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In Defence of Lisztomania

Lisztomania

Format: Screening presented by London Short Film Festival

Part of Ken Russell Forever

Date: 17 March 2012

Time: 11:30pm

Venue: Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill

Writer: Ken Russell

Cast: Roger Daltrey, Nell Campbell, Sara Kestelman, Paul Nicholas

UK 1975

102 mins

Even Ken Russell fans tend to shy away from Lisztomania (1975). It is seen as the point where Russell goes ‘too far’ and collapses into self-parody. Audiences seem uncomfortable with many aspects of the film, perhaps most of all with the idea that he takes the classic Russell subject - the life of a great composer - but films it in the rock opera style of Tommy (1975), his previous and most financially successful film.

Being a Ken Russell fan has tended to mean being a Ken Russell apologist. That the director of sensitive films like Song of Summer: Frederick Delius (1968) and Women in Love (1969) later made a movie in which Roger Daltrey rides around on a giant penis while singing, is seen as the degeneration of a once promising talent. Lisztomania comes almost at the end of Russell’s run of fairly big-budget, successful 1970s movies - The Music Lovers (1970), The Devils (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), Tommy - and the critical savaging it received might explain why Russell made very few interesting films thereafter. Like some gaudy, camp Icarus, he flew too close to the sun and got so badly burnt that he was forced to go to Hollywood and make Altered States (1980).

In the popular imagination, Russsell’s films are full of bizarre fantasy sequences featuring religious imagery, over-literal visual metaphors and copious nudity. Lisztomania certainly delivers on those fronts. As a young ‘cult cinema’ enthusiast, I found it easy to fall in love with the film, while at the same time realising how very silly it was. The problem is that, because Lisztomania is intentionally absurd, it gives plenty of ammunition to those who tar the rest of Russell’s films with the same brush. Russell’s reputation has plummeted in recent years, and the mainstream critical view suggests that it was all downhill after Women in Love. Important films were only made available on DVD many years into the format’s lifespan (Lisztomania, 2009; The Music Lovers, 2011; The Devils, 2012), and there is no legal way of viewing his 1960s BBC work apart from one overpriced region 1 box-set.

The key to rediscovering that Lisztomania has merits beyond knockabout comedy is in comparing it to Russell’s long-banned film about Richard Strauss, Dance of the Seven Veils (1970). Like Lisztomania, it marks the end of a phase in Russell’s career (it was his last work for the BBC for more than 20 years); like Lisztomania, it equates classical music with Nazism; and like Lisztomania, it has no realistic scenes whatsoever.

The Strauss film is described as ‘A comic strip in seven episodes on the life of Richard Strauss’ and gives seven different versions of Strauss - the lover, the family man, the fawning Nazi collaborator, etc. It was the Nazi sequences that were most controversial, and led to Strauss’s family banning the film. The most disturbing sequence shows a Jewish couple being brutalised by Nazi thugs while Strauss plays his music louder and louder to drown out the screams. It is fairly sexually explicit for 1970 television and features a sequence where Strauss appears as a silent film star, Erich von Stroheim. It is also completely unrealistic - there is minimal dialogue, and it is as much ballet as straight drama. Strauss is played by dancer Christopher Gable, a Russell regular.

In this context, Lisztomania makes a lot more sense. While The Music Lovers or The Devils have unrestrained fantasy sequences, they are still coherent narratives with beginnings, middles and endings. Lisztomania is not. It is, in effect, a comic strip in nine or ten episodes on the life of Franz Liszt: the lover, the family man, the pop star, etc. Liszt appears as a silent film star (Chaplin), and the film is full of the kind of nudity that the BBC would never have been able to get away with. Just as in Seven Veils, the episodes are cartoony caricatures rather than realistic portrayals of episodes of Liszt’s life (something reflected in Lisztomania‘s most famous promotional poster). Laughing at Lisztomania for being unrealistic misses the point. The dialogue scenes are intended to seem just as unlikely as the scenes with singing Nazi children or giant penises.

Like in Seven Veils, the most contentious sequence links classical music and Nazism. Wagner - a musical vampire who drains inspiration from Liszt - is reborn as a Frankenstein Monster Hitler who murders Jews with a machine-gun guitar. Unlike the Strauss film, though, Litsztomania does not appear to make a serious point about Nazism and its relation to music. Wagner’s followers are portrayed as children, and Russell has found a similarity between Nazism’s fetishised hand gestures and those of pop music’s various dance crazes. But it feels more than a little adolescent, and Ken Russell was obviously far too intelligent to really believe that Wagner caused the Holocaust.

The main problems with Lisztomania are that it is badly paced (the early concert scene is close to interminable); and that, as Russell admits in the DVD commentary, it requires quite a lot of knowledge of Liszt and Wagner in order to ‘get’ the references. The target audience was probably the same people who had gone to see Tommy, not the best audience to appreciate jokes about Wagner sucking Liszt’s blood. This results in a film that feels like it was made for two separate audiences, neither of whom will fully appreciate it. And although it is easier to forgive clumsy dialogue scenes when you accept that they are probably intentionally clumsy, it does not make them any easier to sit through.

Perhaps Russell was a victim of his own excess. In his autobiography he claimed that the Rick Wakeman soundtrack was foisted on him by producer David Puttnam, who perhaps took it upon himself to nudge Russell into making a more archetypally ‘Ken Russell’ film than he had intended. Perhaps his great financial success with Tommy gave him a bit too much license to go over the top. In returning to the completely stylised filmmaking of Dance of the Seven Veils, but with fewer restraints on what he could show, Russell probably overdid it. A fantasy sequence loses its impact if there are no ‘straight’ sequences to compare it to.

Lisztomania is still extremely entertaining and does not ask to be taken too seriously. It feels unfair to dismiss it as the point Ken Russell degenerated into silliness. It perhaps marks the point where he had done everything he could with a certain style of film, just as Dance of the Seven Veils was the culmination of his BBC work. Lisztomania is a similar bridge-burning effort, after which Russell would be forced to find something new. That it was followed by a frustrating period in Hollywood and then a long, slow decline is sad, but it is commendable that he struck off in other directions, rather than just making Tommy clones for the next ten years.

