Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)

I agree with John Milius who wrote a draft of the screenplay: "I don't think it's so brilliantly written or so brilliantly acted. Siegel can take more credit than anyone for it." I couldn't care less about (the) acting. But the screenplay, whoa boy! Do a shot every time you hear a character utter some variation on "Well, that's why they call him Dirty Harry" and you'll be in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning by the end credits. Dirty Harry is Corn Central which is the fate of a first entry in a new genre, assuming that such a designation is true (or even can be true). But I trust that plenty of viewers in 1971 didn't need to wait for all the copycat films and television shows (and parodies) to detect the film's corniness.

That leaves Siegel, an adept genre director. To be sure, he's created an adept genre film here. The climactic counterpoint of the children singing on the bus while the sniveling psychopath Scorpio (Andy Robinson) attempts to send them to their doom is classic thriller architecture. And the famous shot when the camera blows back while the law-unabiding Harry tortures a confession out of Scorpio at Kezar Stadium is worthy of all the commentary it has engendered. To many minds, this moment proves that Siegel is trying to distance himself from Harry's psychotic behavior. I find this impossible to accept because the viewer knows more than Harry every step of the way. We know Scorpio is guilty. So who needs evidence? We already have it.

But who cares if this film is right wing or left wing, if it supports Harry stepping outside of the law or stands at a distance from his vigilantism, or both? As typical Hollywood product, it can only imagine individual solutions to systemic societal problems. It's called Dirty Harry, not Dirty Police Force or Dirty Urban Planning or Dirty Nixonian Politics of Resentment.

Grade: C+

Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)

Charley Varrick is a solid-plus crime flick helmed by one of the genre's masters. Siegel demonstrates his mastery in the face-clawing finale between Joe Don Baker in a car and Walter Matthau as the title character in a crop duster, a perfect metaphor for this frontierless western. With no more areas to colonize, the only place to go is up and out (although in keeping with the cynicism of 1970s American cinema, not even this happens as Varrick's plane winds up overturned at the very end). Also in keeping with the dictates of 1970s American cinema, women barely exist except to get killed off early or slapped around. Beyond that, there's not much more to say - the blessing and curse of the (even expertly directed) genre film.

Grade: B+

Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021)

An odd rooster, this. To start with the worst, women throw themselves at retired rodeo star Mike Milo, a character many decades younger than the 91-year-old Clint Eastwood who plays him. In a perfect world (to choose a redolent Eastwoodian phrase), that sentence would make no sense. But in that perfect world, we would enjoy the story a 91-year-old woman with men swooning over her. We would also enjoy her decades-long career as a director and bankable star. So while I applaud the unconventional relationships, the focus is on Eastwood and not the relationships. And certainly not the women either - the whorish Leta (Fernanda Urrejola) and the angelic Marta (Natalia Traven) are empty vessels for Eastwood who is always one.

But the structure of the film is perversely attractive. The long second act (at least it felt long; I didn't have a stopwatch) functions as a narrative oasis. Milo shacks up with Marta at a dusty café, retarding the progress in his mission to return the 13-year-old Rafo (Eduardo Minett) to his dad and Milo's former employer Howard (an equally dusty Dwight Yoakam). Slow dancing with Marta, teaching Rafo how to ride a horse, conversing with Marta's deaf grandchild, so little happens in this section that the more violent dénouement feels like a coda rather than a third act. Far from Eastwood's best but I'll take my shameless auteurist pleasures wherever I can get them.

Grade: B

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

It was apparently preordained that a deliciously overstuffed film such as Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta would elicit an overdetermined screening yesterday afternoon at the 59th New York Film Festival. In addition to the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property protesting the film outside and asking for reparations (for what, though?), the screening was the North American premiere of the film. It was also my partner's first time at the NYFF and my first time seeing a movie in a theatre since early 2020. Even more redolent for me, this is the first film I've seen since the death last year of my number one filmgoing buddy Bill Weber. I will carry his loss with me at every screening I attend. 

