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The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Nick Schager — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Though dogged by rumors that executive producer Steven Spielberg spearheaded its production, 1982’s Poltergeist was nonetheless The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s first mainstream, major-studio success. His 1985 follow-up Lifeforce, however, demolished most of the professional momentum generated by his prior effort, and a simple recap of its plot suggests why. Investigating Haley’s Comet, a joint American-British space shuttle crew discovers an extraterrestrial ship full of desiccated bat-man creatures and three nude humanoids trapped in giant crystals, whom the astronauts bring aboard their own craft. Some time later, another space expedition recovers these three unclothed figures, including a gorgeous female (Mathilda May), and transports them to Earth, where they turn out to be space vampires who can possess bodies and are intent on draining – and then beaming to the umbrella-shaped ship they’ve positioned just above London – as many human souls as they can harvest. As May’s sexy E.T. sucks people dry and telepathically communicates with the astronaut (Steve Railsback) who first discovered her, Londoners sapped of their lifeforces become zombies, terrorizing the city and putting mankind’s continued survival in peril.

The term “batshit insane,” it seems, was created with this specific film in mind. And yet I’d argue that’s a positive, since how many unironic psychosexual space vampire-zombie apocalypse films do you get in one lifetime – and helmed by Tobe Hooper in his (relative) prime, no less? Adapted from Colin Wilson’s novel Space Vampires by Don Jakoby and Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, Lifeforce has an off-the-deep-end mentality that was bound to alienate, its plot going from silly to ludicrous to mental ward-bonkers without even an accompanying hint of wink-wink self-consciousness. Hooper plays his bizarro material straight, which in this case involves repeatedly employing a dreamy, hallucinatory aesthetic marked by twisting, gliding, seemingly weightless camerawork, extreme soft-focus lighting, and heightened shot-reverse shot angles for his protagonists’ telepathic conversations. Juxtaposed rotating close-ups of May and Railsback during their maiden encounter not only beautifully evoke how Railsback’s world is about to be turned figuratively upside-down, but elegantly establishes the two characters’ forthcoming mental-physical union, one of many instances where Hooper’s evocative direction elevates his often loony-tunes sci-fi saga.

Hooper’s potent widescreen cinematography and Henry Mancini’s robust score help foster a surrealistic atmosphere for a story simultaneously intoxicated and frightened by femininity. The embodiment of male sexual fantasies and anxieties, May’s Playboy-ready, perpetually nude succubus gives the action a perversely electric energy, while the performances of Railsback, Peter Firth (as a military colonel) and Frank Finlay (as a government scientist who studies “death”) afford just enough campiness to keep the proceedings light. Originally trimmed of 15 minutes by TriStar Pictures, Lifeforce’s restored 116-minute DVD cut boasts few glaring plot holes but a number of memorable horror images – blue lightening flashing around the gaping mouths of a reanimated, dried-out corpse and his victim; May’s alien materializing from the blood spewing out of a deceased Patrick Stewart’s mouth; an ominously carnal dream sequence; and a final, naked make-out session between May and Railsback in a column of blue light comprised of human souls. Frequently outlandish and far from profound, it’s nonetheless a box-office bomb that, like its horror-maestro director, deserved quite a bit better.

OST: "Anatomy of a Murder"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Last week in this space, we discussed the highly effecting soundtrack to The Man with the Golden Arm -- a moody post-bop jazz score that came from a highly unlikely source in the person of Elmer Bernstein. This week's original soundtrack focus, the 1959 courtroom classic Anatomy of a Murder, was penned by someone who hardly needed to prove his jazz credentials. Duke Ellington was a jazz elder statesman by the time the movie started production, but jazz had long been considered off-limits in most movies thanks to its connotation as "race music" through most of the '30s and '40s. It took the work of men like Bernstein and Henry Mancini to normalize it for film use to the degree that Otto Preminger could call upon a living legend like Ellington to score his crime drama a few years later. The picture wrapped in record time, and Preminger rushed to get it into theaters, partly in fear that its highly controversial nature (it was built around a revenge killing for the rape of the accused's wife, and used language that was extremely explicit for its day) would cause it to receive flak from the censors, so Ellington was pressured to work fast. Luckily, years of working with a talented group of improvisors -- some of whom, including Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Cat Anderson, can be seen and heard in the film -- had prepared him well.

