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A big omission from the 50s episode to my mind was the lack of Henri-Georges Clouzot, or really any mention of Sam Fuller. But you could throw in any number of missing filmmakers.

The big problem I have with the series, which is present from the 30s through to the 60s eras especially is what appears to be an unofficial 'two films to a director' rule that Cousins uses (Renoir, Carné and Vigo to represent France in the 1930s and so on). That might work well with certain directors (Leni Riefenstahl is the most obvious example!) but causes real problems when you have filmmakers or even film movements that cannot be easily encapsulated in such a manner.

While Bergman in the next episode is going to be an exception that proves the rule with four entire films discussed, we then move onto the French New Wave and the impossibility of discussing say the breadth and worth of Godard's entire career through just Breathless and A Married Woman becomes apparent. But then Cousins appears more to be using A Married Woman and Bresson's Pickpocket less as films in their own right and more for the influence they had on Paul Schrader's work (Schrader takes over from Stanley Donen at this point as the 'voice of reason' often counterpointing some of Cousins' more worrying flights of fancy!)

It seems most of the series is dedicating to forcing all of cinema history into a singular, one dimensional totalizing pattern for the given subject. Thus 50s hollywood cinemas is all about auteurs exploring maleness and 30s hollywood cinema is all about studios exploring femaleness. the reductiveness and overfitting to these theories/patterns is really disappointing, but also a good illustration of the limitations and drawbacks of the lazy-freudian approach most of the humanities studies is founded upon.

I had a recent PM request to transcribe a few of Cousins' Moviedrome introductions and I thought I would also add them into this thread too. It is interesting to look back on them after The Story of Film - Cousins' negative comments on Robert Zemeckis in the Trespass introduction in particular would seem to account for the Zemeckis-sized gap in The Story of Film when it comes to talking about special effects driven cinema and motion captured actors (I'm ambivalent about Zemeckis too, especially his creepily awful motion capture-animations, but not liking something is different from not acknowledging it).

And I think domino might have an aneurism over the Tashlin introduction!

Westworld (15th June 1997)

Here is a film about a fantasy theme park. Scientists have used modern technology to invent a long lost world. Holidaymakers who visit it are awe-struck. Great creatures roam its terrain who fascinate and scare the visitors. Scientists control and monitor their every movement. Everything in the garden seems rosy. Until that is the creatures go on the rampage.

Don’t worry, we haven’t flipped: we’re not showing Spielberg’s popcorn special effects blockbuster Jurassic Park. Twenty one years before Michael Critchton sold his novel to Spielberg he himself wrote and directed a film that brilliantly explored the Jurassic Park ideas. This film is Westworld. The dinosaurs are cowboys and in the invented world of the Wild West Americans flocked to live out their Western fantasies. The T-Rex is Yul Brynner as a pin-eyed gunslinger.

On a budget as small as Spielberg's was big Critchon made a film which I think describes the soul of human beings as well as Ingmar Bergman. The tourists want a synthetic world solely created for their pleasure. We see them learning aggression as they mistake movies for history.

Since Critchlon taught Anthropology at Cambridge University it is not surprising that his theme is life as a science lab. What is more surprising is his real feel for tension and space and rhythm. Yul Brynner’s robot chase scene is justifiably famous.

The philosophers among you will have a field day.

Demon Seed (15th June 1997)

The British director Donald Cammell killed himself last year. For a decade he worked with Marlon Brando on projects that were never made. His final film was taken away from him by its producer. I never met Cammell but always wanted to because of two of his films which I saw in my teens which most affected me: Performance and Demon Seed. They have his name on them.

Performance, which was co-directed by Nic Roeg, was about a London gangster who goes underground, holes up in a dingy household of retired rock star Mick Jagger and friends, and becomes involves in their hallucinatory existence. Demon Seed, which we are about to watch, uses abstract and complex dissolves to spin its story onto a similar psychic voyage.

Director Cammell traps Julie Christie at home with Proteus IV, a rapidly evolving, menacing, voyeuristic robot. It watches her, Cammell watches her, we watch her.

The film was shot by Bill Butler who did One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Coppola’s The Conversation and Jaws. What could have been a tacky ‘torture the heroine’ number is so well conceived visually by designer Edward Cargafno (who got Oscars for Ben Hur and Julius Caesar) that the evolution of the robot from a kind of a wheelchair with an arm to something out of a Paul Clay painting is for me unforgettable. Cammell seems to love detail like the butter boiling on the floor when Proteus turns the heat up.

MGM, who funded the picture in 1977, probably thought its story about the dangers of artificial intelligence would chime with contemporary attitudes. What they got, I think, is a film of strange hypnotic power and another gripping performance from Julie Christie.

