Insignificance (1985)

Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance was released in 1985 and it has plenty of the Roeg trademarks.

Roeg’s 1980s movies did not achieve the mainstream commercial success that Don’t Look Now had enjoyed but I don’t think it ever occurred to Roeg to compromise. He just kept making Nic Roeg movies and Insignificance is a very very Nic Roeg movie.

In general I dislike movies about real historical figures but in this case the bizarre juxtaposition of people who in real life never met means that you’re not really going to be tempted to assume that there’s any intention to offer realistic portrayals of events in the lives of these people. And the characters are not given actual names in the film.

The basic premise is that The Senator (obviously based on Senator Joe McCarthy) is trying to force The Professor (clearly supposed to be Albert Einstein) to testify at a hearing. In reality the paths of McCarthy and Einstein never crossed. Meanwhile The Actress (obviously Marilyn Monroe) has talked her way into The Professor’s hotel room because she wants to explain the Special Theory of Relativity to him. Marilyn Monroe and Einstein never met in real life. Then The Ballplayer (based on Monroe’s real-life husband Joe DiMaggio) shows up. In reality he never met Einstein.

The Professor of course already knows how the Special Theory of Relativity works but it’s important to The Actress to demonstrate that she understands it as well.

The Professor tells The Senator that he won’t testify.

The Ballplayer is just trying to save his marriage to The Actress.

And the Actress has decided that she’d very much like to sleep with The Professor. Having thought about it The Professor decides that it’s an idea that has much to recommend it.

I don’t think the parts of the movie dealing with The Senator work all that well. They seem out of place and they seem like a misguided attempt to inject a political subtext.

But the scenes between The Professor, The Ballplayer and the Actress work extremely well. They’re all trying to figure something out. The Professor is trying to describe the shape of the universe mathematically. The Ballplayer is trying to figure out how to regain his wife’s love. The Actress is trying to work out why neither her marriage nor her career have made her happy.

Tony Curtis is OK as The Senator and Michael Emil is reasonably good as The Professor. Gary Busey is excellent. He does something here that he did extremely well in other movies (notably Carny) - take a character who could easily have been pathetic and give him dignity and substance and make the audience care about him.

Theresa Russell is great. She’s in full flight here. The two directors who really knew how to get great performances from her were Ken Russell (in Crimes of Passion) and Nic Roeg.

It’s a Nic Roeg movie so of course there’s an obsession with time and some narrative games. Roeg also loved intercutting sex scenes with other scenes and in this case he intercuts two different sex scenes with a scene of The Ballplayer in a bar.

Asking exactly what it all means is a bit pointless. If you can describe what a movie is about in words there’d be no need to make the movie. There’s stuff about time and death and the A-bomb and fame and sex and love. And this is absurdist comedy. If you can explain an absurdist comedy then it has failed.

The Actress is able to explain how Special Relativity works but she admits that she doesn’t understand why it works. The Professor knows what the shape of the universe is but it cannot be described. He has spent years trying to develop a unified theory, without success (just as Einstein spent years trying to unify quantum mechanics and relativity without success).

Maybe that’s the key to the movie. All the characters are looking for answers but maybe there aren’t any, or maybe we could never understand the answers if we knew them. The Professor will never complete his unified theory. Maybe The Ballplayer finds out that trying to understand a woman is like trying to grasp the shape of the universe. The answers will just keep slipping away. Maybe the Actress will discover that trying to understand love is also like trying to grasp the shape of the universe. Once again, those answers just keep slipping away.

And perhaps the movie suggests that time is like that. We think we have a handle on it, but we don’t. Roeg uses flashbacks and flash forwards. There’s a calendar image of the actress fragmented into tiny pieces and the movie is a bit like that. Needless to say the movie’s ending does not wrap everything up in a tidy fashion.

