Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 4
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
22/365: Miller’s Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990) (Vudu, Redbox, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The Coen brothers’ early masterpiece, rampaging around the legacy of Dashiell Hammett (whose novel The Glass Key was the uncredited template) with a firehose dose of rumrunner-era Midwest ambience, a studied visual palate of dark overcoats and endless pine forests, a pretzel plot that reportedly stymied even the Coens in the scripting phase, and a slang-filthy assault of banter and patois that makes it one of the most exciting movies to listen to since The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The story ropes around the conflict of nerves between two crime bosses in an unnamed midwestern city, and the one man (Gabriel Byrne) trying for his own reason to play both ends against the middle, but any synopsis will wilt in the face of the film’s majestic-ironic set-pieces, from the spoiled assassination set to Danny Boy to the diptych of fateful walks into the woods, and in the face of the tommy-gun cataract of straight-faced jokes, which are often riotous but at the same time deadly serious. Both an inventive satire of gangster films and a dazzling postmodern apex of the genre, the movie can be broad and goony one moment and grimly moralistic the next, in an utterly cockeyed movie-movie world of tweed, bourbon, gunfire and unspoken allegiances. It’s also one of those movies jacked into the stratosphere by its distinctive score — Carter Burwell’s Irish-y lament-theme conjures depth even in the film’s cartoony interludes.
23/365: The Living Dead Girl (Jean Rollin, 1982) (Kanopy, Tubi, Amazon Prime)
France’s reigning softcore-gorehound-vampire cheesemaster — or, in fact, France’s only such filmmaker — Rollin was been a well-kept secret for decades, at least in America, and truth be told, most of his films, comprised as they are of very real decaying castles and crypts, nude actresses draped in transparent sashes and set with vampire teeth, and buckets of bright fake blood, are silly affairs best left to the cultists. This freak is an exception, a reluctant-zombie scenario that metaphorizes all over the place. A chemical spill in an empty estate house’s cellar resurrects a dead-too-soon blonde (Francoise Blanchard), who is soon found out by her devoted childhood girlfriend (Marina Pierro, favorite of Walerian Borowczyk’s later years), who thinks her beloved blood-sister is sick and the victim of a faked-death scheme, and who begins to kill innocents to feed her. It’s the only zombie film focused on loyalty and love, and the only one in which the guilt-tortured flesh-eater weeps and shrieks over her final heartbreaking meal. Lavished in exploitative heaps of nudity and gore, it’s nevertheless shockingly tender and sad.
24/365: Scene of the Crime (Roy Rowland, 1949) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Merely another film noir, another assembly-line cop-&-crime procedural produced at MGM but with no special fanfare or investment, but like so many examples of this beloved genre it’s stunningly rich, thoughtful and chilling. We open with a nearly-dialogue-free confrontation on a nightened studio street, and a cop is gunned down by a man with a large birthmark on his face. We don’t see this man — “the Turk” — again until the very end, and in the meantime we trail after hard-bitten cop Van Johnson, whose job keeps him in a constant state of interruptus with luscious wife Arlene Dahl, as he tracks the rat down, through LA’s bookie rackets and by pretending to woo guileless burlesque singer Gloria De Haven. A stock set-up, sure, but it bristles with supporting-role wildlife, each character seemingly starring in their own, even darker film: John McIntire’s aging detective-sage, facing blindness and the business end of his career; Robert Gist’s exasperated private dick, reeling with half a grin after brawling with a hood; Norman Lloyd’s irritating snitch, appearing without warning in cops’ backseats and ending up on a meat hook; Tom Powers’s erudite bookie-empire don (“Only fools bet on horses. Fools keep me prosperous.”). There’s more, but Johnson has enough on his hands, what with his lonesome, untouched wife (few women took your breath away in the mid-century with the same godliness as Dahl) looking to leave him, just as De Haven’s perfectly sweet floozie, who is adorable enough to poison Johnson with guilt for lying to her, turns out to be her own opposite number. Guilt turns into betrayal and the tension of not knowing what we don’t know builds to one of noir’s wildest tommygun battles. Charles Schnee, who wrote beautiful, full-throated screenplays for Hawks, Mann, Ray and Minnelli, penned the deceptively complex script.
25/365: Hit! (Sidney J. Furie, 1973) (Amazon Prime)
This rarely-regarded early-‘70s crime epic begins all blax and jivey, with a high school girl dying of a heroin OD, and her fed agent father (Billy Dee Williams) deciding, much to his superiors’ chagrin, to eliminate the drug trade at the source. This being 1973, the source is Marseilles, and Furie’s film borrows as heavily from The French Connection as it does from Get Carter, The Godfather, and other recent crime-movie hits, lining up no less than nine French bigwigs and millionaires responsible for the flow of scag into American streets. Quickly, though, the cliches and tropes of all things “blax” are abandoned, with the film finding itself climbing the west coast waterfront and mountain towns all the way to British Colombia and, eventually, France. Furie meticulously but very elliptically parallel-edits the drug kingpins’ delivery process alongside Williams’s collection of a reluctant and often blackmailed ad hoc task force of avenging angels, including widowed mechanic Richard Pryor, junkie Gwen Welles, and old-Jewish couple-cum-retired-assassins Janet Brandt and Sid Melton. Procedurally fanning out to limn some 16 characters on both sides, Furie’s movie is framed like a conspiracy thriller, with lots of narrative leaps, culminates with an echo of the ending movement of The Godfather (entailing, among other assassination scenarios, a hit in a French theater showing The Godfather). But along the way there’s enough character quirk to pack two movies, and a startlingly nasty car chase on the northwestern suburban roadways that’s shot with low-tech textbook precision (Furie’s backseat swivel panic is still underutilized in such sequences). The highlight cast-wise is Pryor, and the film provides us with another badly needed portrait of him as a young comic/actor, effortlessly stealing every scene with simply the disbelieving steadiness of his gaze.
