El Topo (1970)

Sam Peckinpah meets Siddhartha. Alejandro Jodorowsky's Spanish language film (the title translates as "The Mole") achieved notoriety after cinema owners started showing it at night after their regular schedule of films, becoming in effect the first midnight movie. Other then actually seeing it nothing communicates the oddity of this film better then a description of its plot, so *SPOILERS* I leave you with its Wikipedia summery:


The film takes place in two parts. The first half resembles a western; albeit a surreal one. The second is a love story of redemption and rebirth.

Part 1

The first half opens with El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) traveling through a desert on horseback with his naked young son. They come across a town whose inhabitants have been slaughtered, and El Topo hunts down and kills the perpetrators and their leader, a fat balding Colonel. El Topo abandons his son to the monks of the settlement's mission and rides off with a woman whom the Colonel had kept as a slave. El Topo names the woman Mara, and she convinces him to defeat four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land. Each gun master represents a particular religion or philosophy, and El Topo learns from each of them before instigating a duel. El Topo is victorious each time, not through superior skill but through trickery or luck.

After the first duel, a black-clad woman with a male voice finds the couple and guides them to the remaining gun masters. As he kills each master, El Topo has increasing doubts about his mission, but Mara persuades him to continue. Having killed all four, El Topo is ridden with guilt, destroys his own gun and revisits the places where he killed those masters, finding their graves swarming with bees. The unnamed woman confronts El Topo and shoots him multiple times in the manner of stigmata. Mara then betrays him and rides off with the woman, while El Topo collapses and is carried away by a group of dwarves and mutants.

Part 2

The second half of the film takes place years later. El Topo awakes in a cave, to find that the tribe of deformed outcasts have taken care of him and set him up as a God-like figure, while he has been asleep and meditating on the gun masters' "four lessons". The outcasts dwell in a system of caves which have been blocked in — the only exit is out of their reach due to their deformities. When El Topo awakes, he is "born again" and decides to help the outcasts escape. He is able to reach the exit and, together with a dwarf girl who becomes his lover, performs for the depraved cultists of the neighbouring town to raise money for dynamite.

A young monk arrives in the town to be the new priest, but is disgusted by the perverted form of religion the cultists practice. He also discovers that El Topo is his father, who had abandoned him to the mission. He threatens to kill El Topo, but agrees to wait until he has succeeded in freeing the outcasts.

With the help of his now-pregnant girlfriend and son, El Topo creates a new exit from the cave. The outcasts come streaming out, but as they enter the town they are shot down by the cultists.

El Topo helplessly witnesses his community being slaughtered and is shot himself. Ignoring his own wounds he massacres the cultists, then takes an oil lamp and immolates himself. His girlfriend gives birth at the same time as his death, and she and his son make a grave for his remains. This becomes a beehive like the gun masters' graves.

As the film ends, El Topo's son, girlfriend and baby ride off on horseback, the son now wearing his father's clothes.

***

Billy Jack (1971)

I first became aware of Billy Jack as a favorite movie of the characters Lorelei and Rory Gilmore on the television show Gilmore Girls. I had the film marked out as something to see and about a year ago recorded it on my DVDR when it was shown during a preview of the channel EPIX Drive-In, which is a channel I kind of wish I hard permanently. Anyway it wasn't until just the other week that I finally watched it, not knowing until after I did so that the films star and director Tom Laughlin had just passed away on December 12th.

Laughlin had had a mildly successful career as an actor in the 1950's with highlights including appearances in the movies South Pacific and Gidget as well as the television show Climax! By 1961 Laughlin had completely left Hollywood to work full time in a Montessori pre-school he and his wife actress Delores Taylor had founded in 1959 in Santa Monica. In the mid-60's Laughlin started making plans to get back into film again and that eventually took the form of the 1967 film The Born Losers, featuring Tom as a character he had created for himself, Billy Jack, a half-Indian Vietnam War vet turned vigilante, basically the source material for Rambo. Anyway The Born Losers (which I have not seen) proved pretty popular with the public, popular enough to spur the making of Billy Jack and two other sequels (which I have also not seen.) Having now watched Billy Jack , I must confess that I now want to see the whole quadrilogy.

