Touch of Evil

Someone I was talking to about this movie said they couldn't enjoy it that much because it was super racist- I didn't think so then, and watching it again, I still don't. It's certainly odd to cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican, and the actual Mexicans portrayed aren't portrayed particularly positively, but they're mostly just types. A lot of them are caricatures, and somewhat embarrassing ones, admittedly, but it's more lazy than racist.

What stands out beyond that, however, is that the really horrid person in the movie is Welles' character, an enormous, repulsive, and incredibly bigoted good old boy. He's clever, charming in a boozy way, and comes off like a funhouse mirror image of a noir hero, and he's corrupt as all hell. The dynamic of the movie makes Heston's Vargas the straight arrow pitted against Welles' Quinlan, who knows better than to bother with rules and regulations. As Welles' character is the villain, all of his characteristics- and his casual racism, which leads him contemptuously to dismiss Heston and railroad innocent Mexicans in for crimes he doesn't particularly care if they committed is one of the most notable of these.

It's also got an interesting and relatively refreshing take on sexism. Janet Leigh is the put upon wife, who is exhausted of waiting around for her husband to get back from work- a detective fiction trope, and generally a misogynist one. She's endangered, too, and in the construction of the plot she's as helpless as any woman written purely as a pawn. On the other hand, she's rude, eloquent, and brooks little bullshit- she may be in an unfeminist position, but she reacts like a real person, not like a distressed damsel. Furthermore, one of the other noteworthy things about Quinlan is his habit of making cruel judgments about other people's sex lives, and invading their privacy; again, since Quinlan is evil, one can assume that his characteristics are evil, and the movie is therefore arguing for tolerance.

It has its flaws- if nothing else, a lot of it is basically b movie material- but where it can't get away from them, it undermines them. So basically, Touch of Evil: a good movie.

Z

I wasn't too impressed with this at first- I was expecting something tense and involved, and it never really becomes that. Violence doesn't happen professionally, as I would expect from a modern political thriller, but thuggishly, and in spurts. The central assassination isn't a sniper with a clever scheme, it's a couple of drunk jackasses in a three wheeled cart they can't even afford.

That's where it gets interesting- it goes from a sort of document of indignation, an illustration of fascists attacking protesters as the police do nothing, to a procedural, as the assassination is investigated. In the course of the investigation, the fascists who'd been attacking at the rally are examined in depth, and they're the very people that socialists are always trying to help: the downtrodden peasantry who can't afford the basic needs of life. The right wing bribes them, and they attack the leftists. It's not surprising, but it's very well done, and a good document of how one gets widespread populist parties founded solely on false consciousness.

Of course, as it develops, the really evil characters are high level political figures. The heroes are mostly apolitical- the prosecutor who does his job studiously and efficiently, the slightly dickish reporter who nonetheless uncovers vital facts, the key witness who is acting largely out of spite etc. The movie doesn't pull a Southparkian false equivalancy by making the leftists as horrid as the right wingers, but it also doesn't really focus on them; as it unrolls, it's a battle of wills between the honest officials who do their job well, and the bastard conspirators who created the situation. As such, it's not a call to revolution, but a call to honesty and goodwill- but one that doesn't excuse the corruption inherent to the system.

Zodiac

This is one of those movies where it's pretty obviously doing whatever it's doing very precisely- Fincher is apparently a director who is obsessed with getting things exactly as he intends them, and it comes across in pretty much every aspect of the movie. What's hard to get at is what it is that he's doing; most viewers know going into it that the Zodiac was never caught, and the recreations of the killings stop about a third of the way into the running time. After that, it's following the investigators, as they follow up lead after promising lead, and run into nothing.

I think that's what the movie is getting at, in the end; certainly someone did the crimes, but the link between investigation and guilt is tenuous, far more so than in most procedurals. It's not because the cops aren't competent- they're quick, imaginative, and dedicated- and it's not because people give up- the movie spans decades, and the main character sacrifices his family to his obsession with finding the truth. It settles on a killer, in the end, but of course there is no proof of his guilt, and it is mentioned in the post script that he was disqualified with DNA evidence. So what are you left with?

In a way, it's a deconstruction of the procedural genre: in most, people find clues, follow up on the clues, and the clues lead them somewhere. The road might be twisty, or they may never actually convict anybody, but you are confident that the tools achieve what they claim they will. In Zodiac, nothing proves anything: handwriting analysis is unscientific, since while the movie respects the underlying procedure, it points out that different experts have different conclusions, which is not the scientific method. The lone fingerprint is either relevant or irrelevant depending on which suspect one favors. The tensest moments come from investigations that lead nowhere, with the sudden realization that almost anyone fits the clues at hand. It's a procedural in which the procedures conflict, each station has its own clues and its own suspects, and nothing is really certain.

This could be presented in an unbearably irritating way- the cop movie as postmodernist shifting sands and decay- but it's not, really. It doesn't try to convince the viewer that there is no truth, just that the quest for it may be futile, unwinnable. The noble hero comes off as bordering on autism before he sets off on his journey, and his personality doesn't alter much. It's a movie about failing, and the quixotic refusal to accept failure is both laudable and tragic.

