Furie Road

Stray thoughts about Sidney J. Furie inspired by my recent work on two video essays for Imrpint’s forthcoming box set.

This is a really useful set — Furie is never considered as being part of the New Hollywood, but during the time frame covered by these movies — THE LAWYER, LITTLE FAUSS AND BIG HALSY, HIT!, SHEILA LEVINE IS DEAD AND LIVING IN NEW YORK and THE BOYS IN COMPANY C, he was right in there, despite being a Canadian who had made films in his homeland and in the UK. His style, both photographic and editorial, fits the bill — he worked with John A. Alonzo a few times, before JAA shot CHINATOWN. The actors he uses include Barry Newman, Michael J. Pollard, Robert Redford, Billy Dee Williams, Gwen Welles, Richard Pryor, Jeannie Berlin, Roy Scheider, a real panoply of the talent of the period.

The two major ommissions in Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls are Peckinpah and Fosse, which is bizarre since their inclusion would have strengthened the author’s assumption, never quite developed into an argument, that most of the directorial talents of the era self-destructed in a welter of booze and alcohol. I can only assume that they were excluded because they’re not quite the right type by way of origins: Peckinpah’s grounding in the western and Fosse’s in musicals mark them out as different from the movie brats. It can’t be their age, since Hal Ashby gets major coverage.

Furie is similarly an alien, and I can only assume that Biskind gave him the go-by because he didn’t consider him significant enough or that he was too level-headed, disinclined to destroy his brain with chemicals.

Furie has been typed — and has sometimes typed himself — as a one-trick pony, developing the elaborate style of THE IPCRESS FILE, then failing to develop anything else to replace it. But why should he? It’s fun. It attracted a lot of critical abuse over the years, but I love flamboyant style, and what we see in these films is a modulation of the concussed-fly-on-the-wall (or behind the potted plant, telephone, lampshade or in-box) approach, which delights in fracturing the widescreen frame with views through doorways, windshields, screen doors, and other architectural elements, but doesn’t necessarily startle the viewer by making the brim of a sombrero and its wearer’s shoulders the main compositional material, with the other guy’s face tiny in the distance, gazing through a narrow slot (as seen in THE APPALOOSA).

I’m curious now to see more of Furie’s recent films — he’s kept working, rather off-radar for most auteurist-types, for a remarkably long time. For now, I want to say that all the films included on this set are worth anybody’s time, and BOYS IN COMPANY C is some kind of masterpiece. The energy and insight Furie packs into every moment is really awe-inspiring. A two-hour movie with what feels like three hours of content.

Of course the presence of R. Lee Ermey as drill sergeant, well ahead of his turn for Kubrick, is an eye-opener, but the movie’s also notable for the younger cast, particularly Stan Shaw, Craig Wasson, James Whitmore Jr. And comparisons with APOCALYPSE NOW may be more germane — the movies were neighbours, both shooting in the Philippines at the same time, though Furie’s shoot started later and finished earlier. While Coppola creates a mood of psychedelic fog and madness, it’s the Furie movie that makes you feel like you’re in the midst of real, deadly events. A more conventional film but a more effective one in many respects, although one has to acknowledge that Coppola’s goals were different…

Daniel Kremer’s book, Sidney J. Furie, Life and Films, has been a great help — it’s the kind of book every living filmmaker wishes they had written about them.

One nice bit: Furie, wary of shooting in the Philippines, suspicious that corruption may be responsible for Coppola’s schedule and budget problems, asked the government man with responsibility for movie-making to what he attributes Coppola’s troubles. “Mr. Furie, my observation is that when the producer and director are the same person, and they argue, the director always wins.”

Cox’s Orange Pippins: Spaghetti is a dish best served cold

Fiona was enthused about seeing THE BIG SILENCE, because as it’s a snowy western, she assumed the people would be less orange. The orangeyness of everyone in spaghetti westerns, their pores clogged with tangerine pancake makeup, really bothers her. She really liked this one.

