Saturday Night Fever (1977)

I avoided Saturday Night Fever for years, assuming it was going to be a syrupy teen musical. That turned out to be a spectacularly wrong assumption. Saturday Night Fever is so far removed from that that it’s in a whole other galaxy. This is a grim, gritty, deeply pessimistic deep dive into despair, futility, alienation and nihilism.

Tony Manero (John Travolta) works in a hardware store. On weekends he goes to the 2001 disco. He’s the king of the dance floor there. But 2001 isn’t a glamorous night spot where you’ll run into A-list celebrities. It’s a third-rate dive in Brooklyn. It’s cheap and it’s tacky.

And Tony doesn’t have dreams of using his dancing as a gateway to fame and fortune. He doesn’t have the imagination for that. He’s a loser.

He hangs out with his buddies. They’re all losers.

He lives with his folks. His dad is a chronically unemployed construction worker. His mom prays all the time. Her only consolation is that Tony’s brother Frank is a priest. He’s almost a god to her.

Tony is hoping to win the dance competition at 2001. This is not exactly a big deal. The prize is a lousy five hundred bucks but that’s the total extent of Tony’s dreams.

He has a dancing partner, Annette (Donna Pescow). She’s madly in love with him. Tony dumps her when he sees Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) dancing at 2001. He persuades Stephanie to be his new dancing partner.

Tony thinks Stephanie has class. He thinks that because he’s never met a woman with actual class. Stephanie does at least have ambitions but she’s as working class as Tony. Her middle-class affectations are merely absurd and tragic.

Stephanie dreams of success in Manhattan, perhaps in public relations. She probably won’t make it. She didn’t go to the right school, she didn’t go to college, she doesn’t have the right accent. She’s Brooklyn. She will always be Brooklyn. Maybe she will make an OK life for herself but she’s never going to have a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Maybe she needs to set her sights a bit lower.

Maybe Tony needs to set his sights a bit higher.

The most powerful moment in the movie and the moment when Travolta really nails it is when Tony comes face to face with reality. He works in a hardware store. He’s a moderately good dancer. His chances of making it as a big-time dancer are zero. He’s just not good enough.

Annette needs to figure herself out as well. Her one real ambition is to go to bed with Tony.

This is also a gang movie. Tony’s gang is a bunch of losers and low-rent thugs. They get into fight with other gangs, who are losers as well. The other gang members are possibly even dumber than Tony.

There’s not a single characters in the movie who isn’t contemptible.

The guys treat the women with disrespect but they disrespect everybody and most crucially they have no respect for themselves.

There’s a subplot concerning Tony’s brother who has left the priesthood. It’s entirely pointless, it goes nowhere, it slows the movie and really it should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Subplots that go nowhere simply irritate viewers. It may have been included purely as an anti-Catholic element. The hostility to Catholicism here is pretty virulent.

This film is typical of a certain strand in Hollywood filmmaking - movies in which middle-class intellectuals express their seething hatred for America and for ordinary working-class Americans. It’s no coincidence that screenwriter Norman Wexler was Harvard-educated. Wexler also wrote the screenplay for Serpico, my least favourite 1970s Hollywood film.

This is a movie all about social class and the way different social classes inhabit different universes. Manhattan and Brooklyn are two different universes. Travel between those universes is not possible.

This is not a musical. There is dancing. Tony’s obsession with dancing is a major plot point. But it’s not a musical in the usual sense. There are no real big musical production numbers. The dancing sequences are rather unglamorous. Again, this seems to be a deliberate choice. This a story about Tony trying to figure out why his life is going nowhere, why he feels dissatisfied and empty. And trying to figure out if there is something he can do about it. The dancing really is incidental. Tony could have been a tennis player or a guitarist. It wouldn’t have mattered. What matters is that dancing is an escape from reality for him, and perhaps a way out.

What’s fascinating is that this is a visually very unattractive movie and this is clearly deliberate. Everything is grimy and seedy. You can almost smell the garbage rotting in the streets. There’s not a trace of glamour. There’s nothing glamorous about 2001. It’s just a dive. They have dancing and they have strippers as well. You can almost smell the stale liquor, the tobacco smoke, the sweat and the desperation.

