To mark the 40th anniversary of the film’s original release, STUDIOCANAL and the ICO are releasing a re-mastered digital print of Luis Buñuel’s surreal comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in cinemas on June 29, including an extended run at BFI Southbank as part of their Jean-Claude Carrière season. Carrière has written the screenplays for many classic films including Belle de Jour, The Milky Way, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Tin Drum, La Piscine, Sommersby and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is released on DVD, and for the first time on Blu-ray, on July 16.
Comic review by Grayham P. Puttock
Grayham P. Puttock is the creator of Love&Ammunition comic. To see more visit dontlooknowcomics or contact Love&Ammunition@facebook.
Some years ago, I was invited to write a piece on a cinematic cult hero. I chose Roger Corman without hesitation. This was doubly fortuitous as I had just been lucky enough to have interviewed the misnamed ‘King of the B’s’. He was gracious, savvy, witty, charming, informed and possessed amazing recall of many of the characters who had graduated from the so-called Corman School. This was all the more noteworthy as he was already 81 and still had seven or so film projects on the go. Corman proved to be a gentleman and an inspiration, and so it is only fair to paraphrase - in this season of Shakespeare - the following line: ‘I come to praise Corman, not to bury him’. That is my caveat to readers of this review of Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, a long-overdue documentary on this unique (now 86-year-old) maverick producer/director now released on DVD, as this is a film for savouring, leaving all critical baggage in the hallway.
This documentary’s tone is by turns witty and irreverent while keeping a proper historical and biographical eye on things. It is as controlled a piece of presentation as one could desire given the breadth - not always depth - of the Corman oeuvre. Director Alex Stapleton has come up with an exemplary documentary that respects and plays with conventions and tropes of Corman’s style - and cheesiness - in a fascinating piece of ‘other’ Hollywood history. And what a history! You want to give a first chance to young directors? How about the following list, whose sophomore efforts were overseen by Corman: Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Robert Altman, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Robert Towne, John Sayles, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Anderson, Paul Bartel and Richard Rush - to name a few. Young actors to play the parts? Pam Grier, William Shatner, Jack Nicholson (who breaks down and cries with his reflections), Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, David Carradine, Barbara Hershey, Talia Shire, Sandra Bullock and Robert De Niro - not a bad list. Many of the above still hold Corman in great esteem and offer fine insights into the man during the course of the documentary.
As part of the legendary American International Pictures, Corman directed and/or produced the terrific Edgar Allan Poe cycle and dozens of low-budget drive-in ‘classics’ with titles like The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Caged Heat, A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors. When he struck out on his own with New World Pictures he not only continued to make delicious drive-in fodder but commenced distribution of foreign language films that no one else would touch. It was due to Corman’s work in this field that American audiences were introduced to, among other films, Fellini’s Amarcord, Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Corman seemed to move seamlessly from drive-in classic to art-house classic with an unerring sense of both. Who else can compare? Corman is a one-off, and although Hollywood ignored him - though studios were happy to poach his subject matter - they eventually saw the light and honoured him (thankfully not posthumously) with an Honorary Academy Award, which is the touching ‘money shot’ of the film.
Almost worth the price of admission alone though, are the end credits that have a high-octane, spirit-raising rendition of ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ by the Ramones from Rock and Roll High School while clips from various films and decades - he made hundreds: 10 films in 1957 alone - literally explode onto the screen. Clips which highlight the maestro’s instinctive understanding of the cultural zeitgeist and the genres he developed for a growing baby boom audience: monster movies, sci-fi, horror (especially his apogee with the Poe cycle), beach party frolics, bikers, rock n’ roll sagas, speeding car spectaculars, gritty blacksploitation flicks, counter-culture tales - you name your sub-culture and Roger Corman was there, well before Time magazine could do a cover story on it. And all on miniscule budgets and legendary production miserliness - as he himself observes: ‘You can make Lawrence of Arabia for half a million dollars - you just don’t leave the tent’.
Thankfully there has been no ‘Premature Burial’ of either Corman or his cinematic products - as his co-producer wife of many years states when commenting on Corman’s attitude to on-set or professional set-backs, ‘the dogs bark but the caravan moves on’. My only real disappointment with this DVD is that it only lasts for a mere 95 minutes (which rush by) and not for at least 180!