The problem is that the flashbacks and flash forwards are too obvious. We’re not surprised by them. It’s as if Roeg felt obliged to live up to his reputation for doing such things but they’re not really necessary. They’re rather trite and they trivialise the characters. It’s interesting that in his next movie, Castaway, Roeg abandoned such tricks altogether and was content to rely on the acting skills of Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe to let us know what was going on with their characters. In Insignificance Theresa Russell, Gary Busey and Michael Emil were perfectly capable of doing that as well.

The one really visually inspired scene is The Actress demonstrating Special Relativity to The Professor with children’s toys.

I don’t think this is quite in the top rank of Nicolas Roeg moveis but even a lesser Roeg film is pretty interesting and Insignificance is eccentric enough to be highly recommended.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, released in 1960, was Fritz Lang’s third Dr Mabuse movie. Lang directed and co-wrote the screenplay. It was his final movie. The movies Lang made after his return to Germany are a major departure from his Hollywood movies. In some ways they saw Lang returning to his roots. He finally got to direct a version of The Indian Tomb (Lang had written the screenplay in 1920 with his wife Thea von Harbou but that first version was directed by Joe May) and he revived Dr Mabuse, nearly 30 years after his previous Mabuse film.

But in other ways The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is actually ahead of its time. It’s arguably the first full-blown techno-paranoia thriller, anticipating many of the paranoid themes of 1970s cinema.

This is also possibly the first movie to focus on all-pervasive technological surveillance. Everybody is being watched, and at times the watchers are being watched.

It opens with a reference to the previous Mabuse movie. At first it seems that this cannot be a Dr Mabuse movie - we are told that Dr Mabuse has been dead since 1932. But we know that being dead has not stopped Dr Mabuse in the past.

The opening sequence is the assassination of a TV reporter. It appears to be a heart attack but there never was a serious attempt to pass it off as death by natural causes. The autopsy will inevitably reveal the truth. This sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s a double deception. The police are being deceived but the intention is that they should discover the deception.

A young woman, Marion Menil (Dawn Addams) is about to throw herself off a ledge of te Hotel Luxor. American businessman Henry Travers (Peter van Eyck) saves her life. They are immediately attracted and he is drawn into her tangled personal life. She is trapped in an unhappy marriage. She is under treatment by psychiatrist Dr Jordan.

Travers is involved in business deals involving nuclear power and rockets.

A psychic named Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) has attracted the attention of Kriminalkommissar Kras (Gert Fröbe) by making predictions that come true. Kras is a hardheaded cop but his case is going nowhere and he’ll clutch at anything that might help.

The case involves a series of murder connected in a mysterious way with the Hotel Luxor.

We, the audience, know something the police don’t know. Everybody in the Hotel Luxor is under surveillance. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. We don’t know who or what is behind this.

It might be Dr Mabuse. But Dr Mabuse is long dead. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe there is a Dr Mabuse. Maybe Cornelius is Dr Mabuse. Maybe Dr Jordan is Dr Mabuse. Or Henry Travers. Or the shady hotel detective. Or the insurance salesman Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig (Werner Peters) who seems to turn up everywhere. Or Marion’s sinister husband Roberto (Reinhard Kolldehoff). Or the clubfooted man. The assassin No 2 (Howard Vernon) is probably just a henchman but it is impossible to be sure. Anyone could be Dr Mabuse. If there is a Dr Mabuse.

If you get halfway through the movie and realise that you don’t have a clue what’s going on don’t panic. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on. It’s not that the narrative is non-linear, but it is deliberately deceptive. It’s deceptive on multiple levels. This is a movie about being watched and of course we, the viewers, are engaged in watching but we cannot trust anything we see or hear.

There are conspiracies within conspiracies and characters tell lies while they themselves are being lied to. We cannot be sure of the real identities of any of the characters.

This may be a crime movie but it’s also a kind of proto-eurospy movie. Dr Mabuse would appear to be more of a Bond Villain than a master criminal. Always assuming that Dr Mabuse exists.

