Ferdy on Films, etc.

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

The Sugarland Express (1974)
Debut film of: Steven Spielberg, director

By Roderick Heath

The 26-year-old wunderkind who had wowed with Duel (1971), a TV movie that received limited theatrical release in Europe, received his first shot at feature directing under the aegis of Richard F. Zanuck and David Brown. The Sugarland Express underperformed badly at the box office (the bad news came in on the first day of shooting Jaws), and Sugarland is still treated as a footnote in the director’s expansive oeuvre. But The Sugarland Express, loosely based on a real incident from 1969 and written by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins from a story they wrote with Spielberg, demands more than a casual glance. From any other director it would be a notable film, which might explain why Zanuck and Brown let him helm their next tricky production, Jaws (1975), the film that gave birth to Spielberg the phenomenon.

Whilst Jaws represents the new model Hollywood, Sugarland is a film from an era that was ending—an era of open-road movies with a cynical, anti-establishment bent, rooted in folksy Americana, as disparate and yet of a common generation as Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), Bad Company (1972), Badlands (1973), and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974). It’s this aspect that makes Sugarland most interesting in terms of the Famous Firsts program. What tendencies does it reveal that marks it, and the director’s later career, as so divergent, from, say, Terence Malick’s, despite the similar subject matter of their early works?

The differences are not hard to discern. Whilst it begins with a similar mood of a blasted, lonely, inhospitable land, Sugarland doesn’t develop the veneer of alienation and poeticism of Rafelson and Malick, or geared-up pulp fury. Sugarland is shot with clear, unaffected rigor, the artless artfulness of great American directors like Hawks, Ford, and Preston Sturges. The film tells a warmhearted tale that counteracts the mood of Easy Rider without actually contradicting its message. Spielberg is friendly towards his protagonists whilst admitting that it’s their own refusal to look facts in the face that leads to their downfall. Whilst the heroes of the other films are cursed by a desire, or by fate, to stand out and alone, Spielberg’s dopey heroes, Clovis (William Atherton) and Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn), are asserting their right to be normal, to be a family. As is so often the case with Spielberg, a family spontaneously forms in response to adversity and includes their hapless hostage, state trooper Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks), and even a stern patriarch, Police Captain Harlin Tanner (Ben Johnson). Tanner’s efforts to prevent the situation from ending bloodily resemble a wise grandfather attempting to corral the high spirits of silly grandchildren.

The story kicks off with Lou Jean’s visit to Clovis, waiting out the last few months of his one-year sentence for shoplifting at a pre-release center in Texas. Lou Jean was sent down for the same offence, released earlier, and is now faced with the permanent loss of their son to the Loobys (Merrill Connally and Louise Latham), adoptive parents who live in Sugarland County, on the far side of the state. Lou Jean threatens to leave Clovis unless she agrees to bust out with her—it only requires her to change clothes and walk out the gate—and go to take back their baby. That’s the limit of her thinking. Lou Jean is entirely a creature of instinct. Her primeval desire to regain her son outweighs everything else. Clovis is her adoring, good-natured patsy. They catch a ride away from the center with the elderly, ornery parents of another inmate. A series of mishaps results in them taking Slide captive and fleeing in his patrol car, the object of a crisis that has every cop, patrolman, trooper, marshal, ranger, reservist, and dog catcher in Texas on their tail.

An aspect of Spielberg’s early work that comes into sharper focus—taking into account Sugarland, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and 1941 (1979)—is their vision of America not as a capricious, clapped-out country wearied by Vietnam and Watergate, but as a sassy, energetic, ebullient place, dogged by corruption and iniquity, but still full of raucous, everyday life. The American-life-as-carnival vision underlies the comedic moments of all those films, and it’s quite often more than a little dangerously anarchic, for example, the beach crowds and the gun-happy bumpkins of Jaws who treat a killer shark hunt as the world’s greatest kegger, or the civil defense volunteers in 1941 who shoot up downtown L.A. when they think the city is under attack. Clovis and Lou Jean’s odyssey draws out crowds of gawkers and supporters who cheer them on with democratic aplomb. Twits who want to get in on the action make it a bigger sideshow, like the Louisiana cops who attempt to ram the hostage car and instead collect half the vehicles in the trailing fleet, thereby allowing Clovis, Lou Jean, and Slide to escape. They’re found hiding in a used car lot by a pair of retired reservists who proceed to shoot up the place, less a proper gunfight than a thigh-slapping good time for the good ole boys.

Spielberg employs an attuned eye and ear in The Sugarland Express to provide a texture that would give Jaws and Close Encounters much of their effectiveness—the rich sense of a languidly fecund, everyday world, full of ice-cream-cramming kids, cussing old folks, tinny transistor radios perpetually ringing out bubblegum pop, and people who’d drive a hundred miles for a cheap thrill. Spielberg’s early style is sleek and naturalistic. If, in the late ’80s, his style became excessively glossy and arthritic by leaving behind his essentially new wave roots, it was still a vital component of his style in the ’70s.

Spielberg’s heroes, male and female, young and old, are usually in search of a grail of some variety, arming themselves with varying levels of self-delusion to protect against the cruelest facts of life. They take journeys that have no guaranteed end quite simply because they can’t afford to stay still. The quest is vital, even if the ultimate goal often is a delirious enigma. The prototypical Spielberg everyman, Dennis Weaver’s David Mann in Duel, is driving theoretically to reach a business meeting, but he’s really in search of his lost masculine sense of propulsion that will enable him to return to the family that has no use for him. Lou Jean and Clovis certainly fit this mould. Neither thinks much further than the next move, and whilst both prove canny—Clovis especially, as he dismantles every move the cops throw at him—they’re clueless when it comes to the world at large. Adult and child behavior rarely have a neat dividing line in Spielberg’s films, especially in the infantile nature of American pop culture. The grind of gears when clashing perspectives meet is realized in the film’s strongest scene: as Clovis and Lou Jean watch a Road Runner cartoon on a drive-in movie screen, Clovis registers the ridiculous violence that befalls Wile E. Coyote as prescient of their own approaching disaster.

Another consistent Spielberg theme taking root is his version of the ghost in the machine, the process that, once begun, cannot be stopped, even by those who propagate it. Even the Indiana Jones films are, in their absurd way, illustrations of snowballing cause and effect. Be it a monstrous shark, dinosaur, Nazi tank, or alien killing machine, force always consumes itself through its own momentum. Usually this process aids his heroes, but in Sugarland (and this is probably why the film flopped), the Poplins set fate in motion themselves and leave it for others to try to stop. Tanner gives them every opportunity to escape this fate, but they continue to drive toward it, held together by their aim as much as society is held together by the laws that must stop them. As in Catch Me If You Can (2003) and The Terminal (2004), where Spielberg returned to this sort of material, the clash between individualism and authoritarianism is essentially a friction of temperaments.

It’s not, ultimately, an innocent joyride. Clovis and Lou Jean put lives in danger, and Clovis, despite knowing better, is more frightened of crushing Lou Jean’s hopes than of police bullets. They find something harsh beneath the surface of their nation. A group of FBI marksmen offer their services to Captain Tanner, which at first he spurns, but eventually accepts, placing them in the Loobys’ house. Mr. Looby hands over his own rifle, requesting that they “shoot the sonofabitch" with it. When Clovis and Lou Jean finally arrive at the house, Slide spots the trap and urgently pleads with Clovis to hand over the gun and end it now. The last 20 minutes are a model of slow-burn tension, until the frantic explosion of the characters—Slide’s appeals to Clovis; Lou Jean wailing first in betrayed rage at Clovis who hesitates, and then, realizing the danger at last, calling for his return. Clovis gets a bullet in the gut for his pains, but he manages to drive the car through the border checkpoint and crash in the mud of the Rio Grande before expiring. Lou Jean is left a shell-shocked wreck, and Slide and Tanner stand on the riverbank shaking their heads in sorry bewilderment.

Sugarland is a fine film, and works rather better than some of Spielberg’s subsequent attempts to balance whimsy, drama, and sentiment. Perhaps the Spielbergian quality it lacks, however, is also one of his strongest—his gift for compulsive cinematic movement. Sugarland is an artful sketch by one of the screen’s great suspense mongers, a simple film that beguiles and then concludes on more of a forlorn note than a tragic one. The final title card tells us that after her imprisonment, Lou Jean does recover her son, a sign that the desperate display that has underpinned these whimsical and tragic events has proven something. As he often would later in his films, sometimes to the point of overstraining, Spielberg emphasizes a singular human ability to survive. l

Grade

Promising

The Paper Will Be Blue (Hîrtia va fi albastrã, 2006)
Director/Co-screenwriter: Radu Muntean

By Marilyn Ferdinand

December 16, 1989, was the beginning of the end of the reign of horror Nicolae Ceauşescu began and intensified over the 25 years he was the Communist dictator of Romania. On that day, the citizens in the town of Timişoara rose up against their abusive government. So severe were the deprivations to which Ceauşescu subjected Romanians, so outrageous the handling of dissent, that Ceauşescu would be the only ruler in the crumbling Communist bloc in Eastern Europe to suffer violent overthrow and execution.

Current Romanian cinema has focused a good deal of attention on the Ceauşescu regime and its downfall. From 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, to 12:08 East of Bucharest, to The Way I Spent the End of the World, Romania’s filmmakers have looked at various facets of this seminal time in their country’s history. Now we have The Paper Will Be Blue, an intriguing, accomplished film that takes us to ground zero of the revolution, recounting a fictionalized version of a true, widely publicized incident that occurred on December 22, after violent protests that finally shook Bucharest began.

