The Kind of Face You Shoot: With All My Heart I Hope For the Worst

Currently, Nic Pizzolatto is having his ass handed to him. By this I of course mean that both the professional and the amateur reviews of the second season of his much-discussed HBO crime show True Detective have thus far, two episodes in, been pretty withering. Then again, set against the critical and amateur reviews of season one of True Detective, which were rapturous to an almost bewildering degree (and I say this as someone who liked that season) almost any dip in enthusiasm would have to count as withering. But I'll tell you, I'm utterly unable to account, on logical or critical grounds, for the shift from adulation to sneering mockery which this show is now experiencing. Whose aunt did Pizzolatto throw off a cliff? Whatever problems season one had are, I'll admit, still there -- among these I myself would count a certain thoughtless adherence to formula, an over-fondness for reference, and possibly an inability to distinguish good poetry from bad -- but so are all the good things: strong lead and secondary performances, a wonderful air of grim mystery, menace, and suspense, a willingness (even a need) to take genre seriously (something Pizzolatto is being dinged for now, though, somehow, not then). And finally, my favorite thing about True Detective, a willingness to be straight-up weird, something that has made its way into the show, ironically, via something that has become one of the show's deficits, which is that fondness for nodding too hard at the works of others. This is a plus and a minus, in other words. When it works on the show, you get, in season one, the weird horror of Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, and, most intriguingly, Thomas Ligotti pulled into the mix of a homicide investigation. In season two, the strong James Ellroy influence that I also noticed in season one becomes foregrounded, as this year's storyline (and each season is a new self-contained story, with a new cast and new characters) and structure almost begs you to think about Ellroy's 1988 masterpiece The Big Nowhere. Recently, it also wants you to think about Georges Franju's film Judex, but never mind about that.

So what happened? Fucked if I know. I'm enjoying season two of True Detective as much as I enjoyed season one (in other words, a reasonable amount). As usual, the backlash can only be observed from a distance and wondered at. You can't assume anything about those engaging in the backlash -- or, rather, you can, and it's possible that I have, but you can't say, publicly, that there's any sort of dishonesty at work here because you just can't know. (And to be extra clear, I don't know, but I am baffled; also, if you never liked the show then obviously you're off the hook.) This is a relief because as it happens, while this post is about Nic Pizzolatto, it isn't about True Detective. In 2006, Pizzolatto published a book of short stories called Between Here and the Yellow Sea. It received praise from such writers as Adam Johnson, Ellen Gilchrist, Tom Franklin, and William Gay. (This, in and of itself, shouldn't necessarily mean anything to you, though I would argue that it's not something that should mean nothing to you, either.) In 2010 he published a novel, called Galveston. The reaction to that, which included a rave by celebrated crime writer Dennis Lehane in The New York Times Book Review, probably greased the wheels that led to True Detective happening at all. None of this, of course, means that True Detective is any good -- if you don't like it, you don't like it. But in the wake of that show's season two premiere, which might have to be regarded as disastrous, Pizzolatto has been accused of being phony, and a bad writer. And I'll admit that if a certain thing that many predict will happen in episode three of season two does in fact happen (we'll all find out in about six and a half hours), then I will have no choice but to call out Pizzolatto on some pretty egregious bullshit, storytelling-wise. Nevertheless, I've read selections from Between Here and the Yellow Sea as well as all of Galveston, and I'm telling you, Pizzolatto means what he writes. You can scoff at it and think his work "takes itself too seriously" (whatever in the world that means), but just because he takes the crime genre more seriously than you do, that doesn't somehow mean he's lying.

Of the three short stories I read from his collection, the one that comes closest to being a traditional crime story is the title story, "Between Here and the Yellow Sea." In it, a young man named Bobby Coressi remembers the day Amanda Duprene, the cheerleader he loved, unrequitedly, in high school hopped into a Chevy and took off forever, leaving behind her father, that same high school's football coach:

I was there the day she left. I mowed lawns back then, and on that Sunday I worked the yard next to Coach Duprene's house. A red Chevy Blazer parked in their driveway. Four boys I knew from school were in that truck. The back end sagged with boxes and bags, a surfboard. High school was over, and they were all moving to California. Coach Duprene watched from the porch and didn't wave as the truck rolled way.

Someone, we can now say, should have stopped that Chevy. It's no secret. She makes movies under the name Mandy LeRock. I've only seen one.

Some time later, Bobby and Coach Duprene join together for a road trip to California, with the vague notion of saving Amanda from the clutches of the porn world. You might envision some kind of bloody showdown with porn goons, revelations that Amanda has sunk beneath the level of mainstream pornography into something more shadowy and frighteningly transgressive, but no. There is a rather dark revelation, or rather a hint towards one, but otherwise Pizzolatto lets the story play out to a deliberately anticlimactic end. The conclusion that not everyone wants or even especially needs your help is not the kind one is usually asked to draw from a crime story.

Another story, called "The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms" is about a young guy named Hoyt who lives in an RV park with his dad. One day, his dad gives Hoyt two thousand dollars and says that he has to leave for a while, and that money will have to last Hoyt until he gets back. In the meantime, Hoyt hangs out with his friend CB, a war vet who now deals drugs with Hoyt's help, and whose RV is across from a palm reader. If this all seems a little too colorful, Pizzolatto's prose is always clean, letting whatever feels like it might be a bit much just exist, unadorned:

CB has told Hoyt that CB used to mean Charles Bailey but now it meant Coffin Boat. CB used to be enormous. He used to hold the state triple-A division record in the shot put. He has a composite plastic plate in his hip and a note that excuses him from metal detectors. He's always refused to tell Hoyt stories about Iraq. CB's skin is dark brown and hard like wood, and he has a thick face, a flat nose, black eyes. He is full Choctaw. Great pink scars engulf his left arm -- a gnarled arm seeded with shrapnel, always bent in a way that reminds Hoyt of the tiny, useless claw of a T-Rex. Hoyt met CB two years ago, pawning the first thing he ever stole, a neighbor's shiny .45 Magnum.

Again, as with "Between Here and the Yellow Sea," the elements of a crime story are laid out, but "The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms" doesn't even employ the kind of crime plot that "Between Here and the Yellow Sea" subverts -- Hoyt's story is instead completely aimless, as is Hoyt. The idea, one supposes, is to take crime out of the high-plotting we usually associate it with, such as you'd find in Chandler, or Ellroy, or, you know, True Detective, and put it back into the realm of bored, angry reality. Which Pizzolatto pulls off rather well, although he's not immune to letting the language of fiction mar the reality he's trying to construct. At one point, two cops are questioning Hoyt about his father, and during one tense moment of the interrogation Pizzolatto writes "One of the deputies idly examined a fingernail." Which, frankly, is pure movie horseshit, a shortcut to "jaded" or "heartless" that has been rolled out unimaginatively in countless films.

And it's odd, too, that Pizzolatto would choose to compound this sort of thing with his blatant references to other crime novels and films. In the other story I read, "1987, The Races," which is pretty much not a crime story at all, about a boy spending a day at the tracks with his kind, yet stupid and desperate, father, the boy, whose mind is all jumbled up with his parents' divorce, his loyalty to his dad, his dad's own frustrating behavior, that he feels great anger at a well-meaning woman at the tracks his father likes (and I'll add for the sake of context, has just given a lot of fruit to), and anyway, Pizzolatto writes:

[The boy] wanted to grab the sack of oranges and beat her with them, like he'd read about a man doing to a woman in a crime novel his father had.

