Stranded at the Drive-In
Page 25
So, for the second unofficial remake of The Blackboard Jungle that merits a place in this book (see To Sir, With Love, here), ’50s moralising and ’60s liberal optimism are replaced by early ’80s nihilism. We still have an idealistic middle-class teacher locked in a classroom power struggle with a working-class gang. But Lester and co-writers Tom Holland and John Saxton take the word ‘gang’ to its logical conclusion. If a group of kids gain enough power in a school to make the teachers quiver in terror, then surely they would use that power to become actual gangsters. The Bad Kids – which include girls now that we’re in the less courtly ’80s – deal drugs, pimp and use violence to extort money and protect their position. On top of all that nastiness, the gang are informed by 1982’s American juvenile delinquency public scare . . . punk.
Ordinary American kids jumped on the punk bandwagon a few years later than us Brits, but made up for lost time by bypassing the arty alternative post-punk phase completely and going straight to the brutal, Sid Vicious-inspired underclass bit, which Brits called Oi! At best, this involved sexless thrash rock, slam dancing, sniffing glue, smelling bad and acting dumb. At worst, it became an extreme right-wing white power subculture which proudly proclaimed itself ‘Nazi punk’. So the children of the perfectly named Abraham Lincoln school have moved way beyond random sexual molestation and sneering, and are committed, Swastika-wearing, fascist-saluting scum-buckets . . . albeit – because, after all, this is a pop film, not a documentary – scum-buckets who have the best fashionista fetish glam-punk clothes and hair this side of a fight in a vintage clothes shop between Alice Cooper (who provides that brilliantly awful theme song ‘I Am The Future’) and Billy Idol. Apart from the fat, sweaty, skinhead character. You can’t make those guys sexy.
So this might be one hell of an ugly-pretty gang of naughty young scamps. But we’re pretty quickly aware that it’s going to take something a little more radical than marching them off to the principal’s office to restore truth, justice and the liberal consensus to poor old Lincoln High. Guns, maybe. Weapons, certainly. Perhaps a tactical nuke or two. Whatever it takes to ‘do what must be done’, right? Besides, the principal’s busy sitting in his office watching his students on CCTV and wringing his hands pathetically. Surveillance. Big Brother. 1984. It’s only two years away and, as the Class Of 1984 gang are fond of reminding us, ‘We are the future!’ Scary shit.
Certainly things can’t go on like they are at the beginning of the movie. Mr Norris arrives for his trip to hell and bumps straight into the faculty’s obligatory jaded cynic, Mr Corrigan, played by the hilarious Roddy McDowall. Within seconds Corrigan is jauntily asking Norris if he knows any martial arts, and introducing us to one of our favourite recurring images of the decline of American civilisation, the airport-style metal detector in the school’s lobby. The detector is manned by tough-looking security guys, but their hearts are plainly not in their work . . . style-mag toughs are waving knives in their faces and they wave ’em through. Corrigan assures Norris that his survival at Lincoln High will depend on his willingness to follow that example and ignore the horrifying truth. This is a very poor show.
A quick word about Roddy McDowall, a man whose acting career took him to some very odd places, who died in 1998, aged 70. Born in London, he became a child star through his ’40s starring roles in How Green Was My Valley and Lassie Come Home. And, like most child stars, he was never taken seriously as an adult lead. His greatest acting triumph came with his face completely obscured by prosthetics as the nice chimp in the long-running Planet Of The Apes movies and spin-off TV show. Although McDowall never officially came out, his sexuality was pretty obvious from his many appearances as all-purpose wit and raconteur on American chat and game shows. Which perhaps explained the mini-scandal he was embroiled in, when his home was raided in 1974 and McDowall arrested for copyright infringement on account of his personal library of movie prints. Considering that this collection included the home movies of notorious hung-stud and sex perv Errol Flynn, and that Rock Hudson was among the customers who hired the films, it was always suspected that the arrest had some form of homophobic intent.
