124) The Prestige

The Prestige (2006)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johanssen, Rebecca Hall, Andy Serkis, David Bowie, Piper Perabo

The Prestige is a film that I feel has never quite received the acclaim it deserves. This is partly a result of the fact that Neil Burger's The Illusionist, a film exploring a similar area, came out at roughly the same time, and partly a result of it having been overshadowed by some of Christopher Nolan's other achievements. I think it's a cracker of a film though, so I've been wanting to give it another look for some time.

Alfred Bordon (Bale) stands accused of the murder of fellow acclaimed magician Robert Angier (Jackman). The Prestige traces the history of this feud, starting with the accident which resulted in the death of Angier's wife (Perabo), and following the fierce personal and professional rivalry which has led to this current situation.

At the very beginning of the film Michael Caine's character explains to a little girl, and to us, that every magic trick has three parts; the Pledge, in which you are presented with something ordinary; the Turn, in which the magician takes that ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary; and the Prestige, in which order is restored. The classic example being the sawing of a woman in half. The pledge is the woman. The turn is when she is sawed in half. The prestige is when she is put back together. We are given this information from the very get go because it informs the in which we understand the film. On the micro level, The Prestige is all about two magicians trying to learn each others tricks, trying to unlock the prestige. On a macro level the entire film is a magic trick, with the audience waiting for the prestige. Waiting to see how order will be restored, and how things will be explained. Nolan does not present The Prestige in chronological order, but rather jumps and forth in time, primarily through devices such as the reading of journals and letters, in such a way as to present us with important bits of information, key to unravelling the mystery. Of course, the solution is not what you expect it to be. The film has a great series of twists towards the end.

Unfortunately, as a second (or maybe third) time viewer the wow factor of the twist ending, and thus the mystery of the story, does not quite have the same impact. Much like with The Usual Suspects, there is a different type of enjoyment to be taken out of a second screening of The Prestige. Rather than seeing all the clues and trying to work out the solution, on the second viewing you have the solution and the enjoyment comes from spotting all of the clues that point to it. The twist ending in The Prestige is the best kind of twist, rather than coming out of left field it is actually completely obvious... providing you were looking for it. Much like any magic trick, once you know how it is done you can't work out how you ever didn't see it in the first place.

Christian Bale is very good playing a grumpy, incredibly determined artist (which when you think about it makes reasonable sense), Michael Caine is good as always and Scarlett Johansson struggles valiantly through an English accent, but the real treat is Hugh Jackman. It is not a case of his performance being better than the others, but rather his being the most surprising. The Prestige shows a darker side of Jackman than has been seen in anything else he's done. Wolverine was gruff, but he was still heroic. As Angier, Jackman portrays an incredible bitterness and hatred towards his nemesis which makes him quite frightening, while still possessing that Hugh Jackman showmanship which makes him a perfect fit for the Great Danton.

There is a nice cameo, or slightly more than a cameo, from David Bowie as real life scientist Nikola Tesla. Tesla was known for his experiments with electricity and having him there as a supporting character both grounds the story in history and gives it a bit of that faux-science which movies love to use as a short cut to explain tricky premises. By faux-science in movies, I'm talking about: "How did they travel through time in Back to the Future?" "They had a flux capacitor." "Oh, ok." or "How did they bring dinosaurs back to life in Jurassic Park?" "They used DNA." "Oh, ok."

The Prestige gets lost among some of the other directorial achievements of Christopher Nolan. It wasn't big and grand enough not to be overshadowed by his Batman films and more recently Inception, but at the same time it is not small and quirky enough to match Memento. Despite this, however, it is a really good film, one which would have put Nolan on many people's radars even if he hadn't been the man who rescued Batman.

123) The Other Guys

The Other Guys (2010)

Director: Adam McKay

Starring: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson, Dwayne Johnson

I met up with a good mate I hadn't seen for a few weeks to see a movie. There wasn't a great deal on that interested us so it came down to Polanski's The Ghost Writer and the new McKay/Ferrell collaboration The Other Guys. The selection was then left in the hands of the Hoyts schedule and The Other Guys presented much more favourable times.

Everyone at the NYPD lives in the shadows of detectives Highsmith (Jackson) and Danson (Johnson). They are the baddest most beloved crime fighting duo in New York City. A couple of desks over at the station sit Allen Gamble (Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Wahlberg). They are the other guys. Gamble doesn't particularly like taking risks so prefers to devote himself to his paperwork. Hoitz has all the ambition to be a hero, but his career has been stunted by an incident in which he accidentally shot baseballer Derek Jeter during the World Series, costing his city the title. When Highsmith and Danson are both killed in the line of duty New York is crying out for new heroes and before they know it, the seemingly insignificant case that Gamble has been working on, involving scaffolding permit violations, leads them all the way to multi-millionaire investor Daniel Ershon (Coogan) and becomes the highest profile case in the city.

I'll admit I have gone a bit cold on Will Ferrell over the last few years, as it appears most people have. Anchorman was brilliant, Talladega Nights was disappointing, Blades of Glory showed promise, Semi-Pro was the worst film I had seen in a number of years and as a result I didn't bother seeing Step Brothers. It didn't help Ferrell's cause that at the same time as his shtick was starting to feel a bit stale the Judd Apatow crew really took off with The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad and Knocked Up all kicking goals. The Other Guys is, however, a step in the right direction. The semi-improvisational comedy style is a bit hit and miss as it always is (the whole back story about Ferrell's character being a pimp in college I could have done without), but generally it's more up than down.

The film had a really interesting cast, which is really what peaked my interest. It was great to finally see Will Ferrell playing a different character. His character in The Other Guys is a slightly repressed nerd, much more like the character he played in Stranger than Fiction than the wailing, screaming man-child we are used to seeing him play. Whalberg has his moments playing a kind of pathetic version of his character Dignam from The Departed. The two aren't quite a natural match, there isn't a real spark there, but they bounce off each other alright. The supporting cast is where the action is though. Steve Coogan, Samuel L. Jackson, Dwayne "Don't call me The Rock, I'm an actor now" Johnson, Eva Mendes and, the highlight of the bunch, Michael Keaton, who it is great to see back on the big screen generally, and in comedy specifically.

McKay and Ferrell have fun playing with the very well established conventions of the buddy-cop movie, and get some good laughs out of it. The over the top hero-cops Highsmith and Danson are great, in particular the way they meet their demise is quite funny. In general, though, The Other Guys is not nearly as clever as Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz or even, for Australians, Tony Martin's often maligned Bad Eggs.

