Beautiful Fraud: Breathless (1983)

Original one-sheet poster.

It was always going to be a hard sell remaking Godard’s seminal cultural/cinematic landmine À bout de souffle (1960). For some reason, director Jim McBride and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson thought it would be a nifty idea to give it a try, with red-hot Richard Gere in the Belmondo role and French softcore actress Valérie Kaprisky replacing Jean Seberg.

No one could replace Godard and Truffaut, however; no one shove Belmondo or Seberg into the shadows. Gere was a huge box office star at that moment, having scored big the previous year in the not-too-shabby 1982 romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman. He smoldered Brando sex appeal and projected a cocky attitude that clicked with audiences, making him the perfect choice for the anti-social lead. But he was no Belmondo, the mush-faced international superstar that epitomized cool, effortless masculinity for his generation.

Kaprisky, a relative unknown, was a whole other matter. She’d done a few parts beforehand, most notably the skin flick Aphrodite (1982), but Kaprisky’s onscreen appeal had nothing to do with her acting. Her casting seemed more predicated on her casualness with onscreen nudity and sex scenes and the fact that she was French, whereas Seberg was notably American in the original movie. Honestly, the less said about Kaprisky’s performance the better. She’s the weak link in the whole thing, despite her and Gere’s onscreen sexual connection. Again, acting has nothing to do with it.

Breathless shouldn’t work as well as it does. But there’s something overwhelmingly seductive and slyly clever in its jumpy, coke-doomed remake hustle and cartoonish lovers-on-the-run refractions; an image within an image within the memory of a dying medium. Godard’s original was a reflection on and a dismantling of Hollywood genre clichés. It celebrated studio filmmaking while setting fire to the celluloid. Hollywood cinema reimagined by French film critics designed to overthrow established narrative that demanded total authority to plot, logic, character. There will be no God before Hollywood.

McBride’s and Carson’s attempt is no revolution. But it snaps and Gere is fun to watch in all his psychotic, narcissistic self-love. Shifty, sleazy, and aggressively charming in that bullying, predatory way that defined a lot of pop culture male iconography of the late 20th century, Gere exudes a manic malice. He pretty much abandoned that persona by the time Pretty Woman jolted his career into a new phase, tempering the impulsiveness for a more content, reliable, reassuring sex appeal.

Obsessed with the Silver Surfer, rockabilly, and sex, amoral Jesse (Gere) speeds all day and night pining for the next thrill. Nothing satisfies, however, like what architect student Monica (Kaprisky) does to him. Jesse flees Las Vegas in a stolen Porsche, accidentally kills a cop, and returns to Los Angeles (where he’s not wanted) to hunt down his newest prey. Monica clearly sees him as unstable, but if it wasn’t for cinematic lust over logic we’d never have movies, so she joins him in his downward spiral. The trick is enjoying the rush without going down with him. Seberg found her way out before Belmondo hit detonate. Kaprisky genuinely looks confused in all of her non-sex scenes, so McBride and Carson figure things out for her.

The ending is great shape-shifting the original, and Gere’s final decisive move is heroically deranged. A suicidal act mirroring all of the countless cinematic losers and psychotic anti-heroes that have fueled the adolescent fever dreams of teenage boys since movies began, since sex began, since the world began.

No wonder Tarantino loves this movie so much. Dig it.

Very METAL: Notes On the Blind Dead Series

Poster for Tombs of the Blind Dead.

The cat and I have been on a Blind Dead kick the last two nights. These Spanish horror movies from the 1970s, directed by Amando De Ossorio, are deep favorites of mine, and though the quality varies wildly through the four, I love them. A long time ago, I wrote in-depth about the series for the journal Bare Bones. You can check out a copy here.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series, these are low budget horror movies filmed mostly in Portugal and they’re brilliantly moody and terrifying in moments. In order to savor the exquisite atmosphere, however, you have to accept horrible acting, languid pacing, and laughably bad character/plot illogic. If you can’t deal with that, move on. These aren’t made for you.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) is the first and arguably the best (more about that below). Two old friends, Betty and Virginia, reunite by the pool one day. They decide to take a train trip for a weekend holiday, and Virginia’s boyfriend Roger tags along. Before you can say choo-choo, Virginia gets mad at Betty over Roger and hops off the train. She finds a deserted castle and beds down there, like you do. Unbeknownst to her, she is in the realm of the fabled Blind Dead, living dead Templar Knight warriors! They feast on the blood of the living to remain rotting in eternal torment! Or something like that. They’re not exactly zombies and not exactly vampires. They’re the Blind Dead. And they seek out their prey by sound. Accept no substitutions. Virginia gets killed. Betty and Roger try to finish their holiday, but it’s difficult. Eventually they go back to the crypt with a couple of other people and try to get themselves killed. The Blind Dead ride! And kill. The ending of this one is expertly and chillingly done. Nightmare fuel as the Blind Dead massacre an entire train and infect the world at large. Great stuff.

