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Review: Swing Time

review | Swing Time

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The plot & characters are mainly just annoying distractions but with Fred & Ginger dancing at the peak of their form, does that really matter?

by Michael Gaughn
December 5, 2022

It might sound like a contradiction to say that the best Astaire/Rogers film is filled with scenes so contrived and hokey you’ll find yourself averting your eyes half the time. It’s hard to believe this movie was made by the same guy who did A Place in the Sun. But it’s a symptom of the evolution of film grammar I talked about in my Darling Clementine review that, up until 1939, movies tended to sputter because the fundamentals hadn’t yet clicked into place.

But then there’s the dancing—which of course you expect in an Astaire/Rogers movie, but for some reason the routines in Swing Time are at a whole other level from their other films, maybe because the numbers don’t just act in parallel with the plot but almost supplant it completely. That’s not to say there’s nothing to keep your attention during the dialogue scenes—Astaire does an unusually good job of holding his own and Helen Broderick is masterful at doing her bits while winking at the camera at the same time—the trick Groucho Marx did so well, and that a handful of performers used to lean on in the early days of sound in order to keep their creative dignity until the movies caught up with the sophistication of their delivery and gave them better material to work with.

And you can always admire the production design while you wait for the next dance number to kick in. RKO had the streamlined look of late Art Deco down so cold it felt like they’d actually come up with the style and were just exporting it to the rest of the world. That pared-down take on Deco was so stylized and so much of the moment it was destined to have a relatively brief lifespan but was both elegant and brash at its peak, which coincided with the creation of this film.

Somewhat in line with the above, Swing Time features the smaller-group, tighter, more rhythmically-driven, more infectious jazz style of the late ‘20s and 1930s, which would soon be drowned out by the lusher, brassier, swinging-for-the-fences sound of the MGM musicals. The leaner, more energetic approach here fits well with the relatively constrained sets and bits of business and creates an appropriate intimacy that enhances the dance routines. Yes, the more modest orchestrations, sets, and scope of action were partly a necessary reflection of budget, like the not-an-inch-bigger-than-they-need-to-be sets of Casablanca, but in both films doing more with less keeps you appropriately closer to the characters and their interactions.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve got anything to add to the vast existing commentary on Astaire and Rogers. But it is worth pointing out how extraordinary their numbers are here for anyone who’s never seen them dance or hasn’t come across Swing Time before. There’s something about this movie’s pervasive creakiness that makes the dancing seem even more exhilarating than usual. Anyone who can watch them break into “Pick Yourself Up” and not feel an unbidden thrill should just go back to watching the deadening sadism of contemporary action films.

That number, shot within the simple confines of a dance-school studio, begins with a deceptively casual stroll that quickly becomes both exuberantly kinetic and epic, making two people dancing far more compelling than any melodramatic scenery-chewing or special-effects set piece could ever be. Similarly the “Never Gonna Dance” number near the end, performed in the justly famous Silver Sandal nightclub set, takes the dross of the plot and transmutes into something sublime. Astaire and Rogers somehow create a whole other realm of existence where they express their emotions not just through dance but also through a kind of mime that for some reason doesn’t feel contrived but instead a natural extension of both their dance and what they’d more lamely been trying to convey through dialogue. By so intensely focusing their emotions, the result makes their limited characters infinitely deeper, more moving and human and real.

And now, unfortunately, I need to talk for a moment about blackface—not that I really want to but the current cultural myopia with its mania to slap labels on virtually everything while showing zero tolerance for context makes it a necessity. That any intelligent human would ever take a pass on this movie because of a warning like that is unfathomable and makes me wonder how much lower we can go with smugly sneering at the past.

Yes, Astaire uses black makeup as part of his tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, but you need to put the first part of that sentence into context, because this is very much a heartfelt tribute on Astaire’s part and Robinson very much deserved to be honored—not just for his dancing but his efforts, as the most prominent black performer of the first half of the 20th century, to counter racial stereotypes. Anybody who, having bought into the whole “blackface bad—censorship good” mindset, misses the chance to experience this number also misses the chance to experience an important piece of history, reinforcing our vast and deepening cultural ignorance instead. And they’d of course be missing out on a virtuoso dance by Astaire with its groundbreaking cinematic framing—and there’s really no excuse for that. It’s more than worth it to claw back all the cultural howling and experience this movie and that number on their own terms, free of the fetid reek of political reeducation.

The HD transfer is good enough for something from 1936 and not likely to seriously get in the way of your experience of the film. There’s a grittiness to the presentation that could be removed with some judicious cleanup—the key word being “judicious.” It would take someone with a keen eye, a deft touch, a dedication to staying true to what was originally shot, and a respect for the inherent look of film to avoid turning Swing Time into a visual travesty. Here’s hoping somebody sensitive and astute enough decides to take that on sometime soon.

There’s not much to be said about the sound of a movie this old but I was surprised by how well the orchestra was recorded, by how there was decent separation between the instruments and how accurate a sense it conveys of the size of the ensemble, with its chamber-size string section. Avoiding the temptation to make the orchestra sound bigger than it was went a long way toward maintaining the film’s sense of intimacy.

I apologize if my comments made it sound like I’m only half-heartedly recommending this film. The distorting pressure of marketing hype aside, there really are only a handful of movies that rise above the vast and rapidly expanding slough that is American film. Swing Time is far from perfect—but perfection is a fool’s goal and what it gets right it gets right in a way that all but erases its flaws and leaves most other movies in its dust.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The HD transfer on Prime is good enough for something from 1936 and not likely to seriously get in the way of enjoying the film, but it exhibits a grittiness could be removed with some judicious cleanup

SOUND | The sound is well recorded for a movie this old, with decent separation between the instruments in the orchestra and accurately conveying the size of the ensemble

Reviews: Seconds

review | Seconds

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A arch portrait in alienation, this 1966 John Frankenheimer shocker might be more important for who it influenced than for what it is

by Michael Gaughn
November 20, 2022

It’s not really a horror movie but it’s got some pretty good jolts along the way. Not really science fiction, it would be meaningless without its sci-fi trappings. A portrait of suburban disenchantment and angst à la Updike and Heller, it doesn’t go far enough down that road to fully qualify. “Psychological thriller” probably comes closest but calling it that shortchanges everything else. John Frankenheimer’s Seconds is undeniably something but it’s virtually impossible to put your finger on exactly what. Probably the most appropriate description would be “mid-‘60s Gothic,” but what does that mean?

What’s undeniable—although Frankenheimer might not have been aware of it and likely never saw the film—is that it’s the spiritual twin of Carnival of Souls, one of those detached portraits of utter alienation that started popping up beginning in the mid 1950s. Souls’ Mary Henry and Seconds’ Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson indisputably share the face of the same troubled coin—and that also makes it a descendant of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the film that first raised the cry that there was something deeply rotten at the heart of Mid Century culture.