One thing which did leave my a bit confused was the final credit sequence for the film. While the credits where running there were animations on the screen which included all sorts of statistics about white collar/corporate crime, Bernie Madoff, embezzlement, etc. It seemed to suggest that the filmmakers believed that The Other Guys had made some sort of serious statement about white collar crime, but that is not at all the impression I had got while watching the film. The specific details of the crime that Coogan's character had committed hardly seemed to be highlighted in such a way as to promote moral outrage. If McKay and his team are of the belief that in The Other Guys they had achieved biting satire which made valuable social commentary, I think they might be slightly overestimating what they have produced. The film is reasonably funny, but hardly profound and you don't walk out of the cinema feeling more aware of a certain issue.

If you're a Will Ferrell fan you'll probably find that the constraints of the buddy-cop genre restrict him too much. If you aren't a Will Ferrell fan you'll probably feel there are still a few too many moments where he reverts to playing a wailing man-child. I sit somewhere in between the two. The Other Guys is not the best film Ferrell has made, but it is also far from the worst. It will make you laugh, but it's not hugely memorable.

122) The Blind Side

The Blind Side (2009)

Director: John Lee Hancock

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw, Jae Head, Lilly Collins, Ray McKinnon, Kathy Bates

My third double up for the year is John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side. With her strong sense of social justice, this has fast become Kate's favourite film, so it was only a matter of time before she wanted to show it to the kids at the youth group she runs, and I help out with, at Turramurra.

Again, I don't want to repeat myself from last time but I will say that second time around I was just as impressed with Sandra Bullock's performance. It really was the performance of her career and a well deserved Oscar win. My main concern now is that she will go straight back to doing another All About Steve or The Proposal equivalent, where she plays a character she is about 5-10 years too old to be playing (what I like to call Cameron Diaz territory). Having seen this great performance, and not having the faith in Bullock's ability to maintain excellence the way someone like Meryl Streep does, I kind of never want to see her in anything again so that she will always remain Leigh Anne Tuohy. But hey, she might prove me wrong and this might be the career turning point for her. Who knows.

While it was probably a bit overrated as a whole this movie is incredibly uplifting, it will restore your faith in humanity (and in Sandra Bullock).

121) Young Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Director: Mel Brooks

Starring: Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman

Before there were the Zucker brothers, Mel Brooks was the undisputed king of spoof comedy, with hits like Blazing Saddles, The Producers (the film which spawned a Broadway musical which in turn spawned another film) and the one I consider to be the cream of the crop, Young Frankenstein.

The grandson of infamous mad scientist Victor Frankenstein, Frederick Frankenstein (Wilder), a respected neurosurgeon, has spent his life trying to distance himself from his grandfather, even changing the pronunciation of his name to Frunkenshteen. When Victor's will is opened, Frederick inherits his grandfather's castle. Upon his arrival, he discovers a book entitled 'How I Did It' by Victor Frankenstein which convinces him that his grandfathers experiments may have had some merit. With the help of his attractive lab assistant Inga (Garr) and his not so attractive assistant Igor (Feldman), Frederick sets out to continue his grandfathers quest to create life.

Young Frankenstein is not just a spoof of the Mary Shelley's Frankenstein story, rather it is specifically a spoof of James Whale's 1930s horror classics, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. Brooks has perfectly recreated the look of these legendary horror films, even going so far as to rent the original set used for Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. The result is this fantastic contrast between the beauty and subtlety of the image and the incredible unsubtlety of the comedy. Brooks was never afraid to go low-brow. This is, after all, the man who in Blazing Saddles gave us cinemas most famous farting scene. He once claimed of his comedy, "My movies rise below vulgarity". So you probably shouldn't be surprised that Young Frankenstein gives you more of the same. One of the key running jokes of the film is the fact that the monster has, as Inga puts it, "an enormous schwanzstucker."

My earliest memory of this film was from when I was quite young, visiting Warner Brothers Movie World on the Gold Coast. They used it in a demonstration of how a Foley sound studio worked. They got a series of volunteers up to perform different sound effects, they would play the scene from the film and when a certain coloured light came on each person had to make their sound to fill out the scene. My dad had been chosen. I can't remember what his job was, but I remember the fact that he had to go on the green light. The only problem was he is red/green colour blind. I can't remember how it panned out, I was only young, but the first time I saw Young Frankenstein for real, I recognised the scene (specifically Gene Wilder's line "What knockers!").

There is a great little cameo from Gene Hackman, playing a blind man whose house the monster shows up at while on the run. It's a pretty bawdy, slap-stick scene but I like the idea that a Best Actor winner would not be above taking on a part like that just for a bit of a laugh.

I was underwhelmed by Blazing Saddles when I saw it for the first time last year. I thought The Producers was good without being great. But I genuinely love Young Frankenstein. I think it is easily Brooks' best film and even if the comedy isn't to your liking it stands up as a really good piece of filmmaking. I think, though, that what this movie really shows is that for spoofs to work the filmmaker must have a genuine affection for the material that they are lampooning. Brooks isn't paying out James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein because he thinks they were lame or crap, rather, he clearly loves the source material and this is shown in the incredible detail that goes into the mimicry. This is, I think, the key factor that has been missing from recent awful spoof attempts like Date Movie, Vampires Suck, etc, etc. Good spoof movies should be like making playful jokes at your friends rather than teasing those you dislike.

120) The Man Without a Past

Meis vailla menneisyytta (2002)

Director: Aki Kaurismaki

Starring: Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Juhani Niemela, Kaija Pakarinen, Sakari Kuosmanen


We are into the second half of Screens, Images, Ideas so have left the New Hollywood behind in favour of a much more incoherent grouping of films under the banner of 'European and French Canadian cinema from roughly the 1970s until now'. We got the ball rolling with Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past, the second installment in what is affectionately known as his loser trilogy.

A man (Peltola) is beaten nearly to death outside a train station in Helsinki. After flat lining in hospital he miraculously sits up, gets dressed and walks out, without being noticed. With no memory of who he is, he finds himself a place to live (a converted shipping container by the river) and with the help of Irma (Outinen), a woman from the Salvation Army, starts establishing a new life for himself.

Kaurismaki is a famous pessimist. His films are primarily about the Finnish working class, which has been under great economic hardship over the last two decades. As a result his films tend to have a bit of a downbeat tone. As I mentioned above, this film goes along with Drifting Clouds and Lights in the Dusk to form what is known as his loser trilogy, with all three films dealing with issues of unemployment, homelessness and loneliness.