When Lang relocated to Hollywood in the late 30s he adapted remarkably well. He learnt that Hollywood filmmaking required discipline. He couldn’t make any more four hour movies. The convention of classical Hollywood filmmaking required tightly constructed movies with strong narrative drives. Lang mastered these techniques. But he never forget that this wasn’t the only way to make movies, and occasionally (in movies like Rancho Notorious and Moonfleet) he departed just a little from strict realism.

When he returned to Germany at the end of the 50s he abandoned many of the conventions he had mastered in Hollywood. It’s easy to see why French critics adored The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse. Lang seemed to be doing what the Cahiers du Cinema crowd wanted to see - adopting simplified streamlined techniques and getting a bit experimental with narrative and playing around with ambiguity. Making a movie in which the meaning has to be teased out. They hailed the 70-year-old Lang as a cinematic rebel!

German and American critics savaged the movie but it would be a mistake to see this as Lang ending his career with a failure. It was a huge hit in Germany. It spawned five sequels. It launched an entire franchise. In commercial terms it was a triumph. And its critical reputation has grown steadily.

It’s interesting that two radically different endings were shot. The earlier DVD releases had the ending of the French release. The Eureka Blu-Ray gives us the original ending from both the German and English versions.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is not just a worthy final film. This is a great Lang film, one of his best. Very highly recommended.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

Electra Glide in Blue was released in 1973. It was badly received at the time but seems to have developed a minor cult following. It's a very very 70s movie.

This was James William Guercio’s only film as a director. When you’ve seen this movie you’ll understand why.

Officer John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) is a motorcycle cop who dreams of becoming a detective. He thinks his chance has come when he finds the dead body of an old guy named Frank in a shack. It seems like an obvious suicide.

Wintergreen is convinced it’s murder, which could be wishful thinking.

Fortunately the detective who shows up at the scene, Harve Poole (Mitchell Ryan), is also not convinced that this is suicide. So now Wintergreen has a temporary posting to Homicide as Harve’s offsider.

Soon there are a couple of suspects. They’re hippies. Wintergreen has his doubts.

Wintergreen eventually solves the case, not through following up clues but because he just suddenly knows.

There’s also a kind of romantic triangle although it seems to be a bit out of place.

Characters undergo sudden personality changes for no reason whatsoever. The plot is not so much loosely constructed as totally incoherent. The tone is all over the place. At times it seems to be aiming for absurdist comedy, at times it tries to be dark and cynical.

There’s an obvious Easy Rider influence (always a bad thing) but Electra Glide in Blue’s attitude towards the counter-culture is more sceptical. The cops are not shown in a very favourable light, except for Wintergreen.

There is one moment which seems to be an attempt to give an ironic twist to a certain scene in Easy Rider.

It shares that movie’s obsession with motorcycles and the desert as a metaphor.

Robert Blake is extremely good.

Apart from Blake the acting is fairly bad although the script might be more to blame for that than the actors. They probably had no idea what was going on. Amazingly Guercio manages to get a bad performance from Elisha Cook Jr which isn’t easy.

The shoot was apparently quite chaotic with Guercio’s inexperience causing major problems.

There was some great music in the 70s but this film features some truly awful hippie music.

Some movies flop because they’re misunderstood, or they’re too quirky, or critics take a dislike to the director, or they’re badly promoted. But some movies flop because they’re just bad movies. Electra Glide in Blue falls into the latter category. Perhaps it might have worked better had it been a bit more trippy. With a stronger more experienced hand on the tiller and a bit more work done on the script it might have had potential. I like interesting misfires but this is a relatively uninteresting rather muddled misfire.

It’s hard to recommend this one.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray presentation is extremely good.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by Amy Heckerling and released in 1982, is a teen comedy and it’s a coming-of-age movie but don’t let that put you off. It isn’t an exercise in vulgarity and it’s remarkably goodnatured. It’s honest and clear-eyed and it’s actually funny.

It’s close to the end of the year at Ridgemont High but life for these kids is centred on getting laid and falling love.

