Beat To A Pulp: Round One

Lock the doors and dig the cash out of the mattress, Beat To A Pulp: Round One is available! I'm proud to be included in this pulse-pounding neo-noir anthology alongside heavy hitters like Charles Ardai, Ed Gorman, Patti Abbott, Hilary Davidson, James Reasoner, and so many more. This tombstone-sized tome is edited by David Cranmer and Elaine Ash and features an introduction by Bill Crider and a history of pulp by Pulp Serenader Cullen Gallagher. You can't afford to miss this book. Asses are kicked, hearts are broken, and we all end up face down in the gutter. Buy yours now!

Also available at Amazon.

Noir City DC 2010

The Film Noir Foundation and AFI roll out Noir City DC October 16th-November 3rd, and it looks to be another raging success. The lineup this year is an embarrassment of riches:

Border Incident-Anthony Mans's gritty illegal immigrant noir, featuring amazing work by cinematographer John Alton.

Stranger on the Third Floor-Arguably the first film noir.

Vertigo-Hitchcock directs Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in one of the truly essential American films.

Criss Cross-Robert Siodmak directs Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo in a 100% perfect film noir. A masterpiece.

Act of Violence-Robert Ryan and Van Heflin in this long dark night of the soul. A beautiful and brilliant (and vastly underrated) masterpiece.

Pitfall-Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell, and Raymond Burr in Andre De Toth's love triangle from hell. One of my favorite films.

Pushover-Yet another underrated masterpiece! Bad girl Kim Novak and bad cop Fred McMurray fall in love and hell opens under their feet.

The Night of the Hunter-Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish square off in this Flannery O'Connor meets Caligari nightmare. Brilliant--and not to be missed on the big screen.

And more!

This is an extraordinary collection of films, a mix of established gems and overlooked works of genius. If you live in or around the DC area (or if you just happen to be in town for the Jon Stewart/Stepehn Colbert rally on the National Mall), do not pass up an opportunity to see some of the these works on the big screen in the gorgeous AFI facility.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

I've had little success introducing friends to the cinema of Ingmar Bergman. Among the great directors, he is one of the harder sells. For one thing, many of his films seem to embody a distinct sixties European art cinema aesthetic. They move slowly--ahem, I mean, deliberately. Audience-aiding exposition is minimal. Characters swing from frigidity to viciousness and back again. Warmth is rare. Humor is nearly nonexistent. Despair is all consuming. The director's most famous obsession is the silence of god.

So, okay, Bergman doesn't make for swinging Saturday night. His success in American art cinemas in the sixties, let's be honest, owed a lot to his willingness to show sex and nudity onscreen. Since the world has long since rendered most of his films tame in this respect (except for perhaps The Silence) even these minor titillations have been muted. What you are left with are the films themselves.

And, God, what films they are! The Seventh Seal, The Passion of Anna, Persona, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Scenes from a Marriage, and his only film with that other famous Swedish Bergman, Ingrid, Autumn Sonata.
I think my favorite among his works might be The Virgin Spring, Bergman's beautiful production of Ulla Isaksson's adaption of the medieval ballad "Tore's Daughter at Vange". Isaksson's script sticks close to the original folktale about a young girl who is raped and murdered on her way to church by two herdsman (accompanied by a young boy). The killers steal her garments and later down the road make the mistake of trying to sell them to her parents. The dead girl's father kills the men, but when he also murders the boy in a rage he recognizes his sin and repents. (The set-up may sound familiar to viewers of The Last House on The Left which ripped off the basic set-up and chucked all that fuddy-duddy stuff about guilt, sin and redemption--in other words, everything that matters)

The most distinctive aspect of Bergman's work is his tone, a fascinating (and potentially alienating) mixture of surface-cool and below-the -surface torment. In The Virgin Spring, like so much of his best work, we are shown rage and lust and terror through the director's cold, unblinking eyes. The girl's parents exist in a marriage of mutual animosity. Their foster child, the pregnant, pagan bad girl Ingeri prays for her virginal sister's death. The one ray of light in the film is the girl herself, Karin (played by the luminous Birgitta Valberg) and she's raped and murdered. The emotional landscape of the film is a tundra overlying a volcano.

Bergman's gaze renders it all so powerfully. This was his first movie shot by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and together they created one the best looking films I've ever seen. In night scenes, pale faces are etched out of sheer blackness--while during the day, sunlight sits cool and soft on skin. Nykvist was as much a master of light as film noir legend John Alton, and he was the prefect collaborator for Bergman. The story is a parable, a mix of the real and unreal, and the photography captures this quality perfectly. It has the hard beauty of sculpted light.

