There is good violence and there is bad violence. You could say that the task of civilisation is to figure out which is which. I could say that whole There is good violence and there is bad violence. You could say that the task of civilisation is to figure out which is which. I could say that whole movie genres are all about this question. The gangster movie, the war movie, the Western – all these show the struggle between bad violence and good violence. And the movies also demonstrate that we righteous members of the audience (and participants, however reluctantly, in real life) enjoy both types of violence. We like the gangsters roaring around in Scarface, Public Enemy, Goodfellas etc; and we like it when the FBI tough guys shut them down too. We have our cake and eat it too. The most extreme example of this bad violence/good violence problem is in the various rape-revenge movies, of which the most horrendous example is I Spit on Your Grave (what a brilliant title) – for half an hour we watch the disgusting rape of the victim; the last hour is dedicated to her violent killings of the rapists.
A lot, maybe most, of these movies are like adverts for violence.
In Unforgiven the violence becomes ever more ambiguous. Clint plays the over the hill William Munny who used to be a very bad violent man but he’s reformed and is now an unsuccessful pig farmer. But he takes up his gun again to seek vengeance for a poor prostitute who was razored by a vile cowboy at whose genitals she unfortunately scoffed. But Munny is only in it for the money. Little Bill is played by the always great Gene Hackman who loves to dish out violence, he relishes it - but wait – this is the good violence because he’s the sheriff of Big Whiskey and he is enforcing a policy of No Guns Allowed In Town. He seems to be dedicated to enforcing peace in sadistic ways. His good violence is bad violence in disguise.
Unforgiven is a great examination of the whole nasty business and this little book is an excellent discussion of it.
With these BFI Film Classic books you never know what you’re going to get, some terrible hoity toity professor writing unreadable jargon or the lovely gossip filled story of how the film was made; and all points between. But all these books are so pretty I have to forgive them.
You know the famous moment in Fawlty Towers when Basil’s car conks out when he’s in a tearing hurry and he gets out and yells at it “Start, you viciouYou know the famous moment in Fawlty Towers when Basil’s car conks out when he’s in a tearing hurry and he gets out and yells at it “Start, you vicious bastard! I’ve laid it on the line for you time and time again…. Well I’m going to give you a damn good thrashing!” and he rushes off and grabs a tree branch and starts beating his car mercilessly. Well as I read this book that’s exactly what happened to me, my brain conked out, just wouldn’t work any more, and I jumped out and yelled at it and thrashed it with a tree branch but it just wouldn’t go.
Mark Sinker is too clever for me, he writes in a compacted ultraknowing style like this (here he’s talking about the idea of college) :
Middle-class investment in the system also hides a more idealised act of dissent. The ambivalence we hear in sacred school song is the chantry’s abiding phantom, the ghost of monkish resistance to a power grab long ago; it persists as a psalm sung within, for your own dead soul.
Or
Nakedness has the free pass of anti-censorship novelty in 1968, but animal growling followed by sexplay to hot drum-pop has today long been deeply unspecial industrial ritual.
And there is lots more on every page! I had the feeling this stuff could be translated into English.
I’m used to being towered over by the professors of semiology, deconstruction and Althusserian psychology but Mark Sinker caused a different kind of sinkering feeling – if this is film criticism, I should leave now.
Anyhow, I rewatched the film itself, and it stands up beautifully, you never saw such a parade of homely English faces and such repulsive English upper class manners; and the movie has a whole extra frisson, since the famous fantasy finale, with Malcolm McDowell and his other three “crusaders” perched on the roof, gunning down teachers, fellow pupils and their parents, must now be seen in the context of Columbine and every other horrible school shooting. Was ever a movie so accidentally prescient.
In film, of course, no consideration of character would be complete without attention to the contextual determinants and the fusioFavourite sentence :
In film, of course, no consideration of character would be complete without attention to the contextual determinants and the fusion of star with character to mediate notions of selfhood, the relations between the sexes, social and national values.