Exotica (29th June 1997)

This screening of Exotica is the network premiere of one of the most talked about independent movies of the decade. Its director Atom Egoyan started with experimental films. This year he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for The Sweet Hereafter. The first thing you see in Exotica is a slow panning shot across hothouse plants. A lot of the action of the film takes place in the Exotica sex club in Toronto in which artificial palm trees grow and girls lap dance like jungle birds. The atmosphere in the club is humid. The workers watch the sad male clients from behind glass.

What struck people about this bold, cool Canadian film when it came out three years ago was how completely the director Atom Egoyan created his dense, hot, humid environment. He mastered the mood of the film. He gave you real sense that the besuited men who watch the girls dance are mired in their own guilt and distant erotic desires.

One of the rules of the club, and this becomes part of the plot, is that the men do not touch the girls. The emotions in the film are also at arms length, until that is they become unbearable. For me the star of the film is Elias Koteas who plays the announcer of the club whose haunting monotone delivery expresses the fantasies that the clients dare not admit to. Koteas almost whispers these desires. He also stars in David Cronenberg’s ‘sex and cars’ movie Crash, which was all over the tabloids earlier this year. In that film too he is seedy and sublime, a kind of joyless slave to an intense erotic imagination. I cannot think of any actor quite like him.

There is so much mastery in this picture – it digs so deep into the dark side of people – that a friend of mine compares it to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And yet I confess that I hate Exotica. Right from the first shot I mentioned it pushes me away from it. I have tried to work out why and I think it has to do with the fact that for me life simply does not feel like a jungle. I think the world is open and unknowable and Atom Egoyan feels that it is claustrophobic and inward. See what you think…

Blue Collar (13th July 1997)

Two years after Taxi Driver, screenwriter Paul Schrader directed his first picture, Blue Collar. Set in Detroit around a motorcar production line, it forewent Scorsese’s epic style for a more low key, almost documentary approach. As with Taxi Driver, former strict Calvanist and theology graduate Schrader wrote a script about blue collar American men, their siege mentality and their violence. He cast Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto to bring comedy and life to his characters. Jack Nitzsche’s score (he also did One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicolas Roeg’s Performance and An Officer and A Gentleman) captures the sounds of these men’s lives.

When you look at it now, Blue Collar doesn’t at first look like a Schrader picture. He usually focuses on one person like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, or Mishima, or Julian from American Gigolo, or Jake La Motta. This film is a three hander. There is a light, loose rhythm to the film that you do not usually associate from him. But then you see the great motionless scene after the first party when the three men sit and talk about their futures and float the idea of a robbery. They do not look at each other, they hardly move, the acting is very downplayed, the dialogue overlaps, there are no cutaways and no moves. It is hard to think of anyone who could have introduced the main storyline of the robbery with more conviction.

What distinguishes this film from the conventional TV style, what makes it in the end very Paul Schrader I think, is the intensity of the stare that you get in that post-party scene. I love the compassion of this film – look at the funny/scary scene when the taxman visits Pryor’s family. And I love that Schrader knows that a static camera can be sublime.

The Girl Can’t Help It (27th July 1997)

Tonight’s two Moviedrome pictures were made almost 40 years apart. One is in dazzling colour, the other in black and white. One is from America, the other is from Finland. You would think they would have nothing in common, and yet I think they share the same strange, farcical, dumb and dumber, laugh or else you’ll cry, view of the world. See what you think…

Here comes a typical 50s dumb-ass teen pic musical. You don’t need to stay up to watch this kind of crap. It is full of jokes about big breasts and caters to sad male fantasies. Except that there are loads of things about this picture which make it extraordinary. The man in it is an alcoholic. He is emotionally paralysed. He’s called Tom and she’s called Jerry and there are loads of times where it is a cat and mouse comic strip.

The film was designed by Lyle Wheeler who designed Gone With The Wind. Truffaut and Godard considered it a masterpiece. Fellini copied it. It is one of the most visually extravagant things that this visual century has produced. Its star was decapitated in a road accident. It has seventeen musical numbers by people like Fats Domino, Julie London, Little Richard and Gene Vincent.

The director of this picture, Frank Tashlin, was considered a tacky gag man in America until the French critics and the Edinburgh Film Festival started saying that he was one of the greats. He started as a cartoonist did Porky Pig and stuff like that and brought the same stylised, fast paced surrealised visual style to these live action pictures.

Tashlin says that there were 347 jokes in this film. I laughed at hardly any of them, but I think it is brilliant with as many ideas as Tashlin thought there were gags. Jayne Mansfield was always exploited by the movies. This is her best picture, I think, because it is as tragic as she was. Watch it if you dare.

Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (27th July 1997)

Alfred Hitchcock once said that movies are life with the dull bits left out. Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana is the opposite: life with the interesting bits left out, and yet it makes you feel very happy. It was co-written, produced and directed by Aki Kaurismaki who has become a cult director and who in 1990 alone had no less than seven of his films play in New York. Aki and his brother Mika are very much like a Finnish version of the Coen brothers. For years they worked together in low budget films which mixed scorn and dry humour. The Kauismaki settings, like the Coen’s film Fargo, were often about what one critic called 'banal non-places'. They loved eccentric people and long silences.

