Top ten gumshoes

Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel in ‘Angel Heart’

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in ‘The Big Sleep’

Jack Nicholson as J.J. Gittes in ‘Chinatown’


Steve Martin as Rigby Reardon in ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’


Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in ‘Kiss Me Deadly’

Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in ‘The Long Goodbye’

Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in ‘The Maltese Falcon’

Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby in ‘Night Moves’

Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’

Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero in ‘Zero Effect’

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth

As “Trekkie” denotes fandom of ‘Star Trek’, thus “Dwarfer” for ‘Red Dwarf’.

My wife is a Dwarfer. I’m something more than a fairweather fan myself. So excitement was running high chez Agitation on Friday evening as Dave (a fairly laddish cable channel normally specialising in cars ‘n’ gadgets type programming) prepared to air the first new episode in a decade.

In true Lister stylee, we sat down to watch it after partaking of a curry and a few beers. We had speculated as to the content and quality of the new three-parter, and whether the cast would gel quite so naturally after a ten-year hiatus. My take was that the first episode would re-establish character dynamics, the second would contain the comedic highlights and the third would be a wrapping up of things.

Friday’s episode was a tad stilted and awkward to begin with (although this could have been deliberate given the direction the story takes in episode two), but there were enough belly laughs, spiky new character Katerina (Sophie Winkelman) was interesting, and at the end of the day it was just good to see the old team back together.

I must admit that I winced when Saturday’s episode went down the meta-fiction “hey, we’re all made-up characters in a TV show” route: as a plot device, it's hokey and has a tang of desperation about it; plus, it’s been done before (and with varying results) – ‘The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse’ springs to mind. But then the first of a series of rib-tickling set-pieces kicked in and after a few minutes I was laughing too hard to care. A couple of brilliantly conceived ‘Blade Runner’ homages sealed the deal - the boys from the Dwarf were back and I was itching for the last episode.

The final part upped the ante on all things ‘Blade Runner’ (“I want more life, smegger” had me in hysterics), as well as neatly twisting the meta-fiction elements of the story and revealing “Back to Earth” as something of an extended sequel to the classic Series Five episode “Back to Reality”. And the extended skit on Craig Charles’ current tenure in ‘Coronation Street’ was priceless.

Then there was the mysterious reference to the show running for ten seasons (there’s only been eight) which seems to indicate that Doug Naylor has something up his sleeve. Any time you’re ready, sir: a new series is long past due.

PERSONAL FAVES: Unforgiven

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is living a hard-scrabble life, working a pathetic dirt farm, half of his pigs dying of fever, trying to raise his two young children and bitterly mourning the death of his wife – “she cured me of drinkin’ and wickedness,” as he tells anyone who will listen – when he’s offered one last shot at the brass ring.

And what wickedness. “You’ll be William Munny out of Missouri, killed women and children,” says Sheriff ‘Little’ Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) towards the end of the film, when killer and lawman stand off each against other. “I killed women and children,” Munny admits; “killed just about everything that walked or crawled …”

‘Little’ Bill is a regular kind of guy; he inspires loyalty in his deputies, spends his off duty hours building a house where he can enjoy the simple pleasures of sitting on his porch, smoking his pipe, drinking coffee and watching the sun go down. Nevermind his shortcomings as a carpenter, he’s a man who takes pride in a job well done. And the results of a job well done as far as being sheriff of Big Whiskey is concerned is a town free of outlaws and assassins, a town where visitors obey the clearly posted City Ordnance sign and turn in all weapons.

When Skinny (Anthony James), owner of the local billiard hall (read “brothel”), summons ‘Little’ Bill to officiate after a couple of cowpokes attack one of his girls after “she let out a giggle” at his “teensy little pecker” (these Bar T boys obviously have issues about size), he fines them and threatens them with the bullwhip if they don’t pay up.

The girls, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Farmer), are understandably aggrieved and pool their meagre savings to post a bounty. Word gets out and the first gunman who shows up is English Bob (Richard Harris), a flamboyant and self-aggrandizing showman who’s travelling with his “biographer” W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer of penny-dreadfuls who laps up all of English Bob’s heavily exaggerated tales.