The studio was convinced they were going to run into huge censorship problems, and if anyone tried to remake this movie today that would probably happen.

Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is desperate to lose her virginity. She’s found a really nice boy, Mark (Brian Backer) but he’s too scared to do anything. She gets plenty of advice from her friend Linda (Phoebe Cates). Linda is a woman of the world, or at least she thinks he is.

Mark is getting advice from his mentor, super cool guy Mike Damone. Mike is a high school kid and an aspiring businessman, making money from scalping concert tickets. Mike will get involved with Stacy as well.

Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) just wants to surf and stay stoned which leads to clashes with the school’s history teacher, Mr Hand (Ray Walston).

Stacy’s big brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) sees himself as a rising young professional but in fact he works in a burger joint. A job he will soon lose, as he loses every job he gets.

This was 1982. A year of great pop music. This was also Peak Mall Culture, Peak Car Culture, Peak Cheerleader Culture.

These kids are learning about love and sex. They make mistakes. Hearts get broken. But underneath there’s a basic optimism. Growing up is scary but it’s an adventure and life is good.

One of the things I love about this movie is the obvious things that it doesn’t do. We expect the clashes between Jeff Spicoli and Mr Hand to escalate but that doesn’t happen. Despite not understanding each other they don’t hate each other.

We expect the rivalry between Mark and Mike to culminate in a violent clash but it doesn’t.

These are fundamentally good people who sometimes do bad things or stupid things but there’s no malice in them. They just make mistakes because growing up is complicated.

Dating is terrifying. What if you do something wrong or say something wrong? What if you misjudge the situation? What if you’re pushing things too far, or not far enough? The possibilities for embarrassment are limitless.

This movie never crosses the line into outright crassness. Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe do not despise their characters. They like them. The audience is expected to regard them with affection, or at least tolerant amusement.

The whole cast is excellent. The big surprise for me was Sean Penn. He’s really funny.

Look out for a very young Nic Cage in a bit part.

This movie has no room for self-pity or social commentary or misery. This is not a critique of 80s America. This is a love letter to 80s America, to its optimism and energy. The mall is not a symbol of the evils of consumerism. It’s the beating heart of a living society.

It’s a good-hearted perceptive movie and the audience is expected to leave the movie theatre having had a good time.

I haven’t seen all the 80s teen comedies but of those I have seen this Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the one I love most. Highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray and the audio commentary by Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe is worth a listen.

…And God Created Woman (1956)

…And God Created Woman, released in 1956, was not Brigitte Bardot’s first film but it was the one that made her an international star, and a mega-star in France. It was Roger Vadim’s first film as a director.

Bardot and Vadim were married at the time. They divorced in 1957 but went on to make many more movies together, becoming one of the great director-star partnerships.

…And God Created Woman was a worldwide smash hit but like all of Vadim’s movies it has never been a favourite with critics. Vadim is perhaps the most consistently underrated of all French directors.

Juliette (Bardot) lives in a small seaside village. She was adopted from an orphanage by an ageing couple but now the wife wants to send her back. Juliette has been causing a scandal. In fact it’s not clear that her wickedness is much more than high-spiritedness but that is enough to have her branded as a hussy.

Wealthy middle-aged businessman Eric Carradine (Curd Jürgens) has become obsessed by Juliette. When we see her sunbathing naked in the opening scene we can understand why he’s obsessed.

Juliette is in love with Antoine (Christian Marquand), one of the three Tardieu brothers who own a failing boatyard. Her feelings for him start to cool one evening when she overhears him boasting to his friends that he is going to sleep with her before the night is out.

Another of the brothers, Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is hopelessly infatuated with Juliette.

There are complications. Eric wants to buy the Tardieu boatyard in order to build a casino.

