Lilith (1964)

Lilith, released in 1964 and written, produced and directed by Robert Rossen, is one of those movies that has fallen through the cracks. Despite being extremely interesting it doesn’t attract much attention. That might partly be because it’s difficult to classify. It’s set in a mental hospital but it’s not a Social Problem Movie and it doesn’t have a political axe to grind. It’s not a horror movie and it’s not a psychological thriller. It is a romance, of sorts.

After leaving the army Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) returns to his home town and gets a job in the Poplar Lodge mental hospital. He is a trainee occupational therapist. Vincent has a reasonable degree of self-awareness. He knows that people attracted to this sort of work often have some personal motivation. In his case it has to do with a family member.

Vincent has a flair for the job and he’s keen. It looks like he’s going to do very well.

This is not a state hospital. This is an exclusive private clinic. The families of the patients pay huge amounts of money to have their loved loved ones cared for there. There are no high walls, no locked wards and there’s almost no security. The patients are high-functioning schizophrenics. They’re crazy but harmless.

The problem for Vincent is Lilith (Jean Seberg). She’s a patient. She’s very high-functioning, or at least she appears to be. She can give the impression of being a perfectly normal bright cheerful vivacious young woman. She is however entirely disconnected from reality. She is also intelligent and manipulative and very pretty. And very crazy.

Vincent isn’t stupid. He knows she is trying to seduce him. He knows this is a dangerous situation. But he’s inexperienced. And she’s so cute and adorable. He knows he can fix her. His love can fix her.

He really does believe that he is reaching her. There are warning signs which he ignores.

A complication is Stephen Evshevsky (Peter Fonda). He’s a patient too. He’s very neurotic, understands nothing about women and is hopelessly in love with Lilith.

There’s another female patient who adds another complication to the situation.

We know this is all probably not going to end well but this is not a horror movie or a psychological thriller so if and when disaster strikes it won’t necessarily involve violence and mayhem.

Lilith pleased neither critics nor the public on its release and is now totally forgotten. It’s just not even close to being a typical mainstream Hollywood movie. It’s an eccentric arthouse movie that feels very European. It’s a movie about people who are detached from reality and that’s how the movie feels. There’s no firm reality to grab hold of. It flirts with realism and then veers into full-blown surrealism. And even the moments of realism have a disturbing not-real edge. Lilith thinks that people keep lying to her. She doesn’t trust anything that anyone says to her. Vincent doesn’t trust anything that Lilith says to him. And we can’t trust anything we see in this movie. Which is not a flaw in the movie.

But it is the sort of thing that was always going to alienate mainstream critics and audiences.

And as the story unfolds reality becomes more and more shadowy and unreal.

And while it deals with a woman who is mad it does not approach this subject in a manner that would be approved by feminist orthodoxy. Its lack of interest in ideological axe-grinding is certainly the reason it continues to be ignored.

It’s a movie that is interested in the mechanics of madness - the way reality just keeps slipping away and the ways in which truth gets confused with lies and lies get mistaken for truth. We cannot trust what we see and we cannot trust our emotions.

In this movie there is certainly a link between madness and sex but again this is not handled in a politically correct manner.

And it has the sort of ending guaranteed to further exasperate mainstream viewers.

Seberg considered this to be her best performance. She really is both dazzling and very very unsettling. Warren Beatty is excellent, giving a performance in which his habitual self-confidence is inexorably eroded. It’s a subtle complex performance. I have never liked Peter Fonda as an actor but in this film he’s delightfully neurotic.

It’s amusing that some reviewers complain that the movie is muddled and implausible. It’s a movie about insanity! We are seeing everything from the point of view of characters whose grip on reality is so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. By the time you get to the ending you understand why nothing you have seen quite adds up.

It’s also incredibly amusing that some reviewers think it’s unrealistic that a metal hospital would be run in such an unprofessional way. These dear sweet innocent children have clearly never had any dealings with actual mental hospitals.

Lilith is a superb movie, daringly out of step with mainstream tastes at the time and still awaiting intelligent re-evaluation. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed the source novel, J.R. Salamanca's Lilith.

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary is a 1949 MGM adaptation, directed by Vincente Minnelli, of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel.

