u/Sortensen

„ANYTHING ELSE“ (2003)

Dir.: Woody Allen; with: Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Stockard Channing, Danny DeVito, "KaDee" Strickland.

I eagerly awaited this film in the double program after "Hollywood Ending" as part of a retrospective at Belgrade Cinematheque, this is one of my favorite Woody works and I wanted to see it on bog screen for the first time. Only a year after the above-mentioned, otherwise weak film (Hollywood Ending“), Woody suddendly got older: like Cary Grant, he decided that it was time for him to move into kingmaker roles, and to give his own "inner immaturity" to younger actors, and from this work onwards, he hires stuntmen for his younger ("immature") self. For his old self, however, an uncle in real time, he sometimes casts himself as a cameo. sputbut even that less often, sometimes as a cameo. Like in Carl Reiner's movie „All of Me“, in which Steve Martin is possessed by the spirit of a woman whom he sees in the mirror, while he remains man on the outside. There is something similar here, from this film on, we see various young people from the outside (who revisit the chronotopes of Woody's youth: oh youth, my youth...), and in the mirror is the fanciful, voyeuristic Allen. (Or vice versa, there is a young Allen in the mirror, I got confused.)

All the characteristics of his earlier films are also present in this one: a young writer who wants success (Jerry Falk /Jason Biggs/), an unfaithful lover (Amanda Chase /Christina Ritchie), who drives him crazy, New York... There is an agent Harvey Wexler (Danny DeVito), who not only exploits him but also annoys him with persistent parables about a textile salesman, there is an unsuspecting drunkard, mother-in-law, Paula Chase (Stockard Channing), from whom the daughter has probably inherited moody character, there is also the type of soon–to–becomee–ex lover, namely Brooke ("KaDee" Strickland), who, as in Bergman's case (read „The Magic Lantern“), is squeezed like a lemon and misogynistically trampled upon and thwoen away, there is also a series of handsome seducers, actually „repairmen for menopause“ in various advanced stages.

And there is the city: New York, as we see it through the eyes of Woody Allen, which means overcrowded with intellectuals in tweed jackets with patches on elbows who (intellectuals, not elbows) clarify the ontological questions of Broadway over cheap wine, a city full of bookstores and tastefully furnished apartments whose rent is a mystery. And with all that, the cameo of the director, who, as I said, has finally come to terms with the fact that it's time for old men's shoes and Icelandic sweaters for the retired. But he compensated for that with an awesome convertible motorcar as if he was a film star...

Allen surprisingly gave vent to the paranoia and gave his character a chance to demolish a bully's car and even nail a racist cop (albeit only in off-told story. But that's at the very end, and we know that Woody always goes crazy in the last fifteen minutes of his films, when he throws around happy endings like Serbian politicians promises before elections.

The character of Amanda (Christina Rcci) is every man's nightmare, and combined with her mother (Stockard Channing) -> it is a guarantee of a horror sitcom. Jason Biggs is ideal for Allen, he's not too handsome, but he's clearly in possesion of big tool. Danny DeVito sweetened the film by playing an incompetent but inconsiderate and sleazy agent.

Although nominally a cameo here, Allen actually steals the movie as David Dobell. He spiced up the film with his constant riffs and concoctions – one  of which became the title – he is that old uncle from a kibbutz who teaches his sons the tricks of seduction and sex, his "wisdoms" are actually Zen-Buddhist, only a naive soul like Jerry Falk can take them without a single grain of salt.

A large number of Allen's films end with an escape. It always reminds me of the end of Marco Ferreri's movie "Dillinger is Dead", when Glauco (Michel Piccoli), after killing his wife, goes to a bay, swims to the ship from which the dead cook is just being thrown into the water (= ceremoniously buried) and applies for a job. Allen's endings are just as silly (and symbolic) as that Ferreri's ending.

„RIGHTEOUS KILL“ (2008)

Dir.: Jon Avnet; with: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Brian Dennehy, Carla Gugino, Fifty Cents, John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Written by Russel Gewirtz.

FIGHT CLUB SYNDROME IS RAVAGING HOLLYWOOD

Jon Avnet got lucky with „Fried Green Tomatoes“, which he shot in the lazy style of Peter Bogdanovich from „Texasville“, and with a budget of 11.5 million it made 119.5 million. Is it only because of that, or did his membership in a prestige country club also helped, that since then he is exclusively making box office flops and losing money, albeit with an increasing gap between the movies, constantly ruining otherwise interesting screenplays which are even voiced by megastars such as Pacino and/or De Niro.

When I returned from the terrace again enchanted by that famous view of the sea (this was written from Crete, Greece, city of Retrhymnon in year of 2023), even in the darkness (the tidal waves are white, and so are the screens of tablets and ipads of high school students on excursions, playing grovn-ups dangerous plays under sunbrellas at night), I ran into a movie on my small TV. I saw De Niro and Pacino, playing baseball just for fun , and then the first mentioned is kicking a thug. "It cannot 'Irishman'?", I thought, remembering how De Niro, with his computer-rejuvenated head, old-fashionably kicked some poor supporting actors. But, no, this is still just a basic cable channel, no Joe Pesci, okay, and I turn up the volume and keep watching. (And later watched reprise at dawn.=

Pacino and De Niro in the same movie, and even in the same frame, and even more, they will turn out to be in "almost every frame", so that's a holiday, man. But the movie is wrong in so many ways I don't know where to start.

And at that time, people got so hyped over this joint performance of their, because it was rumored that these guys can't stand each other and in that scene in otherwise sooo overhyepd „Heat“ was a a computer montage, it was rumored that De Niro had an affair with Yugoslavian opera singer Gertruda Munitić, and that Pacino had a pizzeria in Kralja Petra Street in Old Belgrade. So now here it is, knock yourselves out, watch both of them without CG images in the same frame, enjoy. Alas, not only that they speak a dull script, like a collection of aphorisms of Tony Soprano at the end of his life, but they are also physically in the stage of Sinatra who has not accepted his age: Pacino had his hair backcombed and dyed pitch black, his eyebrows resembles Groucho Marx's bushes (though not as ridiculous  as in the case of Honorable Mr. Burt Reynolds, but more boyish), he wears 15 cm heels like Elton John and Bono, whilst De Niro suffers from overweight and an FBI-like haircut and his acting is marked by repetatedly wrinkling his chin, which is the mannerism he used in his late years.

The scriptwriter steals from many places, "vigilante" from the Dirty Harry's „Magnum“ was taken as a starting point and like Frankenstein's „son“ is sewed up with the stories of two films from 1996: „Night Falls on Manhattan“ by Sidney Lumet and „City Hall“ by Harold Becker. And those three plots are woven into a braid which is actually – Kojak's bald head! Namely, two experienced detectives, two very close friends, quite damaged by decades of service, hang out like Bim and Boom, they almost jerk each other off, and we are led to believe that one of them is that vigilante. Because the film opens with the murder of a villain near the bottom of that vigilante's list, and one of the two detectives confesses as if he is saying: „Yes, I did it!“

Now, if we had been. in a linear plot, in a honest way, led to think that the detective was also a vigilante, that would have been a smart scenario. But we are deceived. When we finally find out ("when it's revealed") that the vigilante is the other one, who we thought was a "good cop" (or at least a little less bad and cynical), then that revelation is just like the one from the movies „Fight Club“ and „Secret Window“ or „Hide and Seek“.

The film tries to be clever by inserting footage of a conversation with a police psychologist, and the words spoken by Turk (De Niro) make us think that he is a vigilante. It could have been done that way, had it hrere been some resolution of the moral dilemmas in De Niro's character, or if, for example, Rooster (Pacino) was put in front of some unbearable choices of the "friend or the law" after being disappointed in a long-time colleague, and especially the great chance was missed with supporting roles of two good cops Perez and Riley (Leguizamo and Wahlberg), who smell the culprit and go in search. The tension that could be created in meeting them at work would be priceless.

The character of Chief Hings (Brian Dennehy), who only receives information and gives a paternal reassurance, is also wasted, and could have been the main role. Dennehy has aged noticeably, but he has retained his corpulence, perhaps with the help of shoulder pads under his jacket. He reminds me of Petar Petrović, a chess player I have met at rapid tournaments in Belgrade since the 1980s.

The screenplay also missed the opportunity to turn the slowly approaching vigilante quest into true suspense, in the style of Chabrol's or Alain Courneau's films. Instead of it, they cheated us at the very beginning by giving us a confession of De Niro's character and that is a criminal offence in screenwriting business. (It turned out that Pacino forced him to say it at gunpoint. Shame!)

 A woman's question

That vigilante kills rapists. One priest is a pedophile, the rest of the men are violent towards women. It is sad that even in the liquidation of rapists, a feminist view of the world, a view "of the position of women in society", etc., does not even change, we don't even manage to empathize with women, they are just a token for the machismo of cynical law enforcement officers, whose motto is: "Most people respect the badge; everybody respects the gun!" with the addition "I am fed up with scumbag judges and procedural errors that will be exploited by skilled lawyers to easily  releases incorrigible villains." The only female role, the policewoman Karen Corelli (Carla Gudginou), is thrown into a snake's nest, exposed to slaps on the ass, professional understatement, sexist remarks, constantly mansplained. In the end, she was even raped. This film promotes a kind of a „legal rollerball“, augmented machismo, toxic masculinism, as well as „Heat“ (remember how Diane Verona's character had been treated by Al Pacino's character in that film).

The ending, which should double deceive the already heavily deceived viewers, is also dirty in the sense just mentioned – Turk simply does not allow Corelli to take revenge on Rooster for the rape, because his conversation with Pacino's character has priority (!), and that conversation is so artificial and silly that the viewers feels need to vomit. It is a misogyny combined with cretinism.

