"Anything" goes in JEOPARDY (1953)

In any marriage, the reasons for "cheating" vary by age and gender; men cheat because they're chomping at the bit or having a midlife crisis or don't want to miss what might be their last opportunity. Women need much holier reasons, at least in public, at least during the code, and sometimes fate has to get way contrived to arrange it for them. Witness JEOPARDY (1953), a post-code throwback to the soapy days of maternal "indecent proposals" in films like THE CHEAT (1931), TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931) and BLONDE VENUS (1932). The whole rickety plot is set up for the payoff answer to the question: "How far would you go to save your husband?" In other words, what Rube Goldberg-style series of events needs to be set up for a Good American Mother/Housewife to able to get her freak on with a wild outlaw Ralph Meeker without having to feel guilty later, or die at the end by the decree of the almighty code?

The story is itchy, fetid and well-laden with cryptic foreshadowing, wheren every little action ring with foreshadowed menace: roadblocks on the family trip to a lonesome stretch of Mexican beach, the WW2 vet husband's .45 automatic, brought along "in case" and stashed foolishly in the glove compartment, a piece of splintered wood that will ominously sink. A rickety, dangerous pier leading far out to sea. The son's constant mention of "peril" as if a Disney ride he's excited for (no American post-war family vacation is complete without a life-or-death disaster). Director John Sturges knows we probably already know what's going to happen (Husband trapped! Tide incoming! Ralph Meeker!) so he's able to mine terrific suspense every step of the way in the foreshadowed set-up, especially once husband Barry Sullivan starts helping his towheaded son back across the treacherously weathered pier.

Stanwyck is set up right off the bat as the kind of broad we just don't see in the movies anymore and why? Because you can tell by her deep voice, brown tan and manly aura that she's a professional cigarette smoker. A closeted lesbian in real life, Stanwyck's ambivalence towards her husband's sexual advances is palpable and anyone who suffers from anxiety is bound to understand her trepidation at taking a holiday in the middle of nowhere, with no one around, open to attack from any wandering biker gang, rapist, sadist or Satanic coven that happens by, with only her naive and monochromatic husband around for protection (with our butch belle Babs, either you show her some rough stuff up front--give her a couple slaps, throw her up against a wall, shoot a cop--or she'd rather sleep with a broad). The film's called JEOPARDY after all and her man's innate sense of trust in the world to supply him with this elusive sense of peaceful isolation jars her craw. Like so many noir women, she's the only "conscious" one in the family, and when she sees Meeker, it's like she finally finds the dark soul mate she's been unwilling to admit she's needed all along. (Note the poster at left, which deceptively paints Meeker and Stanwyck as a tough noir couple)

Stanwyck is a wife who, as she explains in her narration, "found out" how far she would go for her husband. And if you want to know just what kind of distance we're talking about, just look at that canary-fed cat grin of Meeker's up top. But who is really being served here? There can be no doubt this is likely not the daydream of an escaped convict, it's the hothouse fantasy of a very frustrated hausfrau. When she says "I'll do anything to save my husband... anything!" It's both dangerously sexy and hilariously campy.
 

Thus the payoff is not the rescue or near-rescue, the life or death ticking of the clock, but the cool way Stanwyck goes from panicky harridan--speeding around gnashing her teeth--to a resignedly smooth seductress, sizing up Meeker as a potential lover (or wanting him to think she is). You can't tell if she's really turned on, or just trying to seem that way to win his interest, or cannily realizing she can have her cake and eat it too. Meekr proposes she just forget her husband and son and ride off into adventure with him and--for a few seconds--you can believe she's seriously considering it. Regardless of her decision, what impresses Meeker isn't the thought of shagging this near-MILF so much as being impressed that a broad's willing to go that far in order to save her husband. "You've got some cat in you" he says. Man, Stanwyck wrote the book on "cat" and by the way he leaps into the cold surf later to help her husband, yo know she scratched him in all the right places.