Billy Jack has the title character living in either southwestern California or Arizona and helping out a Montessori type school run by Laughlin's real-life wife Delores. The school is persecuted by local toughs, especially after they take in the abused and pregnant daughter of a sheriffs deputy who is also a right hand man to the corrupt local political boss. There's actually a suprising amount of characters and plot to this film, so I won't get into things in detail save to say that Billy Jack can only be pushed so far when the people he loves are wronged. The film is quite engaging, you never quite know where its going, and is thusly full of a lot of unexpectedly things, which are generally done very well. I totally understand how this would become a cult movie. Not for everybody, including older Gilmores, but a pretty dang original piece of film making. ***

Rashomon (1950)

Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon is not only widely regarded as one of the greatest films of the 20th century, but also as one of its greatest pieces of art of any form. It's hard to appreciate how good the film is now because we've all seen its central conceit done so many times since then, namely showing an event from multiple characters biased perspectives (I think I first saw this done on an episode of Perfect Strangers). Its a great way to explore human biases, the mutability of memory, and the difficulty of arriving at absolute truth. The story here is of a rape and a murder and we see events  as retold by the three principle players, including one who is dead, before getting a more or less objective eye view from a witness who had remained silent. The film doesn't stop there however but shows some of the characters grappling with what these diverse retailing's mean, there is cynicism expressed, but also a desire to move beyond petty self interest into some kind of expansive humanity. This is a movie that asks its audience to think clearly and piece things together and then ask themselves introspective and existential questions about truth and humanity, and its shot beautifully. ****

Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Murder mystery based on the novel The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee, or perhaps more accurately by her ghost writer. It has a bit of a paint by numbers feel to it, as if in trying to tie a conventional who-done-it into Ms. Lee's all but trade-marked milieu of the burlesque house, the writer(s) show more concern with getting all the parts in (a love triangle here, a creepy old guy there, plenty of red hearings) then they do with the finished whole. Still star Barbara Stanwyck caries the picture by shear Chutzpah. The burlesque featured here in is no doubt greatly toned down for the production code. Moderately entertaining. **

How Did This Get Made?

Mission to Moscow (1943)

This movie is a strange cinematic artifact from that narrow neck of time when the United States was allied with the Soviet Union during the second world war. This movie was made during a time when there was a perceived need among some in the American establishment to humanize our new Russian allies, to make them more acceptable to an American public who had been taught to mistrust them since the revolution of 1917. Based on the best selling memoire of cooperate lawyer turned  American ambassador to the USSR Joseph E Davis, this feature aims to put the best possible spin on then recent Soviet history, and as a result its awkward, propagandistic, and rather troubling.

One hopes that Mr.. Davis was no where near as naïve as he comes across in this film, here portrait by Walter Huston, an actor often tasked  with playing grinding moralizers. A former Wilson administration association of FDR, Davis left a very successful private practice for the post of Ambassador to the USSR (1936-1938) specifically tasked by the president to give an honest non-diplomats eye view of the country. If this movie is at all an accurate representation of what he communicated to FDR, Davis did the Politburo's job for them.

In the course of the movie Davis treats the famed 'Moscow Show Trials' as not being show trials at all, but rather the Soviet government rooting out actual pro-German traitors. The whole trial sequence in the film is completely unbelievable, with a parade of the accused confessing under seemingly no pressure to their nefarious schemes, basically saying 'yes we were evil bad guys conspiring out of greed and pride against the great Joseph Stalin and the glorious Soviet Union' (Stalin appears in the film played by Manart Kippen in a portrayal not unlike one that might be given to a Catholic Saint). Being a lawyer himself Davis know better then to accept what the Soviet government arrayed before him. Later on in the film the Soviet non-aggression pact with the Nazi's is excused while the Russians subsequent invasion of Finland is justified.

Needless to say when the political climate in this country turned against the Soviets this movie became something of a liability to those involved in making it, studio head Jack Warner had to testify under oath about why this movie was made to the House Un-American activities Committee during the McCarthy era. Robert Buckner, one of the films produces said the film was "an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation," and that " I did not fully respect Mr. Davies' integrity, both before, during and after the film. I knew that FDR had brainwashed him..."