During the J-Horror boom of the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, no aspect of contemporary Japanese life seemed to be off limits to filmmakers aiming to make audiences jump out of their seats: from the videotape in Ring (1998), to wife-seeking in Audition (1999), to electricity in Pulse (2001), to an apartment leak in Dark Water (2002), to cell phones in One Missed Call (2004), directors such as Hideo Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike appropriated aspects of consumer culture or domestic life to suit their respective scare tactics. Arriving as the cycle was arguably running out of commercial and creative steam, Sion Sono’s Exte is a bizarre genre entry that adds hair extensions to the ever-expanding list of modern phenomena that you should beware of because it might be haunted. Distributed by major studio Toei and featuring a recognisable star in Chiaki Kuriyama, best known for playing violent schoolgirls in Battle Royale (2000) and Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), this was Sono’s chance to cross over into a lucrative market following a series of controversial independent films - Suicide Club (2001), Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), Strange Circus (2005) - that firmly established his credentials as a cult auteur. Yet it finds the director working around, rather than adhering to, the rules of genre, suggesting a brief fling with the system rather than a bid for regular employment. Despite this dual identity, Exte succeeds in imbuing its urban nightmare scenario with the director’s trademark societal exposé to be sufficiently interesting for genre aficionados and Sono devotees alike.
Exte opens with customs agents discovering large quantities of human hair in a shipping container, along with the body of a young girl. At the morgue, an autopsy confirms that the girl has been the victim of organ theft, probably committed by a human harvesting operation. Before the investigation can continue, night watchman Yamazaki (Ren Osugi) steals the body and takes it home, where he discovers that it is re-growing hair, not only from the head but also from other parts and orifices. This sexually excites Yamazaki, who is a hair fetishist, while also providing an additional stream of income as he is able to make extensions and sell them to salons. One business that he visits is the place of work of Yûko (Chiaki Kuriyama), a stylist who is taking care of Mami (Miku Satô), the eight-year-old daughter of her irresponsible sister, Kiyomi (Tsugumi). The staff of the salon are impressed by the quality of Yamazaki’s extensions, but the employee who tries them on is killed later that night: the dead girl has a score to settle with society, and her hair is able to control the minds of those who wear it, sharing her horrible experience on the operating table, before committing murder from beyond the grave. Yamazaki’s infatuation with the hair of Yuko and Mami places them in danger, while Sono has macabre fun with his main prop: hair sprouts from eyes and mouths, holds police detectives captive, and slices with the severity of a very sharp knife.
As with his subsequent ‘true crime’ stories Cold Fish (2010) and Guilty of Romance (2011), which favoured narratives of transgression over accurate dramatisation of the facts, Exte finds Sono demonstrating a general disregard for the genre in which he is operating: this is ostensibly a horror film, yet the director spends as much time exploring the fractured family unit as he does staging the requisite shocking set pieces. Mami is a neglected child, and possibly a victim of abuse: the sadistic Kiyomi uses Mami as a means of accessing her sister’s apartment to steal food and raid the wardrobe for new clothing, while treating her daughter as a punching bag when her mood swings. Sono also throws in enough darkly humorous details and lines of dialogue to suggest that he does not take the genre as seriously as his contemporaries: the name of the salon is Gilles de Rais, a reference to the 15th-century French mass murderer, and lines like ‘My nose hair’s out of control lately’ openly acknowledge the ridiculous nature of the premise. Even some of the expository exchanges are played for knowing laughs, such as Yuko’s conversations with her roommate. However, there are some very strange special effects to satisfy gore-hounds, with hair shooting out from a woman’s head, attaching to the ceiling, then lifting her up before dropping its victim to her death. Exte would be immediately overshadowed by the epic satire of Love Exposure (2008), but it remains a typically subversive, and occasionally brilliant, Sono experience.
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray
USA 1960
125 mins
The Apartment is the story of a Manhattan apartment used for illicit sexual liaisons by company executives who in return give its owner, their lowly colleague C.C. Baxter, good efficiency ratings and fast track promotions. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) works in the ‘Ordinary Premium Accounting’ department at a large insurance company. His desk is one of many situated in rows of hundreds in an open plan office. Those ‘using’ the apartment are all his superiors with their own offices and keys to the executive washroom, and their liaisons are with their secretaries, the switchboard girls and the elfin elevator assistant Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), with whom Baxter falls in love. Such is the insular world of this office tower block whose employees outnumber the residents of Natchez, Mississippi.
The script (co-written with regular collaborator I.A.L. Diamond) is so brilliantly crafted you could just sit and marvel at its perfection. It even creates its own syntax, dialogue-wise. There are a smattering of topical 1960s jokes and a few in Yiddish that might need translating but much of the humour is universal and the film is as funny now as it surely was 50 years ago.
Wilder’s films in general are so well written it is easy to credit him as a screenwriter and overlook his talent as a director. For Wilder, the screenplay came first and the other elements worked to support it - his gravestone even reads, ‘I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect’. But that doesn’t mean that mise en scène, cinematography, sound or even editing are without imagination, or that his work is any less cinematic. The editing may be classically smooth and unobtrusive but when the film cuts seamlessly from a suicide attempt to a drunken dance routine with the melodramatic death music morphing into the jukebox’s cha-cha-cha, we can see Wilder taking unobtrusiveness to another level.
