The Screengrab : the terminal man

Mike Hodges Remembers: The "Get Carter" Director Writes About Making the Movies That Nobody Sees

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The British writer-director Mike Holdges scored a big hit right out of the box with his first film, Get Carter (1971), which starred Michael Caine as a vengeful hit man and which just about single-handedly created a new kind of gritty British gangster movie. A couple of decades later, he helped make Clive Owen a movie star with another neo-noir, Croupier, a small film that narrowly escaped going to straight to video but managed to become a genuine sleeper. In between, he worked on probably his biggest-budgeted movie, the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production Flash Gordon, a somewhat underrated entertainment that is one of the few comics-based movies to achieve true camp--the real, gilded thing itself, mind you, not that sniggery TV-Batman stuff. Aside from these high points, Modges has enjoyed the kind of career you might expect from a smart, talented guy who basically works within the industry but whose instincts aren't strictly, safely commercial: he's made some films, such as the 1987 A Prayer for the Dying, that were reportedly mangled by the distributors, and some, such as the 1985 Morons from Outer Space, where it's tempting to think that some mangling could have only helped. He's also made some movies that, as he writes in an article in The Guardian, never had much of a chance to find an audience. Such as his first film after Get Carter, the tantalizingly bizarre comedy Pulp, which also starred Michael Caine. He played a sleazy writer hired to ghost write the memoirs of a movie star (Mickey Rooney) with actual gangland connections.

Hodges writes that the movie bewildered studio executives and so was banished to the vaults, where it "languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York." Pulp had been selected as the first film shown at a boutique theater in Manhattan that was designed to specialize in noteworthy films that the big chains had no interest in showing at all; in order to emphasize the collectors-item nature of the enterprise, the films were booked for one-week runs only. "Now, at last, the critics would get to see it. Much to the distributor's surprise, it received rave reviews. Time magazine got a little overheated and even mentioned the word 'masterpiece'. While I'm of the opinion that film critics spend too much time in the dark, I'm always grateful when, in the case of my own work, they come to the right conclusions." The only downside was that this was in the pre-Internet days when people had to actually wait a few days for such precious information to get out. By the time those rave reviews in the print magazines had hit the newsstands, the one-week run had ended and Pulp was back in the vault.

Hodges followed that one up with the sci-fi slasher movie The Terminal Man, based on a Michael Crichton novel. In this case, the results are harder to defend, but it does sound as if Hodges put a lot of thought into the choices that make the movie so cold and repellent. (It stars George Segal as a brain-damaged fellow who has part of his brain hooked to a computer to help him get over his bad habit of stabbing people. Guess what happens.) Clearly he responded on a surprisingly personal level to its "message" about the "obvious insanity at the very heart of what drives us," which "also drove me to make the film." For the score, Hodges went austere, using only Glenn Gould's recordings of The Goldberg Variations. The pianist was famously reclusive and paranoid, and the movie had to be sent to Toronto to be screened for him to get his approval for the use of the music. "His own solitary existence and extreme hypochondria," Hodges noted dryly, "must have made for a weird screening."

A "director's cut" of The Terminal Man is showing in London in December. On November 30, there will be a screening of what may be Hodges's most obscure obscurity, the fascinatingly moody thriller Black Rainbow (1989), starring Rosanna Arquette and Jason Robards. The movie was kicked under the sofa by distributors, and Hodges writes that "From then on I consoled myself by calling my work "films in bottles". They would wash up somewhere, some time, and maybe surprise somebody watching some remote cable channel in the early hours. This theory was proven correct one morning when I was working with composer Simon Fisher Turner on the music for Croupier... The doorbell rang. It was a Japanese musician friend of Simon's, who was built like a sumo wrestler. They did their business, and he was on his way out. He suddenly turned back and approached me. My name had rung a bell. 'You make Black Rainbow?' 'I did.' 'I see six times.' I was so astonished I assumed he'd seen it on video. 'No. In cinema. Black Rainbow very big in Japan.'"

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)

The title character, played by George Segal, is a brilliant computer programmer who suffers from epileptic seizures and Acute Disinhibitory Lesion (ADL) syndrome. He has begun experiencing blackouts, and he's gotten in trouble with the law because of violent beatings he's inflicted on people while his cerebral cortex was out to lunch. Looking to help the poor guy out, doctors implant electrodes in his brain and hook them up to a miniature computer implanted in his neck. All this is meant to control his seizures and help prevent him from behaving violently, but Segal goes off his meds, the computer malfunctions, and the next thing you know, he's a misfiring killing machine, lurching about the city laying waste to people and waterbeds, and driven even crazier by his "delusion" that computers are taking over the world and waging war on the human race, a species of paranoia for which he himself could now serve as Exhibit A. After The Terminal Man was released, its message about the dangers of computers was taken to heart by everyone who saw it, the U.S. government banned any further development of computer technology, and Steve Jobs became a street musician. You are reading this on one of those new-fangled text-messaging abacuses.

