Wild Target (2010)

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Directed by Jonathan Lynn, creator and writer of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, known for directing My Cousin Vinny, The Whole Nine Yards and 1985's Clue, follows the British humour formula here of gathering together a group of quirky, unique characters and then letting them have a go at each other, seasoned with black comedy.  Lynn will never be heralded as one of the "great directors" because his films are too watchable while utterly indifferent to the viewer, as he creates characters we wouldn't like in real life while enjoying the hell out of them on screen.

The film stars Bill Nighy, coming off his new found success after Love Actually, after which he proved himself ready to play in relatively low-budget, imaginative and drily funny films including this one, Chalet Girl, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and the trio of spy films, Page Eight, Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield. A more reliable good-film plus actor is hard to find in this day and age. With him is Emily Blunt, at the start of her presently unstoppable career, presenting those skills that made her a hot property in Hollywood: cute, manic and perfectly willing to play dark parts.  Mixed in are Martin Freeman, Eileen Atkins, Rupert Everett, Gregor Fisher (Nighy's manager in Love Actually) and the hard to believe Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame, who is simply marvellous here. He should have stuck to British films.

A small part exists here for Rory Kinnear, who is now recognisable from Man Up, The Imitation Game and the later James Bond franchise. What I find delightful is that he's the son of Roy Kinnear, whose face was once everywhere in both black and quirky comedy films of the 60s, 70s and 80s; for a modern audience, the most likely chance is that he'll be recognised as Mr. Salt from 1971's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder. Both father and son look amazingly alike — and if you know the father, and the parts he was willing to perform, then it's not hard to guess why the son would play the role he did in Black Mirror.

Films like Wild Target are why I keep gravitating towards British film and television over and above American. It may have something to do with my being Canadian, and being raised on Monty Python when most Americans at the time hadn't heard of them (at least, not until the films appeared), as well as a long list of patient, intellectual, down-to-earth UK television dramas, where the characters were quite ordinary people. I was effected to the point where I would rather sit and watch Father Duddleswell than J.R. Ewing. 

Summertime (1955)

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One of the worst ingratiating things I find about those who undertake to discuss film is how often the films chosen reflect a kind of insipid "macho" take upon life, upon plot structure and most of all, upon theme. Part of my eclecticism is that I am perfectly able to appreciate and enjoy a film that is entirely about a woman's point of view about life, without in the least feeling bored or that my manhood is being challenged.  Summertime is about as female as a film is capable of being, far more so than any of the rank shit that's been produced in the last 50 years, pretending to be so. This film, for example, is NOT Kramer vs. Kramer.

I shall explain.  As can be seen, the film is directed by David Lean and stars Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi, both at a point in their careers where neither needs to explain what films they choose to appear in. This is a love story, but a bittersweet one.  It is not a story about a woman who is constrained by her times, who carps about her freedoms as a woman, or who does not like the way she is spoken to. It is about a woman who is on an adventure, to strike out alone into a strange world... where the tension lies in her not being ready for it.  Her troubles arise from her own actions and her own inability to embrace those actions when they occur. In short, the film is about a woman who takes responsibility, not one about a woman who whines and cries because she's not "allowed to."

In a modern film, women are specifically written so that they conflict emerges from something they don't control, a marriage they don't like, a career limitation imposed upon, a circumstance she did not create. In effect, the modern filmmaker's approach to the woman character is "Infantilise her first, then have her grow up." The result of this approach is pretty much always garbage.

David Lean here has not yet launched himself into the epic scope: Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago are all yet in his future. Here, within the setting of mid 1950s Venice, just at the point when pretty much everyone dreamed of visiting the city built upon the water, Lean demonstrates his directorial prowess by extracting every element of the city in perfect, brilliant and often uncomfortable detail. Direction here is not about pounding the city into his point-of-view, which is what other so-called great directors might of done; Lean lets the city breathe, he investigates the sounds, the beauty, the ugliness, the romance and the darkness with exquisite, patient detail, thus managing to produce a film that allows a Venice that no longer exists to remain fresh and still alive in the viewer's mind. It's not remotely presented like a travelogue, but exactly in the manner that someone walking through the city would see it — not only for the surprises it brings, but for those elements tourists do not want to see; fading stucco, dilapidation and the decay of a thousand years. He does this without soiling the desire to see Venice, if one could through a time machine, in the least.