The film has a great look - the cocktail bars thick with smoke and bustling with Christmas drinkers (even Santa Claus himself orders a whiskey); the open plan office with its geometric patterned ceilings. The art direction was by the great Alexander Trauner who used forced perspective to show the masses of office staff. The rows of desks were built smaller and smaller with those furthest away being peopled by children in business suits. The apartment itself is a wonderful creation, a quirky combination of thrift-store furnishings and technical innovations, including a very impressive remote control television.
In Jack Lemmon, Wilder seems to have found his perfect star. The Apartment was the second of seven films they were to make together. His C.C. Baxter is anxious, self-pitying, sickly, weak-willed but still the film’s hero. Like his Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1958), he is unable to say no to escalating requests. He is lacking in moral fibre and non-judgemental to a fault. Even Fred MacMurray’s charming philanderer Sheldrake has stronger, if skewed, sense of justice as he complains of how unfair it is for his mistresses to expect him to divorce his wife. The moral world of The Apartment is one of those who take and those who get taken, or of ‘finks’ and ‘schmucks’. Baxter is the latter.
The re-issue material seems to play up the Mad Men connection. The early 1960s inter-office politics (particularly the sexual politics) have a lot in common with Matthew Weiner’s TV show as does the drinking and smoking at work and the after-work cocktails (a Frozen Daiquiri, a Rum Collins or a dozen Martinis). Was every office worker in New York permanently sauced? However, the philanderers in The Apartment are much less classy than Don Draper - actually even less than Roger Sterling. As the switchboard girl complains, she hoped he would take her to ‘Twenty One’ but instead had to settle for ‘Hamburg Heaven and some schmuck’s apartment’. The gulf between the advertising world of Mad Men and the insurance industry of The Apartment is exemplified by Mr Dobisch can-can-ing in sock-suspenders at the Christmas party.
Perhaps more than any of his other films, The Apartment is full of Wilder’s irreverent sense of humour. Although aimed mostly at the corporate business world his scattershot approach hits a wide range of targets, from Wilder’s previous star Marilyn Monroe (a lookalike is picked up in a bar by the aforementioned Dobisch) to Fidel Castro (‘a no-good fink’), from credit card culture to television. Baxter’s enjoyment of one of cinema’s classiest moments - Grand Hotel (1932) - is destroyed by an advertiser’s question - ‘Do you have wobbly dentures?’
Male-female relationships have rarely been viewed with such relentless pessimism. The Apartment has to be the least romantic rom-com ever. However, the film’s darker comedic moments are deftly handled and Wilder side-steps the moral maze he has led us into with yet more well-timed gags. When assessing his own work Billy Wilder described The Apartment as being the film with the fewest mistakes. And he is right: it is as near to perfect as is possible.
From being one of Germany’s most successful silent film directors Fritz Lang moved to Hollywood in the mid-30s, leaving his wife/collaborator Thea von Harbou behind. Although he was raised as a Catholic, the Viennese-born director had a Jewish mother. Despite this, he was apparently invited by Josef Goebbels to head film production under the Nazi government - a job offer he refused.
However, in America he would never again be given the huge budget, year-long shooting schedule, elaborate sets and cast of thousands that he had in making the sci-fi epic Metropolis (1927), nor would he make anything as long as the five-hour epic Die Nibelungen (1924) or even as dark as M (1931) - the shadowy story of a child murderer. Yet somehow, with his staple of small-scale unpretentious genre pictures Lang flourished. For the next 20 years he turned out a collection of noirs - The Big Heat (1953) - Westerns - Rancho Notorious (1952) - spy thrillers - Man Hunt (1940) - and even a musical - You and Me (1938) - that make up an oeuvre as great as any in the studio system.
You Only Live Once was Lang’s second American film. It stars Henry Fonda as Eddie Taylor, a former criminal paroled from jail who marries the girl who has waited three years for him, only to find that life as an ex-con is not easy. The honeymoon lasts less than one night as the hotel owner recognises him from a crime magazine and asks the couple to leave in the morning. He is fired from his job as a truck driver - his boss refusing to listen, chatting to his wife on the phone, as Eddie makes his desperate pleas.
Fonda is perfectly cast as the hard-pressed, good-hearted reformed criminal but has the ability to transform into a desperate killer with a gun in his hand. Sylvia Sidney is Jo, the smitten nice girl who not only is able to see the good beneath the criminal but is perhaps, like Sissy Spacek in Badlands (1974), secretly attracted to his darker side.
