Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      C.C. & Company      A year before C.C. & Company (1970), quarterback Joe Namath had taken the New York Jets to a surprise victory over the Baltimore Colts.  Hollywood beckoned.       C.C. & Company , directed by TV director Seymour Robbie, was Namath's second film.  He plays motorcycle gang member, C.C. Ryder, in with The Heads, led by Moon (William Smith), for only a month when the film begins in an Arizona grocery store.      Happy go lucky soundtrack music accompanies C.C. as he puts some canned foods in his cart, then pushes it around, taking ingredients to make himself a sandwich, enjoying the era of no surveillance cameras in grocery stores.  He drinks a small carton of milk to wash his lunch down, replaces the canned foods to their shelf, and buys a pack of chewing gum for ten cents.  Outside he gets on his motorcycle in the brilliant dry country southwest sunshine and drives of...

      Liquid Sky      Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982) reveals a portrait of early 1980s New York through its new wave/punk/avant-garde and fashion scenes.  It's also a science fiction film depicting an alien ship the size of a dinner tray landing on the roof of model Margaret's (Anne Carlisle) penthouse apartment with a majestic view of the Empire State Building.        The tiny alien inside the ship seeks heroin but discovers that feeding off someone's energy at the point of orgasm makes for a better high.  Margaret finds that her climaxing lovers, and in one case, her rapist, are crunched down into nothing, dissolved by some force.  Meanwhile, fashion photographers, journalists, hangers-on in one scene enter her apartment even as her sense of reality warps, causing her to believe she's causing the strange deaths.      "I kill with my cunt," she says; a line I suspect has never been spoken in a ...

      Katzelmacher      Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second film, Katzelmacher (1969), meaning "Troublemaker," or, more directly, "Cat Screwer," was shot in nine days.  Fassbinder wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Yorgos, a "Greek from Greece."  A circle of friends in Munich frustrated by money problems and interpersonal squabbles gets to know Yorgos in various ways, manipulating him mostly, teasing him, finally beating him up, even as he provides steady rent money to one of them.  He's a guest worker, an immigrant from Piraeus with a wife and two children back home.  The only one among the Germans who treats him well is Marie (Hanna Schygulla).  The others take advantage of his lack of German (beyond some basic phrases and words), speaking terrible things about him in his presence.  They're intrigued by the alleged impressive size of his penis.  One of the women claims to have been raped by him--not true. ...

      Three Films Having Nothing To Do With Each Other      Because I was away for a short time I didn't write about two movies I saw several days ago, The Dogs of War (1980) and Cry-Baby (1990).  The latter was directed by John Waters, an independent Baltimore, Maryland, film director whose work has been characterized as outrageous, over the top, flamboyant.  I realized to my surprise that Cry-Baby is the only Waters film I've seen to date.  I've been aware of John Waters the person for a long time, seen him interviewed often.  He's one of a small number of American "celebrity" directors, like David Lynch, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino.  Waters' thin mustache, slicked hair, sharp wit have encouraged other directors to cast him in character roles, and late night TV talk show hosts like David Letterman would have him on fairly often.      While Waters' work seems not only light but also goofy, Cry-Baby de...

      Fassbinder's Gods of the Plague      I saw my first Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, Effi Briest (1974), sometime in the 1980s.  A black and white, lengthy (140 minutes) adaptation of an 1894 novel by Theodor Fontane, the film mesmerized me, its slow pace seeming perfect for its subject matter--the story of its eponymous heroine, played by a riveting actress I'd never seen before, Hanna Schygulla.  My father, sitting next to me in the university's theater, watched the same film but didn't like it.  I remember him saying to my mother, "It's very Germanic."      Even then, in my early twenties, I was beginning to realize I had a high tolerance for long, slow movies, a capability coming in handy when, many years later, I watched Jacques Rivette's close to thirteen hour long Out 1 (reviewed in this blog), as well as other Fassbinder films I've seen since Effi Briest .      Fassbinder will show you people l...

     The Eternal Love Affair With The Most Dangerous Game Premise       Turkey Shoot (1982), directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, is an Australian film shot in Queensland, with various interesting types of vegetation and landscape, including a beach scene.  The beautiful scenery, including jungle, gullies with roaring waterfalls, lush valleys, agricultural fields, make the movie a plus for nature watchers, but the movie lacks when it comes to something we're supposed to take seriously.      A totalitarian near future state puts "deviants" in work camps out in the country for political dissent and anything else deemed unpalatable by the state, including cases of mistaken intent, like the situation faced by Chris Walters (Olivia Hussey).  During a riot, a man chased by the police sought refuge in her shop.  The cops assumed she was sheltering him and arrested her.  She finds herself, after being drugged, in the back of a v...

