re lying or not, but not Robert—or Charley. But Charley has no real character. He can lie to Jesse, but he can’t actually do anything for himself.

The baleful, recriminatory regard Frank James has for his brother a rhyme in the two Ford brothers. In the film’s one moment of gunplay, a fight erupts in the Fords’ farmhouse, as Wood tries to shoot Liddil for bedding the wife of his uncle Major Hite (Tom Aldredge)—a ridiculous effort to defend family honour, as the wife, Sarah (Kailin See), is a young, fire-under-snow opportunist married to a withered old man. Robert shows for the first time his capacity for cool violence when he plugs Wood in the head to save the more likable Liddil. The killing adds another reason to the mounting list for the Fords to be wary of James and establishes Robert’s oddly dissociative ability to shoot a man from behind.

Andrew Dominik made his directorial debut with Chopper (2000), a picture based on the mostly spurious memoirs of an Australian thug. That film made Eric Bana a movie star and joined an interesting run of gangland films like Essex Boys (2000) and Sexy Beast (2000) in studying the terror of being up close to a dangerous criminal. Assassination continues this theme, as Jesse is certainly that, and his somsersaulting moods and general paranoia make him intolerable. Yet Jesse is also a gentleman, a charismatic leader, and undoubtedly brave. He stands for something—the living ghost of Southern rebellion—and lives too vividly in the zeitgeist to be just another gunman to be eradicated. Jesse is struggling to hold onto his threads of humanity—his wife Zee (Mary-Louise Parker) and kids, his final friends—even as he is pushed by forces within himself and without to destroy. There is the hint that for Jesse, death is an extirpation of his sins and the reclamation of his humanity from a history of bloodshed. In an arresting sequence, the gang robs a train at Blue Ridge, and Jesse awaits the approaching train standing atop a block. It’s a wry take on James’ self-promotional style, but also evokes the nature of his heroic appeal to the bitter and betrayed post-Civil War populace as a single man willing to stand before the oncoming industrial juggernaut of progress.

Ford longs to be James and possibly have his body, as a charged bath scene suggests that each views the other is a completion of himself. Ford feels that James has indelible place in the world, with his family, his fame, his assured strength and character, that he, Robert, can only fantasize over. Robert fails to grasp that such prestige comes only by putting yourself in the monster’s mouth. During Robert’s subsequent attempts to capitalise on his infamy as James’ killer in a stage show where he shows what happened, he’s foolish enough to play it like it happened instead of developing his own mystique. Charley’s bad portrayal of Jesse removes the sting from the play-acting; later, as Charley becomes embittered and regretful, his impersonation becomes more real, and Robert is soon faced with spiteful names from his audience.

Dominik lays claim with this film to being the most talented director to emerge for Australia since Rolf de Heer 20 years ago. His feel for Americana has obvious influences, but the fresh, cleansed physicality of the film and its burnished, poetic spaciousness are rich and new. Assassination is superior to many of those ’70s mud-and-blood Westerns by being even and assured in tone, and by knowing what it wants to do rather than flailing off the path of clichés (an urge that hobbled ambitious works like The Missouri Breaks, 1976). Dominik’s stranglehold on the pacing and quietude of the work threaten initially to be off-putting, but soon proves methodical. Dominik is conditioning us to the music of the actors’ smallest gestures and the narrative’s fixated purpose; when the moments of violence come they hit with true force. The film could have perhaps been a bit shorter (maybe cutting one of the proliferation of time-lapse cloud shots), and a droning David McCullough-esque voiceover by Hugh Ross just bugged me. Films that stand up this self-importantly as “Serious Art" often have their heads cut off, but Dominik justifies his approach with his results.

The film isn’t really revisionist because it doesn’t merely attack or subvert the James myth. Duvall’s James in The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid squarely plugs his myth between the eyes when he shoots an unarmed civilian for no reason, whilst mouthing off his guerrilla war justifications, to make it clear he’s just a psycho with a gun. Pitt’s James is a layered creature, and so is the film’s interest in him. The myth of Jesse, how it enfolded him even in life, is important to the story as it was to the people at the time—idea influences reality and vice versa. Robert wants anything like the celebrity Jesse has, in whatever form, to justify his existence.

Pitt is a majestic Jesse, as perfectly cast as he was as Achilles—both mythical warriors with deeply human fractures to their images—and is this time served by a good film. Such roles make dramatic weapons out of his looks and charisma, which otherwise automatically overwhelm his acting talents that, up until now, have best been showcased by monomaniacal characters (Seven Years In Tibet, 1997; Fight Club, 1999) or outright crazed ones (Kalifornia, 1993) that promised he’d prove to be more than the Tab Hunter of his day. Affleck matches with one of the best male acting performances in years. Previously relegated to light comic relief opposite Scott Cann in the Ocean’s films, Affleck’s Robert Ford grows slowly but surely from an enigma to an all-too-vivid human tragedy. In the film’s wistful, eerie coda, Robert, a grown man, pursued by infamy and tortured by destroying his friend and his own brother, can find a brief solace in the company of an actress Dorothy Evans, (Zooey Deschanel), but waits as patiently for the bullet from behind as Jesse did. l

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge, 1956)
White Mane (Crin-Blanc, 1953)
Director: Albert Lamorisse

By Marilyn Ferdinand

We all tend to hold dear the images and experiences of our childhood. For people in their 20s, The Little Mermaid and Scooby Doo may be the beloved images of youth. For people who were young in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, The Red Balloon is sacred ground. The Red Balloon won just about every award for which it was eligible and played in movie theatres around the world. So popular was this magical story of a boy and his balloon that a chain of Red Balloon coffee houses opened. I remember driving past the restaurant with my parents and gazing fondly at the bronze, lifesize replica of the little boy at the top of a Parisian-style light pole reaching for the string of the painted-red balloon.