The moral waters are certainly murkier than we would expect from 30s Hollywood, and good and bad are much more ambiguous than in the fairy tale world of Metropolis. Lang never really makes it clear that Eddie is really not guilty of the robbery and murder - the monogrammed hat that convicts him is ‘stolen’ off camera and the bank robber or robbers are wearing gas masks. Yet, despite this, Eddie and Jo stand in contrast to the petty meanness of the ‘law-abiding’ citizens. Whether exaggerating a robbery so they can clear out the till themselves or cheating at draughts, the supporting cast are almost universally self-serving and dishonest. Even the police are seen stealing apples from a greengrocer. But unlike the world-weary heroes of the films noirs Lang would make in the following decade, Eddie and Jo never give up on love and hope. They always believe they can escape this uncaring, dishonest world where innocent frogs are mutilated by children.
Lang shows how well he adapted to the pacing of American cinema. You Only Live Once is a rollercoaster ride of hope and disappointment followed by more hope and yet more disappointment. There is little of the expressionist style of his German films. There is an eerie fog-bound prison break but the cinematography, like the sparse sets, is largely functional, either driving the plot or setting a mood - the romantic croaking frogs in the pond at the honeymoon hotel being particularly memorable.
There are scenes of great visual imagination that remind us that we are watching one of silent cinema’s great directors at work. Hope is raised by a newspaper headline reading ‘Taylor freed’, only to be dashed seconds later as we are shown two alternative front pages - no decision or the death penalty - as the printers wait for a phone call to decide which to go with. The set piece robbery - witnessed by a blind man in a haze of tear gas - is a purely visual tour de force.
As with the poetic realist films made in France at the same time it is the hand of fate that rules the plot. Any attempt the characters make to build a life for themselves is scuppered by unforgiving bosses, paranoid hoteliers or just bad luck - the ticker tape news arrives just in time and too late. The heavy air of pessimism is hardly diluted by the pseudo-religious ending and stands in stark contrast to the more upbeat or escapist feelings we associate with 30s Hollywood cinema.
Although You Only Live Once looks like a precursor of film noir it could also be seen as part of the series of Depression-era social dramas such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). The final reel, as the lovers go on the lam together, contributed to create a sub-genre that oddly seems to be made of almost entirely great films from They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950) to Pierrot le Fou (1965), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Badlands and many other great films as well as Natural Born Killers (1994).
As much as Lang adapted to Hollywood it seems American cinema adapted to him. Along with other expats such as Billy Wilder, John Alton and Robert Siodmak, Lang was to lead the way to that great crossroads of European and American sensibilities: film noir,the style/genre in which he was to make his greatest work - Scarlet Street (1945), The Big Heat and The Woman in the Window (1944) stand alongside the afore mentioned M as Fritz Lang’s greatest achievements.
Cast: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi, Kathleen Burke
USA 1932
71 mins
Hard-up 1930s Depression-era cinema-goers were eager to escape the everyday in a tantalising world of the strange and uncanny. The success of Universal’s Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) saw other studios keen to carve themselves a bloody slice of the action. Paramount seized H.G. Wells’s anti-vivisectionist novel The Island of Dr Moreau, adapted to become Island of Lost Souls (1932). Designed to combine grotesque thrills with jungle drama (another hot genre at the time), it was knocked out quickly by work-a-day director Erle C. Kenton. Little did the studio know that the end product would be one of the weirdest, creepiest films to emerge in the pre-Hays Code era and would defy time to become a transgressive horror classic.
Finally out on DVD after years of fuzzy bootleg VHS copies, Island tells the tale of square-jawed Edward Parker, marooned on the eerie South Seas island of sinister scientist Dr Moreau (the wonderful Charles Laughton). Parker is shocked to discover that Moreau has created a shambling experimental race of half-human, half-animal creatures, some cloven-hoofed, some sprouting hair in unusual places, who live in the jungle, obedient to Moreau lest they be summoned to his sadistic ‘house of pain’. Moreau’s latest creation is the sensual Panther Woman. Looking rather unlike Moreau’s other creations – more like an alluring animalistic Betty Boop – she has never seen a handsome man before. In the name of science, Moreau unleashes her on hunky Parker - and that’s when the trouble starts.