The decision to so blatantly and awkwardly reference Jim Thompson's The Grifters is all the worse because "1987, The Races" is a good story -- it has immediacy and real heartbreak in it. Nothing is brought to the table by basically saying to the reader "We both like crime fiction so much that I'm not even going to name the book in question because you don't need me to." It would be far less irritating if Pizzolatto had chosen to pay homage to The Grifters by writing a story in which someone is beaten with a sack of oranges, with no mention that the idea came from a Jim Thompson novel. That is, in fact, the kind of reference Pizzolatto is messing around with in True Detective: the Ligotti, Chambers, and Lovecraft stuff in season one, and the James Ellroy stuff now in season two. At no point in season one did anybody say "Have you ever read Thomas Ligotti? Well let me tell you..." Whereas in "1987, The Races" he's essentially stopping his story to say "The Grifters by Jim Thompson." Although it was not mentioning Ligotti by name in season one that led some people to accuse Pizzolatto, rather absurdly I believe, of plagiarism, so maybe he shouldn't listen to me.

Anyway, the decision to clumsily insert genre references into his writing was not an impulse he was able to shake by the time he wrote Galveston, his novel from 2010. About midway through the book, the narrator, Roy Cady, is talking to another tenant of the motel where he, Rocky, a young prostitute, and her three-year-old sister Tiffany are staying. This other tenant, Tray, says to Roy:

"You know you remind me of, man?...Guy from the movies. What's that guy? He was in the movie about the cockfighter. And the other. Ole boy driving around with a head in the car."

Two words never uttered in the ensuing exchange are "Warren Oates," because we know, we don't need to be told. Although I do wonder about somebody who has seen both Cockfighter and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia yet can't remember Warren Oates' name. On the other hand, now we know that Roy Cady looks like Warren Oates.

So, I don't like that sort of thing, but otherwise I did like Galveston because Pizzolatto, when he's not simply scratching some pointless genre itch, is a good writer. In the novel, Roy Cady is muscle for a New Orleans gangster. As the novel opens, he's just learned that he's dying of lung cancer -- the x-ray showed in his chest "a blizzard of soap chips." When he hits the bar out of which much of Stan Pitko's, his gangster boss, business flows, Roy orders Johnnie Walker Blue, a $40 a shot Scotch that also recently turned up on True Detective, so that's another thing with Pizzolatto, apparently. Anyhow, Roy starts drinking Johnnie Walker Blue because why not? The gist of the rest of Galveston's set-up is that for a variety of reasons, both business and personal, Roy begins to think that the job he's being sent out to do will result in his murder, as ordered by Stan Pitko. He turns out to be right, but, lung cancer or no, Roy doesn't feel like going out like that, he fights back, kills his murderers, and ends up fleeing the house where it all went down with Raquel Arceneaux ("She pronounced it Arson, oh."), aka Rocky. They're now both on the run from the same people, and they find themselves heading to Texas. Galveston specifically, though there is a detour to pick up Rocky's kid sister, which shocks Roy, as does the gunshot coming from Rocky's family home that precedes her leaving with the three-year-old Tiffany. Did Rocky murder her father while she was in there? She claims she just scared him.

Galveston is a much more traditional crime story than anything I read in Between Here and the Yellow Sea, although much of the novel, after that groundwork has been laid, involves the journey of Roy, Rocky, and Tiffany, as well as Roy's relationship with Rocky, which he can't bring himself to make sexual even though she seems almost too willing. This sort of gender mess is one of the things that raised folks' antennae even during the much ballyhooed first season of True Detective -- why all the hookers, why is sex such a huge factor in the makeup of the female characters? -- and it's almost as if this genre, which is a beloved and respected one by, I'll go out on a limb and say, many of the same people now down on the show, had never before contained any strong component regarding the power of female sexual wiles. But I almost feel like it kind of did? For a little while there? Speaking for myself, I liked the character of Rocky a lot, and though she's a bit of an archetype (you can use a less flattering word if you'd like) she's a well-drawn one. At one point, speaking about her to someone else, Roy says that Rocky "had a hard life," which you can see early on (the particulars are eventually made clear, though they're easy enough to predict); you can also see that this hard life has thrown her into an awful situation that she's trying to deal with. And she's about twenty years old. People tend to have abundant sympathy for such people in real life but denounce them as sexist cliches when someone writes about them in fiction.

Of course, Galveston is mostly about Roy, whose own life up to and including his cancer diagnosis hasn't been a barrel of monkeys. Early on, he lays out his family situation:

I was seven when John Cady got back from Korea, and less than two years later he'd fallen of a cooling tower at the refinery and broken his neck, drunk before noon. I called him dad but as I grew older several things made it pretty obvious he was not my father -- our looks, the timeline of my conception. He was always kind to me, though we didn't know each other long. Around a year after we buried him Mary-Anne dropped off a bridge. She preferred me to call her Mary-Anne instead of Mom, which she claimed aged a woman ten years. They said she jumped, but I don't believe the people she was with are to be trusted. Then the group home and the Beidles and the cotton fields.

And now I was dying and everything that had ever happened to me was starting to seem hazily important.

I'd say roughly about a third of the way into Galveston, the plot takes a surprising left turn. Though it comes somewhat early, I'm still somewhat loathe to spoil it here. Suffice it to say, it opens things up considerably, in terms of how we think about certain characters going forward, and how Pizzolatto then manages the suspense, and increases it, in this not terribly plot-heavy book (though the element of suspense, of various kinds, is inherent in the novel's very premise). It also heightens the dread, and the doom, which, given the turn in question...well, never mind. But it works a treat, as they say.

One of Pizzolatto's great gifts as a prose writer is his ability to sketch out an environment, and side characters, with such breezy authenticity that, in all honesty, highlights the hopelessness of that Warren Oates gambit. Speaking of which, Tray, the character with whom Roy has the Oates conversation, is a great piece of added menace, and that section of the book at the Texas motel is a wonderful bit of atmosphere. Pizzolatto is also able to write about poor white Texans without condescending to them, or portraying them as unlikable unless, of course, they happen to be unlikable. This is a distinction not many are able to draw. There are a variety of, for lack of a better term, "civilians" that Roy, Rocky, and Tiffany encounter in their travels, and Pizzolatto seems to understand intuitively how they talk, and how the good ones differ from the bad ones, and what is quickly, noticeably specific about each. Pizzolatto isn't one of the all-time great crime writers by any stretch of the imagination, but that sort of gift is not one to be dismissed. In any genre, but, you might could argue, in this genre especially.

Eventually, Galveston reaches a conclusion that will satisfy some but not others, but which is, fittingly, in tone and incident somewhere between the plotless endings to the stories (the three I've read, anyway; not much of a sampling) in Between Here and the Yellow Sea and the kind of stylized mayhem of True Detective. I liked it. I like his TV show, too, even though most people seem to have decided he's doing the wrong thing. If, however, as a result of this backlash, True Detective gets buried, I'll be okay with it (certainly more okay than Pizzolatto would be), because I assume that would lead him back to writing novels. I'd like to read his next one.

