GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI - #1057

 

Is there a more elegant genre mash-up than Jim Jarmusch’s turn-of-the-century film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai? It’s more than just a marriage of mob and samurai movies, it’s an urban drama about a neighborhood, touching on both race and class in its depictions of Blacks and Italians. And on top of that, it embraces hip-hop, with RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan both providing a groundbreaking score and showing up in a cameo. 

 

Even with all that, it’s light as a feather. Ghost Dog has the usual laconic Jarmusch feel, despite scenes of incredibly precise action. For fans of Jean-Pierre Melville, you will see his influence all over this, from the snippets of philosophy taken from the Hagakure warrior’s code to the calculated assassinations Ghost Dog performs. Quiet, patient, and deadly. 

 

 

The origin story of Ghost Dog is a classic trope. As a young man, Ghost Dog (played with a calm forcefulness by Forest Whitaker) is rescued from a beating by gangster Louie (John Tormey). Over the next several years, Ghost Dog devoted his life to training to be a samurai assassin, shedding material things, living on a rooftop with his pigeons (shades of On the Waterfront). That is the backstory, at least, told in short, repetitious flashbacks. The here and now of it features Ghost Dog acting as Louie’s retainer, serving in the background, killing people Louie needs killed. Ghost Dog has done this twelve times perfectly, but at the start of the film, we see the thirteenth go wrong: when performing a hit on a gangster (Richard Portnow) who is sleeping with the boss’ daughter, the warrior is surprised to find the daughter (Tricia Vessey) is in the room. She was supposed to be gone. 

 

Of course, Ghost Dog does not harm the girl, but the indiscretion raises the ire of her old man (Cliff Gorman), not just because his baby girl was in harm’s way, but also because this leaves a loose end that can trace back to his having ordered a hit on a made man. Thus, Ghost Dog must be removed from the equation. 

 

Things don’t go that way, naturally. Ghost Dog is more than a match for the aging, overweight mafia killers. There is a subtle change of power at work in the New York of Jarmusch. Young Black men work the streets stealthily. Ghost Dog has compatriots everywhere. We never see them in action, but they are acknowledged. They have moved in. The Italian mob, on the other hand, could be seen as aging out: ineffective, comical, caricature. Jarmusch doesn’t lean on it, but it’s there. 

 

What’s also there is the smaller world of misfits that Ghost Dog relaxes in. His best friend is a French ice cream man (Isaach De Bankolé) who plays chess with Ghost Dog. They converse, despite having no common language--the running gag being that they often say the same things. There is also a little girl, Pearline (Camille Winbush), whom Ghost Dog trades books with. She is like a small version of him, and indeed, Ghost Dog fans have been waiting for a Pearline sequel just as much as Kill Bill fans have been clamoring for the child of Vernita Green to grow up and take revenge. 

 

See? There’s a lot going on. But it never seems like too much. Not under Jarmusch’s care. His hand is steady, his approach both easy and concise. He knows each move he needs to make, but he also isn’t afraid to breathe, to let a moment be loose. It’s a pretty impressive act, all said and done, and one could argue he’s applying all the lessons of the Hagakure to his modern Way of the Samurai, being nothing and being everything at once. 

 

Fun aside, back in 1999, I was editor in chief of Oni Press and we were asked by the studio releasing Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to do a one-off comic they could use as promotion. My business partner and publisher, Joe Nozemack, had the great idea of hiring Scott Morse (then doing our book Soulwind, currently a story man at Pixar and recently the author of Dugout: The Zombie Steals Home) to bring to life one of Ghost Dog’s perfect hits. We never interacted with Jim Jarmusch, alas, but it’s still an effort we are all very proud of. You can still find it here and there if you care to seek it out. 

 

 This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT - #969

Jan Němec’s 1964 debut Diamonds of the Night is all things at once. Simple and complicated. Sparse and detailed. Accessible and challenging. Grounded and poetic.

Based on a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night is the story of two young men on the run in World War II-era Czechoslovakia. Having escaped from a train hauling them to a Nazi concentration camp, the boys charge through the forest and countryside, avoiding people, looking for food, and occasionally resorting to desperate acts to survive. Told with little dialogue and shot in real locations, there is a harsh realism to the story Němec lays out. These boys are isolated, without hope, never sure if the people they spot along the way are friend or foe.

Yet, we maybe can’t be sure of the young men either. We have our assumptions regarding whom they might be and why they were rounded up, but as Němec plays with time and memory, slicing up his scenes, splicing in random shots that could be past or present, fantasy or reality, we can’t help but build different scenarios. Němec starts to really play tricks on us when the fugitives rob a farmhouse, forcing the farmer’s wife to make them sandwiches. We see them take the food and go, but we also see them attack her, leaving her unconscious on the kitchen floor. Which was it? What really happened? As we get more information later, we even start to doubt why she was initially scared of the intruders.

