drive: controlled doses of morphine

*SPOILER ALERT*

Drive: (2011. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn) Drive is ridiculously seductive, nearly impossible to resist, even if you sit there cognizant of the dishonesty lurking at its heart while you watch, even then, resistance is very nearly futile. It begins well, with good lines, an enigmatic, slowly emerging and engaging situation, and with an early nod to Vanishing Point.

Its style is so flawlessly smooth and unimpeachable and cool and jazzy that one doesn't even notice the flaws in story or short-comings of character development; one floats easily along in the effortless current Winding Refn provides.

Its palette is Teal-and-Orange, that omnipresent pairing of puke-colors which seems to be irrestible to production designers these days. (Read about the hideousness here, and join the resistance.) This is, in fact, the Teal-and-Orangest movie I've ever seen, and we've all seen a lot lately, haven't we? It's an absolutely shameless color design, almost to the point of inspiring sardonic admiration, a downright fascistically duo-chromatic piece.

Although this director is relatively new to Hollywood, Drive seems to be full of Hollywood in-jokes, such as the presence of a skilled and savage killer who began as a movie producer. Certainly the scene in which the Driver stages an act of brutality in a room encircled by naked, impassive women must be some kind of in-joke, particularly the lingering shot of a deadly hammer held quivering at his hip-level so that it seems to hover in front of a naked breast. Either it's funny or it's some graphic-novel shade of misogynist nutso (see Vampires review for further rant, below).

It is a great pleasure to see Albert Brooks again, finally manifesting the full complement of humor and darkness which has always played just underneath his facade, and Bryan Cranston is fantastic as the Driver's wrecked and doomed mentor. A lesser actress than Carey Mulligan might have been disastrous in the girl-role, but the girl-role is unworthy of Carey Mulligan.

Part of the impeccable style rises up from short-cut scenes, which leave you with an Impression, while avoiding any messy descent into emotional depth. This style is made entirely of perfectly-deployed and cool distancing devices, in fact, which is what makes such a horrifically violent film so sugary-sweet to swallow. In one of only three or four scenes in which we actually witness a conversation of any emotional depth, this one between the Driver and the long-time mentor who has unwittingly betrayed him, a sort of "I coulda-been-a-contender" moment, Winding Refn lifts us in and out of it, cutting away and back, very gently dropping us out of the scene and back into it so that we... well, so we don't get too upset. So we don't get too emotionally involved. He uses audio in the same way, uses it like a great master, sometimes to build tension, as in the scene where the sound of a stopwatch ticking in silence becomes very nearly unbearable. Mostly, though, he uses it like exact dosages of morphine, so that (for instance) a well-placed, hypnotic song lifts you just far enough above an ugliness that you are untroubled by it.

The film "feels" a little like Soderbergh's hypnotic the Limey and a little like 2010's the American, that George Clooney euro-esque existenz-noir, both of which were probably inspired by le Samourai and those old existential gems from the '60s. I prefer the American to this, largely because it was not so exquisitely controlled, and both the script and the actors were given some room to breathe and move around, with questions raised and left hanging, allowing the coldness of space between characters a very palpable influence.

Still, if you're going to exert iron-fisted control, do it with the mastery that Winding Refn does here. There's a shot, an absurd shot, really, but so brazen I cannot resist it: the Driver has just taken his full plunge into the violence which will subsume him by killing two thugs who have been sent to a motel room to take him out. In the silence amidst the carnage afterwards, his face gore-slimed, he looks around a corner for an extended moment, then slowly backs into the shadow, then around so he disappears, inch by inch, behind the door jamb. It is an absurdly obvious visual metaphor, yet, as is so much of this film, almost euphorically enjoyable.

