kennelco film diary

(1927) dir. Josef von Sternberg
viewed: 07/11/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

The first of three or four films that I went to see at the Castro this last weekend as part of the Silent Film Festival, Underworld is notable as a prototype “gangster” film, written by Ben Hecht, who would go on to a very notable career in screenwriting, including Scarface (1932) and others far too many to mention.  The film was directed by Josef von Sternberg with great style and flair and features quite a bit of fun.

The film was introduced by Eddie Muller, local noir aficianado, who suggested it as one of the earliest instances of the gangster film and one of the precursors to noir, though certainly not noir specifically.  And those points were easy to see.

It was interesting to see the gangster film as a silent, since in watching several gangster films lately, the language and delivery of the dialogue seemed so key.  The story is more purely prototypical, as are some of the characters: the moll, the smallish but very tidy gangster, the bigger than life antihero.  According to Muller, Hecht felt that von Sternberg ruined the film with some more sappy sequences.  Again, hard to say, but the film wasn’t as “hard” as some of the later, more well-known gangster films that would soon follow.

I enjoyed this film, but oddly, I am not finding a lot to say about it.  So, I’ll leave it at that.

(1969) dir. Bill Melendez
viewed: 07/10/09

Friday night movie night with the kids this week featured the first feature-length theatrical film starring the Peanuts gang, A Boy Named Charlie Brown.  The first of four feature-length films, all directed by Bill Melendez, the man who brought Charlie Brown and company to the small screen in such classic shows as A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973) among many, many, many others and less-notable efforts.

Still, Melendez managed to create a unique style and character for the Peanuts gang in animation, voicing the kids with the voices of kids (with occasional left-in pronunciation and dialogue flaws that add charm and character).  He’s also the one who brought in Vince Guaraldi to score the group with his gentle, upbeat jazz sound that also came to define the strip when animated.  And while the visual style is less than cinematic on the whole, he created in television’s “limited animation” style, a great series of shorts and a couple of very fine features.

I grew up with Peanuts in the paper everyday and have fond, fond memories of reading it with my mom as a small child before reading on my own as I got older.  I loved the shows, I bought the books, and was well-invested in the work of Charles M. Schulz, and to this day I still deeply love it.

These days, the newspaper comics aren’t the same, meaning they are less kid-friendly and a dying breed.  And since Schulz himself passed away in 2000, there just isn’t the same availability.  I have been buying the collections of the comics that have been republished in recent years by Fantagraphics and read them with the kids and the kids have seen the t.v. shows.  It’s not the same.  But I decided that we’d rent A Boy Named Charlie Brown and see how it went down.  I’d always remembered it fondly.

And it’s a good film.  Truly it is.  The story, adapted from numerous stories in the newspaper, but developed into a broader story arc is surprisingly successful.  Charlie Brown is the ultimate loser, failing to fly a kite, giving up runs on every pitch in baseball, being demonstrated his multitude of flaws by the ever-ready Lucy.  Until he makes it into a spelling bee, which he luckily is given words like “failure”, “unconfident”, and “stomach-ache”, all things with which he is all too familiar.  He makes it from winning the classroom round, to the all-school round, to a national bee in a never-named but clearly New York City.

The film’s musical elements are far less Disney, with one main theme, “A Boy Named Charlie Brown”, a soft, sad-happy tune, along with one or two others and some additional Guaraldi jazz music.  The film is sweet and funny and had the kids laughing out loud quite a bit.

The funniest part for me was when Clara said, “The guy who wrote Charlie Brown must have had a sad life.”

The funny thing is, though I remember going to see a couple of the later films in the theater, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977) and Boy Voyage, Charlie Brown (And Don’t Come Back!!) (1980), I don’t think I’d realized that A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy Come Home (1972) were theatrical releases as well.  I mean, the film is as old as I am, and while that may be the case, it still cheered the whole Coffelt gang for a Friday night.