And Eric decides that the only way to save from Juliette from the orphanage is for her to marry. He would marry her, but he doesn’t want officialdom enquiring into his past. His idea is that Michel will front for him. Michel’s marriage with Juliette will be a façade. Carradine intends that Juliette will be sharing his bed, not Michel’s. That’s Eric’s plan anyway. It was one of those plans that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Of course it gets complicated. It’s significant that most of the trouble arises from people misunderstanding Juliette. They assume she’s a slut and they expect her to act like a slut, but she isn’t a slut. She’s a woman and her emotions are in turmoil and she finds herself with three men in love with her but she did not create that situation deliberately.

The characters we expect to turn out to be wicked are in fact not wicked at all. They’re in love, and love cannot be controlled.

This is not a film noir, it’s a romantic melodrama, and Juliette is not a femme fatale. She is dangerous to men not because she’s scheming or evil but simply because she’s gorgeous.

It’s obvious that the hostility towards Juliette in the village comes from middle-aged women jealous of her youth and beauty. The mother of the Tardieu brothers is the most villainous character in the movie.

Bardot of course is breathtakingly beautiful and her star power is overwhelming. She’s in sex kitten mode here but Bardot had the knack of playing likeable adorable sex kittens who were usually sympathetic characters. She gives a subtle finely judged performance here. The reason Vadim kept casting her in his movies after their divorce is that he recognised that she was a terrific actress.

This was also the movie that established Jean-Louis Trintignant as a star and he’s very good. Curd Jürgens was always good. But this is Bardot’s movie.

…And God Created Woman is in many ways a precursor to the Nouvelle Vague, the difference being that Vadim actually knew how to make movies.

Most of the online reviews start from the assumption that Vadim was a bad director because everybody says so and Bardot was a talentless bimbo who just happened to be cute. Vadim is an example of the unfortunate fact that once the critics get together to trash a director’s reputation online reviewers will just keep parroting the same nonsense. They consistently misunderstand this particular movie. The whole point of this movie is that Juliette is most definitely not a schemer, and Vadim clearly intends the audience to be completely on her side.

This is a great star vehicle for Bardot and it’s stylish and it’s a great grown-up love story. Highly recommended.

I’m a huge Vadim fan and I’ve reviewed a bunch of his movies including The Night Heaven Fell (1958) and Love on a Pillow (1962), both with Bardot, plus La Ronde (Circle of Love, 1964), Les liaisons dangereuses 1960 (1959) and Blood and Roses (1960). They’re all excellent.

Bullet for a Badman (1964)

There’s nothing better than approaching a movie with modest expectations and then finding that it’s a much better movie than one expected. Universal’s 1964 western Bullet for a Badman was such a film for me.

It is included in Kino Lorber’s Audie Murphy Collection volume 5 Blu-Ray boxed set.

It was directed by R.G. Springsteen, a prolific B-movie and television director. It is based on a novel by Marvin H. Albert. More about him later.

Even a lesser Audie Murphy western is worth seeing but this is a very good Audie Murphy western.

Initially it seems like it will be a routine golden age western. Logan Keliher (Audie Murphy) is a former Texas Rager turned farmer. He has a wife, Susan (Beverley Owen), and a son, Sammy.

Now Sam Ward (Darren McGavin) is back in town, to rob a bank and to kill Logan. Sam was Susan’s first husband and he’s Sammy’s real father. Susan divorced him when he was sent to prison and married Logan. Sam wants his wife and kid back and he wants Logan dead.

The bank robbery goes wrong, Sam’s whole gang is killed but he escapes with the money.

A posse is formed to hunt him down. Logan is hunting him as well. They do track him down and it’s at that point that this movie gets interesting.

The good guys have found Sam and they have found the money. And when money is involved there are no good guys. This movie was made at the tail end of the golden age of westerns and it’s just a tad more cynical than the westerns of the 50s. In 50s westerns characters were often corrupted by money but in the world of Bullet for a Badman almost everyone is corrupted. The members of the posse represent the law but now they plan to kill Sam out of hand and steal the money themselves.

There’s also Lottie (Ruta Lee). She was the girlfriend of Ira, one of the gang members killed in the robbery. She mourns Ira for about ten seconds then hooks up with Sam. She will cause a lot of complications.