Winding Refn's last film, Valhalla Rising, seduced me utterly, largely with its use of music and sound, and also, of course, with the ineffable Mads Mikkelsen. In that film, I bought the violence: it seemed he caught the physical heaviness of brutality without flinching but also without overemphasizing it. Drive is a horse of s different color, its exploding heads and gratuitous acts of cruelty pushed to cartoonish extremes, which in itself is a distancing device of another stripe. If you convince us to laugh at the violence, we will not feel its brunt.

maximilian schell-fest: evening four

St Ives: (1976. dir: J. Lee Thompson) A Philip Marlowe story, but about a different guy and set in a later Los Angeles. Charles Bronson is Ray St. Ives, a down-and-out crime-writer with a penchant for backing losing football teams. He takes a typically Marlowe gig: acting as go-between when a rich fellow needs to buy sensitive personal items back from a thief. Then he starts getting framed for murders, and beat up by thugs (in this case, Robert Englund and a very young Jeff Goldblum as a wide-eyed, first-time offender). The story probably doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but the twists are enjoyable. Jacqueline Bissett is badly cast, her talents largely wasted on this femme fatale, and Schell is the rich fellow's shrink who winds up, like everyone else, being both more and less than he appears. A highly enjoyable waste of time.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Vampires: (1998. dir: John Carpenter) A throughline of easy blues acts as rigging to episodes of intense brutality and the kind of half-baked misogyny which generally only springs up from the world of graphic novels, although this one seems to have found that pubescent level on its own. James Woods is the Catholic Church's chief Vampire Slayer in America, and the bulk of his team gets wiped out early on by a rogue Master. The verbiage and wisecracking are akin to tough-guy, less clever Buffy; the slaying is uglier and messier to clean up. The acting is good, especially Sheryl Lee as a hooker who takes a bite early and spends most of the film in bondage to one of the Baldwin brothers while she's making the transition. Graphic novel romance is often like this: stunning babe winds up with the guy who inhabits a space further down the food-chain because she is brutalized, tortured, and forced into love, all for her own good. Schell is the presiding Cardinal, and, as always in Hollywood horror films, any Catholic holding the office of Bishop or higher is always in league with the Devil, or, anyway, working against the good of mankind. (Seriously. Check it out. Always happens.) I suppose Schell took the job because he has a seriously creepifying moment towards the end where he gets to rejoice in his bland, cold evilness. The best I can say about it is that it's not the worst vampire movie I've ever seen: the music is invigorating and the palette is rich and warm.

Heidi: (1968. dir: Delbert Mann) Apparently Julia was not the first Schell movie I ever saw, after all. Apparently I was watching him play Heidi's amiable Uncle Richard from a time before my memory fully reaches. How could I forget this? That little paraplegic girl, abandoned and dragging herself across the face of an Alp? I would think that would have scarred me, made me mistrust adults entirely (and, now I think of it, maybe it did and I JUST DON'T REMEMBER. How disturbing is that?). I don't recall the book, but this film seems to be a message about how all of our troubles, even being crippled and wheelchair-bound, are self-inflicted, and with sufficient mental prowess, strength of will, and societal cooperation, all can be overcome. It sounds like a Nazi thing when I say it that way, either Nazi or New Age. In any case, it's not much of a film, in spite of Schell, Michael Redgrave, and Jean Simmons; the kids are too simple and the adults exist solely as foil and help-meet to the young 'uns. The only bit I really enjoy is the piece of class-obstructed love story between Schell and Simmons' governess, played with dignity and restraint on both parts. The scenes in which they acknowledge their awkward feelings, then backpedal miserably in order to save face, are sweet and, alas, never satisfactorily resolved, because the kids' issues take precedence.

(Read about the "Heidi Football Game Controversy" on Wikipedia.)

maximilian schell-fest: evening three

The Deadly Affair: (1966. dir: Sidney Lumet) What is it with John le Carre and faithless, nymphomaniac wives? This government snoop, played by James Mason, might be George Smiley under not so very different circumstances. As usual with le Carre, there's espionage afoot to be coaxed to the surface and crushed under heel by a rather ordinary, unassuming, and secretly heartbroken civil servant. This time it's communists causing mayhem in mid-'60s London, and we get to venture more than once into the thriving heart of the theatre scene in pursuit of the bad guys, running into Lynn and Corin Redgrave and David Warner en route, Lynn Redgrave in particular giving a lovely, warm turn as a committed but ditzy stage manager.

