Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981); The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980); Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947)

In his terrific new book Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema, Steven Rybin writes that the images in The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) "haunt us in ways that go beyond their functional place in a cleanly modulated, classical narrative, taking on, as so many images in Carpenter’s cinema do, a distinctive status as haunting details that remain with us long after the details of the narrative drive have been forgotten" (167). Rybin's contention here is, of course, the escape valve defenders of horror/slasher films wield to dismiss the genre's frequently sloppy narratives, especially their often risible endings. And while I agree with Rybin at least with respect to The Fog at its best, the narrative drive sometimes sticks with you despite your best efforts to go along with the style-over-substance defenses of the genre. This is an unenviable situation to find oneself in because you get pilloried if you dare to bring up some narrative inconsistency or even just request basic story information to make sense of the thing. 

Unfortunately for me, the one moment I remembered from Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) when I saw it first-run at 11 years old (!) was the scene with the hooker and the sailor in the train station phone booth. Given my age, I thought there was some arcane sex thing happening that caused the sailor to leave the phone booth in disgust. But over forty years later, watching the film again last week, I still don't know! Or rather, I know only slightly more. I'm assuming what happened is that the sailor came too quickly. I also assume that they're both upset about this because they had agreed on $30 for a 30-minute session. But a 30-minute blow job in a public place? Why is such a ludicrous deal even on the table? And why does the hooker get so initially upset about the sailor's quick nut? It's $30 for a job that took about a minute tops. 

OK so fine, I'm focusing on something drearily specific and ignoring all of De Palma's hallmark fireworks. But then why include this exchange in the first place? Since Burke (John Lithgow) is going to kill the hooker anyway, why not just have Burke proposition her and cut out the sailor entirely? And this in a scene which is extraneous to begin with as greyer eminences than me such as Robin Wood (in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond) have pointed out. Why not cut the fat and get to the fireworks that are De Palma's raison d'être? 

Criticism of this nature gets you accused of being one of what Hitchcock called "our old friends, the plausibles," those viewers who would ignore questions of form while harping on implausible plot points. The irony here is that the only such moment in Hitchcock's entire oeuvre that renders me a plausible, as opposed to dozens in De Palma's, is the scene in which Cary Grant holds onto the knife in Townsend's back in North by Northwest, an action I find narratively lazy. But all viewers become plausibles at some point, even De Palma's most ardent supporters. My plausibility meter gets triggered by violence, especially against women whose murdered bodies have been strewn across a century-plus of cinema. If a director is going to have a character murdered, then all the narrative t's better be crossed in order to justify the slaughter to whatever extent justification is even possible. If a murder is not going to approached with a certain amount of gravitas, then a narrative gaffe will only cheapen the effect and infuriate all the more. For me to accept an implausibility, there must be some other compensation beyond a gorgeous tracking shot or rococo set design. And I get it, misanthropes - humans are difficult to like. Let me hold off on any moral indignation to therefore state that it's easy and hence boring to imagine them slaughtered. Attempting to make even the barest of interpersonal connections with others would make for a fresher cinema if only because such a route is more difficult and hence consistently ignored by mainstream Hollywood filmmakers. (And quick, horror fans - name the actress who played the hooker).

Another irony is that the hooker/sailor scene did not cancel out whatever pleasure I took in Blow Out. In fact, I prefer it to Sisters, Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, and Dressed to Kill. It's never boring, the film production milieu is a cinephile's delight, and there are plenty of moments ridiculed by the plausibles that I'm perfectly fine with, namely, Jack's (John Travolta) reconstruction of the car crash via photographs from a magazine. A bigger problem, as always, is where the film winds up. Jack grows obsessed with pursuing justice for the Chappaquiddick-like incident he witnessed near the start of the film. Meanwhile, Burke is tasked with covering up the incident by killing Sally (Nancy Allen), the hooker who survived the car crash and can confirm what really happened on that bridge. Burke uses this convenience to become a serial killer and murder several other women in the hopes that Sally's eventual murder will be chalked up as merely one more thereby dissociating it from the car crash. The final shot confirms that Jack has abandoned his pursuit of justice in mourning Sally's murder. The film thus morphs from a political thriller into a slasher film, a trajectory that Chris Dumas, in his punky Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible, claims "makes Blow Out so difficult to read, to sort into coherence" (185). 