USA is my dreamland, I want to go and settle there

The film as such presents a dark picture of America and most viewers "across the pond" will experience it as a discouraging from even a  tourist trip to the USA. Based on Hollywood and crime series, we can expect that sooner or later someone will intercept us, detain us, search us, strip us naked, examine our body cavities, take a picture of us for a coffee cup (mug shot, haha) and send us to a prison cell where big blacks and whites will fuck us until the consular official comes to collect us and our ravaged ass up. In a rollerball US procedural justice, there is only room for superheroes. And woe betide us if we end up in the prison where cold-blooded & blue-eyed Luke (Paul Newman) served his sentence.

But this is „only“ a movie, folks, just a movie. It was filmed by the guys, including the aforementioned destroyer of production money, Avnet, and a bunch of sissies with visors (that is the fashion in Hollywood!), as well by members of the film crew in dirty jeans with plastic cups with bad filter coffee in their hands, and under the curious eyes of real cops as securities, who would give theor left tesitzcles just to be invited to be extras. They would even forgive a traffic violation to crew members because of that.

Except for Yugoslavian actor Jovan Janićijević Burduš, who was supposed to act in „Midnight Cowboy“.  

So this movie is about recycling a view of the world that doesn't necessarily have to be found on the street. Especially if you have a tour guide or live in an ethnic bubble like Russian or Serbian immigrants.

 It's a pity for De Niro and Pacino and Dennehy and Gugino and Leguizamo and Wahlberg and Fifty Cent. They had no reason to show up in this film.

„BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD“ (2007)

Last movie of Sidney Lumet

(American movie)

Dir.: Sidney Lumet; with: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney. Written by Kelly Masterson.

I missed Sidney Lumet's last movie when it was being shown in theaters because at the time I was still starving and my internet was dial-up. Recently, I came across on one of Serbian reviews on a prestige blog – mentioned in the context of denigrating another film – so I watched the work on a Russian website with Bulgarian subtitles.

And here are these two things: 1) "shit!" is shouted in Bulgarian as „мамка му! whilst "what the fuck!" reads „по дяволите!“;  and 2) "Gina Hanson", that is Marisa Tomei, has the same red scarf bow on her black suitcase as I do! (photos in comments)

The end of the film is a little rushed, like Veljko Bulajić's ending in "Great transport (Veliki transport)". In terms of the solution with the position of the camera, however, it is not true, as some say, that this is something different from the earlier Lumet's works, because he was never visually eccentric, the main thing for him was to tell the story naturalistically (like for example Mike Nichols) and to push a moralistic agenda.

Here he deconstructs bullying, endless hatred in lower middle class families of Irish origin, and weakness in sons who unsuccessfully try to live up to their father's manly role model. In the case of women, on the other hand, Lumet deconstructs passive aggression – how they torture their husbands with verbally unspoken but non-verbally transmitted orders like: "Be a man!"

And then, there's the director's statement about "unprecedented levels of violence today..." The screenplay was written by Kelly Masterson, the guy who adapted the book about the Kennedy assassination in such silly manner so that the movie doesn't mention Hoover at all, and it's like writing a screenplay about Stalin without mentioning Tito. Like the book, like the adaptation, some would say.

The film is about a failed robbery. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Two brothers, one middle-aged and employed in a large steel-glass building (Andy = Seymour Hoffman), and the other in Christ's age, but a loser who can't pay for his daughter's excursion or repay his wife's debt (Hank = Ethan Hawke). The father is veteran Albert Finney – a strict and cold guy, a good provider, dissatisfied with what his sons have become. Typical Irish austerity. Black people are nowhere in sight. The middle-aged son is only a seemingly successful businessman. In fact, he embezzled company money, he is addicted to heroin, his wife is Gina, I already said she's played byMarisa Tomei, who is cheating on him with his own loser brother. Andrew is suffering from a mid-life crisis, a lack of meaning of life, and the fact that he is facing jail when his co-workers discover that he has embezzled money. And he has probably cholesterol to the ceiling, poor blood supply to the left atrium, impotence and stomach ulcer.

And he comes up with the "smart" idea of ​​robbing the jewelry store of his own father with the little help of his younger brother Hank.

And that's where everything goes wrong. Hank reluctantly agrees to do it, but he hires an assistant, Bobby, not a very bright bloke... In the jewelry there is Andrew's and Hank's mother at work, although she had said she wouldn't be there that day. Bobby loses the temper and shoots the mother, she shoots him! Hank forgets an important clue in the form of a CD in the car which he later drove to the car wash, Andy has a fight with his father, a newly widower at the gathering after the funeral. And then breaks into tears in the car, in front of his wife Gina, who finally decides to leave him and she tells him about cheating in worst possible moment... She can't stand a grown man's tears! In an act of passive aggression, she admits to him that she was cheating on him with hir brother, just to get revenge for not being in the center of attention. She doesn't need a whiner, she needs a suppoorter...

But the matters only get more complicated. Bobby's widow found out how her husband died, so she blackmails Hank for money with his brother who is primitive bully, jerk and a thug...

Can it develop even worse than that? It can indeed, oh yes. Hank is a weakling and confide it to his brother who is desperate and takes the brothers to his feminine or better to say "genderly indetermined" dealer to – rob him. In the process, they kill both the dealer and an „innocent“  customer who was in a heroin-induced slumber and then, loaded with money, they go to the widow's brother. There Andy kills the widow's brother and the widow shoots Andy.

And now we come to  that rushed ending. So far everything has been phenomenal, it was going as it should, Chabrol and Nichols and Audiard, they would all put their signature under the direction, because everything is perfect: Seymour Hoffman is a villain with a soul, Ethan Hawke is a weakling with the potential to become Timothy Olyphant if he practices Tai Chi 7 minutes a day, Marisa Tomei is an unparalleled manipulator plus her tits are still like two coat hooks. Finney is in the phase of Clinton's lowered lower lip, his ass is old and slimmed down, but that mournful acting is killing, Michael Shannon as the widow of the brothers, the bully Dex, is real bastard, everything is for A+ ---> but from there, dramaturgically, everything is sloppy and matches too much and too quickly, all the loose ends get laced up – and the poibt of the film was that nothing was laced up so far! So the ending reminds Yugoslav crime imitations in which directors even put the name of the culprit in the very titles...

The father – Finney – follows the sons and sees them chasing the taxi, the older son with the suitcases (we are shown that he took the passport out of the drawer and put it in his pocket) and then he sees the younger son running away, police cars and ambulances arrive and the wounded older son is taken out of the widow's house on a stretcher and the father goes to visit him in the E.R. and then suffocates him in the hospital room using a funny trick with the machine that monitors the heart function. And that's just how he gets away with it... It's totally unconvincing.

But Lumet is as moralistic as ever and unerringly exposes weakness, lies, passive aggression, active aggression, lack of physical courage in men, shows the staunch masculinity of the family patriarch as if he were Ken Loach, and against that background he exposes the meanness of women, in a word – the destruction of modern American  lower middle class, those people who watch soap operas and eat canned soups in kitchens with tables covered with oilcloth-

Until the father saw his older son being carried on a stretcher to the ambulance, this was a perfect movie. And then bam–boom and it's finished. Ethan Hawke has matured and played younger brother on  the verge of a nervous breakdown, there is no poorly played role in this film, maybe even – here I will do it for once – a  little misogyny can be found: the female characters are there to wash, cook, show their tits and be in the shadow of their husbands who "provide a salary to the table". That doesn't look like Lumet. I'm kidding. It is Irish. It is only seemingly like that, but no, Lumet is oriented towards the Irish and Jewish milieu, that is family constraints in traditional families. And this is the fine ending of his career in that respect, because he started with those milieus.

His male characters have a strong ethical compass, and when they make a mistake, they are tormented by guilt, even if unconsciously. A typical Lumet act is when Hank, leaving the scene of the crime –  Andy killed Dex, his brother was wounded, a child's cry is heard from the other room – but he throws a bit of money from his bag to the crying widow. Because he is a good man, in spite of everything... He is tormented by guilt because of his daughter who cannot afford what other children have, he is tormented by the murdered old woman in the jewelry store, he is tormented by letting his brother down (in a sense), he really is not used to harming anyone! The women, on the other hand, got sick from making so many sacrifices for the family. Their cheating is a statement – we are human too! Their violence is passive, except when they get their hands on a gun. Lumet would be a good Catholic preast if he wasn't a director. But as a director he failed in the last 12 minutes of the film...

Music was totally unimpressive, I couldn't tell if there was any music at all. This was filmed with a digital camera, so there is nothing to say about the skill of the director of photography, but it should be noted that Lumet, in 82, didn't lost his mind like Lynch at the end of his life and he was not delighted by the fact that he was "relieved of the misery of shooting with film cameras". Lynch also allegedly said that he might not have even dared to make his last film if he did not have a digital camera at his disposal... That's another story.

„TO LIVE AND TO DIE IN L.A.“ (1985)

Dir.: William Friedkin; with: William Petersen, John Pankow, Willem Dafoe, Darianne Flugel, John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, Debra Feuer. Based on selvbiography by former under cover agent Gerald Petievich.

THE EIGHTIES, AH, SWEET EIGHTIES

Here I had before my eyes the Yugoslavian crime film "Protest Album" by Zika Mitrović, and I think that Milan Srdoč, Miloš Žutić, Mirko Babić and Smoki would do well in this work as well.

But, yes – there is a car chase, which surpassed the one from "The French Connection". That is enough to make the film a hit, as they say in Zagreb. And what would man ask more after such a car chase with – trains?!

Friedkin liked the novel based on a true story, from the pen of former agent Petievich (who appears as a cameo), but from that thick book there left only the spirit of the general destruction of all values ​​at the turn from 1970s to the 1980s, when large, long and wide limousines rushed throgh dirty and cracked streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ehen people wore mullets and hoods, and when there was just a thin line that separated the police officers from the criminals. Richard Chance (William Petersen) is a neurotic under cover police agent tasked with fighting money and credit card counterfeiters. He lives like a Popeye from "The French Connection" (Friedkin without false modesty pays homage to himself), he lives like Richie Marks (Sam Elliott) in the movie "Boy in Jeans", that is, as a pig who has no private life, sleeps at random places, never takes a bath and has a brutal relationship with the informant Ruth Lanier (Darriane Flugel, who looks like our model, the the dark object of desire by many directors and actors). She survives as the cashier of a soft porn show, she has to give him information to pay off the prison sentence forever, and when she asks him for money, he tells her:  "No arrests based on your information. If you want money to buy bread, screw with a baker!"

