A tale of two Italian Jobs

Hang on, lads, I’ve had a great idea: let’s compare Peter Collinson’s 1969 Cock-er-nee crime caper with F Gary Gray’s Stateside remake.

 

What’s it all about?
The original starts with Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) getting out of prison, a job in Italy all nicely lined up for him. Unfortunately, his contact has met with a nasty accident courtesy of the Mafia who figure said job – the wholesale theft of several million in gold bullion – as a nice little earner for themselves. Still eager to pull off the heist, Charlie turns to upper class crime boss Mr Bridger (Noel Coward) – who runs his felonious empire from inside a prison cell (albeit a nicely appointed one) – for backing. Under Bridger’s aegis, Charlie puts together a team. They plan the heist meticulously then head to Turin. With the city crowded for an England vs Italy football match, and with Mafia supremo Altabani (Raf Vallone) on their case, the pressure is on to intercept the gold and make a clean getaway.

The remake starts in Venice as veteran safecracker John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) undertakes the proverbial one last job before handing the operation over to his protégé Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg). The heist goes smoothly and the getaway equally so … until one of Bridger’s team – Steve (Ed Norton) – double-crosses them, shoots Bridger, leaves the others for dead and absconds with the gold. A year later, in Philadelphia, Charlie gets a lead on Steve, who is fencing the gold a bar at a time. Charlie and the team join forces with Bridger’s daughter Stella (Charlize Theron) – who’s as much of a dab hand at opening safes as her old man but has thus far been putting her talents to legitimate use – and track Steve to California where they set out to steal back the gold from under his nose.

Conventional wisdom would have it that Collinson’s film is an evergreen classic while Gray’s is just another tired remake emblematic of Hollywood’s lack of originality. But we don’t do conventional here at Agitation. And we’re not renowned for doing wisdom either. So let’s put both movies on the starting blocks and see which pulls away faster, corners better and blasts past the chequered flag first.

 

Best guv’nor
Michael Caine – exudes 60s cool; gets to say “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”

Mark Wahlberg – does an okay job; ain’t no Michael Caine.

WINNER: the original.

Best crew
Caine’s crew are a fairly anonymous bunch who are generally only there for comic relief. Perhaps the most famous face is Benny Hill. Let us never forget that the original ‘Italian Job’ is a film where Benny Hill gets third billing.

Wahlberg’s crew consists of Seth Green, Mos Def, Jason Statham and Charlize Theron. Green and Def I can take or leave, but when you’ve got The Stat on your team that means you’re serious.

WINNER: the remake.

Best plot Collinson’s film consists of: Charlie gets out of prison, pause for low-brow comedy, Charlie plans the job, pause for low-brow comedy, Charlie and the lads execute the job, pause while Benny Hill does some gurning, tyre-squealing getaway.

Gray’s film actually has a plot, as well as making an attempt at backstory and even tipping its hat in the direction of characterisation. Gor blimey, guv’nor!

WINNER: the remake.

Best heist
Caine and crew pull a very inelegant armoured car job before the real business of the stunt driving gets underway.

Wahlberg and his team pull two heists, and plan but are forced to avert another. Their heists are meticulously conceived and excitingly staged.

WINNER: the remake.

Best Mr Bridger Noel Coward mixes snobbery with menace and creates an unforgettably satirical character. His walk from cell to prison dining hall as his also-incarcerated minions cheer at the news of the successful heist is a show-stopper.

Donald Sutherland plays a character called Bridger.

WINNER: the original.

 

Best last scene
Caine and crew are left dangling over a precipice in a literal cliffhanger.

Wahlberg’s team celebrate a job well done as they leave town on a train.

WINNER: the original.

Best use of Italian locations The original depicts Turin as one big traffic jam and has some horribly stereotyped Italian characters; however, it earns the title ‘The Italian Job’ in way the remake doesn’t.

The remake gives us an evocative opening heist set in Venice, however the remaining hour and a quarter plays out in America.

WINNER? Let’s call it a draw.

Best music
Caine and his cohorts belt out a lusty tune about “the self-preservation society” as they abscond with the goods.

John Powell’s score ramps up the urgency and against-the-clock nature of the heists in the remake, but you’ll not find yourself humming it every time you see a Mini being driven above the speed limit.

WINNER: the original.

Best car chase
Twenty minutes of unsafe driving around, above and through the sewers of Turin.

Twenty minutes of unsafe driving around California and through its sewers and subway system. Oh, and there’s also a car vs helicopter set-piece.

WINNER? I’m almost tempted to declare this a draw, but for two things: (i) the business with the Minis is the only reason, if we’re being perfectly honest, to watch either version and Collinson’s film did it first; (ii) the Minis in the remake were retro-styled by BMW, while the Minis in the original are … well … the original!

Sexiest endorsement of the Mini
Charlize Theron drives one in the remake. No point even debating this one. WINNER: the remake.

Results
Based on ten criteria, Peter Collinson’s film scores five, F Gary Gray’s scores four, and they tie in one category. The kudos, then, should go to the original, but having watched them back-to-back I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I find the remake more satisfying in its script, direction and craftsmanship. The original, however, has the eminently quotable “you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” line, an unforgettable final scene and, in the final analysis, captures a cultural and national zeitgeist in a way the remake doesn’t … and, in fact, couldn’t. Let’s face it: does the sight of a group of Americans pulling a getaway in an American city at the wheels of three British-made cars with, respectively, red, white and blue paint jobs actually mean anything, let alone what it means in the original? F Gary Gray earns a raised glass and a tip of the chapeau for turning in the better example of filmmaking, but ultimately Peter Collinson’s film, for all its flaws, achieves something genuinely iconic.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: girls with guns

Has it really been a year and a half since I did one of these 'Something for the Weekend' posts? Is this blog suddenly in danger of becoming tasteful, reconstructed and non-exploitative? Not having any of that, guv'nor! Here, for your delectation, and tying in aesthetically with this month's Shots on the Blog, is an image gallery built around the thematic continuity of ... awww, who am I trying to kid? Ladies and gentlemen: girls with guns!

Magnum Force

 

“A man’s got to know his limitations.”

