Brief Thoughts: Harold and Maude (1971), Kill List (2011), Thelma & Louise (1991)

Harold and Maude (1971) Dir. Hal Ashby
Starring: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles

A great, strange, idiosyncratic little movie. It seems as if a lot of its quirky odd-couple whimsy and deadpan cynicism has found its way into modern indie films - everything from Wes Anderson to less enjoyable (Zooey Deschanel comes to mind) versions. Its influence seems to be largely underrated. Watching Bud Cort's wide-eyed Harold zoom around in his hearse or continually fake his own gruesome death, one could easily respond with exasperation - we've seen all this quirkiness done before, in a try-hard, glossy way. It's difficult to remind yourself that Harold and Maude was the original, genuine article, and its bizarre love story is all the more charming for it. I think Hal Ashby truly sought to make a movie dedicated to the weirdos and eccentrics, a celebration of those with an utter disregard for social convention. The Cat Stevens soundtrack, the almost-predictable-but-not-quite ending, the unassuming and unsentimental depiction of melancholy, romance, and tragedy, all make the film poignant and disconcerting over thirty years on.

Kill List (2011) Dir. Ben Wheatley
Starring: Neil Maskell, Harry Simpson, MyAnna Buring

I initially watched Kill List at the cinema, and just recently have watched it a second time at home. It centers around two friends who live apparently regular lives, except for their highly mysterious jobs - as contract killers. It remains one of the stand-out films from last year, for sure, though I can't help but to feel the shocks come less keenly after seeing them once before. The shocks aren't gimmicky, certainly - it has moments of real terror, and the whole film zips along with an unnerving sense of dread and discomfort. The many domestic scenes in the film are wonderfully naturalistic, painfully tense, and unexpectedly funny, but are punctuated with moments of increasingly dreadful violence and gore - heads, hands, and kneecaps bursting. The film is Hydra-like in its sensibility; naturally lit and acted, but supernaturally inclined; surreal, and yet so disturbingly placed in a sense of immediacy and reality that 'surreal' is never quite the correct word. Although I disagree with critics who claimed the last 5 minutes of the movie ruined it, I do think it seems a considerably weaker and more derivative ending than it did upon the first viewing. Strangely, it still sort of works, maybe as homage. I've never seen a movie which mixes style and genre quite in the way it manages, and it is a wonderfully dark, bizarre film.

Thelma & Louise (1991) Dir. Ridley Scott
Starring: Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Harvey Keitel


I can't believe I hadn't seen this before, and I really enjoyed it in spite of it being a bit flawed. It's an awful shame that Scott tacks on the ending with a swell of 'cry here' music and a flashback to better times, because the movie really didn't need it - the screenplay is wonderfully well-written and Geena Davis and Sarandon have as much on-screen chemistry as Hepburn and Tracy. Davis' prettily dimpled smiles and innocence give way to a much braver, harder evolution, and she is well played-off by the older Sarandon's cynical waitress, a thin slash of red on her lips and a stern, almost motherly tone to her voice. Their adventures are a testament to that rare filmic thing, a realistic female friendship and camaraderie that runs deeper than their reliance on men. The string of movies about male camaraderie is miles long. The Butch Cassidy and Easy Rider generation, with their intent on escaping stifling respectable lives and searching for real freedom, were revolutionary in one respect, but women were completely sidelined in this vision. Thelma and Louise reject domesticity, dead-end jobs, unfulfilling husbands and boyfriends, a nowhere town they're stuck in. They get to ogle the male body, to carry guns, to drive around with an arrogance previously reserved only for men; but they also get to talk about rape frankly, to be hysterical occasionally, to be fully drawn-out women as well as being figures of rebellion. That it took, more or less, until 1991 for a movie like this to come out - one where we watch women talk, form friendships, and kill for each other to the extent that men are allowed to onscreen - speaks volumes. Thelma & Louise portrays the great majority of the men in the film as foolish and arrogant - a conflated caricature of masculinity in the same way that for a century of cinema, caricatures of man-obsessed, decorative femininity have dominated the screen. For all its moments of mainstream pandering or sentimentality, it is so well-acted and full of such warmth, has so many moments of 'right on' feminism, of turning the classic male road movie on its head, I can't help but to have a huge soft spot for it.

