Boy, it's been a while since we've had one of these, isn't it? Feels that way, at least. Maybe it's just that it's been so long since anybody bothered to tell me about one of these. Okay, I see how it is.
But I'll get my revenge later. For now, it's important to focus on the topic at hand, which is a Nicholas Ray blogathon, hosted by the effervescent Tony Dayoub, of the great blog Cinema Viewfinder. Ray, as I'm sure you're all aware, was one of the giants of mid-century Hollywood filmmaking, and he is as worthy a subject for a blogathon as you'd imagine. So why don't you all take part? Head on over to Tony's place and read the details. You should know, though, that I plan on taking part in this one myself, so don't you go picking the movie I'm going to write about, or else I will punch you so hard.
What people don’t think about when they think about the Exorcist movies is that there are five of them. They don’t think that the Saw films exceed Exorcist films by only one. They don’t now consider that the new Final Destination movie actually makes that franchise even with the Exorcist series. The reason that no one regards the five Exorcist films as any kind of regular horror franchise must be because the sequels, as an extension of the Friedkin/Blatty original, are so wildly scattershot. William Peter Blatty is the original creator, and he only sanctions two of the four follow-ups: Exorcist III, which he wrote and directed himself, and which, regardless of the studio imposed ending, still bears his unmistakable, oddball Catholic stamp; and Dominion, the 2003 prequel written by William Wisher and Caleb Carr and directed by Paul Schrader. That leaves John Boorman’s batshit Exorcist II: The Heretic and Renny Harlin’s alternate universe prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning (clever!) unaccounted for.
The battle (a tad grand, I know) between those films Blatty approves of and those he doesn’t is at the root of the series’ let’s-try-this-again awkwardness, and apparently constant state of reboot. This is true even if Blatty, specifically as a figure making these movies, outside of his role as the creative force behind Exorcist III, doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that Blatty wrote the original novel and, years later, a sort-of sequel called Legion, which followed Boorman’s film and acted as though – and quite rightly, too – it never existed. So it would follow that Blatty’s own film adaptation of Legion would ignore Exorcist II (and would carry over only supporting characters from the original, unless you count Jason Miller’s Father Karras, which you can, but also can’t, depending on how you feel). What matters is in 2002 or 2003, the studio that hired him looked at Paul Schrader’s Dominion and were, for some bizarre reason, so put off by what they saw that they scrapped the post-production and turned the Wisher-Carr script over to Renny Harlin(!), who rejiggered quite a bit, and ended up making a movie which tested so badly that the studio, Morgan Creek, gave Schrader a little money to finish Dominion, and then said “Fuck it, we’ll just release both.” Which is sort of admirable.
Second, and more importantly, is his implication that The Exorcist somehow isn't about positivity or goodness. Perhaps he's forgotten the ending, but Damien Karras goads the demon into leaving Regan, the young girl, and possessing him, Karras, at which point Karras sacrifices himself by jumping out a window, removing the demonic threat from the girl, and from the house. This is good. This is positive, if you understand that defeating a demon at the expense of the life of a good man is a victory, which Karras clearly believed it was. And so did Blatty, so much so that his fear that the victory inherent in Karras's sacrifice would be misunderstood, misinterpreted, or just plain missed, that he would eventually recut the film, add scenes that Friedkin has taken out, for the "producer's cut" that came out in 2000. I did, and still do, believe that this was a mistake, because this version of The Exorcist simply doesn't work. But apparently Blatty was right to have these misgivings, because on the DVD commentary for Dominion, Schrader says that...well first he says that the conceit of Dominion, as devised by William Wisher and Caleb Carr, that the possessed character would be an ill person who got better while the world around him went mad, was ingenious, but a poor engine for a horror film. All this does is prove that Schrader has a depressingly narrow view of what horror can be, but never mind. What he says that's more relevant is that he wants his film, which focuses on the crisis of faith of Father Merrin (played originally by Max von Sydow in the first two films, here, and in Renny Harlin's take, by Stellan Skarsgard), to be a journey for the lead character. Presumably this journey is about Merrin for some reason getting over the hump of his crumbling faith to find God anew. Remember that. And as bit of an ancillary example, to just give some evidence that Blatty's fears were not for nothing, I'll note that Edgar Wright, in one of the DVD extras for Hot Fuzz, describes Karras's death in the original film as Regan "compelling" Karras through the window. So, Karras sacrificed nothing, and was instead murdered. This is exactly the idea that Blatty didn't want people to carry away from the film.
