Very Positive November Capsule Reviews

These three capsule reviews are very positive!

One-Eyed Jacks (d. Marlon Brando) - I'm not entirely sure when I first saw One-Eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando's singular Western, his one and only film as a director, but I was probably just old enough to appreciate it. The problem has since become that for many, many years it's only official home video release was on VHS. Due to what I have to assume are all sorts of reasons, the rights to the film subsequently fell into the public domain, which means that very few cared about it. But the drive to save, preserve, and restore films of the classic era -- from the silents to I'd have to guess the 60s -- has ramped up in intensity over the last decade or so, and with the help of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, as is the specific case here, the people doing the actual hands-on work have been able to pull many films back from the precipice. Including, I think I hardly need say, Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, which as of yesterday is out on fucking Blu-ray, from fucking Criterion. Forgive me, but I have been waiting a long time for this.

And watching the film for the first time since the VHS era has been, let's say, rewarding, because while I used to think One-Eyed Jacks was that good, it turns out it's actually this good. In plot terms, this is a fairly basic Western revenge story (based on a novel called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider which itself was inspired by the legend of Billy the Kid, a legend that has no actual bearing on this movie, but anyhow, please ignore me), what ends up happening in One-Eyed Jacks is Brando uses basic genre ideas to, not create, but insist on the power of formulaic myths. That's a compliment. The plot's this: Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are bank robbers. After a job with partner Hank Worden, who lasts a few minutes, they get into a serious bind, and the plan is, Dad takes off with the money to buy some a horse to replace the one Rio lost and come back so the two old friends can flee the law together. But for a variety of reasons, Dad doesn't come back, and Rio goes to prison. Then, with new friend Modesto (Larry Duran), Rio escapes from prison, with the single goal of tracking Dad down and killing him. He finds Dad because a couple of bank-robbers led by Ben Johnson want the help of the legendary Rio, and know that he's been asking around about the target of his revenge.

And so one thing leads to another. It's not too very long into the 140-minute film that Brando and Malden meet up again as hunter and prey, and in a scene where Brando, who lies to Malden about what he's been up to for the last five years, shares a glass of tequila with the man who left him behind, but who might actually buy into Brando's "you and me are okay" spiel, it occurred to me that pure cinema is and was achieved when Marlon Brando and Karl Malden were in a scene, any scene, together. Furthermore, later, Karl Malden, during a suspenseful chunk of that One-Eyed Jacks last third, rides along a ridge above a gorgeous VistaVision crashing waves, and it's as languorously beautiful and slow a moment during a period of rather heightened suspense as I can imagine. In an extra on the Criterion disc, Scorsese says Brando waited for those waves a long time. And it works, don't it? Most importantly, though, Brando, as Rio, plays the film hero as a figure of massive physical menace. I'm not sure Brando is as in love with Rio's drive for revenge -- in the face of other things the film is offering to him, anyway -- as, well, I was, and those doubts, my doubts, set in when I saw how ruthlessly Brando was playing it. He has moments when he's past reason, is on the edge of violence. In every instance, I hated -- and I suspect you do or will, too -- the men he's about to hand back a handful of their own brains. This doesn't mean Brando's Rio isn't unnerving in his heroism. Which should not suggest to you that he's not the hero.

Café Society (d. Woody Allen) - So it's fair to say, I guess, that Woody Allen's career since, arguably Bullets Over Broadway in 1994, has been the most contentious period in his nearly fifty years as a filmmaker (it would be exactly fifty if I was counting What's Up, Tiger Lily?, a film I like but which I can't pretend is the work of a director). Since then, some films, like Sweet and Lowdown and Midnight in Paris, have been widely embraced, while others have had at least the good fortune to be divisive, like Deconstructing Harry and Melinda and Melinda, while many others -- Hollywood Ending, Anything Else, Whatever Works, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion -- are basically despised. I myself, a defender of some of the unbeloved Allen films of this period (I like Scoop and think Cassandra's Dream is pretty danged good), made it only thirty minutes into Whatever Works. But I do think, overall, his films since 1994 have been, on average, better than popular opinion would indicate (though even the positive reactions can get iffy: in my view, relatively appreciated entries like Match Point or Blue Jasmine are marginal. It's possible aesthetic opinions are very personal, who among us can say?). We may never know why this has happened.

