Monthly Archives: July 2015

Alan Stuart is a sometime musician, writer and critic who lives in Wellington with his wife, Pat, and George the Wonder Dog. His ramblings and miscellanies may be found at Wise Blood.

There are a bunch of strange ideas going on in The Last Sunset (Robert Aldrich 1961) At least they seemed odd to my 14 year old sensibility. The main character, Brendan O’Malley (Kirk Douglas) crosses the border into Mexico because he’s on the run and wanted for murder in the US.  Now that’s badly wrong for starters. How can Kirk Douglas be wanted for murder? No way.

I mean, look at that face. I was fascinated by the guy. Not tall, Not dark. Not handsome. But the camera loved him and so did I.
Brendan arrives at the ranch of a former lover, Belle (Dorothy Malone) and her husband John (Joseph Cotton) and this is where it starts to get really complicated. The sheriff (Rock Hudson) pursuing Brendan turns up and the two men agree to take a herd of cattle back to Texas, yeah Texas, for the ranchers, whose surname is – wait for it – Breckenridge. They have a daughter. No, not Myra, Melissa (Carol Lynley).  Melissa reminds Brendan of the young Belle and guess what? Yep. They’re soon petting on the front porch. Well, that September/April thing is always a bit iffy but when Belle reveals that ‘Missy’ is Brendan’s daughter, I was unable to get out of my seat to refresh my Kia Ora orange juice. So, it all ends up in a gunfight of course and Kirk deliberately doesn’t load his gun so it’s kinda suicide –  a penance for carrying on like a member of the British aristocracy I suppose.
I was pretty upset by all of this and no one really wanted to talk to me about murder, incest and suicide when I got home –  so it just all kinda sat there. Stayed with me.

I don’t quite know how anybody would ever be able to get Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder 1959) out of their mind. Quite possibly the best comedy ever made and in many top 10s drawn from all genres and languages.

Casting Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as two musicians on the lam from the Chicago mob in prohibition America is inspired. Having them cross-dress in order to join Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators is a stroke of genius we can attribute to Wilder and co-writer, I A L Diamond. The plot will, by now, be familiar to most readers; the ‘boys’ meeting  Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), the train trip to Florida, the French farce romancing, the run in with Spats Colombo (George Raft) and his gangsters, the denouement and Joe E Brown’s best ever pay-off line.
The miracle of this movie, though, is how its central premise of men dressed as women never wanders into anything questionable. There are numerous opportunities where that could happen but sure-footed direction and playing ensure the laughs are never gained cheaply. I saw the movie with my father when it was first released. I’ve never forgotten how the magic sparkled off the screen that night.

In truth, I could select almost any film by Alain Resnais for this article. His ideas about the creative process and the human condition send out grappling hooks that may not be easily dislodged. I have chosen ‘Providence’  because I have only seen it the once, when it was released in 1977, and have been unable to track down a VHS or DVD, so I might lay its ghosts.

There’s been an awful lot printed and said about this film and its influence and significance on what followed. I do have a point of view but that’s not what I’m here for. David Mercer’s script, Miklós Rózsa’s evocative score and Resnais’ direction of his brilliant cast (Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, John Gielgud, David Warner and Elaine Stritch) under the swirling lens of Ricardo Aronovich, conspire in space and time to achieve a dizzying treatise for mind and heart. Are those near to us a sort of construct, there to channel our artistic obligations into abstract but parallel creations? Heady stuff. I have to see it again.

‘To our Television Audience: In the aftermath of violence, the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts. “Taxi Driver” suggests that tragic errors can be made’. The Filmmakers.

The disclaimer shown at the conclusion of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976) when it was shown on US television was unexplained. Maybe John Hinckley Jr provided an explanation when he tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981. Sporting a Mohican haircut and a fixation for Jody Foster, maybe he thought he was Travis Bickle. But he wasn’t. Robert De Niro was Travis Bickle. Is Travis Bickle. And Travis Bickle is Robert De Niro. They are indistinguishable. I cannot tell them apart.
De Niro, like Charon, ferrying his passengers across the Styx and the Acheron into New York’s Hell. Travis, wanting a big rain to come and wash all the scum off the streets. De Niro, sidling up to the Secret Service agent with that crazy, mock self-assurance. Travis telling Sport, ‘Suck on this’. Alienation and suffering. Travis is the American experience. I don’t think he dies in the shoot-out either. He survives; becomes Willard and kills Kurtz in Cambodia. Travis lives. He’s here now.

I’m including a New Zealand film, In Spring One Plants Alone (Vincent Ward 1980) because more than anything I’ve seen, more than Tony Fomison’s paintings perhaps, it opens up a kind of limbic channel into our pre-history.