Lisztomania will probably never rank among the best Ken Russell films; the pace is too uneven and the comedy a bit too ridiculous. But it has some merits beyond just being the funny one with the giant penis, the Wagner Nazis and Ringo Starr.

London Short Film Festival will screen Lisztomania on March 17 at the Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill, as part of Ken Russell Forever.

Richard Bancroft

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Zift

Zift

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 February 2012

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Javor Gardev

Writer: Vladislav Todorov (based on his novel)

Cast: Zahary Baharov, Tanya Ilieva, Vladimir Penev

Bulgaria 2008

92 mins

Moth (Zahary Baharov), a would-be boxer and full-time loser, emerges from prison in the 60s, having missed out on most of his youth and a communist coup in 1944, serving time for a murder he didn’t commit, having taken the fall to protect his lover Ada (Tanya Ilieva) and their unborn child. He is barely out of the prison doors when he is abducted by army thugs and taken to be tortured by Slug (Vladimir Penev), once a small-time con man, now a commissar in the new hierarchy, hell-bent on finding a diamond that went missing after that murder decades ago…

Bulgarian neo-noir, anybody? Javor Gardev’s Zift makes no bones about the fact that it’s running on familiar rails. Ada’s femme fatale status is flagged up immediately when she is given the teenage nickname Mantis, and reinforced for those who haven’t got it yet when she reappears under the stage name Gilda in a slinky black number singing a tune that Rita Hayworth would find familiar. Moth is, of course, fatally drawn to his old flame. He seems to be smart enough to deliver the dry, world-weary voice-over, but not smart enough to avoid trouble, getting into the wrong car, falling into Slug’s traps. He spends the second half of the film as a dead man walking (with obvious nods to 1950’s D.O.A.) and the rain-sodden graveyard finale seems so inevitable that it feels oddly flat when it actually happens.

So Gardev, heavily assisted by screenwriter Vladislav Todorov and D.P. Emil Hristov, is serving us a very familiar brew, plot-wise, but, as if to compensate, goes mad on the decoration and delivery. Zift is full of inventive camera work and artful monochrome compositions. Moth staggers around in a sharp leather jacket and white shirt combo when he’s not naked and tattooed, his shaven scalp looking decidedly anachronistic for the 1960s (though various flashbacks tell us this is saving us from a coiffure that looks like a cheap carpet). His story is continually interrupted with grainy cutaways that illustrate other tales and ideas. What would be tense sequences in other films are undercut here by deliberately OTT touches, so an escape from Slug’s torturers results in Moth sliding on his arse through a Turkish bath full of screaming naked women chasing a glass eyeball. Elsewhere, it’s self-consciously cool in a way that reminded me of Europa-era von Trier and other art-house darlings of 20 years back, seeming to take place in its own hermetically sealed nightmare world. Well, either that or Bulgaria is a lot freakier than I think we all imagined. The clock is striking 17, 18, 19, and there are dwarf women selling insects in jars at flea markets in the woods, fart-lighting grave-diggers and creepy grinning nurses; everybody at a hospital seems compelled to tell stories of horror or embarrassment, and most of the cast seem prone to the kind of gutter philosophising that comes naturally to drunks or men serving hard time.

Zift comes to life in prison flashbacks and fever dream hallucinations, in its grotesques and non-sequiturs, and disappoints when it clambers back to its story. It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take all this: the off-the-peg plot and go-for-broke stylisation work against any kind of emotional tug. Are we meant to feel anything for these hard-boiled archetypes? Does it matter, when there’s all this neat stuff to look at? Ilieva is pretty damn sexy as Mantis. In a role that’s written as pure male fantasy, she manages to suggest that there’s more going on behind those eyes than Moth will ever comprehend. Baharov gives good lug as Moth, whose hangdog fatalism means that he never seems all that concerned by his own damnation. The whole thing is engaging and off-kilter and a little unsatisfying. It’s worth watching for those odd moments of Bulgarian business, but you can’t help wishing that all this invention and craft had been festooned around a story that needed telling.

Mark Stafford

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Baby Face

Baby Face

Format: DVD Box-set Region 1

Title: Forbidden Hollywood Collection 1

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director: Alfred E. Green

Writers: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Darryl F. Zanuck

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Bent, Donald Cook, John Wayne

USA 1933

71/76 mins

Barbara Stanwyck’s role as Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933) was a great opportunity for the actress to show her range. The story begins with Lily living with her father in a speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania. Her father hires her out as a prostitute to the steel workers who use the bar, and the politician who keeps his bar open. Lily’s fate changes after her father is killed when his distillery catches fire and blows up. She moves to New York, keen to get what she wants out of life by using men as they have used her. Her vibrant face, fantastic figure and shrewd capacity to seduce men assist her as she exchanges sex for breaks at the Gotham Trust bank. She moves swiftly from barroom sass to jewel-dripping prowess as she rises up the social ladder of 1930s Manhattan. She finally falls in love for real and marries the director of the bank, Courtland Trenholm. In the final scenes, she realises just how much her husband means to her and her own capacity for love.

The film Baby Face itself has had more than one incarnation. In 2004, the original pre-release version was discovered by archivist Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress in the US, complete with five extra minutes of material. It was notorious at the time of release, presumably for its languorous shots of Stanwyck’s body and the supposedly loose morals of Lily Powers. The New York Board of Censors were disgusted and demanded that parts of the film were cut, not only the naughty bits, but some complex moments that give depth to Lily’s character and offer a social critique of the times.

