Ennio Morricone Festival, pt. 3

Death Rides A Horse

dir. Giulio Petroni

J.P. Law heads out for a cold dish.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 13, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

On the off chance you or anyone you know decides to massacre a family in the Western part of the United States of America in the 19th century, make sure they kill ‘em all. Death Rides a Horse takes the familiar trope of a young child, witness to his family’s death, growing up to wreak havoc and take revenge, bloodying the landscape along the way (see Once Upon a Time in the West). Unlike Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, John Philip Law does not take his time in becoming the baddest most feared of all gunmen. His pride won’t let him admit that, but he reluctantly takes the aid of an old outlaw, played by Lee Van Cleef, who happens to be hunting the same gang of rapin’ murders.

Young, handsome John Philip Law will have nothing to do with compromise or bribery and will stop at nothing for his revenge. His fury has warped his perspective of his familial tragedy. The images have been playing in his mind for 15 years to boiling point. Anytime one of the gang members are in sight, passion takes over in the form of a red-hued replay of that specific gang member’s part in the massacre over Law’s steaming eyes. Ennio Morricone provides a thumping, rhythmic, primal score to these moments that is the stuff of dreams and has since become the stuff of legend. I’ve done well to not specifically reference how his scores have been used in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, though in this case, Mr. Tarantino borrowed not just the music cue, but the fury of revenge close-up/red-hued flashback, and to great effect. In a picture more subdued, such as Death Rides a Horse, the insanity of a gut-curling score and stylized close-up pack an emotional wallop.

Lee Van Cleef delivers another brilliant and emotionally complex performance here, as the convict who is not all he appears to be. His swagger as he trots his horse around a buried-to-the-neck Law is both charming and mean with a balance of manner practically unique to his on-screen persona. While The Big Gundown is his swan song, the legendary “Bad” makes us love him yet again.

It would be an understatement to call this trailer "awesome." Watch it.

End of the Game

dir. Maximilian Schell

Wedding Crashers, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 14, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

This tired, unnecessarily moody thriller, featuring a barely existing, unnotable score by Ennio Morricone is the low point of narrative contrivance in an otherwise nearly perfect selection of challenging, complex and mostly unseen classics in the Ennio Morricone program. Director Maximilian Schell takes a little whodunit and throws so much disinformation at you that it becomes bogged down with nonsense.

Jon Voight plays a young go-getter detective taking and shunning advice from a dying old detective. They’re investigating the very mysterious death of yet another detective. The corpse of the murdered detective is played by Donald Sutherland, the lifeblood of so many fantastic ‘70s pictures. The case and point being the lack of pulse in End of the Game. Mr. Voight, who plays innocence wrapped in a rough exterior very well, is unaware of the very personal battle being waged between his old, doddering partner and the suspected murderer. The movie opens many years earlier as the two friends pick up a young lady.

“I could murder her right in front of your eyes and you couldn’t prove it.”

Both the tagline of the picture and the overarching thematic “haunt” of End of the Game lies in that line, spoken by the murderer to the detective (best friend to best friend, rival to rival). The movie would be better off as a tale of cruel obsession with pride, and if it were more focused on the dying old man, it would be a better picture. Instead, Jon Voight unnecessarily takes center stage and observes. Madness, friendship, themes of regret and frustration for a life lost and lives lost; these are all interesting things presented in the blandest possible package. Fog rests heavily over the countryside as the two detectives explore the crime scene, but the heaviest fog distorts what could, in fact, be great if it were less Love Me If You Dare and more The Conversation.


This is part of the ongoing Morricone Festival coverage.

Ennio Morricone Festival, pt. 2

Four Flies on Grey Velvet
dir. Dario Argento

Two fists on brown velvet

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 8, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The appeal of Dario Argento over the likes of, for example, Lucio Fulci will never cease to amaze me. Argento is very effective at molding neon-technicolor color schemes into something that means “horror,” coupled with three or four wham-bang scenes or ideas for scenes. In the case of Four Flies on Grey Velvet part of the wham-bang comes from something as sophisticated and clever as scary masks.

