Cast: Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Ben Johnson, Sally Struthers, Al Lettieri
USA 1972
122 mins
Sam Peckinpah might well have featured in the top 10 list of directors most likely to successfully bring Jim Thompson’s dark misanthropic world view to celluloid - if he hadn’t made The Getaway. Thompson’s 1959 novel was filmed in 1972 as a Steve McQueen star-vehicle, and thus not only is the violence softened, but McQueen’s Doc McCoy - a bank robber who is paroled from prison with the assistance of crime lord Jack Beynon (Ben Johnson) only to escape with the loot - is certainly a more sympathetic character than his literary equivalent. Thompson’s mean-spirited slobbish lowlife (perfectly captured by Philippe Noiret in Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon) becomes that Hollywood stereotype - the charming professional criminal with his own strong moral code. There is no doubting McQueen’s presence and star quality, but he is just too cool and likeable to play a Thompson anti-hero. Peckinpah, who was something of a hired hand at McQueen’s request (in recompense for the brilliant elegiac neo-Western Junior Bonner, a commercial failure but a happy collaboration for Peckinpah and McQueen), might have done better to cast his favourite actor - Warren Oates.
But a McQueen film it is and Jim Thompson’s influence is thus diminished. That is not to say that The Getaway is a bad film, it’s just very different from the book. With Peckinpah at the height of his directorial powers, it’s certainly a cut above the hollow voguish-ness of Bullitt. An incredible wordless title sequence portrays the inhuman mechanistic prison system as Doc is refused parole. The daring non-chronological cutting shows Doc’s dreams of freedom become a reality in the memorable swimming sequence. Making use of his stars’ burgeoning real-life romance (MacGraw left her husband, producer Robert Evans, and married McQueen shortly after), The Getaway becomes an odd blend of matrimonial drama and heist film. McQueen is almost convincing as a cuckolded husband torn apart by his wife’s indiscretion (even she did it to ensure his release from prison). But marriage guidance Sam Peckinpah-style (yes, he even slaps her at one point, despite McQueen’s complaints to his director) proves to be as much a trial as the getaway itself. And what in other hands (Peter Yates take note) could have become a stylish but mindless action thriller becomes a complex drama about relationships and trust issues, complete with narrow escapes and explosive shoot-outs.
The long running time allows for an almost episodic structure with some great set-pieces as various police, gangsters and petty criminals attempt to help themselves to the half a million dollars. The minimal script by Walter Hill (who went on to direct The Driver and The Warriors) is enhanced by some colourful performances by the supporting cast. Al Lettieri’s kidnapping of Sally Struthers and her husband is as disturbing as it is funny and Peckinpah regular Ben Johnson is excellent as the scheming Beynon. Even Ali MacGraw, not always the most skilled actor, does some good work here.
This being a Hollywood movie, the hellish ending of Jim Thompson’s novel has been dropped, but even Peckinpah films never end as bleakly as that. And although the studio system of the 1970s is perhaps what prevented The Getaway from being a more faithful adaptation it seems we are even further away from such a possibility now. That said, maybe Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer inside Me will prove me wrong - after all, in A Cock and Bull Story (2005) he remains true to what was perhaps the most un-filmable of literary voices, that of Lawrence Sterne.
Cast: Oliver Reed, Clifford David, Ann Lynn, Katherine Woodville, Louise Sorel
UK 1963-65
94 mins
Originally filmed in 1962, British melodrama The Party’s Over was shelved for three years after censors objected to some of its themes - most notably that of necrophilia. An edited version eventually received a limited release in 1965, by which time its director had gone on to huge success with Goldfinger. Perhaps nervous of jeopardising his burgeoning Hollywood career, Guy Hamilton had his name removed from the film, disowning it in interviews - and until recently it was thought to be totally lost.