In any case, as I've said, I think there's lots to admire in this stretch of films, and in fact last year, Allen's Irrational Man, one of his "murder" films (a clutch of movies that I find among his most intriguing) played for me as a deeply clumsy yet fascinating moral investigation. Most people hated it because, from what I could see, they badly misunderstood it. Still, though: clumsy but fascinating is one thing -- what was Allen's last great film? As it happens, I have the answer: 2016's Café Society is the best thing Allen has not only written, but directed, in I don't even know how long. A 1930s Hollywood-set love-triangle that features Jesse Eisenberg as an initially naive (but not entirely likable, as an early sketch-like scene between him and a prostitute played by Anna Camp, indicates) young man trying to find his way into the movie business through his hugely successful producer uncle (Steve Carrell), Café Society suggests, quite strongly, that Allen, who has, it must be said, long ago abandoned any claim to being well-acquainted with modern society (I do not consider this an unforgivable artistic crime) should focus now on period pieces.

It's also one of his better-plotted films in a long time, as well. The center of the love triangle is Kristen Stewart, Carrell's assistant with whom he is cheating on his wife, and with whom Eisenberg falls in love. There's also a gangster subplot involving another of Eisenberg's uncles (one of the great ancillary pleasures of Café Society is its occasional shifts back to Eisenberg's blue collar and/or gangster Jewish family in New York), which begins as a lark but transforms into something else. While remaining within the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, there are a couple moments of surprisingly blunt violence, which in turn help to turn Café Society into something resembling a mix between Crimes and Misdemeanors and Purple Rose of Cairo. On some level, that latter film is the more interesting link (if I do say so myself) to this new film as it's been a very long time since Allen has been able to connect to the kind of average human life depicted there. Cairo and Radio Days are his masterpieces in this respect, and he's not too far off it in Blue Jasmine, in all fairness. But with Café Society, which is mostly concerned with the high-life of Hollywood, manages to quietly show the tension between these different sorts of lives. Which is largely what Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days are also about, while also being utterly gripping and visually beautiful, entertaining movies. As is Café Society. When you make as many movies as Woody Allen, the argument goes, you're not going to be able to tend to each work as closely as you should. But apparently, sometimes you can manage it.

Phenomena (d. Dario Argento) - Though a long-time Argento skeptic -- I love Suspiria, was bored sideways by Opera, have perhaps not chosen entirely wisely when selecting the other half-dozen-or-so Argentos I've seen -- I nevertheless have been genuinely and sincerely excited to see this one, from 1985, for a very long time. The problem has always been that for many years its availability as a home video item has been dicey, and those VHS and DVD releases it's enjoyed have not, I'd gathered as I kept my eye on things, told the full story of Phenomena. A film whose reputation, at least among fans and critics interested in horror, is that of a film which is utterly sui generis, thoroughly insane, and the work of an individual artist who, for good and ill, is following his vision wherever it may lead him. "Off a cliff" is always in the cards.

And yet, no. Before explaining why not, I should probably say that Phenomena is a horror film about a young teenager (Jennifer Connelly, fifteen at the time, and whose admirable refusal to buckle to certain requests kept the film from being a uncomfortably prurient as you might justifiably have feared from Argento), the daughter of an Italian movie star who winds up in a girls' school in Switzerland. That's actually not the problem though. The problem is that someone is serial murdering the students at this school. Homicide detectives have indeed been summoned, including Inspector Geiger (Patrick Brachau). Geiger is hoping the expertise of local entomologist McGregor (Donald Pleasance), who is studying, via maggots, the forensic evidence made available by the previous beheading murder, will, with the help of his chimpanzee best friend....

Hm. Also, Jennifer Connelly's character (named Jennifer, let's not make anything out of that) loves and is worshiped by insects. And my concern is that certain members of its cult love it because they think it's "so bad it's good." To be sure, it is utterly ridiculous. And I absolutely laughed at things Argento may not have wanted me to laugh at. But it's well made, and in its own way Phenomena is no less a jarring look into the brain of a singular filmmaker than Eraserhead. Besides which, it's so much fun. Phenomena ends many times, but each time I realized that one climax was going to droop and then build into another, I didn't sigh impatiently. Instead I thought "Oh good!" And I was never disappointed. Plus there's a chimpanzee who thinks she's people.

