Two years before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Hammer Studios produced this socially conscious zombie thriller set in Cornwall and directed by John Gilling. The Plague of the Zombies (1966) is released on double play by Studiocanal on 7 May and screens in selected cities across the UK on 12 June 2012.
The screening is part of the Made in Britain season organised by Studiocanal and the ICO in celebration of classic British cinema between the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend and the Olympics. The other films in the season are Passport to Pimlico (5 June), The Man Who Fell to Earth (19 June), Hobson’s Choice (26 June) and Quatermass and the Pit (3 July). For more information, please go to the ICO website.
For low-budget filmmakers, having a tiny cast and only one or two locations is a huge bonus in keeping costs down. This has led to a number of films based on ‘locked room’ scenarios over the last decade and a half. Cube (1997) was an excellent, genre-defining example of this and in subsequent years, Maléfique (2002), Ryûhei Kitamura’s Alive (2002), Saw (2004), Fermat’s Room (2007) and Exam (2009) have explored horror and science fiction variations on the theme. Many of these have screened at SCI-FI-LONDON or FrightFest in the past so this is starting to become a well-worn theme for fans of the genre and regular genre festival attendees.
Enrico Clerico Nasino’s True Love, which screens at SCI-FI-LONDON this month, is another example, but unfortunately, it adds little that hasn’t been seen before. The central premise of a young married couple, kept in separate, futuristic cells and made to answer difficult questions about how much they trust each other under the threat of water, sleep or mobility being removed is strong enough. As a film made by Italians with an American cast and setting, this could have resulted in an interesting exploration of Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo Bay-style interrogation techniques on middle-class suburbanites who experienced the ‘war on terror’ as a mild diversion through their televisions, but disappointingly, this aspect is barely hinted at.
Instead, the writers and directors have reality dating shows and the Milgram experiment in their sights as the subjects they’re giving an SF twist to. Even then, the science-fictional aspect of the film is minimal, apart from a final scene that adds an eye-catching set piece of gravity working differently in opposite ends of the prison-like environment. [SPOILER WARNING] But this is undermined by a ‘was it all a dream?’ ending, and the nature of the lies they have told each other - adultery, financial trouble - is more suited to romantic melodrama than a death trap thriller. [END OF SPOILERS]
Neither the two main actors or the parts they’re playing are particularly engaging, meaning that the film’s main attraction lies in the more technical aspects of the production. True Love‘s direction, editing, cinematography and sound design are all solid, and for these qualities alone, those involved behind the scenes deserve to work on bigger and better things, but the film overall suffers of a lack of ambition and originality. While True Love isn’t by any means a particularly bad film, for audiences to get the most out of its narrative and visual twists and turns, they’ll need to be unfamiliar with similar narratives that have dealt with these tropes better and with more imagination.
SCI-FI-LONDON opens on May 1 and runs until May 7 at various venues across London.
An excellent science-fiction thriller that, while reminiscent of a number of other films, including The Cell (2000), Identity (2003), Timecrimes (2007) and Inception (2010), improves on all its predecessors by having tight direction, characters the viewer can relate to and a brisk running time that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
US genre TV star Sasha Roiz, reminiscent of a laid-back young Jeff Goldblum, plays an inventor whose device allows a person to experience their own or other people’s memories as an interactive virtual reality environment. To get funding for this, he unwittingly does a deal with a law enforcement agency, who want to use it to investigate whether a supposed killer has committed a murder he claims no memory of. Roiz rushes to get the prototype finished for this initial demonstration. It works well enough in letting him enter the killer’s mind but malfunctions when he attempts to leave, putting his own body into a coma and trapping his consciousness in the killer’s mind for the next four years.