‘Little’ Bill greets English Bob by giving him a pistol-whipping and kicking him down main street, sending out a message to any other assassins who might come calling that Big Whiskey is a zero tolerance kind of place when it comes to gentlemen of that profession. When English Bob is run out of town in chains, Beauchamp stays on, just as entranced by ‘Little’ Bill’s tales of the reality of the west.

Meanwhile, Munny has been coerced into picking up his guns and saddling his horse once more – he’s lost his technique with the former and can barely stay in the saddle of the latter – by a wind-and-piss braggart who styles himself as ‘The Schofield Kid’ (Jaimz Woolvett) “on account of Schofield model Smith & Wesson”. Munny in turn ropes in his old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), and the three of them head for Big Whiskey and a double killing. After all, as Ned puts it, “we done stuff for money before”.

Under Eastwood’s direction, the terse frontier poetry of David Webb Peoples’ script (which Eastwood bought the rights to ten years before he filmed it, waiting until he was the right age to play the character) becomes an elegy for the western in a way that no other film since Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ has achieved. It also demythologizes the western while at the same time, through the ingenious use of the Beauchamp character, reminding us where the myths came from in the first place.

Munny is Eastwood’s finest acting performance (Walt Kowalski in the recently released ‘Gran Torino’ runs a close second), a man who spends all but the last fifteen minutes of the film in denial. Along with the oft-repeated “she cured me of drinkin’ and wickedness”, his mantra is “I ain’t like that no more”, and every time he says it, it sounds a little more hollow, a little more like something he’s trying to convince himself of.

‘Unforgiven’ deconstructs the genre by painting everything in shades of grey. Munny by his own admission has killed women and children, done things for money and professes to being unable to remember most of his misdeeds (“I was drunk most of the time”) and yet for all of his assertions that he’s changed he’s simply being untrue to himself and it’s only when the need for revenge and half a bottle of whisky are lodged inside of him that the real Munny re-emerges … and an apocalypse in microcosm comes to Big Whiskey.

‘Little’ Bill just wants to keep his town free of assassins and “men of low character” and yet he has no qualms about resorting to brutally sadistic methods to accomplish it. The Schofield Kid is desperate to make a name for himself and blatantly fabricates the extent of his career as a hired gun, and yet the messy reality of killing a man proves too much for him in the final analysis. English Bob already has a reputation but is hellbent on perpetuating his own legend; he is ultimately proved a liar. Beauchamp, the ending implies, is the man who will chronicle Munny’s showdown with ‘Little’ Bill (I’ll omit the motivations and mechanics of this scene for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen the film) and yet his literary talents seem less in harness to the truth than to the claiming of a story dramatic enough to boost the sales of his purple prose.

The title crawl that closes ‘Unforgiven’ is purposefully ambiguous, as is the very title. An anti-violence aesthetic hangs over the whole film (particularly in the painfully extended death of one of the cowpokes), yet the final shoot-out is as cathartic and iconic as any western in Eastwood’s filmography.

‘Unforgiven’ is a richly rewarding film that demands repeated viewings. It works on many levels. Acting, script, direction, cinematography and music are spot-on perfect. There isn’t a misstep or a wrong note in the whole thing. It’s a film whose characters are flawed and world weary; who are defined by experience and regret. Some of them change their minds in a welter of remorse. Some can no more escape who they are than fly to the moon. And, in the main, it’s all on account of pullin’ a trigger.

