Welcome to the "American Cinema" Anniversary Blog-a-Thon!

As announced a month or so ago, this is a blog-a-thon to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema, one of my personal favorite books on film and one of surpassing influence. Starting this week (and hopefully beyond), you'll be seeing entries on directors since 1968 from all around the blogosphere. If you want to contribute something, feel free to email me at TGTEleven@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post. I'll add pieces by category below as they come in.

Links without authors attached are by me. Names without links are my personal entries that I plan to write.

About Sarris and The American Cinema
Discovering The American Cinema by itsamadmadblog2's Joseph B.

The Pantheon
Robert Altman
Paul Thomas Anderson by Acidemic-Film's Erich Kuersten
John Cassavetes
Frederick Wiseman

The Far Side of Paradise
Woody Allen
Hal Ashby
Francis Ford Coppola
Jonathan Demme by Burning Emulsion's Phil Ward
Spike Lee
Michael Mann by Radiator Heaven's J.D.
Steven Spielberg

Expressive Esoterica
John Carpenter
Alex Cox
David Cronenberg by The Sickness' Cinema's El Gigante
Elaine May
Sam Raimi
Paul Verhoeven

Fringe Benefits
Lars Von Trier by Project Film School's Gina Telaroli
John Woo

Less Than Meets the Eye
Ron Howard
Wolfgang Petersen
Ridley Scott

Lightly Likable
Mel Brooks
Joel and Ethan Coen by MovieZeal's Evan Derrick

Strained Seriousness
M. Night Shyamalan
Oliver Stone

Oddities, One-Shots, and Newcomers
Lucky McKee by Coffee coffee and more coffee's Peter Nellhaus
Richard Rush

So Far Uncategorized
Sam Peckinpah by The Agitation of the Mind's Neil Fulwood

Strained Seriousness - M. Night Shyamalan (1970- )

FILMS: 1992—Praying with Anger. 1998—Wide Awake. 1999—The Sixth Sense. 2000—Unbreakable. 2002—Signs. 2004-The Village. 2006—Lady in the Water. 2008—The Happening.

The Shyamalan universe, with writer/director/producer/actor Shyamalan at the center, is rapidly contracting with each passing film. Two low-key, earnest efforts preceded his commercial breakthrough, The Sixth Sense, but even then aims of cultural and spiritual redemption appeared that far exceeded his technical and artistic grasps. Those stories of a disaffected Indian teen and a spiritually jaded young boy were marred by, among other things, narrative shortcutting and simple inexperience. What made Sense such a success was an able blending of pop mysticism, calculated moodiness, and advantageous casting at the service of a genuinely affecting conceit. One would be hard-pressed to claim that each film’s “twist ending” is not its raison d'être, no matter what other virtues it may have; the difference with Sense is the wholeness it gains from Shyamalan’s off-balance, ambient spookiness and the still revelatory naturalism of Haley Joel Osment. Compared to this film, M. Night’s two follow-ups contain equally taut handling of continually more schematic narratives, and Sense remains his only film that rewards multiple viewings because of its ending.

A Shyamalan film refers to nothing outside itself yet strives higher. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs start from narrative foundations of collective pulp memory: ghost story, comic book, and alien invasion, respectively. To his major credit, Shyamalan then elides most of the traditional genre thrills, leaving us only glimpses of vengeful spirits, superheroics, or UFO landings. The fact that audiences responded so well to such resolutely melancholy, unexciting genre fare proved that Shyamalan’s was a distinctly new pleasure in the multiplex landscape at the turn of the millennium. Underpinned by vaguely religious themes ranging from transcendence to sacrifice to Manichean duality, Shyamalan’s first three successes (even the explicitly faith-centric Signs) balance moderate artistic aspirations and overriding commercial considerations. His stab at social relevance, The Village, despite effective work from Bryce Dallas Howard and cinematographer Roger Deakins, thwarted an interesting utopian plot with unnecessary contrivances and the almighty twist, never mind the absurd studio advertising. This relative failure led to the unfortunate fiasco-cocoon of Lady in the Water, an amalgam of Shyamalan’s most solipsistic auteurist quirks: his biggest on-screen role since Praying with Anger, the barest of generic frameworks (this time a "bedtime story”), and the conveniently rushed acceptance of the fantastic by the average person. What began as a successful genre entertainment/spirituality hybrid, with only touches of over-ambition, has reduced itself to egotistical, Shyamalan-as-savior shtick. The swallowing of his own hype grew steadily more evident post-Signs, and audiences and critics seem to have caught on. The three successes, however, still carry considerable cachet, and whether Shyamalan can parlay that residual good will with another crackerjack plot remains to be seen.