Taken one way, the lack of exposition in Diamonds of the Night causes us to question why the civilians that the escapees encounter don’t help them, why these common folk give their allegiances to outside invaders, whom history has already judged by the time the film was made; taken another way, we are forced to question ourselves, why we automatically perceive things a certain way, and if our failure to challenge the known is the reason fascism can creep in and ultimately win out.

Either way, it’s a compelling experience, rarely giving the viewers time to catch their breath, and revealing a director with a firm grasp of his own cinematic vocabulary.

Arnošt Lustig was a real-life prisoner of war and much of his writing was based on his experiences. A short documentary included on the Criterion edition of Diamonds of the Night explores how Jan Němec interpreted Lustig’s work for film. Also included is Němec’s 1960 student film, A Loaf of Bread, based on one of Lustig’s stories.

A Loaf of Bread details three prisoners plotting and undertaking a scheme to steal bread to feed them on a planned escape. Though more straightforward than Diamonds of the Night, it displays a similar tight control, reminding me somewhat of the French noir of Jacques Becker or Jean-Pierre Melville for how the attention to small action builds tension. It’s easy to see the promise in the young director that would pay off four years later.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SELECTED SHORTS II - CRITERION CHANNEL

The Criterion Channel, in addition to hosting a plethora of feature films, also has a varied collection of short films--live action, animated, fiction, documentary; comedy and drama; silent and talkies.

Short cinema--just like short stories--is a unique art form unto itself, employing different conventions, and bringing with it different expectations, but these pieces are no less worthy of consideration than full-length films. From time to time, I will take a look at a selection of what’s on offer. You can read the previous column here.

Lira’s Forest (2017; Canada; 9 minutes): An elderly woman on her front porch meets a boy wearing a fox mask, and he proves to be more than he appears. Simple in plot, a film of, essentially, only three or four actions, Connor Jessup’s tiny poem still manages to say something weighty about life and, more strikingly, relieving ourselves of our mortality. Beautifully shot, with no superfluous detail to speak of, it feels like a live action Hayao Miyazaki scene. I’d be curious what Jessup does with something more substantial.

(Note: Jessup is also the director of the Criterion Channel’s documentary on Apichatpong Weerasethakul.)

The Extraordinary Life of Rocky (2010; Belgium; 14 minutes): This black comedy about a boy who decides to give up loving his friends and family, believing that his affection is the reason everyone he cares about dies, aims for a tone and style not dissimilar to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but its humor never sharpens and there’s no substitute for actual heart. Writer/director Kevin Meul has a whimsical eye for visuals, creating some fun rhymes throughout Life of Rocky (note how many times there is a helicopter of one kind or another), but it often feels like he accepted whimsical as being good enough rather than push his ideas further.

Daybreak Express (1943; USA; 6 minutes): Set to the music of Duke Ellington, documentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s art piece recreates the experience of a morning commute, capturing the light and the color of the city as the sun rises over the sky. More of a collage than a narrative, the montage nevertheless activates the right feelings, turning what was probably a daily slog for many workers into a thing of joyful beauty.

(Also available on the Criterion release of Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back [review].)

The Colour of His Hair (2017; United Kingdom; 22 minutes): A mix of documentary and fiction, The Colour of His Hair de-archives an unfinished script by Elizabeth Montague, written in 1964 for Britain’s Homosexual Law Reform Society. Montague’s brother, Lord Montague, had been involved in a high profile prosecution that sent him to jail for a year as punishment for being a practicing homosexual. The case sparked a movement in England to decriminalize being gay.

From what we see here, The Colour of His Hair looked to be a dramatic thriller, something along the lines of Basil Dearden’s Victim [review]. Two young lovers are being blackmailed and threatened with exposure if they don’t pay--a very real problem at the time. Though what exists of Montague’s script is just set-up, filmmaker Sam Ashby lends it gravity by splicing it together with archival footage about the Reform Society and testimony from men victimized in this way--both by opportunistic criminals and the law that empowered their crimes. At first I was hoping for less documentary and more story, but as Ashby carefully layers his narrative, including information about the Lesbian and Gay News Media Archive, where Montague’s script had been housed, he not only illustrates the heartache that many experienced, but the importance of the change that was brought about when the unctuous law was finally undone.

The Black Balloon (2012; USA; 21 minutes): A short from filmmaking brothers Josh and Ben Safdie (Good Time), The Black Balloon is the grown-up flipside to Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic The Red Balloon [review]. In NYC, a gaggle of birthday balloons are accidentally released into the air, and a single black balloon drifts away from the pack. Searching for some kind of connection, someone to take its string and give it a life, the black balloon moves through the city, creating unique opportunities for various denizens of the metropolis to put it to use. One man (Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a collaborator of Bob Dylan and Howard Stern) instructs it to block a security camera so he can shoplift, another uses it to distract the daughter of his girlfriend, and a third to get the attention of his grown son. In each case, the adult abandons the balloon as soon as it served its purpose--the complete opposite of the little boy in The Red Balloon.

