[Originally published in Movietone News 10, January 1972]
Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs reminds us that inour rush to civilization, we too often deny the violent origins of our favorite myths and rituals—and pretend that the primal power of our lizard brains never was. Who wants to recall that Christian Communion is a sanitized version of the actual sacrifice—sometimes involving dismemberment and cannibalism—at the heart of innumerable pagan religions? In the time of Sophocles, it was considered beneficial to communally cathect archetypal fantasies. Now we believe that if we just aren’t reminded too often (via the movies, for instance) of the dark underside of human experience, the unpleasantness will all go away, and we’ll all be polite and peaceful together. Isn’t evil all out there,not stubbornly in residence within us? Or if within us, it’s just a matter of biochemical misfires. Retro filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah should chill out, instead of unreeling incendiary words and images.
Dustin Hoffman as David Sumner
InStraw Dogs, David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), in Cornwall to do mathematical research, ignores the possibility of forces and emotions which cannot be contained in neat theorems or controlled by the rational mind. The Cornwall locals question him about what he’s seen of the “troubles” in America—”Did you take part, sir?”—and he quips, “Just between commercials.” For him, the reality of disorder and violence is a made-for-TV movie safely sandwiched between the plasticized fantasy-worlds of Madison Avenue. The irrational is closer to the surface in David’s wife, Amy (Susan George), who deliberately changes the pluses to minuses in David’s neat little equations, trying to tell him that his mathematical framework fails to include certain realities. (For a screwball comedy take on Peckinpah’s psychodrama, check out Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, in which Cary Grant’s scientist, unmanned and paralyzed by living too much in the head, and Katharine Hepburn, a bundle of impulse, irrationality and energy, survive by finding a point of balance between creative chaos and rigid order.)
[Originally published in Movietone News 10, January 1972]
Recalled by Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy
The Conformist
• Every moment Dominique Sanda’s feline beauty appears in The Conformist or, more specifically: Dominique Sanda’s Sternbergian entrance under a bare, harsh, deifying light bulb; Dominique Sanda’s hands-in-pockets slouch down the hallway, a cigarette dangling from her lips; Dominique Sanda stripping down the top of her sweat suit and advancing on Trintignant…
• Dustin Hoffman and Susan George chewing gum at each other in Straw Dogs…
• McCabe’s drunken monologue of his love for Mrs. Miller: “She won’t be sweet without money… ”
• Jane Fonda taking over a bar, infiltrating the space of one male after another, during a single lengthy telephoto take in Klute…
• The frumpy wife’s aphrodisiac dance in Taking Off, followed in time by Lynn Carlin’s reenactment in the hotel room, with a load on…
• Jack Nicholson, in Carnal Knowledge,asked by Ann-Margret whether it wouldn’t be all right for her to shack up with him, thinking the matter over with desperate self-possession, even though he’s perched nude on the edge of a leather chair, interrupted on his course to the shower…
• The last shot of The Devils, the end of the world…
• Medea:Callas’ strangely aware eyes, wide open as Jason makes love to her, as though she foresees his desertion even then; she closes them quite consciously as if to shut out that vision for the moment….
• Susan George’s child-woman sexiness in Straw Dogs, so consummately good it takes a second look to realize what a superb performance hers is (the same applies to the film)…
• Forty or fifty people reading international newspapers, modeling clothes, and having a last elegant holiday in the hotel lobby, Death in Venice…
• Dirty Harry: that high-overhead shot of Callahan grinding his foot into Scorpio’s wounded leg in the middle of a football stadium (makes you wonder if those critics busy calling this film “Fascist” think football is too)…
• Jack Palance’s memory of a golden summer when he was one of The Horsemen…
• The instant when Buck Henry, singing drunk and nude, standing in the center of the poker table, meets ,the eyes of his runaway daughter—TakingOff…
• Ryan O’Neal sitting against the wall of a cantina, his own blood filling his hands, the certain knowledge that his and William Holden’s spree has come irreparably to grief in his eyes, muttering “God damn. God damn!”—TheWildRovers…
• The trees creaking in the wind: the murder in The Conformist…
• That quiet little slip in The Go-Between which unobtrusively indexes the boy’s personal irrelevance to Julie Christie and foreshadows his-whole future: Christie’s tenderly bandaged his knee—cut by her lover’s axe—and after he’s recounted every item of information about the lover, she turns and says, “Now, let’s see to that knee.”….
