1970s Conspiracy Films: The Parallax View

Filmed during a time when it still seemed like America's best and brightest could, at any moment, wind up dead from an assassin's bullet, The Parallax View is a thriller that asks just where all those assassins might be coming from. A lot of people get assassinated in this movie, to an extent that nearly borders on absurd. Just about every major character, and many minor ones, end up assassinated, often for unknown reasons.

But The Parallax View isn't a movie that's concerned about whether its plot makes a whole lot of sense. What's important here is the idea that society is being systematically manipulated by shadowy forces behind the scenes, and shadowy forces have a way of making plot holes just disappear. Fortunately, this is a very well made film, so if the story seems to be missing a few components, everything else is firing on all cylinders. Warren Beatty stars as a shaggy-haired, small fry reporter who discovers a trace of the conspiracy and decides to see just how much of it he can unravel. Beatty has a great screen presence, but the real star here is genius cinematographer Gordon Willis, working in a 2:35 widescreen format that looks fantastic. Between thrilling long shots where actors are dwarfed by their surroundings and close-ups where big blocks of colour threaten to push them from the frame, Willis creates a world where everyone is on the verge of drowning or being swallowed up by the oppressive space around them. This is a film that truly benefits from being up on the big screen.

As a whole, the film feels a bit disjointed, drawn out some times and rushed at others, but its individual sequences are little masterpieces. Structurally it kind of weirdly reminds me of the rock opera "concept albums" from the same era, complete with a prologue and a reprise, and great individual parts that don't quite gel together into a coherent way.

There's the short and smartly edited opening sequence on Seattle's Space Needle, the gleefully offbeat action romp in a Northwest country town, the taunt, the sublimely Hitchcock suspense of the airplane scene, and the operatic final showdown, but what stands out the most is an unsuspected piece of avant garde cinema spliced into the middle of the film.

Beatty's character, having successfully infiltrated an organisation that trains assassins, is taken into a darkened theatre and shown a film intended to brainwash him. It's a propaganda created like Soviet montage but with a distinctly Americana flavour, and it completely fills the screen, as we watch it along with Beatty's reporter. Images and words flash on the screen that are initially comforting, but become more threatening and confusing as they are repeated faster in different sequences. It's a powerful example of just how easily people, and that includes the audience watching The Parallax View, can be manipulated by the media, especially film.

The montage is constructed to make the viewer believe that the world has descended into chaos and that only the viewer can set things right again by becoming a hero, as symbolised by the repeated image of Marvel Comics' Thor. It's interesting that this is also the journey that most feature films take us on, as well. How often after watching a great adventure movie where the protagonist triumphs, do we leave the theatre feeling like we too can take on the world?

The Parallax View subverts this to some extent, although it doesn't go as far as it might have. After all, Beatty's character is a lone hero who believes that he's the only one who can rescue the world from encroaching chaos, even before he views the propaganda film. He acts above the law and solves problems through violence. He's scrappy and nearly unbeatable as a James Bond character, and the audience is meant to identify with him. He plays the same part as Thor does during the propaganda montage, and the film's downbeat ending doesn't really defray that effect.

What the montage scene does do is alert the audience to the fact that they are being manipulated, even after that scene is over. It may be the ultimate paranoia film, in that it asks "Is society being controlled by unseen forces?" and then answers "Yes, and you are being controlled just by watching this movie."

1970s Conspiracy Films: Night Moves

The first thing we see in Night Moves, the scene that plays under the opening credits, is private detective Harry Moseby, played by Gene Hackman, receiving a telephone message about a case involving a missing girl. The audience immediately knows what kind of movie they’re going to be watching, who the protagonist is, and what he’s going to try and do.

Except, it doesn’t really all work out that way. In most detective movies the gumshoe is the least intriguing character, but in Mosley’s case the audience is brought to ponder his past history, his psychology and his motives just as much as Moseby ponders those involved in the cases he investigates. Unlike Sam Spade, being a detective isn’t what he is, it’s what he does… or at least tries to do.

