Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. Contains one use of strong language. Sorry.

Jackie Brown (1997)

Film soundtracks are only intended for the seriously geeky. I mean, why would anyone buy the 2 soundtracks to Gladiator (2000) when they can have the same music delivered to them in 5.1 DTS with extra hacking and slashing and dialogue every time they watch the DVD? It’s very difficult to come up with anything resembling an explanation, but I’ve been buying film soundtracks for a long time, and in the days before the internet and indeed VHS, a film soundtrack was the only place to find that particular piece that seemed so transcendent when seen in the context of the film. Unless it didn’t make it to the soundtrack album. The best piece of music in The Hit (1984) was produced by Eric Clapton, and it isn’t on Paco De Lucia’s soundtrack. Among the frustrations of Blade Runner (1982) (see more later when The Week of Blade Runner starts) was the non-appearance of Vangelis’ soundtrack and its replacement with Vangelis’ music played by something called “The New American Orchestra”, an Alan Smithee style atrocity to line up with the worst of them. Away from all the conspiracy theories, what seems to have put paid to the 1982 Vangelis soundtrack we all wanted was nothing more exciting than legal bullshit of the kind that has bedevilled Blade Runner ever since the film went overbudget during production in 1981.

Quentin Tarantino very clearly loves film soundtrack albums, and, like me, he probably owns soundtracks to films he’s never seen, the ultimate example of soundtrack geekery. Jackie Brown, like all Tarantino’s films, is stuffed with pieces from other movies; in the case of the music from Coffy (1973) (see below), Tarantino uses the music more effectively in his film than Jack Hill did 24 years earlier. And Jackie Brown begins with one of the best title sequences in recent memory, Pam Grier in character as an air stewardess striding through an airport like an avenging goddess to the tune of Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, from the 1972 film of the same name. This short three and a half minute sequence sets up so much of what happens later. We sense Pam Grier’s attitude, her strength, her dignity, but also her haste, and eventually the realisation that her job isn’t so hot, but just all she could get, and why she’s in the place she’s in, and why she’s couriering money into the country for Ordell.

American Gangster (2007) *

Across 110th Street turns up on the soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s latest movie as well, somewhat critically dismissed but popular with two key constituencies: moviegoers and Oscar-voting Academy members. If you’re being unnecessarily harsh (which I would suggest is a bad place to start when criticising anything), you could say that this film doesn’t contain anything that hasn’t been played out before time and again in any number of films: The Godfather (1972), Scarface (1983), Heat (1995); in short, the touchstone films of modern crime cinema. The important ace that American Gangster has to play is that it’s based on a true story, the vague details of which have surfaced above ground in my cultural memories, but never been connected together in quite this way before. I was aware of the police corruption endemic in New York City in the 1960s and 70s because I’d seen Serpico (1973), but not aware that the later cleanup and arrests of corrupt officers were in part informed by the testimony of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the drug kingpin at the centre of events here, a man prepared to deal to the end to stave off life imprisonment.

The Big Doll House (1971)

Not being overly familiar with the Filipino women in prison films that supposedly inspired this one, a typically opportunistic Roger Corman intervention into a potentially lucrative market, it’s hard for me to say just quite on what level of satire this film operates. Or whether it’s just the low budget and odd performances that account for the all round low rent atmosphere. Christiane Schmidtmer’s overwrought performance as a Nazi prison governor into snakes, whips and torture is just one of the film’s baroque pleasures. The Big Doll House is the Halloween (1978) of women in prison flicks, the new set of clichés that spawned a parade of imitators, including the following year’s…

The Big Bird Cage (1972)

Pam Grier appears in both these films, first as a bitchy lesbian opportunist in Doll House and then as a bitchy revolutionary in Bird Cage. One of the clichés of women in prison films is that all of the prisoners have butch personas, skimpy clothing, and surprising access to haircare and makeup, with the exception of the one femme inmate who can be heard weeping softly in the corner. This excess of female machismo naturally results in encounters in the showers (no WIP film is complete without gratuitous nudity) and wrestling in the mud and sex-starved women holding knives to men’s throats and bellowing ominously, “Get it up or I’ll cut it off,” and mowing down rows of Filipino prison guard extras with machine guns. All tied off with a soupçon of revolutionary politics to keep the student crowd happy.