That sentence is the essence of this film.

Chance sees his work as a drug, as a reason not to think about the meaninglessness of the world and everything around him. He is not an idealist, he knows very well that "the streets will not be cleaner" if he arrests 10 counterfeiters, but that is the job he can do. And he is also corrupt, but „moderately“. His friend Jimmy Hart (Michael Green) is three days away from retirement. But he is killed when he stumbles upon a lair where large sums of money are counterfeited. Is it necessary to say that Chance will frantically, fanatically and feverishly and at all costs until the end of the film only try one thing: to avenge his friend?

The main forger Rick Masters (the still unwrinkled, almost Bowie-like mysterious Willem Dafoe) is chief suspect. It seems that no one can reach him.

The rhythm of the film is just like the character played by Petersen - feverish and frenetic (or in Serbian – frantic) and Chance seems to be neither sleeping nor eating, only drinking whiskey and resorting to greater and more and more illegal extreme measuress, especially when he is given the honest man, John Vukovich (John Pankov) as a new partner and against his will.

Of course, the two of them don't get along at first, but over time, "bonding" occurs. Chance will stop at nothing to avenge his friend. He against the law takes Carl Cody (Turturro) out of prison on parole in the hope that he will testify for parole, but Cody tricks him, beats him up and escapes (this episode, apart from being effective, perhaps a distant inspiration for „48 Hours“, is absolutely unnecessary, except as an illustration of what the enraged Chance is capable to do in order to revenge his cop-friend).

In the end, they reach mob lawyer Bob Grimes (Dean Stockwell in a type cast role) who arranges for them to meet Rick Masters. Chance and Vukovich play customers from Palm Springs. Masters is smart and smells a rat immediately:  they are not who they say they are.

The design of the film is so 1980hs that it physically hurts. The two lesbians (Debra Feuer and Jane Leaves /“Daphne“ from "Frasier"!!/) have hairstyles like Yugoslav stars Mersiha Čolaković and Zana, and the music and songs of the band "Wang Chung" are for "Hit of the Month" histed by Duca Marković. Friedkin is so desperate to prove he is young, he wants to show he mastered the spirit od 1980s and show that "The French Connection" wasn+t just an random incident in his career. He would die just to show he is updated. Willem Dafoe plays his forger role in an arthouse style, like some New York artist who bluffs managers and agents. There's a scene that was obviously improvised but left in the movie, in which Chance gives Masters money while Masters watches two lesbians (Feuer and Leaves) give each other foot massages. Dafoe laughs devilishly, Petersen grins, and Friedkin shouts behind the cameraman "That's great, boys, we just need this, go on!"

 Chance undertakes a series of actions that are insane, more slapstick and suicidal than likely or possible. When it turns out that he and Vukovich have to give Masters an advance in the amount of 30,000 real US dollars, and the police bureaucracy will not give that huge amount, Chance comes up with the idea of ​​using a clue from his informant lover and extorting money from a criminal who wants to buy a stolen work of art for 50,000 dollars! He reasons: "Well, they are criminals, who are they going to complain to?!" After the exciting kidnapping of the couple, the aforementioned anthology car chase follows. Chance and Vukovich are driving in the opposite direction on the freeway (sound familiar?!) and the chase goes on and on and is truly a feast for the eyes if you watch it on the big screen. And then a good twist: it turns out that the man who was robbed and killed by a friendly bullet is actually a – FBI agent under cover.

Chance doesn't give a damn, but the honest Vukovich is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and goes to lawyer Grimes for advice. His advice reads:  "Go to the FBI, confess, testify against your partner and you'll get 7 years and get out in 18 months." "How much will it cost?!" asks the dismayed Vukovich. "$50,000!", the lawyer replies cold as a cucumber.

I can't shake off the impression that the film is occasionally naive and, excuse me, stupid. Like "Protest album" by Žika Mitrović. In one scene, when Masters' henchman hits and kills Chance in the face with a hatchet, Vukovich and Masters are left alone in the forgery workshop. This latter started the fire. Vukovich holds him at gunpoint, but then sticks a revolver in his belt and grabs Masters by the wrist and slaps him even though he is physically weaker. Then he took out a revolver again and instead of shooting he chatters something. Then he let Masters beat him armed onlv with a baton. And in general, the fight scenes are amateurish. Unless the point is that these are actually fights in "real life", what do I know...?! But both Masters and Chance and Vukovich make moves that are downright stupid.

This is otherwise not seen in this general atmosphere of frenzy, cynicism and corruption, where there is simply no positive character.

I am surprised that no one has accused the film of misogyny so far. Because the female characters are corrupt, unfaithful and serve as sexual slaves. I don't know what the wolves of woke are waiting for.

After the movie, the viewer needs to take a shower.

“THE VERDICT” (1946)

 Debut af Don Siegel.

Dir.: Don Siegel; with: Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Joan Lorring, Groege Coulouris, Rosalind Ivan… Writen by Peter Milne, based on a novel “The Big Bow Mistery” by Briths Jew, Izrael Zangwill.

I watched Don Siegel's debut film from 1946 on the Internet, or rather on a blog.

"Siegel, oh, what a master of genre film!" said one of the regular visitors to the Belgrade Cinematheque in the summer of 1992. At that time, immediately after the imposing of  UN-sanctions against Yugoslavia, a large wave of emmigration started. The man, an old young man that is, who uttered the above cliché of thought, fantasized about selling the music stereo appliance and buying a ticket to Canada. That's what he told the old lady with crutches, one of the regular weirdos, poor visitors to the Cinematheque at that time... (See the unrealized script for the TV drama "The Year of Culture 1998". I wrote the drama with Aleksandra Nikolić in mind, and Rundek would also have appeared as a cameo.)

I think his plan worked: I never saw him again. Another regular visitor to the Cinematheque, on the other hand, told me about James Cagney: "What energy, incomprehensible energy!", and about James Mason: "The embodiment of nobility, what an accent and colour of voice...!" That's how regular visits to the Cinematheque turn visitors into walking film encyclopedias (=flee markets of clichés).

The plot of this film is set where it was written (it was not transposed to The New Yorker’s New York), namely it stayed in foggy London, where the crime story by Israel Zangwill, published at the end of the 19th century, also takes place. London and New York are hard to tell apart in movies until the mid-1950s, especially if there is Gothic story and if there are fog. (One nation, one language, one Presbyterianism; and then came the American Spring and the Declaration on the Status of the American Language... Serbs and Croats will recognize the joke.) Here, for example, the legal system is mixed up: the "superintendent" (Sidney Greenstreet) is portrayed as a mixture of police chief, state attorney and judge with all wigs, while the jury is all American, as in Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men". But that's not important... The plot consists of the fact that, until then, the infallible and immensely self-confident chief of police, Grodman (as said, Sidney Greenstreet), messed up in a murder investigation, so an innocent man was hanged, and the murderer remained at large.

The consequence of the mistake is the dismissal of that chief of police, which the ambitious deputy Buckley (George Coulouris) could hardly wait for, so he has been appointed to the vacant position in a jiffy. He even couldn´t wait for his dismissed predecessor to leave the office and is already feeling at ease at his chair and is taking over his desk  ("don't pack your stuff, we'll pack it and send it to you!").

At first glance, Grodman masterfully endures the dismissal, the unplanned retirement and the jubilation of his successor, he bravely continues his social life, although he has become a constant object of gossip and even mockery thrown at him on the streets of the city and in the bars. He is tormented by difficult dreams... However, he only says that he will dedicate himself to writing his memoirs. "What a Stoic gentleman!!, the audience thinks, and so does the landlady across the street, in whose house people live, some of whom which will be later killed…

 In that building, right across the street, lives Arthur, an antipathetic scatterbrain  and – this is a good invention in the script and the novel – the witness who led the chief of police to make that fatal, wrong decision. There lives also Grodman's closest friend, courtroom sketch artisr, jovial and depressive at the same time, and and otherwise failed artist, Victor Emrick (It's not a mistake, it's not Emerick; he's played by Peter Lorre.)

Their association hints at a gay relationship: Greenstreet is a fat-bellied grumpy man, the like of Charles Lawton and Charles Coburn,  an apparently passive member of a relationship in which the little devil Lorre is spanking him all night long. Greenstreet played many  such a roles, as did Lawton and Coburn. Lorre, on the other hand, who had long since found his way in Hollywood, never managed to achieve the fame from the German films of the 1930s directed by Fritz Lang. When he fled to America before the persecution of the Jews, he did not even know English. At the first meetings with American producers, he bluffed and spoke memorized lines. But now, in 1946, he was linguistically confident and played a type cast role, which he could perfom in his sleep. The shadow of doomed career  was already visible on him...

The film is completed by the following characters: Arthur Kendall, the witness (who, conveniently, also lives in a rented apartment in the house across the street from the former "superintendent"), Reverend Holbrook, the aforementioned landlady Mrs. Vicky Benson, timid and careless businessman Clive Russell (Paul Kavanagh).

The real hero of the film is director Siegel, who readily accepted the opportunity and, skillfully using the low-key camera (William Wyler's influence) and Vselovod Pudovkin’s editing style, created a strong gothic suspense atmosphere, which was nicely filled with comic relief in the form of rapid-fire sarcastic dialogues between the former and new police chief and in the form of the panicking of the grumpy landlady from the ground floor (Rosalind Ivan).

In this film, Siegel acted like in anecdote about David Lean: “He couldn't wait to finish shooting so he could cut the actors out of the film in the editing room”. (Later, he treated the actors much more gently, but this was very much the genre.) He did not insist on some great achievements in acting, but contented himself with excellent mise-en-scène, or rolling the eyes of actors who at that moment did not have a text. (For example, when the witness can't remember what kind of coat the man seen at the crime scene was wearing, and the new police chief sighs and fidgets. In this movie, you should watch the actors when they don't have lines!)

