Parallax View

Kathryn Bigelow has been making tough, rich, evocative movies for decades, too few in our estimation, and too often dismissed for the visceral, aggressive qualities that make them so compelling. Now, after leaving an unfulfilling relationship with Hollywood and going the independent route, she brought her uncompromising vision to the screen to the screen with The Hurt Locker, shopped it around films festivals and distributors, and took home the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director: the first woman in the history of Oscar to do so. Join us as we celebrate this dark daughter of Hawks and Hitchcock: Kathryn Bigelow, one of the most provocative and visceral cinematic artists spinning stories on screen. Finally getting her recognition.

The Loveless Worlds of Kathryn Bigelow by Robert C. Cumbow
Black Arts by Kathleen Murphy
True Fiction: Kathryn Bigelow on The Hurt Locker – Interview by Sean Axmaker
The Way You Don’t Die: The Hurt Locker by Sean Axmaker

Related articles and reviews on other sites:
Bravo, Bigelow: Why Oscar Should Crown Kathryn Bigelow ‘Queen of Directors’ (Kathleen Murphy, MSN)
Hurt So Good (review of The Hurt Locker by Kathleen Murphy, MSN)
The Work of War, at a Fever Pitch (Manohla Dargis, New York Times)
How Oscar Found Ms. Right (Manohla Dargis, New York Times)
An Interview with Kathryn Bigelow (Robert Horton, Everett Herald)
Interview: Kathryn Bigelow (Scott Tobias,  The Onion)
Kathryn Bigelow (Steven Shaviro, The Pinocchio Theory)
Georges Bataille and the Visceral Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow (Jeff Karnicky, Enculturation)
Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow’s Metafiction (Laura Rascaroli, Enculturation)
Kathryn Bigelow on Charlie Rose (video via LinkDrop today, Bigelow’s interview is about 30 minutes in)

[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

Scribbling a few notes in 1975 after seeing Phil Kaufman’s The White Dawn, I wrote: “Culture conflict is a key element in Kaufman’s work. The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid deals with the incursion of a group of relative primitives into the bustling world of a growing industrial civilization. The tension created between the seemingly incongruous occurrence of a baseball game in a Western and the primitive, disorganized conduct of the game itself echoes the tension of the film as a whole: The organized constructs of society are taking shape, but not yet rigid; the violent, free-for-all way of life of the Wild West is dying, but not easily. The manic fantasy world of the legendary James-Younger gang of outlaws is brought dangerously close to our own world when someone says of the baseball game, ‘It’s the new national pastime,’ and Cole Younger replies, ‘Our only national pastime is shooting—and it always will be.’ Primitive violence and low humor are juxtaposed with the steam engine and bicycle world of pre-contemporary Main Street, U.S.A. The White Dawn, a quieter, more controlled film, deals with the incursion of representatives of ‘civilized society’ into a world of primitives. The remarkable range of responses among the film’s characters reflects something of the depth and complexity of national, cultural, and racial conflicts. Where the outlaws of Northfield staged a raid on a new way of life, whose coming meant their own obsolescence, the three castaways of The White Dawn found themselves confronting a new physical world: out of place rather than out of time. In the debacle that finally befalls them, The White Dawn takes an essentially cynical viewpoint: Against the optimistic observation that most human beings are adaptable, and will in time adjust to cultural differences, opting for compromise or harmonious coexistence, is set the stark portrayal of the strength of the bigoted few who, out of fear or simple stubbornness, will ultimately prevail: people of whatever society are ultimately led by the worst among them.”

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

The China Syndrome didn’t have to be about nuclear power. A serviceable suspense thriller about a few people’s public responsibility—or lack thereof—could be built on any number of contemporary issues. Nuclear power works so spectacularly well here, however, because of its enormity of risk. Proponents of nuclear power like to dramatize its safety by comparing it with other forms of energy, in which far fewer precautions are taken and to which—so far—more people have succumbed than to nuclear accidents. But that’s like comparing the airplane with the car: everyone knows flying is safer than driving, but if an accident does occur the extent and the likelihood of damage and death are much greater in the air than on the highway. Much of The China Syndrome is built upon the rhetoric of pro-nuclear assertions of safety, which have made the term “safe” so ambiguous as to be meaningless. If an accident actually occurs, it doesn’t matter how great the odds were against it. The film suggests that those oft-repeated declarations of nuclear safety rest not upon the actual fact of safety but upon having said and heard the declarations so many times. Even the plant operators feel safe, and utter the same platitudes as the corporate executives and their public spokesmen, as if saying it often enough makes it so.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

