AFTERNOON WITH AN ARTISAN

BLOOD ON THE MOON (1948: Dir. Robert Wise)

I once had the good fortune to talk with a filmmaker responsible for some of the 20th century's most indelible films. His name is Robert Wise and he had the rare privilege of claiming ownership to at least one seminal film in six different genres including: West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Set-Up,  Run Silent, Run Deep, The Haunting, and The Andromeda Strain, not to mention such other fan favourites as The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles, The Hindenburg, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

It was on one of the hottest days of the year in July of 1995 when an 80 year-old Robert Wise kindly made room in his busy schedule for a book-signing of Robert Wise On His Films at TheatreBooks, where I ran the film department. Wise was actually in Toronto to film a cameo in the feature film The Stupids, joining such other auteur filmmakers as Costa-Gavras, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Norman Jewison and Gillo Pontecorvo, all doing their bit parts at the behest of the film's cineaste director John Landis. Mr Wise arrived by taxi right on time, and as I went out to greet him I was immediately struck by the dignity and strength of his character. Still sporting a tall and robust frame, despite his age and semi-retired status, his unpretentious yet courteous demeanor belied the reputation of the many legendary films in his oeuvre. As this public appearance had been rather hastily arranged with no advanced publicity available, there were unfortunately no customers awaiting his entrance, save for the few staff on duty. Sensing a lull, I quickly offered Mr. Wise a chair and right away began plying him for anecdotes about his storied career, with special emphasis on his early years as an editor working with Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons), and his first directing jobs making horror films for producer Val Lewton (Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher). I was especially eager for some reminiscences about his two projects with one of my favourite actors Robert Ryan, the brutal boxing picture The Set-Up, and the largely forgotten Film Noir Odds Against Tomorrow, featuring a full jazz score by musician and Modern Jazz Quartet co-founder John Lewis, one of the first Hollywood films to a use a Black film composer. Indulging my rabid curiosity, Wise generously stayed for a full hour without having sold a single copy of the book, all the while cheerfully answering any and all questions I put to him. I was also able to converse with him about a mutual friend of ours, TVO's Saturday Night at the Movies host Elwy Yost, a unquenchable film buff  and historian of whom Wise spoke with genuine fondness. When the time was up, I walked him through the sweltering summer heat to his awaiting cab. Still in a daze from our voluminous conversation, I shook his hand, thanking him for his inspirational body of work, and his kindness in making a special effort to visit the store. Before he got into the cab, he turned to me and said with a twinkle in his eye, "Do me a favour?" "Sure", I said. "Turn down the goddamm heat!!" he chuckled, and was driven away in a flash, leaving me to ponder all of the films unmade and unmentioned in our conversation, yet still feeling pleasantly satisfied that I had sat down with one of cinema's great craftsmen.

One of the films I forgot to inquire about with Robert Wise was Blood on the Moon, a moody noir Western that he made during his RKO contract days. Much overlooked, its low profile has remained constant over the years perhaps due to its uniquely stylized look and relative unavailability. Providing one is prepared for the experience, the film yields many pleasures, especially with its chiaroscuro cinematography that bathes the celluloid image in high contrast black and white often obscuring faces and sets, almost to the point of audience frustration. Director of photography Nicholas Musuraca, was an artist who painted with light, and this, his third film with star Robert Mitchum, is a further refinement on the shadowed look he had already perfected for their previous pairing, the quintessential noir Out of the Past, directed by another Val Lewton protege, Jacques Tourneur. Wise utilizes Musuraca's daring lighting to heighten the existential reality of the characters, tightening the screws on Mitchum's taciturn drifter, a man who's loyalty and moral rectitude find him on both sides of a violent range war. As in all of his pictures, Wise directs his evocatively chosen cast with a steady hand, avoiding the pitfalls of overwrought melodrama, in favour of the lingering aura of doomed peril. Emotions are instead reflected in action, particularly in a bravura bar-room fight between Mitchum and his former partner Robert Preston. Intensely staged with a bloody savagery meant to illustrate the chasm between two men who were once trusted friends, it is one of the most disturbing scenes of violence in Wise's entire filmography. Itching to finish off his seven-year contract, Blood on the Moon would be Wise's penultimate film at RKO, followed by the audacious "real-time" drama of The Set-Up, before he began his celebrated film work at the major Hollywood studios of 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and finally Universal Pictures. All of these later films would exhibit the same artistry Robert Wise brought to Blood on the Moon, qualities that make his contribution to cinema an eternal gift to future generations. It was my most profound privilege to spend an enlightening afternoon in his company. BLU-RAY

