The Screengrab : easy rider

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

EASY RIDER (1969)

I remember this one time a friend of mine was running behind on an elementary school creative writing assignment, scribbling the last lines of his composition just before the teacher collected our papers, and so his otherwise well-written tale of Old West adventure ended with a coyote suddenly popping up and devouring his cowboy protagonist. The abrupt, nihilistic climax of Easy Rider has a similar slap-dash quality (and why Peter Fonda’s Captain America would follow the gun-toting rednecks who just shot Dennis Hopper’s Billy the Kid rather than, say, driving away from them must have something to do with them funny cigarettes he was always smoking). On the other hand, gun-toting rednecks aren’t exactly known for their tolerance or decision-making skills, so a couple of yahoos taking potshots at hippies doesn’t exactly challenge my willing suspension of disbelief, even today. And considering the apocalyptic culture wars of the 1960s (which claimed RFK towards the end of the film’s production phase) and the outlaw mythos deep in the story’s marrow, some kind of fatal downer was probably inevitable. But Easy Rider’s characters don’t even get the dignity of a last stand. “We blew it,” Fonda’s biker states in a prescient epitaph for the end of hippie optimism and the rise of Nixonian neo-conservatism, just before Captain America gets killed by his own gas tank and his life savings goes up in smoke while he and his buddy die like dogs on the side of a road to nowhere. (AO)

8 ½ (1963)

Fellini’s semi-autobiographical fantasia inspires and infuriates in equal measure, the film’s whimsical imaginativeness somewhat offset by its indulgent self-satisfaction. Nonetheless, even if some of Fellini’s phantasmagoric flights of fancy rub me the wrong way, the ending is a stunner, a carnival-esque This Is Your Life procession of a director’s (Marcello Mastroianni) past and present acquaintances that resonates as an evocative representation of the myriad lives we touch, and are touched by, throughout our fleeting years. (NS)

THE LEOPARD (1963)

Luchino Visconti's epic masterpiece, set in Sicily in the 1960s, is a rich evocation of a whole society on the verge of disappearing, with the changes that Garibaldi's revolution were about to effect seen through the eyes of a middle-aged aristocrat, the Prince, played by Burt Lancaster. The film's long last section -- which gave the Coppola of the Godfather films and the Cimino of The Deer Hunter a high bar to aim at -- is the Prince's world at its apotheosis; the final moments give you a rare sense of a man feeling the summation of his life up to that point and sadly accepting the feeling of his potency slipping away. (PN)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

For most of its running time, this Cold War conspiracy fantasy dances on the line between thriller and satirical comedy, which makes it all the more unnerving when the clock ticks down and the picture suddenly becomes very serious in tone. It's as if the filmmakers' amusement at the ridiculousness of the McCarthyite witch hunters who inspired their story was gradually swamped by their disgust at what they'd done to their country. Sinatra's final speech, lamenting the fact that no one will ever know about the true heroism of Raymond Shaw, is one of the most hearfelt moments of his film career, and the sobering end point that the movie deserves. (PN)

KISS ME DEADLY (1955)

Restored ending:

Chopped ending:

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer is a nasty piece of work on the page, a misogynistic thug with a fascist mentality who lives in a world of strawmen who are always proving him right. When adapting Spillane's novel Kiss Me Deadly, screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides played up Hammer's sadism and narcissism, showing him to be a bully rather than the tough-guy hero Spillane obviously saw. The movie Kiss Me Deadly adds a great McGuffin, too, in the form of a suitcase full of some sort of glowing atomic energy that quickly becomes a nuclear blast when explosed to the air. In the original ending of Kiss Me Deadly, when the femme fatale unleashes the bomb, Hammer and his assistant Velda escape into the surf while the house explodes. At some point soon after its release, however, someone cut up the ending so that it appears that the house explodes before Hammer and Velda escape. This version won many admirers for its raw pessimism. But it wasn't the intended ending, and the restored version, in which Hammer is shot and has to be supported in his escape by his assistant who he's treated like crap throughout the flick, actually seems more narratively satisfying. (HC)

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Despite its sincere hero, its elaborate plot, and its European trappings, The Third Man is a film noir through and through, and though Joseph Cotten plays the hero as a man on the good side of the law, he’s no less doomed. It’s also one of the most devastating film portraits of unrequited love. Even though he makes it through the film alive, unlike his memorable friend (and later foe), the roguish Harry Lime, like any good noir anti-hero, he’s sunk by his desperate desire for something that will forever elude him. In this case, it’s the love of Alida Valli’s Anna, who can’t shake her passion for Harry even after she finds out that he was a murderous criminal who didn’t love her the way she loved him. Cotten foolishly attempts to apply reason to matters of the heart, and simply can’t understand why Anna would be so devoted to a cruel man who treated her – and everyone else – so shabbily, instead of a good man who really loves her (like, of course, himself). Anyone who’s seen the end of the movie, where Cotten’s Holly Martins waits patiently for Anna outside of Lime’s funeral only to have her walk past him without even a perfunctory glance, has a hard time thinking that the twice-dead Harry is the one who got the better end of the deal. Director Carol Reed and producer David Selznick – who had argued about everything else during the production – agreed on the ending, against the wishes of author Graham Greene, who wanted a more upbeat finish. Greene was a great writer, but Reed and Selznick were right; no happy ending could have bested this heartbreaking scene. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: Jack Nicholson's "Drive, He Said"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.

Like Richard Farina's 1966 Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, Larner's novel (which takes its title from a Robert Creeley poem) was published early enough in the 1960s to later seem prescient about campus unrest in the Vietnam era, and both books were turned into movies that were released in 1971, by which time the campus protest movement had peaked in the wake of Kent State. Nicholson's movie was filmed in Eugene, Oregon on and around the state university. William Tepper, who looks here like a stork-legged cross between Abbie Hoffman and the Robert De Niro of Mean Streets, made his movie debut as Hector Bloom, a star basketball player who is called out by his coach (Bruce Dern) for having an attitude problem. Hector, who could have any girl on the campus he wanted, has pulled the genius move of having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is married to a professor played by Robert Towne, who had also labored in the Corman factory as a screenwriter (The Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia) before writing a couple of movies that gave Nicholson two of his most memorable roles, The Last Detail and Chinatown. (Towne took the name of his Chinatown hero, J. J. Gittes, from Harry Gittes, a friend of Nicholson's who co-produced Drive, He Said. Though the script for this movie is credited to Larner and Nicholson, both Towne and Terrence Malick are said to have taken an uncredited crack at it.) Things turn out badly, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. It turns out that Olive's husband is an overly cerebral, phlegmatic type who knows perfectly well that Hector is balling his wife--it's not easy to miss--but wants to impress everyone with how well he's taking it; a part of him is sort of proud that the great athlete deems him worthy of cuckolding. Olive eventually pushes both of them away, telling them that they're "both big babies" who "deserve each other."

The surprising crosscurrents between the actors caught in this triangle, and also between Tepper and Dern (whose tightly focused performance as the hard-ass coach is some of the very best work he's ever done) capture what's best about Drive, He Said and suggest what Nicholson might have been able to bring to movies if he'd stuck with it as a director. Tepper himself gives an extraordinary performance as an inarticulate but deeply troubled man with the manner of a put-on artist and a romantic soul. (After Drive, He Said bombed, Tepper did some TV but disappeared from movies for a decade. In the early 1980s, he turned up in Miss Right, a comedy that reunited him with his co-star Karen Black, and he had supporting roles in the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Tom Hanks-Adrian Zmed comedy Bachelor Party, and hasn't been seen on-screen since.) Nicholson shows a free but sure hand with the cast, which also includes Michael Warren (of the TV series Hill Street Blues) and, in smaller roles, David Ogden Stiers (lean and hirsute and recognizable only by his voice, even though he's attempting a cracker accent), Cindy Williams, and June Fairchild, beloved to many for her role as the woman who snorts Ajax in the Cheech and Chong movie Up in Smoke.