• Dustin Hoffman’s oddly breaking voice as he screams “Bas-tuurds! Bas-tuurds!” over and over after the shooting of the Major—the turning-point from sanity to madness, passivity to resolution, tentativeness to wholeness in Straw Dogs…
• The irises-in on moments of potentiality in The Wild Child,infinitely tender and as awesomely large as the whole art and history of motion pictures…
• Old Lodge Skins’ indifference to the fact that he has not died at the end of Little Big Man. Arthur Penn’s variation on the ending of the novel, and his film’s sole excuse for existence…
• “Ode to a Screw” in Taking Off…
• A chicken trying to hatch a Volkswagen throughout IntimateLighting…
• A termite mound in TheHellstromChroniclelooking eerily like the monolith in 2001:one of those most effective moments in the film when the director cunningly used a science-fiction echo to render his pseudo-documentary more chillingly familiar to viewers…
• McCabe and Mrs. Miller:McCabe’s first sight of Butler, the company killer, recounting a story to the boys at Sheehan’s place; Butler gives McCabe a cursory glance, says “I’ll be with you in a minute,” and goes on with his story…
• Buck Henry performing his anti-smoking exercise in the park and attracting a Black Power salute from a passing brother—TakingOff;the best-timed gag of the year…
• A rainy morning, a little before dawn, in a small Texas town—Two-Lane Blacktop…
• Another long telephoto take, this one of Donald Sutherland and his friends running along the beach in AlexinWonderlandconfessing their most recent masturbation; in the course of their giggling, klutzy jog, they regress about twenty years in age…
• Howard Cosell bringing you the Presidential assassination in San Marco, before the credits of Woody Allen’s Bananas…
• The moment when Jean-Louis Trintignant lifts his hat from the hotel bed and reveals Stefania Sandrelli’s tush under it—The Conformist…
• The shelter in the rain, Claire’s Knee…
• Mike Snell cracking up in Derbywhen the national anthem unexpectedly fails to play properly: one of the most complex and illuminating moments of truth upon truth upon truth in that singular film… –
• The lovers’ departure in Chikamatzu Monogatari:they have been framed by a static shot, the dark masses of buildings around them as they make their final deliberations; they set off down the street, the camera advances after them, and a whole stable black shape at the lefthand and top of the frame suddenly winks away: a fantastic realization of cosmic shift , by a master of mise-en-scène…
• Also, the literally breathtaking crane of the camera out over the brink of the hillside as the lovers pursue one another down its side; the movement is carried through in the next shot as the camera ducks down and in under the lean-to where the pursued lover attempts to hide….
• The cinema’s second-most-astonishing use of Also sprach Zarathustra:the apparition of the world’s most grossly wrinkled bum outside the flophouse at the beginning of Dynamite Chicken…
• In the midst of John Ford’s Monument Valley, Joe Don Baker shielding the eyes of the last of TheWildRoversfrom the sun by holding his hat over the man’s face: a direct homage on Blake Edwards’ part to Ford’s 3 Godfathers,when John Wayne did the same for Harry Carey Jr….
• William Holden reminiscing out loud about his friendship with Ryan O’Neal, TheWild Rovers,apparently conducting a normal conversation by a campfire until he says, “Man-just-don’t-know-shit!” and covers his dead friend’s face…
• Woody Allen attempting to be unobtrusive about buying a sex magazine—Bananas…
• The opening shot of The Horsemen: the camera plane circles over Afghanistan, taking in hundreds of miles as it pivots on a single trumpeter poised on the mountainside…
• The Beguiled:the little girl’s smile as she helps bury Clint Eastwood whom she has killed with poisoned mushrooms: she’s been initiated into sisterhood…
• Jane Fonda’s cosmopolitan performance for the old businessman in Klute…
• Let’s Scare Jessica to Death: the white plump flesh of the redheaded vampire-girl as she rises dripping out of the lake…
• TheNight of the Living Dead: the little girl’s hunger-driven face as she approaches her mother to hack her to death…
• Hermie buying the rubbers—and also an unwanted strawberry cone with sprinkles—in Summer of ’42…
• Popeye Doyle screaming straight into New York City traffic, knowing he has to get that frog on the elevated above him, and to hell with the rest of the world: Gene Hackman’s furious, exasperated, why-won’t-you-people-learn pounding on the steering wheel nails down the whole chase in The French Connectionand maybe the entire film—which is one ferocious chase all the way to the last enigmatic gunshot….
• The last moments of This Man Must Die,in which our revenge killer suddenly and absolutely convincingly metamorphoses into a doomed hero of tragic myth…
• An après-chaselull in TakingOffwhen Buck Henry and the mother of the runaway girl he spotted wordlessly consider having an affair; he gets a phone call and it’s all over…
• The dancehall sequence in TheConformistthat feels like one serpentine camera movement but isn’t really: especially the first disclosure of Manganiello’s presence at the table diagonally opposite, and Trintignant’s getting simultaneously embraced and bound by the conga line…
• That incredible opening shot in DirtyHarrywhen the camera zooms back from a yellow-suited girl in a glittering blue rooftop swimming pool, to show her and all of San Francisco under Scorpio’s gun; also the whole city seeming to turn on Clint Eastwood’s shoulders as he climbs up there a couple screen moments later…
• Robert Mitchum watching his son make out in GoingHome:a whole class of American male is indexed in that throwaway moment effortlessly, unpretentiously, and succinctly….
• McCabe discovered at the beginning of McCabe and Mrs. Miller by a lazy panning movement that picks him out of the rainy grey-green blur of Northwest fir trees and establishes him as the man to realize this one place and this one moment in time…
• Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey’s I-don’t-know-whether-1’ll-take-this-subway-or-not act in The French Connection…
• The look on Buck Henry’s face-sheer naked childish disillusionment-when he hears that his daughter’s hirsute boyfriend made $290,000 last year: in Taking Off…
• John Moulder Brown frantically trying to know what’s going on in there after Jane Asher and Karl Michael Vogler disappear into the bath chamber in Deep End…
• The gamut of expressions on Rip Torn’s face, in the middle of the night and of Coming Apartas Sally Kirkland does something to his posterior…