Le Beau Serge (1958, Claude Chabrol)

Equal parts overbearing Catholic allegory and interesting, visually unadorned on-location examination of the inhabitants of French village Sardent, Claude Chabrol’s debut Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge), considered one of the opening salvos of the French New Wave, starts out strong and richly textured but eventually succumbs to an overly schematic and redemptive conclusion. Jean-Claude Brialy portrays Francois, a theology student returning to his native town after years away to recover from a bout of tuberculosis. It isn’t exactly how he left it, especially his childhood friend Serge (Gérard Blain), now a drunk with a troubled past and marriage. With the town pastor having resigned to let the village spiritually crumble, Francois takes it upon himself to redeem his friend and oppose the corrosive and entangled influences of the other villagers. The bourgeois town hides an underbelly of mortal sins and squandered promise.

The film has an obvious narrative trajectory towards redemption, even if it is complicated by similarly religious stirrings of guilt and transference, modes that would play more decisive influences on Chabrol’s subsequent thrillers. Themes of incest, rape, and congenital deformity bring a sordid reality to bear on the film’s otherwise Catholic overtones, diluting the protagonist’s faith in human nature and transformation. Nineteen-year-old Bernadette Lafont played a two years younger sexpot, reflecting the distasteful possibilities that awaited Serge’s stillborn son and upcoming child, just as Serge and Francois are the same train running on separate, parallel tracks. This doubling, as well as some brutal violence between the former friends and a thorough investigation of the dark side of French village life, reveals Chabrol’s literary and cinematic debts to Hitchcock and such sturdy native genre directors as Clouzot and Duvivier.

What also separates this debut from the likes of Le Boucher or Les Biches ten years later is also what animates the other first films of Nouvelle Vague directors: a nod towards neorealism by respecting and utilizing personal, lived-in space and performers. Indeed, how less dynamic would The 400 Blows or Breathless be without their genuine locations? Serge’s bravura opening sequence of Francois’s arrival allows the viewer to effortless gain their bearings and to situate himself in the naturalistic milieu. Even if the narrative becomes overtly symbolic and a few of the performances are mannered, Chabrol stays true to the location’s obscuring simplicity and its constricting impact on the inhabitants’ worldviews.

Yet for all the efficient if superfluous camera movements, Le Beau Serge is resolutely a young novice’s film; wildly inappropriate music overtakes perfectly subtle moments, and the ending undeservedly concludes on a hopeful note, despite the undeniably nuanced and problematic interactions throughout the film, for the sake of bludgeoning thematic significance. Perhaps knowing what would come later forces me to underrate the work, for Chabrol would certainly develop as a screenwriter and filmmaker even if the technical skills were there. As it is, Serge remains a merely good film with great timing.

IMDb page

Announcing the "American Cinema" Anniversary Blog-a-Thon, starting April 14

About Andrew Sarris

About The American Cinema

The gist of the blog-a-thon

Known as the bible of American auteurism, Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 turns 40 this year. A compendium of critical commentary and categorization of cinema (sorry!), this enormously influential and eminently readable text tackled the history of American film as a history of dominant personalities that tend to take the production role of director.