Without an understanding of what happened, The Paper Will Be Blue can be quite confusing. Therefore, here’s a capsule summary I put together with the help of Wikipedia:

The morning of December 21, Ceauşescu addressed approximately 110,000 disgruntled Romanians from the balcony of the Central Committee building. He condemned the December 16 uprising in Timişoara. During the speech, sudden movement came from the outskirts of the crowd. Explosive sounds also could be heard. Bullhorns were used to spread the news that a "revolution" was unfolding, persuading the people to join in protest. They soon rioted.

The speech was broadcast live, with an estimated 76% of the nation watching. Although censors attempted to cut the live video feed, parts of the riots had already been seen. More people took to the streets. Soon the protesters were confronted by soldiers, tanks, and other security forces, though the army was split between those who were loyal to the Ceauşescu regime and those who wanted its overthrow. Through the night, forces considered to be loyal to the old regime (spontaneously nicknamed "terrorists") opened fire on the crowd and attacked vital points of socio-political life, including the television station.

The Paper Will Be Blue takes us to this point in time. An armored car is stopped on a street, facing a tank and some soldiers milling around behind a roadblock. Two men emerge from the back of the armored car to stretch and have a smoke. Suddenly, gunfire explodes. One of the men from the armored car drops in place, another is blasted out of the car through a side window, and the third, wearing a civilian’s jacket attempts to escape and is hit. Yells of, “Whose firing? Who started firing?" are heard, probably from the soldiers behind the roadblock. Several come over to inspect the perhaps accidental damage.

The next scene shows the same armored car and its small complement of ordinary militiamen patrolling a Bucharest neighborhood. As evening falls, they spend their time smoking and checking the IDs of motorists who come through their checkpoint. One of the men makes a date with a woman he has stopped for the next evening. Word of the attack on the TV station reaches the unit. The commander of the unit, Lt. Neagu (Adi Carauleanu) is trying to get through to his section leader, Lt. Voinescu (Alexandru Georgescu), on his close-circuit radio, to find out what, if anything, his unit should do.

One of Neagu’s charges, Costi (Paul Ipate), the son of a connected surgeon who has been placed in the militia to keep him farther out of harm’s way, becomes fired with patriotic fervor. He wants to join the protesters who are trying to defend the TV station, he insists on it. Neagu, a fatherly leader, tries to stop him, but eventually lets him have his way. Forcing Costi to turn in his weapons, Neagu turns him loose, half expecting that Costi will change his mind. When he doesn’t, Neagu pulls his gun out to try to stop him. But Neagu’s a sweet marshmallow of a man, and lets Costi go. Nonetheless, worried about Costi’s safety and about getting in trouble for letting one of his men run off, Neagu and the rest of his unit search for him, driving to the TV station and then to Costi’s house.

The rest of the film toggles back and forth between Costi’s experiences as an instant revolutionary and Neagu’s mission to bring back one of his lambs gone astray. Both parts of the story are laden with miscommunications and cases of mistaken identity that convey both the chaos and confusion that comprise the beginnings of revolution and the level to which Ceauşescu has fallen out of touch with the Romanian people.

Communications devices work faultily or not at all throughout the film. Neagu can’t hear Voinescu, eventually having to drive to the Triumphal Arch where he thinks Voinescu is stationed to get his orders. He’s given a new password, “The paper will be blue," that later will fail to be acknowledged by an Army unit (“It won’t work," says Neagu, “they have their own."). Telephone dial tones must be waited for patiently, but at least they eventually sound.

Costi, stripping off his uniform jacket for a street coat, also inadvertently discards his identification. When he and another freedom fighter named Georgescu (Gabriel Spahiu) go to a house captured by the revolting Army, they are recruited to take out a sniper firing on the house from the street. Then they are accused of being terrorists for the other side because Costi, spying the Army uniform of a man they injured, says the men they are firing on are on the side of the revolutionaries. Because Costi can’t produce his ID, he and Georgescu are taken to the basement and tied up. Georgescu is accused of being an Arab, though he is actually a Gypsy. Both men are repeatedly asked how they came to speak Romanian so well; the pair sit silently, exasperated.

In another scene, Neagu and Bogdan (Tudor Istodor), one of the unit's men and a personal friend of Costi’s, go to Costi’s home to see if he has turned up there. They are greeted by Costi’s mother (Mirela Oprisor) and his girlfriend Angela (Ana Ularu) and invited in for something to eat. Dorina apologizes for having little to offer them. “If only Ceauşescu had fed them, this wouldn’t be happening," she says of the rioting, implying the stupidity that caused the conditions for revolution.

The film, shot in 16mm, has a grainy, realistic feel. The film enfolds the audience in the dead of night during which most of the film takes place, adding a slightly surrealistic element to the absurdity of the actions. But the daylight that eventually ends the film does not increase comprehension in this riot-torn city. If anything, it makes human actions seem more senseless than ever.

Throughout the film, characters talk about the coming New Year. Neagu promises his men they will have leave on the New Year. He saves a bottle of wine they have taken with them from Costi's home. "We'll open it on New Year's Day," he says. Romania has seen a new year and a new day. However, not everyone who was there at the dawn had that chance. l

Stuck (2007)
Director: Stuart Gordon

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If you’re like me, you have a few films that you seem always to be chasing. I’m not talking about the films that got away, but the ones that nearly got away. Zero Effect was the first film in memory that I kept chasing around the movie listing pages until, at the edge of sloth, I finally made up my mind to get in my car and go see it on the final day of its run in my city.

Stuck is another one of those films. It played the festival circuit last year, including the Chicago International Film Festival. I had heard some good things about it, and I always like to support my homeboys, especially Stuart Gordon. Alas, I couldn’t fit it into my schedule. I most regretted missing that film over all others. Then, it showed up for a theatrical run at the Music Box Theatre. I didn’t get around to it. Then it moved to the Midnight Movie slot at the Music Box. Again, I was a no-show. I had begun to rationalize that seeing this film on the big screen wasn’t that big a deal. The DVD would come to Facets eventually, and I’d rent it (if I could still remember it).

Then I saw that the tiny, nearby Wilmette Theatre was showing it. Before I could think about it, I packed the hubby into the car, and we went to see the 1:20 pm show—except it wasn’t showing at 1:20 on that day. Rather than wait for two hours, we vowed to see it the next day. I got home from work, did a quick clothing change, and yakked at the hubby to get ready. He didn’t want to go. Damn, well, I’m going, I said. And I did. And while I don’t think DVD viewing will hurt the experience of watching this somewhat cheap-looking film, it’s satisfying to finally hook that fish the way I always intended.

Stuck is based on a true story. In 2001, Chante Mallard, a woman in Fort Worth, Texas, was believed to be drunk when she struck Gregory Biggs, a homeless man, who became lodged in her car's windshield. She drove home, locked the car in the garage, and left Biggs to die. This story intrigued Gordon, who said in an April 2007 interview, “…lately I’ve been thinking that what happens in real life is much more horrifying than anything you can dream up that exists within the supernatural world. So King of the Ants, Edmond, and now Stuck is kind of a trilogy."

Stephen Rea plays Tom Bordo, an unemployed project manager who is thrown out of his SRO for nonpayment of rent, given the royal run-around at the state employment bureau, and is prodded awake from his spot on a park bench by a policeman who tells him to move along to a mission a very long walk away. With the kind of day he’s been having, the only way left to go is up.

Brandi (Mena Suvari), a nurse assistant at a nursing home, has been celebrating her imminent promotion at a dance club with her friend and coworker Tanya (Rukiya Bernard), her boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby), and the Ecstasy he drops on her protruding tongue. Rashid and Brandi have come in separate cars, and when they leave the club, they agree to meet up at her place, a small rental home in a poor section of town. She phones him on the way and asks him to pick up some snacks to satisfy her munchies. Her cellphone signal dies, and she punches at the keypad at the same moment that Tom is crossing the street pushing a shopping cart that Sam, another homeless man in the park (Lionel Mark Smith, who also appeared in Gordon’s King of the Ants and Edmond), gave him for the few items he was able to snatch from his room before leaving. Gordon’s camera slows as Tom and Brandi watch the disaster in the making. Her car strikes him, sending him halfway through the passenger side of her windshield.

Brandi, shocked and shaken, keeps driving, trying to avoid looking to her right. Eventually she looks at the seat beside her, which is slowly reddening from a steady drip of blood. Brandi grabs tissues from a box and dabs at the blood in a deranged attempt to clean it. She sideswipes a car. She finally stops and looks at what she has wrought. Tom, unconscious and shredded, hangs limply over her dashboard, his legs flat on the hood of her car. Brandi heads for a hospital, gets out of her car, and tries to drag Tom off her hood. An ambulance door opens, and she hears voices. She races back behind the wheel, drives home, and parks in its detached garage. Brandi gingerly retrieves her purse from the seat next to her, locks the overhead garage door in place, and goes into her house. Rashid arrives, and eventually learns that Brandi hit a pedestrian. When he hears that the man she hit was homeless, he laughs and says no one will care. They have loud sex to some loud rap music, as Tom, now awake, listens in pain and despair.

In the morning, Brandi picks up the phone. She almost calls 911, but changes her mind and calls 411 for the phone number of a cab to take her to work. She enters the garage to see if Tom is dead. He is not. He asks her to help him, promising not to make trouble for her. She leaves, promising that help is on the way. He honks her car horn. She goes back into the garage and hits him with a 2 x 4, knocking him unconscious again. She catches her cab, goes to work, realizes that she left her cellphone in the car, and determines to deal with her problem once and for all, with Rashid’s help.

