Jordan Cronenweth did the photography, with much help, including Douglas Trumbull in charge of special effects. This was one of the first films where “special effects” seemed to be blooming in the credits list and invading the screen in ways that tested and deceived the eye. So it’s nice to remember at the end that a few shots were donated by Stanley Kubrick from The Shining.
The word clone was not really current in 1982, despite the career success of Ronald Reagan. But Blade Runner was ahead of its time and as poignant as any sci-fi film I know just because of its sense of fragile identity. It is a superb piece of future-making and a film noir that bleeds over into tragedy. Ford has never been better—there was always a gruff reject in him waiting to be discovered—and Scott takes his hint from Deckard’s gaze in creating a world that is soulless already as it sails into its future.
The cast is faultless, and mention should be made of Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, and William Sanderson, and of Joe Turkel as Dr. Tyrell, the evil genius—wasn’t he a barman somewhere, too?
Blade Runner was not nominated in the year Gandhi won Best Picture. That is the only mention of Gandhi in this book.
Blanche (1971)
The dream persists that the U.S.A. discovered animation and is still a rich source for such material—more and more, this parable seems like a paradigm of the history of film itself. So the first thing to say in this unusually broad entry is that American animation has already been reduced to the most circumscribed and unchallenging forms possible. South Park is an important recognition of depraved childhood in America, yet it takes pride in ultra-primitive animation. Pixar produces work of far less interest and takes a similar pride in “sophisticated” new animation techniques that are numb and barren next to the profuse, insane detail of Bambi. So The Simpsons can pass as standard American animation—which amounts to a severe shorthand technique that permits quick work but which is far less droll or touching than the films of Nick Park.
Of course, Park’s work is sculptural, as solid and chewy as the contents of an old confectionery shop. As such, it alerts us to the potential—and the history—of animation as a way of working with objects, puppets, dolls, or parts of solid objects. It is the difference between a lovely set of cels, fluid with motion and duration, and a Joseph Cornell box that may come to life (or is it death?).
In these terms, animation is preeminently an Eastern European art, in which no one dares take it for granted that animation is material for children. I do not mean to attack or vilify children, but surely in America by 2008 we need no more warnings in the religious insistence on being brutish and youthful? It may be too late and thus the willful reduction of adult material or adult habits of thinking may prove far more thorough in ending our world than any amount of misplaced science.
Nevertheless, this is an entry that stands for the pursuit of grown-up animated films. As such it honors Jirí Trnka and the magic-lantern tradition as much as Jan Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers (please see Street of Crocodiles). But I am taking as my golden moment, the collaboration in Poland and then France of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk—above all films like Once Upon a Time, Dom, Solitude, and Borowczyk’s solo film, The Theater of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, a surrealist masterpiece.
Borowczyk is an extraordinary case—he died in 2006 in the ignominy of pornographic pictures (he did Emmanuelle V). But he is a genius, and I have chosen his live-action film, Blanche—set in a thirteenth-century world of castles and enclosing chambers, a fairy tale and a horror story (and starring his wife, Ligia Branice), but aglow with the eerie sensation that live action barely masks the skull and the boxlike framing of animation. It is obsessed with sex and freedom—like most great cinema—and it cannot take its eyes from the way in which these “living” images in film are dead and dying. But it is in great animation that we find the fulfilment of this paradox—that what we call “still life” is known in France as “nature morte.”
Blow-Up (1966)
Forty years later, Blow-Up brings back so much: the way skirts went up a couple of inches a season; the certainty that sooner or later we were going to get to see pubic hair in a respectable film; the way in which kitsch was turning into antiques; the prolonged study of the Zapruder film; the cult of insolent-looking kids who were suddenly artists and photographers; and the certain knowledge that that street in London’s Stockwell area was painted red long before Michelangelo Antonioni came along because it was advertising a motorcar sales yard. So don’t tell me Blow-Up is too cute for its own good. I know that it was there, the very moment the world changed. I would add that forty years later it remains a deadpan delight witty, sexy, nasty, tricky, and one of the best movies to use in teaching film studies that anyone has ever made. Plus an Antonioni film that lets you laugh sometimes.
