Author: UncaScroogeMcD

Andrew Sarris once famously called Samuel Fuller an “authentic American primitive.” Sarris went on to write that the “excitement Fuller arouses in critics sensitive to visual forms is equaled by the horror he arouses in critics of the Left for the lack of social perspective in his films.”

The charge of primitivism, which also has a political component suggesting conservative views, became unfashionable as Fuller grew more famous, but seeing his first three films for the first time all in a row, thanks to the new Criterion-Eclipse set, The First Films of Samuel Fuller (Eclipse-Criterion, three discs in slim cases, $44.95, street date Tuesday, August 14, 2007), makes clear why Sarris held this opinion about Fuller back in 1967 when he was compiling his book The American Cinema, which appeared before Fuller became the darling of the German New Wave and before Fuller himself directed Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße, The Big Red One (1980), White Dog (1982), Les Voleurs de la nuit (1984), Samuel Fuller’s Street of No Return (1989) and the TV movie The Day of Reckoning, which do little to undermine Sarris’s assessment. I don’t think that these films would necessarily modify the “accusation” of primitivism, but some of them were more prestigious. In any case, Fuller’s crude, bombastic style is the very thing that his fans like about him, his knack for cutting through the decorous crap with which most filmmakers drape their projects. Fuller was the original “in your face” director, both figuratively and literally.

If Sarris overstates Fuller’s political conservatism, which is primarily based on the seeming anti-communist thread in Pick Up on South Street, made for Fox, he also overstates the number of close-ups in I Shot Jesse James. The western is not as dramatically awash in close ups as Sarris asserts, although maybe there were relatively more close ups in Fuller’s film than most of its contemporaries. But they also tend to be highly dramatic, so that, like the lions Potemkin, you tend to remember more of them than were actually there. One suspects that Sarris was going on memory here rather than on a recent reviewing of Jesse James. Fuller political views, as became obvious with later films, and which he enunciated cleaerly in his posthumous autobiography, A Third Face, are of what you might call the “macho Democrat” variety of Hemingway, Mailer, and other dogfaces turned writers.

It’s true that Jesse James opens with some rather impatient, menacing, disorienting close ups. And Fuller was prone to the shock close up, what Mike Nelson and the film crew call a rouchet. But there is a great deal of variety to Fuller’s visual style, as Sarris also points out. In The Steel Helmet, there is a great deal of camera movement, and Hollywood great James Wong Howe even photographed the low budget The Baron of Arizona.

Sarris places Fuller in that second tier of muscular filmmakers that includes Anthony Man, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, and Raoul Walsh (Boetticher is in the third tier, but should be up there with these other boys). The big mystery of Fuller’s career, however, is why he didn’t end up like Edgar G. Ulmer. Fuller’s roots had all the proper earmarks, including a vigorous, noirish visual style attached to diverse films labored upon in financially impoverished circumstances. Ulmer was “exiled” to Poverty Row because of his affair with a top executive’s wife. Fuller started there and clawed his way to the top, at at least near the top, with brazenness and sheer force of will.

All three of the films in the Eclipse box were produced by Robert Lippert, a minor if prolific mogul at the time. Lippert’s hefty catalog was recently picked up by Kit Parker films, and this Fuller box appears to be a collaboration between Criterion-Eclipse and Kit Parker. Fuller speaks warmly of Lippert in his memoir. Lippert had the guts to back a neophyte when it was still unusual for a screenwriter to take over the directorial reins.

Fuller makes it clear that he was utterly uninterested in the western aspects of his first film, I Shot Jesse James, released in 1949. Like many of Walsh’s films, it’s really a male love story, a man who killed the thing he loved, which he can only admit with his dying breath. Fuller didn’t care much for Jesse James, whom he called a pervert and a transvestite. But he didn’t share that view with Lippert, to whom he supplied what he was contracted to give, a western. For Fuller, though, it was a shadow play, a morality tale about the mistakes we make in our lurch toward what we take to be freedom.

In the case of Bob Ford (a sometimes visibly intoxicated John Ireland), it is marriage to Cynthy (an unexpectedly rounded and affecting Barbara Britton). His drive to be with Cynthy is so desperate and so inhuman that it screams for subterranean interpretation.

