From the Shelf: Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
Acquired: A long, long time ago (probably mid-2000).
Seen before?: Twice, both times from this DVD, Last viewing likely late in 2003.
For my money, the greatest war film I’ve ever seen. There’s the famous Truffaut quote about a truly anti-war film being impossible to make because cinema makes war seem exciting; if we accept this as a truism, I submit that Coppola’s extraordinary, expansive rendition of the Vietnam War should be considered the rare truly anti-war film, because it makes war seem exhausting, paranoid and terrifying, and it does so better than any film I can think of that isn’t named Come and See. Most of the military grunts we see are twitchy, frightened young men who do whatever they can to distract themselves from the fact of the war, and the few truly competent soldiers we see are all completely insane, ranging from the outward barking mania of surf-obsessed Colonel Kilgore to the mind-blown, hollow-eyed fellow at the Do Long bridge who is uncannily accurate with a grenade launcher. At the center of it all is the grim Captain Willard, who exists only as a man of war, and the enigmatic Colonel Kurtz, whose clarity of vision regarding his purpose and function in the war machine have left him both the sanest and most psychotic man in the film. The overarching idea here is not of war as a cause of psychosis but as an incarnation of it - madness is endemic to the soldier because what they’re participating in is madness, and you can only simmer in that shit for so long before it rubs off on you. Apocalypse Now is a hugely harrowing vision of Hell from a great filmmaker who would never again work at this level - but then, most filmmakers never even get to this level.
Up next: Ghosts and perverts…
D2D entry #65: The Big Bird Cage (1972, Jack Hill)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #1.)
Roger Ebert is generally a very intelligent, perceptive and generous writer. However, like all of us, he sometimes makes assertions that ring a bit false. For instance, his review of Switchblade Sisters contains several sentences that come just short of calling exploitation mainstay director Jack Hill a useless hack. I haven’t yet seen Switchblade Sisters, so I can’t say whether or not it accurately represents the Jack Hill I think I know. What I can say, though, is that the work I’ve seen from the man displays an acute understanding of genre mechanics, audience expectations and the value of keeping both in flux.
The Big Bird Cage, today’s example, reads on paper like a fairly typical Women-In-Prison effort, with scantily clad babes stuck in a tropical hellhole at the mercy of sadistic guards and each other. Throw in some violence, some simmering lesbian tension and lots of cheesecake, and bang! you got a movie. What’s fascinating about Bird Cage, then, is the way that Hill pushes against the tropes and thematics of the genre while throwing in more tonal shifts than a South Korean film festival. The prison shenanigans don’t even start until roughly fifteen minutes into the film, by which point we’ve already gotten Pam Grier playing a guitar, a political shootout in a Filipino nightclub and Sid Haig at his most charmingly lecherous. The fallout from the shootout lands professional harlot-to-the-powerful Anitra Ford in the titular place, a tropical prison barracks/labor camp where women toil day in and day out processing sugar cane in an enormous bamboo structure. As Ford tries to use political connections to get her out of the prison, there’s a parallel strand with Grier and Haig’s revolutionary group conspiring to land Grier in the prison (presumably to strike a blow of freedom against The Man).
Beyond the flipping between the A plot and the B plot, the tone of the film is wont to change from cut to cut, so that low comedy will follow sadistic acts of violence and the antagonistic relationship between sassy black chick Carol Speed and taciturn Amazonian lesbian Karen McKevic suddenly turns credibly tragic when one of them bites it in the Bird Cage. Then there’s the big fiery action climax; what starts triumphant gradually darkens as many of the female denizens, unexpectedly, start getting mowed down. Yet there’s still time for a side trip involving rape — and when that WIP mainstay rears its ugly head, it’s not man-on-woman or woman-on-woman per the usual, but three sex-hungry female prisoners forcing themselves on one of the flamingly gay male guards. (PC attitude is in short supply — Haig manages to infiltrate the prison by caricaturing himself as homosexual.)
Then there’s the matter of Hill’s eye. Even in the midst of dreck and degradation, he can still find the occasional elegiac image (like the long shot of Ford, suspended by her hair, cast against the rich orange-yellow of a Filipino sunset). And when the nasty warden finally gets his, Hill pulls a meta-cinema trick that brings the film that much closer to Two-Lane Blacktop. He may not be Fellini, but the motherfucker knows what he’s doing.
You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.