Despite the Production Code Hollywood was well aware that what audiences wanted was sex and sin. They could not offer them those things so they perfected the art of the tease. In this case they’ve even added a framing story covering Flaubert’s trial for obscenity. This is a movie based on a novel so wicked that even in France it was labeled obscene! That’s a surefire way to get bums on seats.

There’s also voiceover narration supposedly by Flaubert. Along with the framing story this has an odd distancing effect since he is not telling us about something that happened, but merely about imaginary events from his novel. The framing story is a disastrously stupid idea, making the audience feel less involved and less interested.

With Madame Bovary the problem was just how far could the tease go without arousing the ire of the Production Code Authority? Unless certain things are made clear (namely the heroine’s adultery) the story won’t make sense, but they have to be made clear without being brought right out into the open. In this case a discarded hat tells us that hanky-panky has taken place.

This is the story of Emma (Jennifer Jones), who marries a humble country doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin). Emma has spent her girlhood immersed in a world of dreams - dreams of adventure, excitement and romance. She does not cope well with the reality of life as the wife of an obscure village doctor.

She has a serious flirtation with a young law clerk. Things get more dangerous when she and her husband are invited to the Marquis D’Andervilliers’ ball. She meets Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jourdan). He is impossibly dashing and handsome. He is the dream lover she always wanted.

The ball is an opportunity for Minnelli to give us a bit of a master class in film directing. Couples are whirling on the dance floor. Emma and Rodolphe are whirling, whirling, whirling. Emma doesn’t know it but her life is now whirling as well, like a mad dance. It gets more and frenzied and then there are the windows - I won’t spoil it by telling you what happens with the windows but it’s a brilliant moment of madness. This is a ball from a nightmare and it’s the highlight of the movie.

If you’re going to do a melodrama you must not hold back. You have to go for broke. Minnelli knew this.

Jennifer Jones also knew this (as anyone who has seen Duel in the Sun can attest). So did Louis Jourdan. And Van Heflin is absolutely perfectly cast as the bewildered husband.

Emma Bovary is certainly a very bad girl. Her husband cannot sweep her off her feet and she needs to be swept off her feet but he is a good man and a good husband. There are no mitigating circumstances there for her betrayal. And we must be sceptical as to whether he loves Rodolphe - she is in love with a dream and with the dream life she thinks he can offer her. There are lots of mirror shots, suggesting that Emma is somehow outside of real life. Which she is. She is in her fairy tale world of dashing princes.

The Emma Bovary of this movie is not a femme fatale. She’s not clever enough or focused enough. She gets herself into trouble not so much through scheming and duplicity but rather through recklessness and stupidity. She has the mind of a naïve selfish little girl but the sexual allure of a very grown-up temptress. All her schemes are childish. She is doomed by her inability to understand that fairy tales and romantic fantasies lead to disaster when they run up against reality.

It was presumably the Production Code that led to the decision to make Emma a woman driven by greed rather than lust. It’s a movie that needed to be a bit more sleazy but MGM obviously were not prepared to take such a risk.

My big issue is that the character of Rodolphe doesn’t ring true, and the Emma-Rodolphe relationship doesn’t ring true. I can’t help suspecting that changes had to be made to the script and that this might have cued the problems. Unfortunately it mens that a crucial late scene comes across as odd and puzzling.

The film was a major box-office flop and it has never been deemed worthy of critical reevaluation. It’s a flawed but interesting melodrama, better than its reputation would suggest. Recommended.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Written on the Wind is my favourite of the 1950s Douglas Sirk melodramas and in this one the melodrama is as overcooked as any fan could desire.

Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) is a classy sophisticated glamorous woman who meets two men. One is Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), the son of oil tycoon Jasper Hadley. Kyle will one day be one of the world’s richest men. The other is Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson). Mitch is Kyle’s best friend and works for him. Mitch falls for Lucy but Kyle is determined to make her his. Mitch backs off - big mistake.

We quickly learn about these two men. Kyle is extremely rich but he’s a loser. He always has been. He’s never actually been any good at anything. That’s because he’s a lazy, irresponsible, self-indulgent drunk. Mitch is good at everything because he’s responsible, hard-working, smart and sober. Kyle is rich and Mitch is just an employee but Kyle has always been jealous of Mitch. And he knows that his father would have preferred to have Mitch as a son.