That such a key element of the story is missing (we fade out from their first kiss back to the crashing waves and husband) attests to the basic adult understanding of the code... kids could watch this and probably never catch on what happened in between that juicy fade-out. JEOPARDY's so coded: the gun, the car, the desert, the pier, the waves; every element so charged with foreshadowing or symbolic reference, that the film barely needs actors at all. But even if you've never seen a movie before in your life and therefore don't understand coded symbolism, something about that fleshy, middle-aged, husky-voiced Stanwyck smolder cuts right through the crap. And in JEOPARDY there ain't no crap. It's just a vehicle for suspense and suggested sexual content, from an age when middle-aged broads could still hook 'em, still sizzle, even if its in the service of the over-hallowed American Family on holiday. It's the sort of game where everybody wins, and the symbolically neutered husband finally realizes that a wife in the bush can be worth more than a gun in the hand and even the censors can't do anything about it, since on the surface it's just cars, cactus, crowbars, cigarettes and tire jacks.

For more on Stanwyck, read my 2008 review of TEN CENTS A DANCE.

Thanks / for the Lucky Strikes

(Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco)

The title of this blog entry will be familiar to Jack Benny fans, as one of the "commercial song parodies" with which his Sportsmen Quartet slyly ribbed and celebrated their sponsor, Lucky Strike, the fine cigarette that 4 out of 5 doctors prefer... so round, so firm, so fully packed. So free and easy on the draw!

Bob "Looks like I'm not getting paid" Hope was  a frequent guest star on Benny's show. He always seemed more relaxed and at ease playing off fellow star vaudeville types like Benny or Bing Crosby, and for me that's the good Hope, man. BIG BROADCAST OF 1938 finds him in his first big role, as the radio announcer/promoter for a cross Atlantic cruise ship race. WC Fields co-stars as a corporate spy sent to slow the boat down (he lands his crazy flying motor scooter on the wrong boat, sabotaging his own cruise line; laughs ensue). The Fields story line goes nowhere and for the most part; he doesn't have a lot to do, and neither does Hope, except to introduce and abundance of weird yet strangely exhausting musical numbers, including a long Die Wulkure aria, replete with Brunhilde in helmet, braids and brandishing a spear (below, but that's not the same Brunhilde, not that it matters).

But then, like an oasis of beauty and quiet in a big shrill mess, is this lovely scene between Bob and his romantic lead, Shirley Ross. Playing his unhappily divorced wife, Ross has Hope arrested so she can bail him out of jail, and otherwise employs all the screwball tricks to keep this baggy pants slickster around; she can't stand him and she can't stand to be without him.

The song, "Thanks for the Memories," beautifully encompasses this feeling, an ode to good times that later went bad and the way savvy lovers catch themselves rose-tinting the whole affair when they know full well that there were an awful lot of good reasons why they left each other. Hope, later content to be kind of a genial quick-witted leering buffoon, got his start as a guy who could actually wrestle with his fears and face the villain, woo the girl successfully and admirably and still get off great wisecracks. "Thanks for the Memories" encompasses both aspects of the man, and--as a master of working off the energy of his fellow player--he falls completely in step with the deep pangs of longing coursing through the blithe figure of Shirley Ross.

The song itself, written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, stands way, way out from the rest of the pack, almost Shakespearean in the way it's surface percolates with sophisticated drollery, the "Hurrah for the next who dies!" modernist kind of stiff upper lip emotional denial. But just under the skin there's all this unexpressed tenderness, longing, regret and--most beautiful all--a genuine love and interest in the other person, the weird way guilt and regret will fuel the rose-tinting process, the way everything is suddenly perfect just when you're about to finally part. So you stay to try and make it work, and it falls instantly to shit. 