In his autobiography Everything I Needed to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger, Lloyd Kaufman (perhaps apocryphally) quotes “Li’l Abner” cartoonist Al Capp as having uttered, “All humor is based in cruelty.” His career is yet young, but Jody Hill thus far would seem to agree with that. With his features The Foot Fist Way and Observe and Report, as well as his work on the television show Eastbound and Down, Hill demonstrates a fascination with finding the exact division point between laughter and pain for the purpose of dancing on it en pointe. Observe and Report, his latest film, is a more successful venture than his debut Foot Fist in this regard, if only because Seth Rogen’s blinkered mall-cop Ronnie has an element of the tragic about him in his thorough misunderstanding of his station in life; while Danny McBride, as Fred Simmons the delusional tae kwon do instructor in Foot Fist, comes off merely as a pathetic raging asshole, there’s a sadness in Ronnie’s plight that stems partly from his struggles with mental illness and partly from Rogen’s unshakable natural charisma (he doesn’t have an aggressive persona, which is why his role here works as a nicely thought-out bit of counter-type casting while also softening the brutality of the humor just enough). That said, it’s still a pretty bitter pill - Hill is working with a more consistent rhythm and a somewhat more sympathetic protagonist, but he’s still mining laughs from parental neglect, blatant racism, thuggishness, violence, drug abuse, loneliness, misery, and the gleeful crushing of dreams by authority figures. (There’s also the rape thing, but that’s been covered far too well elsewhere.)
The film’s most extraordinary sequence, though, comes at the film’s end, when everything that has been denied Ronnie suddenly gets handed to him all at once in a big cordon bleu of smirking revenge. What impressed me about this wasn’t just its graceful construction (Hill has advanced quite a ways in his visual compositions and use of editing) but its nebulous nature. I’ve read reviews that dismiss this as a needlessly neat tying-up of ends, to which I can only say: Well, yeah, except maybe it’s on purpose. There’s a sense that this balancing of the cosmic scales is too perfect to be true, that it could all be in the realm of fantasy. If you’ve seen it, think about the song that’s playing during Ronnie’s dreamy pursuit of the flasher. Then think about the last time that song popped up in a film’s climactic moments. See where that takes you.
D2D entry #61: Bobbi Jo and the Outlaw (1976, Mark L. Lester)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #3.)
If you’ve ever heard of this film before, you probably know it as the film in which she who would be Wonder Woman gets her tits out. That’s enough justification for a film right there; if Godard is correct and the history of cinema is the history of boys photographing girls, then I can think of few girls who deserve to be added to that history more than the ripe fullness of 1970s Lynda Carter. But Angel Tompkins has a body that lives up to her given name, and constant nudity on her part wasn’t enough to keep The Teacher interesting. So I soldier on from Ms. Carter’s magnificent bosoms and start into why I unexpectedly rather liked this fugitives-in-love flick from exploitation mainstay Lester.
Anyone who’s paying attention will notice within roughly ten minutes that this is a fairly bald downmarket ripoff of Bonnie and Clyde. Lynda is Bonnie, Marjoe Gortner is the Billy-the-Kid-worshipping stand-in for Clyde, Jessie Vint shows up in the role of Buck, Belinda Balaski plays a distaff Blanche, etc. etc. We’re not talking about the most original concoction here, but the cliches and expected beats are all hit with a surprising amount of professional panache. Lester’s isn’t the most inspired of directors, but he knows how to keep this kind of ozoner moving, and he’s remarkably faithful to the gradual darkening his inspiration’s narrative progress. Call me a sucker, but these sorts of narratives, hinging as they do on corruption, marching loss of innocence and inevitable reckonings, tend to leave me pleased (hell, I even liked Baise-Moi). All Lester has to do is avoid fucking it up while doling out the exploitable elements as a reasonable pace. This he does with a sturdy confidence. It’s easy to see why he’s still working while many of his ’70s contemporaries dropped out of the picture in the video age.
The most fascinating wrinkle in the film, though, is the casting of former child preacher Gortner in the role of the outlaw Lyle Wheeler. Gortner’s a magnetic presence, using the charisma and forceful personality cultivated during his youthful roadshow days to incarnate a likeable, goofy guy who nonetheless likes robbing and shooting people. It’s easy to understand why Bobbi Jo would initially fall for him (the whole bad-boy thing), but what matters is why she stays, and Gortner’s portrayal makes that credible. Even more interestingly, though, is that his past life is clearly factored into the casting, as noted at several times in the script. Most pointedly, there’s a scene where Lyle is teaching Bobbi Jo how to fire a gun. After a couple aborted attempt, Bobbi Jo hits the target, at which point Lyle says: “Told ya, it’s just like prayin’.” Armed robbery or fleecings based on misplaced hysterical belief — it’s all crime in the end.