FILM FAILURES I REFUSE TO ABANDON Part Two

VICTORY (1996: Dir. Mark Peploe)

It is a crime against the viewing public when a film remains undiscovered due to the ego of a producer. Such is the case with Mark Peploe's VICTORY, a literate and sweepingly romantic adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1915 novel. Produced by Miramax Films, it was unceremoniously buried after company president Harvey Weinstein personally deemed it unsuitable for North American audiences.  Years later it became available on DVD, where its exquisitely told tale of the South Seas could at last be appreciated. In a sympathetically sensitive performance, Willem Dafoe stars as Axel Heyst, a self-imposed American exile in the Dutch East Indies whose hermit-like isolation masks an aching loneliness of purpose. In a precious moment of courage he abandons his secluded existence when he chooses to harbour Alma (Irene Jacob), a comely fugitive fleeing the white slavery of an all-girl orchestra lorded over by its grotesquely omnivorous conductor (Simon Callow). With her innocent beauty, Alma quietly lays siege to her saviour's fortified heart, but their love is soon threatened with the ex-machina arrival of two criminals, the sleazy psychopath Mr. Jones (Sam Neill), and his bestial sidekick Martin (Rufus Sewell). These greedy interlopers are seeking an apocryphal treasure hidden somewhere on Heyst's forlorn plantation, thus igniting a tinder box of emotion that will consume all the characters in a fiery finale. Previously known for his screenwriting collaborations with Bertolucci (The Last Emperor) and Antonioini (The Passenger), VICTORY was filmmaker Mark Peploe's sophomore directorial effort after the cult success of his art-house horror film Afraid of the Dark (1991). As a Kenyan-born Brit, he was often drawn to exotic locales for his screenplays, including the Sahara Desert, and China's Forbidden City. His interest in foreign environments finds full flower here, where together with Bertrand Tavernier's former cinematographer Bruno De Keyzer, and Merchant Ivory production designer Luciana Arrighi, Peploe unerringly brings to life the fetid jungles and unencumbered lifestyle of a primordial Indonesian island. Dafoe and Neill would re-unite nearly two decades later on another Antipodean island story, The Hunter (2011). Set in Tasmania, and once again featuring Dafoe as the loner protagonist, that film would enjoy a modest though satisfying success, something tragically denied Peploe, who with the failure of his ironically titled masterpiece VICTORY, has never set foot behind the camera since. BLU-RAY

A STONE WRAPPED IN COTTEN

THE STEEL TRAP (1952: Dir. Andrew Stone)

               A BLUEPRINT FOR MURDER (1953: Dir. Andrew Stone)

