Movies – Ash Clifton, Writer

What I’m Reading: “Bogie and Bacall”

So many good books have already been written about Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart that even a biographer as talented as William J. Mann must have felt the need to find a new twist. A new gimmick. And with Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair, Mann found one—a combined biography of Bogart and his famous wife, Lauren Bacall. It makes sense. After all, in the last years of his life, Bogie found himself as half of the first great celebrity couple. Long before Bennifer or The Beckhams or even Taylor/Burton, Bogie-and-Bacall entranced the public with both their movies and their marriage, never mind the fact that the public image of their relationship was largely fabricated by studio hacks.

It wasn’t all fabricated, though. Yes, Bogart and Bacall spent much of their marriage living somewhat separate lives, as one might expect in a pairing where one partner is so much older (and hard-bitten). They often travelled separately, for extended periods. Bogart continued a intermittent affair with his long-time mistress, and Bacall had an intense (and possibly physical) relationship with Frank Sinatra, to whom she was briefly engaged after Bogart’s death. Yet, by all accounts, the love and respect between the world’s most famous couple was genuine and deep. So deep, in fact, that Bogart actually cut down on the booze, at least for a time, after Bacall got sick of him coming home plastered (when he came home at all).

Indeed, in Mann’s telling, the story feels very much like a redemption tale for Bogart. This is especially true since most of the book is devoted to his life story. I would estimate a 70/30 split between words devoted to Bogie and Bacall, respectively—an imbalance that makes sense for a number of reasons. For one, Bogart’s biography began twenty-five years before Bacall’s. And by the time their romance first kindled in 1944 (and the Bogie-and-Bacall legend thus began), Bogart had been a movie star for over a decade and had already made his two greatest films, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, establishing him as the most important film actor of his (or perhaps any) generation.

So, it’s perhaps inevitable that most of Mann’s book would be devoted to his life story. And, as Mann reveals, most of that story was taken up by his Bogart’s two obsessions—acting and booze. The two pursuits were related, of course; Bogart’s damaged psychological state (he had a sterile, lonely childhood) informed his acting even as it fueled his drinking. A deeply intelligent man, Bogart honed his artistry to a level unseen previously in cinema—he could play heroes and villains with equal prolixity—yet his intellect caused him to hate most of the Hollywood people he met, including himself.

Beginning in his youth, Bogart was known for getting drunk and punching other guys in the face. He took the habit with him to Hollywood, where he struggled for years under the thumb of studio system, grinding out B- and C-grade melodramas for the ruthless Jack Warner. And even as his star began to rise (his breakout role was that of a mesmerizingly evil villain in 1936’s The Petrified Forest, much like Javier Bardem’s in No Country for Old Men), his drinking only intensified.

As often happens with alcoholics, Bogart soon married someone who could match him drink-for-drink. Mayo Methot was a highly regarded actress who starred in many films throughout the 1930s. She was beautiful, intelligent, and deeply troubled. After marrying Bogart, she essentially gave up her already waning film career, and the disappointment and frustration of married life drove her to drink even more. And fight. Humphrey and Mayo soon became known as “The Battling Bogarts” in the tabloid press for their frequent, public rows. One of the most notable of these came while they were on a U.S.O. tour in Italy, entertaining troops fresh off the battlefields of World War II.

[The] Battling Bogarts made at least one appearance. After practically “distilling themselves” drinking with a group of paratroopers, the couple squabbled and Mayo locked her husband out of their room. As Bogie attempted to break in, he was apprehended by a colonel, whom he told to go to hell. As a guest of the army, he was called to account. “I didn’t mean to insult the uniform,” he said during a hearing. Looking at the colonel, he said, “I only meant to insult you.”

Despite their conflicts, Bogart doggedly remained married to Methot. Until, of course, he met a nineteen-year-old beauty named Betty Joan Perske, who went by the stage name Lauren Bacall.

One the most compelling aspects of Mann’s book is the almost unbelievable contrast between Bogart’s long, grueling rise to fame over almost two decades and Bacall’s overnight success. Bacall was doing a bit of acting and modelling work in New York when her photograph was spotted by Nancy Keith, wife of legendary actor Howard Hawks. Keith convinced her husband to give her a call. As if that development weren’t serendipitous enough for the young actress, Hawks’s secretary misunderstood his instructions and sent Bacall a plane ticket to Hollywood for a screen test. After meeting Bacall in person, Hawks was so taken by her beauty, intelligence, and poise that he immediately signed her to a seven-year contract. For her first picture, To Have and Have Not, she had a small part, intended to only give her one or two short scenes with the lead, Humphrey Bogart.

There is a scene in Homer’s Odyssey washes ashore on the island of Phaeacia. Naked and starving, he is discovered the virginal princess Nausicaa, who takes pity on him and saves him. I have heard the moment of their meeting described by one professor as “absolute innocence (Nausicaa) meeting absolute experience (Odysseus).” After all, by this point in the story, Odysseus has been at war for ten years, lost at sea for another seven, survived numerous monsters, witnessed the death of all his men, been held as a captive sex-slave by two powerful women (Circe and Calypso), and even made a short trip to hell (well, Hades).