The Safdies have an agile shooting style that works well with the material and the locale. Stray, superfluous moments give a pretty good indication of how much the boys love New York, and you will marvel at how they pulled off some of the au naturale street scenes where the balloon bobs its way through the crowd. The characters all seem as if they are plucked straight from that mass, lending a credibility to what is otherwise a fanciful production. Though slight in its parts, the whole is effective.

(Side note: The Red Balloon enthusiasts should also check out Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon [review] to see an alternate update.)

Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’un clown [Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Clown] (1946; France; 18 minutes): The first film from renowned auteur Jean-Pierre Melville is a long way from his more famous efforts like Le samourai [review] and Army of Shadows [review 1, 2]. This black-and-white documentary is exactly as advertised: a chronicle of what a famous clown, Beby, does between one night’s performance and the next. Narrated by Melville (there is little live sound), the film takes a rather lackadaisical approach to the reporting, embracing its subject and allowing for a little humorous staging--including an excellent sequence where Beby and his partner get inspiration from watching the mishaps of regular folks on the Parisian street (all staged, but don’t worry about it).

My favorite player, though, is Beby’s dog Swing, who goes wherever he goes. Try not to be completely charmed when Swing takes a prayer pose next to his master to say his blessings before bed. Just try!

(Note: Also available on the Criterion Collection release of Le silence de la mer, Melville’s feature-length debut.)

LE SAMOURAI - #306

It’s not the silence that gets me about LeSamouraï, it’s the stillness. Sure, it takes ten minutes before anyone says a word in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 crime masterpiece, but that’s not really what makes Le Samouraï so riveting, so impossible to look away from. That would be the economy of movement, and the willingness of the camera, along with everyone in its lens, to remain perfectly still. Particularly Alain Delon, playing Jef Costello, the hitman that leads this thing. He spends much of the movie with his hands in his pockets, staring straight ahead. It’s a performance absent of gesture. He only moves when he acts.

As with his heist film Le cercle rouge [review], Melville builds this noir knock-off around a Japanese proverb, this time borrowed from the Bushido, the code of the samurai warrior (or, at least purported to be, since apparently Melville made it up). “There is no solitude greater than that of the samurai unless it be that of a tiger in the jungle...perhaps....” Jef is a man without personal relationships, only connections. He lives alone with a chirping bullfinch that acts as his canary in the coal mine, its behavior tipping him off to any intruders. His clients can be anonymous, and the man he kills at the start of Le Samouraï, the nightclub owner, is a stranger to him. He’s a lone wolf (no cub).

Each step toward the hit is part of a methodology: getting an untraceable car, establishing an alibi, picking a route that will make it less likely for him to be seen. Step by step, Jef goes about his business. Only the unpredictability of others is his real enemy. This particular job starts to go haywire when a piano player in the club, Valérie (Cathy Rosier), is in the hallway when Jef exits the boss’ office. Her vague description of the killer causes police to round up any usual suspect that matches the brief. Except, when Valérie sees Jef in the line-up, she changes the details of her story to protect him. He doesn’t know why, and neither does the detective (François Périer, Orpheus [review]) pursuing the case. He’s sure Jef is his man, and he starts hunting the jungle cat with the a precision to match Jef’s own (provided, again, others don’t screw it up for him).

Breaking it down, Le Samouraï is a portrait of a cold-blooded killer having his blood warmed. Though Jef tracks Valérie down ostensibly to find out who his clients are after a double-cross, presuming they paid the musician to lie on his behalf, their encounter has a different effect on him. Jef sees the kindness in the woman, and he begins to understand that there is benefit to not always being alone, people can care about you and help you. At least, for me, this would explain his actions in the film’s final scene. He has fallen in love with her, such as he understands it. So he takes care of her in the only manner he understands: kill or don’t kill. (She wears animal print in early scenes: is she another predator or prey?)

It’s funny, because the first time I’d ever heard of Le Samouraï was when I was editing the comic book series Red Rocket 7. Michael Allred’s sci-fi comic was a tour of rock history through the eyes of an alien clone. Allred is an expert retro stylist, the sort of guy who would watch Melville’s immaculately designed film and see things he could use in his own work. In this case, the author opens an issue of Red Rocket 7 with Red’s girlfriend telling him “I love you” while in a movie theater. The movie they are watching in this moment of potential emotional panic? Le Samouraï. On the screen behind him, Jef Costello has a gun pointed at his head, held by the man who betrayed him. It’s a smart parallel. This kind of emotion is just as deadly for Jef as it feels for Red (though romance has more purchase in Allred’s world).