(1973) dir. John Milius
viewed: 07/09/09

A great cast does not a great movie make.

Earlier this year, I watched Dillinger (1945), another bio-pic about the populist American criminal, John Dillinger, prepping to watch the new Michael Mann film, Public Enemies (2009), starring Johnny Depp.  It seemed like an interesting idea, since I ended up doing this whole Jesse James thing a year or so before.  Sadly, though, these Dillinger films have not been so up to snuff. 

I’d thought that I had perhaps seen this film back about 15 years ago, but when I watched it presently, it really didn’t seem too familiar.  I’m not sure what film I saw that I thought might have been this one, but I had remembered liking it.  I have to say, that this John Milius film feels like a hack-job in a lot of ways, and I don’t think I would have recalled it fondly.  So who knows?

The film stars Warren Oates, who has become a favorite of mine over the years.  He was in a number of great films, including The Shooting (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Cockfighter (1974), to name a few.  It’s also got Harry Dean Stanton (who seems to have been the same age all his life) and features a young Richard Dreyfuss as “Baby Face” Nelson.  The film also has a good general cast including good performances by Ben Johnson, Geoffrey Lewis, Michelle Phillips, and Steve Kanaly.  Cloris Leachman plays “the lady in red”, with a nearly hilarious German/Austrian accent which would have better suited a Mel Brooks film than this one.

I was having a hard time putting my finger on exactly what was wrong with this picture, but even on wide-screen, it felt like a TV movie and the cinematography seemed highly lacking, framing shots of moments that could have had power in someone else’s hands, played like stock drama and some of the dialogue felt flat, too.  The whole thing was a bit of a drag.

I was thinking that it was going to be a bit more like the Arthur Penn classic Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and perhaps that was a bit of the aim.  It was striking me that a number of films were made around this time highlighting the populist criminal heroes of the Depression era and before and I was thinking that perhaps there was some sort of counter-culture identification with outsiders, especially anti-establishment, working-class heroes who were explicitly outlaws.  The Depression Era bank robbers were idolized because of American’s anger at the bank failures and the loss of money, the failure of the government to protect it, but also toward their star quality.

It’s an interesting trope, and like the work of Andrew Dominik, whose excellent films Chopper (2001) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) analyze the character of criminal hero-worship, I think there is a lot to investigate. 

Well, I’m still eager to see Public Enemies.  Dillinger (1973) hasn’t daunted me.

(1971) dir. Ted Kotcheff
viewed: 06/27/09 at Verona Cinema, Sydney, Australia

On vacation in Sydney, Australia, visiting for the first time, the idea of seeing a film was out there, but not top of the list.  But in reading the local newspaper, I saw that this film, Wake in Fright, was being re-released as a new print from a recently salvaged original negative, a nearly “lost” film.  On the promotional material, songwriter/singer Nick Cave called the film the “scariest and most Australian of Australian films” or something to that effect.  It seemed that these characteristics made it an ideal film for a visitor to see on the big screen in the big country of “Down Under”.   The film’s re-release actually was only the day prior to seeing it.

The film is a true Australian nightmare.  I’ve often noted about Australian films that the self-depiction of the “Outback” (which was the American title of this film when it was released), portrays Aussies as smiling psychopaths.  This film takes that to the extreme, perhaps truly defining the archetypical experience or image of the sweating, manly, drunken mania that is either a result of environment or perhaps some relationship to Australia’s criminal outpost origins.  Not that the film tries to say “why” things are the way they are, rather that it’s depicting the bacchanalian hell that is Australia’s bulk of body.  And the film is quite the shocking ride.

The story follows a would-be intellectual, college-educated city man, who is stuck in an outpost teaching in a town with two buildings: the one-room schoolhouse where he is the teacher and across the tracks at the bar/hotel/shack where he lives.  He considers himself an indentured servant, having to pay off some $1000 to the government by working as a teacher wheresoever they post him, paying back for his education.  This might be some reflection of the criminal situation of the convicts who founded Sydney, being put in indentured servitude for their time as exiles.  But he is heading out on Christmas holiday (the bleeding hot summer Down Under), traveling by train and plane to Sydney, to his fantasy girlfriend and the life he wishes he was in.