The Shlagoom

Budd Schulberg once said “I believe the novelist should be an artist cum sociologist. I think he should see his characters in a social perspective. I believe in art, but I don’t believe in art for art’s sake.” Well, I do. As a matter of fact, generally speaking there are few things a novelist could say that would make my soul wither more than this. An extreme reaction, no doubt, but there it is. I’m tempted to make even more radical “art for art’s sake” kind of statements, but please note I did say this was, however strong, still a general belief, because, as it happens, one of the few exceptions to this is Budd Schulberg himself. Not because his politics or social beliefs line up so exactly that I think “Well obviously this stuff is okay,” but because all of the things Schulberg believes should be a novelist’s job, as practiced by him, combined to make him an excellent anthropologist, not to mention – and this perhaps explains it – a fine writer.

All of these various writing jobs Schulberg took upon himself could also cause him to stumble, as in the “this is why he’s like this” section of What Makes Sammy Run?, which, not coincidentally, was also no doubt the driving force behind Schulberg writing that novel in the first place. But it could all pay off for him, or mostly pay off, as I saw firsthand when I recently read his 1955 novel Waterfront. If Budd Schulberg’s name and the word “waterfront” immediately form an association in your mind, you should probably also note that year of publication. On the Waterfront, the Academy Award-winning film he wrote, directed by Elia Kazan, was released in 1954. Schulberg was one of the many artists to win an Oscar for that film, but he apparently wasn’t thoroughly satisfied by that and chose to expand on his own script, to novelize it, essentially, and the results were published the following year. And it’s a fine book, I’m happy to report, though its basic goodness isn’t the most interesting thing about it. Referring to Schulberg’s novel based on his own screenplay as a novelization implies certain things, none of them good, so I’d like to go on record now and say that Waterfront (which is now in print under the title On the Waterfront, a fact that I find regrettable) does not embody any of the negative things you’d normally associate with movie novelizations. It’s its own curious beast. Watching the film again today, for the first time in a long time, I was surprised and fascinated by how much it felt like an adaptation of the novel Schulberg wouldn’t publish for another year. Certain events feel condensed now, character histories and motivations hacked to the bone, the environment, while rendered with beautiful precision by Kazan, nevertheless now seems less sprawling and less populated and less wild. Yet at the same time, when I read the “contender” scene in the novel, I thought “Oh well of course he put this in verbatim. If he didn’t fans of the movie woulda flipped!” Similarly, when Terry Malloy, the lazy, dumb, apathetic, but morally tortured mug played by Marlon Brando, takes Katie Doyle (oh, I should point out here that Edie, the Eva Marie Saint character in the film, is for some reason named Katie in the novel, a fact I also find regrettable, for rather obscure reasons), the young woman whose union-firebrand brother Joey is murdered at the story’s opening by the corrupt thugs who currently run the New Jersey longshoremen union around which everything whirls, Joey having been lured to his doom by an unwitting Terry (he thought they’d just lean on him a little), out for a drink and urges the innocent and pious Katie to knock back her shot, that whole business, with Katie/Edie turning green and dazedly muttering “Wham,” is a pure movie scene, but it makes it into the novel intact.

So it’s like that, sometimes. Meanwhile, Father Berry, the neighborhood priest who takes up the mantel of the deceased Joey Doyle and tries to unite and inspire the longshoremen who have been spiritually and financially pulverized by the corrupt union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), can at times seem like the lead character of Schulberg’s novel. On the Waterfront is entirely Terry Malloy’s film, but Father Berry – and Katie, too, at times – takes over great whacks of the book, as Schulberg focuses on his reaction to Katie (or Edie’s) rebuke that saints never hide in churches, and his rousing of himself out of his own apathy – apathy is almost a theme of the book – and actually do the hard job of being a priest that he’d originally signed up for. In the novel, this is all rather interesting, and depicted by Schulberg with a lot of passion. He quotes Saint Francis Xavier at length, for example, and Father Berry uses his teachings as his blueprint. The question “Can Father Berry pull this off?” almost overshadows “Will Terry do the right thing?”