Now restored to its full length by the BFI’s excellent Flipside strand, it’s most interesting for capturing a particular period in British cultural history, one normally overshadowed by the myth of the Technicolor Swinging Sixties. Yes, The Party’s Over takes place in the pre-pop world of the beatnik, where London (Chelsea, to be exact) is a reckless but somewhat dowdy place, where the wild antics of a group of nihilistic artists consist mostly of listening to jazz, drinking pints of mild and wearing baggy jumpers. When they’re not doing this, they’re painting people green, pulling on roll-ups or speaking in mannered hepcat slang (‘I’m just a dead fly in the soup at the tycoon banquet’).
Into this milieu arrives Carson, a clean-cut American businessman who has flown to England to look for his girlfriend, a spoiled rich girl who is being pursued by a wonderfully brooding Oliver Reed, himself the head of the beatnik gang. But what begins as a neat examination of cultural misunderstandings soon develops into something far more compelling, as Carson attempts to find out the truth behind his girlfriend’s disappearance and struggles to come to terms with the gruesome truth that it reveals.
Viewed today, the film is a potent mix of the kitsch and the genuinely unsettling. Written by Marc Behm (who later also co-authored one of the defining pop flicks, Help!) and featuring a zippy score by a young John Barry, it nevertheless occasionally descends into the kind of wearisome moralising and middle-aged prurience evident in other cautionary tales of the era. It’s hard not to attribute this to Hamilton, a man who spent most of the 1970s directing Roger Moore in various pastel-coloured safari suits in a series of increasingly hackneyed and conservative instalments of the Bond franchise. Produced by Jack Hawkins and, oddly, Peter O’Toole, The Party’s Over nevertheless deals with its themes in an intelligent and un-sensational way - even daring to ask us as an audience what exactly it is about degradation and death that we choose to be entertained by. For that reason alone, it’s a worthwhile watch.
Pat Long
Also available in the BFI’s Flipside strand: Gerry O’Hara’s The Pleasure Girls (1965).
Cast: Ladislav Jánsky, Antonín Kumbera, Irma Bischofova
Czechoslovakia, 1964
64 mins
Diamonds of the Night is a very closely focused film, and its focus is the moment-to-moment bodily experience of two young Czechs on the run from the Nazis. At the same time it is loose in structure. The protagonists’ occurrent experiences are intermingled with sights and sounds from their memories and imaginations. The material is selected and edited apparently more for expressive than for narrative purposes. Various distancing and disorientating techniques characteristic of the 1960s New Wave are deployed. Most prominent of these are temporal fragmentation and repetition: there is so much of the latter that a 64-minute film is compiled out of less than an hour’s worth of material. In addition, sound levels go up and down, light effects include overexposure and dazzle, at certain moments of tension the focus of the camera is too close for us to see what’s going on, and towards the climax of the story there are jarring switches of mood and emotional tone. The rough monochrome cinematography imparts a stark realist feel. The mundanity of much of what we see adds to the impression that this is not a story being enacted, but unplanned events being observed.
The film is driven nevertheless by a grim sense of purpose. It certainly makes you feel what is shown, which is something pretty harsh. The ordeal that bodily existence becomes for the fugitives is vividly conveyed in small details - the state of their feet, their pitiful brushwood shelter, the discovery that they can’t eat the longed-for bread because their mouths are too sore. This is a bleak, numb film, almost wordless, turned inward to lay bare the experience of humans in extremis. There is no refuge taken in detachment from the subject matter, such as often makes the New Wave seem cynical.
Cast: Johnny Hallyday, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam, Lam Suet, Simon Yam
Hong Kong/France 2009
108 mins
In his recent movies, Hong Kong director Johnnie To has been pushing the crime genre in strange new directions. Mad Detective blended a police procedural with barmy surrealism, while Sparrow was much more light-hearted, a hip caper with plenty of nods to 60s French cinema. But Vengeance marks a return to what To does best - stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. With this film, he has gone back to the action of Exiled and the detachment of his crime saga Election.
The plot is simple - a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord.
The main stumbling block is Costello’s own memory, which is slowly failing him. He takes pictures of people to remember their names and faces and his condition worsens to the point where he can forget where he actually is. While this all sounds a bit Memento, To keeps this theme very much in the background, playing out the shoot-outs and double crosses as you’d expect but leaving Costello’s degrading motivation as a nagging question for the audience - can he take revenge if he cannot even remember why he’s doing it?
