This was a Train of Death

More Bruno Ganz — in THE AMERICAN FRIEND he plays a dying man. The film uses green light, not in any obvious “sickly” way — it’s more associated with Dennis Hopper’s ennui than Ganz’s malady — and also trains. There’s an impressive murder staged on a train, but before that, the Paris Metro and a Hamburg el-train are featured, Hopper holds a canvas displaying a locomotive, and Ganz’s young son has Buster Keaton’s The General on his night-light.

The night-light is also one of many projection devices and photographic toy and motion picture gizmos featured, including a zoetrope, perhaps a nod to Wenders’ approaching collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola. We could also include Hopper’s Polaroid selfies and the tape deck he records his meandering thoughts into. (He’s quite UN-like Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley in these quirks, but still close enough to the essence).

Fiona had never seen it, and was surprised at how much of a thriller it actually was. “I mean, it’s very eccentric, but…” Wenders had succeeded in his goal, using the book to get closer to mainstream commercial cinema, without losing his individuality. Indeed, he never lost that, what he lost instead was his coolness, the confidence he evoked that whatever he concentrated on was really cool. I think it dates to the time the rock stars he worked with stopped being so cool. Lou Reed’s songwriting scene in FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE is probably the first cringe-making moment in a Wenders film. Worse than the guy doing a poo in KINGS OF THE ROAD.

The Sunday Intertitle: Shot Missing

The film within the film in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is also called THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Welles described it as a film he would never have made — it’s supposed to tell us about its fictional author, Jake Hannaford, played by John Huston, not about Welles. It represents, in other words, a Hollywood has-been’s pathetic attempts to be hip and radical and appeal to the youth audience, and emulate the art cinema of Antonioni and Bergman et al.

An OTHELLO image.

Counter-arguments are available: David Bordwell remarked, reasonably enough, that the film has more in common with colour supplement photography and advertising than with arthouse imagery, though we could carry on that argument to point out that commercials started being influenced by art movies back in the sixties and so maybe a Jake Hannaford movie WOULD look like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. We know Welles didn’t care for Antonioni’s style and mood and especially pacing (“I’m not a director who like to linger on thing […] Antonioni is the king of it,”) but I don’t think TOSOTW2 is meant as a straight pastiche of Antonionionioni. It could hardly justify the amount of screen time given it in TOSOTW1. Welles seemingly wanted it to be half the movie, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, but it’s a lot less than that in the Netflix cut.

In spite of the attempts to frame the movie within as a Jake Hannaford film or a sub-Antonioni film, it’s also very much a Welles film. While the framing film has qualities in common with the patchwork style of F FOR FAKE, the inner movie practically quotes THE TRIAL, LADY FROM SHANGHAI and others. It’s full of trick reflections, forced perspective tricks (characters at different distances walking along the same horizon line) and extreme close-ups. If the film parodies arthouse imitations, it’s more in the cack-handed symbolism (giant phalluses destroyed by scissor attack) and the sheer EMPTINESS.

Welles and reflections: LADY FROM SHANGHAI comes to mind, but he was playing with multiple and overlaid images from KANE on.

Welles seems to have nailed the kind of cargo-cult art film gaining a toehold in Hollywood. You might compare TOOTW2 to the movie within a movie that begins STARDUST MEMORIES, which is also a kind of pastiche: the kind of film Woody Allen’s character, Sandy Bates, would make. Depressing, earnest, wearing its influences on its sleeve, aspiring to Bergman and Fellini but not quite making it. But if TOSOTW2 were a real film without a framing narrative to protect us from it, it might be Dennis Hopper’s THE LAST MOVIE (and how apt that Hopper appears here), but also Roger Corman’s THE TRIP (thanks to Noel Vera for pointing this resemblance out) with which it shares four cast members, including Hopper again but also Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg and little Angelo Rossitto, enjoying the wildest party he’s been to since FREAKS. But also Christian Marquand’s gloriously pointless CANDY (1968) which also featured John Huston, and especially CAN HEIRONYMOUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS? (1969), a truly boggling vanity project from Anthony Newley which shared with the Welles a rare late-career appearance by comedian George Jessel (as “the Presence”).

Oja Kodar and train stations: Welles met her on THE TRIAL, then filmed her on a train for F FOR FAKE.