Coffy (1973)

Jack Hill directed both of the previous films, and this 3rd collaboration with Pam Grier effectively moves her centre stage as a vengeful nurse intent on taking out the drugdealing motherfuckers who got her 11 year old niece addicted to heroin. She does this by wielding a shotgun, having an affair with a potential congressman, posing as a highclass Jamaican prostitute to penetrate the organisation (as you do when you’re a nurse) and finding herself in quite a few situations where her clothes seem to fall off, no more so than in a hilarious fistfight with a whole bunch of other bitter and resentful (and indeed bitchy) prostitutes, during which their clothes fall off as well. This is a solid entry in the blaxploitation genre, complete with wah-wah guitars, absurd cars and really bad clothes (and that’s not bad as in good).

No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

Duck You Sucker (1971)

Irritatingly, the best title for this film is the French one: It etait une fois la revolution. And the worst is the one plastered over both of my R2 DVDs: A Fistful of Dynamite. That is, if the worst isn’t the actual title on the print and the one in bold above. Duck You Sucker was based on one of those cultural miscomprehensions in which Sergio Leone was convinced that the phrase was one of those in common usage throughout the English speaking world, like look before you leap, say. Of course, not only is Duck You Sucker not this, not even now it’s known as the title of Leone’s penultimate film has it become part of the English language. It never was, and it never will be. So let’s pretend that this film actually has a completely different title, one it never has had in English, and I’ll take it from there.

Once Upon a Time the Revolution (1971)

Sergio Leone’s penultimate film is very odd indeed. As odd as Ennio Morricone’s very odd score in fact. All of Leone’s mature films use the flashback as an essential element of the narrative (this includes A Fistful of Dollars (1964) which has no flashback per se but does have Joe (Clint Eastwood) refer to an incident in his past which results in perhaps his only moral act in the course of the entire film). The flashbacks in this film are the most baroque and distant from the rest of the film, set as they are in early Republican days in Ireland, actually filmed in Ireland in place of being recreated in Almeria. They provide a crucial underpinning to the rest of the story and help to explain why James Coburn is who he is in the rest of the film, and this new DVD Special Edition is really the first time the flashbacks are all intact and the film is at its most complete. The oddity starts to take a backseat as you watch and the extent of the darkness at the heart of Leone’s vision of revolution starts to take root. The betrayals that were played for fun in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) are played for real here, and they linger long after the film is over. This is the first time I’ve ever seen the film, and it’s stayed with me.

Once Upon a Time in America (1983)

I’ve never seen the short version of this film and I never will. Even when I saw it at the cinema for the first time on 3rd November 1984 it was the full four hour version. What’s become apparent is that America is in effect two films: there’s the one with the conventional narrative that just happens to have the structure of an art film, and then there’s the art film that starts and ends in the opium den, and everything that happens after that – the 1960s sequences – didn’t happen, and everything that happened before – the childhood sequences – may not have happened either, suffused as they are with the rose-tinted aura of nostalgia. Leone would neither confirm nor deny that this was the case, but it is known that he welcomed the ambiguity. This same ambiguity turns up in Blade Runner (1982) (the fabled Deckard may be a replicant subplot) and Total Recall (1990) (Arnie kills the bad guys, gets the girl and saves the planet, but all of that may be taking place in his head). These alternate versions of these film’s narratives were not apparent at the time of these films’ initial releases, but over the years the more ambiguous readings of these films have become the most interesting way to discuss them. Which kind of makes me wonder how many more films there are out there with “concealed” narratives waiting to be unpicked?