Before that, we had quite a good time with THE PRICE OF POWER, an interesting, unusual and original spag western from 1969 — the first film, as Alex Cox points out, to directly tackle the Kennedy assassination — though there are all those weird foreshadowing films like SUDDENLY and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE — and then there’s Mr. Zapruder’s magnum opus, which really wins first place.

But Tonino (MY NAME IS NOBODY) Valerii’s film, written with Massimo Patrizi and gothic/giallo specialist Ernesto Gastaldi, really goes for it, in the oddest way. In order to make the story of actual president James Garfield’s actual assassination feel a bit more resonant, they jettison all the facts and transport the event to Dallas, represented by standing sets from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Van Johnson is imported to play the doomed prez, and the basic events we can all agree upon — sniper kills POTUS, patsy is arrested and assassinated, shadowy cabal of political/business interests pays the bills — are recycled all’Italiana, with many additional massacres featuring electronically amplified gun blasts (every gunshot has a ricochet PANG! even if there’s nothing around for the bullet to carom off of. And I generally liked the racial politics — there’s much talk of slavery and the slimy businessmen led by Fernando Rey are trying to undo the outcome of the Civil War. I loved the way the trauma of the actual hit-job causes the camera to come off its tripod and Zapruder around, panic-stricken. Valerii also throws in a lot of wacky diopter shots.

What, to me, stopped the film from really coming off, was the role of Giuliano Gemma, not because he’s absurdly handsome and has five hundred teeth, but because he wins, saves the day for democracy, and all is well. Alex Cox observes that “The necessary assumptions of the conspiracy film (almost-universal racism, total corruption of the police, double-dealing by the forces of authority) are already those of the spaghetti western, so there’s no conflict of interest.” But the Italian western mainly follows the required pattern of good guy versus bad guy, good guy wins. It’s just that usually, or in Leone anyhow, the good guy is less good. Even so, it’s impossible to imagine Leone ending a film with Volonte offing Eastwood (though he wanted to start OUATITWEST with all three of his stars from TGTBATUGLY being shot down by his new hero).

There are some stories, however, that don’t benefit from the popular and gratifying heroic triumph ending. Polanski noted that for the audience to care about CHINATOWN’s story of corruption, it shouldn’t end with the social problems being cleared up. They’re still with us, after all — capitalism, corruption and abuse — so suggesting that a lone private eye with a bisected nostril solved them in the 1930s would be dishonest.

This is where THE BIG SILENCE comes in. I’ve resisted Sergio Corbucci after being underwhelmed by the original DJANGO — the mud, the coffin and the sadism were all neat, but it was extremely poorly shot, and how dare anyone compare a poorly-shot film favourably to Leone?

THE BIG SILENCE is also photographically iffy, but at the same time has many splendid wide shots, thanks to the snowy Tyrolean locations. What uglifies Corbucci’s shooting is the messy, out-of-focus, misframed and herky-jerky closeups. Like Tinto Brass, Corbucci seems to position his cameras at random, stage the blocking without regard to what can be seen, and throw the whole mess together in a vaguely cine-verita manner. And one of his operators here is incompetent. What beautifies it is the costumes, actors, settings, and wide shots. And he has Morricone (with Riz Ortolani) providing a unique, wintry, romantic score.

The set-up is stark and simple: outside the aptly-named town of Snow Hill, a raggletaggle band of outlaws is starving, picked off by bounty hunters. A new sheriff (Frank Wolff) has been sent to impose order. A military man, he means well, but is of uncertain competence: on his way to town he’s robbed of his horse by the desperate outlaws, who eat it.

The movie’s sidelining of the “new sheriff in town” is amusing — our main characters are to be Loco (in the original language version, Tigrero), a preening, psychopathic bounty hunter played by Klaus Kinski, and Silence, a mute killer of bounty killers, played by a Mauser-wielding Jean-Louis Trintignant in what’s apparently his favourite role. Silence has no dialogue but he does have a traumatic flashbackstory, as was becoming de rigeur in Leone films.

There’s also Vonetta McGee, later borrowed by Alex Cox for REPO MAN, rather magnificent as a widow who hires Silence, paying him with her body, to kill Loco. And the usual corrupt manager of the general store. Spaghetti westerns are communistic in a low-key way, the business interests are usually the real bad guys.