The Kind of Face You Whaaaaaaa!?: An Announcement

Oh hello. As some of you may remember, every October for the first several years of this blog's existence, I used to write, every day, about horror fiction. Sometimes novels, sometimes a pair of short stories more or less randomly chosen from an anthology, most often a couple of short stories by the same author so that I might discuss that author within some kind of framework. While by no means my most popular posts, this project did sort of define The Kind of Face You Hate, and those who did read them seemed to like them. I found this very flattering and gratifying, and every year I looked forward to expanding my knowledge about one of my favorite genres. I was forced to think about horror on a level that I wouldn't have had I been merely(!) reading these books and stories for pleasure. If my blog was ever going to have any sort of legacy, which I would have to say I kind of doubt it will, but if was ever going to, this ongoing series, collectively titled The Kind of Face You Slash, would be it.

On the other hand, it fucking sucked; it was, to my mind, and increasingly so over the years, a ridiculous amount of work for someone to do yet not be paid for. Remember, I not only had to write every day, but read every day, as well. Yes, foresight and better planning might have eased this burden, but I have frequently found, over the course of my life, that the best way for me to actually complete something is to have a deadline. And this was a downright shithouse of a deadline. The whole thing, once fun, became after five years a howling, waking nightmare of effort. I believe you can almost see me crumbling under the weight in those later years. One post in particular almost did me in. The stories I read so thoroughly defeated me through their mediocrity that when I sat down to write about them I did briefly consider hitting my computer with a brick to see what the result would be (I'm not going to link to it because, as you might expect, my review of the writer in question was unkind, and eventually he showed up in the comments, and said something that still makes me feel bad about what I wrote). In 2013, I enlisted the help of a series of friends and associates to take half of October off my hands, so that I would have to write and read fifty per cent less than I had before, and those guys came through like gangbusters. The problem was, being a kind of...not editor, because I didn't edit anyone, but I guess a manager, of a sort, didn't alleviate the pressure; it merely substituted the old ones, and not even all of those, with new ones. In short, I still had to work. So, in 2014, I decided that was it, I was indefinitely retiring The Kind of Face You Slash. You know how homicide detectives can get so burned out by the atrocities they're forced to deal with every day that they finally ash up and have to "get out of the life?" Well that was me exactly, and there's no difference between me and a homicide detective.

Cut to today! I'm still not going to bring back The Kind of Face You Slash this October! However, what I am doing, is I'm announcing that The Kind of Face You Slash is going to be an ongoing series from here until whenever. That is to say, I will be writing The Kind of Face You Slash posts in, say, November. And December, maybe. And January. And possibly even (almost certainly) this October. Not thirty-one posts in thirty-one days, but a continuous, though sporadic, series about horror literature. It will be similar to The Cronenberg Series, the major difference being that while The Cronenberg Series ended (for the time being) when I reached the latest of Cronenberg's major works (still entertaining the idea of writing addendum-type posts about his short films, by the way) in the case of The Kind of Face You Slash there's no end in sight. I'll end the series when I finally think "You know what? Fuck you guys." Which could be tomorrow, just to be clear.

But hold on! There's still even more to tell you! And I think I'd better keep this part brief because this announcement post has been very long and boring so far! As a result of my ruthless focus on horror fiction, as someone who writes about genre fiction I have been shamefully neglectful of my other favorite genre, which is crime fiction. And so the other day I says to myself, I says "Hey wait a minute, maybe you could write about crime fiction." And I was like "Yes." So, as of today I am announcing the start of yet another series, as continuous and as sporadic as The Kind of Face You Slash, but this time about crime fiction. So everything I said about the horror project in the last paragraph you can apply to this crime project, which I shall call The Kind of Face You Shoot. That one's actually going to begin sooner rather than later, because I've had something percolating, but anyway, there's your announcement. The Kind of Face You Slash is back, but on a new and endless-ish schedule, and it will be joined by The Kind of Face You Shoot, which will look at crime fiction (mostly novels, given the nature of the genre) from the old-timey ones to new-timey ones. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to some fuckin' new guy, I guess.

Incidentally, the best part of this announcement is that the idea was all my own, and wasn't quite reasonably suggested to me by Jose Cruz one day on Facebook. So thanks for nothing, Jose! I DON'T NEED YOU!

They're Drafting Everyone These Days

Bernhard Wicki's most famous, or at least most seen, work as a director must be the German sections of The Longest Day, the 1962 Word War II epic, which, in a stab at democracy or something, producer Darryl F. Zanuck farmed out to three directors: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Wicki. Roughly speaking, the idea was to have the directors handle the locations that corresponded to their own nationality, but there was an arbitrariness to the gimmick -- the British Annakin also took care of the film's French material, and Marton was actually Hungarian. But Zanuck nailed it with Wicki, who in addition to being German was also untainted: due to his association with a German youth movement that was not the Hitler Youth, Wicki was sent to a concentration camp in 1939. This offense not being one from the long list of Hitler's unforgivable crimes, Wicki was eventually released, at which point he fled Germany. He didn't return until the war was over. In the post-war era his film career began, not only as a director but also as an actor, appearing in, among others, films such as Antonioni's La Notte, Fassbinder's Despair, and Wenders' Paris, Texas.

Wicki's career in Hollywood, once he got around to it, didn't last very long. The most notable American film that he directed by himself is Morituri, a 1965 World War II thriller starring Yul Brynner as the captain of a German supply ship transporting rubber, much needed by the Nazis, from Japan to Germany, and Marlon Brando as an anti-war German expatriate living in India who is coerced by the British into agreeing to gain passage under false pretenses, on the ship and sabotage it so that the boat can't be scuttled, and the rubber can be commandeered by the Allies. Long story. The fact that Brando's character had to be blackmailed into taking on this mission, and that even though his pacifism is found wanting as a philosophy in the face of the Nazi brutality he witnesses on the ship he chooses a course of action that intentionally hurts both the Nazis and the Allies, these things comprise a strange and conflicting set of morals that I don't believe Wicki had fully come to terms with.

Set Morituri (which, otherwise, I think is a solid piece of work, and I think Brando is wonderful in it) against the film that probably got Wicki that gig in the first place, as well as the Longest Day job: 1959's The Bridge, said to be one of the first anti-war films to come out of Germany after the war, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and released on DVD and Blu-ray last week by Criterion. Based on an autobiographical novel by Gregor Dorfmeister, it takes place near the end of the war, when the Nazis were at their most frantic. Losing badly but refusing to surrender, Hitler began literally drafting children and sending them into combat. In The Bridge, the first hour or so follows seven boys no older than sixteen, all friends, as they face heartbreak, pursue girls, follow the war's progress with an excitement their elders do not share, and wonder, with some eagerness, if they'll ever get drafted. One of them, Karl (Karl Michael Balzer), is in love with the housekeeper who helps his father and him. Another, Klaus (Volker Lechtenbrink) has a relationship with a pretty schoolmate which, when the draft notices finally do come in, he's in the process of botching. He so badly misjudges their last night together before he goes to basic training, and doesn't even realize he's misjudged it, that I thought "You poor stupid Nazi." That's not the only time the viewer might be moved to think such a think while watching The Bridge.