Struck is a tightly suspenseful horror film that could have been played as a very black comedy. The wonderful Carolyn Purdy-Gordon does a brilliant job of playing Brandi's vaguely menacing boss with the darkly comedic accents for which her husband's films are known. Brandi's panic at the possibility of not getting her promotion and raise, fed to a frenzy by Purdy-Gordon's insinuations, put her on the insane path to murder. Hornsby infuses Rashid with a false bravado that is great to watch unspool as Brandi, who believes he has wasted dozens of guys, insists that he smother her "problem" with a pillow. Watching him move the pillow toward and then away from a prostrate Tom, who has managed to free himself from the car and is playing possom, is comically nerve-wracking. Another scene of a gay man looking for his Pomeranian, which has slipped through a hole in the garage and is chewing on Tom's protruding leg bone, is a winch-inducing comic vignette.

However, it is both the strengths and the weaknesses of Rea and Suvari that push this film beyond the sickly absurd. Suvari, as a young woman who can cope with cleaning feces-soiled beds and demented patients, has a near breakdown over the accident. Her Brandi is rather blank and unself-reflexive. Other characters keep saying she doesn't look all right, but in fact, she does. She's not much different from one of Gordon's evil, mindless zombies from Re-Animator, but she has no comic flair at all. In one scene that should have been played for laughs, Brandi walks in on Rashid with another woman (Sharlene Royer) and has an all-out cat fight that ends with Royer naked in the hall. Hornsby and Royer roll playfully with the scene, but Suvari is shrill and violent.

Matching her perhaps unintentional earnestness is Stephen Rea. As one of the finest actors working today, he infuses Tom with a pitiable sadness at the beginning and a desperation that is nothing short of compelling as he fights for his life. In one scene, he is trying to grab Brandi's cellphone to call for help. He can't quite reach it because he is impaled on a windshield wiper. This grueling scene calls for him to lift himself off the wiper blade. As he tries it again and again, I felt the pain and found myself lifting out of my chair trying to help him raise himself high enough to escape. Again, Rea's fine performance faces us with a real situation that deflects even the darkest humor from gaining much of a foothold.

I'm not sure Gordon was striving for this more serious tone, but I, for one, thought it worked. When Tom and Brandi confront each other for the last time, they show what each of them is made of. Brandi tells him she doesn't know why she wouldn't help him, and that's basically true. She's not much different from him at this point in their lives; she's near the bottom of the heap and trying to climb up. Her flaw is her oceans-wide self-pity. She could be capable of being the responsible leader of the nurse assistants, but she is, at base, deeply irresponsible. Tom, on the other hand, has lived longer and known better things. He lives in a world of petty rules that he tries to reason against, but ultimately obeys. Only when his life is at stake can he rise to the challenge of defending himself.

Stuck is slightly snobbish, putting Tom on a higher moral plane than just about everyone else in the film. But this is a minor flaw. Stuck is a superior horror film that is all the more horrible because it's true. l

The Bizarro Blog-A-Thon

Love Story (1970)
Director: Arthur Hiller

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The only thing bizarro about my contribution to the Bizarro Blog-A-Thon, hosted by Lazy Eye Theatre, is that I’m here to sing the praises of the greatest love story ever filmed that, for some reason, other people dismiss—Love Story. Says it all, doesn’t it. Simple, direct, generic. You know what it means. So different from, say, Enemies: A Love Story. Who gets that?! Is it about love, or is it about hate? Bad title.

Of course, love is a strong emotion, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings, a temporary insanity, a moment that lasts forever. Love Story seems to last forever—just like love—so that’s one sign that it’s great. Love Story taught me a lot about love and relationships, especially that wonderful scene where Ryan O’Neal as Oliver Barrett IV yells at his new wife, Jennie Cavalleri (Ali MacGraw, coincidentally, the soon-to-be wife of Love Story greenlighter Bob Evans), and she runs out of the house. Ollie runs all over town looking for her. He opens every practice room door in the music department (and to put up with that opera, oy!, that’s love), scours the library—all day and into the night. Then he goes home. She’s sitting on their front porch, her pert, flaring nose red and snotty from crying: “I forgot my key." “I’m sorry," says Oliver. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry." Wow! That sounds so profound, so right. When I first heard it, I adopted it as my new love mantra.

I gave away my first husband’s Colnago bike frame to a scrap metal collector and didn’t say I was sorry. He threw me out of the bedroom for a week. I forgot Mother’s Day and didn’t say I was sorry. Mom refused to take my calls for a month. I stepped on my cat’s tail and she yowled. I found I liked the sound and did it again and again, and never said I was sorry. She bit me to the point of drawing blood and ran under the bed, but cats are dumb; she came out as soon as I shook her bag of dry cat food. So, yes Love Story taught me how confusing love is.

Love Story was the first movie that showed me how much fun it can be to play football in the snow, make snow angels, and eat snow with your life mate. When the first hubby and I were going to the Alps, I brought along a football. We went to frolick in the snow. After we got good and wet falling backward in the snow, I pulled out the football and told him to go deep. OK, so I didn’t expect him to go THAT deep, but the ski patrol was able to dig him out in under an hour, and the pneumonia didn't last long. But I really feel like we bonded, and this time he wouldn’t let me say “I’m sorry," just like Jenny! He saw me trying to form the words, and said “Shut up, shut up, and stay shut up!"

I learned that you can feel and look just fine and still be dying, so I schedule a check-up every time I feel great. It’s made me financially poorer, but I know that money can’t buy happiness. Jenny and Oliver taught me that, and that if I really, really need money, I can always hit up some rich guy for it.

Most of all, Love Story taught me the words I hope to say to my beloved second hubby on the day I die: “You goddamn, stupid preppie, it’s not your fault." Where do I begin…

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

Sanshiro Sugata (Judo Story, 1943)
Debut film of: Akira Kurosawa, writer and director

By Roderick Heath

One of the tricky issues this new series presents is just what counts as a directorial debut. Before he made Sanshiro Sugata, Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) had worked for years as an assistant director and screenwriter, including having worked on several projects where he said he had been left to his own devices. We could consider that he essentially directed these films—including Uma (1941)—himself. Nevertheless, Sanshiro Sugata was the first completed feature film to carry the credit “Directed by Akira Kurosawa."

Sanshiro Sugata has a compact energy and sense of form that establishes a cinematic intelligence far above the ordinary. It portrays, in an immature and limited fashion, the concerns, ideas, and emotions that will recur in complex and nuanced ways throughout Kurosawa’s career. Released when WWII was still raging, it was edited by nearly 20 minutes after the occupation, and the excised sequences only exist in very ragged form.

Based on a popular novel by Tsuneo Tomita that would have a half-dozen other adaptations in the next 50 years, Sanshiro Sugata feels like a foundation text not just for Kurosawa’s career, but also for the whole genre of Asian martial arts movies. You know the drill—impulsive student learns from stern master how to master himself, as the means by which he transcends from try-hard to great Jedi, er, Judo warrior. Hell, The Karate Kid owes a big something to this film.

The film is set in the 1890s. Sanshiro, embodied by the appealingly average-looking Susumu Fujita, wants to become a martial arts master. He comes to the seedy Jujutsu school run by Monma, who lounges about with his indolent, aggressive students, incensed by the rumored superiority of the new fighting style of Shudokan Judo practised by Sensei Yano (Denjirô Ôkôchi). Monma leads his students to attack Yano on the street. Cornering him on the bank of the canal, the students all end up pitched into the water, and Monma finishes up pinioned and ashamed. Worshipful of a new hero, Sanshiro volunteers to wheel Yano to his school in a deserted rickshaw.

Time passes, and we rediscover Sanshiro showing off his new Judo skills, beating up street toughs and Sumo wrestlers. Yano is angry at this thuggish display, Sanshiro, now shamed, throws himself into the muddy pond next to Yano’s house, angrily declaring his intention to die. “Go ahead and die, then!" Yano shouts. Sanshiro spends the rest of the night clinging to a rotten stake in the centre of the pond, where, in studying a flower, he realises the fragile nature of human existence (or something like that), which gives him the self-insight to abase himself before Yano.

That’s the kind of pseudo-mystic jive we’re so familiar with in the genre and that Kurosawa portrays vividly, even though it’s cornball. Kurosawa would entirely toss out such claptrap from his later films. Kurosawa’s heroes usually have utterly corporeal talents, mixed with large dashes of guile; they generally prevail against enemies because they’re smarter. Even in his action films, Kurosawa usually had little time for the unrealistic. Fair enough. If, say, Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood had made it clear his amazing archery skills were thanks to “God-power," audiences would have been wetting themselves with laughter.

More typical of Kurosawa is the subsequent development of Sanshiro becoming a great, but reluctant warrior. When he is let back in from the cold of Yano’s displeasure, he is chosen to fight in an exhibition match between his school and Monma’s, with future employment in training police officers at stake. He throws Monma against a wall, killing him and causing Monma’s daughter to attempt to stab him later. Such prowess attracts the dour attention of the Ryoi Shinto School, in the shape of star student Gennosuke Higaki (Ryunosuke Tsukigata), a dapper, gimlet-eyed gent who, as one student says, resembles a large snake. Higaki is eager to fight Sanshiro. But Sanshiro’s next fight is to be against Higaki’s sensei, the recovering alcoholic Murai, played by an actor who would become one of Kurosawa’s fondest faces, Takashi Shimura. Standing amidst this fraught trio is Murai’s pious daughter Sayo (Yukiko Todoroki), scared of the obnoxiously attentive Higaki, protective of her dissolute father, and attracted to Sanshiro. Sanshiro is tortured by the idea that he might kill Murai.

