The Screengrab : samuel fuller

Believe It Or Not: Patrica Highsmith's Ripley, On Screen

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The New York Times recently noted that this year marks the eightieth birthday of Tom Ripley, the favorite antihero of the late novelist Patricia Highsmith, who between The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was written in 1954, and in which Tom was 25 years old) and 1991's Ripley Under Water (published four years before Highsmith's death) wrote five books about him. Highsmith's Ripley is good-looking, well-built, implicitly gay but basically asexual, beyond suave, and sociopathic. When first glimpsed in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he's scuffling out a grifter's existence in New York before being drafted by the rich parents of a distant acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, to go to Italy and drag their slumming son back to the States. Instead, Ripley insinuates himself into Dickie's life, kills him, and essentially takes his place. He remains an American expatriate in Europe, where he uses his refined eye to become a formidable figure in the art forgery business.

Highsmith adored her creation. Ripley may be without conscience, but he has his own bizarre code, and he isn't casually murderous--he kills only as a last resort, though that's probably because dead bodies make for a mess. In some ways, Highsmith was the Ayn Rand of misanthropic hard-boiled crime novelists, and she seems to have judged Ripley as a superior sort of creature: he deserved to go undetected and live high on the spoils of his crimes so long as he was wittier, smarter, and had better taste than his victims. Highsmith's genius for plotting and nasty twists made her attractive to Hollywood, but her sensibility was too twisted and nasty for most mainstream filmmakers. One of Hitchcock's best movies, Strangers on a Train, is based on one of her non-Ripley novels, but in the movie, the hero, Guy, is horrified to discover that Bruno, the flirty psycho he met by chance has murdered Guy's estranged wife as a favor to him and now expects Guy to return the favor by murdering Bruno's father. In the novel, Guy is reluctant to fulfill his half of the bargain, but he gets over it. Likewise, there have been five movies made so far based on the Ripley novels--including the most recent, Roger Spottiswoode's 2005 Ripley Under Ground with Barry Pepper, which has yet to see either a theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. How have filmmakers succeeded in their attempts to bring Highsmith's hero to the movies? The results are all over the map:

PURPLE NOON (1960), directed by René Clément and based on The Talented Mr. Ripley, probably remains the purest expression of Highsmith's sensibility to make it to the screen. Shot by Henri Decaë and with a score by Nino Rota, it has a distinctive feel that's both lush and chilly. The movie made an international star of its Ripley, Alain Delon, and Highsmith was publicly approving of the actor as a proper physical match for her character. Purple Noon came out at a time when Americans were used to going to see European movies such as La Dolce Vita and La Notte for the spectacle of glamorous people behaving badly in photogenic locations, and Purple Noon fit right in with that trend, though in keeping with Highsmith's vision, it isn't obviously moralistic. But if you know the novel, you can spot the places where Highsmith's viewpoint has been softened a little: Philippe (nee' Dickie) Greenleaf isn't such an ass that you can think he has it coming to him, and Ripley actually gets caught at the end. That never happened in the books, and it hasn't happened in the movies since.