An expansion of his article from Film Culture 1963, the explicitly polemical The American Cinema evaluates, analyzes, and ranks the major and the minor directors of the past according to the ever-elusive personal expression of mise-en-scène, borrowed, like the term auteur, from the French writers of Cahiers du cinéma. In his terrific run through of Sarris' career from Film Comment, Kent Jones encapsulates the "daring" of shifting these ideas to the US:

To embrace American movies and moviemakers in Paris was one thing. To embrace those same movies and moviemakers in the country that had made and marginalized them in the first place was a far riskier proposition. This was a systematic destruction and reconstruction of the standard view of American cinema and, by extension, all of cinema, an insistence that cinematic beauty did not come from without (the right subject, actors, set designer, cinematographer, etc.) but from within, and that it was a matter of simple logic that it was the director rather than the writer or the performers from whom the final result was generated.

The power and usefulness of Sarris' ideas, bolstered by his public persona as a major American critic, inaugurated a director-centric aesthetic movement in the heads of moveigoers that, in some ways, we are still existing in. It seems more than reasonable now to be "obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist," to "look at a film as a whole, a director as a whole," as Sarris states that an auteur critic will, in "Toward a Theory of Film History," a lead-in to The American Cinema. Even since its original publication in 1968, we're still grappling with the "tantalizing mystery of style" that Andrew Sarris in no small way helped bring to the forefront of thinking about movies in America.



But this blog-a-thon will be more about the book than about the man himself. The American Cinema was published forty years ago and itself encompasses about forty years of cinema history. Therefore, understanding that I wouldn't want Andrew to shift focus from his continued prose at the New York Observer, it could still use an update. So I propose to enlist the fine cinematic blogosphere to write up the next generation of The American Cinema by tackling the careers of auteurs since.

For those who have never read the book in question, there are three components to every entry: a complete filmography, a completely subjective subset of which is italicized as the director's most personal works; a concise but thorough discussion of the filmmaker; and a place in one of the book's hierarchical categories. Those were:

The Pantheon: "These are the directors who have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world." Originally these included Chaplin, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang, Renoir, and Welles, among others.

The Far Side of Paradise: "These are the directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems." Aldrich, Capra, Cukor, Fuller, Minnelli, Sirk, Von Stroheim, et al.

Expressive Esoterica: "These are the unsung directors with difficult styles or unfashionable genres or both...they are generally redeemed by their seriousness and grace." Boetticher, Donen, Dwan, Penn, Siegel, Tashlin, Tourneur, et al.

Fringe Benefits: "The following directors occupied such a marginal role in the American cinema...but a few comments may be in order." Antonioni, Buñuel, Eisenstein, Polanski, Truffaut, et al.

Less Than Meets the Eye: "These are the directors with reputations in excess of inspirations." Overrated, basically. Houston, Lean, Mamoulan, Wilder, Wyler, et al.

Lightly Likeable: "These are the talented but uneven directors with the saving grace of unpretentiousness." Berkeley, Curtiz, Korda (both), Whale, et al.

Strained Seriousness: "These are talented but uneven directors with the mortal sin of pretentiousness." Brooks, Dassin, Frankenheimer, Jewison, Kubrick, Lumet, Rossen, Wise, et al.

Oddities, One-Shots, and Newcomers: "These are the eccentrics, the exceptions and the expectants, the fallen stars and the shooting stars." Boorman, Cassavetes, Coppola, Lupino, Nichols, Peckinpah, Watkins, et al.

There are also "Subjects for Further Research," "Make Way for the Clowns!," and "Miscellany," but let's stick with the major categories.



By no means do you need to write or think like Citizen Sarris. I just hope to achieve some creativity in the framework that he set up forty years ago. Basically, pick a director who either debuted or had significant work in the period since 1968; several big names, from Coppola to Kubrick to Cassavetes, have minor write-ups in Sarris' tome but produced major works since. One of Sarris' most likable qualities is his openness for reevaluation, and even in the cases of the above, he's about-faced on some opinions. Feel free to choose anyone related to American filmmaking, and write about their about their career up to this point.

As an example, I could envision writing about John Woo in the category of "Fringe Benefits" by delving into the differences and similarities between his American and Hong Kong work. Conversely, someone like Ang Lee, despite having released several foreign-language films, has always been so firmly entrenched in the American filmmaking scene that he merits inclusion in a different category.