The play begins like all childlike morality plays. “I still have enough to get Cynthy a ring,” Ford mutters to himself idealistically. As Ford, Ireland is an uncertain, stoop shouldered figure, and he walks very much like Henry Fonda, his shirt, at least in the beginning, like John Wayne’s in The Searcher‘s

The film is called I Shot Jesse James, but the point of view is divided up among several protagonists. With whom should we lay our sympathy? In fact, there are no heroes or sympathetic figures in the movie. It is an objective study: and yet it isn’t. Fulller’s sympathy is expansive. He likes everybody. He cannot pick and chose among his characters the way that Hollywood conventionally demands that their directors do.

One thing I noticed from Jesse James was how exquisite a photographer of women Fuller ((in collaboration with his DPs) he happened to be. Britton has one of the longest, most kissable necks in all cinema, and Fuller makes full play with it. Other facets of Fuller’s pre-movie past, when he was a reporter, that are more recognizable are his penchant for headlines to advance the story. Less predictable are the theatrical aspects of the story, that is, that at one point Ford becomes an enactor of his own story on stage, though a poor one. There, he is booed for not killing James, while in the real world he is viewed as a coward and an opportunist. As in all of the Fuller films included in this set, there is a moment when the protagonist is subjected to a terrible public humiliation, in this case when Ford breaks down on stage, his guilt becoming a subject of public discourse.

Being a Lippert production, there is a lax attention to detail. For example, in one scene Ford, referring back to an earlier moment, gets the the number of guys he shot worng. And the day for night contrast in the final shoot out is unnerving. Otherwise, I Shot Jesse James is an efficient, psychologically complex film that is as ravishing a debut as Citizen Kane.

With Steel Helmet, the second film on the disc, the viewer is in Stanley Kubrick territory: it’s like that director’s unviewable Fear and Desire. At the same time, it anticipates Fuller’s own Shock Corridor. At the same time it is like Fuller’s future Shock Corridor and The Big Red One.

What is interesting about the film is that one of the name of one of the main characters may have been borrowed by Spielberg for the second Indiana Jones film (“Short Round”), and that unlike most Hollywood films, there is no true heroically buffed main character at the center of the film. Gene Evans, as the man under the steel helmet, is at bottom not likable. That goes against Hollywood practice. But it is fully in line with Fuller’s personal view of what war is like, and what it does to people who fight it.

The Baron of Arizona is probably one of Fuller’s least seen films, as well as one of the most unusual or unexpected works in his catalog. For those reasons, it is arguably the most revelatory addition to the box. What a bizarre story, and wholly based on actual events! The narrative tells the long, convoluted tale of one man’s attempts to pull the biggest scam in American history. Despite the fact that Vincent Price plays the “villain,” like Gene Evans in Steel Helmet, he sucks at cigars non-stop, like Fuller in real life. There is little doubt that there is an edge of identification by Fuller in the lead characters in these three films.

And Price sinks his teeth into a role that demands that he play in succession a bureaucrat, a step-father, a monk, a gypsy, a lover, and a baron. There is always something hammy about Price’s approach to roles but here the ham is an indice to the multiple layers of the plot as Price is always acting at being someone he isn’t. And what a lot happens in this plot-packed film, from gypsy raids to lynchings. Decor is subtly, or not to subtly, employed to underscore Price’s rise in power, from a small monk’s cell to a huge office that sports a fabulous map of Arizona behind it, the cake he is about to slice up.

And what a relief that the Eclipse films come shed of supplements. One can dive right into the movies. Many film buffs may demand more than the anonymous text on the inside cover of the slim cases, to me it was a holiday. Thank god I don’t have to either feel guilty for not reading what little there was (as I did not). What the lack of scholarly apparatus also means is that innocent viewers will be able to experience Fuller’s first three films the way original filmgoers did.

It’s time to redefine film noir. Or perhaps refine the living definition. Or return to the original definition and work from there. Or scrap the whole genre and its outmoded definition and start over.