A lot of this applies to Aki’s solo movie which we are about to watch. It takes place in the Bermuda triangle around the Gulf of Finland and tells of two ‘dumb and dumber’ types, Valto and Rhino and their misadventures with two Soviet women who hitch a lift with them. What I love is the way Kaurismaki shows what big puddings men can be - how he looks at them through the women’s eyes, how he captures their total inadequacies.

And look at the technique: life does not flow in an Aki movie, he chops it up into absurdist little chunks. Right at the start when there is no coffee left and Valto the caffeine freak locks his mother in the cupboard, there is a close up of his hand slowly curling up in rage. Most directors would think that is too emphatic a way to express his frustration but with Aki it works. The whole movie is like a series of such still lives because his characters have such still lives. I think the result is dazzling.

Logan’s Run (17th August 1997)

Tonight on Moviedrome we have two great sci-fi movies. A double dose of dystopia.

There are a million things I want to say about Logan’s Run. I saw it first when I was 11 and I have never forgotten it. When we were choosing the Moviedrome pictures we put it in without me having re-watched it. I was tempted not to do so at all in case it might ruin my memory of it. But I did, and it didn’t. The story is about a future world of pure pleasure where you can order a sex partner like takeaway pizza, except you have to die when you are 30. Oscar Wilde would have loved that idea, I think. As I have turned 30 since I last saw the film, it gave me goosebumps to think of it.

Logan’s Run was directed by Michael Anderson who did The Dam Busters, Around The World In 80 Days and other movies which are not amongst my favourites. The iffy special effects won L.B. Abbott an Oscar in 1976, Farrah Fawcett’s scenes are sometimes weak and Peter Ustinov overacts I think. Yet I love it. The film surely draws from the same writings of Joseph Campbell, as did Star Wars. It dramatises human being’s despicable tendency to scapegoat and demonise. It’s portrayal of the faceless pain of the 30-somethings who escape murder remains for me really gripping. Look at the scene where Michael York, who was ironically 34 when this film was made, is told by the computer that he must become one of the hunted. Jerry Goldsmith’s music with its dissonance, arrhythmia and operatic layering is startling. York with those great cheekbones expertly expresses the terror the character feels. The scene is a turning point in the story and I think amongst the best in any science fiction films.

Because of the mythic elements of Logan’s Run, because it is interested in post-apocalyptic evolution, Charles Darwin would have loved it. It should be played at every 30th birthday party as Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight should be played at every 20th. I am sure that some 30-something movie mogul has bought the rights to remake it for the Prozac generation. I hope you love it and find, as I do, that it is bursting with ideas.

One last thing: the ending when Goldsmith’s music plunges badly into treacle, is very sentimental. My advice is to switch off one minute before the end.

Fahrenheit 451 (17th August 1997)

In Berlin in 1943, the Nazi’s burned books. In the late 50s Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, a novel which takes its name from the temperature at which paper burns. His story set in the near future is of a time when books and written culture are forbidden. Montag, a fire patrolman charged with searching out and incinerating hidden books, slowly becomes entranced by the things he must destroy. French critic turned director Francois Truffaut loved the story and identified with the main character. Like Montag, Truffaut was unschooled but fell in love with books. For six years he tried to raise the money to make the film. He cast, or wanted to cast, Paul Newman, Jean Paul Belmondo, Charles Aznavour, Peter O’ Toole and Terence Stamp as Montag. Eventually he gave the part to Oscar Werner.

The film was not well received. It was the director’s first English language picture and critics complained that the dialogue was stilted. Truffaut and his lead actor had disagreed about how Montag should be played. Werner wanted to play a fascist. The director had in mind a more vulnerable character and when things got really bad he even used Werner’s stand-in for key scenes. Truffaut downplayed several other aspects of the book and removed the mechanical hand which killed human beings. As he was doing his famous long interviews with Alfred Hitchcock at the time he opted instead for what he called a subtle constant tension and he hired Hitchcock’s composer Bernard Herrmann to do the music.

Here is the result, see what you think. I mostly dislike film adaptations of books because they seem to have an inferiority complex. They genuflect in front of literature. Fahrenheit 451 does this but for me in hauntingly cinematic ways. Bradbury the novelist said that the last scene of the movie is one of the most beautiful in the history of film. It snowed by accident when they shot it. The best things in movies, said Orson Welles, are accidents.