Return of the Evil Dead (1973) is the second entry and it’s neck-and-neck the best alongside the first one. It’s hard for me to choose. I like the first one, but it lags in spots. This one is more action packed, as the Blind Dead attack an entire village celebrating their 500th anniversary. There are several excellent scenes—the Templars surrounding the village square and butchering all the festival goers; a little girl trapped in a doorway while the Blind Dead shuffle closer—and the ending is superb. This one overall moves faster and is just brilliant, though again, you have to put up with dodgy performances and some ridiculous moments. But not as much as the first one.

The Ghost Galleon (1974) focuses on two models that get stranded on a ghost ship and the idiots who go to rescue them. It’s turgid and De Ossorio’s budget is non-existent. There is one spectacularly cool death scene when the Blind Dead kills off one of the models, and the ending is a shocker. But for the most part this is dull and embarrassingly chintzy. The scenes of the ghost galleon itself are obviously terrible shots of a model ship in an aquarium or something. So bad.

Night of the Seagulls (1975) gets things right for the final entry in the series. Returning to land, De Ossorio gives us a backstory of how the Templar Knights ruled this certain coastal village, and we get some cool Lovecraftian “Shadows Over Innsmouth” stuff thrown in. A doctor and his wife come to a small provincial village to live. The locals are suspicious because the couple is from the city and them Portuguese rednecks just don’t understand things like medicine and fancy shit. They also don’t appreciate being patronized and told not to SACRIFICE THEIR VIRGINAL GIRLS TO THE UNHOLY BLIND DEAD! The nerve of those city slickers to stop them! This is a fine last movie and De Ossorio is crazy about the day-for-night shots. He also never saw a zoom he didn’t love. I’m cool with that.

All hail the Blind Dead! Deep cut favorites for the more intrepid horror movie fan.

Video box art for Night of the Seagulls.

I’m Not Like You: Cat People (1982)

Poster for Cat People (1982).

I love Paul Schrader’s Cat People. Released in spring 1982 at the start of what would become a landmark summer for fantastical cinema, Schrader’s version is based on the classic Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur original from 1942, though they’re two very different beasts. Both are highly stylized affairs; both eroticized to the max for their different eras, though Schrader’s version can make things explicit whereas Tourneur and Lewton could only hint at the dark undercurrents motivating the characters.

I love both of them for different reasons and think Schrader’s vision is hypnotic. I saw it first at 13 and fell in love with star Nastassja Kinski, fell spellbound in love with the visuals, fell hard for Giorgio Morodor’s coked-up Euro synth rhythms. That great Bowie title track! What’s not to love? Annette O’Toole is lovely and I wish they’d done more with her character, and John Heard adds real thespian weight to his role. Malcolm McDowell, who plays Kinski’s amorous brother, oozes barely masked hostility and danger. His entire screen presence screams inappropriateness the moment we’re first introduced to him in the airport.

Cat People is damn cool. It’s hard to believe that a major studio, Universal Pictures, was behind this. It’s basically a big budget art film disguised as summer entertainment, with outré sex scenes involving incest, bondage, and dark obsession. Seriously, that’s damn cool. Love every frame. Script by Alan Ormsby (Deranged; Deathdream). Pretty sure this is the only Schrader movie he didn’t write, though his imprint is all over the script.

Director Paul Schrader and actress Nastassja Kinski.

Come Back Ten Years Ago

Publicity still from Devil’s Doorway.

Recently I watched two Westerns by two of my favorite filmmakers—Devil’s Doorway (1950), directed by Anthony Mann and Rancho Notorious (1952), directed by Fritz Lang.