It’s here that the film’s only note of wartime propaganda is struck, when the school’s priest (Kokuten Kodo) admonishes Sanshiro for his reluctance, reminding him that his duty to the school demands he fight Murai and that this will be a truly selfless act. This “duty, right or wrong" moment conflicts with the texture of the film and with Kurosawa’s oeuvre, but then he only made Sanshiro Sugata after having several projects knocked back by the wartime censors. Sanshiro is, however, one of Kurosawa’s familiar, conscientious, all-too-human heroes. In combat with Murai, Sanshiro is nearly brought down by the elder sensei’s skill, but finally he gains the upper hand, the valiant older man rising agonisingly to his feet repeatedly only to suffer another violent toss, before conceding.

But Murai doesn’t die. As he recovers, he gets Sayo to invite Sanshiro to their house, and Sanshiro becomes a friend. When Higaki finds him at their house, he promptly challenges Sanshiro to a duel to the death. Their confrontation is staged on a reed-clad hillside during a strong windstorm. Higaki nearly topples Sanshiro, but Sanshiro, remembering the flower (flower power!), resurges and defeats Higaki. A brief coda follows, where Yano and the priest discuss the fact that Higaki has reformed and forgiven Sanshiro, and that Sanshiro has decided to travel. On the train leaving town, Sanshiro promises Sayo that he will return.

Although the story of Sanshiro Sugata is generic and familiar, it’s a vivid experience—swift and entertaining. Many debut films suffer from imbalance as budding directorial talents test out their ideas without much though to the texture of the film, but Kurosawa barely puts a foot wrong. As in his later work, his close-ups are carefully thought out and sparingly employed. Perhaps the most memorable shot in the film is of Munmo’s daughter, having just seen her father die, staring implacably at the camera, her grief and madness registering as the tiniest muscular twitches. Kurosawa’s background as a landscape painter is always apparent in the way he frames his actors in relationship to the environment, interested not just in their faces but in the behaviour of their whole bodies. The core action scenes are developed in a continuum of intensity. The poise of his camera makes Yano’s early victory over Munmo’s jujutsu brats look effortless; to Sanshiro’s eye, there is no indication of the draining physical and spiritual force required. Later, Sanshiro’s fight with Murai is filled with close-ups of their sweating brows as they engage in a deathly dance, each balanced on a knife-edge between defeat and loss. Finally, when Sanshiro and Higaki battle, the whole earth seems to explode into fractious elements.

Kurosawa’s intense, almost pantheistic relationship to nature as a reflector and counterbalance to humanity is strikingly nascent. As he would do so often later, atmospheric touches overtly or subtly set the tone of scenes—from the insects incessantly chirping in the background when Yano castigates Sanshiro, to the breeze that underscores the hollow-hearted, alien Higaki’s entry into Murai’s house, and finally, to the epic winds and racing clouds of the final elemental clash of the two men—not between good and evil, exactly, but between the humbled, humane, and responsible, and the dictatorial, arrogant, and grasping.

Kurosawa would rarely offer hissable villains like Higaki. His villains tend to be either foolish, or so collectively ill-defined as to be nearly abstract symbols of tribulation, or shaded reflections of the heroes. Higaki is the man in himself Sanshiro has defeated. Higaki’s introduction is so utterly splendid—his umbrella handle enters the film before him, tapping Sanshiro’s shoulder—that his eventual unmasking as a cardboard-thin opponent emphasises the limitations of straight genre for Kurosawa’s strength of style. It’s another possible indicator of when it was made that Higaki dresses like an English gentleman, complete with bowler hat, where Sanshiro wears traditional dress.

In many regards the later film that best displays Kurosawa’s growth from this point is Sanjuro (1965), one his few straight genre films of later years, a funnier, but also angrier film than Sanshiro Sugata. Toshiro Mifune’s title character and Tatsuya Nakadai’s villain represent a similar conflict, virtually separate to the rest of the plot—that of men who see too much of themselves in each other. Mifune’s victory releases not joy, but a sickening welter of blood and the ronin’s self-disgust and disavowal of a violent path. Such dark duality is also a consistent motif, particularly in female characters, clearly present here in the mirror of Munmo’s burning-eyed daughter and Sayo, and Sanshiro’s fear that he will turn one into the other if he kills her father, too.

Kurosawa’s distrust of violence—concurrent with his fascination with it—and love of humanity is ultimately confirmed by the sentiment of Sanshiro and Murai’s friendship and Higaki’s late alteration. Sanshiro is defined as much as the Seven Samurai by his learned determination to use his gifts to fight for a value, and for other people, rather than for self-aggrandisement. And it work for Sanshiro, as he apparently converts Higaki. Although naïve, it’s still a fascinating message for a Japanese film of 1943.

All of that said, there isn’t much more of the dramatic and character richness of Kurosawa’s later work. Sayo is a regulation, radiantly submissive female far from the pithy heroines of The Hidden Fortress and Sanjuro; she anticipates the cosmically forgiving Lady Sué of Ran. Yano is a stock, wise Yoda figure. Higaki a bad guy for barely any more reason than the fact that he acts creepy.

More superficially, familiar stylistic flourishes are present. When Sanshiro is showing off on the streets, Kurosawa likewise shows off, with a series of mirroring crane shots descending down to the street level, showing crowds back away from the attacking Sanshiro as he races forward and picks out men to beat up. This kind of physical-force camera work would later have a profound effect on directors like Godard and Scorsese; likewise, his small dash of slow motion—when Munmo dies, a panel falls like a gentle petal from the wall onto the dead man’s back. Like the device’s similar use in the early stages of The Seven Samurai, it emphasises a sudden, sad realisation of the nature of death in what has been, up until now, a game. Sanshiro Sugata is a truly enlightening sketch of so much that was to come. l

Grade

Promising

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

By Roderick Heath

I’ve always enjoyed tracking down embryonic work by future notables. Even more, I like seeing a work that suggests a future great, and watching their growth – the electric sensation of history being made that came when watching, say, Reservoir Dogs or Hard Eight, or even seeing the birth of greatness from a far earlier era.

So I’m going to make as broad a survey as I can of the unofficial genre known as the debut film. I’m not talking here about those stupid clip shows where they dig up footage of a now-famous actor when they were a teenager with a bad hairdo getting being iced by a serial killer in an obscure slasher film. I’ve employed a highly scientific method that involves DVDs, coffee, and a bagful of mixed nuts.

There’s a cliché constantly employed when describing the debut of note, whether it’s of the future great director, star actor, or accomplished writer. It’s the word “promising," indicating that, amongst the dross of amateurism contained in a debut, there are flashes of real skill and art that might some day flourish into worthiness.

It’s not such a helpful phrase. Quite apart from the fact that it is as belittling as it is congratulatory, it can be misleading. Often, especially in the perverse geometry of modern cinema, the promising debut is, in fact, the best work. How many times have you said to yourself or your friends something like, “I liked the early stuff, but since then he/she’s gone off the rails." All sorts of reasons for that. Have too much money thrown at you, too much adulation, and that energy, discipline, and circumstance-enforced invention all go out the window. Then there’s another endemic problem, which is the overrated debut for which some tyro wins Oscars and legions of fans with a promising film that just isn’t that great.

Most typically, the eye-catching debut is uneven, perhaps even generally lousy, but contains flashes of imagination, invention, vividness. Key themes and stylistic tendencies are present, but in embryonic, naïf form, that will develop in the more considered later work.

Then there’s the highly unpromising debut, the piece of crap that teaches you more by how you screw up than by what you get right, that lousy slasher film that taught the future star never to take a part that means dying from a power tool to the head in the third reel. Sometimes an ill-fated debut creates survivors. Witness Jessica Lange’s recovery from her worldwide humiliation in King Kong (1976), or good directors recover from work like Piranha 2: The Spawning (James Cameron, 1981).

Then there’s the exact opposite—the earth-shaking arrival, the awe-inspiring declaration of ability that seems to have nowhere to go but down. Welles with Citizen Kane. Huston with The Maltese Falcon. Brando in The Men. Godard with Breathless. Lynch’s Eraserhead. Reservoir Dogs. Nightmare on Mills Street (What, you’ve never seen that? The absolute greatest horror film ever made with a camcorder and featuring my mother as a homicidal maniac).

For these films, then, I’ll be applying a broad and not-at-all rigorously planned grading system: Unpromising, Promising, and Tectonic.

*Lead image is Strongman Sandow, the first film ever made (1896).

Oh, Those Legs: Remembering Cyd Charisse

By Marilyn Ferdinand

By now, film fans and most of the world have heard that the enchanting dancer Cyd Charisse has left us. I fully expect all the classic movie blogs to cover her life and accomplishments, both of which were long and enviable, so I'll share personal observations instead. There were a lot of dancers who came up in the Hollywood system, but none were as elegant as Cyd Charisse. Even when she sizzled, she reflected the refinement of her classical ballet training, and she was a model for dancers looking healthy instead of severely underfed.

My favorite performance of hers was in The Band Wagon, where as prima ballerina Gabrielle Gerard, she must learn to work with song-and-dance man Fred Astaire. Artistic differences begin before they meet when after seeing her perform and admiring her artistry, Fred says, "I can't dance with her!" Height—hers—is a problem. So is her refinement. So is her boyfriend/choreographer, who wants their collaboration to be high brow. Poor Cyd! The dancer opposites finally put their differences aside after Cyd breaks into tears, saying, "I'm not used to be unpleasant. It's very stressful!" They go off on their own to see if they really can dance together, and the rest is history.

I also love the pas de deux she danced with Gene Kelly in Brigadoon in which the couple express their love as Gene tries to decide whether to return to his life in New York or disappear with Cyd and the town of Brigadoon for all eternity. The climax of the dance is when Cyd leaps up, and Gene catches her at the hips. He slowly lowers her and begins a long, passionate kiss that ends with the pair on the ground in each other's arms. The intensity of that scene is burned into my memory as one of the most sensuous and romantic moments on film.