      Mr. Arkadin      Here's the Orson Welles film I've had the most difficulty enjoying, finding it even more impenetrable than his Othello .  With the Criterion Collection's restoration, however, I've finally found, after two previous viewings of shorter versions, an experience of Mr. Arkadin (1955) I can appreciate.  Earlier versions had run around ninety minutes.  There seemed to be something drastically missing from the film--it lacked a sense of continuity, plus its burden of a bad soundtrack made it a strain to hear all the dialogue.  Welles's tendency to throw a lot of narrative material at the viewer in brief stretches of his movies also contributed to what I found to be an incomprehensible film the first two times I saw it.      The restoration, fifteen or so minutes longer and restoring scenes not in previous versions, also has a cleaned up soundtrack as well as an excellent picture.  Still, the plot i...

      Burn!      Gillo Pontecorvo's most famous film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), depicts, documentary-fashion though it's also fictional, the travails of the French-Algerian War: an imperialist power seeking to crush colonial resistance.  In Queimada ( Burn! )--from 1969--the subject is the same but decorated with a major movie star, Marlon Brando, playing a fictionalized version of William Walker (1824-1860), the American adventurer and mercenary who established himself as leader of Nicaragua and was later overthrown and executed in Honduras.      Brando's Sir William Walker is English, working on the fictional Caribbean sugar-producing island of Queimada, Portuguese for "Burned."  The name stems from a few centuries back when the Portuguese Empire controlled the place.  Running into resistance from the islanders, the Portuguese military burned the island, making it the kind of place empires destroy and then rebuild, k...

      Joe Don Baker Is Mitchell      Andrew V. McLaglen's wild cop drama, Mitchell (1975) jumps from the diving board set in place by the Dirty Harry Callahan films, but often puts its slob hero, played by lumpy Joe Don Baker, in an empty pool.  Deprived of his gun, he uses a rock to bash the helmeted head of a dirt buggy driver trying to run him down, then takes the buggy into a mad pursuit of the oily rich criminal Walter Deaney (John Saxon), also driving a dirt buggy.  Deaney's buggy, for no apparent reason, explodes and burns after taking a mid-air rotation and landing badly.  Mitchell is relentless, Mitchell isn't very smart, but he's knowledgeable about inflicting punishment.  When he kills, taking down five guys in one scene, he can be sure his precinct won't suspend him because apparently cops in the Mitchell Universe can do whatever the fuck they want.      Mitchell, pursued and boxed in by a vermilion Mustang...

      Vietnam War in the Louisiana Bayou      Walter Hill's Southern Comfort (1981) can be seen as an allegory of the American soldier's experience in Vietnam, although Hill has rejected that theory.  Still, a Louisiana National Guard squad on patrol in a training exercise, of which none of them know the purpose, seems an apt metaphor.  Coming six years after U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam, the film hints at the irony of soldiers on the home wet soil of a cypress swamp wandering lost, their fortune more dire by the hour.      After Squad Leader, the Vietnam War veteran, Sergeant Poole (Peter Coyote) gets shot in the head by a Cajun, the leadership falls on Corporal Casper (Les Lannom), a gung ho man with a mustache and more enthusiasm than sense.  Their troubles start when, taking a wrong turn, they're confronted with a river and some Cajuns' boats to cross it with.  Most of the nine soldiers want to use the boats,...

      Loin du Vietnam (1967)      Chris Marker supervised this collaborative documentary, Far from Vietnam .  Contributors include Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Joris Ivens, Marker, William Klein, and Claude Lelouch.  It's a French take on intervention into the affairs of a place formerly ruled by France, but now--in 1967--invaded by and bombed by the United States of America, with President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the role of imperialist aggressors and, honestly, war criminals responsible for millions of deaths.      That no nations oppose the U.S. militarily on its own territory means it can get away with the daily commission of crimes against humanity and frequent United Nations resolution violations, even as American politicians and news media personalities crow about their country's unparalleled greatness as it pretends to promote democracy worldwide.      Evi...

      From Beneath      Susan Hayward plays Cherokee Lansing (part Cherokee, incredibly), strong-willed daughter of proud Oklahoma cattleman Nelse Lansing (Harry Shannon), himself dead before ten minutes of Tulsa (1949) have passed.      While inspecting cattle with his daughter and main hand, Jim Redbird (Mexican actor Pedro Armendariz playing, of course, a Native American), Mr. Lansing finds dozens of his cows dead from drinking oil-polluted creek water.  A nearby oil well, owned by Bruce Tanner (Lloyd Gough), gushes, breaking up parts of the derrick's structure.  Lansing gets crushed to death after haranguing Tanner's employees about the oil killing his cows.  Cherokee Lansing vows vengeance.      First, she wants from Tanner $20,000 to replace the dead cows.  His lawyer gives her the runaround.  Hooking up with family friend Pinky Jimpson (Chill Wills, who also narrates the film), she's given, ...