Mann is one of those directors that flourished during the classic studio era, cranking out solid movies in a variety of different genres, including film noir, Westerns, historical epics, and war movies. Anthony Mann was the shit, as the kids say. In 1950, the year that Devil’s Doorway was released, he had three other pictures come out, all of them excellent. Mann’s work is visually dynamic, he knows how to block a scene that is cinematic but not in a showy way (unless he wants to really dazzle you), and his stories are usually action-packed, psychologically complex, and violent. The violence in Mann’s work is always startling and shocking, particularly in his crime movies. Border Incident (1949) and T-Men (1947) are real nasty pieces of work.

Devil’s Doorway stars Robert Taylor as a decorated, ex-Union Calvary soldier, Lance Poole, returning home after the Civil War, happy to just settle down and work his family’s cattle ranch. But Lance is an Indian and the West is changing. More white settlers are taking over the countryside and they don’t exactly like the idea of a redskin having more than them, they don’t like that a subhuman Indian is now a rich cattle rancher while they struggle. Verne Coolan (Louis Calhern), a skeevy lawyer new to the territory, mounts a campaign to strip Lance and other Indians of their rights by any means necessary. Lance at first tries to resist their aggression by following the white man’s law. He hires his own lawyer, Orrie Masters (Paula Raymond), to fight back legally. But Lance quickly finds out that the new laws of the frontier aren’t for him. The federal government destroyed Lance’s world, stole his land, robbed him of his culture, and now wants to crush his spirit forever. But that’s not going to happen without a fight.

Taylor, usually a wooden actor, here delivers a nuanced performance, one simultaneously dignified and bruised with anger and resentment. Devil’s Doorway came at a time when Hollywood was starting to represent Native Americans with more sympathy. Broken Arrow (1950), starring Jimmy Stewart, came out before Mann’s movie and got all the publicity and critical accolades for being the first Hollywood production to criticize the way Native Americans were treated, but Devil’s Doorway is by far the better picture. It’s a complex study of a man torn between two cultures and it’s a visually striking experience, as well as an emotional one. Cinematography by the great John Alton.

I love Fritz Lang. For me, he’s my Hitchcock and I sometimes wonder what Lang’s career would’ve been like if he’d had some huge successes like Hitchcock once immigrating stateside. Both men displayed misanthropic tendencies, were perverse, and displayed a wicked sadism… and that’s just onscreen.

Publicity still from Rancho Notorious.

Rancho Notorious (1952), a rollicking overripe Western, stars Arthur Kennedy as a man out for revenge, Mel Ferrer as a dashing gunslinger gone good, and Marlene Dietrich as a rode-hard-and-wet ex-saloon singer turned successful ranch owner. Specifically, she harbors outlaws on her spread Chuckaluck.

The beginning of the movie thrusts us into the artificiality of Lang’s universe with a song, a corny ditty singing of “hate, murder, and revenge.” Lang doesn’t waste any time setting the tone of the movie. Cowboy Vern (Kennedy) sweet talks his fiancé Beth (Gloria Henry), who works at the town store. But things sour after Vern leaves and two outlaws show up and rob the store. Although it’s not shown, it’s clearly hinted that one of the robbers, Kinch (Lloyd Gough), rapes her before shooting her. Vern is consumed by rage, bent on avenging his lost love. He eventually winds up at the oddly named Chucklaluck ranch, where the sultry Altar Keane (Dietrich) gives all the rapists, murderers, and thieves, a place to hang out and rest in their downtime. Her number one guy, Frenchy Fairmont (Ferrer), brings Vern back to the ranch to stay. Vern has gone undercover in his hunt and Frenchy isn’t a very good read of people. Unbeknownst to Frenchy, he’s brought to the ranch everyone’s undoing.

This is one of Lang’s best Hollywood productions—a campy fever dream of sexual tension, jealousy, and soul-cleansing violence. Rancho Notorious is not your average 1950s Western. It’s mostly stage bound and clearly has a limited budget. Howard Hughes, then head of RKO, slashed the budget for the movie and forced Lang to use studio sets. Lang also butted heads with star Dietrich. Nevertheless, despite all of the behind-the-scenes drama, Rancho Notorious is great stuff and sustains its mesmerizing tension. By the time everything explodes during the finale, you’re spent and exhausted.