This movie is a product of the New American Cinema and it has the miserable feel and scuzzy look often associated with that movement.

Saturday Night Fever is a deeply unpleasant movie about deeply unpleasant people. That was obviously the intention. It’s a good movie but it ain’t a feelgood movie. Recommended, if you know what to expect.

The Blu-Ray release is fine. I suspect this is a movie that was always supposed to look dark and depressing. The audio commentary by director John Badham isn’t really worth bothering with.

Congress Dances (1931)

Congress Dances was released in 1931. German, French and English-language versions were shot. There were some cast differences between the three versions. The recent Kino Classics Blu-Ray offers the German-language version with English subtitles.

The Congress of Vienna which opened in 1814 was a diplomatic conference to establish a new framework of relations between the Great Powers after the defeat of Napoleon. You might not think that it would be the perfect background for a lighthearted goofy comedy romance with songs and a strong fairy tale vibe, but you’d be wrong. This is one of those “this idea is so crazy that it just might work” concepts, and it actually does work.

The prime mover of the Congress was the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Metternich (played here by Conrad Veidt). His main problem is to keep Tsar Alexander of Russia fully occupied and out of the way. That way Metternech can ensure the result he wants from the Congress. There’s nothing sinister about this. It’s just diplomacy.

What Metternich doesn’t know, what nobody knows, is that the Tsar has a stand-in. An officer named Uralsky, who closely resembles the Tsar, takes the Tsar’s place in dangerous situations where assassination might be a danger. The Tsar also makes use of Uralsky to avoid very unpleasant public duties, such as the performance of the Russian Ballet that Metternech has organised. If there’s one thing Tsar Alexander can’t stand it’s Russian ballet!

Now a pretty young glove-seller enters the picture. Christel (Lilian Harvey) has come up with an ingenious publicity stunt for her glove shop. Vienna is now filled with VIPs. When she sees a foreign head of state she throws him a bouquet of flowers, with an advertisement for her glove shop attached. When she tries the stunt on the Tsar she lands herself in big big trouble. In fact she’s about to have her bottom caned. Luckily the Tsar gets wind of this and rescues her in time from this painful indignity.

The Tsar is charmed by Christel. He thinks she’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen. They spend a delightful afternoon together. She is swept off her feet by the handsome romantic Tsar. She must have had quite an effect on him, since he provides her with a luxurious villa and a carriage. He has clearly decided to make her his mistress. Christel thinks this that this is a most exciting prospect.

It’s interesting that Christel is not the least bit shocked or disconcerted by the prospect of becoming the Tsar’s mistress. And she is not amazed that such an important man would take an interest in her. She has plenty of confidence.

If you’re trying to see some kind of commentary here on class it’s important to understand that Christel is not working class. She’s not a penniless waif wandering the streets barefoot depending on charity. She’s a successful prosperous independent businesswoman. It’s implied that she owns her shop. She employs several girls. She does not represent the downtrodden masses. She is solidly middle class.

The affair with the Tsar seems likely to prosper but there is somebody about to throw a spanner in the works - Napoleon. He’s not staying quietly in exile the way he’s supposed to.

The fact that the Tsar has a stand-in naturally leads to lots of romantic complications and lots of humorous complications. There’s more than a touch of farce to this movie.

London-born actress Lilian Harvey was an ideal choice as Christel, being fluent in English, German and French which allowed her to play Christel in all three versions. She’s a delight. Christel is pretty, she’s adorable, she’s lively, she’s sexy in a playful way and she’s a total screwball.

Willy Fritsch makes a charming handsome Tsar. Conrad Veidt played Metternich in the English and German-language versions. He’s excellent. Metternich is not a villain. He’s not even mildly villainous. Veidt plays him as a likeable rogue.

Congress Dances was a UFA production which means this is a big-budget big-studio picture. This is a lavish production. The production design is very impressive.