The script explores the morality of the device and the truths and fictions we tell ourselves. While tense and gripping when needs be, the film refreshingly doesn’t feel the audience has to be kept on the edge of their seats throughout, giving the human drama space to breathe. Since the budget doesn’t allow for the eye-boggling visuals of The Cell or Inception, it also avoids the over-familiarity of blockbuster set pieces that its predecessors got bogged down in. And despite the potentially labyrinthine possibilities of the scenario, it tells the tale in a straightforward manner that doesn’t require a scientist with a blackboard to explain the narrative to viewers without a Ph.D.
Indie actor Dominic Bogart portrays a sympathetic junkie and potential killer very well, experiencing his own incarceration in jail while he has another person trapped inside his head, and through the recreation and repetition of his memories, we learn how he has been betrayed and manipulated by the people he loves, throughout his life.
The story includes a twist that makes us doubt the central premise and leaves the plot open for a welcome sequel. This leads to some minor problems I have with the script, in particular: for a film that relies on a certain amount of real-life science, it seems strange that the filmmakers don’t acknowledge until the very end the well-established fact that each time a person remembers something, the memory changes slightly - a fact Roiz’s character seems incredulously unaware of.
Overall, though, a top-notch indie thriller and one that will hopefully find a distributor and a larger audience as soon as possible. Extracted is certainly the best film I’ve seen so far at this year’s SCI-FI-LONDON and its second screening on May 4 deserves to be sold out.
SCI-FI-LONDON runs from May 1 to 7 at various venues across London.
The label ‘poetic realism’ was applied to a whole range of films made in France throughout the 1930s, from the beautifully shot atmospheric stories of working-class life in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) to Julien Duvivier’s Casbah-set crime caper Pepe le Moko (1937) as well as to much of Jean Renoir’s 1930s output. However, the term was never more perfectly used than in describing two films made by Marcel Carné at the end of the decade: Le Jour se Lève (1939) and Le Quai des Brumes (1938).
The latter stars Jean Gabin as an army deserter arriving in the French port of Le Havre looking to flee the country. He meets a girl (Michèle Morgan) and falls in love. The simplicity of this is explained by some wonderful dialogue by the poet-cum-screenwriter Jacques Prévert: ‘It’s like in a film,’ Gabin’s character claims, ‘I see you and I like you. It’s love at first sight’. Gabin’s world-weary yet romantic tough guy prefigures Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca and many a film noir hero. Yet, despite his masculinity and self-confidence, he is unlike his Hollywood counterpart in that he is never really the instigator of the plot, but merely its doomed hero. The strong hand of fate rules the narrative - even the moments of good fortune, such as when Jean finds civvies to change into, complete with shoes the right size, simply serve to remind us that it’s the whim of fortune that is in the driving seat, not the protagonist. Such tragically doomed love stories were typical of the poetic realist style - apologies if this is a spoiler but to those in the know, merely the name Jean Gabin above the titles generally guarantees an unhappy ending (even the trailer gives away the end). It is not so much a question of will he make it - will he escape to Venezuela with his dog and his girl? - but how will he fail. It was this stoic, perhaps defeatist, attitude that led to someone in the Vichy Government to claim: ‘If we have lost the war, it is because of Le Quai des Brumes.’ Carné’s response was to ask, ‘Does one blame the weather on the barometer?’
What is surprising for such a key poetic realist film is that, despite focusing on working-class characters and being set in an industrial port, it eschews much of what we now consider ‘realist’ filmmaking. There are no naturalistic non-professional actors but big box office stars (Gabin) and great film character actors (Michel Simon). There are no handheld cameras and natural lighting: Carné’s films are studio films of the highest artifice, created by highly skilled artists and technicians. Although a few location shots are used, the ‘real’ world of industrial ports, dilapidated bars and rain-soaked streets is largely carefully recreated and artfully shot on a soundstage.