The film is quite well made however, and in fact was the movie that famed Hollywood director Michael Curtiz made between the World War II classics Casablanca and This is the Army. This movie is a truly bizarre curio that feels like it came out of an alternate reality. Worth seeing for those with an interest in propaganda. **1/2

War Arrow (1953)

Largely forgettable western stars Jeff Chandler as an Major charged with getting Indian Tribe A to help the army fight Indian Tribe B in the mid 19th century southwest. Maureen O'Hara plays an army widow and Chandlers love interest. Did I mention this movie is pretty forgettable? **

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Primary (1960)

Documentary about the 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary contest between Senators John Kennedy of Massachusetts and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota (Kennedy ended up beating Humphrey by 2-to-1 largely due to support of urban Catholic communities while Humphrey carried the rural areas). The film has minimal narration and is notable for just kind of following the candidates around with a camera, this is now a common documentary troop but at the time was   unusual. Not as much 'off the cuff' feeling stuff here as I had hopped, but it  does do a good job of capturing the candidates in full cheesy, vote grubbing, politician mode (though more so Humphrey then Kennedy). Interesting fly on the wall moment of history. **1/2

Bulworth (1998)

In the late 1990's there was a little spat of pretty sharp political satires coming out of Hollywood, most notable among these being Primary Colors and Wag the Dog. Bulworth was the lest successful financially of this trilogy (there might be more, but I can't think of any). How this movie was even made is kind of a funny story, I'll let Wikipedia tell it:

"Bulworth was made in complete stealth and released by 20th Century Fox only after protracted contractual wrangling, only for a brief period of time, and practically without any publicity. As Peter Swirski reports in his study of this film, "after 20th Century Fox backed out of producing Dick Tracy, Beatty used the leverage of a lawsuit to wangle unprecedented artistic freedom," disclosing only the barest outline of the story and essentially duping Fox into bankrolling the project."

So this subversive (in the Oliver Stone sense) movie was made subversively. Now it would kind of have to have been because this is not the kind of picture any major studio of the time would have been over joyed to make. Should 20th Century Fox have known something was up? Well they know Warren Beatty had made Reds.

Anyway the plot of Bulworth centers around a long time United States Senator from California, alliteratively named Jay  Billington Bulworth, who is facing a strong primary opponent as he runs for his 4th or 5th term as part of the 1996 election cycle. As the film beginngs Senator Bulworth is having a crises of confidence, again from Wikipedia:

"Bulworth is losing his bid for re-election to a fiery young populist. Bulworth's socialist views, formed in the 1960s and 1970s, has lost favor with voters, so he has conceded to more conservative politics and to accepting donations from big corporations. In addition, though he and his wife have been having affairs openly for years, they must still present a happy façade in the interest of maintaining a good public image.

Tired of politics and his life in general and planning to commit suicide, Bulworth negotiates a $10 million life insurance policy with his daughter as the beneficiary in exchange for a favorable vote from the insurance industry. Knowing that a suicide will void his daughter's inheritance, he contracts to have himself assassinated within two days' time.

Turning up in California for his campaign extremely drunk, Bulworth begins speaking his mind freely at public events and in the presence of the C-SPAN film crew following his campaign. After ending up in a night club and smoking marijuana, he even starts rapping in public. His frank, potentially offensive remarks make him an instant media darling and re-energize his campaign."