Arthur, that witness who actually led the police chief to go astray and who, so conveniently, lives as a sleazy tenant in the building across the street from the prematurely retired police chief, is rotten as a rotten egg and it quickly turns out that he seduced and left an honest girl pregnant and brazenly slandered the influential and mysterious Clive Russell. Both the girl and Russell confronted Arthur in front of witnesses. This is the genre, and you know what comes next: Arthur is soon found dead in his room, discovered by landlady Vicky Benson (the aforementioned Rosalind Ivan), who screams like she's insane. She calls the former chief of police, who lives right across the street. The investigation reveals that the door to the room where Arthur was found murdered was locked from the inside. At first it turns out to be an insoluble enigma. But it provides an opportunity for another comic relief, when some forensic expert clumsily tries to "reconstruct" the crime, and the newly appointed Chief Buckley is fuming with frustration, because he wants to immediately show how the right person came to that position... Of course, those who publicly threatened the murdered man were "invited for an informative interview"...

About halfway through the film, it must occur to a more intelligent viewer that it might be about the morbid revenge of the former police chief. His cold–bloodedness and now gloating over the torments of the new boss can lead to some hidden, diabolical evil... There are many twists and turns, for example, when they finally arrest the most suspicious, businessman Russell and decide to pin Artut's corpse to him, Russell confides in Grodman, whom he believes to be his sincere friend, confiding that only one person can confirm his alibi, but that person is a married woman from high society. Considerations prevail over caring his own skin.

At the end of the film, when Russell decides to use that testimony after all, Grodman, in a race against time and as the hour of the execution approaches, desperately and with a lot of filmic cross–dissolvings, searches for that woman, who – ehat a bad luck! – traveled to France to the countryside, we don't know where... Did that woman die in the meantime or was she never there?! It was just one of the ways to fool the viewers and to increase the tension.

In the end, it will turn out that the second corpse (Arthur) is actually the culprit from the first case of murder (therefore, justice has been served), and the new police chief turns out to be an inept snob and  incompetent overly ambitious freak, no better than Grodman, who triumphs as a diabolical and cynical mind while tasting revenge as cold meal as the savory jelly of pigs’ tails in Belgrade restaurant "Brankovina". Charles Lawton for the Third World.

A clever viewer could have guessed that Emrick and Grodman were collaborating in the last quarter of the film. In that scene, Peter Laurie is getting ready for sleep, he tuckes himself in it nthe bed,  and it is priceless how happy he is when he is about to go to the realm of sleep, in which we are all emperors unless someone is chasing us. And he blows the candle. Oh, what a luck! But when he does it, the door to his room slowly opens and we see hands in black gloves. Emrik (Lorre) pulls out a western style Colt from the drawer of the bedside table and starts shooting. The landlady screams and runs across the street to wake up Grodman, and Grodman gets up and reaches for a housecoat from which gloves fall out.

Great cinematography (Ernest Haller), Londoners had gas heating and gas lighting, it's good that Britain is not dependent on Putin's gas today, they only used candles for reading. The shots on the "streets" are, of course, studio achievements, and who knows how many times Mrs. Vicky Benson (Rosalind Ivan) ran out of a warm house into the cold English fog without a breath coming out of her mouth – all of it was filmed in the studio. It was not for nothing that Thomas De Quincey wrote the essay "On Murder as a Fine Art". Murder in British and American crime fiction does not threaten the foundations of social order, no one thought to cry out: "Well, well, murder is not suitable for our self-governing capitalism!" or "How can a senator or a politician be corrupt? This can only happen in Lenin's or Stalin's rotten USSR!"

In the end, no one remembered that innocently hanged poor guy from the beginning of the movie. Who knows how rich his inner life was...

“OUT OF THE FOG” (1941)

 American movie “Out of the Fog" (1941) by Anatol Litvak based on the play by Irwin Shaw, was screened in the Cinematheque probably under the title "Crime in the Fog" or "Murder in the Fog"; I watched it on those wooden chairs in the early 1980s.

Dir.: Anatole Litvak; with: John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchel, John Qualen (Walter Brennan look-a-like), young Eddie Albert, Gerorge Tobias.

CUTE OLD LITTLE MOVIE

The film actually has typical Hitchcockian elements: the friendship-like relationship between father (Oscar winner Thomas Mitchell) and daughter (Ida Lupino, too old for this part, I must say) and comic relief through the father's hobbies. I would like to add that the friendship between two old fishermen which have Haurw Howxian flavour.  "Jonah Goodwin" is played by Mitchell) and "Olaf Jonsson" is played John Quallen, whose character reminds me of the role played by the young Walter Brennan in the somewhat disfigured by producrs’ itvernetions but still decent work "Come and Get It", signed by both Hawks and Wyler.

The daughter wants to escape from poverty and a narrow environment, and that departure is offered to her by a local racketeer Harols Goff (John Garfield, otherwise a leftist, Marshal Tito's personal acquaintance and Yugophile). Of course, the father opposes her relationship, so in the end, out of anguish, and when he feels he cannot fight the daughter’s heart, he offers the racketeer all his savings (under $200 at the time, in today's price it's about 20 thousands USD) just to persuade the thug to leave. Father feels that even money will not be enough, so out of love for his daughter, he decides to take more serious steps. He and his friend forge a plan to lure the racketeer into the boat and beat him up. How, they have no idea. that scene in the boat is the best in the movie. Laughter was heard in the Cinematheque when two old men have neither the dexterity nor the courage to kill a gangster, so they repeat several times the pre-arranged code "I think the carburetor is gone!" So, they are turn clumsy and their plan almost fails, but the gangster accidentally drowns because – he can't swim.

A quick trial follows, which is another a Hitchcockian feature, after which it turns out that the drowned Garfield (Harold Goff) is the subject of several warrants and a most wanted criminal, so the two old farts get away without any problems and even get returned the US$ 192!

The film is chamber drama, even more than in realization than it had to be. This is indeed based on a play by Irwin Shaw, but it's all filmed in studio, even the scenes "at the sea” or “in the harbour!. While watching the movie, I had the impression that everyone was too old for their roles, Ida Lupino wore a heavy makeup and looke like milf. Thomas Mitchell, the Doc from "Stagecoach”, and his friend Quallen were completely wasted as old guys, but after checking on Wikipedia, I see that they are exactly the right age.

The film has a surprisingly strong social note, and such an achievement could not have been filmed as late as in 1948. At times, a Chekhovian feeling prevails, where everything is talked about and presented to the audience on a silver platter, which is not an American manner at all.

Garfield was one of the few Hollywood stars who was friends with Marshal Tito, and he was also a socialist (which in the USA is equivalent to being a Yugo-chetnik today in Croatia). There are many indications that during the famous Desant on Drvar in May of 1944, Garfield was with Tito in the cave along with Winston Churchill's son. Garfield was officially rejected for the army "due to heart trouble", but traveled to Europe during the war "as an entertainer" and actor. Sterling Hayden organized the rescue of the American pilots with the help of Tito's partisans, and Christopher Lee, later Dracula, first arrived in Hungary as a paratrooper, then magically arrived at the Yugoslav Supreme Headquarters by land and was actually the most important "liaison" between Britain and the partisans, even more important than Randolph. After the war, both Hayden and Garfield were blacklisted. I'm writing all this not because it has a direct connection with this little big film and its warm human story, but because I'm sorry that just a few years later it was no longer possible to make a film like this. Back in 1943, Henry Fonda could have shot that western directed by William Wellman with great gusto, about the mass hysteria of lynching, which foresaw the "red witch hunt" (“The Ox-Bow Incident”), but that was the swan song of liberal America. Ida Lupino lobbied for John Garfield and talked he producers to the the part from Humphrey Bogart!

Wikipedia has miraculously fell for  Alan Cohn's romantic, inspired and perhaps (post festum, with much reading into) communist review, published in “Bright Lights Film Journal”:

"As Goff, Garfield – the progressive, the true common man whose miserable fate it was to be destroyed through the Hollywood Blacklist travesty – reveals the depravity and fantasy of Depression-era capitalist society as he condemns all fascist forces at play in a world at war."

(Garfield was most likely killed by the FBI with drugs that mimic heart attacks well.)

„RIVELAZIONI DI UN MANIACO SESSUALE AL CAPO DELLA SQUADRA MOBILE/AKA SO SWEET, SO DEAD“ (1972)

Dir.: Roberto Bianchi Montero; with: Farley Granger, Sylva Koscina, Silvano Tranquilli (Italian Lloyd Bockner for the Third World),   Chris Avram, Luciano Rossi (as Gaston, like Billy Bob Thornton for Third World, for example from from the movie „A Simple Plan“), Krista Nell...   

A CURIOUS MIXTURE OF GENRES

I came across this film while preparing an article about Americans who found asylum/rest/peace/career continuation in Europe, from experimental bands like "Taxidomoon", gay soul singers like Arthur Conley aka Lee Roberts, through actors who withered away as action heroes and found a stall in Italian and Eurowesterns and crime films, all the way up to gay actors who mix different previous causes. So Farley Grainger with his lover, producer Robert Calhoun – after giving up the facade in the form of marriage to Shelley Winters (and who could make a pancake out of him if she sat on him) – found peace in Rome (as Conley found peace in Amsterdam), and along the way he made a few Italian works, more to preserve his touch than he had to, either for money or for a career that he was never completely satisfied with.

This movie is 30% "giallo" (though more stabbing than women-killing in ocean of blood) and the rest is a police procedural in the form of Italocrime and Eurowhodunnit.

The solution to the puzzle – in  terms of this third ingredient – is commendable, and at the level of the best British detective dramas. All the time in front of our eyes, the least suspicious is the first one who appears to the viewers next to the chief inspector, it was as if you suspected Malraux, who was sitting to the right of de Gaulle.

For example, Italocrime films (and especially giallo) of the seventies are often soft porn. For the American version of this film, additional hardcore scenes with Harry Rimes (who almost went to prison as Yugoslavian director Lazar Stojanović, and imagine, it happened in liberal America!) were added, and such provided an opportunity for the viewers to Yugoslav theatre festival BITEF to feast their eyes.