Ellington had done film work before, but by and large, it was for shorts, concert films, and the like. Anatomy of a Murder would be his first full-length feature film, and the pressure was on in more ways than one, since for all the controversy surrounding it, it was meant to be an A picture. It featured a prestige director, a highly coveted source for its script, and some of Hollywood's brightest actors in the lead roles: Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott and Lee Remick among them. (Ellington even has a minor role himself, playing the owner of a local roadhouse.) He was also something of a grandee of jazz, one of the old men of the medium's golden age, and not exactly known for being able to hit the clanging, atonal, and often dark aspects of the post-bop era. But he acquitted himself better than anyone could possibly have expected: his score to Anatomy of a Murder reels convincingly from swinging to subtle to romantic to comic to clever to violent when the scene calls for it. While it's not quite a great enough accomplishment from one of the finest jazzmen in history to stand unquestioned alongside his greatest sides, it's a remarkably effecting film score that strikes -- if a bit late -- a mightily convincing blow in favor of using jazz as a material for film scores just as suitable, if not more so, than the second-rate symphonic music that was the norm at the time.

What makes the score even more accomplished -- and credit here is due to Preminger and his editors as well as to Ellington and his sidemen -- is that it was designed and executed as a diagetical piece, where the music does not exist extraneous to the filmed action, but is meant to be heard in the context that characters in the film might hear it. The fact that it succeeds so well in this regard and stands up so strongly as an album, independent of the film, testifies to both Ellington's strengths as a composer and Preminger's as a director. Anyone seeking out an album version of this critically important moment in the history of jazz on film is highly advised to find the 1995 Columbia CD reissue; it features restored cover art based on the original ad campaign (which drew heavily on the Blue Note Records design style of the day), a lengthy and engaging interview with Duke Ellington, numerous outtakes, studio sessions, and rehearsal pieces, and best of all, an expert digital remastering that dumps the unnecessary and distracting level of echo that mars some of the original releases. The result is a much clearer, more immediate sound for what should be remembered for decades as one of the best blends of film and music of the 1950s.

BEST TRACKS: Most people who have only seen the film remember only for its opening theme, and that's perfectly understandable: "Main Theme/Anatomy of a Murder" is a dynamite piece of music, jazzy and powerful but with a good pop music composer's understanding of what makes a memorable movie theme. But there's plenty more than that to enjoy on an album that could easily be stuck in alongside Ellington's better work of the 1950s: the moody, steamy "Midnight Indigo", the bouncing, witty "Flirtibird", and, especially, the majestic and melodic "Sunswept Saturday", with its terrific, hooky clarinet work by Jimmy Hamilton.

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OST: The Man with the Golden Arm

OST: The Pink Panther

OST: "The Man with the Golden Arm"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Frank Sinatra, for one. Sinatra knew Elmer Bernstein well from his early sojourns in Hollywood, and once he was cast to play the lead in Otto Preminger's adaptation of a harrowing Nelson Algren novel about a recovering junkie, he approached the director -- not known for his stylistic daring -- and tried to convince him that Bernstein could swing. Preminger decided to take a chance, and as a result, two careers were charged with new vigor: Sinatra won widespread praise for his performance, and convinced skeptical critics that he was capable of being a great actor. As for the composer, he turned in, to the surprise of everyone but Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the most compelling -- and compulsively re-listenable -- crypto-jazz scores of the 1950s. When combined with one of Saul Bass' most stunning title sequences, it all adds up to an absolutely riveting blend of music and visual. Anyone teaching a class about the particular spirit of that period of urban drama needs nothing more for their audiovisual centerpiece than the first five minutes of The Man with the Golden Arm.