Made years before French critics had even considered the idea of cinematic authorship, Le Quai des Brumes stands as an example of collaborative filmmaking of the highest order. With the near collapse of the French studio system (Gaumont, Pathé withdrawing from film production in the mid-30s) newly formed film companies in France seemed to last as long as the governments of the time (months or even weeks). Yet, despite this, an all-star production team was assembled. The sets were designed by Alexandre Trauner, whose stylised recreations of the world of working people in the industrial port town work to heighten and skew the reality. Panama’s ramshackle bar by the sea seems almost dreamlike. Screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s dialogue combines the melodramatic, the poetic and street slang. His characters - although almost types (the petty gangster, the drunk, evil stepfather) - all have their little idiosyncrasies. Eugen Schüfftan, who went on to shoot the phantasmagoric Les yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face, 1960), provides the expressionist shadowy cinematography that was to influence film noir a few years later. And also deserving a special mention is Maurice Jaubert’s score and Coco Chanel’s iconic transparent plastic raincoat for Michèle Morgan.
What is often forgotten when discussing poetic realism is how entertaining the films are, and none is more so than Le Quai des Brumes. Many of these films were box-office smashes in France at the time and Jean Gabin was a major star. This film shows why: he dominates the film even though he is surrounded by such odd and colourful characters, and despite (or because of) his minimal acting, he has a unique screen presence.
After the success of the Death Note series, an inevitable wave of similar films followed, most of them epic-scale, multi-part adaptations of acclaimed - and equally lengthy - manga or animé series. Many of these films centre on competition and gameplay, frequently involving two or more opposing groups, a series of complex rules and a great deal of strategy.
In Death Note the contest is between the intellects of suave psychopath Light and the misfit genius L, each restricted by the rules of the notebooks and relying upon increasingly brilliant strategies and moves to defeat the other. In Tôya Satô’s Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (2009) 30-something gambling addict Tatsuya Fujiwara - the star of Battle Royale (2000) and Death Note - is pitted against several other no-hopers in a series of unpleasant challenges, observed by rich gamblers who make bets on their lives. Fujiwara returns in Hideo Nakata’s reality TV-influenced The Incite Mill (2010), in which 10 lucky contestants are locked in an underground complex for 10 days and told to kill each other while TV audiences watch. Less deadly but more popular is Liar Game (2007), a series that started on television and moved to the big screen with Hiroaki Matsuyama’s Liar Game: The Final Stage (2010), in which the players constantly try to outwit each other for large sums of cash. At the cheaper, nastier end of the spectrum we have Tokyo Gore School (2009) and the two Death Tube films, all of them directed by Chanbara Beauty director Yôhei Fukuda. As well as Death Note, this concept of individuals or teams pitted against each other for sport, punishment, personal gain or the entertainment of others is immediately reminiscent of Battle Royale - and, to a lesser extent, the Saw franchise - although few of them feature similar levels of brutality and violence.
Among the most interesting of the post-Death Note films are Shinsuke Satô’s Gantz (2010) and Gantz: Perfect Answer (2011), the two-part adaptation of Hiroya Oku’s hit manga and the subsequent animé series. In Gantz players are transported at the moment of their demise to an empty apartment, occupied by a large black globe. The globe - known somewhat mysteriously as ‘Gantz’ - provides the nonplussed players with futuristic weapons and equipment, and outlines their new ‘mission’: killing aliens. The aliens themselves are a strange bunch, some appearing to be entirely human, with others looking like enormous Buddhist statues or life-size toy robots. For each kill the players are awarded points, and accumulating more than 100 points allows the player to either come back from the dead and continue their life - with a convenient dose of amnesia, of course - or to resurrect another player and bring them back into the game. One-time school friends Kei (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Katô (Kenichi Matsuyama, who played L in the Death Note films) find themselves drafted when they are accidentally killed by a passing train. Their new weapons and equipment give them great strength and protect them from major injuries, but they’re not born fighters or violent by nature, and it isn’t until several of the other players have been killed or injured that Kei and Katô come to terms with what is expected of them.