This film, since it is not a hundred percent giallo, has a lot of logic, psychologically seasoned characters, all the rules of the detective film and the police procedurals are, as they say in Belgrade Žarkovo,  respected to the full, with the hot & cold relationship between the detective Capuano (Farley Granger) and his boss, the "Questore" (Philip Hersent) and the necrophile-type suspects in the morgue, Gastoni (Luciano Rossi, poorly dyed blond Billy Bob Thornton for Third World, as in Sam Raimi's „A Simple Plan“) and planted arrested suspects in order to induce the real perpetrator to act.

(In this case, that bait lured the vanity of the perpetrator, who was rightly assumed to be a narcissistic maniac, and the motif from "Crime and Punishment" was not blandly used as a template, because it was Italian movie, and only Anglo-Saxons can be suckers up for Dostoyevskiy and Tarkovsky.

Granger almost never takes off his black-and-white tweed trench coat, which looks like a bad vaudeville tume for inspector Clouseau. But it doesn't matter, it's Italy, there all the men except the hobos are well dressed and wear perfectly shined shoes.

 As a rule, there are a million goofs in films in the genre of giallo, but here there is only one: in the second murder, namely, the victim runs out of the house from dusk (which can be seen through the window) wight into broad daylight, and when did she find time to get dressed? She  was completely naked while she was inside, and she ran out in stocking tights and a negligee which today would make two and a half miniskirts) and such dressed-uo she runs through nature all the way to the seashore, but as I said – in daylight. Behind her runs a mysterious butcher with a black scarf on his head, like the Conspirator in the Italian comic, popular in Yugoslavia, namely "Alan Ford", a black barber's coat, a hat, working class boots... There is also a wrong dubbing during the opening credits, Granger's Capuano is apparently silent and does not open his mouzth, but we hear the text he speaks when he tells the policeman that he can go. And that's all from the clumsiness of the Italian giallo of the seventies. Everything else is pure Chabrol, I swear to God, Chabrol would have coldly signed himself under this film and added another layer by casting then–his–muse Stéphane Audran.

I owe you the plot:  every now and then someone kills a beautiful, but always married lady from a high society, and leaves photos of her and her lover next to the corpse, with the lover's figure being scratched with a razor. This causes a lot of tabloid attention and upsets the people from upper class. On the one hand, the murderer should be caught as soon as possible, on the other hand, care should be taken to ensure that fresh widowers from the upper class do not become exposed... Because the corpses of the beautiful wives are piling up, it is clear that this is a serial butcher.

And those Italian women... Not only are they mostly naked, but they are analyzed in the morgue, where the bushes come to the fore once again, because that's how it was in the 1970s. Unfortunately, they usually pluck their eyebrows, but what can we do, Jagoda Kaloper, Yugoslavian sex symbol of the seventies, also plucked her eyebrows, one cannot have it all...

And there is a fine suspect who is employed in the morgue, Gaston, the aforementioned Luciano Rossi, who also has a photo lab and when Capuana visits his apartment, he can see the developed photos of the deceased beauties: "Look, inspector, you can't see that they were killed sadistically, I patched them all up, they look nice in coffin but what a waste of such beauty!" He is either a necrophile or a murderer – we are led to think.

Granger mounted the martyred expression of an uncle who is tormented by various doubts, as if he is Cliff Montgomery in Hitchcock's "Confessions" or his previous characters in "The Strangers in the Train“ and "The Rope". Europeans make mistakes like Americans. For Americans, Erland Josephson, Fernando Rey or Max Von Sydow are better actors only because they are exotic, the grass is always greener on the other side, and for Europeans so many broken and forgotten Americans and Englishmen seem cooler than local actors.

Ah, these Italian interiors, these tiles, so when these rich and beautiful wives, still warm from kisses (as they say in our literature), take off their clothes in front of the mirrod and want to go into a tub full of hot water, we see the bushes when they take off their stocking tights and panties, and those bathorrom ceramics and batteries, those bathtubs, I remember the bathrooms in Roman and Milanese hotels, they are temples, there is always a need for an honest man to wash his feet and ars in a bidet after hot chilli peppers, that is the culture of the Roman Empire, a global empire that collapsed failed because of lead in the...waterworks.

The dialogues between the "Questor" and the detective went beyond the usual clichés, and the solution – I  can tell you, because the film is so old – so the solution is more of De Palma type than of Chabrol type: namely, detective Capuana is being cheated by his wife Barbara (Syliva Koscina), and he learnes about this through a phone call by a lured killer! This shakes the phlegmatic Granger to the core, and in the finale with sfumato flashbacks – which perhaps also inspired De Palma for "Obsession" and "Dressed to Kill" – he decides not to save his own wife, the freshly showered Sylva Koscina (oh, what tiles, what a battery in the bathtub!), but to watch as the masked criminal stabs her, and when we see who the killer is, we can only congratulate the screenwriter and director: that is exactly that professor Casali (Chris Avram), who was in front of our eyes all along with Gastone, Casali, therefore, who is the detective's closest associate, psychologist and coroner, who made a psychological profile of the serial killer! And he has a chin dimple which looks like an ars and makes you think it was done by a plastic surgeon, because that was the fashion at the time, starlets augmneted their breasts and men of steel jaws added a dimple on their chins.

Capuano kills Casselli and only then calls his boss and says: "We have a killer..."

In terms of atmosphere and photography (Fausto Rossi is listed as the director of photography), the film is very reminiscent of de Palma's "Obsession", and in terms of hints of social criticism, it resembles Chabrol at his peak, when Michel Bouquet played sleazy husbands. Dario Argento, for example, is now 100 years old, and he never learned how to put together a decent film like this...

 

„HANG 'EM HIGH“ (1968)

 

Dir.: Ted Post; with: Clint Eastwood, Inger Stevens (vehiculated to the stardom), Pat Hingle, Ed Begley, Ben Johnson, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, Charles McGraw, Russell Thorson, L.Q. Jones

 

* * *

The western comes home, no longer spaghetti and cannoli, but baked beans and black coffee with last drops of which man extinguishes the camp fire, and everything is filmed against blue screen on which the cheesy landcape and art designed resembling a camping and sporting goods store store were later projected (as a grumpy critic, namely Bosley Crowther from NY Times, said after premiere of John Ford's "The Searchers"). Yugoslavian country singer Zvonko Bogdan bought a property, a horse and a stable from the first big fee, and Eastwood with his friend producer of  "A Fistful of Dollars", "Good, Bad - Evil", etc. used that money and founded the Malpaso Productions company and worked hard in it so that everything was his way. He even rejected John Sturges as the director of this film and installed a friend. But it was worth it.

Although it is said in the description that this is a "revisionist" western, it's not, no siree. Firstly, where have you ever seen a revisionist western with Ed Begley? Secondly, the term is used wrongly. The classical western are in fact revisionist, since they are the ones who revise history: they show Indians with feathers growing fron their heads and cowboys as fancy models woth 2 or three guns, and in clean trousers. And they quench the thirst with whiskey which is suicidal at such temperature. No, this film doesn't revise anything, this is a saloon cowboy movie in front of a styropore foam backdrop panels, and the fact that there is philosophizing about justice only vaguely resembles Wedekind, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Chekhov, whoih American filmakers always had a soft spot for. The mythical European spleen was always charming for the people on the other side of the pond. And yes, you still can smell the oregano all the time.

Did anyone else notice in the thirty-something minute, after the arrest of the blacksmith, a member of the lynch mob, he was a John Wayne impersonator (scarf around his neck, brick-colored shirt, baggy pants, smile of Yugoslaian politician Vojislav Šešelj) was walking under the roof on the streets of the Coulisse Film City?  It  can almost seem as awas almost a revenge for Wayne's criticism of the film "High Plains Drifter" from 1973. Or, if you don't believe in time travel, then anger over this joke was brewing in Wayne so much that it erupted like a geyser only in 1973 on the occasion of  "non-American film about the Wild West" as he put it in his accusation letter.

„Unforgiven“ + „Sudden Impact“ + unfilmed sequel of "Incident at Ox-Bow /that is sequel: what would happen next/" --> have you noticed the pattern? For Eastwood, too, it can be said that he has been shooting one and the same film all his life. He adored himself, he filmed the idolized tableau of himself, he was in every frame, he kissed blond skinny girls (his type of beauty), and the villainhe  was only in one movie, the one that Wayne spat on.

Nop, not a revisionism, the film opens with an incredibly dirty velvet shirt, that's how dirty the bums are when sometimes enter the city streets and everyone holds their noses. (Later there is a discontinuity, when that same shirt is unjustifiably much cleaner.) Eastwood is Jebbediah Jeremiah Jeremiah for short Jed Cooper, a former sheriff who has sent himself into early retirement wanting a quiet life. But, by mistake, he is accused of stealing cattle, for which the death penalty follows (all of us comic book readers and Cinematheque visitors know this: stealing horses and cattle is a no-no; but until the movie with Nicholson, we naively believed that you were safe if you swam across the Rio Grande; they also say that Ratko and Radovan lived in a similar delusion because they missed that movie).

Captain Wilson - "Bonanza Face", Ed Begley, or as I say: "Lorme Green for the Rich" - leads the lynching campaign. They hang Cooper and leave, but the mysterious and self-deprecating Sheriff Bliss (Ben Johnson and his role was such unused gold for eventual spin-offs!) appears, cuts the rope and arrests the half-dead Eastwood again and takes him to a new trial in a wooden horse-driven cage (which we later saw again in Tarantino's „Django“).

