Went with a friend to see Nick Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR. I've seen it on video a couple of times and on the big screen it was even more thrilling. When I was younger REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE seemed almost bizarre to me, but now I can't get enough of Nicholas Ray's films.
Later in the vacation I watched several excellent films and a few terrible ones.
Another Ray film, IN A LONELY PLACE, had Humphrey Bogart as a screenwriter accused of murdering a young coat-check girl he brought home one night. He begins to fall in love with his alibi, a beautiful woman who lives across the courtyard from his apartment. Unsure at first, she gradually lets down her guard and falls head over heels for this supremely needy, manic depressive man. But the screenwriter has a violent streak and a history of assault and battery that interests the police immensely, and even though the woman doesn't doubt the man's love, nevertheless she begins to wonder if he didn't murder the young girl after all.
Some -- S P O I L E R S -- here: Bogart is innocent, but by the end of the film he has become so hounded, pressured and desperate that he demonstrates to the woman just how violent he can, in fact be. At the end of the picture it seems that both man and woman realize that even though he is innocent of this murder, the man is just as capable of committing another. It ends with the woman sobbing for Bogart as he leaves the courtyard, perhaps for good. So Bogie exiles himself from his love. He wants to possess her too much, doesn't he? He can't control himself, can he? These are abiding aspects of Ray's films. He is engaged when his characters are pushed close to the edge. David Thomson's comment about how in Ray's films characters start closer to the edge of breaking than in normal movies is a remarkable insight into this filmmaking, and it suggests a conscious technique on Ray's part: in order to depict the breakdown of a person--the collapse of their soul--start close to the edge. Show them near to breaking point at the beginning, and their crackup, and the forces that drives their breakdown, becomes the subject of the film.
The woman is played by Gloria Grahame, and seeing this picture again make me want to see more of her work. As I understand, she was rarely allowed to carry a picture. In this film she is integral, just as she is the lynchpin of the fierce drama of Fritz Lang's THE BIG HEAT (a film in which Lee Marvin's character throws a pot of hot coffee into her face, causing first despair, then outrage, and finally resignation - that this transformation forms the plot of the second half of the film suggests how important she was, but the performance is really something you have to see for yourself).
JOHNNY GUITAR also begins at the breaking point. A mob - close to a lynch mob, and it later scenes that is what they will become - descends on Vienna's (Joan Crawford) saloon. By the end the mob has run riot far enough that it's members have become sick of themselves. Johnny and Vienna's love survives, but it survives in a wasteland; Vienna's saloon has burned down and most of the main characters in the picture are dead. Again and again Ray's pictures dwell on breakdown and disillusion - stripping society's veneer away from the human animal. If that sounds pretentious, it shows to what extreme Ray's themes are drawn.
2 terrible movies: FROM HELL and IN THE CUT; both basically about the murder of so-called "loose" women. IN THE CUT goes much farther towards dispelling the depersonalization the "loose" tag typically assigns these sort of characters in a movie (by contrast Heather Grahame, ostensibly a star of FROM HELL, develops no character whatsoever, and so we hardly care that Jack the Ripper has singled her out for destruction), but IN THE CUT'S superior traits are to no avail; both pictures are pungent, steaming stinkers.
FROM HELL is based on Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name, which was in turn inspired by Douglas Adams' novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency." Moore read that rather funny book and decided to treat the solution to the "Jack the Ripper" legend as a job for a "holistic detective." Thus suspense is promptly dispelled; we know from the outset who Jack the Ripper is and why he killed. We see his connection to the masons and his defense of the philandering royal prince, whom "Bloody Jack" is trying to protect from scandal. We see the Ripper's own personal motives for the murders, which go far beyond masonry and the call of Royal Service. We see the prostitutes Jack murdered, and we see them from different perspectives. We see Victorian England struggling to adjust to massive scientific progress and social transformation. If the society is sick, reasons Moore, then the solution is not to solve the Ripper murders but to treat the society itself. The graphic novel, tremendously long, covers Victorian England like a form-fitting glove. Characters as diverse as the painter Walter Sickert and the Elephant Man play significant roles in the story. It is so rich with historical detail that my edition has page-by-page annotations.
Now, the movie. I loved Moore's comics of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," and I was surprised that I quite enjoyed the seriously divergent movie Hollywood concocted based on that rich vein of source material. But what of the Hollywood treatment of Moore's masterwork?
Sigh.