By the end of the song, Ross is in tears and Hope has re-set the rules by resuming his role as the "distancer" in their codependent pair bond. Things seem already back where they were. So what, then, is love but the contract by which one is humbled into accepting the lesser of two evils? It's like being addicted to war. The pre-WW2 era was all about looking askance at marriage and the conventions of the old social system, of setting something up where you didn't have to listen to your parents any more. Funny how lately the winds of time have so shifted so that we willingly have given up nearly every freedom we won in the years between 1945 and 1979. Soon we will not even be allowed to smoke a Lucky Strike... at all... even outside! Ah, when I first moved to Manhattan in 1992, you could drink outdoors, as long as they were in brown paper bags, and there was dancing in every bar, pimps in fancy cars, drunks and punks and whiteboy funk and junkies with guitars... how lovely it was....

Misogynist! Genius!

The title is a line from Le Tigre's "What's Yr Take on Cassavettes?" but the titles apply equally well to Dario Argento, and all accusations and adorations are true. On a freezing Saturday I start to write but end up reading endless reviews of giallo dvds I'll probably never see on sweet sites like the Mondo Digital, the Cinebeats, the Final Girl, the Tenebrous Empire, the Bleeding Skull and my long-time favorite, Eccentric Cinema. I love reading about movies from other people's perspectives, and something about giallo critics extra good, and I think it's the feeling they have to justify their love of Argento in the wake of "feminist accusations of misogyny." That's not a put-down but an observation of myself in particular. Perhaps discussing Argento DVDs is just the codex some of us use to disguise topics too horrifically ambivalent to deal with directly.
 
I was reading Stuart Willis fine Giallo Collection piece on Sexgoremutants.com and its mentioning the misogyny accusations of Argento's Bird With Crystal Plummage:

The razor-slicing of a female character in a lift is justifiably famous for it's shocking impact, and in recent years the reinstated footage of the killer slicing apart a woman's knickers has become a talking point too. Savage, suggestive and yet another piece of ammunition for the insane brigade who think Argento hates women.

Now, I both agree and disagree that Argento hates women. Any artistic complexity--and Argento's is bottomless--naturally results in oppositional interpretations being always valid. The reason law has to be so exact is to prevent this sort of thing, a bar is set in the shifting sands of human emotion/action, and that is all we have to prevent a full reversion to savagery. Art on the other hand must always remind us that this bar is not really set at all, to remind us not to rely on it too heavily but instead find the bar within, before it closes forever and you're left high and dry. 

The problem isn't in discussing misogyny in relation to Argento, but in understanding the way an artist deals with issues of gender--especially in a country like repressively Catholic Italy, where single women are harassed on the street and mothers are sanctified marytrs, their apron strings like tenacious tentacles that can only be removed with violent razor attacks--and the way critics subsequently respond and the way a wide array of interesting viewpoints can lodge in the drying cement around a film's reputation.  Argento both indulges in and criticizes this approach--a metatextual gaze deconstruction that was the style of his time and place during his formative years (Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini) and as Steven Shaviro and Carol Clover note, the ascription of pain receiver in the play to woman, the Woman becomes mom/whore/wife/victim chimera on which conflicted viewers work out unresolved issues of castration, post-ween depression, and blood of various conquerors tossing angrily in their glands. Argento's like Hitchcock getting stabbed through the looking glass eye with a sharp PEEPING TOM poker, making us aware that we're all part killer part bug-eyed victim and its this continual self-inflicted violence that both defines us and prevents us from effecting real change, we'd be better off blinding ourselves, like Ray Milland in THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES.

So what's cool is that feminist criticism has effectively brought the idea of misogyny and violence against women into the popular critical consciousness, where a cheeky lad like Stuart Willis can still enjoy Argento's film while engaging in a dialogue with a feminist Other who monitors his arousal responses like a disproving clinician. This Other provides a kind of anima projection superego, which prohibits and therefore enhances certain shades of sadistic enjoyment. Internalizing the feminist backlash against the film's violence in this way may add metatextual goodness to one's viewing pleasure.