The film existed in a climate of righteous reform for Hollywood cinema. Since 1930, Will Hays, the current head of Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), had been under pressure from a group of Catholic clergy and their supporters to ‘save’ the American people from the celluloid ‘muck merchants’, as Gregory D. Black writes in his article ‘Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Industry, 1930-1940’ (Film History Vol 3, No.3, 1989, p. 167-189). Hays had been attempting to enforce a moralistic Production Code but his actions were not seen as firm enough by this religious faction. In league with lay Catholic Joseph I. Breen, Hays set up the Production Code Administration, so that by 1934 no script was sanctioned and no film could be released unless it had PCA approval. Heavy fines of up to $25,000 swayed many writers and directors to fall in with the Code’s criteria. To briefly summarise, the Production Code included the banning of any nudity, explicit sexuality, any social mixing or marriage of people of different races. If any criminal or ‘immoral’ behaviour such as infidelity was seen, then it had to punished within the narrative. Another part of the stricture was that the industry permanently withdrew any films already distributed that were deemed immoral according to the code. Baby Face was one of many films to be extracted from circulation.

Thus came to an end what is known as the Pre-Code era in Hollywood. Since 1927, the industry had enjoyed relative freedom and had played up to the audience’s love for sauce and tempestuous violence. They also relished the space to present a commentary on American society, especially with regard to injustice because of class and race. Women were portrayed as having a will of their own and often sizzling sexuality, without necessarily being punished for it. Arguably, the religious fervour irrupted due to the new use of sound, which literally meant that the movies could capture the essence of the people’s voice. Black writes that the producers of the early 1930s rejected the idea that the American people needed to be sheltered and guided by film: ‘the American people were the real censors and the box office was their ballot box’ (p. 172). This was contrary to the desires of the church advocates, who wanted films to present the image of a model society that was pious, moderate and based on family values.

This self-governing enforcement of regulation is a key moment, not only in Hollywood’s history, but in the way that regulation has been used to create a standard of acceptance for the sexual mores and behaviour of women. This is illuminated by moving comparisons of the cut and uncut versions of Baby Face. In the uncut version, there is a sense of Lily’s strength and sexual power. Part of this is heralded by the music in the film, especially a key theme rendition of ‘St Louis Blues’, written by W.C. Handy in 1914. Here it is brassy, swinging and triumphant, played by the Vitaphone Orchestra conducted by Leo F. Forbstein. Every time Lily ‘engages the attentions’ of a manager higher up in the bank she gets a new job in their department. To signify this, with hilarious innuendo we hear the ‘St Louis Blues’ theme over a pan up the exterior of the art deco high rise. The department name is written in the windows: up, up we go, from filing to mortgages and mortgages to accounting. The music taps into Lily’s nonchalance and ambition as she gets one over the men she ensnares. She is also beautifully dressed and there is a pleasure to be derived from her Cinderella-like costume changes as she rises up, each move to a new department seeing her in newer and more lavish finery. Lily is upwardly mobile, not as a result of her commitment to the labour market, but to her own sexuality, and the shortcuts it allows. These I see as spectral clues to the light comic tone the filmmakers wanted to convey, and the titillation they did not want to hold back on.

As I watched the pre-release version, having just watched the censored version, I saw Lily Powers shift into a three-dimensional woman. I saw more of her reactions, wide shots of the places she is situated in and evidence of her being successful at her job. The paring down of Lily’s complexity and her social context in the cut version seemed lamentable, a kind of celluloid lobotomy. A comparison of the two endings is one way into these remarkable differences. In the censored theatrical release, right from the start Lily is warned that there is a ‘right way and a wrong way’ to make her way in the world, by her friend Adolf Cragg, an intellectual cobbler from home. [SPOILER] The ending, which was stitched on to please the censors, is depressing. It reminds us of the start of the film when we see Lily leaning out of the window of the speakeasy; dusting off factory smoke from her window box, she wants air, to escape the steel works and its men. A shot of the smoking factory chimneys lingers. Later, Lily’s biggest decision is whether to give up all her assets and money to Courtland when the bank starts to fail. Courtland attempts suicide and Lily saves him. The final scene of the theatrical release shows a company meeting of elderly men explaining that Lily and her husband have bailed out the bank and have returned to Erie and are ‘working out their happiness’. Courtland is now a labourer. We don’t see Lily; instead the film closes on the image of the chimneys. While it is allowed that Lily has finally found happiness and true love, she is back on the same treadmill, her father replaced by her husband, in a place she hates. The worthy message is clear: Lily has her punishment for cheating the system and doing so in sinful ways. [END OF SPOILER]

The uncut version offers an entirely different moral slant and an open ending. Restored is the extended exchange between Lily and Cragg early on in the film. The bit that was missing is Cragg’s elaboration of an extract from Nietzsche’s Will to Power (it should be noted that this is not a book actually written by Nietzsche, but a series of fragments from his notebooks edited together and published by his sister after his mental breakdown). Cragg suggests that ‘All life is exploitation’, and that Lily could ‘exploit herself’ and ‘use men to get the things [she] want[s]’. Presumably, this nihilistic philosophy and the exposure of the labour market system were too much for the censors, especially as they were used to rouse a woman to action. This exchange entirely shifts the emphasis, from ‘free yourself from systems of exploitation’ in the uncut version to ‘freedom can only exist in reference to pre-written moral codes’ in the cut.

The ending of the pre-release version is also much more interesting. [SPOILER] Lily and Courtland gaze into each other’s eyes as he comes round in the ambulance (this was cut: in the theatrical version, Lily just looks miserably at him), when the paramedic tells her to take care of her suitcase as half a million’s worth of stash is seen spilling out. She says, ‘it doesn’t matter now’, then the smouldering ‘St Louis Blues’ kicks in and the credits roll. To me, this open ending says that Lily now believes that real love overrides material wealth, but it also insinuates that the money might not matter right now, but it might in an hour or two when she wants to pay the medical bill and run away with her gorgeous husband.

Nicola Woodham

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Gun Crazy

Gun Crazy

Format: DVD Region 1

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director: Joseph H. Lewis

Writers: MacKinlay Kantor, Dalton Trumbo

Original title: Deadly Is the Female

Cast: Peggy Cummins, John Dall

USA 1950

86 mins

‘I want things,’ says Laurie Starr, anti-heroine of cult film noir Gun Crazy (1950). ‘A lot of things. Big things. I don’t want to be afraid of life or anything else. I want a guy with spirit and guts… a guy who can kick over the traces and win the world for me.’