The body count is high, as we’d expect. The blood is very red. The bad guys are very bad, and they have it mostly their own way. The typical baroque whimsicality of the genre’s violence is in evidence: rather than shooting his opponent, Kinski shoots the ice he’s standing on, dropping him into the freezing water. But, unusually, none of this is funny. The sadism is intense: even our hero has a tendency to shoot men’s thumbs off when they surrender (stops them from unsurrendering). There’s a really intense focus on INJURY TO THE HAND, which goes back to Django but becomes demented here. Paul Schrader attributed this motif to writers’ anxiety — hands are what you write with.

Cox points out that, though the film is terse and devoid of subplots, the author of the English dub, Lewis Ciannelli (son of actor Eduardo Ciannelli), has used the Utah setting to insert some stuff about the outlaws being victims of religious persecution, suggesting they’re Mormons. At least they’re treated more sympathetically than in THE BIG GUNDOWN… up to a point.

Introducing the film on Moviedrome back in the day, Cox remarked, “And the ending is the worst thing ever.” Meaning it as praise, you understand.

The movie’s ending is its most astonishing element. It stands comparison with CHINATOWN, and is even more startling in a way since there are, after all, plenty of noirs with tragic endings (but none quite like the one Polanski imposed on Robert Towne — Towne’s ending was a tragedy that solves the social problem — Polanski’s instead sets it in cement).

Corbucci came up with the story, penning the script with the usual football team of collaborators. His widow, says Cox, “told Katsumi Ishikuma that her husband had the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X in mind.” Che’s murder happened right before the shoot. This gives the film its unusual seriousness, and what makes it more effective than THE PRICE OF POWER is Corbucci upends the genre conventions that would prevent the horror from staying with us.

THE PRICE OF POWER stars Erik the Viking; Dr. Randall ‘Red’ Adams; and Don Lope.

THE BIG SILENCE stars Marcello Clerici; Don Lope de Aguirre; Proximates the Tyrant; Father Pablo Ramirez; Chico; Fregonese the Tyrant; Principe di Verona; and Marlene.

Beck #1: Inspector Kafka Calls

The first Martin Back novel, Roseanna, came out in 1965 (it’s set the previous year — the novels chart the changes in Swedish society over a decade). The film emerged in 1967. It’s pretty faithful to the story, but has notable differences.

ROSEANNA was directed by Hans Abramson, who also adapted the script. He came from TV, and would go back there just a few years later. A shame, he’s quite deft, stylistically. His movie begins, like CHINATOWN would later, with a series of b&w photographs in extreme close-up, and the images are shuffled before us. This time, though the images show a woman’s naked dead boy on a slab. She’s supposed to have been retrieved from a canal after several days, but of course she looks great. This is pretty near the beginning of the crime show trope of corpse porn, where nude cadavers are lovingly lingered over by the camera. The next example I can think of is Makavejev’s THE TRAGEDY OF/LOVE AFFAIR OF THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR, the same year.

Moviemakers have an unfortunate tendency to see the phrase “sex crime” and automatically translate it into “sexy crime.” On the page, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s stories are defiantly anti-erotic, with their clinical descriptions of pubic hair, and they’re at pains to point out that their murdered girl did not have appetising breasts. Nothing is glamourised.

I was immediately cheered by the sight of this gloomy Gus, and felt that at any rate Abramson had somehow found a perfect Beck. Our hero constantly has a cold or seasonal illness, is dyspeptic, smokes and drinks coffee too much, doesn’t eat, has no sex life. He’s a walking example of the unhealthiness of the policeman’s lot in the western world.

Unfortunately, this guy, Tor Isedel (what mocking fate named this glum grey accountant type, essentially, Thor?) is playing Gunnar Ahlberg, the local cop who helps Beck. Beck himself is played by the saturnine and suave Keve Hjelm (Zetterling’s NIGHT GAMES). This is all wrong. But he’s a good actor, so it still kind of works. It’s just a shame to make the character sleek like that. Beck in a Van Dyke beard? No no no. And having the right actor for the part standing right beside him the whole time just reminds to. It’s like Bronagh Gallagher having a small part in MARY REILLY beside the woefully miscast Julia Roberts.