It’s also undeniable—although again likely a more unconscious than conscious influence—that Seconds springs directly from Hawthorne, not just because of its rarified/stylized world and use of typification that borders on allegory but also because it adopts the kind of sci-fi framework Hawthorne developed in stories like “The Birth-mark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and, most pertinent here, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”

And that kinship also points toward the fundamental problem with Seconds—while it does feel very much like a Hawthorne short story, it needed to be at least a novella to work. The neat pattern of introducing a character into an artificial microcosm, giving them a too easily achieved path to bliss only to have them realize to their horror that they’ve actually been led down to Hell, and then wrapping it up with a twist, is just too linear and one-note to sustain a feature film.

The film—I really can’t attribute this directly to Frankenheimer because there’s no way to know if he was aware of it—compensates for all that by becoming an exercise in style, one that leans heavily on European art movies, introducing Antonioni-like longueurs to at least put up the front of a serious film, and to pad out its run time. And in all that—and many other ways—it’s a progenitor of Lynch. It’s impossible to watch the Saul Bass credit sequence (one of his best—which is saying a lot) and not think of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, or Blue Velvet. And everything from the stylized compositions, lighting, and camera moves to the callow ambiguity, meaningless pauses and elisions, and overall archness of the exercise, feels very much like Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr, or Fire Walk With Me.

It also feels very much like Rosemary’s Baby, with the scene where the Reborns subdue Rock Hudson’s Wilson when he gets out of line very much like the seniors subduing Mia Farrow for her Satan rape. And it’s also very much like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, with the central figure robbed of his identity by a bureaucratic/technocratic corporate society that promises paradise but only delivers the carrot of endless tantalizing diversion while perpetually poised to bring down the stick.

And that goes to the heart of why I’m bothering to write up a film that’s got so many flaws—because it represents a point of intersection for far too many important things in the culture to ignore. No, it doesn’t get many of the fundamentals right but it’s such a tantalizing slice of the zeitgeist, channeling so many powerful currents, anticipating what was about to boil over and what wouldn’t come to the surface for at least another 20 years, that it’s impossible to look away. On a more base level, it is creepy as all get-out, and it’s well worth taking the ride at least once. Just don’t expect it to do much for you the second time around.

Frankenheimer tried his damnedest to be a first-rank director but his stuff just won’t stick. The Manchurian Candidate is the closest he got to making a great film but it wears too much of its anxiety on its sleeve and is too unnuanced, too dead-certain in its paranoia to have the requisite resonance and heft. Everything that feeds Seconds is valid and needs to be expressed but Frankenheimer just wasn’t deft or deep enough to translate it.

The biggest problem is that he doesn’t really care two craps about his main character or his dilemma and seems to treat him with a kind of contempt. The result is that it feels like Frankenheimer is just as cold-blooded as the entrepreneurs and minions who engineer Hamilton’s rebirth and demise, so it’s all kind of like watching a jaded medical-school professor do a lecture-hall dissection of a cadaver.

But it’s not like master cinematographer James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) wasn’t eager to try to deliver on anything Frankenheimer might have asked from him. Howe, through the framing and camera moves and documentary-ish, high-contrast, sometimes blownout look, all of which was about four decades ahead of its time, sets a tone and a mood that would have been mesmerizing for the duration if Frankenheimer had had a better grasp of his material.

The same goes for composer Jerry Goldsmith, who delivers a truly accomplished and innovative score (up there with the one he turned around on a dime for Chinatown) that at times references ‘20s and ‘30s horror while somehow avoiding slipping into kitsch, and evokes fin de siècle Viennese chamber music without slipping into pretension, lending the film a lot of depth it would have otherwise lacked.

And I’m actually going to say some nice things about Rock Hudson, whose career, very much like Marilyn’s, stemmed from being game to be whatever the public wanted to project onto him without pushing back by trying to express anything authentically intrinsic to him. In other words, he was fine with—or at least reconciled to—being nothing but a big, empty hunk. The result was that he never looked entirely comfortable on camera and never felt entirely right in any of his roles. He had to have been aware of all that because he seems to channel it here to portray someone who not only just doesn’t belong but, like Mary Henry, just doesn’t exist.

The HD transfer available through Amazon Prime is good—remarkably good. While the print isn’t pristine—there are some damaged frames and occasional circles for reel changes—there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. It’s crisp, tonally consistent, and faithful enough to the original film.

Noble failure? Flat-out failure? For some reason, going there just doesn’t fit. Seconds is undeniably an experience, an experiment that clearly didn’t succeed but also didn’t utterly fail. Crucial to blazing a fruitful and prodigious trail, it isn’t just some bizarro curiosity. The problem—and I wish there was some way I could be a little more precise about this—is that there just doesn’t seem to be enough there there.

PICTURE | The print used for the HD transfer on Prime isn’t pristine but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it, being crisp, tonally consistent, and faithful enough to the original film.

Review: Play It Again, Sam

review | Play It Again, Sam

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This film version of Woody Allen’s Broadway play showed he had a range behind his cartoony early films, laying the groundwork for his more sophisticated later work

by Michael Gaughn
November 16, 2022

This is a decidedly minor movie made in the somewhat frivolous style director Herbert Ross (The Goodbye Girl, Footloose) was known for, and all involved had to have known they were devoting their energies to what was basically a throwaway. But Play It Again, Sam is still well worth watching 50 years on, partly because the lines still deliver but mainly because it was the incubator or springboard (pick your metaphor) for everything that would be great about Woody Allen’s later work.

In 1972, Allen was in the middle of making the “early, funny” films that would build his initial movie audience. Take the Money and Run and Bananas preceded Sam; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Sleeper, and Love and Death would follow. The problem is, those first directorial efforts are almost unwatchable today—for a couple of reasons. Allen was still an apprentice, a little obviously learning on the job and with no real ability with actors. Also, conceptually, the films tended to be extensions of his S.J. Perelman-inspired essays for The New Yorker, and—especially when looked back on now—was the kind of material that played better on the page than on the screen. But if he hadn’t paid his dues, he would have never matured into a master filmmaker.

Allen originally wrote Play It Again, Sam as a play, which he performed on Broadway for more than a year with Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts. In it lie the seeds for everything that would blossom in mid-period masterworks like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories, and would define the best of his later films. He already had vast experience as a TV sketch writer but Sam forced him to focus on creating believable characters who could sustain scenes and ultimately a play. Probably more importantly, it showed he had an uncanny ear for dialogue that feels convincingly natural yet is full of an appropriately theatrical energy, verve, and wit. Allen tends to downplay his abilities, but this alone shows his genius—a talent that’s never been adequately acknowledged because he makes it look so effortless and is done so well that the technique itself is almost invisible.