The Bridge has an interesting air of melancholy in the first half. It's interesting because you might normally expect that to come closer to the end. But Wicki chooses to not pretend that his audience doesn't know how this will all end, nor that the adults in his film -- the boys' parents and teachers, even in some cases their superior officers -- are any more delusional. When the children betray any amount of exuberance, or even a feeling of duty, about their pending military service, the adults tend regard them with unspoken pity. Once they are drafted, that sense of pity and melancholy turns to one of straight doom. On their first day of basic training, they're awoken in the middle of the night because the Allies are approaching. For a complicated set of reasons, the seven boys are given what is thought to be a cushy, nothing job of "guarding" the bridge into their own town, which is scheduled for demolition anyway, but misunderstanding, panic, and a relentless Allied assault soon transforms this bridge into a genuine battleground.

The morality of the film is complicated. Wicki subtly acknowledges Nazi atrocities and the basic wrongness of serving that cause without ever making the film about that. This allows the film to, for instance, make one of the characters who has some sympathy for the boys' hopeless situation, not only a card-carrying Nazi, but a True Believer. Similarly, the officer set to command them on their bridge-guarding detail (which he also believes is better suited for relaxation than combat) is about as kindly yet professional an officer as a young recruit could hope for. Yet while watching him, I couldn't help but think "How many Jews did you round up?" The Bridge invites that question but I'm not sure it does so intentionally. It may have still been necessary in 1959 to pull back from certain things, I don't know; beyond that, the film wants to be less about World War II than about "war" as a concept, but in my view its tough to use World War II for that purpose. There's simply too much basic morality, too much necessity in the waging of it, to contend with. This is why Kubrick's Paths of Glory is one of the greatest anti-war films, if not the greatest: it's about World War I, a ridiculous war.

Nevertheless, little of this is in The Bridge itself -- it's the sort of stuff you pull out of it later. But The Bridge, itself, is terrific. When the melancholy falls away, it becomes a film of pure savagery. The brutality of the violence is shocking for the time, and though the point Wicki wants to make pushes him to heighten that brutality to a level that is sometimes executed clumsily, more often than not it's incredibly effective. And I was pleased to see the one American soldier who gets any lines portrayed well, in contrast to the absurdity of the few American characters in Morituri. Then again, this depiction in The Bridge is in keeping with the rest of the film. The American soldier is, after all, an adult, and he, like most of the adults throughout the film, he wants to convince these boys that what they're doing is foolish. It's foolish, and pointless, and they don't understand. From their point of view, however, since they were children they'd been taught to fight for the Fuhrer and the Reich. Now that they've finally been given the opportunity, why should they be told to run away?

The Von Klaus Family History

Nowadays, one thing a person can get upset about is the use by the makers of, let's say, a television show of certain violent acts for, the assumption is, shock value. And many times shock value is the goal, I'll grant you, it's just that I'm never sure why this kind of moral fury is righteous, yet when we think back on a time when that same brand of fury was directed at slasher films and, before that, EC Comics, we find only hypocrisy, censorship, and an insidious, intrusive moralizing. The only thing I feel confident about is that, deluxe Tales from the Crypt reprint collections notwithstanding, William Gaines probably wouldn't find things going any better for him now than he did then. That Tales from the Crypt hasn't been grandfathered into this new system of finger-wagging is because, I think, most of the men who wrote and drew those stories are safely dead and can no longer harm us.

Also dead and therefore also exempt is Jess Franco, the Spanish horror/erotica/exploitation filmmaker who directed a ridiculous number of feature films, from black & white Gothic thrillers to hardcore horror porn, to everything within what you'd have to guess is the very wide variety of options in between. Broadly speaking, Franco belongs to the same strain of European horror as Mario Bava, Jean Rollin, and Dario Argento, falling along the spectrum of respectability somewhere between classic Argento and the somewhat less elegant Lucio Fulci. That last bit is clearly a "depends on who you ask" situation, but Franco could be wildly sleazy, and while I don't mind sleaze -- I even, er, kind of like it -- in my experience the sleazier Franco got the less engaging his filmmaking instincts became. My own instinct is to contrast this with Rollin (he also directed porn on occasion) who had an unparalleled talent for combining marketable prurience with breathtaking horror poetry. Then again, my eyes were recently opened because Franco's catalogue is having one of those years -- recently there's been a mini-flood of his films released to Blu-ray, including the long hard-to-find Vampyros Lesbos, a film that I found both less sleazy than I'd anticipated and far more Rollin-esque. Yet I also found that it went in one eye and out the other. I'm frankly stumped.

On the plus side, today sees the release on Blu-ray and DVD of another Franco film: The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus, from 1962. Along with The Awful Dr. Orlof, also from 1962, I'd have to say this is my favorite of the Franco movies I've seen, a fact which may say more about my tastes than anything else. But it's a strong, fun little mystery with a Gothic flair, which it could hardly avoid with a title like that. In a small German town, women are turning up dead. The locals are inclined to connect these deaths to the nearby castle home of the Von Klaus family, currently inhabited by an elderly matriarch (though not for much longer in her case) and her brother Max (Howard Vernon), who looks a lot like a portrait of a male ancestor known to have been a sadistic murderer of women. Also arriving on the scene, to see his mother off into the next world, is her son Ludwig (Hugo Blanco) and his fiancee Karine (Paula Martel). The villagers think the killer resides in that castle, but who is it? Looking to find out are a cop (Georges Rollin) and a crime reporter (Fernando Delgado) for the evidently, though surprisingly, legitimate publication Maidens & Murderers. So who did it? Or rather, who's doing it? And who's next?

I'll be honest, anyone who correctly predicts the identity of the killer should feel not special pride for having done so, but that doesn't matter to me. I've said before that for all the talk about how the Western is a largely dead genre, just as dead, it seems to me, but strangely unlamented, is the murder mystery. Oh you have twist endings and such, but the structured mystery barely exists now, and watching The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus I realized how much I miss it. And predictable or not, it's a good film. It's well shot, it's eerie, and it has nice touches here and there, such as when Karl, the crime reporter, stops the men from the coroner's office who've come to remove a murder victim from the crime scene, so he can take a picture of her face. They stop and let him do it, but Steiner plays it as a man slightly ashamed to be doing his job at the same time that he's determined to do it.

Furthermore, Franco gets to be sadistic in the way that would make him famous, and which he couldn't get away with now, save out on the far fringe of movie-making. It's a brief scene and not all that extreme, given lots of different factors, but because it's effective it is therefore kind of shocking. And why shouldn't sadism be shocking? If not that, what should it be?