Criticism perhaps needs to be over-the-top and make grand sweeping pronouncements, resting assured that whatever we write, we critics won't actually start a revolution, but just plant seeds hither and yon, confident that sooner or later something's bound to actually grow to fruition. The seed planting then becomes the thing, a reward in itself, the seed sweeping motion like Tai chi. For embracing change is not the same as trying to change the world, but rather to realize it is always changing, and its our own perceptions which are stuck in the illusory field of time, a field wherein gravity weighs us down with age and boredom. Thus, no great art should leave all questions answered, but instead leave a lingering doubt, a sense the answer to that question you were obsessed with as a child and have perhaps since forgotten and is still out there, waiting for you to pick up its breadcrumb trail. To firmly believe in two simultaneously contradictory opinions is to free to enjoy your own enslavement, which is all true freedom is, or as Bob Dyaln sang "You gotta serve somebody," and the king is dead. Long Live the King... of death and sex cinema, and his unholy feminist backlash!

Cinema's Naughtiest Germans, Part Two

  BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY (2002)

The best aspect of this strange tale of German highschool girls--torn apart by conflicting development rates-- are the two actresses, one of whom, Karoline Herfurth, looks a bit like Liv Ullman. She plays Steffi, the poutier of the pair, while the radiant and very German looking Anna Maria Muhe plays Kati, her more "normal" friend. Whenever the film is focused on either of their faces, it’s fascinating as they are natural actors who hide as much from the camera as they show, even if they don’t deliver the powerhouse performances of Oscar-minded Americanische jungen.

On one of the girls' nights out they wind up being picked up by two older men and brought over to an "grown ups" lounge. In Germany, , kids can enter bars and drink without i.d.s (making this an interesting contrast with the forbidden, glamorized nature of drinking in typical American teen films) this environment is still seen as adulthood ground zero, full of sex, drugs, music and disillusionment. Among the disillusions is Steffi's discovery that her dad is sitting on a nearby couch, making out with a woman not her mom and--even worse--the woman is East German! Steffi and Kati key woman's car, track her down to a shitty East Berlin tenement, and then Steffi proceeds to trick the woman's teenaged daughter (Josephine Domes) into auditioning at a modeling agency which specializes in adult videos, under the pretext that it’s a record company (knowing from personal embittered experience the owner is a sex predator). Mein Gott! Are Germans really so vindictive that they would want to send girls they don't even know to their death? Oh wait! Of course they are! Was eine unheimliche frage!

Meanwhile another cute blonde girl has disappeared and the whole city is up in arms. Only Steffi knows the truth, and she's too self-absorbed over her dad’s divorce to consider that the psycho killer who almost raped Kati and the East German could be behind it. It's as if city-wide manhunts ala Fritz Lang's M were something a teenager would barely notice. It really becomes Kati's movie at this point as she must stand up to Steffi, who by this point is snorting coke, sleeping around, and not going to class. Of course eventually this all boils down to more suicide and self-cutting, but along the way there’s lots of music sung in English, and everyone there seems to be bilingual, so it’s heartening to think us Americanische would have no problem going to visit. B

 AIMEE AND JAGUAR (1999)

Based on a true story, this is a nice mix of period craftsmanship and forbidden love that makes most Holocaust-ish drama look like the mopey bourgeoisie glad-handing tripe it really is. There's more human warmth and joy in three minutes of screen time with this pair of star-crossed lesbians then in the whole goddamned three hours of THE READER (2008). Why am I even comparing? Perhaps because many are the films that mix Nazi vs. Jew persecution with forbidden love and sumptuous period decor and wartime lighting schemes, but few are the ones any good, and this one is great, and didn't even get consideration for best foreign film in 1999. It did get nominated for a Golden Globe, Oscar's sleeker more artistically comprehensible, less bourgeoisie cousin.