The thing is that Mosley isn’t a very great detective. The second big way that Night Moves subverts the detective genre is that people only start dying after he’s solved his case, and the harder he tries to solve the murders, the more of them there are.

Mosley is never shown to make truly ignorant mistakes or blunders; he’s no real intellectual, but he isn’t portrayed as a lummox either. When he can’t solve the mystery at the end of the film, in spite of great determination, and even courage, the film leaves us with a sinking feeling of confusion and despair, and more questions than answers.

Night Moves feels very much like a product of the mid-seventies, from Moseby’s moustache to his wife’s crocheted blouses, from long scenes involving reel-to-reel answering machines to the ruminations on the deaths of the Kennedys, and especially to the feeling that the “free love” ideals of the ‘60s have turned to decay. I felt like audiences in 1975 would have felt an intimate connection with this movie, and its weary cynicism still has bite today.

There are bits that have not aged well, though. This movie includes The Most Seventies Scene Ever, in which Gene Hackman is lying in bed with his wife, caressing her gratuitously bare breasts with his foot as he eats cheese fondue out of a little home fondue pot. I am not making that up. The soundtrack is made up almost exclusively of watery synths, and it is very, very bad.

In the closing moments, however, I had a glimpse of what Night Moves might have been life if the sound cues were chosen by Martin Scorsese. Someone’s cell phone went off behind me, the only time in movie history when a cell phone has improved a movie, and the ring tone was Bob Marley’s version of All Across the Watchtower. As Mosley helplessly watches a man drown, a man he trusted until this very moment, and as he sees all the meaning he had built up around this case washed violently away, I thought the song fit the film and the tenor of the times it was conveying perfectly.

“There’s too much confusion here, and I can’t get no relief.”

Imagining Interiors: Black Sunday

When shown in American cinemas, the 1960 Italian horror film Las Maschera del Demonio, ran with a disclaimer that the film would shock audience like no other and should not be seen by children under twelve. This was after three minutes of gore had been edited out of the film, and some of the satanic references had been removed, including the translated title “The Mask of Satan.” The film was released as Black Sunday.

In the following half a century, Black Sunday has lost some of its power to shock, so I tried to imagine watching it through the eyes of my eleven-year old self, perhaps having caught it on TV late at night. There are images here, of witches being tortured, people burning alive, corpses rising from the earth and maggots crawling around in the eye socket of a formerly beautiful women, that would have made for feverish talk on the playground the next day at school. All the talk of Satan would have certainly deeply unsettled me as a child and kept me awake for reasons I would have been unable to explain.

Watching this movie about a week after Eraserhead I couldn’t help but compare the two films. Both of them derive their power from strange, disturbing images that relate to each other more like in a dream than in a story bound by logic. Black Sunday has most of the trappings of a traditional narrative film, but none of it really holds together in the clear light of day. It throws around potent images and symbols too quickly for the audience to really be able to make sense of it all, but the feeling you’re left with, provided you can turn off your 21^st century brain, is dread rather than confusion. Like in Eraserhead, there are enough things here that connect subconsciously and emotionally that “making sense” doesn’t seem to matter.

Black Sunday boasts some great, grisly special effects and inspired production design, though perhaps its biggest visual treat is the face of Barbara Steele, which is at once alluring and somehow unnerving, beautiful but slightly askew. She is instantly recognizable, which makes a few plot points more plausible and also made for some awesome movie posters.

Steele gives quite a good performance as well, a bit schlocky perhaps, but well beyond what most of the other actors deliver. Of course, the fact that everyone’s voice has been obviously overdubbed, mostly with anachronistic American accents, doesn’t do the film a lot of favors. Ultimately, there are too many places where the seams of this movie shows, from a few dodgy makeup and costuming jobs, to obviously rubber effects, to a score that distracts more than it connects.

The cumulative effect is too many reminders that you’re watching a film, and one that was probably made with not enough time or enough money, which is one of the reasons that Black Sunday isn’t as immersive as Eraserhead.