Shit in Your Hammock

[Beware of massive spoilers for Fierce People, like you give a shit anyway]

I think it's safe to say that as an actor, at least among Serious Film Types, Griffin Dunne is somewhat beloved. Or at any rate very much liked. This is all on a sort of cult level, but let's face it, it almost always is. On the basis of just two films, both of which exist in universal terms on that same cult level, those films being John Landis's An American Werewolf in London and Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Dunne, as an actor, has been able to cement his place. And good on him, because they're both wonderful performances. Dunne's delivery of the line "David! You're hurting my feelings!" in An American Werewolf in London was one of my favorite bits from that film when I was a kid, and remains so to this day. It's the way his character Jack (a rotting corpse by this point in the film) holds onto his naked but not, in this case, especially ostentatious sarcasm even in the midst of his state of undead horror that naturally appealed to my younger self, and I'd wager most people's younger selves, but even getting over that part it's just funny, it's a funny line and Dunne gives it the funniest reading possible. This all somehow helps sell the pity we must feel for Jack, and the other werewolf victims, which in turn allows the film to walk the very thin tightrope it ultimately succeeds in walking. And I've barely even mentioned After Hours, a great, 90 minute surreal Martin Scorsese comedy that Dunne carries on his shoulders. This is almost undefinable, but in that film the idea is for Dunne to play an everyman, but only sort of, and Dunne is the essence of an everyman who is nevertheless naturally specific and peculiar and not actually an everyman even while he's being one.

So he's great! As an actor! As a director, well, who among us can say? Dunne has been a director only sporadically, and he came to it late, directing his first feature, Addicted to Love, a romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick, in 1997. Since then he's directed four more features, as well as episodes of various TV shows, but I'd never seen any of it until yesterday when I watched, for I was called upon to do so, Fierce People, Dunne's comedy/drama/thriller(!?) from 2005. This is a film about which I can at least say this: it would be impossible to watch the first fifteen minutes of Fierce People and then correctly predict what happens in the last fifteen. Or maybe even the first twenty-five minutes and the last twenty-five. It's a fairly bonkers piece of work, a film that to some degree you'd have to acknowledge as ambitious, but, as is often the case, with ambition comes misguidedness, tone deafness, ridiculousness. You have to know what you're doing, in other words, though I suppose a certain heedlessness is desirable, too. I don't know. I don't even known if what we're dealing with in Fierce People is negligent heedlessness or outright stupidity.

Whatever the case may be, I suspect that Dirk Wittenborn is largely to blame. The temptation is to say "mostly to blame," but since I have not read Wittenborn's original novel Fierce People, on which the film is based (a film for which Wittenborn himself did in fact write the screenplay, as well as serve as a producer), and since slavishly faithful to that novel and script though he may or may not have been, Griffin Dunne is still the guy at the wheel here, and it's supposed to be up to him how much of that source material is going to be chucked overboard. But all of this is verging on speculation on my part, so it's best to to drop that and explain what the film Fierce People is about. It's about this young guy played by Anton Yelchin named Finn Earl who...wait a second, come back. Named Finn Earl whose mother Liz (Diane Lane) is a booze-and-drug-addicted masseuse. His father is a famous anthropologist named Fox Blanchard who...hold on a minute, would you? Named Fox Blanchard, who we see via "archival footage" played by Dirk Wittenborn himself. Blanchard made a famous documentary about an especially fierce (have you clued into anything significant yet?) native tribe of South America; Finn has long been fascinated by this film, and his father, whom he's never met. One summer, all the ducks have lined up and it looks like Finn is going to get to travel to South America and visit his dad when he gets busted attempting to procure drugs for his mom. This incident urges Liz to clean up her act, and legally and financially the two of them are rescued by a very wealthy benefactor, one of Liz's clients, named Ogden Osbourne...I wish you'd at least hear me out.

Osbourne (Donald Sutherland) lives on a vast expanse of land, in a massive estate, on the grounds of all of which live many people, family and employees and the families of employees, and he offers one of the homes to Liz and Finn. Liz accepts, the idea being that she's going to be working for him as his personal and exclusive masseuse. Finn, meanwhile, is free to essentially gallivant about in various teenager ways, meeting along the way such eccentric characters as Jilly (Paz de la Huerta), his and Liz's teenage maid; Maya Langley (Kristen Stewart) and her brother Bryce (Chris Evans), two of Osbourne's grandchildren; and Whitney (Jeff Westmoreland), a mentally handicapped man who exists in the film to be somehow both enigmatic and completely ignored, to provide the solution to the film's big mystery in the only way a mentally handicapped person in a film can do such a thing, which is to say "poignantly," and to be referred to by Finn, our hero, as a "retard," though the effect this has on the story as a whole was perhaps unintended by the filmmakers. Then again, Finn is a genuine little shit to his mom regarding her attempts to get sober (not, please note, regarding her being a cokehead at the time when she was a cokehead), and we're evidently meant to read this as an example of a refreshingly idiosyncratic and loving mother-son relationship, so who the hell knows what Dunne and Wittenborn thought they were up to?

Finn falls in love with Maya and becomes good pals with Bryce. And this kid, this Bryce, he's a real wild card: born rich but disdainful of the wealthy hypocrites who surround him, he's capable of tearing a person to shreds with his words, you see, but he's usually doing that to rich assholes so we admire him. These relationships, as well as Liz's romance with a local doctor (Christopher Shyer) known to the Osbourne family and how this is viewed by Osbourne himself, form the crux of the film's loose plot. The idea is really to, well, listen, I'm just going to say it straight, to tear the lid off the lives of the super rich in America and to contrast them with crazy South American natives -- please notice how intricately the theme of "tribes" and "tribalism" is woven throughout Fierce People by having the word "tribe" repeated somewhere in the neighborhood of every sixth word -- so that we might finally ask the question who, really, are the "crazy natives?" Hence that title, Crazy Natives.

As a film, as, you know, cinema, Fierce People is undistinguished apart from the fact that it feels slightly out of time, though I guess it wasn't. I looked up what other films came out in 2005, to see if they all seemed like they should have come out in 1997, and in fact many did. White Noise and Memoirs of a Geisha and so forth. There was also Munich, which is a film that kind of acts as part of the transition to 2007, which historically now seems like a big deal, but anyhow the point is, in Hollywood the impulse was to cling to something very basic, visually. Fierce People belongs to "The Cinema of Cars Pulling Up in Front of Houses," preferably doing so just as the opening credits end. Which means that the structure of the film's first half or so is neatly mapped out: Something Has Happened, We Must Leave; Here is a Place We Can Go; Here We Are: Oh Boy This is a Weird Place. It's all very easy. You'd have to imagine that for Dirk Wittenborn there's an autobiographical element, as he himself didn't come from money but has, from what I've gathered, spent his life around it. On the website for his most recent book, called The Social Climber's Bible, written with Johnson & Johnson heiress Jazz Johnson, and by the way is anybody else getting tired yet?, Wittenborn describes himself as an outsider (with Johnson being the insider) in relation to the world of the super-rich. That he was able to channel this sense of himself into a pure Hollywood formula is, I don't know what, but it's something, of that I'm almost sure.

Dunne, on the other hand, grew up an insider. His father was Dominick Dunne, best-selling author (and frequent chronicler of high society murder cases), he's the nephew of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, and while there was obviously a more literary bent to the high-end life in which he was raised, it was nevertheless relatively high-end. From that perspective, Fierce People comes off as a piece of self-examination and attempt to tear down from the inside. And while I don't believe that having money, even being born into money, which is the secular world's version of Original Sin (or rather, it's one version out of about seven), is a bad thing, I think that as long as we all agree that examining one's life is a good idea, we can also agree that examining one's moneyed life is maybe an extra good idea. So okay. Now what? A Car Pulls Up in Front of a House...