As a result of all of the above, the novel could be considered a richer version of this particular story. The above, and stuff like this:

Loading and unloading is an art and a fever. The dock boss is on you all the time. Unload, load and turn ‘er around. The faster she puts a cargo down and picks up another, well, that’s where the money is. Do a three-day job in two and there’s your profit. Legitimate profit, that is. Oh, there’s plenty of the other kind for the mob who’s got the local and the Bohegan piers in its pocket. More ways to skin this fat cat than you ordinary citizens would ever dream. You take sixteen billion dollars’ worth of cargo moving in and out all over the harbor every year and if the boys siphon off maybe sixty million of it in pilferage, shakedowns, kickbacks, bribes, short-gangs, numbers, trumped-up loading fees and a dozen other smart operations, why, who cares – the shipping companies? Not so you could notice it. The longshoremen? Most of them are happy or anyway willing just to keep working. The city fathers? That’s a joke on the waterfront. The people, the public, you’n’me? All we do is pay the tab, the extra six or seven per cent passed on to the consumer because the greatest harbor of the greatest city of the greatest country in the world is run like a private grab-bag.

This is a good passage, because it encompasses a lot of what’s going on in the novel. This is from the beginning of the book, taken from several pages of such stuff, and while the sardonic humor of this prose doesn’t travel too far into the rest of the novel, save for in some very sharp dialogue, it gets across the very specific anger driving Schulberg. Father Berry was based on a real priest, Father John Corridan, and the corruption, murder, and apathy that made up daily life along this New Jersey piers was not invented – I know you all know this, of course, but the novel is much more specific than the film, is my point (you probably also noticed Schulberg’s use of the phrase “on the waterfront.” That happens in the film, too, a couple of times, but unfortunately Schulberg hammers it pretty hard in the novel, and perhaps he, too, wished he’d used that for the book’s title). The drunken lives of the longshoremen who would rather drink up the money they haven’t earned yet for doing jobs they haven’t done yet because the option to live under these conditions sober is clearly off the table, and to try to do anything about it would not only ruin them but would ruin their families as well, is really the meat of Waterfront. This is the suffering Schulberg wants to see end. The murders, too, obviously, but the murders are the exclamation points scattered around the rest of the tremendously sad and infuriating story. In the film, Schulberg and Kazan only had time to allude to these lives, but in Waterfront the main characters are constantly walking in and out of them.

What Waterfront doesn’t have, however, is Kazan. Or Brando or Cobb or Malden or Rod Steiger or Saint (Saint in particular, in fact, as she brings some fire to a character that, on the page, can sometimes make you want to tell her to fuck off. The following is an actual quote from Katie Doyle, stating her reaction to having the truth of life on the waterfront laid out for her by her Uncle Frank: “But Uncle Frank, in civics we learn…in America…” Don’t worry, though, there’s not a lot of that). The significance of On the Waterfront in Elia Kazan’s life and career cannot be understated, and Kazan himself confirmed that in his mind the film was, at least in part, a defense of his own decision to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. That’s the kind of thing that will keep Ed Harris from standing up for you when you get an honorary Oscar, but even knowing this Kazan stuck to his guns. If you care to know, I am entirely okay with this. I also do not find this element of subtext to On the Waterfront uninteresting, or something about which too much is made, or not worth hashing out, even if it’s hashed out to a standstill, which it undeniably would. But the truth is, while watching On the Waterfront today, what I was entirely swept up in was the “art for art’s sake” element to it. On the Waterfront hardly seems like the kind of film to inspire that kind of rumination, but it did in me, and one of the things I wondered about was why this film isn’t typically considered film noir. I’m hardly the first person to wonder about this, or to say “Hey maybe it should be” or anything, but look at this:

What kind of movie are you looking at here? Plus, all the crime. On the Waterfront would not be the only film noir Elia Kazan ever made, and it would by no means be the only socially conscious film noir ever made. And boy does it land squarely in that sweet spot, with the questions of morality, corruption, murder, and a man’s conscience on the brink. Chronologically, even, the early 1950s being quite a fruitful period for the genre. It’s a magnificent piece of filmmaking, in any case – Kazan makes things look perpetually damp and chilly, the sky eternally white and threatening. The look of the film, which Kazan devised with cinematographer Boris Kaufman, now appears to have been the inspiration for Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence from 1961 and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls from 1962 – there’s a quality to the grayness in all three that’ quite similar, and evocative of lives lived on the edge of water. That’s kind of key to On the Waterfront and Carnival of Souls, less so to Blast of Silence, that is, until that film’s climax, when suddenly water and death, or anyway violence, eternally re-link the three movies together.

