J.D. Hansel

Crime & Mystery

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid Review

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This film seems to have three aims: paying tribute to Classical Hollywood, parodying film noir, and successfully integrating actors from old movies into the film’s story only using footage of them taken from their classic films.  With its first goal, the film is successful.  The love that this crew and cast have for classic movies – down to the lights, sets, and costumes – is abundantly evident and infectious.  This is a perfectly serviceable “nostalgia fest,” but as a movie, it’s not that funny.  There are a few good laughs in the film, such as the spin on Lauren Bacall’s classic line, “Just put your lips together and blow,” but the comedy was generally underwhelming (and occasionally juvenile).  I think this is because the movie was both a tribute and a parody – it simply repeated elements of film noir and played them as parody if they seemed funny and as tribute if they weren’t.  Had the creative team focused more on putting comedic twists on the film noir tropes they were supposed to spoof, I think the movie could have been much better, but as it is, it almost seems as though the comedy was an afterthought.

For its third task, however, Dead Men is impressive and satisfying.  In a time before CGI, it’s hard to think of how Steve Martin could share a scene with a young Fred MacMurray, but this film pulls off the trick fairly convincingly.  It’s true that the difference between the scenes shot in the 1940s and the scenes shot in the 1980s is very noticeable from the film quality, but the effect is still better than Rogue One‘s cartoon Peter Cushing.  This is not only a technical feat, but a testament to great writing, masterfully crafting a story that can use old dialogue in new ways (besting even the interview collages of “Weird Al” Yankovic).  This third task is the part of the film that stands out – the part that shows Reiner and Martin’s intelligence.  So, as the saying goes, “two out of three ain’t bad,” but if the primary goal is for it to be entertaining and make people laugh, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid leaves much to be desired.

Key Largo Review

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This film is essentially “Film Noir’s Greatest Hits.”  It has Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in leading roles, sharing the spotlight with a wealthy mob boss played in the most Edward-G.-Robinsony way possible by none other than Edward G. Robinson.  In a supporting role is Claire Trevor of Murder, My Sweet and Raw Deal, and one of Robinson’s main gangsters is played by Dan Seymour, whom some may remember as Capitaine Renard from To Have and Have Not.  Character actor Marc Lawrence – Cobby in The Asphalt Jungle – also makes an enjoyable appearance, so the gang’s all here.  The film is as claustrophobic, dramatic, and violent as anyone could want from a film noir, with a satisfying sense of witty cynicism.  That being said, there are a few ways in which this stands out from the usual film noir stereotypes.

Most films noirs – and most films in general – change locations, but this story is about people who are stuck in one building for the whole movie.  The particular location the film chooses is particularly odd: it’s in a hotel on the beach in Key Largo, which is radically different from the general consensus that film noir concerns urban settings.  The movie cleverly uses this to its advantage, employing a hurricane to amp up the usual noir trope of heightening drama with rain by making the rain more intense and to take out the building’s electricity.  The power outage serves as both another way to create anxiety among the cast, which feels very noir, and as a great excuse for making the lighting more extreme.  The result is a lighting style that is more expressionistic than any shadows I’ve seen in any film noir since Stranger on the Third Floor, and it’s absolutely delightful.  It’s also very different for a film noir to avoid themes of male anxieties about women completely (or, in other words, to avoid a femme fatale or similar type), and Lauren Bacall seems almost out-of-place in her “loving, devoted wife” role.

While I think some parts of the film, such as the Bogart-Bacall romance, could have been more interesting than they are, I do think this is one of the greatest films noirs I have ever seen, and perhaps one of the greatest films I’ve seen at all.

Mulholland Drive Review

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what effect the “Books Are Always Better” movement has had on cinema.  Just to be clear, I am referring to the notion that the novel is a superior medium, both intellectually and in terms of affect, to the medium of film.  While I intend to write more on the subject in the future, for now I’ll just say that cinema has spent the past several decades – perhaps its entire lifetime – trying to prove itself as a medium that can both have a certain kind of intelligence, elegance, and subtlety about it, addressing the first insult to its ego, and have a powerful, intimate, and subjective emotional effect like books do, addressing the second.  These are the two main marks of quality and refinement in cinema, and film critics have been striving for years to emphasize the films that display these qualities so that film, and in turn film critics, can have some dignity.  On a related note, in a class on literature I had at my previous college, the professor (and many of the students) had a fondness for a quality of interpretive ambiguity – the literature that was considered to be truly excellent and meaningful was the literature that gestured towards a variety of possible meanings, but ultimately left its meaning up to the subjective feelings of the reader.  This is seen as an intersection of intellectualism and a personally emotional effect because it seems to require thinking on the part of the audience and it relies on subjectivity, which is why so many filmmakers have foolishly bought into the idea that this ought to be the goal of all literature, including film.  Mulholland Drive is one of the films that has impressed people because of how well it manages to be entertaining and interesting as a film while staying at this intersection that is so highly regarded in literature.