This sort of thing makes me wonder if the whole world hasn’t gone mad. Schrader seems to believe that the journey in Dominion – and I like his film – isn’t simply a retelling of the one in The Exorcist. In other words, Karras/Merrin loses his faith and only regains it when confronted by a cosmic evil. Oh, excuse, Karras/Merrin/and also Lamont from Exorcist II loses his faith and only etc. Every single Exorcist film revolves around a crisis of faith (or never having it and then finding it, as it’s unclear if Lt. Kinderman in Exorcist III ever believed, prior to that film’s action) that is resolved by facing off against demonic forces, yet Boorman and Schrader act like they just invented bread. This is Blatty’s whole thing – well, obviously not just his, but his own devout Catholicism has been expressed through stories that employ some variation of this idea. See also The Ninth Configuration, novel and film, in which skepticism is confronted not with an ultimate evil, but with an ultimate good. So the idea that Boorman’s film is a “riposte” is simply inane – his film is, at best, a restating.
Look! She's like a little bunny rabbit making its angry face!
The backstory behind the two prequels, recounted earlier, is really sort of amazing. I've heard that Stellan Skarsgard had some reservations about repeating the role he'd just completed for Schrader under another director after Schrader was fired, but Schrader urged him to do it because what other actor would have the same story to tell? Who else has played an entire role for a basically finished film, only to be told that movie isn't cutting it, here's a new director and a reworked script, now go do it again? This would all be even more interesting if Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning had anything at all to recommend it. Harlin is sort of a punchline, but I'll freely admit that he's made some fun trash. The problem here is, nobody wanted his movie to be trash, exactly. They wanted it to be commercial, but this is The Exorcist we're talking about here, so it had to be serious. Well, apparently when Harlin goes serious, he also goes hopelessly dull. There's nothing that's even absurd enough to really justify watching it. Actually, no, there is the bit at the end when the possessed woman (Izabella Scorupco) is running through a tunnel at a stationary Skarsgard, windmilling her arms in a way that is I guess supposed to ward of Catholicism, but then just as she's about to get to Skarsgard, Catholicism punches her in the face. Killing her, I hasten to add. This would count as a botched exorcism in my view, but it ended up getting Merrin the gig in Georgetown, so I guess we all have different standards.
And even if all these sequels are just weaker versions of what The Godfather Part II did, which was to underline all the important stuff from the first movie, Dominion approaches the ideas introduced in The Exorcist differently. Here, the demon (played by Billy Crawford) doesn't present itself as some ragged and wounded, disease-ridden creature, but as something beautiful and androgynous -- in other words, not so much Satanic as Luciferian ("I am perfection," it says at one point). There is a real Biblical, and Miltonian, power to this that could have perhaps been exploited more completely, but is certainly better and more interesting than we've gotten elsewhere. In Exorcist II, the Catholicism takes a backseat to some moronic science fiction contraption, and in the Exorcist: The Beginning, it's a plot point. But in the other three, the Friedkin, Blatty and Schrader films, the horror and the struggle with religious faith and ritual are inseparable. The suffering -- the "torture of a child" -- is part of it, the hell and nightmares, the sacrifice and triumph, are all part of it.
Such a film is Roman Polanski's 
All of this Polanski buries under an unfortunate layer of academically acceptable farce. I say "academically acceptable" because there is a strain of humor to be found in the 
My goodness, but The Killing looks good, some fifty-five years after its release. And I can testify to the fact that one does not need a blu-ray player, or, so it follows, a blu-ray disc, to appreciate the forthcoming 
The Killing finds Kubrick, the hungry young pup, in efficient artist mode, the kind of filmmaker the auteur theory seemed made for, though he would obviously shrug off the whole "efficient" part soon enough. Which isn't a knock, because I will punch you in the teeth if you try to speak ill of Kubrick, but boy is this thing brisk and to the point. There's no meandering as the racetrack heist is planned, carried out, and then imploded. The implosion, in particular, seems to happen all at once, or like the rapid pops of a string of firecrackers.
