My head’s doing its thing again. I thought this was going to be the final piece of the first round, but I was misremembering; we’ve got ten more movies to go, which we’ll find in Part 1H, before we start actually moving stuff around. In any case, the penultimate ten movies in Part 1 will be the following:
#593, The Warriors
#526, The Egg and I
#634, Forbidden Planet
#853, Faust (1994)
#926, Return to Reason
#551: Sheitan
#712, Fido
#615, Outcast (2010)
#389, Mirage
#510, Sure Fire
And on we go!
The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979)
What is there to say about The Warriors that hasn’t already been said? It’s long been the hallmark of Walter Hill’s sometimes-inconsistent career, the definitive seventies survival thriller that somehow manages to be stylized past the point of absurdity and yet still visceral and gripping. The ensemble cast works so well together that picking them apart often doesn’t work; they go together like peanut butter and sriracha, leaving the only people who really stand out in the cast are antagonist David Patrick Kelly (who picoted this role into playing a long line of creepy, violent misfits) and Lynne Thigpen, whose smooth voice underpins the entire film. Some might consider that a drawback. I think putting together a batch of protagonist that work together that well is a celluloid miracle–especially when you’ve structured your entire film around groups. How do you work together that well when one of your antagonist groups is running around in Yankees uniforms carrying baseball bats, being silent and menacing (while still hilarious)? How do you manage to posit yourself as a group just as coherent? And yet, it happens. And it works. I can see this perhaps edging up a bit, but at the moment it seems like it’s in the right place.
The Egg and I (Chester Erskine, 1947)
Ya know, I generally paint myself as someone who’s not big fan of comedies (save of the zombie variety). And yet my thousand-best list contains a number of little gems like this fish-out-of-water comedy based on Betty MacDonald’s 1945 “we bought a farm” memoir. (That no one has yet adapted MacDonald’s equally funny second installment, The Plague and I, about her fight with tuberculosis, remains a crime against humanity.) These days, The Egg and I has kind of sunk into obscurity. This is sad. The Egg and I launched one of the funniest move spinoff series in history, Ma and Pa Kettle–but then, those too have faded from the public consciousness. We gotta do something about all this, kids. 526 seems perhaps a smidge high, especially when we just talked about The Warriors being in the proper place almost seventy places below, but I don’t want it to goo too far down; keeping it in the 500s seems proper.
Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)
Those who grew up in my generation, and those younger, probably remember Leslie Nielsen for Airplane!, Police Squad!, and the Naked Gun series, all some of the finest comedy the latter half of the twentieth century produced. We, in the main, don’t remember that Nielsen got his start playing heavies. If you want a great introduction to Nielsen’s earlier work, look no farther than this beauty, quite possibly the pinnacle of fifties sci-fi. Why? Because, unlike so many of its contemporaries, Forbidden Planet retains the sense of wonder much more common in sci-fi pictures fifty, sixty, seventy years previous to it. (Remember: when you’re talking about that time period, you’re going back to Mélies and A Trip to the Moon.) And, of course, there’s Leslie Nielsen, a perfect foil for Walter Pidgeon’s manly (and slightly doofy) heroics. It is, above all, a fun movie, and in the end, isn’t that what matters? Another where I’m quite content to leave it where it is.
Faust (Jan Svankmajer, 1994)
In the greater scheme of things, Faust is a relatively minor movie in the Svankmajer canon; Alice and Little Otik both sit in the 4.5-star tier, A Game with Stones is hundreds of place above this, etc. And yet Faust does indeed still deserve a place in the top thousand, I believe. In a catalogue that has traded for sixty years on being light-years away from anyone else when it comes to visual presentation, Faust still strikes me as Svankmajer’s most unique work. It’s not that he’s doing anything differently than he normally does. The presentation, however? Way different. Svankmajer likes to work in small, intimate set pieces, be it the two-clay-figure anecdots in Dimensions of Dialogue, Alice finding herself vastly oversized in small areas in Wonderland (a conceit used to equally excellent effect in Darkness/Light/Darkness), the courtship in Meat Love, etc. Faust is presented to us as the play, with the literal distance between the audience and the stage being partly translated to a figurative distance we get from Svankmajer’s constructions we don’t often have. It’s important within the bounds of Svankmajer’s milieu, which is important in itself. This might well slip a few notches, but it’s not going anywhere rash.
Return to Reason (Man Ray, 1923)
It’s a given that when one talks about dada cinema, the first thing anyone on the other end of that conversation is going to mention is Un Chien Andalou. It’s the movie that has been presented to us by generations of critics and fans as the definitive document of the movement. While it’s certainly compelling (and it sits very high on my list–in the Top 100 and unlikely to go anywhere any time soon), I think that perhaps we should be looking a lot more at Return to Reason as definitive, if for no other reason because Man Ray was actually there when it was all going down. He was in the thick of it. He’s also a multidisciplinary artist, so was able to approach dada from multiple points of view, all of which are now considered classics; why should we not elevate this to the same level? It lacks the cohesiveness and the length of Un Chien Andalou, but have you ever consumed any other dada media? That’s kind of the entire point of the movement–the meaning is predicated on what you bring to the table. This is, of course, going up. Way up.