BEST TRACKS: The finest tracks on the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm are those where Bernstein collaborated with an actual jazzman -- conducter, arranger, trumpeter and former Woody Herman sideman Shorty Rogers. Rogers' bold, accusatory horn is a big part of what makes the movie's opening theme -- better known as "Frankie Machine", after the name of Sinatra's character -- so unforgettable, and his deft arrangement and understanding of Elmer Bernstein's distinct sense of melody, combined with his own rhythmic sensibility, also makes a success of the wonderfully chaotic "Audition". Other great tracks include the manic "Breakup: Flight/Louie's/Burlesque" medley and the mournful "Finale". Overall, it works thematically, but is still strong enough to stand on its own as a skillful period jazz record.

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OST: The Pink Panther

OST: Blue Velvet

OST: "The Pink Panther"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film. In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come. Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants: a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers. While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed. It's not Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch. Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration. He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention. Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound. If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese. He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

While the soundtrack to The Pink Panther is a mighty fine listen on its own -- cue it up at your next swingin' bachelor pad party and offer everone a round of pink squirrels, you wannabe -- it works best in the context of the film, where, as a unified whole, the combination of music and visual creates an absolutely perfect evocation of Europe at the tail end of the Swingin' Sixties. Listening to it in full, as the immediately remembered but somehow never overworn main theme swings its way into your soul, lets you forget about what comes next and remember the days when Peter Sellers was young, alive and full of prome, Henry Mancini wasn't a shadow of his former self grinding out TV hackwork for the paychekc, and Blake Edwards actually knew how to direct funny movies. Doesn't seem that long ago now, does it?

BEST TRACKS: Of course, "The Pink Panther Theme" -- signifying on screen the appearance not of Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but of David Niven's infamous jewel thief, the Phantom -- is one of the certified classics of cinema soundtracks. Its slow, sinister build into a rip-roaring lounge jazz number is unforgettable from the first time you hear it, and seems to lose not an ounce from repetition. But there's more here than just that famous number: take a listen for "Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)", a swinging vocal number with a Continental feel written for young starlet Fran Jeffries, which went on to be a big hit for crooner (and frequent Mancini collaborator) Johnny Mercer. There's also the oddly named "Shades of Sennett", a rollicking piano number used in the movie's final chase number, that conjures British comedies and American honky-tonk blues -- but rarely the silent movie era it seems to predict in the title!

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OST: Fight Club

OST: Blade Runner

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

What is it about alternate cuts? A cynical marketing tool to sell an old movie or the chance for the filmmakers to finally unveil their true vision of the film? In the old days, studios wouldn't bother with keeping trims and outtakes; better to dump them in the sea and save the space for something more worthwhile. Most of the great filmmakers suffered from this. Orson Welles couldn't reconstruct his version of The Magnificent Ambersons, and even more recently, William Friedkin couldn't find the footage to finally unleash his preferred cut of Cruising. In the old days, if you wanted to see the alternate cut of a movie, you had to go to another country. Graham Greene didn't dig the shortened version of Once Upon A Time In The West, so he told his readers to go to Paris to see the uncut version. Friedkin went apeshit when he found out that Sorcerer, his beloved remake of The Wages of Fear, had been completely re-cut by the European distributors, so that the opening character prologues instead appeared as flashbacks, usually whenever a character was just about to blow up. Here, though, is a list of ten alternate cuts that are well worth your time. — Faisal A. Qureshi

BLADE RUNNER (1982, Ridley Scott)

How many different versions of this film are there? Warner Brothers did everyone except eBay bootleggers a favor when they put all five on one platter. First there was the U.S. voice-over cut, then the international cut (for a few frames of ultra-violence that those decadent Europeans dig) and then the authorized director's cut. Hold on a minute though, Ridley Scott kept saying that actually wasn't his final cut, so he went back to the editing room and came out with his definitive final cut (and let's not forget the 70mm Workprint that kicked the whole thing off). Basically, film lovers wouldn't have alternate cuts of movies if it wasn't for Blade Runner. It was the film that showed that ten years after the first release and proved you could still make cash from your old films. Which version is the best though? Well, that's up to you. I thought changing Rutger Hauer's "I want more life, fucker" to "father" kind of sucked and spoiled an otherwise decent flick, but WB did the decent thing and actually made sure all of them are there for your perusal. Heck, maybe I should go into the editing room and cut my own personally approved cut of Blade Runner. I mean, they do give you everything in this package.

