'70s double feature: alice doesn't live here anymore and the hunting party

*SPOILER ALERT, both films*

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore: (1974. dir: Martin Scorsese) How strange, in retrospect, that sandwiched in between Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, the acme of the '70s tough-guy double feature, Scorsese made what used to be called "a woman's picture". While never as good as his tough-guy films, it stands head and shoulders above today's "chick flicks" in its portrayal of a real woman (Ellen Burstyn, who is amazing, and looks like an attractive but real woman, by which I mean that she never would have been considered for the role if it were cast today because she looks like a real woman, attractive but imperfect) embarking on life as a widow and single mother.

Most of the attempts at humor fall flat, with the notable exception of exchanges between Burstyn and Diane Ladd as Flo, who have a great chemistry. Kris Kristofferson is the cowboy/lover who is so damned perfect that he is completely unbelievable, but he and Burstyn share a nice enough chemistry that they're fun to watch. Especially the first morning-after scene we get, where they're giggling and telling stories and laughing like teenagers.

The ending is too crazy to believe. Kristofferson, a rancher, tries to woo Burstyn back, acquiescing to her demand for change, and offers to choose her over his ranch: "I don't give a shit about that ranch. I'll take you to Monterey right now." They are the words which win her, but any audience member who's ever, I don't know, had any dealings with men at all, will know it's a ridiculous statement, either an outright lie or else there's important backstory about this guy we need to know, like why he's faking being a rancher if he doesn't give a shit about it.

Along with Burstyn and Ladd, the other high point of the film is the very young Jodi Foster, fresh off of playing Becky Thatcher in my generation's version of Tom Sawyer. She's tough as nails and funny, to boot ("So long, suckers!"), with her continued invitations to "get high on ripple."

the Hunting Party: (1971. dir: Don Medford) This (the early seventies) was the age of ultra-violence heaped ignominiously on top of the usual misogyny of the Western. It's as if the Spaghettis threw everything into disarray, Hollywood moved in and stole all the wrong things from the Italians, co-opting the heartlessness and big violence but ignoring all the quirky things that make those classics great (the silences, the close-ups of sweat and flies, the weird character choices and odd twists, like a guy dragging a coffin behind him, or another guy choosing to shoot the thumbs off his foes instead of killing them).

Oliver Reed is the hero of this movie; you know that because, when he rapes Candice Bergen, it is less brutally then when Gene Hackman or LQ Jones do. And that's about all you need to know about this movie.

It's also related to the "Most Dangerous Game" genre of humans-being-hunted films, but you wouldn't call it one of the best. Mostly it's a love story between Stockholm-Syndromed Bergen and her darkly dangerous outlaw captor, and not a very enjoyable or convincing one.

Gene Hackman, of course, is entirely convincing as the going-all-Ahab-getting-vengeance-on-your-ass pissed-off rich-man husband. It has some interesting musical breaks and some daring editing choices at the beginning, and a richly rewarding cast of journeyman actors playing bad guys of both stripes: the rich kind, and the poor kind.

And, because it was made at that turn of the seventies when existential angst was reaching the fullness of its blossom in Hollywood, it leads up to one of those "aw, what's the use?" endings, in which the only humans (or horses) left standing are the ones who threw in the towel early on, wisely deciding the game wasn't worth the price.

robert patrick double feature: angels don't sleep here and body language

Angels Don't Sleep Here: (2002. dir: Paul Cade) If you look up Paul Cade on IMDB, he has this one credit, as writer/director, and that's it. As far as I can glean from a cursory search, he's a successful Canadian artist, who made this one foray onto the backlot, then skedaddled back north of the border.

This movie is one of the unfortunates. You can see that Cade cared about it initially, had some fun writing it, and somewhere it just went horribly awry. First of all, whenever you have a "thriller" involving identical twins, what's the one "twist" we know for a fact we can count on? The kids are going to switch identities at some point; it's not a twist, because we know it's going to happen. Secondly, it's as if he wrote it with multiple ideas for who the bad guy was, and flipped a coin to choose one, but any character you choose to be the mysterious psycho-killer-in-black can't possibly be in all the places the psycho-killer is supposed to be when s/he's supposed to be there, particularly not the human who ends up unmasked (literally) as the psycho-killer. Which brings us to the third point, which is that the editing is lousy, in that it takes us from a scene in which two people are fighting straight to a scene in which they're fine, or from a scene in which two people are new co-workers to one in which they're talking as if they've been sleeping together for some time. Never mind about the continuity errors, like a photograph that hasn't yet been taken showing up on the psycho-killer's wall, or the detective exploring the psycho-killer's den wearing yesterday's suit.

The acting is generally good: Kelly Rutherford and Kari Wuhrer in particular carry the sorry-assed female roles with grace and aplomb. Roy Scheider fails sadly in a truly thankless task as the evil mayor (a guy who, on the eve of an election, knocks a cup out of a beggar's hand right in front of a camera crew and nobody bats an eye). The guy who played Bobby in Twin Peaks has the lead and I came away without an opinion about him one way or the other. Channon Roe (you'll recognize Roe from his millions of television roles; I recognize him as the undead bully from the Buffy episode where Xander has his own adventures while the rest of the scoobies are saving the world from imminent apocalypse) gives it a good solid try in another thankless role as the cast-off lover of the assistant DA (who is also the evil mayor's daughter and the ex-girlfriend of the dead twin. We never, incidentally, see the real DA. This girl and her factotum seem to comprise the entire office).

