I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 13
And Ken Russell has really done it this time. He has stripped the lid of respectability off the Ursuline convent in Loudon, France. He has exposed Cardinal Richelieu as a political schemer. He has destroyed our illusions about Louis XIII. We are filled with righteous indignation as we bear witness to the violation of the helpless nuns; it is all the more terrible because, as Russell fearlessly reveals, all the nuns, without exception, were young and stacked.
It is about time that someone had the courage to tell it like it was about Loudon, a seemingly respectable provincial town beneath the façade of which seethed simmering intrigues, unholy alliances, greed, fear, lust, avarice, sacrilege, and nausea. The story has gone untold for too long. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it, and John Whiting wrote a play about it, but only Ken Russell has made a movie about it.
And make no mistake. The Devils has a message for our time. For we learn from the mistakes of the past. We live in a time of violence, and it is only by looking in the mouth of the Devil that we can examine his teeth. In a time when our nation is responsible for violence on a global scale, it is only by bearing witness to violence on a personal scale that we can bring the war home.
I don’t know about anyone else, but frankly, I left the Cinema Theater feeling like a new, a different, and, yes, a better person. The poisons of our political system had been drained from me. I entered the theater as an unwitting participant in the atrocities of our time. But believe me, that’s all behind me now. It took courage for me to go see The Devils, just like it took courage for Ken Russell to make it.
And it took courage for all those folks to congregate in the lobby and lounge of the Cinema Theater before, during, and after the performance. They were ordinary people—kids, students, young folks mostly—you might find living next door. And yet they had gone out into the night to see for themselves, so that the martyrs of Loudon might not go unmourned.
Now they spoke quietly among themselves of the atrocities they had witnessed, or hoped to witness soon. Listening to them, I felt we could all sleep a little sounder from now on. If the movie industry had more hard-nosed, tell-it-like-it-is artists like Ken Russell, Loudon might never happen again.
The Devil’s Rain
(Directed by Robert Fuest; starring Ernest Borgnine; 1975)
I walked into The Devil’s Rain a few minutes late and thought maybe I’d stumbled onto a Sergio Leone Western.
Vast empty spaces baked under the midday sun. There were distant whistles and moans on the sound track, the desert shimmered, and there was eerie music sounding vaguely like the wails of a short-winded harmonica player. A ghost town stood starkly outlined in the wasteland, and the steeple of its church reached for the lowering sky. All that was missing was Clint Eastwood shooing flies.
But, no, here came a new Chevy. At the wheel, one of the men of the Preston clan. His mission: To track down a cult of the Undead, test his faith against their satanist ceremonies, and rescue his kidnapped mother.
She’d been taken in the latest chapter of a feud going back 300 years, when men of the Preston family stole the book all of the Undead had signed with blood. Until the chief satanist (Ernest Borgnine) could get the book back, he wouldn’t truly control the souls under his command.
But he doesn’t just want the book. No, he wants the Prestons, too: He won’t rest until all of them have embraced Satan and given him their souls. Then they’ll be able to spend eternity standing outside in the devil’s rain.
But . . . what is the devil’s rain? This is a question frequently asked in The Devil’s Rain and, believe me, frequently answered. Picture it this way: All the good things of life are on one side of a sheet of plate glass, and you’re on the other, and it’s raining on your side, Bunky. You pass the time by scratching the glass and pleading to be allowed back in.
All of this would be good silly fun if the movie weren’t so painfully dull. The problem is that the material’s stretched too thin. There’s not enough here to fill a feature-length film. No doubt that’s why we get so many barren landscapes filled with lonely music and ennui.
There are, however, a few good scenes, especially those in which Ernest Borgnine appears. He wears his official satanist suit, all red velvet and quite a contrast to the hooded black robes of his disciples. They have empty eye sockets, and when you shoot them, it turns out they’re full of a milky green substance that looks like gelatin that didn’t set.