And then after that, eventually, Fierce People goes totally bugshit. Spoiling the plot of Fierce People wouldn't bother me too terribly much -- my only reservation is how much detail do I want to go into. In other words, how much of my own time do I want to spend on this? I guess I'll cut to the chase and say that after a while the fun times Finn has been smugly enjoying begin to sour, and somebody beats him up and rapes him. Who I ask you is the real fierce people and whatnot. Now it's a mystery thriller, this film, although figuring out who did this is probably not so tough. Because the film keeps the identity from the viewer, you're probably not going to think "I bet it's the guy everybody already hates!" And it isn't. In fact I'll tell you who it is, it's Bryce, the Chris Evans guy, the guy who was maybe a little too wild. His reasons for raping Finn are somewhat less clear than his reasons for murdering Osbourne -- by the way, he murders Osbourne -- but we have to get across to the viewer that frankly when you think about it? These super rich people? They're pretty twisted. And also? The South American natives? Even though we judge them? And think that we're better than them? We're really not. And rich people are probably the least better than them than anybody. If you don't believe me, what about that one guy who raped that other guy in Fierce People.

Dunne's work as a director of suspense sequences and fight scenes is largely of the template variety. If Fierce People becomes weird, that's only because the story is uncontrolled loony toons -- as a film it remains leaden. Which helps to make it weirder, I guess, but not in any way that's interesting. The film goes where it goes because I think Wittenborn didn't believe readers or film audiences would hang around to watch his weak-ass anthropology pun unless things turned violent at some point. But in the end we know who are the real fierce peoples of the world, and everything is good again.
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This post has been part of The White Elephant Blogathon hosted this year by Philip Tatler at his blog Diary of a Country Pickpocket.

The Land Underground

It's been a while since I last wrote anything about Jean Rollin, one of my favorite horror-or-otherwise directors. This is something I used to make a habit of, in large part because Kino Lorber used to make a habit of releasing his films on Blu-ray. That dried up after while but today Kino, as always via their Redemption line, is back on it with their release of The Escapees, Rollin's 1981 feminist, er, crime film? Anyway that, paired with my recent viewing of his earlier horror film The Iron Rose, also available on Kino Blu-ray, has led me here today to offer a few brief words on each.

The Escapees (1981) - This film came out the same year as another Rollin film, Zombie Lake, which I wrote about here, and which may be the worst film Rollin ever made. I'd be inclined to give Schoolgirl Hitchhikers a pass over that one, because at least Schoolgirl Hitchhikers feels honest. In any event, the time had come for Rollin to re-energize himself and to do so he would return to a favorite theme, that of two women on the run -- sometimes they're just together, not so much on the run, but here they're on the run. He'd already done this in, for example, Fascination and Requiem for a Vampire, and would perhaps perfect it in one of his last films, Two Orphan Vampires, which The Escapees resembles more than any other Rollin film I've seen.

Unfortunately, The Escapees is no Two Orphan Vampires. It's about two women, Michelle (Laurence Dubas) and Marie (Christiane Coppe) who are inmates in an insane asylum. Marie won't speak and Michelle is full of anger -- we don't know much more about them than that. But Michelle wants to escape and she enlists Marie's help. Insisting that she'll leave Marie behind once they're in the clear, the two women nevertheless stay together, with Michelle's hard edge crumbling to softness any time she sees evidence of Marie's lonely despair. So the two of them go it alone, meeting lots of curious folks at, for example, what appears to be a traveling outdoor carny strip club, as well as various bars, which is a less colorful example. Along the way they fend off unwanted advances, possibly even rape, and come to see possible freedom from the restrictive, abusive "regular" world on a ship sailing to Brazil.

As already noted, The Escapees isn't a horror film and though I don't want to pigeonhole Rollin my reaction is to think "More's the pity." Since it's impossible for me to not compare this film with Two Orphan Vampires, it's also impossible for me to not see The Escapees as a dry run for that later surrealistic masterpiece. Leaving behind the Baroque possibilities of horror seems to have kept Rollin from indulging his genius for bizarre and eerie imagery, though at every turn the film is practically begging to be pushed over the stylistic brink. Rollin never does that, and the film, though not bad, ends up feeling like a curiosity exactly because it's not especially curious. God knows it's an improvement over Zombie Lake, though, and if The Escapees is what Rollin needed to push on to his next film, 1982's brilliant The Living Dead Girl, well then that's just fine by me.

The Iron Rose (1973) - Ah. This, however, this is something else again. With his fifth feature film, Rollin proved with The Iron Rose that he was a horror filmmaker unlike any other. At just 80 minutes and featuring, for all intents and purposes, only two characters, a young woman (Francoise Pascal) and a young man (Hugues Quester), this film is nothing less than a masterpiece, of tone, and chilling insinuation, and terrible mystery.

Being the kind of film it is, the plot is simplicity itself: this young couple decides one day to wander around in a cemetery, maybe have a picnic, maybe even make love in some secluded crypt. Eventually day turns to night and they realize that the cemetery's gates have been closed and locked. What's more, it's a big place, not very well kept up and overrun by old weeds and bushes, and they're kind of lost. Their nerves fray, they lash out at each other, the man's behavior becomes nearly abusive, while the young woman begins acting very strangely. She becomes very interested in the dead around them, and begins talk about them, and death itself, as a kind of real life. But not in religious, heavenly terms; rather, life that is lived in death, in the dirt, underground.

Where this is all going managed to both surprise me and to feel inevitable after the fact. And while The Iron Rose isn't short of strong images, for once it may be Rollin's writing, his prose, that lifts the film above most films in the genre (an absolutely terrific performance by Pascal doesn't hurt anything either). There's a speech late in the film that lays the whole terrible idea of it, the awful poetry of the young woman's strange new desire, which she finds beautiful, wonderful, something she takes delight in. She talks about "the land underneath" and exhorts her listener to "carry your birds of gold"; the language is obscure but the meaning is clear. There's a menace to The Iron Rose that isn't aggressive or even violent. It's not pursuing you. It's not waiting for you. It's not even menacing. It's natural. It just is.

We May Not Die Hideous Deaths

When a group of artists breaks up, be they musicians or, I don't know, let's say comedians, what the individual members of that group go on to do or not do in their creative lives is often the subject of much fascination and debate. Sometimes even mockery, if you can imagine that for one second, and eventually, usually, down the road, a reassessment of some kind. I get the feeling, for example, that currently the solo albums of Paul McCartney are broadly regarded with more warmth than the solo albums of John Lennon. It wasn't always thus, by any stretch, and this could just be a byproduct of McCartney having so much more post-Beatles work than Lennon (obviously), but anyway, there it is. What's interesting about that example, though, is that the way people talk about solo Lennon and McCartney indicates that both men are or were still in The Beatles and they never were not in The Beatles. The albums they recorded outside of their work with The Beatles was just another way they went about being in The Beatles.