SSSSSSS (1973)

Back in the early 1970s, when concern about global climate change was such an obscure topic that Al Gore was still jacking up the air conditioner to "frosty" and demanding to know "When the hell does it warm up around here?", Dr. Carl Stoner was on the case. Doc Stoner, played by the much-loved and deeply untrustworthy character actor Strother Martin, suspects that a new Ice Age might be coming, and he has his own radical plan for helping the human race to adjust to changing circumstances: he's working on a serum that will turn us all into king cobras. Unfortunately, the good doctor leaves himself open to charges that he lets his personal feelings guide his scientific process: he selects as his first test subject Dirk Benedict (later known as Face on The A-Team), who just happens to have been sniffing around the doctor's young daughter, played by Heather Menzies, who's beautiful when she takes off her glasses. (This being an early-70s exploitation movie, she ends up taking off a lot more than her glasses.) Soon Benedict is stumbling around the lab with a greenish complexion, scaly flaking skin, and his hair falling out, which in my experience would be enough to ensure that Heather Menzies would cut him off even if he didn't wind up turning into a snake.

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Generally speaking, sexually transformative surgery has gotten a bad rap in the movies; Ed Wood did very little to glamorize the field with his 1953 first feature, Glen or Glenda (A.K.A. I Changed My Sex), where the whole point seemed to be to transform a repressive society to make it acceptable for men with pencil-line moustaches to indulge their passion for Angora sweaters. Things hadn't gotten much better by the early seventies, when the writer-director Michael Sarne (compared by one of his colleagues to "a wolf with rabies") committed this blasphemous version of Gore Vidal's classic Pop novel. In Sarne's telling, Myron, played by film writer and Gong Show staple Rex Reed, goes under the knife and comes out as Myra, played by Raquel Welch. It would take a special commission composed of cooler heads than my own to decide whether, for the patient, that amounts to a step forward, a step back, or a lateral move. Incidentally, the surgeon is played by the venerable John Carradine, who must have felt comfortable in the role, because two years later, he played the medical sex researcher in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, who was engaged in such nefarious pursuits as "taking the brain from the head of a lesbian and putting it in the body of a man who works for the telephone company."

RABID (1977)

No list of movie medical mishaps would be complete without a bow to the work of David Cronenberg. In his debut feature, the 1975 Shivers (A.K.A. They Came from Within), a doctor working with parasitic transplants that he hopes will liberate an overly straitlaced society succeeds so well that he turns a Montreal apartment complex into a mindless rolling orgy that sets out, at the end of the movie, to infect the larger world. In his 1979 The Brood, a maverick psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) coaches his prize pupil into channeling her unresolved anger until she begins literally giving birth to murderous creatures who are pure products of her rage. Rabid is sort of the worst of both worlds, plus maybe a few more worlds you never would have thought of without David's kind help. Porn actress Marilyn Chambers plays an accident victim who winds up in the hands of a plastic surgeon looking to try out an experimental skin grafting technique. It somehow causes her to grow a phallus-like organ beneath her armpit, which she uses to impale people and feed, vampire-like, on their blood. Her victims in turn become frothing, murderous lunatics, who run amok like the infected people in Shivers, except not as friendly. If there's a common theme running through Cronenberg's early work, it may be the message, "Even if you don't like his movies, you can at least take heart that, thank God, he didn't become a doctor!"

SPECIAL BONUS BEST-- BEST PROGRAM OF MEDICAL REFORM:

THE HOSPITAL (1971)

This black comedy, written by Paddy Chayefsky, is set in a beleaguered Manhattan teaching hospital that's going to the dogs. The Chief of Medicine, Dr. Herbert Beck (George C. Scott), has to deal not only with the "radiant" bungling of his staff (exemplified by a pompous, strutting quack named Welbeck) but with a mysterious string of deaths among his staff members, whose bodies keep turning up in hospital beds and sprawled across chairs in the emergency waiting room. It's all right, though: it turns out that the staff members are being picked off by a saintly madman (Bernard Hughes) who, having suffered as a patient in the hospital, has been sort-of-murdering the doctors by putting them in situations where they'd be all right if they were subjected to timely care and basic competence, which he recognizes as supremely unlikely. Learning the truth, Dr. Beck points this reformer in the direction of Dr. Welbeck and wishes him godspeed.

Click here for Part 1.