Revenge in cinema often falls into two camps; either it is a moment of glorious catharsis or it transforms the protagonist into the sort of person who wronged him in the first place. Vengeance is less clear-cut. Here, revenge becomes a commodity, bought and sold by the various parties involved in the criminal world, so much so that Costello is almost completely removed from proceedings and his original goal ceases to matter. But To isn’t one to hammer these points home, and Costello’s condition is played subtly at first while To wallows in the seedily lit Macau location, showing that he is still very much about style and visuals.
As usual, To provides some memorable set-pieces that are both playful and fraught with tension. One is the climactic shootout that sees Costello’s hired assassins surrounded by gangsters who roll out huge bales of paper ahead of them as protection. The other is the final face-off in which Costello’s enemy is plastered with stickers so that the Frenchman can remember who he’s hunting, and once his target works that out he starts sticking the flags on other people to confuse him. It’s this simple poetry that gives To’s films a distinctive mark, this touch of the bizarre and the humorous that sets his work out from the crowd.
Vengeance might be a little Westernised for some die-hard To fans. It goes at a slower pace and the inclusion of French singer/actor Hallyday might seem like To is pandering to European audiences, but the director proves himself once again to be a master of the crime film. With each new film he manages to approach the genre from a fresh, unexpected angle and Vengeance takes revenge into dark, compelling territory.
Richard Badley
Vengeance screened at the Terracotta Festival of Far East Film in May 2010.
Opening with a brief history and contextual overview of the video nasties era, Ozgur Uyanik’s debut feature delves imaginatively into the world of the found footage sub-genre of horror movies, capitalising on the media-sparked paranoia surrounding these notorious 80s gems. James Powell stars as James R Parker, an enthusiastic film industry hopeful who gets his first step on the ladder as a runner for a Soho-based production company. Desperate to impress his friendly yet demanding boss Mike and to withstand the constant taunts and put-downs of his more established colleague Dorothy, he subjects himself to the most undesirable tasks in a bid to appear indispensable. When cleaning the understandably filthy basement he uncovers the reels of an unfinished film, The Street Walker, a low-budget nasty horror with which he becomes infatuated, an obsession that is driven further when he notices a reflection of the film’s director in one of the shots. Thus, with his boss’s blessing, he is prompted to finish the film himself in the hope that the complete picture will be his ticket to success. However, the more James uncovers and his fascination escalates, the darker his story becomes.
The use of faux documentary within horror is always a risky device. If used ineffectively, plot and budget holes will be magnified greatly, but if approached with care, it can make for a genuinely chilling and believable experience. Resurrecting the Street Walker walks a fine line between the two throughout the course of its slight 80-minute running time. The opening 20 minutes superbly blend a classic curse story and an account of breaking into the British film industry as seen from a typically inexperienced enthusiast’s perspective, which is instantly gripping and easy to relate to.
Much of the film is played out through talking head interviews of various characters affiliated with James, and this device hinders the film’s unpredictability, as early sequences clearly point to the film’s conclusion. These segments don’t really add anything to the journey documented by the footage captured by his friend Marcus, which displays James’s mental unravelling far more effectively. The film’s climax itself isn’t particularly thrilling or believable, but snippets of the found footage are suitably unsettling and the film contains some shocking moments, including a particularly nasty strangulation scene.
Resurrecting the Street Walker does succeed, however, in conveying the pain and passion of people working their way up from the bottom of the film industry, with James Powell giving a heartfelt performance as a young man who refuses to give in to his parent’s wishes for him to find a ‘proper’ job and has the perseverance required to triumph through unpaid internships. It’s an amusing and familiar tale to anyone who has been in his position and has faced real-life characters resembling Dorothy, brilliantly played with a wealth of creative put-downs by Lorna Beckett, and for this reason it is worth seeking out.