Le Samouraï is a cool film. Not just hip, but I mean in temperature, in look. There are no vibrant colors in the movie. The skies are gray, Jef’s apartment is green and brown, the nightclub is silver and blue--perhaps the most colorful image is Valérie’s white gold dress. It’s sparkly in much the same way the nightclub décor sparkles. It’s sleek and fancy and modern, but not necessarily space age. The club itself presents a different world, one that is clean and shiny. Everywhere else Jef goes is grimy and dank, with maybe the exception of the apartment of Jane (Nathalie Delon), his alibi. Its feminine details are soft and lean toward lighter hues, in contrast to the masculine, utilitarian, beige and gun-metal grey police station--hence, the police destroying the peacefulness of the flat when they invade. Every set is designed to let you know whom you are dealing with the moment you step through the doors. Those coming to this edition of Le Samouraï for the high-definition upgrade will be pleased to see how much the image has improved. (NOTE: The screengrabs here are taken from the 2005 DVD release.)

One last thing before I cease my ramble--AND THOSE WHO FEAR SPOILERS PLEASE LOOK AWAY NOW AND COME BACK LATER--but let’s talk that last scene.

The death of Jef Costello is its own odd style choice. In one sense, it recalls the end of Breathless [review], when Belmondo falls backwards in the street after being shot. Of course, Melville appeared in Breathless, and Jean-Luc Godard looked up to the older director, so is it possible that the end of Le Samouraï is some kind of metatextual answer to the conclusion of the revolutionary nouvelle vague classic? Delon does not go down with the same improvised realism of Belmondo. Rather, in much the same way that Michel’s death in that earlier film reflects the freeform aesthetic of Godard’s mis-en-scene, Jef’s death has a more rigid, theatrical styling, befitting both the aesthetic of Le Samouraï but also of a more classical filmmaking technique. With the small trickle of blood on his mouth, clutching his chest with gloved hands, Delon almost looks like Bela Lugosi sinking back into Dracula’s coffin. Is it the death of a warrior, or the finale of a horror movie?

Then again, perhaps it’s nothing. But if Jean-Pierre Melville is as precise as the character he gave life to, we know it has to mean something. Even if it’s just a sacrificial pose or that Jef is as unmoved by death as he is all else.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

UN FLIC - FILMSTRUCK

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2008.

It's an opening as old as cinema itself. Three men walk into a remote bank, leaving one waiting in the getaway car. Armed with guns and trenchcoats, they rob the vaults. Intercut with this action are scenes of a cop on his nightly rounds, following up on calls, talking to informants. The robbery is precisely planned, while the policeman's trek is subject to the whims of his city; the cop tries to bring order to the human chaos, whereas a robbery goes wrong precisely because the human element can't be controlled.

In most movies, both of these events--particularly the bank heist--would move at a rapid pace, but because Un Flic (a.k.a. Dirty Money) is a film by Jean-Pierre Melville (Army of Shadows [review], Bob le flambeur), these scenarios play out slowly, at a measured pace. The robbers are stoic, speaking only when they have to, weighing each move they make. The cop, Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon), does his job gravely and by the book, meting out justice indiscriminately, but also being fair when it counts.

Made in 1973, Un Flic is Melville's final film, and it provides a cynical coda to his career. Dropping the Eastern philosophy that he used in some of his earlier crime pictures with Delon (Le Samourai [review], Le Cercle rouge [review]), this time Melville opens with a quote from 18th-Century criminologist François-Eugène Vidocq: "The only feelings mankind has ever inspired in policemen are those of indifference and derision." Delon will later repeat these words, showing the weariness of his character. People will do the wrong thing, they always do.

Commissioner Edouard has no idea how right he is, in fact, or how tangled in the crime he has become. Nightclub owner Simon (Richard Crenna) is the man behind the bank robbery, and the money is meant for a larger heist, robbing a drug mule (Leon Minisin) on a train heading out of Paris. It just so happens that Edouard is also on the trail of those drugs, working with a cross-dressing snitch, Gaby (Valerie Wilson), to bust the courier when he arrives with the goods. The cop has no idea that the two cases are connected, nor does he realize that Simon is involved, a fact that is going to strike a little too close to home. As it turns out, Edouard is having an affair with Simon's girlfriend, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve). When it comes time to make his move, this connection is going to muddy the motivational waters for Edouard. Does he make the choices he does because they are the right choices, or is there something deeper, more selfish than that?