As mad Moreau, Charles Laughton dominates proceedings with an incredible performance that veers expertly between quietly understated and the edges of overblown. Like Colin Clive’s Dr Frankenstein, he compares himself to God; but Laughton’s Moreau is not a misguided would-be do-gooder; he is a cheerfully unhinged genius who revels in doing evil. Beaming proudly at the screams of his botched animal-human hybrids, cracking his whip over the awful monsters he’s created, lounging decadently across his vivisection table like a modern day Roman emperor, or simply oozing creepiness as he offers a guest a cup of tea, Laughton plays his part with delicious relish. Somehow he convinces the viewer that despite his odious transgressions against nature, humanity and God, he’s rather a fun fellow really; despite the fact that he is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, we remain sympathetic to him right to the end. This creepy moral paradox is central to the film’s unique, unsettling, perverse power.
Bela Lugosi, the ‘Sayer of the Law’, the chief experimental-reject responsible for conveying Moreau’s orders to the beast-men, deserves mention (as always). Despite sporting a mighty brush of facial hair that would infringe upon anybody’s expressive powers, he turns a lemon of a minor part into lemonade, delivering a convincing, memorable portrayal through pure energetic force of will. “Are ve not men?†he demands of his savage brethren, in that inimitable distinctly un-South Seas voice of his. And he means it. Some of the so-called ‘civilised’ characters are equally fascinating - from the booze-addled, neglectful skipper who thinks nothing of heaving Parker from his boat, before later attempting to chat up his fiancée, to a pipe-puffing disgraced medic, who finds hope of redemption in Moreau’s demise.
It all looks terrific thanks to legendary cinematographer Karl Struss. Like many of the early sound horrors, it has that distinctly creepy quality, an indefinable spookiness that faded away somehow as horror got glossier towards the 1940s. Struss’s camera is always moving, pulling back and forwards through crowded, labyrinthine sets. From the fog-shrouded ship-bound scenes to the steamy verdant undergrowth, he takes us to a distant place. We feel the oppressive claustrophobia of the jungle. In one justly renowned sequence, a succession of imaginatively made-up horrors lurch vengefully towards the camera to attack their master (British make-up specialist Wally Westmore gives Universal’s Jack Pierce a run for his money here). Briefly glimpsed, gangly, dark and hairy, they strike a potent contrast with glistening, corpulent, baby-faced Laughton in his vivid white suit, before they gleefully turn on him in one of the most gloriously twisted finales to grace a 1930s horror.
Wells was outraged by what they’d done to his novel and disgusted by the insertion of a sexual, sensual edge. The British censor banned the film outright for many years; and, even today – perhaps especially today, in these times of genetic experimentation - this tale of man messing with nature retains its creepy potency. Throw out your VHS, the DVD looks great. This is absolutely your best chance to see whether – as is rumoured – Buster Crabbe, Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott really make unbilled appearances as beast-men. Let’s hope some of the other great forgotten horrors of this era can get a similarly lavish make-over. Can we start with White Zombie (1932)?
Part of the Kaneto Shindô and Kozaburo Yoshimura restrospective
Director: Kaneto Shindô
Writer: Kaneto Shindô
Original title:Hadaka no shima
Alternative title:The Island
Cast: Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama, Shinji Tanaka
Japan 1960
96 mins
Kaneto Shindô’s The Naked Island is arguably one of the masterpieces of the Japanese New Wave, yet the saga of its production is just as compelling as the events depicted on screen. Set on a small island in the Setonaikai archipelago, the body of water that separates the three main islands of Japan, this is a story of hardship that frames the struggles of a peasant family against an awe-inspiring yet unforgiving landscape. It was also a location that would test Shindô’s resilience throughout the two-month shoot, with the treacherous natural environment serving as an appropriate metaphor for the economic conditions under which the director was working. The Naked Island was financed through the independent company Kindaï Eiga Kyokai, which was founded by Shindô, fellow director Kôzaburô Yoshimura, and actor Taiji Tonoyama when the two filmmakers left Shôchiku Studios to develop personal projects without restriction. Yet audiences did not share their concerns. Politicised films such as Lucky Dragon Number 5 (1959), which criticised atomic bomb testing, failed commercially, and as his company was on the verge of bankruptcy Shindô embarked on The Naked Island with a budget that was one-tenth the national average. If a family member had been shooting behind-the-scenes footage, or if the film had been made during EPK (electronic press kit) era, then a documentary about the production of The Naked Island would rival Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) and Lost in La Mancha (2002) as an examination of an ambitious project on the brink of collapse.
The Naked Island will be released in the UK on Blu-ray by Eureka Entertainment on 17 June 2013.