So whether or not you're an avowed auteurist, feel free to pick someone you love, someone you hate, or someone you just want to jot down some notes about. If you want to participate, email me or comment to let me know who you want to write about, and optionally in what category you're planning on including him or her in, or if you even want to invent your own category, just so that there aren't a million repeats and, if you email, to keep things a secret. This is the first blog-a-thon I've tried to host, but I'm confident in its potential. Have fun, and I'm looking forward to any and all entries.

Qu'est-ce Que Le Cinéma? Une Réponse #1

The first in hopefully a series of images, sounds, and videos that, for this moment, capture the essence of "movieness" for me. Shout-out to if charlie parker was a gunslinger... and André Bazin for inspiration and a title.





Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

I'm Not Mishima: Artistic (Auto)Biography

How to present a real person’s life? This is the central quandary of the biopic genre, and too often the answer according to filmmakers is to smooth out the unquantifiable human experience to fit the constraints of traditional dramatic structure. While not fully eschewing this linear, arc-filled mode of storytelling, I’m Not There (2007) and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) take more holistic, personal approaches to the biopic, envisions a plethora of existence within the artistic individual, full of mystery, complexity, symbol, and contradiction. The ostensible subjects of the films are Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman), American folkie-cum-electrified rock star, and Yukio Mishima (born Kimitake Hiraoka), prolifc Japanese author and intellectual; both writers, performers, and celebrities with ambivalent ties to the political and artistic worlds of their day. Each film is divided into intertwining but discrete segments with their own stylistic idiosyncrasies. I’m Not There presents six individuals who represent, to put it simplistically, the “personas” of Bob Dylan, ranging from a black boy playing Depression-era folk songs to an aged, hiding Billy the Kid; and Mishima weaves straightforward dramatizations of Yukio’s final day and private and public lives with stylized visualizations of three of his major works, that sometimes verge on Dogville-like abstraction. Both movies illustrate that truism from Midnight’s Children that, in order to understand someone, “you’ll have to swallow a world.” Those who deem either film as too challenging or academic are missing the immediately sensual and intellectually gratifying rewards that come with the experience of one artist grappling with, and finding camaraderie in, another. Neither film is the epitome of the traditional biopic, but the choices made by the makers of I‘m Not There and Mishima could nonetheless be learned from when approached from that context.

The directors and co-screenwriters of the films are Todd Haynes (writer with Oven Moverman) and Paul Schrader (writer with his brother Leonard, along with translation assistance from Leonard’s wife Chieko), and the films represent clear intersections between director and subject. A semiotics graduate, Haynes treats the many elements of Dylan’s existence as signs to be playfully reinterpreted in various settings (like he previously did by making Karen Carpenter into Barbie or by pushing the limits of Sirkan melodrama) in just the same way that Dylan himself capitalized on classical and cultural allusions, or maybe just the sound of the words themselves, in his songwriting. As others have pointed out, I’m Not There moves not unlike a Dylan song, riding cadences and feelings of the visual rather than verbal variety to arrive at a point unencumbered by the limits of conventional logic and drama. It’s not that the songs steer clear of stories or sense, but that his hyperliteracy forges fascinating connections and synthesizes influences in a way that is indebted to poetry rather than to songwriting. Yet there is a tradition being followed, from Thomas to Rimbaud to Guthrie to Elliott, and the past and the present converge in Dylan’s oeuvre just as the phases of Dylan’s own life interact in I’m Not There.

That said, I don’t believe that watching the film is like reading a factual written biography on the singer just with the pages rearranged. A world is, after all, impossible to really swallow, and similarly I never found I’m Not There particularly enlightening as to the whys of Dylan’s artistry. Both it and Mishima feature scenes of the protagonist writing, yet the work is less output than outgrowth, less a compiled end product of experience than a fragment of that experience itself. For Haynes, Dylan’s work is as much grist for his semiotic investigation of DYLAN (as a thing, as a representation of the person/time/place/forebears/influence) as Zimmerman’s real biography is; for Schrader, who took his material in a more rigorously formal direction, Mishima’s unabashedly autobiographical literature is but one facet of his life (and death), the committed, personally cohesive artistic statement of honor and individuality that ultimately pitted him against the politics and culture of his day.