Thomas (David Hemmings) is a photographer and a cult in town. Poor soul, he’s bored already shooting birds who’ll do anything, or tramps in a halfway house. So he goes off to this darling park in suburbia (as long as I live I won’t forget the breeze in the trees in that park), and there he photographs Vanessa Redgrave, deep in uneasy talk with a man. She sees him stealing her appearance, and she’s very hot and bothered. She begs for the film. He tricks her. She comes back—takes off her top, smokes a joint, and rocks to the music—and again he tricks her. But he’s interested now—like Jefferies in Rear Window—and in a long, sustained sequence he turns his pictures into a storyboard, and he begins to think he saw a murder committed in the park.
The film comes from a short story by Julio Cortázar, and the screenplay was done by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, with Edward Bond touching up the English chat. Assheton Gorton did the sets, Herbie Hancock the music (with the Yardbirds), and Carlo Di Palma shot it. Jocelyn Rickards did the very cool clothes.
It’s not as grave a film as the great trio (L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse). It’s not as bluesy as The Passenger. But there are so many admirable things: the refusal to like Thomas or show any sympathy for him, the infatuation with appearance and the way it trains you to see, the chilly wit about what you can trust, and the ability to keep a genuine thriller going alongside a strange black comedy. When Antonioni went to America for 1970’s Zabriskie Point, the gravity and foolishness upset the whole enterprise. But Blow-Up is a perfect bubble and a film of huge charm.
Granted that he was probably not directed, David Hemmings is dead right. Vanessa is bold and foolish and herself. Sarah Miles is in a daze and a crochet dress. The rest includes Peter Bowles, Veruschka (as the ultimate fuck me–photograph me model), Jill Kennington, and a whole line of birds all the way down to Jane Birkin (she’s the one with the pubic hair).
The Blue Angel (1930)
Having worked successfully with Emil Jannings in Hollywood on The Last Command, Josef von Sternberg was requested to go to Berlin for Ufa to introduce the great German actor to sound. It was a lofty invitation, not an ejection from Hollywood, and it surely denoted some warmth between director and actor. And yet. The vehicle was Professor Unrat, a novel by Heinrich Mann, published in 1905 and of far larger scope than the film they would make. In the book, the girl has a child from a previous lover. That helps explain the marriage. And then, when the professor is humiliated, he becomes a gambler and a politician fighting society. It might make a good movie.
Sternberg was clear, however, and Heinrich Mann was his ally: They would tell the story of the humiliation of the professor. I think in hindsight it’s fair to say that Sternberg had in mind an exposé of not just Teutonic grandeur and pretension but the hubris of one kind of acting. He meant to crush hallowed silence. And the key step in that process was casting Marlene Dietrich as Rosa-Frohlick, or Lola-Lola as she is called. According to Sternberg, Dietrich was one of those who believed she could not do the part and might ruin the film. I doubt that. I suspect a bond and a glance had tied director and actress together quite early. She was soon his accomplice. Along the way, the title Professor Unrat gave way to The Blue Angel, the name of the caba
ret, and Sternberg’s intuition that the moody gaze of a chanteuse could pierce the bubble of great acting was proved.
At every step, Sternberg gently but firmly reproached Jannings for overacting and allowed Dietrich to absorb attention. Professor Rath could have a great scene—but then Lola-Lola drew up her thigh. Dietrich is heavy here, and her tawdry costumes don’t do much to glamorize her. What’s more, she is hardly ever given close-ups or the shots Sternberg would perfect with her at Paramount. But her louche, ironic attitude is years ahead of Jannings’s humbug. So we become accomplices in the professor’s degradation.
Carl Zuckmayer and Karl Vollmöller have their names on the script, but I suspect it was Sternberg. Günther Rittau was the photographer. Otto Hunte did the sets, some of them quite pointedly expressionist. And Friedrich Hollander was taken on for the songs—he had played piano for another contender for the lead role, Lucie Mannheim.