As Felice the Jewish lesbian "hiding in plain sight" as assistant editor of a Nazi newspaper in 1943, Maria Schrader is an absolute knock-out, a jovial gamin who'd be ideal as a cross-dressing Shakespeare heroine, ala Rosalind in AS YOU LIKE IT. We believe her dangerous good cheer because Schrader plays the role with a fearless recklessness that perfectly captures our hearts and the character... her decision to risk discovery in order to stay with her Aryan hausfrau lover Lilly (Julianne Kohler) is the most beautifully brave and foolish move since Winslet jumped off the lifeboat in TITANIC (1997). The love they have between them is hot enough that you understand why she makes this suicidal gesture. It's beautiful to be that swept away, like THELMA AND JULIET! Even more startling, the film seems true even as it's completely insane, and still covers all its thematic and narrative bases to leave you profoundly moved. Best of all, sullenly self-righteous books-on-tape artist Ralph Fiennes is nowhere to be found. A

ZENTROPA (AKA EUROPA, 1991)

An early Lars Von Trier gem, not quite a masterpiece, perhaps due to lack of star wattage, a killer performance from Ernst-Hugo Jaregard aside (Von Trier fans know him best as THE KINGDOM's  Dr. Helmer). Udo Kier is good as an ennui-ridden gay brother of femme fatale love interest Barbara Sukowa (LOLA) but a lot of time is spent watching dumbkopf American expatriate Kessler (Jean Marc-Barr) mess things up for his exasperated sleeper car conducting uncle. If you're a fan of trains you don't have to know why Kessler expressly requests the sleeper car. Damn is it sexy there, a giant box full of dreaming passengers, careening along through the Hamburg night. But Kessler is like that temp you hire only to have to spend so much time correcting his mistakes you may as well do it yourself. No doubt Von Trier wanted it this way. He considered this a masterpiece and gave the Cannes jury the finger when he didn't win the Palme d'Or.

 Like DOGVILLE, ZENTROPA thing seems filmed on minimalist interior sets, along with some train miniatures, naturlich! Yeah, Von Trier is Danish, but the film's set in post-war Germany so it still counts! Best of all it's got a German message: if you're not fighting to the death for a cause, no matter how doomed, then you're asleep at the wheel and may as well drown. It starts as good philosophy until someone reminds us it's from Mein Kampf.  And the Germans love trains, punctuality and death in equal measure. Gott in Himmel! B+

Cinema's Naughtiest Germans!

Oh those Germans. And how well they die... on Netflix! It seems half the films available for instant viewing are for, by, or about that most egomaniacally insane of western nations, Deutschland! For some reason these Teutonic descendants of pillaging marauders and towheaded savages are just meant for the casual distance provided by Netflix streaming. Let's take a look:

1. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979, dir. Fassbinder)
Failed attempts to get through badly cropped, dubbed VHS bootlegs made me associate Fassbinder with tedium, experimental amateurishness ala Warhol/Morrissey and inevitable peevish headaches, and even the title of this film made me think it was about Eva Braun, mistress of Hitler (below). But now, on streaming Netflix, Fassbinder is ready for rediscovery. BRAUN's got pre-code era frankness and post-war late 1940s Berlin disillusionment, as a combination LAST SEDUCTION meets BABY FACE uberfemme negotiates her way from despair as the impoverished wife of a missing German soldier to mad riches as the mistress of a captain of industry! Brechtian sociopolitical satire merges with Almodovar/Sirk-style camp like a bayonet through black market butter. Plus, there's lots of good post-war wreckage for our heroine to negotiate her way through (in high heels, naturlich).  A-