Predictably enough, Gantz gives both its players and the audience precious little in the way of explanations and background information. If these creatures are aliens, where are they from and why are they here? Why do they need to be killed? Aside from accusing the players of murdering their friends, the aliens aren’t much help either. And what exactly is Gantz? An early scene in the first film shows us that the black globe contains what seems to be a comatose man on life-support machines, but no further information is provided. Trapped in their Kafka-esque nightmare, the players can only continue to fight, with no real sense of who they’re fighting for or why.
However, Gantz gives them little time to ponder their fate by pitting them against a quick succession of increasingly powerful enemies. It is these well-choreographed and bloody fight sequences that form the core of the first film, introducing the main characters and the central concepts. The sequel, Gantz: Perfect Answer, brings in several plot twists and devices that push the tension up a few notches, as well as providing the requisite number of jaw-dropping fights. Not content with simply recruiting from the recently dead, Gantz now seems to be employing an assistant to ensure that certain people are selected - by killing them. It’s not entirely clear why Gantz needs those individuals or what his long-term goals are, but things take a turn for the decidedly sinister when the name of one of Kei’s closest friends appears on their target list, even though she is obviously not an alien.
These fights are more than just visual treats, however, allowing the audience to fully understand the rules surrounding the ‘game’. They also underline the relationships and emotional connections between the various characters. Kei might spend a great deal of time trying to attract the attention of the pretty Kishimoto (played by actress-model Natsuna), but when he gets the chance to resurrect another player, he doesn’t choose her. Even though Kei pretended not to recognise his former schoolmate Katô when they saw each other at the station and later in the apartment, it’s immediately apparent that he’s going to bring him back. Eventually it’s another player - cult veteran Tomorowo Taguchi, star of the first two Tetsuo films - who resurrects Katô, but later on Kei still picks someone other than Kishimoto. Unlike many similar films, Gantz makes an effort to build and define its central characters, something that gives the physical combat an extra level of impact; they’re not just pins to be knocked down in their droves, and their deaths in the Gantz ‘arena’ have very real effects.
Although the Gantz movies have earned critical acclaim and performed well at the box office, they are less likely to be greeted favourably by fans of the original manga and the animé adaptation. For a start, the material has been toned down, with the nudity and sexual content removed. Certain characters have been altered too - most obviously Kei, who is considerably more arrogant and less friendly in his earlier incarnations. However, both films capture the adrenaline-fuelled thrills of the original manga, and they’re also two of the best sci-fi/action movies you’re likely to see in the near future, from anywhere.
Cast: Christopher Lee, Graham McTavish, Britannia Nicol, Henry Garrett, Honeysuckle Weeks
UK 2010
96 mins
Some belated sequels, which no one particularly expected or wanted to see, are actually well worth a look. These include films that see actors returning from the original, for example Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986), or ones that revisit the title and the source material, for example Return to Oz (1985). Others, while they retain one of the original creators, for example Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 (1984), seem ill-conceived from the start, as few directors, if any, could top Kubrick at his best.
Unfortunately, and somewhat inevitably, The Wicker Tree (2011) is an example of the latter. The original film, The Wicker Man (1973), was in many respects an example of lightning caught in a bottle - a dependable British cast at the top of their game, an unusual story and a witty script that flirts with different genres but is hard to pin down. As the original film depended on many disparate elements fitting together in a production that was beset by problems, a sequel would have to be brilliant to match its reputation. A script of ‘The Wicker Man II’ by original writer Anthony Shaffer did the rounds for decades, but this was stymied both by his death in 2001 and Edward Woodward’s in 2009. The actor, almost unbelievably, was prepared to return to the role of Sergeant Howie, following in the footsteps of Donald Pleasance in Halloween 4 (1988) as another apparently fireproof hero. With Shaffer and Woodward gone, director Robin Hardy has come up with his own thematic sequel, which takes the audience to another Scottish pagan community who enjoy orgiastic celebrations and sacrificing Christians.