For all that's brilliant (or at least brilliantly promising) about Drive, He Said, it's easy to see why it tanked in 1971. Nicholson doesn't seem to have any idea how to shape the material into a cohesive hold, so it feels like a succession of sequences rather than a movie, and the audience is left to get its bearings on its own. Probably a lot of people sat through as much of it as they could stand without ever getting them. There's also the subplot involving Michael Margotta as Gabriel, Hector's roommate, whose character must have struck some people as embarrassingly dated even in 1971. Nicholson fails to establish any basis for a relationship or even any kind of emotional bond between Hector and Gabriel, but what does come through is that, while Hector resists bending to the demands of The Establishment, Gabriel can't even consider it, and the pressure is driving him crazy, at a time when it was fashionable to view going crazy as a noble quest. Gabriel never has a quiet moment in the movie; he's always attacking the M.P.s during his draft induction physical, taking a sword to a TV set after screaming, "They staged the moon landing in Phoenix, Arizona!", throwing commodes out of second story windows, etc. At the climax, he tries to rape Olive, during an assault on her house (and body) that he (maybe with a little prodding from the director) stages as if it were a night of bad experimental theater, and after that doesn't work out, he walks naked into the campus biology lab and sets free the various critters caged there. It must be said, though, that even here Nicholson keeps a tight enough rein on Margotta's performance that only intermittently does this stuff play as foolishly as it sounds. (And in the scene in the lab, there is one glorious caught shot of one of the freed mice appearing to try to make out with one of the frogs, which spurns its advances and hops away.)

Nicholson didn't direct another movie until 1978's barnyard comedy Goin' South, in which he also starred, and that wasn't until after he'd added The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) to his resume. After he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Nicholson began telling interviewers that his ultimate dream was to take home one more Academy Award, for Best Director. He pretty much stopped saying that after his third and, to date, last film as director, The Two Jakes, slithered out from under a rock in 1990. An attempted sequel to Chinatown from a fresh Robert Towne script that Towne had tried and failed to make himself five years earlier, it was the kind of movie that absolutely had to have propulsion and a clear plot line, and once again, Nicholson didn't know how to put it together so that the sum would amount to more than a pile of scenes strung together. Maybe it's not that surprising that, with so little practice sitting in the director's chair, Nicholson had gotten no better at what he had been hopeless at twenty years earlier, but he had also lost his touch at guiding his fellow actors: he couldn't even get a decent performance out of himself.

You'd have to be crazy to suggest that Nicholson took the wrong road after savoring that explosion of applause for his performance in Easy Rider. Chances are that Drive, He Said (which played at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) wouldn't even have gotten as much attention as it did if its director hadn't been a movie star, and if Nicholson hadn't worked as hard as he did at his acting career in the early 1970s, he might not have stayed a movie star for long. (Peter Fonda, the real star of Easy Rider, sure didn't.) As it is, he became the biggest, most durable star of his generation. But he did have something special when he directed Drive, He Said, and it's a shame that, when he reached for it again, it had dissipated.

Phil Spector Convicted of the Murder of Lana Clarkson

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Legendary record producer and notorious self-made freak Phil Spector was convicted yesterday of second-degree murder in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. The jury had the option of convicting Spector of a lesser charge but went with the maximum option, which carries with it a mandatory life sentence. The 69-year-old Spector, whose lawyers insist they will appeal the verdict, will remain free on $1 million bail until he is due to be sentenced on May 29. As Los Angeles Times reporter Harriet Ryan noted, his conviction, which "came six years and two trials after police found Lana Clarkson, a statuesque blond actress, shot to death in a chair in Spector's 30-room Alhambra mansion", makes him "the first celebrity found guilty of murder on Hollywood's home turf in at least 40 years." "Celebrity" almost seems a soft word for Spector, whose recording triumphs with his fabled "Wall of Sound" earned him a place in pop culture history that dwarfs the likes of O. J. Simpson and Robert Blake. Unlike them. however, Spector was never accused of having a lovable side. In his biography of Spector, He's a Rebel, Mark Ribowsky quoted Nedra Talley, a member of the Ronettes and a cousin of the group's focal point, Ronnie Bennett, who became Ronnie Spector when Phil married her in 1968: "[Ronnie] would say, 'Oh, I'm not really getting involved, he's just cute'--but let's be real. Phil is not cute."

In the early 1960s, Spector turned out what Ribowsky called "a lava flow of vinyl", including enduring hits by the Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love, and the Righteous Brothers. (When some complained that the Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" was, at three minutes, fifty seconds, too long for radio airplay, Spector left the song alone and simply sent it out to disc jockeys with a label that read "3:05.") He also crafted the various-artists holiday album A Christmas Gift for You, a commercial disappointment when it was dropped on the public in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination but since then regarded as a seasonal classic. Later, Spector gave Tina Turner the name-above-the-title treatment with the 1966 "River Deep--Mountain High", vacuumed up the shards of the Beatles' last sessions for release as Let It Be, and produced successful solo projects for both John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band, Imagine) and George Harrison (All Things Must Pass). He was also immortalized in print by such writers as Nik Cohn and Tom Wolfe, and was said to have served as the basis for the character of the sword-wielding hermaphrodite "Z-Man" in Russ Meyer's 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay for Beyond the Valley, once chortled in print that despite the rumors, neither he nor Russ Meyer had ever met Spector, but then Robert Graves never met Caligula, either.

Spector appeared as himself in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie in 1967. (His acting ability can be measured by the fact that, even though he was supposed to be himself, he was listed in the credits under a pseudonym.) In 1969, he appeared in the first reel of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider in the wordless role of the connection in the white Rolls-Royce who finances the heroes' road trip by buying their cocaine. According to Danny Davis, a record promoter who had worked with Spector, "The real point" of this piece of stunt casting "was that Dennis Hopper could put Phil Spector in a movie and not let him talk. That was Dennis shutting up Phil Spector, which of course was something nobody could ever do." Spector's on-screen appearances confirmed that reclusive was a good look for him, and he began to make fewer and fewer trips outside his mansion. As his work became stiffer and he got into the habit of taking high profile jobs that were a bad fit for him--with Lennon on his later solo records, with Dion on the comeback trail, with Leonard Cohen on the 1977 Death of a Ladies' Man, and especially with the Ramones on their 1980 End of the Century--there began to be less and less call for him to leave the house.

At the same time, his legend as a scary nut job was only growing. Firearms figured in his collaboration with the Ramones, who claimed that he'd held them hostage in his posh digs, and hastened the end of his professional association with Lennon, who was taken aback when Spector tried to assert his authority at a recording session by firing a shot into the ceiling of the tight studio. "Phil," Lennon is supposed to have told Tommy Two-Gun, "if you're gonna kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with me ears." At the time, Spector's marriage to Ronnie Spector, which had degenerated into a whirlwind of head games and physical abuse, was ending, and it wound up taking Spector's professional and personal relationship with Lennon with it: during divorce proceedings, Spector persuaded Lennon to come to court with him as a character witness, only to have Lennon stagger away from him in dismay when Spector began screaming obscenities at Ronnie in front of the judge.

Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, the same year the Ribowsky book and Spector's own as-told-to memoir, Be My Baby, How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness ("co-written" with Vince Maldron), hit the shelves. His old hits would be repackaged for the digital age, and every so often Spector would make a half-hearted gesture in the direction of a comeback, but he definitely made his biggest headlines in twenty-five years with the death of Clarkson, the beautiful, much-liked actress who made her screen debut in 1982 as Vincent Schiavelli's wife in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and who became best known as an Amazonian B-picture heroine in such films as Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen. In 2003, she was still trying to jump-start her film career while holding down a regular job as a hostess at the House of Blues, which is where she met Spector; he persuaded her to come back with him to his house for a drink, and soon after the two of them vanished inside, Spector reappeared to inform his driver, "I think I shot somebody."