Borgnine occasionally disappears in great puffs of smoke, only to reappear as the devil himself, complete with goat’s horns, a beard, and fierce eyes. One imagines Borgnine reading the script and telling his agent: “This is a part I must make my own!” He works up a fine fiendish cackle and a passable obscene growl and goes out in style, falling down a manhole into Hell.
Then there’s a big explosion, the devil’s rain starts to fall, and the Undead all start to melt. Five minutes later, we’re wondering if they’ll ever finish. The filmmakers apparently spent a lot of money on the special effects, and to justify their investment they have the Undead melt, and melt, and melt, until if we get one more shot of green ooze, we’ll feel like an exorcised popsicle. If only they’d melted just a little, just enough to give us the idea.
But, no, we have to wait about five minutes for the surprise ending, in which guess who doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the devil’s rain?
Diary of Forbidden Dreams
(Directed by Roman Polanski; starring Marcello Mastroianni, Hugh Griffith, Roman Polanski; 1976)
There’s probably a level of competence beneath which bad directors cannot fall. No matter how dreary their imaginations, how stupid their material, how inept their actors, how illiterate their scripts, they’ve got to come up with something that can at least be advertised as a motion picture, released, and forgotten.
But a talented director is another matter. If he’s made several good films, chances are that sooner or later someone will give him the money to make a supremely bad one. I wonder how much Carlo Ponti gave Roman Polanski to make Diary of Forbidden Dreams. Ten cents would have been excessive.
This is a movie so incredibly bad that I ask you to ponder the following facts. Even though (a) it stars Marcello Mastroianni, Hugh Griffith, and Polanski himself, and (b) provides us with almost ninety minutes during which the attractive Sydne Rome wears little more than a table napkin, and (c) is almost exclusively concerned with that surefire box-office winner, sex, it (d) was completed in 1973 and has not been released until now because almost every distributor who saw it fled the screening room in horror, clutching at his wallet.
The movie’s original title was What? That is reportedly what Carlo Ponti said (in Italian, no doubt, and appropriately embellished) after Polanski showed it to him. In its original version, it looked like the work of a madman, of a crazed cinematic genius off the deep end. Ponti, in desperation, had all of Polanski’s outtakes printed up (outtakes are versions of a shot that the director decides not to use). With the aid of skilled editors, Ponti attempted to substitute various outtakes in an attempt to construct a film that resembled, well, a film.
No luck. When Polanski makes a bad movie, he does it with a certain thoroughness. Even the shots he didn’t use were bad. And so here we have it, Roman Polanski’s Diary of Forbidden Dreams. It concerns (I think) the adventures of the young and shapely Miss Rome, a hitchhiker who stumbles upon a bizarre country villa that also functions as a private hospital.
Among the inmates are Mastroianni, who keeps repeating “What would be nice, I think, would be for us to meet for dinner” until we want to mash a plate of lasagna in his face. He walks about in a bathrobe, smoking a cigarette and inspiring us to wonder how in the world he got into the movies. Really. Mastroianni, one of the most charismatic actors in the world, reduced to a cipher. Hugh Griffith, wearing his usual ferocious whiskers, plays an old tyrant who is forever about to drop dead of a heart attack. Polanski plays another inmate who’s a Ping-Pong buff. Mastroianni and, finally, Miss Rome keep stepping on his Ping-Pong balls and crushing them, which leads to no end of ill feeling. I would desperately like to believe no symbolism is intended.
Miss Rome loses most of her clothes soon after arriving at the villa, and spends half an hour wearing the above-mentioned table napkin around her neck before stealing the tops of Hugh Griffith’s pajamas. Hugh Griffith is provided with dialogue like “Who is that girl wearing my pajama tops?” Another of the residents of the villa paints Miss Rome’s left leg blue. There are a lot of shots of her walking around in pajama tops with a blue leg.
These and other shots confirm my long-held suspicion that, when it comes right down to it, there’s a nasty streak of misogynism in Polanski. “What we have in mind, dear,” I imagine him telling Sydne Rome when he was casting the picture, “is for you to walk around mostly nude for ninety minutes with your left leg painted blue.” What she replied I cannot imagine, but she took the job. Some people will do anything to work for a top director.