Personally I think that goes without saying. ...more
A Taste of Honey introduced us to the unusual faces Murray Melvin and Rita Tushingham
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Fans of the art of the back-handed compliment will not wanA Taste of Honey introduced us to the unusual faces Murray Melvin and Rita Tushingham
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Fans of the art of the back-handed compliment will not want to miss what the Daily Express said in 1961 about the star of this bittersweet film :
She looks remarkably like Donald Duck’s sister…the legs are so short that they seem to have been cut off just above the knees, and her backside waddles, when she walks – but not, repeat not, in the manner of Miss Marilyn Monroe. The hair is mud-coloured, the face is like a relief map of Lancashire… yet…those who like them elegant are nevertheless going to give their hearts to drab, dowdy, dumpy Miss Tushingham when they see her.
The movie was praised for its gritty working-class realism (more realistic “than someone coming in and saying ‘It’s a lovely day, I’ve been picking roses in the garden’”), but some critics thought that was ridiculous :
It depends what you mean by “real” : it is quite possible that on an average day in England there are more women picking roses in the garden than there are women living with homosexuals while they wait for their illegitimate half-caste babies to be born
That was a capsule summary of the plot – more expansively, 17 year old schoolgirl Jo is living with her good time girl of a neglectful mother and meets a black seaman on shore leave (cue schoolkids singing on the soundtrack the nursery rhyme “The big ship sails on the alley alley o”) and they have a sweet romance, he leaves her promising to return, and she’s up the duff. Enter Geoff, a young gay man. They become best friends and end up getting a flat together while they both wait for the baby to be born and for the sailor to probably never come back. Okay yes, I see that all of that would have pushed people’s buttons in 1961.
The lovely theme song was added when the original play opened on Broadway in 1960 (having previously been themeless in London since 1958). Two guys wrote the song, one being Bobby Scott who also later co-wrote He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother. The other guy was Ric Marlow who was a singer and tv actor (playing gangsters). He said
I ran over and Bobby and I put this song together in five minutes and rushed it to the theatre…I never guessed it would become such a hit.
So that song joins the long long list of songs bashed out in 15 minutes which then become giant hits, because it was immediately recorded by many people including Herb Alpert and Barbara Streisand and of course The Beatles* on their first LP. In their version you can practically hear John Lennon rolling his eyes and pulling faces in the background as Paul croons “yours was the kiss that awoke my heart”. You wouldn’t catch John doing such mumsy stuff. But of course Paul could switch in ten seconds from that to a screaming Little Richard impersonation, which was weird and impressive.
The movie is one of the key British films of the 60s. Right at the end of the 50s everything changed. Suddenly out went the middle-class drawing rooms and clipped accents and in came constricted working class Northern lives, atmospheric dirty old towns, filmed on location, and an angry energy. Here is a little list
1959 Room at the Top 1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Peeping Tom 1961 A Taste of Honey Victim Whistle Down the Wind 1962 The L-Shaped Room The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner 1963 Tom Jones This Sporting Life Billy Liar 1964 The Girl with Green Eyes A Hard Day’s Night
At this point British movies started to be filmed in colour (!) and gradually relocated from the urban grimness up North to the phenomenon of Swinging London
1965 Bunny Lake is Missing The Collector Darling The Knack Life at the Top 1966 Blowup Georgy Girl 1967 Accident Charlie Bubbles Poor Cow 1968 If… Up the Junction
This run of interesting and often excellent movies could not continue and it didn’t.
*The other Beatle connection is that Dora Bryan, the actress who plays Helen, Jo’s mother, was the perpetrator of a novelty record released in December 1963 called “All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle” which incredibly crept into the top 20 - Lyrics include All I want for Christmas is a Beatle Not a teddy bear, just a Beatle I told mum that nothing else would do There are four, so she can have one too
I confess I did not think I would ever quote that deathless verse in a Goodreads review....more
An American senator wakes up in a hotel bed next to a dead prostitute. Tom Hayden, the Corleone family’s solicitor, arrives and calms the senator downAn American senator wakes up in a hotel bed next to a dead prostitute. Tom Hayden, the Corleone family’s solicitor, arrives and calms the senator down. He says :
This girl has no family,… it’s as if she never existed.
Professor Jon Lewis comments:
The line played differently in 1974 than it does today, as some contemporary viewers, including many of my students, see Tom’s speech as dismissive of the working woman on the bed, dismissive of women in general.