The first of four sequels to Don Siegel’s epochal ‘Dirty Harry’, and the only one of them that even begins to engage with that film’s considerations of vigilantism vs due process and the moral erosion of the already thin dividing line between cop and killer, ‘Magnum Force’ is an often powerful and occasionally flawed movie. It’s also notable for being written by directors-in-waiting John Milius and Michael Cimino, both of whom would turn in infinitely more iconoclastic work than its actual director, Ted Post.

The opening credits play out over the stark image, against a red background, of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood)’s trademark Magnum .45 clutched in a hefty fist. A slow zoom in ensures that, by the time the thumb has moved to the trigger and cocked it, the gun is occupying the whole of the screen. The fist angles it in the audience’s direction. The gun fires. It’s almost the antithesis of 007 shooting the audience in the intros to the Bond movies. There, Bond is being tracked through a gun barrel but gets his shot in first. Here, Callahan just turns his gun on the audience and blasts.

Utterly unsubtle, but a perfect definition of what the film is about. And perhaps the only instance in cinema of a prop, not a person, breaking the fourth wall. This is what you came for, isn’t it? the gun asks (can a weapon sneer?). This is why you bought your ticket and that large tub of popcorn and sat your ass down in this theatre. And, with the benefit of hindsight: This is why you stumped for this movie on DVD. Isn’t it punk? This is why you watch anything with Clint in. Because deep down the right-winger in you wants to see the bad guys, the pimps and the pushers and the scum of the earth, get blown away without all the time-consuming business of bureaucracy intruding.

The gun tips you the wink. It reminds you of Callahan’s mano-a-mano battle with the Scorpio killer in the original movie – a grudge match that was settled without lawyers, judges or the ministrations of twelve men good and true.

‘Magnum Force’ then spends two hours subverting these expectations. Glossing over the fact that Callahan tossed away his badge at the end of ‘Dirty Harry’, we have him busted down to stakeout duty by his irascible superior Lieutenant Briggs (Hal Holbrook) and shoo’d away from a homicide scene. Callahan, bored with sitting in a car when he could be doing some real detective work, decides to involve himself in the case anyway. This doesn’t go over too well with his new partner “Early” Smith (Felton Perry), and with good reason. Callahan goes through partners they way Oliver Reed went through pubs. Put it this way: if it’s your first day with the San Francisco PD and the roster lists you for duty with Callahan, H … don’t bank on collecting your pension.

 

While Callahan probes the execution-style deaths of several major league villains who had hitherto flaunted their above-the-law status, he comes into contact with a group of motorcycle cops led by Aryan poster boy John Davis (David Soul). Bested by Davis in a shooting competition, Callahan muses on his limitations. But when the evidence points to them as a ton-up judge-jury-and-executioner squad, even Callahan’s scepticism about the system is sorely tested. Yup, this is a Dirty Harry movie in which our (anti)hero is given to considerations of morality, due process and human rights.

It’s perhaps disingenuous to delineate the aforementioned dividing line in terms of Harry Callahan only blows people away while they’re in the act, not because of what they may or may not have done in the past, but nonetheless it’s a very shaky exercise in semantics that differentiates him from Davis and co. 

The script, when it gets in gear, exploits this grey area brilliantly, continually challenging us as to why we find Callahan’s methods cathartic and Davis’s reprehensible. Are we really so shallow that we’ll accept rough justice and terminal judgement as long as it’s meted out by someone who looks cool, gets the girls and grunts pithy one-liners with the devil-may-care indifference of a gunslinger spitting out a stream of tobacco juice?

 

You know what? I rather think we are. ‘Magnum Force’ has two main problems. Number one: Ted Post’s direction is uninspired and he doesn’t seem able to rein his actors in – which is no problem as far as Eastwood, American cinema’s unchallenged king of minimalism, is concerned but fuck me if the usually excellent Holbrook doesn’t chew the scenery as if he’s just doused it in Tabasco sauce and had it brought to him with a side order of fries and a tub of coleslaw.

Number two: the script requires Callahan to float around for the first hour, marking time while the biker boys notch up enough hits to establish themselves as antagonists, whilst still reminding everyone that he’s the main character and a badass mo’ fo’ to boot. This results in numerous go-nowhere scenes such as an airport hijacking (curtailed in a thoroughly arbitrary manner), a convenience store stick-up and several flat scenes where various women throw themselves at him.

The second half, however, ramps up the drama and the action. A dockyard shoot-out is poundingly staged and edited, and the finale, in which an unarmed Callahan is caught up in a tense game of cat ‘n’ mouse through the rusting hulk of a decommissioned aircraft carrier, raises the bar on the grain-store chase scene that concluded ‘Dirty Harry’.

After this, only ‘The Enforcer’ with its Alcatraz-set finale would deliver any hint of frisson. ‘Magnum Force’ rides out the definitive pop-culture phenomenon of ‘Dirty Harry’ with a modicum of style and brings a few ideas of its own to the squad room. And, hey, it’s certainly the best film Ted Post ever made.

PERSONAL FAVES: A Clockwork Orange

Posted to coincide with Malcolm McDowell’s 69th birthday. Party well, little brother, party well.

 

“We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die.” Thus spake Anthony Burgess, author of the slim novella on which Stanley Kubrick’s symphony of visual mind-fuckery and ultra-violence is based. It’s a hell of a thing of a writer to repudiate one of their own works, let alone admit that said work has no value beyond the money it earned.

This contentious point, however, is accurate. In 1958, having published his ‘Malayan Trilogy’ but still essentially treating writing as something of a hobby, Burgess collapsed while lecturing to a class and was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. This misdiagnosis was compounded by the clinician in question giving Burgess a year to live. Keen to provide for his wife, Burgess banged out four books in quick succession, one of which was ‘A Clockwork Orange’. It’s an amazing piece of work, not just for its immediacy, raw power and its prescient approach to youth-speak (narrator Alex uses “like” almost as punctual), but for its linguistic experimentalism.