I thought of all this as I read Mann’s account of the romance that quickly blossomed between the teenaged ingenue Bacall and the forty-five-year-old, world-weary, thrice-married, hard-drinking Bogart. But while Bacall might have been something of a princess (in Hollywood terms, at least), she was not a total innocent. As Mann recounts, she had been single-minded and ruthless in her pursuit of acting career, attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York (where she had a crush on one of her classmates, a young Kirk Douglas). After graduating, she endeared herself to various directors, producers, and writers until she finally got a few breaks, appearing in at least two high-profile productions. And though, according to Mann, she never succumbed to the casting couch, she had no qualms about flirting with older, powerful men to get ahead.

This series of flirtations culminated with Hawks himself, who took Bacall under his wing, sculpting her image and even teaching her how to lower her naturally high-pitched voice. (Yes, Bacall’s famously low, sexy, husky voice, immortalized in an erotic moment in To Have and Have Not, was as fake as Bogart’s toupees.)

Yes, Hawks was clearly grooming her for an eventual affair (perhaps even a marriage), and when he realized that she had become infatuated with Bogart, he was livid. However, to his credit, Hawks cared more about making a good movie than about bedding Bacall. Watching the dailies, he took note of the obvious, crackling chemistry between Bogie and Bacall, and he had the script revised to expand her part, giving them more screen time together. Hawks also featured Bacall heavily in all of the film’s publicity.

In less than a year, Bogart had divorced Methot and married Bacall. Taking over from Hawks, Bogart became Bacall’s mentor as well as her husband, instilling in her his passion for acting at a deep, psychological level years before The Method was even a thing.

Bogie remained her acting teacher. Once, after watching Betty rehearse a scene in which she opened a door, he told her, “You walked out there like a model.” She took his advice and changed her stride. “You must always realize you have come from someplace,” Bogie went on. “What were you doing before? Were you filing your nails? Were you writing a letter?” Every scene must convey an attitude. “That is a very important part of acting, and I never forgot it,” Betty later said.

As I said above, their marriage was initially rocky but soon settled into a mellow, happy rhythm. They lived somewhat separate lives, but were united in their love of acting and also their political causes. (Bogart was what we would now call a liberal, so much so that he was—like so many liberals today—accused of being a communist; Bacall, for her part, was so involved in Democratic politics that she nearly had an affair with Adlai Stevenson.) They also had two children.

Then, after over a decade, the marriage ended when Bogart died of throat cancer. Bacall was, of course, still a young woman (in her thirties), and the last third of Mann’s book covers the rest of her long and surprisingly illustrious life. For while it is clear that Bacall was neither as good an actor as her late husband nor as powerful a cultural influence, she was still pretty damned cool. Having moved back to New York after her leading roles in Hollywood began to dry up, she went on to a long and distinguished career as a stage actress, eventually winning two Tony Awards. She also did the occasional character bit in films, most notably her Oscar-nominated performance in 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces.

That’s another reason I really liked this book. Bacall’s life serves as a kind of bridge between the old Hollywood of Bogart’s day and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, when I got into films as a kid, and then into the modern era. She spanned three worlds, at least, and did so with enormous charm.

What I’m Watching: “The Ninth Gate”

** SPOILERS BELOW**

(Disclaimer: This essay is about a film by the director Roman Polanski, who, as of this writing, is a fugitive from justice in the United States on rape charges involving a minor. I have no opinion regarding Mr. Polanski as a person. This essay merely concerns the film as a work of art.)

Well, it’s October, and I’m officially starting to my annual marathon of horror movies that I watch in my spare time. This week, I re-watched Roman Polanski’s 1999 flick, The Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp in his pre-Jack Sparrow era. I first saw the film on DVD about a year after it came out, and I liked it. Now, after my second viewing, my feelings are slightly different: I really like it. In fact, I think it’s one of my favorite horror movies of all time.

One of the Devil’s Engravings in “The Ninth Gate”

This might seem surprising to some film buffs. After all, the movie has gotten a lot of hate in the quarter-century since it came out. As of this writing, it has a 44% “Fresh” rating (i.e. “Rotten”) on Rotten Tomatoes, and it hasn’t fared much better on IMDB. I am always surprised and depressed when something I really like gets such a bad rap. Such a disconnect makes a person question their taste, if not their sanity. Am I crazy, or is everyone else?

I should be used to this. Many, many of my favorite films—starting with Blade Runner in 1982—were commercial and critical flops when they came out, only to achieve cult status later on. Judging by the number of YouTube videos that are now devoted to “explaining” The Ninth Gate, I would guess that it, too, has now become a cult film.

Which is a good thing, because more people should see it. The story follows a chain-smoking, world-weary book dealer, Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), who is hired by a billionaire collector, Balkan (Frank Langella), to verify the authenticity of a 17th-century book of the occult, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. The book has nine engravings in it (which look a lot like the images on ancient Tarot cards), which some believe to be encoded with secret information that can conjure up Satan. Apparently, two other versions of the book exist, each held in a separate private collection, and Balkan wants Corso to compare those versions to his.

