Square in the Maenads: 68 KILL

Trent Haaga's darker-than-black noir comedy posits, early on, that even within the cartoonish, exaggerated post-grindhouse-fueled Alamo Drafthouse-bound renegade spirit popularized in the mid-90s by Tarantino--there are rules of engagement yet to be broken. Even for characters who--like the assassins of Banquo---are so incensed by the vile blows and buffets of the world they are reckless what they do, there are hot babe messes more reckless still. For hard-working squaresville lovestruck septic man Chip (Matthew Gray Gubler), roped by crazy hottie stripper girlfriend Liza (AnnaLynne McCord) into robbing one of her johns (of $68,000 - hence the title), that line of relative decorum is obliterated fairly early on, but... 

I can't say more, for to spoil even one twist or turn on this wild ride is to lessen its blunt force impact. Suffice it to say, for we fans of strong assertive women (those who score along the Hawks-Meyer GF spectrum rather than the 'strong-willed mother-type' Ford-Spielberg curve), this bonanza of badassery is--especially in the time of plunging markets and collapsing governments--something we desperately need. Why wait for a normal woman to be brutalized before turning savage? That, to me, is sexist, inferring a woman needs a man's cruelty to light her inner bomb's fuse. 

From hence forth let mentally remembering the numerical combination of your client's safe suffice as a sufficient excuse for unleashing your inner shredding and devouring maenad upon him. McCord is so turned on by his death throes it looks almost like she's inhaling his departing soul like a hit off the crack pipe.

Liza with her weird brother Dwayne (Sam Eidson)

90s ANTI-MORALITY RETURNS:

When I was around five years-old, I was--for a brief and intense few weeks--obsessed with the dubbed Japanese anime cartoon SPEED RACER. It wasn't because I loved it but because it was the only thing on, every day after school like clockwork. I watched it, but I hated the good guy, 'Speed', and hated his stupid monkey and mustachioed sidekick and their ridiculous Pizza guy striped caps. I found it unfair that the way-cooler bad guys (always in  black shades) never won a single goddamned race. I was too young to know the game was fixed. I kept sticking around because I figured just once the cool guys in black just had to get lucky.

Every day I'd await it on afternoon TV, sure that this one time the guys in black would win. My fury mounted as the weeks passed. 

Finally my mom, sensing my mounting frustration, explained the terrible truth - the good guy always won. The game was rigged. I felt sick to my stomach and never watched SPEED RACER again. 

I mention that memory to explain the euphoria that overtook me--and audiences around the world--25 or so years later, when the murderous outlaws of True Romance, Bound, The Last Seduction, Natural Born Killers, and Pulp Fiction started winning. Surviving past the credits used to be all but impossible for gangsters and murderers --it was a given they'd be shot to pieces or hauled off in chains. Beloved 80s-early 90s crime characters like Scarface, Baldwin in Miami Blues, Thelma and Louise, and Walken's King of New York had all had to die at the end - even though it was clear the cool directors hated this pre-ordained (by ancient censorial codes) necessity. In the early 90s, old ideas of moral code collapsed at the feet of Tarantino, Rodriguez, Stone, Dahl, Armitage, and Tony Scott. It was a victory not only for crime but for the haters of cliche. That killers always pay for their crimes was a rule made by preachy moralists who think audiences are too stupid to get that this is all just a movie, that 'rooting' for bad guys will make us go out and commit crimes - monkey see, monkey do. Showing cool gangsters living past the credits, reaping the rewards of their crimes, implied good faith in audience reactions. It's that same faith hat's paradoxically inherent in the low bar sense of morality we find in 68 Kill.

We don't get that vibe so much anymore, the feeling of cinematic killing as a kind of liberation from moral conscription --we're too crushed up in PC remorse. All our big screen killers tend to be pedophile shadow people now. Cinematic criminal sexuality is no longer 'fun' --it's a two-way prison, where a victim of childhood abuse grows up to abuse children. Crime has lost its sexy bubble gun snap. Sinematic violence is now 'felt' with a sickening bone-break chill rather than as a pop culture splash page. We had Spring Breakers a few years back, and occasionally a Tarantino film, but where can badass alpha bitch psycho monster hotties go to unfurl their random violent urge flags these days, I mean really unfurl them, not in some half-assed tough day at the office meltdown but genuine homicidal merriment? 

There was a villainess in Wonder Woman --all scarred up and ready to go--but then comes the cop-out: she turns out to be just a love-starved, disfigured chemist gone awry. Where are the Kali archetypes? Where is the Red Queen? Where is the Catwoman who revels in her diabolism the way Julie Newmar used to, rather than Anne Hathaway versions. the types that set about morosely stealing just to help her sister, or exonerate her record, or help some blind nephew go to Juilliard? Where are the Bridget Gregorys, the Tura Satanas? The Angels of Death?

Don't sweat it, man -- they're here.

Played by AnnaLynne McCord, main psycho stripper/killer Liza is a super confident, cash-hungry predator with a wild lion's mane of hair and a live-for-today attitude that's all the better for being underplayed rather than hammed up. She savors the death rattles of her victims rather innocently but seems to actually care about Chip, to forgive him his trespasses, to look forward to taking him out for a wild flight from Dodge with a stolen bankroll and maybe finally use the "L" word back at him. In her uninhibitedly sexual and violent way she could be who either Vanessa Hudgens or Ashley Benson from Spring Breakers grow into if they drop out of college and move inland to continue their life of sex and violent crime, becoming more and more nympho-homicidal, each taking in a cute lost puppy boyfriends who idealize them as perfect angels. Evoking the composed beauty of the femme fatales in The Last Seduction, Girly, Gun Crazy (or more recently, Amber Heard in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Machete Kills), with the stripper-gone-legitimately-wild carnality of one of the go-go dancing drag stripper threesome in Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Liza is a keeper you'll want to bring home to terrorize mom with, or at least savor her every line of dialogue over multiple viewings.

And she's only one of a whole parade of amok, strong female alpha bitches to come: freed hostage Violet (Alisha Boe) lures Chip into a playful team sing-a-long to "Pop Pop / Pop Music", and later Sheila Vand (the lead in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) takes over as the psychotic emo chick Monica, the cooler-than-thou deadpan gravel-voiced punk alpha bitch ringleader of a small meth and prostitution and whatever else pays the dealer and landlord gang of trailer-dwelling nutcases, including great turns by Hallie Grace Bradley, who dryly impels Chip to go down on her in back of the convenience store in exchange for information on his missing car, and Lucy Faust as an expertly cackling young tweaker called Skinny. 