Christopher Lee returns in a brief cameo as a former patriarch of the community (possibly Lord Summerisle, depending on the vagaries of copyright law), but the cast of TV actors he’s surrounded with rarely lift the material above the standard of an episode of Midsomer Murders, which in tone, atmosphere and set dressing the film seems particular keen to recreate. As in the original, there are some great uses of music, some well-judged moments of tension and some good depictions of decadent Brits taking their desires to their logical conclusion. However, the comedy moments are often forced and occasionally embarrassing to watch while the horror is never extreme enough to be particularly shocking, with more disturbing and memorable cannibalistic orgies served up in recent years by Perfume (2006) and episodes of True Blood in 2009.
The Wicker Tree isn’t unwatchable, unlike parts of the misguided American remake of The Wicker Man (2006), but adds nothing to the original. A worthy sequel to the 1973 cult movie is perhaps one best left to our imaginations.
This review was first published in our coverage of FrightFest 2011.
Cast: Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Maggie Q, Brad Dourif, Stephen Moyer, Christopher Plummer
USA 2011
87 mins
I’ve always been a fan of the weird West genre, which is to say Westerns that have an element of horror or science fiction added to them, such as The Valley of Gwangi (1969) or Back to the Future part III (1990). The most common element added to Westerns to tip them into the fantasy genre is vampire mythology, as seen in Curse of the Undead (1959), Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966), Near Dark (1987), Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1991), the From Dusk till Dawn trilogy (1996-2000) and others. However, I never thought I’d be able to describe a film as ‘a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, vampire Western’ until I saw Priest.
Surprisingly, the film manages to juggle all these disparate elements well and even fits in an animated sequence that tells the history of the Priest world before the events of the film. The cyberpunk cityscape that bookends the narrative is beautifully rendered, an even more dehumanising and desolate neon-lit conurbation than Blade Runner‘s, with the addition of a religious totalitarian regime that requires the inhabitants to visit street corner confessionals every day to admit their sins to a CGI confessor. This is the result of a thousand-year war between a religious warrior caste - the Priests - and the vampires, who have been present in every major conflict in human history from the Crusades to the World Wars and the inevitable nuclear conflagration that has scorched the Earth before the start of the narrative.
Vampires here are shown to be subhuman mindless beasts with brainwashed familiars that guard their crypts during the day. The only traditional vampire in the film - i.e. a superhuman with fangs - is played by Karl Urban in sou’wester and, as often is the case in modern horror, the villain is more charismatic than the taciturn lead played by Paul Bettany.
Adapted from a Korean manhwa that ran in 16 volumes from 1998 to 2007, the film adds the futuristic setting to the existing vampire Western genre of the comic. The result most closely resembles the American comic book Grendel by Matt Wagner, which also combined cyberpunk, vampires and a religious warrior caste in its latter instalments between 1988 and 1993. The casting of Urban also announces his forthcoming role as the lead in the new (Judge) Dredd movie, which also has Western, post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk elements based on British comics with those themes.
Moving at a brisk pace, the narrative follows Bettany’s excommunicated warrior as he travels into the desert to kill the vampires who have attacked his brother’s family, shunned by the church for defying their belief that the creatures have all been defeated. This is a traditional Western trope - exchange vampires for Sioux in other examples - but the first of many narrative inconsistencies that undermine the film’s achievements in the areas of special effects and world-building. Surely it would make more sense for the church to exaggerate the vampire problem outside the walled cities, to keep the populace afraid and faithful, rather than deny their continued existence.
Bettany travels on in his quest and encounters a varied cast of familiar actors, some reassuring in their presence - Brad Dourif, for example, a horror and Western regular - others who have been cast to give some gravitas to the proceedings, such as Christopher Plummer as a church elder. Stephen Moyer, lead vampire in True Blood, has a cameo as Bettany’s human brother (if this film had been set in the 19th century like the comic, it could almost be his TV character’s origin story) and Maggie Q reprises her reoccurring kung fu role from American techno-thrillers such as Mission Impossible III (2006) and Die Hard 4.0 (2007).