Paul Schrader’s cinema encapsulates manhood and morality, stemming most likely from his Calvinist upbringing but entailing secular repercussions in such films either written or directed by him as Blue Collar, Taxi Driver, and Affliction. Yukio Mishima, about whom out of the four artists intersecting in these films I know the least, combined politics, history, and discipline into a controversial but celebrated career that refused to separate art and life, which ended in ritual suicide following a failed political coup. Despite a dramatic through line that unfolds regarding his sexuality, beliefs, and stringent self-restraint, Schrader’s film rearranges chronology and designates certain sections of Mishima’s life with stylistic motifs that almost do more to present the man’s life than plot points ever could. Opening with a reserved but portentous scene of Mishima dressing for what he knows may be his last day of life, the film slowly builds a somewhat impressionistic portrait of a man fashioning his own artifice out of the world around him, not unlike Dylan, and facing the consequences. The incarnations of Mishima, ranging from a scrawny kid to his literary alter-egos to the stately central performance by Ken Ogata, coalesce finally at the time of death, a life having been lived uneasily yet unapologetically. Where Dylan continues to wander the byways of America in the guise of a resurrected outlaw, Mishima finds peace in the outmoded traditions of imperial Japan.

If every person is made up of a world through associations, connections, and history, this doesn’t mean that every person controls what world he or she is made up of; it took calculation and authority for Mishima and Dylan to construct themselves as they did. The films depict artist-celebrities who both shun and crave attention on their own terms, at times antagonizing their audiences (and themselves) for failing to keep up. Some may feel that Schrader and Haynes similarly forge their personal, literate portraits of heroes or kindred spirits without worrying about audience reception, but both films are as much cinematic autobiographies as biographies. Perhaps this is what ultimately separates I’m Not There and Mishima from the standard biopic fare: just as the most creative and cogent forms of criticism illuminate the critic as much as the work being criticized, so too some of the most enthralling, fascinating films visualize the entangled intersections of artist and subject. As illustrations of influence and creative possibility (the working title for I’m Not There was Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan) the movies resonate by positioning their subjects as founts of inspiration, the filmmakers moored with one foot in the dirt of “facts” and the other in the pool of freeform imagination.

There's more than a fair share of I'm Not There articles online, but here's the recent Great Movies entry for Mishima by Roger Ebert.



Additional thoughts, as of 1/19:
-The stunt casting of Cate Blanchett as electrified rebel Jude Quinn goes surprisingly unremarked upon in the film considering the director of Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven. Schrader of Hardcore and American Gigolo on the other hand presents all of the sexually contradictory sides of Mishima, even if they spring from his literary doubles.
-Both films mix and match music while relying on a single source: the multiplicity of Bob allows for originals and covers to stand side by side (except for the intrusion of a Monkees track), and Philip Glass's magisterial score for Mishima uses varying instruments depending on the segment.
-Haynes' freewheeling (sorry for the pun) visual tactics include aping such Dylan docs as Don't Look Back and No Direction Home, as well as referencing Fellini, another artist whose career's formal shifts perplexed some and delighted others. Schrader picks from a more conservative set of influences, especially Japanese theater.
-Although a mere mix-up over narration recording prevented a Japanese speaker from hearing a Japanese narration, at least until the most recent DVD release, Roy Scheider's voice actually speaks to the multicultural nature of the project: two American brothers, steeped in Japanese culture (both writers of The Yakuza), tackling a figure quite controversial in his native country. Spiritual affinity is more the issue than cultural similarity. Ben Whishaw's ruthlessly quotable Arthur Rimbaud on the other hand serves as a distilled example of Dylan's penchant for wordplay and ambivalent spokesman status.
-Both films rely on certain standard narrative filmmaking techniques, most notably match cuts on faces and entrances/exits, in order to effectively conjoin the various worlds on display into at least a visually coherent whole.
-Another challenging, formally daring cinematic autobiography: Takeshis' (2005).