Plus, as we understand him, Kazan gave us Brando. The amazing thing I realized today as I watched is, well, first: you know how one of the qualities of great acting, or the results on the audience of great acting, is that you forget about the actor and believe you’re simply watching the character? Certain qualifiers have to be put in place in order for this to work, not least that it is I believe neurologically impossible for a healthy and sane person to actually do this, as well as that considering this to be the one true goal of acting is to restrict the kind of acting you can enjoy, but anyway, we all understand what’s being gotten at here, and can acknowledge that in many, many cinematic circumstances, the kind of acting being described is to be hoped for. With that understanding, the amazing thing I realized while watching On the Waterfront today is that at certain times Marlon Brando, the most famous American actor in his most famous film role in one of the most famous films ever made is making me think more about Terry Malloy than about him. Take that scene where he takes Edie out for a drink, and he's telling her his story, and says “my dad got bumped off, never mind how.” That “never mind how” is absolutely brilliant, because there’s a pause just before it, and among the many things you can intuit Terry is thinking about in that pause are the way his father died, how he doesn’t like thinking about it, how he doesn’t want to tell Edie about it and so he should cut off her natural question before she can ask it, how, “bumped off” implying homicide as it does, Terry’s moral compass has just gone crazy again, because who “bumped off” his dad “on the waterfront” if not some version of the men he now (kinda) works for? And so on. Brando’s performance here is positively overflowing with that kind of thing. He’s Terry Malloy, and that’s it.

This will count as a spoiler, I guess, but Terry Malloy’s fate in the novel is somewhat different from what he faces in the film. Schulberg’s optimism, what there was of it, may have calcified in the interim, I don’t know. But Waterfront ends with quite the kick in the nuts. One of the results of this is that while Waterfront may sometimes be Father Berry’s book, and it may sometimes be Katie’s book (Johnny Friendly also appears less, and after an initial flurry of scenes setting up him and his henchmen, he becomes more of a shadow hanging over everything) it finally is, as the film is, Terry Malloy’s. In Malloy, Schulberg created a truly unique character. The versions found in both the book and the film isn’t some secretly wise young man, some still-waters-run-deep brooder. He’s a genuinely dumb guy. If he honestly believed Joey Doyle was only going to be leaned on, that’s a dumb thing to believe. And how often are our heroes so stupid? Father Berry and Katie/Edie cut this somewhat (more Edie than Katie, in my view) and in fact as fascinating, and even as crucial, as the additional material about Father Berry was to Waterfront, there is a fascination for the reader in finding their (my) wagon, narratively and morally speaking, hitched to such a lazy doofus. And he’s not charmingly or sweetly dumb – he’s dumb like real people are dumb. His moral awakening is very basic, and is understood by him on a very basic level. Even so, there’s never a point when he’s not also confused about something. Schulberg created him, and Kazan and Brando planted him right there on his roof with his pigeons. And not for nothing, dumb as he is, he’s capable of standing up. Or, depending on which version of the story we’re talking about here, trying to.

Solved Nothing

.

[Spoilers for The Missouri Breaks and sort of for Night Moves follow. I'd include Bonnie and Clyde as well, but, I mean, seriously.]

.

When Arthur Penn died last year, it was my belief that in the wake of his passing, Bonnie and Clyde would be about the only film anyone was going to bother to remember, and that I might as well accept it (which, considering the man was dead, was exceptionally brave of me). Well, I should have known better, because while Bonnie and Clyde (1967) –a film I hate – is easily Penn’s best known film, and would appear to be his most consistently loved, and would further appear to be the one that is most likely to endure, God help us, the kind of people who are going to bother writing anything about Arthur Penn in the first place, even when he was alive, are going to have a deeper knowledge of the man’s work, and are going to appreciate more than just the poor-little-killers film that invites the audience to share in its own obliviousness.

.