The ending of Un Flic actually fits quite nicely with the overall themes of Melville's filmography. As a police detective, Delon's character makes his decisions, right or wrong, and is forced to live with them. It's a harsh ending, but Melville's heroes (and anti-heroes) have always struggled with a world that seems to lack something fundamental, be it the honor of the warrior in Le Samourai or their basic moral freedoms in Army of Shadows. I am not comfortable saying that Melville has given up on his fellow man completely, but he definitely seems disenchanted, as if there is no real solution to the struggle. The final image, the ringing phone going unanswered, leaves us feeling that something has passed, that Edouard is done, he no longer sees the point of trying to stop the bad guys when even the woman he loves would betray him. Cathy gets the most portentous line of the movie when she says to Edouard, "Dead men arrest no one." She then points a gun at him in jest, and he might have been better off had she shot him then and there. Eventually, she will kill him (metaphorically) without ever drawing a weapon, destroying something inside of him, and getting away with it. (His walking away from her has a kind of thematic rhyme in his releasing the transvestite informant. Both women have beautiful blonde hair, and both disappoint Edouard. Yet, with the snitch, it's Edouard who breaks her heart. He wrongfully believes he can't count on her any longer, but the truth is Gaby can no longer rely on him. The man dressed as a woman is the only one who is everything she seems.)

Dirty Money, the English title often used for this film is a bit misleading, it makes us think that the stolen cash will somehow end up in Edouard's hands, that this will be a story about a corruptible officer of the law. The original French title, Un Flic, which simply translates as A Cop, is far more fitting. It puts the movie in line with Le Samourai, making them bookends to a larger story, each about lonely men on their own side of the law trying to do what they think is right, stuck in a system that would have them stick to one way of doing things even when that way is clearly flawed. The Paris of both films is remarkably similar. Simon and Cathy's nightclub could just as easily be the one Delon visits as Jeff Costello in the earlier picture. Except here, Melville and cinematographer Walter Wottitz cast the events in a blue pallor, as if a melancholic ennui hangs over all of France. Life is stuck in a perpetual, topsy-turvy lie of day-for-night.

Beyond his general concerns of genre stories as philosophical vehicles--or perhaps in conjunction with the same, given his methodical approach to the crimes--as with any Jean-Pierre Melville crime picture, the robberies are meticulously constructed things of beauty. The opening bank job is fairly standard, but the theft of the drugs, which involves trains and helicopters, is ingenious, echoing in its own way the crooks dangling from a hole in the ceiling in Jules Dassin's Rififi [review]. Richard Crenna goes about his work with a silent resolve, taking each step with grim determination. What is interesting this time around is it's also the same determination that Delon's detective takes in tracking the misdeeds. The line between criminal and cop has been erased. Long sequences pass with no dialogue, just the sound of the surrounding world. It's as if words are more precious, and more dangerous, than bullets.

Un Flic is a fitting end to a distinguished career. Jean-Pierre Melville was a master of his craft, and his powers had not yet begun to wane. Sadly, he passed away a year later at the age of 56, far too young for a filmmaker this spry. Perhaps that is why that final image remains so haunting, the police telephone unanswered. On the other end of the line is information about a new crime, a new case that is now a story that will never be told.

THIEF - #691

I am sure back in the day all video store employees had games they played to pass the time when they got bored. When another loop through The Simpsons or Arrested Development DVDs wasn't enough of a distraction, it was necessary to find other things to keep the day from drowning. Where I worked, on particularly slow days, we would each pick out a handful of movies that we had never seen but always wanted to. Once chosen, we would watch the first five or ten minutes and analyze them. I think it was someone's pick of ...And Justice for All that led us to a slow-day revelation. The lengthy opening of Norman Jewison's film is a set-up that has nothing to do with plot, but everything with character. It seemed indicative of what made 1970s American cinema special: the storytelling was the concern, and the filmmaking itself was paramount. No one was worried we wouldn’t know where it was going, or even what might happen next. There was no formula to how the tale was told, just follow the behavior.

Michael Mann's Thief came at the tail end of that era, but it brings up the rear nicely. It opens with an extended heist, dialogue at a minimum, dropping the audience straight into the action. There is a clear line to be drawn between it and Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive [review], one that I would think Refn would acknowledge. Though both openers would, on paper, sound like they are plot mechanicals, the truth is neither has that much importance to the main story. Seeing either Ryan Gosling's driver or James Caan's thief on the job tells us what we need to know about them, how they identify themselves, but not necessarily where the narrative they inhabit might be heading. The particularly key information is in what they do after the crime is done. As Frank, Caan goes to the waterfront and shares a danish with a fisherman, relaxing as the sun rises over the water, calming down from the rush of the robbery. He doesn't introduce himself or give his name, he just is. A thief, and a man.