The inspiration for the novella, if such a lofty word is appropriate to such a grim starting point, was the attack on the author’s wife by a gang of American GIs during the war. They were deserters; Burgess, serving in Gibraltar at the time, wasn’t allowed leave to visit her in hospital. She was pregnant at the time and subsequently miscarried. In approaching such violent material, and using a first person narrator, Burgess used the language of the book as a distancing technique. Using a mélange of corrupted Russian, cockney rhyming slang and Romany colloquialisms, he effectively created a language that any reader of the novella has to pick up as best they can during the first few pages. He called it Nadsat.

Stanley Kubrick – never one to let an author’s intentions get in the way of an adaptation (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Google “Stephen King Stanley Kubrick The Shining” and settle back for an evening of reading) – happily jettisoned the concept of Nadsat as a distancing technique from the violence, turning it instead into a verbal barrage of swaggering machismo that plunged the viewer further and further into the world of Alex and his droogs – a world basically defined by ultra-violence, the old in-out-in-out, and some lovely lovely Ludwig Van (the 9th Symphony a particular favourite). Put simply, Burgess’s novella is a dystopian investigation into societal dysfunction, governmental conditioning, wayward youth and eventual maturity; while Kubrick’s film is an unapologetically amoral romp that celebrates the darker impulses of the human psyche and sounds a triumphant Ode to Joy to free will, never mind that said freedom of choice is often knowingly deployed by bad people who luxuriate in their recidivism.

 

Or, put even more simply, the film is totally not what Burgess intended the book to be. This has much to do with Kubrick omitting the last chapter, in which Alex reflects on his misbegotten life and begins to entertain thoughts beyond the fighting, fucking and fuck-authority-ing that have defined his personal aesthetic thus far. 

And this is where I quit sitting on the fence, launch myself out of the middle ground and come down firmly in Camp Kubrick. As much as I love ‘A Clockwork Orange’ à la Burgess, I’ve always found that last chapter forced and just a smidge unconvincing. The note Kubrick ends the film version on, I completely buy into it even as it chills the hell out of me.

‘A Clockwork Orange’ probably isn’t Kubrick’s best film, and I will admit to some ambivalence regarding the director. I often find myself admiring his work rather than liking it. The lack of any real humanity to a good half of his (admittedly unprolific) output results in some jaw-droppingly amazing technical exercises rather than engaging and emotionally fulfilling works of art. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ remains my favourite, ironically, purely because it’s honest about its lack of humanity. The film introduces us – literally: in his first scene, he raises a glass to the audience – to a complete bastard, albeit an awesome cool one, in the form of Alex the droog, played, in what must rank as one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema, by Malcolm McDowell. Kubrick picked McDowell on the basis of his performance in the equally incendiary Lindsay Anderson film ‘If…’, and it’s easy to see Alex as Mick Travis with a few years on him and a decent classical music collection.

For two and quarter hours, we follow Alex’s rise, fall and restoration to his vicious ways. The first hour is an adrenalin rush of the reprehensible: Alex and his droogs kick the shit out of a drunken old homeless guy, run motorists off the road as they go joyriding, get stuck into a fight with a rival gang using fists, boots, knives, bicycle chains and broken bottles, and pull a “surprise visit” on an unsuspecting couple which concludes with very unsavoury business which plays out to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. And our man Stan films it all with exuberant abandon.

 

After another B&E that similarly concludes in a welter of sexual violence (a porcelain phallus the size of a chair is used to deliver the coup de grace), Alex is abandoned by his droogs – it should be mentioned that he’s not twatting them for getting out of line – and arrested. By the kind of coppers who probably watch ‘The Sweeney’ as a refresher course. He’s booted and spat on and next thing he’s in the nick, hypocritically cosying up to the chaplain to get out of the more onerous work rota and fantasizing all the while about being one of the Roman soldiers whipping Christ on His way to Golgotha. (Think ‘Life of Brian’ without the laughs and you’ll pretty much have imagined this scene.)

When the prison’s pompous Elgar-loving governor mentions a revolutionary new “cure” for criminality – Ludovico’s Technique – Alex immediately volunteers, convinced it’ll win him a quick parole. Ludovico’s Technique involves Alex being strapped to a chair, his eyes forced open, while images of violence, destruction, degradation, Naziism and just about any other bad shit you can think of play out in front of him. He is being programmed to reject all such stuff. To respond with physical revulsion at the very thought of it. There’s an unforeseen side-effect, though. Throughout the treatment, the accompanying music is Alex’s personal favourite, Symphony N° 9 in D minor, Opus 125.

Released, unable to even consider lifting a hand in anger, Alex’s mind is also programmed to reject Beethoven. It’s an almost unpalatably horrible implication: deny free will and you’re taking great art out of the equation as well as the capacity for evil. Your choice folks: a world with all the horrors that Alex epitomises but which also has Beethoven’s 9th, or a world without any of it, the good or the bad. Think you’ve made your choice? Slip a microtape on and think again.

 

Deep, dark, troubling stuff … and you know what the worst (or perhaps the best) thing is? Kubrick plays it as comedy. Right down to the final sequence where Alex, suddenly a cause célèbre as the media rounds on the government in condemnation of Ludovico’s Technique, has the process reversed and gleefully takes up the mantle of his erstwhile persona, imagining himself feted and in flagrante as the ‘Ode to Joy’ reaches its crescendo. “I was cured all right,” Alex purrs as the music dies away and Burgess’s last chapter gets its head kicked in as thoroughly as any of Alex’s victims.

Two more things to mention: like Alex, my favourite piece of music is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; unlike Alex, I regard it as the mankind’s highest artistic achievement in any medium. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard it, and the amount of different recordings I’ve listened to (though the Karajan 1963 version with the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon takes some beating – this review was written while listening to it at high volume), and there are still times, almost without realising it, that I find myself murmuring “I was cured all right” at the climax.

Second thing: the most recent Warner Brothers ‘Director’s Edition’ box set of Kubrick’s work features a documentary called ‘Great Bolshy Yarblockos’ as one of the special features. I’m one of the talking heads in the documentary. I get about thirty seconds’ screen time all told, but it was my bit they picked to explain the origins of Nadsat. I’m a bit proud of that.