I hate Bonnie and Clyde. But I like Arthur Penn. Penn was a bit of a genre guy, which is always nice, even if his interest lay primarily in subverting them, or subverting what we expect and desire from those genres. His genres of choice tended to be Westerns and crime films, which are spiritually linked in a very basic way which somehow often goes unremarked upon. But listen: how many Westerns essentially double as crime films? Yes, you have your cowboys and Indians Westerns, and your historical Westerns (which Penn covered as well), and all that, but the tin star and the posse and the bad man fed just as many films as did frontier life and Cavalry uniforms.

.

Such is the case, sort of, with Penn’s first feature film The Left Handed Gun (1958), and his later, commercially and critically disastrous (well I like it) The Missouri Breaks (1976). The Left Handed Gun, which stars Paul Newman as Billy the Kid, is plainly the work of a young filmmaker who desperately wishes it was already the 1970s, or at least the late 60s. In some ways, Penn is already pushing towards Bonnie and Clyde here, with its near-romanticizing of a punk kid whose claim to fame is spilling innocent blood (though probably less blood of any kind in reality than in this film). But eventually The Left Handed Gun takes a more peacenik approach to its violence, because of course – or not “of course”, because this is not an element you can necessarily bank on in films that print the legends of Billy the Kid, or, say, Jesse James – Billy finally goes “too far”, and Pat Garrett (John Dehner), who’d rather not kill the boy, finds that his hand is forced, for the greater good. No, if The Left Handed Gun has problems, which it does, it’s not due to the film collapsing under its own confused morality, but rather to the two men involved with the film who would eventually enjoy much higher profiles than Penn: Paul Newman and Gore Vidal. The film was based on Vidal’s play, and I’m willing to blame all the shortcomings on him because I hate Gore Vidal about as much as I hate Bonnie and Clyde. But the film’s real problem is its theatricality – despite the variety of locations, and the horses, and all the things you wouldn’t expect from a stage play, the damn thing still seems weirdly stage bound in the sense that it seems pitched to the back of the theater.

.

Newman, who was still finding his sea-legs, doesn’t help. It’s I guess ironic that the common line on The Missouri Breaks is that Penn lost control of star Marlon Brando, who was at the “fuck it” stage of his career, and would, so the story goes, rather amuse himself on set than help whatever movie he was filming. But when I watch The Left Handed Gun, I see a young Paul Newman who is out of control, as yet unable to keep the lid on his worst instincts, and receiving no direction on how to do so from Penn, so that this great actor instead bounces around and mugs like a cartoon psycho. Meanwhile, when I watch The Missouri Breaks, I see a legitimately mad Brando who towers over everything else, and manages to raise the film up to his lunacy. Before Brando shows up, the film is a bit wearyingly ordinary: a bad rich man (John McLiam) takes to hanging horse thieves, thereby putting a group of otherwise decent horse thieves, led by Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), on edge. But the bad rich man hires Lee Clayton (Brando), whose line of work, while never described quite in this way, is that of an assassin. And once that happens, “ordinary” is no longer a word one could logically use to describe The Missouri Breaks.

.

Is any of what follows Brando’s introduction – specifically, anything that actually involves Brando and his performance – really out of control? The commercial failure of The Missouri Breaks badly stalled Penn’s career, but I’m more inclined to blame the people who didn’t go see it and the critics who didn’t give it a fair shake than either Penn or Brando. My understanding is that giving Clayton an Irish brogue was Brando’s idea. Okay, so? Brando doesn’t do a bad job with the accent, however many people claim otherwise, so where’s the problem? And Brando wears a dress at one point. Yes indeed he does (he dresses strangely throughout, but this moment would, I admit, have to count as the pinnacle of that). By the time he puts on the frontier-lady dress, Clayton has been established, partly through Brando’s performance, and partly through what Thomas McGuane’s script has him do and say, as a complete lunatic, loyal to nobody, a sadistic chessmaster, so that, to a degree the dress makes sense, and anyway, as this scene goes on and the building burns and more blood is spilled, the dress adds a Psycho-esque chill.

.