But it was in Singin' in the Rain that Cyd Charisse made the most famous entrance in dance movie history. See for yourself:

Oh, those legs! Thanks, Cyd, for the memories. l

To Die For (1995)
Director: Gus Van Sant

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Suzanne Stone Maretto: It's nice to live in a country where life, liberty... and all the rest of it still stand for something.

Suzanne Stone Maretto: You're not anybody in America unless you're on TV. On TV is where we learn about who we really are. Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person.

The above quotes pretty much sum up that always-plump target—American culture—in Buck Henry’s wickedly funny adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s book To Die For. Suzanne Stone Maretto (Nicole Kidman) is a dumb, narcissistic blonde for whom TV sounds like her only chance to be a good person and who doesn’t really relate to those greater goods of life and liberty as intended by America’s founders. She intends to be a better person even if she has to kill someone to do it.

The beautiful Suzanne has wanted to be on television ever since she first saw herself at about the age of 5 captured by her father’s live camera hook-up to the family Stone’s TV set. Out with her girlfriends one day, Suzanne immediately attracts the attention of nice-guy Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon). They start to date. The members of his close-knit Italian family, and especially his sister Janice (Illeana Douglas), don’t think too much of Suzanne, but Larry is convinced she is the girl of his dreams—delicate, fragile, and a “volcano" in the sack—the perfect madonna/whore of every Catholic boy’s fantasy. He marries her and prepares for a life of Italian wedded bliss.

Suzanne, of course, is still avid in her pursuit of her career. She attends a meeting of NBC affiliates while on her honeymoon, where she gets some advice from the weasly keynote speaker (George Segal)—offering sex for a job is a great way to the top.

The Marettos acquire a condo, a red Mustang, and a tiny Pomeranian puppy Suzanne names Walter after Walter Cronkite and from which she is rarely separated. She reads about a job as a glorified gofer at local cable-access station WWEN. The station manager, Ed Grant (Wayne Knight), and his assistant call her “gangbusters"—not because she puts out (indeed she tears up a letter of reference she wrote for herself that offers sexual favors, an idea she got from Segal's character)—but because she has ideas for the station about every 10 minutes. Eventually, Ed gives Suzanne an on-air job as the weather bunny.

Given an inch, she goes for a mile by getting a local high school principal (Buck Henry) to allow her to shoot a documentary with any students who volunteer. Three burnouts sign up—crude Russel (Casey Affleck), budding lesbian Lydia (Alison Folland), and smitten Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix). Her footage shows their relative inability to put two words together in a sentence, but Suzanne will spin gold from straw if she has to work on the tapes all night.

Meanwhile, Larry and his family are impatient with Suzanne’s lack of interest in popping out babies. Larry confronts Suzanne one night and suggests that she hang up her go-nowhere weather reports and help him out at the family restaurant. When Suzanne comprehends exactly what he means, a strange glow comes into her usually plasticine eyes, and we know we are being prepared for murder most foul.

Suzanne isn’t very learned, but when it comes to providing motivation—sex, and lots of it, to Jimmy—and manipulating Lydia and Russel to keep herself about a step removed from the murder, she’s as “gangbusters" as ever. Her dream of being on TV—this time as a prime figure in a murder investiga- tion—is fulfilled, but she overplays her hand. In the end, she becomes the subject of a documentary on the infamous crime—a fate she would have loved had she only known about it.

Van Sant provides the perfect structure for a film about media fame—interviews with all of the principals in the murder case, who tell their version of Larry and Suzanne’s life and times. Omniscient narration fills in the blanks, and Suzanne herself gets her say on a self-made video.

Kidman plays Suzanne with the perfect amount of paper-thin charm, vicious self-interest, and stupidity. Her wardrobe and make-up make her look like a lollipop—long, slim legs topped with rainbow-bright mini-skirted suits of shocking pink, lemon yellow, lime green, and baby blue—sickly sweet, devoid of nutritional value, and likely to rot your teeth in the short time it takes to dissolve. Suzanne has used her looks and sexual prowess to get her way all her life—right after her wedding, she whispers in her father’s ear, “I’ll never find another man like you, Daddy," As Mr. Stone, Kurtwood Smith assumes a bewildered look on his face at this remark, suggesting that Suzanne’s not just a vain, shallow tart, but rather something closer to a maneating psychopath.

Incestuous overtones continue as Janice competes with Suzanne for attention. The look Janice gives Larry when he interrupts her reverie about her small but important solo as a skater in the Ice Follies to announce Suzanne’s new job is one of jealous betrayal. I laughed when Larry’s parents (Dan Hedaya and Maria Tucci) thought the news was that Suzanne was pregnant—a stereotype, but ringing so true in this film.

The entire supporting cast is phenomenally good (even including a brief, but priceless appearance by David Cronenberg). Phoenix is the perfect sex-besotted burnout who seems to have gone a little insane in prison. I was deeply impressed with Folland as a grimy-haired lackey who says over and over again that Suzanne is her friend, “the only friend I had." It’s not hard to feel sympathy for her and Jimmy, but the caustic wit and sexiness of the script keep the film’s tongue planted firmly in cheek and between legs.

A visually stunning satire, each moment is real, even at its most absurd, as the cast relishes the wonderful lines they are given. There are so many great moments, I can't begin to do them all justice here. I’m so glad that before Nicole Kidman became an Actress, she had the sense to stretch her considerable comedic muscles. Now that she is a bit past her prime for leading lady parts, I hope she’ll return to comedies worthy of her talents. l

Fireworks (Hana-bi, 1997)
Director/Screenwriter/Star: Takeshi Kitano

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The hubby is the person whose enthusiasm for Takeshi Kitano got me into watching the works of this film entrepreneur extraordinaire. Using the stage name—Beat Takeshi—he still uses when acting, Kitano was one half of a popular comedy duo in Japan. He turned to filmmaking in 1989 with the film Violent Cop (Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki), in which Kitano plays a cop who never met a rule he wouldn’t break to get results. Kitano frequently includes yakuza plotlines and characters in his films, but his seemingly endless imagination has never stopped exploring other ways of telling stories. The first Kitano film I saw, A Scene by the Sea (Ano Natsu, Ichiban Shizukana Umi), his third outing as a director, was a gentle, bittersweet tale without a yakuza in sight.

Fireworks has some of Kitano’s trademarks—seaside scenes, yakuza, his own ensemble of actors—but strongly references the events and aftermath of his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1995. The film focuses on policemen Nishi (Kitano) and his long-time partner Horibe (Ren Oshugi) and the course of their lives following violent encounters with a yakuza gang. Nishi is a legendary cop with a tragic life—after his wife was diagnosed with fatal leukemia, their young daughter died. He has had to go to a yakuza loan shark to help pay for her medical care. Horibe pities Nishi, cherishing as he does his normal family life.

One day, Horibe approaches the stakeout car of two cops he and Nishi are training, telling them they will have to remain on stakeout longer than expected because Nishi must visit his wife. Nakamura (Susumu Terajima) says he has a date waiting for him across town. Horibe releases Tanaka because he is a family man and takes the duty alone. As he sits in the car, he calls home and talks to his wife and daughter. He learns from his daughter that she has drawn a picture. Comically, he listens to her and then opens his notebook to look inside. This is the last bit of normalcy in the film. In a quick shot, we see a yakuza with his hand wrapped in a newspaper, pointing his gun downward. Switch to a shot of Horibe on the ground, his hands impotently pushing at the air to shield himself. Bang.

The film plays with time and characters in a seemingly random fashion. Nishi talks with a woman, asking how she is. As well as can be expected; she has a part-time job now as a clerk in a deli. We learn what has happened in Shakespearean style, as two incidental characters confound our expectations of what happened and relate that Horibe has been crippled and that his wife and daughter left him. Tanaka has been killed; Nishi was talking with his widow. Nishi is no longer on the police force, having resigned in the wake of Horibe’s crippling injury and Tanaka’s murder at the hands of the yakuza soldier being watched. The latter event is revealed slowly in flashback.

Nishi visits Horibe. The former partners stare at the sea, and Nishi asks Horibe what he plans to do. Paint, he says, almost at random. We see Horibe alone on the sand looking down as the water splashes at the front wheels of his wheelchair. Two parallel lines in the sand trail behind the rear wheels.

Nishi plans to take care of everyone, from providing for Tanaka’s wife and his own to settling his debt to the loan shark and setting Horibe up with art supplies. How he does this is interesting and not without consequences. His ultimate goal is to be left alone to spend all his time with his wife in her remaining days.

Fireworks takes us far inside Takeshi's creative process. For example, the responsibility Nishi assumes for his extended family of police officers and their families could very well mirror his regard for his regular collaborators on the screen and behind it. Beyond providing for those affected by the fall-out of the yakuza shooter, Nishi refuses to put Nakamura in a difficult position when he has to track down Nishi for the murders of the yakuza loan shark and his gang. He maintains his honor, even though he must now be regarded as a ruthless killer.

Horibe is a stand-in for Kitano after his motorcycle accident. Months of recovery left the director time to learn how to paint. (All of the art in the movie is by Kitano.) We see Horibe regarding bunches of flowers and picturing animals and people with flower heads. The images are beautiful, alive, and meaningful, a reaffirmation of sorts of Horibe/Kitano's desire to live and create. At one point, Horibe takes up a pointillist technique, producing an image interesting like Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of the Grande Jatte." He refines this technique by substituting words for dots; the image at the beginning of this review has the Japanese pictogram for "star" forming the points of light in the sky. The bold, red word across this impressionistic landscape is "Suicide." Horibe finishes the painting by splashing red on the canvas to resemble a blood spatter. This canvas certainly communicates not only the despair of many of the characters in Fireworks, but also that of Kitano as he mends and must come to terms with his disfigured face and noticeable limp. It also gives a graphic example of the rather pointillist construction of this film, in which the story assembles into a coherent whole from the out-of-sequence slices of life Kitano films.

