Amplifier Article #1: Ingmar Bergman's Face To Face

The original version of this article can be found at this link. The following is my slightly revamped version for Moon In The Gutter.

The passing of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman earlier this year has no doubt drawn many newcomers to his vast body of work available on DVD. While many of the late master's best films are currently available, several of his finest works remain extremely hard to find. One of the most notable of these films is his masterful 1976 feature ANSIKTE MOT ANSIKTE (FACE TO FACE), although thankfully it appears that Criterion are currently at works on a DVD of it for 2008.

FACE TO FACE started out life as a Swedish mini-series, much in the same way that two of Bergman's most well regarded films had, SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973) and FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982). The television version of FACE TO FACE, starring legendary Bergman muse Liv Ullmann, appeared originally in April 1976 to much acclaim as a 200 minute four part series. Bergman simultaneously cut the film down to a much slimmer 135 minute running time for its 1976 theatrical release.
The film, like many of Bergman's greatest works, focuses on an individual whose life and grip on reality is slowly slipping away. The film's leading character, played brilliantly by Ullmann, is a well regarded psychiatrist who is realizing that she has spent so much time delving into other people's psychosis that she has forgotten who she actually is. With a supporting cast featuring several Bergman regulars, including a remarkable Gunnar Bjornstrand and a young Lena Olin, FACE TO FACE is one of the great seventies films focusing on the loss of one's own identity in an increasingly cold and industrial world.
Chief among the film's many attributes is the remarkable cinematography by Sven Nykvist, who gives what could have been a very bland looking film an extremely striking and well thought out look. The Oscar winning Nykvist had just shot Louis Malle's underrated BLACK MOON (1975) when he shot FACE TO FACE, and it is to his credit that he was able to follow up Malle's surreal and strange film with Bergman's much more grounded and realistic work.

Also extremely noteworthy is the sound design of Owe Svensson, who manages to give this very quiet film a real spacious and at times warm soundscape. FACE TO FACE is a model on how a completely character driven piece should sound, and Svensson's work is the equal of his more celebrated design for Bergman's own CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972).
The cast is especially fine as well. Ullman has never been more brilliant than she is in this complicated role, and Olin is especially memorable in her brief screen debut here. Bergman would remember the talented Swedish beauty, and he would later cast her in his masterful later works FANNY AND ALEXANDER and AFTER THE REHEARSAL (1984).
The film was a major success when it came out, garnering two Academy Award nominations, including one for Bergman's direction and another for Ullmann's fearless performance. The film also won the Golden Globe's best foreign film award, and Ullmann was honored by many of the top film awards, including the Los Angeles and New York Critics Awards.
FACE TO FACE has had a troubling history on the Home Video market. Paramount is notorious for their mishandling of classic films in their library, and Bergman's great film has astonishingly never been given a proper home video release. Outside of a couple of foreign VHS versions, the only way to see the film has been through grey market versions or the occasional lucky theatrical screening. Hopefully the upcoming Criterion version will include both Bergman's original television version, as well as the shorter theatrical cut, as they did on their exceptional releases for SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE and FANNY AND ALEXANDER.
The passing of Ingmar Bergman marked a great loss for the cinema world, and it is time to make sure his work is preserved for future generations to see. FACE TO FACE remains one of Bergman's greatest, if most under seen works, and is chief among his films in need of a quality re-release. Hopefully the rumor on the upcoming Criterion edition is true, and this powerful film will be available again soon for film fans to see.

Amplifier Article #2: Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place

The original version of this article can be found at this link. This is my slightly revamped version for Moon In The Gutter.

