Rampart (2011)

Directed by Oren Moverman
Written by James Ellroy, Oren Moverman
Starring Woody Harrelson, Robin Wright, Anne Heche, Ned Beatty, Ice Cube


I've been sloppy, yes.  I've not been keeping this blog going.  The reasons... oh, you don't want to know the reasons (there aren't any, but if there were, you wouldn't want to know; this is a film blog, after all).  Anyway, I've not updated it in ages, not since The Artist.  In the interim, The Artist has been hailed almost universally - aside from the inevitable backlash which comes with the universal hailing of anything - and won a sackful of awards, perhaps heralding in these troubled times a fondness for warm, cosy, lovely, utterly charming pictures.  Simple pictures that set out to warm the cockles of our hearts, and achieve that aim marvellously.

Rampart didn't win any awards.  The reception has been mixed, to say the least.  It doesn't warm the cockles of anyone's heart.  It's not a feelgood picture, it's not charming, it's not lovely, it's not cosy or delightful.  It's not a movie to ease a few hours of the difficult days in which we live.  Unremittingly bleak, cruel, vicious and despairing, without a real beginning and no end to speak of, Rampart spends its hundred minutes showing us the darkness as a constant theme - in a similar sense to the (admittedly superior) No Country for Old Men, cruelty and violence are with us throughout, they're not some abberation that springs up at the beginning of a movie and disappears in a burst of good-will-outing two hours later.

And if you can stand the constant, crushing negativity, there is a very fine film here.  In the right role, Woody Harrelson can be a very intense, engaging actor (indeed, he was in No Country for Old Men), and with barely a moment in the film when he's not on screen, this is a towering and powerful performance.  It's also a very interestingly put-together picture - only Moverman's second as a director* - and laudably well-paced and trim.  Rampart is not at all perfect - the relationship between the central character and his increasingly estranged family is rather hackneyed - but as a character study of unpleasantness in the line of duty, and one that leaves open the question of whether duty is an acceptable excuse, it's certainly worth watching.



*He has, however, had a longer career as a screenwriter - including the execrable I'm Not There, which couldn't be more different to Rampart.

Panic in the Streets (1950)

A beautifully lit Jack Palance (in his debut movie).

Directed by Elia Kazan

Written by Richard Murphy, Daniel Fuchs, Edward and Edna Anhalt (story)

Starring Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes, Jack Palance

What if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it?  We’re in control of so much in the world, we can take its resources from anywhere (and cause untold damage in the process), we can explore the deepest seas and the highest mountains, we can study how life can flourish in wildernesses of ice, jungle and burning desert and use that knowledge for our own ends.  We can transport ourselves rapidly from any point on the planet to any other.  We can ramble pointlessly on a blog and publish it instantly for the entire world to read.  Or ignore.

But what if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it?  Deep down, we can’t shake the awareness of our own fragility, the tenuous hold we really have on the world.  We’re not really in control, we’re just fiddling around with the details, and the world is never slow to show us just how tiny we are:  hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tsunamis.  And the more we learn, the more we find out just what nature might have install for us – life on earth has been dealt a devastating blow with considerable regularity over the years, with mass extinction events being triggered variously by objects dropping from the sky and chemicals and heat bursting up from under our feet.  On top of that, there’s the inevitability of the sun eventually packing it in, and the likelihood of the magnetic field flipping and failing to protect us for long enough that we all die, not to mention the alarming possibility that the universe may exist in a false vacuum (which could be replaced at any time by a lower energy or total vacuum, casually annihilating all matter in the process).  Should the universe get a bit tired of us, there’s really not a lot we can do about it.

Over the years, cinema has never been slow to pick away at this particular wound on our consciousness.  Where once catastrophes beyond man’s control could be nothing other than the wrath of a vengeful god, the silver screen took one of its favourite plot devices – chance – and expanded it out to threaten great swathes of humanity on the whim of outrageous fortune.  Even in the earliest days of film, we find Fire!, James Williamson’s dramatic and innovative tale of, well, a fire; a little over a decade later, when the collision between the Titanic and a ruddy great iceberg brought news of genuine disaster to the world’s radios and newspapers, the movies weren’t at all far behind with their own tales of the collision (Mime Misu’s Nacht und Eis and August Blom’s Atlantis were both released within months of the accident).