McDowall was also one of the villains (The Bookworm) in the ’60s TV version of Batman, and it was that kind of camp that this slight, good-natured presence could be relied upon to bring to movies with a self-parodic B-movie aesthetic. In Class Of 1984 his droll performance is vital to the film’s success, because, while everyone else in the cast plays it dead straight, McDowall is telling a sly running joke to the viewer along the lines of: ‘Yes, we know this is ridiculous. So do you. Fun, isn’t it?’, and never allows his nods and winks to tip over into loathing for himself, the movie or the audience.
The other star of the movie is Timothy Van Patten as gang leader Peter Stegman. Stegman has the looks of a Greek god and the winning personality of Vlad the Impaler. He beats up jive-talking black kids called Leroy, before insisting that ‘We’re the only niggers that sell shit in this school!’
Class Of 1984’s major curio factor involves the presence of Michael J. Fox as trumpet-playing nerd Arthur. This Michael J. Fox is a chubby berk with a pudding-bowl haircut who is so clean-cut and annoyingly whingy that he almost makes you feel empathy for his psycho tormentors. He’s almost impossible to connect with the impishly lovable Marty McFly of Back To The Future (see here), yet the 21-year-old Fox is just three years away from being the most popular ‘teen’ actor of his generation, and mere months from his Emmy and Golden Globe-winning breakthrough role on sitcom Family Ties (a part he only got, incidentally, because Matthew ‘Ferris Bueller’ Broderick turned it down), where the wry Reaganomics joke revolved around the relationship between Fox’s right-wing yuppie teen and his ex-hippie liberal parents. Here, in only his second film, he is doomed to be stabbed in the school cafeteria for being a suck-up.
The plot is note-for-note The Blackboard Jungle, but with an injection of genuine nastiness that makes you feel slightly sick and wrong for enjoying it so much. Remember the ‘last straw’ in The Blackboard Jungle, where Rick Dadier is finally forced into action when Vic Morrow’s gang write poison pen letters to his pregnant wife? Well, we still have the pregnant wife. But Van Patten’s monsters cut out the men-of-letters routine and just go round to the nice suburban Norris family homestead and commence with the rape and torture. Norris is forced to leave the school concert he’s supposed to be directing and become Charles Bronson’s prettier vigilante action hero kid brother. And Lester then does the right thing and heads right out of dramatic logic and right into grand guignol action/horror/slasher territory involving severed arms and heads crushed by cars, for a final battle showdown between Stegman and Teach, which has an ending so gasp-out-loud ridiculous that Brian De Palma could have happily smuggled it into the end of Carrie (see here) without anyone noticing.
The rest is all great scenes, in school corridors covered with disgusting graffiti, in Warriors-style gang fights under deserted underpasses, in punk rock clubs with kids cavorting violently to the savage strains of a band called Teenage Head. There’s a hilarious parody of the Sidney Poitier-sings-spirituals scene in The Blackboard Jungle, when Van Patten’s Stegman suddenly stops Norris’s class in its tracks with his virtuoso piano skills. There are comically impotent police, a skinned rabbit on a skewer, and the awesome bit in the school toilet when Stegman, blood pouring over his crazy eyes, starts head-butting mirrors and sinks. And, best of all, there’s the movie’s most admired and darkly funny set-piece, when camp old Corrigan finally loses the plot and forces the gang to listen to his biology lesson at gunpoint. McDowall momentarily beams himself in from another film, where the agony of a middle-aged teacher who has never been allowed to educate anyone might finally boil over and become real despair, real rage. You start watching the scene wanting to laugh, and end it genuinely freaked out. But, as soon as the moment of peril passes, McDowall plays it for camp laughs again, cutting the tension. Corrigan’s tantrum doesn’t get him a nice lecturing job at Yale.
MADE IN BRITAIN
1982
Starring: Tim Roth, Eric Richard, Bill Stewart, Terry Richards
Dir.: Alan Clarke
Plot: The Nazi teen as the ultimate anti-hero.
Key line: ‘You hate the blacks more than I do only you don’t admit it. You hate the blacks more than I do ’cos they frighten you. That’s why you lock ’em up. You lock up anything that frightens you.’