The title song to Moonraker, sung by Shirley Bassey, sets the tone for the latest James Bond film: gentle, inoffensive, almost sweet. This is not the audience-affronting, brassy Bassey of Goldfinger or Diamonds Are Forever; and of John Barry’s score, even the recycled, tried-and-true music from previous Bond films fails to please. The brash, insistent guitar of Monty Norman’s original “James Bond Theme” has been traded down for gentle violin pizzicati, the tempo tripping rather than surging, more cute than clout. Like a turtle drawing in its head, the James Bond format has become systematically less and less daring with the passing years. Not only the actors but even their characters seem progressively aware of participating in a routine: Bond (Roger Moore) isn’t surprised when Drax (Michael Lonsdale), with no provocation, immediately sets about trying to kill him; and Drax himself makes no bones about wanting Bond dead. There’s no detective work, no effort to sidetrack or deceive the investigating agent. What immediately gives Drax away—to Bond and us—as the archvillain is his lavish wealth. It’s become an accepted premise of the Bond film that those who have enough money to buy anything they want will inevitably build private fortresses, equip private armies, and spend their lucre on a quest for world domination.

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[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

Emlyn Williams’s play The Corn Is Green is nothing if not aptly titled. Williams has always been a minor writer, and when writing about his homeland, Wales, which is also my homeland, he has been particularly unimpressive. He writes for tourists—coy jokes, local colour, stereotypes, and carefully transposed clichés from melodrama. People outside Wales, knowing little or nothing about the place, are inevitably caught by the curiosity value of it all, not realising that what they are really responding to is the familiarity of all this Celtic strangeness. Williams’s clichés are commonplace ones—it’s just that the setting he finds for them seems strange. Viewing a production of The Corn Is Green, the uninformed will ask, Are the Welsh really like that? Answering yes, they can then add: How quaint! And how frightfully sweet! What the play chiefly offers on top of this topographical spice is a thundering leading role for any actress d’un certain age. Miss Moffat, the schoolmarm who discovers a genius amidst the unlettered and uncouth populace of a mining community, is a lady to outgrabe the meanest mome-roth who ever breathed, and Bette Davis did nobly by her in the 1945 movie. No less of a natural for the role is Katharine Hepburn, and I’ll bet she was the prime mover in getting this present made-for-TV movie version of the old warhorse onto the assembly line. Thank God, they roped in George Cukor to direct her. The whole of the enterprise is in the work of these two: had either failed, then surely the whole would have crumbled.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

The Dark looks for all the world as if it had started life as a detective murder-mystery and was recut and redubbed to cash in on the science fiction vogue. The film’s continuity stresses the methodical work of the police in tracking down a killer, even after we’ve been told both visually and verbally that it’s really an alien creature out there. If The Dark were more sure of itself, it might seem a reworking of the Fifties horror movie convention in which we squirmed and tried to warn the characters in the film that they were onto something far bigger and more dangerous than they thought. But as it is, in reminding us of the variety of unknown things we might have to deal with, the film is excusing not its farfetchedness but its ineptness.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

You don’t have to care or even know much about football to enjoy North Dallas Forty. Ted Kotcheff doesn’t seem to know much about football either, but that didn’t stop him from making a film about it. Well, no, not really. North Dallas Forty is barely about football at all, in the sense that sports movies are ordinarily about their sporting subject. It begins on the morning after one game and ends not long after the next contest, the only one we see—and we see it for only the last two minutes of playing time. Based on an awfully good novel by ex–Dallas Cowboy Peter Gent (which I’m grateful to the filmmakers for leading me to read), the movie specifically homes in on the world of pro football as exemplified by the North Dallas Bulls (in the book, the real thing, the Dallas Cowboys). As computer-programmed by the North Dallas coaching and management arms, football becomes a kind of corporate warfare wherein the players are just so much materiel and the game is a business, the business a game.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

A young girl with a boy’s name is about to have a birthday party that is, to her, emblematic of the beginnings of womanhood, while two old friends are planning their gift to her, a bicycle. Not only is it not the appropriate gift for a girl about to become a lady but, what’s worse, it’s a boy’s bike. This little storm builds, and at moments threatens heartbreaking consequences; but, as in Shakespearean comedy, impending disaster is headed off by the lightest of devices and the day is won by the creator’s gentle understanding of his characters. Jon Purdy evinces a remarkable grasp of personality in this short film, creating at least four characters more human, believable, and fully realized than the personae of many a film five times as long. Though Sammie is the central figure, there is never any side-taking, and no one is completely right or wrong. We fear as much for the impending disappointment of Sammie with her present as we do for the disappointment we expect Martin and Phinney to feel if Sammie doesn’t like the bike they have lovingly reconditioned for her.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