Corso flies to Europe to begin his investigation, prowling down shadowy, medieval streets in various ancient cities. The movie thus becomes a kind of noir detective movie, with Depp doing an impressive job as the hard-boiled detective, inching his way deeper and deeper into a dark secret. As with any hard-boiled detective yarn, he soon encounters two beautiful women—Liana Telfer (the radiant Lena Olin), a rich femme fatale who once owned a copy of the book, and a mysterious, dangerous-looking blond girl who looks dresses like a European backpacker, without the backpack. This girl, played by the stunning Emmanuelle Seigner (star of Polanski’s earlier film, Frantic), becomes an even bigger enigma than the one Corso is pursuing. Corso dubs her “Green Eyes,” and she seems to be following him, appearing out of nowhere at various times on his quest, often protecting him (she knows kung fu) from various henchmen that intent on stealing his copy of the book—and probably killing him in the process.

As one would expect, Corso’s search turns nasty, with everyone he questions ending up dead in some grisly and perhaps supernatural fashion ala The Omen. He learns that the engravings in each of the books are slightly different from each other, with some being signed LCF for Lucifer. He deduces that these altered versions hold the key to a Satanic ritual, and, indeed, the trail eventually leads him to a coven of rich devil worshipers who seek to use the book to conjure up old Scratch himself.

If it all sounds like horror-movie hokum, it is. In fact, The Ninth Gate reminded me of many great B-movies from the 1960s and 70s like The Witches, Eye of the Devil, The Dunwich Horror, and, yes, The Omen. These are all creepy, supernatural horror movies that are best viewed late at night on TV with the lights off, the viewer munching popcorn and wondering what Satanic will be revealed next. I love how Polanski was able to replicate the B-movie appeal of those old movies in what is, obviously, an A-movie like The Ninth Gate, with movie stars (Depp, Olin, Langella), high production values, gorgeous cinematography, exotic locations, and one of the most ethereal, haunting scores ever written, composed by Wojciech Kilar. At heart, it’s still a schlocky old horror thriller, with ancient tomes, black-robed witches, castles, and bloody murders. Somehow, Polanski celebrates all those familiar tropes even as he ever so lightly mocks them.

Yet, at the same time, the movie is a damned good psychological thriller. For one thing, the acting is uniformly great. 1999 found Depp at the height of his appeal both physically and artistically. Polanski was reluctant to cast him, apparently, because Corso is supposed to be 40-something, whereas Depp was 34 at the time. But even with his hair sprayed conspicuously gray at the temples (to suggest encroaching middle age, obviously), Depp is completely convincing as the corrupt but strangely honorable Corso. This is a man for whom the adjective “cynical” doesn’t suffice. He’s selfish, hedonistic, and completely jaded—a man who thinks he can no longer be shocked by anything. And so, his accelerating sense of horror at the mysteries he soon uncovers is, somehow, all the more believable. He is soon forced to take account for his actions, even as his quest leads him into dangers that any sensible person would shun. In every scene of violence, horror, or sex (sometimes all three at once), Depp sells it wholeheartedly. It’s one of his best performances.

As for the supporting cast, Langella is at his absolute best as the elegant yet creepily sinister Balkan, whose character represents what some now call “the Epstein class.” That is, a fabulously rich guy who is evil AF. With his velvety voice and understated delivery, Langella steals every scene he’s in—including one where he’s not even on-screen. Late in the film’s second act, Corso discovers that Balkan’s copy of the book has been stolen from his (Corso’s) hotel room, and when he calls Balkan to deliver the bad news, the scene is truly terrifying. I could almost do an entire essay on how Langella—completely unseen, mind you—delivers one of the most chilling monologues in film history. It’s great stuff.

Lena Olin is also great. She made a career of playing sophisticated, seductive women (see Paul Mazurski’s great movie, Enemies: A Love Story) and she really shines in this one. In the role of Liana, a supposedly grieving widow who turns out to be a devil-worshipper herself, she is by turns demure, wanton, and vicious. And always bewitching (forgive the pun).

Yet, in some ways, the real casting triumph of the film is that of Emmanuelle Seigner. To cast his “Green Eyes,” Polanski didn’t have to look very far—like, across the bed. Yes, Seigner was (and remains) his real-life wife. And while casting a family member in a film is often a recipe for disaster for directors, Seigner is perfect in the role. She has perhaps a hundred words of dialogue, so her performance is, in effect, almost like that of a silent movie. Which is perfect, because she doesn’t need words. With her almost brutal, Gallic features and (yes) her mesmerizing green eyes, Seigner hypnotizes Corso every time she looks at him, not to mention the viewer. And with her bemused smile and unflappable demeanor, she exudes power and confidence, anticipating the great female superheroes like Black Widow and the Scarlet Witch that would begin to populate the Marvel MCU a decade later. When Green Eyes kicks a bad guy’s ass, we believe she could really do it.

Her smile also hints at hidden knowledge. Throughout the film, she clearly knows a lot more about what’s going on than Corso does. Which leads to one of the great topics of discussion about the film, to which dozens of blog posts and YouTube videos have been devoted: Who is she? An avenging angel? The Whore of Babylon? The devil himself (er…herself)?