Quite to the contrary, Blow Out is all too coherent. It exemplifies Hollywood's compulsion for supplanting meditations on larger sociopolitical structures/institutions with stories driven by the psychology of an individual character. And it belongs to a distinctly post-1960s tradition of relinquishing oneself to the idea that corruption and violence are an indigenous part of American life and there's nothing one can do about it. In this respect, Blow Out is of a piece with such dubious faves as The Godfather saga and Chinatown. For Dumas, "this is how De Palma might be said to have a purely negative politics, as Adorno might be said to have had" (197), one which highlights how we are all whores with a price (200), how political crime "disappears in a blizzard of information noise," and how a "protagonist can only and always fail" (184). For me, it's permission to remain weak-willed and mutter "we're so fucked" when political corruption gets (or rather, continues to be) intense so we can hide our heads in the sand instead of organizing to fight. It's an insult to those who (foolishly, in this hopeless conception) hold doom at bay and battle for a better world. 

The Fog is certainly less ambitious than Blow Out. And its narrative is even more of a mess. As per horror ordinance, the ending is godawful; it's Carpenter admitting "oops - we forgot to kill off this important character so let's get that out of the way immediately before the end credits." And it has implausibilities that drive me bananas such as Jamie Lee Curtis wasted as a young gal implausibly (and quickly) falling for a man many years her senior (the few times it's the other way around, it's almost cause for a 20/20 exposé). But other implausibilities won my heart because they're not tied to violence and/or political resignation. For instance, Adrienne Barbeau's DJ is the source of much of the film's bizarre, even poetic charm. Implausibly, she plays a sort of cocktail jazz during her third-shift sets (I later discovered all of the songs are library music!). And there's a gorgeous shot of her implausibly playing station identification tapes (they sound eerily like number stations) on a cumbersome recorder as she descends a mammoth staircase to a lighthouse, the implausible location for her radio transmissions. Here is where implausibility shades into bafflement and the film takes on some of the hypnotic, indigestible quality of the best art films. By the climax, I didn't mind when she implausibly broadcasts to her listeners the trajectory of the murderous fog, tracking its every movement with a hilarious specificity (a paraphrase: "It's now winding its way down Applebury Lane right past Mrs. Fish's house!") 

Also lulling and attractive were the many shots of the still waters awaiting the fog's impending invasion. They reminded me of the infinitely superior Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947). One of the great head films, Le Tempestaire runs 23 minutes and does indeed feature a story. But it's merely a skeleton through which Epstein spaces out over the waters crashing off the coast of Brittany on Belle-Île-en-Mer. Through slow-motion, fast-motion, reverse, and long takes, Epstein transforms the titular tempest into a newly baptized form of nature, one with rules that transcend the natural world. It may be just as politically escapist as Blow Out. But it's far breezier and inexhaustible in its ability to dumbfound.

The version here has no English subtitles but you really don't need them. EDIT: Or you can enjoy it in better quality and with English subtitles here (thanks to the great Patrick Friel).

Blow Out: B+

The Fog: A-minus

Le Tempestaire: A+

The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)

It's no surprise that it took nearly forty years for Nathanael West's 1939 novel The Day of the Locust to get any sort of Hollywood treatment if only because Hollywood, in the year of its greatest flowering, could never countenance such a venomous critique of its ubiquity. But the New Hollywood brats were running amok by the 1970s and West's disdain for Tinseltown was tailor-made for mavericks like Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt. For one thing, no classical Hollywood director could get away with a faithful airing of the novel's pulpier aspects of nasty violence. For another, the impressionistic, foreshortened chapters found a home in the discursive narratives championed by the New Hollywood directors and their supporters. Like the best of those films, The Day of the Locust dazzles in its indigestibility - its heroless trajectory, its dead-end scenes, its hothouse zoom-cured graphics. 