Sheitan (Kim Chapiron, 2006)
Vincent Cassel has a thing for playing assholes. I can’t remember a single thing I’ve seen him in where he wasn’t one. But man, if you want Cassel’s definitive asshole, look no further than Sheitan. (Spoiler alert: the hint’s in the title.)
I’ve long had a rule of thumb when it comes to New French Extremity: the more a movie gets talked up in the American press, the less good it is. (The one massive exception to this is Martyrs, but then we already knew Pascal Laugier was great thanks to Saint-Ange… at least, those of us who were paying attention did.) Haute Tension has a nasty plot hole so big you can drive the killer’s truck through it. Inside is a wannabe Baby Blood (the film that started New French Extremity, though it wouldn’t get a name for over a decade afterwards). Frontier(s) is so generic I can’t remember a thing about it, even though I originally rated it 2.5 (so there must have been something about it I liked). But then you get the movies no one over here tells you about… Calvaire. The aforementioned Baby Blood. Nuit Noire. Ils. Sheitan. Absolute gems of French cinema. This one crowned by Cassel’s best performance, leading a cast that hits on every cylinder from first frame to last. That the plot is nothing you haven’t seen before becomes the most minor of niggles. Another from the 500s that deserves to stay right where it is.
Fido (Andrew Currie, 2006)
Where in the world did this movie come from? It’s very much an anomaly in the Currie catalog. And, as I noted above, in my own as well, given that comedies and I don’t generally get along. But the simple truth is that Billy Connolly should probably have a prescription for some great pain meds, because he carried this entire movie on his back. The man manages to be hilarious without speaking a word in scene after scene. There haven’t been many truly excellent zombedies over the years, but this is one of them. Yet another “this doesn’t need to move” entry.
Outcast (Colm McCarthy, 2010)
I said it in my original review, and I will say it again: Outcast is the very definition of “urban fantasy” (in the literary world) onscreen. There have been other notable examples (Boy Wonder, released the same year, is an excellent starting point), but it strikes me that all of the other ones I can think of lean heavily into the “urban” and keep the “fantasy” at bay. Not so this one, which embraces its mythic roots and celebrates them as they should be celebrated. It’s one of my favorite movies of the 2010s, and its current position strikes me as a bit on the low side, given that.
Mirage (Edward Dmytryk, 1965)
The easiest way to describe pretty much everything great about Mirage is to say that for twenty years I’ve referred to it as the best Hitchcock thriller Hitchcock didn’t make. (For the twenty before that, thanks to a VHS copy of it I recorded off HBO or summat that I missed the credits on, I thought it actually was a Hitchflick.) Gregory Peck plays the amnesiac to the hilt while channelling Cary Grant in NNW with an adeptness that, possibly, only Peck could have pulled off. I don’t mean to damn Dmytryk with faint comparisons to Hitchcock; Dmytryk, for all that he was a vicious sellout, was one hell of a director in his own right. Let me put it this way–he was good enough to get two Director’s Guild of America noms for Best Director AFTER he turned coat to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he did it while his turncoatiness was still fresh in everyone’s mind. That’s insane. (It was also something of an anomaly; despite doing, arguably, his best directorial work in the fifties after his 1951 HUAC testimony, he was never again nominated for an Academy Award after 1948).
As huge as this movie has been in my development and as much as I try to keep politics out of this list, I do feel that its rather elevated position in the list is probably too high given a lot of what I noted in passing above. It’s likely to drop.
Sure Fire (Jon Jost, 1990)
How much do I love Jon Jost? I offered to let him crash on my couch when he was touring Coming to Terms in 2013 and his original lodgings fell through. (He ended up being able to grab something else at the last minute, thankfully. I wouldn’t wish the couch I had back then on anyone.) Sure Fire is one of his that I didn’t see until much more recently, and I’m sorry for that, because like Jost’s other 1990 release All the Vermeers in New York (which sits at #501, this one’s a burner. Jost, as I mentioned with Svankmajer above, has a tendency to focus on intimate moments, but he tends to focus on a single intimate moment and spend the rest of the film building around that one moment. Contrast to Béla Tarr, who does the same thing in the main, except the one moment is often one of violence. Given Sure Fire‘s obsession with firearms, the specter of Tarr always feels like it’s in the background when you’re watching this one. Jost, however, isn’t going to take any easy paths. He never does. This is yet another that’s in the 500s, just a mite below Vermeers, and the two of them belong together.
And so we bring Part 1G to a close with the following entries in the sketchbook:
Return to Reason +
Outcast +
The Warriors =
Forbidden Planet =
Sheitan =
Fido =
Sure Fire =
Faust –
Mirage –
The Egg and I –
Tune in next time (which hopefully won’t be nearly as long) to find out what lies at 750 – 370 – 323 – 763 – 377 – 323 – 844 – 403 – 794 – 567!
Popcorn for Breakfast 