Hjelm does eventually get the sniffles, which was good to see. Well, what actor can resist the opportunity to blow his nose in the middle of someone else’s line? (Donald Pleasence, stand up, and put that hanky away. And no, the nasal inhaler is no better.)

In the novel, Roseanna McGraw, homicide-victim-to-be, comes from the American midwest. Abramson evidently wasn’t lured by the fleshpots of Nebraska so he relocates her to Puerto Rico and gets Svensk Filmindustri to pay for his vacation. Maybe he is a cinematic genius.

One person who definitely is is Sven Nykvist, who shot this, in an airy, light, slightly washed-out summer style. A dark story filmed in a bright manner. The novel tells you about the summer, but you don’t feel warmed. The action of the book covers months, and so Sjöwall and Wahlöö get to write passages like “7 January arrived and looked liked 7 January. The streets were full of grey, frozen people without money.”

Now, I’m watching ROSEANNA without subtitles, because the Swedish DVD has none. But chunks of it are in English because Beck has the assistance of American detective Elmer B. Kafka (!), who interviews Roseanna’s lover and former flatmate. The latter is played by Diane Varsi, the film’s most familiar face (to me — PEYTON PLACE, COMPULSION, BLOODY MAMA). The English language scenes are NOT GOOD. The laid-back, informal style of the Swedish dialogue (dunno what they’re saying but it sounds l-b. and i.) yields to hilariously stiff, robotic delivery much like the English-speakers in Japanese movies who I always enjoy. Varsi is actually fine but Michael Tolan as Kafka is one for the ages. Blame the language problem (lack of direction) because he had a long, perfectly successfully acting career and was no just some bozo off the street as the performance would suggest.

Needless to say I enjoyed greatly the ineptitude, which was all the more amusing since it would burst into the film intermittently, with everything else very professional and slick. I also enjoyed the film’s use o/f pseudodocumentary techniques grafted onto the police procedural form and looking like they were made for it: home movie footage, interviews with witnesses that play like movie interviews. Even the soft, reassuring purr of the camera motor, a near-constant presence on the soundtrack, brings a vérité vibe. Also, the most cups I’ve ever seen on a ceiling:

Someone once described my old acquaintance David McKenzie’s YOUNG ADAM as an “existential barge thriller” and at long last I’ve found another film that fits that sub-sub-genre. Oh, I guess Compton Bennett’s beautiful DAYBREAK (1948) is another.

Deciding to cast an angelic, baby-faced young actor as the killer is a nice touch — the book’s psycho seems a little harder. And it makes me think — around this time Hitchcock was planning his own sex killer pic, the never-made KALEIDOSCOPE, which would have borrowed much of its look and technique from European art cinema, notably Antonioni. Hitchcock remarked that it was hard to tackle this kind of story without falling into the convention of the police hiring a girl to act as bait, which is exactly what Beck does in this story. In the book, a chance traffic accident hinders the cops from getting to the scene: professionalism is continually undermined by the ridiculousness of happenstance in the Beck novels. That slightly conventional suspense device is jettisoned here, which is OK, but I feel they deal a blow to authenticity by having their decoy welcome the killer into her bed. Good luck getting a conviction against him after that.

ROSEANNA seems pretty fine, from what I could tell — it makes the shrewd decision to fragment time, as if were being shown a case file in cinematic form, full of stray bits. An early case of Resnais and Godard’s innovations getting pumped into more mainstream cinema. It allows Abramson to unfold a slow story without much looming jeopardy (detectives are rarely in danger in a true story) while keeping things lively and unpredictable. It’s just a shame they didn’t have the nerve to reproduce the book’s most radical elements, the uncharismatic hero and unglamorous victim. Maybe if they had, they’d have gotten a series out of it. That would have to wait…

Martin Beck will return in THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE — soon!