You will notice that I have awarded Diary of Forbidden Dreams one half star. There is a principle at work here, and now’s the time to explain it. No movie, no matter how bad, gets no stars at all in the Sun-Times unless it is, in addition to being bad, also meretricious and evil. Diary doesn’t even have the wit to go that extra step.
Dice Rules
(Directed by Jay Dubin; starring Andrew Dice Clay; 1991)
Dice Rules is one of the most appalling movies I have ever seen. It could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew Dice Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him. The fact that Clay apparently thinks this movie is worth seeing is revealing and sad, indicating that he not only lacks a sense of humor, but also ordinary human decency.
Andrew Dice Clay comes billed as a comedian, but does not get one laugh from me in the eighty-seven minutes of this film. I do not find it amusing to watch someone mock human affliction, and I don’t find it funny, either, for him to use his fear of women as a subject for humor. Of course any subject can theoretically be made funny, but just to stand and point is not the same thing as developing a humorous point of view.
An example. We have all known someone who has undergone a tracheotomy, having their voice box removed because of cancer. Sometimes these people are still able to speak through controlling the air stream in their throat, or by using small battery-powered devices that magnify their whispers. Andrew Dice Clay finds their speech funny, and mocks it in this film. I imagine that tracheotomy patients themselves use morbid humor as one way of dealing with their condition, but Clay is not using humor at all—he is simply pointing and making fun, like a playground bully.
He has many other targets. The handicapped. The ill. Minorities. Women. Homosexuals. Anyone, in fact, who is not exactly like Andrew Dice Clay is fair game for his cruel attacks. His material about women constitutes verbal rape. Using obscenity as punctuation, he describes women as essentially things to masturbate with.
I think his approach to women is based on fear of them. It is too painful and too consistent to be explained otherwise. Everything that he says about women is based on the kind of ignorant dirty jokes told by insecure teenage boys among themselves, as they try to conceal their misinformation and bolster their courage by objectifying women into creatures who can be dismissed with the usual crude obscenities. Even then, if he were mocking or kidding this attitude, it could perhaps be funny. But not a single word in Clay’s film indicates that he has been able to deal with the fact that women are living, thinking beings. He sees only their sexual organs, fears them, and must punish or conquer them to reassure himself.
Dice Rules was filmed in concert (what a word) at Madison Square Garden, which the comedian was able to fill two nights in a row. It is eerie, watching the shots of the audience. You never see anyone just plain laughing, as if they’d heard something that was funny. You see, instead, behavior more appropriate at a fascist rally, as his fans stick their fists in the air and chant his name as if he were making some kind of statement for them. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is giving voice to their rage, fear, prejudice, and hatred. They seem to cheer him because he is getting away with expressing the sick thoughts they don’t dare to say.
Comedians have long been a lightning rod for society, drawing down the dangers and grounding them. Some of the most brilliant comics of recent years—Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin—have dealt with taboo words and concepts. But they bring insight and an attitude to them. They help us see how we regard them. They provide a form of therapy, of comic relief. Not Clay. Strutting and sneering, lacking the graceful timing of the great stand-up talents, reciting his words woodenly, he creates a portrait of the comedian as sociopath.
Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.
Dirty Dingus Magee
(Directed by Burt Kennedy; starring Frank Sinatra, George Kennedy; 1970)
Dirty Dingus Magee is as shabby a piece of goods as has masqueraded as a Western since, oh, A Stranger Returns. It’s supposed to be a comedy, and it was directed by Burt Kennedy, who is supposed to be a director of Western comedies (Support Your Local Sheriff wasn’t bad), but its failure is just about complete.
I lean toward blaming Frank Sinatra, who in recent years has become notorious for not really caring about his movies. If a shot doesn’t work, he doesn’t like to try it again; he might be late getting back to Vegas. What’s more, the ideal Sinatra role requires him to be in no more than a fourth of the scenes, getting him lots of loot and top billing while his supporting cast does the work.
