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? **