Stormy Monday (d. Mike Figgis) – Like Don Siegel’s The Killers
and George Romero’s Creepshow, this film, just out from
Arrow Video, features one of those casts the true looniness of which can only
really be appreciated in retrospect. In this case, Mike Figgis’s debut feature
(which is about gangsters and nightclubs and jazz and whatnot) we get a main
cast comprised of Sean Bean, Melanie Griffith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Sting. For a
moody 80s crime film, that bodes well, right? Or at least it bodes interesting. Right?
The guts of the plot are typical: Sting plays Finney, the
strong-willed owner of a jazz club who, as the wearily satirical “America Week”
gears up to begin in the English city of Newcastle, is soon being threatened
and otherwise pressured to sell his business because of some criminal real
estate something-or-other. Finney is tipped off that this is going to happen by
Brendan (Bean), who overhears two guys talking about it while he’s out on a
date with Kate (Griffith). She’s a waitress at another club, but also reluctantly
uses her feminine wiles for mercenary purposes, at the behest of Cosmo(!), an
American businessman who is really a
gangster when you think about it, played by Jones. Finney fights back
against physical threats, Brendan falls in love with Kate and finds himself
caught in the middle of all this, Kate wants her freedom from Cosmo, and Cosmo
wants to destroy all that is good in the name of America or whatever. Together,
they rush towards a breathful anticlimax.
The film looks good. Roger Deakins shot it. All the
performances are, you know, fine. Jones is full of the blank-faced tics that
made so much of his early work hard for me to get behind, and Melanie Griffith
still hadn’t quite learned how human beings speak. But Sting and Bean are good.
The main problem for me, in addition to the fact that as a crime thriller, which Stormy Monday seems to
think it is, I was never once compelled by anything that happened on screen or
by the people doing them, which admittedly is hardly a frivolous complaint, is
Figgis’s lame, limp-dick satire of America and capitalism. I’ve said before
that I have many, many problems with satire as a comedic form, at least as its
been practiced in my lifetime, because in satire all you have to do is plant a
giant Pepsi bottle somewhere it doesn’t belong and suddenly you’ve make a “joke”
which is not only “funny” but which also “says something.” Satire is revered,
satirists are holy figures, yet somehow it takes no effort at all to make it or
be one. No one expects more out of satire than a giant Pepsi bottle.
Terror in a Texas Town (d. Joseph H. Lewis) – This 1958
Western, also just released by Arrow Video, has a few things in common with Stormy
Monday. Here, a crooked businessman and extortionist named McNeil
(Sebastian Cabot) pressures a Swedish immigrant (Ted Stanhope) to sell his
farm, because McNeil knows there’s oil bubbling underneath the land. When the
farmer refuses, McNeil’s hired gun Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young) murders him.
Before McNeil can swoop in and buy up the rights, though, the farmer’s son
George (Sterling Hayden) arrives in town, learns his father has been murdered,
and begins a quest to find out why he was killed and who is responsible. His
mission is somewhat hampered by the fact that the other farmers in town are
frightened of McNeil, and so at times it seems as though, with the exception of
Mirada (Victor Millan), his dad’s loyal friend, George is going it alone.
This obviously also calls to mind High Noon, which came out
six years earlier and bore the same political subtext. Terror in a Texas Town
was written by Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted and using the credited Ben Perry as
his front, and so capitalism is condemned, and immigrants working the land are
the victims as well as the heroes (here it parts ways with Stormy Monday, since in
that film the foreigners (the Americans), are the whole problem). In other
words, the politics are as up front here as they are in Stormy Monday. The
difference is that the writing here is good,
the draw of the story is primal, and his while Figgis wanted his individual
shots to look good and hired the right guy to give him that, Joseph H. Lewis
and his cinematographer Russell Harlan are concerned with their film looking
good as shots and scenes move and flow into each other.
Even better, Lewis and Trumbo weren’t interested in stock
heroes and villains. Or least, not exclusively. George and Mirada don’t have a
lot of guilt to work through, apparently, and McNeil isn’t about to see the
error of his ways. Johnny Crale, though, is another matter. Nedrick Young’s
performance is top-notch, the best in a very well-acted film, and he has the
most to work with. Early in the film, Young subtly lets on that his Crale, a
prolific killer, has something going on inside him, related to how he’s chosen
to earn his living. And it’s always there, manifesting in different ways. The
moral and existential crisis that is roiling around inside Crale’s head and
guts might bring out in him a sense of pity one day, and fuel his brutality the
next. If he’s the Angel of Death, and his black clothes suggest that he might
be, then he’s one who, if he’s not stopped, will soon suffer a complete
psychotic breakdown, and bring everything and everyone down on his head.