What lends the efficiently violent Nishi, and this film, its sad tenderness is the relationship between Nishi and his wife Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto). Miyuki seems like a true innocent, enjoying simple pleasures like fishing and putting some wilted flowers in a vase and scooping water into the vase with her hand at the edge of the sea. The couple's relationship is telegraphed in many intimate scenes. Nishi puts a sardine-sized fish on a stick and cooks it over a fire. He says, "Italian-style cooking," and they both laugh, no doubt at some private joke this comment evokes. However, we don't hear Miyuki speak until the very end of the film; rather Nishi "translates" her off-screen comments in his dialogue. He asks her why she wanted to see snow as they drive along a road plowed through a good 6 feet of snow. He stops and says, "Can't you hold it?" Miyuki runs off into the snow, only to fall into a drift in one of the small comic moments Kitano peppers throughout the film.

Fireworks is an odd work that mixes almost cartoonish violence, comedy, and deep feeling to create a compelling and affecting film. "Beat" Takeshi Kitano is a wonderfully bold and original voice in world cinema who deserves your attention. l

"Our Backstreets" #19
Corruption on Steroids

By Marilyn Ferdinand

It was my sincere desire to write a review of a wonderful film I saw the other day and post it today. Unfortunately, local events that perhaps have global implications have my mind spinning in a murderously angry haze. I will lay the facts of the case down for you and ask you to consider what your role as an active citizen of the United States and the world will be at this crucial time in history. Sorry for getting political on you. Please ignore if you turn to this site just for fun.

As most of you know, I live in the Chicago area. I was born here, in the now burned-out ghetto of Lawndale, on the city’s Near West Side. I was raised in a near north suburb, but moved back to the city to attend college. I lived in the city as an adult for 22 years. Currently, I work in an area called Streeterville, walking distance from the #1 tourist attraction in the city, Navy Pier. Upon this pier rests the Chicago Children’s Museum, by all accounts, a very needed and successful institution for visitors and residents alike.

Over the past few months, Mayor Richard M. Daley has expressed his deep desire to move the museum to Grant Park, often called Chicago’s front yard because of its wide-open expanse of public parkland. It would be somewhat analogous to Central Park in New York, but it is not as large and, therefore, all the more precious as a haven from the concrete and steel just to the west.

It’s not only a nice thing to have in our very big city, it’s protected by law. I’ll quote part of an article from the Chicago Reader dated September 14, 2007, and written by Lynn Becker:

Bob O’Neill, president of the Grant Park Advisory Council, jokes that his usual response to citizens concerned about new construction in the park is this: “Well, they’re actually out there building it right now, but thanks for the public input."

It’s funny, as Homer Simpson would say, because it’s true. Or nearly. O’Neill is lobbying overtime to build a new Chicago Children’s Museum in Grant Park—the same Grant Park that, a century ago, A. Montgomery Ward fought a long, bruising, ultimately successful battle over. Ward was defending the 1836 mandate to keep Chicago’s lakefront public ground, “a common to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever."

The Children’s Museum is but the latest in a long procession of hustles seeking to circumvent that mandate. It’s looking to replace free access to open land with new construction and stiff admission charges, and Bob O’Neill is doing his part to keep those who don’t think it’s a very good idea safely on the sidelines.

I would add that he is doing that on orders from the mayor.

I won’t go into all of the criminal, unethical, and outrageous things the mayor and his lap dogs in the City Council have said and done to ensure that the city is profitable for the few by being paid for by the many. His favorite way of doing this is through misuse of a law setting up tax-increment financing (TIF) districts to help blighted areas make improvements. If you read any of the long-running series of articles on these legal slush funds reported on brilliantly by Ben Joravsky in the Reader, you’ll see how it works—ridiculously, a TIF has been set up in the city’s financial district, hardly blighted with anything but the greedy and ethically vacant. The mayor's latest big dream is to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago, lying about not using public funds to help pay for it, even while he allows our formerly wonderful public transit system to fall into ruin and our schools to go further into a pit of despair we didn't think could get any deeper.

It appears that the Children’s Museum move is simply a ploy to break the back of the law to open the lakefront to development, with its first objective being to allow for restaurants and concessions for the Olympics. From the Division Street/NBC5 Chicago blog:

“Opponents are also criticizing a provision of the museum’s secret agreement with the park district that allows them to transfer their 99-year lease to another private corporation without any oversight from the City Council. That agreement between the museum and Park District Superintendent Tim Mitchell allows the museum to transfer the building with only the Chicago Park District’s approval:

“CCM may not, without the prior written consent of CPD, which may be withheld or conditioned in the sole discretion of CPD, assign all or any rights under the Use Agreement, provided that CPD’s approval shall not be unreasonably withheld, conditioned or delayed if the proposed assignee intends to continue to operate the project as a children’s museum."

Navy Pier is the museum’s third home in as many decades, and the museum still hasn’t paid off loans for construction at Navy Pier issued in 1994. Opponents also argue that the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, with one million visitors per year, is four times larger than the proposed Chicago museum, yet CCM officials hope to reach one million visitors in the near future. That makes it likely that CCM will have to abandon its Grant Park location long before their 99-year lease runs out.

“The Chicago Children’s Museum is already in its third home in as many decades, and it’s clear they’re already making plans to move out of this building before it’s even built," said Figiel. “The inclusion of a liquor license in their zoning application means that this could be a 100,000 square foot restaurant and mini-mall just in time for the 2016 Olympics."

Why should you care

I’d like to think you should care because you like me and trust my judgment. No, seriously, you should care because this situation is all about good government and bleeds over into our presidential election.

As we all know, Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party's candidate for president, campaigning on a platform of change. I know some people fervently believe he will be a breath of fresh air, a break from business as usual in that dirty game of politics. I want you to think about it. Change. What does it look like?

Does it look like a politican endorsing the people who are behind the Children’s Museum land grab, who are trying to break the law? Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Barack Obama did. From the Reader:

I'm not surprised that Senator Barack Obama endorsed Mayor Daley's reelection. We're used to the sight of erstwhile reformers scrambling to board the mayor's gravy train before it leaves the station.

"Even [Daley's] detractors acknowledge that the city has been well-managed and has performed in all respects in ways that are the envy of a lot of other cities across the country," Obama said at his press conference with the mayor yesterday.

Well managed? Daley's public transportation system is literally falling apart even as it squanders millions on projects it doesn't need and, in the case of the express lines to O'Hare and Midway, may never even use. Property taxes are skyrocketing as the city plays games of deception with its off-the-books TIF program. Just about every significant public works project--from the O'Hare expansion to the construction of Millennium Park to the Brown Line renovation--has come in late and overbudget.

Mr. Obama also endorsed the entire Regular Democratic Party ticket, which included some people with ethics problems and the incompetent legacy candidate Todd Stroger, who took his father’s place on the ballot after the elder Stroger had a stroke whose severity the Party kept hidden to keep him on the ticket until deals could be made. Toddler has padded his office with PR flaks and high-priced jobs delivered to people he knows in what has been mockingly referred to as the Friends and Family Plan.

Now people will say that Obama had little option, that this is what Illinois politicians must do to have a career. But if Obama really is a reformer, is really about change, why wouldn’t he help out the long-suffering residents of Chicago and Cook County. Don’t be fooled by reports that Mayor Daley got 75% of the vote in his latest election—only 20% of eligible voters cast ballots. Everyone else has become too jaded. We don’t believe in the hope that is plastered on Mr. Obama’s attractive, heroic postcards. I’m not asking you all to vote for Mr. McCain. I'm not endorsing anyone for president. What I am asking you all to do is to GET INVOLVED after the election. Hold Mr. Obama—should he be elected—to his promises for change. Do the same of all your elected officials in Congress who are needed to make change. l

If you want to help Chicagoans preserve their public lands, go to Save Grant Park and contribute to the legal defense fund for the lawsuit the organization has filed against the city.

Knife in the Head (Messer im Kopf, 1978)
Director/Co-Screenwriter: Reinhard Hauff

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Following the massacre at the Munich Olympics and the domestic insurgency of the Baader-Meinhof gang, West Germany—not yet united with the East—reverted to some of its bad old ways. Any group who protested against the loss of freedoms under a more vigilant government and police force could find themselves under threat of physical violence and imprisonment. It is the story of one man with ties to one such group that director and co-screenwriter Reinhard Hauff takes up in Knife in the Head.

Biogenetist Bernhard Hoffman (Bruno Ganz) putters about in his laboratory one evening, putting away cells he has been working on and closing things up. He makes a phone call. We don’t hear the other end of the conversation, but he says, “I’m coming to pick you up." Where he is headed is a community center rife with anti-oppression slogans. The police have surrounded the building and are holding back crowds. Hoffman is initially stopped from going into the building, but he breaks away and enters as a man and a woman being pushed into a paddy wagon yell his name. He moves to the back of the community center, in which police are scuffling with civilians, presumably to look for the person he spoke with. At that moment, the frame freezes and a loud gunshot is heard. Fade to black.

When we next see Hoffman, he is on a hospital gurney, his head in bandages obviously applied in the field, and being rushed to surgery. Apparently, a policeman was stabbed by Hoffman and shot him in self-defense. He’s being attended to as well. Hospital personnel can’t say whether either man will make it.