I suspect Allen could have never arrived at the breakthrough of Annie Hall if he’d only made movies and never done a play. The need to make sure Sam would land with a live audience—a live Broadway audience—meant everything had to be perfectly honed by opening night since he wouldn’t have the luxury of fixing anything in post. (Most of his early films essentially had to be saved in the editing.) Nothing could be too glib or jokey, and the whole couldn’t play as a disjointed series of big laughs. Just as he learned how to be a filmmaker on the job and in public, the same with his education as playwright and stage actor. The theater forced him to finetune his writing and performance to a degree he’d never had to do with film.

More importantly, it showed him he didn’t need to rely on silly non sequiturs to entertain an audience, that there were people eager to watch other people sit around a New York apartment hashing out their neuroses—as long as there were a few fantasy sequences tossed in. Which is the formula for the best Allen films in a nutshell. No other filmmaker has ever made it more inherently interesting to just listen to people talk to each other for 90 minutes at a pop.

It’s hard not to watch Play It Again, Sam and wish the Allen of five years later had directed it instead of Ross—but that would have been pointless because in Annie Hall, Allen took what was best about Sam to a far higher level. Fearing the movie version would feel stagebound, Ross made the mistake many directors do of building out the action way too much. And why the hell did they set it in San Francisco when everything about the characters and dialogue screams New York—especially the NYC references that are oddly retained from the play? The ‘70s were the absolute nadir of the film score, and here you have to suffer through an execrable effort by Billy Goldenberg.

But it’s not too hard to look around all that while watching the film and imagine it as it must have played on the stage and how it would have gone if Allen had made the movie instead of Ross. The scenes from the play, when they’re not arbitrarily chopped up for the film, still work beautifully, and this is the first movie where Allen isn’t just trying to be a funny character but a credible urbanite who’s both a victim of and wry commentator on his circumstances.

The HD presentation on Amazon Prime is pretty faithful to the film’s look, which Owen Roizman (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Network) shot in that archetypal early-‘70s style he pretty much defined. But it seems flatter than it should—even for a style that was defined by its limited color palette. As A Clockwork Orange showed, it’s especially important to keep transfers of ’70s movies faithful to what was originally filmed so they don’t look drearier than they already are.

One of the pleasures of the movie over the stage version of Play It Again, Sam is its famous—and, for some people, notorious—opening with footage from the final scene of Casablanca. The footage they cut into Sam wasn’t in great shape but it feels a lot more like watching that movie than the recent digitized-to-death 4K HDR release.

PICTURE | The HD presentation on Prime is pretty faithful to the film’s look but seems flatter than it should—even for an early ’70s movie with a limited color palette

Review: My Darling Clementine

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Often eclipsed by the more iconic Stagecoach and The Searchers, this lower-key approach to the western proves to be John Ford’s most satisfying take on the genre

by Michael Gaughn
November 14, 2022

I’m always wary of “best of” lists because they’re near always just a way to coerce a consensus, usually for institutional or marketing purposes, and rarely have much to do with the actual quality of whatever’s listed. But it’s hard to understand the importance of My Darling Clementine without going there, even if just a little. My favorite John Ford film, I would place Clementine just slightly above Young Mr. Lincoln and Fort Apache, partly because of its deceptively loose, almost documentary style and episodic structure, which have helped keep it limber and relevant. While I admire Stagecoach and The Searchers, I just don’t have the unalloyed affection for them that I have for those other three.

I would also humbly suggest that Clementine is the best western ever made—exactly because it isn’t epic and mythic but intimate and, that dread word, poetic. Anything shot in Monument Valley is inevitably going to have an epic feel, and there are moments when Ford gives the Academy-ratio frame the grandeur of widescreen. But he never lingers there for the sake of effect, instead devoting almost all his attention to developing his core group of characters, making sure they’re never eclipsed by the setting and that nothing allegorical or mythic distorts their human scale.

He also keeps the film rooted in history, having it revolve around the actual town of Tombstone and the actual figures of the Earps, Clantons, and Doc Holliday, being careful to keep all the elements in proportion. Is it accurate? Not really—or not much at all. But rather than stay pedantically true to the facts, it stays true to the feel of the facts. This isn’t how history actually was but how we want it and need it to be.

Maybe the biggest reason for the film’s strength and durability, its glue, is its grounding in process. Ford doesn’t underline it but Clementine’s not just armature but foundation lies in its portrayal of Tombstone’s evolution from frontier outpost to something resembling a civilized town and of how Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday both effect and are affected by that maturation, which makes the film much richer than if the town had just been used as a backdrop.

The most startling thing about Clementine, though, might be its look, which is often stark and gritty with naturalistic light but filled with grace notes and, especially in nighttime shots, both exteriors and interiors, venturing into chiaroscuro. I suspect this was partly inspired by the documentaries Ford had been making for the government during the wartime years leading up to the filming, and that he deployed that style here to, again, keep things immediate, rooted in the characters, and seemingly real.

I was struck this time around by just how fluid film grammar had become by 1946 and by how the ‘40s represented its crestline. Every movie pre 1939, no matter how well done otherwise, feels a little awkward, hesitant, because the language was still forming, only to click suddenly and a little miraculously into place right at the end of that decade. The most confident expressions of American film followed, 10 years during which the core genres were forged and the execution of movies, for all its contrivance, felt effortless, with the results speaking with both power and grace, economically and, often, with surprising subtlety. Everything since has been a reaction to, a mostly futile rebellion against, what was established then.

You can even see this in the lighting—something seemingly secondary but actually core since it subliminally has a huge impact on how we experience a film as a whole. The technique had become so refined by the mid ‘40s that no moment in Clementine feels tainted by what we would usually think of us as the high-key Studio Era style. That doesn’t mean its look isn’t inherently theatrical, and there are times when Ford ventures surprisingly close to Expressionism, but it never draws attention to itself in a negative way—which makes it all the more curious that the next few decades—well into the ‘80s—would be defined by a much flatter technique often populated by numerous, blatantly artificial shadows.

Clementine adopts a variety of visual styles, but it shows the maturity of both film grammar and of Ford as a director that their use and juxtaposition are never jarring. Large sections of the film feel like he was back working with Greg Toland, with significant swaths of deep black, faces in shadow, and low muslin ceilings. But then there are those starker passages with their documentary immediacy, which Ford never tries to make feel vérité, instead carefully using composition and light—especially the consistently dramatic western skies—to style his tale.

Joe MacDonald’s mostly undistinguished résumé keeps him from being considered a top-rank cinematographer but he did have his moments, shooting Samuel Fuller’s classic noir Pickup on South Street and probably the two best color noirs, Fuller’s House of Bamboo and Henry Hathaway’s almost Sirkian Niagara. He also did outstanding work on Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life and probably the best Frank Tashlin film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? What he and Ford came up with for Clementine feels almost experimental, so fresh and responsive that you won’t encounter anything similar until more than a decade later with the emergence of the Nouvelle Vague.