Spector's subsequent attempts to spin the case to his advantage included a 2003 Esquire interview with Scott Raab in which, in contradiction of all other available evidence, he claimed to not have been drunk on the nigh in question, insisted that Clarkson was drunk and out of control when he gallantly agreed to her request for a midnight tour of his digs, and then tried to sell the story that her death had been a "suicide"--that, as Spector put it, in what sounded like a hard-boiled rewrite of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", the title of a Goffin-King song that he recorded with the Crystals in 1962, "She kissed the gun." The idea that Clarkson, who had sought treatment for depression in years past, was suddenly overcome with suicidal despair while in Spector's presence and wrestled his gun away from him so that she could ruin his clean and sober night out by killing herself in his home turned out to be a centerpiece of his legal defense; it was countered by prosecution testimony from a seemingly endless supply of women who had been invited by Spector to take a look deep inside the barrel of his peacemaker while the trigger-happy music legend was three sheets to the wind. The admissibility of that testimony will reportedly factor into the defense's plans to appeal. In the meantime, Spector's lawyers insist that he was fully expecting to be convicted this time out. "Mr. Spector is a realistic man," said his lawyer Doron Weinberg, which is the second judgement delivered yesterday and connected to this trial that few people could have seen coming

Many Happy Returns, and a Couple of Not-So-Happy Ones: Vin Diesel and the Movie Brotherhood of Those Who Have Come Crawling Back

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It actually wasn't that long ago that Vin Diesel was being touted as a potentially major, breakout star, capable of both carrying a commercial genre movie (Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious) and lending a hand to more nuanced dramatic roles (Boiler Room). It probably feels like a long enough time ago to Diesel, which presumably accounts for his presence in the new Fast & Furious. In 2003, Diesel explained his absence from the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious by saying that he had one foot in three movies--Pitch Black, a lively little B movie that led to the far more expensive sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, and the extreme-007 movie XXX, as well as The Fast and the Furious--with serious franchise potential, and rather then spread himself too thin, he had to decide which two were likeliest to be the most successful in the long term. Five years after Riddick belly-flopped and the failure of the XXX sequel, in which Diesel wound up being replaced by Ice Cube, it's no small wonder that he wants a do-over. (In between the two Fast/Furious films co-starring Diesel and Paul Walker, there was a Diesel-free sequel starring Walker and a Walker-free third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to which Diesel contributed a cameo. The new movie basically reconstitutes the cast of the first film--reuniting Diesel with Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster--making it somewhere between a remake, a sequel, and a "reboot.") Given the dismissive, somewhat lordly attitude that the amply franchised Diesel once showed towards the role of hot-car king Dominic Toretto, it would only make sense for him to have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, given the reception that Diesel has gotten for the movies he's made since XXX and Riddick--The Pacifier, Find Me Guilty, and the disowned-by-its-own-director Babylon A.D.--he might just be happy to be somewhere he's wanted.

He can, at least, take comfort in knowing that he's not the only movie actor ever to take stock of his own career and concluded that his best move might be to hit the "reset" button. In fact, he's practically part of a long tradition:

Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau

Sellers was set on the path to living legend status in England by his work on The Goon Show, and his appearances in such British comedies as I'm All Right, Jack, The Smallest Show on Earth, The Wrong Arm of the Law, and Only Two Can Play and the Stanley Kubrick films Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) made him a favorite in the United States with the art-house audience. But it was his creation of the bumbling French police detective Clouseau in Blake Edwards's 1963 The Pink Panther that put him across with the mass audience. In that movie, Sellers was a supporting player to the top-billed David Niven, and he only landed the role because Peter Ustinov dropped out days before he was to begin filming. But so much of the movie's enormous success was so clearly the result of the slapstick aplomb that Sellers brought to his thinly written part that Edwards brought him back to star as Clouseau in 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Although this was the movie that introduced the actors and characters who would become the standard Clouseau supporting cast--including Herbert Lom as Clouseau's seething, tic-ridden boss Dreyfus (who would here establish a pattern of trying to kill Clouseau after the detective's incompetence had driven him to hysterical madness) and Bert Kwouk as Clouseau's houseboy Kato--the script was actually based on a Broadway play that had in turn been based on a French play by Marcel Archard, called L'Idiot. The screenwriters, Edwards and William Peter Blatty, simply inserted the Clouseau character into the comic-murder mystery set-up, and allowed Sellers to go to town with it. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is that, by casting the delectable Elke Sommer as a ditsy heroine in need of a savior--she plays a woman who's been falsely accused of murder--Edwards actually managed to turn Clouseau into a romantic hero while intensifying his physical and mental incompetence.

A Shot in the Dark, the only Clouseau film that doesn't have the character's name or a reference to the Pink Panther in the title, was probably the funniest of all the Edwards-Sellers collaborations(including the non-Clouseau The Party), and perhaps they should have folded Clouseau up and filed him away after that. So far as Sellers was concerned at the time, that's just what they were going to do, and when United Artists wanted to bring the character back in 1968, they had to make do with Alan Arkin for the ill-fated Inspector Clouseau. But by 1975, Sellers had suffered through an unrelenting string of flops that he later described as "my bad patch", and Edwards had gone down in flames with the big-budget disaster Darling Lili (1970) and a string of smaller but no more successful films. They paddled back to safe land with the 1975 The Return of the Pink Panther, in which Sellers adopted the costume style that Arkin had used in his one turn as the character and introduced the rubbery, incomprehensible accent that some French critics would never forgive him for. Sellers would dutifuly report for work on The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and then The Curse of the Pink Panther (1978), only those with calloused eyeballs could fail to see that this accomplished actor wasn't exactly thrilled to be going through the same old paces again and again. The prodigiously imaginative Sellers was trapped in a role that had gotten smaller over time; no longer a layered if farcical character, the Clousesu of the later films is simply a dolt who is consistently wrong about everything and keeps falling over things yet somehow manages to end in triumph. Yet Sellers was also a famously insecure man who seems to have decided that only as Clouseau could he still star in hit movies. When Sellers died in the summer of 1980, just months after racking up an Academy Award nomination and a Time magazine cover story for his starring role in Being There, he was preparing to reprise the role yet again for The Romance of the Pink Panther. Edwards, who seemed ready to sap the tree until the whole forest was gone, managed to squeeze out one last Sellers-as-Clouseau film--Trail of the Pink Panther, released two years after Sellers's death--using old clips and previously unseen footage, before moving on to such dubious replacements as Ted Wass and Robert Benigni.

Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates

The role of Norman Bates, motel manager, taxidermist, and mother's boy, took Perkins's movie career to another level, but it also got him typecast playing villains and loonies, which became more of a problem as the gifted, intelligent actor's style became more mannered and self-consciously neurosthenic over the years. His leading man days seemed to be over for good when Universal Pictures declared its interest in making a sequel to Psycho with Perkins reprising his role. Directed by the late Richard Franklin (Road Games, Cloak & Dagger), the movie had no input from Robert Bloch, who created the character or Norman in his original novel (and who cashed in on the publicity by writing his own Psycho II novel), nor from Joseph Stefano, who adapted it for the screenplay, and Alfred Hitchcock had been dead for two years. Perkins himself turned down the offer when it was first presented to him, but then, after it became clear that the studio intended to go ahead with or without him, but with another actor playing Norman, he began to feel proprietorial about his best-known role. When you consider that the movie was always going to be something of a travesty, the finished product isn't that awful. In the most effective moments, Franklin had the grace to play the violent set pieces--which include a climactic scene involving a woman who identifies herself as Norman's real mother and a well-timed blow to the head with a shovel--as black slapstick comedy, treating what everyone in the audience knows about Norman's past and his proclivities as a shared dirty joke.