And that question leads, inevitably, to the even greater one about the movie’s ending, which has been controversial since the film’s release. Why does Corso go back to the castle, and why does it erupt in blazing white light? Is it a fulfillment of the Latin phrase that Corso himself quotes earlier in the film, “nunc scio tenebris lux,” translated as “now I know light from darkness”? Does it suggest that, at last, Corso had released Lucifer (whose name literally means, “bringer of light”)?

For whatever reason, the ending works for me. I like the fact that Polanski doesn’t try to spell it out (whatever “it” is), or, even worse, CGI-bomb the final scenes with some computer-generated images of Satan emerging from hell. It’s just a fade-to-white. Cool.

If you haven’t seen The Ninth Gate (and if I haven’t completely spoiled it by now), you should check it out. It’s one of the most underrated movies of the past fifty years. It’s also a great pick for Halloween.

Synchronicity for Bookworms: “White Fang”

This installment of my on-going Synchronicity for Bookworms series came about when I was re-reading one of the cherished novels of my childhood, Jack London’s White Fang. Many decades have passed since I last read the book, yet I have vivid memories of riding the school bus while engrossed in the story of the young Alaskan wolf who becomes the protagonist of London’s story. Note that I don’t call him the “hero” of the story; London’s literary school of Naturalism doesn’t really believe in heroes. But few have ever written so movingly about the physical and emotional plight of animals—including the most dangerous animals of all, human beings.

As I was reading the book this time, I was struck by this passage, in which London describes, from the point-of-view of the wolf-pup, what the inside of his cave is like. And how scary one bright “wall” of the cave is…

By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.

For some reason, I focused on the phrase “a thousand thousand lives,” and I immediately wondered whether this were even roughly accurate. After all, a “thousand thousand” lives is a million lives. That seemed like a lot, even from an evolutionary standpoint.

So, I dialed up the Wikipedia page on wolves and found that the question really depends on what kind of “wolf” one is talking about. Gray wolves of the sort found in Alaska split off from the African wolf roughly one million years ago (mya) . If you include the African wolf or its predecessors, that takes you all the way back to 1.6 mya. Therefore, if you fudge a bit and replace the word “lives” in London’s passage with “generations,” you can properly say that little White Fang carries the genetic memory of one million ancestors inside him, at least.

Of course, wolves, like so many great mammalian lineages, first evolved in Africa. Specifically, they are descended from African jackals, having split off from the jackal line over two million years ago. Reading all this, I remembered something I learned in one of my anthropology classes in college—the so-called Out-of-Africa Theory in which modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have evolved in Africa and then migrated out to Europe and Asia. This new, improved, model of humanity soon displaced the human species in those lands such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on.

I did another web search on the “Out-of-Africa” theory and got a million hits for…Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Instead of staying on-course, I immediately went down this new rabbit-hole, hitting the Wikipedia page for the movie. I went to see it in the theaters at the time, but I have almost no memory of it. It is, in fact, one of the most forgettable films of the 1980s, the sort of big-budget, star-heavy drivel that Hollywood has been churning out for almost a century. I do remember that many people in the audience were crying at the tear-jerker ending, and that I wanted to cry, too, out of sheer boredom.

Naturally, the film went on to win seven Oscars that year.

In fact, I am being unfair. It’s not a bad movie. The cinematography is lavish. And the acting is brilliant (even though Robert Redford doesn’t even attempt a British accent for his real-life character, Denys Finch Hatton, probably because Pollack told him not to). Streep, in contrast, shows off her usual, preternatural ability with foreign accents, playing Swedish noblewoman Karen Blixen, on whose fabulous memoir (it’s great; you should read it) the film is based.

But the real standout of the film, for me—in fact, the film’s only actor whose scenes I actually remember—was German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who was a minor movie star at the time. I became a fan of Brandauer when I saw the movie Mephisto, in which he plays a conflicted Berlin actor who finally achieves fame when his most famous character (the devil in Faust) goes viral with the ascendent Nazi party. Brandauer also played a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again (another bit of drivel, but better than Out of Africa), in which he steals every scene.

I always liked Brandauer because he exuded the air of a blazing intellect, yet one that was tightly controlled. (Rather like Jack Nicholson, in fact, only German.) He was also just really, really charming and magnetic.

Unfortunately, Brandauer’s film career tapered off quite a bit after Out of Africa. You can imagine my surprise when I went up to IMDB, looked him up, and found that one of his more successful films of the 1990s was a Disney production of Jack London’s White Fang.

Yes, I had come full circle on the Great Synchronicity Wheel, returning to where I had begun. Only now, I knew a lot more about wolves, Jack London, Out of Africa, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Not a bad hour, actually.

Yes, the Marvel Movies Are “Real” Cinema (Repost)

Having once been an art student (well, a creative-writing student; close enough), I know from experience that the quickest way to start an argument among a bunch of art majors is to ask them what the definition of “real” art is. Similarly, the best way to start an argument among a bunch of cinephiles is to ask them what “real” cinema is.

That is essentially what the great director Martin Scorsese did in 2019 when he suggested that Marvel superhero movies (in their zenith, at the time) were “not cinema”. He stated:

Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.