THE AMERICAN FRIEND (1977): The German director Wim Wenders made this version of the third book in the series, Ripley's Game. In some ways, it's the smartest and richest of all these films, though it also has the sorriest Ripley, hands down: Dennis Hopper, then deep into his drug-fueled freak-of-the-week period. Hopper was either unaware of or indifferent to the whole notion that his character was meant to seem classy enough to pass through the rarefied circles in which he did his business without setting off alarm bells. It's supposed to be a major insult when an art restorer--Jonathan, played by Bruno Ganz--who has heard rumors that Ripley is a shady character declines to shake his hand, but Hopper looks and acts like somebody who should be used to getting driven away from people's establishments at the wrong end of a fire hose. The plot here turns on that strange ethical code of Ripley's: as payback for the insult of the unshaken hand, he sets the wheels in motion that result in Jonathan, who is sick and in need of money, being hired to perform a contract killing. But then the contractor wants Jonathan to perform a second murder, and Ripley, who sees that as out of line, joins forces with Jonathan, first to help him pull off the follow-up killing and then to face off against the murdered man's vengeful associates. Hopper may have been hired not so much because he might be right for the part as for his status as the director of Easy Rider and the film maudit The Last Movie; having a little fun with the casting, Wenders filled many of the roles that called for gangsters and other untrustworthy types with fellow directors, including Nicholas Ray, Jean Eustache, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, and Samuel Fuller. In fact, the best performance in the movie is given by Fuller, as a cigar-chomping Mafia boss toting a gun whose barrel is about half as long as he is tall.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999): This second go at Ripley's debut boasts strong performances, especially by Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles, one of the few characters who managed to drive Ripley to overcome his natural aversion to commit murder. Directed by Anthony Minghella, it's a handsome production, and very impressive on its own terms. It's just that those terms are a flat contradiction of Highsmith's. Minghella and company set out to explain Ripley psychologically by emphasizing his inner struggle over his sexuality and the terrible loneliness he feels, which the mercurial, snobbish Dickie exacerbates by first appearing to accept him as a brother and then coldly shutting him out. Ripley here isn't a natural aristocrat rising to his true level but a frightened child in need of a hug, and the murders he commits aren't cold-blooded chess moves but the desperate acts of a cornered animal. The movie ends with him commiting one more murder (that isn't in the book) that leaves him lonelier, more miserable, and weepier than ever. Maybe the filmmakers thought they were making him more sympathetic. Highsmith, who thought her Ripley was already better than sympathetic because he was fascinating, would have wanted to put this crybaby out of her misery with a champagne bottle upside his head.

RIPLEY'S GAME (2002): This little-seen version of the same novel that inspired The American Friend was directed by Liliana Cavani, an Italian filmmaker best known for the godawful Nazi porn fantasy The Night Porter (1974). It doesn't have the brilliant conceits that decorated the Wenders film, or the atmosphere that enriched it, either. What it does have is John Malkovich as the Ripley of a Highsmith fan's dreams: he may not be the eye candy that Alain Delon was in his prime, but he's certainly convincing as an American who's exiled himself partly out of a sense that he's better than his home country deserves. The movie, which also features Ray Winstone, Lena Headey, and Dougray Scott as the accidental assassin, is a straightforward treatment of the story, and the story is a good one. But the best reason for its existence is that it gives Malkovich a chance to preen. At the climax, with a carload of Mafia killers on the way to his Italian villa, he carefully arranges his various death traps and then settles in for a night and a morning of waiting. It's like watching the last reel of Straw Dogs if the Dustin Hoffman character had been played by HAL 9000.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And now, the war films that didn't quite make our official Top 25...

HONORABLE MENTION

LAND AND FREEDOM (1995)

Land and Freedom is Ken Loach at his most unabashedly leftist and over-earnest, but by Jove it is enjoyable! It certainly helps that unlike many other Ken Loach films, Land and Freedom is not set among pale, pudgy and poorly nourished people in some post-industrial British shithole. Well, it may start and end there, but no mind, that isn't what you will remember. The story quickly whisks you off to the heady days of the Spanish Civil War. A young English Socialist goes to Spain to fight the good fight and finds himself chanting "¡No Pasarán!" among the Catalonian hills amid leftist in-fighting galore, and plenty of sexy comrades who believe in free love. As icing on the cake, Ian Hart plays our hero (you may remember him as a young John Lennon in Back Beat — if you swing that way. No one does sullen English working class desperation with quite the same verve.

HAMBURGER HILL (1987)

This movie, directed by the British John Irvin from a script by James Carabatsos, who served with the First Air Calvary Division in Vietnam, is the plainest and most direct of all the 'Nam movies. It introduces you to the guys in a U.S. Army battalion and then documents the ten days they spend trying to carry out their orders to take an occupied hill that affords them minimal cover from the fire raining down. Although Hill shows some of the soldiers complaining about how unappreciated their efforts are back home, the film has no real political statement to make and no larger messages about the nature of warfare aside from the obvious ones, principally that the war looks a lot different to the officers who are off somewhere deciding which orders to give than it does to the guys on the ground who are staring up at the building about to collapse on top of them, and dying for a decision that makes no sense to you sucks. A lot of Vietnam movies have been made with the stated aim of providing a requiem for the people lost in that war; of all of them, this one gets that job done with the least fuss and confusion.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951)