I never liked MENACE II SOCIETY, the Hughes Brothers' previous claim to fame, and FROM HELL doesn't diverge far from that slack model of filmmaking. The brothers posses a directorial style that is actually so low-key as to be narcoleptic, but not in the ubercool way of mid-career Sogo Ishii (I'm thinking mostly of one of my favorite pictures, Ishii's ANGEL DUST). Instead, scenes meld from one to the next as the camera sways druggily. That sounds cool, and it has been done beautifully in other movies--the camera pans here are often without palpable motivation, and there are tons of poorly-conceived scenes that just depict unsympathetic 'victims' fronting grotesque attitude in lieu of focus or story. FROM HELL is not delivered with much sense of artistic engagement, and it takes the massive volume of source material in its grubby arms and shreds every gorgeous, holistic detail from it. So instead of Jack the Ripper introducing us to Victorian London by the ley lines of ancient druids, we have Jack's point-of-view shots as he tempts crude prostitutes with grapes and then bloodily slashes their throats. The cuts aren't even plausible, but in this movie Jack seems to be some kind of 'magical' killer, whose eyes go black when a bloodlust is upon him. Wow. Instead of adapting Moore's clever, unique and imaginitive story, the movie FROM HELL is just a typical serial-killer movie, in which each character we meet is introduced just to be minced a scene or two later. It's not even much of a "Jack the Ripper movie." The final reveal of Jack, which for some reason the Hughes Brothers hold off as a shock (you know; the kind of shock the audience can foretell 40 minutes too soon), is terribly anti-climactic. And then poor Ian Holm appears wearing some kind of alien-looking black contact lenses for the scenes when he is in full psychotic bloom--why did the Hughes Brothers choose to do this ridiculous visual 'trick' with the eyes? I read articles at the time this picture came out in which the Hughes Brothers defended their use of marijuana as a creative stimulant, but seeing the actual result in the movie causes one to reassess the value of the ganja in helping creativity along. Plus the film is just ugly and boring; two major complaints which the graphic novel doesn't suffer at all.
IN THE CUT is also about a serial killer. And also, it is not too interesting. I'm not sure why I rented two such movies at once and watched them back-to-back in the same evening, especially since I am none too fond of serial killer movies at all. Period.
IN THE CUT was made by director Jane Campion, and her film, THE PIANO, is a movie that grows with every viewing. Many critics suggested that IN THE CUT was a film somewhat comparable to THE PIANO, and they are all alarmingly wrong. In spite of Campion's storytelling skill, the movie's luminous cinematography, and Meg Ryan's alarmingly committed performance, this sometimes imaginative movie from falls into terrible holes and gets overdone and boring quite quickly. The trite ending reveal cheapens the picture even further.
The plot is weirdly similar to that of IN A LONELY PLACE, now that I think of it. But while the characters in the Ray movie began the drama on the verge of cracking up, Campion's characters seem frozen and sterile, frustrated and frustrating. Meg Ryan is a lonely literature professor in New York, looking for love but finding it difficult to trust anyone (she can only depend on her stripper half-sister, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh; the two of them have predictable neuroses relating to their mutual father's lack of faithfulness and commitment). One day she sees a man with a unique wrist tattoo, fornicating with a girl on the way to a restroom in a bar. The experience excites the frigid professor until it turns out that the girl she sees is murdered that same night. The detective in charge of investigating is Mark Ruffalo - a usually really charming actor who attacks this movie determined that we aren't to like him; not one little bit. Mark should be the villain of the movie; he is sinister beyond the rest of the picture. Against all odds Mark isn't the villain, and he even retains some weird nobility as a perverted, mean 'good guy.' After some rude police questions Mark randomly asks Meg out on a date. He is an odious detective, racist, sexist and zealously homophobic - seemingly the blistering details of his job have thoroughly desensitized him against caring about anyone at all. But the professor is irresistibly attracted to him. Why? I dunno. Oh yeah, and he has the same tattoo on his arm as that guy Meg saw at the bar that day when the girl died. Oh crap, wait! He's probably the murderer! But Meg can't keep out of his bed. Or she can't keep him out of hers. Or she can't keep him from between her legs, or having phone sex as he drives away from a crime scene where there are tons of body parts inside a washing machine. Meg and Mark's relationship escalates to a degree of sadomasochism uncommon in contemporary movies, and it is convincing--but it never left me feeling envious of these pathetic partners. Still, the premise is worthwhile. What Meg has done is that she has fallen in love with the very murderer she witnessed in the bar, but the pull of their mutual loneliness leaves her helpless to turn him in. Then of course there is a deus ex machina that really just smacks of cookie-cutter screenwriting, and it turns out the murderer is actually Mark's detective partner, who - gasps of surprise - has the same tattoo on his arm as Mark. 'Cus they're like bosom buddies. But one's a murderer. And the other's just an off-putting sexual deviant with no empathy left in his drained husk of skin.
Here's what it is: what this cheap revelation does is turn the movie into JUST ANOTHER DUMB THRILLER, in which the psycho turns out to be a red herring. THE PIANO is certainly not JUST ANOTHER DUMB SADOMASOCHISTIC SEXUAL BARGAINING SITUATION ABOUT REPRESSED SCOTS EXILED IN NEW ZEALAND THAT YOU'VE SEEN A HUNDRED TIMES BEFORE. I don't know why all these critics think IN THE CUT rates anywhere near that remarkable movie. The damn thing is hardly distinguished within it's dead-end genre. That and there's a scene in which the professor's stripper half-sister is brutally murdered for basically no reason at all. So the plotting has significant weaknesses that crash the tone the picture tries to maintain.