Vand's Monica is so good with that low register druggy southern drawl it's like she talks and moves via an inner green slime-soaked slinky tied to a high voltage electric hum. She alone would make the film a must. And like every other girl in the film, she can't resist messing with Chip's squaresville puppydog mind. 

We may roll our eyes at Chip's idealizing cluelessness, may wonder how he can take so many golf club swings to the head but still keep most of his teeth and all his eye socket structural integrity, but--and this is a hard thing to pull off--we still like old Chip because we see through his beaming eyes how golden and irresistible Liza's skin glows in in the morning light as she sleeps; how the sun filters through the colors of their head shop tapestry curtain blanket and brightens every hidden purple in her hair and kimono; how even her teeth and gleaming are her teeth (1). We feel his rage and confusion, too, because we know what it's like to be so suggestible (or I do, at any rate), but--unlike other fall guys Chip's been compared to, like whiny Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild or smarmy Griffin Dunne in Scorseses's After Hours or Peter Berg's hick with a too-good-for-this-town pretensions in Last Seduction--we don't consider his squeamishness to be cowardice or a lack of adventuresome spirit but the work of a crisis within his sweet nature--conscience grinding gears with his smitten rapture. He means well, but every new tattooed girl casting him a come-hither look is just another ounce of sweet kryptonite. Lovestruck by nearly every set of female eyes he sees, the only thing saving him from the latest femme fatale is the next, even deadlier one, waiting around the next bend.

That's why it's so important that 68 Kill (terrible name, great movie) came out the same year as Wonder Woman, The Beguiled, Lady Bird, and The Love Witch. It's like 1994 all over again but with the focus square on the women. Now the women don't have to even be sociopaths to conquer the terrain. Now they do it so surefootedly it's like all of feminism up to now have been as little effeminate 'eh-heh' cough.

Those films are all made by women though, whereas --like Rob Zombie before him--Kill's writer-director Haaga grew up in a trashy trailer park, and it shows, not in a bad way, but in a way that captures the scuzzy low-fi vividness of the scene, only unlike Zombie, he does it without our eyes ever feeling soiled by grim misogyny and torture porn. Haaga got his start writing stuff (and I use the word loosely) like Citizen Toxie, so you know he knows how to deliver thrills far outside the morality-taste spectrum that so blandifies his fellows (Zombie included - where the murdering white trash have thin little nonsmoker suburban voices and perfect dental work and the violence scans as mean-spirited misanthropy rather than breezy black comic fun).  68 Kill might be violent and trashy but it has a summery feel that says 'oh, lighten up Scott Tobias! (2) 

We're not in "reality' while watching movies. We're through the grindhouse mirror spectrum, where the colors are a little more vibrant (it looks like it was shot on actual 35mm film with popping colors and super rich flesh tones).  The score, by Frank Ilfman and James Griffiths, uses all sorts of twangy guitars and rumbling synths it evokes all the right past motifs: some dashes of guitar echo swamp haze, and a sense of love and joyful innocence continually revived and re-drowned in the saw mill molasses sea.

Either way,  if a trailer park in every neighborhood in the coming disaster-stricken country of ours means more crime movies like 68 Kill. I can only trust the fourth wave will recognize the strength behind its crudity rather than get so pious it drowns the neighborhood with the bathwater. To paraphrase Nigel Tuffnel, when a man sexually abuses a woman, that's sexist, when a woman does it to a man - that's social justice. Maybe that's not being honest about real female personae, but this is the movies, man. It's just drag. If we can't let our hair down here, we're going to go bald from stress. We used to be adults...we can be both NPR listeners and as aggressive and combative as the red state chimera. Sometimes, well, sometimes, if you're a real American, and maybe a liberal but not a total beta cuck, you got to look at your right wing Arizona-dwelling kid brother's gun collection over Xmas and, instead of rolling your eyes and waving pictures of dead schoolchildren, feel the heat of the cool, the thrill of the target range recoil. You gotta look at your bro and say, damn right, brother, damn right. After all, a lot of shit's gone down but we're still here. If America's gonna get it together we gotta learn how to enjoy each others' outlets. A little PCP-laced oregano, an AR-14, and thou. 

Whatever testy little snipes you may have about the right wing lunatic fringe, at least they know who they really are --they're killers. We in the blue states close our eyes to the abbattoir even as we grab the grass-fed fillet mignon. To quote German freelance terrorist Wulfgar Reinhardt (Rutger Hauer - 1981's Nighthawks), "we're not heroes, we're victims! " The white heterosexual man will not share his toys, he'd rather break 'em. So let's break him first, for he is the hypnotized toy of any Fox wily enough to shake a tail feather-covered snake rattle.

Further Reading:

I. ANGELS OF DEATH
II: Great Women of Horror
III: Badass Brunette Edition
IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition 
V: Magic Slut Split/Subject Edition
VI. Girl Mummies
VII: FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!
VIII: Good, Bad, and Beyond
IX: Lullaby of Broadway (special)\

ALSO:
TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)
EL MONSTRO DEL MAR (2010)
GIRLY (1970)
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945)
SPIDER BABY (1968)
HONEY WEST
CHARLIE'S ANGELS (1976-79)
Salute to Beatrice Dalle (Hey BETTY BLUE, come blow your Mind!)
Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression
Ich liebe dich so, Anita Pallenberg
Top Ten Acidemic Women 2010
Hot German Blondes Rule Space: STAR MAIDENS, ELEOMA, IM STAUB DER STERNE
Tiffany Bolling!
WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
PJ Soles in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

Catty-Cool Susan Cabot

NOTES:
1.as with Rob Zombie's similarly comic-grotesque Devil's Rejects, the big give-away that these are actors, not real trailer trash, is their perfect teeth; but I think I speak for everyone when I say, thank heaven Rob let that detail go unfixed
2. If you check out RT or wheveer, a blurb from him pops up calling it nearly a de facto remake of After Hours [that] keeps the hostility and loses the self-deprecation, which turns it into an example of misogyny rather than an examination of it.  But Scott, your implying Scorsese's film isn't misogynist, which is absurd. Go look amongst thy Scorsese discs for a real live alpha bitch and see how far ya get. PS- Sharon Stone in Casino don't count (loud does not equal strong). But the ladies of Hagga-ville? I'm more worried about the fate of their drugs. Those poor suckers never had a chance.