However, such a record is perhaps unnecessary, as anyone with some knowledge of the production process of The Naked Island, or the geographic region in which it was shot, will be able to appreciate the difficulties that Shindô and his crew dealt with on a daily basis. Although the film is infused with a poetic quality that is enhanced through the almost total absence of dialogue, this is very much a realistic vision of island life: surroundings are not presented as a utopian paradise, but as tough terrain with limited hydrologic resources. The problems caused by the lack of water largely constitute the minimalist narrative as the family, who are the island’s only occupants, obtain water for their plants and themselves by rowing their boat to a neighbouring island. This task is undertaken alongside other physically draining chores, carried out while unprotected from the heat of the sun, resulting in a cyclical experience for both the protagonists and the audience. Drudgery eventually leads to disaster: while the parents are away from the island, their older son falls ill, and his father must race to find a doctor before his offspring’s symptoms prove to be fatal. Such drama would usually inject urgency into a study of the family unit, but Shindô maintains the detached approach of a documentarian. He positions the family as hard-working farmers trying to live off the land, but is unsentimental with regards to their predicament. Nature is in control of both their future and the rhythm of Shindô’s filmmaking.
The Naked Island evokes the necessary routine of life away from civilisation through the constant sound of waves and Hikaru Hayashi’s haunting score, which mostly repeats the same melody throughout the film. Kiyoshi Kuroda’s striking cinematography captures each area of the island with such clarity that the family’s constant struggle becomes deeply moving, despite Shindô’s restraint. Nagisa Ôshima famously criticised the film, suggesting that Shindô had conceded to the image that other countries had of Japan in order to achieve overseas success. Beyond its setting, however, The Naked Island is characteristic of Japanese cinema in that it emphasises steadfast determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity: the only ‘reward’ that the family receives for suffering the trials of the island is being able to carry on living until their shared willpower runs out. Shindô was more fortunate as The Naked Island was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1961 Moscow International Film Festival in a tie with Grigori Chukhrai’s Chistoye nebo (1961), with sales to international distributors rescuing his company in its hour of need. In addition, the firm relationships that were formed with Hayashi and Kuroda under considerable pressure led Shindô to adopt a collective mode of production that would result in such subsequent classics as Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). When he went out on location, the financially desperate Shindô thought that The Naked Island would be his last film, but it instead resulted in the kind of resurgence that can only come from the most trying of circumstances.
Vincente Minnelli’s insider look at the golden age of Hollywood is sly and slickly entertaining, with Kirk Douglas as the unscrupulous producer Jonathan Shields adding a tough edge to the black and white melodrama. Told in three long flashbacks, it recounts the relationships of director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), writer James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) and the luminous Lana Turner, who plays the actress Georgia Lorrison, to the ambitious Shields. Shields woos them, puts a magical gloss on their burgeoning talent, and then carelessly, casually ditches them when they’ve outlived their usefulness to him.
Charles Schnee’s whip-smart script, packed with sharp one-liners and passionate dialogue is a pitch-perfect accompaniment to the noir-ish look of Robert Surtees’s cinematography. There’s an extra layer of knowingness to the whole production too: shadows, odd staircases, extravagant stage sets and behind the scenes shots are nods to the mechanics of filmmaking, while in-jokes about directors and actors add an extra frisson to this gripping tale of Hollywood hubris.
Director Amiel is the first one to dish the dirt on Shields. A paid mourner at the funeral of Shields’s father, he insults the dead producer: ‘one of the mad men who almost wrecked it, a butcher who sold everything but the pig’s whistle’, unaware that he’s standing next to his son. He apologises and it’s the start of a beautiful friendship. The duo learn their craft on the B-movie production lot, their biggest success ‘The Doom of the Cat Men’, where the laughable, ill-fitting cat costumes are abandoned for the shadowy allure of silhouettes: ‘Because the dark has a life of its own. In the dark all sorts of things come alive.’ Soon after, darkness enters their relationship too, as Shields’s ruthless disloyalty becomes evident.
Lana Turner as Georgia Lorrison is next in line for the Shields treatment. Drunk, and crushed by the weight of the legacy of her actor father, she is rescued by the charismatic Shields from playing ‘the doomed daughter of the great man’. Shields coaches her, stops her drinking, makes her believe that he’s in love with her. Lana’s all aglow, like a damaged angel, tender and trembling and determined to do her best. Until fear overcomes her on the night before filming her first important role and she goes on a bender. Shields drops her in a swimming pool to sober her up, and sets her on the path to being a star. And then along comes the celebratory party where Georgia is feted and Jonathan is missing. Heading to his house wrapped in a white mink, and with her heart on her glittery sleeve, she’s determined to celebrate with him. But instead of a celebration, Georgia is faced with the heart-breaking realisation of Shields’s betrayal.