A young, hip rock n’ roller in some way unbeknownst to him and us becomes the victim of a very, very convoluted series of events that frame him in a murder plot. The person wearing the scary mask is the one behind it! Our protagonist being a dopey drummer in a rock band reeks of something as tired as a sleep-away camp horror story with the sex-starved little kiddies being haunted by a Scooby-Doo monster.

At its heart Four Flies on Grey Velvet is a mystery with a result so stupidly unlikely, and plot devices as gooftastic and amateurish as our protagonist having an affair with his wife’s obnoxiously hot cousin, and thus living out some sort of teenage fantasy. Like with most of the Argento movies I have seen there are moments, and I mean moments, that are very strong, funny and creative. These moments would be enough in a movie of greater ambition, not one feigning ambition with a nonsense plot, cheap thrills and slack performances by pretty faces.

Decidedly awesome trailer for decidedly fair movie.

A Quiet Place in the Country
dir. Elio Petri

Elio Petri directing a roped and diapered Franco Nero

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 8, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Franco Nero plays our hero, Leonardo, who leaves the pressures of being a city-bound artist to find some inspiration in a rural, isolated existence. Leonardo finds himself drawn to a particularly beaten-down country home. As it turns out, this place is haunted and Leonardo’s previous mania (both urban and sexual) molds itself into an obsession with the young woman who met her demise on the premises during WWII. Soon enough the girl’s sordid history unravels and the house starts acting unruly. The old townsmen reveal their many lusts and conquests with the girl and Leonardo’s obsession with the girl grows and develops into something sexual, much to the confusion and chagrin of his manager/lover, played by an adventurous Vanessa Redgrave.

A Quiet Place in the Country director Elio Petri demonstrates admirable restraint in presenting the horror elements of this story with little to no bloodshed. It can be seen as a clear precursor to Stanley Kubrick’s comparably plotted and restrained masterpiece, The Shining. They are both haunted house movies revolving around an artist’s need for peace and quiet, and the resulting rebellion and betrayal against the loved ones who pressure them to create. Kubrick and Petri also infuse the haunted house genre with a sense of poetry and artistry, by considering their subjects with the utmost sincerity. A Quiet Place in the Country respects its characters, though at the same time, acts as a critique of the bourgeois fascination with rustic living and the idealization of finding some sort of earthy sanctuary, ala Straw Dogs.

Ennio Morricone provides the cacophonous score, full of what sounds like clanging pots and pans melded with various orchestral string plucks, emphasizing that yes, this is a horror movie. While a horror movie, Petri molds an accomplished post-war nightmare, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. This layer and his awareness of the intellectual implications of including a ghostly victim of not only her sexuality, but of The War are almost a bit heavy-handed. This contextual intellectualization of the post-war horror pulls out some of the visceral fear that could have been gut-wrenching stuff, if Petri weren’t so intent on elevating himself above the junk-art of other 60’s and 70’s Italian filmmakers.

Navajo Joe

Navajo Joe

dir. Sergio Corbucci

Burt Reynolds deliverances us from evil.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 7, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Burt Reynolds, who is a quarter Cherokee, plays the titular character in Navajo Joe. It is only slightly disconcerting to see Mr. Reynolds caked in a reddish layer of body covering make-up, as the movie takes on an approach of reaching back to a time, and a race, that has been wiped out of history. Joe lives alone; his tribe and lover’s lives stripped from him, and thus the last pieces of something humane and familiar have disappeared. He cannot simply be described as lovelorn and lonely, as his loss is larger than that, reeking of post-apocalyptic recklessness and despair. His people are gone and he exists in a deserted wasteland of a patch of ground, resembling something far less than a hogan, and more like the scarecrow-strewn plains of Planet of the Apes.