"A thousand dollar bill I was supposed to be bribed with" or "real between curtains" - John Huston and Bree Daniels--Gamblers (KLUTE, THE MALTESE FALCON)

Checking out The Maltese Falcon (1941) again--every time it's a different movie! Last time I wrote about it I saw it right after In a Lonely Place and was shocked by much that film's unflattering portrayal made Bogie and Astor each seem as monstrous and misshapen as Joel and the Fat Man. Mary Astor's twisted rococo hair styles made it scan like some Martian transmission from the bowels of one of my old-school delirium tremens. (see Bride of Bogartstein, Acidemic August 2011)

This time around, a slim three years later-ish, there was none of that but another facet, one equally rare in a noir or detective film: a concise expense account. The film is almost completely obsessed with it but not in a big brass ring way--though that is what "the Falcon" represents--but also in a hundred dollar way - the money never gets lower than hundred denominations but even that is unique in a movie. It starts with the two hundred given to Miles Archer and Spade by Brigid O'Shaughnessy ("you gave us too much money if you'd been telling us the truth and enough money to make it all right") and culminates in the envelope of ten thousand dollar bills with the delivery of the eventually worthless dingus. Spade gives the cops the thousand dollar bill (see title of this post) Guttman leaves with him for "his time and expenses," but pockets all the smaller denominations he's accrued along the way. After all, he has to keep the office running. Running around with these dregs then dumping the whole kitten-kaboodle in the lap of the law is his stock and trade.

Paradoxically--and this is something most movies don't understand-- if the money amounts were larger, they would be less relevant. It reminded me of the few times I ever did large (to me) drug deals, handing over five hundred dollars (a lot of money, at least to me) to a hippie I never met in a place that seemed dark and strange, where I was relying on the kindness of strangers not to just rip me off as they disappeared into their secret sanctum. There's an electric cord of adrenalin clear-headed focus associated with such sketchy cash outlays. When some big deal cokie brings a briefcase of thousands to a drug deal in a modern gangster film it paradoxically seems to mean a lot less than those smaller deals, refracting down to mere MacGuffin status by contrast --but in Falcon every hundred dollar bill has clout. A C-note buys Spade's loyalty, to a point, and it's never really clear whether he's just faking his lack of morals to solve his partner's murder or just faking his faking. This is a movie where even we don't get to see the hero's cards. Dashiell Hammett's dialogue is always realistic in the sense that detective work is a business and, like a lawyer, a fastidious record of retainers, per diems, and expenses must be kept (the radio show is all dictated by Spade to Effie as a report to be filed both with client and --if necessary--police).

So back to biz: After his second meeting with Brigid, Spade relieves her of another five hundred, compelling her to hock her jewelry (she says). Then he calls his lawyer when he gets back to the office: "I think I'm going to have to tell the coroner to go to blazes, Sid." He asks if he can hide behind his client's privacy, "what'll it cost me to be on the safe side?" another pause as Sid surely lays out an estimate (for filing injunctions, paying off inquest officials to temporarily misfile paperwork? We never know). "Well, maybe it's worth it. Okay go ahead."

These kind of details reflect a savvy gambler's awareness of how money predominates discussions when no one is copping to their real motives or who they really are, i.e. in a game of poker. Money talks while bullshit walks as it does in gambling or with Brigid and Sam's love affair, who can say if either is really in love with the other? Who knows what the other guys are holding? In most films, we're encouraged to forget we're watching actors play characters; even so, we still know we're not watching the truth. But not seeing the truth implies there is a truth, somewhere outside the frame -- the truth is actors are making a film and you're watching it and being able to forget that is restorative; but great movies like The Maltese Falcon call the idea that there is such a thing as truth at all into question. That's what separates great literature from 'fiction.' Great literature uses our willingness to lose our compass back to the truth against us, to lead us to some truth so great the barriers we'd set up against it melt like ice in the Tropics.

Huston, John --above all, an adaptor of that kind of great literature, and a gambler. A lot of film directors are gamblers by nature, borrowing money to try and break the bank, trolling through the world, collecting philosophies that help them deal with losing huge amounts of money--whether through a hand of poker or a roll of the wheel, the critics' whims or the public's fickleness. In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Walter Huston's cracklin' pappy gold prospector and Tim Holt realize the entirety of a year's work on the mountain is lost in the Mexican desert wind as easily if shooting the works on a spin of the roulette wheel --and Holt is dejected but Pappy--played not incoincidentally by John's own (Walter Huston)--knows just what to do, laugh it up! God's joke on us! So laugh they do. And the fact that Holt is able to let go and shrug it off is the real 'treasure' he finds shows he's discovering what John himself has perhaps learned in his storied life. And in Maltese Falcon it's about being so good at bluffing, at seduction, at manipulation, that even we, your movie audience, don't know what you're holding. Hell, maybe even you don't. A busboy once told me how his wife was so good at reading tells that his only chance of winning was if he no longer even looked at his hand. He just took his chances and laid his money down. Now that's a deadpan gambler!

Not to be trite, but for real gamblers, like Huston, a fortune is something meant to be won and/or lost - its table stakes - the stakes get larger, the table grander- but it's still a game --and the measure of a man is not how much he keeps (how rich he gets) but how gracefully he can lose his skin on a toss of the dice, as per Huston's beloved Kipling. I know this poem of Rudyard's must be like holy gospel to old John H.:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!  

I've never been much of a gambler myself --if I win I turn arrogant. If I lose I turn ashen, my son. But  I ascribe to the Great McGonigle's 'never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump' philosophy--a good trimming can be as valuable as four years of NYU; if the chump be naive enough to be trimmed twice the education was wasted. Casinos create valuable service industry jobs and remain meccas for performers. And what's a bigger stakes gamble than filmmaking? A few million dollars is considered a low risk gamble compared to the titanic bloated budgets of normal multiplex fodder. If gamblers didn't know how to laugh off catastrophic losses, Michael Cimino would have wound up wearing cement shoes after Heaven's Gate. Shit, my son. He singlehandedly killed our once strong studio system! And he's still walking around... even making movies. They suck, don't look them up.