The movie was given a handsome promotional campaign that aimed to tap into nostalgic fans of the original while also reaching out to younger moviegoers who were advised that Norman Bates was the granddaddy of such slasher-movie icons as the boogeymen of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the end, Psycho II, the movie whose title suggested a Saturday Night Live spoof, was a big enough hit that the studio wanted more. And once Perkins had played Norman again, he couldn't seem to get him out of his system. He not only agreed to return for Psycho III (1986), but he also signed on to use it as his movie directing debut. Pyscho III, which began with a sequence that almost could have passed as the opening of Vertigo II and ended with Norman once again headed for the nutbin, was in turn followed by Psycho IV: The Beginning, a 1990 cable TV film, written by Joseph Stefano, in which Perkins co-starred with E.T.'s playmate, Henry Thomas, as the young Norman, and Olivia Hussey, twenty-two yeara after she'd starred in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, as Norman's mother. The film ended with the birth of Norman's son, who may or may not carry the hereditary psycho-killer gene, setting up the potential for a "Norman, Jr." franchise that has yet to be realized. Perkins died in 1992, six years before Gus Van Sant's official (and infamous) "shot-by-shot" remake starring a glassy-eyed and miscast Vince Vaughan as Norman.

Sean Connery/James Bond

Connery renounced and returned to the role that made him a star on two separate occasions. After Connery sat out On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the sixth film in the official Bond franchise, United artists lured him back for the 1971 Diamonds Are Forever with a deal that included a wheelbarrow full of money and the studio's agreeing to finance The Offense, a movie Connery wanted to make with director Sidney Lumet. Connery's performance in Diamonds is probably the best-acted Bond of his career, but so much of what surrounded him in the movie was tacky and played-out that he must have left the set feeling confirmed in his decision to leave the role of Bond to whoever wanted him. So it was a shock when it as announced, thirteen years later, that the now 53-year-old Connery had agreed to return the role. Hitting the interview circuit, Connery coyly insisted that he'd always said that he'd be happy to do another Bond film if he was presented with a wow of a script, and he also hinted that the new movie would make great, subversive use of his advanced age.

In fact, the new film Never Say Never Again, had its roots not in a brilliant screenplay with a daring new take on the character but in the conclusion of a legal battle between the producer Kevin McClory and the producers of the Bond franchise, which left McClory with the remake rights to Thunderball. The resulting film is mostly a tired action flick that looks as if the director, Irvin Kershner (whose 1966 A Fine Madness boasts one of the best of Connery's early performances), hadn't recharged since his previous job, The Empire Strikes Back. Connery moves through it gamely, despite being subjected to such indignities as an ill-fitting hairpiece and a glaring edit where you can see him disappear from the frame and a stunt double reappear in his place. Under the circumstances, he seems understandably happy to leave the film to be stolen by the actors playing the villains, Klaus Maria Brandaeur and Barbara Carrera. Originally, plans were announced to release the movie in the summer so that it could go head to head against the latest "real" Bond movie starring Roger Moore, Octopussy. In the end, the studio blinked, and Never Say Never Again opened later in the fall. Despite its lack of sparkle, it was a huge hit. At this stage in his career, four years away from his Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables, Connery was pretty much bulletproof, and his decision to break his vow, and his having so little to show for it, did his reputation no real harm. Presumably he walked away feeling that the project was worth doing so long as it had succeeded in its real mission--i.e., to give the Bond franchise owners who he felt had underpaid him throughout the '60s a little agita.

Not all unexpected reunions in movies are between actors and characters. Some are between actors and directors, such as the infamously difficult relationship between Henry Hathaway and Dennis Hopper. Early in Hopper's career, Hathaway cast him in his 1958 Western From Hell to Texas. Then in 1966, he used him again in the John Wayne picture The Sons of Katie Elder. In a story that became legendary after Hopper repeated it again to interviewers during his post-Blue Velvet comeback, Hopper was reluctant to give a particular line reading that the director was insistent on, so Hathaway had Hopper do take after take until the broken actor finally did just as he was told--after which Hathaway declared his intention to have the already shaky actor driven out of the business. Three years later, Hathaway hired Hopper for a small but memorable part in True Grit, the movie that would win Wayne an Academy Award for Best Actor. Hopper has speculated that Hathaway decided to make this magnanimous gesture because Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Margaret Sullavan and the producer Leland Hayward, and thought that the young man deserved to be given the chance to support his new family. If anything like that did go through Hathaway's mind, the joke was on him: Hopper had been using his time off from banging on casting office doors to get his own directorial debut made. The movie, Easy Rider, which made it clear that there was a wide audience for a "youth cinema" that identified itself as part of the counterculture, was released in the summer of 1969, the same time that True Grit was playing to audiences who saw it as an antidote to new-fangled ideas and strobe-happy trip sequences. Both movies established themselves as zeitgeist hits and cleaned up, but Hopper and Hayward's marriage wouldn't survive to the end of that year.

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

JOHN BARRYMORE AS OSCAR JAFFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

No American actor ever made theatrical stylization work as well in movies as Barrymore, and when he played men of the theater, the impacted layers of self-parody in his performance just kept popping like strings of firecrackers. This movie was based on a play that in turn was based on an unproduced play called Napoleon of Broadway, a label that, if anything, sells the maniacal producer Jaffe short -- given enough men on horseback and a sufficiently isolated island, Napoleon could be stopped. Gorgeously over the topic from the word go, Barrymore plays him as a man who works behind the scenes in the theater because no stage would be big enough for the performance he calls his life. (PN)

MISCHA AUER AS CARLO IN MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

A Russian emigree born Mikhail Semyonovich Unskovsky, Auer was one of the supreme comic character actors of a great era for them, a man whose sometimes mournful-seeming countenance could never conceal the fact that there was helium in his shoes. His role here set the tone for much of his career: he plays a pianist who, having been adopted by rich society grand dame Alice Brady as her "protege", settles into her family's Art Deco mansion and easily adapts to being their pet. Auer was also memorable as a henpecked husband in a Western cow town in Destry Rides Again, and in Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, where, as the manager of a flea circus, he rolls up his sleeve and announces to his charges, "Soup's on!" (PN)

HARPO MARX IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

As a kid, I watched endless hours of Marx Brothers movies (courtesy of my dad). I felt the most kinship with the fast-talking bullshit artist Groucho. But it was quiet, sad Harpo who stole my heart. I didn't quite get why he wouldn’t talk. No matter, his kindly face with the rubber mouth and big sad eyes, together with that little horn, said more than an entire film's worth of yakking from Groucho. Who was he supposed to be, exactly? Dunno and don't care. In Monkey Business, someone suggests he's a "dumb Swede?." Perhaps he is a caricature of a FOB Irishman to to go along with the other ethnic stereotypes that the Brothers' characters seem to be based on. The mystery adds to his allure. No matter his origins, it would seem that Harpo's hobo owes something to Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, but where Chaplin verges on the annoying, the comic genius of Harpo is that he is always understated and soothing, even at his most burlesque. Like a good children's book, Harpo appeals to everyone precisely because he never speaks down to the audience. (SCS)

MARLON BRANDO AS GRINDL THE GURU IN CANDY (1968)