Joe lives a superhero existence, living out his days fighting for a code of honor and justice, and spending his off time at a dilapidated lair, but he has no need for a mask or an alter ego. Instead he tosses his body from horse to horse with complete abandon, selflessly, instinctively saving the day. Reynolds excels with his ferocious, grounded physicality, balanced by his very direct, very funny line delivery. “I’m going to need some dynamite,” Joe repeats over and over again to much laughter, intentionally or otherwise… it doesn’t matter. Ennio Morricone’s score is one of loud high-pitch screaming coupled with rhythmic chants of “NAVAJO JOE!”, effectively tempering the rather placid Joe with an undercurrent of operatic anger and desperation. This musical cue also functions in further injecting some sort of comic book or superhero element by giving Joe a theme song.

While these layers of apocalyptic emotions flood Reynolds’ performance and the overall feeling of the picture, it is unfortunately framed as a revenge saga. The folks that murdered his people scheme to rob a large lump of cash and lay waste to a blossoming Western town. Joe volunteers to protect the town, and in turn volunteers to kill every last one of the bandits, with shotguns, pistols, knives, dynamite and his hands. The story would succeed to a greater degree if revenge had nothing to do with it. Joe never stakes his claim of revenge, or demonstrates ill judgment due to any personal emotional involvement with the crooks, and thus themes of revenge are never really explored and are irrelevant. Director Sergio Corbucci seems to favor the idea that Reynolds is playing a wanderer who has stepped out from the dust of some extinct species and different time, frightening even those he volunteers to protect. This idea is far more interesting than simple revenge, and thankfully there is greater time spent on it. As a result, any hint of the revenge narrative feels a bit tacked on, though fun and action packed.

Eventually the townspeople acquiesce to the idea of a mythic stranger unquestionably saving their skin, yet once they’ve used him all up the dinosaur wanders off into the sunset. He may be going to save another town, but more likely he’ll fade away.


This is part of the ongoing Morricone Festival coverage.

Ennio Morricone Festival, pt. 1

The Film Forum here in New York City just finished up a series of movies scored by Ennio Morricone. They showed 26 different movies over a period of 3 weeks. I saw 18 of them in the theatre during those 3 weeks. The other 8 I had previously seen. This entry is the first of many, examining each of those 18 pictures, often with visual/aural aids. Some of them have already been reviewed here, and for those I will simply post a link.

Mr. Morricone is receiving an honorary Academy Award tomorrow. I can only hope this means brief clips of some of the below movies get shown on national television. To be very, very brief, my favorites of the bunch I saw were Arabian Nights, The Burglars and The Big Gundown.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
dir. Elio Petri

Big posters of some hand prints.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 3, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The title of this picture is pretty much the sum up its parts, though it leaves out the very Philip K. Dickian twist that the investigator is also the “citizen above suspicion.” After meditatively, deliberately murdering his kinky mistress, the titular citizen (and investigator) sets out on an Ouroboros quest that begins as an intellectual experiment and folds upon itself to Dostoyevskian/Dickian paranoia. Dostoyevsky meets Dick is a fine way to describe this artsy and introspective, yet pulpy, handheld detective yarn.

The anti-establishment bent of the picture and the detective’s proto-fascist power abusing intents build something that is more intellectually palatable for the Film Forum-going audience than say, Burt Reynolds as a Navajo, and thus it makes a very fine two-day long opening to the Morricone program. It tastes a bit like a much trashier detective version of Army of Shadows or The Conformist (both of which enjoyed extended runs at Film Forum). The brand new 35mm print looked pristine and is clearly indicative of an impeding, overdue DVD release in the near future and a chance for Dickheads all over to imagine a world where Elio Petri could direct Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

Arabian Nights
dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

LOVE!

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 5, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s mythological celebration of life takes the form of a series of short moral tales strung together with hyper-ecstatic energy. The lesson or moral of each is fairly unclear, but what is clear is that the characters in this blissful, meandering journey are more than likely to be spending their time fucking or dying than anything else.

The story charged with holding the picture together and running from start to finish revolves around the lusty passion between a young boy (of about 14 or 15) and his young (also 14 or 15) dominating slave girl. They are beautiful kids and the young boy’s beauty is so paralyzing that as he loses his slave girl and searches for her far and wide he ends up copulating with a wide variety of smitten young women. This young kid looks like one of the heroes of Larry Clark’s wonderful Wassup Rockers and Pasolini rests his camera on him with the same affection and awe, marveling at his frequently nude figure, skillfully blending human, animal passions with fantastical elements with an ease that would make Guillermo del Toro blush.