Then, of course, there’s the climax to Clayton’s story, his last night on Earth, spent with a couple of horses and Penn’s patient camera, which records Clayton’s loving interaction with one horse, then stern rebuke of another, then his lilting attempt to sing himself to sleep, then sleep, the blackness, then death. I have to rank this as The Missouri Breaks’ finest hour, and possibly Penn's, and if much of what precedes Clayton’s sleep was improvised by Brando – and I don’t know that it was anyway – then bravo to him, and to Penn for seeing the worth in it all. There’s some darkly comic poetry at work here, and if this counts as out of control, then I want more of it.

.

Though the connection is thin at best, when, in its early going, The Missouri Breaks seems to be about how law and order crushes otherwise peaceable thieves, or at least that the idea of "frontier justice" was an oxymoron, it plays a little bit like a wheezing version of Bonnie and Clyde (thin at best, I know, I said that, but you gotta connect these things somehow). Bonnie and Clyde. Motherfucking Bonnie and Clyde. It's a well made film, I'll grant you -- watching it again recently, I was impressed by how well it moved -- but if I had to boil my contempt for it down to one scene, it would be the part where the gang robs a bank and Clyde fires a shot at the bank guard (Russ Marker), who'd been going for his gun. In this same scene, Clyde tells a bank customer to keep his money (because he's nice like that), and later we see both the customer praising Clyde's generosity to a newspaper reporter, and the bank guard vainly posing for a photograph while he describes looking into the face of death. We're meant to laugh at this guard because, additionally, we're supposed to scorn the way he pumps up the danger in his story. In order to do this, the audience needs to forget, or not care, that not only after that robbery, but before it, Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) have been killing policemen by the handful. The real Bonnie and Clyde did the same thing (though, in terms of the film, I'm told this doesn't matter), so it's more than a little appalling to see the police represented in the film either as glory hounds or bumbling seekers not of justice, but of vengeance (this in the form of Denver Pyle's Sheriff Hamer, who after being humiliated by the Barrow gang, later orchestrates the ambush that will lay our heroes low).

.

There's a sense that Bonnie and Clyde played to audiences who outwardly professed to abhor violence and bloodshed, but might be okay if the blood was being shed from pigs. I'm sure the film's admirers, as well as Penn and screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, would wave their hands in the air and say "No no no no no!" if presented with the theory. But look at how the stage blood is dispensed in Bonnie and Clyde. One innocent victim, the first one Clyde kills in the film, is allowed a brutal death, with shattering glass and a blown off face. The film comes very near to making something out of this, but in order for that to really click, the pursuit by law enforcement of the Barrow gang would have achieve at least ambiguity, but it doesn't -- the cops aren't good, and we're shown this. Not only that, but the dozen or so cops who are murdered by one or another member of the Barrow gang don't get to be brutalized, and therefore humanized. All those deaths are of the grab-chest-and-fall-over variety of the Hollywood crime films and Westerns that Bonnie and Clyde is supposed to be signalling the end of. That is, of course, until Bonnie and Clyde are most cruelly ambushed by the police force, whose ranks the Barrow gang has bravely thinned. Then, Penn makes with the red paint, and how. Because these were human beings, damn it. We know this, because the manner in which their deaths are depicted invites the audience to look away. All those cops, though, well, you know. You can't make an omelette, etc.

.

There's a terrible smugness to Bonnie and Clyde that I absolutely cannot stand. It flatters its audience, those who like it, in a way that, say, Sam Peckinpah, the master of moral confusion and splattered viscera, never did. It's a kids film in a lot of ways -- Clyde's gun is like a penis that one time, and so on -- and thankfully Penn would grow out of it. He would do this most notably, to my mind, and going by my incomplete experience with his work, with Night Moves (1975). Written by Alan Sharp and starring Gene Hackman, Melanie Griffith, James Woods, Jennifer Warren, and Edward Binns, Night Moves is the kind of loose, digressive detective story that, in literature, is perhaps best represented by the fiction of James Crumley. There's not a huge narrative drive to solve the mystery, and in fact for quite a while it seems that there is no mystery, once Hackman's Harry Moseby, a private detective, does right by his client (Janet Ward) by tracking down her free-spirited and often nude teenage daughter (Griffith), who has been hiding out in Florida with her stepdad (a quietly terrific John Crawford). When bodies start to appear, and motives come into question, all the plot elements that had been held in reserve -- which have to do with stuntmen and filmmaking and drugs and statutory rape -- are released in a rush towards the end, so that while Moseby is able to piece together what's been going on, he has to acknowledge that it all just fell into his lap. "I didn't solve anything," he says.

