VERA CRUZ - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2011.

The 1952 cowboy picture Vera Cruz is one of the first big Hollywood movies to be shot in Mexico, so it's only fitting that it be a story about the Mexican fight for independence from European (and particularly French) occupation. The focus of the script is two American outlaws, both with different approaches to how they do business. One is a dangerous man, a smiling gunslinger named Joe Erin, and played by young star Burt Lancaster; the other is a man of honor, Benjamin Trane, portrayed by an elder statesman of American movies, Gary Cooper. Joe has gone to Mexico to escape a bounty on his head. Benjamin has traveled south of the border in order to leave behind a painful past: he lost his livelihood fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. That conflict was about a house divided, two sides of the same coin struggling for supremacy. So, too, is the Mexican revolution a division amongst the people. And likewise there is the division between the two mercenaries who choose to fight it.

Despite being an unlikely pairing, Joe and Ben team up, heading a posse that is hired by the foreign-occupying Emperor Maximilian (George Macready) to escort a rich aristocrat (Denise Darcel) across the country to the town of Vera Cruz, where a boat will take her and a treasure chest of Mexican gold back to France where she will buy more soldiers to hold back the revolutionary army. Joe and Ben make plans to steal the gold for themselves, but then they turn around and make plans to also steal it from each other. Joe romances the rich woman, while Ben makes eyes at a sexy Mexican bandit (Sarita Montiel). She also just so happens to be working for the Mexican army, who want the gold themselves. And, of course, Maximilian's lancers have a pretty good notion that all of these double- and triple-crosses are underway, and they set up their own ruse to keep their hands on the Emperor's coinage.

Vera Cruz is directed by Robert Aldrich, who also helmed The Dirty Dozen, another famous film about a band of rough customers facing impossible odds. The screenplay by Roland Kibbee (Valdez is Coming) and James R. Webb (Cape Fear) may feature a healthy cast of characters--Joe's original team includes such recognizable character actors as Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Elam; the Emperor's right-hand man is played by Cesar Romero--but the focus here stays tight on the main stars. The odds build against them as the movie progresses, ending in a giant battle between the Mexican and the European forces that claims a lot of lives. It's a gut punch of a finish, especially after the turbine engine plotting that gets us to this particular port of call. Vera Cruz generates speed as it goes, the chase growing more dangerous, the action more exciting. The resolution brings to bear all the compromises and consequences in a way that is both bleak and surprising.

It's hard to see how it could go any other way, though. When there are two central but opposing forces, there will have to be some kind of reckoning between them. Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster are perfectly cast as the hero and the anti-hero, and their disparate acting styles mesh surprisingly well. Cooper is stoic, mannered, and every bit the Hollywood hero; Lancaster is feral, unpredictable, and physical. He's not quite as twitchy and method as some of his contemporaries, but he's definitely more willing to engage in behavior otherwise unbecoming of a leading man than Cooper. As the other complications build up, so too do we see how nasty Joe really is and the full depth of the inherent good that defines Ben. The latter can't pretend to be the villain any more than the former can play at being the hero.

The movie itself embodies all of these things as well. Vera Cruz is full of the humor and the bravado and the clear-cut morality of classic westerns, but it also prefigures the darker themes and violence of the horse operas to come. Heavy is the head that wears the white hat, and what Cooper walks away from at the end of Vera Cruz may be more than a pock-marked battlefield and a chest of gold, it could be seen as a metaphor for the whole Western genre.

KISS ME DEADLY - #568

“I picked up a girl. If she hadn't gotten in my way, I wouldn't have stopped. She must be connected with somethin' big.”

It’s a fairly common private detective line. It makes me think of Nick Cave’s intro to “From Her to Eternity,” a pulpy title if ever there was one. “I wanna tell you about a girl.” This may not have been Mike Hammer’s opening declaration in Kiss Me Deadly but his words describe the opening scene nonetheless. A woman (Cloris Leachman, in her first film role) freshly escaped from a mental hospital runs out into the middle of the road and forces the next passing car to stop. She runs it into the ditch, in fact. But since it’s Mike Hammer, here played by Ralph Meeker (Paths of Glory [review]), he forgives her the indiscretion and gives her a ride. Not out of a sense of duty, he’d have passed her by if he could, but like he said, she got in the way, he had to stop, and now he’s involved.