Scorsese thus not only managed to make himself sound like a bit of a snob—not to mention a grumpy old man—but to also start an internet flame-war that continues to this day.

Ultimately, though, the whole affair was a tempest-in-a-teapot. Of course the Marvel films are “real” cinema. That is, they are fabulously well-crafted motion pictures that, at their best, have an emotional and even a physical impact on their viewers. They also (again, at their best) make important philosophical and political points.

However, they are a different kind of cinema than what Scorsese works in. In other words, what we’re really talking about her is the difference between literary cinema and popular (that is, genre-based) cinema.

This is the same distinction one must make between literary fiction and genre fiction. The purest and simplest definition of genre fiction is that, for the most part, the reader knows what they’re gonna get. A mystery is going to have a murderer and a sleuth. A horror story is going to have a monster and hero/heroine fighting it. A rom-com is going to have two people who should get together romantically but just can’t, for some reason, until the very end. And a superhero movie is going to have, well, a superhero with some kind of superpowers who is fighting some equally superlative evil.

The devil, of course, is in the details. We consume genre cinema for the same reason we consume genre literature—because we want to see how they pull it off. “They” in the case of cinema, being the director and the writer and the actors. How do they change-up the old formula, make it interesting and somehow new?

That is how genres evolve and adapt to new time periods and new zeitgeists. Daniel Craig’s interpretation of James Bond was different from Sean Connery’s or Roger Moore’s—it was more brutal, more bloodthirsty, and yet somehow more vulnerable, too. Just like us, the American film-viewing public.

In the same way, Marvel superhero movies are different from superhero movies of the 1970s (think Superman) or the 1980s. The characters are more believable, as well as being more complex and even vulnerable. I am, again, thinking of the very best Marvel movies: the first Ironman starring Robert Downey Jr. and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This latter film, which came out in 2014 (yes, it’s been that long), is probably the best film of the entire series. And, yes, it is “real” cinema.

Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”

In fact, as very few people have realized, The Winter Soldier is almost a remake of a 1975 film that most film snobs would agree is “real” cinema: Three Days of the Condor.

The only obvious similarity is that both films feature Robert Redford. In Condor, Redford plays a brilliant but very bookish CIA analyst named Turner who works in a New York City branch office. One day, he comes back from lunch to find everyone in the office dead, murdered by professional assassins. Turner goes on the run. Unsure of who he can trust, he kidnaps an unsuspecting, beautiful woman (Faye Dunnaway) and hides in her apartment. From there, he gradually figures out that the assassins who killed his work-mates were sent by a rogue faction inside the CIA itself. Apparently, Turner’s branch had stumbled upon a secret plot by the faction to invade the Middle East and capture all the oil fields (how very far-fetched, right?). Turner eventually confronts the leader of the faction, as well the head assassin, a Zen-Master-like Frenchman named Joubert (played with brilliant, icy effectiveness by Max von Sydow).

On the surface, Condor might seem like a very different film from The Winter Soldier. But the closer you look, the more The Winter Soldier seems almost like a remix of the earlier film. That is, it has all the same elements. The good-guy-betrayed-by-his-government figure is Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America) who, like Turner in Condor, discovers a vast conspiracy within U.S. intelligence (S.H.I.E.L.D, in this case, rather than the CIA). Like Turner, Rogers finds himself on the run with a beautiful woman (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow). He confronts the leader of the conspiracy (played by none other than Robert Redford himself). And of course he confronts the lead assassin, Barnes, who (like Joubert in Condor) turns out to be far more complicated than he appears.

Even some of the individual scenes in The Winter Soldier are eerily reminiscent of those in Condor. Take the now famous elevator sequence, which is not only the best in the film but one of the best in the entire MCU series. On his way out of the high-tech and vaguely fascistic H.Q. of S.H.I.E.L.D., Rogers steps into an elevator and rides down. As the elevator stops at successive floors, more and more men step on, each menacing but seemingly disinterested. The scene works so well because everyone can relate to it, to that sense of unease we all fell when forced into close proximity with strangers. We begin to wonder: what if some of these people were evil. They could hurt us—maybe even kill us—before we could react. And yet, despite this unease, we do nothing because we have no real evidence of evil intent. We’re playing a social role. And that’s just what Rogers—a good-natured man if ever there was one, willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt—does.

I love the moment when Rogers notices sweat streaming down the face of one of the men next to him. He knows—as we, the viewers, know—that this is really, really bad. But there is nothing he can do about it…yet. It’s still in the future. Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have done it any better. Nor, for that matter, could Sidney Pollack, who has an almost identical scene in Condor, in which the hapless Turner finds himself in an elevator with Joubert, the master assassin. Each man knows that the other man knows who he really is, but neither can take any action…yet.

Ever since I read Mark Crispin Miller’s landmark essay “Hollywood: The Ad” many years ago, I’ve been fascinated the way in which the tropes and elements of an early “classic” movie can end up rearranged and transformed in a later pop film. Miller gives the example of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977). If you look closely, many of the components of the former get transmogrified in the latter. The apes of 2001 become the loyal Wookie Chewbacca. The cold, robotic voice of HAL the computer becomes that of C3PO the droid. The white, sterile interiors of the spaceship Discovery become the stark, sterile halls of the Death Star. And so on and so forth.