And here a slapstick western could be continued in two or three directions, perhaps also comical. but then the screenplay invention of Leonard Freeman enters the scene, whose character of judge Adam Fenton, the hanging judge, interpreted by Pat Hingle, turns the film into the terrain of Mitteleuropa, Dürrenmatt, Dostoyevskiy and Wedekind, and I can easily imagine Lars von Trier making a cowboy „Dogville“ as a kinde of film palimpsest... Hingle looked like a young Nick Nolte at the time. In the scene where he the still half-dead Cooper to the brothel to "cheer him up" and reward him, Hingle scratches his leg. This suggests that he probably has syphilis. So far, the judge has already delivered a good set of pocket philosophical tirades on the subject of ethics, law and the purposefulness of human actions, so we can consider him Satan in a judge's toga, a master of sophistry and ethical juggling. In the same scene, just a little earlier, when the mysteriously bathed Cooper (Eastwood, let me remind you) wakes up with a smile in clean sheets in a room with plush wallpaper and while the "friend of the day" (who by the way looks like a young Olja Grastić) pours him coffee from a kettle, we see the coffee drip down the lid and fall onto the blanket, we see delicious American cornmeal buns with baking powder and baking soda and that metal container for milk and a cigarette ashtray from our hotels from sixties...

In this film, only the gang gathered around "Captain" Wilson behaves somewhat cowboyish, revisionist or not, while everyone else throws wise onlliners as in tragic MittelEuropean operettas or dramas. Inger Stevens, king-size Jennifer Aniston, well, Inger summarizes the content of the film „Unforgiven“ while sitting on a blanket during a picnic, sums it up to a rather confused Eastwood, who does not realize that he is being offered material for an Oscar (because he will read the mentioned novel only after 7 years!), he justa had a crash on her and she also devours him with her eyes – look at the screenshot!

Dennis Hopper played "The Prophet" dressed as a beggar from nowadays America, and the Captain's crew consisted of young Richard Gere lookalike (Loomis), Aca Kubura, Mihajlo Ramač (Jenkins), Labud Nikačević (Blackfoot), and a blindfolded Zablaćanski (Rhino). (All mentioned people are contemporary Serbian actors. Internal joke for myself.)

If it weren't for that feeling of the television scenography (I kept waiting for Ljuba Tadić as Socrates to appear) and the spoting goods  storelook, I might have taken philosophizing about justice and ethics more seriously. But, that would probably burden the film, since the main character gave up the cardinal solution that would lead to tragedy, that is, to a cowboyish apophatic theology. Cooper, is it because he is weak or because he is in love (Judge Fenton tells him: "Ah, you have solved your problem, now you have fallen in love and you are going to deal with the garden, and let the state be managed and run by others!" and thus questions the conformity of liberals and today's escapism of the middle-class intellectual to the limits), or because he is just an opportunist – but he stays in the game, he does not oppose the devil's prosecutor/judge, because then the Wild West would be then left to Captain Wilson and their henchmen.

The film would have suffered and would have been less propulsive as a story if it had ventured to go deeper into this issue, and – most importantly – it would not have earned so much money, and the production company would have failed one hundred percent. But the film is not revisionist, let's be clear, it is more of an art western with a Middleuropean flavor. If I were as snarky as famous Yugoslavian critic Milutin Čolić, I would also say that the film has a morally dirty ending (as he said for Jim McBrides rameke of „Breathless“). If instead of the Americans (let Eastwood stay), we were watching highly synchronized Italians, we would have laughed more, but we would also have believed the film's premise more.

The use of sweating is fascinating. Ed Begley, as "Captain" Wilson, is sweating like a pig right from the start. His fear at the end, when Cooper comes to his house to gun him down and the only two remaining companions who didn't leave him, grows exponentially, his eyes are more and more swollen and beads of sweat on his face and his cheeks take the size of golf balls, it's a horror like when Christopher Lee died of fear in one scene of the horror series when he saw Lucifer himself (he also played Lucifer himself in one of Robert Shearer's films and there he bought the soul of none other than Sammy Davis Jr.). In the end, the captain hanged himself out of great horror.

Also the sweat on the face of Madows (Russell Thorson) during the speech on the scaffold before the hanging of 6 culprits is striking. Bob Steele, as Jenkins, the only positive in the gang that lynched Cooper, is the image of a person who can redeem himself, really tormented by strong guilt. For a moment, I believed that he too would perish in the frenzy of revenge, as the last member of the pursuit that chased Chato (Bronson); in „Chato's Land“ by Micahel WInner, but no, he was pardoned, which was more a manipulation of the satanic judge/prosecutor in the desire to keep the efficient but hesitant marshal than an act of justice. Because he was pardoned with a piece of paper, not, for example, tchetnik Nikola Kalabić...

In the scene of the six-fold hanging, the filmmakers obviously enjoyed the humor with that "'cold beer, 'cold beer, popcorn!'" shouted the salesman, which was taken from "I Married a Witch" by René Clair, while humble and blood thirsty old grannies licked their lips in eager expectation of execution, but at least they did not yell like at the gig of Tom Jones. Both writer Freeman and producer/star Eastwood found the measure.

„THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS“ (1967)

British/French/American co–production

Dir.: Anatole Litvak; ensemble cast: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Donald Pleasence, Joanna Petet, Tom Couretenay, Christopher Plummer (as Rommel), Philippe Noiret, Charles Gray, Nigel Stock. Gore Vidal is uncredited as a co–writer or script doctor.

* * *

I saw this movie in the theater in the early 1980s, "Kino Balkan" was that cinema, and it was one of those forced nights out with grown-ups in a mixed family company and at the last minute. The film arrived in Serbian cinemas late. At that time, there were many so–called "previews" and late distributions in Belgrade, at the time there were still cinemas, no cineplexes, all sold out, filmmakers still knew how to create a crowd waiting in front of the box offices and more over one could see long queues in front of the Cinematheque for for example  "The Return of the Pink Panther" and "Bloody Throne", or for the new Bond film in front of the "Cinema Odeon"... There were specific audiences for „Kosmaj“ , „Zvezda“ and „Partizan“. (What a queue it was, in 1982 (although the movie was made in 1976), in front of the „Odeon“, in broad daylight, for a Japanese porn film with artistic pretensions "In the Realm of Senses“!

I checked the film again the other day on a new Samsung phone through national television internet service. And the new impression is much better than was the original one. At that time, the film felt  extremely boring, drawn– out, even pathetic and naive. It was an ensemble cast, all right, but – I wouldn't say it like that at the time, of course – Peter O'Toole repeatedly delivered his mannerisms in spades, playing a psychopath with tics and idiosyncrasies, but still a conscious guy who knows what he's doing, and knows how to hide clues. (If I were mean, I'd think it was some twisted polemic with Hannah Arendt and the theory of the "banality of evil"!) The role of General Tanz was light years away from his glorious return in "The Stunt Man"...

With hindsight, I recognize Joanna Pettet from "Casino Royale" in a – today, bad critics would say so – "wasted" role, but all female roles are wasted in such male war films. She showed her tits for nothing, which was a shame.

I know that then I noticed "alo-alo!" foreign languages ​​(there was no such series then, this is another anachronistic assessment), but with this memory, I notice quite a lot of wit and dynamism, which I had missed then in the company of elderly people. After the late screening, the „Aeroflot“ representative office with the Nabokovian ominous letter З ( in: Аэрофлот) was already closed by then, I looked as if hypnotized at the sign and the darkened shop window while we waited at the traffic lights next to the pedestrian crossing (which today is Monty Python–like screwed up by new silly city government, so that pedestrians get dizzy and get trampled to each other, as rwo bands, Stones and Beatles are colliding to each other on crossed zebra crossings), and then we went to Skadarlija for a Belgrade specialty, some goulash in a bun, which we called „liquid crap“, and ate it while stumbling on the Skadarlija's touristic cobblestones, only remnants of Old Turks, and tepidly commenting on the film. Nobody was thrilled by it...

 

Donald Pleasance (General Kallenberg) is surprisingly normal, Omar Sharif (Grau) is slick, and he spoke with slowed-down special English, as if he were reading a report on the water level of European rivers on the Voice of America, while Philippe Noiret (Inspector Morand) and the aforementioned Pleasance wore cheesy masks and „gray hair“ in the finale of the film "twenty years later"...

 

With this late knowledge, I also see a despondently extended hand of the West towards the Germans. As our critic Bogdan Tirnanić said on the occasion of Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War“: "For Americans, fascism is a kind of sport", and so here we don't see an excessive hatred toward Germans as Nazis in general, but it is repeatedly made clear that "not all Germans are the same", the attempt to assassinate Hitler is explicitly used in that purpose, although in Rommel's lines (Christopher Plummer, filmed from afar, so he can be recognized only by his voice), it is still balanced in a style: "We destroy a madman, then it is not treason, yes, we had a good time fighting for Hitler at the beginning, and now that he's gone mad, we hope to get out alive and maybe even get a bit of honor if we kill him before the allies get to us...!", but the most valuable part of the film is what otherwise completely prevails in Peckinppah's "Cross of Iron", namely the anti-war, unpatriotic and melancholic approach in the character of Corporal Kurt Hartman (Tom Courtney), which is in fact, the most ordinary defeatism, as well as the magnificent philosophical obstinacy of Major (later colonel, but he didn't allow himself to be bribed!) Grau (I said: Omar Sharif), who stubbornly (as if it were a movie by Costa Gavras) seeks individual justice in the world chaos in which thousands of others perish collectively, even though "everyone" repeatedly asks him: "What the hell are you doing looking for justice for some whore while war is everywhere around us?!" But ---> that's the point – man should  give their best at all times!

Now I am also impressed by the scene when Tanz shot the good guy, Colonel Grau. He suddenly became – a corpse!. After he fell, we no longer see him – only a stretcher with a dirty gray blanket covering it: he became – so suddently, man!1 – a cadaver. General Tanz has just found out that the assassination attempt on Hitler has failed. How fast things change... Well, now I interpret that scene as a hint toward notion of „fragility of life“, or something similar.

All of this escaped me during that late screening in the early 1980s, and while I was only trying not to make my shirt dirty with goulash in a bun from the legendary food stand in tourist trap of Skadarlija (at that time one of the few places where a person could grab a bite  so late, and peopl in Socialist Yugoslavia thought only criminals want to purchase something after 10.00 PM), the film then appeared really naive to me and boring film, like a light French comedy „The Wing or the Leg?“ with Louis de Funès, which I saw around the same time, but at least French movie was funny... Only later did I notice that Louis de Funès resembled like Radovan Karadzic disguised in an old woman... Probably he used the same mask when hiding for years...