NYFF programmer Dennis Lim introduced the film by asking if any Catholics were in the audience. After about two or three dozen patrons raised their hand, Lim thanked them for sharing their Sunday with us. Verhoeven was not in attendance due to travel restrictions. But David Birke, who co-wrote the screenplay with Verhoeven, was on hand to provide some brief context and then we were off. No Q&A afterward.

I don't want to say too much about a film that most people will not get to see until December, especially one that depends on shock for much of its savor. So just thematics ahead, no spoilers. Loosely based on Judith C. Brown's Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Benedetta tells the story of Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira), a nun in seventeenth-century Italy who had a sexual relationship with another nun, Sister Bartolemea (Daphne Patakia). She experiences visions of Jesus and starts to bleed from her hands and feet. Due to these apparent miracles, she is made abbess of the convent, much to the chagrin of the previous abbess (Charlotte Rampling) who has serious doubts about the authenticity of Benedetta's visions. And when the lesbian relationship is discovered, problems very much ensue.

Verhoeven never settles the question of whether Benedetta's mysticism is real or just really great theatre. In her visions, Jesus is a studly Samson who vanquishes lurid CGI manifestations of fleshly guilt, a link back to the video game work of Isabelle Huppert's character in Elle, Verhoeven's previous provocation (2016). And yet Benedetta experiences these moments so fervently that they halt several convent ceremonies. Clues are dropped to suggest that she is faking her stigmata. But Jesus may be telling her to do so, therefore, how fake is it really? The central question of the film then becomes how willing one is to believe what one knows full well is not true.

In this, Benedetta reminds me of "Between Things and Souls: Sacred Atmospheres and Immersive Listening in Late Eighteenth-century Sentimentalism," a recent essay by Anne Holzmüller in which she analyzes late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century travel reports of Protestant German travelers to the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week. The reports record all manner of disappointments: patrons blithely eating oranges throughout the chapel; constant chatting before the illumination of the cross (pic below); Allegri's Miserere sung out of tune; improper positioning of the Pope during the papal blessing on Easter Sunday; etc. And yet, they also register succumbing to the high theatre of the events. Thus, in Holzmüller's estimation, "[a]s pietist, art-loving tourists, [they] face the dialectic tension between a desire for authenticity and immediacy on the one hand and, on the other hand, an awareness about the illusionary and deceptive character of the experience to its full extent" (231).*

As with Holy Week, so with Benedetta. And with Benedetta. Bartolemea, for one, wants to believe in Benedetta's mysticism. But she sees the fakery. How does one reconcile the two, if at all? It's a fundamental tension at the heart of religion (even for the protestors outside, I suspect, especially given how young so many of them were) and at the heart of cinema as well. Beyond the surface nunsploitation outrages, Benedetta's wrestling with these antinomies is Verhoeven's most compelling achievement. 

Grade: A-minus

*Holzmüller's essay appears in Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds, by Friedlind Riedel and Juha Torvinen, eds. London and New York, Routledge, 2020, 218-237.

Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)

I avoided this for decades because I assumed it was just another body-shaming, sex-phobic gorefest. Color me stunned that it achieves a stateliness quite uncharacteristic of the genre. The body count is minimal which allows the narrative to focus on semiotics (!) grad student Helen's (Virgina Madsen) investigation of the title folk anti-hero (Tony Todd) terrorizing the residents of Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project. The film's biggest drawback is the cartoonish depiction of the projects which comes off scarier than the Bates Motel. There is an attempt to imagine the texture of daily ghetto life in the character of Anne-Marie (Vanessa Williams; no, no that one), a single mother trying to raise her infant Tony. But overall, the haunted-house characterization of Cabrini-Green feels designed to play off (and confirm) the unexamined fears of white viewers. And if Helen is the rare narrative-driving, intelligent female protagonist, why do we see her breasts several times and never her husband Trevor's (Xander Berkeley) butt? 100% serious question.

Grade: B+

P. S. Dig the poster below. The scariest film since...last year???