He overnights in Bundanyabba, a town that is both Purgatory and Hell all rolled into one, but as a visitor, he hasn’t caught on to the life of the Outback.  The culture that there is is one of “Buy you a beer, mate?”, an offer that can’t be refused no matter how many times it is proffered.  He meets, in the sweatiest, dirtiest, enormous Outback bar, the local sheriff, played with perfection by Chips Rafferty, a character straight out of Jim Thompson, an overly friendly seeming buffoon, drinking him into oblivion.  And he meets “Doc”, played by the sweaty, filthy Donald Pleasance, a bizarre and definitive character who lives on nothing but the town’s fringe.  And he is introduced to a coin-tossing gambling game, a metaphorical yet ludicrously simple crap shoot that drags the locals in like vultures.

The teacher drunkenly indulges in the gamble, enjoying the manly, drunken fraternity despite its personal “otherness”, and makes a killing, earning himself a big wad of cash.  But like many a gambler, he goes back for the big score (enough to buy him out of his servitude), and loses everything.

But in Bundanyabba, as Doc tells him, you can live on nothing but the friendly charity of others.  Everyone wants to buy you a beer, one after another, endlessly.  And every character has this psychotic manly friendliness that is ingratiating but frightening, and the teacher drops into the drunken abyss.  The hedonism is both sexual and violent, sickening, shocking, but eventually he falls all the way into the pit.

The film is shocking in particular for its depiction of the slaughter of a multitude of kangaroos, which was shot at the time following professional hunters on a kangaroo cull, and edited into the film to look like the doings of the drunken louts, roving the nighttime Outback in a Range Rover of sorts, catching the roos in the headlights and shooting them down, occasionally collecting their bollocks for eating (to further the intake of manhood).  The slaughter initially intrigues the teacher because he thinks it’s going to be more like a “hunt”, but it turns out to be just literal bloodlust, eventually wrestling a kangaroo to slit its throat and going mad and stabbing it to death.  The scenes are shocking because they are real to an extent.  The violence and excess oozes and inflates the other scenes.  It’s psychotic.

Donald Pleasance is a satyr, an unlikely bald, bearded, unclean middle-aged satyr, but the exemplar of non-comformist pure indulgence, satyr or devil.  He’s more than just a piece of work.  He’s a piece of pure creepiness.  But his discussions of free love and independence echo of movements of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, not idealized but ideological, and though his words and essence are revolting, he speaks a truth about the world in which he lives.  It’s an amazing performance, impossible to imagine anyone else to have played the role.

The film was released the same year as Walkabout (1971), another film set in Australia though produced by the UK and directed by Nicolas Roeg.  Walkabout won the Palme D’or that year at Cannes, and though Wake in Fright recieved positive reviews on its release, its shocking and negative portrayal of Australia perhaps helped it on its way to the near dustbin.  Very luckily, it was found, restored, and made available.

My trip piqued my interest in Australian history quite a bit and made me reflect on my perception and commentary on Australian films, such as my note to say that Australian films depict their world as pretty backwoods and psychotic.  Wake in Fright is almost an Australian version of Deliverance (1972), but with lots of friendly schooners of beer.  So, now I am thinking that I will have to do some re-investigation of the films that I referred to in my thinking.

Doubtlessly, Wake in Fright is very much the ultimate in this area, but not just for its extremity and creepiness, but because it’s a fantastic film, replete with dark humor and constructed with great efficacy and power.  Not everyone will be able to stomach it, but for those who can, it’s nothing like you’ve ever seen before.  And afterwards, you’ll be quite cautious to take an offer of an Aussie buying you a beer.