Liebestraum (8th February 1998)

I think Mike Figgis who directed Liebestraum, the film we are about to see, is British cinema’s jazz filmmaker. I say this because Figgis himself was once a jazz musician and avant garde filmmaker. His pictures such as Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Liebestraum and Leaving Las Vegas are usually smooth, intoxicated, cool things. Even the day time films have night time atmospheres. Situations are ambiguous and distilled. My heart went out to him when he had his famous run in with Hollywood over his second picture with Richard Gere, Mr Jones. They wanted to take all the darkness out of it, the very darkness which is his delicious trademark.

Halfway into Liebestraum is an eleven minute brothel sequence which was cut from the American release of the film. Maybe this was done because the scene adds little to the story, or maybe it was because of its sexual frankness. Whatever it was that the Americans did not like, I think the scene tells you a whole lot about the movie. Liebestraum plays as if you had pressed the slow mo button on your zapper. In the brothel scene Kevin Anderson’s Nick and the women who are there take an eternity to answer each other. They are in a trance that is like a dream.

The whole movie is about the waking up of a woman, Kim Novak, Nick’s mother, and of a building. Look at the light in that scene. Throughout this film of many close ups the brightest light is often behind Anderson, leaving his face in semi-darkness, making his eyes points of light. Behind the prostitute’s sofa on the wall is a print of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. If this painting is famous for anything it is for the way that the smile is rendered mystical by being veiled in half-shade. Figgis’ whole film is like her smile I think. Using dissolves, slow fades down to and up from black, shadows and exquisite shots where the lights come on in the Robson building, he is using light and the absence of light to create psychological mystery. He knows that we the audience imagine what we cannot see.

I know that the script of this film is not perfect. There are a few lines that I would happily chop. But Moviedrome is not really about scripts. I love this film because it gave us our first glimpse of Novak in years. Because everything in it is half seen or half heard. Because the whole film is wrapped in velvet.

Trespass (20th September 1998)

In 1935 the very mysterious German-American novelist B. Traven wrote a book about the greed of gold prospectors called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Thirteen years later John Huston adapted the book for the screen and cast Humphrey Bogart as the psychotic and Tim Holt as the moral man whose desire for earthly richness leads him to near hell. Huston loved Traven’s bitter, anti-capitalist parable, poured into it some of his own World War Two inspired pessimism and the result became one of the most influential adventure films ever made. Its effect was to be seen in several Sam Peckinpah pictures, like The Wild Bunch, and it was spoofed in Blazing Saddles.

44 years after Huston’s film and nearly 60 years after Traven’s book, long time collaborators Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, who had done the empty-headed Back To The Future trilogy together, took the basic story of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre for a script about two Arkansas firemen who find a buried treasure map. They called the script “Looters” but the name was changed to Trespass because the film was released just months after the L.A. riots of 1992.

Trespass was directed by Walter Hill and if you know his best or most popular work, films such as The Driver or The Warriors (which we showed last year on Moviedrome) or 48 Hrs, you will have an idea about the world we are about to enter, a world unloved by many mainstream film critics. Firstly, there are no women. Secondly, the action is tightly limited in space and time. Hill is influenced by classical drama and Aristotle’s idea of time and space. His actors almost look down the lens and declaim as a Greek chorus would.

A third Walter Hill preoccupation is mixed race stories. There are black and white characters here and in Hickey & Boggs, 48 Hrs and The Warriors. We learn little about the past lives of the men. Hill once said “I very purposefully give my characters no back story”. Then there is the tension and violence which here builds to a climax in the last fifteen minutes.

On top of these there are new scenes. The film is obsessed by money. At one point William Sadler, who plays the Bogart part, explains his desire for gold:

I got mortgage payments on a house I just got kicked out of, plus my own rent money that just got jacked up on me, plus fucking taxes that get higher every fucking year just so guys like him can keep eating without doing any work. Now if that loot is here buddy I want it, and I’m not going to share it with some old bum.

This right wing twist on Traven’s ideas is itself punished by the film. Its racist roots are complicated by the way so many of the black characters are gadget–toting yuppies. The gadgets themselves put a spin on Hill’s dramatic unity. Countless mobile phone calls become part of the story, both to complicate the action and its geography, but also as a liability because when you are hiding your phone can go off.

The image of hell on earth was one famous shot in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre where the campfire seems to engulf Bogart. Here the force of moral retribution makes the whole ending hell. The effect is gripping I think, and the point is underlined by the Ice-T and D.J. Aladdin song “Depths of Hell”. Trespass took a tiny amount at the US box office, but that doesn’t mean anything. Only on the surface is this great film amoral.

Mommie Dearest (6th June 1999)

The film we are about to watch was voted the worst of the year, 1981, then of the entire decade. Faye Dunaway got the worst actress honour, and went a bit bonkers afterwards. Diana Scarwid matched this achievement with worst supporting actress, and Frank Perry, Steve Forrest and Frank Yablans completed the full house with worst director, actor and producer. But we at Moviedrome think there is something special about it.