Like many of the other markers of my youth, the restaurant is gone, and the movie has faded from memory. But now in its 50th year of existence, Janus Films has begun touring The Red Balloon and White Mane, an earlier children’s film by the same director, on the arthouse circuit. The timing not only coincides with the Janus anniversary, but also capitalizes on the recent release of respected Chinese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon. The childish thrill I experienced when I heard the song over the opening credits of The Red Balloon was an unexpected joy.

The film opens with a gorgeous view of a neighborhood in a hilly part of Paris, its grey cobblestone streets and stairways ghostly in a morning mist. Then, our boy (Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son) comes into the scene. The camera stays at his eye level as we watch him descend a few stairs and walk up a wall while holding onto a light pole. When he reaches the top, we see what he is after—a large, very round, red balloon. He has to grip the string in his mouth to descend the pole. Once safely on the ground, he grips the string and goes off to school.

The streetcar conductor won’t let him on with the balloon. Rather than let go, he runs all the way to school. He hurries through the door. A few moments later, he hurries back out. He finds an old man on the street and tells him to hold onto the balloon (“and don’t let go") until he comes out. Miraculously, the man complies. When the boy gets home to his grandmother, we watch up at their apartment window as she opens the shutters and tosses the balloon out. But the balloon has picked the boy to be his friend, and it floats outside the window waiting for the boy to retrieve it.

The boy and the balloon are inseparable. It harasses a teacher who locks the boy up and follows a blue balloon a little girl is holding; the two balloons play and check each other out like a pair of pet dogs. It’s amazing how much personality an object can convey under the skillful direction of Lamorisse and the matter-of-fact acceptance of his son as the balloon’s friend. When the balloon finally is separated from the boy by an envious pack of boys from his school, all the balloons in Paris rush to his side to convey him to a place where he and the red balloon can be reunited. It’s a very special moment, and one of the most beautiful scenes ever captured on film.

White Mane is a new film to me, but this story of a wild and proud horse is a beautiful, somber, and sad affair that I would have loved as the dramatic, morbid child I was. (I asked my teacher to read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl" to my second-grade class, and she was appalled by the death at the end.) Unfortunately, American parents of yesteryear pretended childhood was nothing but fun and games, and I doubt the film ever played in the States. To today’s parents who are overly paranoid about exposing their children to anything that might harm them—like reality—I issue the caution that this film is intense and violent.

The story takes place in the Camargue, a marshy region south of Arles in France known for its herd of small, wild horses. White Mane, the narrator (Peter Strauss) tells us, is the leader of his herd. He is sought by some gauchos who wish to tame him. They chase him over the dunes and lead him to a pen, where they try to break him. However, he escapes. They try again, setting fire to the marsh to flush him out, but he attacks their leader’s horse, which throws the man to the ground. “Whoever wants him can have him," says the man in disgust. Young Folco (Alain Emery), a fisherman, overhears this remark and decides to make White Mane his. The horse takes a liking to him, and agrees to come back to his home, where Folco and his young brother (a very cute Pascal Lamorisse) live with their grandfather and a menagerie that includes one of the Camargue’s famed flamingos.

White Mane is happy with Folco, but when the gauchos drive his herd toward their ranch, he gives chase and ends up in a pen with another male from the wild herd that has taken his place as leader. He and White Mane fight for dominance of the herd. The battle of these two males is very intense, lengthy, and violent—nothing staged about it. White Mane is driven out and returns to Folco, who tends his wounds.

Of course, the proud men are not about to give up so quickly. They decide to humble White Mane, but Folco takes off, riding him to the river. The two plunge into the water and are swept to sea, where the narrator relates that they are going to a place where men and horses live always as friends.

The sad ending of White Mane rings true, coming from a man who had lived through the Nazi occupation of France and who made this film for children who had survived the war and were still dealing with its aftermath. The Red Balloon touches on the same theme by pitting envious, warring boys armed with slingshots against their smaller classmate and his defenseless, but brave, balloon. Although White Mane evokes the emotion of wartime Europe, reminders of the war are all around in the much more gentle The Red Balloon. Looking at the rubble the boy walks through, it's not surprising that Lamorisse would want to evoke a bit of magic to take him away. In the end, the boy also leaves the world to go to a place where boys and their balloons can live unmolested. If you want to call these films a plea for peace—or even religious parables—you wouldn't be far off. If you're afraid your kids can't handle them, ask them if they think life is just fun and games. They might surprise you. l

The Red Balloon and White Mane are playing around the country during the holidays. In Chicago, the films are currently running at The Music Box Theatre. Do what numerous parents are doing and take your kids to see them.

Don’t Come Knocking (2005)
Director: Wim Wenders

By Roderick Heath

Like, I think, many other viewers, I gave up on Wim Wenders after the unbearable, overlong, over-everything sci-fi work Until The End Of The World (1991). I had barely watched any of his work since then, a sad thing considering that two of his films from the 80s, Hammett (1982) and Paris, Texas (1984), are amongst my favourites of all time. Don’t Come Knocking was selected for Cannes a couple of years back and greeted by some as a comeback, all the more promising in that it reunited Wenders with Paris, Texas’ scribe, Sam Shepard. Since that film’s chilly, unremitting look at humanity lost in wasteland culture, and the counterbalancing magic realism of Wings of Desire (1987), Wenders had become lost in a simultaneous desire to critique modern culture and still be a kind of pop cinema icon, doodling in inflated arthouse projects that lack both the scrappy appeal and economy of a outsider’s low-budget work. Like his mates in U2, he seemed to have long exchanged the appeal of a good hook and tight for a desire to be cooler-than-God and duller than dishwater.

