CLAUDE AUTANT-LARA/FOUR ROMANTIC ESCAPES FROM OCCUPIED FRANCE: SYLVIE ET LE FANTOME - ECLIPSE SERIES 45

There are many interesting cinema stories from Occupied France, the period of WW2 when the Germans controlled the country and everything in it, including the film industry. There were fictional films made under Nazi supervision, some of them sneaky parables of the times (Clouzot’s Le corbeau), or later dramatizations. of those who resisted (Melville’s Army of Shadows [review]). Then there were the real stories, the nonfiction travails of those who labored under the watching German eye--touched on in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [review] and examined in detail but without much insight in the documentary Sold Out!: Cinema Under Occupation (previously available on Filmstruck).

One of the more intriguing aspects touched on by Sold Out! is the popularity of light fantasies as distraction, serving a dual purpose of alleviating everyday woes while also pleasing the occupiers by not fomenting dissent. One of the more popular--though it actually went into production just after the liberation--was Sylvie et le fantôme (Sylvia and the Ghost), based on a stageplay by Alfred Adam and directed by Claude Autant-Lara, a filmmaker whose career blossomed during the Occupation. This period of the director’s oeuvre is the subject of the Eclipse boxed set Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France, of which Sylvie is the last.

An enjoyable romantic lark, the film features Autant-Lara’s regular star Odette Joyeux as the titular Sylvie, a sixteen-year-old girl fixated on the story of how her grandmother’s lover died in a duel with a man meant to be her husband via arranged marriage. The dead man, known as “the White Hunter,” was memorialized in a painting hanging in the family home. When Sylvie’s father (Pierre Larquey, Diabolique [review]) sells the painting the day before the girl’s birthday, he attempts to make up for the sadness it causes her by hiring an actor to play the ghost of the White Hunter to deliver her a birthday message and keep the magic the art inspired alive. Little does he know that he’ll get more ghosts than he bargained for--including the real Hunter, played by none other than Jacques Tati, M. Hulot himself, in his film debut.

Dear ol’ dad does get the real actor he hired to don the white sheets, an old man of the stage (Louis Salou, Children of Paradise), but his arrival is mixed up with two potential suitors for Sylvie--the art dealer’s son, Frederick (Jean Desally, Le doulos [review]), and a burglar he interrupts, a fellow called Branch (Francois Périer, Gervaise [review])--causing one fake ghost to become three. Never mind that Frederick was sneaking into Sylvie’s bedroom in the middle of the night when he catches Branch; or maybe do mind, since it’s this fact that prevents Frederick from admitting neither he nor the burglar are supposed to be there. Both boys meet Sylvie by chance--Frederick the day before, Branch the night of--and neither told her his name. Thus, when they are haunting their would-be paramour and compel her to admit she loves a man amongst the living, they can’t be sure which of them she is referring to.

Sylvie et le fantôme definitely has elements of farce and screwball comedy, but its tone and presentation lean more toward light costume drama than Hollywood slapstick. Even Tati is pretty subdued here, wandering the scenes as a transparent apparition, never engaging with anyone but the family canine, who barks at the Hunter’s own ghost dog. To Autant-Lara’s credit, he pulls off some pretty impressive practical effects, using double exposure to place Tati in the scene and have him manipulate “real world” props. The quality of the illusion helps sell the absurdity of the characters in the film not only believing what are obviously men in bedsheets to be specters, but also being frightened to see them. The best recurring gag is actually when Tati keeps trying on the costume himself, only to have it fall off when he walks through walls.

Outside of that, there are few laughs in Sylvie et le fantôme. And it’s not altogether romantic, either. The potential lovers don’t spend much time together and so never develop much chemistry. On the contrary, the relationship that gets the most screentime is Frederick and Branch’s. Even so, Autant-Lara’s light touch and likable cast means that Sylvie et le fantôme is charming regardless of its insubstantial script. It makes for a pleasant afternoon’s viewing, and should appeal to fans of other ghostly fair like Topper or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Which makes it easy to understand why it would have been popular with French moviegoers in 1946. Ghost stories are often about yearning for something lost, and in this case, about simpler times, when it was easy to believe in something fantastic and forget everything else--even if just for 98 minutes.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO - #485

Of all of Whit Stillman’s films, The Last Days of Disco is by far my favorite. It’s the most full realization of his unique vision, and the most watchable on repeat viewings, offering multiple complete story arcs for its ensemble of characters. It was also what, for many years, we thought would be his final film. In a move worthy of Terrence Malick, Stillman would wait 14 years to release his next movie, 2012’s Damsels in Distress [review]. For all we knew, we were never getting him back.