BOND-A-THON: The Man with the Golden Gun

 

12 January 2012, Nottingham, England. Yours truly decides to host a Bond-a-thon on The Agitation of the Mind. I can only assume the rationale floating through my mind went something like this: Yeah, cool, I get to watch the Connery films, I get to re-evaluate the Timothy Daltons, there was that one with Brosnan that had a pre-credits speed boat chase along the Thames, and I get to wrap the whole thing up with Craig’s reinvention of the franchise. Woo-hoo! This is going to be so cool. Bartender, bring me a vodka martini, shaken not stirred.

I cannot recall, during this moment of deluded enthusiasm, whether it ever crossed my mind that, discounting Connery’s reprisal of the role in ‘Never Say Never Again’ as non-canon, Roger Moore has made more James Bond films than any other actor. And if even the vaguest consideration of the Moore years did cross my mind, there was probably another rationale to hand, something along the lines of: ‘Live and Let Die’ is pretty decent, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ co-stars Caroline Munro and Valerie Leon therefore eye-candy a-go-go, and ‘For Your Eyes Only’ marks something of a return to form. Hell yeah, let’s do this thing.

If, on 12 January, someone had whispered in my ear: Yo, Fulwood, you’re also going to have to watch ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, ‘Octopussy’ and ‘A View to a Kill’, there might have been second thoughts. I might have re-envisage the project as a best-of-Bond-a-thon. In fact, if that rhetorical whisperer had put in an appearance, there would have been no need for them to mention ‘Octopussy’ or ‘A View to a Kill’. They’d have had me at ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’.

‘TMwtGG’ is the franchise’s nadir. Just looking back at my review of ‘Live and Let Die’ and the issues I had with it throws ‘TMwtGG’ into sharp relief. Bog awful theme song? Sir Paul McCartney, I apologise: your three minutes of widdle-wank is fucking Mahler compared to Lulu’s execrable effort. Racism? The treatment of black characters in ‘Live and Let Die’ is an exercise in race relations compared to the wholesale stereotyping of Asians. How bad is the racism? Let’s put it this way, there is a ludicrous amount of screentime, just after the halfway mark, where Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), holidaying in Bangkok, repeatedly lambasts the locals, calling them “little brown pointy-heads”. Between this and the flying car, watching ‘TMwtGG’ is a two-hour exercise in losing the will to live. Yeah, there’s a flying car.

 

It would be twenty years and ‘Die Another Day’ before the 007 saga gave us anything as face-palmingly stupid. And, oh Christ, I’ve got that motherfucker to watch before this whole moviethon is over.

The annoying thing is that ‘TMwtGG’ could have good. It could, conceivably, have been fucking great. For all that the films have drastically departed from the books, often to their detriment, one genuine improvement is made in this case. Ian Fleming’s novel, written just prior to the author’s death, was published in its first draft without his customary revisions; consequently, it’s a thin and sketchy piece of work and suffers from the lack of an interesting villain. Scaramanga, in the novel, is a grubby little mobster whose much-hyped facility with a pistol barely compensates for his lack of personality. In Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz’s script, Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) is Bond’s equal – indeed, the opposite side of the coin to 007: a gourmand and a sybarite who lives well and has no qualms about what he does for a living. 

Christopher Lee was Ian Fleming’s cousin and would probably have made a chillingly amoral Bond (in the alternative universe where Sean Connery accepted Matt Busby’s offer of a contract to play for Manchester United and became a footballer instead of an actor, I’m still undecided as to who would have made the most interesting Bond – Christopher Lee or Patrick McGoohan). As Scaramanga, however, Lee exudes serpentine charm and menace in equal measure. I’ve never known Lee not to be magnetic whenever he’s onscreen, and ‘TMwtGG’ is not exception.

 

The film also flirts with topicality in its choice of McGuffin: the “Solex Agitator”, a device that ramps up the efficiency of solar power. The energy crisis was big news as the film went into production, and still in the news at the time of its release. Scaramanga’s designs on the Solex, essentially setting himself up as auctioneer to the super-rich with unlimited energy and its conversion process to electricity up for grabs by the highest bidder, elevates him from mere assassin (albeit one who pulls down a cool million per hit) to the kind of über-villain audiences had by now come to associate with the Bond movies.

The presence of Christopher Lee and the inclusion of a newsworthy subject, however, are all ‘TMwtGG’ has to offer; and the filmmakers seem perversely determined to offset these things by as many stultifying creative decisions as possible. We have mentioned Lulu’s theme song (“the man with the golden guuu-uuu-huuu-uuun”) and Sheriff Pepper’s xenophobia. Let us also consider a ludicrous kung-fu sequence where two schoolgirls beat the shit out of a gang of tough customers (the fact that neither actress seems to have any facility for the martial arts just makes the whole thing even more laughable); an otherwise fine car chase ruined by comedic sound-effects; Britt Ekland’s simpering performance as Mary Goodnight, easily the dippiest Bond girl ever to don a bikini, (particularly annoying since the much more engaging Maud Adams – as Scaramanga’s kept woman Andrea Anders, is cavalierly disposed of); and the painfully unfunny Bond vs midget final scene.

Oh, and the potentially engaging business about the Solex? It comes down to a big laser that blows things up.

 

Towards the end, Scaramanga challenges Bond to a duel, declaring that “it will be a battle of titans”. “There’s a handy four-letter word,” Bond replies, “and you’re full of it.” Watching ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, it’s hard not to feel a certain affinity.

Ripley's Game

 

I was never that keen on Anthony Minghella’s ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, an overlong and far too polished adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s claustrophobic and bitingly cynical novel. But if its success contributed in any way to ‘Ripley’s Game’ getting made, then I tip my hat to the Minghella flick and wish it well.

Highsmith’s novels are studies in what Walter Scott called “the tangled web we weave / when first we practice to deceive”. The murder that necessitates another murder. The lie that requires another lie, then another, until a seemingly straightforward bit of deception finds itself drowning under gallons of whitewash. The consequences of an act. It takes a filmmaker who’s not scared of the darker recesses of the human psyche to engage effectively with Highsmith’s work.

 

Step forward Liliana Cavani. 