You think you know what noir is, don’t you? You think film noir is a minor genre that thrived from the early 1940s to 1958, one that focused on troubled men lured into criminal situations by their own bad judgment and the wiles of a seductive woman, all ending when fate, in the form of the law, reaches out its long arm to snatch them all up? You think that film noir is a heightened genre in which the visuals tell half the story, in which long shadows and venetian blinds and rain swept corners and curling plumes of cigarette smoke are as important as dialogue, if not more so.

If this is your definition, then how do you explain the presence of such films as House on Telegraph Hill, Panic in the Streets, House of Bamboo, or Dillinger in recent sets of supposed films noir. Or put another way, how loose of a definition of film noir do you want?

The DVD distributors no doubt want a definition as fluid and flexible as they already seem to have. Or maybe a definition ever more porous. Film noir is probably the most popular of the genres that sell on disc. Its films come in mostly well-priced and attractive boxes in bright colors and fun typefaces, they seem to epitomized “classic” Hollywood, and they break the color barrier: i.e., kids who normally abjure black and white films will watch noirs. Critically, each box is greeted as if it is the salvation of motion pictures. They don’t make like they used to! What great old films, each and every one!

If a person truly loves noir, shouldn’t they also be seeking out the films of French poetic realism of the 1930s, films such as Pepe le Moko or Le Jour se leve? Or, some of the films of pre-World War II German expressionism, such as Lang’s M, films whose visual style clearly pre-dated the use of shadows and unusual angles in true American noir. The answer is yes, they should: but they don’t. Noir has become a wholly American thing, its roots in other cultures ignored by consumers, its life span artificially elongated, like a dying patient on life support, a very un-noir way to go.

And is noir even a genre? When the two Toulouse-based intellectuals Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton came to write their book A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941 – 1953, they called it a “series” rather than a genre. It’s an interesting distinction to make, because it ends up emphasizing the short lived nature of the cycle of noir films. In their book, which was finally published in English in 2002, they don’t define the genre, but rather offer a set of five key noir characteristics (roughly: dreamlike, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel) that proves not to be especially helpful, and then they give you a list of noirs, a subdivided taxonomy from which we are supposed to infer a definition. Later, when Raymond Durgnat came to attempt a definition of noir for the British magazine Cinema, he ended up sub-dividing the films by cycles and motifs, such as sociological films, prison films, juvenile delinquent films, and so on. Thus, in 1970 when the article first appeared, and just two years after Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg had introduced the term “noir” to American criticism in their book Hollywood in the Forties, noir was already out of control, a casserole pot for whatever likes or linkages the critic cared to include. The first chapter of James Naremore’s book More Than Night offers the best treatment I’ve found of the difficulties of defining noir.

But here’s an easy definition of film noir: it’s a film whose images are used to illustrate the cover of a film noir book (and there are a lot of them: I have over 50 noir books on my shelves).

The current pro-noir situation is only one instance of a wholesale celebration of the cinematic past as if there had never been a bad movie made in Hollywood. Is there no film so bad it doesn’t deserve a special edition with a making of, the trailer, a booklet, and two or three audio commentaries in which the same film noir specialists pontificate and the surviving filmmaker, regardless of how minuscule his role, is dragged from the the precipice of the grave to have one final day in the sun?

I share a lot of these prejudices. Noir is my favorite genre, and I love collecting the discs and reading up on the films. But at a certain point one has to admit that nor every film out of the past is of equal weight. But in any case, these were the issues plaguing me as I work my way through the new Warner Bros. five-disc, 10-movie set, Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4.

The disc people will probably take out first is No. 2, which features Crime Wave, with an audio commentary track featuring crime novelist James Ellroy, along with the related film Decoy. In any case, that’s what I did. Crime Wave (released in 1954, but shot in 1952) proved to be an interesting little policier presented in the documentary mode, with stylistic roots in the Hellinger style of street realism. Shot in only 13 days by notable Hollywood director Andre de Toth for Warner Bros., it is an urgency and rawness that is only accentuated by its brash lighting, especially in the interiors, its tinny, almost drive-in movie level sound production, and its authentic locations.