As in most le Carre, the world here is a shabby one, peopled largely by schmoes of one stripe or another struggling to find some dignity in day-to-day life and largely failing. The plot and characters are engaging, albeit slightly depressing (again, welcome to le Carre's world), and for the most part well-played (how I love Harry Andrews, this time as a patient, hard-working DCI with a menagerie in his bachelor flat, no tolerance for guesswork, and a marked tendency to nod off when between tasks). If this screenwriter had found the graceful device which last year's Tinker Tailor did, in which we never experience the heartbreaker wife directly but only through the husband's perceptions of her, the story might more readily have found its wings. As it is, the subplot of uxorious devotion and its continuing betrayal, although germane to the story at large, clunks awkwardly along the ground because le Carre's cheating wives tend to come across as wafer-thin and falsely reported, as this one does.

There is one especially wonderful piece: a climactic scene taking place in the audience during an RSC production of Edward II, in which Schell gives us a magnificent, tacit soliloquy of intensifying emotions as he figures out what to do. After that, his soft-spoken end-scene is just right.

Judgment at Nuremberg: (1961. dir: Stanley Kramer) For years I have railed against the unfairness of a world which refused to give Paul Newman his richly-deserved Oscar for the Hustler, tossing him instead a belated bone for his pale reprise in its sequel, the Color of Money. This seemed to me a plateful of contumely which no such beloved and hard-working Hollywood royalty should be forced to stomach.

Although I still love that performance, I have suffered my moment of revelation while watching Nuremberg for the first time in many years, and for the first time in its entirety. Schell's Oscar-seizing performance as the brilliant defense counsel for the Nazi judges inhabits an area just short of stunning, particularly in its context. Imagine, if you will, a huge studio venture starring Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, and Judy Garland. Imagine going to the cinema to see it on its release. Now imagine the shock of seeing, against the backdrop of this collection of Hollywood's Eminences Grises (all accomplished to the point of greatness, but in that comfortable, studio manner), a performance, delivered in a language not his own, with such intelligence, exactness of gesture and spontaneity of expression as Schell gives here. It must have knocked the Academy sidelong, and suddenly it looks like a gesture of uncharacteristic honesty, lauding the new European kid on the block over our own beloved blue-eyed boy.

I left Montgomery Clift off the list because the scene in which Schell gently and ruthlessly dismantles his slow-witted baker's assistant is one of the most painful you'll ever see, and that's due as much to Clift's spontaneous gestures of vulnerability as to Schell's easy mastery. My favorite scene, though, occurs not in the courtroom but in an antechamber: Lancaster's prisoner has declared he will make a self-damaging statement and his lawyer has this one chance to talk him out of it. Schell's monologue is a perfect blend of emotional honesty and the lawyer's tendency to histrionicize, and I think I will never tire of it.

Kramer is already playing with the extreme camera moves which will make Ship of Fools so visually striking, using slow pans behind characters and the occasional quick zoom to arresting effect. The way he reveals Dietrich in her final scene is perfect, and the moment in which, after extended and stubborn silence, Lancaster rises in the courtroom to demand, "Are we going to do this again?" is one of the greats in cinema.

horror double feature: outcast and the wicker tree

Outcast: (2010. dir: Colm McCarthy) A fascinating story (with very good actors, including Kate Dickie and James Nesbitt) about a war of magicks between Irish gypsies in Edinburgh. It allows sufficient ambiguity to power the "alleg'ree", but you never feel the filmmakers are cheating by not knowing the answers to their own questions. It is set in a modern slum, a world of some ugliness emphasized both by the palette of browns and oranges used and by the abuse of the camera, which never, poor thing, gets set down to do its work properly. I suppose all the fancy camera-tricks were meant to flash up the low-budget aspects, and it's not the worst cinematography I've ever seen, but I'm taking up a collection to send this guy a tripod anyway.

Because of the strangeness of it, its boldness of story, that and the quality of the acting, I recommend it in spite of its flaws.

the Wicker Tree: (2011. dir: Robin Hardy) I was so looking forward to it, and it is so beyond dreadful. Looking back, who can put a finger exactly on what it was that made the original Wicker Man great? It is very nearly stuck in low-budget camp, and yet it survives as a true classic of horror filmmaking. This one is not fit to hold its elfen boots. This one is like some hippie renaissance faire gone awry. This one is crap.