She delivers these lines matter-of-factly, between putting on her stockings and part-challenging, part-seducing her new husband into joining her on a series of robberies [SPOILER] that will end in death for them both [END OF SPOILER]. The quote is frequently cited to demonstrate her near-psychotic acquisitiveness, her ruthless nature, her lust for power and skill for manipulating luckless partner Bart Tare, played by John Dall. But not only is her desire destined to be unfulfilled, it is also oddly unconvincing, spoken as if it’s what is expected of her, like much of the character’s minimal dialogue. Laurie never really gets any of her ‘things’; material gain from the couple’s crime spree is fleeting, and the guy isn’t up to much either. One senses that she knows this from the start, but cannot articulate the power of desire for desire’s sake; cannot admit to how much the violent process of satisfying that desire excites her.

Instead, Laurie Starr’s most memorable moments are non-verbal: flashes of action and intent from the mobile, expressive face and body of British actress Peggy Cummins, then in her early 20s - more tomboy than vamp, and exuberantly transported by action, violence and transgression, however hard her words might strive for conventionality. As the couple drive away from the scene of the film’s most celebrated heist, Cummins turns and faces the camera; as she sees the clear road behind them, her face blooms with pleasure, breaking into an impish and breathless grin. She wears the same cowgirl outfit in which we first glimpsed her performing a sexually charged shooting routine. Whether on a carnival stage or fleeing a bank job, she is rarely at ease. While Laurie shares some traits of classic noir women - not least a certain pragmatism and survival instinct - she is not presented as a femme fatale. She has none of the 40s temptress’s constructed mystique, nor her corresponding, closely styled appearance; her changeable moods and impulsive actions suggest that she is most of all a mystery to herself.

Frances Morgan will be discussing Gun Crazy‘s Laurie Starr and other femmes fatales with Nicola Woodham and host Virginie Sélavy on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 17 February, 5-5:30pm.

If Laurie Starr is an atypical noir heroine, Gun Crazy is no ordinary noir. Although it is directed by Joseph H. Lewis, best known for the classic The Big Combo (1955), and employs some of the severe angles, expressionist close-ups and shadowy pursuit scenes associated with the genre, it sometimes feels not like a noir at all. Gun Crazy is a film about modern sex, violence and poverty, but much of it has the slightly dreamlike, archetypal quality of a fable; its tone is at once ambiguous and highly moral. It offers some tantalising commentary on a lost, young underclass in post-war America, but never really dips beneath the surface. It chooses for its hero a man who seems reluctant to exist at all. Gun Crazy‘s most urgent and well-realised theme is one that, by necessity, remains heavily coded: that of transgressive, violent sexuality and fetishism.

The film begins as a teenage Bart is caught stealing a gun. In the court scene that follows, his sister and friends explain that while the kid loves guns, he is not violent - a fact demonstrated in a flashback in which Bart refuses to shoot at a mountain lion. Guns are objects of power for this disenfranchised, parentless young boy, but he is not a killer. When we meet Bart again in adulthood, he is a colourless, law-abiding character, whose slight melancholy and air of displacement are well realised in John Dall’s lanky frame and awkward smile. That smile becomes a charged, canine grin the night he and his friends enter a carnival tent to watch Miss Annie Laurie Starr’s performance, the climax of which is a shooting competition with an audience member. Of course, Bart volunteers, and narrowly wins, but this rather predictable sequence bursts into life thanks to the couple’s extraordinary chemistry. The play of heavily coded signals between the two - Bart’s triumphant smile; Laurie’s swaggering walk towards the target; the hits and the misses of both characters’ guns - sets up the power relationships they will play out as a couple. As an establishment of the erotic vocabulary of two fetishists, it is hard to beat, and is all the more effective for its air of secrecy: everyone in the room sees their attraction, but only Bart and Laurie seem to understand exactly its true nature. Like many deviant sexualities, it is both highly theatrical and very personal, and it is not surprising that Bart’s next step is to join the carnival himself.

Gun Crazy‘s slightly soporific atmosphere is only stirred up when it focuses on the two lead characters’ gun fetish. In an echo of both sexual role play and the characters’ carnival days, Bart and Laurie carry out a series of robberies in disguise. But there are no safety words for these scenarios, and the logical progression of their fantasy into the real-life trauma of murder and a fugitive lifestyle takes its toll on Bart’s already shaky sense of reality: ‘Sometimes it doesn’t feel like me. I wake up sometimes and it’s as if none of it really happened, as if nothing were real anymore.’ All Laurie can offer back is that she is real - which only serves to reinforce the lack of escape routes for them both. Later, after agreeing to separate after their last big heist (to avoid suspicion), they are unable to do so, turning their respective getaway cars around in a scene that is both highly camp and deeply sad. While the added back story ostensibly casts Bart as the lead, there seems no doubt in Lewis’s direction that they are in it together, whether that’s as star-crossed lovers or as victims of a shared delusion.

And yet the film’s alternate title was Deadly Is the Female, and many reviews of the film still cast Laurie as a deliciously wicked character, the driving force of evil, a violent woman whose already dangerous sexuality is exacerbated by the weaponry that she carries. But even if we accept such readings as dated, indicative of paranoid male fantasies of powerful women, and recognise the transgressive fun to be had in such stereotypes, it is a shame that sympathetic takes on Laurie are still rare. More understanding is reserved for her husband, a man who feels emasculated in a post-war society. Bart’s passion for shooting ‘things, not people’, while clearly in sexual thrall to a violent woman through whom he kills vicariously, is cited as evidence - in the film, at least - that he is inherently harmless, and blameless, when in fact it is close to sinister.