"A SAFE PLACE is an important milestone in the art from of the motion picture."
-THE FREE PRESS, 1971-

"Tuesday Weld changed the whole way I did films, she taught me to be true to myself."
-HENRY JAGLOM-

"I may be self destructive, but I like taking chances with movies. I like challenges and I also like the particular position I've been in all these years, with people wanting to save me from all the awful films I've been in. I'm happy being a legend. I think the Tuesday Weld cult is a very nice thing."
-TUESDAY WELD on the eve of filming A SAFE PLACE-

"A SAFE PLACE is an essay on time and memory."
-HENRY JAGLOM-

"The part was written for me and about me. I'm really that girl, Noah, except that I don't want to go anywhere near my past. I would like to develop amnesia about it...I feel misplaced everywhere."
-TUESDAY WELD-

The unexpected success of Dennis Hopper’s low budget EASY RIDER threw a major monkey wrench into an already struggling studio system machine in 1969. Suddenly, baffled movie executives desperately began searching for young talent to come in and create their own counter-culture success, in order to flip the bill for such big budget disasters like PAINT YOUR WAGON.
The two years following EASY RIDER is one of the most audacious and uncompromising periods in Hollywood history. Never before had so many young filmmakers been given Cart blanch in the Studio system. Films like Jack Nicholson’s DRIVE HE SAID, Peter Fonda’s THE HIRED HAND and Hopper’s own THE LAST MOVIE would have been unthinkable just a few years before, but Hollywood was in trouble. The studio heads knew it, and blank checks were being handed out to anyone with a vision.

No one had more of an uncompromising vision than 29-year-old actor and writer Henry Jaglom in 1970. British born and mainly known as a TV actor, Jaglom had struck up friendships with Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson in the sixties and had appeared in EASY RIDER with the three of them. On Hopper’s recommendation Columbia Pictures gave the go ahead to Jaglom’s first feature, A SAFE PLACE ( a work originally written as a stage play), in the hopes that it would find the same sort of massive success Hopper's film had secured.

Despite the studios bafflement at the young Jaglom’s ideas about making a film dealing with childhood as a mystical place of magic and memories; they were thrilled when he quickly secured not only friend Jack Nicholson for the film but also legendary Orson Welles as well. The key to the film though lay in the casting of the female lead who would be known at different points as Susan and Noah.
Tuesday Weld was already something of an underground legend by 1970. Thought by many to be the greatest actress of her generation, the intense Weld seemed to take great delight in continually sabotaging her career, and by 1969 had turned down everything from BONNIE AND CLYDE to ROSEMARY'S BABY. After finishing up work on John Frankenheimer’s underrated WALK THE LINE in 1970, Henry Jaglom offered Weld the complicated lead role in his film. She quickly signed on for it and set into motion one of the most baffling and moving performances in American film history.
With his cast in place and MIDNIGHT COWBOY camera operator Richard C. Kratina along for the ride, Jaglom began shooting his partially scripted, largely improvised first feature in early 1971.

Any attempt at detailing the plot of A SAFE PLACE is futile at best. Think of a special childhood memory that is so vague that you can’t be sure if it actually happened, and you might get a feeling of how A SAFE PLACE feels. Unlike Hopper, Fonda and Nicholson, Jaglom didn’t seem to be a filmmaker concerned with the day’s politics or the youth movement, which he seemed to accept as only an idealistic gesture destined to fail. His film, scored mostly with songs from his youth in the place of the expected popular music that had helped sell EASY RIDER, was a strange and at times deliberately absurd valentine to childhood slipping away.

A SAFE PLACE feels authentically dreamlike and, viewing it today, it also feels very much like a film divided between two ideals. Tuesday Weld’s Susan/Noah is a woman literally split between becoming the person the blossoming women’s movement was asking her to be, and the child she wanted to hold onto so tightly. Nicholson, who later said he improvised his whole part, as an old free-spirited boyfriend, and Welles, as a wise old magician, seem to be the two catalysts pulling Weld in these very different directions. There are other characters that randomly wander in and out of the thin storyline, but it all centers on Weld’s struggle with her identity, a struggle that many young women were going through in 1971.