 „Cross of Iron“ in the version of Jackie Collins and in the form of a telenovela..., I thought then.

„THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED AT MINSKY’S“ (1968)

American movie from 1968. Dir.: William Friedkin; with: Jason Robards, Britt Eksland, Norman Wisdom, Forrest Tucker, Elliott Gould, Denholm Elliott, Harry Andrews. Based on Broadway play by Norman Lear.

 This is one of several films that Friedkin made based on novels or (Broadway) plays; sometimes only buttons remained from the book and sometimes the piece was transfered to the big screen sung verbatim. I have the impression that from this burlesque (which he watched many times) he took over its flaws as well. Weaknesses: soft-pedaling the production cruelty of the Broadway scene, stereotyped heroes, romanticized story about a girl bewitched by bright metropolis lights and so on. It is difficult for Friedkin to associate such a term – softpedaling – but I have to: he portrayed the Broadway scene in the most clichéd way. The manager of the theater (Elliott Gould) is an asexual ulcer sufferer, his fingers brown from nicotine, obsessed with art, the manager (Joseph Wiseman) is a pussy hunter who takes a bribe in natural kind from every young chick like a pimp, and there is also a couple of actors of  the type Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis (Jason Robards & Norman Wisdom) who simultaneously fall in love with a new actress.

I would venture to say that this film inspired Bob Fossey for "All That Jazz" and Baz Luhrmann for "Moulin Rouge", as well a series of films with Sylvia Kristel in which she plays a girl who breaks free from the chains of a Christian upbringing and becomes a woman who lets herself go into sex without guilt. Here that type Rachel Spittendawell (played by Britt Ekland) – an innocent Amish girl captivated by the big city's bijouterie in the manner of the village girl from Guy de Maupassant's famous short story.

But she looks so modern, so hippy, that Brit Ekland, in fact she has a 60's hairstyle and it's like she attended Stones' or Animals' concert, everything about her is so sixties, swingerish and that mini-skirt!. These are the type of girls who are spent in tons at Hefner's parties, these are the girls who marry small, ruddy nosed, ugly but successful and talented men, Roman Polanski and Jackie Stewart type (see that lost and found documentary about Stewart directed by Polanski!; I saw it at Copenhagen Dox in the Danish Cinematheque) and Kate Moon, these are tall muses with full lips and real breasts and long legs, these are the faithful wives of provider husbands for whom only a dick, a yacht, a villa and a wallet are valid. Hairy arses, loose sock elastics, hair from ears, strong male cologne, smell of marlboro and cigarillos and "Wat 69" whiskey, that, bro, smells of the sixties on the big screen, even though the movie takes place in fiscal year of 1925.

Friedkin, like a true filmmaker, make a play filmic, he grabbed a piece of the American "Newsreel" from that era and began to fill it with shots that slowly become colorized, that invention  was cool at first, but I have to admit that I it gor boring soon. The director could not get enough of that joke, which served as a connecting element (the so-called "fuge") between scenes. Yes, he kept reminding us how good this movie is.

The relationship between Raymond and Chico (Martin and Lewis, interpreted by Robards and Wisdom respectively) is the relationship of seemingly inseparable friends who can still be separated if the temptation is strong enough. They build a Quixote-Sancho Panza, Zagor-Chico, Martin-Luis type relationship, but it's all too clear how Chico is too smart to settle for just carrying water for elder friend. Robards doesn't look Broadwayish enough physically, somehow he's a shade too old and kind of gray and with make-up he looks like a corpse that escaped from a funeral. Wisdom, on the other hand, is all in the role, he could play fine in Ronald Hqrwood's play „The Dresser“.  I notice softpedaling or romanticizing in the absence of a rush for Raymond to consume the young actress that is offered to him when he says "no-no" (while Rachel needs to strip naked and „invent a striptease“, which is one of tge goofs in the film) and in the fact that manager Louis Minsky didn't get seriously angry when the girl  wasn't given to him right away.

Among the clichés, there is also the one that artists ddon't payfor the meals, but always eat free (either they don't have money or they are suffering from an ulcer).

The film recreated the middle of the 1920s with external means (and the stock market crash was yet to come!) in which Prohibition and unrest in the theater went hand in hand. It's called "Broadway decadence" and just as female suffragettes demonstrated against saloons and alcohol, so the „Anti-Vice Commission“ carefully watched the plays and wrote complaints. Denholm Elliott plays one of the main figures in that Commission, and he repeated his grimace with which he became famous in war films, domestic dramas, comedies, etc. Harry Andrews, a true Englishman who played Tarant in Joseph Losey's „Modesty Blaze“, plays here an Amish father (!) looking for his wayward daughter. The English, like so many times, gave their soul to play Nazis, degenerates, moral police, Amish and other non-American weirdos. Americans fall for phonies in art, that's how they went crazy with Beckett, that's how Erland Josephson and Fernando Rey are good actors for Americans just because they're foreign.

At that time, New York police officers carried flashlights, fire helmets and did not have pistols. Some more policemen appear in the film, as if they fell out of some vaudeville, and they wear gray and ugly uniforms and look a lot like Eastern European militia men from the 1970s...

 The film is actually a male masturbation, which is a pretty good label for vaudeville of that era, and especially the soft porn of the sixties and seventies. Men pretend that they are artists so that, heary and  unwashed as they were, perfumed with cologne and with cigarillos in their crooked teeth, they could steal some actressess and make them strip naked and get money from the tickets.

”THE ONE EYED SOLDIERS” (1966)

UK/Yugoslavian/US/Italian co-production

Co-written and directed by John Ainsworth (under pseudonym “Jean Cristophe”); with: Dale Robertson,  Luciana Paluzzi, Guy Deghi, Dragan Laković, Dragan Nikolić, Predrag Preša Milinković, Mile Avramović

***

AH, THAT FORMER YUGOSLAVIA!

(One of the gems of Yugoslavian co-productions)

“United Screen Arts”, an American production company, naively entered into a deal with Belgrade-based company “Avala film”, in believing that Yugoslavia is a mecca for co-productions of all kinds, that everything is cheaper, extras and cameos at will, plus cheap landscapes which look like a Hollywood dream. What destroyed those dreams and soon drove away the film magnates, however, was – corruption. Support staff, from key grips and best boys and downwarfs, through carpenters, tailors and cobblers, to the procurement of planks, wooden and styropor panels, to the ordinary buckets, brushes and brooms – all these people-in-between tried to charge multiple times for services and so-called “repromaterial”. Dragan Babić described a part of that lark when he was a guide to David Lean, who intended to make a film in Yugoslavia, more precise in Serbia, even more precise in city of Čačak and the surrounding area, and came in a "Rolls Royce" in order to to incognito (!) look for locations in the small villages and rainforests of Serbia. Leann said he gave up because of bed bugs in the bungalows he was sleeping in. And Dragan Babić explained: "He, who survived the rainforests, snakes and crocodiles of Bangladesh while filming 'The Bridge on the River Kwai', would hardly have escaped from some bedbugs there. There was already talk of shameful corruption in the stage design during filming in Yugoslavia... That's why the whole dream of co-productions failed, because of the sloppiness from the lowest level to the top of the production..."

Thus, this film remains the only one made jointly by “United Screen Arts”, the house established by the star Dale Robertson (who did the same thing as "Rick Dalton" in Tarantino's best film did -> have tried to slow down the fall into oblivion) ​​and then prestigious film company “Avala Film”. Dale Robertson wanted to provide himself with Italian beauties for his partners in Bond and Maltese pastiches in a nice climate, but during that sunny Mediterranean decade, apart from this film, he only shot “East Connection”, and the rest of the time he had to devote to television, from which he just wanted to escape. Those films did not stand out in the sea of ​​Bond parodies, although for a time they were thought of as disco music: "play that disco groove and bass, and whatever goes over that, drums and fiddles can do it, the people will dance", but it still depended on some other factors. (For example, even Parabond rip-offs, which starred all the original cast members {including Bernard Lee, Louis Muskwell, etc.} + Sean Connery's own brother - flopped at the box office.)

 So, in retrospect, “The One-Eyed Soldiers” were left to sad destiny to fuel nostalgia ofr good old Communist South, and now and then to receive an unexpected recognition on various film blogs, like when you recognize yourself on panoramic shots of “Pathé Newsreel”…

The plot of this film is totally irrelevant, everything here is more important than the whole, logic and plausibility.

The scenographies, that is city sites of Zemun, Batajnica, the future ethnic village of “Pripizdina” near Babušnica, Dubrovnik and Makarska Riviera are important, which were used as a spoiled brat would use the carpets of a rich hotel. Populations of Entire villages and towns could be enticed to participate in making a fmovie, they would sold their arses for a piece of gingerbread, chewing gum and popcorn just to be extras worthy of Spartacus. Thez dyed hair blond to be Vikings…

In this scene (look at the ohoto), a local colonel (of an unnamed Mediterranean dictatorship, perhaps a Greek military junta, but in East German and Yugoslav militia's uniforms) searches a person he thinks is a man disguised as a woman. The woman is played by none other than –> Guy Deghi! It's one of the film's charming comedic vents. It's a shame that the colonel looks like Castro from the Bond parodies. Mile Avramović played the dwarf, the certain Caporellii, and Božidar Drnić the gentleman's assistant, looking like a combination of Karl Bulic and Vladimir Medar.

Guy Deghi has been described as Sydney Greenstreet for the poor (as Rutger Hauer has been described as Paul Newman for the lower middle class), and any actor who has created a certain template with appearance and aura, so to speak, has a number of imitators who can do the same for less money.

Critics agree that Guy Deghi played according to the template of Sidney Greenstreet, that is, a cynical uncle with perfect British English, a big perspirator who constantly wipes sweat with a handkerchief and pesters the main character around the Mediterranean gardens of a small restaurant. Dale and Luciana clearly had chemistry and by all accounts a comfortable affair even though he was married, because – it’s Italy, bro, Italy (remember Billy Wilder’s “Avanti!”).