This joy-filled movie is currently not available on this country on DVD, though once was, briefly. I do not want to assume this is due to the frank use of graphic teen sexuality, and rather the delay to gather the best elements for a marvelous American Pasolini box set.

Danger: Diabolik
dir. Mario Bava

LOVE!

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 6, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Danger: Diabolik is a silly, sly, visually stunning, yet entirely straight-faced comedy about a handsome James Bond-ish super villain and his lover’s adventures in lucrative, victimless crime. While John Philip Law is the charming, statuesque “star” of the movie as the titular character, the set design and visual gags clearly take center stage. Eva, his lover, sterilely writhes around in piles of money and the two passionlessly kiss the night away, as we crane our necks to observe the gadgetry that adorns Diabolik’s lair. Eventually all gadgets are exposed, and are creatively designed, though all a bit too polished. The polish and camp making the stuff of cult appreciation, Danger: Diabolik is best when it is a music video, not just to the Beastie Boys’ “Body Movin'," but to Ennio Morricone’s electric guitar twang as well.

After The Burglars, this manages to take the prestigious spot as the 2nd best of the Ennio Morricone scored emerald heist movies. Though the score for Danger soars among the greatest, with Morricone flexing his silly muscle and elevating the 60'sness excess of James Bond music to another level. Danger is great fun, but for its lack of substantive material (minus the score and visuals) and its impression on the ham-fisted idiotic bullshit of Roman Coppola’s CQ, it deserves to sit in the corner of this series with a dunce cap atop it’s funny little head.

The Burglars

dir. Henri Verneuil

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 6, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Click here.

The Big Gundown

The Big Gundown
dir. Sergio Sollima

Run, man, run.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
February 13, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

A young girl, a real young girl, has been ravaged and murdered. Government endorsed vigilante lawman Jon Corbett is going to stop at nothing to catch the motherfucker who did it and watch him bleed. The motherfucker is Cuchillo Sanchez, and I’ll be damned if he isn’t the craftiest, dirty-fightingest scumbag on this piece of shit maneatin’ planet. I’ll be double-damned if you don’t love fucker by the end of this picture.

Largely due to the bravura performance of Tomas Milian, who plays Cuchillo, The Big Gundown stakes its place as arguably the greatest non-Sergio Leone spaghetti western (Lee Van Cleef’s strongest performance, a glorious score from Ennio Morricone, no-nonsense direction from Sergio Sollima and the intellectually complicated subject matter may also contribute).

The first taste of the sort of man Cuchillo is comes from a scene where he appears to be taking a second victim, another pre-teen, a blonde Mormon girl. He bathes giddily in a river beckoning the young lass to join him in the fun. Corbett (Lee Van Cleef) to the rescue! Cuchillo’s playfulness and good humor is a shocking display of objectivity on the part of director Sergio Sollima. With dramatic irony in place, the audience well aware of Cuchillo’s predatory tendencies, the scene plays out as if Solima just stumbled across Cuchillo taunting the pre-teen from the water and found it simply a source of mild amusement. The confrontation with Corbett is doubly strange, considering that it occurs so early in the movie. The set-up is one suggesting an endless chase, and the hero and villain are already facing off? Wait, Corbett gets shot? Already? I would call it a spoiler, if it didn’t occur so soon in the story. Cuchillo, caught red-handed and practically naked, rags hanging from his skin, starts blubbering like a fool when threatened by Corbett. Pathetically and half-mockingly repenting to God, Cuchillo, by flailing and whimpering on his knees manages to coerce the young girl into, get this, shooting Corbett! Cuchillo has a great belly laugh and takes off. When Corbett comes to, an old Morman man thanks him for protecting his wife and apologizes for his getting shot. Wife? Yes.

