***My visits at Harry Moseby Confidential doubled this past week due to my tribute to Sergio Martino's Torso. Thanks for all that visited. I had to go out of town this weekend so I was unable to deliver all I wanted on the film but I hope what I did proved interesting...I will be finishing it up in the morning.***
I realize this would be the perfect time to pay tribute to Blondie's landmark 1978 album Parallel Lines at Harry Moseby Confidential. After all, this week marks the arrival of the special edition of the album and I will also be having the pleasure of witnessing the band perform it live in just a couple of days.
I decided to pay tribute instead to the often forgotten powerhouse of an L.P. that proceeded Blondie's Parallel Lines, 1977's Plastic Letters. Featuring some of their greatest songs and most spirited playing, Plastic Letters remains one of the seminal New York Punk albums of the seventies...a savagely infectious comic book for the ears performed by a band and singer on the brink of stardom.
I will be paying tribute to Blondie's Plastic Letters all this week at Harry Moseby Confidential and will be offering up a review to their concert Tuesday night in Louisville as well. Thanks to Jimmy Destri, Clem Burke, Chris Stein and especially Debbie Harry for continuing to provide me so much inspiration after so many years.
THE MOON IN THE GUTTER ARCHIVES
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Overlooked Classics: The Stepford Wives (1975)
Originally appeared as part of The Stepford Wives Tribute Week at my Harry Moseby Confidential.
Scripted with a fierce intelligence by author William Goldman and directed with an equal amount of astuteness by British born filmmaker Bryan Forbes, 1975’s The Stepford Wives is one of the most chilling and important horror films of the seventies and one of the best.
The film started out as an acclaimed and popular novel by Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin. Levin’s original story was a much more ambiguous work than the film version it spawned but the two share the same austere chilliness and sharp satirical mindset, making them a remarkably unique pair in the history of novel to film adaptations.
Director Forbes was born in Stratford in the summer of 1926 and he actually broke into film not as a writer and director but as an actor in the 1949 Powell-Pressburger film The Small Back Room. After working throughout the fifties as a performer and sometimes screenwriter, Forbes made his directorial debut with the fantastic BAFTA nomintated Whistle Down The Wind, which gave young Hayley Mills one of her finest roles.
After his successful first venture as a filmmaker, Forbes continued to show himself as one of the most promising young British filmmakers of the sixties with films like The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Séance On A Wet Afternoon (1964). After being removed as director on the controversial Kim Novak version of Of Human Bondage in 1964, Forbes made the Oscar nominated King Rat which would signal Hollywood of his considerable talents behind the camera, as would his work with up and coming British actor Michael Caine in Deadfall (1968).
Forbes would continue writing, directing and sometimes acting throughout the sixties but his career began to slow down after 1971’s The Raging Moon as he settled down with his wife, and sometimes star, Nanette Newman. Five years would pass after The Raging Moon before Forbes would step behind the camera again, this time on an American finance production set and filmed in Connecticut.
Shot mostly in and around both Darien and Fairfield Connecticut with some location work in New York City, Forbes The Stepford Wives is a stylistic triumph filled with telling POV shots, incredible production design, smart performances and a haunting score courtesy of the great and underrated Michael Small. Forbes directs the film with a real sincerity and sympathy towards the horrifying journey that his lead character Joanna takes and the audience follows along thanks to the remarkable work of Katharine Ross, a wonderful and down to earth actress who never got the credit she deserved.
The film is filled with moments that alert the audience to just how incredible crafted, well planned and smart it is. Take the key moment when Johanna meets the head of the men’s club, and the mastermind of her eventual doom, for the first time in her kitchen. Forbes shows him from behind walking into the kitchen and seeing her for the first time. He cleverly positions the camera just behind his shoulder so we can see them both in frame, this alerts the audience that it is not the expected POV shot, which takes away the traditional male oriented gaze. The next shot is a head on of the male character and it is an absolute POV shot from Johanna. This is one of many moments in the film where Forbes cleverly and forcefully reminds the audience that this is a film very much siding and sympathizing with Johanna’s character.
The heart of Forbes film revolves around the friendship that develops between Joanna and Bobbie (played by the always outstanding Paula Prentiss). Hollywood has always had issues in portraying friendship between two women as it typically seems either forced or pandering but the bond that develops between Joanna and Bobbie is extremely resonate and well handled, a fact that gives the final act of the film an even more haunting and added emotional pull.