If Bart is emasculated, Laurie is even more so, yet she takes action, again and again. The film’s timing is crucial. Following the Second World War, women who had enjoyed a measure of power during the 1940s - and seen themselves reflected in strong film portrayals by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell - began to fade once more from public life, which was echoed in the cinema in what Susan Faludi calls ‘the image of womanhood surrendered… Strong women displaced by good girls’ (in Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women). There is something both exciting and poignant in the way Cummins’s character inhabits her femininity and pushes against its constrictions at a time when the idea of femininity was undergoing a re-evaluation from active back to passive. In the film’s most action-packed and erotic sequences, Laurie moves and dresses in a masculine way: she is most capable in a cowboy outfit; at her best when running, driving, fucking and doing. When she dons a black dress and opulent fur for a last, romantic night out, it is moments before she’s on the run again, the fur dropped in a puddle, the high heels skidding on the pavement. It’s a direct contrast to the film’s last successful heist, in which she poses as a secretary. Dressed for practicality in trousers and flats, she is reprimanded by the head of the typing pool for her inappropriate office wear. ‘I hope to see you in a skirt tomorrow,’ says the manager, only to be gunned down by her typist minutes later. While Laurie demands ‘action’ from Bart, putting the onus on her male partner to take her where she wants to go, it is clear she has the will and resources to do it herself. As feminist critics of film noir have often stated, it is the agency of heroines such as Laurie Starr that makes such pleasurable viewing for women: just the very sight of a woman who acts, viewed separately from what those actions might be, is undeniably thrilling. [SPOILER] Laurie is eventually shot, not by the police, but by Bart himself, to prevent her killing his childhood friend. This jolting reminder that the male world is paramount is a response to the fact that, at her best (worst?) Laurie really does appear to pose a threat to that world. [END OF SPOILER]

Of course, Bart ends up dead beside her, the two slumped in the misty rushes like shot ducks. Both of them have been powerless from the start, as they move through the empty, tawdry settings of small towns, cheap rooms, fairgrounds and Vegas weddings. What’s striking, though, is Laurie’s commitment to turning this life around, however doomed the outcome. It’s tempting to imagine a parallel with the pragmatic, Poverty Row origins of the low-budget film itself, and in the odd, never fully realised career of Peggy Cummins herself, whose brief stint in Hollywood would end just a year later. She plays Laurie with an instinctive fierceness that a more A-list, experienced actress might have toned down; her accent, which swings from received pronunciation to an American drawl, marks her out as an outsider. Whatever big things Peggy Cummins was chasing, the unbridled, angry glee she brings to Laurie Starr suggests that, for the 30 days it took to make Gun Crazy, she managed to tap into the darkest essence of her character’s desires, in the process delivering one of the best power femme performances of the B-movie era.

This article was first published in the Winter 2009 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.

Frances Morgan

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Rolling Thunder

Rolling Thunder

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 30 January 2011

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: John Flynn

Writers: Paul Schrader, Heywood Gould

Cast: William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linday Haynes

USA 1977

95 mins

‘Once you take out the perverse pathology of these characters, rather than becoming films about fascism they become fascist films, and that’s what happened to Rolling Thunder.’ ~ Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Rolling Thunder (1977).

A few lines before this statement (which is true) in the book Schrader on Schrader, the screenwriter remarks that in the mid-70s he was writing screenplays at a fantastic rate because he was so full of ideas. Which one could, if one felt inclined, regard a little sceptically, since Rolling Thunder is in many ways the same idea as Taxi Driver, Schrader’s most acclaimed script: a Vietnam veteran goes on a campaign of vigilante violence culminating in a massacre in a whorehouse.

The differences here lie in the talents involved and the respect shown to the story: re-writing has purged both William Devane’s character in Rolling Thunder and Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver of their most overt racism, but Scorsese works with what he’s got to vividly evoke the prejudices of his protagonist. There’s a fascinating push-pull of attraction-repulsion to this psychotic protagonist, which makes some people uncomfortable, but at least shows minds working behind the camera.

Rolling Thunder is an altogether less thoughtful piece. John Flynn, the director, did make the commendable The Outfit (1973), with Robert Duvall and a rogue’s gallery of vintage film noir faces, which is one of the better attempts to put Richard Stark’s psychopath-hero Parker on screen, but the unreflective approach to the material in Rolling Thunder robs it of the chance to live up to its predecessor. Tarantino is a fan of its no-nonsense kick-ass attitude, but I must confess I was disappointed by the ending, in which the protagonists murder a building full of people, and we are left with no clue as to what the attitude of law enforcement is going to be. It’s typical of QT to be enthused by inventively violent, empty movies, and so I suppose a flick where a guy loses a hand in a garbage disposal grinder and then sharpens his hook so he can rip up his persecutors would appeal. And I’m not unsympathetic to the visceral appeal of those elements, but I want more.

Devane, no De Niro, is nevertheless effective, his dark little eyes as unrevealing with or without aviator glasses. But whenever his buddy Tommy Lee Jones is on screen, we get a glimpse of a far more disturbing film: that thousand-yard stare speaks of true alienation and death-wish drive. Linda Haynes is affecting and natural as the girlfriend Devane takes with him on his Peckinpah-inflected Mexican mission of madness, and it’s a shame to see her dropped from the plot, especially after she’s demonstrated the required sharp-shooting skills. An interview included as extra feature catches up with Haynes today.

The overall feeling is of a violent, nonsensical movie that happens to contain more intelligently filmed or played moments than you’d expect. The structure is peculiar, which suits the unpredictable 70s vibe, but the assumptions underlying it are, as Schrader says, extremely dubious: the Mexican characters are all sleazy stereotypes, and of all Devane’s opponents, only the white Texan shows any competence or intelligence. Once on his mission, Devane is able to get anything he wants by torturing or intimidating his enemies, and this works - nobody thinks to lie to him. And the inciting incident, the vicious attack that sets him on his path, is terribly unconvincing: having heard he has $2000, four thugs come to his house to get it, somehow correctly assuming that he won’t have banked it. These guys are willing to torture and kill for what will divide up into 500 bucks a head: desperadoes indeed.

David Cairns

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Punishment Park

Punishment Park

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 23 January 2011

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Peter Watkins

Writer: Peter Watkins

Cast: Patrick Boland, Kent Foreman, Carmen Argenziano

USA 1971

88 mins

All you non-conformists, step this way.

The Vietnam War is intensifying. Nixon is ordering bombing missions on the Laos-Cambodian border and civic unrest is reaching new heights with violent demonstrations in the inner cities and on the university campuses. A pair of documentary crews, one from West Germany and one from Great Britain, follow two groups of detainees. One (group 637) is being processed through a tribunal, while the other, having already chosen the option of Punishment Park over significantly long prison sentences, is finding out just exactly what Punishment Park is.