Much the same thing could be said about the various members of Monty Python after that groundbreaking British comedy team broke up, as they've done more than once over the years. Their TV sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1974, and from 1971 to 1983 they wrote, directed, produced, and starred in several films, at least two of which, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, have survived and will continue to survive as classics (The Meaning of Life is pretty underrated, incidentally). But Monty Python as we know it pretty much ceased to exist in 1983, yet of this most influential of all sketch comedy groups' six members -- John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman -- only two of them, Cleese and Gilliam, could be said to have enjoyed a level of fame and artistic success that would seem appropriate, given their previous cultural impact (for those thinking "But Eric Idle has done very well for himself," yes indeed he has, but that success could hardly be said to have been independent of Monty Python). It would not be difficult to argue that comedically speaking, the true masterpiece to come from the group is Fawlty Towers, the sitcom Cleese co-created, wrote, and starred in with Connie Booth in the mid-to-late '70s, while the film department of Python was really chugging along. Beyond that, Cleese also has the hugely successful film A Fish Called Wanda that he wrote and starred in, and he's appeared in dozens and dozens of films, including parts of the James Bond and Harry Potter franchises. For his part, Terry Gilliam has had one of the more unusual careers as a film director I can think of. It's been a struggle, famously so, but when at the very least you get Brazil and Time Bandits out of the struggle you can rest assured that you've left your mark.

That the other four haven't left the same kind of mark post-Python is not a criticism. Leaving aside Idle (please), Michael Palin's many series of travel documentaries is hardly negligible, for one thing, plus he's a published novelist and so forth. Palin, and Idle too come to think of it, has shown scant interest in making films, other than as an actor, and even then with a steadily decreasing frequency. All of this despite the fact that film seemed to be the future of Python, or the Pythons -- as a group or individually. I'd bet good money that more people have seen Monty Python and The Holy Grail than have seen more that a handful of their television sketches. But really only Gilliam has shown any passion in that arena, his stylistic idiosyncrasies showing through even in The Holy Grail, which he co-directed with Terry Jones, his devotion to depicting the Dark Ages as filthily as possible seeming on paper to be at odds with the comedy, but instead helped to create something truly unique. When he had full rein to indulge in this way, he produced Jabberwocky, his first non-Python film as a writer and director; the results are a bit iffy, so it was perhaps Jones (and to some degree Cleese, who during the making of Holy Grail butted heads with both directors because he believed their artistic fiddling about had nothing to do with comedy) keeping his head screwed on straight, and having maybe a more classical/traditionalist approach to filmmaking, who kept the tone of that film right where it needed to be.

Terry Jones would go on to direct Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life without Gilliam. They don't feel like the work of the same director, though this could be a result of settings and the stories being told -- Life of Brian is naturally sunny and dusty, The Meaning of Life is largely indoors or set in the English countryside, etc., but one might sense that Jones is trying to find his way to a degree that Gilliam, as much of a mess as Jabberwocky is, never had to worry about. He imbued The Holy Grail with his style, it became a part of the Python style, and he carried it back out again into his own films. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas may have nothing to do with Monty Python, but it still feels like there's a connection that is more than just superficial. As a filmmaker, Jones never established that same strong personality (I might argue that as a performer he certainly did, however, and while Cleese is my own personal favorite of the Python group -- really going out on a limb on that one, I know -- Jones may have been the most idiosyncratic). His biggest shot at doing so came in 1989 with Erik the Viking, a comedy-fantasy that he wrote, directed, and has a small (fittingly ridiculous) part in, and which will be released tomorrow on DVD and Blu-ray by Olive Films.

You should know, if you don't already, that this will not be the first home video release of Erik the Viking. Perhaps I'm jumping the gun here, I can't tell anymore, but for a DVD release in 2006, Jones delegated to his son the opportunity that had been provided to him by the studio to re-edit the film. Bill Jones, the son, ended up delivering a cut of the film that was 75 minutes long. That's down about half an hour from what made it to theaters in 1989. I don't think it's going too far to infer that this suggests a certain dissatisfaction with the film, on the part of both Terry and Bill (who'd been involved with the project before the re-edit), but I've never seen that cut, or heard the Terry Jones commentary track that accompanies that disc, so what do I know? I do know the theatrical cut, I saw this film in the theaters and more than once on home video during my teenage years, and now again the other day on Blu-ray. The movie was a flop, Jones's career as a director basically stalled out (he does have a new one, fairly big, coming up though), and even when I was thirteen or fourteen years old I think I knew that whether Jones was conscious of it or not, Erik the Viking played out like someone was hoping people would mistake it for a Gilliam film (whose career was more robust then than it is now) and thereby elevate it in whatever way one elevates Gilliam's films (pardon the confusion here, but like him or not -- I do both -- it's never easy to know where to place Gilliam).

Erik the Viking is a comedy about Norse mythology that stars Tim Robbins as the titular character, a man who, though a Viking, finds less satisfaction in raping and plundering than many of his friends and fellow villagers do, including his father played with no small amount of commitment by Mickey Rooney (because might as well cast Mickey Rooney as an elderly Viking). That basic premise, which is just a starting point, is a classic Python reversal; it's really a classic reversal as a premise for sketch comedy, period (it also would have felt right at home in a novel by Terry Pratchett). What's less usual is what it's used to set up. As the film opens, Erik and his fellow Vikings are raiding a village. Erik hacks into a tent occupied by a woman named Helga (Samantha Bond). Erik is planning to rape her, not because he wants to but because he's a Viking; however due to this reticence Helga is able to talk to him, with some anger, about the evil he and his people are doing. So Erik backs off, but as he does so two of his comrades burst in. They're about to rape Helga and Erik fights them. He kills one, and then runs the other through with his sword, yet in doing so the sword also pierces Helga, and she dies. Now what?

He visits the local witch named Freya (Eartha Kitt) because the war-like nature of the Vikings doesn't feel natural to him. Over the course of the subsequent conversation, Erik learns that Ragnarok, the Norse word for the end of the world (essentially) is upon them. There's one way to stop Ragnarok, involving the blowing of the Horn Resounding, so Erik goes back to his village and recruits a team of Vikings to go on a quest to find the Horn Resounding and stop Ragnarok.

Sounds pretty funny, right? Well it kind of is. Erik the Viking isn't a deathless comedy classic, but there's a lot of fun to be had watching a film that draws as reference and inspiration for its jokes not something contemporary, but actual ancient ideas and ways of thinking. Of course the contemporary enters into things, unavoidably so, because why else are we laughing at the casual reactions to death and violence and things like that if not because we're so very much not Vikings ourselves? Going on the quest with Erik are a father (regular Gilliam actor and co-writer Charles McKeown) and his son Sven (Tim McInnerny, from Black Adder). The son has never been able to successfully enter the "berserk" state during battle, a state for which Vikings are known and feared. And so comedy (and an emotional payoff) is mined from an ancient Norse conception of the concept of bloodlust. This isn't to say that Erik the Viking is tiresomely high minded or proud of itself, but I don't think a film comedy with a frame of reference broader than Judd Apatow could ever imagine should be dismissed. I also think it's worth mentioning that with a film like this, you can compare its approach to comedy with that of Apatow, and think that in its approach to Vikings the film, whatever its faults, which are numerous and real, feels somehow more honest than Nicolas Winding Refn's ostensibly more "authentic" Valhalla Rising. This is the sort of thing that can come out of the world of Monty Python, and pretty much nowhere else.