The film is based on the most influential Hollywood memoir ever published, Mommie Dearest, by the very lovely Christina Crawford, daughter of Joan. Joan Crawford was the diminutive, self-styled Queen of Hollywood. After escaping an abusive Texan family she became a dancer, reputedly a prostitute and naked model before bulldozing her way into the movies. Her name was chosen by magazine poll. She was one of MGM’s biggest stars by the late 20s, received her 900,000th fan letter by 1938, was considered box office poison by the early 40s and dumped by the studio. She came back in 1945 with an Oscar to boot as Mildred Pierce. By the 50s she had to have three vodkas just to come out of the dressing room. She was bisexual and her lovers included Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson – an interesting pairing if ever there was one – and Barbara Stanwyck.

Crawford’s daughter Christina’s portrayal of her mom as a sadistic drunk was one of the very first modern revenge memoirs, a high literary genre whose most recent addition is Margaret Cook’s assessment of her Foreign Secretary husband Robin. What is great about these books, and Christina’s in particular and its film version, is how their revenge often backfires, even when you are married to the Executive Producer, as Christina was to David Koontz. Mommie Dearest the movie portrays poor old victimised Christina with such manifest awfulness and spectacular unbelievability that in minutes you are rooting for Joan, the beast-woman.

-Who do you think you are talking to? I tell you what you are going to do, you are going to march yourself upstairs and you are going to stay there until I tell you to come out.
-No. I. Won’t!
-"No you won’t?" Yes...you…will!

The film is shallow about shallowness, and an unintentionally joyful thing about joylessness and Puritanism. Joan’s yelling of the line “Tina, bring me the axe!” is surely one of the funniest ever delivered.

Tinaaaa…..bring me the axe!

As with Rocky Horror Picture show, Mommie Dearest has become an excuse for sublime audience participation. New Yorker’s bring axes to the cinema and wave them on cue.

The famous scene involves coathangers. By this stage the film has swung into a kind of uncontrolled frenzy. Faye Dunaway actually goes out of focus. The mix of sadism, melodrama, brilliant performance and absolute daffiness is almost unique

Noooo…..wire……HANGEERRRRRRSSSS!!!!

We are of course in the arena of high camp here and camp is a cornerstone of cult movies: going against the grain, hating the cute girl, loving the monster.

What are wire hangers doing in this closet!!!!

Scorsese’s Raging Bull shows how well a biographical film can portray real self hatred but Mommie Dearest doesn’t scold (scald?) you. There is nothing in it to touch Jake La Motta’s prison cell scene. About halfway through this picture Dunaway as Crawford acts out a scene from Mildred Pierce. It is also fascinatingly about a hateful daughter and her psychic bond with her mother. If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely must.

And one last irony: in the mid-80s Christina Crawford became the Los Angeles Commissioner for Children’s Services. And look out for Marlon Brando’s dead-spit of a sister Jocelyn as Barbara Bennett, the show biz journalist.

(Colin note: I checked on Wikipedia for Barbara Bennett and found this: “Many people believe Bennett was portrayed in the 1981 film Mommie Dearest by actress Jocelyn Brando, older sister of actor Marlon Brando, but this is not the case. It is a coincidence that the Redbook writer in the movie has the same name. Bennett was never a magazine writer”

One-Eyed Jacks (11th July 1999)

At the end of the 50s, by which time he had become an icon of rebellion, Marlon Brando founded a production company called Pennebaker. He wanted to make a Western and spent ages developing scripts. Then someone gave him Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Henry Jones about a bank robber called Rio deserted by his friend who has the Oedipal name of Dad Longworth. He immediately took to it and said at the time “our early heroes were not 100% brave all of the time. My role is a man who is tough and vain and childish” Stanley Kubrick was to direct, and Karl Malden, who had been in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront with Brando, was to play the friend Dad. When Kubrick saw the finished script which was part-written by his long time collaborator Calder Willingham and Sam Peckinpah, he bottled out saying that he did not understand what it was about. Brando tried Sidney Lumet and Elia Kazan. Both refused so he decided to direct it himself.

The production was endless. Brando threw away the script, improvised many scenes, shot different angles with different dialogue, got drunk when his character was to get drunk, filmed for six months, spending $6 million rather than the budgeted $1.6 million. The first cut lasted six hours. Paramount had hated it, and in particular how everyone lied apart from Malden’s character. According to Brando in his laddish autobiography: “They cut the movie to pieces. By then I was bored with the whole project and walked away from it”. The fact that shots do not match when Brando and Malden meet for the first time in five years does suggest that this scene was re-shot.

Revenge is the driving force of many of the best westerns of the 50s and since such as The Searchers, The Naked Spur and Once Upon A Time In The West, and so it is here. What really works I think is that Brando takes most of the action out of the genre. His revenge on his friends is long delayed. His performance is almost expressionless so the effect is a slow accumulation of rage. And all around this pressure cooker of a character is tumult. The great use of wind and dust storms and the almost constant presence of the sea, the Big Sur, which expresses the build up of unease, as it does in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. All of this is beautifully shot in blue and gold velvety tones with compositions like Georgia O’Keeffe paintings by veteran cameraman Charles Lang.