Released in 1998, The Last Days of Disco takes us back to the early 1980s, when disco was enough of a cultural phenomenon to inspire mass hatred across America. (One spliced-in news report of a public burning of disco records is so exaggerated you’d not believe it were it not real.) The screenplay follows a handful of twentysomethings over the better part of a year, as they realize the young professional life they were promised is not exactly as described. They are fresh enough that what university their peers attended still matters, but on the precipice of having enough experience to discover it really doesn’t matter at all.

The group that Stillman follows congregates at a Studio 54-esque nightclub, mostly at the behest of Des (Chris Eigeman), one of the club’s managers. If they can’t get in through the front door, he sneaks them in through the back. This doesn’t always earns him points with his bosses. Junior ad man Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin) is persona non grata, but he keeps weaseling his way in, convinced it’s the access that keeps him employed.

More important to the social group are Alice (Chloe Sevigny, Manderlay [review]; Big Love [review]) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale, Snow Angels [review]), two assistant editors at a major publishing house who, despite attending the same college, weren’t really friends until now. Mirroring their roles in Stillman’s latest, Love & Friendship, Sevigny’s Alice is more naïve and impressionable, while Beckinsale’s Charlotte spews advice incessantly. Her helpful hints are often born of jealousy and intended to position herself better, whether she realizes it or not. In fact, as Alice’s fortunes rise both in romance and at work, Charlotte pushes to get in ahead of her. She even ends up dating Jimmy not long after Alice has moved on to Tom (Robert Sean Leonard, DeadPoet’s Society).

The characters in The Last Days of Disco bear a striking resemblance to those in Metropolitan [review], just a few years further down the line when they are no longer living at home and no longer able to rely on the same level of handouts from their family. All are anxious to make their mark in the world, but at the same time, they find that it’s not as easy as they expect. As Jimmy and Des complain at one point, they keep being branded as “yuppies” despite the fact that neither has a job that feels upwardly mobile or professional, much less lucrative.

But this is where disco comes in. Stillman has cast he discothèque as a metaphor for cultural change. The dancefloor bouillabaisse mixes all types together, and the scene offers different promises to each. Charlotte sees it as the harbinger of a real sexual revolution where women will have control, whereas Josh (Matt Keeslar), a freshman district attorney, sees it as a great equalizer where anyone can be whomever they want. His interpretation is particularly ironic, since being who they want to be is exactly what these young adults are failing at.

As episodic as Barcelona [review], and yet as socially contained as Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco provides Stillman with his most pronounced opportunity to place his idealized caricatures within the real world. Released from the manicured confines of their Manhattan apartments or the exile of a foreign land, the ensemble here steps closest to a recognizable world of any of the films. In fact, though released last, it fits the trilogy as a middle piece. A cameo of Audrey and Jack from Metropolitan shows us that there is some hope for these anxious wannabes, while an appearance by Ted from Barcelona (Taylor Nichols pulls double-duty) points a way of escape for the young men. The fact that unlike the other films, however, the characters all find their place by the end, or at least believable direction to the same, gives The Last Days of Disco a greater sense of finish. (We are still completely ignoring that Barcelona epilogue.)

By this go-around, Eigeman had perfected the fast-talking cynicism routine that had serviced him through Stillman’s previous efforts. Des fully embraces his role as a scoundrel, and his well-rehearsed routine of dumping women by telling them he has realized he is gay is tinged with equal parts savvy and machismo. And if we ever doubt Stillman’s sympathy for the cad, there is a Tarantino-worthy debate between Josh and Des over whether The Lady and the Tramp reinforces an unhealthy obsession with the bad boy or shows that a gadabout can really change.

The Last Days of Disco really belongs to Sevigny and Beckinsale, however. Though Alice bristles at being compared to a kindergarten teacher, Sevigny has never been more wholesome or confident, disguising her real charm as plainness. And Beckinsale’s performance is marvelously knowing. She treats Charlotte’s bullshit with the utmost sincerity, so much so that at times you can’t help but nod along and say, “Yeah, but she’s right, you know.” Frankly, by the end, I kind of feel like Charlotte and Des are the ones who’ve really got if figured out. They don’t see the value in conventional delusions.

The best part about The Last Days of Disco, though, is that it’s pragmatic without lacking hope. Stillman appears to judge his characters less, and to embrace their foibles without the wry irony of his earlier films. Perhaps it’s his own heartfelt  love of disco, just as he loves all dance crazes, and his full embrace of it that allows him to spread his wings a bit more. Or perhaps it’s just the confidence that comes from having made a few films. Regardless, The Last Days of Disco remains his crowning achievement. Nearly two decades later, it’s fun, and touching, and just plain likable.