Here's a mash-up I made of the Schrader and Haynes films, illustrating some visual motifs and parallels, as well as favorite moments and sometimes intuitive musical editing:

Spaghetti Madness: Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell" (1987)

Alex Cox’s 1987 flick Straight to Hell is an odd duck, to say the least. Cult fans know its bizarre history already, but for the rest of you, here’s the rundown from an interview with the director on his personal website: Producer Eric Fellner planned to expand a Brixton show featuring the Pogues, Joe Strummer, and Elvis Costello benefiting the leftist Sandinista Liberation Front into a full-blown tour of that organization’s home of Nicaragua. Politics came into play after the musicians agreed to hold off their own plans for August 1986, so Fellner convinced everyone to shoot a low-budget feature during that time instead. Hastily collaborating with co-star Dick Rude, Cox cobbled a screenplay together, and it was filmed in a few weeks in the expansive deserts of Almería, Spain, shooting location for many of the spaghetti Westerns that inform Straight to Hell. It was and always will be primarily a lark for the circle of friends who created it. But should it have ever been released to a wider audience?

Reviewers at the time certainly didn’t think so. Roger Ebert, having liked Cox’s previous films Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, described it as “a record of aimless behavior, of a crowd of pals asked to dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set.” Washington Post writer Hal Hinson jeered that Cox “never attempts anything other than antagonistically unfunny, home-movie-style gags.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin was more positive, merely dismissing it as “a mildly engrossing, instantly forgettable midnight movie,” although she also thought it was “[not] even halfway as amusing as it sounds.” Even contemporary reviews mostly write it off as the incomprehensible and indulgent equivalent of a cinematic vacation slideshow. The film did poorly in theaters but, like many of Cox’s features, has languished in cult status since.



I’m happy to report that twenty years have been good to this do-it-yourself, witty, sly little hodgepodge of a movie, and it’s time for a reevaluation. The ostensible plot involves three bungling but cool hit men (Sy Richardson, Clash frontman Joe Strummer, and co-writer Dick Rude) and their pregnant, whiny moll (a chubby, pre-plastic surgery Courtney Love) high-tailing it to Mexico when they over-sleep a job at a motel. They quickly rob a bank, the spoils of which are constantly being swept up by the wind or dropped by the inept crooks until they are finally buried, and find themselves in a ghost town run by a motley gang of coffee-addicted cowboys and Western stereotypes. As played by such punk luminaries as the Pogues, Elvis Costello, and Zander Schloss of the Circle Jerks, and near-respectable actors like Miguel Sandoval and Xander Berkeley, the townspeople are funny, unpredictable caricatures, as apt to sing a song as to fire a six-shooter. The strangers ingratiate themselves through droll comic vignettes, killing off the dominant gang’s enemies, unsuccessfully romancing the local chicks, but kept alive only so long as their loot is still hidden. Eventually the thieves’ boss, an incongruously growling Jim Jarmusch, makes an appearance and triggers a nihilistic bloodbath tempered by some fine visual gags and ellipses. The final credits promise to go “BACK TO HELL,” but there’s not much chance for that at this point.

The first thing to notice in Straight to Hell is its striking visual style. Obviously taking a cue from, among others, Corbucci and Leone (even aping that director’s signature extreme close-ups), as well as the jagged landscape of Spain, cinematographer Tom Richmond employs a sumptuous widescreen aesthetic that allows all kinds of interesting compositions and eye-popping colors. The empty, piercingly blue sky in particular (even if its shade of blueness shifts between shots) gets a wealth of deserving screen time, contrasting with the grungy, lovingly-detailed characters below it. Costumes, from the mariachi-style dress of the Pogues to Jarmusch’s crisp white suit, bring characters a distinct visual appeal quite beside their performers’ acting abilities. If this sounds like an apology to Ebert’s phrase “dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set,” so be it; I am merely commenting that time, effort, and artistry went into this throwaway excursion of a film, and it shows.