Sterling Hayden is the Robbery-Homicide cop investigating a cheap little gas station knock over that balloons into a manhunt for a team of crooks that includes Charles Bronson (under his real name), Ted de Corsia, and Timothy Carey. It’s worth noting that Hayden, de Corsia, and Carey would appear together again two years later in Kubrick’s The Killing, and that Kubrick’s film may also have borrowed its look from Crime Wave, as the audio commentators point out.

What the yak trackers don’t point out is that Crime Wave has a plot that is an expanded version of a subplot in Michael Mann’s Heat, and that when we first meet the film’s innocent, ordinary couple, Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk, they are in bed together, a single bed, not the dual beds the MPAA equivalent demanded. Otherwise, Eddie Muller and his pal Ellroy cover all the film’s bases, from the exact locations where the film was shot to the backgrounds of the film’s cast. Ellroy clearly tickles Muller, who generously and sincerely laughs along with Ellroy’s shtick. Among the things we learn about Ellroy in the two-way chat is that he is self-conscious about going bald, and he thinks that Crime Wave is a better film than Chinatown. It is unclear whether he had ever seen Crime Wave before, however, as Ellroy dissolves into loud canine panting whenever a recognizable location, such as the original Bob’s Big Boy or the LA police department, pops up, as if the film were new to him. On a side note, this track appears, from internal evidence, to have been recorded early in 2006. Is it possible that Warner, in creating this set, combined what would have been two separate boxes, thus holding back a few of the films whose audio commentary tracks might have been more timely if released closer to recording?

In addition there is the film’s trailer, and a short new “making of” featuring, for no discernible reason and to no profitable end for the viewer, that pontificating windbag with nothing to say, Richard Shickel. Fortunately he is joined by others who do have something to say, including Oliver Stone, Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, Christopher Coppola (who sounds just like his brother Nicolas Cage), and de Toth himself in archive footage. In any case, Crime Wave is an efficient programer, but I’m not so sure that it is a noir, what with its photorealism and its reasonably happy ending.

Warner Bros has cleverly paired Crime Wave on the same side of the second disc with Decoy, as Decoy is written by one of the actors in Crime Wave, Ned Young, a writer and actor who suffered at the hands of HUAC. It’s a complex tale adapted from a radio play by Stanley Rubin concerning a femme fatale named Margot Shelby (British actress Jean Gillie, who was briefly married to the film’s director Jack Bernhard , and who died a few years later with very little of a film career), who contrives to ensorcel a doctor (stage actor Herbert Rudley ) into reviving her sugar daddy, a dead row inmate (Robert Armstrong), after his execution, so that she and her third lover (Edward Norris ) can dig up the buried loot. The plot isn’t told in an orderly fashion, however. After a mysterious, zombie-film style opening, the tale is told in elaborate flashback form by Shelby to tough guy cop Joe Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), who also figures in a lot of her flashback, as she lay dying.

Shelby is touted as filmdom’s cruelest femme fatale, but I didn’t find her so “bad.” Her crime career is carefully motivated, and she kills with less lurid excitement than Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity or Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy. She is an entertaining creation, however, because she seems fully fleshed out by the script and by Gillie: literally it seems, as her daring cleavage was commented on by Variety, as the disc points out.

In any case, though Decoy doesn’t bear any of the visual traces we associate with, or should associate with, noir, it does include a essentially moral man whose will is sapped by the demoness who takes down everyone with her in her pursuit of money. But that may be due to the fact that the film was made for Monogram, the so-called poverty row studio, which later became Allied Artists, only to be consumed by Warner, itself in turn consumed by Ted Turner. Hence the film’s presence in the set.

As with all the films in the box, Decoy comes with an audio commentary track, this one with writer and producer Stanley Rubin, hosted by Glenn Erickson, a film editor, filmmaker, and writer (he says on the track that the site DVD Savant is his, while I always thought it was attached to DVDTalk). Erickson is giddily enthusiastic to have Rubin on the air, and solicits many amazing little nuggets of Hollywood lore from him, such as that he almost “discovered Marilyn Monroe, and that he also cast Clint Eastwood in his first movie, years later collaborating with him again on White Hunter, Black Heart. The little making of that follows is shorter than the one for Crime Wave, but features a more interesting selection of pundits, including Dick Cavett and Molly Haskell. But I will have more to say about the pundits and audio commentators for this set in future installments.