Along with Ross and Prentiss, who give near career best performances here, the film is filled with a number of notable actors delivering strong performances. As the plotting but emotionally torn Walter Eberhart, Houston born Peter Masterson gives a haunting performance as a man losing his soul while planning to take another's away. Masterson’s young daughter, and future star of films in her own right, Mary Stewart is also very good as Joanna’s lonely and troubled child Kim.
>
Making the biggest impact among the wives themselves is Tina Louise, seen here about eight years after wrapping up her famed turn as Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. The beautiful Louise is very memorable in the role of the sassy turned stoic Charmaine, as is Carole Mallory as Kit. Making a strong impression among the husbands is Franklin Cover, who would begin his long and much loved turn as Tom Willis on The Jeffersons later in 1975. Future E.T. and The Howling star Dee Wallace appears in a small role as well, as the maid Nettie.
One can’t talk about The Stepford Wives without paying tribute to the incredible score by Michael Small. A haunting and involving weaving of acoustic guitars, electronics and strings, Small’s score ranks among the best that graced any thriller of the seventies and the fact that it has never enjoyed an official release is tragic. Sadly that would be something that would mark much of the late Small’s life, as many of his best scores from Night Moves (1975) to Marathon Man (1979) remain unreleased.
The Stepford Wives is also an incredibly attractive film to watch, thanks to the vivid (Forbes said he wanted to make one of the brightest horror films ever) photography of Oscar Nominated cinematographer Owen Roizman. The set decoration by Oscar winner Robert Drumheller also stands out making The Stepford Wives one the distinctive looking films of the seventies with its influence stretching to Ang Lee’s Connecticut set The Ice Storm (1997) more than two decades later.
The controversial choice of Forbes as director on The Stepford Wives has been chronicled quite a bit throughout the years and the issues between him and Goldman centers on the casting of Newman in the role of one of the wives, and Forbes' differing viewpoint as to how they should be portrayed. Originally set up to be a group of Playboy like bunnies in Goldman’s screenplay, Forbes pictured a much more sinister and old fashioned suburban housewife as the model for his version of The Stepford Wives. The men in the town wouldn’t be seeking out simple adolescent male fantasies for their diabolical male dominated world but would instead go for wives quite simply fashioned after the first woman in their lives, their mother, making Forbes’ version of Levin’s novel a much more twisted and perverse vision of male arrogance, wish-fulfillment and dominance.
The Stepford Wives is a remarkable film on many levels. It is first and foremost one of the key feministic works of the seventies and people who have labeled it misogynistic are way off the mark. Outside of being told almost entirely from Joanna’s (Katharine Ross) point of view the film presents the men as being coldly arrogant and boring at best. The Stepford Wives is very much a womens’ picture and a chilling reminder at the consequences of foregoing oneself in the service of another. It’s also a remarkably eerie picture in just how much it foreshadowed a society that would eventually switch it’s role models from strong and independent minded women like Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave to Stepford-like children like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. One need only look at the crushingly bad Frank Oz remake from 2004 to see just how far the individualistic and liberating ideas of Forbes film have fallen in the three decades since its release.
The Stepford Wives was released to theaters in Febuary 1975 to fairly strong box office and mostly positive (with some major hold-outs) reviews. It would play throughout Europe in the seventies where it would find quite a bit of success as well. It was a television fixture in the States throughout the late seventies and early eighties but strangely didn’t have a home video release until the mid nineties when Anchor Bay released it on VHS and Laserdisc. It is currently available on DVD with a nice widescreen transfer and a solid if short fifteen minute making of documentary featuring interviews with most of the main players. The film and Levin’s original book have both entered into our public consciousness and they inspired three made for TV sequels of diminishing returns (Revenge of The Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987) and The Stepford Husbands (1996).
Frank Oz brought his atrocious comedic remake to screens in 2004, a film that managed to waste the considerable talents of Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler and made a mockery of both Levin’s original novel and Forbes vastly superior film.
Scripted with a fierce intelligence by author William Goldman and directed with an equal amount of astuteness by British born filmmaker Bryan Forbes, 1975’s The Stepford Wives is one of the most chilling and important horror films of the seventies and one of the best.
The film started out as an acclaimed and popular novel by Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin. Levin’s original story was a much more ambiguous work than the film version it spawned but the two share the same austere chilliness and sharp satirical mindset, making them a remarkably unique pair in the history of novel to film adaptations.
