A Canon With More Cannons

Quentin Tarantino loves movies, too many and not wisely. It's not that he doesn't recognize great, boundary pushing work for the artfag crowd: his Cannes jury awarded Tropical Malady in 2004. But Tarantino's better known as our foremost champion of junk culture: his now-defunct Rolling Thunder Pictures put out Chungking Express, but it also reissued The Mighty Peking Man. Anyone who has showed up for his marathon presentations from his personal collection ("QTFests" at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse and elsewhere) knows the very real risk of boredom from yet another film that's more fun to summarize than watch. But Tarantino's canonical reshuffling deserves attention, and his aesthetic has its critical equivalent. A contentious thread at Dave Kehr's website last year spiraled into a relatively civil argument about Nathan Lee, with Kehr summing up the case:

"There's nothing more natural than for each new generation to revolt against the taste of the last, usually by staking out territory that the oldsters considered beyond the pale. My generation did it by defending Hawks, Ford and Hitchcock against the Crowther-Macdonald-Kael crowd who had ruled that westerns and thrillers weren’t worthy of serious consideration. This generation—and I suppose Nathan Lee is its most formidable standard-bearer—has moved the goalposts again, this time to include gialli, Asian action films and 42nd Street exploitation."

Sure. And the problem is that if you don't trust the person pushing the reintegration, it's hard not to dismiss everything as undiscriminating, mouth-breathing enthusiasm, obscure fetishes being defended through overanalysis and rapturous prose.

But I think I'm inclined to take William Lustig's choices seriously. Mr. Lustig is the CEO of cult distributor Blue Underground and director of the Maniac Cop series (which I've regrettably never seen), and he is now curating a series running through Thursday—"The '70s: Buried Treasures"—for Anthology Film Archives. Based on the three I've seen—Rolling Thunder and The Outfit, both directed by John Flynn, and The Outside Man—Lustig's a fine connoisseur of movies combining macho badassery with thoughtful form. (And yes, as it happens, Tarantino did name his distribution company after the former, then named his production company after Band of Outsiders as if to balance it out.) While it might normally be alarming that Anthology Film Archives is taking a week out of its usually-pretty-rarefied schedule to show old Charles Bronson flicks et al. [ed: related reading here], the fact is no one shows this stuff in a serious curatorial context (LA's Cinefamily is cool and all, but it's not quite the same thing, even though it might be the prototype for the next generation of rep houses). It's good someone stepped up.

1977's Rolling Thunder is the real deal, a Taxi Driver B-side I like even more, with the Vietnam-era psychosis made explicit (Paul Schrader is credited for the story and as co-writer). What's surprising is how far it is from the "insane veteran" cliché: Major Charles Rane (William Devane) did time in the Hanoi Hilton (the low-budget flashbacks are the one serious misstep), and then he goes out on a killing spree, but he has his reasons and they're not worse than anything else going on. Entering with genre expectations, you keep waiting for him to snap; the fact that his wife welcomes him home with a verbal "Dear John" is bad enough, and it's definitely a troubling indicator when he asks her new man to re-enact some rope tricks on him, but he keeps his cool surprisingly well. Rane isn't a victim of Vietnam, at least not in the traditional formulation; he's a guy who knows how to kill people and doesn't relate to anyone outside the military once he's back home. Instead of drifting into ennui, he's given the impetus to do the one thing he still knows when his wife and kid are killed. By film's end, he's the same taciturn guy he was at the beginning, the one whose advice for facing people you're bashful in front of is to "put your glasses on." He's slightly less human than the Terminator, but that doesn't mean he's a sociopath. This is a vigilante movie that makes the protagonist seem at least a little reasonable, which is always troubling.

Despite Tommy Lee Jones' above-the-title billing, he's a supporting player; the film is mostly a duet between Rane and local gal Linda (Linda Haynes), who likes him enough to go on the road for what she thinks is a weekend trip down to Mexico and turns out to be a mini-combat operation. One of the more remarkable things about Rolling Thunder is the way it flawlessly splits down the middle as both a killing spree and as a sad and richly detailed abortive affair. Linda and Rane fight, have sex, drive and negotiate the terms of their potential relationship; in one unexpectedly gorgeous scene, they fight in a field in a moment nearly worthy of Badlands. Linda's been around, and she's dragging Rane from marriage into the free-floating, ill-defined terms of freely accessible sex in 1973. He's dragging her across Texas, from his hometown of San Antonio down into Mexico, through various squalid bars, asking around for citizens of dubious social worth whose names have prefixes like "Fat." In other words, it's an edgy revisionist noir in a decayed Western landscape, and I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn it's a major influence on No Country for Old Men; it's just as tense, laconically brutal and aware that the border area is one big no-go zone on either side. In terms of Devane's eventual anatomical transformation into man-with-a-hook (the robbers shove his arm down the garbage disposal), it's not that far off from Robert Rodriguez's stupid Planet Terror, but what's risible in summary becomes plausible on-screen. Rolling Thunder is smart and funny enough to join the '70s canon of disaffected cynicism going down easy with snappy dialogue (Tommy Lee Jones to madam: "Are there any white girls in here?" Madam: "Go ahead and look around, gringo. Maybe you'll find your sister."); it's almost as good as this year's belatedly rediscovered sensation The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

1973's The Outfit has a better reputation, presumably because Donald Westlake's crime fiction is less overly lurid and more genre respectable. The plot's a bit of nothing: Robert Duvall is none-too-pleased his brother was killed while he was in jail, and he aims to get some money from the people responsible. To affect this aim, he equips himself with a partner and a variety of artillery, and proceeds to get busy. In a world where Jean-Pierre Melville's work is readily accessible, this kind of baseline B-movie isn't quite sharp enough. Beautifully shot by Bruce Surtees, The Outfit's pleasures are smaller and more predictable than Rolling Thunder's: a sense of bummed-out, economically disenfranchised place, some terse dialogue (the final line is perfect), and brutality to spare. (Audiences at Anthology seem freaked by Duvall hitting women in the face, which proves how much has changed; they seemed to find it altogether inconceivable.) But it's finally not much more than warmed-over noir fatalism, without much of its own to bring to the party. It's a movie connecting the dots rather than creating its own genre.

As for The Outside Man, Lustig isn't the first to bring it to my attention; Thom Anderson features it in his brilliant, deserves-to-be-seminal-but-stupid-copyright-laws 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, alongside other French-person-in-L.A. oddities like Jacques Demy's Model Shop. The first two-thirds basically imagine Dirty Harry as a Gallic assassin in an especially bad mood, stomping through L.A. (perhaps best of all when he slaps a whiny child who won't shut up because he wants to watch Star Trek). Anthology is hopefully showing the uncut European version—copious gratuitous full-frontal, huzzah—which would add a welcome touch of Euro-sleaze to a series that's sure to otherwise be drowning in a very specifically American strain of seediness. The Outside Man finally shows co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere's influence in the last act, beginning with the fantastic moment when the man's assassin freres show up and start bitching about having to wear black suits, because then they won't be able to pick up any girls. The finale—melting, seemingly waxwork corpse and all— proves Carriere was Luis Buñuel's collaborator after all. The film veers from gritty time capsule to active surrealist derangement without missing a beat.

The Outside Man screens tonight at 7pm. Rolling Thunder screens tomorrow at 9pm. The Outfit screens Thursday at 7pm. All screenings are at NYC's Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave at 2nd St.).

Posted by ahillis at August 10, 2009 10:42 AM