2. The Baader-Meinhof Complex(2008, dir. Uli Edel)

Sociopathic German youth never looked better than in late 1960s swinger outfits with machine guns in hand, even if the filmmakers feel the need to use, yet again, Buffalo Springfield singing about how what it is ain't exactly clear / but there's a man with a gun over there, to encapsulate that wild time of the late 1960s (and of course the ubiquitous flaming monk on the eleven-o-clock news). Though occasionally confusing as characters come and go with no ID cards (and all the hot German frauleins change wigs and hairstyles understandably often), this film is boldly ambiguous and well-crafted without being tedious and stuffy. The terrorists aren't painted in any particular brush, letting viewers be attracted to these angry political activists while horrified at the violence of their actions, two for one cinema thrills! The sobering effect is to find your gangster movie fantasia suddenly resembling middle eastern terrorist mentality, and to realize you've been tricked into identifying with your own enemy via the very tool of mass hypnosis of popular cinema, your bourgeoisie schweinhund!  Consider the loop of hate that leads from the Nazis back around to the Baader-Meinhof group aka The Red Army Faction: First, the Nazis take their hate out on the Jews, the toughened surviving Jews split to the Holy Land and take their rage against the Germans out on the Arabs who are living there, and the German youth later take the rage of the Arabs out on their parents, for not complaining about it, for what they perceive as yet another Hitler in their midst, America... and they don't want to make the same mistake their parents and grandparents did, of just looking the other way and shrugging it off as fascism takes over and seals the fate of the free world. But in the end, the politics hardly matter as more than a pretext for hot kids in hip clothes making big holes... in people! Older people. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so cute... been so violent... for so much media attention. B+

3. The Last Days of World War Two (2005, History Channel)
We love this war because it's the last one wherein we had a clear, unshakably firm purpose as human beings, and we really needed to band together and work our asses off to defeat Nazism or we'd all be enslaved or killed, so it was more than just a "political policing" action like we've had ever since. And when Bush calls Iran part of the Axis of Evil he's showing he doesn't know what he's talking about: the real Axis of evil would blow his mind with its horrific yen for wanton destruction. The documentary itself flashy, bold and relatively fearless in its constant, excited head counts ("one hundred thousand die on this day, 60 years ago!") And great footage, unsparingly gruesome, sad, sometimes darkly comic... sometimes devastating beyond thought or words. We can never remember this war enough, and thank the stars, Ike, and General Patton for our continued rulership over the free world! A

Go To Bright Lights After Dark for a semi-sequel to this entry: From Russia With Hell!

Great Dads of the 1970s: Lee Marvin in THE BIG RED ONE (1980)

Sometimes a "period piece" tells more about the period in which it was created than the one it depicts. Fuller's grand war saga THE BIG RED ONE is such a film, with Fuller's unique mix of sentiment and vulgarity being the ideal commentary on the 1970s mindset, at least how I remember it. You could almost say that Fuller's aesthetic came to mesh so perfectly with the 1970s that at the time--and especially edited to nearly half it's intended length--THE BIG RED ONE was almost invisible even in plain sight. For a WW2 movie, it blended so well into 1980 you could barely see it, like camouflaged commandos at the drive-in.

If you're a WW2 fan you know that Fuller's films are all pretty accurate, with scuttlebut about Patton corresponding to the movie PATTON and so on. Why? Because Fuller was there; a lot of the dialogue is no doubt straight from Fuller's sharp journalist memory, with Marvin leading a rifle squad through North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and finally Germany. Most of it was filmed in an around the actual locations of the battles, with Fuller's journalist memory no doubt recreating it all better than any squad of Spielberg advisers ever could.

A lot of the onscreen action can get confusing, but then again, war was like that, and you can see where Godard--a true-blu Fuller fan--got ideas for his own narrative-melting 1980s works like CODE NAME: CARMEN from various scenes such as one where Lee Marvin wakes up in a North African hotel-turned hospital that's so full of both Germans and Americans in and out of disguises as they try to figure out which side is in control,  or the squad's sneaky infiltration of a Nazi-held mental asylum with its now cliched moments such as an inmate grabbing a dead German's machine gun and shooting everyone in sight,shouting "Look, I'm sane like you!" Whoa! War is full of paradoxes! You know why this cliche is forgivable? Because Fuller did fight in an asylum and probably saw it actually happen. It feels like  Fuller's been carrying some of these scenes in his head since he was in the war. They have the callow comic book simplicity of youth unfiltered.