Inglourious Basterds

I haven't watched this one for a little while, but I am reading a book about fascism and its depiction in movies, and it brought up some points that seem to apply. The book decries a lot of movies on the subject for oversimplification- the Nazis are evil, and the victims good- and points out that fairly frequently, this is done doing symbolic shorthand that was used in propaganda by the Nazis themselves: they are depicted as effete, impure, sexually deviant, feminized, a lot of things along those lines. They become stock villians of the kind the Nazis used to depict Jews, and describe more about what the filmmaker considers ultimate evil than the actual question of fascism and what it represents.

Inglourious Basterds, whatever else is the case, does not indulge in these faults. The titular Basterds are horrifying- they're sadistic, they're torture happy and kill crazy, they classify Nazi as a strain to be snuffed out in a way that readily recalls the viewpoint of the Nazis themselves towards 'degenerates', and they seem to have no real moral viewpoint of their own. The Nazis often display heroic traits- loyalty, cleverness, honesty, whatever. They don't come off at all well, and the movie never forgets that they are Nazis, but for the most part, their behavior is no worse than that of the Basterds, and there is quite a specific point made to humanize at least one (the new father).

What's deeply unsettling about the movie, then, isn't its use of movie tropes to explode movie conventions (this happens repeatedly in both of the main plot strains) but the audience response: in my theater, at least, the audience ate up every minute of torture and cruelty towards the Nazi soldiers. The movie seems somewhat designed for this: it's structured as a series of unbearably tense scenes, with chaotic violence always lurking a second in the future, so that when the violence is presented as something controlled- and controlled by the protagonists- it's a relief, and the laughter is almost hysterical. It's almost entirely a series of ambushes and counter-ambushes, with the closest thing to a depiction of a fair fight ending up with nearly everyone in the room dead, so the audience snatches at the violence perpetrated by the charming, amusing, familiar Americans, even though what they are actually doing is repellent.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

The first really weird line in this movie is right in the beginning, in which a guy is being bound up in chains- someone yells 'but he's a freeman, and a landowner, you can't enslave him!' It's sort of appropriate for medieval morality, but you would hope that by 1938 people would find that strange: how heroic is it to fight for a society in which, by implication, you can go ahead and enslave anyone who doesn't own land?

The strange sense that there's been no reconsideration of 13th century (as seen through probably the 18th or 19th century) ethics throughout the movie, too- Robin is a noble in this one, and he claims someone being harassed by the villain knight as his serf to defend him, then threatens the knight to defend himself. Aside from a brief upbraiding of the king for placing any priority over defending England, there's no sense that going off on a Crusade isn't a pretty solid idea. The Merry Men fall all over themselves to show how Royalist they are. Robin gets an Earldom for a reward in the end. It's sort of repulsive, really.

It's still a fairly fun movie, mostly because Errol Flynn is such an entertaining, dashing actor, and there is some specific sense that Robin and co. do actually intend to defend the weak generally and not just the weak freemen specifically, and moreover that their primary motivation isn't so much social justice but a sort of IRA style nationalism in favor of the oppressed Saxons. It's also campy as hell- when Robin and Little John are fighting, Little John wearing bright yellow, red, and blue, Robin's pal whips out a lute. Claude Rains plays Prince John as a simperingly effete guy with no real sense of menace, although there's probably some gay bashing mixed up with the portrayal, and all the swashbuckling stunts still work. It's nonetheless a situation where I yearn for a bit of postmodern gray goo, because Robin is such a character so admirably suited for reinterpretation- his campaign of guerrilla warfare against the wealthy hangs on so well for a reason- and it's disappointing to see what specificity there is in this version remaining so reactionary.

In Macbeth, he knocks off the good king, gets deposed and the rightful, honest monarch takes his place. It's not monarchy that's the problem, it's Macbeth. When Kurosawa redid it, the previous king was a bastard, and the man who takes Macbeth's place is a bastard, and it feels like a much more honest view of the world. I didn't really hope that a 1938 historical adventure movie would be as bold as that, but it would be nice if it were recognized that, to an American, a king is and should be a ridiculous figure at best- the Bugs Bunny cartoon managed it.

The Red Shoes

I watched and liked, in fits and starts, the Tales of Hoffman- it's a pure opera, but the movie is an opera mixed with ballet, and it captured me with the same sort of spirit a music video sometimes does, the mixture of sound and motion becoming something new and fascinating. I had heard from a lot of people that the Red Shoes was the masterpiece that Hoffman was following up on, and... I was let down. It's not a bad movie at all, it just doesn't work as well for me as either Hoffman or Black Narcissus- I spent the whole movie waiting for the ballet sequence, sitting through the backstage shenanigans, and then the ballet itself seemed less unhinged and less cinematic than Hoffman. Towards the end, though, the power of the narrative began to come together, and the heroine's choice between art and life is a deep enough one that what came before it is almost retroactively interesting.