The whole first half hour or so is just our chance to get to know Frank. It's only in subsequent scenes that we find out he sells cars as a front for his night-time activities, or that he has a thing with the waitress (Tuesday Weld) at his favorite diner. He is a thief first, an individual second, and the evolution of how he is presented to the audience mirrors his personal quest within the film. Stealing diamonds is funding the construction of another life. It will eventually pay for him to be out of the underworld and a citizen in the legitimate world. He's even mapped this out with a collage he made in prison.

Of course, there still emerges an identifiable plot to push Thief along. The first heist and some resulting fallout gets Frank the attention of a local crime boss (Robert Prosky) who wants to bring Frank in under his umbrella. The independent operator is reluctant, and with good reason: just talking to the guy puts him on the radar of law enforcement who previously had no idea he existed. Yet, the promise of a big score means Frank can fast track his transition to the good life, marrying and having a family. He also needs to move fast to get his mentor, Okla (Willie Nelson), out of prison before the old convict's heart condition takes him down for good.

The new boss sets up Frank with a rather large target, and despite the job being complicated, the takeaway will be worth the risk. There are shades of Jean-Pierre Melville in Mann's stoic staging, though Thief also owes plenty to Jules Dassin's Rififi [review], possibly in the same way Refn owes a nod or two to Mann. I’d wager it’s no mere happenstance that Criterion has reissued Dassin’s 1955 caper alongside Thief. The climactic rush to stop a double-cross and keep mother and child out of the combat zone is not an altogether original scenario, but there seems to be at least some eye cast from Mann back to Dassin. Then again, there are lots of genre tropes being employed here. The ending of Thief is also reminiscent of many a western--though Mann's handling of the violence lacks the bloody grace of a Sam Peckinpah, not to mention the restrained tension of traditional shootouts like the climax of High Noon. [review] 

Fans of the Miami Vice TV show or Crime Story [review] are familiar with Mann's affinity for slow-mo paint-splattered showdowns. The violence here is fairly clunky. The aesthetics only call attention to themselves. The years have not been kind, nor is high-definition the filmmaker's friend. It's a little jarring, because everywhere else, the new technology shows how Mann's love of neon was already firmly in place, even at this early stage. The night-time skylines are beautiful, as is the shot of James Caan driving his shiny Cadillac onto the car lot, lit up under a canopy of light bulbs.

This is merely window-dressing, however. All of the macho stuff--the gunfights, the stealing--is superfluous; it all still comes back to character. The best material in Thief is what happens away from the job. Willie Nelson, for instance, shows an incredible depth of emotion in his short appearance, and there are some interesting class issues that emerge as Frank tries to bury his past and present himself as a working stiff looking to make good.

The best bit in the movie, though, is an extended interaction between Caan and Weld. Out on a date, they both decide to put their cards on the table and get real. No more hidden pasts, no more looking the other way. The exchange feels raw and unscripted. No artifice, just two people sharing a back-and-forth. I didn't check the clock, but it goes on for what seems like ten minutes, and the two of them could easily highjack the movie at that point. I'd have been more than happy to have Thief turn into a Before Midnight-style discussion between a gangster and his dame.

Of course, that's the first scene they'd cut today. You can't have a big genre picture with a lot of talking. James Caan would pull Tuesday Weld out of the bar and then there'd be a hard cut to them having sex. And it wouldn't be James Caan, it'd be someone more conventionally handsome and not so abrasive. And Tuesday Weld would be an actress at least ten years his junior. And there'd have to be a pretty awful bad guy and a recognizable rival cop. Stuff that tests well, you know?

Which just makes Thief all the more intriguing, all the more special. The end of an era of adventurous mainstream filmmaking. We still see movies of a similar stripe crop up occasionally--the films of David O. Russell spring to mind--but not even Michael Mann makes them like this anymore. There’s something fresh and unforced about Thief that his quest for perfection would prevent him from ever recapturing. Moments still pop up here and there--who can forget the sitdown between De Niro and Pacino in Heat--but the fresh excitement of Thief is something you only get to have the first time.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

M - #30

I don't know if Fritz Lang's M would be considered the first police "procedural" in cinema, but the 1931 motion picture is certainly very close to it. Having seen the film multiple times now--and this go-around actually seeing it in a theater for the first time, as I caught a screening of the new 2K digital restoration put together by the Munich Film Archive--M is one I've gotten to know fairly well but that still manages to surprise me each and every time I see it. Since first discovering M as a teenager, I usually focused on the almost surreal, Brechtian depiction of Germany's criminal underworld, culminating in the trial sequence where the crooks judge the murderer. Seeing it this time, I was struck by how methodical Lang and his wife and screenwriter, Thea von Harbou, are in arranging the different elements of the story, following the case step by step toward its conclusion.

