Dennis Hopper, RIP. On a related note, another favorite from the 1970s: Wim Wenders' Der Amerikanische Freund / The American Friend / L'ami américain / El amigo americano (1977).
The "American friend" of the title is a character derived from Fort Worth-born writer Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad novels. In Wenders' version, we're not quite sure what motivates the "talented" Mr. Ripley or his German anti-buddy, Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz): money, mortality, kinship? Or is it chance and opportunity? Is Zimmermann dying fast, or is he being hoodwinked into becoming a de facto hitman? What is self-reflection, projection on others, what is real and what is forgery? As art forger Derwatt (Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause) quips, "A little older, a little more confused. . ." At one point, Tom Ripley admits to a tape player: "I know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is."
What makes the plot work is the added tension created by Jonathan's wife Marianne Zimmermann (Lisa Kreuzer), their son Daniel (Andreas Dedecke), and mystery man Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain). Sam Fuller (the director) adds more as Der Amerikaner, a gangster -- Fuller who said, "Van Gogh was a great inspiration for me, a guy for whom life was work and work was life. I wanted to be like him, except I didn't want to go nuts and cut off my ear."
A beautifully crafted film. Like Sorcerer alluded to in the past two posts (also from 1977), not for the Disney and Hallmark crowd nor the easily distracted, my friends . . . but oh, what a movie!
The Kinks play a subtle reinforcing role for the pensive Mr. Zimmerman: He mumble-hums and listens to The Kinks' Face to Face, specifically "Too Much on My Mind;" when Marianne suspects he's involved in shady business, another Kinks song -- "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" from Kinda Kinks -- plays in the background.
Mr. Ripley has appeared in more recent movies, as well, but this one's his best showing.
Way cool flick! I doubt any film could be made quite this way today . . . Friedkin shows a mad genius in this one, in the direction of Werner Herzog . . .
From William Friedkin, the director who has given us such gems as The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973) and Bug (2007), another insanely torqued masterwork: Sorceror (1977)! I can't say enough good stuff about this one: visceral and creepy, it draws the viewer into a world few would want to live or die in . . . It's an alternate version of one of my favorite 50s films, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur / The Wages of Fear (1953) based on Georges-Jean Arnaud's 1950 novel. Off the charts good filmmaking . . .
Early on in Sorcerer, there are scenes in Vera Cruz, Jerusalem, Paris and New Jersey that lay out why four bad dudes end up as desperados driving two trucks carrying volatile explosives toward a burning oil well 216 clicks away from the squalid village of Porvenir ("future" in Spanish) somewhere in South America.*
A shady hitman, a smalltime gangster on the run from robbing a church, the survivor of a cell that set off a bomb in Jerusalem, a banker fleeing from corruption charges, and "the German" -- that's the main crew. Throw in death, destruction and wreckage from an oil disaster, a peasant uprising, guerillas in the mountains, the brutal and ever-changing nature of the terrain, savage tropical weather and corporate mandates -- plus Tangerine Dream's first soundtrack -- and there you have it . . . Not for the Disney and Hallmark crowd nor the easily distracted, my friends . . . but oh, what a movie!
*Possibly an allusion to Provenir in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, though actually the village of Alta Gracia -- "high grace" -- in the Dominican Republic.
Somehow fittingly, just as there's more than one version of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (ca. 1928), there's more than one version of Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2006). Confusing, I know, but John Thomas and Lady Jane, not published (so far as I can tell -- even this is hard to verify completely) until 1972, provides an alternate version which is, via Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois [Lady Chatterley and the Man of the Woods] (1977), the basis for Ferran's movie versions.
Okay, so what's the big deal? This is not far afield from either Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (ca.1857) or Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina / Анна Каренина (ca. 1877), right? Well, it is and it isn't. For one thing, Lawrence incorporates the industrial slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918 into Lady Chatterley's arc, which is thus more modern in its setting.
Lady Chatterley's husband, a mine owner made an invalid by the war, spends part of his time wheeling around in something like a riding lawnmower/wheelchair, complete with combustible engine. Besides that, reading aloud about the Trojan War and acting the aristocrat, he's not able to do much. This leaves emotional and physical space for Lady Chatterley (his wife) to meet up with the gamekeeper from time to time.
So that's the big deal: a modern twist on an enduring -- and appealing -- trope.
Pascale Ferran (the director) herself notes why she preferred the version she chose to adapt: "[T]he gamekeeper is a much wilder, more sensitive character. He’s a very solitary man, with a complicated relationship to speech. He really should have been a miner, but he didn’t enjoy being around people. He prefers being alone in the woods like a hermit.”
Ferran, in this same interview with Anne Cammon from which the above is quoted, further observes: The two [main] characters come out deeply transformed, both in themselves and in their vision of the world. They come out freer and braver, and maybe more intelligent . . . At the beginning of the film Constance [i.e. Lady Chatterley] is sort of like a 19th-century woman, and by the end of the film she’s more like a woman from the late 20th-century . . ."
A pivotal scene in front of one of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescos at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in HBO’s Hung got me to snooping through old newspaper files. One 1933 article claims that Diego Rivera, a large man, lost a hundred pounds during his Detroit year (mostly 1932), after studying Ford’s River Rouge plant, roaming around with Frida Kahlo and creating masterpieces.
My favorite pertinent news piece so far is “DETROIT IN FUROR OVER RIVERA ART: Murals Symbolizing the City’s Industrial History Threatened With Destruction”(New York Times, March 22, 1933):
“I am in a curious position,” explained Rivera. “The official Communist party of this country has expelled me from membership; and now the conservative element attacks me. However, my public is made up of the workers – the manual and intellectual workers. The religious are attacking me because I am religious: I paint what I see. Some society ladies have told me that they found the murals cold and hard. I answer that their subject is steel, and steel is both cold and hard. . .” The paintings are finished, he concluded, and he does not intend to alter them.
He did not alter anything. The DIA showcased them. Rivera and Kahlo have long since died, but the murals remain in Detroit for all to experience.
Frida Kahlo staring weirdly at Rivera while he apparently dozes off, Belle Island, Detroit, 1932. . .
This one goes out to Pete Quaife (RIP) and The Kinks: a rough live version of "Till the End of the Day" from around 1966. Eclectic, moody, pensive and cool -- that's them. And they do a hell of a great live show when they're on . . .
My favorite Kinks period goes from the mid-60s through Muswell Hillbillies (1971), and then sporadically though their American albums ever onward, akin to The Rolling Stones. In both cases, hard to beat the early surge, eh? But hell, even one great song would have been worth the whole shebang -- and there are scores of them!
HBO's Hung works on a bunch of levels. It's got everything but the kitchen sink packed into half hour episodes, including the nature of: economic exchange; societal values; gender differences and commonalities; human desire; comedy; family; friendship; love; sports; metro Detroit as microcosm of late capitalist society. And it works no matter how you take it, lacking only physical violence -- the more typically macho American response to thwarted dreams. All in all, a subversive and brilliant show, with a strong cast.
If you think "Marxian" is too strong a read, check out a most telling scene in the season 2 opener between Lenore, Tanya and Ray in front of one of Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry frescos at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA),* discussing life. No joke.
Today's Rune: Wholeness.*(Production of Automobile Body and Final Assembly, 1932-1933).