Books on Film

I've been reading some fascinating books about cinema, and my university library is so full of them I never know where to start. So I thought I'd point some out that were of interest to me particularly, and that I'm at some stage of reading at the moment:

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies by Molly Haskell

Haskell's ambitious critical study of the different 'types' of women throughout Hollywood's history - the vamp, the virgin, the wholesome good girl and the busty sex goddess - highlights the patriarchal attempt to place women in submissive roles in the movies. Haskell covers Hollywood from the 1920's to the 1970's, discussing the star personas of Lillian Gish, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day, and so on. By doing so, she fascinatingly uncovers our national tendencies toward sexual repression and our attempt to dominate women's sexuality and free choice by organising, controlling, subjugating, or shaming it. A great Feminist handbook for American film studies.


Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970's American Cinema by Derek Nystrom

Derek Nystrom has come up with a brilliant thesis about a common theme in 70s Hollywood, one that seems terribly obvious yet has remained relatively undiscussed; the figure of the working-class white male. From the possible homoeroticism of Saturday Night Fever to the potential danger of the 'redneck' in films like The Deliverance, Nystrom deals with the undergirding theme of the social and political upheaval of the 70's - class. It is one that American myth has sought largely to ignore, but is brought to the fore in many films of this period, with the interplay of working-class masculinity against a more middle-class milieu, feminism, homosexuality, and war. It's easy to digest and has an interestingly fresh perspective on films that have been written about again & again.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

Looking for Mr. Goodbar, (1977) Dir. Richard Brooks
Starring: Diane Keaton, Tuesday Weld, Richard Gere, Tom Berenger


Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a film you really do want to like; there's some amount of weighty expectation to it - it was never released on DVD and as such is quite difficult to get hold of, but I've been constantly hearing about how it was one of the early, key texts of New Hollywood. It may be a minor film, but it starred a very young Richard Gere, an equally youthful Tom Berenger, and Diane Keaton fresh off the success of The Godfather. I was always baffled as to why it wasn't more available.

The trouble is, the Diane Keaton character, Terry, is rather likeable. Throughout the film, she has a chilled-out, increasingly free-spirited attitude towards sex and drugs, a prickly inability to go for a 'safe' man, and a mattress-on-the-floor bohemian sensibility, boldly inviting Richard Gere home with her. Even as Brooks beats us over the head with Theresa's 'daddy issues', combined with her cliched 'rebellion' from her strict Catholic family, she feels sympathetic. Brooks poses her character as dangerously sleazy and promiscuous; her nymphomania is attributed completely to her family problems. Yet she seems coolly above it all, in many ways - until the end of the film,I did not feel that the narrative had served to judge her. It is easy to vicariously enjoy her lifestyle - particularly her flagrant disregard for the social values which have for so long defined not only what is right for women to do, but what it is safe for them to do. Essentially, when she is not a rather compassionate schoolteacher, she prowls seedy disco clubs at the nighttime for casual encounters.

It seems strange, and perhaps telling, for me to say that as a woman watching this film over 30 years after its release, there was still something pleasurable about watching Keaton swagger around, for all intensive purposes, like a man. (Though her hysterical laughter at the sight of a condom seems rather more alien, to say that not long after 1977 she certainly wouldn't have been laughing.) But of course - of course - there are consequences. There always must be consequences for this kind of behaviour - reasons and motivations, too, but most definitely consequences. A woman must never exist in the dangerous margin of sexuality where neither slapdash Freudian analytics explain her nor some sort of cautionary punishment await her.

The ending came as such a shock, then, that I found myself angrily trying to work out how I hadn't seen it coming all along. The gut-twisting, seedy ending serves as reactionary, homophobic, and sexist. At its heart, Looking for Mr. Goodbar has a deeply moral conservative stance. One might argue that it was based on a true story, and that in crime-ridden 70's New York, a wildly promiscuous young woman might easily have fallen into the wrong arms. While that may be true, Goodbar presents a stereotypical world - when women join the sexual revolution, dubiously following the steps of men, they must suffer the gravest of consequences.