I also resonate with the gambler because I have addictions of my own, and knowing these I've been wary - casinos, like strip clubs, always seem very sad and suspicious to me, like pushy salesmen traps. The lap dance is okay to receive if part of some academic study, but I know if I surrender to its allure I'd wind up broke and pathetic within a matter of months and no closer to any kind of even semi-permanent fulfillment. Gambling too is okay for research and participation on some minor scale, to get a flavor for it so you can write about it later. Casinos wouldn't even be in business if a right-brained scattershot like myself could beat them.

But beating them is not really the point: Every true gambler is always either rich or broke, it keeps them on an even-keel. Huston was like that, filling his unforgiving minute with guts and glory-- and part of what makes his films work is that few other directors convey such an accurate vision of what it is to be broke enough to understand the sign of class that is giving up your last cigarette to a near-stranger when you can't afford another pack, or the victory of getting a peso coin handout twice from the same American tourist, or quietly benefitting from the two-day period involved in finding your partner's murderer, to the tune of approx. seven hundred dollars in the bargain:

Brigitte's initial retainer -         $200.
Brigitte's second cash outlay    $500.
Joel Cairo's 'small retainer' -     $200.
Less the lawyer fee for Sid to keep
her name out of it -- guestimate - ?? est. --minus $200.
-TOTAL $700!
--------------------
Solving two murders = priceless cred.

Lastly the thing that stuck with me this viewing was the impossibility of knowing whether or not Spade really loves Brigitte or is just a gent since he shagged her and any gent can feign being into a girl for at least 24 hours after shagged. We get his clear-eyed list of all the things that would go wrong if he trusted her and helped her dodge the rap --"Look at the number of them!" Bogie's eyes when he says that indicate he's mentally looking at the list and shuddering with withdrawal reptilian self disgust.

S - "Maybe you love me and maybe I love you"
B - "You know whether you love me or not!"
S - "Maybe I do."

Note that she doesn't even bother to wonder if her own feelings are real or if she's just scared to death because she too can register horror and reptilian self-disgust the way he can. Her tears fall so hot and fast you can see her whole persona begin to melt off, even if her make-up never runs. She's a great actress, is Astor, which perfectly suits the material. Not unlike Elizabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas or Jane Fonda in Klute, they convey the complexity of performance by dissolving the metatextual difference between good actresses who are sexy by nature (Astor loved sex as we well know from her infamous journal) and don't have to prove it, vs. bad actresses acting sexier while acting sincere (probably as the result of acting teacher input and relentless sincerity). As Mildred Plotka once put it, registering the "genuine" tragedy of sincerity is impossible-- "We're not people, we're lithographs. We don't know anything about love unless it's written and rehearsed. We're only real in between curtains."

in KLUTE, the triumph of Fonda's Bree is that though she doesn't really feel too attracted to Klute it's the very fact that he doesn't ask or need to be loved or adored that proposes the actorly challenge for her. It's his renouncement of any happiness for himself (including masochism or martyrdom) that ensures living in Bumfuck PA with this hangdog snoop will be like rehab, or prison, where she can no longer escape the fish bowl confessional that is finally looking at a too-long unregarded self. Such a choice seems like the last thing a girl of Bree's 'drinking wine in the dark and nursing a roach clip'-cool would find endurable. But she can at least realize that bored frustration is a unique paradise compared to the nonstop sexual twilight that is feigning genuine interest in unattractive and possibly psychotic guys. Klute demands no expression of even minimal interest on her part, and sees through all artifice as his job demands, so it's sincerity or nothing with him, a bit like the court-ordered rehab worker who believes not a word his scamming patients say, trusting only in the sanctity of their urine.

This kind of endorsement can come close to being a pro-sexist post-code patriarchy soap opera sanctification of woman's 'choice' to be a barefoot pregnant servant of any man who'll marry her.  Man can't force her, but if she chooses to renounce her freedom then she is the only girl in town who will know true happiness. That's kind of coercion through manipulation, force by a slyer name. Looking at these kinds of films now can make one feel dirty, like our most cherished ideas of self-sacrifice were being exploited like we're goddamned Viridiana or Candy Christian.

In the end, acting itself may be a form of prostitution, but there is one idea you can trust above all others --not steel, as it was for Conan; it's not even cash. It's that the best possible kind of secret agent doesn't even know he's an agent and that there is no discernible difference between a real person faking being in love and a fake person in love for real. If that's too harsh a truth then don't play poker, don't fall in love with your prostitute, and don't ever fuck with Roy Rogers' horse. Shit's POTENT, son. Love will not be trifled with. Fake it at Your own risk --but the payoff is all around us, choking the Earth with its relentless distracted appetites. One Tin Actress rides away... yeah, ride it.

pre-code capsules 5: WHITE WOMAN, RED DUST, GIRLS ABOUT TOWN, THE PURCHASE PRICE, MANDALAY

WHITE WOMAN

(1933) - ****

Fans of KONGO, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and/or Charles Laughton: Alert! Here is a film you should see. Lurid and steamy and darkly funny, there's really not much in the way of miscegenation but Charles Laughton as a psychopathic but otherwise borderline lovable rogue who operates a rubber plantation far deep in the tropics more than makes up for it. Employing escaped convicts and wanted men so they don't dare ever leave him, he bribes the natives to kill anyone who does, if the crocs don't get them first.

A truly marvelous scene occurs early wherein Laughton seduces Lombard while he's out in Saigon or wherever getting supplies. Coming off all down to earth and humbled by the loss of his wife, he's  truly touching. She's being booted out of port almost as soon as she arrives thanks to snooty governors' wives, so needs a place to crash -- and Laughton doesn't mind a shady past, in fact he depends on it. Then, as soon as they're married and he has her deep in the bush, he becomes a bully in high MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY / BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET style. However, I think he's better and more sympathetic here than in either of those films, especially in his bemused rivalry with fellow jungle rat Charles Bickford, who shows up out of the soggy swamps looking for a job (as "overseer") and making no bones about his intentions to steal her out from under his portly employer. But Charles would much rather have an honest-about-his-shady-intentions rogue as his rival than the mealy-mouthed 'moral' pretty boy who does steal Lombard's heart (Kent Taylor).

