Those Tumescent 1970s

As with serial television, so with feature-length film - the longer a show/movie goes on, the better chance it has of shitting the bed. This is one reason why I gravitate towards the classical (pre-1960) era of Hollywood before running times (and budgets) grew tumescent. For instance, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) is so taut you could bounce a quarter off it. But Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake tacks on 35 minutes during which his version, well, shits the bed. The interior scenes evince an assured hand transforming the first half into a prismatic wonderland. But Kaufman loses control once the film moves outdoors for more workaday imagery. The climactic destruction of the pod lab is visually drab compared to the hypnotic moments in the mud spa. And while Denny Zeitlin's score works in burbling electronic mode, it's preposterously inappropriate when it adopts Star Wars clomp. Why the initial swirling of spores on a distant planet needed Valkyrie volume levels remains a mystery.

As a key tentpole of the New Hollywood, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) was tumescent to begin with, a roided-up exploitation film drunk on The Method. So it's not as if Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977) had a model of economy to work with. But at twenty minutes shorter than the first entry, it feels forty minutes longer. It pains me to admit this. As yet another example of my "perverse" readings, I'd always felt it trounced its predecessor. But a recent rewatch had me wishing I bailed at the forty-five-minute mark. Much of it still amazes. The psychiatric institute where Regan (Linda Blair) continues to heal is a dazzling honeycomb of windows and reflections and peripheral activity. Her NYC apartment sports a shatter of mirrors and opens out onto the most dangerous patio in Manhattan complete with incomplete railings and an Op Art birdhouse. And even zanier than the locust-eye views of Africa are the hypnosis sessions bathed in pulsating white light and low electronic moans. Too bad Boorman had to fashion a story out of all this scintillation. With a production plagued with rewrites and a frequently MIA director, the film loses its narrative footing and begs to be put out of its misery by the halfway point. Still, I'd rather have this playing in the art-porn theatre of my dreams than the first one. Easier to treat it like a piece of architecture rather than an absorbing drama. 

Standing apart from all these films is The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980) even though it supposedly forms part of Blatty's "Faith Trilogy" novels of The Exorcist and Legion. Good luck getting horror dorks on board with this sui generis wonder. Dave Kehr likens it to "wacky personal" films like William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders From Mars or James B. Harris’s Some Call It Loving. There's definitely a lot of the latter in The Ninth Configuration's setting (a creepy castle), style (dreamy freeze frames, cognitive shifts), and, especially, score (De Vol with a hangover). The worst I can say for it is that the insane asylum conceit affords Blatty a convenient excuse to parade around the wackiness. But it morphs into an unexpectedly moving portrait of PTSD as a motley crew of Vietnam vets try to make sense (and nonsense) of their lives. Unexpected because you've been treated to tryouts for an all-animal production of Hamlet, an astronaut encountering Jesus on the moon, one of the wildest bar fights in cinema history, and dozens of purple one-liners available for obsessive quoting. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956): A

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978): B+

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973): B+

Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977): B

The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980): A

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+