That’s just what has happened here, with Condor and The Winter Solider. They’re practically the same movie, but shaken up by time and changing purposes. That is, The Winter Soldier is every inch a pop film, with the full intention of stimulating the audience with all the action and explosions and kung-fu fights that we’ve come to expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. But, on some level, the kernel of Condor is still there. The Winter Soldier is also a story about evil, rapacious men seizing control of government, and also the creeping power of America’s military-industrial complex. It’s also about the dehumanization the soldiers like Rogers and Barnes undergo as pawns in the hands of callous leaders and ruthless institutions.

In short, despite all its roller-coaster-ride thrills and spectacle, The Winter Solider is a “real” movie.

And, yes, it’s “real” cinema.

Perfect Films: “Us” (Repost)

** SPOILERS BELOW **

Author’s Note: I was bemused by the recent outrage expressed by some very silly (and possibily racist) people regarding the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Noland’s The Odyssey. That is, outrage regarding the casting of a non-white woman in a surrealist fantasy film that is, itself, an adaptation of a surrealist fantasy story from 3,000 years ago. Yes, a movie with cyclopses and sorceresses and a wooden horse (built on a beach with no trees) big enough to hold 20 men but light enough to be rolled into a city!!!

I thought this would be a good time to repost an essay I wrote some time back about Nyong’o’ truly amazing dual performance in a truly amazing film, Us. Enjoy!

The better part of a decade has passed since Jordan Peele’s landmark horror film Get Out was released, marking Peele’s transformation from famed comedy writer and sketch artist to one of the most important filmmakers of our time. Peele has since added two more films to his horror oeuvre—2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope.

All three are great, but my favorite is Us. For me, it hits on the deepest and most disturbing level, and it has the richest palette in terms of effects. It’s also the hardest to figure out in terms of plot. With Nope and Get Out, the viewer has a vague sense of what’s going on, even early in the film (although the details turn out to be more shocking and terrifying than anyone suspected). But while watching Us, I was totally mystified. I knew it had something to do with evil twins—true doppelgängers in both the literal and the psychological sense—but I had no real idea of what the actual plot would turn out to reveal. And what a reveal it is!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Part of Us’s appeal lies in its slow-burn first act. (This is true of Get Out and Nope, too, but Us takes it to the next level.) The movie starts with a flashback to 1986, when a little girl, Adelaide, breaks away from her bickering parents at a beach boardwalk and finds a strange funhouse. It’s a simple premise, yet so much disturbing stuff is going on in this segment that it’s almost impossible to describe. We have the tension between the parents, raising the specter of divorce (the thing most kids fear more than anything else except death). Then, we have the separation of the child from the parents (another primal fear). And, finally, we have the freakish funhouse, which, though apparently deserted, is still lit with eerie neon light.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Believe”

Cathy and I have been watching season 4 of Dark Winds on Netflix, and I was thrilled to see the fine German actress Franke Potenta playing the villain. She was Lola in Run Lola Run, one of the coolest films of the 90s. (She was also the love interest in the first Bourne movie.) Nice to see she’s still doing great work.

Run Lola Run was also notable for its amazing, propulsive soundtrack, which perfectly fits the action of the film. (You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean.) I liked the soundtrack so much I bought it–on CD, no less. (Yeah, it’s old. So am I.) And I wrote many line of software code while listening to it. Of course, it’s not really “rock.” It’s techno, or EDM, or whatever they’re calling such music these days.

Whatever it is, it rocks.

Here is the premier track, “Believe,” on which Ms. Potente’s voice can be heard speaking. Enjoy!

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 001: “Goldfinger”

Well, the day has arrived. My debut novel, Twice the Trouble, is a Kindle Daily Deal for $1.99 today on Amazon. The offer will stand until 11:59 P.M. tonight, Pacific Standard Time, at which point it will turn into a pumpkin or…something. (Actually, it will just end.)

So, to finish my list of Great Movie Countdowns, I’m selecting what many people think is the greatest James Bond movie of all, 1964’s Goldfinger, directed by series veteran Guy Hamilton.

One of the most magical things about James Bond, the character, is that he knows how to do just about everything. He can fight and shoot, of course. But he can also fly a plane, drive a tank, sail a boat, race a motorcycle, surf, and even (as he shows in Goldfinger) play a mean-and-dirty round of golf.

One thing Bond does not know how to do, unfortunately, is disarm an atomic bomb. Which is a problem, because that’s exactly the threat he faces in the climax of Goldfinger. Bond finds himself locked inside the huge, cavernous vault of Fort Knox, surrounded by stacks of gold bars and handcuffed to said atomic bomb, with just a few minutes ticking down on the device’s timer. (This might be the first use of a digital timer in any major motion picture; let me know in the comments if you can think of an earlier one.)