Laughton is always hilarious and you feel the hurt over his new wife's revulsion towards him and his futile jealousy over the young Kent underneath his bravado and smirking. You hate him for shooting the porter's monkey but you'll cheer his poker-faced Englishness during the big native attack finale. Can you believe Laughton made ISLAND OF THE LOST SOULS the same year? Talk about a roll!

RED DUST

1932 - ****

More remote rubber plantation action with Clark Gable in the Laughton role, so he does much better with the ladies, particularly Mary Astor (wed to a naive white fever victim) and traveling 'salesgirl' Jean Harlow (she takes her famous rain barrel bath). The plot is the usual W. Somerset Maugham-style steamy love triangle, in the jungle where white Christian decency melts in the tropical heat and monsoons. MGM keeps the lurid indecency on a tight chain but they keep it hungry too -that one rainstorm kiss between a soaking wet Astor and Gable is hotter than hell, and no one who sees this film, even once, has ever forgotten it.

I like what Rupert has to say about it on Classic Movies Digest:

As Barbara, Mary Astor is even more unwillingly libertine in her adulterous lust for Gable's Denny when one knows the background of the actress' torrid and infamous real life amours. The fireworks are in their scenes together as well. Early on when Astor slaps Gable hard for a verbal offense, he enjoys it, grinning that Gable grin from ear to ear. Then she can barely conceal her growing desire for him as she watches the strong, dark and commanding Denny hold her fair and weak husband, nursing him back to health from the fever. The comparison of the two is indeed notable to the tingly Astor. Then in the scene immediately following, Vantine happily and boldly watches Denny undress for bed, only to be told to go to her own, which she does in disappointment. These two ladies have it bad. 

GIRLS ABOUT TOWN

1931 - ***1/2

I saw this at the Film Forum about ten years ago during their first pre-code festival, with a packed, delighted audience, and it was a hoot and a holler and a half. Seeing it at home is still good, though it helps to have seen a lot of other pre-codes first so you understand the haphazard amorality brought on by the Great Depression, when so many women were broke and on the streets and hustling in a kind of gold-digger limbo between outright streetwalking and showgirl social climbing. Like Liz Taylor in BUTTERFIELD 8, the GIRLS also have a phone service to get their dates, and while one or two of them get happily reformed by the end the final shot is of our fearlessly amoral survivor calling that number for yet another victim. Kay Francis and Lillian Tashman are the girls. Joel McRae is the reformer, Eugene Pallette is the A-list sucker, Lucille Gleason his hard-luck wife. George Cukor directed with his champagne touch already in evidence. Similar in a lot of ways to BED OF ROSES and dozens of other features of the early sound era, the story is predictable but pre-code to the core. Sure Francis reformed at the end but Tashman gets to keep her diamonds and booze, thus pleasing everyone long time. 

THE PURCHASE PRICE

1932 - ***

Barbara Stanwyck has probably never looked sexier than trying to seduce dumbass sodbuster George Brent in this weird pre-code crowd-pleaser. Tired of life as a New York City singing slickster, Babs runs away from her clingy gangster lover Lyle Talbot by switching places with a Montreal hotel maid who was supposed to marry Brent via long distance matchmaking newspaper ads.

It's not quite fair the way Brent gradually changes from sullen hick to merely a college grad who's designed his own new kind of wheat germ but needs a bunch of money to pay the mortgage. Paramount's resident pre-code sleazebag David Landau (he was the villain in the Marx Brothers' HORSEFEATHERS - "Here's to dear old Darwin!" the same year) wants ti step in, buy the mortgage and get Babs as his, um, 'cook,' in the process (things aren't going great in the Babs-Brent marriage - she fends off his one lamely busted move and he sulks ever after).


The story's strictly from hicksville and Brent's too much a mealy-mouthed pretty boy to convince as either a hick or a horticulturist, but Wellman gives us, as is his wont lots of great pre-code nitty city and farm town grit, including: one pretty good barroom fight; a vividly etched and very drunken shivaree; burning cornfields, terrible wallpaper; and lots of leering through open doorways. No grit in the world is so nitty it can best Stanwyck in a negligee and thigh high stockings, though. Seldom before has adult sexuality seemed so tangible, vulnerable or rock-hard tough, via a young, rail thin and undressed woman who's still wearing all the pants in sight.

MANDALAY

1934 - ***1/2

If you're suspected of killing the guy who ran out on you, and get exonerated, and then the guy shows up alive, are you allowed to kill him? That is the question asked of many a pre-code heroine but few have handled it as coolly as Kay Francis in MANDALAY.  Ricardo Cortez is the charming gunrunner fiancee who leaves her behind in a Burma nightclub to pay his debt to shady club promoter Warner Oland. At first she refuses to stay, but then gets a hang of the game, changes her name to 'Spot White' and is soon so deep in the bedrooms and pockets of the rich and famous that the wives move to ship her farther up river (the way they do Lombard in WHITE WOMAN). But on the riverboat to Mandalay who should show back up? Old Ricardo... and right when she's trying to make it with one of the ubiquitous archetypes of these jungle expeditions, the drug-addicted (or here, drunk) but good-hearted doctor (Lyle Talbot) heading up river to work on yellow fever victims, which--as we learned from W. Somerset Maugham's PAINTED VEIL--is a great way to pay off your malodorous malpractice or adulterous guilt.

The code came in around halfway through 1934, so the whole RAIN / PAINTED VEIL-ripped subgenre of commonwealth sin would soon be extinct in place of frilly frocks, domestic breakfasts, nannies, priests, and angelic children, but here in MANDALAY things are still allowed to be rife with all the lurid trimmings: drugs, booze, depravity, prostitution, gun-running, miscegenation, and murder. Michael Curtiz directed so you know there's nary a dull moment, even when nothing happens, and Kay's seldom looked lovelier. Dig that slinky Orry-Kelly gown above! Oh you kid! Awooga!

KONGO -The ultra lurid 1932 saga of jungle sin!

If you know in your heart that 1931-1933 was the most lurid era ever of movies, then dear heart, KONGO is your new king!