Which makes it all the more ironic that if The Last Days of Disco has one real flaw, it’s that the dance-obsessed Stillman is not very good at directing the dancing itself. The club scenes are stiff and subdued, and never match up to the rhythms of the soundtrack. The discothèque is too brightly lit, removing any mystery or allure; it never feels like the type of place you’d really want to be. That may be the only advantage the “true-to-life” 54 has over its rival. Mark Christopher’s grim mess was released just a few months after Stillman’s triumph, to much more fanfare and failure proportional to the same. It’s coked out and seedy and mired in the 1970s, and Christopher makes Studio 54 look like a real good time, whereas Stillman is stepping forward toward the neon 1980s with little lingering nostalgia, a move that makes all the difference.

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS - #806

Why is it we always forget that Cary Grant could be rugged?

Sure, we remember that he’s funny and handsome and debonair, but even when he was playing the dandy, Grant was a man’s man. In movies when he wasn’t on the same continent as a tailored tuxedo, he was still suave and commanding, but in a way that was far different than the romantic playboy image that endures.

He was rugged.

Should you not believe me, then you need look no further than Howard Hawks’ 1939 aviation drama Only Angels Have Wings. In the film, written by Jules Furthman (The Docks of New York [review]), Grant plays Geoff Carter, the head of an airmail service flying out of South America. His crew is made up of guys who are mostly young and have the daredevil streak that is the stock-in-trade of motion picture pilots. They live for their time in the air, and when on the ground, they spend it getting high, indulging in booze, food, and women.

It’s one of those women, a tough Brooklyn gal, that serves as our entry point into their world, as well as the dramatic catalyst of much of what goes on in Only Angles Have Wings. Jean Arthur (The Devil and Miss Jones [review]) stars alongside Grant as Bonnie Lee, a traveling musician who runs into a couple of Geoff’s boys during a cruise layover. The two pilots (Allyn Joslyn, Heaven CanWait, and Noah Beery Jr., Red River) make a play for the beauty, but she’s more taken with the idea of conversing with her countrymen than she is being romanced. It would seem the American pilots have a similar homesickness, as they are all ready to have their heads turned by the visitor. This includes Geoff, who rearranges his team’s assignments to try to make sure he’s the one who can woo Bonnie before she has to return to the ship.

This proves disastrous, however; Bonnie has picked the wrong night to visit the airfield. Geoff’s people are responsible for shuttling the mail, and they must fly regardless of weather. One of Bonnie’s suitors has to go up in the terrible fog that has spread across the area, and he doesn’t make it back.

The scene in which Geoff and his right-hand man, Kid (Thomas Mitchell, Make Way for Tomorrow [review], Stagecoach [review]), try to guide the doomed flyer back to base is the first of many bravura sequences that Hawks delivers in Only Angels Have Wings. He plays the scene long, focusing on the ground team, cutting out ambient noise both for effect and because, storywise, it’s necessary for Geoff and Kid to ascertain where the plane is positioned. It’s a good trick. As they lean in to listen for the vessel’s location, we instinctively lean in, as well. Only Angels Have Wings has our attention.

It’s not the only time that Hawks lets a moment run long in the film. His narrative style was Tarantino-esque before Tarantino, drawing tension from delayed resolution (see, for instance, Death Proof [review] for Quentin’s employment of the same kind of withholding). Hawks is patient, taking his time with the scene, knowing that a quicker release would have far less impact. A year later, Hawks would make movie history with His Girl Friday, when he famously had his actors (including Cary Grant) perform the script at twice the accepted pace. Here, however, he is not concerned about getting through the material quickly. At times, Only Angels Have Wings appears shaggy. It is episodic rather than plot heavy. In the camaraderie amongst the pilots, Hawks achieves a surprising realism, letting the conversations follow a natural course and somehow capturing the performances in such a way that they appear, if not improvised, at least unrehearsed. Take for example a scene where Geoff and Kid try to settle a disagreement by flipping a coin. The action when the actors chase the money is clumsy, the way it would be were two fellows trying to one-up the other in real life. Maybe Grant and Mitchell had marks to hit, but the audience would never see them.

This stripe of convincing buddy-buddy behavior is essential to a film that is all about the relationships between men who have signed on to do a particular job. In many ways, Only Angels Have Wings prefigures the sense of duty that would permeate more patriotic films made in the years during World War II. What sets it apart from those films is its sense of isolationism. Geoff and his air force do what they do, and outside interference is not welcome, even when it’s a beautiful woman who is willing to accept that the untamable adventurer would be a fine lover just as he is. Only Angels Have Wings has story points in common with Casablanca. Both feature rogues who exile themselves to exotic, dangerous locales to escape a broken heart--but unlike Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, Cary Grant’s Geoff doesn’t do what he does because it would be good for others, he does it because it’s what is expected of him. It’s what he signed up for.

