The Last Great American Hero: Richard C Sarafian's Vanishing Point

In the changing film landscape of post-1968 America, the youth road movie was still deeply intertwined with the exploitation market. Low-budget B-movies like The Wild Angels (1961) and Motorpsycho (1965) employed sensationalist imagery of drugs, violence, and nudity to capture the zeitgeist. In spite of the mainstream commercial success of Dennis Hopper’s more peaceful Easy Rider in 1969, many films (including the aforementioned) were accused of shallow ‘of the moment’ posturing. As such, plenty of critics responded with what amounted to a shrug at the seemingly superficial premise of 1971 cult classic Vanishing Point.

The plot revolves around hopped-up speed freak and ex-cop Kowalski, who wagers a bet that he can ‘deliver’ the white Dodge Challenger he’s driving from Denver to San Francisco in a little over 36 hours. Vanishing Point, a 106-minute chase movie with little to no motivation for any aspect of the chase, remains the poster child for fashionable alienation. All Kowalski is guilty of is driving too fast — with no pressing reason to reach San Francisco bar a meaningless bet, he has no motivation to send the cops on a three-state wild goose chase in pursuit of him. Yet he keeps driving, feverishly, suicidally, around hairpin turns in the West’s vast deserts, maneuvering around police roadblocks and helicopters while red dust flies, and encountering an eccentric mix of hitchhikers, druggies, Native Americans and evangelicals on his journey.

Through Sarafian’s unusual use of cross-cutting and flashback sequences, Vanishing Point often dislocates temporal and spatial orientation through the very act of driving. This disorientation underscores Kowalski’s sleepless amphetamine-fuelled mindset, heightening the sense of isolation already present. The driver’s very field of vision is cinematic, defined by the items that move into his limited focus. In true road movie tradition, Sarafian plays homage to the iconography of rural America — the tarmac road and the enormous blue skies that surround it, its ‘hick’ towns and gas stations Yet, the apparent symbolism of the open road is stymied by the intolerant forces of law and order that Kowalski defies.

Through the film’s interruption of narrative expectation (it reveals its conclusion in the opening sequence), Kowalski does not become a traditional outlaw in the mould of Bonnie & Clyde (1967) or The Wild One (1953). Instead, his unexplained impulse to escape is almost manic; he is a man on an existential quest, eaten up by a mysterious past and speeding eternally. As scholar Thomas Elsaesser points out, movies like Vanishing Point‘reflect the moral and emotional gestures of a defeated generation’, with their frequent portrayals of youthful martyrdom at the hands of ‘good old boys’ or figures of authority. The film ironically reveals the dead-end ambitions of the 60s youth movement, while nevertheless championing the ‘blaze of glory’ defiance of its antihero.

                                                          Read the rest at Kubrick on the Guillotine

Review: Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel 
Dir. Wes Anderson

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton

After Wes Anderson's charming 2012 film, Moonrise Kingdom, he continues his preoccupation with childhood nostalgia and dollhouse mise-en-scene with Grand Budapest Hotel. It is the century-spanning tale of an eloquently foul-mouthed concierge, Gustav H. (Ralph Fiennes) and his loyal lobby boy, Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori).

From first sight of the luxurious Grand Budapest, ('an enchanting old ruin', we are told,) Anderson has underlined the artificiality of his set; he reveals cut-out, coloured-in backgrounds as if in a Ladurée-themed storybook. Jude Law's voice-over even peppers its narrative with 'he said' and 'she said' around the actors' lines.

The film is laid out in a triptych structure, set in three different eras with the through line of various characters at the hotel. In the 1930's, 60's, and 80's, we learn of M. Gustav and Zero's run-in with a malevolent family. When a final will & testament leaves a priceless painting to Gustav, the film unfolds into a lavish, comic chase story. The triple structure is instrument both temporally and spatially; Anderson not only volleys between three eras, but follows the same story-within-a-story visual framework. The action is forever framed by prosceniums, arches, doorways, and other structures which make the audience self-aware of its positioning - as, of course, an audience.

 The star-studded cast and setting of the film cannot help but to bring to mind the 1932 MGM classic, Grand Hotel  -- a section begins in the very same year. Adrian Brody is a dashing black-clad villain, like some ominous uncle from a Gothic novel; Jeff Goldblum a tenacious attorney, Willem Dafoe a Nazi-lite bodyguard, Harvey Keitel a prison-tattooed jailbird. The sheer pleasure and eccentricity of these cameos - alongside Anderson's instinct for a perfectly-timed comedic cut - make the film an unpredictable joy to behold.

The film carries a nostalgia for the grand, eccentric lives of the super-wealthy that once peopled European hotels at the turn of the century. One cannot help but to be reminded of another story of summering cultural elite in the interwar years; Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Although the hotel's 'golden age' initially appears to be in the early 1930's, it is soon apparent that even M. Gustav's reign is at a period of early decline. Such hotels in the Swiss alps and the South of France had once been alive with the decadence of exiled aristocrats and corrupt civil servants, heiresses and alcoholic novelists. Thus, even the golden age depicted is not the most gilded. It is soon to be tipped into the nightmare of war and forever changed.

Such a sense gives Grand Budapest Hotel its tone of wistful reverie. The ornate style that we come to expect from Anderson - his precise framing techniques, snap zooms, and mobile camera - are combined here with an emotional punch and sweet humour. These elements raise the film above mere dollhouse confectionary to to a surprisingly affecting, romantic work.