Peter Watkins had already made his reputation as a provocateur with his Wednesday Play The War Game in 1965, which was banned by the BBC for 20 years. Punishment Park, released in 1971, is in many ways just as incendiary. The pseudo-documentary style is complemented by the improvisational techniques that Watkins employed. It allows Watkins to portray a topical moment of confrontation (Kent State Massacre was in 1970 and the Chicago 7 trial began in 1968), but it also seems part of the point that America is dangerously improvising with its own polity and identity. Throughout the film there is a radical sense of people making stuff up as they go along. This goes for the activists, who are a melange of counter-culture figures, from an obvious Bobby Seale stand-in, to a poet who looks like Allen Ginsberg and a Joan Baez-style protest singer. But it is also true for the kangaroo court that tries them and the police and National Guard, who are never quite sure of what their role is supposed to be. The media are also included in this free-for-all. The documentary filmmakers are complicit in giving the legal procedure legitimacy as well as producing a striking warning not to fuck with the government. Their protests are feeble — ‘you bloody bastards’ — and largely ignored by the trigger-happy police who, anticipating criticism of Watkins’s own origins, point out their outsider status: ‘why don’t you go back to Europe?’

Tension mounts in the film as it becomes increasingly clear that the Punishment Park experience is not about education or rehabilitation but is a cynical sadistic game, similar to something out of Pasolini’s Salí², or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), an experience the prisoners have little hope of surviving. To add to the tension, the soundtrack is dominated by the incessant sounds of gunfire and passing fighter jets in the background. This is America: constant bitter and angry argument with a clear and present threat of heavyweight and disproportionate military violence.

It would be a stretch to say that Watkins is in any way even-handed - his is a bitter and a furious film of denunciation. The court is composed of recognisable faces from the news, sociologists, a housewives-of-America spokeswoman for the Silent Majority, a big union man and politicians. They are easily hissable straw men and their depiction is the weakest element in the film. And yet the film does allow for some ambiguity. It is the prisoners who draw first blood, when some of them decide that they won’t follow the rules of their own punishment and ambush and kill a policeman. What we end up watching then is perhaps the tragedy of 60s radicalism, which saw street fighting pitching middle-class radicals against often working-class police and soldiers, to the great relief of the ruling class.

Listen to the Electric Sheep I’m Ready For My Close-Up programme on Peter Watkins with BFI archive curator William Fowler on Friday 20 January, 5-5:30pm, Resonance 104.4FM.

John Bleasdale

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AFR

AFR poster

Format: DVD

Distributor: Sandrew Metronome

Director: Morten Hartz Kaplers

Writers: Morten Hartz Kaplers, Allan Milter Jakobsen

Cast: Kofi Annan, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Reimer Bo Christensen, Morten Hartz Kaplers

Denmark 2007

83 mins

Politics has, surprisingly, not been a target for the mockumentary as often as one might imagine, with the TV mini-series Tanner ’88, detailing the run for president by a fictitious candidate, and the made-for-TV movie The Death of a President, imagining the assassination of George W. Bush, the most easily recalled. The opportunities afforded for satire, scandal-mongering and provocation would appear to be a goldmine for filmmakers and television directors but it remains a largely untapped source of inspiration. One intriguing big screen take on the political mockumentary came out of Denmark in 2007: Morton Hartz Kaplers’s AFR - the initials of the then Danish PM and now Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen - was another what-if assassination scenario. Perhaps best suited to television, with nothing particularly ‘cinematic’ to warrant seeing it on the silver screen, AFR is as a whole somewhat underwhelming: its depiction of Rasmussen’s assassination and the subsequent search for his killer, thought to be his secret gay lover Emil, played by Hartz Kaplers himself, runs out of steam after a promising set-up. And yet in its deft interweaving of factual footage and staged scenes to comment on the Machiavellian world of politics, media intrusion, the age of celebrity, voyeurism and the nature of documentaries themselves, it feels like the natural successor, in terms of construction at least, to the work of Peter Watkins.

AFR is conventional in structure, pretending to be an after-the-event investigative exposé of the incidents leading up to Rasmussen’s murder and the potential identity of the culprit. It uses staged talking head interviews with fake politicians, friends and family members of both Rasmussen and Emil, footage from interviews with actual politicians (taken out of context to suit Hartz Kaplers’s narrative), images from the N&#248rrebro squat riots of the 90s and a damaging scandal involving Rasmussen early in his political career to paint a fictionalised portrait of the two ‘lead characters’ and Danish society as a whole. Alternative lifestyles, conspiracy theories, the war on terror, the anti-globalisation movement and political cover-ups all play a part in AFR‘s narrative, and figures such as Kofi Annan and George W. Bush crop up alongside the extensive footage of Rasmussen, in office and being grilled by the media, which has been corralled into this, for Danes at least, controversy-baiting alternative universe. An added murder-mystery element is introduced into proceedings as Emil, a troubled, volatile and independent thinker, is first fingered as the assassin before appearing to be the fall guy in an unresolved conspiracy reaching right into the heart of the Danish political elite.

Although AFR was branded as exploitative and in bad taste prior to its release, in much the same way as The Death of a President was, Hartz Kaplers’s mock-doc won the Tiger Award at the 2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival. Rather than being an attack on its titular subject, it makes political hypocrisy, media manipulation and social divides its real targets. It may be a minor piece but it’s an intriguing exercise in sound, image and history manipulation that, along with crime series Forbrydelsen (The Killing) and the hard-hitting Afghanistan war documentary Armadillo, which in their own ways both investigate and comment upon Danish politics, forms part of a provocative trilogy exploring the country’s recent past.