Skip forward a century – hopping dextrously over the giants of disaster, over-the-top we’re-all-going-to-die flicks like The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno – and the last couple of months before writing have given us a couple more.  Lars von Trier’s Melancholia follows the ever popular (and comparatively new) sub-genre of mass extinction as a consequence of large objects flying through space, whilst Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion threatens us all with the possibility of a devastating pandemic, following the likes of Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain, Wolfgang Peterson’s Outbreak and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.

The last of which takes a somewhat unusual approach – rather than addressing the pandemic itself, which evidently can’t be cured, Bruce Willis gets sent back in time to stop those responsible for spreading it in the first place:  no carrier, no outbreak.  And it’s this approach (albeit without the time travel) that Elia Kazan introduced in Panic in the Streets, a taut , bleak thriller following noir-staple Richard Widmark’s desperate hunt for the carrier of plague before he can transmit it through New Orleans and onwards through the whole of the United States.  Of course, this being 1950, it really is just about protecting the United States, not the rest of the world (which was presumably too full of Communists and other Enemies of America to really care about).

 But I really shouldn’t quibble about the American-centric view of the end of the world (not least because it crops up in so many pictures).  Panic in the Streets is far, far too good for that, an exemplary piece of classic noir from one of the finest directors of the time.  And a superbly crafted drama it is, rich on tension and human emotion, closely tied to Widmark’s desperation as the doctor trying to find the shreds of information in a community used to keeping its mouth shut – while Kazan never takes the camera away from that community, from those around the doctor and the difficult world they inhabit, never fails to show the tide against which he’s swimming in all its murky depth.

There’s a striking scene right at the beginning of the picture that illustrates the skill with which Kazan handles the world of his picture.  In a mortuary, an autopsy is in progress; two men who work there are arranging to meet for lunch; and a couple are asked to identify another corpse.  The three events are entirely unrelated, but they take place in the same location – and, most importantly, at the same time.  This isn’t a film which allows the story to go about its business unmolested and in a straight line, but one which embeds its tale of pursuit and impending doom in a world of activity and competing interests.  It’s a difficult job:  after all, if we are all going to die, society isn’t going to face it hand in hand and all singing from the same hymn sheet.  The human world is chaos, and we’re not really in control of all that much. 

Kazan holds a mirror up to this chaos with extraordinary panache, shaping a thriller of terrific energy and suspense.  I don’t want to go into the personal controversies that surrounded him; I just feel it’s important to recognise one of cinema’s greatest talents.  He was a magnificent director, and Panic in the Streets deserves to be considered alongside his best, and more famous work. 

Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island looks good - pity about the screenplay.

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Laeta Kalogridis, Dennis Lehane (novel)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow



At what point does the big twist of a film become sufficiently well-known to be talked about in public?  I know that I've not exactly been slow to throw in the odd spoiler - for which I would apologise but, well, I'm not going to, it's your fault if you've not seen the film before - but there's a difference between letting slip a detail of how the film progresses and giving away the big reveal.  After all, the whole point of a twist in the classic sense is that you, the viewer, are encouraged to believe one thing throughout the film before discovering, often (though not always) in the picture's final moments, that you were wrong all along, that what you've learnt needs to be reinterpreted and put together again in light of the revelation.

If the twist is given away in advance, then there's not going to be a wrong interpretation to correct later, and the reveal won't mean anything.  The film has built up to a moment of Oh! Now it all makes sense!, and that moment's lost if you know what's coming from the start.  The magic of the great climactic discovery - who Keyser Sözé* is, what Rosebud means, what's the connection between Bruce Willis and the little boy, what's inside Jaye Davidson's pants - depends entirely on being a surprise; there's no magic if you can see up the conjuror's sleeve.

Unfortunately, in Shutter Island, the conjuror's sleeves are rather baggy to begin with - you don't really need to be told what's hidden up there to know just what's going to come out.  It probably doesn't help that the twist is somewhat similar to that of a very well-known picture (with elements of few others) that I shan't name, but frankly, even if you'd never heard of the precedent, I'd be surprised if you couldn't tell what was going to emerge at the end of this film.  I don't want to spoil it for you, but that thing you'll be thinking halfway through the film, yes, it's that.