Even then, the Germans didn’t quite get it. Sternberg had advised Paramount to sign Dietrich, but Ufa had an option. They let it go, even after they had seen the picture! So then she signed with Paramount. Joe went home first, but Marlene gave him a book to read on the boat, Amy Jolly (the basis of his film Morocco). She stayed for the premiere, received huge ovations, and took the next boat. With sound it had become possible to look at someone else busy emoting and just consider their folly in silence, with maybe the hint of a sigh. Underplaying was born, and with it the quality of experienced smartness. The monotonous virgins of silent film vanished like the wicked witch of the West when she got wet.
Blue Velvet (1986)
Once upon a time in a town called Lumberton (and it was a very nice town where the fireman waved as his truck went past), there was this boy, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), and Jeffrey’s father had been struck down in the prime of life—as can happen. And on a piece of open ground in the town, Jeffrey found an ear, cut off from the rest of a human being. He gave it to Detective Williams (George Dickerson), like a good boy. And the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), told Jeffrey her dark imagining that it might have to do with Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), the mysterious nightclub singer. So Jeffrey, like a boy detective, and like a boy, stole into Ms. Vallens’s apartment and watched her and waited for her. And she was ready to punish him when she found out, but she gave herself to him instead…. Dorothy sings “Blue Velvet,” and she has lost a son. And Jeffrey loves her suddenly so much (though not in the way he loves Sandy) that he will do anything to help her. But then there is Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who already protects and menaces Dorothy, so there is hardly room for Jeffrey. And Frank has been stricken out of a dream in the way Jeffrey’s father was struck down.
What’s a boy to do when it’s 1986 already and the fairy-tale world of Lumberton is so close to the most alarming horror film you were never allowed to see?
Blue Velvet was David Lynch’s breakthrough film, whether he wanted it that way or not. All of a sudden, the art-school strategies of Eraserhead were erased and in their place—as naked as Rossellini at the end of her tether—was Freudian casebook served up with chocolate-fudge surreal toppings. With many other Lynch films before and since, it was not possible to explain the obscure inward action. But with Blue Velvet it was impossible not to try. It was as if Luis Buñuel had made Un Chien Andalou in such a way that it lodged directly into the public consciousness. Jeffrey was defending everything we had, and Jeffrey was a brave kid. But he was just a stripling in a dark place where eternal ogres strode and sang our favorite songs. This was Beowulf at the International House of Pancakes.
And it emerged seemingly from nowhere, with the blind imprimatur of Dino de Laurentiis—not just a vision, not just a masterpiece, but as American as Casablanca (though less safe). Lynch wrote it and directed with an implacable assurance that he has never quite matched since. Frederick Elmes photographed it like a new Grimm. Alan Splet did the vital sound design, with so much poisoned breathing. Patricia Norris did the production design. And Angelo Badalamenti wrote one of the enduring movie scores.
The human figures are indelible. There does not seem to be any acting in sight. But as well as those named already, there is Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell (don’t let anyone tell you about Dean Stockwell—just see him), Brad Dourif, Jack Nance, and Priscilla Pointer.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
There they were, four in the bed. It was one of the essential self-publicizing images of the late 1960s—like Goldie Hawn in bikini and body paint on Laugh-In or the LOVE dress on the cover of The Medium Is the Massage (Marshall McLuhan). Though, really, when you think about it, that nervously merry quartet is a harbinger of the early seventies and of teenage sexual liberty spreading to the thirty-plus generation.
Long before Photoshop, the four are sufficiently shy to look as if they might have been put there one at a time—Elliott Gould, as if caught unawares; Natalie Wood, hoping to say, Well, I don’t see the fuss in all this, everyone knows I’ve been around; Robert Culp, wearing beads and sturdily not looking at the camera; and Dyan Cannon, in a dressing gown, hunched up, as if a mouse (or Cary Grant) could be chewing her toes. No, they’re not having, or thinking of having, the most abandoned time, no matter that they all four feel the duty to do so. They’re just hoping the picture won’t outlast them. Of course, it will.