In the 1950s, there was only one filmmaker apart from Alfred Hitchcock, who consistently delivered superior white knuckle entertainment to cinema-goers, Andrew L. Stone. Beginning  in 1950 with the gut-punching gangster film Highway 301, this maverick writer-director-producer made nearly one suspense film a year until Ring of Fire in 1961 ended his unprecedented string of low budget successes. Stone, often with his wife and editor Virginia as co-producer, had been directing films for nearly twenty years when he finally hit his stride with a pair of lean nail-biters starring Joseph Cotten. Both of these were mini-masterpieces of domestic tension, and featured Cotten as a man struggling to care for his family under the most desperate circumstances. In The Steel Trap, he is the grasping husband of naive homemaker Theresa Wright, who successfully steals from the bank where he works only to have second thoughts. The film's coup de cinema comes when he decides to return the money before its discovered, leading to an extended sequence of almost unbearably nerve-wracking intensity as he attempts to rectify his misdeeds with the same precise planning that he used to execute the robbery. Stone, whose independently financed films where a textbook model of economy, always believed in the use of real locations instead of studio built sets, not just for parsimonious reasons, but to add a contemporary reality often missing from glossy Hollywood products. This practice was particularly effective in The Steel Trap, a film that lingers in the methodical detail and procedure of the bank and its employees, as it slowly tightens an invisible vice grip around the audiences' throat during the film's ticking clock climax. Director and star reunited the following year in A Blueprint For Murder, another solid suspenser with Cotten as a distraught man trying to solve the murder of his wealthy young niece. Unspooling in a brisk 76 minutes, ten minutes shorter than their previous collaboration, Blueprint, is, despite its mundane police procedural elements, nearly as heart-stopping, with a wrap-up that keeps one guessing almost until the end credits roll. In both films Cotten acquits himself admirably in roles which require him to convincingly convey moral uncertainty, while at the same time displaying a genuine and sympathetic every-man earnestness. As box-office insurance Stone made sure to cast previous Cotten co-stars as his love interests. Theresa Wright, who had played his admiring niece in Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt (1947) becomes his loving spouse in The Steel Trap, and Jean Peters, the well-intentioned woman who discovered Cotton's uxoricidal intentions toward an unfaithful Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953), this time plays his coolly elegant and recently widowed sister-in-law. Stone was able to repeat this winning combination with two memorable back-to-back James Mason vehicles, Cry Terror! (1958), a paranoid home invasion extortion thriller, and The Decks Ran Red (1958), an offbeat seafaring tale of murder and salvage. Prior to that he also gave Doris Day her most emotionally overwrought role as the eponymous wife terrorized by pathologically jealous husband Louis Jordan in Julie (1956), an exercise in near hysterical unease. My particular favourite of Stone's suspense cycle is The Last Voyage (1960), a sinking cruise ship disaster movie with stalwart hero Robert Stack bravely rescuing his family from breathtaking jeopardy, his wife poignantly portrayed by Stack's former Written On The Wind (1957) co-star Dorothy Malone. Typical of the director's constant efforts at cinema verisimilitude, Stone rented the Ile de France ocean liner and flooded parts of it under controlled conditions, even insisting his actors undergo death-defying peril including Stack, who, with only a wire around his wrist, valiantly traversed a narrow plank precariously perched over an actual 73 foot drop. Ring of Fire, with Deputy Sheriff David Jansen menaced by a raging forest fire while being held hostage by a gang of criminal fugitives, provided a fitting end to this pot-boiling phase of Stone's oeuvre. Turning the page, Stone decamped to London where he made three largely forgotten comedies, followed by Song Of Norway (1970) and The Great Waltz (1972), a misguided matched set of thoroughly maudlin musicals whose disastrous receptions spelled the end of his career behind the camera. Having the last laugh, he lived to the grand old age of 96, long enough for critics to finally acknowledge this early auteur of anxiety. DVD

FILM FAILURES I REFUSE TO ABANDON Part One

The Sicilian (1987: Dir. Michael Cimino)

 

I pride myself for my loyalty. If a filmmaker makes even a single work that I fully embrace, then I consider myself a custodian of his entire oeuvre. Michael Cimino is one of these artists I will defend at any opportunity. Under the screenwriting mentorship of Clint Eastwood, Cimino made a memorable directorial debut with an eccentric heist buddy comedy Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in 1974.  His follow-up was The Deer Hunter (1979), one of the most influential films of the Seventies, and the first Oscar-winning movie made about the Vietnam War. High on his sophomore success, Cimino garnered an unprecedented budget and schedule commitment from United Artists to make his mesmerizing mega-budget western Heaven's Gate (1980), a nearly four hour box office disaster that bankrupted the studio, and became the tipping point for directorial excess in Hollywood. Chastened by his fall from grace, Cimino regrouped for the slightly less ambitious Year of the Dragon (1985), a dynamic though money-losing cop picture plagued by protests for its "racist" portrayal of Asian culture. Undaunted, Cimino accepted the assignment to direct the film adaptation of Mario Puzo's sequel novel to The Godfather, entitled The Sicilian, a largely fictionalized retelling of the life of Salvatore Giuliano, an actual post-war Italian bandit, known as the Robin Hood of Sicily. Puzo, in a crass bid to give historical credibility to his invented Corleone family, shoe-horned them into Giuliano's real-life exploits. With all cinematic rights to The Godfather still in the hands of others, any mention of the Corleones were excised from the script of The Sicilian, and Cimino also distanced himself from Coppola's landmark saga by avoiding the casting of any familiar Mediterranean faces. This led to some downright odd casting choices, including German Fassbinder almuni Barbara Sukowa as an American-born Countess, Cockney Terence Stamp as an effete sphinx-like Italian Prince, and fair-haired Irish actor Ray McNally as a Roman politician. Cimino personally campaigned for Frenchman Christophe Lambert as Giuliano, and at the time his choice must have seemed right, given the era's paucity of young bankable Italian stars. Lambert, whose myopic intensity and physical grace often compensated for his limited emotional range, perfectly embodied Cimino's romanticized hero, a direct contrast to the docudrama approach favoured by Neopolitan writer-director Francesco Rosi for his 1962 film Salvatore Giuliano. Much like Rosi, Cimino saw his Giuliano film as a personal statement, the third in his mythic trilogy of criminal systems and the rebels who oppose them. In Heaven's Gate, it was Kris Kristofferson's cynical betrayal by the robber barons of the East Coast, a reality lived by Cimino himself when the film was cut in half and forsaken by its distributors. In Year of the Dragon, it was Mickey Rourke's noble redemption in his one-man war with the Chinese Tong, revealing a determination which mirrored Cimino's own rising from the ashes, but it would all come to a fateful conclusion with The Sicilian, where the optimism of altrusitic banditry is proven to be no match for the seemingly eternal corruption of Mafia-controlled Sicily. Cimino learned the same hard lesson about the Hollywood system when his 146 minute director's cut of the film was legally butchered to 115 minutes and released with minimal enthusiasm by a fledgling production company founded by former Columbia Pictures chief David Begelman, the convicted embezzler in a notorious 1977 cheque forging scandal that almost fatally damaged the career of actor Cliff Robertson. Maimed in previous battles, Cimino now seemed to have lost the war, making only two forgotten subsequent films in the Nineties (The Desperate Hours; Sunchaser), before pursuing a career as a novelist in Europe. With its lacklustre North American reception, The Sicilian was effectively orphaned, with only a later home video version of Cimino's cut, where the virtues of David Mansfield's lush Italianate score, Alex Thomson's burnished cinematography, and the director's own eye for visually epic composition, could still be appreciated by those who believe that a true artist is the author of his or her own fate and can never be silenced by the opposition or indifference of their corrupt benefactors. BLU-RAY