I think it boils down to how people think about photogénie.  This is a term used in reference to the aspect of cinema that is essentially, distinctly, and uniquely cinematic, and it is usually associated with Jean Epstein’s theory that film is not meant to focus on characters and plot so much as its elements and powers that no other media have (e.g. its tendency to break the rules of time with editing techniques, or its ability to show large, complex movement).  The dominant view right now, from what I can tell, is that cinema is at its best when it focuses on its sheer power to emotionally overwhelm the spectator, not on the logic of its plot.  While I will write further on this later, I argue that the pure essence of cinema has more to do with simulating a logical sequence of events following from an understood set of premises for the spectator to analyze intellectually and/or emotionally.  Naturally, I find it hard to get behind a film that has complete disregard for everything I believe cinema ought to be, and I find it exceptionally lazy to set up a great story that has no conclusion or meaning.  It’s a huge disappointment, but at least it is somehow strangely captivating.

In the end though , I still think it’s just finely polished garbage.

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Gun Crazy Review

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SPOILER WARNING

In my last review, I wrote a bit about how I’m currently fascinated with génial–nanar blends – films that are very impressive and enjoyable in some scenes, yet are so stupid, bizarre, or unimpressive that they become enjoyable in other scenes.  One of the best examples of this type of film is unsurprisingly found in the film noir genre: Gun Crazy, also known as Deadly Is the Female.  While I don’t think it’s meant to be a comedy, many scenes are so strange or absurd that they seem laughable, giving me a feeling that’s no so different from what I get when I watch Duck Soup in that it feels almost like a child’s idea of how to make a movie rather than a rational adult’s.  What I think Gun Crazy demonstrates is that this group of films, in which I would include Gun Crazy, often achieves this state by trying to be completely interesting, surprising, or unique.

First, consider the strange aspects of this film.  The protagonist is obviously a very odd choice for a romantic lead in a crime drama because of his tall, lanky, silly appearance, which is only made sillier by his awkward smile and his unexplained obsession with guns.  Towards the beginning of the film, two characters are presented as children – Clyde Boston and Dave Alastair – who are dressed as adults and look exactly the same when they grow up.  Towards the end, Annie is randomly crazy enough to steal the baby from Ruby’s house to keep herself (and Bart) from getting shot by police.  The foggy, swampy environment of the ending looks nothing like the rest of the film, and wouldn’t naturally occur in that location, breaking what little sense of realism the film had maintained.  Best of all is the line that was nominated for inclusion in AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes: “We go together, Laurie. I don’t know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together.”

Now consider just how much of Gun Crazy is clever and creative.  The opening titles are presented over the background that becomes the first scene, meaning the cast and crew held on that shot for a few minutes before they started moving – nothing novel, but certainly something rare and interesting.  As far as the storytelling goes, there is great irony in the fact that the protagonist first encounters his lover when she shoots him and their relationship ends when he shoots her.  The bank robbery scene that was shot all in one take is highly impressive from a technical standpoint, not to mention how difficult it must have been for the performers to time everything properly and improvise any needed dialogue.  Even some of the weirdest things can be viewed from a perspective that makes them seem clever.  For example, one might see the representation of young Clyde and Dave as miniature adults as an indication that much of the film (or at least the opening scene that takes place in the past) is being presented from Bart’s perspective according to his memory.

Ultimately, all of these positive elements and bizarre elements seem to come from the same directorial approach: making the film as interesting as possible – striving to make things unique at all costs.  Trying things that people have never done before in cinema can lead to the greatness of Citizen Kane or the ridiculousness of a Joel Schumacher film.  In spite of its resemblance to other film noir, it clearly strives to be very much its own film, refusing to let anyone say that it is not unique.  This isn’t the greatest answer to my question of how we get génial–nanar blends, and it is not my final answer – in fact one professor of mine found it very inadequate, arguing instead that it has something more to do with affect.  Still, the desire to make something very different from what everyone’s seen before, something that’s very captivating and memorable at all costs, does seem to be at least a preliminary requirement for the génial–nanar.  I don’t think anyone else would have thought to make a film noir with a tiny touch of the western and a big load of goofiness, but the fact that this mixture was somehow able to get produced in the height of the studio system’s panicked identity crisis is enough to make it the unique novelty that audiences never knew they wanted.

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Creepers/Phenomena Review

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I think I’ve written before about my love for nanar, which is the French term for a movie that’s so bad that it becomes enjoyable.  I know I’ve written before about my love for movies that are nanar in some scenes and legitimately impressive in others.  Since I am finding more and more films that seem to fit this category, I’ll call this type of film a génial–nanar blend.  Usually I only note one of these kinds of films if I absolutely love it, which was the case for Masters of the Universe, but sometimes there are parts that are bad enough to be mildly enjoyable in some scenes and decent in others.  This is a bit more common and less noteworthy, so we don’t often think much of these films, but one that stands out for me is Phenomena, or as it was known in the United States, The Creepers.