.

He sure didn't, as the film's incredible and devastating final ten minutes makes clear. It takes a great deal of courage, not to mention confidence, to intentionally leave an audience as confused by why something has just happened as Penn and Sharp do at the end of Night Moves. I've said before that one of the great tragedies of the word "mystery" as it relates to genre fiction is that it has come to mean, in most people's minds, "something that is solvable." Night Moves rejects that utterly. This embracing of uncertainty is one reason why Night Moves feels like the film of an adult, or group of adults, rather than a film like Bonnie and Clyde, which was made by people who just wanted to set fire to all the shit that was older than they were.

.

--------------------

TIFF's Lightbox is running an Arthur Penn series in the coming weeks. All films discussed in this post, and many more besides, will be shown. The Left Handed Gun will be screened on March 27; The Missouri Breaks will screen March 28; Bonnie and Clyde on March 24, March 27 and April 6; and Night Moves on March 31.

A Collection Project Three-fer

Häxan (d. Benjamin Christensen) - The above still pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Christensen's 1922 documentary/sociological essay/horror phantasmagoria would find itself very lonely if you were to try and place it within a genre. Occasionally, and tediously, didactic, Häxan is nevertheless gripping for the fact that it broke all the rules of documentary filmmaking before there ever was such a thing to break, and for its deeply bizarre and unnerving horror imagery, which take the form of Black Sabbaths and devils and witches and so forth, as Christensen chronicles the history of a particular kind of supersitious thought in the Middle Ages. What's curious about these images -- which range from the plain creepy, to the ludicrous, to the darkly sexual -- is that they're filmed with such verve and creative energy that they almost convince the viewer that those witch-hunters from hundreds of years ago were maybe on to something. As a thinker, Christensen cares to teach us how not to revert back, in our own modern and self-righteous way, to old and fiendish habits; as a filmmaker, however, he was far more interested in how the world looked through those superstitious eyes.
.

The Night of the Following Day (d. Hubert Cornfield) - Cornfield's DVD commentary track for this film is, for reasons it would be crass to explain, impossible to listen to. From a very shallow point of view, this is a shame, because, frankly, I'd like an explanation. For much of its length, The Night of the Following Day is a lean, precise, and vicious little crime thriller, about the kidnapping, in France, of an English heiress (Pamela Franklin) by a group of American criminals, led by Marlon Brando and Richard Boone.

.

First thing's first: despite the fact that, in his parade of tight all-black get-ups, Brando looks like he's constantly on the way to, or just back from, dance class, he's absolutely terrific, playing the smartest and most moral of the kidnappers with the ease of a top-class character actor. And the role of "top-class character actor" in Night of the Following Day is filled by Richard Boone, as Satanic and horribly convincing as he's ever been (by the way, Rita Moreno, as the female kidnapper, is also excellent, and she gives one of the best stoned-out-of-her-gourd performances I've seen).

.

But after a note-perfect climax (directed, I've gathered, by Boone, at Brando's insistence, due to Brando's belief that Cornfield was incompetent; in fairness the vast majority of the rest of the film doesn't bear this out), Cornfield throws in a loony-bird twist that caused my brain to silently rage "What the dick!? This was all a...wait, no, that can't be it. What? Why!?" In short, the film is like the worm Ouroboros, or the symbol for infinity, or a Moebius strip, and all that, but to no good goddamn purpose. The last few minutes of the film -- which supposedly Brando strenuously objected to -- have the strange distinction of neither ruining the ending's impact and making the viewer wish they'd been cut altogether. Narrative experimentation gone awry, is what I'm talking about, but the lion's share of the film is still well worth anyone's time.

.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (d. Steve Carr) - I implied there would be films such as this would pop up now and again. And I suppose I could pretend that my wife and I don't think Kevin James is funny, and that we didn't rent this one night because we both really wanted to see it, and that we didn't both laugh often enough at the zany antics of an overweight and socially inept mall cop who finds himself defending his turf (a mall) against a group of gun-wielding robbers (burglars?) that I eventually picked it up at a Blockbuster sale. I could do all that, but it would be a lie. I think this movie's kinda funny. Fuck you, you jerks!