Congress Dances is zany, offbeat, wildly romantic and charming. It’s also very very German. If you’ve ever seen any of Ernst Lubitsch’s crazy early silent films such as The Wildcat (1921) and The Doll, or early Lubitsch musicals like The Love Parade (1929), or the insanely romantic Sissi (1955), you’ll know what I mean. Whimsical romance with a fairy tale flavour was something for which German filmmakers had a real affinity. Congress Dances is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

The source material was in bad shape but Kino Classics have come up with a pretty decent Blu-Ray transfer.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed (1966)

Winnetou and the Crossbreed (Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi) is a 1966 sauerkraut western. 

The sauerkraut western is the German equivalent to the spaghetti western. The main difference is that spaghetti westerns were always aiming for an international audience. Sauerkraut westerns were aimed more at the German domestic market, tapping into the immense popularity of the genre in Germany.

That popularity was due to Karl May (1842-1912), a popular German writer who launched a pop culture phenomenon with his novels of the Wild West. His books have sold around 200 million copies and are still in print. May’s novels were written at a time when the Wild West still existed. And at the time he wrote his best-known westerns he had never been anywhere near America. He wrote about the Wild West of his own imagination. And the entire German nation went totally Wild West crazy.

The main heroes of May’s westerns were a German settler nicknamed Old Shatterhand and his best friend, the Apache chief Winnetou. May’s novels were very very sympathetic indeed to the Apaches and this is reflected in the movies.

Between 1962 and 1968 there were seventeen Karl May movies, most of them based on his westerns.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed opens with the 21st birthday of Apanatschi (Uschi Glas). Her father is a European settler, her mother is an Apache. Her father’s birthday present to her is a gold mine. This present turns out to be a very bad idea. Some very unpleasant people find out about it and they’re determined to steal the gold.

A gang of bandits and cutthroats gets involved. There is treachery among the bad guys. Apanatschi and her kid brother are kidnapped.

Fortunately somebody was smart enough to contact Old Shatterhand (Lex Barker). He’s not going to allow this kind of wickedness to go on. And if Old Shatterhand comes to the rescue he’ll have Winnetou beside him.

It ends up in a full-scale war between the good guys and the bad guys, with lots of gunplay and lots of explosions.

The bad guys are holed up in a little town that is almost completely lawless. People are constantly getting shot. Within a few minutes we get every single western cliché you can name. At times it’s almost like parody. It’s a bit like Blazing Saddles, but played straight.

Of course there’s a classic western saloon and there are saloon girls. They’re quite obviously whores, but interestingly they’re very much on the side of the Good Guys.

What’s fascinating is that this movie gives the impression of having been made by people who hadn’t seen any of the great grown-up psychologically complex westerns of the golden age of westerns (from about 1946 to 1962). It’s as if their idea of a western was drawn entirely from the B-westerns of the 1930s. In this movie there are very straightforward Good Guys and Bad Guys.

This is a movie totally imbued with the sensibility of 1960s German pop cinema. Just as the German Edgar Wallace krimis are supposedly set in England but get every single detail delightfully wrong so this movie gets everything about the Wild West delightfully wrong. And as with the Edgar Wallace krimis it’s the fact that everything is slightly wrong that gives this movie such a wonderfully delirious and crazy flavour.

And it really does have that B-movie feel - it’s just pure entertainment packed with action and thrills.

Pierre Brice (a Frenchman) does the noble Apache warrior thing quite well. Lex Barker makes a fine hero. Uschi Glas as Apanatschi is a fine heroine - she’s lively and likeable and she’s as cute as a button. All the bad guys are played with gusto.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed is nothing like a spaghetti western. The violence is never graphic and there’s not a trace of cynicism. It’s family entertainment but it is fun and it’s recommended.

The Treasure of the Silver Lake and Winnetou and the Crossbreed are both included in a German three-movie DVD which offers the movies in both English-dubbed versions and in German with English subtitles. I recommend the German-language version because it gives more of a non-Hollywood feel.