You might say there is meandering of a sort in the various acting styles employed. Kubrick famously liked big, howling performances, stylized to the hilt, and while his cast is led by the ever business-like Sterling Hayden, and also includes the well-trained meekness of Elisha Cook, Jr. (poor bastard), you have, on the other hand, Timothy Carey, one of cinema's great loons. How Kubrick must have laughed at Carey's bizarre performance -- the guy hardly ever parts his teeth when he talks. It's like his character's jaw is wired shut, except it's not. Here's Carey pictured with James Edwards, who, six years later, would freak out memorably in The Manchurian Candidate:
Edwards seems barely able to contain himself in his few scenes -- whatever emotion he happens to be feeling in the moment, he's feeling the ever-loving shit out of it. Then, also, on yet a third hand, you have someone like Kola Kwariani in his only film role. Kwariani comes off as a more avuncular Tor Johnson, and about as coherent. A wrestler and chess enthusiast, Kwariani has long stretches of dialogue that sound like complete gibberish, but given both the film's strangeness and its expert pacing, this never matters. Kwariani's the muscle, and otherwise sort of gentle. There you go.
What you have ultimately with The Killing is one of the great heist clusterfuck movies, and one of the great fate movies. That last one is what noir is supposed to traffic in, but it doesn't always, and even when it does fate tends to loom like a buzzard, or, more precisely, like a buzzard's shadow. That's not to say you don't sense fate constructing its plot against Hayden's Johnny Clay -- it's just that you don't hear the thud of approaching doom. You expect it, but you don't hear it. In keeping with The Killing's police blotter narration, read by Art Gilmore, the film proceeds like a news story, the summarizing headline of which you've already read, so you can read along and marvel at the foolishness of those who you know to be dead, or lost, or gone away.
There's some rich humor to all this, too, shot throughout, but the end of the film is a wild contrast between an "oh shit!" kind of laugh and an...I don't know, appreciation seems too weak a word for how I feel about what Sterling Hayden does in the film, from the moment he arrives at the airport to check his bags to the moment when THE END fades up ominously on screen. Hayden was one of the great no-bullshit actors, and in films like this, and also in this film (I feel it's important to not forget that), he was almost always the smartest guy there, whether he played a cop or a hood. But the masterpiece of acting in The Killing, if it has just one, is when Hayden, as Johnny Clay, realizes that he messed up bad, and has to try to talk his way around it, like a normal citizen, to a couple of airport employees who won't budge, because they can't, but are entirely professional and polite about completely, albeit unbeknownst to either of them, destroying Clay's life. And Clay is a professional in his own right, and he's trying to hang on to that, because to lose it would be to lose his last hope. But just to watch a big, tough, un-fuck-withable guy like Sterling Hayden scramble like this is kind of amazing. It's like watching Lee Marvin get lost.
The Criterion disc for The Killing comes with one of the more exciting extras of the year -- a whole entire other Kubrick film. Killer's Kiss, from 1955, is not Kubrick's very first film, but it's the first film he was willing to acknowledge might be worth anyone's time to watch. Another film noir, what struck me most about watching it today -- and I'd never seen it before -- was that in the opening credits it says that the story was an original idea of Kubrick's. In the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Kubrick's widow Christiane says that one of the great frustrations of her husband's life was that he was unable to invent his own stories, and was therefore driven to adapt all his films from other writers' work. All his films save Killer's Kiss, but you can see here that this brief, at 67 minutes, film doesn't have much of a story at all. The narrative of Killer's Kiss seems less like an idea than an excuse -- an excuse to film boxing scenes, an excuse to film a rooftop chase, an excuse to film in a mannequin warehouse. Especially that one. The film is full of contrivances to move the plot, such as these couple of jokers:
...taking Jamie Smith's white scarf just so he can chase after them and take himself away from where he needs to be, thereby being missed, ruining plans, endangering others, and all the rest of the things you need to keep it moving. Of course, it wouldn't be the first film helped along by contrivances. Hell, The Killing has the tire-puncturing horseshoe, one of the more desperate lunges for irony I can think of. No, Killer's Kiss is not a film noir in the mode of The Killing. It's part of the tradition that includes Blast of Silence and, actually, a genre switch here, but also Carnival of Souls. You can see the kinship with Blast of Silence, for instance, in the shots of New York, as it was then at that moment -- the shop windows with the creepy automaton Santa Claus and the pastries and the wind-up swimming toy, and the rooftop chase.
Which is not to say that the film is bad, because it's not. It's actually pretty involving, and manages to build a very strong amount of queasy suspense very quickly. It begins with a series of painting, over which the opening credits play, that look like what might be produced by an unholy hybrid of Hieronymous Bosch and Bill Sienkiwicz, if one or the other of them played sports (or hated sports, or both). These paintings are the work of Amos Rawlings (Onur Tukel), one of three brothers around whom the film will revolve. Amos paints away in the shed of a family ranch, which is now being run by Amos's brother Ezra (Robert Longstreet), a fastidious man, and a religious man, one who objects to Amos's obscene artwork in a general but unobtrusive way, and still brings his brother a glass of orange juice every morning (as well as to Wilbur Cunningham, played by Jim Willingham, a simple-minded friend of the family, it would appear, who lives on the ranch and is doted on by Ezra). These quiet, vaguely tense lives are upended when Cornelius (Michael Tully), the third brother, returns after having disappeared for 18 years.
