Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 39
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
267/365: Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
From nowhere, during the Carter administration no less, David Lynch landed on the American scene with this mutant indie, quite possibly the most ingenuously strange American film ever made. It debuted as a midnight movie, and we’ve been trying to articulate what this is ever since, from its suppurating Man in the Planet to the wailing mutant baby to the Lady in the Radiator to the pencil factory, and somehow we’re right back where we started, wondering when the mere suffocation of dream logic ends and Lynch’s one-of-a-kind perspective on stuff — a point of view that’s long come to be defined as just “Lynchian” — begins. Beautiful, nauseating, inexplicably discomfiting, it heralded a brand new voice, one that’s still haunting our culture like a poltergeist.
268/365: Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) (Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel)
The team of Powell and Pressburger made some of the most vivid and most mysterious British films of the 20th century, and this is one of their most beloved, a tense, sumptuous and finally harrowing story about Anglican nuns working a mission in the Indian Himalayas, where the cruel landscape reflects back upon the women’s own escalating sense of isolation and sexual frustration. Deborah Kerr is iconic as the leader, but Kathleen Byron, as the least stable of the sisters, steals the show.
269/365: Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) (Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
In a decade when Hollywood movies made enormous effort to faithfully render real American landscapes and subcultures, this controversial white-knuckler has the sweaty, dirty, sun-soaked authenticity of a real and very bad memory. Four city guys (amiable Jon Voight, would-be outdoorsman Burt Reynolds, bleeding heart Ronnie Cox and chubby fish out of water Ned Beatty) go on an ill-advised Georgian canoe trip that plummets down a rabbit hole once they’re assaulted by hillbillies, becoming an entirely convincing study of what happens when the privileged niceties of modern life, and what passes for modern masculinity, are stripped down to the bone.
270/365: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
One of those movies — a movie that despite a familiar cast and a familiar plot is positively intoxicating, and can become almost an addiction. Perhaps credit extends also to sardonic screenwriter Graham Greene (whose skills at plot-making were unrivalled) and the trademarked zither score, but this hallowed saga of postwar Vienna — American schmoe Joseph Cotten comes to town looking for his old buddy/black marketeer Orson Welles, and is told that he’d just recently died, which may or may not be true — simply gels into pure Movieness right in front of your eyes. It’s often noted that, without taking credit from Reed (whose previous films, 1947’s Odd Man Out and 1948’s The Fallen Idol, are even better), Welles didn’t direct but certainly could have.
271/365: Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Who would’ve thought that the man behind those air-brushed cut-out animations on Monty Python’s Flying Circus would eventually arrive at this, an anachronistic, technophobic mega-vision of a preposterously British bureaucratic dystopia that pushes Orwell’s 1984 through a Play-Doh Fun Factory? Gilliam uncorked every bottle in his cellar for this hellzapoppin experience, which chronicles a lone Everyman (Jonathan Pryce) trying to find joy and righteousness in a neo-fascist future where misprinted paperwork can get an innocent man “erased,” and ductwork is so maniacal that repairmen have become covert vigilantes (a nice turn by Robert DeNiro in a SWAT uniform). By taking out newspaper ads and holding a clandestine screening for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Gilliam shamed a scissor-happy Universal into releasing this visually berserk film unmutilated — right down to the catatonic climax.
272/365: Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Welcome to Endsville: this 10-cent B-movie may be film noir’s greatest, direst dirge. Road movie ideogram, skid row bad dream, down-&-dirty postwar tragedy, this lean ditty — about a luckless schmuck (Tom Neal) who adopts a dead man’s identity, thereby ensuring his own doom — feels like an exhumed artifact from a time when it was every man for himself and God against all. For all its kitsch, narrative shortcuts, and uproarious ’40s vernacular, Ulmer’s film is, ultimately, more than something you watch — it’s a revealed strand of all-American DNA, and a genre landmark.
273/265: Barton Fink (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1991) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
The Coens won at Cannes with this rich casserole, in which a self-righteous Clifford Odets-like playwright (John Turturro) goes to ’30s Hollywood to cash in on scriptwriting, and enters a deranged dream factory of uneasy stereotypes: a Faulknerian lush (John Mahoney), a splenetic producer (Tony Shaloub), a megalomaniacal studio head (Michael Lerner), and, best of all, John Goodman’s traveling sales agent, all aw-shucks working-class congeniality and sweaty psychomania. Eventually, the dislocation and stress is abetted by an errant dead body. More than anything, the movie’s a feast of ironic details (the wallpaper), character explosions, and evocation of place — you may see that hotel in your dreams.
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
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