Brando could hardly be accused of picking a self-aggrandising role. Rio is an out-and-out heel, adolescent as many method roles are, because the actors were taught that their angst comes from teenage problems. Brando’s lover in the film played by Pina Pellicer is worth a mention. Her intense close up performance is the only one she gave in English language cinema before she killed herself three years later. The scene where he lies to her about a necklace by saying that it was his mothers is very brave, and the whipping scene shows how much he knew about acting. He does little but watch the extras – they stare at the horror, and Brando gave a bonus to the ones who winced most.

And here are some more introductions from Cousins's time on Moviedrome, which I think is still where he was at his best. I wonder how much Vanishing Point influenced 90s era Oliver Stone, particularly Natural Born Killers and U-Turn?:

Storyville (11th January 1998)

Tonight’s two Moviedrome films are about the Faustian world of power-politics American-style.

Storyville was written and directed by Mark Frost who co-created Twin Peaks with David Lynch and directed many of the episodes. It tells the story of young Southern Democrat candidate Cray Fowler who is standing for Congress and trailing his right wing opponent in the polls. Like Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, the film derives its name and atmospheres from a seedy club. In this place its main character enters the underworld.

I think Storyville is self-conscious and full of flaws, the erotic clichés come thick and fast, the contrast between the two women is particularly unconvincing to me and Frost seems to have had a complete sense of humour bypass. But in the end I think the film is redeemed by its cast. Piper Laurie, who was Sissy Spacek’s mad mother in Carrie gives a juicy, dreamy performance as Constance. Jason Robards, who got Oscars for All The President’s Men and Julia, is great and ambiguous as usual.

But Storyville belongs I think to James Spader. From his first success in Sex, Lies and Videotape through White Palace, this film and Cronenberg’s Crash, Spader seems to embody that new disease that people are being treated for: sex addiction. In these roles he plays variations on the same preppy clean-cut WASP for whom sex seems to take over his whole life. Spader looks to me like he is made of silk. When he smiles, he seems in pain. His sexuality is like that of Hitchcock’s women Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak – cool blondes on the surface, fire underneath.

Ruthless (11th January 1998)

How’s this for a career - Edgar Ulmer the maverick B-movie director who made Ruthless, the film we are about to watch, worked with Greta Garbo, did the sets for the silent classic film Metropolis, was designer to one of the greatest directors Ernst Lubitsch and he did the miniatures for the epic silent life of Christ, Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings. One day while working with another silent master director, F.W. Murnau, he saw a woman in Berlin pushing her child in a pram. He had the idea of putting a camera on a pram too, and according to him invented the first camera dolly as a result.

When he went to America Ulmer became something of a legend for the speed at which he made films, the so-called Poverty Row Pictures, with juicy titles like Girl In Chains and Isle of Forgotten Sins. In order not to, as he put it, ground up in the Hollywood hash machine, he made his films incredibly cheaply in as little as six days shooting only what he needed. Ruthless from 1948 is one of his bigger budget films and because it is about the life of a rich man told in flashback it is often called Ulmer’s Citizen Kane.

Ruthless was photographed by Bert Glennon who got an Oscar for the John Wayne western Stagecoach. The script is credited to S.K. Lauren and Gordon Khan, but these were invented names. The real writer was lefist Alvah Bessie who fought in the Spanish Civil War, was blacklisted by McCarthy and imprisoned. This was to be the writer’s last film for 25 years.

As the title suggests, the film criticises the capitalistic and selfish determination of the main character, Horace Woodruff Vendig. Ulmer’s producer was weak however and some of the more daring scenes were cut out. But enough remains to show the boldness of the director’s style. Look for example at the first flashback to Vendig’s boyhood when he sees his mother kissing another man. Big close ups and great music make for real finger-licking melodrama in direct expression.

If you recognise by the way the boy actor it is because it is Bob Anderson who gets the bloody ear in the classic Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

Ulmer remained passionately committed to movies to the end of his days. We screen this lovely movie in tribute to his type.

Vanishing Point (18th January 1998)

Filmmakers have always known that there is something hypnotic about putting a camera on a moving vehicle and watching the passing scene. What the German director Wim Wenders called the close relationship between motion and emotion was used by amongst others Charlie Chaplin in the 20s, Frank Capra in the 1930s and John Ford in The Grapes of Wrath in the 1940s. Later tonight we are showing one of the rarer and most vivid examples of the genre, The Devil Thumbs A Ride.

