Citadel: Fear and Despair

Citadel might be one of the bleakest horror films I've ever seen, and therein lies its terror. It opens on a very young pregnant couple, Tommy (Aneurin Barnard) and Joanne (Amy Shiels) moving into what appears to be a pretty uninspiring housing complex on some bleak semi-urban stretch of Ireland. But just as Tommy heads into the elevator to go retrieve more of their stuff from the car, a creepy gaggle of what appear to be children in hoodies attacks Joanne with syringes. She dies in the hospital, but not before delivering the baby. So now poor Tommy, left agoraphobic, paranoid, and almost catatonic by the experience (and let's not forget, he's still basically just a kid), has to raise a baby on his own. In abject poverty.

Of course, it gets worse. The hooded kid-things come back for the baby (and sure enough, we eventually find out they're not kids at all). And Tommy, who also has to deal with the paralyzing psychic scars of his earlier experience, has to find some way to begin to cope -- to hide, or escape, or fight back. But he can't. They can find him wherever he is. Dear god, I'm getting shivers again just thinking about it.

Forgotten Films: Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)

To learn more about the Forgotten Films project, go here.

One doesn’t quite know at first what to make of 1949’s frazzled noir Shockproof. It was directed by Douglas Sirk from a screenplay co-written by Samuel Fuller: Two legendary auteurs, meeting here early in their careers, before the films for which they would later become known (and maybe even for which they’d be a little pigeonholed). No, it doesn’t qualify as the kind of colorful “woman’s picture” Sirk is famous for (Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows), nor does it resemble the zonked-out, surreal crime thrillers and war pictures (Shock Corridor, The Big Red One) Fuller would ride to immortality. Maybe that’s why, until recently, it was so little known. (There was a brief re-release of it a few years ago, and it can now finally be purchased on DVD.)

Compared to the florid, sublime expressiveness of Sirk and Fuller’s later work, Shockproof is a relatively subdued film. But it’s also an object of genuine wonder – in which Fuller’s characteristically uncompromising, extreme plotting is given shape and conviction by Sirk’s sophisticated mise-en-scene. The film begins with a pair of women’s legs, clad in ratty black stockings and shoes, walking among the clean, dapper shoes of a mid-day crowd on Hollywood Blvd. A brunette walks into a hair salon and gets her hair dyed blonde. We quickly learn that we’re watching Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), a beautiful, recent parolee who has just done time for murder. Her parole officer, the tough-as-nails Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde, embodying a typical Fuller character with a typical Fuller name), tells her, in a classic hard-boiled exchange, that she has to change her ways: ”You gotta change your brand of men.” “Who picks them for me, you?” “You won’t have any problem making friends. Just make sure they’re friends this time.”

Trouble is, Jenny still adores Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), a dapper gambler whose love was what got her in trouble in the first place. Griff warns both Jenny and Harry to stay away from one another. The lovebirds, however, will not be stopped; they begin to meet clandestinely. Meanwhile, Griff tries desperately to reform Jenny, eventually getting her a job taking care of his own blind mother. Sure enough, the straight-arrow parole officer also begins to fall in love with her, making advances she doesn’t quite know how to accept. Teased into domesticity, Jenny feels the lure of the honest life, even as Harry plots with her to continue her inadvertent seduction of Griff.

The complexity of the male-female dynamic in Griff and Jenny’s life is refreshingly unpredictable and pronounced. While Griff presents a tough exterior, as he falls more and more in love with Jenny he becomes a figure not of romance, but of compromised masculinity: In one bizarre scene, he shrieks and grabs her hand during a movie. Acting in bizarre, volatile ways, Griff is no Clark Gable; he’s an increasingly desperate, lovesick man. Jenny reduces him to a surprisingly raw, open state, even as her character remains harder for us to decipher. It’s a welcome meeting of the two filmmakers’ sensibilities: Griff is one of Sirk’s emotionally vulnerable male protagonists, crossed with one of Fuller’s typically extreme personalities.

While the narrative’s broad strokes feature all the moral certitude of 40’s American filmmaking, the film’s particulars can’t help but toy with our allegiances and emotions. Duplicity is rampant on both sides of the law here: To scare Jenny, Griff at one point sends her to a doctor, secretly a psychologist whose job is to judge whether she’s a habitual criminal or not. (Jenny sees through the ruse.) Likewise, even though Harry has all the oily charm of a classic noir snake, it turns out he actually does love Jenny: His office is dominated by a giant portrait of her. This blurring of boundaries reaches its zenith when Jenny’s gradual attraction to Griff and his upstanding life winds up reducing Griff to something of a criminal himself. The last act of the film finds Jenny and Griff on the run from the lawful society to which they had tried desperately to belong.

The byzantine web of manipulation featured in Shockproof sometimes feels like a test-run for the networks of desire Sirk would establish in later films like Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, where one character’s love for another would often spur that object to covet another. The mise-en-scene here feels familiar, too: As Griff and Jenny’s story becomes more desperate, the compositions become increasingly unbalanced and unreal: One of the film’s later scenes is dominated by a giant oilrig, churning away in the background. Indeed, one could say that as Shockproof proceeds, the film’s two auteurs find their concerns coalescing perfectly: Sirk works his favorite theme of an individual collapsing under the stern eye and expectations of the society around them, while Fuller’s script follows an outlaw character trying anxiously to break free of the past (”That heater. It’s all corroded. Once corrosion starts with those things, eh, it’s finished.”) It may not be as expertly calibrated as one of either auteur's later films, but in its own way, Shockproof is unforgettable.