Liliana Cavani made ‘The Night Porter’. I’d say her credentials are in order. Like the fastidious, opera-loving Max (Dirk Bogarde) in that film, Ripley is an aesthete who presents to the world an impeccable façade that borders on prissiness, a façade that masks his insouciant capacity for doing bad things. “You know the most interesting thing about doing something terrible?” he asks Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott) at one point: “After a few days, you can’t even remember it.” 

Ripley imparts this pearl of wisdom after the two of them have done some unmistakably terrible things, although in Trevanny’s defence he’s been largely coerced. It all starts when Ripley and a déclassé associate by the name of Reeves (Ray Winstone) conspire to sell some forged artwork to a Berlin dealer. This gentleman earns Ripley’s ire and violence and double-cross ensue. Ripley parts ways from Reeves and sets himself up in palatial style in an idyllic Italian village. Fast forward three years and he’s playing house with seductive harpsichordist Luisa Harari (Chiara Caselli) and enjoying the fruits of his ill-gotten gains. Two events disturb his pleasant, well-ordered existence. One is a slight from Trevanny at a party. The other is the reappearance of Reeves, now a club owner in Berlin, who wants Ripley to pull a hit on a Russian mobster who’s muscling in on his territory.

 

Trevanny – an English picture-framer with a wife, Sarah (Lena Headey), and a young child – is suffering from a terminal illness and struggling to earn enough from his business that they will be provided for upon his demise. Ripley elects to steer Trevanny into Reeves’s orbit, effecting the avian-duo-single-stone-usage result of getting Reeves off his back and teaching Trevanny a lesson. All well and good until Reeves calls in another favour and the fecal matter hits the air conditioning device. 

Malkovich plays Ripley – to draw upon a comparison made by Bryce of Things That Don’t Suck – as a sort of second cousin to Hannibal Lecter, deviating from the Ripley of the novels but still turning in a compelling piece of characterisation. What makes this film’s Ripley interesting is that, while a criminal, he’s better suited to the more gentlemanly business of forgery – he’ll use brute force when necessary (and sometimes to stomach-churning effect) but he’s the first to admit that it’s not his forte. “A garrotte doesn’t come with an instruction manual,” he muses with just a hint of ruefulness when an antagonist turns out to have survived his ministrations. He even admits to being “fucking terrified” when the chips are down and it’s just him and Trevanny holed up against a group of gunmen. 

 

Cavani understands claustrophia; understands the sweaty tension of the inevitable closing in. Another ‘Night Porter’ comparison: Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling unable to leave their hotel room but doomed anyway. One of the chief pleasures of ‘Ripley’s Game’ is how rooted Cavani’s aesthetic is in the 70s: the look of the film, its pacing, the performances, how comfortable the director is with an unsympathetic protagonist. I can easily imagine this had been made in 1974, the year the book was published … and I wonder what if it had, and how awesome it would have been with Dirk Bogarde as Tom Ripley. And that’s no disrespect to John Malkovich.

Mona Lisa

This makes for a good double bill with ‘Get Carter’. Both are harsh crime dramas filmed in grim urban locations. Both make use of blue movies for important plot points. Both have women who are still really just girls misused by the adult world. Both feature Michael Caine playing a nasty bastard. ‘Mona Lisa’ has a more sympathetic protagonist than ‘Get Carter’ and has, if not a happy ending, then at least one imbued with a modicum of hope. Though what George (Bob Hoskins), our anti-hero of the day goes through before arriving at the ending, what he witnesses and what he begrudgingly has to give up on, make descriptions like “sympathetic” and “hope” very much relative concepts. 

Neil Jordan’s film – his third after ‘Angel’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’ and the first to break out to a significant audience – starts with George trying to make amends with his teenage daughter Jeannie (Zoe Nathenson) after being released from prison. He’s done seven years. His ex-wife vehemently turns him away, much to the entertainment of the neighbours. George loses his rag and a gets into a fight, against superior numbers (although he gives every impression of being able to handle himself). The situation is defused by the quick intervention of George’s best mate Thomas (Robbie Coltrane). Thomas is a Del Boy type, out to make a quick buck from various get-rich-quick schemes (spaghetti bolognese sculptures; glow-in-the-dark statues of Jesus) while running a rattletrap car repair business. 

George’s seven-stretch was an exercise in keeping his mouth shut and thereby keeping gang boss Mortwell (Caine) out of the slammer. George figures Mortwell owes him, but Mortwell is in the process of legitimising his business – though, as we discover later, he’s still doing some pretty malfeasant shit – and doesn’t want an uncouth “face” like George ruining his image. Mortwell’s club-owning number two Dudley (Joe Brown – yes, that Joe Brown) fobs George off with a gig chauffeuring around high class call girl Simone (Cathy Tyson). That George, ever the stranger to the reconstructed outlook, refers to her in conversation with Thomas as “a tall thin black tart” might give you some indication of how mismatched this pair are, and how badly they hit it off.

Over time, however (“time” in this instance equating to the first third of the movie), relations thaw between George and Simone. George seems to get over his incipient racism, while Simone gives him an image overhaul and sands some of the rougher edges off him. Eventually, Simone opens up about a girl she used to know back when she worked the streets – Cathy (Kate Hardie). Simone co-opts George first into driving around the seediest areas, trying to pick her out from the shadowy contingent of overly made-up and often spaced-out streetwalkers; and later into cruising the massage parlours and “gentlemen’s clubs” himself trying to find her. 

As George’s odyssey takes him into some dark places – an encounter with 15-year old May (Sammi Davis) brings it home to him that girls his daughter’s age are being forced into prostitution – increasingly he looks to Simone for his salvation. But as the tagline has it, “love is a weakness”. It’s also a tightrope and George is soon walking a perilous line between knife-wielding pimp Anderson (Clarke Peters) and Mortwell himself. 

Neil Jordan’s script – co-written with David Leland – trades in familiar film noir tropes: the loveless city, the little guy trapped by desperate circumstances, the beguiling but fallen woman, the hair’s-breadth chance of freedom and very real possibility of violent death that stands in the way. Between the palpable sense of claustrophobia as things inexorably close in on George, and the abject filth of the underworld he finds himself wading through, it’s a small mercy that Jordan and Leland leaven their story with some nicely judged touches of humour and humanity. An effective and unforced running joke has Thomas press onto George the battered paperback crime novels he reads with voracious appetite, challenging him to second guess the killer. This sets up two beautifully underplayed scenes: the first when George tries to talk to Thomas about Cathy and the only way he can verbalise the facts of the matter is as if it were the plot of a pulp thriller; the second after Thomas catches George mournfully watching a porno flick on VHS in which Simone has the starring role, and berates him for not finishing his book and yet “finding time to watch this crap”.