Here's what I wrote about the film in a post from last time it played TCM, October 2008:

Based on a play that originally ran in 1926 (with the film's same stars, Walter Huston and Virginia Bruce), Kongo is also a remake of the Lon Chaney silent film West of Zanzibar. Silent film devotees might laud Chaney, and/or say Huston is channeling Chaney here, but I'd say it's more the reverse since Huston originated the role in the theater. Plus, if you love Huston as I do, you will know he would never just emulate someone else, or phone it in, or just ham around in a role where he's the center stage tyrant. He gives it 11,000,000 percent. Lupe Velez is in the Jean Harlow role of good natured floozy who lives at Flint's trading post/bar, where she spreads her charms liberally and gets drunk (and other things) with Flint's two dimwitted white flunkies. All is "well" until Flint makes his move for revenge... involving pulling a sweet innocent white woman played by Virginia Bruce out of her Cape Town convent and dragging her into the pits of HELL!

Infamous for his tight control of a vast 80 mile section of the Congo, Flint hoards ivory and controls the local tribes via displays of magic tricks all while planning his OLDBOY-style revenge against the guy who carved up his face and left him crippled to die. This plan involves Flint taking custody of his enemy's daughter and putting her through an all girls convent school, only to pull her out on her 18th birthday and throw her into a Zanzibar brothel for a year or two. After she's sufficiently debauched he drags her out to his godforsaken corner of the jungle, gives her "black fever" and strings her along on booze and beatings. Meanwhile, a white doctor (Conrad Nagel) in the throes of addiction to some kind of local opiate root shows up, and Flint tries to get him clean (via leeches!) so he can operate on Flint's back. But Lupe Velez secretly risks having her tongue cut out in order to bring the doc all the root he can handle in exchange for sex. And that's not all! A parade of sadistic horrors are either narrowly escaped from and/or inflicted offstage while Huston roars in sadistic laughter; and what about the native practice of burning women alive on their dead husband's funeral pyre? GOOD GOD! This was made in 1932!? It's almost too hot to handle even today. With all the implied sexual and physical abuse and degradation it would likely get an NC-17.

Aint no doubt Billy Bob Thornton be good in the remake

Part of the pleasure of the pre-codes is in trying to fathom just how X-rated and lurid they can be; we're just conditioned from childhood to think of old black and white films as being safe, innocent fun. When we see something like Kongo  it's like having the bottom drop out on all our socialized expectations; like being all prepared for a boring three hour lecture and having the professor start shooting up speed, passing around brandy and reefers, flogging the latecomers, and cutting off the tongues of anyone who talks without raising their hand.

Time to bleed the junky...

Bruce and Huston's performances here are beyond "riveting"-- each feels very "lived in" (thanks probably to their time spent together in the 1926 play version), like they've been dragged through the ringer together. If you've had a chance to catch Huston's wild-eyed cattle patriarch perfection in Criterion's The Furies, you know how ably this man can embody a super-manipulative, authoritative nut job, roaring in laughter when a man tries to shoot him, weilding his whip like a cross between Indiana Jones and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and playing with his weird chimp companion or awarding bottles of brandy as rewards for debased behaviors. Like Brando in Streetcar, you hate him for crushing the spirits of the weak, but love him for his canny bravery and raw animal humor. (as opposed to, for example, Rocco in Key Largo, who wont give his poor alcoholic mistress a drink even after she debases herself by singing -like Brando in THE GODFATHER, that I do not forgive).

For her part, Bruce is a powerhouse who matches Huston in sheer seething rage, and despite all her torments, she still possesses a sense of humor and a grip on sanity and dignity that can't be destroyed; for all her ranting she's much more an Anna Christie than a Broken Blossom.

With typically detailed MGM production design, Kongo's action doesn't play out as much in the jungles (though they are represented) so much as the bar and bedrooms of Huston's compound - and holds just enough stock footage (probably taken from West of Zanzibar) to make it interesting: The only animals you see are crocodiles, snakes and spiders! No boring zebras or antelope herds. More than anything, Kongo is a valuable window into a time when "going native" in the mind of Hollywood and post-Victorian morality meant being a law unto yourself and indulging in whatever capricious and kinky cruelty suited your mood, the vice and evil stockpiled in repression's cobwebbed basement suddenly elevated to the drawing room, and the roof blown off. In addition to the vice, sex, violence, and vengeance, racism abounds: the film sees the native Africans as inferior savages to be manipulated and abused, and once the flames of sadism get going, the white woman is next! We see in pre-code jungle horrors like Kongo that the tortures and degradations of SAW, HOSTEL and their ilk are nothing new. Though this kind of kinkiness was abolished during the bloodless reign of "the code", before 1934 there was still a place for drugs, sex, slavery and sadism... it was called the jungle. Long may it reign, though thank god it's safely in the past... except for YOU, if you tune in today... on TCM!

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribillis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack

Though Harvey Keitel has become a listing in our cinema icon treasury, he's still been booted off at least two films: EYES WIDE SHUT and APOCALYPSE NOW, and considering the films in question, must be one kinky wildman. Therefore, these two films might be considered bookends of an era. Then, he became the nudist of 1993, doing full frontal as a kind of gone-native Kurtzian honorary Maori in THE PIANO and as a depraved representative of power in BAD LIEUTENANT. It was rare to see even one schlong in an art film back in 1993, but to see the same guy's twice in two badass movies? Something was in the wind.

But that's not why we're here. We need to discuss the last film Harvey was fired off of, namely EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) and the man Kubrick replaced him with, the late, beloved director/ actor Sydney Pollack. The director of grat films like THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY, Pollack had a pretty lively bit part film career playing rich, smartass New York Jews (as Randy Newman would sing) with penchants for beautiful prostitutes and heavy nostril breathing. There's something about his casual older guy frankness that adds chilling layers of ambiguity to his performances; as a nonchalant womanizer he's unsettling in the Lacanian-Zizek anal father horrific way (1), the kind where you think he must be in some weird Illuminati Monarch 7 Satanic cabal very close to the one in EYES WIDE SHUT. He's a hirsute bespectacled emblem of enjoyment, a disturbingly intimate presence, he seems to invade your mind, leaving you with the weird feeling you just caught him in bed with your little sister, whether you have one or not.

Pollack's character in EYES especially is chilling in his unconscious acceptance of his privileged status quo: he sees nothing wrong with spending more money than you make in a year in order to hire sweet young things as his coarse pleasure tools for a weekend.. is there any more subtly offensive line in all of Woody's oeuvre than Pollack's glowing review of a hooker in HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1993, below left): "She has a mouth like velvet," as if describing the fellatio-infused seats on a first class flight? But it works because Woody--another likely candidate for that Illuminati sex cabal-- is horrified he said it and no doubt later, when no one is around to appreciate his moral outrage, intrigued.