The movie might also be a rather mean mockery of John Huston’s occasional forays into artiness, but here it seems wide of the mark in a way that suggests Welles wasn’t trying to score a direct hit on his star. Huston did make one, beautiful and arguably empty Euro-art film, A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH, which is far better than its terrible reputation suggests, but usually when he tried to be stridently “cinematic”, it took the form of photographic experiments like the aureate tinge of REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE or the tinted flashbacks of WISE BLOOD. Though the late career of Huston certainly features some commercial hackwork (ANNIE, PHOBIA) his actual attempts at making good films add up to a remarkably dignified body of work. It’s arguably in his acting roles that he was guilty of trying too hard to be with it (CANDY, MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, DE SADE, and on the plus side, CHINATOWN) but he always claimed not to take his acting career remotely seriously, so this might just be a case of him saying “Yes” to anything offered, and ignoring John Carradine’s sound career advice to his sons: “Never do anything you wouldn’t be caught dead doing.”

A frame not in the Netflix cut.

Thanks to the late, much-missed Paul Clipson I was able to see extended versions of Welles’ cut of Oja Kodar wandering around Century City, and running about nude on a movie backlot in a lot of noir stripey shadows, and can confirm that those scenes sustain the attention effortlessly. And the psychedelic club with the ultrawhite toilet full of orgiastic activity is a stunning set-piece, as is the nocturnal car sex scene and the crazy desert bit. Would longer versions have worked in the context of the movie, interrupting the slender narrative of the party sequence with dreamy, plotless interludes? Maybe it would be useful to get Mel Brooks in to pontificate over them, as in THE CRITIC?

As with every posthumous Welles release or discovery, I find myself wanting multiple versions, the way we have several TOUCH OF EVILS, OTHELLOS, ARKADINS. If anyone could ever be said to (a) be large and (b) contain multitudes, surely it was Welles.

Dismember the Alamo

I had been warned by Paul Duane, who knows Texas, that TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 was pretty fucked up. He wasn’t wrong.

The first film managed to mingle a kind of very unpleasant black comedy with a grotesque charnel-house realism, avoiding extreme gore but lingering on extreme emotional distress. For the sequel, original director Tobe Hooper and screenwriter L.M. Kir Carson, who was coming off of Jim McBride’s BREATHLESS and Wim Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS (on which he has an odd crediting for “adapting” Sam Shepherd’s original screenplay) evidently decided to abandon any taste of realism and pump up everything else until it burst. As a kind of Rabelaisian revulsion response to the concept of horror movies, meat, the human body and the state of Texas and the country of America, it’s pretty strong stuff.

Hooper’s enthusiasm for cruelty and violence and terror and the gross seems to come at the expense of any interest in the non-mayhem scenes, which is a shame — final girl Caroline Williams and the recently career-resurrected Dennis Hopper are good company, but many of the straight acting scenes seem like rehearsals. Once some suspense kicks in — a long, creepy intimidation scene in a tiny radio station — Hooper’s skills with the camera and with pacing come to the rescue, and though there are continual flaws of logic and basic credibility, the pace never flags from then on.

Cannon Films evidently showered largesse — and offal — on the production, allowing it to employ Tom Savini for grue and mummification effects, and to build a spectacular, impossible set, Texas Battle Land, a decaying theme park partially converted into an abattoir by the Sawney Bean-inspired Sawyer family. Among the bizarre murals and sculptures is a huge hand with fringed sleeve, clutching a bowie-knife, apparently breaking through the floor. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s kind of wonderful.

The active Sawyers this time are Bubba, AKA Leatherface, now played by Bill Johnson, who proves himself a nimble physical comedian, contrasting his physical bulk with small, apologetic gestures; Chop-Top, played with gusto by Bill Mosely, a Viet Nam vet with a steel plate in his skull, which he continually picks at with a heated coat hanger, eating the shreds of himself he tears away; and the paterfamilias, Jim Siedow, back from the first film. He can’t exactly act, though he is certainly a striking performer. This movie tends to showcase his weaknesses more than the first film, giving him more dialogue, more emotions, and more screen-time. He isn’t nuanced, but he IS enthusiastic. His forced maniacal laugh, which he throws in even when his character is supposed to be angry, adds to the sense of nervous strain on the whole enterprise, so it’s in its clumsy way pretty effective.

More bad stuff: Hooper co-composed the score, and he’s no John Carpenter. Fragments of Bernard Herrmann served up with synths — genuinely horrible, and not in a good way.

But the film has a demented vigour, a go-for-broke aggression born either of Hooper’s sheer ignorance about what is acceptable behaviour in a mainstream horror movie (chainsaw masturbation? Really?) or his suicidal urge to career-immolate as penance for LIFEFORCE and INVADERS FROM MARS (which are still ridiculously enjoyable movies). The addition of hot-pink disco lighting doesn’t lessen the impact, it makes everything feel sicker. It’s like eating a barbecue under coloured lighting while death metal plays. It’s a film so full of bad-taste energy that it can casually throw out the suggestion of a Viet Nam War theme park and not bother to elaborate.

“Was it wrong of me to enjoy that?” asked Fiona. It’s wrong of all of us!