Director Forbes was born in Stratford in the summer of 1926 and he actually broke into film not as a writer and director but as an actor in the 1949 Powell-Pressburger film The Small Back Room. After working throughout the fifties as a performer and sometimes screenwriter, Forbes made his directorial debut with the fantastic BAFTA nomintated Whistle Down The Wind, which gave young Hayley Mills one of her finest roles.
After his successful first venture as a filmmaker, Forbes continued to show himself as one of the most promising young British filmmakers of the sixties with films like The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Séance On A Wet Afternoon (1964). After being removed as director on the controversial Kim Novak version of Of Human Bondage in 1964, Forbes made the Oscar nominated King Rat which would signal Hollywood of his considerable talents behind the camera, as would his work with up and coming British actor Michael Caine in Deadfall (1968).
Forbes would continue writing, directing and sometimes acting throughout the sixties but his career began to slow down after 1971’s The Raging Moon as he settled down with his wife, and sometimes star, Nanette Newman. Five years would pass after The Raging Moon before Forbes would step behind the camera again, this time on an American finance production set and filmed in Connecticut.
Shot mostly in and around both Darien and Fairfield Connecticut with some location work in New York City, Forbes The Stepford Wives is a stylistic triumph filled with telling POV shots, incredible production design, smart performances and a haunting score courtesy of the great and underrated Michael Small. Forbes directs the film with a real sincerity and sympathy towards the horrifying journey that his lead character Joanna takes and the audience follows along thanks to the remarkable work of Katharine Ross, a wonderful and down to earth actress who never got the credit she deserved.
The film is filled with moments that alert the audience to just how incredible crafted, well planned and smart it is. Take the key moment when Johanna meets the head of the men’s club, and the mastermind of her eventual doom, for the first time in her kitchen. Forbes shows him from behind walking into the kitchen and seeing her for the first time. He cleverly positions the camera just behind his shoulder so we can see them both in frame, this alerts the audience that it is not the expected POV shot, which takes away the traditional male oriented gaze. The next shot is a head on of the male character and it is an absolute POV shot from Johanna. This is one of many moments in the film where Forbes cleverly and forcefully reminds the audience that this is a film very much siding and sympathizing with Johanna’s character.
The heart of Forbes film revolves around the friendship that develops between Joanna and Bobbie (played by the always outstanding Paula Prentiss). Hollywood has always had issues in portraying friendship between two women as it typically seems either forced or pandering but the bond that develops between Joanna and Bobbie is extremely resonate and well handled, a fact that gives the final act of the film an even more haunting and added emotional pull.
Along with Ross and Prentiss, who give near career best performances here, the film is filled with a number of notable actors delivering strong performances. As the plotting but emotionally torn Walter Eberhart, Houston born Peter Masterson gives a haunting performance as a man losing his soul while planning to take another's away. Masterson’s young daughter, and future star of films in her own right, Mary Stewart is also very good as Joanna’s lonely and troubled child Kim.
>
Making the biggest impact among the wives themselves is Tina Louise, seen here about eight years after wrapping up her famed turn as Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. The beautiful Louise is very memorable in the role of the sassy turned stoic Charmaine, as is Carole Mallory as Kit. Making a strong impression among the husbands is Franklin Cover, who would begin his long and much loved turn as Tom Willis on The Jeffersons later in 1975. Future E.T. and The Howling star Dee Wallace appears in a small role as well, as the maid Nettie.
One can’t talk about The Stepford Wives without paying tribute to the incredible score by Michael Small. A haunting and involving weaving of acoustic guitars, electronics and strings, Small’s score ranks among the best that graced any thriller of the seventies and the fact that it has never enjoyed an official release is tragic. Sadly that would be something that would mark much of the late Small’s life, as many of his best scores from Night Moves (1975) to Marathon Man (1979) remain unreleased.
The Stepford Wives is also an incredibly attractive film to watch, thanks to the vivid (Forbes said he wanted to make one of the brightest horror films ever) photography of Oscar Nominated cinematographer Owen Roizman. The set decoration by Oscar winner Robert Drumheller also stands out making The Stepford Wives one the distinctive looking films of the seventies with its influence stretching to Ang Lee’s Connecticut set The Ice Storm (1997) more than two decades later.