Kyle makes a crude attempt to buy Lucy. She is outraged and lets him know that she’s not that sort of girl. But she marries him anyway. She’s in love with him. Maybe she thinks she can fix him. Whether those oil billions helped her to fall in love with him is something that might occur to some viewers.

Mitch has been noble but he can’t stop loving Lucy.

There’s an extra complication and it’s a big one - Kyle’s kid sister Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone). She has always been in love with Mitch, but Mitch, Kyle and Marylee were all brought up together and Mitch still thinks of Marylee as a kid sister.

Marylee decided long ago that if she couldn’t have Mitch she would get her revenge by letting every man in the town have her. She’s the town tramp.

Then the marriage between Kyle and Lucy hits an unexpected snag and the emotional meltdowns begin. 

Rock Hudson is good but he has the most thankless role - Mitch is a more or less functional stable grown-up human being which doesn’t give Hudson much scope for bravura acting. 

Lauren Bacall has a tricky role. Lucy doesn’t have obvious characters flaws except that her decision to marry Kyle was a spectacular error of judgment. Lucy is perhaps just a bit underwritten - we’d like to know more about her motivations. Did she marry Kyle out of pity? Did she have visions of saving him? These things are at least hinted at.

You can if you want to see this movie as a critique of capitalism but if you do you’ll miss all the most interesting things about it. There are a few obvious swipes at obsessions with respectability but they’re not very interesting. What makes this movie great is the full-blown melodrama with all the emotions and interpersonal conflicts and character flaws exaggerated to an extreme degree.

Kyle’s self-pity is on an epic scale and clearly indicates a massive lack of confidence in his masculinity. Early on we see him provoke a fistfight and he loses and it’s obviously just the latest in a series of fights that he’s lost. His crude attempt to impress Lucy with his wealth is another sign of his insecurity about his masculinity. He doesn’t think he can win a glamorous sophisticated classy woman like Lucy without flaunting his wealth. After a year of marriage he finds out that Lucy hasn’t yet fallen pregnant because he has a low sperm count. He naturally assumes that this means he isn’t satisfying her sexually when in fact it’s obvious that she finds him a totally satisfying husband in every way. He wasn’t impotent but now he has undoubtedly talked himself into actually being impotent. His self-pity takes off into the stratosphere. This allows Robert Stack to overact outrageously and he does.

Marylee has a similar problem. She has spent years unsuccessfully trying to seduce Mitch  but it’s a no-go so she feels inadequate as a woman. Giving herself to countless losers she picks up in bars just makes her feel even more inadequate as a woman. Her nymphomania is on a scale that could keep a whole team of psychiatrists busy.

She is the catalyst for the major disasters. She’s a bad girl and a wild girl but as we discover at a crucial moment, not truly evil. She’s in her mid 30s but she’s still just a little girl. She wants Mitch and if she can’t have him she’s like a little girl whose daddy won’t buy her a pony. Her manipulativeness is childish and obvious. But she knows how to use sex as a weapon, and the family fear of scandal. Dorothy Malone dominates this movie. Malone overacts outrageously and deliciously. This is an actress who knows how to do melodrama.

I love melodrama for many of the same reasons I love film noir. They don’t depict reality but a heightened exaggerated version of reality. The shadows in film noir are deeper than the ones in real life, the nights are darker, the punks are lousier, the dames are more rotten and the greed and lust are more extreme and the sense of doom is more palpable. It’s an artificial world.


And melodrama exists in an artificial world. This is especially so of Sirkian melodrama. In Written on the Wind the rich are super-rich. They live in huge mansions. When Kyle wants to impress Lucy he turns her hotel room into what looks like a seraglio. Mitch is impossibly handsome. No real person could could collapse into a state of self-pitying hysteria to the extent that Kyle does. No real woman could be as much of a clichéd cheap tramp as Marylee. The characters’ emotional responses are insanely excessive. Everything is absurdly overheated. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone chew scenery the way you’ve never seen scenery chewed. Even the cars are ludicrously wild - Kyle’s 1953 Allard J2X and Marylee’s 1955 Woodill Wildfire look like cars that comic-book characters would drive. Sirk uses matte paintings and he wants them to look like matte paintings. We have left the real world and entered Melodrama World.