Top ten romantic heroines

Keeping it clean for Easter Sunday (don't worry - normal service will be resumed next week), here's the top ten romantic heroines:

Audrey Tautou as Amelie Poulain in ‘Amelie’

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson in ‘Brief Encounter’

Amy Adams as Giselle in ‘Enchanted’


Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind’

Kim Hunter as June in ‘A Matter of Life and Death’

Emmanuelle Riva as Elle in ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’

Josette Day as Belle in ‘La belle et la bête’

Janet Gaynor as “the wife” in ‘Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans’

Gene Tierney as Lucy Muir in ‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’

Atonement

My thanks to Viv Apple for the following review:

I found ‘Atonement’ so absorbing and involving that it took me some time to untangle my thoughts about it. It was certainly beautiful, but was it about class, or love, the pity of war, or the foolishness of youth? It was all of these and more. The opening scenes, set in a country house in the 1930s, seemed to exaggerate class attitudes a little too much, but even that became acceptable for the times as the drama took over.

In a key scene the teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a dreamer, looks through a window and sees her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) strip off her dress and dive into a fountain watched by Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son who has just graduated from Cambridge. Briony misinterprets the situation, which leads to more complex misunderstandings and eventually to the tragic separation of Robbie and Cecilia just after they have acknowledged their love for each other.

Although the story was made believable by sensitive performances, there were some flaws which could have undermined the whole narrative. For example, the police investigation which hinged on a young girl’s word was glossed over, even though it appeared that Robbie, the accused, was elsewhere when the offence in question was committed.

Fast forward four years, and the rest of the film is set during the second world war. We see the effects of Briony’s lie intertwined with her attempts to atone for her behaviour.

I won’t spoil the plot by describing any more of its intricacies, but must mention the remarkable Dunkirk scene: a long tracking shot in which Robbie wanders, wounded, through the beach with all the horrors of that time around him. Hundreds of soldiers, horses, a beached boat with shredded sails, men singing in an old bandstand, all against a background of a Ferris wheel, combined to create a surreal atmosphere reminiscent of ‘Oh What a Lovely War’. At first I thought this too unreal and stagy, but then it struck me that it was not meant to be representational. The effect was highly emotional and, like Picasso’s Guernica, the surreal nature of the scene underlined the unimaginable horror of war.

In a final scene, Vanessa Redgrave plays Briony in old age, effectively bringing together loose ends. Beautifully done, but somewhat marred by a sugary final shot which bordered on cliché. Had director Joe Wright cut the film by 30 seconds, I would have believed it all.

The Damned United

Full disclosure: I have no interest in football. I am, however, Nottingham born and bred and I was seven when Nottingham Forest won the European Cup in 1979, a feat they reprised the following year. Brian Clough was – and is – a legend in Nottingham. The A52 connecting Nottingham and Derby has been re-signposted as ‘Brian Clough Way’ (apposite given his track record managing clubs in both cities) and his statue was unveiled in the Market Square in November last year.

So it was out of curiosity as to how well Michael Sheen’s performance captured Cloughie’s trademark admixture of charm and belligerence that me and my friend Aidy headed to the Broadway Cinema last Saturday night for a screening of ‘The Damned United’. Our better halves evinced no interest in the film and occupied themselves otherwise while we attended the screening, then enthusiastically discussed the film in the pub afterwards.

If this makes ‘The Damned United’ sound like a blokey movie – trawl up to the cinema with a bunch of mates, cheer at Sheen’s heroic performance, then head for the boozer afterwards – then I’m doing the film a disservice. There’s nothing laddish about it at all, and the amount of actual on-the-pitch footage would probably add up to little more than a couple of minutes. What ‘The Damned United’ is really about is friendship, rivalry and overreaching ambition.

Tom Hooper’s film, adapted by Peter Morgan from David Peace’s novel, contrapuntally charts Clough’s miraculous leadership at Derby County in the late ’60s and early ’70s, dragging the club from Second Division doldrums and turning them into fiery First Division contenders, with his disastrous 44-day managership of Leeds United in 1974.

Leeds were then at the forefront of British football, undisputed champions, and relations were loyal and productive between them and manager Don Revie. They were also aggressive on the pitch and had a dubious disciplinary record. ‘The Damned United’ takes the rivalry between Clough and Revie (Colm Meaney) as its central dynamic, Revie snubbing Clough at a Leeds vs Derby match, refusing to shake his hand, and Leeds trouncing Derby in several clashes over the years, Clough’s players fouled and injured by Leeds’ thuggery.