Nothing as it seems is the status quo in The Big Gundown as Corbett, used to fighting for simple right and wrong, is now drowning in a world where a raping murdering motherfucker is actually charming and likable. There will be no take ten paces and “draw!” with these two. Cuchillo barely picks up a gun the whole movie. Instead, he uses a knife, whines, squirrels his way out of trouble and runs about like a chicken with its head cut off from scene to scene through Texas and Mexico, every once and a while injecting a political diatribe about the state of his oppressed peasant culture, which are all strikingly genuine. Slowly Corbett discovers his foe is not as simple as things seem and he is faced with not only being outsmarted by this ruffian, but having his ideological and geographical worlds turned upside down.

The wonderfully junky and comical candy scenarios and characters in The Big Gundown coated with the hard emotional shell of poverty, rape, murder and desperate fatalism make a delicious masterstroke of moviemaking. This picture is the missing link between the bombastic poetic schlock of the spaghetti western genre and the intense character studies as haunting political and emotional landscapes of the Sam Peckinpah genre (yes, he deserves his own genre). In other words, come for the goofy hijinks, rousing score, snap dialogue and fun performances, stay for self-critical crises of ugly introspection, dishonorably charming cheating motherfuckers and brain-busting, jaw-droppingly brave motion picture creation.

The Burglars

The Burglars

dir. Henri Verneuil


Regrettably, the youtube version of the chase is not in the proper aspect ratio, limiting its monumental power, but... you get the picture.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

February 8, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

The concept of cop and criminal being of the same mental geometry is a tired one, and something I would like nothing to do with. With a tired genre convention such as that, something easily grasped, comes the fruition of a new world amass in possibility. Utilizing a pre-existing, innately understood concept is freeing, letting one delve deeper into concepts both flighty and psychotically fearsome without the limitation of having to spend time establishing rules.

Abel and Azad are a crooked cop and a crooked criminal, respectively. They are quintessential foils, and the expediency with which they discover that they are pieces of the same puzzle (accepting their own social conventions) is in effect a safe-cracking, an unlocking of scenes that may otherwise make no sense. These scenes explode the senses, bringing joy, excitement and laughter at every turn, in the coherent, masterfully told motion picture event, Henri Verneuil’s The Burglars.

An extremely quiet, mostly dialogue free emerald heist kicks off the story with a whisper, harking back to that extremely serious, marvelously quiet heist in Rififi. The Burglars’ heist is detailed and systematically interesting, though the technological gadgetry is the stuff of a bad spy movie. Logically following a scene of dialogue-free quiet is a scene of dialogue-free loudness; without a doubt, one of the most riveting, wowing car chases in movie history. The hyperbole is well earned. Two crappy cars careen in every direction though the streets, sidewalks, back alleys and stairs of Athens, Greece. Yes, the cars chase one another down stairs, just like Jason Bourne. An utter lack of what today one would refer to as special effects or controlled locations load this pursuit with an air of refreshing reality, rendering each near miss of a pedestrian jaw-dropping, every impact eye-popping. This is a lengthy chase, worth dissecting, but what carries the heft of the never boring chase are the moments when one or both of the cars come to a halt. There is no blood thirst amongst these rivals, and the chase is not a murderous one. There are moments of quiet when the cars stop, often practically on top of one another. The struggle to then escape an automobilic chokehold, a duel even, is endless entertaining. There is an urge to scream at either of the drivers to get out of the car and pull the opponent out, but then the opponent would be able to jet away. Even a slow car is faster than a man.

The chase comes early on, and is long, but what follows is thrilling set piece after set piece matched with Abel and Azad’s delicious cat and mouse banter. The crazily cool Omar Sharif, playing the civilized super villain the utmost ease, plays Abel. Jean-Paul Belmondo (yes, the guy from Breathless), a physical man’s and ladies’ man hurdling and tumbling through the picture’s creative set pieces and colorful supporting characters, plays Azad. Both characters spill over with confidence and zero fear. In order to improvise escape, Belmondo runs up to a moving bus, jumps up, shoves his arms through a window and holds on while the bus continues down the highway, Sharif in tow, attempting to knock him off with his car door. There are showdowns at a seemingly abandoned toy warehouse and a stunning conclusion in a silo (pre-Witness, obviously). Again, as action-packed as this all seems, it is tempered with winning, witty, wordy power plays between the leads, and a constant grinning joy.