But now comes the 1970s aspect - the jetzt-verboten political incorrectness, regarding "whores" and scenes such as one extraordinarily uncomfortable bit in which Marvin's squad delivers a French peasant baby in the moist confines of an abandoned German tank. With the boys all gathered around and holding down and spreading out her legs as she screams in pain, a guy mentioning he's getting horny while using condoms on his fingers as gloves and a cheese cloth as a surgical mask, what's evoked is soldier-on-peasant gang rape, right up to Marvin whispering "puuu-say" into her ear to get her to push the baby out. Later Robert Carradine blows a thousand bucks on a party to get Belgian whores for the night and make them do "whatever weird stuff we always wanted," which includes freaking out a Belgian hotelier with the ridiculous request of a recently dead fellow infantryman, to have a big-assed woman "put 'em on the (freezing) glass."

The thing is, man, being occupied and half-destroyed by bombs and occupation has probably made half the young women in Belgium into prostitutes, just to survive and feed their families, so this broad drunken objectification carries a weird depressing aftertaste, especially if you've seen UGETSU. Then again, is being a prostitute that much more tragic and demeaning than being a soldier? (As Dietrich said in MOROCCO: "There's a foreign legion of women... too...")

I don't mean to knock the film or Fuller with this thing, quite the contrary, to show how no one likely even noticed or thought twice about these possible readings makes the mix of raunch and reproduction all the sweeter (as in old-fashioned sweet, not "vengeance is"). Back then men didn't have to constantly affirm they were NOT rank misogynists. And if a guy got his nuts blown off, we didn't mollycoddle him and race to sew them back on like they do now in movies like TEETH and HARD CANDY; we tossed them to the dogs with a smirk and then forgot about the matter, even if he was our best friend.

Marvin's '70s dad skills include his ability to stand back during downtime and let the boys in his rifle squad do their own bickering, boasting and teasing. He listens, and grins wryly or walks away in feigned disgust, but he rarely interjects or tries to compete. He doesn't need to, and he knows these kids do need to. You almost never see him interrupt or censor a conversation no matter how offensive, but when he calls your number to run up and die trying to bring a Bangalore torpedo across a heavily defended beach, you better move ass or he'll shoot you where you cower. The best you can do is just trust and love Lee Marvin. Do what he tells you and rely on him to not get you shot.

Marvin only smiles in a close-up/medium shot once, when he finally loses it and starts laughing with joy when they successfully deliver that baby. A man who's been doling out death for years suddenly brings in a little life. "We all felt pretty good about it" Carradine notes in the film's voiceover; completely unnecessary, as it's all there in Marvin's hangdog expression as it finally overflow its borders, exploding with a hoarse grinning laugh and a palpable joy as unsentimental in its genuine sentiment as a Hemingway novel, then just as quickly back to business.
 
According to Gary W. Tooze (DVD Beaver, his excellent screenshots stud this post) "It isn't hard to figure out why Mark Hamill affectionately calls him (Fuller) Yosemite Sam, or why Lee Marvin simply says he's D.W. Griffith." Marvin is dead-on right about that. In the land of no morality and bullets flying overhead, it's a man like Fuller you depend on to deliver the sense of security that a strong, good man is holding the tent up, even if he's just acting to keep the children from crying. No wonder the kids love Marvin and follow him around all throughout RED (and why Fuller was such a popular fellow, becoming lifelong friends with everyone from Godard to General Omar Bradley). In the end, the kids getting blown to bits come and go, but it's Marvin you depend on for direction in the film, it's Marvin you come to love, even as he sends you to your death with a silent pointing gesture.

More from the Great 1970s Dad series (including Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson, Jon Voight, and Burt Reynolds)

le rayon bleu de Deneuve

Xmas is over and I'm now in the blu-ray group. It's cool and all but man, all that detail and clarity scares me motionless. Two minutes into it and I'm really missing the blur that used to cover all the tiny beads of sweat under actors' stage makeup. Well luckily there's Criterion, who manage to make blu-ray look just better enough to be worthwhile, but not so sharp as to cut the nose of a snoopy detective, or possible peeping tom? Shall we all not be punished for seeing too much? Well, not all the time, and REPULSION looks heavenlier than ever, not that I've seen it in any form but streaky pan-and-scan VHS hell, my natural habitat. 

