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.

Don't Touch the White Woman!

Marco Ferreri's anti-imperialist comedy Touche Pas a la Femme Blanche (Don't Touch the White Woman) (1974) reconfigures the Battle of Little Bighorn to the modern-day streets of Paris, pitting Marcello Mastroianni's George Armstrong Custer against Alain Cuny's Sitting Bull. The climactic scene, featuring Custer's ill-conceived plan of attack, takes place not in the Black Hills of South Dakota but rather in a gigantic pit of a construction site that was formerly the famed Les Halles marketplace of working-class Paris, which was undergoing a sort of "urban renewal" at the time. The film also stars Michel Piccoli as Custer's deranged nemesis Buffalo Bill Cody and Catherine Deneuve as Marie-Helene de Boismonfrais, the primly Victorian "white angel of the white man" who beds Custer in a fit of untrammeled passion (under the watchful gaze of President Richard Nixon, whose photograph sits on Custer's writing desk). War with the Indians has been coordinated by various railroad executives--neocons in period costume--who have enticed the government with stock options, contracted the military for their own means, and pull the strings of the media. Aware of previous "mistakes" by the architects of Vietnam and the Algerian War, as well as the "lessons" of Watergate, they have hired Custer out of retirement knowing that the public will be drawn to the war by either total victory or total defeat. Little Big Horn, of course, like the Alamo, was a crushing defeat turned into national cause as fallen imperialist heroes such as Custer and Davy Crockett were made into martyrs. It was exactly the kind of rallying point that the atrocities of modern war cannot foster. Lurking in the background with the railroad executives is an undercover C.I.A. agent, posing as an anthropology professor, who carries postmortem snapshots of Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Surrealism at its finest, representing both the struggle of the subconscious and that of the common man under totalitarian regimes and/or modern capitalism, Ferreri's film is notable for predating Robert Altman's underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) which featured a toupee-wearing Paul Newman as the charlatan Buffalo Bill and Geraldine Chaplin as Little Miss Sure Shot (Annie Oakley). Altman's seething, but accurate, satire of Cody's Wild West show also featured Harvey Keitel, Kevin McCarthy, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, and a fantastic gag on President Grover Cleveland and his child bride Frances Folsom Cleveland.

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (2008), which opened in New York at the IFC Center last summer, starred Asia Argento and Fu'ad Ait Aattou as ill-fated lovers in a brilliantly filmed version of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1851 novel Une Vieille Maitresse (aka An Old Mistress). D'Aurevilly was a minor French writer and newspaper critic whose career spanned the Second Republic and Second Empire of Napoleon III. Like many of his other works, Une Vieille Maitress presents characters in a vice-like grip of passion who are drawn to excess, criminality, and self destruction with an almost-supernatural obsession. For Breillat (Fat Girl, Romance, Anatomy of Hell), the period-costumes and mannerisms of d'Aurevilly's novel seemed more liberating than restrictive, and The Last Mistress was her most balanced and human work. Likewise, playing the outcast Spanish mistress Vellini opened new possibilities for Argento, whose carnality--while central to her on and off-screen image--is usually handled awkwardly by lesser directors (including her father). In surrendering herself to Breillat, however, Argento displayed the emotional depths of her talents as an actor and took the film to heights it would not have reached without her. Co-starring with Argento and the fey Ait Aattou was Roxane Mesquida as the demure bride Hermangarde and Yolande Moreau as La comtesse d’Artelles, the spiritual matriarch of the film. Shot by Greek cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis (Romance, Anatomy of Hell) and edited by Pascale Chavance (Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy), The Last Mistress was ultimately about the complex banality of doomed love-triangles (in any era) and will stand as one of the most complete films of the decade. Old lovers, literally, will haunt your dreams after watching this film.

The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961), like the geography and characters it portrays, has had a long and obscure history, paved over, discarded, presumably lost forever. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and distributed by Milestone, it was screened at IFC Center and BAM last summer. The film revolves around six or seven American Indians living in Bunker Hill, the benighted backwater of Los Angeles where wooden Victorian mansions, long since turned into hotels and cheap apartments, were carved out of the steep hillsides of downtown L.A. Once an exclusive and wealthy neighborhood, Bunker Hill was abandoned by local businesses in favor of the newly-constructed department stores (with off-street parking lots) on Wilshire Blvd. The former mansions were left to decay and, though filled with working-class Mexican Americans and South American immigrants working in the garment industry, the area was rezoned as an "urban renewal" project of the 1980s, financed largely by Japanese investment. Bunker Hill is today's financial district of Los Angeles, and the "center" of high culture with museums, opera houses, and concert halls. But the Bunker Hill presented by Mackensie's tragic and beautiful film is fraught with the romance of night, the uncertainty of youth, and the difficulties of assimilation for the American Indians of the film. It is the Bunker Hill of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939) and Dreams From Bunker Hill (1982), filled with the same mystery, sadness, and humor. Few today know that in the late-1950s a young generation of American Indians left their Southwest Reservations for the "freedoms" of urban America. The Exiles has been called a documentary, which is about half-true. The film was a collective effort made while Mackensie (1930-1980) was studying at USC, filmed on leftover scraps of film stock, and its stars play honest versions of themselves and their lives. Of special note is the dance scene at the end of the film atop a desolate hill adjacent downtown. American neo-realism at its finest, it remains one of the greatest independent movies ever made.