As if this weren’t bad enough, Bond isn’t alone inside the vault. Goldfinger’s chief henchman, Odd Job, is in there too. If Goldfinger is the best Bond movie ever, then Odd Job is the scariest Bond henchman ever. Played by Japanese-American wrestler Harold Sakata, he has such a great, imposing physical presence—a hulking man who seems barely able to hold his own strength in check. When he crushes a golf ball with his bare hands, we, as viewers, really believe he could do it! But what really makes Odd Job scary is his evil little smile. He always seems bemused, enjoying himself, even when he throws a guy off a balcony or throws his steel-brimmed bowler hat into someone’s neck.

In the movie’s climactic countdown (yes, another countdown to nuclear self-destruction), Odd Job seems determined—even happy—to make sure the bomb goes off, despite the obvious fact that it will mean his own death, too. Odd Job, it seems, isn’t afraid of anything except failing in his mission, which makes him that much scarier.

My classics professor in college once said that James Bond is the modern version of Heracles, who, like Bond, loves to fight, drink, and sleep around. Sure enough, the final battle between Bond and Odd Job feels a lot like a Greek myth, with the hero battling a monster—one with some really scary weapons—to the death. And, as in a Greek myth, the contest ends with an example of poetic irony. Odd Job is undone by his own superpower—in this case, his favorite weapon, that lethal, steel-brimmed hat. Bond manages to get hold of it and throws it at him. It misses, alas, and lodges into some steel bars. Instead of just finishing Bond off, though, Odd Job goes to retrieve his beloved hat, at which point Bond slides across the floor and touches a loose power cable to the bars. Current conducts through the bars and through the steel hat, electrocuting the villain. Thus, the monster is defeated by his own magic.

But what about the bomb? Looking inside the device, Bond seems genuinely clueless, for once, bewildered by all the wires and blinky lights. Pathetically, he even tries to stop the machine’s spinning cylinder (which holds, we presume, the cobalt-iodine mixture that makes the bomb “particularly dirty,” in Goldfinger’s words). All to no avail.

Then, with mere seconds left, a man’s gentle hand sweeps in, stops Bond’s frantic groping, and turns the bomb off with the flick of a switch. With the crisis averted, Bond and the man—who looks like a wizened college professor, wearing a brown suit and hat, his face serious yet calm—face each other. A strange look passes between them. A mixture of relief, puzzlement, and awe, the look seems to suggest the entire absurd, insane reality of the Cold War, if not modern existence itself. “How did we get here?” the look seems to say.

How, indeed.

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 002: “Escape from New York”

Well, it’s just one more day until my book becomes a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon (the offer starts at midnight tonight, Pacific Standard Time). The next movie on my Great Movie Countdowns list is my favorite B-Movie of all time, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (EFNY).

EFNY is probably the best example of a classic movie countdown because almost the entire movie is a countdown. War-hero turned bank-robber Snake Plissken has exactly twenty-four hours to find the President of the United States somewhere in the yawning, black hulk of Manhattan, now turned into an open-air prison by the U.S. government. If Snake doesn’t find the POTUS and get him out alive before time runs out, tiny explosives implanted in Snake’s neck will detonate, killing him instantly. Such is the deal made to him by the coldly practical Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (played by Lee Van Cleef in his greatest role since The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly): get the POTUS out alive and you’ll get a pardon. Otherwise, you’re dead.

So, armed to the teeth, Snake infiltrates the island and begins his desperate search. All the while, he keeps checking his special, way-cool digital watch, which looks exactly like a beefed-up version of the first Casio digital watch that me and all my friends had back in the day. The watch doesn’t tell time, of course—it’s a life-clock, counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until Snake’s neck goes boom.

To make matters worse, there are many people in New York who feel that twenty-four hours is far too long for Snake to live. Chief among them is the Duke of New York, the sinister war-lord who controls the prison, played with great panache by the great musician Isaac Hayes, of “Shaft” fame.

Kurt Russell famously said that Snake is always just trying to live through “the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is.” Carpenter’s genius lies in filling every one of those “next minutes” with some new, compelling, and darkly magical moment of mayhem, all of which Snake must overcome in some unexpected and thrilling way.

The final chase scene where Snake and his companions race across the fictional 69^th Street Bridge, dodging mines, with The Duke in hot pursuit is a classic. But my favorite moment in the film comes much earlier, when Snake, realizing he has almost no chance of finding the president, gets out his radio, calls Commissioner Hauk, and asks if he can just come out. “I’ll burn you off the wall,” Hauk coldly replies. At which point Snake looks at the radio and says, mostly to himself, “A little human compassion.”

Snake does, in fact, find that little bit of “human compassion” in the course of the movie, when he makes some new friends who help him escape. More importantly, he finds it in himself, too. But that doesn’t stop him from being a bad-ass.

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 003: “Alien”

It’s T-Minus two days and counting until my book becomes a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon (that’s right, on Thursday, August 6). And, to commemorate this, the next movie on my Great Movie Countdowns list is Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Alien.

Alien is the greatest sci-fi monster movie ever made. And so it makes sense that it also has the greatest countdown-to-self-destruct sequence of any sci-fi movie ever made. It works because of Ridley Scott’s great direction and Sigourney Weaver’s brilliant performance as Ripley, the ship’s sole survivor, who has started the self-destruct sequence herself. In what is surely one of the most impressive examples of physical acting in Hollywood history, she ducks and weaves through steam-filled corridors, holding a flame-thrower, peeking around each corner to see if the huge, metallic-skinned alien is there.