Ford even extends that approach to the music. There are only a handful of cues and the ones that are there are just brief accents, not the usual wall-to-wall wash. Most effectively, there’s no score during the big dramatic scenes when almost any other filmmaker would be amassing great gobs of turgid Late Romantic noodling, relying on sheer musical tonnage to prop up their material. Fonda’s horseback pursuit of the stagecoach is just accompanied by the sound of charging hoofs, and the big shootout at the O.K. Corral is just isolated gunfire, spare dialogue, some whinnying from the corral, a passing stagecoach, and the wind.

This is probably Henry Fonda’s best performance, angular and laconic, of course, but making each line, look, movement, and gesture ring true—except in the somewhat discordant coda, which feels like a studio-mandated reshoot. It’s hard to believe a film this good could have Victor Mature near the top of the bill, and it’s a huge testament to Ford’s abilities that Mature’s presence doesn’t sink the whole thing. Linda Darnell specialized in playing what were once known as loose women, and she really works her patented trashiness here, but Ford even finds ways to draw expression from that laboriously manufactured erotic heat. (To Darnell’s credit, she pulls off Rex Harrison’s elegant, befuddled wife in Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours beautifully.) Walter Brennan, usually typecast as the cantankerous but lovable sidekick, is disturbingly strong as Clementine’s villain, his sadism all the more unsettling because Ford bases it in a believable devotion to his sons.

So, to sum up, you’ve got a western that’s likely the best in the genre primarily because it doesn’t use epic sweep, mythic iconography, or fussy pedantry to distance you from the action but instead creates a compelling you-are-there effect with disarming moments of grace. Its technique is still fresh and engaging because its nut has never been cracked. And the characters are finely and distinctly drawn while still feeling like organic members of a burgeoning community. (I just realized I could be describing a Robert Altman film, but this is 1946, not 1976, and Altman was too much of a cynic to ever lend his characters the warmth and rough charm and unexpected but apt layers Ford used to bestow on big and small alike like a benediction.)

CLEMENTINE ON PRIME
I realize that, watching Clementine in its current form, you have to take a decent amount—but hopefully not too much—of what I wrote in the main text on faith. The transfer available in HD on Amazon Prime is, like so many older films, a bit of a visual mess, with some sequences sharp and with the proper tonal gradation and others great blotchy blobs of black and white. (One brief shot of a stagecoach racing through the desert is so blurry, contrasty, and stuttering it looks like badly damaged 8mm film.) I can only make assumptions here, but it would be hard to believe most of this was present in the movie as originally released and is likely a product of having to cobble together the transfer out of disparate elements, some of dubious quality.

That said, I also have to wonder if Clementine isn’t suffering a bit of the neglect that comes with manufactured consensus. Because The Searchers is big, widescreen, and Technicolor, unabashedly mythic and not afraid to beat its chest—and conspicuously, although mostly dubiously, influential—it’s been doted on in ways My Darling Clementine never has. True, Searchers is the more recent film (though by only 10 years), but it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to think more can be done to steer Clementine back in the direction of the movie John Ford and Joe MacDonald created. (The recent 4K HDR releases of Casablanca and The Godfather show the downside of being iconic, so thoroughly scrubbed they no longer look much like film. Clementine even in its current state is the better experience because at least it still feels, from beginning to end, like a movie.)

Lastly, there’s something strange going on with the sound, with the music and effects track often mixed way higher than the dialogue. In the quiet scene where Henry Fonda delivers a monologue at the graveside of his younger brother, he’s almost completely drowned out by some strumming on a solo acoustic guitar. I don’t remember that being a problem with previous releases.

—M.G.

Review: Hail the Conquering Hero

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This Preston Sturges comedy would be one of the very best American films if Sturges hadn’t decided to pull his punches at the end

by Michael Gaughn
November 7, 2022

We’re back in smalltown America again with Eddie Bracken and William Demarest and the action again revolves around World War II, but beyond that Hail the Conquering Hero bears little resemblance to The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek from just earlier that same year. Preston Sturges was on a roll and Morgan’s Creek had been one of the biggest films of 1944, but he was never one for formula and Conquering Hero is dark and almost brooding in exactly all the places where Morgan’s Creek was silly and light.

Sturges pretty much broke the comedy mold here. The first almost 20 minutes are shot and for the most part performed as straight drama—so are most of the closing 15. The satire, which was so light in Morgan’s Creek that the audience wasn’t even sure it was being kidded, is here brought to the foreground and with such force that it verges on the vicious and bitter. The contrasts are so stark that, if it wasn’t for the presence in both films of Bracken and Demarest, of Sturges’ recurring themes and his vast stock company, it would be hard to believe they’re from the same director, let alone made in the same year.

This was all very much deliberate of course and not just Sturges being wildly schizo. You just need to compare Bracken’s characters, and his performances, to see what Sturges is up to. In Morgan’s Creek, Bracken is so broad you almost want to cringe. Here, his character is again a schnook but he’s also a genuinely tortured soul. The Norval of Morgan’s Creek could have never done the long monologue about the history of the Marines or the closing speech where Bracken tells the town members he’s nothing but a fraud while at the same time basically calling them a bunch of morons.

Morgan’s Creek was about how war hysteria had stirred the moral pot, breaking up the too-simple strictures of smalltown America and putting them in play. In Conquering Hero, Sturges frontally attacks the American love for appearances over substance, how we’ll believe practically anything as long as it comes from someone we want to believe in and are deaf to the people we don’t want to see. The film revolves around the premise that we already know what we want to hear and are just looking for mouthpieces that fit those preconceptions—which is why Bracken is able to get away with so visibly and audibly reacting to being forced into that role. The townspeople literally can’t see or hear him.

The scene where he tries to resist the locals’ effort to draft him into running for mayor, with them conveniently spinning his protests into affirmations, is a sitcom staple I don’t think has ever once worked on TV. But it succeeds here because Sturges has built up to it so carefully and cunningly that it becomes an ambiguous and troubling moment that almost gets the audience to look at itself.

Hail the Conquering Hero is one of the great American movies and would be one of the very best if Sturges hadn’t gotten himself all snarled in his own net. The final third begins to fall into the tradition of bold and cutting truth-telling that defines the greatest American art—the saying “No! in thunder” that Melville ascribed to Hawthorne. But right after Sturges delivers a couple of staggering blows, he fails to finish the job, instead pulling his punches, all too aware he’s making a major-studio film in the middle of a particularly brutal war and ultimately reverting to what the audience wants to hear instead of what it ought to hear. And so it almost always goes with the movies, which is why they’ll always be a second-tier artform.

You have to wonder if Sturges’ inability to reconcile his insights and ambitions with the material didn’t spill over into the production, which is, at moments, oddly uneven. About half the cast proves nimble while the other half can barely get its lines out, which can be disconcerting when four or more of them are trading quips within the same scene. Ella Raines is undeniably striking but also as wooden as they come, and you just need to compare that four-minute take in Morgan’s Creek where Bracken and Betty Hutton stroll through town to the similarly long stroll here with Raines and the tall, handsome, and dull Bill Edwards to feel how the latter scene creates a drag on Conquering Hero. If coat trees could converse with each other, this is what it would sound like.