I mean, here's a comedy that also deals with rape and makes jokes about murder but uses both as a catalyst for various characters to become better people within the framework of the world they actually live in, not the one the viewers live in. It has elements of Mel Brooksian parody without ever actually being that. It has monsters and other practical effects, which set a very appealing mood like in early Gilliam films; it uses John Cleese as the villainous flip on his Robin Hood in Gilliam's Time Bandits (in which Cleese wasn't villainous, just deeply, hilariously cynical; otherwise, look at Robin Hood's scene and Cleese's main Halfdan the Black scene in Erik the Viking side-by-side -- they're pretty much the same); it even eventually becomes ethereally serious, in a way that both evokes the last third of Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and sort of refutes it, being somewhat more sunny in its philosophy than Gilliam's bit. But while watching Erik the Viking you can't avoid Gilliam, and in this way you can't avoid Python. Not that you should have to, or even want to -- I originally wanted to see Erik the Viking in 1989 because of the strong Python connection. And if that long serious bit late in Erik the Viking doesn't work, and is in fact pretty tedious, and in fact ultimately rolls back certain things in the story that I really wish it hadn't, well, that similar bit in Baron Munchausen can be faulted for all the same things.

I realize that it seems as though my point is that Terry Jones is merely ripping off Terry Gilliam. I don't think that. I do think that Gilliam's success had to be on his mind when making Erik the Viking, but as Paul McCartney's Ram and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band are in cultural/historical terms thought of as merely extensions of The Beatles, Gilliam's early films and certainly Erik the Viking are both steps away from and to Python. An obvious point, maybe, but everything goes out of fashion eventually, and Python was going out of fashion by the time Erik the Viking came along. "Had already gone out of fashion," you'd almost have to argue. Cleese's A Fish Called Wanda came out just one year before, but if you think about it, that film is not especially Pythonesque. It's a romantic comedy caper, but darker and R-rated enough to give it all an appealingly grown-up edge. Compared to Erik the Viking (and I'm not foolish enough to think that Erik the Viking is better than A Fish Called Wanda), Cleese's hit film takes place in the everyday world we all live in. But of course the tragedy of Erik the Viking isn't that it's not funny (I think it's funny) or that it has flaws (A Fish Called Wanda has flaws), it's that it's weird. Flops that are weird aren't given any credit for being weird. People simply say "What were they thinking!?" They don't then go on and try to understand what they were thinking. So Erik the Viking was a flop because it was strange in a way that had just recently gone out of style. It's as simple as that.

Contrast this, if you will, with Yellowbeard, a film from 1983 directed by Mel Damski and co-written by and starring (sort of) Graham Chapman. Chapman had such a strange place within Monty Python -- never mind that he was one of the funniest (my second favorite, for the record), but by all accounts some of the most ridiculous and surreal non sequiturs were his (the famous, defining, hilarious, and sudden ejaculation "Burma!" in one Python sketch was Chapman's, for example); yet when the films were being made it somehow fell to Chapman, and not Michael Palin, who now perhaps seems like a more obvious choice, to play the straight man/protagonist/everyman. Chapman wasn't necessarily playing all of these at once (in Life of Brian he was, though), but he was chosen to be the center of these absurdist films. This despite the fact that on a personal level his life was the most chaotic. Chapman was an open homosexual, which caused a fair amount of controversy but against which the other Pythons were ready, willing, and able to stand with Chapman; he was also an alcoholic, and this caused a great deal more upheaval in the group. It was dealt with, one way or the other, and I for one have never seen the effects of his addiction on screen (he really was a natural comic genius, whose frequent pairings with Cleese -- they were also writing partners -- stand in my mind as one of the great comic pairings in history); the point of course is that Chapman could do all of that, and he could also be ridiculous and silly at the drop of a hat. He was, perhaps, the quintessential Python.

It's not impossible that the reverence in which I and many others hold Graham Chapman is goosed by the fact that he died (he's the "dead one" of the group; most groups of a certain vintage have at least one) in 1989 (to give you some idea of myself, I still remember the day) at the infuriating age of 48. So yes, perhaps that's it, but I'm not dissuaded from that reverence by watching Chapman's work. I'm not even dissuaded from that reverence by watching Yellowbeard, another flop, a not beloved film, a film best known at this stage probably because co-star Marty Feldman died suddenly of a heart attack while making it (because his diet was rich in dairy and eggs, Mel Brooks has postulated). Also in the cast are Peter Cook, Madeline Kahn, James Mason, John Cleese, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin, Peter Boyle, Eric Idle, Kenneth Mars, David Bowie (in one of the more pointless cameos I've ever seen), and Spike Milligan. Plus others. Yellowbeard tells the story, and I might as well get this out of the way quickly, of a viciously ridiculous or ridiculously vicious pirate named Yellowbeard (Chapman) who escapes from prison and goes in search of the treasure he hid, while the English government, represented mainly by Idle, follow in hopes to be led to that treasure, and also while an old enemy (Boyle) pursues him for not just wealth but also revenge, plus there's stuff about a map and Yellowbeard's son, and so on and so on. The plot doesn't matter, of course. The jokes do, and though there's no particular style brought to the material by director Mel Damski, in terms of comedy it's more aggressively Pythonesque than Erik the Viking. It's quite offensive, in fact. I don't remember any rape jokes in Erik the Viking even though that crime comes up a lot in the film, but Yellowbeard has a ton of rape jokes. At one point, Yellowbeard denies that he has a son with Betty (Kahn) because, he says, the last woman he raped he also killed. Hoo boy. But listen, I wouldn't hesitate to argue that that's actually funny, because the period being depicted in this film, and the kind of person Yellowbeard is meant to be, would have regarded rape as nothing to get worked up about. So that's the joke. That's what we're mocking by laughing at it. I know, that's not the thing to do now, but maybe...well, whatever. Yellowbeard would never be made today. "It wouldn't be the first head I ever ate!" Yellowbeard says at one point, and you can take that quote literally. It's funny.

Yellowbeard was also a flop. That doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that the film finally kind of backs away from the heedlessly offensive material referenced above. How could someone like Yellowbeard who thinks nothing of rape and murder go out of his way to save a bum from being caught in an explosion he, Yellowbeard, had orchestrated? There's a fair chunk of that in the last half hour of the film, and it strikes me as wildly disingenuous, or would do if I didn't strongly suspect those bits were forced upon the film by the studio. A commentary track on this disc would have been very welcome, but apparently nobody much cares about it now. It's considered bad and unfunny, but I don't think it's either one of those. It's a product of an era that's gone, of a sensibility that's gone, of a type of humor that we still claim to worship but which is also gone. Flying in the face of what I said earlier, it's less Pythonesque than Erik the Viking because Mel Damski could not have been more of an outsider, but there's still John Cleese in there, and Chapman. More than anything, there's Chapman, who didn't do much outside of Python that we can easily see now. Yellowbeard is one of the few films he made, and damn it, it's not a great film, but it's funny.