The true story is of an elderly Tuhoe woman caring for her mentally ill son in the Uruweras. The rituals and small details of their isolated existence provide the narrative. Leon Narbey and Alun Bollinger ask their cameras to be still; to allow their subjects to wander into frame. Jack Body’s spartan music serves only to underscore the loneliness, the tragic beauty of lives far removed from our own. The only one of the five that I will properly describe as haunting.

Performance (Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg 1970) joins ‘The Wizard of Oz’  (Victor Fleming 1939) and ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (Stanley Kubrick 1987) in a select trio that I describe as ‘movies of two halves’. Which, in this case, is appropriate, given the film’s cult status and reputation as ‘the greatest seventies film about identity’.
The first half of the film is a London gangster tale. Chas (James Fox) is an enforcer for Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) and goes on the run after shooting a local bookie.
The second part of the film is set in Turner’s (Mick Jagger) Notting Hill house where Chas lies low as he arranges to leave the country. Turner is a whacked-out pop star who has put himself out to grass, so to speak, with two women in a ménage à trois.  This part of the film borders on the experimental, the surreal. The transition from Get Carter to Belle de Jour, if you see what I mean, is uncomfortable and nervous. Roeg’s cinematography is too close to both Richard Lester and Joseph Losey without being its own thing. The interior shots are mostly askance with all of the de rigueur psychedelia in focus; oriental carpets, tapestries, incense – the lot. So what happens is that Cammell and Roeg are busy telling us, telling me, that they’re making a film. Not telling a story. Not really. So they don’t direct their actors with any precision or feel for story telling. It’s all too loose and disconnected. The numerous sex scenes and displays of angst over sexual identity are all servants to the way the movie looks. If one of the principals connected to the production had made a grand statement about trying to transfer Brecht’s theory of alienation from the theatre to a film, I might have tried harder, I suppose. As it was, I just felt excluded most of the time – the one notable exception being when Mick sings ‘Memo from Turner’ on the soundtrack. Isolated intimacy.

Author’s Note
I was encouraged to write an account of ‘Performance’ by Wellington Musician, Mikey Jamieson. He and I go back a ways as friends and musical collaborators and so I was pleased to do the right thing – although I have a feeling that he may well disagree with the sentiments I’ve expressed above. I’d like to just add, for Mikey, and anyone else’s, benefit,  one of my lovely dad’s observations about developments in film during the late 60s; ‘If you get your gear off in a British film, it’s a sex film. If you do it in a French or Italian film, it’s cinematic art.’

In the past week or so, I’ve watched three movies that are all quite different stylistically, but have a common theme. Each story has a central character that dares to take on a power elite and all three characters experience a kind of limited success.

Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones 1995) has Liam Neeson as the title character wandering around the early 18th century Scottish highlands in a Mogadon-induced trance trying to save both his honour and a large sum of money  from the clutches of the evil Duke of Montrose (John Hurt) and his despicable henchman, Archie Cunningham (Tim Roth). Neeson was about half way through his ‘Mogadon period’ when he made this movie. He first discovered the value of the powerful hypnotic when playing the role of Oskar Schindler in 1993 when he realised he’d need something to combat Steven Spielberg’s directorial technique and Ralph Fiennes channelling Peter Cook into his character of Untersturmführer Amon Goethe. The addiction was at its peak when Neeson later played the role of Qui-Gon Jinn in ‘Star Wars Episode 1; The Phantom Menace’ (1999). His lines throughout were spoken by a ‘voice double’ as Neeson was barely conscious for the entire shoot.
So despite good turns from Jessica Lange and Brian Cox, the whole thing has the feel of a pedestrian pantomime plodding around  a picturesque backdrop – the ridiculous powdered wigs and brocaded costumes, indeed, only serving to induce the audience to scream , ‘Watch out! Behind you!‘ when Tim Roth scowls his way into frame.

John Grisham has stated that The Rainmaker ( Francis Ford Coppola 1997) is the best adaptation of any of his novels. And I think that there’s ample evidence to agree with him. Matt Damon has the role of a tyro lawyer, Rudy Baylor, desperate for work in Memphis, Tennessee. He accepts a position working as an associate in sleazy  personal injury lawyer, J. Lyman “Bruiser” Stone’s (Mickey Rourke)  ambulance-chasing practice.

What I like about Coppola’s direction is his understanding that the dynamic of ‘smaller’ lives stammering and jerking their course through time and space create a kind of intimate history of America. There are shades and nuances present in Coppola’s stories that allow the characters a subtle voice in the development of a broader plot. As Damon and his streetwise colleague, Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), proceed to take on an Insurance Company and their smooth legal team, we see how the quotidian lives of the bit players draw out the mores and motives of the moneyed classes. It made me think that Grisham and Coppola were made for each other.
I cannot complete this review without mentioning Elmer Bernstein’s score which perfectly evokes time and place. As ever, Coppola recognising the importance of both sight and sound in narrative detail.