While The Man Without a Past has this pessimistic tone, it is actually quite a funny movie. One of Kaurismaki's traits is an incredibly deadpan humour. There were a lot of exchanges of dialogue which in an American or British film would have been really punchy, sharp back-and-forth, but Kaurismaki prefers to have them delivered slow and monotone. You almost don't realise how funny the film is, because there is a moment of delay while you register that something was actually a joke. There is nothing contrived about the humour in the film, rather it is just the kind of humour that springs from everyday life.

This film was an interesting take on the amnesia trope. Usually, films about someone who has lost their memory are primarily concerned with regaining it. While the man, known simply as M, does eventually find out his identity, for the majority of the film it is not really his aim. The Man Without a Past is more about him starting afresh, and his difficulties in doing that, rather than his search to find his identity. If anything, his identity finds him, rather than him finding it.

The acting in the film seems almost wooden, though without the connotations of bad acting that using a word like wooden suggests. The emotions of the characters are very restrained and downplayed. Kaurismaki has an established company of actors he likes to work with. You can understand why he always ends up working with the same actors when you read about his working methods with them. In an interview he said "My relationship with my actors has never changed. I hold up my finger when I want them to say the line. They say it, and then I say, 'Thank you very much.' If they want more detailed direction, in that case there is always the door." While there is obviously a bit of hyperbole being used there (as Kaurismaki is very prone to doing when he talks about his methodologies), at the very least it suggests that he is probably not a fan of letting actors experiment and improvise their way through a scene. I can't imagine he would be a great director to act for, so having found a group of actors happy to work with him it doesn't surprise me that he's hung onto them.

The Man Without a Past was the first Aki Kaurismaki film I've seen (though we did watch snippets from a couple of others). He is said to be very much an acquired taste, and it is not hard to see why. Fans of his work would call him a comic director, but it is definitely tragic comedy rather than 'get your mates around for a laugh' comedy. The Man Without a Past is Kaurismaki's most decorated film having won awards all over the world, including the Jury Grand Prize at Cannes and a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. This film was interesting, it was well made, and it leaves you with a real feeling of contentment, but I don't think it'll be most people's cup of tea.

119) Top Secret!

Top Secret (1984)

Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Starring: Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Christopher Villiers, Eddie Tagoe, Jim Carter, Harry Ditson, Jeremy Kemp, Michael Gough, Omar Sharif

After seeing Flying High for the first time a few weeks ago, I was quite keen to revisit another Abrahams and Zucker brothers film, Top Secret!. I saw it maybe a decade ago, and thought it was quite good for what it was, but a lot of people continue to rave about it so I thought another look may be in order.

American rock 'n' roll sensation Nick Rivers (Kilmer) is sent to East Germany to perform in a cultural festival which the Nazis are using to distract the world as they prepare for their tilt at world domination. While in Germany, Rivers falls for Hillary Flammond (Gutteridge) who is a part of the French resistance, and whose father, scientist Dr. Paul Flammond, is being held prisoner by the Nazis who are forcing him to build them a super-weapon.

Abrahams and the Zucker brothers like to play on particular genres. In Flying High it was the disaster movie genre. In the case of Top Secret! they've kind of mashed together two genres; the World War 2 espionage/spy genre and the Elvis musical. As you would expect from these kings of the spoof, both are done very well, but the Elvis inspired musical numbers are particularly on the money.

Easily the most inspired scene in the film takes place in a Swedish bookshop, featuring a cameo from Peter Cushing (you might recognise him as Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars, but in doing so would out yourself as a nerd... as I have just done). The scene relies on the observation that English, when recorded and played backwards, sounds like Swedish, though probably not to a Swedish person. To play off that joke, they have recorded the entire scene backwards and put English subtitles over the dialogue. At first it just looks a bit strange, and it takes you a while to work out what they're doing, but as the scene goes on they start to play with it. Check it out.

I always think it's a bit strange that Val Kilmer is the lead in this film, though surely it is not as strange as Omar Sharif, of Laurence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago fame, being in the film, because I have never really thought of Kilmer as being a comic actor. But then I'm not really sure what Val Kilmer is supposed to be. An average dramatic actor/part time action hero? That being said, hands down the most impressive thing I've seen from him was a comic performance in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang though the comedy in that film is not as in your face, winking to the audience as in a Zucker brothers film. Top Secret! was his screen debut though, so he came with none of the baggage that comes with Val Kilmer when you watch him today, and he did all his own singing for the film so there is some talent there.

Top Secret! was Abraham and the Zucker brothers' follow up to the incredibly successful Flying High but it really doesn't live up to the standards set by the first film. While it still has its fair share of laugh-out-loud funny moments, the most noticeable difference between the two films is the density of the humour. Flying High was absolutely packed with gags. In every scene, every shot, there were multiple things going on that you had to be looking and listening for. This density is not there in Top Secret!. It is very much one joke at a time and therefore you don't have that feeling of being bombarded, in a good way, like the first film gives you. A lot of people have really fond memories of Top Secret!, it has quite a following, but I'd suggest that it shouldn't be the first port of call if you're looking for a Zucker style spoof comedy.

118) The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Director: Joel Coen

Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid, John Turturro


Another film that I'd been really keen to revisit was the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski. I'd been wanting to introduce Kate to it, but I got impatient. She was out today and I felt in a Dude kind of mood.

A couple of stand over men show up at the house of layabout Jeff Lebowski (Bridges), commonly known as 'The Dude', mistaking him for the millionaire of the same name (Huddleston) whose trophy wife Bunny (Reid) has large debts. One of them urinates on The Dude's rug, a rug which really tied the room together, which inspires him to go to the other Jeff Lebowski to seek compensation, without luck. However when Bunny is kidnapped the big Lebowski employs The Dude to act as ransom delivery man. The drop does not go well and The Dude finds himself stuck in the middle of a crazy network that includes a millionaire and his daughter (Moore), a pornography mogul, modern artists and German electronica musician nihilists, when all he really wants to do is bowl.

The films of the Coen brothers tend to fall within two genres; comedies, usually of the darker variety, and film noir inspired thrillers. The Big Lebowski straddles both of these genres to make it the ultimate Coens film. The story is based loosely on Raymond Chandler's famous hard-boiled crime novel The Big Sleep (which spawned a famous film version starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall). The similarity between the two is not strikingly obvious, but if you break it down you see that it is there. There is the southern Californian setting, the millionaire, the young woman getting in trouble due to her unsavoury contacts and the femme-fatale daughter, all standards of the Chandler world.