Reading Vice magazine, you get the impression of intelligent writers having to use their skills for an audience to which they do not necessarily belong, sort of like a Daily Mail or Sun for pretentious hipsters (at least, this reviewer does). With shabby-but-articulate Vice co-founder Shane Smith’s casual profession of a love of drugs just a few seconds into The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema, it seems like Vice‘s new web series is going to be more of the same, which is why it’s such a pleasant surprise when it quickly turns into a well-made, entertaining and easily consumed piece of film journalism.
Smith travels from Texas to Tijuana, on the way doing a great job of putting Mexico’s ultra-violent Narco Cinema of drug runners, fetishised cars and bad cops in context. He outlines the importance of Mexico’s drug industry to its economy and then interviews a film commissioner, who reveals that only 18% of the population can afford to go to the cinema. It’s no wonder then that these straight-to-DVD (the genre is also known as ‘Videohome’), low-budget action movies about poor Mexicans who use drug-running as a way to lift themselves out of poverty and give back to the community have become so popular, both in Mexico and with immigrants in the US. Think Scarface, but without the tragic fall. Or at least, if the characters do get shot at the end, there’s always a family member to take revenge in the sequel.
Each film is based on a ballad (corrido) about a famous criminal, which makes the whole genre reminiscent of the way the Robin Hood legend got started with the troubadours of Europe. However, in this instance both song and movie are almost always commissioned by the narco in question, with serious consequences for not sticking to the agreed script. So of course everyone Smith interviews speaks of the narcos in heroic terms and the genre singularly fails to hold a mirror up to Mexican society. To his credit, Smith has a go at highlighting this irony, interspersing clips of Narco Cinema with shots of real-world victims caught in the crossfire between the narcos and the government forces trying to crack down on them.
The overall message though is that these innovative, $40,000-50,000 films, which are shot on location, with the script written on the fly, where more often than not each character type is played by their real-world counterpart (the prostitute is a an actual prostitute, etc.), are a lot of fun and it doesn’t really matter which of them you watch, so long as there’s a car in the title. On this point The Vice Guide to Film: Mexican Narco Cinema is pretty convincing, although one criticism would be that as there are thousands of these films in existence surely there must be some canonical highlights for newcomers interested in exploring the genre?
Alexander Pashby
The lastest episode of the Vice Guide to Film is Inside Iranian Cinema. In this episode, Shane Smith travels to Iran for the 3rd Annual Urban Film Festival in Tehran where he meets Iran’s top directors, actors, and clerics.
To mark the BFI release of the Kurosawa Samurai Collection, Karen Rubins gives The Hidden Fortress the comic strip treatment. The 5-disc DVD box set containing Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962) is released on June 7. This box-set is released alongside BFI Southbank’s Akira Kurosawa and His Influence, a season running from June 1 to July 8, which marks the centenary of Kurosawa’s birth with a season of films made by both the seminal filmmaker himself and those he has influenced. It includes an extended run of Rashomon (1951). More information on the BFI website.
Comic Review by Karen Rubins
For more information on Karen Rubins, go to her website or her blog.
We are pleased to announce that the winner of our May film writing competition, run in connection with the Electric Sheep monthly film club at the Prince Charles Cinema is Simon Johnson. Our judge was Time Out film critic Tom Huddleston, who said: ‘Simon Johnson’s review of Midnight Cowboy may read more like a diary entry than a film review - gleefully breaking that cardinal critics’ rule of keeping yourself out of it - but its a heartfelt, lovingly written and rather touching celebration of a classic film.’
Here’s Simon Johnson’s review:
It was just as the Greyhound left the Port Authority bus station bound for Florida that it occurred to me. I turned to my friend Shane, a fellow cineaste, and asked him if he remembered the scene near the end of Midnight Cowboy when Joe Buck and Ritso Rizzo, aka Ratso, left the very same bus station, also on a Greyhound and also bound for Florida. ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘and that means you’re Ratso and I’m Joe Buck!’