"A Vessel Grim and Daring": Some Thoughts on Spielberg's Lincoln

The more I think about it, the more it seems that Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln – which I caught at the New York Film Festival some weeks ago -- might actually be some sort of masterpiece. I loved it when I saw it, but it’s also grown in my mind since then. I’ll be writing more about the film after I see it again, but for now I wanted to make some observations that struck me both as I watched it and as I reflected on it afterwards.

To Control Something That's Out of Control: On Tony Scott

Tony Scott’s shocking suicide yesterday brought an end to not just one of the most influential careers in modern Hollywood, but also one of the strangest and most divisive. It’s interesting to note that, for a guy so often identified with blockbusters, he really had just a handful of genuine hits: Top Gun was huge, Beverly Hills Cop II was huge (mainly because it was a sequel to a box office phenomenon), Enemy of the State and Crimson Tide were huge-ish. Otherwise, films like Days of Thunder and The Last Boy Scout were generally seen as underperforming and not quite there. And True Romance, now correctly viewed as one of Scott’s best films, was basically a flop. Despite all that, his influence over not just other filmmakers but also male moviegoers of a certain age is undeniable.

Almayer's Folly: Leave It All Behind

Chantal Akerman’s updated adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Almayer’s Folly, which opens at Anthology Film Archives today, starts off with one of the most elegantly controlled and tense sequences I’ve ever seen. We see an open air night club somewhere in Asia. As random people go in and out, a shadowy figure moves into the frame and ominously enters the club. Akerman then follows the man from behind, slowly, as he makes his way towards a stage where a lounge singer, backed up by some awkward, scantily clad female dancers, lip syncs to Dean Martin’s “Sway.” The man watches the performance for an extended moment. Then, he goes onstage and stabs the singer, dragging the body offscreen. The music stops and the dancers all flee. All, that is, except for one -- a tall Eurasian girl with a distant look in her eyes, who continues her clunky dance as the empty silence gathers around her. A voice offscreen whispers, “Nina. Dain is dead.” The girl stops, and moves into close-up. And suddenly begins singing a religious song, in Latin, looking straight into the camera.

We may not know exactly what just happened, but we’re riveted nonetheless. This is what Chantal Akerman does at her best. She takes a moment and slows it down to such a degree that anything seems possible. Some directors like to hold their shots to give the viewer space and time to contemplate and explore. But Akerman’s not an analyst. She’s a hypnotist. She uses shadow, composition, and sound – just listen to this film sometime, with its mesmeric use of water and rustling reeds, its drifting waves of classical music and timeless pop – to pull us into this wild, twilight world.

Theory vs. Practice

[Herzog] left the precipice to scale the higher peak across the valley. I followed him. After we started to climb the perilous spindle, however, Herzog ordered me to go back before I killed myself.

"Werner, this is not the way I'm going to die," I affirmed.

He stared at me knowingly, but Herzog was insistent, so I retreated. Herzog continued on, clinging to the bare cliff, his toes searching for inches of support. I called out to him.

"Herzog, what do you think of the auteur theory of filmmaking?"

"The what?" he replied while hugging the rocky cliff two thousand feet above the ocean.

"The auteur theory -- you know --"

"The auteur theory? I don't know what that is. What is the 'auteur theory'?"

"Forget it!"

"What?"

"Forget it!"


-- From Alan Greenberg's Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass, which is well worth your book-buying dollars.

“You Must Become a Terrible Thought”: Nolan, Batman, and Hope

I’ve written quite a bit about Christopher Nolan over the years. (Again, go here read my review of The Dark Knight Rises for the Nashville Scene, or go here for some of the pieces I’ve written about Inception.) A couple of months ago, I wrote something for Vulture about the way that Nolan seems to weave his films around individual ideas, in which I also speculated about the potential themes in The Dark Knight Rises – which, needless to say, I hadn’t seen at the time. Having now seen the new film a couple of times, I’d like to talk a bit more about the ideas – or rather, the one main idea – behind it, and how Nolan presents it.

Some context: I said in that Vulture piece that “each of Nolan’s films is built around a single idea that eventually seizes control of the characters and, eventually, the film itself.” In Memento and The Prestige, for example, that idea seems to be identity. In Inception, it’s regret. In Batman Begins, it’s fear. And in Insomnia and The Dark Knight, it appears to be guilt.

Of course, the problem many writers have with Nolan isn’t so much that his films are devoid of ideas or themes, but that said ideas and themes tend to be blunt and inartfully stated. (For some very smart and very critical writing on Nolan's films, you should check out some of Jim Emerson's work.) Needless to say, I disagree. True, Nolan’s dialogue is often quite matter-of-fact about such things: He has Stanley Kubrick’s precision but lacks Kubrick’s talent for the glancing blow, the subtle gesture. What Nolan does have, though, is a unique ability to make sure that everything in his films – not just dialogue, but performance, music, visual style, editing…everything -- whirrs around these central ideas. It’s a single-mindedness, a totality that, for me at least, can be awe-inspiring to watch.