Most of all the film is about love; not the silly misunderstandings of American romances, nor the sedentary domesticility of character who show love through restraint and care.  It is not the running, stupid, idiot love of the young before life begins. It is messy love, badly played out love, embarrassing, clumsy, sometimes accusatory, always not quite in reach despite the best efforts of two brillliant performers. It is an adult love that is hardly shown because, honestly, it hurts too much.

I expect it would not be popular with my readers. What matters with film, however, is not how much we "like" something, but rather how well we understand it. Far too often we cast aside films and other works of art that might make us better as human beings specifically because we don't understand it and we don't want to. That approach says only one thing about the assemblage of thoughts that we ultimately become as we age: our willingness to be blind to the real lived experience of millions who happen to not be like ourselves.

Hopscotch (1980)

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This first-rate spy thriller from the competent Ronald Neame, known for a wide range of films including The Poseidon Adventure, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Chalk Garden, provides a different kind of spy for the era in the person of Walter Matthau, the last entity someone might expect in the same genre of which James Bond is the most famous character. All through the 1970s there was a push to present "spies" in the manner they really existed, as ordinary-looking, easy-to-ignore nobodies who did quiet work without getting noticed. Hopscotch is the best of this counter-thriller spy culture, mixed with a dry comedic element than made the film fun. It was a sensation when it came out, a sleeper hit so called, and though dated to its time period, the intellectual elements of the film remain wholly intact. It's well worth the time, even though stealing from this film results somewhat in parts of it now being made predictable. Once again, the film suffers from doing it first and generally better than later copycats.

The film also includes Glenda Jackson at the apex of her career, just at the point where she began seriously considering moving to another career; becoming increasingly political, she considered numerous alternatives that culminated in her being elected a Member of Parliament in Britain, a position she held for 25 years. In Hopscotch she is an absolute gem, surly, sarcastic, a perfect foil for Matthau; they had appeared together in 1978's House Calls, another smash hit that did for the medical profession what this film does for the spy industry. Pairing them up again, given the chemistry they had, was a natural choice.

Matthau's career is so dependent upon his association with Jack Lemmon (they made nine films together) that modern audiences are sometimes unaware of Matthau's interest in choosing crime drama projects, the elements of which leak into this film also.  His earlier performances in Kotch and Charley Varrick add to his credibility in the role of Miles Kendig, brilliantly hopping and jumping one step ahead of the C.I.A. as they attempt to muzzle him. Matthau is also at the height of his career, making films that interest him and having the box office numbers that permitted him to work with whomever he wanted at the time.

Ned Beatty and Sam Waterston round out the cast, the latter such a young kid it's hard to believe he's not still in short pants. Still, he's coming off an excellent performance in 1978's Capricorn One, and is thus getting bigger parts. Beatty has less range as an actor, but his small diminuative stature is good for this role; around this time, Beatty is absolutely everyone, becoming one of those "that-actor"s that everyone recognises but no one knows their name. 

Run Silent Run Deep (1958)

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Sure has felt like a lot of dull title cards.

Robert Wise had been directing for 14 years by the time of this film, most famously to that time for the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Of course, later he would obliterate that reputation by first directing the blockbuster (before the term was coined) West Side Story in 1961 and then The Sound of Music in 1965... given those two films, it's hard to imagine his directing a war picture with just two women characters in it. Yes, this is a film literally about sea men. Rim shot.

Unquestionably a cheap joke. I don't mean to disparage the film. Later, films like this would develop a reputation because they legitimately played upon an audience filled with men who had actually participated in the war on submarines, or in some capacity related to submarines or the navy. As such, a raft of such films exploded on the market in the post-war years, with male casts made up of hard, athletic bodies sweating in underwater cans stripped to their t-shirts, feeding a certain cultural phenomenon attached to gay culture in the 1970s.  Steve Reeves was not in this, but it's the kind of film Frankie is talking about in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I'm not disparaging this film for this reason. It is a well-written, restrained, believably designed picture from the outset, with tight framing, careful actor blocking the fits the mood and reality of submarine mechanics, while maintaining a strong, reliable pace and solid elements of tactile, unsettling what-was-it-like for the men aboard these vessels. It's that combination of a film worth seeing and the later social shadow it cast upon other projects that makes the movie important as one in a filmophile's repertoire.