26/365: Our Nixon (Penny Lane & Brian L. Frye, 2013) (Tubi, Vudu, Hoopla, Amazon Prime)
A doc built entirely out of “found” footage, Lane and Frye’s film pivots on hundreds of reels of 8mm home movie footage shot in and around the White House by self-professed camera bugs H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and Dwight Chapin, from the 1969 inauguration to 1973, when the staffers were forced to resign and face the Watergate hearings. Four short years, but what a toxic weight of historical poison, and what a time in the secret history of modern American government to have these aw-shucks soul-sellers acting like film-crazy tourists in their own lives. When you consider the Nixon regime’s neurotic obsession with surveillance, proactive espionage and secret-keeping, the circumstances in which this footage naturally occurred is almost more astonishing than the images themselves. Inevitably, because they are home movies, the aggregate focus is not on Nixon per se — it’s on the three busy shooters, squares and nerds to the last, and their unabashed delight in walking the halls of power, participating in what they clearly saw as a watershed moment in modern history. Haldeman, Erlichman and Chapin are a goofy trio of starfuckers, turning their cameras on every world leader and celebrity they come across, and often filming each other — Haldeman and Erlichman are even seen preserving each other for posterity with their little cameras, grinning like fools, while visiting the Great Wall of China in 1972. Following history, the 8mm footage is augmented with news footage, TV interviews, and, best of all, large swaths of recorded phone conversations between Nixon and the filmmakers, as they all confront with splenetic bigotry first the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, and then the self-immolation that began with Donald Segretti, the Plumbers, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and the Watergate Hotel. The home movies are filled with boyish hope, and serve as a kind of counterpoint to almost everything else we know about the Nixon White House, suggesting an almost pathological narcissism, or at least a giddy sense of privilege and power that these convicted schemers would do almost anything to protect. Found footage cinema is all about the original context of the filming — and then, contrapuntally, about its opposite, its sociopolitical or aesthetic transformation in the service of a brand-new context, which is, in this case, powerfully judgmental.
27/365: The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) (Redbox, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
An eccentric inventor disappears and there’s no shortage of suspects, from his tawdry girlfriend to his ex-wife’s dead-beat husband. That’s the Dashiell Hammett-derived mystery at the bottom of this movie, but it’s famously inconsequential — what this dishy lark is really about is the enthralling banter between the most adorable, comfortably droll, mutually secure movie couple of all time, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and, in a career-making turn, the delectable Myrna Loy). This portrait of a supercool husband-wife team who have fun, often at each other’s expense, often while drinking too much too often, changed American culture, and movies — the Charles family (plus dog) became a kind of benchmark for connubial happiness, in and out of fiction, and presented a new model for how real grown-ups could behave, and still enjoy each other, amidst the tumult and crisis of the Depression. From Loy’s dismissive nose-shrug to Powell, hungover, shooting at Christmas-tree balls while reclined on the sofa (“Best Christmas present I ever got!”), from fur-trimmed dressing gowns to flowing martinis, it’s a vision of thoroughly adult conviviality for which Hollywood movies were not known. Powell and Loy became top-tier stars, acting out a modernist idea of romance — no moony gazes or clinches or mush, and yet still it’s evident to the blind that these two quippers enjoy each other like sunny days.
28/365: Monte Walsh (William A. Fraker, 1970) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
It’s still something of a mystery as to why the celebrated Hollywood films of the homely, thorny, sometimes haywire Nixon/’Nam era, blooming as they did in the midst of a worldwide youth culture siege, were so overwhelming interested in the lostness, melancholy and frayed edges of middle age. Did American movies, after decades of studio-run formula, suddenly grow up? (And then regress again, after Star Wars?) This forgotten anti-Western is a prototypical tissue sample, adapting Jack Schaefer‘s novel into a dawdling, small-bore riff on the mundanities — pleasurable and maddening both — of cowboy ranch life in the Old West. Lee Marvin and Jack Palance are cowhands coming off a long winter’s stint, hired on at one ranch as another goes bankrupt, and wondering how much more deeply into middle age they’ll be able to sustain their freelance lifestyle. But the soul-searching is minimal: the boys’ life is consumed with horsing around (literally and otherwise) with the half-dozen other ranch-hands in their bunk, and finding solace in brawls and women. (Jeanne Moreau, as a secretively consumptive whore, is Marvin’s indulgent nowhere girl.) Fraker was a pivotal cinematographer of the Hollywood New Wave (he shot Rosemary’s Baby and Bullitt) but only an occasional director, and he relies too often on post-Ford barroom humor and corny macho simplicity. But amid the cheap bravado — the characters’ and the actors’ both — the story dallies on opportunities long lost, and the tragic plot turns not on epochal events but on an economic downturn, cowboy unemployment and poverty. Marvin’s starring vehicles of the period were almost always reflections of his own persona — lazy, unambitious, drunken and rueful — but the surprise is Palance, who never smiled as much and is the movie’s hauntingly sad heart.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3
Year Two 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, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One 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, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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