I really didn’t know anything about The Whistle Blower (Simon Langton 1986) before watching it. Taking anything on trust that stars Michael Caine is always a risky proposition – but straight off – let me say that I both liked and enjoyed his appearance in this British spy thriller set on the cusp of Perestroika.
Caine is Frank Jones, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, now a moderately successful businessman – a widower with an adult son, Robert (Nigel Havers) who he both dotes on and constantly bickers with. Robert is a naïve idealist working as a Russian translator at a British Intelligence listening station. He is also having an affair with a married woman who has a child.
What sets this film apart from many others in the genre is the ordinariness of its protagonist as he struggles to unravel the labyrinthine infrastructure of the neurosis-fuelled spy world when his son dies in suspicious circumstances. Even the name, Frank Jones, is the name of a cypher, a ‘little’ man who’s lived his life, doesn’t want any trouble, any excitement. But Caine, when he’s on form, is expert at conveying stillness, passivity that masks anger – an anger that is intensely alive once released. And he gets to display those skills here, in spades.
As Frank sets about finding the truth, I wondered how he was going to get himself out of the hole that he digs for himself as the Intelligence elite (James Fox, Gordon Jackson and John Gielgud et al) conspire to thwart his efforts. But the writers, John Hale and Julian Bond, have come up with a witty and credible denouement which I will not reveal. Watch the movie for yourself and be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

I thought I’d write about music in movies, starting with some feature films that use stories about music or musicians. Not necessarily greats or favourites but movies, that for one reason or another, interest me – and hopefully you.
I’ll follow up in further blogs with some documentaries or concert movies. I might also discuss soundtracks as well.

The Blues Brothers (John Landis 1980) could well be sub-titled ‘Nothing Exceeds Like Excess’. This one is a favourite and always has been. I love its anarchy, its energy, its lack of discrimination and its music. The idea of two habitual criminals on an Arthurian mission to reform their band and, in that cause, destroying a shopping mall, untold numbers of police cars, a tenement building, an Illinois Nazi rally and anything else that comes to hand, is too glorious to miss. I do hope that Landis wilfully overspent the budget rather than simply mismanaged. I like to think that he brought ‘the method’ to direction and his own excesses resonated within the movie. As Richard Corliss wrote in Time; “The Blues Brothers is a demolition symphony that works with the cold efficiency of a Moog synthesizer gone sadistic“.
The music is memorable. I played in a band that did a Blues Brothers night at the Stokes Valley Cosmopolitan Club some years ago. I brought along my pork pie hat and Bill Bass sunnies and we did Time is Tight, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, Boom Boom and the rest. A great gig, everybody up dancing and singing along.
‘Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters… sell them to me. Sell me your children!’

The Man With The Golden Arm (Otto Preminger 1955) was a landmark film both thematically and historically. The movie’s central character, Frankie Machine, played by Frank Sinatra, is a jazz drummer heroin addict who gets clean doing time but struggles to stay that way when released.
Once completed, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) refused to certificate the film because it portrayed drug addiction and breached the Hollywood Production Code. But Preminger insisted that drug addiction should not be marginalised by the film industry and that such stories, if well told, had artistic merit. He won the day, the Code was changed and the picture granted a certificate, thus paving the way for further examination of other previously taboo subjects such as prostitution and abortion.
Elmer Bernstein wrote the distinctive main theme and it’s played by Shorty Rogers and his Giants – Shelly Manne on drums –  as is the rest of the music.

Control (Anton Corbijn 2007) is the director’s film debut. He had worked as a photographer with Joy Division and so knew them and the movie’s subject, frontman Ian Curtis. Also involved in the production were Curtis’ widow, Deborah, Tony Wilson, the owner of Factory Records, and band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris. The result, I believe, is a moving, accurate portrayal of a unique musician.
This is not the music of my youth, I have to say. But this band, and Ian Curtis in particular, had a lasting effect on my musical sensibility. The power of their search for articulation, the hampered poesy and the instant mythology occasioned by Curtis’ suicide are more than just suggested by this account. ‘Control’ is an intimate study of pain and the creative instinct.

I think that I’ll make this a two-part blog and write about a few more movies in the next couple of days.
Closing trivia; ‘Still Crazy’ (Brian Gibson 1998) is a decent comedy about a fictional 70s band, ‘Strange Fruit’ that reforms some 20 years after its break up. Appearing in the film, tellingly, is Bruce Robinson, director of the legendary ‘Withnail and I’ (1987). There’s not a lot of people know that.