If you’re like me, you may not remember much more about the movie than that shot. But as I study it, I feel the thing I always like in Paul Mazursky, the director: his kindness, or the wry good nature that could see caution and abandonment going hand in hand. He wrote the picture with his regular cowriter, Larry Tucker, and it’s full of nuanced talk and behavior—a little like a Jules Feiffer cartoon brought to life, though without Feiffer’s sense of the abyss being so close at hand.
And at the same time, for people who were thirty in 1970 (and who therefore felt in grave danger of missing the whole thing, the con called free love), this was a film that probably coaxed reluctance into a few absentminded swappings and a generally looser sense of sex. But Mazursky was wise enough as a dramatist to know that only a part of us wants that looseness. The rest cries out for security, habit, and ownership. So in the history of sophisticated sexual comedy (which comes to an end not long after this film), Bob & Carol et cetera is a nice, enjoyable portrait of the tricks we play on ourselves.
In another way, of course, the poster still serves as a dead end. Yes, Hollywood could now put four more or less naked and very attractive people in the same bed. It could even get some of its stars to go at it. But the movies are at a loss when it comes to such wrestling—we don’t know what the minds are thinking; we surmise that the whole sport is a fake. So, really, four in a bed with a little bit more showing than Ms. Wood was prepared for (she wears a Pentagon-issue bra) is fine and dandy, but the people have got to keep talking to be interesting. And to judge by our movies now, people are deaf when they have sex.
Bob le Flambeur (1956)
The title means “Bob the High Roller,” and it promises a famous and delightful film, albeit one that goes a touch too sweet in its ending.
Bob is in his fifties, and Roger Duchesne makes him a rather shabby-looking Burt Lancaster (the picture would play nicely with Atlantic City). He has been a thief in the past and done time, and now he survives as a gambler. Which means he is hard pressed. He lives in one of the ugliest apartments ever filmed—but Sacré Coeur looms above it. He picks up a Bardot-like girl (Isabel Corey), but never complains when his young male protégé takes her over. There’s a café owner he set up in the past: She adores him, but Bob’s a gambler, so he deflects her signs of availability and waits for the big break. One day he gets the idea to rob the casino at Deauville.
This is Jean-Pierre Melville making one of the pictures that inspired the New Wave. There is an opening tribute to Paris, so full of gray vistas that it seems like Les 399 Coups—why not? Both are photographed by the great Henri Decaë. The atmosphere of Pigalle at dawn is matchless, and this love of the
city actually helps explain what keeps Bob floating. He is kind, honorable, sad, and deeply romanticized, whether Melville knows it or not. For much of the film, this bargain is acceptable and very entertaining, but as the Deauville caper reaches its climax, the different tones are jarring. You see, Bob the bad gambler has his greatest night at the tables waiting for the robbery’s 5 a.m. deadline. So he has cartons of money to go in the trunk of the police car that will carry him away. Enough for a good lawyer? someone wonders. Enough to sue the cops, he promises.
At that point, I fear, pleasure chills a little, and one cannot help but remember Melville’s allegiance to John Huston’s equally gray but truly sour Asphalt Jungle, where when the job goes wrong everyone ends up badly. My own feeling is that the ending needed to be worked out more carefully in script form and then shot more slowly. It feels rushed. and too close to a fairy story. I can easily imagine the ghost of Melville turning to me with Bob’s pained face and saying, “Come on—a fellow needs a hit now and then!”
This is true, and it’s always hard to challenge the sight of a gambler winning on film—after all, this is a medium about desire and dreaming. But Melville can be a great artist, and this film is so good for 80 percent of the game that it deserves better. The relationship with the cop is marvelously done. Howard Vernon is wonderfully laconic in a couple of scenes as the moneybags. I love the black jazz band in the nightclub. And Melville the tragic fights a long battle with us and himself over whether we’re ever going to get a proper look at Isabel Corey’s breasts. (Rest assured.)
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