I’ve reviewed the first of Karl May’s Wild West novels, Winnetou I, and I cannot recommend it, except for its considerable historical significance. It’s slow and dull. I’ve also reviewed the first of the Karl May movies, The Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), and it’s a rollicking tale of adventure in the Old West and it’s huge amounts of fun.

The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe is a 1949 film noir based on a Frederick Nebel story.

Whether The Bribe is true film noir or a noirish melodrama can be debated. It does have major affinities with another genre that flourished in the 40s and early 50s - thrillers in exotic settings with an atmosphere of tropical sin and moral corruption. Movies like Macau, The Shanghai Gesture and Saigon.

This is one of those noirs that doesn’t rely on shadows and darkness in the mean streets of a big city. Instead we get the blazing tropical sun, lots of sweat and an exotic atmosphere in which sin and corruption flourish. Passions get overheated.

Rigby (Robert Taylor) is a G-Man investigating a racket in stolen military aircraft engines. The trail leads to South America. To a place called Carlotta. This is definitely the tropics and presumably it’s the Caribbean. It seemed to be a general belief at that time that when Americans went bad, or finally realised themselves to be irredeemable failures, they always ended up in the tropics.

Soon after arrival Rigby encounters Elizabeth Hintten (Ava Gardner). She’s a sultry night-club singer and she gives off major bad girl vibes. But when he gets to meet her Rigby finds that she’s actually really sweet. She’s a really nice girl. That’s it for Rigby. He’s falling for this girl big time.

Her drunken loser husband Tug (John Hodiak) might be a problem, especially given that he’s a prime suspect in the aero engine racket.

There a couple of other shady characters floating about. THere’s a sleazy old guy named Bealer (Charles Laughton) who just oozes moral corruption. He seems too hopeless to be involved in a major racket but the evidence certainly points that way. And then there’s Carwood (Vincent Price), a businessman Rigby met on the plane to South America. Carwood was headed for Peru. His turning up at Carlotta is quite the coincidence.

Rigby is investigating the case but he’s spending most of his time mooning over Elizabeth. And she’s giving off damsel in distress vibes. The unhappy wife, tied to a loser drunk with whom she is obviously no longer in love. Rigby has definite knight in shining armour tendencies, especially when the damsel in distress is both really sweet and smokin’ hot.

Rigby has always been an honest cop and he’s not the sort of guy who would ever turn crooked through mere greed. But there are other inducements besides money. And Elizabeth is very cute.

This was a significant step in Robert Taylor’s reinvention of himself as a battered world-weary cynical anti-hero filled with self-loathing. No more of the lightweight pretty boy stuff. This reinvention turned out to be a brilliant idea. Few actors could portray cynics more successfully. He’s in top form here.

Charles Laughton is of course great fun. Vincent Price is delightfully oily.

This is a very good role for Ava Gardner. Elizabeth is not a straightforward femme fatale. She may not be a femme fatale. She may be the nice girl she appears to be. Rigby is sure she’s not involved in anything dishonest, but he’s not exactly unbiased. Gardner plays it subtle. Rigby wants to trust her and he’s convinced himself that he can trust her but there’s that tiny seed of doubt. The audience is in the same boat.

The odd thing about Ava Gardner’s career is that she gave some of her very best performances in movies that have been underrated and under-appreciated. Movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and Whistle Stop (1946). She herself was inclined to be dismissive of her acting career, rather unfairly.

There’s a decent crime plot here but this is a character study of a man not just tempted but torn. He doesn’t know which way to jump. He wants to do the right thing but he’s no longer sure what that means.

Robert Z. Leonard is the kind of director usually scornfully dismissed by auteurist critics, and he was certainly no auteur. He was one of those competent craftsmen and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some years earlier he had directed the very underrated pre-code Greta Garbo melodrama Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) and there are some affinities between that film and The Bribe - both deal with moral degradation in exotic settings.

The climactic action sequence really is superbly done.

The Bribe doesn’t tick all the noir boxes but it ticks quite a few of them and whether it’s really noir or not it’s still an excellent movie. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very nice transfer.

Gun for a Coward (1956)

Gun for a Coward is a 1956 Universal-International western. Which means it was shot in colour and in Cinemascope.