No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

The second Dollars film was a much bigger hit than the first, and allowed Leone access to an even larger budget for the third one. Even though the films are clearly related, it is a mistake to view them as sequels in the conventional sense. The first item to increase in size is the running time, now clocking in at a hefty three hours, and the second is its overall scope. The reality of the American Civil War, especially a little known failed campaign fought in Texas by one Confederate Colonel Sibley, here intrudes upon the mythic treasure hunt which preoccupies the three protagonists of the title. And it is this clash between the actuality of the West and Leone’s own memories of the Westerns he saw as a boy that will form the subject matter of the films he directs in the rest of his career, including the gangster film of 1983. There is a marvellous kitchen sink quality to this film, which switches modes of expression in practically every scene from sadism to low comedy, single gunfights to the clash of armies, all of it scored brilliantly by Ennio Morricone. By the time the journey ends in yet another circular arena surrounded by gravestones and the ecstasy of gold, there is a sense that a profound (if not profane) journey has taken place, the meaning of which remains to be teased out for decades to come.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

This is one of my favourite films. Has there ever been another film with a cooler “Story By” credit: Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci & Sergio Leone? Would you not pay good money to get these guys together every year for the rest of their lives to come up with more projects like this one? Something that never happened. The running time issue became even more acute here since the project was bankrolled by Paramount Pictures, at the time run by the charismatic, eccentric Charlie Bludhorn, who regarded Leone as a genius (but Bludhorn still ended up fatally shortening the film for its initial American release). The extremely oblique quality of the narrative that I so admire (it’s never obvious at first who has committed what piece of onscreen action or why they have done so – although all of these narrative pieces are eventually revealed) came about as a result of Leone realising that the script was too long and the scenes were all going to play too slowly and the film would run about five hours, so scenes had to be cut on the run and patched together later. Large chunks of Morricone’s score were pre-recorded for use during filming, one wonderful example being the early crane shot that reveals the town of Flagstone – it looks like it’s been perfectly timed to Morricone’s music, and it has, because the piece was played on the set while the shot was being filmed. The film has a whole bunch of cliched characters and situations, quotes from other Westerns and its entire plot filched from Johnny Guitar (1954). On the face of it there is nothing original about it, but the emotional weight and gravitas that Leone brings to the end of the West as signalled by the arrival of the railroad and thus civilisation, has a gorgeous melancholy rapture to it that is really beyond my ability to describe in words. Once Upon a Time in the West is film as a dream of the West, of what was lost when the West was won, and all that Sam Peckinpah was reaching for and would achieve the very next year with The Wild Bunch (1969).

No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Armed with a bigger budget for the second Dollars film, Sergio Leone was able to achieve a fuller effect. One of the more subtle improvements over the first film is that Leone was able to employ extras to populate his offbeat recreations of Western towns (though it could be said that the lack of extras in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) only adds to the existentialism of it all). Leone was preoccupied with research and realism as a frontispiece to the scenes behind which the narrative can take place, which is very different to the Hollywood attitude. Christopher Frayling, in his recommended biography of Leone, recounts an incident in which a librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington was astonished by Leone’s requests for background research materials on the reality of life in the West that no American film director had asked to view in the 20 years the librarian had worked there. The end result is the intense weathering of the sets, the smoky atmosphere in the saloons, the cruddy costumes of the cast, detailed replica firearms, and Clint Eastwood’s unshaven face. Yet this realism serves only as a mask behind which the surrealism, carnival, satire and unreality of Leone’s approach can occur and an Italian mythos of the West is produced. Over time, this method has become dulled through its repetition by inferior talents, but in 1965 it was absolutely new.

Irréversible (2002)

Along with Mulholland Dr. (2001), The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-03) and INLAND EMPIRE (2006), this film completes my quartet of the only bona fide cinema classics to have been produced in the 21st Century of cinema. So far. It’s over four years since I saw it at the cinema and knew I was in the presence of something special. What I’ve found is that doubts set in about the film only afterwards when you’re not in its presence: doubts as to how seriously Gaspar Noé intends any of this, doubts about the incessant references to rectums, buggery and vaginas, doubts about every aspect of the making of the film, in fact. But all of these doubts disappeared once I started to watch the film again. As a boring liberal, there’s nothing I find more boring than having my liberal prejudices reconfirmed by a filmmaker telling me something I already know. For example, I haven’t seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) because I already know George Bush is an idiot and I don’t need Michael Moore to remind me. With cinema, I want to see something I’ve never seen before, something to astonish me, upset me, offend me, take me completely out of myself into worlds I would want to visit myself or never want to visit, not to escape the old, but to experience the new. And Irréversible delivers all of this in spades.