James Lee Bartlow seems the most likely candidate to resist the allure of the film world. A pipe-smoking Southern writer, with a delightful wife - Gloria Grahame, blonde and blithe and funny, with the catch phrase: ‘You’re a very naughty man, I’m happy to say’ - he nonetheless succumbs: ‘I’m flattered that you want me and bitter you got me.’ Jonathan and James go to work on the script, with constant interruptions from charming Rosemary Bartlow, until Shields, unbeknownst to James Lee, arranges a distraction with fatal consequences. It’s the end of another relationship, a definitive severing of all ties, like those with Amiel and Georgia.
But this is Hollywood, and in the final scene the three protagonists are clustered around a phone, listening to the scintillating, despicable Shields pitching them a new project. Until the very end we wonder if they will be sucked in again by his treacherous charm.
Part two of the Vincente Minelli retrospective runs until 26 June 2012 at BFI Southbank.
Writers: Jonathan Hardy, David Stevens, Bruce Beresford, Kit Denton
Based on the play by: Kenneth G. Ross
Cast: Edward Woodward, Jack Thompson, John Waters
Australia 1980
107 mins
A palpable, and justifiable, air of anger, bewilderment and injustice permeates Bruce Beresford’s Boer War drama, a major entry of the Australian New Wave of the late 70s and early 80s. With an Academy Award-nominated screenplay co-written by Beresford, Jonathan Hardy and David Stevens, a never better Edward Woodward in the title role, and an all-Australian supporting cast including Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown and Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, Breaker Morant recreates the damning true-life tale of a court martial where military chicanery and international diplomacy doomed the accused before proceedings had even started.
A lieutenant in the Bushveldt Carbineers during the Second Boer War in South Africa, the Anglo-Australian Morant, now a folk hero to many in Australia, was arrested, along with lieutenants Peter Handcock (Brown) and George Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), and charged with the murders of six Boer prisoners. Morant and Handcock were also charged with the murder of a German missionary, who witnessed the killings and may, or may not, have been siding with the Boers. Acting under long-standing orders to take no prisoners and also to seek vengeance for the killing and mutilation of their ranking officer Captain Simon Hunt (Terence Donovan), Morant, Handcock and Witton would end up as sacrificial lambs for the greater good of the British Empire. Used as scapegoats to appease the South African and German governments after news of the summary executions by firing squad spread, and to keep the planned peace talks on track, the accused claimed that they were following the direct orders of their superiors, including Lord Kitchener, but their assertions held no sway in what was, ironically, little more than a kangaroo court. Morant and Handcock were executed by firing squad, and Witton, the youngest of the three, was sentenced to life with hard labour.
The larrikinism, earthy mordant humour and loyalty of the trio stand in direct opposition to the handlebar moustaches, repressed emotions, deceitfulness, clipped accents and air of privileged arrogance evinced by the British military leadership throughout Beresford’s expert retelling of the story. Morant, a renaissance man known for his great skill with horses, ballad writing and poetry, Handcock, a simple, working-class soldier and Witton, a naí¯ve, idealistic young man, were thrown to the wolves by the army they had volunteered to join. Presented in a non-linear, episodic fashion, reflective of the disjointed (and patently false) narrative that the British army forced onto the incident, Breaker Morant, shot entirely on location in South Australia, is awash with cutting dialogue, memorable performances and striking imagery.
The winner in 10 categories at the 1980 Australian Film Institute Awards, and including a performance by Thompson as the accused’s lawyer, Major J.F. Thomas, that won him the Best Supporting Actor Award at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, Beresford’s take on the 1978 stage production Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts by Kenneth G. Ross is an enduring reminder of a shameful act of betrayal, not just of individuals and colleagues, but of the colonial bonds between Britain and Australia. Morant’s bitingly sarcastic comment that ‘It is customary during a time of war to kill as many of the enemy as possible’ lays bare the hypocrisy, pig-headedness and callous indifference of his superior officers. Thompson indelibly captures the frustration, stoicism and professionalism shown by Thomas in fighting a battle that was already lost, and the climactic hilltop execution of Morant and Handcock, filmed at sunrise in a coincidental but notable reversal of the sunset sacrifice of Woodward’s Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man, is both gut-wrenching and visually breath-taking. As with much of Breaker Morant, the eschewing of a musical score in the climactic scenes enhances the grip of the emotionally engaging material. Everything you need to see and feel is up there on the screen without the need for aural manipulation.
The corrupting influence of war on all those involved and the heavy price paid by some for their blind allegiance to a cause, the flag they fought for and those in charge of espousing its virtues is thrown into stark relief in Beresford’s anti-war classic. Specific though the narrative may be, it attains a timeless quality made abundantly clear by the contemporary horrors of Abu Ghraib and the distance the US military’s chain of command put between itself and the perpetrators of those crimes committed in the name of the War on Terror.