Jeff Bridges may have won an Oscar this year for his portrayal of Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, but he will never cease to be The Dude. Every now and then an actor lands an iconic role, a role which they will forever be associated with, regardless of whatever else they achieve in their career. Harrison Ford will always be Indiana Jones, Marlon Brando will always be Don Corleone, Arnold Schwarzenegger will always be the Terminator, and Jeff Bridges will always be The Dude. Rather than being your standard ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation, The Dude is no ordinary man. The problem is he is on the complete other side of ordinary to the situation he finds himself in. The Dude is a man in whom casualness runs deep. The Coens have written a great character here, giving him so much more depth than your run-of-the-mill movie stoner, and Jeff Bridges has brought the character to life.

But The Dude is not alone in this story. He is surrounded by what must be one of the cinema's great ensembles of odd-ball supporting characters. You have John Goodman as Walter Sobchak, the short tempered Vietnam veteran who takes his bowling seriously and his religious observances even more so (despite the fact that he only converted to Judaism for the sake of his now ex-wife). Their bowling team is rounded out by Steve Buscemi's Donny, who is constantly present, but only says about five complete sentences in the whole film, an in joke which plays on the fact that in the Coens' previous film, Fargo, Buscemi's character never shut up. You have Julianne Moore as the modern artist who swings from a harness in the nude to paint and who wants The Dude for his semen. You have the butt-kissing assistant Brandt played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. You have the porn star/German electronica musician/nihilist Karl Hungus. But special mention has to go to John Turturro for one of the great scene stealing performances as Jesus Quintana, the convicted paedophile turned purple-bodysuit-wearing bowling opponent, who in about two minutes of screen time leaves a big impression.

The Big Lebowski is hilarious, and incredibly quotable, but what makes it great is the fact that the Coens are filmmakers rather than comedians. Therefore the film is actually visually impressive in a way that comedies aren't usually.

Bridges and the Coens are teaming up again this summer, alas not on a much speculated about Lebowski sequel, but rather on the remake of True Grit (not so much a remake of the original film as a return to the novel upon which the original was based). The first trailer has just been released and I have pretty high hopes for this one.

The Big Lebowksi is the Coen brothers best film. That's a big call given they have made some very good films across a number of different genres, but I'm sticking by it. They may have made more decorated films, but no other film more perfectly sums up the Coens' style than this one. It is an absolute gem that is hard not to love.

117) Heat

Heat (1995)

Director: Michael Mann

Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Amy Brenneman, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Ashley Judd, Danny Trejo, Ted Levine, Diane Venora, Natalie Portman, Kevin Gage, William Fichtner, Hank Azaria


Last year when I started making a concerted effort to watch more films my primary focus was trying to see things I hadn't seen before. Trying to fill in gaps in my film experience, see those films I'd been meaning to see but hadn't got around to it. While I'm still very keen to see new films, at the moment I'm feeling like I want to revisit a lot of films. Things I've seen before, maybe a couple of years ago, and quite enjoyed but haven't got around to watching again because my priority was unseen films. So I came up with a bit of a mental shortlist of films I wanted to try and see again before the year was through, so I could include them in this blog, and Michael Mann's Heat was on it.

Neil McCauley (De Niro) is a master thief. Calm, controlled and precise he lives by the motto "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." Vincent Hanna (Pacino) is a master detective. Emotional and intuitive, he relies on his gut instincts. Hanna is called in to investigate the robbery of an armoured car which resulted in the murder of four security guards. He is soon on McCauley's tail. As Hanna gets closer and closer to him, McCauley and his team have to decide whether to split or to go through with their plans to pull a big money bank job. The temptation to make one last big score is too great and McCauley and his gang decide to hit the bank anyway. But Hanna and his police are ready for them.

What you have in Heat is two movies rolled into one. You have an excellent, high action heist movie, about a team of expert thieves and the police trying to catch them. You also have a very thoughtful, psychological drama about a master detective and a master thief with a great deal in common. This dual nature of the film is reflected in the picture's two most notable scenes. The first is the shootout as McCauley and his crew try and escape from their bank heist. This is a big, loud spectacle of a scene, which sprawls over a number of city blocks with both the police and the criminals using big automatic weapons. It is a scene all about action and noise. The other scene is an intimate conversation over a cup of coffee between Hanna and McCauley. This scene explores the mutual dependence of the thief and the detective. They are yin and yang. This is a quiet, still scene, all about character, but every bit as engaging as the shootout.

Heat contains an interesting focus on the women in the lives of the main characters. Hanna marriage with his third wife, Justine (Venora), is in trouble. McCauley compromises his 'nothing you can't walk out on' rule by falling for Eady (Brenneman). His partner Chris (Kilmer) also has a wife, Charlene (Judd). The women in the lives of these men feature very prominently in the story, not so much because they are central characters, but more so in terms of the influence they have. Heat contains a real struggle between men who are obsessed with their work, addicted to their lifestyle, and the desire of their women to domesticate them. I don't mean this in a 'ball and chain' kind of way, suggesting that the female characters restrict the men, rather that their presence forces them to engage with that side of their life. Hanna is a crummy husband and step-father because, as a homicide detective, he "live[s] among the remains of dead people." Even when he is present at home, he is not emotionally present. McCauley is adamant that he is alone but he isn't lonely, though he grows attached to Eady. This focus on the relationships of the central characters adds an extra level of depth to the heist narrative.

The big selling point for Heat was that it was the first time that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would share the screen. They were, of course, both in The Godfather Part II, but given their characters inhabited different time periods they never came face to face. In Heat not only do they get to share the screen, the narrative is set up in such a way that these two titans are actually going head to head. In actual fact, their two characters only really come face to face in two scenes in the film, the aforementioned coffee scene and the film's finale at LAX airport. These two scenes though are riveting viewing. However, I think it is fair to say that neither De Niro nor Pacino quite live up to the very lofty standards they have set for themselves. They are both good, but neither really at the top of their game. In terms of the head to head you'd have to say that De Niro gives the stronger performance of the two, there are a couple of scenes where Pacino just falls back on yelling when he could have done something a bit more interesting.

Despite being very highly regarded now, Heat did not receive a single Oscar or Golden Globe nomination. One award that it did get though was Val Kilmer's win at the MTV Movie Awards in the category of Most Desirable Male, undoubtedly one of the more prestigious awards going around.

As brilliant a film as it is, I can't help but feel that Heat is a film which tends to get slightly overrated. I think the 'event' of having two of the cinema's greatest actors sharing a screen for the first time tempts people to remember this film as being slightly better than it actually was. It is very, very good. It's a very detailed and very clever thriller and is easily Michael Mann's best film. It's a legitimate four/four-and-a-half starts kind of film. But I don't think it is one of the true classics.