Welles and Nicholson are both fine in the film. Welles is certainly featured a lot more, and he floats in and out of the film like some wise old ghost with the ability to see just past where everyone else’s vision stops. His scenes with Weld are some of the most effective of his later career, and the monumental Welles surely must have felt some kinship with the idea frenzied Jaglom. Welles unfortunately remained mostly silent on the film in later years though, so it is hard to accurately know exactly what he was feeling.

Tuesday Weld is simply astonishing in the film, and very strange. Perhaps only Marlon Brando in Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS would seemingly give so much of his own memories and inner turmoil to a role. Weld invests her fragmenting character with a mystifying childlike intensity that is hypnotic at times, and extremely troubling at others. No other American actress could have played a role like this, and seemed anything other than ridiculous. Tuesday Weld is very much all of our lost childhoods in this film, and the work's final haunting disappearing act is a total triumph, even if it is one of the puzzling endings in all of American cinema.

Henry Jaglom confidently delivered A SAFE PLACE to Columbia studios in the summer of 1971, and it completely alienated and baffled the studio’s executives. With no idea what to do with the film, the Studio decided to take a chance and premiere it at the New York Film Festival in October of 1971. The film received such a divided and hostile reaction that screaming matches were said to have broken out in theatre between people who thought it was nonsense, and those proclaimed it a masterpiece.
The film had some brief European showings, and it received a handful of rave reviews in Paris and Britain and then, much like its lead character, it totally disappeared.
The film was pulled from circulation from Columbia and outside of a handful of Festivals, private screenings and gray market copies; A SAFE PLACE has virtually vanished.
By 1972 the Studios started to get a handle on the new Hollywood, and many of the periods most maverick artists would find their original works harder and harder to get made. Few directors were hit as hard as Henry Jaglom, and it would be five years before he was able to get another project off the ground, with the intense TRACKS crash landing in 1976. He has managed to get more than a dozen made since, but they have all been hard fights and he has never again been backed by a major studio again.
Jack Nicholson would of course go in to become one of the most respected actors and stars in the business, and he has thankfully still never completely let go the ghost of his independent days. Ironically his brave and brilliant 1971 directorial debut DRIVE HE SAID remains just as hard to see as A SAFE PLACE.
Tuesday Weld would have just one more leading role, that of the fragmented and destroyed Maria in Frank Perry’s masterful 1972 film PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, and has spent the rest of her career playing supporting roles in films almost exclusively not good enough for her. She remains one of Hollywood’s best kept secrets, the sad and complicated sex kitten who turned out to be the best actress of her generation , even if very few realized it.

The stage version of A SAFE PLACE is still occasionally performed, but the film remains one of Hollywood’s most hidden treasures. It is a near lost reminder of when, for a very brief shining time, the movie business was almost took over by authentic, and very sincere, visionaries; mavericks controlled by their imaginations and not a company’s pocketbook. A film like A SAFE PLACE should be being celebrated and not lying dormant in a studio vault somewhere.

For more on Tuesday Weld, I highly recommend the out of print PRETTY POISON: THE TUESDAY WELD STORY by Floyd Conner. The quotes at the beginning of this piece are taken from it.

"Something is About to Happen, Something Final": Jose Larraz's Symptoms

My original version of this article can be found at this link. The following is a slightly revamped version for Moon In The Gutter.

"Last night I dreamed they had returned. They were here again, just like in other dreams, but this time it was more confused. I have a feeling that something is about to happen, something final in which I will be involved."
-Jose Larraz, SYMPTOMS-