This isn’t noble, it’s cynical, and it’s what makes Hammer so fascinating. His whole motivation for pursuing the case is partially out of an obligation to see it through, but I think it’s mainly out of annoyance at other people. He appears more concerned with proving the cops are idiots and poking the bad guys in the ribs than he is with right and wrong. As long as he comes out on top, what does it really matter?

It’s as bleak of an attitude as you’re likely to find in film noir, and it’s a major reason why many scholars consider Kiss Me Deadly to be the last legit example of the movement. There is nowhere to go from here. Robert Aldrich’s 1955 adaptation of Mickey Spillaine is as dark and rough as it gets, and its ending reveals how insignificant we all really are. Not insignificant in the same sense as a guy taking two bullets in the back or losing a suitcase of money, but serious insignificance in the face of all things. The characters here are a victim of the same kind of hubris that has led many a heavy to bleed out on cold pavement, but on a global scale.

The plot is inconsequential. Hammer runs across the girl, the girl dies, he decides to find out who and why. Each step he takes reveals another obstacle, usually in the form of a person who doesn’t want him to know the truth, and he charges through to the next. It’s a genre exercise. One step forward, two back--each revelation gets Hammer no closer to unraveling the truth.

Which, as I’ve suggested, is the point. For once, there is no unraveling the truth. There is only the personal unraveling in the face of one truth: we are all going to die.

Hammer seems ideally suited to be the one to find this out. He is unfazed by everything he trips over. Meeker plays him as a postured muscle man who can’t be deterred. Once he has something between his teeth, he’s going to chew it down. Nowhere is this more evident than his relationship with Velda (Maxine Cooper), his secretary and girlfriend. As the case begins, Hammer’s not too bothered with the mystery yet, and he’s more than eager to make love to her; when he’s deeper into the conspiracy and what happened to the dead woman is all he can think about, Velda practically crawls up on him, and the private dick barely registers her presence. Velda is bothered, but she’s not surprised, she knows the deadly cat’s cradle Hammer is tangled in. “First, you find a little thread,” she says, “the little thread leads you to a string, and the string leads you to a rope, and from the rope you hang by the neck.”

Aldrich sees Hammer as a modern antihero, a man who works with his hands caught up in a plot of men who work with their minds. The essential difference, it would seem, is that these other guys don’t consider the consequences. Are you ready for spoilers? The thing that everyone is after and that will ultimately undo everything--they call it “The Great Whatsit”--is a briefcase containing a nuclear device. That’s right. The stuff that dreams are made of is no longer a counterfeit bird statue, but a legit A-bomb. Anyone who has seen Pulp Fiction has seen Tarantino’s riff on the Kiss Me Deadly briefcase: when you open it, it glows. Only here, it won’t just burn your hands off, it could destroy the whole world. Which it very well might be doing at the conclusion of the picture. Hammer and the dead woman’s roommate, Carver (Gaby Rodgers), watch from the water as a beachside house explodes after Carver opened the Maguffin. Only, as the screen fades to black, the explosion isn’t over, and we don’t know if Hammer and the gal get out alive. The title card that says “The End,” in this case, is more of a big maybe.

As a piece of cinema, Kiss Me Deadly is as roughly sculpted as the hero it portrays. Ernest Laszlo’s photography is imprecise and off kilter. The camera barrels through the scenes in much the same fashion that Hammer does. Zooms are clumsy, framing is out of whack, angles are imprecise. It’s as if there is no space to make it pretty. Time is running out! The world is out of order! Even the credits are running the wrong way!

Or it might be as simple as the fact that what Kiss Me Deadly is portraying isn’t meant to be pretty. It’s not just Hammer’s cynical attitude that jars the viewer, even to this day, but the nastiness of the violence--the first burst of which is a rather gruesome torture scene. One that happens almost entirely off screen, mind you, we just see the girl’s bare feet and hear her awful screams, but the effect is just as grisly as any bloody slasher movie. Opening with that sets the stakes high: this is the kind of vicious business Hammer is going to have to find retribution for.

That there is none may be the most cynical part of the whole affair. Sure, all the bad man are dead, but pretty soon, everyone else will be, too. I’m sure there’s cold comfort in knowing they went first.

REPO MAN - #654

"There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine," says one character in Repo Man, Alex Cox's 1984 punk rock comedy.

"I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!" declares another.