If you’re looking for messages here you’re missing the point. Any messages in this movie are embarrassingly trite. It’s the style and the overblown quality and the sheer glorious excessiveness that matter. They are the content. They’re all the content it needs to make it a masterpiece.

Written on the Wind is very highly recommended.

Internal Affairs (1990)

Internal Affairs is a 1990 neo-noir which had enormous potential but suffers from some flaws and some clumsy writing.

Raymond Avilla (Andy Garcia) is a cop who has just been assigned to IAD (Internal Affairs). He’s going to be partnered with Amy Wallace (Laurie Metcalf). They’re investigating an officer, Van Stretch (William Baldwin), who is clearly an out-of-control coke addict.

The two IAD cops begin to suspect that the cop they should be investigating is Dennis Peck (Richard Gere). He seems to be the spider at the centre of a web of corruption.

Usually a cop under investigation by IAD has the odds stacked against him but Peck is not only crooked he’s also smart and ruthless. And Raymond Avilla is as dumb as a rock.

Avilla and Wallace have plenty of evidence against Stretch but what they want is for him to testify against Peck in return for immunity. Stretch won’t do it.

Their case is going nowhere which seems strange since they have a mountain of evidence against Peck and that’s one of the movie’s implausibilities.

The IAD cops slowly become aware that Peck may be involved in murder as well as corruption. There’s a link to Steven and Tova Arrocas and a hit that he may have organised for them.

There are plot twists which rely heavily on Avilla’s stupidity - his inability to predict that Peck’s actions even when it’s obvious what he is likely to do.

There’s not just a battle of wills but a battle of nerves between Avilla and Peck. Peck has the edge because he’s a whole lot smarter.

The IAD cops hope to get useful information from Stretch’s wife and her refusal to co-operate is another case of the IAD cops missing something very obvious.

Peck is playing mind games with Avilla, trying to convince Avilla that his wife is being unfaithful.

This is one of those cop thrillers in which the cop hero’s family gets caught up in the action.

The problem is come crude ideological messaging. Every male character is either evil or stupid. The straight female characters are all helpless victims of Evil Men. The only good person in the entire story is Amy Wallace and she’s a lesbian. It’s taken for granted that she is therefore virtuous and wise and brave and noble. Unfortunately she is so perfect that she ends up having no personality at all.

Peck’s character is established as cold, calculating, smart and ruthless but then towards the end he starts doing out-of-character stupid things, mainly because that’s the only way to set up the very contrived ending.

There are however some really interesting aspects to the story. Apart from Peck there are three significant male characters, Steven Arrocas, Van Stretch and Raymond Avilla. All three are sexually inadequate. It is clear that they are incapable of satisfying their wives sexually. What’s interesting is that their sexual inadequacy seems to be linked to moral weakness and a general inability to take charge of their lives. And all three are aware that Denis Peck’s claims that he could satisfy their wives sexually are well-founded. Whatever moral failings he may have it’s clear that Peck does not lack sexual potency.

And while the idea that if a wife isn’t sexually satisfied by her husband she will go looking for a man who can satisfy her might be cynical it’s something that has been known to happen.

Peck is able to taunt Raymond Avilla and convince him that his wife Kathleen is playing around behind his back, with Peck. The taunts hit home because Raymond knows they’re plausible. Raymond’s sexual inadequacy makes him vulnerable and that vulnerability makes him a less effective cop.

And the three sexually inadequate men are rather creepy. Peck might be evil but he isn’t creepy and pathetic.

The casting is significant. John Kapelos as Steven Arrocas is a loser trying to be a big man but still living in his father’s shadow. William Baldwin as Van Stretch is a neurotic contemptible mess whose violence comes from weakness. Baldwin makes him slimy and clammy. Andy Garcia plays Raymond Avilla as a man afflicted by doubts and self-pity. These are weak men played by actors who effectively capture the characters’ essential weakness.

By contrast Richard Gere as Peck exudes confidence and charisma and has women lining up to sleep with him. He’s the total alpha male.

Internal Affairs has some real problems but it is perhaps more interesting than it set out to to be. Recommended.