So when Clough’s outspokenness and habit of royally pissing off Derby chairman Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent) sees him and assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) relieved of their duties, he reluctantly accepts a job with Brighton & Hove Albion. Taylor relishes the challenges of building up the club from nothing (ie. the Third Division, which is pretty much the definition of “nothing”), but Clough rails against the seaside, the boarding houses and cafes, and the general ubiquity of Southerners. The moment Revie quits Leeds United to manage the England squad, Clough takes the job.

He loses no time in earning the animosity of his team. Day one, first address to his players: “The first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.”

What follows is kind of like ‘Downfall’, but with a football stadium instead of a bunker.

Michael Sheen is simply astounding in the lead role; following on from recent turns as Tony Blair and David Frost, the man’s king of the biopic, with a real gift for evoking the personalities he plays. Timothy Spall is an odd casting choice for Taylor, physically nothing like him, but succeeds in capturing the frustration and affection that characterised the two men’s turbulent relationship. Colm Meaney brings a dour gravitas to his characterisation of Revie, even if the role is tad underwritten. But it’s perhaps Jim Broadbent who deserves a man of the match award, jettisoning a good decade’s worth of twinkly comedic roles and really getting under the skin of old-school chairman Longson, a working class man made good whose patience is sorely tested by Clough’s cavalier attitude towards him and the board. The verbal stand offs between Clough and Longson, particularly when Longson suggests that Clough give Leeds an easy victory so they can play a stronger side against Juventus in a forthcoming European match, are tour de forces.

I mentioned at the start of this piece that I don’t like football. The main reason I don’t like it is the tribalism and the alpha male bullshit that goes with it. There’s a scene where Clough, being interviewed for TV, states that football is “a beautiful game and it should be played beautifully”. Amen to that. Cloughie’s a local hero – hell, a national one – and although his family have spoken out against ‘The Damned United’, for my money it’s a damn fine film.

Top ten truckers

UPDATE: thanks to Alper for reminding me of Stallone's pugnacious trucker in the splendidly over-the-top, uh, ‘Over the Top’:

In honour of the two day ‘Wages of Fear’ love-in, ten coffee-drinkin’ smokey-dodgin’ double-clutchin’ truckin’ types:

Stacy Keach as Pat Quid in ‘Roadgames’

Carey Loftin as “the truck driver” in ‘Duel’

Yves Montand as Mario in ‘The Wages of Fear’


Richard Conte as Nick Garcos in ‘Thieves’ Highway’

George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as the Fabrini brothers in ‘They Drive by Night’

Hugh Jackman as Jack Willis in ‘Paperback Hero’

Stanley Baker as Tom Yately in ‘Hell Drivers’

Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck in ‘Convoy’

J.T. Walsh as “Red” Barr in ‘Breakdown’

Patrick Swayze as Jack Crews in ‘Black Dog’

The Wages of Fear (slight return)

Quite apart from inspiring William Friedkin’s fully-fledged remake ‘Sorcerer’, it occurred to me watching ‘The Wages of Fear’ a couple of nights ago just how influential it’s been on other film-makers.

One guy pegs it while one guy drives in ‘The Wages of Fear’ …

… one guy pegs it while one guy drives in ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’

Yves Montand stares at the flames in ‘The Wages of Fear’ …

… Daniel Day Lewis stares at the flames in ‘There Will Be Blood’

Charles Vanel surfaces in ‘The Wages of Fear’ …

… Martin Sheen surfaces in ‘Apocalypse Now’

PERSONAL FAVES: The Wages of Fear

Picture the scene: a flea-bitten South American town where children walk unclothed through the rutted streets and vultures lazily watch them; where the airstrip is nothing but the hard baked earth, the airport a shed and the customs official gimlet-eyed and corrupt and wanting his kick-back from every new arrival; where expatriates sweat it out under an unforgiving sun as they wait for an opportunity to get the hell out of there; where the local bar provides the only social outlet and tempers threaten to flair into violence.