Candy is routinely derided as a godawful, amateurish mess, a barely watchable '60s relic and a travesty of the Terry Southern-Mason Hoffenberg novel. Furthermore, Brando's participation in it is often pointed to as the ultimate degradation that the great actor submitted to during the dark period between his '50s triumphs and his early '70s comeback. Let's define our terms here: this movie really is a piece of shit. But Brando is hysterical in it. Playing a fraudulent horndog of a guru whose Indian accent turns into a New York honk as he applies himself to the task of getting into the heroine's pants, and looking like a cross between a Roman senator and Alice Cooper, he dives right in and applies the broadest comic strokes, single-handedly bringing a MAD-comics tone to this crass, tinny show. As Brando became increasingly estranged from his own craft, more and more it was the opportunity to play comedy that lured him out of the fortress he'd built around himself with his own flesh, and in movies like The Freshman (1990), he showed that he could join in with the critics and gossip columnists in making fun of himself, and do it with more wit and grace than any of them could. (PN)

JACK NICHOLSON AS GEORGE HANSON IN EASY RIDER (1969)

Any good clown has a hint of tragedy. Jack Nicholson takes it to the limit as alcoholic ACLU lawyer George Hanson — the only latent liberal in a small hick town. Hanson is in the habit of poncing around Main Street in white linen suits and his starspangled football helmet, getting hammered daily and then sleeping it off in the local jail. Perhaps that is the kind of thing you can get away with in your own town if your father's a big shot. Better not try it outside city limits though. When the hippie bikers come through he seizes the opportunity to escape. This can't end well. (SCS)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007)

I've been an Adam Goldberg enthusiast since Dazed and Confused, but if you don't appreciate the actor's neurotic, hyperarticulate humor, then 2 Days In Paris may not be your cup of Pernod. On the other hand, even Hebrew Hammer haters may find themselves charmed by Julie Delpy's performance (in a movie she wrote and directed) as the distaff half of a bi-national couple facing relationship meltdown during the titular 48-hour period. After all the France-bashing during the (still not over yet!) Bush administration, it's interesting to see Delpy's warts-and-all depiction of The City of Lights, while her lived-in, heartfelt insights into love and family breathe fresh life into the ill-used romantic comedy genre. But Goldberg is the fish-out-of-water focus here, in a performance for anyone who’s ever been sick and disoriented on vacation while desperately wishing for the comforts of home.

COMING TO AMERICA (1988)

Probably Eddie Murphy's finest moment. Also, one of those big box office-y 1980s comedies — like Back to the Future — that, while seemingly silly, get at the very heart of America. Hard to say how much of it is intentional but damn it, it works. Eddie Murphy doesn't just star as the pampered Prince Akeem of Zamunda ("The royal penis is clean your highness"). He also wrote the story. One imagines his train of thought went something like this: if the enslaved Africans brought to America were once kings and queens, then what would an African king seeking a wife in Queens think of America? Natch, hilarity ensues.

THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

The director-star Dennis Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider (1969) begins with a Hollywood crew shooting a Western in Peru. Hopper plays Kansas, a stunt man who continues to hang around after the movie wraps. The film is insanely overedited, and Hopper the auteur got more than a little carried away with the possibilities of movies within movies and illusion versus reality games. To the degree that the movie has a plot, it seems to involve the Peruvians getting so excited from having watched the moviemakers at work that they build their own (non-functioning) cameras and other equipment out of bamboo and use them as an excuse to stage violent scenes, which in turn may be real. Hopper himself seems to have rendered the movie unintelligible because, out there on location, he got so into the heady atmosphere (and, it's said, some of the local mushrooms) that he couldn't stop tinkering with his baby, cutting and re-cutting it and throwing more and more monkey wrenches into its motor. His movie about the deranging effects of a clash of cultures thus also became an example of it. Luigi Pirandello would be proud. Jeff Spicoli might want to tip his hat, too.

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Strangers in a strange land is something of a pet theme of Graham Greene, whether he's charting the course of the well-meaning but destructive title character of The Quiet American in Indochina or the crooked international financier of "Across the Bridge" who finds himself stranded in a dusty Mexican town. This classic may serve as his most enduring movie exploration of his mixed feelings about the good man -- in this case, American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) -- who thinks he's being a nobly stalwart hero when he's really just in way over his head. Martins arrives in Vienna after World War II, at a time when the city is divided into zones ruled over by representatives of four different countries and corruption runs rampant, only to be informed that the friend who summoned him there, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was recently killed in a lorry accident. Naturally, Holly recognizes that something must be up and raises hell trying to find out what it is, until his friend, who faked his death to evade the consequences of his horrible crimes, comes out of the shadows and threatens his life. It would seem that Holly has been running himself ragged to avenge the death of a man he hadn't known at all. But the girls in Heavenly Creatures had his number.

PEPE LE MOKO (1937)

The strangers here are multiple: there's Pepe himself (Jean Gabin), a mythical French criminal hiding out in Algiers' Casbah, the police detectives sent over to track him down after his many successful years of hiding, the visiting woman Pepe seduces with a combination of his criminal allure and knowledge of an area off-limits to tourists, and — not least of all — director Julien Duvivier and his crew. Pepe Le Moko isn't entirely location-based, but there's very real exterior footage — especially in the opening sequence above — frequently from cameras far shakier and more obviously documentary and on-the-fly than most '30s narratives would allow themselves. Pepe is some kind of classic, at least in part because its relationship to its status as colonial filmmaking is constantly unsettled. "Algiers isn't Pigalle" announces a local cop before giving an overview of the area — including people "descended from barbarians, honest traditionalists but a mystery to us." Pepe's more at home with the natives than the French authorities pursuing him, and not in a way that's condescending or self-conscious either. Rough filmmaking at times, but containing more ideas than most movies know what to do with. Many of the same locations were used for The Battle of Algiers, if all that isn't weird enough for you; those traditionalists wouldn't remain a mystery for much longer.

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)

Albuquerque. NM: into town comes a man so urbane he reads a newspaper while sitting in the car he's being towed in. The man is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a veteran reporter already fired from 11 metropolitan dailies. Tatum's here to give the sleepy little town the shot in the arm it needs and thereby rebuild his disgraced career, but Albuquerque won't give him the material for the yellow journalism he practices. Tatum's an urban hustler in the land of rural innocents — until a man's trapped in a cave and Tatum brings him to the world stage. Deliberately endangering Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) by needlessly delaying his rescue for a bigger story, Tatum transforms the area around the cave into the kind of oppportunistic carnival land of free-floating capitalistic enterprise and gaudy spectacle he's used to. Buried for years after its initial brutal reception, a recent restoration and release on Criterion have brought one of Billy Wilder's greatest films back into the spotlight it deserves.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

By the late 1960s, old-fashioned epics had fallen on hard times. With the counterculture movement in full swing, fewer young moviegoers were interested in large-scale entertainments, with sweeping vistas and larger-than-life filmmaking. However, Hollywood has always been a little slow to catch up with popular tastes, and this led to a string of big-budget flops, as the roadshow musicals and bloated period pictures failed to rope in audiences who went wild for The Graduate and Easy Rider. But if anyone could still make an old-school epic under these circumstances, it was David Lean, coming off the award-winning blockbusters Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t remotely up to the standard of the director’s best work.

From the beginning, Ryan’s Daughter had problems. The filmmakers took a suspiciously long time to cast the film, with name actors like Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole turning down the role of the British Maj. Doryan before up-and-comer Christopher Jones was cast. But things got far worse once production began. Lean was a notorious perfectionist, often taking hours to set up a single shot, which angered several of the film’s stars, with Leo McKern commenting, “I don’t like to be paid 500 pounds a week for sitting down and playing Scrabble.” And Jones’ acting talent- or, more appropriately, the lack thereof- caused friction between him and both Lean and leading lady Sarah Miles.

Of course, stories like this are nothing new in show business. Moreover, had the movie turned out well none of this would have mattered. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter was a flop with critics and audiences, to the point that Lean didn’t direct another film for more than a decade. The film is a lumbering bore, without so much as an interesting character to hold the audience’s interest. Naturally, this being a Lean movie, Ryan’s Daughter is often gorgeous to look at, but that’s hardly enough to tide the audience over for upwards of three hours.