Where is the tension? There is none. The first held us in its grip because our innocent wayfarer placed himself out of the best intentions in a place of increasing eeriness which began to tighten around him vice-like until he was crushed by it. This one places a pair of rather incredible innocents (a newly Born Again Texan couple: she is a famous country singer, recently shed of her previously sluttish image and now squeaky clean, he is a charming cowboy who still drinks without guilt but has sworn chastity until marriage) in a grim situation which we all understand from the outset, and the tension is supposed to come of watching them rise into the horror of comprehension, but it doesn't. The initial misstep is that they are there not to solve a crime but to bring souls to Jesus, a mission that is treated by both filmmaker and nouveau-Summerislanders (reset in the Scottish village of Tressock) with a sort of amused pity from the get-go, and so we are discouraged from relating to these already barely tenable lead characters.

Because we go in with pre-knowledge of its destination, the movie's best hope, really, is to charm us with the pleasure of the company of those natives, and this the script does not allow. The characters are loosely and blandly written, and so the gorey set-pieces do not touch us in that visceral place for which they are aiming. Honeysuckle Weeks's pale and thin hetaira is beggared in comparison with Britt Ekland and the dance which inspired a thousand wet-dreams, the plot is convoluted without being particularly interesting, Christopher Lee is in it for maybe thirty seconds (part of an inane flashback), and we, Hardy's Once-Hopeful Audience, are left adrift in an ever-expanding wake of disappointment.

maximilian schell-fest: evening two

*SPOILER ALERT BOTH MOVIES*

Topkapi: (1964. dir: Jules Dassin) I don't like heist films, generally, and I'm not wild about Carnaby Street camp. You put the two together and I wind up grinding my teeth all through the Italian Job, despite its many charms. Topkapi seduces even a hard-case like me because of its cast of well-defined misfits, led by the irresistible Melina Mercouri, and given poignancy by the comic subtleties of Peter Ustinov as a small-time crook over his head and out of his league in a plot to steal fabulous emeralds. Schell is the suave, unflappable brains behind the operation. It's a perfectly-timed romp with plenty of tension at the appropriate moments, as you might expect from the director of Rififi ... and then it's spoiled by its ending. This is one heist which ought to have been pulled off. The end feels like a cheat, and is further cheapened by the comic tag from the Turkish prison.

This film doesn't belong to Schell: it belongs to Mercouri and Ustinov. Still, after all the sober intensity of my Maximilian Schell film festival, it's nice at last to see him relaxed and enjoying himself.

the Young Lions: (1958. dir: Edward Dmytryk) Schell's first foray into Hollywood is a remarkably adroit one, but the film itself is one of those ridiculously self-indulgent epics, the kind that were edited with extra seconds on either end of each scene to show off the picturesque locales. It's also a big mush of comedy and drama, as personified by the casting of Dean Martin opposite Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. (Yes, I'm a sucker for Rio Bravo as much as the next guy, Dude included, but there's something about The Dean Martin Persona which does not translate past his generation; he comes across as slimy, unhealthy, mean-spirited, grotesquely charmless.) The first half of this endless movie traces three or four stupidly-written romances, the most awful being between Hope Lange's non-character and Clift's underdoggy soldier. Still, once you've fast-forwarded through all that, and also through Brando's "soulful" romance with a feisty Parisian gal, there are unforgettable pieces: namely, the scene in which the badly-wounded Schell asks Brando to visit his wife ("convince her that I am salvageable"), then the scene of the visit itself. Schell's Captain Hardenberg has been disfigured in a mine accident while sharing a motorbike ride in the desert with Brando, who escapes unscathed, and whom he suspects (rightly) of having been his treasured wife's lover.