It’s here that Mario (Yves Montand) is killing time, arguing with the locals and enduring the clinging attentions of bar girl Linda (Véra Clouzot). Then fellow Parisian Jo (Charles Vanel), swish in his tropical suit and talking a tough line of macho BS, arrives. Mario and Jo strike up an immediate (and borderline homo-erotic) friendship. They drink together, bemoan their surroundings and start some shit with Luigi (Folco Lulli), an Italian who is perhaps the only sympathetic character in the whole film.

Jo has an ‘in’ with Bill O’Brien (William Tubbs), foreman at the Southern Oil Company plant just outside of town, an American outfit who are laying a pipeline across the country. Jo’s pleas for a cushy number and some easy money fall on deaf ears, however.

Then an oil fire blazes out of control at a rig miles away from the plant and O’Brien makes an on-the-spot executive decision at an emergency meeting: load up two trucks with a tonne of nitro-glycerine apiece, get non-union drivers (ie. ones who won’t be missed if they get blown to smithereens), send them across 300 miles of bad road (or at times no road) and hope that at least one truck arrives. (Take dynamite to a fire? you may ask. A conflagration as severe as an oil well fire can really only be extinguished one way: trigger an explosion that consumes the oxygen around the fire.)

So O’Brien puts the word out that he’s looking to hire four drivers, at $2000 a man, to take their lives into their own hands. See why it’s called ‘The Wages of Fear’?

The, ahem, lucky four are Mario and Jo in one truck, Luigi and German ex-fighter pilot Bimba (Peter van Eyck) in the other. Now, bear in the mind that this was a French production made just seven years after the end of the war. The Italian and the German remain calm and resolute as they encounter one pitfall on the road after another, while the two Frenchman prove themselves callous (Mario) and cowardly (Jo).

That said, it was the anti-American sentiment that generated the most controversy on the film’s release. The choice of Southern Oil as the name of the oil company didn’t go over too well with Standard Oil, and the depiction of American bosses as anti-union, indifferent to the indigenous workers who die in the fire and unconcerned as to the fate of Mario and co. led to about twenty minutes’ worth of cuts being made for its US release.

Which is harsh. This is, after all, an Henri-Georges Clouzot film – and for H.G. Clouzot, despair at the human condition went beyond mere matters of nationality. From ‘Le Corbeau’ (1943), a venal study of provincial jealousies and poison pen letters, to his last film ‘La Prisonnière’ (1968), an examination of voyeurism and sexual objectification, Clouzot painted portraits of nihilism on the blackest of canvases. There is, in his filmography, simply no hope. I mentioned that Luigi and Bimba stay calm and resolute in the face of adversity; more so than Mario and Jo, they’re the closest ‘The Wages of Fear’ has to heroes. Doesn’t prevent ’em from going up in flames though.

Oh, sorry. Should have put a “SPOILER ALERT” warning there. But like I said before, this is an H.G. Clouzot film – you didn’t expect a happy ending, did you?

There is a whole article to be written about why Clouzot was cinema’s master miserablist. His first films were produced by the Continental Film Company, a Goebbels-authorised propagandist production company operating in Nazi-occupied France, which essentially branded him a collaborator (even though ‘Le Corbeau’ can be read as a very subtle comment on life under occupation). Nevertheless, he was barred from film production after ‘Le Corbeau’ until 1947. He suffered ill-health throughout his life, including a four-year spell in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis. He was a perfectionist who demanded the absolute from his cast and crew (on ‘The Wages of Fear’, Montand and Vanel contracted conjunctivitis after filming a scene that has them floundering in a pool of crude oil) that created tension and bad feeling on set. You could easily call him the French Kubrick … except that his continued fame owes much to his status as the French Hitchcock.