Neil Mitchell

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I’m Still Here

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I'm Still Here

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 10 January 2011

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: Casey Affleck

Writers: Casey Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Antony Langdon, Sean Combs

USA 2010

108 mins

Few mockumentaries have received as much media attention as I’m Still Here, although this is largely due to the manner in which the press was coerced into participating in the project: in late 2008, movie star Joaquin Phoenix announced that he was retiring from acting to pursue a music career, a statement that was swiftly reported by entertainment news programmes and the celebrity-obsessed blogosphere. Phoenix received Academy Award nominations for his performances as a Roman emperor in Gladiator (2000) and as country singer Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (2005), while maintaining independent credentials through his frequent collaborations with writer-director James Gray. If he had yet to achieve megastar status - an increasingly unrealistic expectation for any actor in a movie-making era dominated by special effects-heavy franchises - Phoenix was certainly well-known enough for his ‘retirement’ to fuel the rumour mill: was this a very public breakdown, or a hoax, or a genuine desire to try a different form of self-expression? The media further speculated on the actor’s professional shift when Phoenix performed his latest rap material at a Las Vegas club in early 2009, with his friend and brother-in-law Casey Affleck filming his set for a documentary project that would be titled I’m Still Here. Writing for the Chicago Sun Times in September 2010, Robert Ebert described the film as ‘a sad and painful documentary’, dealing with a ‘gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head’. Ebert also noted ‘subtle signs’ that I’m Still Here may be ‘part of an elaborate hoax’.

The suspicions of Ebert and other critics were proved correct when Affleck explained the intentions of his collaboration with Phoenix in a number of interviews that followed the theatrical release of I’m Still Here; they wanted to explore the nature of celebrity, commenting on the relationship that both audiences and journalists have with stars in the era of new media and reality television. What their mockumentary actually observes is a breakdown in such relations, as Phoenix becomes increasingly isolated due to intense media attention. He begins the film by claiming to feel trapped in ‘a self-imposed prison of characterisation’ due to the mass perception that he is ’emotional, intense and complicated’, an identity that he concedes to creating through his choice of roles but one that he feels has been exaggerated through media pigeonholing. As he no longer wants to ‘play the character of Joaquin’, Phoenix abandons his acting career to record rap music, with Sean Combs producing his debut album and live performances scheduled in Las Vegas. Industry commentators do not wait to listen to any material before passing judgment, labelling this choice as career suicide, while ridiculing the ‘former’ actor’s increasingly unkempt appearance as Phoenix goes from svelte leading man to bearded rapper with noticeable weight gain. He becomes a laughing stock in Hollywood, alienates his ‘general assistant’ Antony (Spacehog guitarist Antony Langdon) and gets into a fight while performing to an audience that is more interested in capturing a falling star with their camera phones than in listening to his lyrics.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that I’m Still Here is a ruse, albeit a well-conceived one: scenes of Phoenix ordering hookers and snorting drugs are calculated self-destruction staples that are designed to shock, and interactions with other performers often feel contrived. Ben Stiller visits Phoenix at his Los Angeles home to pitch Greenberg (2010), suggesting that the ‘retired’ actor should play the supporting role eventually undertaken by Rhys Ifans, only to be accused of ‘doing Ben Stiller’ by Phoenix, who no longer cares for Hollywood pleasantries. With comedy star Stiller cast in his familiar straight man role to Phoenix’s imploding artist and dialogue that references Stiller’s earlier success There’s Something about Mary (1998), their meeting plays more like a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm than a genuine conversation. The centrepiece of I’m Still Here is not Phoenix’s rap performance - we hear some of his material, but never a full track - but his now legendary appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote his ‘final’ film Two Lovers (2008). It’s an exercise in awkward humour as Phoenix seems to be more interested in the gum in his mouth than discussing his work, only becoming slightly engaged when Letterman brings up the subject of his rap music. ‘I’d like to come on the show and perform,’ offers Phoenix, only for Letterman to deliver the put-down, ‘That seems unlikely’. Phoenix manages a few chuckles at the expense of the host, but Letterman gets the last laugh - ‘I’ll come to your house and chew gum.’

Phoenix disappears into ‘character’ as he becomes distanced from those around him due to media ridicule. Although he turns to music to escape the artifice of acting, Phoenix finds the rap world to be similar to Hollywood: Sean Combs states that both movies and music revolve around the circus of production, while the audience that Phoenix is trying to reach may change, but reactions to his celebrity status do not. He eventually retreats from public view, travelling to Panama to spend time with his father and, in the parting shot, disappears underwater while swimming. The three-word title of I’m Still Here recalls not only D.A. Pennebaker‘s classic Bob Dylan documentary Dont Look Back (1967) but also Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), a fictionalised deconstruction of Dylan’s ever-changing persona, with media reaction to Phoenix as rap star exemplifying a celebrity culture that now forbids such multi-faceted behaviour. In this respect, the process of making I’m Still Here had more impact than the completed film as it received a brief theatrical run that grossed a mere $568,963 worldwide, suggesting that the cultural and economic value of artists or celebrities as ‘public commodities’ is greater than that of their actual work. A clean-shaven, slimmed-down Phoenix would return to the Letterman show to discuss the film, thereby re-establishing his movie star identity through the promotional process. I’m Still Here is technically a mockumentary, but the manner in which its subject unravels due to media scrutiny makes it a painfully real portrait of a creative spirit in crisis.

John Berra

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Best DVD/Blu-ray Releases of 2011

The Colour of Pomegranates

Electric Sheep writers review the best DVD and Blu-ray releases in 2011.