Don’t Come Knocking isn’t on its face so hugely promising either. It’s laced with flourishes of the fable, always the stickiest, most potentially irritating of narrative modes, and tells a pretty familiar story. Hell, after Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, it’s the second film of 2005 to have the same plot and feature Jessica Lange. Tim Roth plays an unplayable part—a film-studio lawyer who acts like a secret service agent, a remorseless, culturally hermetic enforcer of a plastic, unfeeling corporate culture. Yeah, right, like groovy, gotta watch out for the Man, y’dig?

And yet, Don’t Come Knocking maintains a poise of expression, a precision of pace, and a lightness of touch that are beguiling. Shepard plays a Western movie star named Howard Spence who indulges in all the modern excesses. Yeah, I know, there are no Western stars anymore, and this kicks off the film’s edge of fable, as Howard, in costume and on a horse, flees a movie set full of irritating movie types, clueless groupies, and a red-faced, infuriated director (George Kennedy!).

Howard, swaps clothes with a drifter and proceeds on foot to the nearest car rental lot. He drives to Nevada to visit his mother (Eva Marie Saint), who he hasn’t seen in 30 years. We learn that although Howard’s family used to own a ranch, his pose as a cowboy is bogus. His mother has long since sold the property and lives in a bungalow in a Nevada gambling town. She’s kept a scrapbook of his newspaper clippings detailing innumerable drug and drink problems, brushes with the law, fights, and general catastrophe. Howard’s a bundle of nerves and angry impulses. He’s on the run from his reputation. Deeply uncomfortable in the shallow glitz of the local casino he stalks through, he nonetheless likes it when young women recognise him. It’s only with an old school friend that he loses it. He is eventually arrested for getting too emphatic with a slot machine.

Howard soon finds from his genteel, utterly honourable mother, that he has a son, or so she was told by an ex-girlfriend of his in Butte, Montana, where he shot one of his most successful films, “Just Like Jesse James." Simultaneously, a young woman named Sky (Sarah Polley) sets out with the ashes of her recently deceased mother, to scatter them in the mountains where her mother had mentioned being happy. Soon, both she and Howard are in Butte—she carrying a blue urn with the ashes, he driving his father’s long-unused Cadillac. Finding his old flame, Doreen (Lange), isn’t difficult; she runs the M&M Bar where they met when she was a waitress. She soon leads him to their son, Earl (Gabriel Mann), who’s a singer-songwriter in an alt-country-blues band, escorted by his girlfriend Amber (Fairuza Balk), who’s so flaky she could blow away. Earl’s a bundle of dynamite, fuelled by long-festering resentment, ready to go off at Doreen, Amber, or Howard.

Like Paris, Texas and other Shepard works, Don’t Come Knocking is about regeneration, featuring Shepard’s signature ruined man struggling to recover from the wounds of the past that have reduced him to a vagabond or madman. The demons that drive Howard are obscure, but slowly reveal themselves. In fleeing a rural life, Howard has lived a modern dream, found it hollow, and is panicked contemplating the emptiness of old age. He’s a manifestation of a lost America, whilst Earl is young America—confused and consumed by disillusion and frustration. Sky attempts to serve as intermediary, recognising that the two men, instantly and violently at odds, are her brother and father. The generations are all at odds; Howard’s mother is infinitely forgiving but as easily appalled (by rudeness) as Earl is compulsively unforgiving.

Don’t Come Knocking is essentially a love letter to an America of the mind, much like Bob Dylan’s recent albums, where, on the outskirts of town, western heroes, blues musicians, punks, and hippie chicks hold court in a mystic kingdom of Cool. Many of the visual compositions are highly reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s work, recreating Hopper’s sense of the alien in the familiar. Wenders’ eye, aided by Franz Lustig’s gorgeous cinematography, captures a West that seems simultaneously beauteous, mystical, eerie, and sparse. The film isn’t so stylised that it seems to happen on another planet, but it does unfold in a dreamy altered state into which manifestations of modern life (chintzy casinos, gyms full of programmed exercisers) appear as epigrams of absurdity. Shepard’s poetic dialogue reinforces the mood, but its feel for detail is strong, like Earl’s boho apartment, on the top floor of a weirdly severed terrace house.

Most vitally, though unhurried, the film unfolds with a sleek, unruffled ease, moves insistently, and never quite comes to a dead stop until Howard does, in one of the film’s strangest images: Earl, in a rage, ejects first Amber from his apartment and then every item of furniture through an open window, including his couch, upon which Howard falls in bleak, exhausted depression and sits as the day drains away, having realised his son and future might be beyond reach. He’s already been dressed down by Doreen after he said they should have gotten married; she insists there’s no way she’s becoming an emotional crutch for his sorry ass (a spectacular bit of acting from Lange), before kissing him passionately and leaving him in solitude, simultaneously affirming her feeling for him whilst jabbing a thumb in the eye of menopausal male self-involvement.

Most of the last act occurs in the open-air travesty of a home Earl’s destructive fit provides, where a ragged family accumulates in an exploded living room. Howard tries to leave town, but crashes his car in a boozy daze, and is hauled from the car by Roth, who has finally caught up with him to drag him back to the movie set. Howard manages to convince Roth to give him enough time to say goodbye to his kids. Sky delivers an impassioned soliloquy gushing her desire for Howard to be her father and end a lifelong ache, which Earl also felt but suppressed. Her words melt both Howard’s and Earl’s hearts, even as Howard is hauled off by Roth. He finishes the movie, effortlessly recapturing his style, as Sky, Earl, and Amber drive the Cadillac to come rescue him. It’s an unabashedly sweet and cheering ending, all the more affecting for the film’s caginess about its tone and intent—its semi-surreal portrait of modern America is sort of like David Lynch on happy pills. The acting, apart from Roth’s inevitable discomfort, is great. In addition to his skills as an author, Shepard is always a tightly wound, unusually minimal, and truthful-seeming acting presence. His underplaying works well against Mann’s souped-up bravura, and Polley radiates sunshine from her pores.