FAR-OUT FLASHBACK

SPACE STATION 76 (2014: Dir. Jack Plotnick)

For fans of my generation it is the Science Fiction send-up we never imagined. A laugh-out-loud love letter to the groovy dystopian space fantasies populated by swinging stereotypes in all their bell-bottomed glory. If you grew up, as I did, devouring everything Sci-Fi in the Seventies, then filmmaker Jack Plotnick 's Space Station 76 is the ultimate nostalgia trip back to the future. By cunningly stealing external elements from such treasured television trash as The Starlost, Buck Rogers, and Space:1999, and emotionally combining them with the narcissistic angst of a John Cheever story, Plotnick and his collaborators have created one of the most amusing recent critiques of the so-called "Me Decade". The film is an evocative compendium of the social and sexual self-involvement of the Seventies, embodied by the isolated inhabitants of the film's eponymous space station. As the lives of these egocentric avatars were being played out in front of me, I couldn't help experiencing cringes of recognition in between prolonged bouts of ribald laughter. Plotnick not only knows that hair, make-up and clothes are the easiest of visual gags when summoning up such a colour-blind fashion epoch, but he also cleverly underlines the emptiness of his character's lives by recreating the cloying consumerism and psychedelic suburban styles that saturated the interiors of homes from my childhood memories. Just as this was an era when it was o.k. to have wood paneling and blue paisley wallpaper in the same kitchen, it was also a time when the tradition of marital fidelity was being challenged by a generation raised on a steady Sixties diet of freedom and experimentation. Western society was in transition, trying to make sense of a culture liberated by the enlightenment of new gender roles, and until 1977 when the retro-pulp fantasy of Star Wars changed the channel, the Science Fiction genre in film and TV reflected this disillusionment with outmoded ideologies. The danger is that films like Space Station 76 can fool us into thinking we have come a long way since those days, but it's Plotnick's ingenious intention to question that assumption, thus allowing the chilly air of truth to temper his warm mirthful memories. Blu-ray

ACTION HEROES WHO DELIGHT ME: Jean-Paul Belmondo

"THAT MAN FROM RIO" (1964: Dir. Philippe De Broca)