This was in 1989 and in the intervening years many times have letters, postcards and emails been exchanged between us always arguing who is indeed Joe Buck as neither of us wants to be Ratso. On that Greyhound all the way to Miami, we came to realise how much the film meant to both of us. It was often shown late at night on the BBC in the 1970s and 80s and I always made a point of seeing it. For a teenage boy the film was impossibly sophisticated, exciting and even a little bit dangerous. The heady mixture of illicit sex, religion, counter-culture and New York was intoxicating. This was the New York I was looking for on my first visit in that summer of 1989, even more so than the city of Taxi Driver or Mean Streets. Being fairly broke meant that we did see the seedy side depicted in the film.
I still watch the film every year and even though some argue that it is dated it always seems fresh and dynamic to me. Oh, and Shane, I’m Joe Buck!
Next screening: Wednesday 14 July – Blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown + Q&A with award-winning filmmaker Rebecca Johnson.
Cast: Ali Suliman, Elia Suleiman, Saleh Bakri, Amer Hlehel
UK/Italy/Belgium/France 2009
109 mins
Taking to the stage at the London Palestine Film Festival, Palestinian-Israeli director Elia Suleiman spoke of the problems he encountered making his latest feature, The Time That Remains. As he peppered the discussion with wisecracks, there was something of the charismatic showman about Suleiman. He wittily told tales of problems with funding, run-ins with the Palestinian Army (who, somewhat unsurprisingly, failed to lend him a tank to film) and his own difficulties in approaching the film’s subject matter. Clearly, any cinematic work that presents a narrative of Palestinian history will necessarily generate a certain amount of controversy but with this semi-autobiographical work, Suleiman also needed to wrestle with his own personal history.
Inspired by the private diaries and letters of his parents, the film follows the lives of Suleiman’s family, starting in 1948 when his father was acting as a resistance fighter. It was an immensely strong beginning with a rapid-fire pace, as characters raced through occupied streets, dodging bullets and finding themselves in absurdly comic situations. Furthermore, the first quarter of the film was infused with instances of sublime beauty. A shot where white pamphlets fluttered down over the hills to announce victory in the Arab-Israeli War possessed a particularly powerful stillness. A similarly graceful silence permeated perhaps the most vivid scene of the whole film. Arrested and tied up, Suleiman’s father was led to an olive grove as his captors prepared to shoot him. As he was left alone for a few moments, his blindfolded eyes faced out on to a beautiful valley. There was an intensified rustling among the branches and grass; the sun shone a mellow honey; he breathed in deeply and serenely. Here was a man facing death, unable to see the view, and yet the magnificence of the scenery overpowered his senses, even through the material of his blindfold. Suffocatingly still and hushed, yet light and beautiful, it was a subtly powerful moment. Suleiman is evidently a director capable of masterful cinema.
Unfortunately, for me at least, the rest of the film did not achieve this level of subtlety. After chronicling his father’s experiences in the 1940s, the narrative progressed to Suleiman’s childhood in 1970, his teenage years in 1980 and, finally, the present day. Suleiman himself appeared in the final quarter, resurrecting his semi-autobiographical persona of ES, seen in the two features - Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention - that began this loose trilogy of films. As Suleiman comes closer to the material, the magic seems to diminish. The blackly comic elements played out so nicely in the first quarter, with its balletic violence and incongruous moments of beauty among conflict, become increasingly heavy-handed and broad. In particular, there is one scene where a tank tracks a man while he takes his rubbish to the dustbin outside his house; too wrapped up in a conversation on his mobile phone, he does not notice the tank’s movements, which become increasingly frantic as it tries to keep up with his back-and-forth pacing. This may have been a funny skit for a second or two but the scene lingers too long; it almost seems to be waiting for the audience’s laughter.
