I produced this piece for a magazine, as part of a “memorable cinema experience” thing they were doing, but it fell afoul of their editorial policy which rejects negativity in all its hideous forms. I figured that bashing Michael Winner is such a national sport here that it can’t be considered negative. Winner himself accepts the situation in much the same spirit that the fox welcomes the pack of braying idiots on its tail ~
Michael Winner is a kind of institution in the UK, despite nobody liking or ever having liked the films he directs. Maybe he appeals to us because for a long time he kept making his awful films even when the box office of the DEATH WISH films had begun to elude him and even, in the twilight of his career, when he had to pay for them out of his own private fortune. So some part of him must love the cinema. (They say each man kills the thing he loves.) He even edits his own work, under the pseudonym Arnold Crust. And Crust is as bad an editor as Winner is a director.
In PARTING SHOTS (1998), Winner’s last feature to date, a man with a fatal illness (singer Chris Rea) goes on a killing spree, eliminating anyone who annoys him. It’s a comedy. Even when he’s making a comedy, Winner still likes to kill everything he sees.
I went to see this when it opened even though I had to be persuaded by two friends, who assured me it would be “a laugh”. My friends arrived at the cinema in heavy disguise. Wigs and false beards.
(This is the memorable bit. I realise my “memorable trip to the cinema” may seem quite insipid and conventional to some of you. I imagine Osama Bin Laden always wears a disguise when he pops round to his local multiplex to see the latest High School Musical or whatever. In his case he has to wear a long plastic chin, because he already has a beard. The staff smile upon him as if we were a child trying to get into an R-rated film without an adult.)
PARTING SHOTS, from the first hilarious line, “It’s cancer,” to its most disturbing image, in which Bob Hoskins floats in a swimming pool, thick back-hair floating in the water, making black tendrilled clouds like the ensnaring pseudopods of some Japanese porn monster, did actually make me laugh, with its strange attempts to be funny, to tell a story, to in some way reflect human existence. “It’s one of those gun pubs,” somebody says at one point, as if that were a recognised thing. Sitting between my hirsute companions, I felt I was in another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of crap.
Title image courtesy of Shillpages, home of the title card.
…In fairness to Winner, I’ve acquired one of his earliest hits, THE SYSTEM, starring Ollie Reed, and am going to check it out soon. And maybe THE MECHANIC or THE STONE KILLER, sometime.
I’ve mentioned this before, but this seems the right place for it — my late friend Lawrie once told me:
I signed his papers. He was trying to get into the union, and somebody came to me saying, There’s this chap, crazy about movies, wants to join the union. And I didn’t know him from Adam, but I remembered how much trouble *I* had getting in, so I signed his papers, endorsing him. And it wasn’t until some years later that I thought ~
“My God — what have I done?”
shadowplay 