Arthur Hiller tends to hedge his “serious” film bets by covering them with near-simultaneous releases of comedies. The In-Laws covers Nightwing in much the same way that The Out-of-Towners covered Love Story in 1970. And now, as then, the comedy is the better effort. The strength of The In-Laws lies in Andrew Bergman’s consistently funny dialogue, and in its smooth delivery by Alan Arkin and Peter Falk. The film opens, intriguingly, with the well-planned and audacious robbery of a Treasury Department armored van, in a spectacularly slick operation that caps itself when the crooks, having torched their way into the truck, start dumping pouches of bills and one of them mutters, “Shit, there’s nothing but money in here!” They’re actually after the engraver’s plates, which they soon find, setting off a bizarre misadventure in which mild-mannered dentist Sheldon Kornpett (Arkin) becomes inexplicably and inextricably mixed up. He meets the father (Falk) of his son-in-law-to-be, who tells hilarious dinner-table stories about the horrors of life in the Guatemalan bush country, where tsetse flies the size of eagles carry off small children; this fellow also mumbles something about working for the government, hoodwinking Kornpett into accompanying him on an ostensible mission against fiscal guerrillas hiding out on a Caribbean isle called Tijada. Head of the plot to destroy the world’s currency system is Tijada’s dictator, a General Garcia (Richard Libertini), who has a Z-shaped scar on his face, does Señor Wences imitations with a face painted on his hand, and boasts the world’s foremost gallery of Tijuana velvet paintings.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

Terry Curtis Fox, writing in Film Comment, seems to have been the only one to point out the rather obvious fact that The Deer Hunter isn’t really about the Vietnam War. Director Michael Cimino is much more interested in how change comes to the safe, closed world that protects and justifies both the commonest and the most eccentric behavior of its inhabitants. Indeed, how these people face change, and whether or not it really succeeds in taking over their world, are questions the film asks much more readily than the obvious moral and psychological questions about the Vietnam War that shallow reviewers have attributed to the film. The closed community, with whose solidarity and survival Cimino is concerned, is built on the foundation of ethnic pride. In this respect the film is reminiscent of The Godfather in its epic length and pace, and its focus on an ethnic subculture. It is Cimino’s debt to Coppola’s debt to Ford that the structural burden of this parable of a closed society is borne by the recurrence of rituals that lend a sense of continuity to the story as well as to the lives of its characters: drinks at the tavern, the hunting trip, the wedding and reception, the funeral, and that most disturbing ritual of all, Russian roulette.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

Quintet is one of those things that Robert Altman makes from time to time: an unoriginal, lumberingly obvious, altogether hokey script coupled with a visual and aural atmosphere so overpowering that one wishes to forgive the film its lack of narrative integrity out of respect for what it does to the perception and the nerves. Indeed, a lesser director than Altman would be so forgiven; but remembering the more complete and narratively justified worlds of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images, Nashville and 3 Women, one is harsher, less willing to settle for a half-realized world this time out. The film’s premise is arresting: the ice-world of McCabe and Mrs. Miller has become a whole future society, and tramping heavily coated through the snow is offered as a metaphor for playing the game of life. Cinematographer Jean Boffety’s lenses give every scene a vignette of foggy soft-focus, making the chill tangible, and stressing the fact that this is another Altman dreamfilm. Unlike 3 Women, however, this dream has been consigned to too many writers for fleshing-out, and Quintet emerges as a visually fascinating film with no more real substance than a snowball, its screenplay a botched mixture of self-congratulatory weirdness, flaccid imitation, labored moralism, and just an occasional moment of really disturbing brilliance.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

It’s fairly hard—and also somewhat presumptuous and pointless—to try and get a fix on the directing career of the prolific writer Michael Crichton after only three films. Westworld would seem as different from Coma as Coma is from The Great Train Robbery (called The First Great Train Robbery in Britain, where it was made), which is a jolly period caper romp set in 1855. If all three films can be boiled down to a common core, it’s simply that Crichton believes people are better than machines, and have to be, because if they’re not, then machines are what they will themselves become.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