It’s a treat. l

I am The Lexx. I am the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes. I was grown on the Cluster, which is ruled by His Shadow. The food was good there. My captain is Stanley Tweedle. I blow up planets for him.

Lexx (TV, 1997-2002)
Creatively Culpable: Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff, Jeffrey Hirshfield

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The 61 episodes that comprise the two universes of Lexx, a fiendishly fun space opera from Canada/Germany/UK/US, may be my favorite scifi entertainment of all time. Its brilliantly conceived and executed first season, leading to the inevitable letdown of the second season, and moving on to existential meditations on life and death, heaven and hell, and finally renewal in its final season on the most corrupt and evil planet in the two universes, the “Little Blue Planet" a.k.a. Earth, comprised a year-long adventure I’ll never forget.

Assembling a full set of DVDs of the four seasons of Lexx required the hubby and me to spend a lot of time on e-Bay. Sometimes I wondered at the fast pace and cost of our acquisitions, but after the first season—the single most inventive, entertaining, and audacious visual treat I have ever been glued to—there was no stopping us. We might sit for hours watching two, three, four episodes in a row, then give ourselves a breather of a couple of weeks or even a couple of months. Drawing out the pleasures and frustrations of Lexx was the only way to make it all the way through. Like part human love slave/part Cluster lizard Xev Bellringer (Eva Habermann in Season 1 and Xenia Seeburg for the rest of the series), we were driven by our curious natures and powers of endurance to continue. Like Stanley Tweedle (Brian Downey), former security guard class 4, ex-Austral B heretic, and captain of The Lexx, we were “self-centered, vain, old, unattractive" enough to believe in our own inevitable victory over inertia and the other fads of the day. Like 2,000-year-old zombie assassin Kai (Michael McManus), we’d kill anyone who got in our way “in the service of His Divine Shadow and his predecessors and … never once show any mercy." And like insane robot head 790, we believed anyone who didn’t support our quest gave “carbon molecules a bad name."

Lexx presents a dystopia created by the insect wars of the Light Universe that carried on for millennia until the human race destroyed the insects. Under the totalitarian rule of His Shadow (Walter Borden), all humans are assigned a place in the Universe. Difficulties are ironed out through reassignment, banishment, or death. Xev, an enormously fat and homely woman raised to be a wife, is sent for reassignment by her rejecting adolescent husband. She is to be molecularly transformed into a love slave, but rebels against His Shadow break in. Just as she is put into the reassignment machine, a Cluster lizard falls in as well, imbuing the suddenly beautiful and hypersexed Xev with a lizard's personality and physical agility. A domestic robot model 790 (the voice of Jeffrey Hirshfield)—or rather, just his head—gets the full love slave treatment and falls deeply and exclusively in love with Xev.

Stanley is a pretty disgusting human being, a menial in a red jumpsuit and pillbox cap who basically only wants to get laid. By misadventure, he ends up getting from the rebels the key to The Lexx, a powerful insect/machine created by His Shadow to blow up troublesome planets. Because the key is biologically coded to Stanley's DNA, he is the only person who can command The Lexx.

Kai, last of the Brunnen-G, resisters who were destroyed by His Shadow's forces, was killed 2,000 years before and enlisted into the Cluster's army of assassins. He is kept animated by protoblood and is awakened from cryostasis to retrieve The Lexx. The entire first season is devoted to uncovering the plots underlying the insect wars, the shifting alliances that put Kai in league with Stanley, Xev, and 790, and lead them to destroy the Light Universe and travel into the even more dreaded Dark Universe.

The enormously colorful cast of characters from the first season include Mantrid (Dieter Laser), a centuries-old genius who has systematically replaced his decaying body with robot parts and who keeps a kinky male slave in leather and chains to attend to his needs, and Giggerota (Ellen Dubin), a literally maneating "woman" who wears a suit made of the skins of her victims and calls Stanley "a waste of skin." I admit I was completely revolted by Giggerota and was happy when she was vaporized by The Lexx. However, like Kai, nobody ever really "dies" in Lexx.

Recasting the part of Xev when Habermann had a scheduling conflict required Xev to be killed and reconstituted. A grieving 790 composes hilariously bad poems to Xev and pines unceasingly. Ironically, his ardor will turn to hatred when a reprogramming gone bad has him fall in love with Kai instead. The sex mania of 790 is unlike any ever depicted. He forces the construction of a body so that he can consummate his love physically and eventually goes stark-raving mad, willing to destroy anyone and everyone to possess Kai. His hatred for Stanley becomes an entertaining running joke. "If I only had an arm, I'd be more than just a head. If I only had an arm, I would strangle Tweedle dead! "

On a more poignant note, Xev's unrequited love for the lifeless Kai does tug at the heartstrings. A hypersexed love slave, she literally can't get a rise out of Kai, who feels nothing physically or emotionally. The entire second season deals with sexual frustration and was, for me, very one-note and annoying. The heaps of trouble Stanley and Xev get into trying to get laid make for some entertaining theatre, but it's more than a tease to have a newly minted love slave with the stamina of a Cluster lizard and keep her a virgin until Season 3.