Spanish writer and director Jose Ramon Larraz is best known in the United States for his brutally erotic, audacious and influential horror film, VAMPYRES (1974), but the fascinating Larraz has always been much more than just a typical horror filmmaker.
Born in Barcelona in 1929, Larraz made his directorial debut with 1970’s WHIRLPOOL, a wild and inventive low budget film that proved a minor success. WHIRLPOOL led to the equally compelling DEVIATION (1971) and finally to his financial and artistic breakthrough, VAMPYRES.
Larraz was expected to follow up VAMPYRES with another erotic and violent horror film, but instead he delivered a psychologically devastating and genuinely frightening work that was nominated for the Cannes Golden Palm in 1974 before disappearing shortly after.
SYMPTOMS (1974) is, along with Roman Polanski’s REPULSION (1965) and Richard Loncraine’s FULL CIRCLE (1977), probably the best film ever made about a woman slowly slipping completely into madness. Shot quickly in England on a relatively low budget in early 1974 and rushed to the Cannes film festival that summer, SYMPTOMS is one of the great-lost films of the seventies and warrants major reconsideration.
The plot of SYMPTOMS, featuring a woman lost in solitude, a creepy old house, a nosy groundskeeper and other often used genre elements, isn’t that noteworthy. What is noteworthy is Larraz’s unsettling style and his camera’s unshakable obsession with his leading lady, the very haunted looking and remarkably talented Angela Pleasence.
Pleasence is probably best known to American audiences as the daughter of the very well respected late British actor, Donald Pleasence. Angela began appearing on British television in her early twenties and made her big screen debut in the delightful HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH (1967). She would prove very memorable in the 1973 Amicus anthology film FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE but SYMPTOMS would give her the first lead role of her career, and one of the best parts she has ever gotten to play.

Joining Pleasence were a small group of notable British actors including Michael Brady, Lorna Heilbron, Peter Vaughan and Marie-Paule Mailleux, but it is Pleasence’s film all the way though. Much like Polanski and Loncraine used their leading actresses, respectively Catherine Deneuve and Mia Farrow, in nearly every scene of their great essays on madness, Angela Pleasence dominates almost every frame of Larraz’s film with an eerie near silent work that is among the best genre performances of the seventies.
Much of the credit for SYMPTOMS hypnotic power should go to Editor Brian Smedley-Aston who manages to match the obsessive and lingering directorial style of Larraz with a sharp and consistently inventive cutting technique. Aston had handled the legendary PERFORMANCE for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg in 1970 and was a perfect choice for SYMPTOMS. Larraz’s film could have been overwhelming cold and near impossible to watch, but Aston manages to cut the scenes in a way that allows them to retain their voyeuristic nature but never allows them to outstay their welcome.
A relative novice, Trevor Warren, is credited with the film’s striking cinematography, but I suspect that Larraz was the one really responsible for the films unforgettable photography. The look of the film balances perfectly the languid and lovely British countryside shots with the terrifyingly dark and oppressive interior work. Where as REPULSION used black and white photography and shadows to highlight Deneuve’s increasingly paranoid state, Larraz lets the lovely color outdoor photography of the film become an impenetrable foil for Pleasence’s iced over interior landscape.
The prolific jazz oriented composer John Scott provides the near silent film with a lovely soundscape punctuated by a series of sharp and memorable musical cues. Also worth noting is that Larraz wisely hunted down STRAW DOGS art director Ken Bridgeman to design the lovely, but prison like, interiors of Pleasence’s house and the film does indeed resemble that Peckinpah masterpiece on several occasions.
When the film premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1973 it got some major word of mouth going, and Larraz was nominated for the Golden Palm but he failed to secure a substantial distribution deal. One especially outspoken admirer of it was Jack Nicholson who proclaimed it a masterpiece but even his strong vote of endorsement didn’t help. SYMPTOMS would encounter distribution problems immediately and wouldn’t get an American release until over two years later when it was retitled THE BLOOD VIRGIN, and put on the second half of a handful of drive in bills. It would seemingly disappear completely afterwards and has since only been seen in poor quality grey market prints.