What is interesting is that the picture could have been great with a bit of tweaking, and here's where I tell you Alan's brilliant fix-all that will make IN THE CUT as good as THE PIANO, even though it will always remain the kind of picture I wouldn't really want to watch usually. Are you ready? Here it is: Make Mark's sadomasochistic cop character the actual killer. Don't throw away this rich character by passing him off as somehow 'respectable.' Already as the film stands Ruffalo can somehow gather a slight amount of sympathy about him even though he is despicable from the get-go. Don't the filmmakers see the opportunity here? He's already horrible! And the remarkable thing is that the professor still likes him. And because she does, the rest of us do, too. This is good stuff. It saves the strange eroticism of the movie, and it makes good use of the fact that the serial killings in this film remain very much in the background most of the time. The only point at which they aren't peripheral is in the scene where the professor finds her half-sister's head in a bag, and that scene is ridiculously weak and wrongheaded to begin with. Take it out! The point of the picture should be that she has committed herself emotionally to this guy, even though he rejects her emotionally all throughout, and even though he is - in Alan's magical version at least - the murderer! And she is the only witness to his crime! There. THAT'S drama. I would also try and reign in Kevin Bacon as the jealous suitor. Or get rid of him. But that would ruin lots of new links for the Kevin Bacon game.
I washed the bad taste out of my mouth by re-watching THE BIG SLEEP that very night. Nothing like Howard Hawks' world of crisp, witty double-entendre and innuendo to knock the bad aftertaste of two lame serial-killer pictures out of my mind. I could see THE BIG SLEEP once a month for several years on end.
After a day I went on to two genuinely amazing movies, Michael Powell's BLACK NARCISSUS and Luis Bunuel's DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID.
BLACK NARCISSUS stars an actress whom I like a lot: Deborah Kerr. Watching a Marnie Nixon concert once, I heard from her a story in which Marnie asked Deborah Kerr whether Jack Warner's comment that Kerr was "just like an old English schoolmarm" was indeed the truth. "Oh yes, Marnie," Kerr replied; "but with a twist of gin." And just as that story implies, Deborah Kerr has a natural way with parts representing conservative, status-quo authority...and then that dash of gin.
BLACK NARCISSUS was maybe the test case for that analysis of her character. Deborah plays a young nun - too young, really, to ride herd over the establishment of a border outpost of nuns in Nepal. Kerr's nun is charged with converting an old harem into a girls' school and dispensary for the natives, but the local immediately begins to wreak havoc on the nuns' already battered self-image. Most of them, we suspect, had parts of their lives which they escaped from when they took their vows, and the old harem, the remoteness, the wildness of the jungle, the foreignness of the natives - and especially the lazy sexual suggestion and profanity of the local Englishman (an agent for a Nepalese general situated nearby) - drive these nuns further from their vows than any of them ever thought they might go. The tasks before them are impossible enough, but none of them are really suited to the demands of their mission to begin with. Needs of corporeal life weigh too heavily upon them for them to turn away from...opportunity. Deborah grows a kind of emotional kinship with the disgruntled Englishman, and we believe it could blossom into unchecked romance but for the intervention of Kathleen Byron: another nun, deranged and nearly feeling the seductive rhythms of the tribespeople's drums. We half expect Byron to turn out like Brigitte Bardot in ...AND GOD CREATED...WOMAN--trapped in a crazy mambo rhythm her body can't deny. And sure enough, this crazy nun bucks the order by putting on a dress, heels, and letting her hair down. Yikes! The soundtrack obliges with a wild orchestra cue and Deborah Kerr screams in shock. All of a sudden the delirious Powell-and-Pressburger magic takes over and the movie mystically transforms into a horror movie in the German Expressionist tradition. The crazed now-ex-nun Byron takes out all her sexual aggressions on Deborah Kerr, hoping to throw her from the cliff on which the school's bell-tower rests. The now homicidally-sexed-ex-nun's makeup is pale white, with sickly shades of green. As she stalks Kerr the school/dispensary is lit in lurid magentas and blues, signaling that we have stepped all of a sudden into a world where magical rules have taken over. Even for a wild cat-fight movie with neurotic nuns, this one steps off into the deep end of weird. I liked it a lot. : D
At this point you can probably tell I like movies with biting, scratching, hair-torn catfights. And not the kind with actual felines. Though that might be okay.
Perhaps I can write about DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID at greater length, or incorporate it into some writing on Bunuel.
That's all for now. I'm preparing an article on one of my favorite recent movies, Johnnie To's MAD DETECTIVE. It's a movie that stirs up all sorts of conflicted, inconclusive feelings for me about directors re-envisioning their own work. I've been griping about it all over the internet and found no takers, so I'll be illustrating my case here. Next will be something about the Shaw Bros., I think, and a piece on martial arts movies in general. But this is it for now!
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