17,736 Steps to a Perfect Life

Our family had a subscription to the Catholic newspaper The Advocate, and as a child I’d excitedly check every week to see what movies the Legion of Decency was giving their Condemned rating to. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in these things that made it an actual sin to even witness one, although I’d start finding out as soon as I could.

The fact that I can remember Baby Doll from these listings is a tribute to how it must have been getting re-released periodically as things loosened up in the 60’s. Apparently on its first release (1956) the archbishop of New York forbade Catholics to see it (from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral!) and Jack Warner pulled it from circulation after only a week.

Plainly it still makes some people antsy…the DVD is rated R! I had thought Psycho was the earliest film to attain a Restricted rating but this has it beat by four years. And with no nudity, no sex, no violence, and no swearing! Plenty of innuendo and humidity, and a couple of offhand uses of “nigger” (not by a likable character), but still…

Elia Kazan directed from a Tennessee Williams screenplay and some of this is very funny. Eli Wallach is the Sicilian businessman who inserts himself between farmer Karl Malden and childlike wife Carroll Baker, and I’ve never seen Wallach having so much fun - you can see why, it’s a great role.

15 years down the road, all of the principals would be making giallos in Italy - Baker particularly was in numerous films as the imperiled blonde whose males are trying to kill her or drive her insane - but, sadly, not together.

When the Legion of Decency was dissolved in 1980, their very last flurry of condemnations included Dressed to Kill. De Palma must have cherished that.

What I learned from this film

Don’t let a Sicilian with a riding crop near your wife, particularly if you’ve yet to consummate the marriage.

Very sharp character study / crime drama that’s the directorial debut of writer Scott Frank.  A young man - a former golden boy - who’s suffered brain damage in an auto accident has a job as janitor in a bank, and is manipulated into assisting in a robbery.  Lots of good performances, good writing, scary and believable low-lifes.

What I learned from this film

More anecdotal evidence that bank robbery just doesn’t attract the best class of criminals.

  I was 11 when this came out and I can remember reading all the controversy around it - the nudity, and how “adult” and “frank” it was. It says something about the presentation of sex in cinema that it still seems that way.

Sharp, creative cinematography and editing, and some remarkable images. But also a lot of dialog that sounds like Pronouncements getting lobbed back and forth, and which frequently I couldn’t parse.

All the leads are good, and with the exception of Jennie Linden they’re all very good; I don’t think it was the fault of any of them I sometimes couldn’t understand their characters’ motivations.

Oliver Reed isn’t given much of a range of emotions to run through, but does a lot of good work in close quarters: it’s probably as impressive a performance as I’ve ever seen from him.

I laughed at Alan Bates’ spiel about eating the fig - because it was unexpected, and funny. I also laughed at Reed’s flashing back during sex, to his mother snickering at his father’s funeral - because, well, I thought that was only me!

[Within the last several months I’ve seen both Reed and Linden in (different) early-60’s Hammer psychological thrillers. Reed’s turn in Paranoiac had a lot to do with making it the best of the series. However it took me about three tries to get through Nightmare, where Linden’s schoolgirl is an insufferable drip - who cares if your protagonist is being persecuted if you don’t like her? I wouldn’t have bothered if the b&w ’scope photography hadn’t been so sweet and I wasn’t such a sucker for the genre]

I found the appearance of the distinctive-looking German artist in Switzerland a bit distracting, then realized why: he was an assassin in From Russia with Love, which I’d probably seen seven times before I was 14 (in pre-video days). Plus I’d read recently that Reed had been considered as Connery’s replacement for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service…given all this I was expecting the ferret-faced bastard to close in on Reed’s sled during the downhill sequence.

Remarkably abrupt ending - not complaining, just surprised.

What I learned from this film

Personal troubles or no: it’s still better to own the mine than work in it.

I’d seen an awful print of this years ago on television and wasn’t particularly impressed; the sharpness of the Criterion restoration foregrounds the ugliness a little more forcefully. That showing was also, I think, missing the murderous protagonist Mark slumping, spent, after seeing the climax of the filmed killing that starts the movie. I’m going to guess that that particular shot was instrumental in provoking a lot of the hostility with which the film was met.

Still a disturbing film, and one that obviously made a big impression on Scorsese (who championed its restoration) and De Palma (who built Raising Cain atop the protagonist’s backstory)

I’m embarrassed to say I’ve seen nothing else of Michael Powell’s; I’m interested in seeing The Red Shoes.

I couldn’t place Anna Massey at first and then realized that she’d gone on to figure prominently in Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

I thought the finale was not as well-staged as it could have been - not to give anything away, but something is shown to happen but doesn’t look as though it’s really happening.

Mark sometimes looks eerily like a certain M. Sellez.