Gloomy old sod or no, Clouzot could create a scene of suspense second to none. Personally, I’d rank ‘The Wages of Fear’ as a more accomplished nerve-shredder than anything Hitch did. Four set-pieces in particular induce sphincter-tightening, knuckle-whitening, squirmy agitation every time I watch it: the drivers speeding up to 40mph to take a stretch of pot-holed road (any slower and the bumps and jolts would set off the nitro); a mountain pass with a bend so tight that navigating it necessitates backing onto a rickety wooden platform overhanging a sheer drop (you’ve heard the expression “cliffhanger”; this film makes it literal) – there are two trucks, so Clouzot puts you through the whole risky manoeuvre twice; a landslide blocking the road that sees Bimba utilise some of his cargo to blast the way clear; and a nasty bit of business involving a ruptured pipeline, a deepening pool of crude oil, a slip (again quite literally) on Jo’s part and a heartless decision on Mario’s.

And then, when it’s all over and the payload delivered, Clouzot signs off with barbed irony that’s both utterly inevitable and a slap in the face. I don’t think I can honestly say that I know of a film so bleak that manages to be so tense, exciting and, in places, even exhilarating. It makes ‘Ice Road Truckers’ look like a Sunday drive.

Right At Your Door

Whiling away a slow afternoon at work looking back at some reviews I posted on MovieBuff Redux, my previous corner of the blogosphere, it struck me that 2006 – the period I was most active in posting on that blog – was a huge downer of a year as far as American cinema was concern. Don’t get me wrong, some bloody great films came out that year … it’s just that the best of them were so resolutely downbeat they make ‘The Dark Knight’ look like ‘Blazing Saddles’.

In particular, five years after the event and with the scars still painfully visible, 2006 was the year of 9/11 cinema. There was Paul Greengrass’s ‘United 93’, as uncomfortable a film-going experience as I’ve ever had; a film, indeed, that I’ve only seen the once. Then there was Oliver Stone’s ‘World Trade Center’, which I just couldn’t bring myself to go and see. Occupying a thematic middle ground between them was Chris Gorak’s ‘Right at Your Door’.

Gorak’s film, however, differs in several ways. While ‘United 93’ and ‘World Trade Center’ were specifically depicted all-too-real events, ‘Right at Your Door’ is emblematic of the cinema of 9/11 in that it seems to have developed from the climate of fear which the American government and media have perpetuated in the aftermath of the attacks.

The aesthetic differs, too, but that can be said of all three films. ‘United 93’ achieves an almost documentary sense of realism whereas ‘World Trade Center’ – from the look of the trailer and the opinions of friends who saw it – took a more heavily emotional approach. ‘Right at Your Door’ is a smaller film: low-budget, low-key and, a few early scenes apart, claustrophobically limited in its setting.

Most of the action takes place inside a small suburban house. Or rather, most of the inaction. The film opens with out-of-work musician Brad (Rory Cochrane) seeing his career-focused wife Lexi (Mary McCormack) off to work. Shortly thereafter, a series of ‘dirty’ bombs are detonated across LA. Brad tries to find his wife, but encounters police roadblocks; turned back, he seals his home in accordance with official instructions broadcast over the radio. Then he waits, as ash floats across the city. Waits for help. For information. For news of his wife.

Gorak turns the very tedium of waiting into the kind of nerve-shredding suspense of which Hitchcock would have been proud. Then - when Lexi turns up, alive but apparently infected - his film takes a turn into yet darker territory. The ensuing scenes are pretty much a two-hander, character-driven, redolent of Bergman at his bleakest. And even then, Gorak has one nasty fucker of a surprise up his sleeve.

I’m not giving anything away, but it’s one of the darkest, most unpalatable ironies this side of H.G. Clouzot*.

‘Right at Your Door’ is one of those films that benefits from its budgetary restrictions. There are no big crowd scenes, no pyrotechnic special effects. Instead, a sense of urgency is generated by simply not knowing (Gorak doesn’t even bother with who may or may not be responsible for the bombings), a gnawing sense of dread building and building until the shatteringly apocalyptic final moments.




*Speaking of whom, it’s not exactly gearing up to be a laugh-fest next on the Personal Faves project, either. Ooops, wasn’t April was supposed to be my have-fun, share-the-love, happy-go-lucky month on the blog?