Cut to the end of this little book, page 87 :
A few years ago, I taught The Catcher in the Rye in a class on American youth culture. Along with so many among my generation, when I read Salinger’s book (back when I was about the same age as my college students are now) I empathised with Holden Caulfield’s existential struggle. I was surprised and dismayed to discover that this new crop of late teens and twentysomethings had little patience for Holden’s “whining” – a view summarised neatly by a student who groused “why doesn’t he just get a job?”
Poor modern professors who live to see their cherished great works get chewed up by a cruel pack of clearsighted youth who do not choose to pay tribute to the hoary shibboleths of the past.
The Godfather, both parts, is still great though. But you can throw Holden Caulfield in a cement mixer for all I care.
Note : This BFI Flim Classics series of books is so exquisitely produced, they are like tiny boxes of jewels with tiny jewelled photos on every other page, and even when the critic writing the text is a little on the dull side they are still one of my favourite things.
I remember seeing Pulp Fiction first time round – it was the vertigo inducing wtf moments like when Vincent accidentally shoots the guy sitting in theI remember seeing Pulp Fiction first time round – it was the vertigo inducing wtf moments like when Vincent accidentally shoots the guy sitting in the back of the car, or when the Gimp is brought out, or the spectacular adrenalin shot to the heart revival of Uma Thurman, plus the ultracool funny dialogue plus the brainjangling nonconsecutive plot, and almost no dull moments in its 2 hours 34 minutes that I enjoyed so much. And the rocket fuelled soundtrack with many unearthed gems.
The author here says that Pulp Fiction is the all time beloved film of geeky fanboys in their 20s and 30s and if so there are a lot of them because this is still the 8th most popular movie EVER on IMDB.
Watching it again in 2023 and several things jump out that did not before. The hip dialogue has many cringey moments. The spraying around of the n word from the mouth of one of the white characters grates (this character played by QT himself) – the author comments
Pulp Fiction rarely wavers in its admiration for all things black. The use of racial epithets is a manifestation of this admiration
and then there is the silly jokey lines like
I’ma get medieval on your ass
or
This shit’s between you and the soon-to-be-livin’-the-rest-of-his-short-ass-life-in-agonisin'-pain Mr Rapist here
and the pompous long quotation from Ezekiel ("The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish" &c) which Jules comes out with THREE times is tiresome. And there’s a white saviour moment (when Butch rescues Marcellus from the gimp owners) that might jar modern sensibilities. (The author says that this scene isn’t racist but it is probably homophobic).
So we can probably call Pulp Fiction flawed (heck, what movie isn’t?) and too desperate to be hip and too appealing to the sensibilities of the young males and WAY too overpraised, but still. You have to see it once. John Travolta is great!
Between intention and expression there opens a great and harrowing gulf, we see this when Bret Easton Ellis says that American Psycho is not misogynisBetween intention and expression there opens a great and harrowing gulf, we see this when Bret Easton Ellis says that American Psycho is not misogynist. Callie Khouri, screenwriter of Thelma & Louise, has a jaw sagging quote on page 73 here. She is talking about the famous ending of the movie:
It always struck me as preposterous that people saw it as suicide. I don’t even think of them as dead. I just wasn’t in any way prepared for people to say “God, they killed themselves? What kind of message is that?” I want to say “It’s the message you came up with, not me.” To me, the ending was symbolic, not literal. We did everything possible to make sure you didn’t see a literal death.
Well, they failed. Because when I see to women being chased by an army of cops, helicopters, the whole kit and caboodle, and they drive off the side of the Grand canyon, which is well known for being a very inadvisable thing to do, which is likely to cause a degree of harm to two people in a car who plunge to the bottom seeing as the Grand Canyon is 4000 feet deep, I like most of the dunderheads Callie is shocked by thought (when I had recovered the power of thought) “Thelma and Louise literally ran out of road and this was the final radical rejection of nasty patriarchal men, the most cruel but most appropriate ending there could be, wham, crash into the canyon – DEAD." And this is such a smart script. But that is such a major misunderstanding of what the ending was intended to mean.
Perhaps the authors of movies and novels don’t always understand the works they themselves have created.