Now it’s a case of the good guys who are now the bad guys going after Logan (a good guy) and Sam (a bad guy). There is moral ambiguity in golden age westerns but this movie does push it a bit further.

And it gets very dark.

The most interesting thing is the complicated relationship between Logan and Sam. They had been best friends. Logan and Susan thought they were justified in marrying since Sam was in prison and no longer capable of fulfilling his duties as husband and father but Sam does have some valid cause to feel aggrieved. And he does actually love Susan, and his son. He hates Logan, but mostly because he was a friend who (in Sam’s eyes) betrayed him. Logan will do whatever is necessary to defend his wife and child but he has no desire to kill Sam. Logan hasn’t forgotten their friendship.

All of this works because Audie Murphy and Darren McGavin are so good.

And Lottie is a nicely ambiguous female character.

Bullet for a Badman is a very fine western, still basically a golden age western but slightly more cynical. Highly recommended.

As for Marvin H. Albert, he wrote some great stuff including the brilliant action/adventure novels (written under the name Ian MacAlister), Valley of the Assassins and Driscoll’s Diamonds and fine hardboiled crime (as Nick Quarry) such as No Chance in Hell. And under his own name a very good spy thriller, The Gargoyle Conspiracy.

You should also check out the review of this movie at Riding the High Country.

I've reviewed lots of Audie Murphy westerns. No Name on the Bullet (1959) remains my favourite.

Speedy (1928)

Speedy, released in 1928, was Harold Lloyd’s last silent feature film (he would go on to make several sound features). 

Although released by Paramount it was made by Lloyd’s own production company. By this time Lloyd was in full control of his career. The director was Ted Wilde.

Dialogue scenes were later added (silent movies were rapidly going out of fashion in 1928) but the Criterion Blu-Ray edition reviewed here is the original silent version.

In this film he plays Harold "Speedy" Swift, an easy-going but irresponsible young New Yorker. He has no trouble getting jobs and even less trouble losing them. He

Speedy and Jane Dillon (Ann Christy) are madly in love. Her grandfather (always referred to as Pop) operates the last horse-drawn streetcar in New York. A railroad company wants to buy up Pop’s streetcar franchise. Pop won’t sell at the price being offered. 

The railroad resorts to nefarious tactics to pressure him and Speedy is determined to save Pop’s horse-car.

In the meantime Speedy gets and loses several more jobs while his romance with Jane continues to blossom.

Eventually there’s a madcap street battle and some breathtaking chase scenes.

The Depression had not yet begun so this movie has a breezy confident Jazz Age tone. 

This is an exciting carefree New York, that atmosphere being enhanced by some excellent location shooting. Lloyd was an early enthusiast for location shooting and the Coney Island sequences here are rightly celebrated. Lloyd was a big enough star for his movies to be generously budgeted and this film is technically impressive and very polished.

Speedy is a very likeable hero. He’s not a typical silent comedy buffoon. Unlike most silent comics Lloyd was capable of being a convincing romantic leading man.

Compared to most silent comedies Speedy is more in the mould of later romantic comedies except that in Speedy the romantic twosome are crazy about each other from the start.

Ann Christy isn’t the most memorable heroine but she’s cute and endearing.

Speedy is mercifully free from sentimentality. And we never doubt that things will work out for the two lovers.

This is a good-natured fast-paced lively very visually inventive movie.

I personally did not find it overly funny but at this point I should make the admission that while I’m a huge fan of silent movies I’m not a fan of slapstick, apart from Buster Keaton. I prefer the witty sophisticated silent comedies of Cecil B. DeMille such as Why Change Your Wife? (1920) and Male and Female (1919). So Speedy was never going to be quite my cup of tea.

Having said that there’s plenty here to admire and it is good-natured and cheerful. I’ll recommend it but if you love this style of comedy you’ll probably enjoy this one very much indeed.

The Criterion Blu-Ray offers a lovely transfer with various extras.