The controversial choice of Forbes as director on The Stepford Wives has been chronicled quite a bit throughout the years and the issues between him and Goldman centers on the casting of Newman in the role of one of the wives, and Forbes' differing viewpoint as to how they should be portrayed. Originally set up to be a group of Playboy like bunnies in Goldman’s screenplay, Forbes pictured a much more sinister and old fashioned suburban housewife as the model for his version of The Stepford Wives. The men in the town wouldn’t be seeking out simple adolescent male fantasies for their diabolical male dominated world but would instead go for wives quite simply fashioned after the first woman in their lives, their mother, making Forbes’ version of Levin’s novel a much more twisted and perverse vision of male arrogance, wish-fulfillment and dominance.
The Stepford Wives is a remarkable film on many levels. It is first and foremost one of the key feministic works of the seventies and people who have labeled it misogynistic are way off the mark. Outside of being told almost entirely from Joanna’s (Katharine Ross) point of view the film presents the men as being coldly arrogant and boring at best. The Stepford Wives is very much a womens’ picture and a chilling reminder at the consequences of foregoing oneself in the service of another. It’s also a remarkably eerie picture in just how much it foreshadowed a society that would eventually switch it’s role models from strong and independent minded women like Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave to Stepford-like children like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. One need only look at the crushingly bad Frank Oz remake from 2004 to see just how far the individualistic and liberating ideas of Forbes film have fallen in the three decades since its release.
The Stepford Wives was released to theaters in Febuary 1975 to fairly strong box office and mostly positive (with some major hold-outs) reviews. It would play throughout Europe in the seventies where it would find quite a bit of success as well. It was a television fixture in the States throughout the late seventies and early eighties but strangely didn’t have a home video release until the mid nineties when Anchor Bay released it on VHS and Laserdisc. It is currently available on DVD with a nice widescreen transfer and a solid if short fifteen minute making of documentary featuring interviews with most of the main players. The film and Levin’s original book have both entered into our public consciousness and they inspired three made for TV sequels of diminishing returns (Revenge of The Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987) and The Stepford Husbands (1996).
Frank Oz brought his atrocious comedic remake to screens in 2004, a film that managed to waste the considerable talents of Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler and made a mockery of both Levin’s original novel and Forbes vastly superior film.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Who You Are and What You Are: Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome (1989)
Lean, extremely mean, and all around brilliant, Walter Hill’s 1989 feature Johnny Handsome stands as one of the best crime films of the eighties although it has still never gotten its total due for the truly great work it is.
Starting out life as a 1972 John Godey novel entitled The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome; Hill’s thrilling modern noir went through a lot of players’ hands before it ended up at his door in the late eighties.
Al Pacino had been attached to the project for quite awhile, along with director Harold Becker but the two couldn’t accept that at heart it was essentially just a hard-boiled thriller. Pacino would recall to Lawrence Grobal in 2005 that “Harold and I were trying to find the third act, and we couldn't. The first half of that movie is great.” Pacino would also regretfully say, “That was my favorite role ever in movies” which marks Johnny Handsome as one of the biggest what if’s in the actor’s legendary career.
Pacino and Becker, who would make Sea of Love in 1989 instead of Johnny Handsome, finally gave up on the project and it ended up with director Walter Hill who immediately saw greatness in the material.
Scripted by Heart like a Wheel screenwriter Ken Friedman and shot with icy cool precision by cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti, Johnny Handsome is one of Walter Hill’s greatest works and it fits in well with what is an impressive if often undervalued filmography.
Born in Long Beach, California a few years before the end of World War Two, Walter Hill started out his career after college not in films but in construction. A lifelong movie fan, Hill entered into the world of American film in 1968 as second assistant director on not one but two classic films, Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair and Peter Yates’ Bullitt. You can clearly see the influence both of these well paced and tightly cut films had on Hill all the way up to his current last feature film, 2002’s Undisputed. The calculated ferociousness of Bullitt can especially be felt in all of the best Hill’s features with Johnny Handsome being no exception.
Hill banged around Hollywood for awhile in the early seventies mostly working as screenwriter before he landed his first gig as a director with 1975’s Hard Times (which he also scripted). This brutal and tough as nails film pairing Charles Bronson and James Coburn would garner Hill some acclaim and marked him as a director who seemed acutely aware of the underlying violence in the classic male persona and it is this idea that has haunted many of his key works.