La Femme et Le Pantin (1958)

Julien Duvivier’s La femme et le pantin was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by Pierre Louÿs (translated into English as The Woman and the Puppet). The novel is one of the masterpieces of decadent fiction. Duvivier’s film has had several English titles including The Female and A Woman Like Satan.

The novel was filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935 as The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich starring. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made (I’d put it in the top five) so attempting another adaptation was extraordinarily bold. And while Brigitte Bardot is an excellent actress there’s no way anyone could ever surpass Dietrich’s performance. The von Sternberg movie, like all his important movies, is a flamboyant and brilliant exercise in style.

In passing it’s worth noting that The Devil is a Woman was released in France as La femme et le pantin.

Eva Marchand (Brigitte Bardot) is a young French girl living in Seville in Spain with her father. He is a once-famous novelist with a slightly shameful past and he is now more or less in exile.

Eva is a dancer and a good one. She could earn good money if she accepted the offer to work in the nightclub owned by Arabadjian (Darío Moreno), especially if she worked upstairs where the girls do the erotic dancing. The problem is that Eva is a virgin and Arabadjian doesn’t employ virgins.

Eva has a boyfriend, Albert. Or at least that’s what Albert imagines, and he assumes that she will marry him, but it’s mostly wishful thinking.

Then she meets Don Matteo Diaz (Antonio Vilar). He is very aristocratic and very rich. He’s also married. That’s no obstacle - Don Matteo’s wife Maria Teresa (Espanita Cortez) allows him to have affairs. Her only concern in this case is that Eva might hurt him.

Eva is, as I have said, a virgin. He has indicated to Albert that she will lo him to take her virginity, but only if he’s a very very good boy. She makes the same offer to Don Mateo. Albert allows her to toy with him because he’s a nonentity. Don Mateo is however a proud caballero and it’s surprising that he allows her to string him along but he is obsessed and he is prepared to allow her to humiliate him.

Of course sooner or later the crisis will come.

We have to decide if Eva has any actual feelings for either man or whether she’s just enjoying playing them both for fools. The title obviously suggests that we’re supposed to see her as a scheming puppeteer.

My problem was that having seen von Sternberg’s movie multiple times it was almost impossible not to make comparisons. While I have a great admiration for Bardot (and anyone who thinks she wasn’t a fine serious actress hasn’t seen her in La Vérité) it has to be admitted that Dietrich had the ability to project feminine cruelty, and feminine pleasure in cruelty, in a way that Bardot can’t quite match.

Bardot was a different kind of actress and she’s playing the role her way. She’s enjoyable to watch but she fails to nail the character the way Dietrich did.

I think that the contemporary setting was a mistake. The proud caballero Don Mateo doesn’t feel quite at home in the late 1950s and the extent of his humiliation might have has more impact in an earlier time setting. And many of Eva’s games involve dangling the prospect of taking her virginity in front of both men as if it’s a treat for a well-behaved puppy. This doesn’t quite fly in 1958.

Duvivier can’t match von Sternberg’s visual tour-de-force but it is a gorgeous movie shot in sumptuous colour. And the brawl scene is superb, with the camera rocking back and forth as if it’s caught in the middle of the flying fists.

There are some unnecessary and distracting subplots that just go nowhere, especially the one concerning Eva’s father.

What we have here is a talented director, but he’s the wrong director for this movie. And a very talented lead actress, but she’s the wrong actress for this movie. I can’t help thinking that Roger Vadim might have had a better feel for the material. And maybe this is a crazy idea but it might have been been better done a few years later with Jane Fonda. Her French was sufficiently fluent to allow her to act in that language without any problems and she might have added just a bit more of an edge.

This movie doesn’t quite come off and watching it just convinced me even more of the genius of von Sternberg and Dietrich.

Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tales of Hoffmann is the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film of Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which was based on three of the wonderful short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But this statement needs to be qualified and amplified a great deal. Powell and Pressburger did not simply film the opera. They adapted and altered it significantly. Opera is the most deliberately and consciously artificial of all art forms and the most uncompromisingly theatrical. Making a movie that is artificial and aggressively non-realist is no problem but opera is artificial and theatrical in a very non-cinematic way. And if you remove the artifice and the theatricality then you have removed the very heart and soul of opera. So how do you make an opera into a feature film?