In this, Only Angels Have Wings also prefigures film noir, and even another famous Bogart picture, The Maltese Falcon [review]. There is an existential streak in Geoff that we would see in noir antiheroes. He has a code, and he must follow it. As a rake and a rapscallion, Geoff’s Achilles heel is his commitment to doing the right thing. Geoff’s fatal flaw is that if the mission is considered impossible, he’ll take flight himself rather than send one of his men. It’s the sort of soft and gooey character trait that makes audiences care for him and adds credibility to Bonnie’s unrequited love for the flyboy. We know he’s good despite his cynical protestations.

Also reminiscent of noir is the sense that the past will catch up with you, no matter how good your are at outrunning it. Fans of Gilda [review] take note, Only Angels Have Wings gives Rita Hayworth her breakout role, and in many ways, it sets the tone for her signature performance. Hayworth plays Judy, the wife of Geoff’s newest hire. She also happens to be the woman who broke Geoff’s heart, the mysterious phantom that Bonnie sees hovering over her would-be lover from the jump. Neither Geoff nor Bonnie reveal this fact, it would be too complicated and they both would rather deny their past. Yet, the added irony is that Judy’s husband (silent-era star Richard Barthelmess) is himself harboring a disgraceful history, one he has hidden from his bride. Geoff and the boys keep that secret to themselves, even though, for Geoff, exposing it might change everything. Move this plot to a casino, and it’s Gilda before Gilda.

The big difference between Only Angels Have Wings and noir, though, is that Only Angels Have Wings is more redemptive. Both men will get another shot to prove themselves, and even Judy will have a chance to get it right. The only one who doesn’t need redemption is Bonnie, but then if we know our noir, the down-to-earth blonde might have a chance to ground the aerial daredevil. Just maybe.

Furthman gives his script a kind of doubled structure, like a coin with the same face on either side (plot point!). The first flight will be echoed in the last flight, and though we might guess that hearts will melt, the writing stays true to its main character’s principles right to the end. That last scene is pure old Hollywood, and yet smarter than it has any right to be, holding fast to the manly ethos laid out in the rest of the movie. I feel simultaneously more sensitive and more macho for having seen it.

Criterion’s high-def presentation of Only Angels Have Wings is wonderful, offering a pristine picture and a soundtrack that lacks any snaps, crackles, hiss, or pops. Extras include a radio performance of the movie, condensed for the home listening audience, and a new documentary examining Howard Hawks’ other aviation-themed movies.

And for comic book fans, the cover and interior illustration is by Francesco Francavilla, artist on Zorro and Afterlife with Archie, as well as creator of the pulp-inspired The Black Beetle.

The screengrabs for this review were taken from an earlier DVD release. The Criterion disc under review was provided by the Criterion Collection.

SHALLOW GRAVE - #616

Motive, means, opportunity.

Except all out of order. That’s the way of 1994’s ShallowGrave. It’s backwards. Opportunity provides the means, and hanging onto those means becomes the motive.

An accidental overdose of the fourth and newest roommate in a Scottish flat offers the tight-knit friends sharing the apartment the chance to change their own lives. The three twentysomethings--journalist Alex (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting), doctor Juliet (Kerry Fox, An Angel at My Table), and accountant David (Christopher Eccleston, eventual star of some television sci-fi medical drama or other)--find a suitcase full of cash in the dead man’s bedroom. He was a drug dealer as well as a user. No one outside of the apartment really knew he lived there, he had just moved in. If they can discard the body undetected, they could keep the cash.

The debut of Danny Boyle, Shallow Grave is darkly comic, almost Hitchcockian, with hints of the cinematic verve (extreme angles, tricky camera moves, songs by Leftfield) that would quickly become his trademark. The ease with which he developed that style, and with which he now cravenly exploits it in humdrum efforts like Trance [review] and Steve Jobs, doesn’t necessarily suggest the cinematic revolution to come, but Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald, and writer John Hodge were on the verge of something big. That they would take off with Trainspotting two years later, only to crash and burn with the unfairly maligned Coen Bros.’ riff A Life Less Ordinary and the exaggerated failings of The Beach is perhaps a defining story of 1990s motion pictures. Frame it as a mini version of the rise and fall of the American auteurs of the 1970s. Like Coppola leapfrogging from The Godfather [review] to One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now (if, you know, everyone hated the latter). We aim so high only to have our excess bring us low.