116) The Searchers

The Searchers (1956)

Director: John Ford

Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Henry Brandon, Ward Bond, Hank Warden, Natalie Wood

In the readings relating to Mean Streets for Screens, Images, Ideas this week, there was a really interesting article by Stuart Byron about John Ford's western The Searchers and how it became the cult film of the New Hollywood. I'd seen it a couple of years ago, but reading the article peaked my interest so I decided to watch it again.

Ethan Edwards (Wayne), who has been off fighting in the Confederate Army, returns to his brothers ranch three years after the Civil War ended. One day Ethan joins a posse to go out and investigate the theft of the cattle from the neighbouring ranch. When they find the cattle slaughtered Ethan recognises it as a decoy. He returns to his brothers ranch to find the farmhouse torched by Comanche. His brother and nephew have been murdered, his sister-in-law raped and murdered, and his two nieces missing. Ethan vows to retrieve the girls and is joined by the families surrogate son, a one eighth Indian, Martin (Hunter) on his quest.

Westerns were traditionally built around reasonably uncomplicated binaries. You had good and bad, civilised and savage, and very little in the way of grey area. By the time Ford made The Searchers, the black and white nature of the Western was starting to be questioned. Ethan is a very openly racist character. He has a deep seeded hatred of the Comanche. This deep hatred leads to a pivotal transition in the story. Having been searching for a number of years, Ethan's intentions change. He knows that Debbie would now be of an age that she would have become a sexual partner to one of the Indian men, or in Ethan's words, she has become "the leavin's of a Comanche buck." His hatred of the Comanche leads to a change in his intention from trying to rescue her to trying to kill her. Marty's mission then becomes to protect Debbie from Ethan as much as it is to rescue her from the Comanche. Ethan's racism is no different to the basic racism which underpinned the vast majority of earlier Westerns, but in this case it is highlighted in such a way that it becomes a character flaw. Ethan becomes a tainted hero. Whereas a traditional Western would have had the good Ethan chasing the bad Indians, in the case of The Searchers we are encouraged to question our hero. This was a real eye opening performance from John Wayne, who up until this point, while being one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, was not taken overly seriously. Here Ford and Wayne played with the expectations that audiences had developed about the roles he played. He would do so again with great success in True Grit, which would win him his only Academy Award.

John Ford is an absolute institution of the American cinema, having directed over 140 feature films. Today, The Searchers is probably his most highly regarded film, but that was not always the case. Films like My Darling Clementine, How Green was my Valley and especially The Grapes of Wrath were seen as the high points in Ford's illustrious career, but the profile of The Searchers rose considerably in the 1970s. It actually broke into Sight and Sound's highly regarded, once every ten years, top ten films of all time list in 1982 at equal tenth and then moved up to fifth in 1992. More than just being highly regarded, The Searchers has probably become the most influential American film. An article in New York magazine in 1979 claimed "you could construct half the syllabus for a course on contemporary American cinema just from films that, consciously or not, have been influenced by The Searchers." In large part this revision of The Searchers is due to the regard that it was held in by the filmmakers of the New Hollywood. As Byron's article suggested, The Searchers really became the cult film of the New Hollywood with references and citations appearing in many prominent New Hollywood films. Some are only subtle nods to the film, others borrowed key plot structures. To note a few:

• In George Lucas's Star Wars, Luke Skywalker returns to his Uncle Owen's farm to find that it has been torched in a scene which is very similar to Ethan's return to his brother's farm.
• Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is driven to violence by his mission to rescue a girl who has become a sexual possession of those he sees as subhuman.
• In Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, Michael searches for his friend Nick, only to find that he does not wish to be rescued.
• In Steven Spielberg's Jaws, after discovering the body of Chrissie, Brody's assistant sits on the beach and digs in the sand with his knife, mimicking the actions of Ethan after he discovers Lucy's body.
• John Milius, who claims to have seen the film over 60 times, openly admitted "I steal from Ford and I don't care!... There has been a reference to The Searchers in all the movies I've directed." He even went so far as to name his son Ethan.

The western is not really a genre on the radar anymore. Every now and then someone makes a really good western which threatens to spark a western revival, but nothing seems to eventuate from it (this Christmas the Coen brothers will release their remake of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, which will no doubt peak some interest). It's a genre which has turned a lot of people off, mostly because we associate the western with the highly formulaic product the studios used to churn out which constantly got rolled out as midday movies when we were growing up. But it is a really rich genre which has brought us some brilliant films, and I'm developing quite a soft spot for it.

The Searchers is visually spectacular. No one shoots the American west and the iconic Monument Valley the way John Ford does. But what makes it such a brilliant film is the storyline. It really hooks you in, with the exception of the subplot about Marty and his hopeless relationship with Laurie Jorgensen (Miles), which is the reason the plot has been adapted and reused so much since then. Even if westerns are not your thing, this one is worth seeing. If you're a film buff you have to see at least one John Ford/John Wayne western, plus you'll start to make connections with the many, many films which have borrowed from it.

115) Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Director: Victor Fleming

Starring: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel

To start with an obvious statement, there are lots of movies out there. Far more than anyone, even the most dedicated movie nerd, could realistically expect to see in their lifetime. So there are always going to be holes in your film experience. That being said, some holes are more embarrassing than others. There are films that you are supposed to have seen, that you've been meaning to see, but you've just never got around to. Every movie lover has them. They're the films which draw the response "I can't believe you haven't seen..." While over the last couple of years I've done a good job of filling some of those gaps, the big embarrassing one remained. I had never seen Gone with the Wind. It's one of the true monuments of the cinema. If you adjust for inflation it is still the highest grossing film of all time. An absolute classic, and I hadn't seen it. I've had it on DVD for years, but a film with a running time of just under four hours is not the sort of thing you can just whack on any old time, but tonight was the night.

Gone with the Wind is the epic story of the tumultuous love between Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh) and Rhett Butler (Gable), set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Scarlett can have any man, except the one she wants, Ashley (Howard). Ashley is engaged to marry his cousin Melanie (de Havilland) when civil war breaks out and he joins the Confederate Army. He asks Scarlett to look after Melanie for him while he's away. Scarlett and Melanie relocate to Atlanta to work as nurses. The roguish Rhett is in and out of their lives periodically, and is quite taken with Scarlett. While a romance blossoms between the two of them Scarlett is always looking for Ashley out of the corner of her eye.