This was the first war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, a World War II infantryman who would later tell interviewers how proud he was when a military representative complained to him that his movies would have no value as recruiting tools. Like his follow-up film, Fixed Bayonets, it's a Korean War picture that serves as a showcase for Gene Barry, a big, brusque galoot with a beady-eyed, unshaven mug who Fuller judged to be the ideal actor to play a grunt. (Suggestions from one studio that they enlarge the budget and try to reel in John Wayne sent Fuller swooning in horror.) With its garage-sale props, pissed-off acting, and quick bursts of chaotic action, it perfectly represents the mixture of cartoon, off-Broadway theater, whirligig violence and real anger that struck Fuller as the appropriate response to war. Spielberg later paid homage to the movie in the second Indiana Jones picture by giving Indy's child sidekick the same name (Short Round) that Fuller gave to the Korean kid who attaches himself to his hero.

WAG THE DOG (1997)

If you think this comedy about a political spin specialist (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman, doing his patented Robert Evans impression) helping to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal by stirring up public support for an attack on Albania isn't really a war movie, what channel have you been watching? At the time of its release, just as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was breaking, the movie seemed prescient, but David Mamet's script borrowed its basic idea from a novel, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, in which the president was George H. W. Bush and the phony war was the 1991 attack on Iraq; the novel depicted real-life Republican slimeball Lee Atwater literally handing over the worked-out plans for the war and its likely effect on the president's approval rating on his death bed, along with the advice -- which the White House failed to heed -- that George not get overexcited and be sure to save the plan until closer to the 1992 election so that it would do him some good. Mamet and company may have cost the project some of its edge by making it about a fictional president and a fictional war, thus rendering it more "universal." On the plus side, they did give us the image of Willie Nelson, hard at work on his new novelty propaganda song, trying his damndest to think up a rhyme for "Albania."

UNDER FIRE (1982) & WELCOME TO SARAJEVO (1997)

These two movies are both about white English-speaking reporters trying to cover violent trouble spots in remote corners of the world while having to grapple with their ethics about playing nonjudgemental observers of the horrors going on in front of their noses. (Oliver Stone's Salvador is in a similar mold except that James Woods' Richard Boyle, who by most official professional standards has the loosest ethics of any reporter imaginable, is so sure he knows what's right and what's wrong that he isn't troubled about a thing.) In Under Fire, the setting is Nicaragua in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. The hero, a photographer played by Nick Nolte, agrees to help the rebels keep up morale by faking a photo "proving" that their dead leader is still alive. The politics of the movie flew in the face of the Reagan administration's policy that the Sandinista government was unacceptable and needed to be taken down by proxy warriors. The movie was, accordingly, buried, but the director, Roger Spottiswoode, and the writer, Ron Shelton, manage to achieve a clear-eyed view of all the competing forces propping up the Somoza dictatorship or trying to bring it down, including a fun-loving psycho of a professional mercenary (Ed Harris), a mysteriously well-connected Frenchman played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Richard Masur as Somoza's mealy-mouthed American flack, who's trying to turn things around with media spin while Somoza's soldiers are shooting down people in the street. In Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, which is set during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovia (and which was shot on location there while the ruins were still smoking), Stephen Dillane plays a British journalist who weighs the pros and cons of adopting a little girl and smuggling her out of the country. Challenging and involving, the movie is also blessed by one of Woody Harrelson's most entertaining wild man turns as a well-respected establishment TV journalist whose off-camera behavior in the field is pure double-live gonzo.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Seven
Seven

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent

Take Five: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A., a documentary about the massive national debt being accrued by the United States, opens in limited release today. Using charts, graphs, and mountains of economics statistics, Creadon – the man who brought us the charming crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay – has essentially created An Inconvenient Truth 2: The Doomsday Debt. In the film, which features guest appearances from a pantheon of econ-nerd luminaries including mega-investor Warren Buffet, Comptroller General David M. Walker, and celebrated presidential candidate/crazy person Ron Paul, we are shown how our unthinkably huge national debt may lead to war, inflation, the collapse of our international alliances, economic catastrophe, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria. But hey, every movie with those three wonderful letters ‘U.S.A.’ in the title has to be about how we’re all doomed because of the short-sighted policies of warmongering, tax-cutting, pork-barreling, corporate-welfare-loving presidential administrations! Maybe it’s just some residual patriotism from the Fourth of July, but this movie inspired us to create a Take Five featuring other ‘U.S.A’ movies that aren’t quite so bleak. Or, at least, don’t have so many pie charts.