In fact, I’d say the visuals are part of the problem, or more accurately, that Lean cares more for the pictoral beauty of the film than he does for the people who inhabit it. Now, I realize that this criticism has also been levied at several films of another notorious perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that if you look at films such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon, you’ll see that Kubrick’s style demands a degree of distance from the characters, and the visuals are a large part of this. By contrast, Lean means to tell a human story in Ryan’s Daughter, and this distance only hinders his ability to do so.

Consider the early scene in which Rosy Ryan (played by Miles) sees her former teacher Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum) after he comes home from a conference in Britain. As Rosy has long felt love for Charles- the man she will eventually marry, mind you- you’d think it might be good to see her reaction to his arrival. However, Lean’s staging of the event is so clumsy that he forgets to show us. One minute, Rosy is alone at the shoreline, then suddenly Lean cuts to an extreme long shot as Charles walks into the frame, so that they’re hardly more than specks on the beach moving toward each other. It’s only after they come together and begin talking that he cuts to their conversation. I wish I could say this was atypical of Lean’s style in Ryan’s Daughter, but this isn’t the case. Time and again, Lean’s characters are upstaged by the landscapes that surround them.

Then again, perhaps extreme long shots would’ve been the best way to deal with Christopher Jones, so that the audience couldn’t have seen how untalented and inexpressive an actor he was. Of course, this was hardly the first time a director was faced with the challenge of a difficult leading man, but Lean never figures out how to successfully work around this. Initially, the film gives most of Jones’ dialogue to a subordinate, but once he embarks on his affair with Rosy this becomes impossible, so Lean resorts to swelling music, longing glances from Miles, and cutaways to nature. But worst of all are the scenes in which Maj. Doryan flashes back to the battlefield- Jones screws up his face and flails around, but never convinces us that there’s anything underneath the surface. Jones’ performance is so inept that our antipathy toward him extends to the character itself, and by extension to Rosy, who by forsaking Robert Mitchum for this clown looks less like an impetuous youth than a horny little fool.

Speaking of fools, if Christopher Jones’ performance is inept, John Mills’ is downright embarrassing. Mills plays Michael, a local oaf who sadly has nobody to grapple with, in what surely has to be one of the most ignominious performances ever to net an Oscar. But even if Mills’ hammy turn isn’t completely Lean’s fault, the way the character is used has to be, as Michael functions as a comic mirror to the events of the story, eavesdropping on the lovers and following them around at pivotal moments. It’s a cheesy touch on the part of Lean and frequent screenwriter Robert Bolt, one that they should have known better than to include.

All of this isn’t to say that Ryan’s Daughter doesn’t have good points. For one thing, Miles’s and Mitchum’s performances would distinguish a film that told this story on a more intimate level (especially Mitchum’s). However, Lean’s style here is so unnecessarily grandiose that we lose sight of any reason why we should care about them or anything else we see onscreen. By the time the film actually justifies the magnitude of its scope, it’s far too late. There’s a spectacular sequence in which the townspeople aid a band of IRA fighters in bringing weapons ashore in the middle of a storm. But impressive though it is, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been to film. And that’s just about the last thing one should be thinking about during a scene like this.

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“This used to be a hell of a good country,” Jack Nicholson’s pot-smoking lawyer George Hanson laments in 1969's Easy Rider. “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it...”

He didn’t know the half of it.

And yet, even after seven-plus years of the Bush administration, the United States is still, for the most part, a hell of a good country, and next week, as the nation barbecues and cherry bombs itself into a frenzy of patriotism over the 4th of July weekend, we here at the Screengrab will join the celebration with a list of movies that show just exactly how and why America kicks ass.

But this week, partly in tribute to the passing of beloved comedian (and scathing social critic) George Carlin, we thought we’d take a cinematic tour of the nastier side of the American Empire. From slavery and the near-extermination of the nation’s indigenous population to rampant corporate greed, bigoted religious fanaticism and horrific military fiascos, the U.S. (and its citizens, including me and possibly you) have a lot of skeletons in our collective national closet.

Fortunately, we’ve also managed to (more or less) hang onto that whole freedom of speech thing, resulting in the following films (some by outsiders, but mostly homegrown) that, to paraphrase Toby Keith, put a boot in the American way.

THE WIRE (2002-2008)

Again, as with last week’s inclusion of Angels in America among the Gay Pride Top Twenty, I’m cheating a bit, since HBO’s epic, five-season dramatization of the death of the American working class, the devastation wrought by the “War on Drugs,” the failure of inner city public schools, the inherent corruption of organizations and the helplessness of the individuals trapped within them is, technically, “just” a TV show. But, taken as a single, sixty-hour cinematic exposé, David Simon’s epic, multi-layered, deeply human depiction of the drug dealers, junkies, cops, dockworkers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, reporters and regular civilians of modern day Baltimore (and, by extension, Anytown, U.S.A.) trumps just about any movie ever made in its unflinching depiction of the ways that Americans become trapped in their own delusions and systems of organization, allowing hacks and sociopaths (like Jamie Hector’s drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, Michael Kostroff’s sleazy lawyer Maurice Levy and corrupt cops Herc (Dominic Lombardozzi) and Burrell (Frankie Faison)) to flourish while system-bucking firebrands like Detective McNulty (Dominic West) and Michael K. Williams’ iconic stick-up artist Omar Little are marginalized or destroyed. But, unlike grim civics lessons like the recent slate of doomed Iraq films (typified by Robert Redford’s deadly earnest Lions for Lambs), The Wire (even at its most harrowing) was never a slog, thanks to the work's relentless humor, suspense, virtuoso writing, astonishing performances and, for all its pessimism, a crucial, inspiring sense of gratitude for the men and women (like Sonja Sohn and Wendell Pierce as “good police” Kima Greggs and “Bunk” Moreland, Deirdre Lovejoy’s tough, incorruptible state’s attorney Rhonda Pearlman and Jim True-Frost’s ex-cop turned schoolteacher “Prez” Pryzbylewski) who somehow manage to keep their heads down, plug away and, ultimately, hold the world together for the rest of us. (Now if only the not-racist-at-all Emmy voters would notice and finally honor The Wire with at least one friggin’ award.)

DOGVILLE (2003)

Lars Von Trier's Dogville (the first of his proposed – and still uncompleted – "U.S.A. – Land of Opportunities" trilogy) certainly got the job done in terms of provocation. Von Trier, already one of the most controversial and divisive directors working today, sure wasn't going to win a lot of friends on this side of the Atlantic when he announced, not long after September 11, 2001, his intention of making three films whose intent was to turn a gimlet eye on some of the ugliest aspects of American culture. And when Dogville was released, it had a polarizing effect almost immediately: for everyone who praised its uniformly excellent cast, its stark, eerie direction, and its brilliantly minimalist set design (which served as an unsettling visual reference to that most all-American of plays, Thornton Wilder's Our Town), there was someone who condemned its inflammatory rhetoric, its brutal tone, and its determination to poke at the festering sores of everything bad about America, from racism to sexism to crime to class inequity. Some critics – no names, no pack drill – apparently became so unhinged over the movie that they spoke of it in terms better suited to hate crimes, or even war crimes, than to movie reviews. But the deeply dividing effect that Dogville had on audiences and critics may have proven nothing more than the fact that the reaction Von Trier gets out of his movies is exactly the reaction that he wants.