From a generic standpoint, the movie is surprisingly, radically glib, most obviously influencing the work of Tarantino. It’s no less in-jokey and violent than Reservoir Dogs, say, and Sy Richardson’s Jheri-curled badass Norwood may as well be getting royalty checks from Jules Winnfield; but it purposefully lacks the slick, transgressive language Tarantino is known for in favor of cliché and deadpan comic dialogue. Despite this, it somehow received an MPAA R rating for “strong language” when the saltiest thing said is “heck.” While being ahead of its time, for better or worse, in fusing bloodily comic irrationality with specific genre tropes, Straight to Hell has its own share of cinematic referents and direct homages, from sassing a classic quote from Shane (“A gun is just a tool, it ain’t no better or no worse than the man who uses it.” “Just like shoes.”) to staging Peckinpah-inspired massacres; it at times has the sun-drenched incoherence of a punk-rock movie nerd’s El Topo. Even when the film’s non-sequiturs become more absurd than funny, a few actors still manage engrossing presences; Joe Strummer in particular has an energetic nonchalance, whether idly smoking a cigarette or running a gasoline-coated comb through his hair, that also enlivened Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. The aforementioned Schloss, as an inexplicable hot dog vendor-cum-commercial jingle singer, gets a ridiculous performance scene than nonetheless binds the community like a campfire singalong in Hawks or a funeral dirge in Ford.



Which brings me to perhaps rightfully Straight to Hell’s most overlooked feature, its pretty unsubtle capitalist satire. To call the film a revolutionary comic attack on corporate imperialism is blowing its real but minor virtues out of proportion, yet such a group of dedicated, organized political figures could not have made anything but with a left-wing bent. Without giving too much away, a major if somewhat indistinct plot point involves the smiley cameo of Dennis Hopper (who made his own disastrous pseudo-Western, The Last Movie) as oil magnate I.G. Farben and his drilling operation in the middle of the town. Such incidental details as his name on a pump handle in the city and oil drill towers dotting the landscape belie the shoot-em-up going on within the town, and death may be just another step in someone’s business deal. Money is supposedly at the root of the crosses and double-crosses that punctuate the film’s second half, yet it turns out to be a slippery commodity in itself. Whether purposefully considered or merely a byproduct of Cox’s and Rude’s political feelings, this subtext is admittedly slight compared to its insistence at being a down-and-dirty paean to the Western, camaraderie, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Buoyed by a lively, earthy soundtrack by some of the musicians involved, Straight to Hell is a relatively obscure, worthwhile cult diversion. What it lacks in polish, dramatic heft, and multidimensional characterization it nearly makes up for in visual verve and good-natured, clever senselessness. It deftly mingles punk’s homegrown spirit of communal anarchy with the movies’ creative generic structures, to produce a fun, headlong romp that’s too short to overstay its welcome.



More images:

A Personal Alternative to the AFI Top 100, Part 3

21. A Face in the Crowd (57, Kazan)
An extremely well-paced indictment of media saturation and superstardom. Making his film debut, America’s favorite sheriff Andy Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a hobo/jailbird who becomes a radio and later TV folk hero with songs, wit, and not a little manipulation. Patricia Neal initially takes notice of him and is caught up in his media rise to fame. Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg mine the corruption of American glamour and its whirlwind in the media spotlight.
Alt to the Alt: Quiz Show (94, Redford). Some of the same themes show up in the real life drama of fixed TV quiz games.


22. Fat City (72, Huston)
John Huston’s career produced a number of fantastic films in various genres, but Fat City is perhaps the most underrated of his filmography. Stacy Keach and the perennially underrated Jeff Bridges play boxers on opposite slopes of the profession, one going down and one going up. Fat City is in line with Huston’s subtle, realistic, dramatic output, from Night of the Iguana to his swan song, The Dead. If you can find it, it’s a real winner.
Alt to the Alt: Champion (49, Robson). With a searing performance by Kirk Douglas, this is also one of the great boxing films, akin to a classic Hollywood Raging Bull.