UNDERWORLD U.S.A. (1961)

A little-seen late-period noir from the underrated Sam Fuller, Underworld U.S.A. is a flawed film, particularly in its underwhelming cast, predictable action, and sometimes hokey dialogue. But Cliff Robertson is dynamite as Tolly Devlin, a man who, after seeing his father murdered by two-bit hoods, decided that revenge is a dish served straight out of the freezer, as he spends the next 20 years infiltrating their organization.

MADE IN U.S.A. (1967)

One of the most impenetrable relics from when Jean-Luc Godard really started to go off the narrative rails and into an experimental/revolutionary world of his own, Made in U.S.A. purports to be – and, to a certain albeit incomprehensible degree, actually is – an adaptation of one of Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark” novels. Bu really, it’s just a glorious excuse for Anna Karina to lounge around in a (French-speaking) Atlantic City hotel room, talking about socialism.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple set out to make a documentary about the bitter electoral dispute that was tearing the United Mine Workers union apart in the mid-1970s. Instead, after visiting an unauthorized strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, she found a new subject: the desperation, suffering, and nobility of the miners as they struggled to survive under the weight of bosses who crippled them at every turn. Moving, gripping, suspenseful, infuriating, enraging, affirming and beautiful – everything a good documentary should be.

GRANDVIEW, U.S.A. (1984)

Made during that period of the 1980s where they would apparently greenlight a movie about any old thing, this forgotten relic by Randal “The Blue Lagoon” Kleiser involves a painfully underfed C. Thomas Howell, who is a race car driver and aspiring oceanographer for some reason, falling in love with Jamie Lee Curtis, who owns the local demolition derby in the grand tradition of movie sports bosses who look nothing like Bud Selig.

INVASION U.S.A. (1985)

Now we’re talkin’! After all this 'waah-waah, the economy is failing, the unions are dying, some gangsters killed my dad' nonsense, here comes Chuck Norris, with a sleeveless denim shirt and a big pickup truck, to make everything all right. He does this by single-handedly wiping out a huge invasion force, consisting of a wide variety of swarthy foreign nationals, who have had the unmitigated audacity to take over some of our finest shopping malls. Now that’s the U.S.A. I’m talking about!

Manny Farber, 1917--2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

A one-of-a-kind eccentric voice whose tastes and opinions left an unexpectedly long shadow across the battlefield of late-twentieth-century movie criticism and geek argument, Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. In such essays as "The Gimp", "Underground Movies", "Cartooned Hip Acting" and the landmark "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art"--originally published in such out-of-the-way venues as Film Culture, City Lights, and Artforum--Farber gleefully pissed on middlebrow attempts to uplift the movies to the level of self-serious kitsch, saving his highest praise for those directors, ranging from Samuel Fuller and Don Siegel to Chuck Jones and Jean-Luc Godard, who "seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything." Farber's embrace of wise-cracking, tough-guy language and a scorn for the self-conscious "pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing masterpiece" (so that the "assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turned into mannerism by the padding lechery, faking required to combine today; esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art") that almost borders on nihilism should not be mistaken for philistine thuggery. Farber himself was a painter, often turning out canvasses inspired by his favorite films by Fassbinder and Sam Peckinpah. As a critic, he used words the way the best Abstract Expressionists used color and brushstrokes, boiling his opinions into a steady stream of hard little bullets of impressions and laying them out in a field of poeticized yet slangy language that could at first appear chaotic and off-the-cuff yet, upon close examination, revealed themselves to be the carefully shaped product of a lifetime's thinking about what mattered in the arts. Because Farber was so funny, and his writing so electric, nobody ever needed much convincing that they ought to give his writing that kind of close study.