Acting in this kind of environment is tricky. At the the center of the Bergman oeuvre stands the tall, reedy figure of Max von Sydow, star of so many of the director's best films. With his ascetic face and cavernous voice, von Sydow was to Bergman as Wayne was to Ford and Mifune was to Kurosawa--the perfect walking representation of the director's worldview. Want to know what Bergman thought of life, look into von Sydow's sad blue eyes. In The Virgin Spring, he plays a man robbed of everything but his own sense of guilt. Like Job he questions God, implicates God in the murder of his child, but is forced to admit that he has nothing else to hold onto.

The last scene (changed from the ballad) contains the emergence of the magical spring of the title. After von Sydow has repented of his killings and pledged his devotion to God, a cleansing spring breaks forth under the body of his murdered daughter. It's a miracle. Very few filmmakers could pull off this kind of moment (and since so few filmmakers are seriously interested in matters of faith, it's difficult to believe that most would even try). Bergman, his cast and crew, and his screenwriter, earn the moment with an almost brutal lack of sentimentality. Ingmar Bergman is well aware of three things here: 1) girls really are raped and murdered in this harsh, cold world; 2) miracles such as the pure spring do not happen; and 3) humanity invented stories of the miracles as a way to hold on. It takes an artist as despairing as Bergman to sell us on the idea of a miracle.

***

Like many of Bergman's works, The Virgin Spring is available in a beautiful edition from the Criterion Collection. It's the one to get.

Lou Boxer Talks NoirCon 2010

NoirCon hits Philadelphia again this year, Novemeber 4-7. A celebration of all things dark and dreary (i.e. awesome), the conference gathers writers and noir geeks together in the hometown of noir great (and NoirCon patron saint) David Goodis.

Recently, NoirCon kingpin Lou Boxer talked to everyone's favorite pulp fiction blog, Pulp Serenade. It's a great exchange, the highlight of which is Boxer's perfect summation of the Goodis appeal:

"It is the purest, most unadulterated writing. It cuts right to the bone like a jagged knife. Goodis wrote for the sake of writing. He had a story to tell and he told it...His stories were extensions of his personal life. Goodis tells the day-to-day struggle of the guy down on his luck, trying to make it through one more day of hell, knowing the next day will be no better than the one before."

That's what I'm talking about.

For more of this conversation go check out Pulp Serenade.

Bogdanovich Speaks

The final entry in my salute to director Peter Bogdanovich is to link to a fascinating interview that he did with Alex Simon around the time of The Cat's Meow. It's a wide ranging talk--touching on many aspects in the life and career of a man who has experienced, as Simon puts it, "high highs and low lows."

A Brief Introduction to the Cinema of Peter Bogdanovich

Last week I talked a bit about Peter Bogdanovich's new blog and some of his wonderful writings on film.

I don't want that to obscure his work as a director, though. Bogdanovich was one of the brightest talents of the 1970s, a period of extremely bright talents. For a brief window of a few years, it looked as if there might be no end to his success. One wonders what would have happened if he had been the dominant voice in American film instead of George Lucas; we'd be living in a different world--one with far better movies, I suspect. Bogdanovich was one of the few major directors of that era who wasn't obsessed with violence. While Scorsese, De Palma, Lucas, Coppola, and Spielberg either made violent cartoons or bloody masterpieces, Bogdanovich made comedies and stark dramas. Among American directors of that era (most of them men) he was the one who seemed to like female characters the most, while also being the one most comfortable with the subject of sex. I wish his influence was more keenly felt today.

Here is a brief introduction to the films of Peter Bogdanovich:

Targets (1968)-His first film, made for producer Roger Corman, was a tense thriller starring Boris Karloff as an aging film star who comes face to face with a deranged young killer based on the Texas clocktower shooter Charles Whitman. An amazingly assured debut, smart and suspenseful. A film about violence rather than a violent film.

The Last Picture Show-This quiet drama about the sexual goings-on in a sleepy Texas town was shocking in its day. Hell, it's still shocking. Few American films are so plainspoken about matters of the bedroom. A great cast, anchored by the touching affair between Timothy Bottoms as a high football player and Cloris Leachman as the lonely wife of a latently gay football coach.

What's Up, Doc?-His biggest moneymaker was this blockbuster comedy starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. It's screwball in the tradition of Bringing Up Baby--a G-rated goofball jamboree. Want to understand why some people love Barbara Streisand? Here's the answer. One of my favorite comedies.