The first thing that struck me about this film is how strange it felt to watch a film which glorified the old south, the Confederate States, in relation to the unified America after the war. In particular it felt a bit off seeing a film which longed for the good old days of slavery. The opening text says that we are about to witness a tale about the last days of "knights and their maiden's fair, masters and their slaves". I can understand seeing a romantic element in knights and fair maidens, but to suggest there was something romantic about masters and slaves seemed a bit odd. But once you get passed that, the sheer scope of the film is amazing. For a film that was shot in a studio, which gives it a kind of surreal element, the size of some of the shots is simply incredible. The famous shot of the war wounded around Scarlett where it starts as mid shot of her and then zooms out and just keeps going out and out and out is fantastic, and really hits you with the reality of war in a film which up to that point had seemed quite excited about the concept. In terms of its size and scope Gone with the Wind is a very grand film. That's the best word I can think of to describe it.

With this film I found something that I often find occurs in excessively long movies, the narrative focus changes. In Gone with the Wind, for the first 2-2.5 hours the film is effectively about Scarlett's experience of the American Civil War and the recovery. We follow her to Atlanta, and then back to her beloved Tara, where she is forced to take charge of the estate in order to survive. In this first part of the film the war is front and centre and her relationship with Rhett is more secondary. It is obviously still a key feature but it is not the focus, he comes in and out of her life periodically through those years. In the second half of the movie however, the war is in the past, the south has recovered and the film becomes about Scarlett's life with Rhett. The tone of the film completely changes. I was completely engrossed by the first half of the film, I thought it was fantastic. Watching Scarlett with the greater context of her being on the losing side of a civil war was very interesting viewing. The second half lacked a bit of the magic for me. In a way it almost felt like a sequel to the first half of the film, what happened next to Scarlett and Rhett, but lacking the context which made the first half so enthralling.

What is also quite amazing about this film is the fact that it is centred around a character who is so unlikeable. Right from the very start Scarlett is a self-absorbed, arrogant, stuck up bitch. Towards the middle of the film, around the time of "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again", you actually start to feel for her. She seems to have become a self-sacrificial person. She is working in the fields and marshaling the troops to do likewise. But then as the war finishes and the film goes on she slips back into her old habits. She is obviously intentionally unlikeable, which is why everyone cheers when Rhett delivers his famous line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn", but that makes it a bold move to devote so much of this film to a character audiences won't like. Rhett Butler, on the other hand, is a fantastic character. The classic lovable rogue. Very cool, suave and charismatic. Undoubtedly one of the cinema's great characters, although I must say that I couldn't help but think Gomez Addams when I was looking at him. The character I don't understand is Ashley. He is the centre of the film's love triangle and the cause of all the problems, but he is an unbelievable bore of a character, a complete sop with not a tenth of the charm or charisma of Rhett.

In 1939 Victor Fleming made two movies; The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Not a bad double really. Two of America's greatest and best loved films in the one year. Both films made the top ten in the American Film Institute's list of the greatest American films of all time (Gone with the Wind at #6 and The Wizard of Oz at #10). I don't know that anyone can beat that for a double.

Gone with the Wind is a truly grand film, amazing in terms of its size and scope. It is up there with Casablanca in terms of being a compendium of classic quotes. It's extreme length is always going to be a turn off for people, but it is definitely worth the investment of time at least once in your life. It took me too long to get around to it, but I've seen it now and it didn't disappoint. That means the title for my biggest "I can't believe you haven't seen..." film now passes on to Lawrence of Arabia.

114) Mean Streets

Mean Streets (1973)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Starring: Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, David Proval, Richard Romanus, Amy Robinson


This week in Screens, Images, Ideas is our last week looking at the New Hollywood, so of course we had to finish with a Scorsese. In previous years the course has watched Taxi Driver, but this year we changed it up a bit and went back to where it all started with Mean Streets.

Charlie (Keitel) is a small-time hood growing up in New York's Little Italy. He works for his uncle, making collections and reclaiming debts. He's a good soul, probably too good to succeed in his line of work. A devout Catholic, Charlie struggles to reconcile his faith with his life. He's in love with Teresa (Robinson), though the relationship is kept quiet as his uncle disapproves of her due to her epilepsy. Charlie feels duty bound to protect her cousin, and his friend, the near psychotic trouble-maker Johnny Boy (De Niro). Johnny Boy has been running up debts all over town and disrespecting the wrong people.

Mean Streets was Scorsese's third feature film, but it was the film that really announced his arrival. It didn't make a noticeable splash at the box-office, but it is only in the last decade that Scorsese has really become a bankable director. But it did make critics and those in the industry notice him. Mean Streets was a very personal story for Scorsese, with it largely being inspired by his adolescence growing up in Little Italy. Charlie is largely seen to be an autobiographical character for Scorsese, in terms of his struggle to reconcile his devout Catholicism and the reality of his life in Little Italy. In the part of Little Italy that Scorsese grew up in, the people who got the most respect were the wise guys and the priests, so as he grew up he had to decide which he was going to be. As he was a short kid with asthma, he decided he probably wouldn't have made a great gangster and instead enrolled in Seminary school (thankfully he pulled out after a year or two and went to film school). It seems odd, because in the lives of most people you don't imagine there being a fork in the road where you have to choose between a life of organised crime and a life of organised religion, you expect them to be total polar opposites. But in Italian-American New York these two worlds co-existed, and that uncomfortable duality would go on to inform much of Scorsese's work. Two of the primary themes that run through Scorsese's oeuvre are organised crime (Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed) and spirituality (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun), with Mean Streets straddling both.

Originally the film was going to be titled 'Season of the Witch' but film critic Jay Cocks suggested Scorsese change it to Mean Streets, which comes from a Raymond Chandler quote:

"Down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man, and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

While the original Chandler quote refers to the hard-boiled detective of his crime fiction, I think it resonates nicely with the character of Charlie, with the film ostensibly being about his struggles to be a man of honour on the mean streets.

In my blog on Goodfellas I talked about how Scorsese provided the other side of the gangster equation to Coppola's Godfather films. It was Mean Streets that started this. It was released only one year after The Godfather, and while it played to a much smaller audience than Coppola's films, critics in particular were keen to make the comparison. While Coppola's gangsters had monarchies and compounds, wore suits and brushed shoulders with senators, Scorsese's hoods in Mean Streets are losers, small time thugs hanging out in bars and pool halls and hustling for $10 notes.