The only problem with both film and novel is that they traffic in an unearned contempt for humanity. West deserves plaudits for pulling off the paradoxical trick of excavating the interiorities of his most vacuous characters. Nowhere is this more effective as when Homer Simpson [sic] (played with contents-under-pressure subtlety by Donald Sutherland in the film) tries to fill the emptiness of his home by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" - "It was the only he song he knew." Pace Adorno, I cannot think of a more accurate depiction of a pathetic, incurious life. 

But because West subscribes to the theory that "nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure," his misanthropy gets wearying. Even in the opening pages, he portrays Los Angeles with no hope: "Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon."And as with any garden-variety misanthrope, he professes to know the interiority of the masses or at least the mass accrued outside a Hollywood premiere awaiting their allegorical death by immolation in the climax: "It allowed itself to be hustled and shoved out of habit and because it lacked an objective. It tolerated the police, just as a bull elephant does when he allows a small boy to drive him with a light stick." You get the impression that West feels they deserve the violence that befalls them because "[t]hey haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure." That last is particularly galling since it attributes moral failing in part to a lack of wealth. And it leaves no room to honor those without money who have the equipment for leisure and pleasure, staving off a meaninglessness to which West so weakly succumbs.

Grade: A-minus

Six 1960s films

Select Boomers shall be delighted. But it's difficult not to read Hollywood films of the 1960s through a countercultural lens, even those released at the opposite end of the decade. So in the final scene of The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran (Shirley MacLaine) drop out of not quite society but rather, the corporate nine-to-five grind and leave Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) to his Don Draperesque lechery. As proto-hippies, they may go on to lose each other at Woodstock or, more likely, in the halls of MOMA, given Baxter's penchant for festooning his apartment with replicas of Picasso and Mondrian. But as the decade progresses, the tenor of the dropping out becomes more strident and intense, at least as it's played out in the films below.

There aren't many obvious connections between Baxter and Paul Newman as the title character in Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963). Lemmon feels of an older generation even though Newman is thirteen days his senior [sic]. But given the considerable swagger Hud exhibits in every scene, one might surmise that Baxter realizes his Hudness at the end of The Apartment when he finally gathers up enough fortitude to forsake an executive position in the hopes of saving his soul. 

What exactly Hud is swaggering over is open to interpretation, though. He rails against big government prompting Pauline Kael to conclude that for her, "Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater" (18).* But I took him for another proto-hippie because he rails against everything, a cousin to Marlon Brando's Johnny spouting "Whaddaya got?" in The Wild One a decade prior. On the precipice of dropping out, he could just as soon vote for no one as for LBJ or Goldwater. And to the extent that Ritt and screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. (adapting Larry McMurty's 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By) intended audiences to hiss at Hud as a materialistic brute and instead revere his morally upright father Homer (Melvyn Douglas), the film must be counted as largely a failure. As Kael notes, "it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy...Hud, the 'villain' of the piece, is less phony than Homer" (ibid.). But that doesn't mean the good liberals in the audience can't claim Hud as their own. This is what happens when filmmakers play with ideological fire - you showcase Oz at the risk of audiences wanting to remain there instead of returning to the sepia drabness of Kansas. James Wong Howe's unshowy, even skeletal photography assists in this endeavor, staying out of the way as we project whatever ideology onto Hud's attractive frame.

The most remarkable aspect of the lesser-known All Fall Down (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is that it's a dry run for Hud and all the more attractive for it. It's the far quirkier film with Brandon deWilde preprising [sic] his role as Lonnie, the nephew who looks up to but eventually rejects his uncle Hud. The Hud here is played by Warren Beatty as a young stud named Berry-Berry who escorts and discards a string a middle-aged women. His younger brother Clinton (deWilde) adores him. But Eva Marie Saint arrives on the scene and Clinton becomes repulsed at Berry-Berry's sadistic treatment of her. As with Patricia Neal's Oscar-winning role in Hud, Saint exists solely to enact a Freudian battle of wills and libidos between two male relatives. Still, Frankenheimer makes the thing digestible in the end by bedecking the Oedipal drama with odd trills and featuring a powerhouse performance by Angela Lansbury as a matriarch even more incestuous than the one she played for Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. 

Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) is the most rebellious film here in terms of form. Beatty as the title character spouts such Hudisms as "I gotta live the only way I'm at least free" and, indeed, he seems in perpetual search of something. But to give you an idea of the chaotic nature of the film, we never learn the character's real name. In flight from the Mafia which may or may not be after him, he gains a social security card stolen from a man named Miklos Wunejeva and he gets rechristened Mickey One. The film is all flight comprised of evanescent vignettes and confounding detours. Scenes of religious fervor, intense melodrama, and comedy both good and bad seem to drop in from other movies. They hook viewers in for two or three minutes and then baffle us by neglecting to connect to the subsequent scene. Written by Alan Surgal and edited by Aram Avakian (who would go on to direct his own chaos theorem with 1970's End of the Road), Mickey One reportedly baffled even Beatty himself who kept losing his footing with the project. In this, he's a stand in for the viewers themselves who wind up either exhilarated or annoyed by the tsunami Penn and company make of the narrative. Classical Hollywood types Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield are on board and they seem more game than Beatty with the swirl of emotional registers and story fragments, perhaps because they portray the purveyors of the paranoia that keeps Mickey in flop sweat and bandages. In the same year, Bob Dylan sang on "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?" and that same omen infuses Mickey One with an agitated energy that feels indelibly rock 'n' roll (jazz being a foregone conclusion given that Stan Getz scored much of the soundtrack).

If so far these reviews exemplify the proclivity of critics for making connections between any two disparate films, then Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964) shall be the fly in that particular ointment. It shares a vague sense of disaffection and soul desertion with the other films. James Franciscus plays the title hunk who moves from Kentucky to Manhattan and becomes a best-selling author. But soon, under the influence of various big-city sybarites, he compromises his integrity and must return to Kentucky to finds his true self. Overall, though, it shares little with the angsty titles here except insofar as it serves as their negative snapshot. The frequent book porn points to a majority far more silent than Hud (at least for now), the audiences who purchased the chunky tomes that would be adapted into the highest grossing films of the decade: Spartacus, Exodus, The Longest Day, The Carpetbaggers, Doctor Zhivago, and onward to Hawaii, The Sand Pebbles, Valley of the Dolls, etc., a list Herman Wouk hoped to join with his 783-page Youngbloood Hawke (1962). 

It would be simple to claim that these were the people who were repulsed by Hud or Berry-Berry, maybe even Baxter and the men Lonnie and Clinton became, and afraid of encountering them in the big bad recently deserted cities or, worse, fearful that they'd infiltrate the well-tended suburbs. Peter Bogdanovich was not one of those people. But with his 1968 directorial debut Targets, he adds fuel to the suspicion that Hud and his ilk wind up like the Charles Whitman stand-in Bobby Thompson (Tom O'Kelly, chilling in his blasé malevolence). There's an icy fatalism to this film that would have impressed Fritz Lang if not made him shudder. But no title of the 1960s did more to presage the resignation that permeated the New Hollywood (The Godfather, Chinatown, etc.) if not Boomer ideology overall, the sense that violent fragmentation, maybe even history itself, was a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about it. Bogdanovich essentially plays himself in the film, shushing Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself in the film, while he watches Karloff on TV in The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931) while intoning "All the good movies have been made." One must wonder how Bogdanovich managed to go on having a career in directing after such a doomy pronouncement (at the very least, he could've spared us 1975's At Long Last Love). But in this conception, cinema is not just dead but deadly. In the most brilliant moment of rhetoric in this term paper of a film, the movie screen literally becomes murderous - Bobby has positioned himself behind a drive-in screen and shoots through it with his rifle at the moviegoers in their cars and environs. 80-year-old Karloff manages to stop him with his cane and slaps him across the face as if Bobby were a mere petulant child. "Is that what I was afraid of?" asks after 90 minutes of mourning over how the world had become more violent and scary than any of his films. It seems like a message made for the Silent Majority who voted Nixon as their president that same year. But they didn't know the film existed. They were busy seeing Funny Girl and The Love Bug.