It's also around here that the film becomes unhinged. A plumber and one-time high school football coach (Mark Darby Robinson) enters the picture, and I'll leave most of what happens from there for you to discover. But the film becomes quite bizarre in a way that isn't particularly welcome. If one had to compare Septien to anything else, it felt to me very much like a cross between Jeff Nichols's Shotgun Stories and Terry Zwigoff's Crumb -- I was entirely on board with that unlikely mix. In the last twenty minutes, though, Tully decided to add (I mean this in terms of tone and style more than actual incident) Steve Balderson's Firecracker, that bullshit piece of phony Southern Gothic dumbassery that Roger Ebert, and only Roger Ebert, loved so much. That film was a dishonest bit of rural, carny, grisly New Age hokum, and Septien decides to follow suit. In short, the film becomes magical, and, worse -- or rather, this is the bad part, because "magical" might have worked -- easy. As long as I'm comparing Septien to every movie under the sun, I might as well point out that once it starts reminding me of Firecracker, it also starts reminding me of Good Will Hunting -- something very awful and traumatic gets talked through by way of a mantra. But this film's Robin Williams is magic, so I suppose they got around my objection this time.
Good Neighbors (d. Jacob Tierney) - This dark Canadian thriller caught me completely unawares. It stars Emily Hampshire, Scott Speedman, and Jay Baruchel as neighbors in an apartment building who become friends, and more in some cases, against the backdrop of a Quebec neighborhood that is being terrorized by a serial killer. So which one of them -- specifically, which one of the two guys -- is the killer, right? Well, that's what I figured this thing was about for about 60% of its running time, and then it blind-sided me. Not with some whiplash of a twist, but a natural progression into a different sort of film, one much more interesting and strange and disturbing. Speaking of, that's one more thing you might be unprepared for if you decide, as I did, to casually, even lazily, purchase Good Neighbors on PPV: it contains one of the most unpleasant and harrowing and awful moments of violence I've seen in many a moon. This scene is also kind of funny, in a way that will make you feel deeply ashamed.
The Driver (d. Walter Hill) - I've always been something of an agnostic when it comes to Walter Hill, having been underwhelmed at a young age by several of what I was told were his very best films. But every so often, I'll cave in again and decide to see if I'm more in tune with his stuff, which I should be, by all rights, given my tastes. When it comes to Southern Comfort, which I rewatched not too very long ago, no, I'm not, unless you're talking about the last fifteen minutes, in which case yes, I am. So impressed was I, this time around, with that film's ending that I figured I'd better keep going (it even erased the whole rest of the film in my mind, which still does nothing for me), and so over the weekend I watched The Driver , Hill's second film. Starring three-time good movie-maker Ryan O'Neal as the title character, The Driver is a classic of '70s crime cinema, which puts it right up there pretty high in the genre's Hall of Fame. Like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, the film is about cars, and character types (who aren't given names -- O'Neal plays The Driver, is nemesis Bruce Dern plays The Detective, and so on), and, like so many heist films, which this sort of is without ever quite seeming like it, it's also about doing the job. Not to mention dealing with the shit that comes with that job. It's all so very well-made, so precise and lean -- "expertly sketched", is what a book critic might call it if The Driver was a novel. It's pure cinema, though, and bracingly brutal, too. And Ryan O'Neal should probably send Hill a Christmas card every year, because that part where he shoots that dude from behind the car door must be the coolest thing O'Neal has ever been allowed to do in a film.
Battle Beyond the Stars (d. Jimmy T. Murakami) - These new "Roger Corman's Cult Classic" DVDs they have now are sort of odd. I'm not debating the need for a deluxe DVD of the original Piranha or Humanoids from the Deep or Death Race 2000 or anything like that. But some of these films are so limp, even in their attempts to exploit all the things we want to see exploited (rarely have I see nudity more half-heartedly filmed than in Slumber Party Massacre). And if you're not going to exploit anything, and want to skew younger, then you'd better be as insane as Starcrash. Because if you're not crazy, and you're not exploitive, you know what you are? You're Battle Beyond the Stars, a film whose deluxe DVD exists solely because people think nostalgia is nice.