All of which is a bit disappointing.  It goes without saying that Scorsese is a magnificent director, not to mention a great student of the cinema - which probably explains why the look of this movie reminded me so much of The Shining.  Scorsese being Scorsese, that probably wasn't an accident.  Indeed, it shouldn't be:  The Shining looked superb, full of tension and foreboding, and Shutter Island doesn't fail in that respect, bleak, taut, confusing, intimidating.  And by and large, it has a fine cast - although I have to confess to a long-term lack of respect for DiCaprio.  Not enough to discourage me all too much - and I loved Inception - but enough to make me think that it really should have been someone else.  Personally, I blame Richard Herring, for firmly fixing into my mind the notion that DiCaprio's face is too small for his giant sprout head (it's probably on youtube somewhere).  Anyway, aside from DiCaprio and his small face, what was I going on about?

A film that's really not that interesting.  Hence the diversion.  Great director, fine cast, and a dull, unimaginative screenplay with lumpen dialogue and a good few pages more than it ought to have had.  Movies being too long has always been a bugbear of mine - since longer films stopped meaning markedly higher costs for the studios, the art of cutting unnecessary time has been largely lost - and it's disappointing to say that a picture is lengthier than it ought to be when it's only a little over two hours.  But Shutter Island drags throughout much of the film, it repeats itself, it pulls out scenes longer than they need to be.  It's flabby.  Although, to be honest, a good trim wouldn't solve all the problems, wouldn't improve the rather obvious twist.  It's not a bad film, but if you want to see something by Scorsese, he's done so much that is an awful lot better than this.




*I have no idea how to spell this.  It's never written down in the film, and doesn't appear in the credits for obvious reasons.  It's bloody annoying.  He should have been called Keith Smith.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Men really knew how to dress in gangster pictures.

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger (story)

Starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Jeffrey Lynn

Whatever else Prohibition might have been responsible for, it certainly did the cinema a world of good. I rambled on last time about the three genres with exclusively American roots: the musical, the western, the gangster flick. Musicals come from the stage, of course, from the Vaudeville traditions that gave us so many early screen greats. Westerns come from, well, the west, that grand American foundation myth of brave heroes taming the wilderness.

But the gangster flick wouldn't exist without Prohibition; not merely because of the wealth of stories the era offered up, but also – crucially – because of the glamorisation of crime it engendered. The Eighteenth Amendment was hugely unpopular across much of the United States – especially in the major cities – and fighting it grew into a popular crusade. In the westerns, the bandits were there to be defeated by the dashing, maverick hero; in the gangster flick, the leaden-footed enforcers of a hated law were the villains, the bootleggers the stars of the show.

And the violence? Nobody, wherever they live, wants violence in their lives. But most Americans were never affected by the Tommy guns and the beatings; these existed in newspaper reports, on the radio, on the screen, not on their street. Just as war when seen from a distance has heroism without the brutality, nobility without the squalor, so the rise of the bloodthirsty gangster and the millionaire who took his money from the hands of the dead and dying couldn't possibly be so grim and repellent when projected onto the silver screen.

Time provides even more distance than geography. When Prohibition sank unmourned in 1933, the bootlegging era was cut adrift*, and its heroes and villains became ever more distant, and ever easier to build into tales of adventure and dynamism. After all, that period was half-over by the time sound – another essential ingredient of the gangster flick – made its way into the movies, and nostalgia never struggled to find a way into the stories and legends that were already growing apace.

The Roaring Twenties is a very nostalgic gangster film. Cagney may be playing a criminal, he may be playing a man of violence, but there's never any question that his heart is in the right place: here is a man who just wanted his job back when he returned from the Great War, and when that was denied him, he had no other choice but to pursue a life of crime. He devotes himself to helping a young girl who wrote to him during the war, and when she goes off with a fellow more her own age, he's disappointed but never vengeful. Even in a genre that relished nostalgia, the rosiness of Raoul Walsh's view back to the 20s is strikingly simplistic and uncritical.

