Fat City

John Huston's Fat City (1972), a terse, funny, and unsentimental meditation on youth, marriage, and wine that played for a two-week run at the Film Forum this month, was at its roots a lover's elegy to all the lost dreams of the Stockton, California: the bars, the boxers, the migrant farm workers, the faded rooms, the peeling paint, the broken hopes. Stacey Keach starred as Billy Tully, an aging (30) and alcoholic man who once boxed against the 5th in line for the title. Based on the 1969 novel by Stockton-born Leonard Gardner, Huston took over production from Monte Hellman and directed one of his finest films, aided by the sunlit color cinematography of Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke) and by Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" (taken from his 1970 album Kristofferson). Susan Tyrell was superb in an Oscar-nominated performance as Oma that was equally lighthearted and heartbreaking. Jeff Bridges and Candy Clark were featured as visions of Tully and Oma's idealized youth, while Curtis Cokes (as Earl), Sixto Rodriguez (as Lucero), and Nicholas Colasanto (as Ruben) gave the film depth and life from smaller roles. Fat City moved seamlessly across the San Joaquin Valley's world of migrant labor from the predawn allotment of jobs to the onion fields and walnut farms picked by black, Mexican, and Chinese laborers. The workers in these fields, like the young boxers in Ruben's gym, provided some of the best moments in the film. For Keach, who played Mike Hammer on CBS in the the 1980s and was excellent in The Killer Inside Me (1976), Billy Tully was a career-defining role.

The Bedroom Window

The pairing of Steve Guttenberg and Isabelle Huppert as illicit lovers in The Bedroom Window (1987) should warn first-time viewers that a plot twist is soon forthcoming. Directed by Curtis Hanson (Bad Influence, L.A. Confidential), Huppert is the wealthy and otherworldly Sylvia Wentworth—aka the boss’s wife—who goes home with the hapless everyman Guttenberg following a work party. Huppert, witnessing the attempted rape of a girl through Guttenberg’s bedroom window, is hesitant to call the police as she, of course, would not be able to explain the her presence in his apartment without revealing her liaison dangereuse (with the Brooklyn-born star of Diner, Police Academy, and Bad Medicine no less). When Guttenberg calls the police to report the crime himself, he soon becomes the focus of both the police investigation and the attack victim played by Elizabeth McGovern (Once Upon A Time in America). Though its billing as a “romantic thriller in the tradition of the master of suspense” was a bit of a stretch, The Bedroom Window should nonetheless please fans of Huppert as it marks one of her very few American films, along with Michael Cimino's brilliant Heaven's Gate (1980), a turn-of-the-century historical epic starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. The Bedroom Window features several 80s-style chase scenes and was filmed by Gilbert Taylor, the director of photography of The Omen (1976) and Star Wars (1977). Look for Wallace Shawn in a scene-stealing performance as defense attorney for the lead suspect in the attack.

The Stranger

Orson Welles' Nazi-fugitive thriller The Stranger (1946) starred Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Loretta Young. Each play a sort of perfected version of their screen self: Welles as the duplicitous college professor Charles Rankin/fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler; Robinson as the tireless federal agent Mr. Wilson, doggedly on Kindler's trail; Young as the resilient but desperate damsel in distress. Like The Night Porter (1974), Liliana Cavani's sadomasochistic cult film starring Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling, Welles' film begins with an examination of fugitive psychology, a process involving confession, conversion, guilt, and murder. As the movie begins, Rankin performs the ultimate film noir daily double--a marriage followed by the secret burial of a man he has killed in the woods of his small Connecticut college town. Rankin/Kindler, part-author of the final solution, must evade not only Robinson but his strongest "ally" as well, Loretta Young's subconscious. The film is full of textual gags such as the USE GYM AT OWN RISK sign in the beginning, admonitions like "in Harper there's nothing to be afraid of," and casually-spoken lines like "we'll catch up with you." 1946 was an eventful year for Welles who also used his radio show that year to work in conjunction with the NAACP to publicize the case of Isaac Woodard Jr., a returning African American soldier beaten and maimed in his South Carolina hometown while still in his Army uniform. Stylistically, The Stranger bears an unmistakable nod to Hitchcock. Robinson's character of the Nazi-hunting federal agent also brings to mind the role of "Vampire Hunter" Van Meer played by the great Sam Fuller in Larry Cohen's A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). Fuller, a notorious cigar smoker, guaranteed Cohen that he would carefully regulate the use of his on-screen and off-screen cigars so that continuity would not be disturbed during editing. The problem was that Sam Fuller did not really have an on-screen and off-screen cigar; watching the film today it is more than amusing (for Fuller fans) to watch his cigars magically change back and forth in length. The Stranger's melodramatic ending, high above the town in the giant clock tower, should not distract from this well-paced thriller.

Gran Casino

The first of Luis Bunuel's 20 Mexican films, Gran Casino (1947) is part melodrama, part musical. It is also, of course, total Bunuel. Set in the booming Gulf Coast oil fields of pre-Revolution Mexico, Gran Casino intertwines greed, fate, and desire in a tale hinging on the foreign ownership of Mexican natural resources. Though it was Bunuel's first film in 15 years, it was--in his own words--not half bad. The musical numbers performed by stars Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque are filled with suggestion and surprise (including the hilarious "Trio Calaveras" as Negrete's backing chorus who appear out of nowhere). Though missing the usual dream sequence, the layout of the casino in the film's title was utilized as a kind of map of the mind--characters pausing on the stairs between the conscious and subconscious worlds where scheming and dreaming evolve into murder and suspicion. Having fled Franco's Spain, Bunuel edited propaganda films at MOMA in New York and dubbed features into Spanish in Hollywood before his Socialist ties and distaste for life in the U.S. led him, unbeknown to himself at the time, towards a career and citizenship in Mexico. After a long layoff from the three films of his youth, Le Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age D'Or (1930), and Land Without Bread (1933), Bunuel was asked to direct Gran Casino for producer Oscar Dancigers, who he had known in Paris. Dancigers is thus one of the most important men in film history, resurrecting the career of one of the medium's most innovative and international directors; their collaboration in Mexico included, among other films, Los Olvidados (1950), El (1953), and Abismos de Pasion (aka Wuthering Heights)(1954). Though Bunuel, the master of surrealist cinema, would undoubtedly reject such a simplistic reading, as Negrete claims in Gran Casino to have "won something out of our defeat," it is difficult not to see Bunuel's comments veering toward the defeated Republicans of the Spanish Civil War, toward the oppression of workers everywhere, and toward his own directorial career.