I was a little puzzled why Hot Fuzz didn’t do better on the American circuit. Hot Fuzz is, of course, the follow up to the same team’s Shaun of the Dead. With Simon Pegg and Nick Frost once again front and center, and with Edgar Wright behind the camera, where he also co-authored the script with Pegg, you’d think that the returns would at last match the zombie film. But despite having what one would presume to be a built in viewership, the film only made some $3 million dollars its first weekend, before eventually crawling up to $28 million. Worldwide the film has made $78 million so far. Then I took a closer look at the numbers, and found that Shaun also only made $3 mil its first weekend and accumulated only $13 million in the U. S back in 2004. Shaun is probably an example of a film that is notable less for how many people like it than for who it is that like it, people like Harry Knowles and Kevin Smith. The same, perhaps, with Hot Fuzz, and no doubt it will be as big on DVD as Shaun ended up being.

Hot Fuzz (Universal, $29.98, widescreen 2.35:1, also in separate full frame and HD editions, street date Tuesday, July 31, 2007) is as funny a loving parody of buddy cop films as it was on the big screen. As you know, it concerns a talented cop shuffled off to a bucolic English village where he won’t show up the city police. There he nevertheless unearths grand crimes and buddies up with the Chief’s son. The loving parody part comes in with the replications of famous moments from such films as Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon. So why did the film underperform here? I’d speculate that it is for two reasons. One, Americans don’t like their buddy cop films mocked. Look what happened to The Last Action Hero. And anyway, most buddy cop films are already half comedies to begin with. But second, the action is all set in an English village with jokes directed at peculiar English concerns, which flow over or under the heads of mono-cultural Americans. Well, I hope it does better on DVD because it is a terrific, hilarious film that also earns its place among the films of Michael Bay, Richard Donner, and Shane Black.

Extras are abundant. There is a short gag moment, outtakes, storyboards, a trivia track, 22 deleted scenes with optional commentary, “Danny’s Notebook,” which is a flip book, trailers for other Rogue pictures, a video record of the US publicity tour (28 minutes long), in which at one moment Wright and Frost comically stuff payola in Harry Knowles’s shirt, enacting redundantly what so many filmmakers do figuratively, a collection of bowdlerized moments (just over three minutes), and a commentary track with Pegg and Wright.

Going the other way, there are certain American personalities who always attract European documentarians. One of them is the cartoonist John Callahan, who has had at least three docs made about hiim. Another is James Ellroy. James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, made by Austrian television, came out in 1993. That was followed by James Ellroy’s Feast of Death in 2001. Now comes James Ellroy: “American Dog” (Facets, $29.95, widescreen 1.85:1, in English, French, and Duch, street date Tuesday, July 24, 2007). Made in 2005 by Clara and Robert Kuperberg, who co-wrote and co-directed this 57 minute movie.

Ellroy is not only a great American writer, he single handedly changed the detective novel, not unlike three of his predecessors, Hammett, Chandler, and McDonald. Ellroy’s slangy, jazzed up, telegraphese style moves so fast and contains so many hypertext links that he made the ordinary crime novel seem sluggish and old fashioned. Suddenly, hundreds of other books on the same crime section shelves of book stores and libraries were rendered out of date.

Essentially, as he did in Reinhard Jud’s Demon Dog, Ellroy tells his story again: battling parents divorce and mother ends up murdered, Ellroy becomes a prowler, drug addict, drunk, fixates on the Black Dahlia case and that of his mother, and a later revisitation of the case as a successful adult writer opens old wounds. Unlike Jud’s film, which spent a lot of time driving around Los Angeles as if it were an alien third world, the Kuperberg’s pull a bit of a Erroll Morris and show Ellroy sitting under staged Bava-esque lighting telling his story to the camera, or reading from his books while shown walking around ex-crime scenes wearing a series of brightly colored and flowered Hawaiian shirts. Ellroy is a straight talker. He tells the truth, in truth’s own language, which is blunt and foul. He doesn’t converse, he lays down the law. He walks a bit like a nerd, and looks like a cross between G. Gordon Liddy and an aging yet fit L. A. patrolman.