  Now Showing at Cineworld Nottingham 

Screen Women: Luchino Visconti's Ossessione + Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice

 A director simultaneously blessed with the ability for painterly, decadent production design, salt-of-the-earth documentary realism, and rigorous formalism, Marxist aristocrat Luchino Visconti remains a unique figure in Italian cinema. Visconti’s directorial debut Ossessione (1943) is frequently described as one of the earliest neorealist films, but is also an unofficial adaptation of James M. Cain’s crime novel — an adaptation that would later become The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Originally banned by the Fascists for its portrayal of an extramarital affair and murder, the story centres around a handsome young drifter, Gino (Massimo Girotti). Gino wanders into a bar run by old man Bragana, much older husband to Giovanna (Clara Calamai). Gino and Giovanna begin an affair, eventually plotting to murder her husband before making an attempt to live out their guilt-stained lives. Although many neorealist directors (Rossellini, to name one) got their start at Cinecitta under Mussolini, the deeply anti-Catholic and anti-family values of Ossessione proved to be too outrageous to ignore.

I would contend that the film is not just socially subversive but sexually too; Visconti, who was openly homosexual, upends cinematic representations of gender relations, particularly in relation to the noir genre. He casts a scopophilic eye on his male lead — a choice which redirects the blame that is often cast on the archetype of the seductive female. The love triangle is fleshed out past one-dimensional class stereotypes; the cuckolded husband, while a bourgeois bore, is also warm and fatherly at times, with a beautiful singing voice. Giovanna is torn between genuine love and bourgeois comfort, but isn’t the grasping, conniving femme fatale we’ve come to associate with the genre.  As both a committed Communist and a nostalgic aristocrat,  Visconti portrays the couple as trying to live between two worlds. They have flouted all traditional morality, but remain shackled to their worldly goods; a tension that simply cannot be.  His inclinations toward political and sexual subversion are all the more apparent when compared to Tay Garnett’s production code-era adaptation of the novel, backed by Hollywood’s least subversive studio, MGM.

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Book Review: Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood & The Second World War

                   Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War 
                   By Mark Harris 

Set out chronologically from 1939 to 1946, Mark Harris' sweepingly ambitious book charts the shockwaves that the Second World War sent through Hollywood, and the lives and careers of five of its most prominent directors. They were cushioned by government bureaucracy on all sides, with the American government uncertain or unable to agree on how best to employ its most talented filmmakers in the art of propaganda. The men (Frank Capra, John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, and William Wyler) were loosed to all four corners of the globe in search of newsreel footage for hungry American audiences, eager to see the most recent news from the front.

The story follows John Ford as he captured the Battle of Midway, George Stevens' horrifying newsreel footage of the camps at Dachau, Frank Capra's 'Why We Fight' series, and William Wyler's story of the heroic pilots of B-17 bomber Memphis Belle. John Huston also shot much valuable newsreel footage, alongside training material and documentaries. One of the most memorable is arguably Let There Be Light, featuring veterans housed in a special facility for serious post-traumatic stress disorder.  The searing footage was censored until the 1980's, like much of Ford and Huston's footage of the carnage at Normandy.

The sheer scope of research involved with Harris' undertaking shines through, revealing anecdotal details and sometimes discrepancies which mark the characteristic self-inflation or myth-making of each director - particularly Huston, who had a flair for retelling stories with increasing distance from reality. Harris leaves no stone unturned, organising a vast amount of information from archival war papers and personal letters into a thoroughly digestible, entertaining narrative of Hollywood's war years.

 The brief, fervent anti-Nazism of Hollywood coincided with its alignment to our Soviet allies - a position banished from American mindsets and cinema screens forever once the war had ended and anti-Communism reigned supreme. It's enlightening to see the burgeoning political factions at work in 1939, when a group of isolationists held Senate investigations into Hollywood for producing pro-war propaganda. The Nye Committee charged Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack Warner particularly, but the studio heads and their lawyers were much too wily and articulate for the committee, who were essentially laughed out of Hollywood. With the backstory sketched in, it is fascinating to think of how these various factions would coalesce into the paranoid postwar landscape. The American government is shown to be both wary of Hollywood's massive popular influence and hoping to harness it, and one cannot help but to think of the influence of the war in relation to the Paramount Decree, which saw the government dismantling of vertical integration in 1948.

George Stevens' story was of particular fascination for me, and the book offers great insight into how the war in many ways both established him and permanently darkened his worldview. After witnessing Nazi atrocities, he decided never to make a comedy again. When the war ended, he was left at something of a loose end, while the more established directors, like Wyler and Ford, drew on their experiences to make The Best Years of Our Lives and They Were Expendable, respectively.  Of course, Stevens went from strength to strength in the 50's, with output like A Place in the Sun and Shane. Harris also proves insightful on the complexity of a man like Frank Capra, whose reactionary and conflicting political views often interfered with the cohesiveness of his work. After the war, which Capra mostly spent in Washington, he made what many consider to be his enduring masterpiece, It's a Wonderful Life. It was to be the last noteworthy mark in the director's career, which petered out with astounding speed in postwar America.

Five Came Back not only reveals the irrevocable changes war would bring to these directors and their work, but the greater power struggles and political maneuvering of the Hollywood studio system. Both as a historical document and a detailed look into the motivations and experiences of these men, the book is essential reading.