The best part of the movie is (surprise!) Robert Patrick, who gets to wear some excellent suits and brings the only real life to the proceedings as a bent cop. The sole satisfying mystery in the piece, in fact, lies in trying to pin down exactly how bent he is. Does he harbor a secret heart of gold which will out in the end? Will he betray the evil mayor in whose pocketbook he currently resides? Is he truly helping our ostensible hero unravel the enigma of his long-missing twin brother, as he claims? or is he just the crooked opera-lover he appears on surface?

My final gripe is for the cinematographer: set the damn camera down, will you? If you don't want to show us this story, then why are you making the damn movie in the first place?

*SPOILER ALERT*

Body Language: (1995. dir: George Case) When Robert Mitchum first lays eyes on the lousy dame who's going to steal his heart, distract him with kisses, then set him up for a sucker's fall, he knows her from the get-go, and goes along with it anyway. Tom Berenger, on the other hand, is an overpaid lawyer who gets bullied, brutalized, seduced, and set up in the most obvious frame that film has ever seen, by the most obvious no-good femme-fatale on celluloid, and he's utterly clueless from beginning to end, so you can't really feel sorry for him as he slides down his slippery slope into the bed he sat and watched being made for him. This was made for television; it's what they used to call an Erotic Thriller. Which means, like, the lawyer and his trashy stripper do it in the aisle of a K-Mart store. Is that really a fantasy fulfilled for someone? Bathed in the glow of the blue-light special?

Anyway, Robert Patrick is her boozed-up, trailer-trash, chopper-riding husband, and, if you know the genre from which this is gracelessly drawn, then you'll know that she wants him dead, for her own sociopathic reasons. We don't meet him until we're a third of the way in (and most of us are half-asleep), and even then we see him mostly in long-shot until his climactic fight-scene. Which, by the way, he ought to have won, because there's no way that wussy-pants lawyer dude is going to take out Robert Patrick, unless it's specified in the script, which I guess it was.

Survey says: by-the-numbers neo-noir with enough strip-joint footage for titillation and glowing neon lights for street-cred and very little at all to recommend it.

robert patrick / james mangold double feature: cop land and walk the line

Cop Land: (1997) Cop Land is a sublime movie, and let me hasten to remind you that I don't even like cop movies, as a rule. This one is extraordinary. It moves at an assured pace, just right to tell the story, never rushing, never lagging. Stallone projects a heavy, world-weary sweetness that is so flawlessly communicated you forget that you ever forgot he could act. He stands out, and this in a movie filled with fine performances.

It was here that Michael Rapaport first caught the world's eye with his admixture of boyish good will and potential violence. In his first scene, we follow him through a titty bar as he says good night to his friends, and there is that combination of smooth camera and smooth, improvisational finesse that reminds one a little of the old De Niro things, the old Scorsese things. Liotta, Keitel, and De Niro are all here, and all have their moments; Cathy Moriarty has a striking turn as an aging and bitter sex-kitten.

Patrick is Jack, one of the stalwart, "bent" cops in Keitel's fold. His role is secondary: he's sort of the hammer in the Keitel character's tool-chest, he spends a lot of time scrapping, but we see his depth in the unspeaking way he looks at his trusted boss after one of their own has been killed under suspicious circumstances.

The element that sends this one over the top as one of the greatest cop films ever made is its aural presence, its soundscape. Exceptional throughout, its most obvious greatness kicks in at the end, after Stallone’s sad-sack but relentless Sheriff is deafened by a gunshot while he goes forward on his quest for justice. Everything slows down, the atmosphere thickens. We hear all sound as if from underwater, through a wall of deep, ambient roar, and accompanied by a distant, haunting bagpipe refrain, a leftover from the cop funerals we’ve witnessed. Then, the first clear thing we hear after a long time is Stallone’s voice, saying, “I can’t hear you, Ray,” to the last of the bad guys. It's really stunning.

Walk the Line: (2005) Dirt-poor country boy transcends poverty, a mean daddy, and drug addiction to become a beloved musical legend and leave a profound, game-changing legacy. Yeah, it follows the musical-bio-of-the-week formula, but this one has a few extra things going for it: not just a very good cast (they all have that), but a better-than-average script (the one that particularly gave me shivers was the section where Sam Phillips is describing to Cash the song he needs to sing instead of the safe gospel he's been doing) and a truly sweet love story. Most of these movies, you have to take it on faith that the fellow in question really found his soul-mate and it's not just Hollywood gimcrackery, but anyone lucky enough to have seen Cash and wife June Carter perform together will have come away with the romantic notion that this was, in truth, a match made in heaven. It lends extra charm to the early scenes in which they're innocently coming to know one another, and it's necessary to shore up the story, which lies balanced evenly across two pillars: the love story, and Cash's daddy issues.

Robert Patrick, as Cash's hard-drinkin', sharecroppin' daddy, performs a crucial task in relatively abridged screen-time, and does it with admirable command, never relaxing into black and white but using a whole sfumato-palette full of minute gradations in grey. You never doubt that he's a real man, with both virtues and flaws, which are communicated in a stoical manner that rings true from a Depression-era dirt-farmer. There are beautiful touches: the panic around his eyes in the life-changing moment when his beloved eldest son is dying and he spits at Cash, "Where were you?" and -- this one really got me, -- when he pulls Cash's cap off his head as he pushes him into his dying brother's room. When they finally have their showdown, over an awkward Thanksgiving supper alongside the Carter clan, it's the son who picks the fight, but daddy doesn't wince, shows no sign of embarrassment or doubt. Patrick's paterfamilias knows who he is, knows he is the alpha-dog, and his face relaxes just barely into a smile as he launches, uncowed, into the proffered duel of words, knowing it's his boy who will roll over in the end.

And, Shelby Lynne, by the way, is just about perfect as Cash's mom, too.