The next time we see Hoffman is postop. He’s just waking up, and the two people we saw yelling to him from the paddy wagon are there to visit. Ann (Angela Winkler) appears to be Hoffman’s wife. The man, Volker (Heinz Hoenig), protests as the police make them empty their pockets. Just to show him whose boss, a cop pats him down for weapons. Ann and Volker don gowns; Ann goes in to see Hoffman. His eyes are deeply bruised from the surgery, and he has an almost greenish look about his skin. His lidded eyes look at Ann without recognition. She kisses him. He sputters out imperfectly, “Those bastards" and “Ann." His life still hangs in the balance.

Once he is over the first hurdle—surviving—his long rehabilitation commences. His verbal and motor skills have been damaged, as well as his memory. He looks at a picture book and repeats with his therapist the words that match the pictures, “dog, spoon." He has trouble with “banana." He writes with his left hand, considered progress until Anleitner (Has Christian Blech) his lawyer and friend says, “he used to be right-handed." No more of that—his right side is mostly paralyzed.

More of Hoffman’s larger story starts to emerge as he relearns just about everything. His wife and he separated several months before the incident, and she is living with Volker. She visits Hoffman dutifully but does not intend to take care of him for long after his discharge. Oh, and officials are claiming Hoffman is a terrorist working with the community center group, whose headquarters they plan to raze. Hoffman becomes something of a minor celebrity in the hospital. When he is practiced enough to walk, he goes to the patient lounge on the neurosurgical ward and orders a beer. One fellow patient asks for his autograph on an article that has his picture and the headline, “Bernhard Hoffman – Terrorist?" and purports to tell of his double life.

As the pressure comes down hard on Hoffman’s doctor (Eike Gallwitz) to release Hoffman to a prison hospital, Anleitner works hard to persuade zealous detective Scholz (Hans Brenner) that Hoffman was not involved. Scholz assures an incredulous Anleitner that he not only thinks Hoffman is a terrorist, he “knows it. Don’t let the absent-minded professor act fool you." In a face-to-face confrontation, Hoffman has been positively identified by Schurig (Udo Samel), the stabbed officer, as his attacker. Soon, in an attempt to take back control of his life, Hoffman escapes from the hospital, and after a difficult reunion with Ann and recapture, eventually confronts Schurig to find out if he is indeed a knife-wielding terrorist or simply has a knife in his head.

The script and direction of this film layer it with ambiguity and suspicion. We don’t know who Ann is at first. When she and Volker come to the hospital to see Hoffman, the estrangement between the married couple seems more like an activist trying to take advantage of a brain-damaged man. For what purpose, it’s hard to say, but her insistence that Anleitner get him out of the hospital as soon as possible might indicate that Hoffman has something she wants or could reveal something damaging to the police—or maybe something else entirely. Right before his escape, we know his wits have returned to him in some measure when he finds the policeman guarding his hospital room playing chess with himself, and handily puts the guard into checkmate with one move. His escape isn’t particularly difficult because he seems to be counting on hospital staff to assume he is too handicapped in mind and body to attempt one. Is Hoffman really a terrorist adept at fooling people, or is he just gaining back some measure of the intelligent man he once was, as well as the desire to be free?

It would be easy to sympathize with Hoffman if Ganz had portrayed him as the type of brain-injured victim we are used to seeing in movies. Think Regarding Henry, and you’ll know how wrong and false it is to think that injury is ennobling. Ganz’s performance is nothing short of miraculous. His rehabilitation is slow and painful to watch, his frustration palpable, his desire to become a whole man—including a sexual being who can win his wife back again—relentless. We can’t really be sure of the reality of his double life until the very end of the film because we don’t see him before his fateful night. That superb choice by Hauff keeps us focused on Hoffman as a complex man with unfortunate ties to a political enemy of the state who can arouse doubt as well as sympathy in us.

Last year's Oscar-winning foreign language film from Germany, The Lives of Others, is heir to Knife in the Head. As that win shows, the paranoia and police-state measures that have reemerged in modern times have made Knife in the Head relevant again. Bruno Ganz, with his uncanny ability to play everything from a devil to an angel, always was. l

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

Frank Cottrell Boyce

By Roderick Heath

A genre-bending, radically original, yet deftly humane writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce has become one of the major creative forces of modern British cinema. Like one the loopier heroes he has—Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People (2003)—Boyce inhabits many worlds at once without effort, if not without the odd disaster. Particularly through his partnership with Michael Winterbottom, Boyce has helped weld together previously disparate strands of Cinematic Britannia— the knowing, pop spirit born sometime around A Hard Day’s Night (1964); the mocking allusiveness of the quick-witted Oxfordian best exemplified by Monty Python; the madcap, yet purposeful anachronisms of Ken Russell; the musty highbrow historical and literary classic genre; the gritty, down-and-dirty Loach-and-Leigh realist stream; and a fractured but vivacious post-modernism.

Boyce found a true collaborator in Winterbottom, a director of enormous inventiveness and unique restlessness of style and theme. Yet Boyce maintains his individuality. A film as anarchic and yet intelligent as Pandaemonium (2000) could only come from the hand also responsible for Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005). Boyce, born in 1961, was an Oxford graduate in English and palaeontology, a detail not unimportant to his writing’s sense of history and humanity entwining in chaotic ways. After working for many years as the TV critic for the magazine Living Marxism, he attempted to break into writing for television proper. After some scattered work, he finished up on a dreary assignment (penning a script for an anti-smoking programme) for a company that also employed frustrated trainee editor Winterbottom. The two men met and decided to help each other along.

Both men made their feature film debut with Forget About Me (1990), which made exactly nil impact at the time and yet is now much beloved. Boyce’s spell as a staff writer on the seminal Brit soap Coronation Street began soon after, the reason, some suggested, that Living Marxism was often seen on sale in the news agency on the show. In 1995, he and Winter- bottom returned for their second shot with the loopy road movie Butterfly Kiss, featuring Amanda Plummer as a mad punkette who accidentally becomes a serial killer whilst falling in love with bewildered Jane Lynch. The film was an earthy mixture of indie grit, new queer cinema, and ’90s-breed film noir, and was a breakthrough.

Boyce followed up by penning two biopics for director Anand Tucker—the characteristically eccentric Saint-Ex (1996) and the more standard, and acclaimed, Hilary and Jackie (1997). A signature sequence in the latter film, in which Emily Watson’s Jacqueline du Pré and other young classical music students blithely bash out The Kinks’ “I Really Got You," is, in a way, a key to Boyce’s oeuvre. Often in his films, high culture, pop culture, low culture, new and old, collide and transform each-other, making new and witty connections. In his most distinctive scripts, the heroes are fools of fortune caught in webs of past and present, fiction and reality, all mashed together and made inseparable by that tyrannous agent, time.

In between those two films for Tucker, Boyce and Winterbottom pursued a highly personal and urgent project, Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), inspired by the death of a journalist ex-boyfriend of Boyce’s sister in the titular war-torn city. The resulting film was shot on location in an environment still virtually at war, and as a result, the film almost reeks of blood, dust, and cordite. Though the film’s of-the-moment immediacy often overwhelmed the compact drama of Boyce’s script, it was still filled with his trademark referential wit and pithy, outraged humanism:

Annie McGee (Kerry Fox): This could be the most important story in this war.
Michael Henderson (Woody Harrelson): More important than bombing people in the street?
Annie McGee: Compared to that, this is like fucking Jane Austen.
Michael Henderson: I never fucked Jane Austen.

The turn of the millennium saw the release of perhaps the two best films Boyce has penned, but both barely recognized as such. The Claim was an adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, a literary hero of Boyce and Winterbottom, the latter of whom had scored with Jude (1996), his relentless, rigorous adaptation of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The Claim transposed the setting of Hardy’s novel to frontier America and channeled elements of Altman, Leone, Cimino, and Herzog in its often spellbinding realisation, a rare melding of Hardy’s intense psychological tragedy and epic cinema. Not surprisingly, it sank virtually without a trace in the year of Gladiator. Indeed, like its models, it’s a hard film to love, with its chilly locales matched by Winterbottom’s restrained, melancholy style. Boyce blamed its failure of the producers’ insistence on pulling the teeth of the tale by forcing the story’s key moment—when “The Mayor," here christened Dillon and played with great force by Peter Mullan, sells his wife and daughter for a claim that will later make his fortune—away from its natural place at the start and into a flashback. Perhaps this does sap the film’s thematic directness, but I found it impossible not to be moved by staggering sequences like that in which Dillon, attempting to comfort his crippled wife (Nastassja Kinski), has an entire house dragged across a mountain for her to live in. Later, the perversities of screen adaptation encountered here would provide, in themselves, rich material.

The other film was Pandaemonium, realised on the screen by Julien Temple, once a bad-boy of punk-era Brit cinema as director of the Sex Pistols rock-doc The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) and the infectious sci-fi musical Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). Pandaemonium tells of the strange, troubled friendship of poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Linus Roache) and William Wordsworth (John Hannah), with William’s diarist sister Dorothy (Emily Woolf) caught between them.

William Wordsworth: I wandered lonely as a cow...
Dorothy Wordsworth: Perhaps “cloud" would be better, William.

If the thought of watching the likes of Becoming Jane or Miss Potter makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon, then this is the biopic of Limey literary greats for you, combining antic elements of Ken Russell’s wayward biographies with an allusive, satirical purpose. No one would ever mistake it for a truthful account, not with Wordsworth proves to be a nefarious Royalist agent who sets out to destroy the radical Coleridge and get him addicted to Laudanum whilst leeching his talent. But Boyce is after larger game than the usual artist biopic, which often work as conservative warnings against the dangers of being unusual as much as celebrations of various lives and oeuvres.

