Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 46
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
316/365: Daisies (Vera Chytilova, 1966) (Criterion Channel)
No New Wave movie, from Czechoslovakia or elsewhere, had ever resembled anything like Chytlova’s defiant experiment, an epochal exercise in individualistic-feminist resistance executed with a frenetic measure of in-your-face norm-meltdown that’s still exhilarating to watch. Of course, it’s actually just a prank, but Sasha Baron-Cohen owes everything to the movie’s simple non-narrative: two giggling, semi-dressed young women, both named Marie (Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbanova), irrationally cavort at high speeds through conventional Euro society, treating trad norms and rituals and food and their own bodies like so many meaningless feathers in the wind. It’s not a story, it’s a scary, sexy, irrepressible dance party, a message of complete freedom, and naturally it was banned — in fact, it’s hard to imagine a Communist bureaucrat who wouldn’t want to hide it in a vault forever.
317/365: The Razor’s Edge (John Byrum, 1984) (Amazon Prime)
All-but-unseen, unpredictable, freakishly sad, this vanity-project W. Somerset Maugham adaptation for Bill Murray (his reward for the Ghostbusters franchise) remains one of the most disquieting, off-kilter movies of the Reagan Administration, a portrait of spiritual craving lit up by an irrational warmth but also spiked by money-zombie class war satire, and by Murray’s irrepressible lapses into hyper-irony, arriving in flashes and making Margaret Dumonts out of the rest of the cast. This Larry Darrell, Maugham’s questing Lost Generation wanderer, is equal parts deadpan clown, genuinely befuddled nowhere man and utter mystery; in other words, a complete person, running with his very private devils. Murray’s lostness gives the film five dimensions — is it Murray or Darrell or both running so awkwardly for the foxhole in the war scenes? Is that persistent throat lump signal the actor’s unease or the character’s? Director Byrum, perhaps inadvertently, imbues the movie with the buzz of an elegaic feverdream, but it’s the disarming details, from Murray/Darrell’s mocking seal impersonation to his cheek-press against his murdered lover’s lips in a Paris morgue, that stick in the memory like a heartbreak.
318/365: The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A much-celebrated indie out of nowhere, this horror film gets most of its mileage from its absolutely convincing setting — the 1630s New England wilderness, where a Puritan family struggles to survive and become faced with multifarious (and somewhat maddeningly unspecific) supernatural forces. Something of an achievement in period reconsitution, it’s also acted with bristling conviction, particularly by Anya Taylor-Joy as the teenage protagonist, and Game of Thrones vets Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson as the parents. You definitely walk away feeling as though you’ve been somewhere real.
319/365: 99 River Street (Phil Karlson, 1953) (Amazon Prime)
This hostile, complicated noir paints a vivid portrait of a postwar America, with John Payne as a has-been boxer now driving a New York cab, much to the bilious chagrin of his ex-showgirl wife, played with selfish venom by Peggy Castle. Nearing the boiling point once he finds out she’s cheating on him with a snake (the disconcertingly slimy Brad Dexter), whom we know is a homicidal jewel thief, Payne’s mug gets suckered by a flighty, narcissistic actress (the fluttery Evelyn Keyes) into helping her dispose of the body of a Broadway producer’s she killed in self-defense. That is, until it’s revealed that the whole thing was a ruse (the theater’s investors wanted to prove the actress’s chops), at which point Payne socks every single one of them, nearly kills Keyes, and then finds his wife’s body in his cab’s backseat, strangled and planted by Dexter’s lowlife. A thick weft of grungy and believable supporting characters keeps things grown-up, notably Jay Adler’s as a menacing diamond fence, Eddy Waller as a fight trainer, Frank Faylen as a weathered taxi dispatcher, and so on, giving the film a zesty New York-ness that belies its entirely-studio-shot locations. Karlson, as always, keeps things terse, tense, and sentiment-free. It’s another restored staple for the genre canon, seething with mistrust over an America where the proles who fought WWII struggle in rotten jobs while thieves lurk in the backrooms twisting the system and getting rich.
320/365: Cutter’s Way (Ivan Passer, 1981) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A haunting, ghostly post-American New Wave film about national guilt and mourning, set on the fringes of ’70s Santa Barbara wealth, and circling around a trio of lost souls: Jeff Bridges as a dim, womanizing commitment-phobe, John Heard as a one-eyed, one-legged, ‘Nam vet trouble-lover, and Lisa Eichhorn as his sad, hope-wasted wife. Heard’s boozy, raging extrovert decides to fill the hole that Vietnam has left in him and in middle America with a murder mystery and an absurd stab at unlikely justice, even though we know as little about the mystery in the end as the troubled characters do. The atmosphere is pungent, the cultural autopsy is chilling, and the actors all craft 4-D people — Bridges’ gigolo pulses with grace just as he reeks of helpless narcissism, while Heard’s confrontational freakout is the bad-news friend we all had once and eventually had to leave behind. And Eichhorn — where did she come from, with her froggy voice, vodka-bloodshot eyes, sleepy-ruminative way of talking, and fearsome indignation?
321/365: Plan 9 from Outer Space (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1959) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The worst film? Hardly, but it’s a good vote for the richest, most rewatchably inept film ever made. With its Bressonian disregard for realistic acting, knotted catch-22 dialogue, jaw-slackening discontinuity (day/night, Lugosi/6-foot chiropractor, tiny/huge tombstones), dazzling fusion of back-alley kitsch and Caligarian expressionism (wrinkled night backdrop, cardboard mausoleum, graveyard grass carpet), Wood’s magnum opus — aliens in silk pajamas scheme to take over Earth — smacks less of ineptitude than of outright dementia. Indeed, given the rheumy phases of the man’s life (Tinseltown outskirter, transvestite, suicidal tosspot, pornographer, world-class lowlife), you get a sense that watching any of his films, but perhaps Plan 9 most of all, is in a very real sense like entering the dead-end dreams of an authentic American nut. That they’re uproarious as well, and have single-handedly fostered an entire subgenre of film appreciation, simply adds to their legend. As grade-Z celebrity “psychic” Criswell intones in his prologue, “You are interested in the unknown. The mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here.” Amen.
322/365: Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976) (Archive.org)
Some documentaries, by documenting real events, become history themselves. This Oscar-winning socialist-cinema doc offers an extraordinarily detailed chronicle of an intimate, forgotten American war: a 1973 Kentucky coal-miners’ strike, captured in what amounts to real time (there are no after-the-fact summaries), as it is met with violent resistance by corporate-backed authorities and the law. It’s a bruising community tale of murder, gun threats, crowd violence, poverty, corporate usury and, in the end, astonishing union solidarity. At the same time, Kopple sketches out a succinct historical context of nearly a hundred years of union building and busting and bloodshed, a vast national story about power and resistance that still goes missing from public-school history. In 1976, this rather terrifying film rocked audiences (in theaters and on PBS) and instantly became a cultural touchstone; today, it also spotlights, with its customized communist ballads, IWW sloganeering and memories of healthier early-20th-century worker networks, the pathetic state of organized labor in the new global economy.
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, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45
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