Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 24
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
162/365: The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010) (Vudu, Crackle, Amazon)
A retro-ish Euro-espionage thriller written, acted and directed as it were still 1974, this film’s formidable resolve, low-boiling story, emphasis on revery, not action, and huge patches of stillness and quiet suggest an agenda, to hearken back to the New Wave era, when texture ruled and narratives often “happened” inside the protagonists’ heads. Deliberately, we never learn the context of George Clooney’s insulated assassin hero, as he warily tries to find anonymity in European mountain villages: who he works for, what he’s done, who’s trying to kill him, why precisely the higher-ups want him dead, and though the upshot certainly rhymes with the character’s disconnect and his own sense of not needing-to-know, it leaves the film feeling ascetic, filled with vacancies and question marks.
It’s a quiet film, and takes some getting used to, but it’s mature, fastidiously logical (and therefore skimpy) with exposition, and patient, meant for grown-ups. The hero is an utterly convincing nowhere man, lean, decisive, remorseless, yet slowly realizing with his aging that his days are numbered and he’s missed out on anything human in the process of his career. After an attempt on his life, Clooney’s buttoned-up hitman is sent by his boss/contact to Italy, where he is sent on one last assignment: to build an untraceable rifle for a killing. While he is in Italy, trying to deal with his paranoia, he meets Clara (Violante Placido), a local prostitute, with whom he falls hesitantly in love. Knowing full well that romantic entanglements simply endanger his secrecy, Jack perseveres and becomes increasingly suspicious of the Belgian woman for whom he’s making the gun. When he realizes he’s being set up by his own people, Jack attempts to double-cross the double-crossers and escape to freedom with Clara. Placido is so absurdly lovely that on one hand Clooney’s life-changing impulses make perfect sense, and on the other she turns an icy, brooding piece of existential angst — spy-assassin as the modern man without a country or conscience — into pure matinee pop.
163/365: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Roger Vadim, 1959) (Kino Now, Kanopy)
Postwar Euro-film’s suave hyper-satyr, Vadim was always more content pursuing box office popularity, and fresh wives, than critical approval, but he did make the occasional stab at cool prestige-lit adaptations (Zola, Schnitzler, Sade), and this icy version of Laclos — the first — is both deft and insidiously hip. Jeanne Moreau’s Juliette and Gerard Philipe’s Valmont are married here, a pair of romantic nihilists entertaining each other with extramarital competitive tales of trysts and manipulations, which reach a destructive crescendo with the all-or-nothing seduction of a ironclad paragon of virtue (Annette Stroyberg, Mrs. Vadim for that moment). Laclos’ devious narrative might be, given a degree of fidelity, foolproof, but although Vadim’s film doesn’t have the high-end word-craft of Christopher Hampton’s play (and the various versions derived from it), it has something that’s uniquely Vadim: the acute, late-’50s sense of weary, fated co-dependence between the protagonists, reflecting out around them onto a decadent postwar Europe of chateaus, cocktail soirees, and meaningless affluence.
The leads provide this grim-&-glossy funeral with ample pizzazz; Philipe, who died suddenly of liver cancer just two months after the film’s release, is a convincingly silky Valmont, while Moreau dominates every room simply by watching others (although, oddly, Vadim’s shooting of her is far less glam than Louis Malle’s that same year; perhaps only lovers and wives got the royal treatment). It feels very much like a brand of French cinema that was already being overrun by the New Wavers, down to Vadim’s Mallean move to get Thelonious Monk to rip an original score, his only one.
164/365: Orlando (Sally Potter, 1993) (Apple TV, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube, MoviesAnywhere, Vimeo)
A larky, impish riff on literary modernism and cinematic postmodernism, Potter’s film happily wades hip-deep into the darkest of metamovie waters; it’s such a self-reflexive film that there’s seemingly no there there. That’s the zesty, maze-like glamour of postmodern narratives, of course, and by adapting an unadaptable Virginia Woolf novel — a “biography” of a young nobleman who lives for hundreds of years and switches his sex somewhere in the middle — Potter knowingly engages a riot of self-consciousness in the mode of Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman (he used Greenaway’s production designers, Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs, and Jarman’s costume designer Sandy Powell). With its overdressed tableaux, broadly caricatured aristocracy and throbbing mock-period music, the movie nips at the heels of Greenaway’s farcical structuralism and Jarman’s homoerotic decadence, seemingly skeptical in the end of both masculine attitudes.
We first meet Orlando (Tilda Swinton, at the time another Jarman lift) as a teenage boy favored by the age-old Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp, in drag, of course); s/he flirts with desire for a Russian princess, with writing poetry, and eventually, with the sphere of men at their most manly: war, which precipitates the lad’s gender swap. Fed up with masculine values, Orlando simply becomes a woman. “Same person, no difference at all — just a different sex,” she says, turning naked toward a full=length mirror. Orlando re-enters the en vogue salons of 18th century London as a woman and finds herself stripped of rights and property, needing to bear an heir or lose everything. At the center of Potter’s film stands Swinton, an undeniably magnetic screen presence, here a self-empowered Romantic icon whose relationship with the camera is far more complex than any permitted with the other characters, thereby expressing what was, and still is, “modern” about Woolf’s work cinematically.
A homage to women of all centuries who have sacrificed themselves for liberty, Orlando is an anthem-movie, radiating affirmation and sisterly will.