Sure enough, the alien appears, blocking her way to her shuttle-craft, and she is forced to go ALL the way back to the ship’s control room. When she discovers that she’s too late to stop the self-destruct, she briefly breaks into tears. It’s a heartbreaking moment, one which becomes thrilling when she defiantly yells “You bitch!” at MOTHER, the ship’s AI, and then steels herself to reaching the shuttle, alien or no-alien.

I love how the last 15 minutes of the movie function as a complete contrast to the 105 minutes that came before—that is, the first and second acts of the film, which are mostly filled with moments of silent, creeping horror as the crew tries to find the alien xenomorph (before it finds them). The last act, however, is a brazen, nerve-wracking light- and sound-show, full of strobes, klaxons, hissing steam vents and general mayhem as the good ship Nostromo prepares to blow itself to smithereens. Honestly, I’m not sure the film could be made today in the same way, even with a slew of those “epilepsy-warning” messages at the beginning. It’s that intense. I remember seeing the film in the theater and being battered into my seat.

It’s also the definitive sci-fi-self-destruct sequence, better than all that came before or since. (Yes, even better than the “five-minutes-until-the-Death-Star-blasts-Yavin-to-bits” sequence at the end of Star Wars.) It’s just damned good filmmaking.

As noted by film scholar Eleanor Johnson, it also marks an important moment in American feminism, with Ripley being the first completely compelling female action hero in cinema. She’s not only smart, brave, and strong, she’s honorable. She doesn’t need to blow up the ship; she could just escape on the shuttle-craft. But destroying the ship is the only way to prevent MOTHER from flying it back to Earth on auto-pilot along with its horrifying passenger, the alien. So, Ripley risks her own life to kill the bastard. (Which she does, but not in the expected way.)

Pretty freakin cool.

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 004: “The Andromeda Strain”

It’s just three days until my first book becomes a Kindle Daily Deal. And so, I thought I would count down the days with…a LIST OF COUNTDOWNS.

That is, the Best Countdowns in Cinema.

The countdown is an obvious dramatic instrument. You might think it was strictly a modern invention—depending, as it does, on a clock ticking—but I think it goes back to at least the 19^th Century. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is based around an (extremely long) countdown. And in the Sherlock Holmes stories of the 1890s, Holmes often finds himself racing against the clock, desperate to find some missing treaty or compromising letter that, if not secured in time, will spell certain doom.

As for film, one of the greatest westerns of all time, High Noon, has an obvious, analog countdown, with the camera often showing the town’s clock as it sweeps toward noon. (That’s when a gang of bad guys is expected to arrive on the train and kill the heroic sheriff, Gary Cooper.)

In modern fiction films—and especially genre films like science fiction and spy movies—the digital countdown has become something of a staple. Over the next four days, I’m going to discuss four of my favorites.

For this first installment, I choose what is still one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time, Robert Wise’s 1971 masterpiece, The Andromeda Strain. The story of what happens when an alien pathogen arrives on Earth via a crash-landed satellite, it is perhaps the first great techno-thriller film, combining science fiction with a tale of a military and political crisis.

When fighter jets are sent to overfly the satellite’s crash site in the Arizona desert, the authorities see that everyone in the nearby town of Piedmont is already dead. They activate a secret “Wildfire” team of scientists, who are grabbed from their homes and flown to a secret, underground biolab that is also (a bit too conveniently) located in the Arizona desert. Most of the drama takes place in the sterile, spaceship-like interior of the lab, where the scientists bring the satellite and isolate the germ. They also bring along the two surviving inhabitants of Piedmont—one, an old, alcoholic man and the other a month-old, helpless infant—who seem mysteriously immune to the alien bug.

The scientists name the bug “Andromeda” and discover, to their horror, that it is a crystalline-based life form with no DNA, which cannot be killed by heat, solvents, or even radiation. Indeed, it laps up X-Rays and uses the energy to mutate at an alarming rate.

As luck would have it, one of these mutations is able to dissolve rubber, which allows Andromeda to escape into the lab’s silo-like core. Naturally, this triggers a countdown to the automatic detonation of a nuclear bomb placed under the lab, intended to sterilize the site before the contamination spreads. Realizing that the bomb’s radiation will not kill Andromeda—it will, rather, cause the germ to flourish, perhaps ending all life on earth—the Wildfire team rushes to cancel the countdown. The only member with this ability is a surgeon, Mark Hall, who has also just solved the riddle of the two unlikely survivors (it has to do with their blood acidity). Hall bravely enters the core and begins the long climb up to the one level where the bomb can be disarmed, using a high-tech key that he has dangling around his neck.

The last five minutes of the movie show Hall desperately trying to avoid the automatic laser guns that guard the core (one of which shoots a hole through his cheek), as well as the nerve gas that the lab’s central computer releases.

Does he make it in time? Does he save the world? You’ll just have to watch the movie…