Artistically the failure of SYMPTOMS affected Larraz in a great way, and it would take him over five years to make another film worthy of his best work, the surreal and bitter THE COMING OF SIN (1978). His filmography since has been filled with a series of interesting if under developed films. Despite being undeniably talented and innovative, Larraz has never again made a film as masterful as SYMPTOMS.
The time is right for SYMPTOMS to be rediscovered. Several of Larraz’s works have been made available on DVD in the past few years and a release of SYMPTOMS would serve as a sharp reminder of one of Spain’s great talents and individuals. The depth and subtlety present in SYMPTOMS might surprise film fans that have always thought of Larraz as just a filmmaker of brutality and extremes. SYMPTOMS is a truly inspired and fine piece of filmmaking that deserves the opportunity to be seen by more film lovers.

For more on Larraz and SYMPTOMS please seek out the amazing IMMORAL TALES by Cahal Tohill and Pete Tombs. It is one of the most indispensable film books in my collection, and their writing on Larraz and SYMPTOMS is extraordinary.

Also Horror Express has a look at the film here, and some of the above stills are taken from that piece.

Amplifier Article #4: Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst

The original version of this article can be found here. This is my slightly re-edited version for Moon In The Gutter.

Chances are if you were around in the seventies you probably have an opinion on Patricia Campbell Hearst. Her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), her imprisonment, and her eventually joining the terrorist group in 1974 became one of the biggest and strangest media stories of the decade, and to this day people are still divided over what actually happened to Patricia Hearst in that fateful year of 1974.
Writer and director Paul Schrader was twenty seven years old when Hearst was forcibly taken at gunpoint from her San Francisco home in that particularly cold January of 1974. He had just recently sold his first script, for THE YAZUKA, and was working on the work that would make him a legend, 1976’s TAXI DRIVER. Schrader, like most of the country, watched intently throughout the mid to late seventies as Patty Hearst went from kidnap victim to fugitive to finally convicted felon. By the time President Carter had her released from prison in 1979, most Americans, including Schrader, had all but forgotten who Patricia Hearst had been and could only see the gun toting “Tania” that the SLA had made her into.
Schrader hadn’t thought about Hearst for years until one night in the mid eighties when he ran into her at a social gathering. The two immediately hit it off and Schrader was impressed by the down to earth and fragile person he encountered. After that fateful meeting Schrader began looking closely at her case and realized that the real story of Patty Hearst wasn’t the bank robbing counterculture icon that had been ingrained in so many peoples heads, but instead the nineteen year old college student who had her life and spirit completely and suddenly stripped away from her.

Working from a script by Nicholas Kazan and adapted from Hearst’s own searing memoirs, EVERY SECRET THING, Paul Schrader began shooting his PATTY HEARST in and around San Francisco and Los Angeles in early 1988. Schrader, still reeling from the failure of his last film LIGHT OF DAY (1987), felt suddenly reinvigorated working on location, with a low budget and a relatively unknown cast. The resulting film would be a triumph for the fallen director as well for his lead actress, and a work that would restore the humanity that had been stripped away from Hearst a decade before.
The opening shot of PATTY HEARST is one of the most memorable from the eighties, and quickly identifies this as a major work by a director stylistically shooting on all cylinders. Featuring an ambitious 360 overhead crane shot that manages to finally pull into a tight close up of the film’s star, Natasha Richardson; the opening shot of PATTY HEARST is one of the more audacious moments of Schrader’s controversial career and one of his greatest. Add on that thematically it is one of the only shots in the film that doesn’t feel totally claustrophobic and you have a striking reminder of how quickly freedom can be stripped away.
The film quickly moves straight into the kidnapping in just the second sequence, and the open air spaciousness of the first scene is suddenly transformed into thirty of the most frightening and claustrophobic sequences in American film history. With Hearst’s own words providing bracing narration, Schrader’s camera first puts us inside a car trunk with her and then immediately into the closet where the SLA kept her for weeks in the first stages of her imprisonment.