Pandaemonium works as a vast cultural parable that analyses the nature of British art for the past 200 or more years. Coleridge, his wife Sara (Samantha Morton), Dorothy, Lord Byron (Guy Lankester), and others who collect around them are progressively identified as prototypical lefty radicals, beatniks, hippies, feminists, rock stars, punks, and environmentalists thrilling in new intellectual possibilities in the age of the French and Industrial revolutions. Boyce’s script zeroes in on a split between establishment values and radicalism in artistic life, an evergreen theme, particularly in this peculiarly British version. The narrative begins with Wordsworth in respectable middle age expecting to be awarded the Poet Laureateship, whilst Coleridge and Dorothy have both been consumed and destroyed by laudanum addiction. At stake is the unpublished, near-mythical fragment Kubla Khan, product of Coleridge’s most feverish visions, which Byron is seeking to publish:

Guest: Is it true you offered a hundred pounds to publish Kubla Khan?
Byron: I would have paid Wordsworth that not to publish his last poem.

The poem proves still to exist only within Dorothy’s scrambled memory, and the hilarious sting in the tail sees both men bypassed for the laureateship by their middling lawyer acquaintance Robert Southey, who happened to write an amusing story about three bears that eat porridge.

24 Hour Party People was an only slightly less ambitious survey of a culture, this one through the eyes of Manchester TV star, record producer, pop culture gonzo, and prat Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan). Wilson’s tale involves the rise and fall of punk rock, the great British band Joy Division, and the eventual birth of the rave scene. Enabled by Winterbottom’s dexterous direction, the look, tone, and social background of the times are dead on. If the film refuses to live up to Pandaemonium’s richly eccentric tragedy or The Claim’s chilly equivalent, it’s largely deliberate. It is in keeping with the playful nihilism of its core subject—modern hipster, particularly punk, culture—and because Wilson is essentially a fool who makes solemn and dramatic actions look absurd (like signing contracts in his own blood) but whose eyes behold a vast panorama.

Wilson, like Boyce himself, I suspect, is driven by the intense conviction that classical and pop cultures are one and the same and only divided by snobbery. Discussing the Sex Pistols’ epoch-changing show in Manchester: “The smaller the attendance, the bigger the history. There were 12 people at the last supper. Half a dozen at Kitty Hawk. Archimedes was on his own in the bath." Unlike Boyce, Wilson has no discipline, or perspective, and mumblingly compares whichever singer he’s lately signed to Keats and Shelley. In such terms, then, 24 Hour Party People continues the theme introduced by Pandaemonium from the opposite end, contending the likes of Curtis are the inheritors of the shambling, artistic anarchy of Coleridge.

The third work in this virtual loose trilogy, also made by Winterbottom, was Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005), a film that is as much a spin on Truffaut and Fellini’s filmmaking epics as it is of the eponymous Laurence Sterne novel, “a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about." The film is as much about the difficulty in constructing a film as Sterne’s book is about that of telling a story. It begins as straight adaptation, but then steps back to contrast the comic hero Shandy with the people laboring to film his story, most particularly the clash of egos between costars “Steve Coogan" and “Rob Brydon." As in 24 Hour Party People, its creative folk are both ridiculous and yet highly dedicated as they attempt to wrangle the best possible picture out of an unfilmable novel. Winterbottom and Boyce succeed in filming the unfilmable by deliberately failing.

A Cock and Bull Story was a last hurrah, as Boyce provided the screenplay under a pseudonym and dissolved his partnership with Winterbottom. Boyce has turned to writing novels, including the prize-winning Millions, an adaptation of the screenplay he wrote for Danny Boyle’s film of the same name in 2004 and widely regarded as Boyle’s best film since Trainspotting (1996). Boyce’s most recent script was for the Grow Your Own (2007), a general disappointment, and perhaps the call of literature will soon be greater for him. But I hope he still has interesting places to go in his screen writing. He has seven kids, so we know he needs the work. l

Our Backstreets #19
From Russia with (Too Much) Love

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Every blogger knows the thrill when one of our posts—hopefully, our whole blog—receives a lot of hits. It’s validation that we wrote something good, something people are interested in, something that will last in the vast ephemera that is cyberspace.

Well, I have such a post about a rather obscure movie that is fully deserving of the widest exposure possible. And that’s the problem. The fact that it exposes widely has made it the most popular of my posts, thanks to a certain group of Russians who are exceedingly fond of kiddie porn.

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a marvelous film that represents the best of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early 70s. It tells the tale of a Portuguese soldier who is being held prisoner by a Brazilian tribe, which intends to eat him in the fullness of time because they mistakenly believe he is French and therefore their enemy. Photos from the film were hard to find when I first posted this review, but I managed one. It shows an elaborately wardrobed European lying in a hammock with a nearly naked native woman in the background. In fact, this entire film is loaded with bodies naked save for a few baubles because that’s how this tribe chose to garb itself. The photo above is representative of a lot of the frames of this film.

A link to my review was posted on a discussion board by someone whose moniker appears as agepi using the Roman alphabet; if you view this person’s moving icon, I think you can imagine a better transliteration from Cyrillic than "agepi." This link was posted September 28, 2007, and within the first couple of weeks, I had nearly 1,000 hits to my review. Unfortunately, I don’t read or write Russian, so I could not thank this sudden influx of film enthusiasts for their interest in this film and my work. Nor did I know what they were saying about it. You have to understand that when I visited the site, there were moving icons of pretty women here and there, but also one of Stalin. I didn’t suspect the nature of their interest until I started poking around the whole site a little.

My growing suspicion that the films this crowd liked were not likely to be reviewed at Ferdy on Films was confirmed by the housekeeper of one of the elderly residents of my building, who could read some Russian. Then I started getting a little wigged. I live in a town that has a large number of Russian residents. I go to the same produce markets, liquor stores, and pharmacy as they do. I’d go to the market, see a Russian sizing up some tomatoes, and wonder what he planned to do with them. I’d see a Russian at the Walgreen’s picking up a prescription and wonder whether he was getting some Viagra to use with his underage girlfriend—after he plied her with liquor from the Russian deli I’d seen him exit 10 minutes before. My life was truly a nightmare for a short time until I put the incident into perspective.

Let’s face it, fellow film bloggers, porn sites are the most popular web sites on the planet. I stumbled into this world by accident, and am regularly reminded of my dubious popularity by the hits to this review that come at a slower, but still steady pace.

Be careful what you wish for… l

The Narrow Margin (1952)
Director: Richard Fleischer

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Before Richard Fleischer made some of his varied and iconic films—Fantastic Voyage, The Boston Strangler, The New Centurions, Soylent Green—he learned his craft and showed his great potential in the B-movie market. Luckily, Fleischer was tapped to bring another great story by Detour writer Martin Goldsmith to the screen. Although he didn’t have the services of Goldsmith to write a screenplay quite as smart as Detour, Fleischer brought a bit more money and greater skills than Edgar G. Ulmer could have to the task. The result is The Narrow Margin, a taut, cat-and-mouse game played on the claustrophobic cars of a California-bound train.

Charles McGraw brings his noirish toughness to the role of Detective Sergeant Walter Brown, who, with his partner Detective Sergeant Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe), is charged with bringing an important witness in a mob trial safely from Chicago to Los Angeles. The witness is the wife of the defendant, Frankie Neall. Marie Windsor’s Mrs. Neall is tough, frightened, and a real handful. As Brown and Forbes escort her from her guarded apartment, her large-beaded necklace breaks. The beads tumble down the stairs, with a few landing at the feet of a shadow—a man in a fur-collared topcoat holding a gun. Forbes heads down the stairs first with Mrs. Neall close behind. Not close enough, however, for the gunman, who fires, hitting and killing Forbes. Brown gives chase through the city streets, but the gunman escapes. A heartbroken Brown escorts Mrs. Neall to Union Station, angry that Forbes died for a lowlife chippy like her.

It doesn’t take long for Brown to spot the gangsters who intend to ensure that Mrs. Neall never makes it to Los Angeles. Pencil-mustachioed Joe Kemp (David Clarke) keeps a bead on Brown, watching to see which car he boards. Brown evades him by hiding behind a cart of luggage; unfortunately for him, Kemp spots him through the train windows. Kemp and his partner, the efficient and evil Vincent Yost (Peter Brocco), set up in their compartment and make plans to intercept Brown and take out Mrs. Neall.

Mrs. Neall is confined to her compartment, of course. Brown goes to the dining car and is seated with a pleasant and attractive blonde named Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White). He orders “the same as she’s drinking," and she proceeds to spill her drink on him. After this meet-messy, she comments on jumpy he is. He distractedly chitchats with her, all the while watching Kemp at another table. When Kemp stands up to go, he abruptly leaves.

Various moves are made in this game, from Yost offering Brown a considerable sum of money to turn his witness over (plying him with a photo of Forbes’ grieving family who, he reminds Brown, have just lost their breadwinner) to reading each other’s telegrams. Brown inadvertently has more and more contact with Sinclair and her son, putting them at risk. A huge passenger (Paul Maxey) blocks passage through the train cars in a couple of amusing scenes, but soon becomes a player in the game. As the miles tick away, the gangsters become more determined than ever to hunt down and kill Mrs. Neall, and Brown, if necessary. At the same time, Brown’s growing concern for Mrs. Sinclair has him take his eye off the ball, endangering all of them.

The film’s vérité techniques are handled extremely well, adding to the suspense. For example, at one point, Brown asks that an urgent message be telegraphed ahead to one of the train stops. The hubby and I both gasped when a lineman hooked a large, metal ring holding the message with his arm as the speeding train passed by. Another example in the trailer below shows Brown and Kemp in a surprisingly violent fistfight that clearly had the camera operator scrambling to keep out of the way and hold focus.