In the movie’s most amazing moment, a clear demonstration of exuberance and joy for cinema, Belmondo has evaded Sharif during a showdown at a carnival by hiding in the bed of a truck hauling salt. The truck takes him to the top of a mountain of salt and trash and he is dumped overboard. The vantage point is from the bottom of the mountain. Belmondo tumbles, and it is undoubtedly him, in a moment of sheer physical bravado, flipping recklessly down a mountain, enormous chucks of salt and rock chasing him down and down and down and down and right into your face. BAM! This is movies!

Burn!

Burn!

dir. Gillo Pontecorvo

Sir William Walker can out-puppet Don Corleone any day of the week.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

February 12, 2007 - 35mm/Film Forum

Not unlike Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s previous feature, The Battle of Algiers, Burn! is a sprawling, rambling, geographically contained epic of timeless urgency. The lesson is a simple one. No person can free another person; a person can only free themself. The method by which this lesson is taught is the interesting thing here. An unusually and appropriately restrained Marlon Brando plays an Englishman with flowing locks of hair. This hair, along with his collected demeanor first suggests the classic “white man out to save the black people” narrative, though Mr. Brando turns out to be the classic “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

He lands on a Portuguese Caribbean colony where, naturally, Africans have been enslaved to work sugar plantations. After witnessing a government endorsed beheading of a “friend,” our white knight helps the deceased’s family carry the beheaded body back to their home. He then proceeds to hang around looking for the smallest indication of rebellion amongst the enslaved. Once he discovers this, in the form of Jose Dolores (Evaristo Marquez), a band of revolutionaries is formed and Brando leads his pupils by the hand through a successful revolution. This first portion of the movie is riveting political thriller/revolutionary cinema stuff, and it all carries the impressive weight of a “why dunnit?” rather than a “who dunnit?” Why is Brando’s Sir William Walker doing this? Is it out of hate of the Portuguese? Has he been hired to free the people for their own good? Yeah, right. Sir William is on that island for the same reason any imperialist country has any presence in any “unstable” country. Money.

Abruptly Sir William convinces Jose that he is unfit to actually run an organized government and installs a puppet ruler. Britain wins! 10 years pass; talk about abrupt, a title card just flashes on screen. Brando no longer holds any interest in the island he fought so hard for. It was all in a day’s work, and now he is enlisted by his government for another day’s work, this time fighting against the still wound up and enslaved islanders and their still powerful leader, Jose Dolores. The second half of the movie is far more ambiguous and difficult to comprehend than the first, due to the fact so much time has passed and that Britain and therefore Sir Williams Walker’s interests are in stark opposition to their previous allies. This is a historical norm with imperialist governments, and it has never been so pointedly represented.

Brando’s character, through the first half of the picture, is presented as a morally ambiguous presence, but this ambiguity is exposed as heartless and inhumane, no matter if his actions seem well intentioned in the first portion. No matter if this imperialist nation is fighting for “good” or “evil” they are still “evil,” but more than evil, greedy. Brando plagues this island like a curse, and this time around the violence takes on a far more affecting strain in the form of civil war. The island is divided between those who decided to follow the puppet leader, and thus Dolores’ troops now war, not against English or Portuguese soldiers, but against their own people. Brando simply observes, a political puppet master with only the slightest twang of guilt over the chaos he caused at the behest of his nation.

Sir William Walker is a fascinating, complex creature and Brando plays it all with maniacal detachment in his eyes. Struggling to figure him out, Jose becomes the audience’s eyes and ears, which adds to the complexity of the movie’s structure, considering Jose is not the main character. Sir William is our hero, and it is often a horror to be left alone with him. Ennio Morricone adds a gripping musical theme of epic heroism with an underlying current of menace, as the camerawork acts similarly, shaking through a chaotic mass of extras, yielding a grand scope of intimacy and uncertainty. The uncertainty yields passages that are uneven and less interesting than others, but Burn! remains one of the most politically complex movies I’ve seen, even if the morals of the story are beat over your head in the final moments.