In Season 3, the crew of the Lexx become involved with a war between two planets in the Dark Universe, Fire and Water. Prince (the formidable Nigel Bennett) is an immortal who rules the evil Fire and wishes to destroy idyllic Water. Hot-air balloons are the ships of war in this system, and we watch as our crew become marooned and must use these airships to go from planet to planet. Stanley falls for a young volleyball player from Water named Bunny (Patricia Zentilli), but she is killed by the duplicitous Fifi (Jeff Pustil), a Water resident who "doesn't really fit in." Only slowly does it dawn on the explorers that they (with the exception of Kai) are the only living inhabitants of these worlds. No one on either planet remembers being born—one day they were just there. Individuals the crew remember from other places reappear; for example, Giggerota is now a bodiless Queen of Fire. The battle for survival of The Lexx's crew becomes existential, as Kai meets Prince for a game of chess in an interesting imitation of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Kai will be granted life if he beats Prince, setting up perhaps the most poignantly triumphant moment of the entire series.

Season 4 takes place on Earth, where all of the souls of Fire and Water travel after their planets are destroyed. Bunny becomes the sexpot doofus wife of U.S. President Reginald J. Priest (Rolf Kanies), a toady to Prince, who is now a Dick Cheney knockoff. Conspiracies, rebels, honky-tonk music in a Canadian tavern, and as always, sex (particularly funny is a reality show similar to The Bachelorette starring Xev, who will screw the winner at the end of the series) fill this corruption-happy final season. Putting Lexx in the realm of the familiar dampens the scifi appeal somewhat, but the satire is sharp and the series finale extremely satisfying.

Lexx becomes more profound as time goes on, but its basic staples are food and sex. The Lexx is a living being and must eat enormous amounts of organic matter to keep up its strength. If Lexx doesn't eat, it can't produce a gloppy food it expels from a penis-like tube for Stan and Xev. Stanley's one true love is Lyekka (Louise Wischermann), a plant that not only can take human form but can devour a single person or an entire planet. She would never eat Stanley, but she gets "very hungry" a lot and becomes a threat to Earth in a send-up of Japanese horror films. In fact, the dangers facing the the living often come down to the very primitive concern of being eaten by something bigger and more powerful.

A number of well-known actors appear on Lexx, including Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, Malcolm McDowell, and Rutger Hauer. I liked the bold, blonde Habermann better as Xev because she seemed to bring deeper emotion to her character. Seeburg just seemed like a preening pair of fat lips to me most of the time, and I never warmed to her. Downey admirably never really redeems Stanley all the way. While he becomes more comradely, particularly with lust object Xev, he is who he is. When he is condemned to Purgatory after a real death he suffers, his task is to keep pedaling a bicycle or risk having a guillotine chop his head off—at which point he is back on the bike repeating the same routine for all eternity. I actually thought this was a fitting punishment for him. McManus is definitely the most appealing character—which is quite a commentary considering he is a dead assassin. When he is cleansed of his loyalty to His Shadow, he helps Stan and Xev primarily because he has no other purpose. He has no real feelings, only shadows of them from time to time, but the writers were smart enough to give him a chance to show some character. When he sings the Brunnen-G fight song, an infectious ditty that the hubby and I chanted with the opening credits to each episode, his beautiful voice is a real treat.

The look of Lexx is very "squishy." Insect forms, body parts, heads with exposed brains, the dripping innards of The Lexx filmed over with membranes, bloody torture chambers, and ratlike people in elaborately ruched clothing create a tactile, sweaty, junglelike atmosphere you can practically smell. Time has no meaning when assassins can "live" after death and cryostasis can keep the living going forever. Interestingly, one death—a very painful one for me—comes unexpectedly, yet signals the hope for renewal. We've been through Dante's Hell through the fevered minds of the creators of Lexx, and now there is light.l

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)
Director/Screenwriter: Norman Mailer

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In an example of the worst/best kind of timing, the day we received the DVD of Tough Guys Don’t Dance in the mail was the same day that its writer and director, Norman Mailer, died. That very morning, the hubby read aloud several reviews of this movie he felt compelled to buy and view. The reviews were all over the place, from warm appreciation to outright contempt.

Two reviews described the film, based on Mailer's novel of the same name, as being as convoluted and impossible to follow as Beat the Devil; one reviewer found this pleasurable, but the other was simply angered. Another reviewer thought this film was a love letter to Provincetown, Massachusetts, Mailer’s home and the place where the movie was set and shot. Still another was positively apoplectic that a film this bad was greenlighted just because Norman Mailer was attached to the project. I could say the same for dozens of bad films by established filmmakers, of course, so I didn’t take this objection seriously. And so what if a novelist wanted to play director? He’s been in and out of the film world in one way or another for years and shouldn’t be forced to do “just one thing" for the rest of his life.

Nonetheless, I do listen to the opinions and advice of my fellow reviewers. When the hubby asked if I would watch the film with him, and despite his obvious enthusiasm for it, I said no. Then word of Mailer’s death came. Well, now I have to watch it, I thought. This is just too much of a coincidence.

“I keep saying to myself, ‘Death is a celebration,’" is the first line of dialog, said before a single image emerges from the screen. (Again, irony of ironies at watching this movie on this day.) Then the story proper begins.

Tim Madden (Ryan O’Neal), bleary-eyed and looking a bit like death warmed over, arises from his bed in his Provincetown mansion. He goes into his bathroom, then hears a tea kettle whistling from the downstairs kitchen. He arms himself with a crowbar and stealthily descends a long staircase, moves into a sitting room, and peers around a corner. A man is sitting at his dining room table. Madden heaves a sigh of relief, puts the crowbar down on the fireplace mantel, and goes in to greet his father (Lawrence Tierney). Dougy doesn’t keep us waiting long for the title line. He informs his slightly estranged son that he has cancer. The doctors predicted he would be dead six months ago, but having outlived their good intentions, he decided he needed to see Tim just in case. He says ghosts keep telling him to dance with his illness—presumably the dance of death. He tells them “tough guys don’t dance." He comments to Tim, “You look like shit." This prompts Tim to explain why the last five days have been unusually taxing; “I’ve got the heads of two people in the basement, and I can’t remember if I killed them. I don’t think so, but I’ve been having blackouts."