Asian action cinema, and in particular Asian martial arts films, has been on something of a downward turn of late. Maybe it’s because the old stars are, well, getting older - Jackie Chan has just hit 58 this year, even Donnie Yen is nearing 50 - and the void has not really been satisfactorily filled. Tony Jaa was the great big hope, but we all know what happened to him - one only hopes that his reunion with Prachya Pinkaew (Ong-bak [2003], Warrior King [2005]) on Warrior King 2 will serve as his redemption. The scene, bar a few outstanding films such as Ip Man 1 (2008) and 2 (2010), has been somewhat lacklustre of late, with action roles falling to Asian pop stars seeking a film career rather than talented martial artists.
So thank heavens for writer-director Gareth Evans and new shining light Iko Uwais, who between them have created two beacons in an otherwise faltering genre. Their first collaboration, Merantau (aka Merantau Warrior, 2009), is a highly enjoyable action flick that introduced the world to the formidable talents of Uwais and his preferred martial art, Silat, an Indonesian form that had never really been showcased on film before. It’s a simple coming-of-age set-up: a young boy (Uwais) leaves his remote village to become a man and must face the hardships that come with growing up in an unrepentant and crime-ridden city (in many ways, it’s similar to Ong-bak). While not altogether ground-breaking, there’s enough raw energy, passion and style on show to suggest that a more accomplished film would come.
The Raid is the film that delivers on that promise. Having already stunned festival-goers around the world, The Raid is now set to take the UK by storm. And that’s exactly what it is, an unbridled storm, a thunderous lightning bolt of action cinema that will sweep you up and blow you away.
Once again, the set-up is simple. There’s a murderous crime boss, Tama (Sahetapy), living on the top floor of a tower block, a high-rise concrete maze that he’s populated with seemingly every hardcore villain and violent madman in Jakarta. A team of crack special forces cops is sent in to take him down, quietly and with no fuss. But, as in all good action films, there’s a dirty cop on Tama’s payroll and soon the spec ops team have been betrayed, and, cut off from the outside world, they are facing certain annihilation. Fortunately, one loyal cop, Rama (Uwais), has eaten his Shredded Wheat for breakfast and sets about cleaning shop in the most brutal way possible.
Like Merantau, The Raid starts with Uwais warming up, stretching his muscles and practising his martial arts skills - the quiet before the storm. But when the action hits, it’s relentless. Each breathtaking set piece is perfectly orchestrated, from Uwais’s intricate skill set through to Evans’s peerless and pacy direction. The fights are artfully done, played out like ballets of destruction, culminating in a final three-way fight that is stunning in its execution: I can’t recall any other action film finishing with a fight between hero and villain where the latter is the one who is outnumbered (two vs one) but is so talented in his art that the heroes are the clear underdogs.
Uwais is certainly the star of the film, mixing the charisma of Tony Jaa with the hand speed of Bruce Lee, but the performer who really captures the eye is Yayan Ruhian as one of Tama’s psychotic henchmen, the appropriately named Mad Dog, who delights in causing pain. Slight in build, Ruhian, who served as the film’s fight choreographer with Uwais (a role the pair also filled on Merantau), is a lithe, lightning-fast bundle of muscle and sinew whose performance as Mad Dog is set to make it one of the genre’s most memorable villains ever.
As a full-on martial arts action film, The Raid wears its influences on its sleeve, taking the very best traits from the cream of Hong Kong cinema, in particular John Woo’s classic heroic bloodshed movies of the 80s and 90s, such as Hard Boiled (1992) and A Better Tomorrow (1986). Even Oldboy (2003) gets a nod with what has become a de rigueur scene for Asian action cinema - a fight in a corridor. But with the director being Welsh (yes, we don’t really get how that happened either), it also has smatterings of Western cinema too, such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Die Hard (1988). Indeed, one scene, where Rama tries to hide an injured fellow officer in a wall crawlspace as one of the villains systematically stabs through the plasterwork with a machete, is so nerve-twitchingly intense it would be more at home in a horror film than an action flick.
Overall, The Raid is hard to fault. OK, it’s not breaking any new ground, more so reinvigorating it, and the action dominates character development (although there’s just enough to make you care what happens to Rama et al). Equally, some of the more visceral violence will put off a few, and even have hardcore fans wincing, but, as a whole, The Raid is such a refreshing take on the action film it makes you realise just what you have missed from the genre for the past few years. It’s been a long time since I’ve left a cinema so pumped with energy that I just wanted to watch the film again immediately, and I can’t wait to get it on DVD so I can watch in more detail the blistering fight action.
It’s early days yet, and there are still some excellent films to come, but already I think I’ve found my film of the year. Bring on Evans/Uwais collaboration number three.
Toby Weidmann
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