Other sub-films were made before this: more than a dozen in the 1950s before this one was released, most notably The Enemy Below, which had been released the previous year. Wise's picture differed in that he'd obtained an actual sub, the USS Redfish, a Balao-class boat, which provided serious constraints for the film's production given that a good third of the film takes place below deck. The film was also different in that it's the first in which the submariners do not partake in multiple operations divided betwene returns to base, but rather describes a single patrol where radio silence, a continuous threat and separation from what base command might consider important are factors driving the plot. This allows the two officers aboard ship, played by an aging Clark Gable and a troublesome actor of the period Burt Lancaster (in this case, also producing the film), to go at each other on matters of strategy, hierarchy and cowardice with no higher power present. This dynamic would be repeated again and again in other films where militaristic and other hierarchy-driven were deliberately cut off by the plotline in order to rehash the same uncertainties.

All sorts of properties in the 1960s, especially in content made for television, seized upon this argument in a vacuum, with no higher up to clarify who was right or wrong.  Half a dozen Star Trek episodes, cast in space far from Earth, used this very trope, though it was not the only one. My reasons for Star Trek as an example comes from the writers use of Run Silent Run Deep as a textbook happens more than once: first in the Original Series episode, Balance of Terror, in which the Romulans and Federation fight a sub battle in space, then again in The Wrath of Khan. That's not a failing — it's stealing from an original as the sincerest form of flattery.

Whether or not the reader can appreciate the film in and of itself is irrelevant. Wise's practices here would prove fertile for the work of a lot of other people.

Straw Dogs (1971)

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This is Sam Peckinpah's violent controversial film in which the assumptions we make about people, for good or ill, are subject to misconception. The phrase, attributed to Lao-tzu, is that "Heaven and Earth are not humane, and regard the people as straw dogs." Within the film, it can be seen that things which are seen as harmless are not necessarily so, and that misjudging them is something that we do to our peril.

It's not a spoiler to state that the film is violent; that element is so well known about the film that the value or purpose of the violence within the story's frame is conveniently ignored, misconstrued or fatally misrepresented. Much of that comes down to a class of people, particularly in the early 70s, who had become so isolated and preserved from real violence, they had come to perceive it as something unreal. Even the shocking events of Helter Skelter had done little except to imbue the cultural elite to the blindness of a four year old who, having burnt his fingers on a stove, now lives in such fear of the object that he won't go into the kitchen. Viewed in these terms, criticism of Straw Dogs at the time was little more than a cacophony of performative ignorance, as though violence was not a regular daily spectacle surrounding the Vietnam war.

These are just the surface reason why discussion of the film at the time went horribly wrong. Peckinpah created content for a mature audience while deliberately provoking an immature one. It is self-evident to anyone with their eyes open that he did not create this to "get attention," again, the sort of way a bad parent describes every action of their four-year-old, but to force attention, to create something that couldn't be ignored. He succeeded.

That said, it's not an easy film to watch. It's not for the faint of heart. There's quite a lot of it where the viewer is bound to ask, "Is something going to happen?"  This is plainly intentional. Straw Dogs does not include Hitchcock-coded tension. It is normality to the point of banality, this being much of the point. It is a film that requires patience for something that is wholly unpleasant. One might ask why anyone would make such a film; or for that matter, what sort of person would like it.

I saw this film first when I was just 15.  Imagine, television airing such a thing.  It opened my eyes in a way that no film ever had. That feeling is hard to explain, particularly with a film like this.

Little Darlings (1980)

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Thought long and hard about this one. Given the present climate for the subject matter, even acknowledging that the film exists threatens to open a can of worms... which is precisely why art cannot be allowed to kowtow. The film exists, whatever anyone thinks of it, and that existence must be managed by those who find themselves faced with it, whatever perspectives they bring with them.

