The Steel Helmet (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Steel Helmet (1951) – S. Fuller

Tough and uncompromising, Sam Fuller’s first war film (enlivened by his own experiences in WWII) shows gutsy G.I’s in Korea coping as best they can with the situation (which involves  a potential enemy behind (or up in) every tree). Jumping right into the action from the word go, we follow a few soldiers who have survived when their patrols are killed as they hook up with another group and take refuge in a Buddhist temple.  Among the soldiers are a Japanese-American lugging a bazooka, an African-American medic, and a cigar-chewing no-nonsense Sargent who has befriended a Korean boy.  Fuller’s script doesn’t hold back from criticizing America’s actions toward its own people (segregation of African-Americans, internment of Japanese Americans during WWII) even as it defends democracy as better than communism. We even see an American commit a war crime, which apparently got Fuller into hot water with the FBI, given that the Korean War was still ongoing when the film was released (and the terrible realities of war were apparently not ready to be acknowledged). I found the film gripping from start to finish; despite its low budget, it feels realistic and its stock characters are somehow made fresh. Packs a wallop.   

  

Inherent Vice (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Inherent Vice (2014) – P. T. Anderson

After seeing Inherent Vice, I feel fully deranged -- and I don’t think this is because I haven’t read the Pynchon novel.  True, there are a lot of characters and details cluttering the film. But I think, more accurately, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unreliable protagonist cum narrator Joaquin Phoenix (as “Doc” Sportello) has simply softened my brain with his mammoth drug-taking and his confused mystery-solving.  Or maybe it’s just me who got confused – despite Doc’s continually expressed befuddlement (Phoenix is a master of the reaction shot), he still solves the mystery.  Maybe with the help of “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (played by Josh Brolin), the LAPD cop who is his foil and antagonist, and maybe just because things happened to work out that way. Did I mentioned this is a comedy? Although there were only a few laugh out loud guffaws in the theatre, I did find myself chortling at Anderson’s well staged routines.  Not all of this is a big drug reference, there’s also a dash of ribaldry, some Owen Wilson, hidden games to play (spot the celebrity relative), and the grooviest 1970 era sets, hair, cultural memes, music, and L.A. vibes that you could ever care to meet.  The film may seem even better when more fully digested as the claustrophobic framing and artful misdirection (camera tight in on close ups, heads cut off from the frame) dissolves and all that is left is the schematic private-eye frame (also used expertly by Altman earlier) and the various elements of the film that directly relate to it, with anecdotes and asides, such as a crazy Martin Short, floating away in the haze. Or maybe there are no asides and everything is relevant – you be the judge, I might just be paranoid or hallucinating.

  

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Thin Blue Line (1988) – E. Morris

This is Errol Morris’s incredible non-fiction film that got a man released from prison.  Watching it again after many years, I found its blend of talking heads and re-enactments still just as gripping as in the 1980s.  And unfortunately, the issues it raises, about truth, bias, motivation, and memory are still just as pressing for the innocent men and women facing murder charges and the death penalty.  As we know, latter-day DNA evidence has exonerated scads of people improperly convicted.  In Randall Adams’ case, the evidence against him was provided by unreliable witnesses (not crime scene evidence) who are more-or-less emphatically discredited by Morris’s documentary (including from interviews he conducted but aren’t in the actual film).  His re-enactments presented clues (such as the chocolate shake) in a way that might have been more compelling than in the actual trial.  However, one could validly ask whether such techniques could be used to create more bias rather than introduce more truth.  As I’m sure Morris would agree (especially given his later films, such as The Fog of War), reality is in the eye of the beholder and the filmmaker’s vision is not necessarily clearer.  However, in this case, it seems that Morris stumbled into a version of the truth and set the groundwork for the current fever-pitched interaction between media and reality.

