Films of 71: Get Carter

Before Mean Streets, Mike Hodges stripped away any romanticism to be found in the gangster film. There's a streak of evil running through the British crime film, a streak of which can be found in The Long Good Friday and The Hit. 

Jack Carter isn't just another typical anti hero. He is a total bastard who wouldn't think twice about getting someone innocent killed in order to achieve his ends. His mission is to find out who killed his brother and as you see him dish out copious amounts of pain on his quest of revenge, you realize just how far he is willing to go. Michael Caine is known today as someone who brings this air of British classiness to the films he is in. Not enough people know him for arguably his best and most ruthless role. 

Hodges never really retained this quality after Get Carter. He would go on to direct Flash Gordon, but that is miles apart from what he was doing here. 

The Films of 71: Three Gialli

The first giallo film was made by Mario Bava in 1964 under the title, The Girl Who Knew Too Much. The subgenre wouldn't truly take off until the 70's. And even in the beginning, directors were adding special flavors and ingredients to it. 

CAT O'NINE TAILS

The second in Dario Argento's animal trilogy. The first being Bird With the Crystal Plumage and last being Four Flies On Grey Velvet. Out of the three films, this is my least favorite. There are strong sequences like the elevator shaft scene. But not enough to make it rise above.  

The focus on narrative is stronger than his later output like Suspiria, Inferno and Phenomena. Which, when it comes to Argento, isn't his strong suit. Dario is all about mood, lighting and atmosphere. 

LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN

I came to Fulci after discovering his zombie films: Zombi 2, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead. Each one's atmosphere and mood fed off the last. Which is the kind of horror I devour like catnip. Little did I know, he had a string of movies behind him that proved he was every bit as capable of telling a coherent story. Lizard is one such film. 

It's a film that starts off as an open shut case and then proceeds to make you look closer at little cracks in the story. Fulci employs split screen, a technique not commonly used back then. Keep in mind, this is before DePalma's first split screen use in Sisters. 

There's a fascination with sexuality you can sense in the film. The 60's explosion and culture's loose grip on forbidden pleasure all came to the forefront in genre cinema. It's not just the sex you're getting here. Fulci brings the gore. Plenty of it. 

So if you want to watch one of Fulci's earlier efforts, you're best checking out the labyrinthine psycho sexual shocker Lizard In A Woman's Skin. 

THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH

Bava, Argento and Fulci are the three big names in Italian horror circles. If I were to include a fourth, it would be Sergio Martino. Unlike Argento, Martino was a journeyman. He started out with westerns and documentaries before this. 

Mrs. Wardh was the first of a series of giallos Martino would make. The one to set the DNA for everything else that would follow. The director brought an ingredient that others weren't using in the giallo: eroticism. A film like Henri Georges Clouzot's Les Diabolique would be the basis for these gialli Martino would make. What Clouzot could only imply in 1955, Martino made explicit in 1971. 

Even though there are traits that can string these films together, Martino brings a distinct flavor to each one. He always broke his own mold and did something different. His next film, All the Colors of the Dark blends in  the occult with the subgenre of giallo.

The gorgeous Edwige Fenech, a Martino regular for his next two giallos stars as the titular Mrs. Wardh. 

The Films of 71: McCabe and Mrs. Miller

 50 years is a benchmark for celebrating anniversaries. So today we're kicking off a celebration of the films from 1971. The idea was to make a top twenty list at some point this year. Yet upon looking at the movies that came out that year, I was overwhelmed. You can make a top 25 and still regret leaving quality flicks out. So instead of a one day thing, this is going to be a year long celebration of the year that gave us some of the strongest works from Kubrick, Altman, Friedkin, Bogdonavich, and Roeg. 

On the genre circuit we were gifted the folk horror of Blood On Satan's Claw, the wildly transgressive The Devils, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, and the one two lesbian vampire punch of Vampyros Lesbos and Daughters of Darkness. Italian giallo continued to grow with Dario Argento (Cat O'Nine Tails), Lucio Fulci (Lizard In A Woman's Skin) and Sergio Martino (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh). Blaxpoitation exploded onto the scene with Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. The comedy circuit had Elaine May, Hal Ashby and Woody Allen releasing A New Leaf, Harold and Maude and Bananas. 

It's January, the snow is falling outside, so what better time to watch or talk about McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

After the success of MASH, Altman turned his eye toward an adaptation of Edmund Naughton's 1959 novel about a gambler who defies a small town from the predations of a powerful mining company. Altman chose it because of how conventional it was. "It's the most ordinary, common western that's ever been told." 

As I've said before somewhere on this blog, traditional westerns don't interest me. So it delighted me to see the Altman twist on the genre. It's an anti-western. Along for the ride are Altman regulars Rene Auberjoinis, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall and script supervisor Joan Tewkesberry. The two big chips in this gamble were Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Two mainline actors who all but secured financing from Warner Bros. to make the picture. 

Altman always likes playing around with struture. McCabe is no different. The secondary characters played by the likes of Carradine and Michael Murphy have rich storylines. Julie Christie's Mrs. Miller doesn't even appear until the half hour mark. So we are left without a central narrative for the first 30 minutes. This is nothing new to Altman. In future projects he will only expand on these narrative experiments. 

The first thing I think of when McCabe is brought up is the look of the film. We have Vilmos Zsigmond to thank for this. But we also have the director himself. He partially exposed the negatives to destroy the clarity of the film. In the book Altman on Altman, the director describes his thought process. "I wanted it to have that antique, historical look. I really set out to make it look like those old photographs do." The result is looking at the images as if looking through stained glass. 

Like MASH, Altman once again experimented with sound. Specifically with overlapping dialogue. One of his big complaints with the artifice of filmmaking was the fact that there was all of this clean dialogue where no one overlapped one another. It wasn't realistic. Beatty would complain later about how he couldn't hear anything being said in the movie. In an interview on The Dick Cavett show, Altman discusses how he worked on the picture. 

We can't leave out one of the defining parts of the movie: Leonard Cohen. Back in 2016, the death of Leonard Cohen was a twist of the knife. A slap on an already gaping wound after dealing with the passing of David Bowie. It begins with Stranger Song and ends with Winter Lady. As much as I love Short Cuts, The Player, Images, California Split, and The Long Goodbye, the Cohen songs coupled with the howling winter winds put it over the top as my 2nd favorite Altman. Just behind Nashville.

On the commentary track, Producer David Foster calls the ending a 'true ending'. The 70s were littered with them. The ending of Electra Glide In Blue is such an example. That pull back on the road as Terry Kath's Tell Me is playing and the credits roll. Criterion put out a beautiful edition that is a must for an Altman head.