But that's just a warm-up for EYES WIDE SHUT (and may have been what got Pollack the role). There's something about the way Pollack says the word "hooker" in EYES that makes the blood run cold. the hooker in this case is a beautiful, tall, perfectly figured lass who seems to be everywhere at once in Cruise's big night of almost-passion, including the big masked orgy.

I never understood this orgy scene, and I've understood many an orgy scene. First of all, if everyone is masked, why is everyone so uptight? No one knows who they are! Does security have to be that tight because human sacrifices are occurring shortly? And why is dopey Cruise so anxious to crash in where he's not wanted, especially in this dreary scene, more a bourgeoisie museum retrospective version of a masked orgy than a real thing, where people come and go whispering of fellatio / while all the while maybe 2-7 people per gigantic room are actually getting it on, and only in the most dull lifeless way imaginable (lord knows how many takes Kubrick demanded, but every time I watch this scene I shudder in sympathy for those poor models with their achingly perfect, breasts, being banged around like lifeless cattle, their heavy Rothschild masquerade ball-style masks no doubt suffocating their skin). And we have to wonder which came first -- does Kubrick make films about dehumanization because he's worried about us, or because he's cold and clinical by nature, and so he changes the message to match his limitations? (i.e. when you're a rich sadist, you can pay huge amounts of overtime to watch perfect breasts jiggle from doggy style thrusting, take after take, until the poor girls have nervous breakdowns?)

Masked scenes in pornography are never a good idea, since facial expressions are important for arousal, unless of course, a) you want to hide and b) fetishize some particular body part that precludes any real eye-to-eye connection. But if you want your lovers anesthetized like the night upon the table... man, I guess that could work but pornography would be cheaper and more tactile. Manm T.S. Eliot is really creeping into this entry. But then again, that makes perfect sense. For if EYES WIDE SHUT has a iconographic codex, it would surely be "The Wasteland":

The awful daring of a moment's surrender
which an age of prudence can never retract
by this, and this alone, have we existed
which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficient spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor. (405)

Because you see, all the threats made against Bill (Cruise) after he's caught at the masked orgy make no sense since a) nothing illegal (or even transgressive) is technically going on and b) everyone is masked. He doesn't know who in hell was there and they're all so worried he crashed the scene. Who cares? The only reason such harsh security would be necessary is if everyone wasn't masked, and he was, say, a reporter from the NY Post. And a bevy of abducted children were shortly to be cut open and their still beating hearts fed to a demonic manifestation inside the flames. Hasn't Kubrick ever been to an orgy? Or watched a masked orgy in 70s porn? Or, worse, has he, as part of his faking the moon landing, been so inducted, and now is determined to get the truth out?

I've been obsessed with orgies since I was nine years old and didn't even know what they were. But man, what a great name, orgy... they sound so wild and crazy. Then again, if we bring this back like a long chalkboard curve to the Lacanian model of desire, it makes perfect sense that it turns out to be such a dull, humorless show --the closer our proximity to our desire (objet petit a) the more nervous and self-sabotaging we become, for it's just a big empty finish line and the momentum of the race is all there is to keep us from falling off the planet.

Such a weird mix of prurience and play is part of the film's swirling appeal for some people and I can appreciate that. I can appreciate the beauty of all the women and wallpaper in the film and the way Tom Cruise kind of bashfully lets his character be sucked up into various hottie vortices, so to speak, but if the rumors as to why Keitel was fired are true, then it just goes to show you what powerful prudes Cruise and Kidman really are. Who cares if he came in her hair? This is acting! In a goddamned sex film! Would Arnold Schwarzenegger fire someone for accidentally punching him in a fight scene? Would he run and call his momma in Germany and/or sue the stunt man? No, he wouldn't. Keitel would have at least brought a kind of legit sexual energy (did he come on that car door in BAD LIEUTENANT?) that Pollack just can't duplicate and probably doesn't want to. Even playing rich sleazebags, Pollack is a gentlemen of poise and money.

Yet, also, that's what ultimately works - his character seethes with menace because Pollack the actor's inherent decency isn't subsumed but merely switched over to mask status. He is a man who goes to orgies yet has given up on orgies and sex as his objet petit a. To him these young beauties are little more than distractions, like the 800th time you go to yoga class and realize you're falling asleep during your asanas even as you do them perfectly. For Pollack's rich obscene pater, the only concern is the risk his young chippies will embarrass him in front of his heavy intellectual friends (talking about astrology at his bourgeois friend's dinner party in HUSBANDS AND WIVES, or worrying the girl in his bedroom will die from an O.D. and cause a scandal in EYES WIDE SHUT, below).

If you've forgotten that last one, it's after the lengthy preparation for the holiday party scene, and the Cruise-Kidman's nervous arrival (all beautifully done). Upstairs we see Pollack getting hurriedly getting dressed as a beautiful naked woman lies splayed out on a chair in his room. He's sent for Cruise because she "O.D.-ed, doing a speedball or something." Which is ridiculous, since the chick's lips aren't even blue (above). Dude, she passed out, so the fuck what? She's fine. Put her into bed and turn the lights out. She'll probably just come to in a few hours and sneak out the back with your whiskey decanter and wife's fur coat. Instead, Cruise brings her out of her stupor and gives her a patronizing lecture about how she almost died, which carries all the inauthentic ring of a Sarah Palin lecture on international affairs. Dude, how can you talk about things of which you know less than nothing? Pollack, for his part, is worried, not because he cares about her but that disposing of the body would be hard with so many people downstairs, kind of like he just spilled red wine on his tuxedo jacket and doesn't have time to yell at the cleaning lady.

But the cool thing is, I do believe, this is all intentional and that Pollack is brave and focused as an actor, especially for his willingness to play with moral ambiguity, to use his own aging, hairy bourgeois Zionist paranoia-engendering profile as an example of what William Burroughs once described as "the cold, dead look of heavy power," tapping into a common racist/classisct/ageist phobia that rich old Svengalis are stealing off our Trilbys. Like Christophe Waltz in BASTERDS, Pollack uses deep, relaxed nasal breathing to make you feel very close to him and you don't want to be; you feel like he's stolen something from you and you're afraid to ask for it back. There's something incestuous about the way we're conditioned to accept him as a "good guy" via his ease with signifiers of wealth.  He seems to turn the viewer into a prostitute through his nostrils and through his use of anonymous but gorgeous younger women for sex, the way most people wearily order pizza, "again" for a dull dinner.