ROGER AND ME (1989)

No list of films critical of America could be complete without a Michael Moore documentary (strangely enough, no one at Screengrab headquarters was lobbying for Canadian Bacon), so it was only a matter of choosing which one. In the end, there was no real choice. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the most incendiary grenade Moore has lobbed, but it's marred with some cable access-level conspiracy mongering. In both The Big One and Bowling for Columbine, the messenger overwhelms the message. And I'll confess I haven't seen Sicko yet – I'm simply Michael Moore-d out. But that wasn't the case back in 1989, when Roger and Me arrived in theaters as a most unlikely breath of fresh air. How unlikely? Here was a film released by a major American corporation (Warner Bros.) openly criticizing another major American corporation (General Motors) for its outrageous treatment of its employees. Here was a movie about the economic devastation wrought on an American city by the closing of its auto plants – and it was funny. Moore hadn't worn out his welcome, because we didn't know who the hell he was; he was just this shambling schlub in a ballcap trying to get an audience with GM CEO Roger Smith to find out why his hometown of Flint was being put through the wringer. If his shtick has long since grown stale, it was fresh then, enlivened by such real-life characters as Deputy Fred (who tries to evict the newly unemployed in the friendliest possible way) and the woman who offers rabbits in two varieties: "Pets or Meat." We know now about the manipulations of chronology (Horrors! In a movie?) and many of us have soured on Moore's self-aggrandizing style, but the impact and influence of Roger and Me on documentary film – for better and for worse – cannot be overstated. And if you lost your job on the assembly line and nobody gave a shit, you'd probably be grateful to have a high-profile advocate – even a self-righteous schlub in a ballcap.

BLOW OUT (1981)

The critic J. Hoberman called Brian De Palma's conspiracy movie the last great film of the 1960s, even though it was released during the first summer of the Reagan administration -- a moment that it also memorializes quite well in its own sick way. Set in Philadelphia, De Palma's picture stars John Travolta as a motion picture sound man who inadvertently records the gunshot that sends a car containing a potential presidential candidate and a hooker (Nancy Allen) into a river, killing the politician. Another figure, a photographer played by Dennis Franz, claims to have recorded the crash in a series of photos that are published in a national magazine. Meanwhile, the man who shot out the tire -- Burke, played by John Lithgow -- is committing a series of murders so that he can take out the Nancy Allen character and make it look like the work of a serial killer the papers have dubbed "the Liberty Bell Strangler." Not satisfied with this amalgam of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and G. Gordon Liddy gone off the reservation, De Palma invented his own bogus patriotic holiday, "Liberty Day", so that he could show his hero failing to save the heroine against a backdrop of oblivious citizens garishly celebrating the country whose promise we in the audience can see openly turning to criminal rot.

THE CANDIDATE (1972)

Robert Redford uses his Kennedyesque qualities -- "Kennedyesque" having once been code for anyone really good-looking who might plausibly read his subscription copy of Newsweek -- as a double-edged sword in this collaboration between a director, Michael Ritchie, with a special knack for throwaway slapstick and bits of offbeat Americana and a screenwriter, Jeremy Larner, who was regarded as a walking mother lode of inside political knowledge from his having worked as a screenwriter for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. The film has plenty to say about the importance of money and image, at the expense of substance, in American politics, though what really sets it apart is the absolute hopelessness that comes attached to its cheerful, Zippy-like grin. Redford's Bill McKay is the son of an former governor and old-style pol (Melvyn Douglas) who, thanks to watching his father at work, knows that nothing can be achieved through conventional politics and so works as a liberal lawyer for good causes. He's talked into running against the despicable old conservative incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) so that he can shake up the campaign and bring attention to the real issues he favors; he signs on with the understanding that he can't possibly win. But when he does so badly that he risks becoming a joke, he agrees to let the handlers polish the rough edges on his campaign style, and damned if he doesn't end up winning -- after which he turns to his chief handler (Peter Boyle) and asks, in a state of mild panic, "What do we do now?" Other movies in this period, such as The Parallax View and Executive Action, jumped on the JFK-assassination-theory bandwagon and took it on faith that if anybody decent ever ran for office in this country, the big boys would have him whacked. The Candidate's Nader-esque attitude -- that politics is such a total shuck that nobody decent would ever get involved with and if, by some accident, they did, the compromises they'd have to agree to would reduce them to a dithering nothing -- seems less doom-laden on the surface but is actually much worse, if only because so many intelligent people find it irresistable as a reason for bowing out of political engagement altogether.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Video of the Day: Wonder Woman '67

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:45:00 GMT

One of the most hotly contested superhero properties on the market, with virtually every other big-name crimefighter already appearing on the big screen, is Wonder Woman. The upcoming Joel Silver production, slated for a 2009 release, has already gone through a multitude of changes, and fans crawl the internet for any word of what's to come: who will play the Amazon princess? Is there a completed screenplay? With Joss Whedon bailing on the project, is there any truth to the rumor that the Wachowski Brothers are next in line to direct?

We can't tell you the answers to those questions, but we can tell you this: as hokey as the 1976 TV series with Lynda Carter was, it could have been worse. Much, much worse. If you don't believe us, take a look at this: the only surviving footage from a 1967 attempt by William Dozier, producer of the ultra-campy 1966 Batman television series, to work the same dark magic on Princess Diana. It looks like it was filmed for about $3, it apparently has mistaken the warrior princess for Nancy Drew's doofy friend Bess, and star Ellie Wood Walker (best known as "Mime #3" from Easy Rider) gives a performance that lives up to her middle name.

Your 4:20 Stoner Movie Symposium

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:20:00 GMT

In honor of Sunday’s national stoner holiday (4/20, dontcha know – see also the time of this post), Entertainment Weekly presents a roundtable discussion of the weedsploitation genre, with such luminaries as Seth Rogen (Pineapple Express), John Cho (the Harold and Kumar movies) and Tommy Chong (You know! CHONG!) pontificating on pot cinema. For those of you who have already sparked up and thus don’t have the attention span to get through the whole thing, we present a few selected highlights.

Everyone has their favorite stoner movie, of course. Rogen is a Friday proponent and Chong goes old school with Easy Rider, but we’ve got to side with Super High Me star Doug Benson on this matter. “I'd say for the sheer quality and vibe of it, Dazed and Confused. Whether you watch it stoned or not, it really delivers. I saw it in the theater and it appealed on a Freaks and Geeks kind of level, where it was really funny and realistic, but also reminded you of the s---tier aspects of being a kid. The only thing that takes away from the stoniness of it is the hazing element, but it does sort of represent the way that stoners are treated in general.”

Rogen knows what doesn’t work in stoner cinema, and that’s the obligatory anti-drug message Hollywood studios often insist upon. “That was something we did not want [for Pineapple Express]. Half Baked, I liked that movie, but the ending drove me crazy! The whole movie is for potheads, clearly, then at the end he stops smoking weed — so what the f--- am I doing? A lot of these weed movies shoot their core audience in the foot when they do that. We wanted to acknowledge that it's not a great idea to be stoned 24 hours a day, especially when there's guys trying to kill you, but we didn't want the ‘We should stop smoking weed’ moment.”

And then there’s...uh...hey, man, what was I writing about?

“There Will Be Blood” Under the Marfa Lights

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

For as long as anyone can remember, Marfa, Texas has been known for two things. It’s the home of the Marfa Lights, those mysterious glowing blobs that could be paranormal entities, swamp gas or car headlights, depending on who you ask. And it’s the little town where George Stevens, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor made Giant more than fifty years ago.

In the last year or so, however, Marfa has enhanced its cinematic pedigree considerably. Both No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were shot there, accounting for 40 percent of your 2007 Best Picture nominees, 16 nominations total, and six Oscars between them. Yet Marfa doesn’t even have its own movie theater.