The cinematographer, as with Morgan’s Creek, is John Seitz, the man who in Double Indemnity single-handedly defined the look of noir and thereby the look of all American movies from that moment on. Conquering Hero has a much more noirish style than Morgan’s Creek and that couldn’t feel more right—partly because what Sturges is doing here overlaps sympathetically with the true heart of noir. The distance between Fred McMurray in Indemnity and Bracken in Hero is so slight they could be doppelgängers. Both are trying to control worlds that have their own agendas—worlds that definitely don’t have either character’s best interests at heart. Both ultimately have to admit to the futility of will and don’t so much come to accept their fates as have them imposed on them.

Visually, Conquering Hero is discernibly darker than Morgan’s Creek and that comes across well in the HD presentation on Amazon Prime, which is a step up from the same service’s presentation of the latter. But the deep grays (there are no real blacks) are muddy and crushed throughout, making the transfer darker than it should be, which can make the film feel a little oppressive. The 4K HDR release of A Clockwork Orange showed how using a transfer to bring a film all the way back to its original look can have a big impact on how it’s perceived (that is, if the director and cinematographer knew what they were doing in the first place). I have to wonder if nailing the original look of Conquering Hero—getting the visual tone to match the comedic/dramatic tone—wouldn’t go a long way toward clarifying what Sturges was up to.

Many filmmakers have tried to peer into the American soul—some have even tried to lead a charge against it—but none have ever done it, as Sturges did here, in the guise of Norman Rockwell. It all comes cascading down in an avalanche—patriotism, heroism, boosterism, motherhood, smalltown democracy, civic pride, the myth of the childhood sweetheart, the basic decency of the common man. The funny thing is, in the wake of the ‘60s and ‘70s and their relentless assault on those same institutions, which triggered the relentlessly cynical reaction of the ‘80s to the present, all of that has been successfully obliterated but nothing of any substance has been put in its place. We just have endless self-obsession and self-indulgence and the need to be endlessly diverted instead. That lends a delicious and frightening irony Sturges could have never foreseen to the fact that everything in Hail the Conquering Hero is set in motion by the actions of a psychopath.

PICTURE | Conquering Hero is a dark, almost noirish film, and that comes across well in the HD presentation on Amazon Prime. But the deep grays (there are no real blacks) are muddy and crushed throughout, making the transfer a touch darker than it should be.

Review: Mighty Aphrodite

review | Mighty Aphrodite

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Woody Allen’s last completely solid film until Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks surprisingly good on Amazon Prime

by Michael Gaughn
October 23, 2022

I don’t have a tremendous lot to say about Mighty Aphrodite because, although it’s a solid enough film with some genuinely funny moments and clever enough twists and decent enough acting, especially from Mira Sorvino, it feels lighter than it should be. That seems to have been deliberate on Woody Allen’s part, and I think he went there partly because he didn’t want the bluer material to hit too hard and partly because he didn’t want the Greek tragedy conventions to get too ponderous, but it just seems like the movie should have a little more meat on its bones.

The big irony is that, coming from any other filmmaker, Aphrodite would have been something of a miracle, since it’s virtually impossible to find movies that rely on wit instead of flat-out jokes and on subtle character interaction instead of a gratuitous succession of puerile clichés. But from Allen, you wish—as with films like Sweet and Lowdown and Melinda and Melinda—that he’d tried a little harder. You can’t really fault the execution, but the base material would have been well served by a little more rumination and revision.

There’s something genuinely sad about Sorvino’s character, and even though Sorvino is terrific at playing her both hardened and naive would-be porn star for laughs, she manages to work in some wistful and defiant notes that cry out for more support from the script. I’m not saying that sensed absence really hurts the film—it holds up well and is enjoyable enough—but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

The one false note is Helena Bonham Carter as Allen’s wife. She brings her trademark high-strung brooding mannerisms to the role, and little else. You easily believe that she’d aspire to open a gallery in Tribeca, but it’s just not believable that she’d be married to Allen. That’s partly his fault—his persona has rarely been convincing when his character is in something other than show business, and while you can imagine him having a brief relationship with someone like Carter, it’s impossible to buy into the idea they’d have a long, let alone happy, marriage.

The presentation of Mighty Aphrodite on Amazon Prime is surprisingly good—especially given how compromised Bullets Over Broadway, from the previous year, looks on the same service. Given that both films apparently came from the same distribution chain, you have to wonder what’s up. Carlo DiPalma’s cinematography is subtle, especially for a comedy, but always appropriate and effective, and sometimes striking. Skin tones look natural and interiors look realistic, if a tad muted, and the whole of it is a crisp and clean and accurate enough transfer.

If you feel a movie review isn’t an appropriate place to comment on the attempts to savage Allen and obliterate his works, stop reading here. But it’s impossible to watch Aphrodite now and not be reminded that Sorvino was one of the people who turned on Allen based on hearsay and a kind of herd instinct. This film was both the beginning and pinnacle of her career—she won an Oscar for her role, then disappeared into the usual show-biz netherworld of endless dead-ends. I realize this is considered passé at a time when people don and shed professions on a dime (something I’ll refrain from commenting on for now), but there is something—a lot, actually—to be said for dedication to your craft, a focus that ought to preclude indulging in public denunciations based on thin innuendo. But if it wasn’t for that kind of shameless blaming—and the public’s endless hunger for more—there wouldn’t be any social media.

PICTURE | The presentation on Amazon Prime is surprisingly good, especially given how compromised Bullets Over Broadway looks on the same service. Skin tones look natural and interiors realistic, if a tad muted, and the whole of it is a crisp and clean and accurate enough transfer.

Review: Bullets Over Broadway

review | Bullets Over Broadway

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One of Woody Allen’s best, this comedy about the absurdity of creating was also one of his last completely satisfying films

by Michael Gaughn
October 17, 2022

Bullets Over Broadway comes from the end of Woody Allen’s last consistently strong period as a filmmaker. After that, and Mighty Aphrodite in 1995, he would wander in the woods for the next three decades, managing to come up with something truly worthy only about once every 10 years. A lot has fed into that protracted “lost” period (some of which I’ll speculate on below) but the sad truth is that, somewhere around 1996, Allen lost touch with the elements essential to sustaining his work.

Bullets shows him radically reinventing himself as a filmmaker, a process he’d begun with Husbands and Wives two years earlier but didn’t fully realize until this film. He succeeds mightily, forging a vigorous and responsive and seemingly resilient style that consistently heightens the material. Why he wasn’t able to carry forward and build on what he’d wrought and why it instead led to embarrassing messes like Everyone Says I Love You just two years on remains one of the great mysteries. Allen must have kept the formula in a jar somewhere, though, since he was able to bring it to bear again, in full force, almost 15 years later for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

In Bullets, he took a looser, higher-stakes approach to his fondness for long-take master shots and semi-improvisational dialogue and applied it to larger, more diverse ensembles in a way that essentially drove the whole work. It’s a nervy form of filmmaking, one that could have easily unraveled if he hadn’t had sufficient confidence in his abilities. It also could have easily become mannered, but applied to the world of Broadway theater, and to the crafting of a play in particular, it feels like a natural extension of the fictional environment.