Suleiman evidently enjoys referencing historical cinema (one particular scene echoes the plane-dodging episode in North by Northwest) and much has been made of his stylistic similarity to the greats of silent comedy. Certainly, there is a comparable playful physicality in the early stages of The Time That Remains but towards the end of the film the endless visual gags begin to feel a little superficial and repetitive. The balance between physical comedy, dramatic tension and human interactions is difficult to achieve; the variation between these elements begins to disappear as the film progresses and the character of ES, as a silent witness to history and observer of those around him, seems a little too detached to demand our sympathy. While we are always rooting for the characters created by Buster Keaton, it is not easy to empathise with a protagonist who provides such little outward emotion. There are moments where we catch glimpses of ES’s inner feelings - when visiting his sick mother in hospital or looking at a pretty girl on the bus - but they are few and far between. As the amount of dialogue and interaction between the characters diminishes, the surrounding individuals are in danger of becoming basic caricatures or figures of fun.
In the Q&A after the screening of the film, Suleiman explained that he had to think harder about how to deal with the early material as he knew less about this period of his family’s history; he decided to approach it in what he described as a more formal style. For me, the leap between the straightforward narrative of the early stages and the later whimsical, episodic approach was ultimately too great. Having felt emotionally involved at the start of the film, it was disappointing to feel this attachment evaporating. There needed to be more balance and pacing in order to retain the film’s subtlety and maintain the audience’s involvement. Yet, although the latter part of The Time That Remains was dissatisfying, there were certainly elements to enjoy. By injecting incongruous comedy into a history of conflict, Suleiman emphasises the absurdity of much of human experience. This approach is a refreshing one and, at times, created some moments of thoughtful visual beauty.
Eleanor McKeown
The Time That Remains opened the Palestine Film Festival at the Barbican on April 30 with Elia Suleiman in attendance.
Venue: Curzon Soho, Empire Leicester Square (London) and nationwide
Distributor: Lionsgate UK
Director: Werner Herzog
Writers: William M Finkelstein + earlier film: Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Abel Ferrara, Zoí« Lund
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer
USA 2009
122 mins
How Werner Herzog ended up helming a kind of remake of Abel Ferarra’s 1992 film, starring Nicolas Cage, I don’t know, and don’t really want to. I prefer to think of it as a product from an alternate universe where Herzog does this kind of thing all the time. What you need to know: it’s a blast, and funny as hell, with Ferrrara’s gritty, tortured Catholicism tossed in favour of wilful absurdity and a plethora of lizards. Cage is terrific, with a lopsided gait and a crackpipe laugh, torturing grannies and shaking down football stars, screaming one quotable line after another. It’s every cop show cliché reflected in a hall of mirrors - wholly indecent fun.
Still mystified by what I’ve seen, I hook up with Vertigo online editor Robert Chilcott to talk about the film. Earlier plans to play the dialogue with Robert as Ferrara and me as Herzog are abandoned as Robert fears the substance abuse would kill him, and I fear that I can’t take a bullet with the required sang-froid. We open in a café in Victoria, surrounded by notes, both versions of Bad Lieutenant on the laptop.
Robert Chilcott: This shot (of the iguanas) is filmed by Herzog himself? It’s his point of view. He is the iguana.
Mark Stafford: When they had a press conference at Cannes last year, Herzog praised the iguanas as the best thing in the film. And you also have Englebert Humperdink singing ‘Please release me, let me go..’
RC: That’s Herzog, stepping outside of this detective genre, disdainful of the conventions of the script.
MS: I find myself hesitant to describe it as a great film. Before the press screening of MICMACS I went to, there was a circle of top rank film critics knocking back the freebie wine and quoting line after line from Bad Lieutenant with obvious delight. Contrast this with a friend of mine who just saw it on some kind of download and thought that Nicolas Cage, and the film in general, were awful. I think that tells you what the reception for it is going to be. Filmheads are gonna love it, but I don’t know if it works properly for anyone outside of the circle of celluloid junkies.
RC: Sure. There’s all this stuff in it that is fairly generic. There’s a crime, the cop solves it, all a bit too CSI. But Herzog takes it to a different level with his asides. And Cage’s performance, his little chuckle whenever he mentions ‘your boy G’. He knows there’s something ludicrous about the whole thing.
MS: The same laugh every time. He’s there from the word go, the profanity, the hunched back, the gun in the waist band. He’s just fun to watch.