THE SHINING (1980, Stanley Kubrick)

How can a filmmaker allow two different cuts of a film in release? If you're Stanley Kubrick, you can do everything. Whilst US audiences had the pleasure of a 147-minute cut of the Stephen King adaptation, the rest of the world just had the pleasure of a two-hour cut of the film, both approved by the director. Sure, Eyes Wide Shut had CGI figures covering some naughty bits, and he trimmed twenty minutes from 2001 after its world premiere, but this is different: Kubrick allowed both cuts to co-exist. What's the difference between them? Well, it's mostly scene shortening and dialogue trims, including bits where Scatman Crothers' character is going back to the Overlook Hotel to see what the heck is going on there. At one point you could get both versions on DVD, but with the recent re-release of the longer cut of The Shining, expect to see the shorter cut to disappear from existence. And did you know that there's a third version that had an alternate ending that was trimmed from all prints a week after its US release?

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

As far as I'm aware, there are four versions of this film lying around, the longest being a five hour workprint that you can probably bit torrent now from bad VHS dupes. But Coppola re-released the original theatrical and the Redux edition together. Which one's better? For my money, I prefer the theatrical release, as Sheen just comes out as a mean brooding muthafucka. Redux is good to have, but for me, that music in the French plantation scene just spoiled the entire mood of the flick and the film never recovered completely from that moment on. Currently available on DVD but without the excellent Hearts of Darkness documentary included, what really spoils the film is cinematographer Vittorio Storraro's insistence that the film be transferred at his preferred retrospective Univisium 2:1 aspect ratio instead of 2.35:1 of its original release. If you want to see it properly, best to record a HD broadcast straight onto your hard drive, cause Storraro ain't having you watch it any other way.

EXORCIST 4 (2005, Renny Harlin, Paul Schrader)

Orson Welles had his ending for The Magnificent Ambersons re-shot by a studio hack, but enough of the film survived to be eventually regarded as a butchered classic. When Paul Schrader was kicked off the Exorcist prequel by Morgan Creek, rumors started circulating of his cut being some horror classic that had been 99% re-shot by studio hack Renny Harlin. A vocal internet campaign and the disastrous reception of the Harlin version resulted in Schrader's film being released to re-coup some of Morgan Creek's investment in the film, but the response was indifferent. Harlin's cut is goofy fun, with OTT sequences that make no sense but do crank up some foley effect on the soundtrack. Schrader's is Bergmanesque in comparison, interesting to watch and with a great performance by French pop star Billy Crawford as the possessed boy in need of exorcism. Both prequels are interesting to see a study in rhythm: Harlin has the actors play it fast and cuts every couple of seconds, whilsts Schrader meditates on his scenes, trying to build the tension up slowly.

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958, Orson Welles)

Orson Welles' sleazy cop thriller was first known only in a ninety-minute version, then in an extended 108-min cut that was found and re-released in 1976, but cineastes had to wait until 1998, when Rick Schmidlin and Walter Murch did a re-cut of the film based on a fifty-eight-page memo that Welles had sent the studio. (Needless to say, the studio ignored him completely.) After the restoration was released, the 1976 cut was retired to the vault, and what a pity that was. I'm not a fan of the restored edition; the limitations of the picture restoration can be seen in the opening sequence, when the picture softens at each point where a title had originally appeared. But the worse aspect is the removal of the excellent Henry Mancini score. Universal has no plans to re-release both cuts on DVD so until then, compare both openings and see what you'd like.

Click here for Part 2!