There isn’t a more 1990s movie than Shallow Grave. It’s not just of its time, but it’s accidentally about its time. Sure, there’s the obvious bad, poorly fitted fashion and the techno soundtrack, but it’s more than the outer trappings, it’s also the characters. Think about the types: the smartass Kurt Cobain wannabe, the independent woman with the short haircut, and the uptight accountant. Give us a Joey and a Phoebe, and you’ve got yourselves an episode of Friends where the Ugly Naked Guy dies in Monica and Rachel’s flat. (Oh, wait, we need a Rachel, too.)  And just like the 1990s, you want to slap that mildly amusing smirk off Shallow Grave’s face by the end. Its deep lesson is about as deep as the title would have you believe. It’s so ’90s, its sequel is John Cusack’s suit in Con Air. To quote Pulp, a band whose rise was contemporary to the folks involved with this picture, “You’re going to like it, but not a lot.”

Part of the problem is that the Juliet, David, and even Alex are all aggressively unlikeable and, even worse, not that interesting--which is usually the way around unlikeability, we want to watch the terrible people doing terrible things. Witty Alex isn’t all that funny, and none of the three appear to be anything other than mediocre at their chosen professions. Hence their need to belittle others and play cruel pranks. While Hodge’s scripts does raise a lot of moral conundrums, with the dead body and the stash of cash proving an apt metaphor for much of the 1990s--does one stay true to oneself or sell-out?--his characters never break out of their types. This means none of their decisions are all that surprising. We can guess that, for instance, the uptight bean counter who initially blanches at the prospect of covering up a death will change his mind after being humiliated at work, and eventually decide he wants to e  a big man and deserves the lion’s share of the treasure. Likewise, we know that there will be other bad guys on the hunt for that money, and the urge to protect it will cause the friends to all turn on each other.

Which, hey, that could quite possibly be a good movie. Think The Treasure of Sierra Madre but in a four-room Edinburgh rental. The cast here is as game as John Huston’s was in 1948. McGregor is fresh-faced and buoyant, his charisma punching holes in the script’s smarm, and Eccleston is predictably tense but without the egotism later directors would exploit to varying effect. The problem here is that Boyle feels often more like an architect and a technician than a storyteller. Shallow Grave predicts the award-winning sheen of his most successful feature, Slumdog Millionaire, and like Slumdog, has the same preoccupation with making the pieces fit a schematic rather than find an organic path to the same conclusion. It’s more Jenga than plot. Have you ever asked yourself how Dev Patel’s character managed to be asked not just the right questions, but in chronological order mirroring the events of his life?

In fact, if you think about Slumdog’s ever-present, Oscar-winning score and how much polish that added to Slumdog, you have another connection. Because the music in Shallow Grave, provided by Simon Boswell (Santa Sangre, Hackers), is cheesy cliché all the way, like a bad television movie that is afraid the dramatic histrionics won’t work well enough on their own, despite how obvious the emotional beats really are. It’s all shortcut.

It’s also pretty easy to watch, and thus pretty easy to give Shallow Grave a pass, despite its considerable flaws. Boyle’s filmmaking is skillful and alluring, and draws the viewer along like a Looney Tunes character who has caught whiff of a savory pie, floating on air, ready to take a bite. Perhaps I’m being harsh on the film, I used to be a fan, and it’s been since the actual 1990s that I likely saw it. It’s funny how things strike you depending on where you are in life, and it is worth remembering how exciting the 1990s could be post-Sex, Lies, &Videotape; however, unlike that movie or, perhaps, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Shallow Grave may be too much of a time capsule, frozen in its era, and less relatable for it.

"Mr. Dead Drug Dealer, you're trying to seduce me."

HAROLD AND MAUDE - #608

Generally, when connecting the two sides of life, a la Shakespeare and the ages of man, babies and senior citizens are usually listed as mirror images of one another. The older person’s functions fail them, they return to helplessness, and also there is a perception of a reclaiming of innocence and naïveté. Watching Harold and Maude, however, one might make a different argument. In Hal Ashby’s 1971 comedy, it’s adolescence and old age that complement one another. They aren’t mirror images, but there is a healthy morbidness and a willingness for adventure that fit together quite well.

Bud Court stars as the titular Harold, a wealthy young man adrift and lacking in purpose. Or so his interfering mother (the fantastically named Vivian Pickles) would have us believe. She wishes Harold would find a good woman, or join the army and get some discipline. Harold isn’t interested in either. All that really interests him is death. He stages elaborate fake suicides to shock his mother--though she has become so immune to his pantomimes, she is more annoyed by the blood on her bathroom mirror than her son lying in the tub with his wrists cut.

Harold likes to attend funerals, and that’s where he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), a woman in her mid-80s who also likes to crash the services. Maude is, quite aptly, an eccentric. She steals cars and smokes a hookah and liberates plants and animals into the wild. She takes a liking to Harold, and though he is skeptical at first, Harold takes a liking to Maude. A friendship develops, and then a romance.