The defining moment for Ellroy within the context of his mother’s death was learning that there were two worlds, the official 1950s with its apple pies and mown lawns, and the world of bars and drugs and loose women and men who can murder them and get away with it. He’s like the Teresa Wright character in Shadow of a Doubt, who finally sees the underbelly of Santa Rosa when her serial killer uncle drags her into a nightclub.

Extras include two cinematic records of dinners with Ellroy and some of his friends, first a 13 minute conversation with novelist Bruce Wagner (who pretends that Ellroy hasn’t written My Dark Places), and Rick Jackson, an LAPD cop friend of Ellroy’s, a second 12-minute segment with Dana Delany (a recent muse of Ellroy’s), Joe and Matthew Carnahan and Michelle Grace, a producer, who are the team making White Jazz, and Wagner again. Plus there is a reading by Ellroy from American Tabloid, Ellroy receiving the Jack Webb award (an award given out by the LAPD), and two photo galleries, one of vintage postcards, the other of crime scenes, from a book derived from the LAPD archive for which Ellroy wrote the intro.

One of Ellroy’s favorite authors is Ian Rankin, whose Rebus books are profligate. Set in Edinburgh, these are grim, realistic, carefully plotted books (that should be read in order), that, though they like the kind of prose stylization we associate with Ellroy, do have a cumulative power due to the attractiveness of Rebus himself, the harried DI. They are politically neutral though with a slight liberal tilt, which also runs counter to what we assume about Ellroy.

Nevertheless, Ellroy endorses Rankin’s work, and by now some 10 of the novels have been turned into TV movies, first with a youngish John Hannah, and more recently with an appropriately run down and dragged out Ken Stot. Rebus Set 2 (Acorn Media, $49.95, widescreen 1.85:1, street date Tuesday, July 31, 2007) gathers four of them (“The Black Book,” “A Question of Blood,” “Strip Jack,” and “Let It Bleed”), which aired in 2006 (these shows are technically from series three). The shows are accurate accounts of the books, and generally cover cases with profound effects on the city.

It’s hard to imagine a better actor to inhabit Rebus than Stott. His Rebus is angry and dedicated and has a long memory, and Stott appears to melt into the role, his shoulders slumped, his face haggard, his black suit worn to a glossy moistness. He is accompanied on most of his cases by Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke (Claire Price), whose face seems permanently sent in an expression of rabbit-like worry. His nemesis is his boss Detective Chief Inspector Gill Templer (Jennifer Black), essentially a good person but who has to answer for Rebus’s irregularities. In these details, Rebus rather mirrors the similar and more beloved series Touch of Frost.

The four episodes come in fine, if somewhat soft transfers, and with extras, a 50 minute or so making of and a trailer, confined to the fourth disc, plus text only actor and writer biographies related to each episode.

Continuing the British theme is Starter for 10 (HBO, $95, widescreen 1.85:1, street date Tuesday, July 31, 2007), which is most interesting for its cast of future stars than for the upbeat if familiar story itself. The plot concerns the working class Brian Jackson (James McAvoy) a student at Bristol University in 1985 whose goal in life is to serve on the school’s college bowl team. While struggling through college he is torn between two women, the blonde Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve), who wants to grow up to be an actress or a presenter, and Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall), the Molly Ringwaldish radical Jewish activist. Unlike The Way We Were, he ends up with the radical. All in all it comes across like a well-meaning Disney channel teen film, covering all the expected events in just the manner we expect to see them. Again.

All the actors are from elite acting families and will be heard from again (McAvoy has already been in The Last King of Scotland), and the actress who plays Brian’s mother, Catherine Tate, is the next Doctor Who partner. The widescreen transfer is fine, and extras consist of a pop up trivia guide, and an HBO “First Look” at the film.