I saw this film when I was myself 16 years of age, with a date name Shannon, and whom I did not remain with long. We were not compatible. I remember that a lot of what I saw resonated with me deeply; I was only a year older than the "children" in this film, and did not see myself as a child when watching it. Others my own age were working jobs, earning incomes, putting money aside for university, making plans for the future and expanding our consciousness with the same investigations that take place in this film. I don't write this to argue that the film is this or that or any label we might care to put on it. I write this to say that at the time, I was consciously aware of what the film was depicting, what the message was, how it affected me personally and many of my friends. As such, I think it is ridiculous that anyone ever takes a stand that begins with, "These people are too young to know..." regardless of what follows that last word. I can think of a lot of 40+ somethings that are too "young" to comprehend the film's message. Being 15 or 16 is not an epistemic disability.

There were other films covering the same ground as this at the time, notably 1978's Pretty Baby, which in Alberta was rated 18+ (there was no national rating system at the time). I didn't see that until my parents did, at the Red Deer Drive-in, which we used to go visit on weekends during the summer; my parents cabin was 15 miles west of Red Deer, so occasionally, when we wanted to see a movie, we'd drive the distance and see what was there. Between 1976 and 1985, they used to run movies all night; sometimes we'd sit and watch four in a row, until the early dawn. My parents loved movies. They did not like Pretty Baby, which I saw when I was about 18. I didn't think much of it either.

Little Darlings was not classified as adults-only in Alberta. Unlike Pretty Baby, it did not trade on sexual depiction or even explicit scenes; Porky's in 1981, a Canadian film, was far more explicit. While containing sexual themes and frank dialogue, Little Darlings is not, in fact, about sex as a practice. At no time is any dialogue given to the act itself, only to the expectation of the act and the consequence thereafter. This, as I remember from discussions of art, is how we are supposed to address a thing: identify what it is, identify how people comprehend it, describe the effect thereof. Sounds like an art film to me.

If anything, the film is unrestrained in its depiction of teenager viciousness, the performative aspects of cliques, the compression of pain inside oneself and how the stress of that is turned into a knife to hurt other people. In this regard, the teenagers depicted here are far more insidious that something more cartoonish like the Karate Kid; they are vastly less considerate than the foursome in Mean Girls. Here we see the steady, abiding urge of teenagers to self-protect, to redefine themselves instantly so as not to look like fools, or not to fit in, or not to look as though they want something too much. These characters do not speak their minds; they hedge, they protect their shame, they coddle their egos... and when it falls apart, it is because they find character within themselves and stand up. Not in the pleasantly fanciful way of Revenge of the Nerds, but in merely deciding to cease playing the game. It's brief, it comes at the end, it's lightly indulged (Hollywood cannot help being Hollywood)... but what matters is that it's there. At that time, that resonated with me.

Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol were both struggling with the ghettos of their childhood acting careers. O'Neal plays against the type she established in The Bad News Bears. McNichol plays against the type she gained with the saccharine but successful TV show Family. Both ultimately succeeded in the early 80s with such projects... and both, for their own reasons, largely stepped away from the spotlight, though not entirely. Both continued to dabble, but never again had the notariety of this time.

A young Armande Assante has a difficult role here; if there are moments that would make a modern viewer's skin crawl, it would be his character's part — but honestly, there's nothing to read from within the film that convicts him. Matt Dillon is young and hunky; this is his second actor credit on IMDb. An extraordinarily young Cynthia Nixon appears here, long before growing up and joining Sex in the City. Adult actors barely register in the film at all; in most scenes, they are little more than scenery. The film is about the girls themselves, free of authority figures.

One small fun coincidence: at the summer camp where the girls attend, a short skit featuring Climbing over Rock Mountain of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, while McNichol's character Angel is miserable for plot reasons. Two years after Little Darlings, in 1982, McNichol would start in a spoof version of Penzance, called The Pirate.

The Naked City (1948)

It's evident that youtube has removed the embed into blogger again. So this film can be found at this link.