The Apartment: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

Hud: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

All Fall Down: A-minus

Mickey One: A

Youngblood Hawke: C+ (docked a notch so I'm not tempted to watch it a third time)

Targets: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

* Pauline Kael; "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood." Film Quarterly 1 July 1964; 17 (4): 15–23.

 

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

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

This is a tough one. Structurally, it's hypnotic. It drifts from scene to scene with no imperative to create strong connective tissues in between. Especially in the first half, episodes occur at unspecified temporal junctures. And even as the narrative generates more forward motion in the second half, the increased linearity does not push the story towards a resolution of an enigma or the result of a high-stakes contest. All of which is fitting for a tale about a drifter with no direction in life.

Too bad the film had to have a star at the helm because Five Easy Pieces is one of the most obnoxious displays of toxic American individualism ever pinned to celluloid. Jack Nicholson plays one Robert "Bobby" Eroica Dupea, a disaffected musician who has given up a promising career (and the upper-middle-class values that go along with it) to work with the salt of the earth at an oil rig - ya know, where real, honest labor happens. Think of Five Easy Pieces as a sequel of sorts to Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999) in which Judge, not knowing what do with his antihero at the end of the film, gets him a job in construction, presumably free of the mind fuckery of his former employment as a white-collar drone. Bobby cannot even handle the oil rig job and soon he's off drifting. The de facto road movie that ensues indulges in at least three instances of the venal gotta-move-on-babe-don't-hold-me-back macho frontier spirit with respect to his girlfriend, the admittedly irritating Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black). The last instance is, of course, the final shot when Bobby strands Rayette at a gas station, a shot of extreme profundity for some, the height of assholism for others. 

There's also the famous "chicken salad sandwich" scene in which Bobby abuses a waitress for menu policies she had no hand in creating. The scene is played for laughs but it's funny only to those who fail to conceive of waitressing as labor. And it rings false besides since the waitress (crucially, she's unnamed but played by Lorna Thayer) would have just given Bobby whatever he wanted to end his harassment of her. All this before he reaches home in Puget Sound where he signals his superiority to his family and their friends at every turn.

Rafelson could have made the self-absorption go down with less stomach upset had he engaged in any kind of distanciation techniques. But we are clearly meant to be in awe of Bobby's rugged individuality. Take the early scene in which Bobby and his co-worker Elton (Billy "Green" Bush) are driving to the oil rig at a crawl on a crowded highway. Enraged at the standstill, Bobby jumps out of the car and makes a spectacle of himself, jumping on a car, barking at a dog, and unaware that his fellow travelers may be equally put out. He hops on the back of a pick up and plays an out-of-tune piano while Elton cheers his rebelliousness. Just look at that crazy kid and his shenanigans. 

Rafelson keeps cutting back to Elton to posit him as our surrogate as we're sutured into the scene. In a moment of epic dorkiness, he mimics Bobby's piano playing (I thought the New Hollywood was supposed to deliver us from the corniness of classical Hollywood cinema).

 

 Then he applauds Bobby before coaxing him back into the car.

All the while, the drivers are honking because Bobby is holding up traffic. Oh if only these zombies could recognize Bobby's esprit.  

 

But lo, Bobby ignores Elton and hitches a ride with the pick up truck, blowing off work with no apparent consequences, a luxury unavailable, one has to assume, to the drivers who can't hold their horses.

There's a hilarious sequence with Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil as lesbian hitchhikers, the former fabulously (and hyperbolically) cranky. Nicholson's eleventh-hour breakdown in front of his ailing father is a justifiably fantastic piece of acting. And some will claim that we are not supposed to be in awe of Bobby, that we can identify with the drivers instead of Elton. I'll leave you to debate that while I take in 1970 films of much greater substance such as Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma or Andy Milligan's Torture Dungeon. 