Paper Moon-One of my favorite films of all time. In the middle of the Depression, a con man named Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal) discovers that one of his ex-girlfriends has died and left behind a ten year old girl named Addie (Tatum O'Neal). He agrees to take the girl to her family in Missouri, but as they travel across the country it turns out the girl has a gift for grift not unlike Moses himself. I am in love with this film. It's charming and funny without being sentimental or cute. Ryan and Tatum O'Neal had, by all accounts, a horrible relationship in real life. In the film, though, the gloom is always lifting, the sun always peaking through dusty skies. The more I see it, the more I love it.

Nickelodeon-Bogdanovich's comedy about the rough-and-tumble early days of moviemaking plays a little like an adaption of his interview book, Who the Devil Made It. His script was cobbled together from stories he'd heard from directors like Leo McCarey, Allan Dwan, Raoul Walsh, and John Ford--all of whom had started out in the primordial pre-Hollywood silent film industry. Cinema during this little-known era was more like gorilla filmmaking than the sleek studio system it would give rise to, and none of his contemporaries could have brought the same passion and knowledge to the subject than Bogdanovich. That said, the film is a minor entry on his resume. There are a lot of laughs here, but the film lacks the precision of some of his other comedies. The shoot was also compromised by the studio's insistence that the film be released in color, but the newest DVD release of the film features the director's preferred black and white version.

Saint Jack-Bogdanovich's fortunes took a sharp turn after the success of Paper Moon. He started getting bad reviews and his films started flopping. Even his personal life got bad press. He scored a critical comeback with this 1979 drama about an American pimp in Singapore starring Ben Gazzara. A pointed criticism of the hypocrisy of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia and another stark look at the emotions, self-justifications, and self-delusions surrounding sex. A great film, criminally overlooked.


They All Laughed-The film that nearly ruined his life. Bogdanovich fell in love with his leading lady, Dorothy Stratten during the making of this comedy co-starring Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn and John Ritter. After she was murdered, the studio wanted to shelve the project, so a distraught Bogdanovich bought the film (!) and tried to release it himself, a move that ruined him financially. While the film holds a special place for the director and has its defenders among people like Wes Anderson and Quinton Tarantino, I've never really warmed it. In short: it's a comedy that doesn't make me laugh. See it yourself to decide. (And click on the title above to watch Wes Anderson interview Bogdanovich about the film)

Mask-I haven't seen this film since about, oh, 1987. Cher, Sam Elliot, and Eric Stoltz as a funny kid with a deformed face. That makes it sound like one of those disease-of-the-week films from the eighties, but my recollection of the film is that it was a genuinely moving, surprisingly funny, piece of work. Bogdanovich was able to release a Director's cut of the film on DVD that reversed some tampering by the studio.

The Cat's Meow-His last feature film to date, this 2001 drama is a fictional meditation on some old Hollywood gossip--the story that William Randolph Hearst supposedly shot and killed a man during a cruise because he thought the fellow was having an affair with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. A witty little romp.

Directed By John Ford-In 2006, Bogdanovich updated his 1971 documentary about director John Ford. He included new information and footage (including a private conversation accidentally recorded between Ford and his long lost love Katherine Hepburn). The result is a fascinating look at one of the cinema's pivotal figures.

Peter Blog-danovich

I've long thought that Peter Bogdanovich was one of the great undervalued men of cinema. I discovered him the way I assume most people do, by the reputation of his second film, the critical and commercial success The Last Picture Show. When he made the film in 1971, he was thrust to the forefront of the film geek generation that briefly held sway in Hollywood following the success of Easy Rider. He had a few more big hits after that and then his career took a sharp turn. His films started flopping. His marriage fell apart because of an affair with his leading lady Cybil Shepherd, and then that relationship fell apart. His relationship with model-turned-actress Dorothy Stratton ended in tragedy when her jealous estranged husband brutally murdered her. Bogdanovich's life fell apart. Financial ruin followed, and it seemed as if he might not recover.

Happily, he put his life back together. He did a lot of work in television, directing TV films and issuing a supporting role on The Sopranos. He's even managed in an increasingly convoluted Hollywood to direct some movies.

Now he's on Indiewire with a new blog called, of course, Blogdanovich. As most fans of his work know, Bogdanovich started out as an actor but first made his name as a writer. He did early books on Allan Dwan, John Ford, and Orson Welles. His Welles book led him into a collaboration with The Great One on the bible of all Wellesians, This Is Orson Welles. His book Who The Devil Made It, a collection of interviews with classic directors is an essential film book. Essential. As in, you must read this book before you call yourself a film geek.

The prospect of Bogdanovich blogging about classic film (issuing short introductions to films like Ball of Fire) is a happy thought. Here's hoping he keeps it up.