I usually like Arthur Kennedy, but he seems miscast here. He just can’t get hip to being undercover as an outlaw. He looks and acts straight, continually needling the other outlaws with questions that he’s repeatedly been warned not to do! Also, when he immediately focuses on a big, loud-mouthed outlaw (who brags about his love of rape) named Wilson (George Reeves), Vern hilariously can’t keep cool. Vern is a square and is seconds away from a cold grave.

Somehow, regardless of ridiculous, jarring moments like that, Lang makes it all work. He pulls it together and makes one of the finest Westerns of that year. Essential stuff.

Invitation to the Blues: L’Enfer

Emmanuelle Béart in Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer.

Hotelier Paul (François Cluzet) and his vivacious young wife Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) have the perfect life: their lakeside hotel is bustling, their marriage is solid, and they’re still deeply in love. But this being a Claude Chabrol movie, unease and rot fester beneath the bourgeoise respectability. Men are highly attracted to Nelly. She’s flirtatious, funny, smart, and beautiful. She may be having an affair with a brutish auto mechanic (Marc Lavoine), though Paul has no clear evidence. At first, Nelly is flattered by her husband’s jealousy. She playfully teases Paul about it and the added sexual tension heats up their relationship for a while. Paul’s suspicions, however, grow deeper and more irrational and soon his marriage is full-blown abusive. Paul’s life is pure Hell, and it’s all his own doing. Or is it?

In Chabrol’s world, it’s not that everyone is guilty, it’s that no one is exactly what they seem. And everyone rationalizes their reasons for transgressing the moral order. At first, Paul–confident and successful–would never suspect his wife of desiring another man. He’s that smug. But his self-confidence breaks down when he keeps finding the mechanic and his wife together, particularly when he discovers them secluded in a dark room looking at slides and later when he spies on them nestled along the banks of a lake, exhausted after a day of waterskiing. Or are they exhausted from something else? Both scenes are uncomfortably funny because Paul’s paranoia seems legitimate. Of course she’s cheating on him and she’s not even trying to hide it! Paul has become the classic cuckold.

Those scenes, however, especially the one at the lake when a terrifyingly distraught Paul catches them in the act, take on new layers when we realize that Paul may in fact be mentally ill. His paranoia a symptom of a greater illness. Nelly remarkably stays with Paul, promising to never see the mechanic again, and devotes herself one-hundred percent to their marriage and relationship. But not even her love and faithfulness can cure Paul of his dark thoughts. The seeds of jealousy long ago sprouted and his mind overtaken by their thorny vines. It may be too late for a new start.

After Paul brutally beats Nelly and breaks her will, there is no disguising his madness. He is a violent, dangerous man and Nelly’s fate grows ever-more bleak.

L’Enfer is based on a script by director Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Ferry, and José-André Lacour. Clouzot attempted to realize this story for an ill-fated movie in 1964 that he partially filmed and abandoned after a number of technical and personal problems. The movie, starring Serge Reggiani as the hotelier and Romy Schneider as his young wife, was to be Clouzot’s magnum opus and the French director was given an unlimited budget by Columbia Pictures to realize his dream work. What exists of Clouzot’s vision was repurposed for a fascinating 2009 documentary by Serge Bromberg that obsessively chronicles Clouzot’s misguided feature and attempts to reimagine what could have been.

Test Footage of Romy Schneider from Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno.

Jealousy and sexual obsession have long been perfect themes for cinema since the silent era. F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is a masterwork on the theme and a favorite of mine. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a fever-dream of sound and vision and emotional violence that is barely contained in its slick, studio-era Hollywood shell. But for me, Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980) is my personal favorite movie on the subject. Forty years after its infamous release, Roeg’s exhilarating bad trip into a dysfunctional romantic relationship, bipolar disorder, jealousy, unbalanced power dynamics, and sexual obsession is unrivaled. Bad Timing still feels transgressive and dangerous.

L’Enfer likewise drips with pain and violence, but Chabrol’s directorial coldness, his sense of irony and emotional detachment, keeps us at a distance from Paul’s mania. Chabrol is much too polite, too reserved to plunge us deeply into the delirium of sex and violence. But L’Enfer is nevertheless a cruel work, one that surreptitiously sinks its teeth into us. Before we know it, before we can patch the wound, we’re bleeding out.