Harold and Maude is a classic tale of outsiders, a black romantic comedy of misfits. Neither of the lovers fit in the world, but unlike Harold, Maude has created her own space within it. If she offers him any one important thing, it is that: an example by which he can embrace his own uniqueness. Maude has experience with life and death both, and neither scares her. Harold embodies the cliché adolescent feeling of believing he’d be better off dead than alive, which he even admits in a tearful confession midway through the picture, in what is probably Harold and Maude’s most emotional scene. Harold’s first near-death experience brought him both attention and a kind of peace, as everyone believed he really was deceased. For a brief pocket of time, he was in that rare state where people remembered him fondly. Though Maude sees her own time coming up soon, she offers the young man an alternative: an existential rejection of all things mortal. There is freedom living in a state of in-between, a state that Harold will find in the final scene of the film, which itself prefigures a very similar leap of freedom at the end of Quadrophenia [review] just a few years later.

For all this heavy thinking, Harold and Maude is not a ponderous movie. On the contrary, the script, written by Colin Higgins, who would later go on to helm a couple of Dolly Parton vehicles like 9 to 5, is lightly composed, its episodic structure allowing for the narrative to remain nimble and never be bogged down with one scenario too long. Together, Higgins and Ashby create a unique pocket universe for their characters to live in. It’s quirky and stylized in a way that would later influence Wes Anderson, but unlike Anderson, not nostalgic. Rather, it is very much of its time. The filmmakers weave in current events and important issues of the late ’60s and early ’70s, including free love, war, and technology. Harold’s uncle (Charles Tyner) is an army officer that promises him glory overseas; Harold’s dates, found via a computer dating service, bring glimpses of the outside world into Harold’s isolated existence. For instance, one is a political science student, and she is concerned whether or not Harold is “involved.”

My favorite of Harold’s would-be companions is Sunshine (Ellen Geer), an actress who is gung-ho to join in on Harold’s performances. He fakes hara-kiri in front of her, and she not only delights in the public spectacle, but takes the dagger and shows him how she died on stage playing Juliet. In a more conventional film, the script would diverge here, and Sunshine’s arrival would threaten what Harold and Maude have together. Instead, Ashby is content to let the sequence deliver one of the film’s funniest punchlines and then move on.

It’s kind of remarkable I never saw Harold and Maude until well into my twenties, because this would have been an ideal movie for me when I was a teenager. Its obsession with death, its quirky fashion, the flaunting of social convention--it seems ideal for Teenage Jamie. Of course, I didn’t have Rushmore [review] back then, either, and maybe fate was such that I could not be inspired by Harold and Maude, that was reserved for Wes Anderson--who makes no bones about cribbing from Ashby for his second feature. Max Fischer’s obsession with an older woman and his dramatic performances are directly borrowed from Harold and Maude. In a Tarantino-esque move, Anderson even goes so far as to crib some of the Cat Stevens tunes from the soundtrack. I imagine if we ever got to see Max’s first car, it would be a hearse.

What is perhaps most impressive about Harold and Maude--and there is a lot to be impressed with, not least of which are the exceptional performances by Cort and especially Gordon, whose every moment appears effortless--is how Ashby avoids allowing this strange world he’s creating to ever be precious or contrived. While careful thought certainly went into the details--the fashion, the set dressing, the locations--there is also a bit of a shaggy dog imperfection to it all, a trait that comes naturally to Ashby in all of his films. There is a raggedness that lends an air or reality to even the most unreal of proceedings. (See also Being There [review]).

When thinking again about the connection between adolescence and old age, I have to say there is something about how the young man connects to the old woman that appeals to middle-aged me. Perhaps it’s that the message of the movie extends beyond such specific time periods. Harold’s plight is one that many of us will return to again and again. Who am I, and what should I do with myself? If only we would all be so lucky to find a Maude here and there along the way. Or better yet, to wake up to the fact that our own personal Maude might just be us in the future, as we gather experience and wisdom, and simply just learn to be ourselves.

Sidebar 1: In a previous write-up for the Portland Mercury, I chose Harold & Maude as one of three films to watch alongside Rushmore. Read that piece here.

Sidebar 2: Check out more from Jordan Crane, the artist behind the cover and the menus, here.

KISS ME DEADLY - #568

“I picked up a girl. If she hadn't gotten in my way, I wouldn't have stopped. She must be connected with somethin' big.”

It’s a fairly common private detective line. It makes me think of Nick Cave’s intro to “From Her to Eternity,” a pulpy title if ever there was one. “I wanna tell you about a girl.” This may not have been Mike Hammer’s opening declaration in Kiss Me Deadly but his words describe the opening scene nonetheless. A woman (Cloris Leachman, in her first film role) freshly escaped from a mental hospital runs out into the middle of the road and forces the next passing car to stop. She runs it into the ditch, in fact. But since it’s Mike Hammer, here played by Ralph Meeker (Paths of Glory [review]), he forgives her the indiscretion and gives her a ride. Not out of a sense of duty, he’d have passed her by if he could, but like he said, she got in the way, he had to stop, and now he’s involved.