RC: And Herzog is the reptile - hissing, pissing, laughing. The joke is on everyone else. Who’s this idiot cop and this straight-to-video storyline. He empathises with the alligators, the iguanas, the snake at the beginning. The fish in the tank at the end, they’re all cold-blooded. It’s a big prank.
MS: Herzog has said that he hadn’t seen Ferrara’s Lieutenant. Ferrara is a Catholic boy, albeit of a heavy-drinking, drug-taking persuasion. His film is all about sin and redemption in a very staunch, religious, Graham Greene way. Herzog, of course, happily believes in an entirely meaningless universe of hostility, cruelty, and death. He’s not gonna take the sin and redemption angle seriously. There’s warmth there, in the characters, the dad, his girlfriend, all lovely people, but essentially Herzog’s removed, it’s all absurd.
RC: The Ferrara is a more serious film, more serious in its aesthetic, slower paced. A shorter film, but with longer takes. Cage revels in the mania of his drug abuse. Harvey Keitel is a sluggish coke addict, he doesn’t look like he’s having a very good time on it. Then there’s the rape of the nun, which he can’t really deal with. But that’s absent here, Cage’s soul is not tied to the case. And it’s almost like he’s taking coke for medicinal reasons, for his back pain!
MS: There is the murder of an immigrant family, but you’re right. Apart from being a terrible degenerate, Cage is a good cop, he seems to have his eyes on the prize and his heart in the right place - whereas you genuinely fear for Harvey.
RC: Though there is a redemption scene in this new one. Chavez, the prisoner he rescues at the beginning, saves him at the end. There’s a full circle. There is reflection in the final scene.
MS: It’s just not played out in such Catholic terms. It is a lovely ending. Apparently it arose from an improvised Herzog line, though typically it takes place 15 minutes after most directors would have finished the film.
RC: Keitel’s cop meets a fairly squalid end, whereas Cage’s lieutenant triumphs in the most absurd extreme, where everything just seems to go ridiculously right for him.
MS: It’s like a parody of your normal ‘well written’ Hollywood film, where the resolution is wholly brought about by the hero’s actions and his will is forced upon the world, but here…
RC: It’s luck, or fate. It all falls into his lap. Like when he tries to fix the football game, it doesn’t work, and yet the results of the game turn out right for him anyway.
MS: Well, he brings some of it about. The fate of Big Fate, the murderous gangster, is his doing. But the rest of it, it fits into Herzog’s world view. Blind chance has a much bigger role in life than Hollywood would allow.
RC: And what about this bizarre character that says ‘whoah’ all the time. Again, it’s Herzog taking the piss?
MS: I think that’s typical of the reason a lot of people expecting a grim thriller, or a similar film to the Ferrara, are going to be nonplussed, there’s all this odd broad comedy. There’s the bit with the old lady’s oxygen tube, and this ‘whoah’ guy who gives a ridiculous, mannered performance, but at the same time I could happily believe in him as a person, even though it’s completely mad. It’s like someone showed him and Cage tapes of the Herzog/Kinski films and said ‘look, this is how far you can go, this is what Werner’s happy with’.
RC: With Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and the other films they made together, you kind of knew that Klaus Kinski was Herzog, there’s not much doubt that he’s an alter ego.
MS: In this scene and elsewhere, there’s B-movie dialogue and bits of business that would sit happily in Miami Vice. And then you’ve got bits like this guy, which would just not.
RC: Ferrara directed two episodes of Miami Vice.
MS: Herzog didn’t need to. He’s had this career, the amazing art-house hits of the 70s, then he disappears, for many people, into the documentaries in the 80s, and in the last 10 years or so he’s come back as this incredibly prolific great director who’s all over the shop. Ed Pressman offers him this and he says sure. Knocks it out on a 35-day shoot. You end up with the least Herzog Herzog film. But it’s still utterly his.
RC: The general critical consensus is that he’s made a lot of poor fictional features in the last 10 years, but that his documentaries are superior. Where does this fit in?