Made In Britain is one of only two films in this book that were not made to be shown in cinemas. The two movies have a few things in common: actor Tim Roth, a right-wing skinhead character, the poor end of working-class London shot with unflinching realism. Although they were both made for TV and promoted as ‘plays’, they are here because there is nothing theatrical about them. They are cinematic experiences given life by the grim streets and very specific interiors in which they are shot. They were both made by legendary British directors who took their cue from the British ‘Free Cinema’ directors of the late ’50s and early ’60s. And, from a personal perspective, they were made at a time when I was just exiting my own teen years, and put people onscreen that I’d known and tried my best to avoid – and avoid being – for the previous five or six years. They say something accurate and disturbing about Britain under Thatcherism, and provide much information for historians about why left-liberals of a certain age despise Thatcher so much. They also give the lie to those who are nostalgic about the early ’80s because they liked the music, or whatnot. Things were shit at the time. Really, really shit.
Set in east London, Made In Britain is a character study of a 16-year-old racist called Trevor. Trevor is played by Tim Roth, making his screen debut at age 21. The film is an extraordinary four-way collaboration between Roth, Liverpudlian shock tactic director Clarke, gritty social realist writer David Leland and innovative cinematographer Chris Menges. They conspire to create the world’s worst boy: a fearless, nihilistic, articulate, violent force of nature with a swastika tattooed on his forehead. We follow Trevor over the course of a few days on his journey through a court appearance, his referral to an assessment centre for juvenile offenders, his escapes from the centre, and, finally, into a police holding cell. In 1982 you came away from the 70-minute film feeling like you’d just been beaten up. The years have not dimmed its sickening power. And the power comes from the gamble that Clarke took with the character of Trevor. All right-thinking people thought that young fascist skinheads were ugly, thick and inadequate. This was a comforting thought whenever you considered the possibility of far-right organisations like the National Front or the British Movement progressing from a few scattered thugs exploiting a white working class that felt abandoned to a genuine popular movement with its own paramilitary force. But Trevor is not ugly, thick or inadequate. He is what a great many young men look up to and long to be: a tough, charismatic, free spirit who can look authority figures in the eye and refuse to be intimidated. He is brave, good at fighting, right about a great many things . . . and even, to some extent, cool. Made In Britain is, on some levels, an attack on liberal apathy and self-satisfaction; the belief among so many of a leftish persuasion that anyone who doesn’t share their views is simply doomed to failure because they must be stupid, or easily led, or weak. Trevor is clever, strong and packed full of leadership qualities. Successful monsters generally are.
Roth’s performance was so extraordinary that he didn’t need David Leland’s dialogue to be particularly amazing. Trevor’s power comes from the actor’s Johnny Rotten eyes, switching between wild fury and dead insolence; his rictus grin full of hatred and sadism; his wiry body, always tensed for war; his taunting voice, again, suffused with Johnny Rotten’s withering scorn; and, most of all, his walk. An open-legged, bouncing swagger, fists bunched by sides, body coiled like a spring, a wide, forceful gait that always looks to be going towards you to do you unspeakable damage.
Clarke emphasises Trevor’s visceral presence with the deliberate ugliness of everyone around him. Assessment Centre head Peter Clive (Stewart) is perhaps the least attractive man to ever ‘grace’ the screen. This isn’t the kind of ugliness that has a charisma of its own. It’s an anonymous mess of greasy hair and skinny-rimmed glasses, small, piggy eyes, Mr Byrite suit with no-brand trainers. A mean but ultimately anonymous face that just doesn’t exist to be looked at. In comparison to a man like Peter, Trevor can only leap from the screen, stand out in his environment. He is designed to excite the teenage imagination: all that arrogance and fearlessness, physical power and bug-eyed threat. He is what teen boys dream of being . . . a law unto himself, a dominator of authority, a pure anarchist rejecting the ‘real world’ utterly by refusing to live in it.
The ‘shocking’ scenes are not the most memorable scenes. We watch Trevor and his hastily co-opted black sidekick Leroy (Terry Richards) smash a Job Centre window, steal cars, throw bricks through an Asian man’s window, sniff glue and urinate and defecate on their Assessment Centre case files. In fact, the least convincing scene in the movie comes when Trevor beats up the Centre’s cook, and Clarke’s limitations as a director of action – exposed in his ridiculously overrated 1977 borstal drama Scum – are obvious.