There are very few actors in the history of world cinema who are willing to risk their lives for a film. During the silent era, both Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd seemed to dance with death regularly, Lloyd even lost a thumb and forefinger in a botched explosion. For succeeding generations various performers have exhibited a desire to do their own stunts, and in France starting in the Sixties one daredevil actor perched himself above all others on the precipice of excitement. Jean-Paul Belmondo may not have been a vaudeville tumbler like Cary Grant, or a circus acrobat like Burt Lancaster, but this classically trained stage actor was just as fearless taking a punch or leaping from a tall window. Belmondo`s career as a leading man was auspiciously launched in 1960 with the art house hits Breathless and Two Women, and soon after his dramatic talents were firmly established in the challenging role of an intellectual cleric in Leon Morin, Priest (1961).  The next year he began a collaboration that would last for nearly his entire career, when director Phillipe De Broca cast him opposite Tunisian starlet Claudia Cardinale as the eponymous swashbuckling rogue in Cartouche. In this lively romp, Belmondo was allowed to finally cut loose, winning over a delighted audience with his abundant charm and seemingly boundless energy. Both men basked in the unprecedented success of their endeavour, so when De Broca was denied the film rights to the famous Belgian comic book hero Tintin, he quickly developed his own similar adventure film featuring a star whom he knew could deliver the requisite heroic stunts on camera. As with all action adventure films of that era and despite its roots in the traditions of European pulp literature, That Man From Rio, couldn't help but be also influenced by the recent 007 craze. Most notably featuring future Bond baddie Adolfo Celli (Thunderball) in a supporting role. Proudly flaunting its bubbly buffoonery the film's damsel-in-distress plot concerning stolen native artifacts, was in reality just a pretense to stage all manner of chases, fights and daredevilry, all the while featuring the jet set locations of Brazil, the sweet ethereal beauty of Francoise Dorleac, and of course, Belmondo`s affable humour and awe-inspiring physical courage. Even fifty years later, it still stirs the blood when Bebel (Belmondo`s nickname), performs his own vertigo-inducing high jinks in full view of the lens. It was a feat not attempted again by a major star until a generation later, when Jackie Chan took even bigger risks with often injurious results. That Man From Rio proved to be a substantial hit, and after collaborating on a more comedic follow-up project Up To His Ears (1965) co-starring Belmondo`s then girlfriend Ursula Andress, he and De Broca took a break from each other until their hilarious James Bond fantasy spoof The Man from Acapuclo a.k.a. Le Magnifique (1973), subsequently succeeded by the entertaining con man comedy Incorrigible (1975) and finally Amazon (2000), a late career mis-step uncomfortably combining the science fiction, comedy, and jungle adventure genres. Belmondo would vault into action for other filmmakers as well, but few of the those pictures possess the pure fun and innocence of those he made with De Broca, the filmmaker who made him France`s greatest action star. BLU-RAY

ACTION HEROES WHO DELIGHT ME: Roger Moore

MOONRAKER (1979: Dir. Lewis Gilbert)

For some he was the Bond that should have never been. For others he was a delightedly droll hero from the intensely paranoid era of Popeye Doyle and Dirty Harry. Roger Moore was never going to be the greatest actor to wear the mantle of Ian Fleming's ageless spy, but he was, for more than a decade, the unflappable personification of Seventies British Cool. Fresh from his debonair TV characters of The Saint and The Persuaders, Moore scored an immediate hit as 007 starting with the Blaxploitation Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), followed by the dreary kung fu antics of The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), and finally hitting his stride with the witty and sophisticated action adventure cocktail of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). For Your Eyes Only, was intended to follow, but in the meantime Star Wars had proven Sci-Fi could be huge box-office, so the third James Bond novel Moonraker, with its out-of-this-world title, was substituted instead. It became the highest grossing film in the series to date, but it was not without its detractors. For Sean Connery, and even George Lazenby fans, Roger Moore's interpretation was just too light and self-mocking, an eyebrow-raising maitre d' presiding over a full course meal of snide one-liners, pigeon double takes, and silly set pieces. For the young film fans coming of age during this new era of the blockbuster, the tall fair haired Moore represented the ultimate parody of the British stiff upper lip, always ready with a witty rejoinder for every deadly situation and never with a hair out of place. This characterization mined a different vein from his predecessors but it was Moore's personal irreverence for his own acting abilities that sold his breezy Bond to a willing public. Possessing none of Connery's cat-like grace, Moore embodied the stiff action man, thereby diminishing much of the tension and suspense of Fleming's popular literary protagonist. Aware of these shortcomings, producer Albert R. Broccoli, embraced the infectious drollery of his new leading man, boldly anticipating an audience who didn't need to be shaken and stirred, just pleasingly satisfied with the deluxe morsels of a stylish Bondian banquet. Moonraker represents the zenith of the Moore era, containing the most extravagant set designs by series veteran Sir Ken Adam, the stunning in-camera miniature effects of Derek Meddings, the sensual cinematography of Jean Tournier and the majestically elegant score by Bond theme arranger John Barry. It was also the first of the series to be based outside of Britain, nearly overwhelming its Parisian crew of technicians with an ambitiously sprawling production matched only by the recent mega-budget spectacle of Superman. A middle-aged Moore would go on to star in three further Bonds, with progressively less enjoyable results, and despite futile attempts to cover his wrinkled visage, he would never lose his sense of facetious fun in a role that brought unaffected joy to a cynical post hippie generation. BLU-RAY