Top ten femmes fatale

Kathleen Turner as Matty Walker in ‘Body Heat’

Jennifer Tilly as Violet in ‘Bound’

Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins in ‘The Killers’

Diane Lane as Lorry Dane in ‘The Big Town’

Lana Turner as Cora Smith in ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’

Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat in ‘Out of the Past’

Linda Fiorentino as Bridget Gregory in ‘The Last Seduction’

Rita Hayworth as Gilda Mundsen in ‘Gilda’

Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson in ‘Double Indemnity’

Theresa Russell as Catherine Peterson in ‘Black Widow’

Jaws

My thanks to Paul Rowe for the following article:


“The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.”

Typing these opening words to his as yet untitled novel in 1973, Peter Benchley would have been unaware of the impact he was about to make on popular culture. A couple of years later, ‘Jaws’ the phenomenon was in full swing – and cinema would never be the same again.

Credited with being the first summer ‘event’ movie is, perhaps, a dubious honour, but ‘Jaws’, when considered as merely a piece of cinema, more than lives up to its legend.

A girl strips off her clothes and bounds gleefully to the sea in the opening sequence, and we are taken in with her. When the camera sinks below the surface, prompting the first bars of John Williams’ immortal score, we know what she doesn’t. But we are powerless to help. Don’t go in, we implore silently. Towards the end of her futile struggle, she chokes, “Oh, it hurts”, through a mouthful of foam and blood, and is taken down for the last time. At this point, we exhale, and realise we haven’t done so for some while.

From this, arguably one of the most memorable openings in cinema history, the tension rarely relents. One by one, we are introduced to the main players: Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (a career best Robert Shaw). Brody’s fish out of water (if you’ll excuse the pun) city cop is perfectly pitched to conflict with Hooper, the wealthy shark expert from the Oceanographic Institute, who, in turn, is constantly baited by the domineering presence of old-school fisherman, Quint.

One of director Steven Spielberg’s achievements is in perfectly balancing the verbal interplay, resulting in the scenes of character development which bring relief between each action set-piece and prove as memorable as the shark attacks themselves. The script (credited to Carl Gottlieb, but in fact, somewhat of a joint venture) takes some of the plaudits, but ultimately it must be the director who receives acknowledgement for ensuring that, by the time the final hunt is on, these characters are as familiar to us as any cast member of a long running soap opera.

After a number of skilfully executed scenes of attack, public denial by the Mayor (Murray Hamilton) and his office, a handful of red herrings and – finally – chaos on the fourth of July, the three men set sail on Quint’s boat, the Orca, to hunt the shark. Spielberg’s masterstroke is to not allow the audience a sight of land again until the end credits, creating an environment of perfect claustrophobia in the most open location on earth.

Once the hunters have become the hunted, there’s nowhere for the Orca to hide and there’s no relief for the audience. The tension is cranked like woven steel fishing line. Man is pitted in a primeval struggle against an unthinking, relentless adversary; death itself, if you will. This machine-like predator will not be bargained with and will not see reason. If it catches you, you’re dead. The final reveal of the beast itself is delayed and perfectly timed, which offsets the film’s only true shortcoming: its modest and somewhat dated special effects.

The main players are not stereotypical movie heroes and are all the more human for that. Brody wants to be anywhere but on the sea and needs a bigger boat. Hooper believes technology will be his saviour. Quint takes it personally and is, as a result, perhaps the most cartoonish of all the characters; yet, ironically, he has the most human scene with his astonishingly haunting monologue on the fate of the USS Indianapolis.

Yellow barrels break the surface, heralding the next onslaught, whales call in the calm of night and Williams’ incessant score ebbs and flows, as the film builds to its frantic climax. Only then, as the survivors paddle to shore, are we allowed to relax. Now we can laugh and pretend we weren’t really that scared.

But we know, don’t we, that the next time we go in the water, a simple tune will float through our minds and we might just feel the need to look below the surface.

by Paul Rowe