The film's eerie but glacial frisson makes it actually ideal for being the first film to watch on blu-ray: we see just enough ugliness outside the flat to make us cling to Deneuve's soothingly blank visage all the more. The "too much detail" problem is sidestepped via her stunning countenance. The way blu-ray sharpens her features into a realm of "too much sight" is usually reserved only for the insane -- the sight of particles and energy actually changing in the face second by second. She oscillates into Cybil Shepherd and Gwyneth Paltrow at times, and it seems sometimes she's trying not to laugh as she walks down the street, hiding how amused she is by Polanski's camera, and we realize that for some of us, beautiful girls in particular, the camera never shuts off. 24/7 they're watched by a million slavering, arrogant males all longing to be toasted in a flaming wicker head... or singed on the edge of a straight razor. As Saul put it in THE OLD DARK HOUSE, "Flames... are really knives... and it's cold, fire is!"

Such madness is, I'm afraid, generally the result of too much clarity rather than too little. As REPULSION's side cast makes clear, the ones who get along in this crazy social order are half-asleep, half-deaf barbarians. Like a younger, quieter version of Blanche Dubois, Deneuve's heroine suffers at the hands of her sister's arrogant, cheeky lover, a balding Kowalski who can't imagine why she wouldn't find him adorable and presumes she must be dumb and daft just because she's sensitive, vacant and almost Zen-like in her stillness. This girl should be in a nunnery, only she'd have to cover up that dynamite hair... and that none of us could abide.

Sometimes I wonder if all this clarity is revealing stuff even Polanski didn't see when picking out shots. He sure doesn't seem to miss much, though, and this is the kind of film that craftsmanship was made for since it's the accumulation of small details -- the gradual shading of light and darkness and the way the world keeps turning outside your door even as you are locked up in your house afraid to go out because of the weird breathing you hear several floors down, coming from your drain -- that makes the film work. If it's too pronounced and over-produced you sense the trickery and think someone's working a gaslight. On the other hand, if it's too unnoticeable, you think maybe they really are out to get her. One tentacle of Polanski's genius is that even when his story decides which is which, he doesn't.

Take it from anyone whose ever been confined to their flat in the middle of a sprawling, car alarm and siren-ridden city while recovering from drug binges or emotional trauma for days on end without human contact, not even daring to move from a sitting or lying position, watching the sun come and go, the hustle and bustle of commuters like a syrup-paced Koyaanisqatsi, the slowly cohering spiderweb in the corner your only friend, every little shadow counting for something. Now it makes sense that Deneuve's so hypnotized by cracks in the film; now we can see deep inside them ourselves, and man, this whole society is fucked up once you get the blinders off! Even the cracks look strange in the new format...  like the barrier between the viewer and the image itself has been removed, and any minute we might reach in there and pull Deneuve's hair (or worse), like the arms from the walls, or be pulled in ourselves... no wonder she's so crazy. Just be glad her razor's not in 3-D... yet.

It's an alarming trend that imagination is so undernourished while being paid so much lip service by Hollywood. I'm happy that geeks are gettin' rich and powerful, but every new format and breakthrough leads us further from the power of our own personal imaginations to fill in blind spots, to see stuff where nothing was there before. After all, even looking into a campfire and imagining a hook on a car door is a hundred times more intimate and personally relevant (scary) than the inhuman precision of CGI. The more we see, the less scared we are. Like so much corporate red tape, digital image "clarity" results less in capturing the transformative beauty and power of our dreams than the reverse, reducing even the wildest alien vistas to ones and zeros, ever-so-slightly pixelated and airless and "more human than human." It'll keep getting worse until one day we'll look in the mirror and have one of those meta-mecha Cyberdine/Rydell Corporation moments, and when that happens we can only hope Polanski will still be there, slicing our noses and rubbing his lens in our lifeless eyes until we're blocked, shocked and pleasantly clockworked, like Deneuve in the arms of her painted-white rapist walls.