As well as being Scorsese's calling card, Mean Streets really launched the career of Robert De Niro. Mean Streets was the start of the Scorsese/De Niro partnership which would produce numerous great films over the following twenty years. Scorsese first spotted De Niro in a couple of Brian DePalma's films, Greetings and Hi, Mom!. De Niro delivers an absolutely electric performance in this film as the trouble-maker Johnny Boy. There is something so raw and uncontrolled about his character that you are just waiting for him to blow up. It is a really amazing performance, a real scene stealer, and it really kick started his career. It was apparently off the basis of his performance as Johnny Boy that Francis Ford Coppola cast him as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. This amazes me because Vito Corleone and Johnny Boy are such polar opposite characters. Johnny Boy is a bit unhinged and ready to go off whereas Vito Corleone is so calm, composed and restrained, while equally dangerous. Obviously Coppola recognised a talent rather than just a character and it paid off, with De Niro winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as the young Don (an amazing achievement when you consider he performed the entire role in the Sicilian language, a language that he does not speak).

Mean Streets has a really interesting soundtrack. It is quite a strange combination of 1960s rock 'n' roll (including Scorsese's standard quota of Rolling Stones tunes) and traditional Italian operas and classical music. I've already said that this was a personal film for Scorsese, and the soundtrack reflects just that. The soundtrack of Mean Streets is the soundtrack of Scorsese's youth. He said that when he thinks about that place and that time what he hears is the combination of the rock 'n' roll music that he and his friends listened to and the traditional Italian music of his parents.

Almost forty years after it's release we can look back on Mean Streets and read so much into it, seeing connections between it and his later films with De Niro, his later gangster films and his later religious explorations, and as a result the film takes on an extra level of significance. But in its own right, Mean Streets is very much the film of a young man still learning his craft. While it shows his incredible potential, Mean Streets is flawed film. It lacks a real flow and any sort of narrative drive, which tends to frustrate some viewers. It isn't as polished or refined as some of his later work, but it is an incredibly raw example of his talent, and that of De Niro. Very much worth watching, though it is frustratingly unavailable on Region 4 DVD so you will have to look overseas.

113) Up

Up (2009)

Director: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

Starring: Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson

We had our second last Reel Dialogue for the year this evening at Turramurra Uniting Church. This time the film we looked at Pixar's brilliant animated film Up.

78 year old widower Carl Fredrickson (Asner), to avoid being sent to a retirement home and separated from his house, which has become his connection to his late wife, uses thousands of helium balloons to transform the house into an airship. His destination is the mysterious Paradise Falls, a place he and his late wife Ellie had dreamed of journeying to since they were children inspired by adventurer Charles Muntz (Plummer). Once on his way Carl finds that he is not alone, with young Wilderness Explorer Russell (Nagai) accidentally stowing away. A storm sees them descend within sight of Paradise Falls so the pair have to walk the low floating house the remainder of the way. Their journey is interrupted by an encounters with a rare bird and an evil Muntz, who is still seeking to capture it.

Much like with Pixar's previous effort WALL-E, the first act is simply breathtaking, with the rest of the film struggling to achieve the same heights. In particular the first act of Up contains a beautiful, dialogue-free montage, only a minute or two long, which covers Carl and Ellie's entire life together. It covers their marriage, purchasing and renovating their home and their saving for their dream trip to Paradise Falls constantly being thwarted by life's little interruptions. But most significantly this montage includes the news that Carl and Ellie were unable to have children, as well as Ellie's passing. Unlike the infamous death of Bambi's mother, in this case death is not the result of an act of evil or even an accident, rather it is just a part of life. This montage is probably the most gut-wrenchingly emotional couple of minutes of film I've seen in a film, the fact that it is so early in an animated family film means that it hits you like a sledgehammer. Unlike the tear-jerking final scene in Toy Story 3, which felt a bit manipulative for mine, this montage is done with such amazing subtlety that it is just beautiful. For mine, this was a really significant moment in the history of digital animation. Early on, computer animation attracted criticism for the glassy, lifeless eyes of its characters. Eyes play such a key role in expression that it made digital characters difficult to emotionally engage with. This scene, done without dialogue, relies completely on the visual expressions of the characters to convey what is going on, and it does it just as well as any live action actor could. It is one of those scenes in a film which will stay with you forever.

I have an enormous respect for the creative team at Pixar's willingness to put the story first. In a period in which most blockbuster film, particularly children's and family movies, are dictated by their merchandising and cross-promotional potential, making a film whose main character is a crotchety old man, with an overweight, socially awkward, slightly simple child as his sidekick was a very bold move (though the talking dogs do provide something for the kids, but even they are well written). But while they may not have sold as many action figures and toys as something like Monsters Vs Aliens did, they've ended up with a far superior film. In a way that is not very common today, Pixar seems to be all about the film rather than all about the package, and they continue to kick arse at the box office.

As a pleasant coincidence would have it, today is actually Fathers Day, which made Up a very relevant film to be watching. The film has a lot to say about the role of the father and the father figure. Carl and Ellie, of course, were unable to have children. Russell has an absent father who seems to have little interest in being a part of his life. The relationship that develops between Carl and Russell, one of a surrogate father and a surrogate son, is really lovely and speaks of the importance of father figures and male role models as opposed to simply biological father, an important message on Fathers Day, a celebration which can often be seen to exclude a number of people.

For me it is too hard to call which is better between Up and WALL-E. They both sit at the top of the pile not just for Pixar but I'd say for animated film in general. I was really pleased to see this film get a Best Picture nomination at this years Academy Awards (only the second animated feature ever to do so) even if it was likely only as a result of the category being expanded to ten nominations. It was easily one of the best films of 2009, and while the Academy is still not quite at the point where it would feel comfortable giving Best Picture to an animated feature, I think you could have made as good a case for Up winning the award as any of the nominees.

112) Filmmaker

Filmmaker (1968)

Director: George Lucas

Starring: Francis Ford Coppola

When George Lucas was a film student, he won the National Student Film Festival with his short film THX-1138B: 4EB/Electronic Labyrinth (catchy title). The prize for winning was a scholarship to observe a production at Warner Brothers. That production was Francis Ford Coppola's Finian's Rainbow. Lucas and Coppola struck up an instant rapport, given they were the two youngest people on the set by a long way, so when Coppola was preparing to film his next project, The Rain People, he hired Lucas as a production assistant.

The Rain People was a different type of film project. Rather than filming on the studio lot, Coppola and his small cast and crew road tripped their way across America filming as they went. Lucas's primary role on set was to capture footage for a 'making of' documentary. That documentary ended up becoming Filmmaker.