But there are frustrations. Allen, with his career-long belief that the best way to keep material fresh is to avoid working it too hard, rarely lets his scripts steep enough, and there are moments here that feel embryonic rather than fully fledged and gags that just feel like gags instead of arising naturally from the situations.

It also takes a few minutes for Bullets to get up on its feet, partly because of its unusual visual style, which ultimately yields big dividends but does take some getting used to, but also because Dianne Wiest’s first scene gives the impression she’s going to lean a little too hard on Norma Desmond throughout. Some more screen time needs to pass before it becomes apparent there’s a character there and not just a lot of derivative posturing.

The bigger problem is the inadequate John Cusack in the lead. He doesn’t have the range to convincingly play a self-important struggling playwright, and his failed attempts to rise to the challenge create something of a void at the center of the film. Allen has always relied on casting the flavor of the month as a way of ensuring some box office for his movies—something he slyly comments on in Bullets through the Cusack character’s difficulties with casting his play—but it doesn’t do him any favors here.

Fortunately, the combined efforts of Wiest; a surprisingly strong Jennifer Tilly; Chazz Palminteri, in a nicely modulated performance; the rock-solid Jack Warden; the always enjoyable Jim Broadbent (in an underwritten role); and even Tracy Ullman, during the moments when she’s able to rise above her trademark schtick, more than compensate for the presence of the seemingly lost Cusack.

Thanks to Palminteri, Bullets includes one of the best moments in all of Allen’s work as he and Cusack sit at the counter in a pool hall talking about writing. It’s a seemingly simple scene but the way Palminteri begins to open up, convincingly showing his character is something more than a stereotypical goon, the whole accompanied by the tapping of cues and crack of billiard balls, becomes the almost imperceptible pivot for the whole film. (Allen would largely recapture this 22 years on in a couple of the key exchanges between Jesse Eisenberg and the otherwise unexceptional Blake Lively in Café Society.)

Of all the older movies I’ve looked at recently, Bullets Over Broadway most cries out for a better presentation. Not that it’s unwatchable in HD on Prime but the saturated, constantly bordering on soft, heavy on grain images are ill served by this jittery transfer. Some scenes, like one between Warden and Cusack in a steam bath and the ones in the mob boss’s apartment, with its vast stretches of off-white walls, are full of distracting noise. Luckily, the cinematography is strong enough to punch its way through how it’s presented here, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how Bullets would likely look if it were treated to a straight 4K transfer.

This is such a good film—one of Allen’s best, although not quite at the level of Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Stardust Memories or the much later Blue Jasmine—that it’s sad Allen wasn’t able to continue to fruitfully mine the vein he’d struck here. You just need to compare Bullets to his effort to cover the same thematic ground in 2005’s Match Point to realize how badly he’s been flailing in his late period.

There are many possible explanations for those struggles, none of them completely satisfying, but I would point to two big factors. The more simplistic one is that Allen always needed an onscreen anima to define his work against—Diane Keaton up to 1980 and the more problematic—but no less fruitful because of that—Mia Farrow from ‘80 to ‘92. He tried to fill that void for a few years with Scarlett Johansson, but that only resulted in one great film, Vicky Cristina. That Allen, for obvious reasons, was far more distant from Johansson than he was from either Keaton or Farrow, and that she has no discernible comedic chops, made her a comparatively meager source of inspiration.

The more substantial explanation is likely that not just the movies but the culture had changed so drastically that it no longer provided fertile ground for sustaining Allen’s form of romantic fantasy. As I mentioned when reviewing 12 Monkeys, it was around 1995 that films became colder, nastier, and more cerebral, in the detached, game-playing sense. They suddenly stopped being about lived experience and, as the children of the Regan era began calling the shots, became movies about movies instead, divorced from realistic cause and effect, only tenuously tethered to reality. While Allen’s films have always been about fantasy and often about people yearning for lives more like what they see up on the screen, they need that credible anchoring in the messiness of day-to-day urban life, that more emotion-based grounding, to have any resonance at all. Come the mid ‘90s, all of that disappeared from the culture, likely forever, and Allen’s efforts since to build movies on memories of a more substantial world have, not surprisingly, almost inevitably failed.

PICTURE | Bullets is watchable in HD on Prime but the saturated, constantly bordering on soft, heavy on grain images are ill served by this jittery transfer

Review: Carnival of Souls

review | Carnival of Souls

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Given how it was made, this classic horror movie shouldn’t be a classic, or even a movie, and yet it remains one of the most influential films to come out of the genre

by Michael Gaughn
October 10, 2022

If the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a B movie, then Carnival of Souls is a solid C—a wild fling at moviemaking by a bunch of naive and repressed Midwesterners meant for second, or third, billing at Kansas drive-ins, a kind of Bergman-goes-to-Topeka thing that must have confused the hell out of the 2 a.m. hangers-on expecting to get off on something like Chain-Gang Girls. And yet somehow out of that impossible equation came art.

To give a quick, urban-legend take on its genesis for those unfamiliar with the film, Herk Harvey, a staff director at Centron, best known for its ‘50s industrial-arts and hygiene shorts, stumbled upon a Bergman film, which inspired him to take his one and only stab at feature filmmaking by grafting European art cinema onto the American exploitation horror movie, the whole thing done on zero budget. By rights, the result should have been a disaster, and in some ways it is; and yet, miraculously, out of that compost heap emerged a very beautiful and, in the best sense, haunting little film.

(Just so it doesn’t sound like I’m unfairly dumping on the decidedly staid Centron, it was something of a filmmaking powerhouse, within its lane, and the place where Robert Altman got his start.)

The best explanation for why Carnival of Souls works is channeling. The filmmakers, by their own admission, had no idea what they were doing so they had no choice but to surrender to what was in the air. And the cultural winds were so strong at the time that they ultimately steered Harvey and his team safely into a very snug little harbor.

This is completely naive, seat-of-the-pants filmmaking—the kind of thing a lot of us hoped would become legion in the wake of camcorders and cellphones and The Blair Witch Project, but we got a bunch of unimaginative dolts aspiring to make superhero movies instead. By aping arty gestures without understanding them, Harvey and friends were somehow able to conjure up a film that bears an uncanny resemblance to Polanski’s Repulsion (which was three years in the future at the time) and that can actually pretty much hold its own against that other more carefully crafted and deeply felt film.