These shots from the closet represent Paul Schrader at his most brilliant and most humane. There is never a moment when he lets us completely leave Patty Hearst’s viewpoint, and I have never talked to anyone who has seen these degrading and dehumanizing sequences that questions why Hearst would have done absolutely anything to get out. Schrader’s film is less about brainwashing and more about sheer survival, and everything Patty experiences helps us understand just what was finally going through her mind months later when she re-appeared as the angry and crazed “Tania”.
These early sequences also show, even more than his MISHIMA, Schrader’s dedication to Ozu and Japan’s more presentational style cinema. With his camera seemingly sitting, unmoving, on the floor next to Patty in total darkness, and the only light being provided by the light just behind the SLA member’s looking down at her from the hallway; Schrader’s PATTY HEARST is an astonishingly composed and well designed film that recalls many of the European directors he had written about so intelligently in the seventies. More so than most of his contemporaries, Schrader was actually able to take some of his Bressonian like tendencies and translate them into something very much his own, and PATTY HEARST is the greatest example of this.

The stunning first section of the film finally gives way to the second act, where Patty is finally let out of closet to find that in place of an actual army, is just a small group of confused and angry kids who had chosen the only path they could see in front of them. It is the handling of the SLA that is among the biggest attributes to PATTY HEARST. Instead of presenting them as monsters, Schrader treats them instead as humans and the second half of the film is ultimately about their shattered lives as much as Hearst. Schrader never offer excuses for their actions but he does allow a window into their lives and it is finally this that distinguishes PATTY HEARST from being just another true crime film.
Some critics have pointed to the very last act, which includes Patty’s capture and trial, as being a let down. But to me the stylistic change in tone in this section was very necessary. Gone is the claustrophobia of the first act, the character development of the second, and all we are left with is the fragmented shattered shell of a woman and a judicial system that lets her down. Patty Hearst’s last line of the film, which I won’t give away here, is one of the most subtle and powerfully simple indictments of hypocrisy in America that I have ever heard; it is also probably the greatest moment Paul Schrader has ever shot.

Of course PATTY HEARST wouldn’t have worked without the right actress in the title role. Twenty-four year old British born Natasha Richardson might have seemed an odd choice but here the young actress delivers a seamless and terrifyingly real performance that channels the real Hearst in a very complete and profound way. Mostly known in that period as just one of Vanessa Redgrave’s daughters, Richardson is simply astonishing in the role and it is impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. Schrader was so impressed by the young actress that he would give her the lead in his next film, 1989’s THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS. Also noteworthy is a young and unknown Ving Rhames giving a haunting portrayal as the angry and damaged SLA leader Cinque. William Forsythe, Frances Fisher and Dana Delany also provide fine support in the film.
Yugoslavian cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, in one of his first major assignments, gives PATTY HEARST its memorable washed out grainy look and his work is particularly noteworthy in the, near impossible to light, first section of the film. Minimalist composer Scott Johnson delivers an outstanding score and the rather rare soundtrack album is a real aural treat.
Schrader’s film still resonates, possibly more than it did in 1988, as our current political and media crazed climate feels much more like 1974 than it did twenty years ago. One suspects that this is one reason PATTY HEARST came and went so quickly in the fall of 88. Despite mostly positive reviews and a Golden Palm nomination at the Cannes Film Festival, PATTY HEARST bombed at theaters and barely cracked a one million dollar take. It faired slightly better on Video but it has been out of print in America for well over a decade now and no DVD is currently planned. Used VHS and laserdisc copies can be found and a region two DVD is on the market, but otherwise one of the bravest and most perfectly realized films of the eighties remains missing in action.
Patricia Campbell Hearst was given a full pardon by President Clinton in 2001 and works today as an actress, mostly for director John Waters. She remains one of the most controversial figures of the seventies as some view her as more a master manipulator and less a tragic victim. Paul Schrader’s brilliant and moving film stands as a reminder though of the one fact that everyone should agree on, that on a Winter’s day in 1974 a young woman’s promising life was irreversibly altered and corrupted beyond repair.