This isn’t noble, it’s cynical, and it’s what makes Hammer so fascinating. His whole motivation for pursuing the case is partially out of an obligation to see it through, but I think it’s mainly out of annoyance at other people. He appears more concerned with proving the cops are idiots and poking the bad guys in the ribs than he is with right and wrong. As long as he comes out on top, what does it really matter?

It’s as bleak of an attitude as you’re likely to find in film noir, and it’s a major reason why many scholars consider Kiss Me Deadly to be the last legit example of the movement. There is nowhere to go from here. Robert Aldrich’s 1955 adaptation of Mickey Spillaine is as dark and rough as it gets, and its ending reveals how insignificant we all really are. Not insignificant in the same sense as a guy taking two bullets in the back or losing a suitcase of money, but serious insignificance in the face of all things. The characters here are a victim of the same kind of hubris that has led many a heavy to bleed out on cold pavement, but on a global scale.

The plot is inconsequential. Hammer runs across the girl, the girl dies, he decides to find out who and why. Each step he takes reveals another obstacle, usually in the form of a person who doesn’t want him to know the truth, and he charges through to the next. It’s a genre exercise. One step forward, two back--each revelation gets Hammer no closer to unraveling the truth.

Which, as I’ve suggested, is the point. For once, there is no unraveling the truth. There is only the personal unraveling in the face of one truth: we are all going to die.

Hammer seems ideally suited to be the one to find this out. He is unfazed by everything he trips over. Meeker plays him as a postured muscle man who can’t be deterred. Once he has something between his teeth, he’s going to chew it down. Nowhere is this more evident than his relationship with Velda (Maxine Cooper), his secretary and girlfriend. As the case begins, Hammer’s not too bothered with the mystery yet, and he’s more than eager to make love to her; when he’s deeper into the conspiracy and what happened to the dead woman is all he can think about, Velda practically crawls up on him, and the private dick barely registers her presence. Velda is bothered, but she’s not surprised, she knows the deadly cat’s cradle Hammer is tangled in. “First, you find a little thread,” she says, “the little thread leads you to a string, and the string leads you to a rope, and from the rope you hang by the neck.”

Aldrich sees Hammer as a modern antihero, a man who works with his hands caught up in a plot of men who work with their minds. The essential difference, it would seem, is that these other guys don’t consider the consequences. Are you ready for spoilers? The thing that everyone is after and that will ultimately undo everything--they call it “The Great Whatsit”--is a briefcase containing a nuclear device. That’s right. The stuff that dreams are made of is no longer a counterfeit bird statue, but a legit A-bomb. Anyone who has seen Pulp Fiction has seen Tarantino’s riff on the Kiss Me Deadly briefcase: when you open it, it glows. Only here, it won’t just burn your hands off, it could destroy the whole world. Which it very well might be doing at the conclusion of the picture. Hammer and the dead woman’s roommate, Carver (Gaby Rodgers), watch from the water as a beachside house explodes after Carver opened the Maguffin. Only, as the screen fades to black, the explosion isn’t over, and we don’t know if Hammer and the gal get out alive. The title card that says “The End,” in this case, is more of a big maybe.

As a piece of cinema, Kiss Me Deadly is as roughly sculpted as the hero it portrays. Ernest Laszlo’s photography is imprecise and off kilter. The camera barrels through the scenes in much the same fashion that Hammer does. Zooms are clumsy, framing is out of whack, angles are imprecise. It’s as if there is no space to make it pretty. Time is running out! The world is out of order! Even the credits are running the wrong way!

Or it might be as simple as the fact that what Kiss Me Deadly is portraying isn’t meant to be pretty. It’s not just Hammer’s cynical attitude that jars the viewer, even to this day, but the nastiness of the violence--the first burst of which is a rather gruesome torture scene. One that happens almost entirely off screen, mind you, we just see the girl’s bare feet and hear her awful screams, but the effect is just as grisly as any bloody slasher movie. Opening with that sets the stakes high: this is the kind of vicious business Hammer is going to have to find retribution for.

That there is none may be the most cynical part of the whole affair. Sure, all the bad man are dead, but pretty soon, everyone else will be, too. I’m sure there’s cold comfort in knowing they went first.

REPO MAN - #654

"There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine," says one character in Repo Man, Alex Cox's 1984 punk rock comedy.

"I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!" declares another.

The nouns are different, but the sentiments are the same. One crazy concept deserves another. When man has gone this nuts, all nutty ideas are created equal.