Few films hit as hard as Eraserhead, though, and Black Sunday still has plenty of creepy scenes of horror that can’t easily be forgotten … especially for those under twelve.

Imagining Interiors: Kontroll

Instead of the scheduled Australian film The Well, which was unavailable tonight, we were treated to Kontroll, a Hungarian film made by American-born Nimrod Antal in 2003. After gaining acclaim with this film Antal has gone on to have a career in Hollywood, most recently directing Predators for Robert Rodriguez. I am glad I didn’t know that going into this movie, though, and was able to watch it with an open mind.

The film takes place entirely in the Budapest subway system and initially follows a group of misfit ticket collectors as they try to perform their jobs with some semblance of dignity in the seediest part of the subway line where train patrons are more likely to physically threaten them, offer them the services of a prostitute or play deaf rather than simply show their rail pass. Filming in the actual subway, Antal makes this world feel real and alive, and does an excellent job setting up his main actors as a band of likeable losers who try to do their best in spite of a hostile environment and their own limitations. If the passengers themselves weren’t bad enough, there’s also an unseen murderer lurking somewhere in the bowels of the subway system who has developed a habit of pushing complete strangers in front of moving trains.

After the first twenty minutes I was impressed with this movie, which I thought had created the perfect set-up: our small group of weary and unwitting workers would cross paths with this murderer, and the results would be disastrous, but in the end we would learn just what these misfits were made of.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the movie that Antal decided to make. Instead, as the movie goes on most of the crew of losers drop to the background as he focuses on their most adept member, a mysterious loner named Bulcsú who dropped out of a “normal” society and now sleeps in the subway like a homeless person because … well, we never really find out. Eventually the movie turns into long stretches of watching Bulcsú sort of wander around the subway with no clear goal or motivation.

It’s still stylishly done, but the promise of the first half hour is badly squandered as the movie becomes more psychological and symbolic without really giving us a reason to care about Bulcsú or his psychology.

In the end the murderer subplot does resurface for a showdown with Bulcsú which is well staged and shows off the skills Antal would eventually get hired for in Hollywood, but ultimately has no real dramatic weight.

To be charitable to the last half of the film, I would assume that Antal, who was working from his own script, intended for his movie to have some of the dreamlike qualities that Eraserhead does, where the literal meaning takes backseat to whatever symbolic meaning the audience takes from the film. But Eraserhead works because it is a tightly controlled film, and Kontroll feels a bit like Atal threw in everything he could get to stick. The result is an interesting film that ultimately feels like a wasted opportunity to make something truly terrific. But I suppose it got the director a job!

Imagining Interiors: Eraserhead

All the films that I’ve seen at Adelaide Cinematheque have benefited from being shown on the big screen, but none more than Eraserhead. David Lynch’s debut feature is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen, and as seen in a theatre as it was intended it simply envelopes the audience, drawing us into a bizarre, terrifying and hilarious shared dream.

Eraserhead is a wholly unique film -- the special effects are unlike anything else seen on film and likewise the sound design truly sensational. The movie full of strange and disturbing images and sounds that are deployed with precision, never used only just to shock or disgust the audience, but to draw us deeper into the film.

Lynch has wisely refrained from explaining what the movie is supposed to be about, except to say that it does have a specific meaning to him and that no reviewer has ever gotten it right.

To me Eraserhead seemed like an expedition into a young man’s fears and anxieties about childbirth, reproduction and parenting. The first truly unsettling thing we see in the movie is a horde of puppies nursing on their mother, creating a sickening sound that disturbs long before its source is revealed, and the images of fertility, birth and parasitism don’t stop for the rest of the movie.

The strange baby that our protagonist suddenly finds himself having to take care of is an ugly, alien-looking thing that he never asked for, but which still manages to take over his entire life.