The scene in which Brando's Lt Diestl visits him in hospital is a piece of unheimlich surrealism that will not leave my mind. Brando is all but speechless with guilt, and Schell, his head swollen and obscured by bandages, communicates his mania not just vocally but with those strange, long hands. It is the best written thing in the film, a scene in which this character, whom we have previously known only through Brando's eyes, manipulates him marvellously, convincing him to bring the weapon with which he will kill himself, an act of which Brando will not learn until he arrives in the broken-down shell of the wife's house in Berlin. This is the second best scene, and Brando's best, when he realizes with horror both the awful, destructive nature of the marriage and of his own destructive part in its drama.

an evening of maximilian schell

Cross of Iron: (1977. dir: Sam Peckinpah) Watching this film is like visiting the exact place in Quentin Tarantino's brain where Inglourious Basterds first took hold. Schell's Prussian, medal-obsessed Captain Stransky is one of those men who is so awful, so charmless and arrogant, that you'd leave the room if he walked into it. Schell gives him very exact and telling quirks and body language: the way he combs his hair, for instance, puts one oddly in mind of a serial killer. An under-achieving aristocrat stuck at the crumbling Eastern front where class means nothing, Stansky is fixated on cheating his way into obtaining the Iron Cross, as he is coward enough he will never earn it rightfully. In the final scenes, after a protracted and often near-fatal enmity with our Iron-Cross-wearing hero, Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn in another fruitful venture with Peckinpah), the story nearly flips out of its cynicism into a place of possible salvation, a surprise turn which Peckinpah dangles in front of us but never really has trouble resisting.

This is a very fine film in many respects, and its best scene is a tour-de-force for Schell and his Stansky: having gleaned that his lieutenant is gay, he coaxes the man and his young lover to confess it, then uses the knowledge for blackmail. It might have been the inspiration for that later scene in Basterds when Christoph Waltz's snakelike villain wheedles and wrenches the whereabouts of hidden Jews from a French villager. Although that later scene is more sublime and certainly more enjoyable, Schell's is so horrid in its unctuous manipulation that it is difficult to watch, impossible to look away from, and leaves one feeling soiled and skinless, as many of the best Peckinpah scenes do.



Julia: (1977. dir: Fred Zinnemann) I've loved this movie since I was a kid. It's well established now that Lillian Hellman made it up out of whole cloth and dressed it up, very effectively, as memoir. The book is good, and the movie is very, very good. It's one of the best edited films you'll ever see, and photographed to evoke flawlessly the atmosphere of the times. It's shaped like memory is shaped: moments from different years blend into one another apparently at random, as your life does, once it's stored in the brain. There may be an overuse of soft-focus (and I cringe at Jane Fonda's downturned inflections when finishing interrogatives, a pretention that only theatre students use); certainly there is some sentimental hogwash written into the script. (Absolutely it's hogwash that anyone who knew Lillian Hellman would want her looking after their child, and utter hogwash that she would break her heart looking for the little tyke.) Set historicity to one side, though: this is Lillian Hellman, a champion liar, and it's Hollywood Hellman, to boot. Look instead to the use of music as accent to the ominous, and use of distance and lightning-cut to suggest the fading or calling up of memory. These effects and more are masterfully used.

And here are great performances: not only Redgrave and Robards, and (inflections aside) Fonda, but Meryl Streep and Hal Holbrook and John Glover in secondary but memorable roles. And Maximilian Schell: this was the first time I saw him, and his performance was unlike anything I'd seen before. He is a resistance-fighter come to Paris at the behest of Hellman's friend Julia (Redgrave) to ask her help in smuggling money into Berlin. His manner is so singular that, when set beside the easy familiarity of Jane Fonda, he seemed almost totally unreadable to me in my youth. Now, many viewings later, it seems an unpretentious, straightforward portrayal, but looking closely I see the hallmarks of brilliance. In one moment Mr. Johann is the very soul of blandness; in the next, he is weirdly baleful. It is a perfect face for an undercover fighter, exactly controlled but with an underlay of anxiety tugging at the musculature. When he sits to eat, he clutches hold of his coat and eats quickly, his eyes never still, always checking the perimeter.

Sometimes it pays to watch a film first as a child: you can be fair certain that the things that stick with you, the strange things which remain in your memory, are the extraordinary ones, and Schell's performance, which might look lackluster at a first adult glance, is one of those extraordinary things.

ward bond would be 109

And in honor of his birthday on April 9th, TCM gave us twelve straight hours of hard-to-find selections from the vast, rich Golconda that was his oeuvre. Since I no longer have cable, I parked myself on my mom's couch to watch four films, all, delightfully, from 1936. I wanted to stay and watch Santa Fe Trail again, which doesn't have much Bond to it (or anything to do with the Santa Fe Trail, as I recall), but offers a lot else, including Errol Flynn and Van Heflin and Raymond Massey as John Brown. Alas, though, the way life is shaped, sometimes you have to do other things besides watching Ward Bond movies. It's a dirty jip, copper, but there it is.