It's too bad that Criterion couldn't release Repo Man to the collection just after Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, and then maybe followed it with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, giving us three consecutive spine numbers with mysterious glowing objects under the lid, each representing some kind of metaphor for man's dissatisfaction with the current state of being. Well, okay, I'm not sure we can take the briefcase in Tarantino's film that far, but he clearly watched Alex Cox movies back at the video store. In Repo Man, there are alien corpses thawing out in the back of a Chevy Malibu, incinerating all who look upon them. In Aldrich, our doom was the nuclear bomb mankind created to obliterate himself; in Tarantino, it's possibly the manifestation of spirituality and evil, hence the 666 combination lock; for Cox, it's the doom from beyond, a higher form come to show us what a pathetic race of meatbags we really are.

Emilio Estevez stars as Otto, a punker in Los Angeles who doesn't fit into the generic culture that permeates 1980s America. At the start of the picture, he works in a grocery store that deals exclusively in generic, plain-wrap food. It's a good sight gag but also one based in reality. At the time, the Ralph's supermarket chain had its own brand that was just white packaging with a blue stripe and the name of the product printed on top. Public Image Limited lampooned it with their album that was, well, called Album if you bought the record, and Cassette if you bought the tape. It had the hit song "Rise," about a social misfit who can't take it anymore. "Anger is an energy," John Lydon chants--and it could have just as easily been a motto for Otto. He gets fired from his job for refusing to stack the plain cans spaced equally apart. Uniformity is treason.

It's on his way home after being canned that Otto meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a repo man who tricks Otto into helping him repossess a car. As payment, Bud takes the kid under his wing and teaches him the rules of the game. It's not so much a veteran of the system taking in the disaffected youth and corrupting him into selling out, but rather a veteran outlaw who himself exists somewhere outside the system while helping perpetuate and enforce it. The repo men are a little bit like the gang that couldn't shoot straight, and Cox's film has its roots in the western as much as anything else, even if there is some rejection of the tradition, i.e. "John Wayne is a fag." But that's anarchy for you. The cowboy frontier was about establishing your own code of conduct because civilization's laws were too stifling.

So it is here. Otto can continue to pursue nihilism for no good purpose, or he can find one. Given the way life was going under Reagan, that purpose is selfish at first, but the deeper Otto gets into this new life, he becomes exposed to the true extremes of society. One one hand, there is the CIA looking to squash radical ideas; on the other hand, the trio of mohawked, shaved-head crooks robbing liquor stores. At some point all these forces want the same thing: the Chevy Malibu and the secrets locked inside.

Repo Man's crazy theories are an amalgamation of the weirdness of the 1980s. Stagnant culture forced people to go searching for solutions that were beyond the norm. Whether it was believing in aliens or Scientology (here parodied as "Diaretics"), or jumping into a musical subculture, or living by a code in a secret society, everyone was looking for something. Cox's credo about UFOs and time machines, communists and Christians, was his dismissal of all such pursuits as being one and the same. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In this case, literally, he's the lobotomized driver trafficking in extraterrestrial corpses. Sure, he's got some wacky ideas. So does Miller (Tracey Walter), the one who equates spaceships and time travel. Considering where they both end up, they prove that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you.

Though he goes with Miller in the end, Otto doesn't so much join the crazies as he rejects the ways of thinking that make him a part of the herd. The key scene is really in the shoot-out at the liquor store, the showdown between three aspects of Otto's life. In a standoff that must have given a young Q.T. many a good idea, it's a three-way battle between Otto's straight life (the security guard that escorted him out of the grocery store), his punk roots (the robbers, his former friends), and his newer career (Bud). Not only is he the only one who really walks away, but he does so by drawing an individualistic line in the sand. As his old buddy dies, he says, "Society made me who I am," to which Otto replies, "No, it didn't. You're a white suburban punk. Just like me." It's a defiant rejection of anything that would otherwise attempt to define you. Otto is his own man, and like Pablo Picasso, no one calls him an asshole.

By all accounts, so is Alex Cox, and Repo Man is certainly its own movie. In all honesty, for as much meaning as I could sift out of it, I didn't find it to be an entirely satisfying viewing experience, not the way I did when I saw it all the way back in high school. The gonzo, anything-goes quality of the narrative that made it feel fresh and uninhibited thirty years ago just seems messy now. Cox doesn't quite know how to resolve all the criss-crossing story lines, instead letting the episodic storytelling pile on itself in one massive jumble. He also never finds a consistent tone for the humor. The biting satire gives way to ridiculous slapstick and an occasional meanness.

Still, Estevez and Stanton both give excellent performances, and the music is pretty good. Plus, you have to admire any film that dares to give a two-finger homage to Grease, stealing the musical's ending for its own purposes. Of all the punk rock stylings Cox adopts, that may be the most punk of all.