23. Feed the Kitty (52, Jones)
Genius is taking the simplest concept and making every moment and detail count. Chuck Jones is one of the undisputed geniuses of animation, and Feed the Kitty is but one example of it. A bulldog named Marc Anthony happens upon and is immediately charmed by a fearless little kitten, and the entire cartoon concerns his efforts to hide it from his owner. From this bare premise Jones and Maltese and their team craft some of the most brilliant facial acting in Looney Tunes history, and despite his muteness, Marc Anthony truly comes alive in each of its seven essential minutes.
Alt to the Alt: One Froggy Evening (55, Jones). The other great animal Looney Tune, also with some fabulous animation via the frog’s owner and Michigan J himself.


24. Force of Evil (48, Polonsky)
The eventually blacklisted Abraham Polonsky made his first film a keeper, a New York-based critique of the evils that can be perpetrated by capitalism. John Garfield (a corrupt lawyer) and Thomas Gomez (a banker trying to stay straight) are brothers caught in the web of illegal business. With poetically hard-boiled dialogue and a classical plot structure, Force of Evil is like a Shakespearean On the Waterfront.
Alt to the Alt: East of Eden (55, Kazan). Another brother-brother drama with gorgeous cinematography.


25. Freaks (32, Browning)
Unquestionably among the greatest of all American films, Tod Browning’s Freaks is a disturbing but humane examination of prejudice, mistrust, and conformity. Using real sideshow performers as actors and entirely sympathetic characters, the film upends the conventional connection between outer and inner beauty and instead puts the audience in with the “freaks.” Only when the performers eventually turn on the “normal” people does their righteous anger appear horrifying. A complex and important piece of work.
Alt to the Alt: The Elephant Man (80, Lynch). Less horrifying but still touching.


26. The Front (76, Ritt)
This black comedy about the Hollywood blacklist is the best Woody Allen movie that he didn’t write or direct. He’s Howard Prince, a politically neutral nebbish hired to stand in for writers in the industry. He still gets caught up in the House Committee on Un-American Activities witch hunter and must make a moral choice. Also features a superb turn by Zero Mostel in the most dramatic role of his career.
Alt to the Alt: Good Night, and Good Luck. (05, Clooney). Stirring and claustrophobic look at the McCarthy phenomenon from behind the doors of CBS News.


27. Groundhog Day (93, Ramis)
A high concept stretched just far enough and helped along by a genuinely transformative performance. Bill Murray deftly straddled humor and drama (although liberally leaning into the former) as the asshole forced by fate to change his ways on the most absurd of holidays. He carries the film on his shoulders and never falters on each successful day/life.
Alt to the Alt: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (41, Hall). A dead boxer is given a second chance at life by inhabiting the body of a millionaire. Hilarity and romance ensue.


28. Harold and Maude (71, Ashby)
Perhaps the most unlikely romance in the history of film, Harold and Maude are portrayed with vigor and life by Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. He’s a death-obsessed adolescent who likes to stage fake suicides; she is a senior who ignores the law and defies social convention. It seems by the end that Maude provided Harold with the piece of his life, the joy of living, that he lacked; but perhaps they each had something the other needed.
Alt to the Alt: “Quirky” is a poor epithet for Ashby’s achievement, but another colorful tale of adolescence, age difference, and, let’s say, a “unique sensibility” is Ghost World (01, Zwigoff).


29. The Haunting (63, Wise)
A psychological ghost story of the highest caliber, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s story is blessed with an effective, low-key cast and the sure hand of Robert Wise behind the camera. Julie Harris is the ostensible heroine as the psychic and emotionally stunted Nell who is enlisted with others to investigate the haunting of Hill House. Brilliant sound design ratchets up the terror until the literally haunting conclusion.
Alt to the Alt: Rebecca (40, Hitchcock) is a similarly Gothic story more interested in character than outright scares.


30. The Heartbreak Kid (72, May)
The second film in Elaine May’s ill-fated directorial career is perhaps her most perceptive on gender dynamics and the peculiar tendencies of the middle-aged Jew. A perfectly cast Charles Grodin waffles between poor, whiny Jeannie Berlin and fluttery blonde Cybill Shepherd. Infinitely funny and infinitely sad. A pitch-perfect final scene as well.
Alt to the Alt: My Favorite Wife (40, Kanin). Less cynical but still a funny marriage farce.