What’s being called Diary of Forbidden Dreams or simply Forbidden Dreams in its current run is actually Roman Polanski’s 1972 opus What?, being released in the U.S. for the first time to cash in on the director’s recent notoriety. Like Dance of the Vampires, which he made five years earlier and which also suffered a ridiculously obvious retitling for its American release, What? looks like a film on which the director emphatically did not have final cut. The English-language version, at least—dubbed by predominantly British voices and edited by people with British names—looks like less than what Polanski must have intended. Still, judging from the evidence (which is all one can do), it’s hard to believe there was much good in the film to begin with.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]

The Muppet Movie is dedicated “to the memory and magic of Edgar Bergen,” who died shortly after doing his cameo role in the film. In that scene, Bergen and Charlie McCarthy are seen in the audience as fans attending a puppet show at a county fair—a puppet show within a puppet show within a puppet show, as well as an all-important nod to the immense influence of Bergen on the field of ventriloquism and puppetry. That kind of layered telescoping is typical of the film, which opens as the Muppets arrive at World Wide Studios to attend a screening of their new film. In a hall-of-mirrors effect (neatly reflected in a shot of hundreds of Kermits singing before a dressing-room mirror late in the film), what really happens is that we watch a movie in which the Muppets watch a movie about how the Muppets came to Hollywood to make the movie that they—and we—are watching. It’s not an original conceit but it is splendidly sustained, and frequently mind-boggling. When Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, and Camille Chicken arrive at the aforementioned county fair, we see a couple shots in which real chickens are prominent, and we fear momentarily that Camille may be in danger. As it turns out, she never is. In the same way, Doc Hopper (Charles Durning) is pursuing Kermit only to persuade the frog to be his publicist, not to cut off our hero’s legs for his chain of frog-legs restaurants. Kermit’s resistance to Hopper’s overtures is not a matter of life and death, but of principle: for no amount of money will he aid Hopper and betray his brother frogs. Thus even the darker entanglements of the film are lightweight. Kermit’s impassioned speech about frogs on tiny crutches calls to mind the famous Gahan Wilson cartoon of a legless frog begging in front of a restaurant advertising frog’s legs.

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Author, critic, film authority and festival programmer Eddie Muller was branded “The Czar of Noir” by James Ellroy for his knowledge of and passion for the subject. Since publishing Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir and programming a film noir festival in Los Angeles in 1998, Muller has become not simply the most prominent film noir authority in the U.S., he’s become an ambassador for film noir as the organizer, programmer and Master of Ceremonies of the Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco (and in the smaller traveling Noir City offshoot) and as the president of the Film Noir Foundation, the non-profit organization that puts on Noir City and uses the proceeds to fund film restoration. The Eighth Annual Noir City (with 24 films in 12 programs over 10 days) unspooled at the Castro in San Francisco in January 2010 and the Seattle incarnation (14 films over 7 days) opened on Friday, February 19. (The Hollywood incarnation at the historic Egyptian Theater, where Muller programmed his first film noir festival, is scheduled for April.) I spoke with Muller by phone between the San Francisco and Seattle series and we talked movies, noir icons, film preservation and the thrill of seeing film noir on the big screen. (My profile and preview of the series is at The Stranger here.)

Noir City 2010

This is the eighth year of Noir City, and the fourth road show edition of Noir City in Seattle. How have you been able to develop it into such a big annual event?

First off, it’s the eighth Noir City Festival we’ve done in San Francisco but I’ve actually been doing them, oh my God, this will be my eleventh year in L.A. at the American Cinemateque, which is where I actually started doing it. But those early ones at the Egyptian weren’t Noir City events, that’s a San Francisco thing, there’s where it was started. And it really was like the perfect storm, in a way. It’s a combination of showing the right kind of films in the perfect venue in San Francisco at the exact right time of year. Beyond that, I guess that somehow it works that people like to have a personality or a face attached to it that they recognize, so that has been helpful, it turns out, that I’m so associated with this festival and that I’m a San Franciscan, that certainly has helped in San Francisco. So that’s really it. There’s nothing else competing in San Francisco at that time of year, is winter, it makes sense for film noir, the Castro is the perfect place to show these films. People have turned it into a real happening and that’s really—besides the restoration work and all kind of stuff—it is fascinating to me that we have show, somehow, that you can draw a thousand people on a weeknight to watch sixty-year-old black-and-white films in a theater. It is pretty remarkable.

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