SCREENING LOG - 6/12/2006-6/18/2006

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Experiment in Terror (1962, Blake Edwards)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055972/
This was an engrossing film to be sure, a well-crafted and paced suspense mystery with detective Glenn Ford tracking down an asthmatic extortionist (Ross Martin) who threatens to kill bankteller Lee Remick. It starts terrifiyingly enough with the man assaulting Remick in her own garage, moves along at an agreeable slow burn and ends with your standard hostage situation-cum-shootout, though in a setting I have much fondness for, breezy Candlestick Park in my hometown of San Francisco. As engaged as I was for the most part, when the film was over I instantly started wondering what that was all about. This film doesn't seem to exist for anything other than being a well-crafted but cold exercise in suspense storytelling.

That could be fine enough, and on those grounds there's much to recommend it. to start, there's Henry Mancini's score, which seeps through the texture of the film, lending a cool, menacing, quality that gives a weird chicness to the picture. All the weirder since there's a lot of everyday plainness counterbalancing the eerie shadows and mood music -- Ford, Remick and Martin all come off as TV-type talent -- sturdy but unextraordinary. Edwards is good at taking San Francisco locations and public places (a bank, a diner) and highlighting their reassuringly mundane qualities only to turn that domestic security on its ear with a threatening call from the psychopath ("Your sister has been shot! Come out and meet me right away!") Ironically, people's homes end up being the primary locations for terror.

Despite the formal skill that Edwards and his crew display, what's most unsatisfying is the human element of the story, which isn't in the least developed. Everyone, Ford the cop, Remick and her sister as the victims, stay squarely in the realm of the generic - there's no sense of emotional involvement with Ford's cop, which may make him the quintessential professional but doesn't make him terribly interesting - never does he even grapple with any moral dilemmas that come naturally to the profession, like jeopardizing Remick's safety in order to expose the criminal. Remick and her sister played by Stefanie Powers are standard women in peril and they scream dutifully for each other when the other comes to harm, but that's as deep as their relationship gets. Most frustrating of all is the killer's character -- there's a subplot involving his apparently magnanimous relationship with a Chinese American and her son that amounts to a red herring. The most we learn about him is that he's an asthmatic with an Asian fetish. Even David Fincher's SEVEN managed to bring more intrigue and layers of complexity into its cops and villain.

My guess is that EXPERIMENT IN TERROR was an influential 60s noir: influential in promoting a sophisticated cool and clockwork suspsense storytelling over psychological complexity, a significant shift in emphasis from the noirs of the 40s and 50s. Would I be off in calling this the first "designer thriller"?
yes

Co-Film of the week:
Vera Cruz (1954, Robert Aldrich)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047647/
yes bordering on YES (#9 for 1954 between LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS and ON THE WATERFRONT)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094336/
TSPDT #869
mixed to yes - truth be told, I didn't find this cult classic to be particularly funny - while it had a number of memorable lines and moments of laughably bad behavior, the characters, especially Withnail, grew thin, and the treatment of the gay uncle seemed a touch homophobic. Then I watched the half-hour documentary included in the Criterion disc, featuring interviews with not only cast and crew but also a handful of diehard fans, and it was like participating in an initiation. Hearing them recall the highlights and quoting blocks of dialogue verbatim, I couldn't help but take in some of their affection for the film, which is what cult movie love is all about -- the social value of watching and appreciating certain films. I admit that it's hard to dislike a film that has prize moments of dialogue like this: -- which makes me regard this film as a kind of predecessor to SIDEWAYS, and sharing many of that films virtues as well as wearisome "comedy of loser-dom" limitations.

Co-Film of the week:
The Man Who Envied Women (1985, Yvonne Rainer)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131467/
Rosenbaum #582
Improbably, I find myself recommending this film highly despite a series of reservations I held while watching it. Rainer uses a wide array of formal and dramatic approaches to explore conflicts involving sexual relationships, gender equality, American imperialism, intellectual culture, artistic creation and plenty else. Initially her techniques are a little off-putting, in her caricaturish depictions of men she seems at first to have an axe to grind, but as the film accumulates in voices and ideas it becomes incredibly complex, and quite brilliant in exploring the connections between any two or three items in the aforementioned list of themes (i.e. how gender inequality relates to American imperialism, as discussed in comparing articles and ads in the New York Times). Ideas are not only presented but interrogated as well, providing an unstable and constantly in progress line of argument. The results lead to no clear-cut answers but open a Pandora's box of ideological problems for how to live in a world seemingly rife with injustices and inequalities -- most pointedly for myself, how to fight those injustices while maintaining a humanistic respect for those allegedly perpetrating them (i.e. much of white male America).
yes (#8 for 1985 between BACK TO THE FUTURE and TAIPEI STORY)

Macario (1960, Roberto Gavaldon)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054042/
yes

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989, Peter Greenaway)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097108/
TSPDT #870
The second of two celebrated Brit films of the late 80s, this one was a bona fide disappointment. Technically it is as slick and polished as all get out, but as far as what all these production values and top talent Brit actors are dedicated to communicating seems questionable, a high-class snubbing of low-class people trying to be high class, aiming for the shock value of a Bunuel or Pasolini while betraying the kind of elitist pretentiousness that either of those artists would have enjoyed pricking apart. Michael Gambon is nearly insufferable doing his Cockney impersonation of Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, thankfully counterbalanced by the graceful suffering and longing of Helen Mirren.
mixed

The Round-Up (1965, Miklos Jancso)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059776/
TSPDT #871
yes - I'm surprised this doesn't make my top ten of the year - it no doubt is one of the important films about war and occupation of its time, and quite brilliant in its narrative form, which moves effortlessly from one prisoner to another (the narrative shifts twice from a betrayer to the man he betrayed). The storytelling is so assured, and the camera movements so impeccably elaborate, that perhaps the clinical precision of the filmmaking left me a little cold, not unlike some of Stanley Kubrick. But 1965 seems to have an overabundance of great films dealing with war and occupation (STORY OF A PROSTITUTE, THE WAR GAME, BATTLE OF ALGIERS, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, and one could even compare A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA to THE ROUND-UP, given its child protagonists abducted by pirates), all of which I honestly liked more than Jancso's great work.

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