Occasionally, films come along that create an entire genre with this origin. It Happened One Night from 1934 pretty much invented the "road picture," in which the plot revolves around the movement of two characters travelling, with the route itself being the primary scenery. Night of the Living Dead in 1968 heralded a long list of zombie movies. 1948's The Naked City essentially created the procedural cop drama, which later drifted into lazy tropes that this film vocally came out against. The film opens without visual credits. A narrator tells you that who wrote, photographed, directed and designed the film. It then takes the time to explain that the film wasn't filmed in a studio, but actually on the streets of New York, which in 1948 was unheard of.

The narrator then continues,

"Barry Fitzgerald, our star, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Ted de Corsia and the other actors, played out their roles on the streets, in the apartment houses, in the skyscrapers of New York itself. And along with them, a great many thousand New Yorkers played out their roles also. This is the city as it is. Hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup."

Digging into the film (won two oscars, nominated for another), I found a great many inaccurate tags applied. It is not a "semi-documentary" in any greater sense than any film happens to occur in a real place. It is not a tour through everyday New York; it is a film that uses New York just as hundreds of films do now, every year, only this was made at a time when that wasn't done, except for newsreels. Much of the film does appear to be "newreel" in style, but this is because that was the only means of production that would allow filming in the outdoors, under these conditions, in 1948. It wasn't a director's choice. There were no other choices. The voiceover does not "clarify" the story, nor does it explain the character's motivations. It asks the same sort of questions anyone might, makes wry observations, gives no explanation of the story beyond what is seen.

The Naked City only seems to have the characteristics named above because it's difficult to explain, to a modern film audience, why things were filmed this way, or why the narrator spoke thus, or how the city unfolded, because in terms of film suspension of disbelief, this film in particular stands out as alien to most anything else we might see. It doesn't "fit" a genre, because it invented one. Prior to this, movies were detectives and bad guys, or cops and robbers... police officers weren't depicted as people with private lives, they weren't shown making jokes with each other, "cases" were solved by clever intuition, not by cops doing their jobs — and on that point, police work wasn't shown as a routine, repetitive, working man's job, until this film was made. The story takes the position that cases are not solved by brilliance, but by a lot of people doing small, boring things methodically, repeatedly, over time. It shocked the hell out of audiences at the time, revolutionised the idea of film and did a great deal to smash Hollywood thinking in the 30s and 40s... and yet, now, except in film courses, where the film is horribly mis-labeled and abusively misunderstood, it's almost unknown.

This isn't because the film failed, but because it succeeded too well. The concepts were copied almost immediately, like a tidal force, that not only invented the 1950s idea of the television "cop show," it revamped other genres as well, as western shows like Have Gun will Travel and Gunsmoke likewise became 19th century versions of the same cop-show pacing, very successfully. Amidst the deluge, the original film disappeared.

Also, because the film did use a lot of unknown actors willing to film in New York, perhaps working in the theatre there, a bunch of neat cameos appear of people so near to the beginning of their careers that they're unknown. Arthur O'Connell, the colonel from Operation Mad Ball, appears here much younger, barely recognisable, as a simple cop early in the film. David Opatoshu, is recognisable from Star Trek's original series episode, A Taste of Armageddon. A very young John Randolph, who would later play Clark Griswold's father in Christmas Vacation, is a virtually unrecognisable police dispatcher. James Gregory, familiar as Inspector Luger from Barney Miller, is here, quite obviously as a cop. All of the aforegoing were born in New York City. Molly Picon, who played Yente the Matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof is here as a shopkeeper. Kathleen Freeman, the nun who goes at Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers is here, on a subway train. She was born in Chicago. Paul Ford is also here, best known as Mayor Shinn from The Music Man, but whom I also love in The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming. He was born in Baltimore. None of these are "cameos." They're all working actors at the beginning of their career, sprinkled like wedding rice throughout the picture.

Obviously, I don't want to talk about the story. Barry Fitzgerald has always been one of my favourite actors; he turns up in my favourite film, The Quiet Man. More's the pity, it's not available on youtube.