Souls’ ineptness is actually a virtue. Taking a trained New York actress and dropping her in the middle of a bunch of well-intended but obviously unsophisticated Midwestern actors heightened the sense of the main character’s extreme alienation. A lot of the movie’s justly famous atmospherics can be attributed to the disparity between the onscreen action and dubbed dialogue that sounds like it was recorded in somebody’s closet. The Foley work consistently maintains an earth-to-Alpha-Centauri distance from whatever it’s trying to enhance or depict. And only about a quarter of the shots work but they’re just strong enough to keep the film from unraveling completely. This is a movie held together with chicken wire, spit, and a prayer.

That lays bare a fundamental truth about all mainstream filmmaking, no matter what the budget: The audience almost always contributes at least half the experience of a movie—sometimes considerably more. Producers figure out what people will respond to and then provide just enough emotional and intellectual triggers to allow audience members to fill in the blanks with their own projections. That explains why most films have no staying power—people move on to new fads and preoccupations, so they’re no longer able to bring anything relevant to watching the film. It also explains why most movies that do hang in there are wrapped in a nostalgic glow—because the viewer has commingled it with the emotional resonance of their own memories from the time they first saw it. It also helps to explain why franchises—the safest and least creative moviemaking bet there is—have spread like the plague.

That’s not to say there isn’t a substantial movie here. Candace Hilligoss somehow managed to craft a legitimate performance while having to contend with throw-it-at-the-wall direction and lousy continuity. You keep wondering if she’ll be able to bring any consistency to her character but then the roadhouse scene happens, where she convincingly conveys the sense of clinging to whatever shred of reality she can find because she knows letting go will mean she’ll disappear forever. I didn’t realize until this viewing how much of what’s best about Souls can be attributed to Hilligoss. They could have pulled off all the spooky atmospherics they wanted but none of it would have mattered if she hadn’t been able to rise several levels above the material and the circumstances. That makes it all the more amazing that the filmmakers were able to create a powerful and fairly nuanced portrait of radical dissociation while having no real grasp of their own subject matter.

There’s something—a lot—to be said for naivety. Movies have gotten thinner and thinner—and longer and longer—as each successive generation has found the basics of film technique working their way deeper and deeper into their DNA. Practically every sentient being now knows how to make a presentable movie. But it’s become almost impossible to find anyone who knows to how to do anything meaningful with the tools once they’re given to them. I realize it’s an impossibility, but a new take on cinema that took its cues from Carnival of Souls wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to us—not by a country mile.

SOULS ON PRIME
I know it’s my job but I don’t know what to tell you about the UHD presentation on Prime—mainly because this is such an unorthodox film it’s hard to know what matters. Although it’s been repackaged in all kinds of ways, Souls has never looked great—and, given the shooting circumstances, it’s not hard to understand why. To say that watching a subpar version can add to the creepiness is true up to a point, but it’s also a bit of a cheat. I’d prefer to see something that comes as close as possible to what Herk Harvey actually shot.

This presentation doesn’t do that. Yes, it’s UHD but it’s been processed with such a heavy hand that everything looks waxy. Occasional shots do look exceptional but it’s frustrating to have them be the exception and not the rule. All I can say is that, if you can get onto this film’s wavelength—something that can be hard for the increasingly jaded to do—the presentation isn’t likely to have much impact on your experience one way or the other, which is praising by faint damning.

The last thing I want to do is find myself in the middle of an aspect-ratio pissing contest, but the film is presented in 1.37:1—the ratio of the negative and how the usually definitive Criterion has chosen to offer it as well. But IMDB says it was meant to be seen at 1.85:1, which, if true, helps to explain what seem like some unusually bad compositions and why camera gear appears in the top of the frame during the whirling dancing shots near the end. I can’t say it ought to be shown 1.85 because I’ve never seen it that way—just curious why it’s not.

—M.G.

Review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

review | Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

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The first Body Snatchers movie and the precursor of the modern zombie film, the original still packs a bigger punch than any of its descendants

by Michael Gaughn
October 7, 2022

I create Top 10 lists but never as a permanent enshrinement of anything but more as a snapshot of how I value things at a certain moment in time. To believe you’ve permanently decided on the definitive of anything—let alone believe anything as fluid and zeitgeist-driven as movies can be correlated in any meaningful way—is pure hubris, and to etch your choices in stone is to essentially embalm, not appreciate, them, like pinning butterflies to a board. All of which is to say that I once had the original, 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my No. 1 slot. That troubled me a lot at the time but it also felt somehow right.

I don’t know if I would ever put it back at No. 1 but it still feels somehow right. If there’s an inherent value in a piece of pop cinema being able to both capture the angst of an era and use it as a springboard to perfectly project the trajectory of the culture, then Body Snatchers has that, and in spades. The film was too easily dismissed at the time and subsequently as an expression of Red Scare paranoia. It’s not. It’s a low-budget B-movie depiction of the loss of self, or soul—depending on how you want to parse that—uncannily prescient, and done with a power that lends it a continuing relevance it never would have achieved as an A-list project.

I can’t think of another movie that’s done a better job of portraying that fatal pivot in the culture, nor any that come close to it that approach the subject with as much restraint. That restraint compresses the film’s energy, allowing it to resonate just as strongly (more so?) 66 years on, eclipsing all the remakes, off-shoots, and imitators.

I’m not saying Body Snatchers is what would traditionally be considered a masterpiece, in the technical or even the cinematic sense. At the end of the day, it’s still a B movie, with all the basic flaws that come with pandering to that segment of the audience. But it captures something tremendously important, and captures it better than could have been done if it had been put in more accomplished hands. Its B-movie weaknesses are its virtues, forcing its makers to keep the action intimate and the practical effects modest. And the material seems to need the rough energy, the inherent luridness, that comes with aiming for the cheap seats.

The wraparound—tacked on after the fact because the ending was considered too depressing—remains pointless. The film means nothing, packs no punch, if it’s not hopeless, and to enjoy it (in the troubling sense of the word) you have to edit those bookends out in your mind as you watch it. (But there is a certain giddy frisson to seeing the ubiquitous Whit Bissell, the embodiment of bland, benign mid-‘50s authority; Richard “The Dick Van Dyke Show” Deacon; and the hit man who tried to rub out Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross all being called up for active duty to do a couple of completely unnecessary scenes.)

The movie’s Santa Mira is a typical small American city the way Santa Rosa is in Shadow of a Doubt, but Body Snatchers doesn’t waste any time establishing that because, like in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, that almost mythic sense of place was so thoroughly understood, was such a shared and reassuring cultural reference point, that any kind of stage-setting would have been unnecessary and just slowed everything down. Unlike most horror movies and thrillers, Body Snatchers jumps right into laying down its “there’s something wrong here” vibe, which makes it infinitely creepier.

From that opening scene on, the film is breathless—but without once seeming to break a sweat. The mood deepens, the shadows thicken, and the thrills are placed as quietly and cunningly as the seed pods, building to an overwhelming sense of inevitability and dread. There’s no big rush to get to a big effect—the first developing pod doesn’t even appear until the halfway point—and yet no scene lingers. Each says exactly what it needs to say and moves on.