 

The humanity is underscored by the Johnny Mathis song that gives the film its title. It seems to be the only thing George listens to as he glides through the fetid underbelly of London in his classic Jaguar Mark II (later populised as the car Inspector Morse drove). Sweet music is a good description of Mathis’s output, and George clings to the yearning romanticism of the song. “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?” the lyric asks. By the end of the film, George has his answer. But this, albeit in shot in colour, made in the 80s and set in England, is film noir to the hilt, and the Gospel According to Mick and Keith applies. 

You can’t always get what you want.

PERSONAL FAVES: Get Carter

 

Mike Hodges’ career has had its ups and downs, but fuck me if the man didn’t make a stone cold classic first time out. ‘Get Carter’, adapted from Ted Lewis’s stark novel ‘Jack’s Return Home’, is arguably the great British crime movie. A slice of grim and unflinching northern noir, it boasts authentically gritty locations, an unapologetically amoral aesthetic, and a career-defining turn from Michael Caine. 

I’ve neglected the Personal Faves project for a while. ‘Get Carter’ is a punchy and uncompromising choice to get back into the grove with. 

 Jack Carter (Caine) is a London-based villain whose associates aren’t too keen on the idea of him taking a sabbatical in his old stamping ground of Newcastle, but Carter’s insistent. His brother Frank has died – ostensibly in a car accident, ostensibly while drunk – and Carter’s convinced he was murdered. On the train up from London, he reads Raymond Chandler’s ‘Farewell My Lovely’, and what follows is as complex in its plotting and character interrelationships as anything by Chandler, even though Carter eschews Philip Marlowe’s laconic style for a brutally direct investigative approach. 

He starts out by bracing Eric Paice (Ian Hendry), a “face” from the old days. Eric is evasive when it comes to questions about Frank, and won’t say who he’s working for now. Carter wastes no time in determining that Paice is employed as a chauffeur for gang boss Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne). He also has some probing questions for Frank’s bit on the side, Margaret (Dorothy White). Carter’s expectations that Margaret will take care of Frank’s teenage daughter Doreen (Petra Markham) – who, it is heavily intimated, might well be Jack’s daughter – are met with reluctance. 

   

Carter’s blunderings earn him the disapprobation of the local underworld and increasing pressure is exerted on him to return to London. Meanwhile, bent property developer Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley) tries to coerce Carter into disposing of Kinnear in order to extricate himself from the mobster’s extortion. Aided by the booze-addled Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), sometime plaything to both Kinnear and Brumby, Carter’s search for the truth is given a nudge in an unpalatable direction by her offhanded revelation that she’s appeared in blue movies for Kinnear. 

‘Get Carter’, for all its plethora of characters and complexity of narrative, is an incredibly lean movie. Its aesthetic is stripped down. The cinematography is an exercise in documentary realism. The milieu is bleak. The dialogue, though mainly sparse, offers some eminently quotable dialogue: “A pint of bitter – in a thin glass”; “Get yourself a course in karate”; “You bloody whore!”; “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. For me, it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.” All of these lines are the more memorable for their context. No spoilers, but Caine’s delivery of “I know you didn’t kill him. I know!” is just as chilling as the action that accompanies it. 

Anyone even remotely familiar with the film won’t need me to tell them, particularly after the above quoted moments, how much of a bastard Jack Carter is. Caine’s interest in the role sprang from the people he’d seen, in his youth, dragged into crime as an escape from poverty, a fate that could easily have been his. He referred to Jack Carter in interviews as “the ghost of Michael Caine” and described the character as a corrective to the tendency, in British cinema, to portray gangsters as comedic or inept. As Caine pointed out in a much-quoted turn of phrase, “gangsters are neither funny nor stupid”. Carter certainly isn’t. Carter’s cold, ruthless and entirely self-serving. He uses violence without a second thought, yet the violence in the film is sudden, brief and not overused. There’d be no point in a man like Carter overdoing the violence. It’s a means to an end, as is virtually everything else in his life – nothing more.

 

 Caine’s is not the only terrific performance. Ian Hendry, struggling with alcoholism, his career marooned in TV while Caine was soaring high on the big screen, is a study in malevolent contempt as Paice; Hodges played on Hendry’s resentment to draw a performance from him that stands as a career best. Softly spoken playwright John Osborne was an offbeat choice for Kinnear, but kudos to Hodges for going with him – Osborne exudes menace, and the quieter he talks (some of his dialogue is a real strain to hear), the more threatening he seems. Tony Beckley and George Sewell – the latter British television’s hard man of choice in the 70s – deliver the goods as a couple of heavies who try to take Carter down in a dockside shoot-out. Bryan Mosley, who would go straight from ‘Get Carter’ to playing a greengrocer on soap opera ‘Coronation Street’, is suitably oleaginous as Brumby. 

Passing over Britt Ekland and her nothing role as gangster’s moll Anna (quite why she gets third billing for what’s essentially a cameo is a mystery), the ladies of the cast acquit themselves just as admirably, particularly Rosemarie Dunham as Edna, the landlady whose guesthouse Carter uses as his HQ. His ejection of two hoods at gunpoint from said establishment, while naked and during a Girl Guides march-past, is one of the highlights in a film not exactly robbed of highlights. 

Seriously: how many gangster movies – in fact, how many movies in general – have so many great scenes? ‘Get Carter’ boasts probably the best car chase in British cinema, at least two on-foot chases that capture the adrenaline and the breathlessness of pursuit, an act of brutal retribution at a multi-storey car park, the aforementioned gunplay on and around a ferry, a bit of business involving a sports car and the River Tyne, some nastiness at a bookie’s shop, and a blunt and unforgettable finale set against the backdrop of an aerial ropeway dumping buckets of slag out to sea. 