What I learned from this film

“All this filming isn’t healthy”

Watching this was like watching a really, really great episode of Law and Order. Given that it spawned an apparently great New York cop show, I suppose it could be the progenitor of all subsequent TV cop shows. It’s certainly a lot more laid back and humorous than most noir or crime films of the era, despite the unpleasantness of the crimes, and it takes a special pleasure in the locations and local characters. Barry Fitzgerald is excellent as the avuncular, prune-faced, Irish lead cop.

What I learned from this film:

• In 1948 swimming in the East River was not a sign of mental illness.

Park Chan-Wook’s precursor to Oldboy is gorgeously shot and stunningly composed – I was thinking as I was watching it that is was one of the most beautiful films I’d ever seen – but I didn’t think the story merited it. You can see where it’s going after a while, and then it goes there – a couple of weird detours on the way but no major surprises.

It’s hideously violent. The fact that a couple of the main characters are so amped up by the desire for revenge that they are seemingly beyond rationality, and thus don’t seem frightened or hurt by what happens to them, is the only thing that made some of the sequences watchable.

All the leads are very good. The main character’s charmingly sullen terrorist girlfriend is a particular standout.

Evocative and creepy sound design.

One thing that surprised me was the director’s explaining the final twist at the end (the identity of the men who appear late in the film)…the groundwork had been laid for this very explicitly and it was jarring to have it spelled out.

Two of the last three Korean films I’ve seen (by different directors) have a plot point of a postcard written to a radio station, and someone’s identity being discovered as a result. I don’t know what to make of this.

I also don’t know why I’m so fond of the film’s title - maybe just because it sounds absurd - but I am.

What I learned from this film

Lots of dyed hair going on in South Korea

Entertaining monster-in-the-city movie that hits all the marks one expects from the genre while also managing to be a well-acted and interestingly offbeat dysfunctional-family narrative. Director Bong Joon-Ho also did Memories of Murder and this features the same lead actor: Song Kang-ho, who is again excellent.

I’ve liked both films I’ve seen by this director, and I’m glad he’s young because I think he’s going to do a lot of good stuff.  He doesn’t seem to like pat wrap-ups, either.

What I learned from this film

Chekhov’s directive holds true in Korea, too: if you introduce a bow and arrow in the first act, it’s going to go off sometime.

Fact-based 1988 TV movie chronicling a crime spree by two heavily-armed and apparently psychopathic Florida bank robbers. The reason the episode gained notoriety was because the eventual FBI stop of their car went so cataclysmically wrong. The resultant close-quarters gun battle as detailed herein is one of the most hellish things I’ve ever seen; it’s difficult to believe this was produced for TV.

David Soul (Hutch from Starsky and…) and Michael Gross, who play the robbers, were known for their good-guy TV roles, and this was going against type with a vengeance. While a lot of the movie (and almost everything involving the boring FBI agents) is cardboard, these two (and particularly Soul) bring a curdled intensity to their parts.

And that gun battle…a lot of things went wrong for the FBI but the main problem they had was that the bad guys just would not die. Seeing Soul’s character – already mortally wounded and moving like a leg-dragging zombie as he continues to get hit by gunshots – advancing on wounded FBI agents who are disabled or out of ammunition, and executing them on the ground, is the absolute stuff of nightmares.

What I learned from this film

Watching movie shootouts become significantly less fun when you’re aware that the particulars are real.

Odd black comedy from Polanski. Donald Pleasence is a neurotic egghead with a French trophy wife (Françoise Dorléac) and Lionel Stander is the American gangster who shows up at their 11th-century castle.

Sometimes drags a bit, but the humor – a lot deriving from the contrast between the male characters, although Stander’s is not exactly a stereotypical thug - and the uncertainty about where it all was going kept me watching.

There’s a scene on the beach that lasts an uninterrupted seven minutes, featuring multiple characters and the arrival of an airplane: I have to think that was not an easy thing to do. I’d actually be interested in knowing how closely the cast stuck to their dialogue, in general, and how much is extemporaneous.

Dorléac was Catherine Deneuve’s older sister; she died at the age of 25 in her sports car a year after this film was made.

What I learned from this film

I’d thought (mainly from his role behind the bar in Once Upon a Time in the West) that Lionel Stander was short, if exceedingly barrel-chested. Maybe he was, but he dwarfs Donald Pleasence (Polanski emphasizes Stander’s bulk with low angles but side-by-side he looks a lot bigger).

A long, slow film with few dramatic moments, low-key performances, and an unsatisfying not-really-resolution. Very good. The film was compelling almost because of the lack of fireworks, although some of the establishing shots - Sacramento Airport, Golden Gate Bridge - were hilariously beautiful. I particularly liked Mark Ruffalo, doing one of his angry, quiet men, but really everyone was great. It felt like a real team effort - no one in the crew or cast trying to showboat - which was fitting for a grim true-life crime story that could easily have been exploited (I’m looking at you, Siegel).

What I learned watching this film:

• Anthony Edwards should get more work.