Tim’s story unfolds as we learn—and I’m putting this in chronological order to show that the film, despite having a lot of plot, can be understood—that he met a lovely Italian girl named Madeleine (Isabella Rossellini) one night while he was tending bar. They fell in love and moved in together. After about two years, he tells her he answered a swingles ad in Screw magazine and talks her into meeting Baptist preacher Big Stoop (Penn Jillette) and his white trash wife Patty Earlene (Debra Sandlund) in North Carolina. After a wild night of sex, Patty Earlene (later she will change her name to Patty Lareine) tells Tim he has “marked her for life." She asks him what he wants to be. He says, “a writer." She says she will ditch Big Stoop, marry a rich man, then divorce him, then marry Tim and give him access to all her money. Strangely enough, this is exactly what happens; even stranger, Patty Lareine marries Tim’s old schoolmate from Exeter, Wardley Meeks III (John Bedford Lloyd). The abandoned Madeleine ends up barren from a car accident Tim caused and later marries Capt. Alvin Luther Regency (Wings Hauser), the eventual chief of police of Provincetown. Problems arise when Patty Lareine leaves Tim, and he runs into a couple from Santa Barbara, California, Jessica Pond (Francis Fisher) and Lonnie Pangborn (R. Patrick Sullivan), at a bar. They spend the evening together, and the next day, Lonnie is found shot in the trunk of his car. Regency dogs Tim at every turn until the mystery of the quickly burgeoning number of bodies is finally revealed, and Madeleine and Tim are reunited.

The film’s structure relies on flashback at several points not only to relate Tim’s backstory, but also to solve the various crimes and misdemeanors that comprise the plot. I thought this approach worked well and provided for some interesting comic moments, most of which had to do with the hypersexed characters and their various couplings, many of which drive the plot.

Debra Sandlund, in her first screen performance, put a lot of energy into her Southern gothic femme fatale and tossed off one of Mailer’s many arch, literary conceits with the greatest aplomb: “My pussy hair was bright gold in high school, until I went out and scorched it with the football team." Similarly, Lawrence Tierney is the mug to end all mugs—a tough, critical father to his hedonistic, pretentious son who, nonetheless, shows that a bond was always there and will always be the most important thing in his life. All of the supporting roles—save for the scenery chewing of B-movie actor Wings Hauser—were handled artfully, and I particularly liked Lloyd as a foppish rich boy who conspires to deal cocaine because it’s “exciting." Affectingly, he confirms to Tim one lonely night that he feels like “ashes" and wonders why everyone thinks that the reason he has money is for them to steal it.

Ryan O’Neal, always an underrated actor, is, of course, playing Norman Mailer as he would like to see himself. O’Neal mines a coldness he seems always to access to great effect (see Barry Lyndon) to show how writers develop a distancing sense of irony about even the most painful actions of others. Wallowing in his own self-loathing for the way he treated Madeleine, Tim nonetheless wraps himself in the luxury his marriage to an attractive sexpot affords and gives up trying to put pen to paper—aka, he’s essentially a selfish bastard who would probably eat his young. This is, of course, a cliché of the writer’s life, but one that people of Mailer’s generation seemed to try to fulfill every bit as much as newspapermen like Jimmy Breslin tried to make ink flow from their veins.

In the DVD’s one extra—an interview with Mailer on the making of the film—Mailer gives full credit for the gorgeous look of the film to John Bailey, who is strangely uncredited in the film. He says that he and Bailey played the fiction of director’s prerogative. “Where would you like the camera, Mr. Mailer," Bailey would ask. Mailer would tell him. Then Bailey would say what he would like to do instead. All of Bailey’s choices were dead-on, making the unique topography of Provincetown—from sand dunes to long, rocky breakwaters—comment on the action and occasionally telegraph the characters’ states of mind. I particularly liked how he used the interiors of Mailer’s own home (Madden’s mansion), hung with large paintings of the Provincetown landscape, to unify the look and atmosphere of the film.

Mailer says that he designed this apparent noir film as a subtle horror movie. There are certainly horrifying scenes, such a quick shot of an eye peering from a severed head and a headless corpse hoisted on a chain. A séance for two prostitutes (read Patty Lareine and Jessica, a triple-X film star) portends of bad things to come and allows for the return of the uncanny at the end of the film. While I doubt anyone would put this film on a horror movie list, I see what Mailer was trying to do. Within his literary spin on the genres on which he decided to riff, I think he largely succeeded. The film is as compulsively watchable as any good horror or noir film would be.

I’m rather sorry that Mailer never had a chance to make another feature film. He actually would have been one up-and-comer to watch. Thanks for the memories, Norman. l

Persons of Interest
A semi-regular feature on the underappreciated, the promising, and the very cool

Donald Pleasence

By Roderick Heath

Christopher Lee would say that turning down a role in an unknown director’s cheap horror film was the greatest mistake of his life. The part in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) went to Donald Pleasence instead, giving him the kind of heroic role he’d never managed to land before. Nobody could play a kinky little creep, shifty fella, or cracked genius like Pleasence. Over his 40-year film career, Pleasence was one of those actors who make standard definitions of stardom irrelevant. A short, bald Englishman, he outlasted generations of pretty boys and starlets in carving out a niche in the psyche of committed cinemagoers.