   

‘Get Carter’ ends, with a sense of the inevitable, on the least glamorous beach in the history of cinema. Which is apposite since ‘Get Carter’ embraces a genre so often beholden to iconography and showy set-pieces and boils it down to its harshest, bluntest elements.

Ray Bradbury

  

i.m. Ray Bradbury, 22 August 1920 - 5 June 2012

BOND-A-THON: Live and Let Die

With Connery’s return for ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ a strict one-off (at least until he made the non-canon ‘Never Say Never Again’ in 1983), the producers found themselves back where they were after ‘You Only Live Twice’: they needed a new Bond. This time, they avoided the pitfall of casting a male model who’d never acted before. This time they went for someone who not only had twenty-five years experience before the camera, but came complete with a significant fan base courtesy of his hugely popular turn as Simon Templar in the TV series ‘The Saint’.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Roger Moore. Not, however, that he was the first choice. The producers initially approached Clint Eastwood, hot off ‘Dirty Harry’ (its sequel ‘Magnum Force’ was released the same year as ‘Live and Let Die’), who politely declined on the grounds that Bond should be played by a British actor. Clint Eastwood – respect! Julian Glover and Jeremy Brett were considered – and the mind boggles at the idea of the guy who would later essay the definitive Sherlock Holmes (despite what it cost him) playing Bond – before they settled on Roger Moore.

When ‘Live and Let Die’ was shot in 1973, Moore was already in his mid-forties. He’d play the character for another twelve years, ending his tenure as a paunchy and vaguely ridiculous Bond, pushing sixty, in ‘A View to a Kill’. During those dozen years, the franchise would become increasingly bloated, parodic and self-indulgent, with ‘For Your Eyes Only’ (excepting its cringingly embarrassing final scene) representing a back-to-basics for the 007 aesthetic.

Still, ‘Live and Let Die’ – directed by Guy Hamilton; the third of his four Bonds – is a solid first outing for Moore, and a decent action movie to boot. It has its flaws, particularly in its tapestry of ethnically stereotyped villains, but it’s a more cohesive work than ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and, with one exception, doesn’t go haring off into the realms of the stupid as gleefully as the next few productions would.

‘Live and Let Die’ opens with a pre-credits sequence notable for (a) actually having something to do with the rest of the movie and (b) not featuring Bond. Apart from ‘From Russia with Love’ – which kind of features Bond and kind of doesn’t – I think it’s the only pre-credits sequence in the whole saga in which the agent doesn’t appear. What does happen is that several British agents are killed, one at a United Nations conference which is being attended by Kanaga (Yaphet Kotto), the ruler of a Caribbean island called San Monique; one during a stakeout in New Orleans; and one on San Monique itself during a voodoo ceremony.

M turns up at Bond’s apartment (predictably he has female company), gives him a terse brief – Bernard Lee was ill during filming, which perhaps accounts for how succinct the scene is – and it’s off to Harlem for 007 to probe the dealings of a local Mr Big (named, uh, Mr Big) and try to determine the connection with San Monique and Kanaga. Let me mention again that the film was made in 1973. Albert Broccoli was nothing if not a canny popularist and it hadn’t escaped his attention that blaxploitation movies were cleaning up with mainstream audiences. Hence the first third, where Bond gets into it with pimps and pushers against a backdrop of urban decay. ‘Live and Let Die’ gives us some of the least glamorous moments in 007’s entire career. In fact, you’d probably have to fast-forward to Bond’s capture and incarceration at the start of ‘Die Another Day’ to get any grungier. Ladies and gentlemen: Bondsploitation.

When, however, the scene shifts to the Caribbean and then to Louisiana, a more typically Bondian sense of scale comes to the fore, with gliders, light aircraft, speedboats and a wonderfully out-of-place London Routemaster bus being pressganged into the service of high speed chases and wanton destruction. “What are you, boy,” hick sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James) demands after Bond has wreaked havoc the length and breadth of his parish, “some kinda one-man doomsday machine?” There’s a contingent of Bond fans who don’t like Sheriff Pepper (and utterly despair of his reappearance in the next movie), seeing the character as more at home in something like ‘The Cannonball Run’ than a Bond movie. Personally, I like the way his red-faced sweaty bluster, drawling accent and tendency to spit tobacco juice like a gunslinger in a western movie provide a nicely vulgar foil to Bond’s implacable Britishness. It also gives us a stereotypical dumbass white character, which – while not exactly expiating the incipient racism elsewhere – at least begins to redress the balance.

So: we have Roger Moore acquitting himself well, Yaphet Kotto giving us one of the great Bond villains (he manages to be suave, infectiously enthusiastic in his villainy, and completely ruthless – often all at the same time), and some very well staged action scenes. We also have a sympathetic and likeable Bond girl in the enigmatic but vulnerable Solitaire (Jane Seymour), not to mention top-notch supporting villains in Tee Hee (Julius Harris) and the batshit crazy Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder). The voodoo aspects of the plot, although revealed as (at least partially) a knowing exploitation by Kanaga and co. of local superstitions, add something different to the formula.

On the minus side, we’re deprived of Q (although the resultant low gadget count paradoxically works in the film’s favour); Paul McCartney’s theme song – with its excruciatingly ungrammatical reference to “this ever-changing world in which we live in” – is fucking horrible; and – as divisive as Sheriff Pepper – Bond’s escape from a crocodile farm. If by some chance you’ve never seen ‘Live and Let Die’ (and I do know several people who’ve never seen a Bond movie outside of the Connery entries) I won’t spoil the silliness for you: just think “jumping the shark” but with crocodiles.

While it’s by no means as egregious a moment as some of the later instalments would trade in, it nevertheless points to what the Moore Bonds would become. And it wouldn’t take them long to dig towards that nadir. The rot started setting in on the very next film.

Men in Black 3

Does this one count as a Shots on the Blog review? Well, the franchise is about a couple of agents tasked with policing alien activity on earth; this latest (and belated) instalment starts with a prison break; and the plot centres around an attempt to prevent a murder. Yeah, that’s good enough for Shots inclusion.