Clarke is at his best when shaping the way Menges’s Steadicam follows and stares in horrified awe at Roth as he produces a performance composed of such frightening intensity you find yourself wondering what his upbringing as the son of a left-wing journalist might have to do with it. Is he taking gleeful pleasure in being his father’s worst nightmare?
So the scenes you take away are Trevor striding topless through the Blackwall Tunnel at night, so insane with rage that he’s willing to fight a passing car. Or him stopping to look at a design of a perfect middle-class family living-room in a shop window complete with mannequins. You’re positive that this is about to become the latest victim of Trevor’s love of the sound of breaking glass. But he just peruses the scene, curiously, much as one might look at a group of animals in a zoo, fascinated, it seems, by the alien world it depicts.
But the best scene begins with Trevor largely silent. It takes place in an empty room in the Assessment Centre . . . a place that looks like a bleak blend of inner-city classroom and police interrogation room. It starts with a mesmerising lecture on the checks and balances of the system with regard to juvenile delinquents delivered by the Centre’s nameless Superintendent, played by the excellent Geoffrey Hutchings. The speech treads a perfect line between factual information, mesmerising art and scathing cynicism about a failed system. The Superintendent is northern and has a copper’s bearing, right down to the scruffy trench-coat. He doesn’t attempt to befriend Trevor . . . the other workers’ constant use of his first name, like they know him, is a particular Trevor bugbear. But, when faced with this man, Trevor shuts up and listens, even though he is telling him nothing he doesn’t already know. Is Trevor responding to the Superintendent’s job title, or no-nonsense demeanour, or salt-of-the-earth working-classness? We never know for sure. He is the one person who looks as if he might have some chance of taming the boy whom he repeatedly compares to an ‘animal’. We never see him again.
It’s then that we get Tim Roth’s moment: the few minutes onscreen that made him the star that Trevor, at one point, insists that he is. His verbal slaughter of the hapless and condescending Centre workers Peter and Barry is compelling and terrifying in equal measure, as he convinces us that there is a new generation of young working-class men who believe themselves immune to a system they despise, and that depends for hope on a fascist revolution they see as inevitable.
But don’t think Made In Britain is a straightforward liberal film. It sneers at the �
�caring’ aspects of the system like a Daily Mail leader column. The more repulsive and uncontrollable Trevor is, the more the system spends on trying to placate him. Apart from giving him the money that enables him to go on his glue-sniffing, car-nicking, Job Centre-trashing rampage, the rant at Peter and Barry simply encourages Peter into giving him yet more. He offers to take the boy banger racing at the state’s expense. Hell, he even arranges things so he can compete. A terrible punishment for a car thief. It’s not that a film as non-preachy as Made In Britain is exactly suggesting that the Trevors of this world should just be given twenty lashes and locked up as a lost cause. But Leland and Clarke laugh darkly at the middle-class managers of a broken system and their futile attempts to make Trevor into a good dog by throwing him bones.
The ending is haunting in its refusal to resolve. Trevor, now out of the youth system and into a grown-up police cell, tries to wind up a couple of coppers the way he has wound up everyone else. One blow with a truncheon to his knee, and everything we’ve watched for the previous 72 minutes falls away from Trevor. He’s a small, shocked boy, trying not to cry or cry out in pain, finally shutting up for fear of more violence.
But he is also the boy in the final freeze-frame . . . a nod to The 400 Blows (see here), perhaps. The two cops leave him alone in his cell, and Trevor simply sits and stares, and allows that demented, defiant grin to slowly return. You’re reminded of the glee with which the Sex Pistols chanted the words ‘No future’ at the end of ‘God Save The Queen’. Trevor greets violence, no-future in prison, oblivion, with the same determined rejection of everything that our world would define as reason or goodness. He is a terrifying vision. And the film has equally steadfastly refused to provide anything that might qualify as a potential solution to the insoluble problem that is the working-class youth who will not conform to a liberal agenda, no matter how much you hurt him.