Yet, for all that, it's in no way a bad film. Suspend your disbelief for a moment – just as you would for all those westerns which aren't filthy and ridden with disease, malnutrition, poverty and gore; just as you would for all those musicals where bursting into co-ordinated song in an instant seems a perfectly normal thing to do – suspend your disbelief, and the charm of the lost world and the deep-down-goodness of Cagney's gangster-hero is as engaging as it is delightfully crafted. The Roaring Twenties is as much a nostalgic homage to the genre as it is to the era it glorifies, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. Forget realism, this is just very good cinema storytelling

*of course, in reality, most of those involved simply moved on to other things – criminal organisations of that size were never likely to just disappear overnight. But it makes a better movie for their kingpins to end the story dead or defeated, particularly for gangster films in the 30s and 40s, before the world had entirely moved on, before a more critical and impartial eye could be cast on events of the time. Later gangster pictures – notably Leone's Once Upon A Time In America – tend more to reflect the continuation of organised crime into other areas once alcohol became legal again.

The Boys From Brazil (1978)

Gregory Peck, auditioning for a role as a Bond villain.

Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner 

Written by Ira Levin, Heywood Gould

Starring Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Denholm Elliott, Bruno Ganz

Do you remember Josef Mengele? Well, not personally (I’m assuming), but you’ve heard the name, yes? Mengele – as you’re no doubt aware – was a genuinely twisted and repugnant monster, even by the standards of a century packed with them. He was responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds of individuals, mostly twins, in the name of a warped and horrific view of medical science. His sadistic and brutal experiments to satiate a curiosity about humanity and to attempt to prove theories that were glaringly wrong constitute a crime almost without compare in human history.

All of which makes it rather surprising to find a different Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. This Mengele did commit the same monstrosities – we know this, it’s mentioned briefly, and we see a couple of people who’ve been experimented on (they have suddenly blue eyes) to prove it – but that’s barely relevant. See, it turns out that Mengele was not so much a vicious and deranged sadist as a camp 60s supervillain that even Ian Fleming would have considered a little too over-the-top. 

 

We find this Nazi Blofeld (Gregory Peck, unexpectedly) in Paraguayan exile, the final brush both with actual history* and common sense. Clearly, he must be caught, and it falls to elderly Nazi-hunter Ezra Liebermann (Laurence Olivier, in a role inspired by Simon Wiesenthal) to catch him. Why? Is it enough to try to catch Mengele because he deserves to be brought to justice? No, of course not. Mengele needs to be caught because he’s planning to take over the world with his secret army of Hitler clones. Obviously.

(The Hitler clones, for what it’s worth, all have dark hair, pale skin and… blue eyes. Presumably because everyone knows Hitler was obsessed with blue eyes, and regardless of the rather glaring fact that Hitler had brown eyes, and any clone of him would be the same. Even allowing for the relative lack of genetic knowledge in the 1970s as opposed to today, it would still have been reasonable to assume that genes trump ideology every time when it comes to reproduction. Nonetheless, we know they’re all Hitler clones, because they’re a bit grumpy and selfish and have severe partings in their hair.)

The bones of the story could easily have been turned into a comedy-scifi-thriller, with an entirely fictional cast of characters. Might have been a bit of good fun, too, particularly if it lost the embarrassing fight scene between the two elderly leads. Today, it might have a cult following and a high standing amongst comedy thrillers of the time. But no. 

 

Alternatively, the fine cast could have been put to better use in a serious thriller about the actual pursuit of Nazi war criminals in Latin America, and the courageous and devoted work of those who dedicated their lives in the hope of finally achieving justice. But no.

No, what we have is a daft, hole-ridden plot, polished by some picturesque locations and that exemplary cast. And we have something else: we have a torturer and murderer turned into an absurd villain in an adventure story. Perhaps I’m oversensitive, but I find such a lack of respect and decency towards all those who suffered and died in horrendous circumstances at Mengele’s hands to be insulting and deeply offensive.

This is a horrible film: horrible, stupid, and all the worse for that stupidity. 

*I accept, of course, that at no point did the movie claim to be anything other than fiction. I raise this issue purely because of the highly significant and unpleasant historical nature of the real Mengele and the decision to use him as a character in a daft thriller.