Body Snatchers is really a chamber drama with a perverse sense of humor and the occasional practical effect. Everything is grounded in basic human interaction and kept plausible for as long as possible. It never overreaches. For all the cheesy horror makeup and monster suits with zippers in ‘50s films, the effects here remain remarkably convincing, which has a lot to do with the film’s staying power.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems—it’s a B movie, so it’s brimming with problems. Dana Wynter’s entrance is so badly handled it always gets a laugh, you have your pick of cringe-worthy lines, and poor Kevin McCarthy seems to be in over his head throughout. And then there’s the constant churning and over-insistence of the Carmen Dragon score. But the premise is so strong and the film clings to it so tenaciously and develops it so powerfully that the fumbles almost feel like grace notes.

The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers spawned the modern zombie movie—although not in the ways you’d think. The characters recoil upon discovering their pod doubles not because they’re alien but because they’re so much like themselves. Similarly, zombie movies aren’t about the undead being other—they’re one of us, just a too easily taken step away from who we are now. Depending on your angle of approach, Body Snatchers can induce an even bigger shudder today than it did in its time because it’s a pretty accurate depiction of who we once were and who we’ve, c. 1985, become.

PICTURE | The usual Amazon Prime spiel—watchable, with occasional standout moments, with little that could be called exceptional. But this was always meant to be a second-on-the-bill potboiler, never exquisite or pristine.

Review: 12 Monkeys

review | 12 Monkeys

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Terry Gilliam’s most successful attempt to work within the system, this apocalyptic thriller proved to be prescient—but not just for the expected reasons

by Michael Gaughn
October 3, 2022

Having had an affirmative experience getting reacquainted with Brazil after the rout of Baron Munchausen, I wanted to do some more digging around to try to figure out if Terry Gilliam was something of a one-hit wonder. I’d watched The Fisher King again a few months ago and, while some of it remains powerful, too much of it feels out of scale with the material. It’s a good movie—far better than most—but can’t even begin to compare with Brazil. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has its moments but is basically a rambling mess that gets squeezed much too thin. The bottom line seems to be that Gilliam without a solid script is mainly an occasionally compelling diversion.

The Peoples’ script for 12 Monkeys is way too full of itself but gets most of the structural stuff right enough to let Gilliam build something pretty substantial atop it. But his greatest achievement here—which definitely isn’t derived from the script—is the tone, the ability to give a presence to the impalpable. 12 Monkeys feels like an elegy—one that manages to be both moving and troubling without being either depressing or sentimental. As soon as we know almost every character we see on the screen is soon going to die, a consistent tenor takes hold that makes everything feel both tenuous and more vivid.

And Gilliam establishes that tone—it can’t really be called a mood—so strongly that even his lapses and indulgences can’t queer it. The Britishisms and silly gags he was able to make work, to some degree, in Fisher King feel alien here and push you damn close to the point of “O, come on.” But the film’s portrayal of the end is so credible that it carries you over the errors in judgment.

And a lot of the credit for that—and I can’t believe I’m writing this given that I’m talking about Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt—goes to the acting. Bruce Willis is always Bruce Willis, or something less than that, but Gilliam gets him to stretch well beyond his persona and, by adeptly molding the individual moments of his performance, succeeds in piecing together a nuanced and forceful whole. Pitt, in probably his only convincing role, takes what can be seen as just goofing and makes it feel like that absurdity, in sum, is the character. Although his Jeffrey Goines is something of a red herring, it was crucial to the film to show that there’s a menacing chaos at the heart of all his acting out.

Why didn’t Madeleine Stowe ever have a career? Her performance, which is the film’s fulcrum and is subtly modulated but in a way that becomes powerful, should have led to her having her pick of standout roles. It could have been a personal thing or an industry thing or just a dearth of good enough parts, but it’s a tremendous mystery, and a huge loss. She brings much needed weight to the the film through her believable pivot from intelligent and perceptive but hopelessly smug to utterly lost and desperate to believe.

Seen as a madcap stylist, a Goldbergian concoctor of cinematic gadgets, Gilliam has never received his due as an actor’s director. But his films, going back to Time Bandits, have been graced by exceptional performances, even when the material didn’t seem substantial enough to hold that kind of weight. 12 Monkeys is driven by the acting, not the style.

My comments about the HD presentation on Prime (as a portal for Starz) are made knowing a 4K remaster was done this year and a new home release could be imminent. Parts of the film are in surprisingly bad shape for something from as recent as 1995, with the quality sometimes varying tremendously from shot to shot, especially near the beginning. While much of the movie holds up well watched on a big screen, those sudden soft or super contrasty moments can be jarring.

As we’ve seen repeatedly, 4K is no panacea—it can even be an older film’s worst enemy. Depending on the elements they had to work with for the remaster, a new release could be a benison or could be uneven as hell. I’d be especially concerned it would accentuate the flaws in the decent enough but definitely now creaky CGI. That said, I’m keen to check out the 4K, if or when it comes.

Allow me to ruminate for a moment on my way out the door.

The intuitiveness of the mass consciousness can be startling. The dire events portrayed in this film, until then just the shouts of lone voices, weren’t even thinkable on the mass level until around 1995. It’s as if we were beginning to prepare ourselves for everything that’s transpired over the past few years, and for the worse to come.

And, as often happens, the surface content of a film—or wave of films—also has a self-reflexive cinematic complement. By getting you to feel the death of the race in a way that gets into your bones, 12 Monkeys gets you to sense the death of emotion in movies as well. It’s hard to pin down exactly but there was a distinct moment when the movies (all entertainment, actually) crossed a rubicon from being grounded in humanity to deriving from a kind of unfeeling viciousness, when creativity devolved into facile cleverness, when it all shifted from grounded in emotion to cruel, abstract exercises in the coldly cerebral.

That moment seems to be right around the time of 12 Monkeys’ release, with the solidifying of the Coens and the rise of Fincher, Jonze, the Andersons (Paul Thomas and Wes), Nolan, and others of their ilk. Their work resonates as long as you can view it with an arm’s-length detachment, don’t invest too much in it emotionally, and don’t bring your full being to bear. In other words, as long as you don’t allow yourself to feel. None of the above-mentioned could have summoned up any of the bittersweet sense of passing that pervades 12 Monkeys because none of them could have sensed it to begin with.

12 Monkeys is the cry of the canary in the coal mine, the voice essential to survival we’ve since opted to drown out with the screeching din of an increasingly brutal culture. Given that we were just capable of hearing that warning at the time the movie came out, I have to wonder if it has any value as anything other than an evening’s amusement now.

PICTURE | While 12 Monkeys holds up well seen on a big screen, there’s a surprising amount of inconsistency between shots at times

SOUND | Dating from the early days of DTS surround, it can all get very ping-pongy but the material lends itself to that kind of treatment, for the most part

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