Powell and Pressburger adopted a bold radical approach. Their first crucial insight is that yes this is opera but it’s a movie. There’s no need to cast actual opera singers. Why not cast actors and dancers, and have their singing voices dubbed by real opera singers? In fact the entire movie was shot as a silent film with every element of the soundtrack post-dubbed. This allowed Powell and Pressburger to use a lot of silent film techniques. They were much influenced by German Expressionism.

This also allowed Powell and Pressburger to pull off three casting strokes of genius. Moira Shearer had been a sensation in their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. She couldn’t sing. But she was a magnificent dancer, so her singing voice was dubbed. And they were able to cast the great Australian ballet dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. He couldn’t sing either but again no problem. Not only could Helpmann dance, he was a very competent actor and he had extraordinary screen presence. And he had that amazing face. Once the makeup people were let loose on him he could become sinister, monstrous, comical, grotesque - whatever Powell and Pressburger wanted him to be. And Ludmilla Tchérina has breathtaking screen charisma.

Being able to cast dancers rather than singers allowed Powell and Pressburger to carry out their master plan - to create an extravaganza of music, images, dance and movement. A total artistic experience that was more than opera and more than straightforward cinema. Powell called it a “composed” film.

Casting dancers rather than singers gives the film a sense of dynamic movement and energy which would have been impossible otherwise. And choosing dancers such as Shearer, Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina who could act as well was another excellent idea.

Powell and Pressburger were totally and deliberately out of step with the mainstream of British cinema. With movies like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) they had already been pushing the boundaries. They were in fact operating more in the realm of European art cinema. They were making films with more in common with stuff like Jean Cocteau’s surrealist masterpiece Beauty and the Beast (1946) and were already venturing into territory that Max Ophüls would explore in his 1950s masterworks like La Ronde, Le Plaisir and especially Lola Montès. Martin Scorsese (a huge fan of this movie) has also correctly pointed out the influence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There are three separate stories. Hoffmann is the only character appearing in all three. In the first story he falls in love with a beautiful girl but she is in fact a mechanical doll. In the second tale Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta but she helps an evil magician (played with gusto by Robert Helpmann) to steal his reflection (and presumably his soul). In the third story Hoffmann is in love with the lovely soprano Antonia who is suffering from consumption. She must give up singing to save her life.

There’s also a framing story and Powell and Pressburger added a whole new sequence that was not in the opera - the Dragonfly ballet (scored by Sir Thomas Beecham who also conducts the orchestra throughout).

So what went wrong? The episodic nature of the film is a problem - with the framing story and the added Dragonfly ballet there are in effect five disconnected stories which dissipates any real emotional resonance. The film collapses under its own weight and at 136 minutes it is a bit of an ordeal. Apparently when it was shown at Cannes Alexander Korda told Powell and Pressburger that if they dropped the third segment, the Antonia story, it was a certainty that they would win the Golden Palm. They were unwilling to do this, and the movie missed out on that coveted prize. But Korda was right. It’s the weakest of the stories and it makes the movie way too long. On the other hand the Antonia sequence has a technical tour-de-force ending.

The Dragonfly ballet has no connection to the rest of the film but it’s a crucial part of the Powell-Pressburger plan to integrate image, music and dance. And it’s a fine showcase for Moira Shearer who was after all the movie’s biggest box-office drawcard.

The first sequence with Shearer as the mechanical doll Olympia has so much charm and wit and then we get that very unexpected ending.

It’s the second sequence, set in Venice concerning the courtesan Giulietta, that is the highlight. Here we have a sexy bad girl and Ludmilla Tchérina brings an unbelievably degree of sensuality, eroticism and decadence to her role. This sequence is wildly flamboyant and surreal and dream-like. It’s magnificent cinema.

This is a movie for hardcore cinephiles, filmmakers and devotees of cinematic experimentalism. The Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Martin Scorsese. He talks (delightfully) about his obsession with this film but it was clearly an obsession with its awe-inspiring technical virtuosity. For a young would-be filmmaker it provided boundless inspiration. I’m not sure a general audience was ever going to be able to embrace this movie to quite the same degree. It really is an exercise in technique. It doesn’t really have any emotional centre or anything likely to engage the interest of an ordinary movie-goer. It’s a movie to admire and to be dazzled by might be be heavy going if you’re not a devotee of opera and ballet.