It was in the late 60s and 70s however that so-called road movies came into their own. Camera equipment got lighter and easier to haul around. The success of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Easy Rider in 69 encouraged trend chasing producers to make copycat films and the themes of freedom and escapism began to mean a lot to idealistic young hippies. The film we are about to see was made in 1971, four years into the cycle, but already movies on the road had worked through many permutations. Where Bonnie and Clyde was about a guy and a girl and Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop were both about guys on the road together, Vanishing Point was one of the first films about a man travelling alone. He’s got no one to talk to, so his dialogue is sparse. In fact the main voice in the film is Cleavon Little, Stevie Wonder and speed DJ, who acts like a Greek chorus.

Yeah baby, they’re about to strike and they’re gonna get him, smash him, rape the last beautiful soul on this planet

This film’s main character Kowalski is not escaping for love or friendship, so the film is more internal and melancholic. The titles of the songs on the great soundtrack – Freedom of Expression, Runaway Country, Where Do We Go From Here? and Nobody Knows – give clues to the nature of the journey. It is directionless, it is alienation, it hints at existentialism.

Vanishing Point was directed by a 46 year old New York Armenian called Richard Sarafian. He had worked in television from the late 50s, did TV movies in the 60s, usually about lonely men searching, trailing or killing, and became interested in science fiction as a metaphor for authoritarianism in such TV movies as Shadow On The Land, which starred Gene Hackman. Vanishing Point was his sixth film for the cinema and was shot by the great John Alonzo who had only done Roger Corman’s cult picture Bloody Mama before this but who went on to shoot Chinatown, Close Encounters, Scarface and Internal Affairs. Alonso puts his camera near the ground to emphasise the speed of the car, or on a helicopter to capture the distant patterns and dust trails in for example the film’s beautiful Nevada desert sequence.

This is Vanishing Point’s ‘mythic’ section: director Sarafian makes the car rattle, his main character’s eyes burn, he quietens the sound of the car engine, introduces Snakes, Dean Jagger’s wise old man, and talks of his character as ‘disappearing beneath the surface’ as if the desert was an ocean, or a Biblical wilderness.

The best way to my knowledge to get away is to root right in where you are. Just root right in.

I think Vanishing Point works as a great mood movie. It has a lovely loose structure, minimal plot and expresses well the exhilaration of speed, the fear of being still for a minute, the romance of being miles away from anywhere. It would have been even better I think if directed by Nicholas Roeg, and some of its ideas are 70s clichés. But Barry Newman, who went on to be TV attorney Petrocelli, is suitably enigmatic, the portrait of small town Cisco is chilling and its sense of space and speed and light is fantastic.

And by the way one of the most acclaimed albums in recent years, Primal Scream’s Vanishing Point, was directly inspired by the film.

The Devil Thumbs A Ride (18th January 1998)

In contrast to Vanishing Point, here’s a road movie that is full of plot and dialogue. It is a wee unpretentious gem from 1947, the year of Black Narcissus, Odd Man Out, Gilda and Kiss of Death, and this may even be its first time on TV (Note: it was).

The Devil Thumbs A Ride is an RKO B-movie directed by a then 41 year old New Yorker called Felix Feist. Feist was known as a small fry, reliable, nuts and bolts filmmaker who started as a newsreel cameraman, produced travelogues and did screen tests. He appears in hardly any film books and the only other picture of his that you might have seen is the sci-fi movie Donovan’s Brain.

(Colin Note: Since this time,while The Devil Thumbs A Ride and Donovan's Brain haven't been shown on UK television for at least fifteen years, Feist's 1952 film starring Kirk Douglas, The Big Trees, has gotten occasional showings on Film4)

The first minute alone of The Devil Thumbs A Ride shows that it is a bit special. In just sixty seconds or so we meet a man, Jimmy Ferguson, who hates driving alone. He gives a lift to a sinister character called Steve Morgan who has just done a robbery in San Diego. Together they make for L.A. Jimmy has been celebrating his wedding anniversary and birthday with friends from work. He is happy and can’t wait to see his wife.

The film keeps up this bracing narrative pace. It packs a great amount of detail and menace into just 59 ½ minutes of running time. Feist, who also wrote the screenplay, somehow finds time to make eccentric and memorable even single scene characters with only a few lines of dialogue, such as the scratchy, skeletal brother of the guy who is supposed to drive Jimmy home when Steve punctures his tires.

The film’s accumulating menace comes from the writing, acting and shooting of Steve’s ‘Devil’ character, played by Lawrence Tierney. Tierney was a bad boy in real life, frequently in trouble with the law, stabbed in 1973 and given a new lease of life by Quentin Tarantino when he cast him as Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs.

As Morgan he spins great, mentally agile stories to get himself out of scrapes, his evil is tempered by an exhilarating survival instinct. Tierney plays him tight-lipped and hard-boiled. Cameraman J. Roy Hunt, who also shot the beautiful, mysterious horror classic I Walked With A Zombie for RKO, takes big close ups of the actor, whose slight turn in the eye is lit to make him seem even more deranged.