Grade: B+

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

I slated Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967) in a genre I called Feel That New Hollywood Train Comin'. But you can sense Preminger barreling toward it with this 1959 classic. There's an exciting disconnect watching old-guard actors like James Stewart (as "humble" country attorney Biegler, a virtuosic performance that's quite possibly his greatest ever) and Eve Arden exist in a world where words like "rape" and even "bitch" (!) are uttered (not to mention going toe-to-toe with such Methody new-guard actors as Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick [in a role abandoned by Lana Turner!], and George C. Scott). 

Not that 1959 (or any era) had the corner on modernity. Anatomy of a Murder recalls prior milestones in sophistication, exhibiting a bit of the Lubitsch touch in its ending. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932) comes to a close, for instance, when Mariette (Kay Francis) allows Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins) to steal ₣100,000 and a string of pearls from her. Her tone is bittersweet rather than enraged or screaming for vengeance. She may be in a funk for a day or so. But soon, she'll struggle to remember Gaston's name. Similarly, Biegler and his colleague McCarthy [sic] (Arthur O'Connell) shrug off the fact that Manion (Gazzara) has left town without paying them, a mindset perhaps absorbed from Biegler's secretary Maida (Arden) who never seems overly concerned that she hasn't received a paycheck in a while. Biegler isn't even bittersweet here. He's probably just eager to get back out on the lake to fish. Both endings still startle and even confuse today for how they flout expectations of rage and depression.

And even at that, I can think of at least six or seven Preminger films that cut it (Angel Face, Fallen Angel, The Human Factor, Bunny Lake is Missing, Bonjour Tristesse, maybe Daisy Kenyon if I can sift out my Joan Crawford idolatry, etc.) and many more that are its equal. After Sirk, he's my favorite classical Hollywood director.
Grade: A

Feel That New Hollywood Train Comin'!

A double feature that I call Feel That New Hollywood Train Comin'! Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) is a Twilight Zone episode stretched to feature length. But a damn gripping one every frame of the way. More shocking than the shots of peen in the grape-stomping Bacchanal scene (since it was apparently cut from the American first run) was the mention of a microwave oven. I had no clue they were around that early even as a status symbol. Then, oh boy, Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967) in the version slathered with golden caterpillar guts. I found the secondary coupling of the de facto spinster Alison (Julie Harris, incredible as always) and screaming Filipino queen Anacleto (Zorro David*) far more intriguing than Liz/Brando's gothic S/M. Not a terribly likeable film but a fascinating example of how haywire things can get (so everyone was okay with that preposterous final shot, huh?) when "dealing with" homosexuality. As for Robert Forster, dat ass! 

*IMDb lists this as his only film. He died on my birthday in 2008 in one city over from where I was raised!
Grades for both: B-plus

Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)

Klute looks better than ever in its new Criterion. It blew me away in undergrad and remains one of the precious few New Hollywood films I'd judge a masterpiece. And it's one of the first films to acknowledge how sound subjugates women as much as image. Everyone is working at such a high pitch here. Fonda earned her Oscar but understated performances like Donald Sutherland's rarely get the recognition they deserve.

Feel That New Hollywood Train Comin'

A double feature I call Feel That New Hollywood Train Comin'! Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) is a Twilight Zone episode stretched to feature length. But a damn gripping one every frame of the way. More shocking than the shots of peen in the grape-stomping Bacchanal scene (since it was apparently cut from the American first run) was the mention of a microwave oven. I had no clue they were around that early even as a status symbol. Then, oh boy, Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967) in the version slathered with golden caterpillar guts. Lawd. I found the secondary coupling of the de facto spinster Alison (Julie Harris, incredible as always) and screaming Filipino queen Anacleto (Zorro David*) far more intriguing than Liz/Brando's gothic S/M. Not a terribly likeable film but a fascinating example of how haywire things can get (so everyone was okay with that preposterous final shot, huh?) when "dealing with" homosexuality. As for Robert Forster, dat ass! *IMDb lists this as his only film. He died on my birthday in 2008 in one city over from where I was raised!