Highly recommended for its originality and strangeness and for the glorious use of Technicolor. It’s insanely ambitious and despite its flaws it is in so many ways a triumph of cinematic art.

Rumble Fish (1983)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish was released in 1983. Audiences stayed away in droves. In the 80s Coppola was reinventing himself as the crazed visionary wild man of American cinema. This resulted in a series of spectacular box office failures.

It seems like it’s going to be a juvenile gang movie. Rusty James (Matt Dillon) leads a gang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s about to face a showdown with a rival gang leader, Biff. During the fight his big brother (referred to throughout the film merely as The Motorcycle Boy and played by Mickey Rourke).

The Motorcycle Boy had left town suddenly and mysteriously a couple of years before. Rusty James idolised his big brother. Now he’s back and this sets up certain expectation in Rusty James, expectations which will be disappointed. The Motorcycle Boy had been a big shot. Rusty James assumes that he will now reassume his big shot status and lead the gang to glory in its battles with rival gangs.

Rather than doing this, The Motorcycle Boy broods mysteriously. He continues to brood mysteriously for the rest of the picture.

Their dad, played by Dennis Hopper, is an alcoholic loser. His wife, the mother of the two boys, walked out on him years ago and went to California (in this movie California is like a fabled land across the seas).

Rusty James has a girlfriend, Patty (Diane Lane). She’s a typical high school girl girl. Rusty James treats her with contempt.

The Motorcycle Boy keeps on brooding. Rusty James indulges himself in childish tantrums and self-pity. Nothing really happens until the ending which I guess we’re supposed to see as tragically inevitable.

Coppola also saw this as a movie about time. He does come up with some interesting ways to evoke the passage of time. But in this movie the passage of time is largely meaningless. At the beginning of the story Rusty James is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. By the end of the story he is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. At the beginning of the story The Motorcycle Boy is brooding mysteriously. By the end of the story we still have no idea what he was brooding about.

A story about a kid hero-worshipping a big brother had a personal resonance for Coppola since he had hero-worshipped his own big brother.

The movie is based on a novel by S.E. Hinton who also co-wrote the screenplay. It really does feel like a story written by a woman, a woman with zero understanding of men and zero interest in trying to understand them.

This was the golden age of Hollywood flops. Movies like Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar and Waterworld. Some of these - The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Cut-Throat Island, Hudson Hawk and Coppola’s own One from the Heart - were actually great movies and it’s difficult to see why they flopped. But it’s very easy to see why Rumble Fish flopped.

Coppola went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the film’s commercial failure. He shot it in black-and-white, which in 1983 made it impossible to market.

Stewart Copeland of The Police wrote the score. It’s jarring, discordant and bizarre. That’s apparently what Coppola wanted but it’s jarring, discordant and bizarre in a way that doesn’t fit the tone of the movie.

All of the characters are unlikeable losers. A movie about unlikeable losers can be fascinating if they’re unlikeable losers in interesting ways. But these people are irritating and uninteresting.

The Motorcycle Boy is clearly meant to be a mythic outsider figure. Coppola wanted Mickey Rourke to look like Camus so he clearly had a bit of an existentialist theme in mind - the Motorcycle Boy as a complete outsider totally detached from the world around him. That can work but it requires an actor with the right kind of charisma. It’s the sort of thing that Alain Delon could do effortlessly. Mickey Rourke just doesn’t have that charisma so he comes over as a dime-store would-be Camus.

It sounds like I’m doing a hatchet job on this movie but it does have its strengths. It looks extraordinary. At this point in his career Coppola had a knack for making movies that did not look like anyone else’s movies and did not feel like anyone else’s movies.

Everything about the way it’s shot, and especially the continual use of smoke that seems to come from nowhere, gives it an odd feeling of unreality. In a way that anticipates some of David Lynch’s later movies we’re given the impression that we’re not exactly in the world of everyday reality. At times it feels like a descent into Hell.

Rumble Fish is a failure but it’s an interesting failure.