Early in their respective careers, in the 1958 Ealing Studio version of A Tale of Two Cities, both Lee and Pleasence can be seen playing the kinds of characters they would be typecast as. In this less well-produced but more dramatically intriguing adaptation than the 1935 version, Lee plays the Marquis St. Evrémonde, a splendidly nasty, aristocratic monster. Pleasence plays Barsad, his agent in nefarious schemes—a seedy turncoat who fakes his own death to escape the fallout of one such scheme only to turn up again as an official in the revolutionary government. Barsad establishes Pleasence’s ability to play mole-eyed little men of no character and fewer principles. Yet the film’s most splendid moment comes when Barsad, blackmailed by Carton (Dirk Bogarde) to gain access to his imprisoned romantic rival and double Charles Darnay (Stephen Murray), is so moved when he realises Carton plans to die on the guillotine in Darney’s place that with a quiver in his voice and awe in his eye, he offers to shake Carton’s hand. Carton won’t, but he does pat Barsad on the shoulder for reassurance.

Pleasence, born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, in 1919, was the son of a stationmaster. He made his London debut in 1939 in a production of Twelfth Night. His World War II experiences were dramatic. Beginning as a conscientious objector, he later joined the Royal Air Force. He served as a radio operator in the 166 Squadron of Lancaster bombers, was shot down in September 1944 and held until the end of the war in a German POW camp. He passed the time by staging plays with his fellow prisoners, including a production of The Petrified Forest that saw the diminutive Donald playing romantic lead opposite a 6"1’ Canadian as the heroine. The atmosphere of psychological entrapment, sexual ambiguity, and blackly funny absurdity of this image also underpins so much of Pleasence’s best work. With his rubbery body and hairless head, Pleasence was fearless in evoking emotional retardation, sexual anxiety, and outright perversity.

Pleasence was therefore the only actor in The Great Escape (1961) to have been an Allied POW. Fittingly, Pleasence’s turn is the most affecting, portraying Flight Lt. Colin Blythe, known as "The Forger," who covers counterfeiting operations as lectures in bird spotting, communicating the details of their colouring and songs as gimlet-eyed Germans patrol. The film is filled with symbiotic, probably romantic male relationships, like that of Danny (Charles Bronson) and Dickes (John Leyton) and Hilts (Steve McQueen) and Ives (Angus Lennie); the strongest is that between the gnomish nerd Blythe and the charming Yankee gopher Hendley (James Garner). In the course of his relentless work, Blythe strains his eyes to the point of going temporarily blind. Desperate to join the escape, his attempts to fool Hendley and his CO Bartlett (Richard Attenborough) into thinking he can still see with a cheery façade is painfully superb acting.

Pleasence made his cinema debut in The Beachcomber (1954), and gained profile playing Prince John in the Robin Hood TV series (1955-1960). Amongst his more noteworthy early roles was the grave robber William Hare in his first horror film, The Flesh and the Fiends (1960); a Labour Party faction leader who manipulates Peter Finch’s soft-headed MP into a back-bench revolt in No Love For Johnny (1961); and the most notorious of mild-mannered English murderers, Dr. Crippen (1962). His stage career was on fire at this point, originating as he did the role of the sinister derelict in The Caretaker (1962), the play that also made the name of its author, Harold Pinter. Pleasence recreated the role in a film version the following year, coinciding with The Great Escape, and making Pleasence a sought-after character actor. He played villains, religious fanatics, and other miscreants, including the ultimate—Satan—in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) taunting Max Von Sydow’s bloodless hippy Jesus.

Fantastic Voyage (1966) he described thus: “…My funniest moment was when I was eaten up by the antibodies at the end of film because, predictably, I turned out to be the Russian agent who was trying to run them down in some attempt in the miniscule microscopic-sized submarine when they were trying to rescue the great scientist by burning out his blood clot with a miniscule laser beam. And, of course, the submarine, I think, began to leak and the antibodies began to creep in, and I was swallowed and eaten up by them and thus they came out by the eyeball, which is as good a way to get out as any, I suppose…we spent two days trying to work out what it would be like, cinematographically, to be eaten up by antibodies, and we tried all kind of things, y’know like porridge and polycell and anything, blancmange, custard, I forget what we finally settled for, haggis or something, anyway every time we tried this and the goo poured over my head, I was in this body-molded rubber suit and sitting there looking mad and Communist and wicked…."

1967 gave him two indelible roles, one of which became a pop-culture icon. He landed the part of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice when the actor who provided the voice for the hitherto unseen supervillain, became ill. Pleasence’s incarnation was indelible shorthand for exotic evil—bald, with a scarred eye, alien accent, and taste for sadism explored with a pool of piranhas whilst stroking a snow-white Persian cat—the direct model for Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil. The other role was Major-Gen. Kahlenberg in Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals. Kahlenberg is one of three German generals in Warsaw during WWII suspected of brutally slaying of a prostitute. The casting plays on Pleasence’s evil image, covering the fact that Kahlenberg is a hero, albeit and anxious and alcoholic one. His mysterious absences are caused by his involvement with conspiracies against Hitler that culminate in the ill-fated July Plot. He also gets the best lines, delivered with caustic style, as Kahlenberg assiduously mocks the pomposity and savagery of his Waffen-SS superior, Gen. Tanz (Peter O’Toole): “What constitutes resistance? A rock thrown at his golden head?" He teases phony war hero Cpl. Hartmann (Tom Courtenay) by reading out his press clippings: “I see that you are the reincarnation of Siegfried, a German hero from the Golden Age." Later, he gives Hartmann the job of being Tanz’s driver, informing the corporal of his duties in catering to the general’s taste: “Let us hope that whatever it is, that it is not you, Corporal. However, if it should be, remember that you are serving the Fatherland."