165/365: Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Christopher Speeth, 1973) (Tubi, Shudder, Amazon)
An intensely odd drive-in genre film from yesteryear, rare enough to have become almost mythic, Speeth’s cheapo film stuck in the brain pleats of certain American “monster culture” youngsters at the time, after a gushing rave about it ran in the short-lived tabloid periodical The Monster Times. In the August 1973 issue, reviewer R. Allen Leider pulled out the stops, declaring Speeth’s weird ultra-indie to be “without question, the goriest, bloodiest, most frightening film ever made ANYWHERE. And it’s funny, too.” It’s none of these things; Leider, almost 30, imagined scenes that aren’t in the film, and asserted that it was more like Camino Real than Greaser’s Palace, when it resembles neither.
Still, in 1973, Speeth’s movie sounded essential. But it never had any kind of release, and did not surface in any way until recently. A Herschell Gordon Lewis-influenced occasion for bad make-up and orange paint-blood, about a family lost at night in a ghoul-haunted carnival, the film does accrete into an intensely disorienting sense of what it’s like to not sleep all night, with a fascinating craft-shop set design built entirely from plastic sheeting, papier-mache, and junked cars, and a subliminal soundtrack of “psycho-acoustics” comprised of animal noises, backwards cymbal crashes, and industrial droning. Did I mention Herve Villechaize as a cannibal? It’s a lost signal from Planet Psychotronica, not a successful film in any way, but a testament to the accidental creep-out vibe a talent-free but mad passion for movieness can muster.
166/365: Cry Danger (Robert Parrish, 1951) (Archive.org, Amazon)
A mean-tempered yet emotionally suppressed number from the seemingly inexhaustible noir storehouse, this recently restored beaut was Parrish’s debut, after years as a kid actor and editor for John Ford and Max Ophuls. It’s only saying so much to suggest it may be his best film, but even so, Parrish thrives with the telescoped-perspective compositions and keeps his varied zoo of characters, led by bitter ice man Dick Powell, on delightfully long leashes. Angry and innocent, Powell is sprung from a bank robbery prison stint by a souse (the fascinating Richard Erdman) who lies about new evidence in hopes of landing some of the still-unaccounted-for booty. The two bond uneasily, and despite everyone telling Powell to relax in the postwar sunshine (including noir’s loveliest trailer park), and despite Regis Toomey’s suspicious cop following him like a guilt trip, Powell is determined to find the real culprits, in hopes of getting another innocent man out of the jug.
This means, with Rhonda Fleming, as the other con’s ludicrously hot wife, in the wings, getting at the center of crime boss William Conrad’s small-time syndicate. The set pieces are unforgettable in their often weird and overt unpredictability — Powell’s visit, to the widow (Joan Banks) of the dead man whose paid-for testimony started the whole megillah, begins as particularly odd tough-guy-tough-gal banter, but then internally escalates into foreplay, the intimations of casual sex to come only squelched (sadly, for Powell) by a revealing phone call. Even more memorable is the climactic face-off against Conrad, when Powell commands the semi-fat man to lie across his desk and then plays Russian roulette on him, the villain’s huge balding head aiming right at Powell’s crotch and gun. The script, written by genre master William Bowers, is packed to its seams with spry sarcasms and hidden connections, and Joseph Biroc’s cinematography is rich with realistic details.
167/365: The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet, 1960) (Apple TV, Tubi)
Marlon Brando, at his muscular-jawline peak, lights up this star-packed, Tennessee Williams banquet of psychodrama with unbridled animal sex appeal, the likes of which should never be underestimated in movies. The cast’s dynamics, of Brando’s snakeskin-jacket-wearing wanderer (this must be where David Lynch got the snakeskin for Wild at Heart) versus Anna Magnani’s horny-testy wife of a small-town variety store versus Joanne Woodward (so miscast) as the bigoted hamlet’s resident overacting trollop, play out like dissonant music, and it’s quite a show. Revamped from Williams’ Orpheus Descending, it deserves another look, because it paints a vibrant picture of the neglected South, as so many ‘60s-‘70s movies do, a dying burg full of aging buildings and too few inhabitants to make it matter.
We shouldn’t take this for granted — it was part of the New Wave phenomenon that even Hollywood films began exploring the social backwaters otherwise shunned by cinema: think the roadside nowhere of Psycho, the highway nation of Easy Rider, the dusty wastelands of dozens of ’70s movies, in which nothing seemed as American as… hitting the road and trying to get the hell away from America. But this is another kind of wonder, because to whatever extent moviegoers may’ve been used to Brando and Magnani in the ’50s and early ’60s, we have no one like them now. Garbling their Southern-fried dialogue each in their own powerhouse fashion, the stars bridle and strut and vamp like two exotic species of racehorse — the characters may be slight, but these were not small people. And often enough, Williams’s tongue hits a nerve, as when the town’s bellicose old sheriff (the redoubtable R.G. Armstrong) warns Brando’s walking-talking sexual threat by way of a sign bordering another county, warning Blacks to not “let the sun set on you in this county.” Brando is not a black man (he does not say “black man”), Armstrong admits, “But…”
168/365: The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005) (Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon, Vudu)
Malick followed up his subversive, Hollywood-epic-as-poetry war epic The Thin Red Line with this historical saga, utilizing the man’s trademarked daydreamy lyricism for ends just as substantial: the story of Jamestown, John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher). It’s a beatific, fabulously Rousseauvian experience. It’s also as easy to get caught up in Malick’s rapturous wilderness ballet as it is to deride it later (critics were split), but it’s a different sort of historical film: one whose heart breaks for the onslaught of civilization.
The raw beauty of the film is hard to deny, but it can distract you from the brutality of the story, including the war with Powhatans and the remorseless afflictions of the winter of 1609–10. Of course, as history it’s romanticized hooey, just like the utterly nonsensical Disney version, but as a visionary love letter — to both the American wilderness and Kilcher’s dewy beauty — it sings.
Year Four 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
Year Three 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 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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