I wasn’t surprised to learn after watching Eraserhead that David Lynch had indeed been a young father and was forced to marry his girlfriend when she got pregnant. All of this transpired while he was living in Philadelphia and he has called Eraserhead his “Philadelphia Story.”

I’ve read a lot of theories about what this movie is supposed to be about, which is actually quite a lot of fun, but I think the meaning is not that far from the surface. To me it seems clear that this movie is a nightmare about trying to raise a child that you never wanted in the first place.

Marylin Monroe: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

There aren’t many cinematic confections more fluffy or sugary than Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as American showgirls on a cruise ship bound for Paris. Monroe plays Lorelei who is beautiful, ditzy and unrepentant about using her looks to persuade wealthy gentlemen to part with their riches. Russell is the more street smart and down-to-earth Dorothy who couldn’t care less about money and would prefer to find love, although she doesn’t have a lot of time for love with all the effort it takes to keep Lorelei out of trouble.

Monroe arguably plays the more interesting character, and certainly the one that the film revolves around, but I thought Russell was the real star of the film, adding a mischievous sparkle to all her scenes and making the whole production just look like a darn lot of fun.

The film’s signature song, “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” is more remembered for Monroe’s performance, but Russell has the last word when she reprises the number in a platinum blond wing while imitating Lorelei in a raucous courtroom scene. It succeeds as a brilliant send-up as well as a great performance in its own right.

From beginning to end, this isn’t a movie that takes itself seriously, but Lorelei’s cynical scheming lends it a sardonic edge. Her point, that wealth outlasts beauty, is hard to argue with, and in the end she emerges victorious, through little effort of her own. But Russell gives a performance that tempers what could have been a crassly materialistic message by suggesting that a sense of fun can trump both beauty and wealth.

Marylin Monroe: Clash by Night

The legendary Fritz Lang directed screen goddesses Barbara Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe in the 1952 film Clash by Night, and the result unfortunately does not add up to the sum of its pedigreed parts.

The film starts off strongly, with documentary shots gulls, seals and fishermen off the coast of Monterey, California. The sequence is edited so that we are introduced to mechanical workings of the local industry and how the film’s characters fit in with it. Amongst shots of dripping loads of fish being unloaded at the docks, we see Marilyn Monroe rolling out of bed in a tiny apartment to simply pull on a pair of jeans and head to her job in the cannery. It’s the best and most memorable scene in the film, despite lasting only a few seconds. The whole sequence emphasizes the way the community is built around industry and recalls scenes from Lang’s earlier masterpiece Metropolis.

But once Lang gets around to tackling the film’s story, it feels like none of the material really engages him as a filmmaker. It’s obvious that the script was based off of a Broadway play from the way the scenes are staged to the actors’ mostly melodramatic performances. There are some entertaining moments, especially from the supporting cast, but for the most part the film tends to plod ponderously along without much really happening.

This film gets classified on wikipedia as a “drama with some film noir aspects,” but there’s simply not enough noir here to make it interesting. Stanwyck’s character is fond of glumly declaring how she’s damaged and will bring no good to anyone, although we never really find out what happened to make her so morose. I suppose she’s something of a femme fatal, seeing how the men she attracts inevitably end up worse off than they started, but Stanwyck hardly exudes sex appeal in this role and it’s hard to see just what attracts these men to her in the first place. Perhaps their little fishing village is bereft of eligible women? Whatever the case, she makes for one of the dullest femme fatales in cinema.

I suspect it’s Lang’s association with film noir that is responsible for the movie being painted with that brush, and it’s interesting to note that there are multiple mentions of children being lost or kidnapped throughout the film, almost like an echo of Lang’s classic film M. The fact that these disappearances have no bearing on the story or plot of the film only makes them more unsettling. They contribute to a feeling of dread that sort of percolates under the whole movie without ever coming to a boil.

I spent most of the film waiting for something, anything exciting to happen, but the eventual betrayal feels small, petty and, worst of all, anticlimactic considering the long-simmering build up. Even then the plot never really kicks into high gear, and as a result I felt like this film was something of a missed opportunity.