Hard Times would be followed up with the brutal one-two knockout punch of The Driver (1978) and The Warriors (1979). Both showed Hill as an absolute master of modern action films with a flair for crafting great car chases and pulling great performances out of his actors. The Warriors especially made Hill into something of a legend even though neither it nor The Driver got the credit they deserved at the time of their release, a problem that has plagued Hill’s career since the beginning.
Hill had slipped by the mid-eighties after the mega-hit 48 Hours (1982) and the cult film Streets of Fire (1984) although his films from this period (1985’s Brewster’s Millions, 1986’s Crossroads, 1987’s Extreme Prejudice and 1988’s Red Heat) are all worth another look. Johnny Handsome would return him to the kind of filmmaking that had made a film like The Warriors so special and it would be marked by one of the great performances by the actor who took over for Al Pacino, Mickey Rourke.
Rourke has admitted that he had all but lost interest in making movies by the time Johnny Handsome came around, but you can’t tell as he delivers one of his most finely crafted and haunting performances as the horribly disfigured criminal bent on revenge who gets a second chance on life with a new identity and a new face. Rourke’s work here for Hill is beautifully realized and ranks with the actor’s best. It is arguably the last really great starring role from Rourke (although an argument can be made for Cimino’s The Desperate Hours remake from a year later) until his welcome comeback that began in the late nineties.
Joining the powerful Rourke is an incredible cast made up of some of the finest actors in America, including Morgan Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Ellen Barkin, Lance Henrikson and Elizabeth McGovern. With the exception of McGovern (who I typically love in films but she seems miscast here) all give superlative performances, especially Freeman in one of his grittiest roles and the sizzling Barkin, who was being reunited with Rourke here seven years after Diner (and who would ironically appear in Sea Of Love with Pacino also in 1989).
The term ‘modern-noir’ is thrown around a lot but Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome really fits the bill. It’s a tough and classic story of double crossings and revenge filled with over the brutal bad-guys, crooked cops, a sexy femme fatale and a tragic anti-hero who we know is doomed from the get go. Pacino mistakenly wanted to elevate Johnny Handsome into something perhaps more profound, but the great thing about the film is that is an unapologetic genre piece and Hill inherently realized that and let it play to the conventions instead of against them.
The film, clocking in at less than ninety minutes not counting the credits, is a winner from the lonely first frame to the final photograph that closes it. Helped by a typically memorable and brooding score by Ry Cooder with the aforementioned photography by Leonetti giving it a real timeless look, Johnny Handsome feels remarkably un-eighties like. While some of the fashions have dated, Hill’s film still feels fresh and it probably would have been a much bigger success post Pulp Fiction as it has much more in common with the crime films of the late nineties than the time it was shot in.
Hill’s razor sharp direction moves the film along at a lightning pace and it is one of the most intelligently shot movies he ever made. Hill’s constant framing Rourke behind bars of some sort makes the film work thematically as a tragic tale of a man who has no chance of succeeding at a new life because he literally can’t escape his old one. Johnny Handsome might not transcend the genre in which it places itself but that shouldn’t take away from just how smart of a film this is.
Johnny Handsome opened up to a mixed critical reaction (although almost everyone praised Rourke’s bravura performance) and mostly empty theaters in September of 1989. The shot on location in New Orleans film would rank in just over seven million dollars in its brief theatrical run, less than Sea of Love would make in its record breaking opening weekend the same month. It fared better on home video but has strangely slipped out of print in the United States.
The atrocious Artisan DVD from 2002 was a real insult to the film and looked like it had been transferred directly from the old full frame VHS marking it as one of the worst looking DVD’s released from a major company this decade. The in-print Region 2import DVD is an improvement but is still not a worthy edition to a film that is screaming for a special edition release. A Blu-ray was finally released in 2010 and, while it's not perfect, it is absolutely the best-release this film has had on home video.
Pacino admitted in 2005 that he still “loved the role” although he still hated the final act. He also tipped his hat to Rourke and said he “did a great job in it.” Roger Ebert wrote a terrific defense of the film in his near four star review and praised it as “ a movie in the true tradition of film noir - which someone who didn't write a dictionary once described as a movie where an ordinary guy indulges the weak side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.” The failure of Johnny Handsome to find its audience back in 1989 was frustrating to say the least (I still remember seeing it opening day in a near empty theater) but thankfully the Blu-ray will hopefully help more people discover it.
For more Johnny Handsome, please visit my friend LaShane's always awesome and essential Mickey Rourke Walls.
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