Captain Blood (1935)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Captain Blood (1935) – M. Curtiz

Pirates of the Caribbean indeed!  Tasmanian Errol Flynn swashbuckles into action as the gentlemen doctor Peter Blood turned prisoner of King James II turned slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation turned captain of a pirate ship turned….I won’t spoil it for you.  Michael Curtiz keeps the film moving along and Flynn is aided by 19 year old Olivia de Havilland as his love/hate interest, Guy Kibbee and Ross Alexander as pirates in arms, and Lionel Atwill as the villainous plantation owner. Flynn is certainly charismatic in his first major film but this is the one that typecast him forever. Sets, miniatures, and special effects make you feel that you really are on the high seas (sort of). A true “boy’s own adventure” as they might have called it back then.

Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) – W.-P. Yuen

Jackie Chan’s first big hit is a classic all-fighting kung-fu flick, spiked with humor which makes it all the greater.  Impossibly young Jackie (23 or 24 years old) is a poor dolt, serving as a janitor for the Hungwei School where he is terribly mistreated.  When he happens to meet Simon Yuen, a puckish old kung fu master disguised as a beggar, he is transformed into an expert in the Snake Fist style.  Comic training scenes included!  Unfortunately, the Snake Fist clan is being hunted down and killed by the Eagle’s Claw clan and Jackie and his old master are targeted.  In order to save the day, Jackie must invent a new style of fighting.  And he does.  Jackie’s abilities here are incredible and Simon Yuen (the father of director Wing-Poo Yuen who later worked on the Matrix) is similarly amazingly acrobatic.  The sequel, Drunken Master, is also a classic of early hand-to-hand fighting Jackie, before he graduated to larger-scale death-defying stunts in the 1980s.  Both have coherent plots so seek them out rather than some of the poorly edited schlock that also circulates under Jackie’s name. 

  

Freud (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Freud (1962) – J. Huston

John Huston may have enjoyed the challenge of putting Freud’s theories (not his life, exactly) on screen, given the direct parallel between repression of sexual thoughts by the superego and repression of the same by the Hays Office censors.  Surely, he also smirked when he put Monty Clift into the lead, knowing that the actor suffered great torment over his homosexuality (leading to emotional and alcoholic problems that troubled this production).  Indeed, Huston himself voices Freud’s inner thoughts on screen in occasional narration, suggesting his role in directing/dominating Clift.  Somehow, despite being all talk talk talk (therapy), the film mostly succeeds and is fairly gripping and noir-ish when Freud faces his own internal conflicts in a dark dream (not unlike Hitch’s Dali sequence in Spellbound or Bergman’s Wild Strawberries scene).  Susannah York’s ongoing somatoform problems, Larry Parks’ kindly but less brave attempts to treat them, and Eric Portman’s dastardly (but secretive) supervision of Freud’s early work are all pieces of the puzzle – but all roads lead to his relationships with his parents (of course).  For me, it is hard to know how much the audience of the day was able to fill in the gaps of Freud’s theories from what is onscreen but the more you know, the more you may see (notwithstanding the schematicity necessary in all film).  Not the travesty it could have been and in fact consistently absorbing. 

Zardoz (1974)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Zardoz (1974) – J. Boorman

Some might complain that Zardoz is half-baked but I declare that it is well and truly fully-baked.  A true WTF flick before WTF was a glimmer on a larrikin’s keyboard.  John Boorman takes (ex-Bond) Sean Connery and deposits him in the future (2293 to be exact) where he is an uneducated ape-man, trained to maraud, rape, and kill in service of the god Zardoz who takes the form of a giant flying stone head.  Yes, really.  For reasons not initially explained (and by methods also withheld until later), Connery manages to get inside the head, kill the man he finds there, and enter the Vortex zone where a different class of humans lives.  These half-dressed humans are young intellectuals who live forever – yes, they have found a way to eliminate death.  But they are totally bored with everything and their society is fraying at the seams, with a few subgroups (apathetics and renegades) causing problems.  Connery plays dumb, but he’s not and he holds the answer to that future society’s problems and indeed to our race’s evolutionary future in the 24^th century.  The film looks pretty great and, although possibly pretentious (OK, definitely pretentious – and perhaps not entirely coherent), I found that its totally bonkers over-the-top images and theorizing were to my liking.  Uh, but it might not be for all tastes!