MC: I love it, but I’m a Herzog fan. I think three quarters of the viewing public are just going to think it’s a thriller made wrong, that somebody screwed up along the way, or that it’s a comedy that isn’t consistently funny enough. I think that unevenness of tone, the sense of play, is part of what makes it entertaining. But most people are going to think it’s a sloppy mess. Camera shadows in shot and all…
RC: There is a scene that could be out of The Wire where Big Fate is going to buy condos, get into real estate, and he wants Cage’s cop to be the frontman for it. There’s this whole political corruption angle which…
MS: …which doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no time for it. But again, Big Fate is delivering his spiel while at the same time his two henchmen are pulling an obvious wrapped body out of the back of the SUV and dumping it in the river, so the scene becomes absurd comedy. That’s the film all over. The post-Katrina setting adds a definite presence to the film, but the post-Katrina politics aren’t explored, and the tourist New Orleans is wholly absent, not a blues bar in sight. Only one cemetery scene. It says in the notes that they filmed there mainly because of the tax breaks. It was a good decision. Cage says that New Orleans was the town that turned him into a philosopher, which is why you should never read interviews with actors.
RC: One of his philosophical principles in the film is ‘it’s amazing how much you can get done when you’ve got a simple purpose guiding you through life’.
MS: It sounds like something Ferris Bueller could say. I don’t know if it’s great philosophy, it’s a good T-shirt. It’s something that could be said by a great violinist, or a paedophile (laughs).
RC: A Katherine Hamnett T-shirt from the 80s. Here’s another: ‘When we engage with another human being we remind ourselves we are not alone’. That’s probably a quote from somewhere else that they’ve re-attributed.
MS: ‘When we engage with water we remind ourselves we are not always damp’.
RC: This one works better, in larger font: ‘Shoot him again - his soul is still dancing!’
MS: I’d get that shirt. That’s going to get quoted. Together with I’ll shoot you ’til the break of dawn!’. And ‘You mean you don’t have a lucky crack pipe?’
RC: There’s a scene where Cage gets a couple coming out of a nightclub and basically shakes them down, then makes it with the girl, forcing her boyfriend to watch. With the earlier film, Keitel gets two girls to talk dirty to him while he jerks off.
MS: In the Herzog it’s funnier, it’s outrageous. In the Ferrara it’s a scene of seedy depravity, it’s much more unpleasant and uncomfortable to watch, you’re wondering where the hell it’s going to go.
RC: It’s good to wonder. It’s good to not know.
MS: Abel Ferrara’s film is probably of more worth as a piece of art. But comparisons are futile. It’s like rating a garage punk band versus the Brodsky quartet.
RC: What’s the last Abel Ferrara film you saw?
MS:(long pause) I don’t remember. He came out of the arty end of the Times Square grindhouse cinema, with Driller Killer and Ms 45. He’s like a cousin of the cinema of transgression, like Nick Zedd and Richard Kern, but his work was just disciplined and shaped enough to play ‘proper’ theatres. His Lieutenant is pretty lean and mean, Herzog’s is baggy, oddly shaped.
RC: In the Ferrara film there’s a lot of indulgent scenes of Keitel following the Mets games coverage. He’s driving around listening to the game, the Mets lose and he shoots the radio. Everyone looks at him, so he just puts the police siren on and drives away. Now that could be a Cage/Herzog moment.
MS: There’s no scene in the Herzog as screamingly raw as that one of Harvey Keitel, out of his mind, naked and crying like a baby. His body looked like concrete covered in rubber.
RC: Ferrara said that finding out the film was being remade was a horrible feeling ‘like being robbed’. And that ‘They should all die in hell’, and wondered how Cage ‘had the nerve to play Harvey Keitel’, and called (screenwriter) Finkelstein ‘an idiot, man’.
MS: ‘He then vomited and fell off the sofa’. I guess that the difference between the two Lieutenants is that, in true punk spirit Ferrara ‘means it, maaan’, and Herzog’s playing games.
RC: The two films are separated at birth. Two babies throwing their toys out of the pram.
Mark Stafford and Robert Chilcott
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