Immediately after finishing, I was considering whether it was an anti-feminist movie or not- I had thought it was a choice between submissive domesticity and the freedom of art, but from my brief description, Grace felt that it was essentially a story of a woman choosing which male will dominate her. In arguing the point, I came strongly to embrace the side that the satanic impressario figure was tempting her to dance, but that he was not in control of her when she made her decision, nor when she danced- he was tempting her to revel in her highest self, to forsake the world for art. The rather thinly defined love interest had nothing on that. Some of the external information backed that up, too- the screenwriter described it as a movie arguing that it was worth dying for art, which validates her decision.

The novelization, however, does not- written by Pressburger, it consistently vilifies the impressario, making him not merely a tempter but a controller, the man pulling the strings for all the dancers. The art the ballerina dies for is thus not hers, but a function of his greater art, a glorification of him. And her love interest too comes off badly, rejecting her angrily when she begs him to let her dance one more night, to save face in front of her friends. He is imperious, and her desire to throw herself to him is somewhat inexplicable. It goes from a sort of Faustian story of a woman who consciously chooses to throw away the trappings of mortality for the promise of the greatest art she can imagine to one of vacillating between a 'good' man- a proper man, one who will make a nice bourgeois household with her- and an evil one, who wants to use her for her body.

The fairy tale is worse. It's awful. A little girl is cursed for her 'pride', her desire to look nice and her feeling of independence, to dance until her feet bleed, until her adopted mother dies, and until she begs to have her feet cut off. Even then she is not sufficiently humbled, and her mocking feet dance before her, barring her way. She must become utterly the female gender role, utterly humbled, utterly subservient, before she is allowed any grace. And the sexual subtext of dancing makes the story even more repellent, implying that as punishment for desire, she must become a prostitute until she is castrated.

Nonetheless, I think the movie itself is not nearly so anti-feminist as all this would imply, by strength of the ballet and Moira Shearer's exultation in dancing it- the movie falls in love with her when she dances, and is bored by everything else, so eventually the movie defies its own message in the same way war movies often do- the audience doesn't give a damn for her love interest, nor for what the filmmakers claim to say (and I don't really believe they had any investment in what they were claiming to say either), it is the ballerina who is in charge when she dances, and nothing is worth taking her away from that.

Hard Boiled

On the commentary for this, the source they kept referring back to was a sort of Chinese opera, the Peking opera- it's a tradition I obviously know nothing about, but it's pretty easy to see the operatic origins for how Woo's style works, all enormous gestures and huge emotions expressed through actions that, except through the filter of the stylization, don't make a lot of sense. It's
strange, though, actually watching the movie, because you can't really place it for a while- it's got the sort of murky look of a lot of American movies from the seventies, and the pitch is somewhere between a kung fu movie and more Hollywood style action.

It's also sort of gut wrenching, for all that the gunfights are chaotic and spectacular (and difficult to follow) because it actually takes a fairly unwavering stance that human life is valuable, then allows the bad guys to mow down innocents by the dozen, and the heroes to accidentally kill other good guys in the crossfire. There is a lot of balletic but otherwise normal jumping around and machine gunning guys who you as an audience member are fine with being killed- bad guys- but there's also a sequence in which a hero guns down a dozen people from his own gang, without apparent cause, both protagonists shoot men point blank in the head when they are helpless, and helpless, crippled civilians are killed by the dozen in the hospital- not sadistically, not with any sense of them being tortured to psych the audience up for a big cathartic killing later, but just as part of the crossfire, because the bad guys don't really give a shit about them. The good guys do, but they're not torn up about it when they're killed.

I say the movie places value on human life, and I stand by that- although there are a lot of deaths that aren't reflected upon, and many of those that are are standard cop movie reflections, the totems of a dead fellow officer kind of things, there is never a sense of glee in a murder, never a feeling of delight in someone actually dying in an unusual way. The gunfights are performed as a dance of violence, but nobody is impaled, no quips are made, and there is never an argument put forth that anybody is 'scum' who deserves to die. Hard Boiled doesn't hold human life sacred, but it also doesn't yearn for anybody in particular to die: there is a standoff with the primary protagonist at the end in which he is killed, but the relief of his death is as much because he was an immediate threat as any idea of 'this guy has to die, I want to watch it'. It's still there, but it's not promoted particularly forcefully, and it's one person, not a class of humanity.

A lot of American action movies loop you in by threatening a child- the bad guys hold the hero's little girl hostage, and the hero has to get her back. Hard Boiled skirts the edge of this (certainly children, neonatal infants as it happens are threatened) but they aren't hostages- they're innocents caught in a bad situation- and there's no specific connection between them and the heroes. They're babies, and that's enough. It avoids entirely the uneasy sense of rape threat on which the American movies tend to turn, and overall is far less sexual in its violence.

It's possible that Hard Boiled is just as worrying as any other action movie, but it does avoid a lot of the specific things that worry me about American action movies, and especially the 80s action movies that immediately preface it. Given that Woo seems to have been folded entirely into the American system now, and had all the subtle elements of his directorial style sanded off, it's hard to see the underlying differences between his view of the world and the American one in his later work, but this one at least combines his talents- the beautiful set pieces, the broad and effective characters, the balletic movements- with a context that may or may not be his own, but which either way is refreshingly different from the relics that were his contemporaries.