Phenomena is the title I use for it because it’s the name of the original, longer version of the film, which is the version that I saw, so those who’ve seen it as Creepers may have seen a much worse film than I did.  This is an Italian film from Dario Argento, a name I didn’t recognize since I’ve never been much of a horror buff, but he seems to be a bit of a name in the field.  The star of the film, however, is not an Italian, but a young Jennifer Connelly, and seeing as how I’m obsessed with Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, I had to see this movie.  She does a decent job with most scenes, but fortunately there’s some cheesy and over-the-top acting in there to make the film nice and campy.  That being said, the consequence of an American star in an Italian film is that most of the characters are dubbed, and very badly at that.  This just serves to make the film exceptionally comical, but also very odd seeing as how the moments of what seem like entirely incompetent film-making are matched with moments displaying cinematic mastery – sometimes both seem to happen at once.

I still haven’t worked out exactly how génial–nanar blends come about, or how they’re even possible, but at least I now know that their home is in classic campy horror films.  There’s something about the desire to create a strong, original, and uncomfortable (yet somehow still fun) affect that is built into the old cheesy horror films, and it seems to be exactly the kind of thing that generates the génial–nanar.  I guess there’s no nanar like nanar noir, and between this and Phantom of the Paradise, I’ve learned that I actually like the horror genre far more than I thought I did.  The trick seems to be to approach cinema with a sense of fun, whimsy, experimentation, and love for entertaining.  I’m still not a big fan of being afraid, but blood as fake as this film’s blood, music as fun as this film’s music, and a script as nutty and lovably stupid as this film’s script, I’m willing to put up with a few jumps and skipped heartbeats to enjoy an experience like this film’s camp.

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The Asphalt Jungle Review

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(SPOILER ALERT)

It’s surprising to me just how much better this film is on my second viewing – how much easier it is to follow and enjoy watching it after having already seen it before.  That’s not to say I really liked it the second time I watched it – in fact I never finished watching it a second time – but it is easier to appreciate.  The film has a structure that’s hard to work out on the onset, and the first few minutes of the film give the impression that the story will follow the perspective of the police officers more than the criminals.  Without any clear protagonist, and with an ensemble cast with intricate relationships, it’s easy to get lost in the story, as I did when I first started watching it.  There’s also the fact that I generally have little interest in crime and heist films, which made me hope for better motivations behind the characters’ actions so I could have an easier time getting invested.  On the second viewing, however, it has become clear to me that this film is very careful and detailed, making it rather fascinating.  I’m particularly fascinated by the role of women in the film.

I think it is quite safe to say that the filmmakers planned on having a mostly male audience, seeing as how the main characters in the film (or at least the ones who push the plot along) are men, so the film looks at women from a few male perspectives.  There seems to be a dichotomy presented between the “good life,” represented by adhering to domestic norms, and the wrong way of living, represented by inappropriate lust (or, to a lesser extent, greed).  The professor seems to have no interest in settling down with a wife – his ideal retirement is chasing the pretty Mexican girls around in the sunshine.  The film seems adamant about making the point that greed, lust, and criminality are all in the same family of things that ought to be avoided, and it is no surprise that Doc’s lust becomes his undoing.  Similarly, Emmerich’s affair seems to be at the very least related to his unhappy ending.  When Bob Brannom suggests that Emmerich went broke because of Angela (Marilyn), Emmerich denies it, saying it was his extravagant way of living, but I argue Emmerich would have no need for his many properties if he didn’t need places to have his affair.  “Doll” tries to pull Dix into the conventional, domestic, married life, but he inexplicably resists, instead pining after the horses of his home.

Interestingly, the film only touches on the subject of how crime can hurt one’s family.  The brief memorial service scene seems to mostly serve the function of reminding the audience of the consequences of criminal behavior, which is a message the film probably needed to drive home quite severely in order to get approved.  If a big proponent of Sobchack were to try to figure out why a family would be brought into this film, it seems that the reasons would be purely functional: to raise the stakes so the drama of the heist is more interesting, and to help the film get its approval.  I can’t help but wonder how entirely different the film would be if one woman had been involved in the heist itself and how the perspective on women the film presents might completely change.

Unfortunately, a film that’s fascinating in hindsight is not the same as one that’s entertaining from the start, which is really what I was hoping to see.  Some of the characters are really good and leave a strong impression, and I think that’s largely due to the great performances from Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, and of course Marilyn, but somehow this isn’t enough to keep the film interesting.  I recognize that it’s a well-made film in many respects, but it’s not my kind of thing.  I think I’ll have to finish my second viewing sometime, or maybe even watch it a third time, because as of right now, I’m wondering if I’ll ever decide if the film’s ending is an unsatisfying bummer or a work of poetic genius.

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