But with that heavy serpentine weariness comes the knowledge that as a representative of the power elite it's his job to posit himself as "the one who enjoys," to situate the rest of us as outsiders in the fantasy realm so that we can keep ourselves in a distracted orbit around the real and thus preserve the gravitational field. Note in the scene below, Pollack's genial massage of Cruise's shoulders. This is a man who lives his pleasures close to the hairy surface; he's tactile. He forces us to imagine him having sex via his physical looseness. Cruise by contrast is repressed, i.e. 'normal' - he's not used to being touched unless it's in a mundane sexual way by the wife or paternal way by the daughter, and like us, he worries the whole world is a continual orgy the moment his back is turned, that he and he, alone, is the odd man out, the one everyone hides their stash of libidinal enjoyment from, even when they're fully undressed in his doctor's office.

So while I have yet to like EYES WIDE SHUT as a film, in general, when the time is right, and I get over my revulsion/admiration for Pollack's casually evil performance, his superb grasp of "prohibitive enjoyment," I'll probably dig it. And though she's not onscreen for whole chunks at a time, Kidman is amazing, running acting rings around her narcissist husband while he flexes into the mirror.  On some level you can understand both Pollack's and Kidman's frustration: this is a dream world, and sexually awakened beings like them are surrounded by idiots like Cruise, a guy who so desperately wants to live a dream he can't even see he's already asleep. Kidman and Pollack don't have much interaction in this film (whatever that "hairy" scene was with Keitel was presumably cut at her and Cruise's insistence) but they anchor the main character's delusional pursuit of orgiastic experience with their adult understanding that even in the thick of a wild drug-fueled orgy you sometimes have to fantasize about being somewhere else in order to feel like you're really even there.

And Kubrick, the Tiresias who perhaps has not fore-suffered all, tacitly stands on the sidelines leaving us to wonder if he's so far behind the cinematic times that he's ahead of them (as he was in LOLITA) or just utterly lost due to his hermitage (as he was in FULL METAL JACKET). We can wonder, and I'm glad we'll never have a clear answer, for the hazy ambiguity of intent adds to WIDE SHUT's luster. The impossibility of desire's fulfillment has seldom been more lushly, mercilessly illuminated in sex cinema. For what Pollack represents in the Kubrick stable isn't the Tiresias of Eliot nor the impotent hermit wrestling with his genius mantle of the auteur himself, but the stale endgame of accumulated wealth and power, the primal father. Pollack's billiard room may be lush, but it's still just a room with a pool table, and sex is still just sex, regardless of the wealth and masks and perfect breasts. Actual emotional connection is what makes sex hot, and it's what missing altogether in EYES WIDE SHUT. In order to perpetuate the myth of "hot" anonymous sex, or the GQ/Maxim subterfuge of confusing sex, love and consumer goods, Pollack keeps his orgy mask on 24/7, even though he's perhaps all too aware its become saggy and old. To paraphrase Nick Tosches' summation Dean Martin's later life philosophy, no matter how far you get in life, your dreams of success just wind down to a drink and a blow job. The trick is to pretend you don't care so the masses think you do, so they can continue to live in the illusion that your lifestyle would solve their problems and bring them satisfaction if they only had it.

But maybe, just maybe, you don't have to choose between the smarmy unconsciousness of Cruise, nor the withered entitlement of Pollack, nor the primordial mockery of Kidman. You can be free, and real, like Harvey Keitel.

Only they won't let you swagger around nude on crack and masturbate into people's hair at these hoity toity big budget control freak orgies (if ever there was a contradiction in terms!) To really "bring it" you have to find a dark alley with Abel Ferrara's camera rolling in the dark ominousness of a real New York, not Kubrick's expensive indoor studio sets. Kubrick's film tries to deconstruct the notion of a "No sex, please, we're British" sex film about sex in New York, but it has nothing to do with New York, per se (as in the bridge and tunnel gang making homophobic remarks at Cruise like its 1979) and instead ends up lost in its own self-reflexive maze of overthought set design, suffocating luxury and meaningless sex.

But what does that matter? Jesus said a rich man can no more enter the gates of heaven than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. Pollack's elite power broker is the rich man shredding camel after camel as he tries to force them through the needle so he can feel half as as alive as reckless Harvey's BAD LIEUTENANT, who just goes around snorting coke, passing out, making bets on the Dodgers, jerking off at underage Jersey girls, and screaming through the gates of heaven into the arms of Christ our Lord as He appeareth in a crack withdrawal flashback. Amen, brother. 

------I wrote the above, then found this from Zizek, which doesn't mention the anal father aspect, but is nonetheless interesting as an explanation of the orgy scene's antiquated timidity:

"It is only Nicole Kidman’s fantasy that truly is a fantasy, while Tom Cruise’s fantasy is a reflexive fake, a desperate attempt to artificially recreate/reach the fantasy, a fantasizing triggered by the traumatic encounter of the Other’s fantasy, a desperate attempt to answer the enigma of the Other’s fantasy: what was the fantasized scene/encounter that so deeply marked her? What Cruise does on his adventurous night is to go on a kind of window-shopping trip for fantasies: each situation in which he finds himself can be read as a realized fantasy – firstly the fantasy of being the object of the passionate love interest of his patient’s daughter; then the fantasy of encountering a kind prostitute who doesn’t even want money from him; then the encounter with the weird Serb (?) owner of the mask rental store who is also a pimp for his juvenile daughter; finally, the big orgy in the suburban villa. This accounts for the strangely subdued, statuesque, ‘impotent’ even, character of the scene of the orgy in which his adventure finds its culmination. What many a critic dismissed as the film’s ridiculously aseptic and out-of-date depiction of the orgy works to its advantage, pointing towards the paralysis of the hero’s ‘capacity to fantasize." (173-175) 

But there you go again, Harvey Keitel ain't paralyzed! He lives the fantasy cuz he's much too drunk to fantasize! (TDTF). Go Harvey! Oh wait, is he passed out?

Read more on Harvey Keitel and whoremongering in my Funkamatic Piece on Cinematic Pimps!