*
RANDOM NOTE
This two name title is a favourite of film makers, almost a cliché – Jules and Jim, Bonnie and Clyde, Harold and Maude, Minnie and Moskowitz, Cesar and Rosalie, Benny and Joon, Stan and Ollie, Jack and Sarah, Mikey and Nicky, Melvin and Howard, Harry and Tonto, Wendy and Lucy and Mary and Max. Just the ones I have seen....more
the most extraordinary fact about this extraordinary movie. A Hollywood studio committed a serious budget to a film in which almost all the principalsthe most extraordinary fact about this extraordinary movie. A Hollywood studio committed a serious budget to a film in which almost all the principals, both cast and crew, were absolute beginners. More than that, Warner Bros allowed them to shoot entirely on location with no representative of the studio to ensure that they would produce an acceptable movie...more
I love this long established BFI Film Classics series of books but the editors need to go back and reread the whole lot because some of them, like thiI love this long established BFI Film Classics series of books but the editors need to go back and reread the whole lot because some of them, like this one, have passed their sell-by dates. This one is so far past its sell-by date that the sell-by date is just a distant speck only to be seen with the most powerful telescope....more
They wouldn’t release a movie called Gun Crazy now, can you imagine. They were a little nervous about the title back in 1950 too and it was originallyThey wouldn’t release a movie called Gun Crazy now, can you imagine. They were a little nervous about the title back in 1950 too and it was originally released as Deadly is the Female
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before they thought nahhh. Gun Crazy is way better.
I was very late in becoming a fan of film noir, the la di dah name put me off, plus a lot of the great ones are hard to find. Here’s my current list of favourite film noirs :
1. You Only Live Once 2. Dead End 3. They Drive by Night 4. High Sierra 5. This Gun for Hire 6. Detour 7. The Killers 8. Out of the Past 9. Crossfire 10. Kiss of Death 11. The Naked City 12. Pitfall 13. Cry of the City 14. Act of Violence 15. Call Northside 777 16. Side Street 17. They Live by Night 18. The Reckless Moment 19. Criss Cross 20. Night and the City 21. Where the Sidewalk Ends 22. In a Lonely Place 23. Gun Crazy 24. On Dangerous Ground 25. Pickup on South Street 26. The Big Heat 27. Crime Wave 28. 99 River Street 29. Kiss me Deadly 30. The Desperate Hours
Once I went to see The Warriors, Walter Hill’s tough tale about street gangs, and hey, it turned out it was part of a double bill and the first film uOnce I went to see The Warriors, Walter Hill’s tough tale about street gangs, and hey, it turned out it was part of a double bill and the first film up was something I never heard of called Eraserhead. Even now I can remember the creeping feelings of bewilderment, irritation, disbelief and a horrible disgust and dread that got worse and worse as the slow black and white movie unreeled. When the Lady in the Radiator started edging to the side of the little stage she was standing on in order to squish the awful sluglike creatures that kept falling from out of camera range whilst winsomely trying to smile bravely and continue with her song
In heaven, things are really fine You got your good things and I’ve got mine
and all the time the cheeks on her face grotesquely distorted by some kind of growths, I wanted to leave, this was not a horror film, this was some kind of experiment designed to induce a panic attack. It was awful.
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If the art of cinema is to induce particular emotions in an audience, this movie is the purest of cinema, and even now you’d be hard pressed to find a movie this oppressive and unpleasant. This is not a horror movie where people get chopped up or eaten, this is a movie where a dreadfully deformed baby is left in the care of a frightened father. The baby has become pretty famous
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and David Lynch has resolutely never explained what the horrible thing actually was (some kind of actual animal foetus seems to be the best guess).
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The movie was really David Lynch’s student project and it kept growing until it became a feature, and because of one thing and another, and another, and another it took FIVE years to finish, and the small but dedicated crew and the actors had to be available for the whole of the five years leading Jack Nance to remark “David Lynch, the only guy who shoots a movie one frame at a time”. Poor Jack, he had to maintain that mad haircut for five years.
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This book has some good information in it but every other sentence is like this one
The spatial and material focus has sought to reveal the mechanics of Lynchian world-building that are grounded in physical places and collaborative relationships, as opposed to the common auteur narrative of a filmic world sprung from the subconscious of a singular visionary genius.
I happen to believe you can write about film without having to perpetrate sentences like that. There's absolutely no need for it....more
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