The "White Elephant" essay, a full-throated expression of artistic preference, begins with a dissertation on Cezanne before veering off into a celebration of those "termite artists" of the movies, such as Laurel and Hardy and the Howard Hawks of The Big Sleep, whose work does not stand before the audience preening its beauty and solemnity of purpose but rather "goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." Farber's own path of eager, industrious, unkempt activity as a writer can be found in his single collection, Negative Space, which was originally published in 1971; a paperback version was issued under the title Movies, and in 1998 Da Capo brought out a new paperback edition which included a preface by Raoul Walsh (who certainly owed him one) as well as the scarce handful of movie essays that Farber had turned out since the mid-70s, all of them listing his wife Patricia Patterson, as co-author.

Dennis Lim Hammers Out the Evolution of the Fight Scene

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Set off in part by the arguments over The Dark Knight's action scenes--widely held to be "visually incoherent" even by many of the film's admirers--Dennis Lim has assembled a thoughtful and compelling "slide show" charting the evolution of the movie fight scene. Classic action directors such as Don Siegel and Samuel Fuller used action and space to give their fights a kinetic punch that made audiences sit up and forget to blink, but in recent years directors have come to rely more and more on technological pizzazz to put the viewer in the position of someone right in the action (as in Scorsese's Raging Bull) or to violate the laws of gravity, more purposefully in The Matrix. At their peak, the Wachowskis were able to use stage violent ballets and dissect them even as they unfolded, but more hackish and hollow-headed directors have helped rob movie action of its soul by making scenes that feel so unreal that there's nothing at stake even when they're readable. Still, you do occasionally see something like what Lim calls the "show-stopping corridor fight in Korean director Park Chanwook's Oldboy," adding, "to watch this after trying to figure out what's happening between Batman and the Joker is something like going back to Astaire and Rogers after watching Renee Zellwegger and Richard Gere in Chicago. Fight scenes play on the spectator's dual need for illusion and authenticity. And precisely for that reason, great fight scenes, like Park's one-take wonder, tend to be at once believable and beyond belief. The choreography is intricate and meticulous enough to be convincing, but the scene also calls attention to its artificiality, with sly allusions to the side-scrolling vantage of beat-'em-up video games and the blatant proscenium framing. (To shoot from this "impossible" angle literally required the demolition of the fourth wall.)"

Screengrab DVD Review: Pierrot le fou

Peter Smith — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:55:00 GMT

Were the world a simpler and gentler place, Pierrot le fou would consist of 110 minutes of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina) relaxing on the seaside. Instead, it's the most exhilarating elegy for a failed marriage and betrayal you're ever likely to see. Jean-Luc Godard's tenth film marked a turning point for the director, who divorced Karina around the time he made it. Afterwards, he abandoned its romanticism and upped the political references and Brechtian tactics that lie on the sideline here. It might be a good entry point for Godard neophytes, made at a moment where he could still celebrate American directors like Frank Tashlin, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller (who makes a cameo) and rage against American foreign policy, maintaining an uneasy balance of experimentation and accessibility.

A married father and aspiring novelist, Ferdinand abandons his family to go on the road with Marianne, the babysitter. After stealing $50,000, the couple is forced to flee a gang of criminals connected with Marianne's brother, who's involved in gun-running. But Godard's disinterest in the film noir-derived narrative (based on Lionel White's novel Obsession) is palpable. He's more excited about the images he's creating — especially when aided by cinematographer Raoul Coutard. Throughout, the colors are dazzling, especially in a sequence where fireworks are reflected in the windshield as Ferdinand and Marianne drive. Frequent outbursts of violence — including an early instance of waterboarding — serve as a reminder of the fragility of love and life, but the film also takes time out for numerous images of art, several musical numbers and a trip to the bowling alley. Like many French New Wave films, Pierrot le fou ends unhappily, but its blissful exploration of emotional highs and lows still thrills. — Steve Erickson

DVD EXTRAS: The second disc includes vintage interviews with Godard, Belmondo and Karina, as well as a recent talk with the latter. It also features two documentaries: A "Pierrot" Primer, which features commentary from frequent Criterion guest and Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Godard, L'Amour, which concentrates on Godard's relationship with Karina both as a wife and actress.