This time, as usual, the supporting cast is good. We get George Kennedy as a cigar-chewing sheriff; Anne Jackson as a madam of sorts; Lois Nettleton as a sympathetic nymphomaniac, and Jack Elam, naturally, as the villain. They’re fun to watch, but where’s Sinatra? In Vegas?
The movie loosely concerns Sinatra as a con man who. . . . But never mind what the movie’s about; that’s hardly the issue. I want to hurry on to a statement by one Charlie Blackfeet, president of the IFTP (Indians for Truthful Portrayal). Blackfeet is quoted at great length in MGM press releases as saying Dirty Dingus Magee has his organization’s “first unqualified stamp of approval for Hollywood stories dealing with Indians in twenty years.”
Blackfeet, who talks amazingly like an MGM press agent, allows that “Hollywood’s version of the average American Indian has been as artificial as a toupee.” Not a tactful statement where Frank Sinatra is involved. But Blackfeet likes this movie, because it avoids “make-believe jargon that makes Indians sound like a cross between Tarzan and a man making a phone call underwater.” End of press release quotes.
Well, with all due respect, sir, I didn’t much dig Paul Fix’s dialogue as Chief Crazy Blanket (“If I’m crazy, you’re crazy”), or the scene where four old squaws and George Kennedy (disguised by a blanket and, naturally, mistaken as a squaw) watch while Sinatra makes out with the chief’s lithe daughter, at the chief’s insistence. “Paleface take-um Injun girl,” indeed, Mr. Blackfeet.
The Doom Generation
(Directed by Gregg Araki; starring James Duval, Rose McGowan; 1995)
Words like “disaffected,” “distanced” and “deadpan” flew from my mind onto my notepad while I was watching The Doom Generation. This is the kind of movie where the filmmaker hopes to shock you with sickening carnage and violent amorality, while at the same time holding himself carefully aloof from it with his style. He would be more honest and probably make a better movie if he got down in the trenches with the rest of us.
There is an attitude in Gregg Araki’s film that I’ve sensed in a lot of work recently: The desire by the filmmaker to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to make a blood-soaked, disgusting, disturbing movie about characters of low intelligence and little personal worth, but he’s not willing to cop to that, and so by giving them smarmy pop-culture references and nihilistic dialogue, and filling the edges of his frame with satirical in-jokes and celebrity walk-ons (Margaret Cho, Heidi Fleiss), he’s keeping himself at arm’s length. Hey, if we’re dumb enough to be offended by his sleazefest, that’s our problem; Araki is, you see, a stylist, who can use concepts like iconography and irony to weasel away from his material.
Note carefully that I do not object to the content of his movie, but to the attitude. Content is neutral until shaped by approach and style. This is a road picture about Amy and Jordan, young druggies who get involved with a drifter named Xavier who challenges their ideas about sex, both gay and straight, while involving them on a blood-soaked cross-country odyssey. The movie opens as the drifter “inadvertently” (Araki’s word, in the press kit) blows off the head of a Korean convenience store owner. The head lands in the hot dog relish and keeps right on screaming. Ho, ho,
It continues as the “enigmatic Xavier” (I am again quoting from the wonderfully revealing press kit) “has such rotten karma that every time they stop the car for fries and Diet Cokes, someone ends up dying in one gruesome way or another.” Wait, there’s more: “As the youthful band of outsiders continue their travels through the wasteland of America, Amy finds herself screwing both Jordan and Xavier, forging a triangle of love, sex, and desperation too pure for this world.”
Now let’s deconstruct that. The correct word is “its,” not “their.” (1) “Band of outsiders” is an insider reference to “A Band Apart,” the name of Quentin Tarantino’s production company, which itself is a pun on the title of a film by Godard. (2) Is it remotely possible that America is a “wasteland” because Amy, Jordan, and Xavier kill someone every time they stop for fries and a soda? That wouldn’t have occurred to this movie. (3) The usage “someone ends up dying” employs the passive voice to avoid saying that the three characters kill them. This is precisely the same construction used by many serial killers and heads of state, who use language to separate themselves from the consequences of their actions.