This film has been mentioned a couple of times in various books I'd been reading for my research on Coppola and I'd been quite keen to see it. However, being that Filmmaker is only a short film, just over half an hour long, and was not overly marketable, it was never released in any formal capacity (hence the lack of poster). But in this wonderful age that we live in this obscure film still somehow made its way onto Youtube.

Just by watching Filmmaker you don't really get any insight into what The Rain People is about. Lucas's film is not about Coppola's film. Lucas's film is about Coppola himself. You get the distinct impression that for the young Lucas, the main reason to be on this trip was to observe Coppola. You can really see why for the young filmmakers of his generation, Coppola was seen as a bit of a standard barer. Even at this early stage of his career he is thinking big picture, he is thinking about the future of cinema. There is a really interesting scene in Filmmaker in which Lucas captures Coppola in a heated phone discussion with the Directors Guild, who are demanding that he employ an extra Assistant Director. Coppola starts to rant and rave about the future of cinema and how the system is going to crumble under its own weight and how his generation of filmmakers won't need Hollywood. It's really interesting to hear when you have that hindsight knowledge of where Coppola would take his career, starting his own production company in San Francisco and eventually launching his own film studio.

This would be a really interesting film to watch in conjunction with Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, their excellent documentary about Coppola's experiences in the Philippines making Apocalypse Now. While Lucas's film shows us a pre-Godfather Coppola, a young dreamer who none the less already shows many of the personality traits that would make him a big time mover and shaker in the following decade, Bahr and Hickenlooper's documentary shows Coppola at the absolute apex of his megalomania.

On a more trivial note, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola have two of the most famous beards in world cinema (you need Steven Spielberg's to complete the holy trinity of beards), but for the production of The Rain People though, both of them had to shave them off. Because the film was being produced on the road, and they were constantly needing the cooperation of different townspeople Coppola decided that his crew needed to look as reputable as possible, which meant beards off. There were no shots of a beardless Lucas, but there were a fair bit of clean-shaven Coppola and all I can say is that is a face that needs a beard.

As far as 'making of' documentaries go, Filmmaker is pretty rough. There are no formal interviews, and no real discussions about the film The Rain People itself. Rather, it is just behind the scenes footage, mainly observing Coppola and the way he operates. It is not the sort of highly processed 'making of' you'd expect to find as a DVD extra, which is nothing more than a bit of marketing for the film. But it is worth hunting down if you are interested in Coppola. It provides some unique insight into the way he thinks and the way he works.

111) Wanda

Wanda (1970)

Director: Barbara Loden

Starring: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins

This week in Screens, Images, Ideas we stepped into slightly unfamiliar territory for me with Barbara Loden's Wanda.

Wanda (Loden) is down and out. She hasn't got a job, her old boss refusing to rehire her because she works too slow, she has walked out on her husband and children, admitting in court that it's probably best the children stay with him, and is sleeping on her sisters couch. One night she walks into a bar after closing, failing to realise that the bar is being held up. She ends up leaving with the robber, Mr. Dennis (Higgins), and going on the road with him. While he tolerates her presence, he constantly belittles her, which she quietly accepts. As Mr. Dennis prepares for the next robbery, a more ambitious bank job, Wanda decides she wants to help him.

Despite having studied the New Hollywood period for a number of years, I haven't really crossed paths with Wanda in any detail. It's slightly understandable though. The film was the only feature film directed by Barbara Loden, the mistress turned wife of legendary director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront), and despite winning a couple of awards in Europe, it only opened in one theatre in New York and didn't make any noticeable impact at the box office.

Loden got the initial spark of inspiration from a newspaper article in which a woman who had been an accomplice to a failed armed robbery, was sentenced to twenty years in prison and upon hearing her sentence she thanked the judge. This intrigued Loden. What sort of life must she have led, what sort of mental state must she have been in, to be thankful that she was being locked away. While this was the germ for the idea, the character of Wanda was not strictly based on this woman, but rather Loden took a lot of inspiration from her own life.

The New Hollywood was a very male dominated era of Hollywood, both on and off screen, so a film written by, directed by and starring a woman is quite a unique article from that era. Unfortunately for Loden though, her film probably came at an unideal moment. It came just a few years too early to ride the wave of feminist film and gender theory that took off in the mid-1970s, but unfortunately came late enough that it copped harsh criticism from middle-American feminists. They argued that the screen needed strong female characters, heroines, and that Loden had seemingly squandered an opportunity by presenting a character who was such a victim, such a loser.

When Wanda came out in 1970, the natural point of comparison for a lot of viewers and critics was Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. Both films involved a woman who walks out on her life and takes up with a robber, though it should be noted there is a difference in motivation. Bonnie is clearly bored and sees Clyde as a means of adventure. Wanda is wandering aimlessly and just stumbles across Mr. Dennis by accident, going with him because she seemed to have nothing else to do. In interviews Loden went to great lengths to insist that she had in fact written the screenplay for Wanda a decade before Bonnie and Clyde was released, and it was in no way an influence on the story. She does go on to admit however, that she didn't like Bonnie and Clyde because it was too Hollywood. The people were too beautiful. The lifestyle was too glamorous. So if anything, she was trying to create in Wanda the anti-Bonnie and Clyde. In this regard she has succeeded, because there is absolutely nothing glamorous about the life Wanda leads, and even though Loden is quite a beautiful woman (she originally came to Hollywood as a model) she plays down her beauty in the film.

Loden didn't have a lot of money to play with on this one. It was very much a small, independent film, so a number of cost cutting measures were taken. The film has no score. Any music that appears in the film is diagetic (Here's a lesson for you: Diagetic sound refers to sounds whose source is present in a scene. So this could be dialogue, sound effects, or music coming from a radio or band on screen. Non-diagetic sound refers to sounds which is not implied to be present with the action, such as narration or mood music). The other main cost cutting exercise was the use of non-professional actors. Loden and Higgins are the only professional actors in the film. I'm not sold on the use of non-professionals. There were a number of characters in this film who I honestly could not tell if the character was supposed to have some sort of intellectual disability or whether it was just poor acting.

At times Wanda is quite a powerful film, but mostly it is just very sad. This one pushes The Road for the title of most depressing film I've seen this year. Wanda is lost in the world, lacking any direction, and you really struggle to see where she'll fit. She wanders without any real intention and that gives the film a very hopeless tone. Wanda is not for everyone. There is a very small niche who might get something out of it (if you are interested in the development of feminist film it is an interesting touchstone) but for most people I think it'd just be an excruciating couple of hours.