Although it is exciting, innovative and visually stunning - enough elements to recommend it - Priest is flawed in several other areas: absurd fight sequences defy the laws of gravity, even allowing for the priests’ superhuman abilities; the script, based on several issues of the comic, is overly episodic; and the open ending announces a sequel that presumably will never come, based on the film’s bad reviews and meagre profit at the box office. Overall, it is well worth a watch for fans of science fiction, vampires and weird Westerns, but it will frustrate fans and critics used to more mainstream fare.
‘Hi, I’m Peter de Rome, and I spent the last 50 years making gay porn movies.’
With The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, the BFI continues its thankless task of rewriting the universe of alternative British filmmakers, otherwise lost, forgotten, or never discovered in the first place. De Rome, now almost 90, was born in 1924 in Juan-les-Pins, and spent his formative years in a Lancashire mill, followed by a stint in Birmingham Rep, though in the documentary that accompanies the DVD extras he more fondly recalls his times living in a beach hut in Ramsgate, jerking off to matinee idol pin-ups.
A veteran of D-Day, De Rome had been a publicist for Rank, Korda and David O. Selznick, who took him to Hollywood with the promise of work on an adaptation of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, though De Rome soon quit the movie business mainstream in favour of a sales job at Tiffany’s (he reminisces about encounters in the basement store room). A cinephile in the 60s, with an admiration for Antonioni and Bertolucci, he took to porn very gradually. To get around the processing restrictions, he would begin each roll with an innocuous piece, duping the labs at Kodak into thinking this was a generic home movie. Made just for fun, as a way of picking up boys, his films act as Proustian visual diaries of ex-lovers and one-night stands, his long zoom lens stalking its prey, mirroring his own scopophilic desires.
After one of his films, Hot Pants, won the top award at Amsterdam’s Wet Dream Film Festival in 1971, attracting a review in the Financial Times and a letter of endorsement from William Burroughs, he was approached by producer Jack Deveau, who blew up a selection of his shorts from standard 8 to 16mm for wider distribution. The six-minute film shows a young black crotch in tight jeans and string vest dancing to James Brown, the pants mysteriously falling down, revealing full frontal and bare ass, as the cock gyrates up and down, twirling around, getting harder, then spurting.
Despite the obvious limitations of the boy-fucks-boy genre, De Rome shows endless possibilities in the variation of these simple narratives. In Second Coming, a group of cruisers from London and Paris make a pilgrimage to the white village of Casares in Malaga, where they witness a crucified Adonis, twitching his member to attention, and coming all over himself in his moment before death. In Green Thoughts, a man wanders through a park land, with various stems of trees and plants offering phallic prompts as we cut to him in bed fondling the budge in his Y-fronts. John Gielgud was a fan - while doing Pinter on Broadway, De Rome took him to the Anvil club and Gielgud suggested a plotline for another film idea, though it never materialised.
Though certainly not camera-shy of full-on oral and anal, explicit 69-ing and montage of golden showers, De Rome was clearly interested more in titillation and the aesthetics of arousal, in filmic terms more exciting than the money shot of the act itself. Intentionally or otherwise, the vibrant cine colours, vérité compositions and lack of dialogue lend his work an artistry perhaps not evident in the execution. The ambient muzak scores preserve each scenario as some sort of forbidden Pathé newsreel that we were never meant to see, and the collection now serves as a wistful, nostalgic and almost innocent travelogue of gay life in the 60s and 70s.
The quintessential Englishman in New York, though with a strong resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, this grandfather of gay porn quit filmmaking in the 80s, after the clean-up of adult theatres and the onslaught of AIDS. Never before commercially available in the UK, his work suggests a parallel reality to the sophomore Sapphics of Hammer or the castrated innuendo of the Carry On films. One waits in eager anticipation for the Blu-ray restorations of the works of George Harrison Marks, John Lindsay and Ben Dover.