My favourite moments are when the two men and the two girls they pick up are in the car together. Their four faces are brilliantly framed. They have all just met. They are all on the road together. There is a rootless thrill in these few scenes I think, a dodgy excitement about the way the naïve boy and the naïve girl are like baby seals ready to be clubbed.

There is a touch of Hitchcock about this film. It is a particular favourite of Barry Gifford, who wrote Wild At Heart and Lost Highway, and it predates the 80s yuppie-in-peril movies by a mere 40 years.

Cheers for these transcripts Colin. Reminds me of when I would record these as a teenager. Among some of those above, I remember his ones for Force of Evil ("one day I want to make a film like this"), White of the Eye ("probably the best film ever made about a serial-killer" - or something to that effect!) and a Nicholas Roeg double-bill of Don't Look Now/Walkabout which was something of a revelation to this seventeen year old!

I run hot and cold on Cousins. His one virtue is his honesty (witness those sublime moments in Scene by Scene where he'll tell his subject exactly why he thought a particular film is crap) and his willingness to talk about cinema with a passion and reverence not usually heard on television then. Or now, come to think about it. He does tend to embody the cliché of the pretentious film-critic though (remember the old Adam & Jo send-ups?) and his attempt to balance out the 'racist-by-omission' Western (i.e. Hollywood) conception of film-history - though laudable - tended to overpraise some pretty marginal figures in World cinema at the expense of greater talents.

I'll take him over Mark Commode any day though!

catching back up with the series, I really like it whenever Hollywood is not involved in the episode. The highlight was Baz Luhrman stating that stoners sitting around saying, "that's so reeeeal, man" are not seeing realism, they're just seeing another constructed aesthetic approach.

movielocke wrote:catching back up with the series, I really like it whenever Hollywood is not involved in the episode. The highlight was Baz Luhrman stating that stoners sitting around saying, "that's so reeeeal, man" are not seeing realism, they're just seeing another constructed aesthetic approach.

I turned off that episode after hearing Cousins proclaim Luhrman as the most important American director of the 90s. Stuff like that causes a lot of people to miss the good parts of the series which become fewer and farther between as it goes on

I think the unavoidable reductivism really begins to hurt more and more post WWII, the breadth of surviving world cinema, and access to it, is vastly greater once you hit that point, and then the series really begins to show flaws in it's 'box-it-in' containment strategy. Needing to find a snappy short little dismissing 'thesis' about each era, like 1930s Hollywood was all about hollywood studios portraying female-ness, really hurts the series. On the other hand, it's damn well made and often interesting.

Superswede11 wrote:

movielocke wrote:catching back up with the series, I really like it whenever Hollywood is not involved in the episode. The highlight was Baz Luhrman stating that stoners sitting around saying, "that's so reeeeal, man" are not seeing realism, they're just seeing another constructed aesthetic approach.

I turned off that episode after hearing Cousins proclaim Luhrman as the most important American director of the 90s. Stuff like that causes a lot of people to miss the good parts of the series which become fewer and farther between as it goes on

I finished the rest of the series--well apparently my DVR didn't catch the last episode, but Cousins attitude towards digital is so fucking noxious I'm never going to seek it out to finish the series. In any event, Cousins proclaims another dozen or so filmmakers with the exact same moniker after crowning Baz as "THE most important filmmaker of the nineties" so it's not like it is the unique assertion it sounds like.

I was also amused that Cousins has this 'birth of Athena' approach to celluloid, where it is fully born effortless with no manipulation if the film was posted with film/lab based color grading and cut on film, but if the film was cut or graded digitally then it is somehow unacceptable as art because somehow that takes longer and in taking longer it is illegitimate. or it is somehow easier to do it all digitally and in being easier it is somehow illegitmate. The implication is that finished on film involves no manipulation and presents things exactly as they are, which is an incredibly deluded perspective. At the very least, all digital has the whiff of vileness about it, as Cousins is fond of repeating over and over and over again.

The series started off well, but it got pretty nasty by the end.

A few BBC TWO episodes of Scene by Scene:

Scene by Scene BBC series — Brian De Palma, vimeo.com/.

This one may be better for the Brian De Palma: Mark Cousins’ Scene by Scene BBC series, cinearchive.org/.

Martin Scorsese Scene by Scene Part 1 of 5, youtube.com/.

Scene by Scene — Roman Polanski, youtube.com/.

Music Box Films will be releasing a boxset containing The Story of Film: An Odyssey and The Story of Film: A New Generation in June.

Are there any reasons to prefer US Blu-ray releases of The Story of Film and Women Make Film over the UK releases? From what I can tell, UK releases run at 1080/50i, which I suppose is the correct source speed/framerate compared to 1080/24p of the US releases. Also the UK releases are spread across more discs, so likely higher bitrate as well.