So this shouldn't work, both in the story sense and as a movie, but somehow it does, and in fact its oddly endearing. The rapping coming for a white sixty something liberal is (surprisingly) good, funny, and informative.. The cast is full of good character actors, including Oliver Platt, Paul Sorinvo and Jack Warden. Halle Berry, still fairly early in her career is good as a Bulworth campaign volunteer and potential love interest for the Senator. The movies balance between the cynical and the sentimental is very well maintained. Inherently awkward at points the film still manages to coalesce into something worth seeing and thinking about. I particularly liked the sequences set amongst the California black community. This is a flawed, minor classic, political tract of a film. ***

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The Duel at Silver Creek (1952)

I liked this movie but I don't want to spend a lot of time summarizing it, so I will quote from the Wikipedia:

Luke Cromwell, aka the "Silver Kid" (Audie Murphy), loses his father to mine claim-jumpers. He is deputised by Marshal Lightning Tyrone (Stephen McNally) of Silver City who wants to defeat the claim jumpers. Both men fall for woman, Tyrone for the treacherous Opal Lacey (Faith Domergue), who is secretly in league with the claim jumpers, and Cromwell with tomboy, Dusty Fargo (Susan Cabot).

Standard western fair, nothing that interesting or original about it, but it was well executed and as a result likable. Interestingly Audie Murphy is only the secondary lead, Stephen McNally is really at the center of events and gets probably a little more screen time. The fact that this film was shot in color helps it, its a pleasant looking picture. Some times an uncomplicated Louie Lamour-ish story just hits the spot. **1/2

Rain (1932)

This is one of several film versions of the W. Somerset Maugham story Miss Thompson. More specifically Rain is an adaptation of the 1923 play of the same name that was adapted from Maugham's story, and like many films of its time that come from plays this movie feels oddly stage bound (especially for a story set in the south seas) and very talkie. The story concerns the passengers of an ocean liner who are unexpectedly forced to stop and stay in American Samoa after something happens to their boat (the movies not real clear on what happened with the boat but I read on line that it might have been a cholera outbreak on board).

Among the passengers put ashore is the prostitute Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford) who is fleeing legal troubles in the States, and the party of Alfred Davidson (Walter Houston) a "moral reformer" and missionary and Dr. Robert MacPhail (Matt Moore) and their wives. These characters all end up staying in the same lazily decaying hotel in Pago Pago, where Davidson becomes obsessed with either saving Miss Thompson, or ensuring that she gets severely punished for her life of sin. Dr. MacPhail tries to calm Davidson down and intercede for Miss Thompson, who was on her way to (I think) Tahiti to take up a legitimate job working for a friend. Davidson however will not budge and uses his political influence to force the governor of the island to agree to send Sadie back to the States where she expects to go to prison. The stress and trauma of this is enough to  cause Sadie to have a breakdown and become extremely pliable to Davidsons wishes. But by this time his reformers zeal has given way to baser desires, and things will not end well for him.

I'd have to agree with what the Motion Picture Herald said about this film:  "Because the producers have made such a strong attempt to establish the stern impressiveness of the story, it is rather slow. In its drive to become powerful, it appears to have lost the spark of spontaneity....Joan Crawford and Walter Huston are satisfactory." Crawford is playing a role kind of similar to Bettie Davis's in Of Human Bondage and Huston plays the kind of excessively moralizing role he was often expected to carry in films of this time such as Gabriel Over the Whitehouse and Dodsworth.  Everyone does what they can with this material, director Lewis Milestone even manages to work in a few interesting tracking or angled shots, and the seat design is appropriately moody (the constant rain effect even works for the most part). However I don't think that film is the right medium for this story, on the stage or the page this was likely more satisfying stuff. **1/2

The Landlord (1970)

A year before gaining cinematic immortality with his cult film Harold & Maude, Hal Ashby directed his first movie, an adaptation of African-American novelist Kristin Hunters 1966 novel The Landlord. Prior to directing Ashby had made his mark as director Norman Jewison's editor of choice, earing an Oscar for his work on 1967's In the Heat of the Night. As a lapsed Mormon from Ogden, Utah the anti-establishment themes of his directorial work may well have stemmed from an unhappy childhood. Watching this film I couldn't help but think what a middle finger it was to Mormon racial dogma of its time. This is not to say that racism is anything near a Mormon monopoly, though the films boldness in pointing out racial insensitivities is pronounced in a way that would have rubbed many contemporary Mormons, white southerners and others 'the wrong way'. Though not entirely uncritical of the urban black populace as regards a stream of self pity, the films big satiric guns go for the white establishment, most memorably conveyed in uneasy scenes at a costume party, and one of a wealthy white family having an argument with strong racist overtones as their black servants serve them the various courses.