Cast: Enrique Irazoqui, Marcello Morante, Settimio di Porto, Otello Sestili
Italy 1964
137 mins
I would recommend watching Pasolini’s The Gospel according to Matthew only if you really fancy seeing the story of Christ played out in Italian (I did): the rewards otherwise are thin, even for Pasolini fans. The material looks good on paper: Matthew’s gospel is one of the great poetic and dramatic texts of human literature, and a wellspring of Western thought and expression. But its drama is more of action than words: most of the speech is monologue. There are flashes of genuine dialogue in the film, as when Christ debates with the Pharisees, or when Peter denies his master. The scenes with Judas and John the Baptist are good value: we see people vying with each other, rather than just being witnesses. But the great Pilate scene is thrown away, played as a ceremonial in long shot. And most of the rest of the talk is Jesus (or John, or occasionally an angel) holding forth, while others look on in awe or consternation. The visions of the holy land (Apulia) and its inhabitants are memorable, but the cinematography is more effective in portrait mode than landscape, which tends to the murky.
Enrique Irazoqui was a Spanish economics student, discovered by Pasolini at a political meeting and cast as Jesus for his first acting role at the age of 20. No pressure! He is strong on luminous intensity: he stands out convincingly from the typically rough-hewn (and unmistakably Italian-looking) cast assembled by Pasolini. His vocal power is impressive too (unless you read the small print and see that he was overdubbed by another actor). But this Jesus does have the air of a brilliant student who knows it and patronizes his classmates and teachers, with a trace of a smug smile on his lips. There’s something dispiriting in hearing the beautiful words of the Sermon on the Mount on the lips of a prig. Some viewers have managed to see the film as a Marxist document, and certainly there is something of the humourless zeal of the ideologue about this Jesus, but there’s no particular political insight or edge here, none at least that isn’t already in the Gospel.
Despite the fact that Pasolini was an atheist, I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that his art is here reined in by reverence. Or perhaps respect: after all, his mother was watching - he roped her in to play the mother of God! Anyway, the enfant terrible is on his Sunday best behaviour. One might perhaps take as a warning the lengthy lists of Catholic awards with which the film comes fore-garlanded. I dread to think what other cinematic fare the berobed papal prize committee sat through: I doubt that it was a close finish with Goldfinger. Pasolini’s adherence to the Gospel text is unwavering. No sex: Mary Magdalene is anonymous (25 years to wait for Barbara Hershey). Salome’s dance consists in wafting around what looks like something you might grow on a trellis. The expression on Herod’s face at the end suggests ‘Is that it?’ The only character likely to stir any loins in this drama is the angel, who looks like someone Caravaggio would have taken an interest in.
Blackthorn is the assumed name of Butch Cassidy, outlaw of the old West, who in this film survived his famous shoot-out with the Bolivian army in 1908 and is hiding out, waiting to finally make his return to the United States to see his child. When a misunderstanding leads to Cassidy losing his horse and life savings, he is drawn into one last adventure that puts his long-standing moral code to the test.
This film is steeped in the ‘ageing outlaw makes one last stab at glory’ trope. Although conscious of the weight of the myths it deploys, the film does so straightforwardly, without any self-reflexive winks or nods, and this is to the film’s credit. It’s interesting to recall Richard Lester, who, despite being fond of self-conscious japes himself, helmed a Butch and Sundance ‘prequel’ and a beautiful, melancholic epitaph for Robin Hood that, in some ways, this film resembles.
Blackthorn begins in 1927, the year of the first transatlantic telephone call and of the first talking picture. But down in rural Bolivia, there’s not the faintest hint that the jazz age is in full swing. Cassidy assigns the ending of his era to the coming of the railways and big corporations. The frontier was of course declared closed in 1890, so Cassidy is by now well and truly an outlaw out of time.
Cassidy meets the handsome and charismatic Spaniard Eduardo Apodaca and agrees to help him, at first largely for pragmatic reasons. But soon the two become friends and, in the course of their attempts to recover money Eduardo has stolen and to dodge the assassins on his trail, Cassidy re-discovers his lust for adventure.