*SPOILER ALERT*
Avenging Waters: (1936. dir: Spencer Gordon Bennett) These first two are old Ken Maynard westerns. This was back when cowboys were musical and wore insanely huge hats. My mom wandered in halfway through and said are those good guys or bad guys and I said look at the hats! The hats are white! Those guys are good! Yes, life was that simple once.

This poor plot has Texas-sized holes torn in it. Ward Bond is a not-very-smart but certainly evil cattle-baron hoist by his own petard when he dams the river to drive another rancher off his land, then a storm (sent by a vengeful god, I guess) takes out the dam and it floods Ward out. He jumps on the back of a horse, leaving the heroine to drown (she just stands there instead of running for the hills like a normal person, so maybe this was the vengeful god's way of cleaning out the gene pool). Luckily, white-hatted Ken Maynard is in town on his faithful white horse Tarzan, and so she lives, probably to slow the evolution of the race by procreating.

The worst part of this movie is the party-scene, an excuse for bad jokes and lots of musical ridiculousness. The best part is at the beginning, when the heroine is attacked by a mountain lion (a real mountain lion!), with no suspense-music or anything, just a nice build-up and attack, and Ken Maynard shoots the poor beast just in time but it spooks her horse which goes barrelling head-first off a cliff into the river, with Maynard on Tarzan right after it. I don't even want to think about how they did those stunts. Did those horses even survive? If I could watch it again, I'd put money on it that they didn't risk the real Tarzan. That horse had a stunt-horse on call, I'm sure of it.

There's another part where Maynard is being dragged by a horse, gesticulating madly in close-up while racing scenery is projected behind him, and he's rescued when Tarzan gallops abreast and somehow he mounts up and gets his leg free... Truly ridiculous. Yakima Canutt would have been red-faced and sputtering foul-mouthed curses.


Cattle Thief: (1936. dir: Spencer Gorden Bennett) Now, THIS one is worth watching. Maynard is not just the white-hatted hero riding Tarzan, he is also in disguise as a doltish wares-salesman. A double role! He wears a little mask when he rides out in his big white hat to do his good deeds.

Ward Bond has more interesting matter to chew on here as the evil ranch-manager trying to clean up at the expense of local cattlemen while his boss is temporarily incapacitated. And the stunts are far better: there's one of those great overtaking-the-runaway-wagon-at-full-gallop things that I love so much. There's also a silly scene in which cattle are stampeded in a bottle-neck, which John Wayne could have told you would result in a sort of meat-grinder effect, but these beeves emerge miraculously unscathed, no doubt due to the spotlessly good intentions of Ken Maynard and Tarzan in their ongoing quest to make the world just, fair, and safe.


The Man Who Lived Twice: (1936. dir: Harry Lachman) Ah, my favorite of the four! A nice stretch for Ralph Bellamy, who gets a doubling role as a hardened criminal who undergoes brain surgery to become a model citizen. It's well shot, too, with the action scenes done in quick, effective montage. If only the expository scenes were also done with such snappy aplomb, it'd be a very good film. As it is, it's a lot of fun, mostly because Ward Bond will steal your heart as a good-hearted, steadfast ex-boxer who is the criminal's stalwart sidekick.

Get a load of some dialogue:

Moll: What’d you do, swap your heart for a bowl of chicken salad?
Sidekick: Chicken salad ain’t bad.

If that kind of illogical sass appeals to you, you'll be won like I was.


Muss 'em Up: (1936. dir: Charles Vidor) A witty parlor-room whodunnit in the style of the Thin Man, although somewhat thinner on the charm and wit and very much thinner on the charisma. Decent as he is, Preston Foster is nobody's William Powell. That said, Vidor helms it well with decent comic timing and whoever wrote it had the chops to carry it without knocking off our collective socks. Bond has a small but recurring role as a hired goon who turns out to be neither the smartest nor the baddest hombre in the mansion.