The nouns are different, but the sentiments are the same. One crazy concept deserves another. When man has gone this nuts, all nutty ideas are created equal.

It's too bad that Criterion couldn't release Repo Man to the collection just after Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, and then maybe followed it with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, giving us three consecutive spine numbers with mysterious glowing objects under the lid, each representing some kind of metaphor for man's dissatisfaction with the current state of being. Well, okay, I'm not sure we can take the briefcase in Tarantino's film that far, but he clearly watched Alex Cox movies back at the video store. In Repo Man, there are alien corpses thawing out in the back of a Chevy Malibu, incinerating all who look upon them. In Aldrich, our doom was the nuclear bomb mankind created to obliterate himself; in Tarantino, it's possibly the manifestation of spirituality and evil, hence the 666 combination lock; for Cox, it's the doom from beyond, a higher form come to show us what a pathetic race of meatbags we really are.

Emilio Estevez stars as Otto, a punker in Los Angeles who doesn't fit into the generic culture that permeates 1980s America. At the start of the picture, he works in a grocery store that deals exclusively in generic, plain-wrap food. It's a good sight gag but also one based in reality. At the time, the Ralph's supermarket chain had its own brand that was just white packaging with a blue stripe and the name of the product printed on top. Public Image Limited lampooned it with their album that was, well, called Album if you bought the record, and Cassette if you bought the tape. It had the hit song "Rise," about a social misfit who can't take it anymore. "Anger is an energy," John Lydon chants--and it could have just as easily been a motto for Otto. He gets fired from his job for refusing to stack the plain cans spaced equally apart. Uniformity is treason.

It's on his way home after being canned that Otto meets Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a repo man who tricks Otto into helping him repossess a car. As payment, Bud takes the kid under his wing and teaches him the rules of the game. It's not so much a veteran of the system taking in the disaffected youth and corrupting him into selling out, but rather a veteran outlaw who himself exists somewhere outside the system while helping perpetuate and enforce it. The repo men are a little bit like the gang that couldn't shoot straight, and Cox's film has its roots in the western as much as anything else, even if there is some rejection of the tradition, i.e. "John Wayne is a fag." But that's anarchy for you. The cowboy frontier was about establishing your own code of conduct because civilization's laws were too stifling.

So it is here. Otto can continue to pursue nihilism for no good purpose, or he can find one. Given the way life was going under Reagan, that purpose is selfish at first, but the deeper Otto gets into this new life, he becomes exposed to the true extremes of society. One one hand, there is the CIA looking to squash radical ideas; on the other hand, the trio of mohawked, shaved-head crooks robbing liquor stores. At some point all these forces want the same thing: the Chevy Malibu and the secrets locked inside.

Repo Man's crazy theories are an amalgamation of the weirdness of the 1980s. Stagnant culture forced people to go searching for solutions that were beyond the norm. Whether it was believing in aliens or Scientology (here parodied as "Diaretics"), or jumping into a musical subculture, or living by a code in a secret society, everyone was looking for something. Cox's credo about UFOs and time machines, communists and Christians, was his dismissal of all such pursuits as being one and the same. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In this case, literally, he's the lobotomized driver trafficking in extraterrestrial corpses. Sure, he's got some wacky ideas. So does Miller (Tracey Walter), the one who equates spaceships and time travel. Considering where they both end up, they prove that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you.

Though he goes with Miller in the end, Otto doesn't so much join the crazies as he rejects the ways of thinking that make him a part of the herd. The key scene is really in the shoot-out at the liquor store, the showdown between three aspects of Otto's life. In a standoff that must have given a young Q.T. many a good idea, it's a three-way battle between Otto's straight life (the security guard that escorted him out of the grocery store), his punk roots (the robbers, his former friends), and his newer career (Bud). Not only is he the only one who really walks away, but he does so by drawing an individualistic line in the sand. As his old buddy dies, he says, "Society made me who I am," to which Otto replies, "No, it didn't. You're a white suburban punk. Just like me." It's a defiant rejection of anything that would otherwise attempt to define you. Otto is his own man, and like Pablo Picasso, no one calls him an asshole.

By all accounts, so is Alex Cox, and Repo Man is certainly its own movie. In all honesty, for as much meaning as I could sift out of it, I didn't find it to be an entirely satisfying viewing experience, not the way I did when I saw it all the way back in high school. The gonzo, anything-goes quality of the narrative that made it feel fresh and uninhibited thirty years ago just seems messy now. Cox doesn't quite know how to resolve all the criss-crossing story lines, instead letting the episodic storytelling pile on itself in one massive jumble. He also never finds a consistent tone for the humor. The biting satire gives way to ridiculous slapstick and an occasional meanness.