The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov, 1968, Second Sight)

Inspired by Armenian miniatures and icons, its tableaux slowly evoke - rather than tell - the life of the 18th-century poet and troubadour Sayat Nova. Laden with the poet’s suffering and biblical and folkloric symbolism, there is an epic, earnest solemnity to The Colour of Pomegranates; and while such gravity and careful construction could lead to austerity and artificiality, there is also a consuming warmth and sensuality. The extraordinarily striking actress Sofiko Chiaureli plays the part of both poet and muse, exploring male and female sexuality (Paradjanov was himself bisexual and first imprisoned for a homosexual act with a KGB officer) and the film is joyously abundant with melodic folk music and heightened sounds: the crinkling of books’ pages; the squelch of pomegranate seeds; the urgent chirping of bird song. The Colour of Pomegranates is an emotionally affecting film and is especially poignant given Paradjanov’s own suffering in prison and the loss of his first wife. Lost loves and issues of ethnicity, subjects raw to his heart, are treated with immense compassion. And yet, The Colour of Pomegranates is also a film that joyously arouses all the senses: a truly sensory experience without precedent or successor. Eleanor McKeown

La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969, Park Circus)

The pristine swimming pool of a glamorous couple’s private villa in the French Riviera is the focus of Jacques Deray’s 1969 tale of lust, co-dependency and revenge. Of ample size and stylish design, it’s where lovers Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) fool around during a long hot summer, far from the madding crowd of St Tropez. It’s also where Jean-Paul challenges Marianne’s ex-lover Harry (Maurice Ronet) to a symbolic swimming race, and where the film reaches its shocking and deadly climax. Deray does a deft job in capturing the hedonism and abandon of the period, where good looks and chic clothes conceal dark feelings that lurk beneath the surface, helped by a toe-tapping soundtrack by Michel Legrand. Legrand is a name often associated with the French New Wave, as is Maurice Ronet, who plays smooth-talking music producer Harry, but La piscine‘s connection with the movement ends there. Instead, with its smoulderingly attractive cast and focus on relationships, it owes more to American film noir and psychological thrillers of the previous two decades. Lisa Williams

Who Can Kill a Child? (Narciso Ibañez Serrador, 1976, Eureka)

Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? is arguably the best Spanish horror film ever made. It’s also a classic of 70s horror, but you’re unlikely to find it on many ‘best of’ lists, from either fans or critics. This is mainly due to its half-hearted distribution until Eureka finally released it on DVD in the UK this year. Like Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Corn (1984), Who Can Kill a Child? pits adults against children, this time working from the template established by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Unlike those films, Who Can Kill a Child? doesn’t dilute the horrific premise by making his children aliens or religious maniacs controlled or directed by a supernatural entity. Following Hitchcock in The Birds (1963) and Romero, Serrador provides no real information that might help to understand or explain the events taking place. Once the misjudged moralising prologue is over, Who Can Kill a Child? is a masterpiece of atmosphere and a deeply unsettling, original experience, and one that deserves to be seen by a much wider audience. Jim Harper

Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988, Manga Entertainment)

Based on Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s serialised comic, in which telekinesis and telepathy are imagined as evolutionary reactions to a dehumanised machine-driven world, Akira proved to be a ground-breaking film on its release in 1988, presenting concepts and imagery rarely seen on the big screen in animation. While some aspects have dated and the rushed ending - a soupí§on of Kubrickian post-human light show plus shafts of divine light in a ruined landscape - strives too hard to be sublime, this is a classic animated Japanese film that is well worth adding to any Blu-ray collection, in a HD transfer that finally does justice to the film’s colour palette and intricate line art. Alex Fitch

Alice

Alice (Jan Švankmajer, 1988, BFI Video)

Alice, technically a Swiss-British-German co-production although, in all creative respects, entirely Czech, was filmed in Prague with Švankmajer’s regular team. Significantly, the Czech title translates as ‘Something from Alice’, indicating that it should in no way be considered a straightforward adaptation of Carroll. While Alice is played by a real little girl, the world of her imagination or dream world is represented by puppets and animated figures. The characters have become much more explicitly threatening than in Carroll’s original. Švankmajer’s most nightmarish creations are his ‘animals’, who pursue Alice at the White Rabbit’s behest after she has escaped from his house. These skeletal monsters include a coach pulled by chickens with skull heads, a fish-like skeleton with legs, a skull dragging a bone body, and a skull head that snaps out of a jam pot. This array of visions is far from the antiseptic world of Disney or the reassuring middle-class images of Sir John Tenniel. Peter Hames

The Kingdom (Lars von Trier, 1994 + 1997, Second Sight)

Set in Denmark’s largest hospital, Lars von Trier’s 90s TV series The Kingdom is perhaps best described as the mutated offspring of a hospital-based reality TV show and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. The Kingdom‘s horror might seem tame to viewers of Saw and Hostel, but von Trier manages to establish - and increase - a surprising level of tension and atmosphere, something that suits the work much better than explicit violence and gore. The Kingdom is absolutely essential viewing for lovers of horror or fantasy, as well as anyone with a passion for the weird. Originally broadcast in two seasons of four episodes each, the first season was edited into a single movie for a British VHS release in 1998, but this is the first time that both seasons have been available in this country. Jim Harper

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970, BFI Video)

Deep End is a film driven by and dripping with discomfort, an effect that’s heightened by the 40-year interval between its original release and recent revamp by BFI’s Flipside imprint. The story of Mike, a London teenager working his first job as a public bath attendant, and his sexual obsession with his co-worker Susan, it is morally ambiguous in tone, pitched somewhere between psychosexual thriller and a dark coming-of-age comedy. In that sense it’s quite typical of the era in which it was made, but there is something more self-aware about Deep End. The uncomfortable mood is not just the by-product of its time and our latter-day perspective on it, but also, perhaps, of director Jerzy Skolimovski’s own slightly distanced perspective on his subject. Frances Morgan

Shôhei Imamura releases (Eureka’s Masters of Cinema)

Eureka continue to make the work of the great Japanese director Shôhei Imamura available to UK audiences. Following the release of Vengeance is Mine (1979) and Profound Desires of the Gods (1968) in previous years, 2011 brought a bounty crop: Pigs and Battleships (1961), A Man Vanishes (1967) and The Ballad of Narayama (1983).

Pigs and Battleships
A vivid indictment of a nation struggling with a serious identity crisis, Pigs and Battleships is a biting social satire by a truly brilliant filmmaker. John Berra

A Man Vanishes
Over 40 years ago, Shôhei Imamura created the quintessential mockumentary, A Man Vanishes, a film essay that reveals with cunning wit concerns of veracity and corruption and anticipates the traps reality will lay for filmmakers. John Bleasdale

The Ballad of Narayama
The cruelty of survival is the focus of Shôhei Imamura’s stunning film. His achievement here is in presenting a radically different society with values that clash directly with what we today consider universal and inalienable rights. John Bleasdale