The flashbacks to the Butch and Sundance days that are interspersed throughout the main narrative were perhaps a misstep: they naturally invite comparison with George Roy Hill’s legendary 1969 film. But they do highlight the strength and subtlety of Stephen Rea’s performance as Mackinley, who, with the passing of the years, transforms from dogged detective of the Pinkerton agency to a near-nihilistic derelict, swilling chicha straight from the bottle.
The Western has usually been the preserve of self-sufficient male characters. The women typically stay back at the ranch, threatening to tie the men to the spot with their apron strings. It seems as though Blackthorn will go this way: Cassidy outlines his view that there’s no greater riches to aspire to than being ‘your own man’ and the depiction of Yana, Cassidy’s much younger, seemingly subservient Bolivian mistress may irk some. But in one of the film’s later scenes, when Cassidy feels forced to justify his outlaw past, he explains that he’s never killed anyone in cold blood. In contrast, in one of the flashbacks, Etta Place, Sundance’s lover and the mother of Cassidy’s child, efficiently dispatches three of their adversaries, whom Cassidy has wounded during a gunfight. Furthermore, Cassidy’s adversaries on his last adventure are ruthless female assassins. These femmes fatales seem less an expression of the Western’s traditional misogyny than an admission that the grasping, avaricious threadbare conditions can all too easily cheapen life, turning one into a hardened cynic, whose wealth can only be prised from their cold dead hands.
Films with a ‘buddy’ narrative have often prompted academic interpretations of the homoerotic aspects lurking beneath the manly surface. In a film where Cassidy, in an attempt to allay Eduardo’s saddle sores, spits into his hand and rubs his saliva into the cleavage of his friends buttocks, telling him ‘your ass is softer ‘n a book-keeper’s’, one hardly needs to reach for Jacques Lacan to elucidate the subtext. Cassidy constantly looks back to his friendship with Sundance, and in his memories, Etta is depicted right from the start as a beautiful disruption to this manly camaraderie.
The Bolivian landscape is breathtakingly beautiful: we see verdant green hills, a dusty desert and abandoned mine, vast rock outcrops, and there’s a memorably suspenseful sequence set among the Uyuni salt flats - exactly the sort of landscape that is rarely portrayed on film, and that, in its desolate, dreamlike urgency recalls certain moments from Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. There’s also some curious use of the zoom throughout the film that perhaps reflects the influence of the Spaghetti Western, although Gil’s measured, economical style is a far cry from the operatic style of A Fistful of Dollars or the grime-spattered histrionics of Django Kill!. The score, though effective, at times verges on something that Mark Knopfler might have composed, but there’s also a fantastic scene where Cassidy and Eduardo set out on a lengthy trek during which Cassidy plays a gloriously out of tune version of the folk standard ‘Sam Hall’ on a ukulele.
Director Mateo Gil is better known as a scriptwriter (he worked on both the Spanish and American versions of Vanilla Sky), and in many respects Blackthorn is very much a script-based film. The film has been well cast and features fantastic performances throughout. Indeed, Gil’s often matter-of-fact, character-driven approach is perfect for the material. We never feel that the film is puffed up with a sense of its own importance, or even that it’s trumpeting how beautiful the on-screen landscapes are. There’s a plot twist towards the end of the film that doesn’t just add intrigue, it’s the payoff to Gil’s belief that the Western is ‘a truly moral genre’. But it’s a morally complex genre; Cassidy hasn’t always practised what he preaches, especially where romantic passions are concerned. There are no clear-cut heroes and villains here, although some are far more villainous than others.
The decision to set almost all of the film in Bolivia, and to depict impoverished miners and the native Quechua population without exoticism, means that this is very much a Western from an outsider’s perspective. It also means that it is free of the visual clichés associated with the genre. A Western in possession of a social conscience, but without lapsing into preaching or patronising, this is an unassuming film in some ways, but ultimately it’s self-assured, elegiac and sometimes strikingly beautiful.
John A. Riley
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