Still, Estevez and Stanton both give excellent performances, and the music is pretty good. Plus, you have to admire any film that dares to give a two-finger homage to Grease, stealing the musical's ending for its own purposes. Of all the punk rock stylings Cox adopts, that may be the most punk of all.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 6/11

There was no post here on the blog last week, so I have fallen a bit behind again. As you'll see in the monthly round-up, it's not for lack of work; on the contrary, it's been too much work, I've been reviewing a lot. All I need to do is double up one week, though, and I'm back on track--and that should hopefully be easy, since I have four new releases (two Louis Malle, a Satyajit Ray, and the most recent Eclipse set) waiting to be watched. Comic Con is also coming, so you may see me scrambling yet again in not too long. Who all is going to the big show this year? Be sure to stop by Tr!ckster, there is much to be done and seen, including a Criterion sponsored event celebrating Kurosawa and raising money for relief in Japan. I'll also be part of Symposium 5, a ticketed event, so plan on going to that now!

IN THEATRES...

* 13 Assassins, samurai slaughter from Takashi Miike.

* Beginners, Mike Mills' exploration of mortality, love, and depression will catch you off guard. Naturally quirky and moving, it stars Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Melanie Laurent.

* Green Lantern. You will believe that space can be realllllly boring. And Earth. And everything else.

* Larry Crowne. This weekend, you can watch cars transform into robots, or you can let Tom Hanks transform your cold, dead heart into something living again. Your call.

* Midnight in Paris, everything old is new again in Woody Allen's delightful return to form.

* Submarine, a quirky, heartfelt coming-of-age drama set in Wales.

* The Tree of Life, in which Terrence Malick wrestles with the universe, the All Father, and all fathers.

* The Trip, Steve Coogan on a very funny roadtrip with his pal Rob Brydon. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

* X-Men: First Class: Hey, man, that's a groovy mutation, but the movie's kind of a piece of crap.

ON DVD/BD...

* BLAST!, a science documentary about sending a telescope up into the sky on a balloon to look at the stars.

* Carancho, an Argentinian twist on crime and romance, from the people who brought us Lion's Den.

* The Cocoanuts, yuck it up with Los Bros. Marx in their 1929 debut.

* Despair, a Vladimir Nabokov adaptation from writer Tom Stoppard and director Rainer Werner Fassbender, starring Dirk Bogarde. And it's as weird as that combination would suggest.

* Eight Iron Men, a WWII variation on the "chamber room drama" that never quite takes off. From Edward Dmytryk and Stanley Kramer.

* The Goddess, Paddy Chayefsky wrote this thinly veiled portrait of a Marilyn Monroe-type actress, played by Kim Stanley. Interesting, if not entirely successful.

* Laila, a silent Norwegian epic from 1929.

* Man from Del Rio, starring Antony Quinn as a Mexican sheriff in a racially progressive 1950s western.

* The Man in the Net, starring Alan Ladd, directed by Michael Curtiz. Read the review that one fan called "a classic example of...uninformed arrogance" and inspired him to suggest I "take up something else to while away your time or attend a junior college film class."

* Marriage Italian Style, a strangely dark, yet intriguing, romantic "comedy" from Vittorio De Sica, reteaming Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

* Never Apologize, Malcolm McDowell's one-man show in remembrence of director Lindsay Anderson.

* New York, New York, Martin Scorsese's notorious 1977 musical mash-up of new and old styles, starring De Niro and Minnelli.

* Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese's documentary about author Fran Lebowitz. Engaging and funny.

* The Romantic Englishwoman, Joseph Losey directing a Tom Stoppard script about Glenda Jackson's aching loins. And Michael Caine yells a lot.

* The Sacrifice, a beautifully remastered new edition of Andrei Tarkovsky's final film.

* Spectacle: Elvis Costello with...Season 2, a second go-around with the maestro.

* Vera Cruz, Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper shoot up Mexico in a film by Robert Aldrich.

* Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, a concert documentary about the influential feminist punk band. The DVD includes a ton of great bonus features.

* Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a trio of themed stories from director Vittorio De Sica and actors Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.