M opens on a city in distress. Someone is kidnapping and killing children. The situation has already passed into popular culture, as evinced by the little girls singing jump rope songs about the murderer. He is a bogeyman, one notch to the right of an urban legend. This specter of death is also, at that moment, on the prowl. Peter Lorre stars as the disturbed killer, Han Beckert, delivering a performance that is chillingly calculated. Beckert is an icy personality with a chameleon's talent for fitting in. He is kind and warm to the little girls whom he bribes with candy and balloons, cocky when writing letters to newspapers about his actions, but cowardly when consequence comes knocking.

Early portions of the film follow the police as they chase down leads looking for the killer. We glimpse into private meetings, back room preparations, and the investigative labs, with Lang showing us how the detectives, experts, and technicians process the evidence and build the case. When the clues yield few results, the cops hit the streets and start putting the boot into the criminal class. The homicide bureau is led by Lang-regular Otto Wernicke, who plays the recurring character Inspector Lohmann, a fearsome and corpulent scourge of shady practices and their practitioners. Lohmann's raids on speakeasies and other criminal hangouts begins to put a damper on the various illegal businesses, so the top crooks put their heads together and vow to capture the child killer themselves. The various criminal divisions are con men, pickpockets, and burglars, with the top of the food chain being a dangerous individual referred to only as "Safecracker." Actor Fritz Odemar strikes an imposing figure. He is easily the most stylish of the bad guys, swaggering in his leather trench, bowler, and cane.

The crooks employ the Beggars Union as their street team. The theory is that panhandlers regularly go unnoticed. The case is cracked when a blind balloon salesman (Georg John) hears Beckert whistling Edvard Grieg's "In the Halls of the Mountain King" and recalls hearing a customer whistle the same melody on the day the last little girl was killed. The beggars spring into action, marking Beckert with a chalk "M" on his coat and following him street to street before cornering him after hours in an office building. The jig is up!

Lang spends sufficient time with each aspect of the story, letting every character have his or her due, fully developing cop and criminal alike as their investigations run parallel to one another. What is perhaps most revolutionary and daring for the era, however, is how much screen time the director gives to the killer. While we are spared seeing any of the bloody details of Beckert's deeds, we are privy to his behavior after he satiates his bloodlust and how the compulsion next takes over him. Lorre is well known for his buggy eyes and reptilian voice. He is chubbier here than he would be for his more famous Hollywood roles in films like The Man Who Knew Too Much [review] and The Maltese Falcon [review], but he is already cultivating that sweaty, ghoulish manner that would see him play villains for most of his career. Hans Beckert is perhaps one of his most varied roles, as it features him jumping through many moods. At times, he is pitiful and almost sympathetic; at others, sinister. A scene of Beckert making faces at himself in a mirror is darkly comic and yet also unsettling. Lorre looks like he is legitimately losing his mind.

Fritz Lang's approach to the storytelling in M is perhaps best exemplified in how the criminals work through the office building, searching it floor by floor, room by room, until they find their man. (One sees a direct line from here to Rififi [review] and Le cercle rouge [review], in the nearly dialogue-free heist with robbers drilling through the ceiling, among other things.) This is how Lang and von Harbou also develop the script, considering every possible scenario, looking at the community impact the string of disappearances would have, how the fear and paranoia would turn neighbor against neighbor. As a director, Lang controls every aspect of his scenes and how he delivers the information to his audience. For instance, one of the major elements that the restoration efforts of the last decade have set out to correct are all the changes made to the soundtrack without Lang's blessing. He chose to show many sequences without any audio at all, using silence to build anxiety and anticipation. When police raids descend on the streets, there is no dialogue, no ambient noise. It's dead quiet as swarms of men arrive in automobiles and begin corralling suspects. When the sound does return, the initial jolt is shocking.

The Munich Film Archive print of M represents the film in its most complete form, quite possibly the edit that Lang originally intended. Though the running time is not much longer than the version Criterion released in 2004, it is substantially different in that the newly discovered nitrate has allowed the restoration team to fix jittery cuts and drop-outs and maintain a more consistent picture throughout. The film looks wonderful projected digitally. Lang's use of high and low angles, and his sense of how to frame an image, particularly his extreme close-ups, works even better when seen at a theatrical size. There are many engagements set up around the country, including the weeklong run at Portland's Cinema 21 that begins this Friday, March 29. Check the Kino site to see if M is coming to your area. It's well worth whatever effort it takes to see this in the cinema. M is an unforgettable film, melding a social consciousness with expert storytelling, balancing the macabre with realism for a queasy balance between the things that scare us and our desire to watch them come to life.

PURPLE NOON (Blu-Ray) - #637

"Your genius lies within..."

For what is basically a crime thriller with a very average plot, Purple Noon (Plein soleil) is a film that happens almost entirely on the interior. Though René Clément's 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley has plenty of action--there are two murders and a meticulous flight from justice--all the important stuff happens behind Alain Delon's piercing blue eyes.