The three Keogh brothers run a ranch left to them by their late father. The oldest brother, Will (Fred MacMurray) is in charge and he’s a father figure to the other two. The youngest brother, Hade (Dean Stockwell), is a bit wild but he’s OK. The other brother, Bless (Jeffrey Hunter), is not OK. He’s a coward.

It doesn’t take long for us to realise why he’s a coward. He’s a grown man but his mother treats him like a baby.

And we soon learn that there’s more to it than that. Mrs Keogh despised her late husband. She hates the ranch. She despises ranchers. She hates the West. She always thought she was too good to be a rancher’s wife. She doesn’t want Bless to be a rancher. She wants him to move to the city and become something respectable. A doctor or a lawyer.

And she doesn’t want him to be a man. The masculine world of ranching horrifies her. She despises her other two sons.

Every time Bless tries to be a man his mother undermines him. She humiliates him. She’s controlling and manipulative.

There’s potential for other kinds of trouble as well. It’s understood that Will is going to marry Aud Niven (Janice Rule), the pretty young daughter of a neighbour. They would make a fine couple. The problem is that young Bless is rather sweet on Aud as well. Even worse, she’s rather sweet on him. They really need to tell Will that Aud isn’t going to marry him, but they keep putting it off.

Without fully realising it Will and Hade have become somewhat over-protective of Bless. There’s a confrontation with another rancher. It’s a situation in which Bless desperately needs to fight his own battle for once, but Will and Hade just automatically step in and fight it for him. The sad truth is that even his own brothers don’t think Bless is man enough to fight his own battles.

Naturally Bless keeps getting into situations in which his behaviour looks like cowardice. He’s pretty good at rationalising it away. He thinks he’s being sensible and smart. But then two men are killed in separate incidents and his cowardice seems to have been a contributing factor. The interesting thing is that sometimes his behaviour really is sensible. The trouble is that backing down from a fight is not always the right thing to do.

Fred MacMurray was a very reliable actor and he’s excellent here. Will is a good man but he has a lot to deal with. He makes mistakes but he does his best. He’s an imperfect hero. Jeffrey Hunter does the tortured thing quite well. Dean Stockwell is very good as Hade. Hade is wild, undisciplined, hot-headed and impulsive. He will be OK, if he learns to exercise some judgment.

Janice Rule is OK although I found Aud to be a very unsympathetic heroine. She’s interesting. You expect a female character in a western to be a good girl or a bad girl. Aud is a misguided good girl. She thinks she’s helping Bless but she’s harming him. She thinks she’s trying to avoid hurting Will by not telling him she’s in love with Bless but in fact she’s going to hurt him a whole lot more by keeping it a secret. And she’s unable to recognise that at times her behaviour is simply selfish. She’s a seriously flawed good girl.

The three brothers represent different kinds of masculinity. Will is mature masculinity. He never goes looking for a fight. But if he has to fight he will fight, and he does possess considerable courage. Hade is immature masculinity. He hasn’t learnt that sometimes not backing down is just dumb. A man has to learn to recognise the times when he should fight and the times when he should just walk away. Hade is going to be in trouble unless he starts growing up soon.

Bless is masculinity gone wrong. He can’t accept that if you keep running away then people will keep provoking you because they know you won’t fight back. So rather than avoiding confrontation you’ll end up in more confrontations, and increasingly dangerous confrontations.

This is a movie that some modern viewers will have problems with since they’re not used to seeing subjects like masculinity and courage treated seriously and sympathetically. They might be inclined to sympathise with Aud who lets Bless know that she loves him even though he is a coward. I think Aud is dead wrong. That’s the sort of thing that will make a man hate himself for the rest of his life. She fails to realise that he can never have self-respect unless he overcomes his cowardice. He already has too many people protecting him and coddling him.

On the surface Gun for a Coward is a very routine western but if you dig a bit deeper you find that it has some subtlety and some intelligence. Highly recommended.

Umbrella released this movie on DVD in their excellent Six Shooter Classics series. It’s a very acceptable transfer.