The plot of the film centers on Elger Enders (Beau Bridges in one of his few screen roles in which he rivals his brother Jeff in lackadaisical coolness) the younger son of a respected, wealthy, WASP family, who at 29 finally purchases his own place, a tenement house in Brooklyn. At first Elger intends to evict the current tennets and dramatically remodel the building to his own tastes, but his contact with said tenants changes his mind. The story conceit of a man raised in a closed off society coming to embrace members of another social strata, and different race seems kind of trite and obvious when we think about it today, but then, and particularly in the way this movie does it, it was bold, so non-schmaltzy or romanticized, it is something to behold. This is not a movie about minimizing cultural differences, those differences are there and they matter, this is not a movie about making 'blacks' seem more 'white' for white audiences (as say Guess Whose Coming to Dinner largely was), but a movie about acknowledging those differences and then telling the white audience members to take care of the beam in there own eye before worrying about the mote in the others.

This is a bold film, but its also a clever one, its got unique editing flourishes, including the kind of  'peak into the characters mind' cutaways that wouldn't become main streamed until say Alley McBeal in the late 90's. The characters are often ideocentric but full (see again the works of David E Kelly). The aura of the film is kind of proto-hipster, but without trying to be. This is what distinguishes the work of Ashby and makes it to my mind superior to his later imitators, especially Wes Anderson who always seems to be trying too hard, Ashby makes this look easy, almost off the cuff. As impressive a first film as your likely to find out of any director, though sadly it seems to have been largely forgotten. A real find. ***1/2

Killing Kennedy (2013)

Based on the best selling book by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, this is a television movie made for the National Geographic Channel, yes apparently they do air the occasional TV movie. Anyway the format is a dual biography, covering roughly the five year period ending with the first Kennedy assassination. The Kennedy part of the film we've all seen many times before, a largely hagiographic greatest hits real of Jake (Rob Lowe) and Jackie (Gennifer Goodwin, now the second Big Love wife to play this particular first lady) , who really do love each other in spite of everything. The really interesting part the film is the lesser know story of  Oswald (Will Rothhaar, who nails the grandiose self obsessiveness of his character) and his Soviet born wife Marina (Michelle Trachtenberg, who is a better actress then you might expect her to be). I now feel even more sorry for Marina then I did before watching this film. I also think that its important we remember that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist, a haunting fact when seen in the stories cold war milieu, and one that is often overlooked in the wider conspiracy mania now associated with this turning point event in American history. Better and more informative then expected. ***

The Untouchables (1987)

Directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Mamet this film has a fine pedigree. Based loosely on the 1957 ghostwritten memoirs of Elliot Ness, which in turn served as the inspiration for the popular late 50's early 60's TV show of the same name staring Robert Stack. The Untouchables movie is a kind of reboot of the entire prohibition gangster genera, grittier and better written then what came before, but still conveying the essence of what constituted the genera and made it popular. It is hard to imagine there being a Boardwalk Empire (currently one of my favorite shows on television) with out there first being 1987's The Untouchables.

Even with its pedigree and cast, which included Kevin Costner at the height of his popularity and Robert De Niro having a ball as Al Capone, there apparently was some trepidation from the studio about the film. That didn't last long however as the movie was very well received by audiences and critics and went on to be one of the most successful films of 1987, which itself was a pretty good year for movies. This may also have been the film that started Sean Connery's late career renaissance.

The film has a lot of memorable actions pieces in it, the most iconic of which is 'the baby carriage sequence' that was later parodied in the 3rd Naked Gun movie and doubtless elsewhere. While its name is The Untouchables its characters aren't, or at lest not fully. The good guy stay committed to certain general principles, but even more to each other and take some legal liberties along the way. One aspect of the film which lends it an air of moral complexity is that 'The Untouchables' are enforcing a law, Prohibition, which they know to be untenable and don't really agree with, yet it is the law. Ironically they will break other laws to enforce it, I like's me some good moral complication. A very solid film that is everything it could be, very enjoyable both as action and drama. ****