Delon stars as Tom Ripley. He was the first, ahead of Dennis Hopper, Matt Damon, and John Malkovich. He is arguably the best, at least for the iteration of the character this early in his criminal career, an empty vessel waiting to be filled, a chameleon looking for a new color palette to imitate. Delon plays the con man with a near absence of personality, alternating between a cold blankness and an almost childish petulance. For the early part of the film, when he carouses with his target, Philippe Greenleaf  (Maurice Ronet, The Fire Within [review]), they act like hormonal teenagers, giggling and pulling pranks and making nuisances of themselves. The seemingly homoerotic link between them is more predatory than sexual. Tom is already shadowing Philippe, sticking close to gather inspiration, his gaze recording information to mimic. To the unknowing eye, it looks like male one-upsmanship at its worst. When the pair pick up a tourist out on the town (played by Viviane Chantel), they paw her from both sides, hoping to secure her attention.

The caginess of Ripley's technique only becomes evident when cornered. Philippe confronts him, knowing the mooch is up to something, having seen Tom mimicking him in the mirror and finding his bank statements in Tom's things. Tom doesn't deny it. Instead, with a steely resolve, he tells Philippe what his plan is. Philippe is the perfect victim. He is perversely intrigued by the whole thing, and also so self-absorbed, he believes Tom would never do it. He's the invincible Greenleaf!

It's an odd twist I had never really considered before. Clément gives us an entirely unsympathetic murder victim, so that no one is sorry to see Philippe go. Ronet plays him as a bully. It's all there in the script by Clément and Paul Gégauff. Though Purple Noon is refreshingly lacking in psychobabble and explanations, that doesn't mean it's lacking in psychology. Philippe is the classic abusive boyfriend, lashing out at his fiancée and then immediately apologizing. Marge is played by Marie Laforét, and though she fights back, she always relents. No writer can watch Philippe toss her handwritten manuscript in the ocean and believe that she would ever take him back. And yet there she is. For his part, Tom lets Philippe be cruel to him because it's the rich kid's one true talent. Observing how he does it is essential.

Tom working his way up to kill Philippe makes up the first third of Purple Noon. The second third is his adopting Philippe's identity, forging documents and laying an elaborate trail that both establishes a new life and keeps shaking everyone else off the scent. The last third follows another murder, an unplanned slaying to keep from having the truth exposed. To cover that crime, Tom must kill Philippe again, making it appear that the killer has fled from justice and has committed suicide out of fear and guilt. This ends up being Tom's most masterful move, however: the new opportunity opens up the vault. He can take everything of Philippe's now, not just what he had on him in travel, but his full fortune...and also his romance.

In Purple Noon's creepiest scene, we learn that this is perhaps what Tom wanted all along. The ultimate theft, the ultimate assumption of roles: he will take Philippe's place with Marge. Here, the abusive triggers work to aid him. He whispers to Marge in her sleep, imitating the man she thinks she's lost, only to have her see the truth on awakening. Yet, this is the hidden key. Just as sure as the metal key in the cubbyhole by the door is how he got into her bedroom, this ruse will let him sneak into her affections. The delivery of harsh news, that Philippe never loved her, shows he can be as callous as she's used to, and then he provides her the comfort she seeks, mimicking the familiar pattern. Philippe never loved her, but Tom always has. Get the girl, get all the money, step into the dead man's shoes. A woman finally chooses him over Philippe, the tourist looks his way at last.

René Clément hasn't so much created a suspense thriller here or a whodunit as he has a "how will he do it." Ripley's success is, for the most part, a foregone conclusion, so we're intrigued to watch him lay out his pieces and then follow along as others, including a sharp police inspector (Erno Crisa), figure out where they all fit. Purple Noon is as colorful as a Hitchcock picture, but its view of mankind is as dark and cynical as a film noir. Clément has created something in between. Henri Decaë's lush color photography provides a bridge from the black-and-white of yesteryear (he shot more traditional French noirs like Elevator to the Gallows and Bob le flambeur) and the redefining of genre that was just around the corner (Le samourai and Le cercle rouge [review], both for director Jean-Pierre Melville, and both featuring Alain Delon). He uses primarily solid colors here, the Technicolor equivalent of light and shadow, creating shapes and angles. The most flamboyant use of patterns are on shirts that give Ripley away. The striped coat that Philippe catches him wearing becomes his disguise in his final gambit. On the flipside, a solid white shirt with Philippe's initials are what tips off their friend Freddy (Bull Kearns) to Ripley's scheme and leads to the second homicide. It's an omen Ripley doesn't pick up on: there's no coverage behind a blank canvas, you will be seen.