Starting May 1st, however, it does have its own film festival. The first annual Marfa Film Festival will open with a screening of There Will Be Blood on the set where it was made, “just south of Marfa on the McGuire Ranch. Though some small parts of the set will remain after the event, the town (where we will screen) will soon be torn down, as the West Texas winds are already taking their toll on the scenic construction.” The closing night film on May 5th will be The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper’s notorious follow-up to Easy Rider, which Hopper will present in person. This will apparently be his first return to Marfa since shooting Giant.

The rest of the festival selections range from Texas-shot documentaries recently screened at SXSW (including Crawford and Tulia, Texas) to David Byrne’s Texas-lensed 1986 feature True Stories to films with no Texas connection at all, like the 1961 British horror classic The Innocents. The festival will also feature the world premiere to what may be the least likely sequel of all-time: Okie Noodling 2, the follow-up to the 2001 documentary about hillbillies who pull giant catfish out of holes with their hands. Apparently there’s even more to learn about this bizarre tradition, and I, for one, am intrigued.

You can check out the rest of the schedule and buy tickets here.

And the ReOscar Goes to…Peter Fonda?

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While we’ve been busy with our spreadsheets and slide rules, trying to figure who the big winners will be come Sunday night, Time’s Richard Corliss is just getting around to giving his picks for the 1998 Oscars. No, Corliss hasn’t slipped through some sort of wormhole in the space-time continuum. Instead he’s presenting Time’s First Annual Re-Oscars.

The premise is that the Academy may have occasionally made a mistake or two over the years, a controversial notion we’re nonetheless prepared to embrace. "What we're offering is a second chance at the Academy Awards handed out on March 23, 1998," Corliss writes. "To a lot of people, the record eleven Oscars that James Cameron's Titanic lapped up that night were suitable acknowledgment of a much-loved movie that quickly became the top box-office attraction in film history. We're asking how Titanic, which was named the Best Picture of 1997, and the performances that won in the four actor categories have stood the test of time. And we're answering: Eh, not so well."

If your memory of the films that challenged Titanic for Best Picture that year is a little shaky, we don’t blame you. Somehow we’d forgotten those timeless classics As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty were nominated as well, although with guns to our heads we probably could have guessed Good Will Hunting made the final five. Given those choices, we’ll go along with Corliss’s selection of L.A. Confidential as the first Re-Oscar winner, although his reasoning is a little shaky: “A guilty secret of film criticism is that reviewers often lavish their fondness on modern versions of the kinds of genres they don't make any more. Thus The English Patient, a film in the David Lean epic tradition, was my choice for best film of 1996. L.A. Confidential is a time trip back to the period in which it's set, the early '50s, when film noir (as the French called Hollywood's crime dramas) argued that postwar optimism was a lie — that brutality and betrayal lurked around the every city street corner, where the cop on the beat might also be on the take.”

Corliss also reminds us of one of the laziest Academy decisions in recent memory: Jack Nicholson winning his third Oscar for his Jack Nicholson-esque performance in As Good as It Gets. "Nicholson had lost an Oscar a few times when he deserved one: in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and especially Chinatown, a great performance that lost to Art Carney's turn as a lonely older guy with health problems in Harry and Tonto. . . Chalk up Nicholson's third Oscar as an early Life Achievement Award." Instead, Corliss chooses to recognize Peter Fonda’s nearly forgotten turn in the all-around understated Ulee’s Gold. Hey, we’re happy for him. For the rest of the ReOscar roster, click here.

Two-Disc "Blacktop"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:10:00 GMT

Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop was last released to home video in an Anchor Bay edition that came out on VHS and DVD in 1999, and it's been out of print for the better part of the twenty-first century. This past week, the movie has been released in a handsome, "director-approved", two-disc edition from the Criterion Collection, and this news will divide the public into two groups: the ones who are turning cartwheels down Main Street and the ones asking, "What's that about Diane Lane's black top?" It was always thus. When the movie was about to be released in the summer of 1971, Esquire put its female lead, Laurie Bird, on the cover of an issue that included the text of the entire shooting script, along with the claim that this readymade cult item was destined to become "the movie of the year." Six months later, that claim was included in the magazine's annual "Dubious Achievements" feature. Hellman's scheduled follow-up project, to direct Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from a script by novelist and Blacktop screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer, was quickly reassigned to Sam Peckinpah.

In retrospect, it's easy to see how the studio and the media might have gotten their hopes up that they had the next big thing on their hands. It's also easy to see why those hopes were so quickly dashed. Two-Lane Blacktop was produced by Universal as part of its short-lived "youth division", which was set up as a direct reaction to the success of such films as Easy Rider and the old studio bosses' dawning realization that they had no idea what the kids out there wanted to see. Whatever they wound up making in this case, it sure isn't Easy Rider, and it's harder now than it must have been in 1971 to see that as a failing. It is in fact a mesmerizing film, especially if you just stumble across it--as your humble correspondent did when, as a sleep-deprived adolescent, he first encountered it on TV one night around four AM--but it was probably always too abstract for mass popularity, and it doesn't flatter anyone on either side of the generation gap the way the big counterculture hits did. As Dennis Lim points out in his appeciation of the film the director Richard Linklater has described it as being both the last film the 1960s and the first film of the 1970s, and he has a point. It does feel as if it were taking place in the wake of something and that it marks the subsequent beginning of something, something uncertain and with wide-open possibilities that may or may not be acted upon. (By contrast Easy Rider looks and feels like something that Time once did a cover story on, back before you could read.)

Our heroes are the nameless driver (played by lanky-haired James Taylor--yeah, the singer), who pilots his '55 Chevy from town to town getting into drag races for money, his mechanic (Dennis Wilson, of the Beach Boys), and Laurie Bird (a non-actress with a period-specific look) as the girl they pick up hitching. This near-mute trio meet up with Warren Oates, an older man in a GTO who seems to regard their existence as some insufferable challenge to his very being, and they agree to race him to Washington, D.C., with the loser agreeing to forfeit his car to the winner. But this turns out to be not so much an actual plot as an excuse to keep the characters tearing across the back roads, taking in the scenery and interacting (or, in the case of Taylor and Wilson, not interacting) with a procession of folks who briefly drop into the movie and drop out again. (One of them is Harry Dean Stanton, who has a memorably squirmy encounter with Oates.)

Seen now, the movie has a special tension that develops between the characters and the landscape they pass through. The small roadside lunch counters and empty country roads have the attraction of an lost, unexplored, now unexplorable America, yet neither the driver nor his mechanic nor the motormouth "GTO" seem to be really interested in taking it in. They just want to keep in motion, perhaps as a distraction from the fact that they obviously aren't going anywhere. Taylor and Wilson don't seem able to focus on anything beyond their forelocks, and their antagonist is busy tailoring and re-tailoring his fantasy persona; he sees every meeting with a new person as a curtain going up, reeling off a different back story for everyone who steps into his car. Oates was in full bloom as a character star in 1971, and his funny, strangely beautiful performance here serves the movie well, even as it turns it on its head. This middle-aged fantasist, who might be the last of the Beats--the one who never got off the road long enough to write his book-- envies Taylor and Wilson for their youth and inscrutable cool and longs for their approval, but he takes the movie away from them as easily as breathing. The younger men are locked inside their affectless poses, cool in a way that looks comatose. Maybe someday, if they ever develop their imaginations, and they'll be so regretful about all the things they've passed through without noticing it that they'll be trying to fill in the blanks of their past by making up stories about it, like GTO. Maybe not; maybe the simulated immolation of the film print that ends the picture amounts to the burning out of whatever life is in them.

Now that it's once again available for home viewing, and just in time for Christmas, Two-Lane Blacktop is primed to excite and bewilder people again. Here's hoping that a lot of people whose families know that they like racing pictures and "Sweet Baby James" are going to find this beautifully packaged DVD under the tree next week, just waiting for the chance to perplex and bewilder them. The circle of life continues.