Remember when the original ‘Men in Black’ was released in 1997? It was fun, frothy, irreverent and inventive; it boasted a who’d-a-thunk-it double act between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones that was quite simply a delight; and it’s hour and a half running time made for a slick blockbuster that utterly entertained and never outstayed its welcome.

The sequel appeared five years later. And it was “meh”. Five freakin’ years and they served us up an instantly forgettable piece of mediocrity. In the meantime, director Barry Sonnenfeld’s career nosedived. He’d proceeded ‘Men in Black 2’ with the misjudged ‘Wild Wild West’ and the just plain awful ‘Big Trouble’; he followed it with ‘RV: Runaway Vacation’, a film I’ve only seen ten minutes of which left me feeling profoundly despondent. Six years working in television followed.

To say I approached ‘Men in Black 3’ with trepidation is putting it mildly. To say I enjoyed it is nothing short of miraculous.

Not that the first twenty minutes or so are that promising. In short order, galactic uber-criminal Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) breaks out of a maximum security compound on the moon; then we’re reintroduced to Agents J (Smith) and K (Jones) ten years on from their last appearance, and several scenes of forced and un-engaging dialogue try to remind us how zippy the banter used to be. Following an okayish set-piece at a Chinese restaurant, some semblance of a plot kicks in. It turns out that Boris got sent down after being apprehended by K and he’s out for a little payback courtesy of a time-jump device, transporting himself back to the 1960s to assassinate K.

In the here and now, J suddenly finds himself bereft of his partner and perplexed as to why none of his colleagues can remember K. Then the full extent of Boris’s anarchic plans come to light and earth finds itself on the verge of defeat from an alien invasion. J travels back in time, intent on stopping Boris and under the dire warning to keep clear of K lest he create a paradox. The moment J steps into the late 60s, the film picks up no end. And when he encounters a forty-years-younger K (Josh Brolin), ‘Men in Black 3’ really hits his stride.

Brolin is the filmmaker’s secret weapon. He reverse engineers Tommy Lee Jones’s characterisation so perfectly that it’s not imitation or parody, but a damn good performance in its own right. Moreover, the chemistry between J and the younger K in this movie is reminiscent of that between J and the original K first time round. ‘Men in Black 3’ marks a return to the tone and style of the first film, and that can only be a good thing. There are some great visual jokes and nice concepts (Sixties counterculture provides an effective touchstone), the script plays fair with the time travel elements, and even if a late-in-the-game scene attempts to push the emotional buttons a bit too hamfistedly I’m prepared to turn a blind eye. It’s nice to see the MIBs back in a film that’s actually entertaining.

King of New York

Frank White (Christopher Walken) gets out of prison, is driven off in a stretch limo with two ladies of easy virtue present and correct on the back seat. He tours the old neighbourhood. Meanwhile, an old score is settled as a rival is aerated by several dozen shotgun rounds. Frank’s nocturne continues, the Vivaldi violin concerto striking an appropriately contrapuntal note on the soundtrack to the grim urban landscapes the mobster’s caddy glides through. Elsewhere in the city, Jimmy Jump (Laurence – billed as Larry – Fishburne) and Test Tube (Steve Buscemi) rip off some Latino dealers and fill them full of holes. This done, they rendezvous with Frank to celebrate his release, pay their tribute from the sting and get in on the ground floor for the Frank-White-reclaims-NY business proposition. 

So far, so fall-and-rise-of-Italian-American-mob-guy. But prison has changed Frank. Well, slightly. He now hangs out as much with the city’s prime legal movers – principally advocate Abraham Cott (Jay Julien) and sexy counsellor Jennifer (Janet Julian) – as he does with the pimps, pushers, whores and homies who constitute his usual retinue. And with a hospital in his old stamping ground due to close because of municipal budget reductions, he takes an uncharacteristic interest in philanthropy. But his do-gooding (financed by his not-so-do-gooding) is threatened by the tenacity of hard-bitten cop Roy Bishop (Victor Argo). Frustrated by the ministrations of Frank’s legal eagles, Roy’s number two – the righteously indignant and dangerously unpredictably Dennis Gilley (David Caruso) – posits a drastic plan of action and due process be damned.

For its first half, ‘King of New York’ plays less as a cohesive narrative than a collection of loosely connected sequences that suggest scripter Nicholas St John had presented director Abel Ferrara with a précis and some writing samples rather than a finished screenplay. Frank’s takeover of territories ruled by pretenders to his throne such as the straight-out-of-central-casting Artie Clay (Frank Gio) and the equally clichéd Larry Wong (Joey Chin) is reduced to a series of vignettes that lack any real sense of the scale of the operations involved. How prison changed him isn’t really explored, and the drive behind his determination to save the hospital is more a plot device than a result of characterisation and motivational development.

Likewise, the internal dynamic of Roy’s team comes across as shoehorned by the requirements of the script, instead of developing naturally. A terrific Irish wedding scene gives us our only real glance of who these guys are off-duty, after which they’re relegated to sparkplugs for an often disjointed narrative. The wedding scene is one of a cluster of great individual moments – it rates alongside a white-knuckle car chase/shoot-out by night, a risky hit at a cop funeral and Frank’s violent intrusion on Artie’s poker game – that add up to a film that’s never less than watchable despite its flaws. (The less said about the horribly staged Chinatown gundown, however, the better.)

The second half is somewhat more focused, with Frank’s still-embryonic empire beginning to crumble, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that ‘King of New York’, with its sparse running time (99 minutes) and production values indicative of a restrictive budget, is a gangster epic that wants to be sprawling and expansive, boasting a huge cast of colourful supporting characters, but has looked at the available funds, shrugged and tried to hit as many of the high notes as it can.

And yet … and yet …

Ferrara scores an incredibly effective point in the juxtaposition of Frank’s public façade – all swanky restaurants and high-class acquaintances and artsy milieus – with the reality of the criminal underworld: decrepit crack-houses, well-appointed but anonymous hotel rooms, edgy associates and glaze-eyed hookers. Drastically different aesthetics, but Ferrara shoots both as commentaries on lifestyle porn. If, in the final analysis, ‘King of New York’ can be said to have a theme, it’s about the reduction of success to surface sheen and death to designer ennui.