At the end of the ’60s, roles in major movies became scarcer for Pleasence, who now joined the British horror cinema in its weaker years, contributing to trash like Tales that Witness Madness and The Mutations (both 1973). One good part at this point came in an episode of the anthology film From Beyond the Grave (1973), “An Act Of Kindness," in which he plays a shabby WWII veteran who encounters his superior officer (Ian Bannen), himself maintaining a façade of petty respectability with methods barely above criminality. Pleasence presents a pathetic eagerness to please his former CO, and, to top it off, his own daughter Angela plays Pleasence’s daughter who soon bewitches the CO into marriage. The payoff comes when father and daughter, Satanists both, celebrate with wedding cake over the corpse of the dead officer, sacrificed to the dark gods. Though blunt as a ghoulish yarn, as a satire on the social wake of the war’s official heroism, it’s almost without equal.

Pleasence also gained his first role from one of the up-and-coming Movie Brats, in THX-1138 (1971), George Lucas’ directorial debut, playing a semi-crazed inhabitant of a futuristic, repressive regime’s apparently boundless prison of white. He aided the budding Australian film industry by coming out to appear in Wake in Fright (known internationally as Outback, 1971). Pleasence also made a great contribution to an early episode of Colombo, “Any Old Port in a Storm," portraying Adrian Carsini, a winemaker who murders his spendthrift brother to maintain control of their vineyard. With Pleasence’s peerless ability, he evokes a figure both fatuous and despicable, but also sympathetic and vaguely tragic.

And at the end of the decade, Pleasence played Dr. Sam Loomis in Halloween, the haunted psychiatrist driven by guilt and fear to track down an escaped patient, the now-grown child murderer whom he realised possessed no soul. Over the hill and faintly unstable, Loomis is both hero and comic relief. This, along with Pleasence’s delivery of his portentous dialogue with the utmost seriousness, gave the balance needed for the cat-and-mouse game of the unstoppable Michael Myers and virginal victim Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Halloween became the biggest independent film in history, making $50 million back from a $500,000 budget. The pleasures and ambiguities of Halloween were killed by lousy sequels in which Pleasence appeared gamely, feathering his retirement nest. Asked by producer Moustapha Akkad how long he’d stick with it, Pleasence replied “I stop at 22."

Carpenter would use Pleasence again in Escape from New York (1981) and Prince of Darkness (1987). The former film sees Pleasence playing a weak, media-inflated, Texan-accented President of the United States who is forced to crash-land in an alternate-reality Manhattan that is used as a walled prison—typically barbed sociopolitical subtext from Carpenter. The overwhelmed POTUS is held by gang leader The Duke (Isaac Hayes), who ties him to a wall and uses him for target practice, before he is rescued by Kurt Russell’s asocial renegade Snake Plissken. The presidential worm only shows his teeth right at the end when he lets man’s man Snake dangle on a rope helplessly whilst he shoots The Duke, giggling and mocking his enemy with the hysterical bravado of a nerd dropping a water bomb on a jock’s head.

Woody Allen gave Pleasence a cameo that serves as a fine, if grisly, career send-off, in the horror satire Shadows and Fog (1992). Pleasence plays a doctor who performs autopsies on the victims of a mysterious pathological killer, in a surgery filled with perverse curios and morbid paraphernalia. As an intellectual and rationalist, the doctor expects evil can be analysed and understood, theorising on the biomedical nature of madness and desiring to get hold of the killer’s brain. But the killer comes instead for the doctor, who tries to meet his face with cool, but ends up being strangled as scared and trapped as anyone else.

Pleasence died at the age of 75 in 1995 following heart surgery. I’d seen him shortly before that interviewed on television, bags under his eyes so thick they could be pillows, a kind of sad, weary, good humour about his life, which had seen him through four marriages, five daughters, and many bottles of booze. He had been set to play Lear on stage with three of those daughters. If Pleasence’s career had been littered with trash, unworthy and facile parts, he had at least once, on screen, risen to the heights of his ability. Cul-de-sac (1966), my favourite of Roman Polanski’s films, was also the summit of Pleasence’s.

Polanski’s stark, neurotic modern drama cast Pleasence alongside Lionel Stander, the great, exiled American. Pleasence plays George, a retired industrialist who’s obviously previously dedicated himself to ledger books and production quotas and is now playing at arty bohemian. He’s bought the island castle where Walter Scott wrote Rob Roy, and retreated from the world with his young trophy wife, Teresa (Françoise Dorleac). Their marriage is tense and odd, as he submits to her humour in dressing him and making him up as a woman. It’s clear she thinks he’s a joke, and is having an affair with a pretty boy. Stander plays Dickie, a gangster who hides out in the castle, not even really needing violence to browbeat George into submitting to his authority. Dickie alternates between gentlemanly presentation and tough guy authority, between complimenting his “classy" home and labelling him a fairy. George won’t even drink because of his ulcer until Dickie forces him to. The centrepiece of the film is an astonishing 10-minute take in which George confesses his misery and frustration to Dickie, and the pair strike a mutual, if far from equal, amicability.

It’s a part that brings together almost all the aspects of Pleasence’s screen personae, as well as his gifts both as a comic and a tragedian. George is silly, weak, foolish, intelligent, sexually and emotionally confused, friendly, frustrated, intense, determined, weird, curiously upright and honourable, and lost. George grows up a little and empowers himself, telling off friends for helping ruin his last marriage to his long-time companion Agnes. But instead of making him happy, George, with the manipulation of the passively malevolent Teresa, is driven to destroy his friend Dickie, and then shed everything he possesses—wife, castle, and veneer of giving a damn— exiling himself on a rock to moan for his dear, lost Agnes. It’s possibly the cinema’s greatest-ever ode to a man who realises too late what he’s thrown away. l