For the viewers of former Yugoslavia, the most interesting will be the ones from their  country: for me, Dragan Laković is a revelation, although he is not even credited at all, but he simply stole the film and had more lines than Relja Bašić, Dragan Nikolić, Antun Nalis and Gidra Bojanić together in all their later co-productions. Laković plays the local carabiniere, a cynical, handsome, witty tall guy, it's a wonder that some gay manager didn't pamper him like candy and make him the new Dean Martin for the C-productions…

Also, Predrag Preša Milinković played such a role that you can get diabetes from it: he has lines, he shoots, he falls out of an old car as a Anti-Turkish highwayman, bachelor, and at the end he makes a long stunt with a pirouette and rolling in the dust. If only they had made spin-offs with the three of them: Guy Deghi, Laković and Milinković – they would’ve made a lot of money!

Note this, as well: that scene in the city port, when the dwarf Avramović is driving a jeep convertible, firing from a machine gun and ordering "Avanti!" and chasing other cars – it obviously inspired director Slobodan Šijan for the scene in “The Marathon Family” from 1982... Yugoslavian film is epigonal, in the novel “Čarapanke sa Zvezdare” (Stockinggirls from Zvezdara, published by Knjigomat, Zagreb, 2008), the writer Crnkovic noticed that Yugo–movie stars “borrowed a lot” from their European role models: Milena Dravić stole from Anna Karina, Bata Živojinović in his comedix phase stole heavilly from Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Slobodan Cico Perović, on the other hand, from Jean-Claude Brialy.

The colors in the film are enchanting even now when the copy is worn out like a cheap Chinese umbrella, and it is easy to imagine how enticing it all looked in the open-air cinemas on Adriatic coast, in Tivat, Rovinj and also Macedonian Bitola and again in Portorož; the scene at the bell tower in Dubrovnik, on the other hand, clearly inspired Lordan Zafranović for "The Fall of Italy", and some chases on the stairs for "Occupation in 26 pictures...", all this is simply an unintentional cross-section of the history of Yugoslavian cinematography, let me say so and save my soul.

Let me also mention that the director is larger than both life and the film as art and this work. He and Ian Fleming parachuted into Berlin in 1944 to catch one of the Bormann brother who fro their side were looking for Nazi gold.

Dragan Nikolić is "credited" highly, but he has not a single line. He is present in one and a half shot in which, huddled in the back seat of the car, he looks grimly and “meaningfully” while the driver chases after the suspect, that is, he looks with intense concern at Mile Avramović, who rages with all his might in a Cagney style while holding the machine gun in his hands. (And handsome and scene-stealing  Laković, as I said, is not even mentioned….)

“Sunset” (1988) by Blake Edwards

CHINA TOWN MEETS DARLING LILI

Dir.: Blake Edwards; with: Bruce Willis, James Garner, Malcom McDowell, Mariel Hemingway, Patricia Hodge, yound Dermot Mulroney; bad guys: M. Emmet Walsh and Richard Bradofor; notable absences:Graham Stark, Andre Marane, Herbert Lom, no editor Raplf Winters (they appear in almost each movie of Blake Edwards).  Screenplay after unpublished novel by Rod Amateau.

* * *

This is one of the hidden gems that someone recommended to me so I checked out the work on one of the three Russian sites.

I love Blake Edwards and there's no way I'm burying him, and there's no need either. I am fed up with critics who know better than a director and never made any movie themselves, critics who destroyed such masters of scripting and directing as Cimino, Esterhazy, or Edwards, who was in full force in the 1980s and whenever the producers did not take away the final cut from him – he made a masterpiece. They found a small million flaws in this film, they even gave Edwards a "Golden Raspberry" and nominated Meriel. After the movie "Interiors", Woody Allen, in the phase when he was still infatuated with Dostoyevsky in that immature, imbecile way, like the younger Henry Miller and the evene younger Bukowski, beautifully said: “I start as Dostoyevskiy, but soon I take a direction toward Mel Brooks!”

Edvardsshurely thought; „I begin like Polansky, but I end like Pink Panther...“, but for me this a minor complaint.

Edwards has always been suffering from a depression, he also suffered from chronic fatigue all his life and spent more time with his psychiatrist (who often wrote his scripts and even once appeared as a cameo psychiatrist in one of Inspector Clouseau films) than with his wife Julie Andrews, which is understandable, because, judging by the auto-fictional films "The Ten" and "That's Life!", she was a bit frigid and loud, a real puritan womant (and yet she forced to show her tits in "SOBs"). I wrote about that director on the now deceased websites of Petar Luković...

This is a film that is self-fictional insofar as it reveals Hollywood production as scumbags. How Edwards survived so much hype about his favorite projects, I don't know. But he still directed 5 masterpieces in that disgusting decade.

In the beginning – it's a real western. Anyone who does not know what it is about will be pleasantly surprised when, after the shooting at backlot (film coulisse of a fictive film studio), it turns out that it is "just" filming a movie, moreover, a silent film. The plot takes place in the 1920s in Los Angeles, Bruce Willis plays Tom Mix, a real star from Hollywood at the time, and Garner plays real Earp as a consultant. Earp was in fact nearing the end of his life, and Garner played the character back in 1967 in the John Sturges' biopic „Hour of the Gun“, so it can be said that he reprized himself in a double sense. That aspect of the film (buddy-buddy) was very successful. The producer character, a former slapstick comedian, Alfie Alperin is given in an interpretation of the evil McDowell. He played it so well that audience had to hate him. The producer's name is multi-symbolic, Alfie is from a famous film song by Burt Bacharach, and Alperin is an Ashkenazi surname with very ominous symbolism

In the film, that producer forces Tom Meeks to play Earp and imposes a mentor on him in the form of the real Earp, but in the Chandlerian twist, "mail bonding" occurs between the two of them and they solve the conspiracy that the producer and the corrupt politician and the corrupt lawmen came up with and tried to implement with their combined forces. It just sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The corrupt men are played by M. Emmett Walsh as a rotten lawyer and Richard Bradford as a corrupt uniformed man. The latter reprised same role later it in de Palma's „Untouchables“ and I bet it was because of this film. Walsh worked wonders with his face as a rotten lawyer. That fancz critic Ebert once said: „No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad“. But he seems to have forgotten that when burying this film.

So, the film begins like "Nickelodeon“ by Peter Bogdanovich, a fun quasi-nostalgic sfumato fairy tale about how the film used to be great, but Edwards has other agenda, he devotes himself to Hollywood and right at the beginning he throws in the murder of one of the expensive prostitutes from the brothel under the code name "Candy Store", and the young Dermot Mulroney, that is his character Michael Alperin – otherwise the stepson of an evil producer, is accused.

It has a few Chinatown-esque twists. No one is the father of people they should fathered, there are sisters born in incest, there are hatred in the family, corruption's everywhere. Like in „Bad Day at Black Rock“..

But Edwards is from a vaudeville family, he can't help but include at least one musical show in every movie. So here we have Mexican slum bar and its star, singer Liz Torres, who was spitting image of Michael Robinson as a transvestite from „The Pink Panther Strikes Again“.

There are also several slapstick fights, carambolages and witty exchanges  befitting more the the films like „Victor Victoria“ and „Darling Lily". In my earlier articles about the director on Pera Luković's website, I said that it was probably autotherapy: slapstick and the indestructibility of the main characters as a cure for depression and the fear of death.

That mixture of genrese -- "Chinatown"-type obscurity (the indomitability of local provincial  corruption) and the playfulness of silent film slapstick – disappointed many critics of lazy spirit, unrealized directors. It didn't disappoint me. It's Edwards. Even Henry Mancini composed music like Jerry Fielding for Peckinpaugh and if someone had told me that Fielding had composed – I would have bought it.

You can see confusion in that how much the critics were upset by the fact that Patricia Hodge bothers them, imagine, they wrote: "she reminds too much of Julie Andrews"?! Well wtf?! They are also bothered by the "meticulous" reconstruction of the era. Meriel Hemingway bothers them, too. I had sucha crash on her, man, she was always good to me. I don't see why the Golden Raspberry nomination. This is one of Edwards' middle-grade films, but I explain the collapse at the box office in terms of the spirit of the times: the eighties were an ugly decade, with David Haselhof type of hairstyle, even Stallone had a hairstyle like Era Ojdanić (with arms like Popeye) and people flocked to the cinemas to have fun, so the movie "Die Hard"; which was released at the same time (!) both improved Willis's image and ruined Edwards' “arty” work.

Now with ill Willice the film i emotional: Bruce still had his hair, he was in full force and radiated an suave image as in “Moonlighting”. That's the way he is – he can do neither better nor worse, "The Accidental Partners", "Hudson Hawk", "Sunset", "Die Hard I-XXXII", it's the same delivery, and had you planted bad rze brandy in a bottle of old malt, the critics would have praised the drink… By the way, Garner didn't like Garner, so he criticized him like old farts do with new music. ("You can't do it like that, you just enter the set and try to charm everybodv...!”, said Garner of Willice.)

In "Sunset", Edwards expressed his distaste for Hollywood, his blackest depression, the fate of the women in this noir is the fate of his films, who are kidnapped, mutilated and sold into white slavery or brothels. His inclination towards vaudeville,  sense for comedy, however, also came through, but it's just genre impurity, nothing more. This is a "negroni" cocktail, a sweet cocktail for grown-ups with the addition of Absinthe, Angostura and maybe "Grand Marnier", not a hodgepodge, but critics used to cheap bad brandy in small botlles from paper stands didn't have the nerve for it. The pearl was cast before swines. I think the film was a decade late in terms of audience affinity, but Edwards wasn't quite so bitter back in the 70s…

It is said that Polanski adores this movie… It should be said that the screenplay was based on an unpublished novel by Edwards' close friend Rodney Rod Amateau. That bloke has, just one year before "Sunset", wrote & directed a film that was voted among the "ten worst in history of movies".