Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) dir. John Sturges

“I’ll only be here twenty-four hours.”

“In a place Like this that could last a life-time. “

It seems like a good time to talk about John Sturges’s 1955 genre hybrid Bad Day at Black Rock, since it’s going to be playing in a new print at Film Forum for the next week or so.   Shot in beautiful Cinemascope by the perpetually underrated Sturges, who would mark American film not only through classics like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape but equally fascinating films like Ice Station Zebra and Joe Kidd, with a screenplay by blacklisted writer Millard Kaufman that stands out as much as a dissenting voice in Cold War America as Clouzot’s Le Corbeau did in occupied France.

Red Sun (1971) dir. Terence Young

Charles Bronson! Toshiro Mifune! Alain Delon! Red Sun!

Carlos Ezquerra

Thriller #8 (July, 1984): Written by Bill Dubay, drawn by Trevor Von Eeden, colored by Tom Ziuko

I can't think of a single compelling reason that comic book covers no longer look like this

Thriller was ostensibly another rung upon the ladder of DC Comics’ ascent towards maturity, a word they took to mean the precipitate acquisition of credibility. For the vast world of mainstream comics, this was a hitherto unprecedented time for unconventional work to slip beneath the radar into reader’s hands. Normally, focussing on the business end of a given period in comics is the most jejune and stultifying portion in a given rant, but Thriller was one of the Direct Market’s promethean figures. The Direct Market, capitalized out of respect rather than grammatical correctness, was how DC and Marvel saved themselves from Reaganomics while simultaneously paving the way for a decade and change of grim, humorless comics that looked less like John Buscema had drawn them. Simply put, the Direct Market was a means by which comic shops would cater to older audiences. Comics geared towards an older demographic would be prevalent, as would related memorabilia (i.e. bric-a-brac), subscription opportunities and a sense of community for twenty-somethings before Watchmen came out. The Direct Market has been enthusiastically absorbed by most comic shops still in existence. The system plainly has its faults, but from the mid 1970s into the 80s (or even 90s) this particular demand supplied no shortage of terrific artists, freed from the strict guidelines of a typical DC or Marvel comic book.

Breathless (1982) dir. Jim McBride

1.

Watching a film that is very evidently not working is a truly strange experience,  a little like getting on the wrong bus in a town you only thought you knew in the first place. One’s heart starts to shrink in one’s chest as the bus rolls on and on, the buildings becoming less and less familiar.  Such is the sort of feeling I associate with watching the 1982 version of A Bout de Souffle (1960); an odd, sour film, the remake, that is perhaps more interesting for whatever thoughts may stir in the mind of the confused viewer than anything occurring directly on screen.

Blue Steel (1990) dir. Kathryn Bigelow

For the sake of writing  another post about a movie featuring an outsider police officer, we’re going to follow Kathryn Bigelow into the murky world of the 1990s, and the steamy pit of the ‘thriller genre,” that deeply hazy classification which for our purposes will refer to that strange group of films that coalesced around the release of “Fatal Attraction” and the adoption of VHS as a significant viewing format. Bigelow had directed the cult “vampire western” Near Dark several years earlier, with even stranger times ahead in the form of Patrick Swayze, sky-diving, and Point Break. Blue Steel crawls around there somewhere in the middle,  a film that’s simultaneously audacious and strangely tentative, especially for a director who’s early work seemed so fully formed.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) dir. James William Guercio

“You know, loneliness can kill you deader than a .357 magnum.”

A genuinely strange film as only passion projects by one-time-only directors in the early 1970s can be, Electra Glide perversely inverts the Easy Rider formula by focusing on the lives of two doomed motorcycle cops in the dead end town of Stockman, throwing out most of the forward drive expected of the genre in favor of increasingly mordant character study and exercises in American/Western iconography. Shot with monument valley ever on the horizon, legend has one time director/producer/composer Guercio — best known for his work with Chicago, with Moondog and the Firesign Theater — giving up all but a dollar of his director’s salary in order to court the services of cinematographer Conrad Hall.  This may have been a wise choice, as the film moves dream-like through a world built almost entirely out of iconographic symbols , in which characters are defined by the uniform that they wear, and in which our protagonist — star-crossed character actor Robert Blake playing the just as star crossed John Wintergreen — finds his life defined almost entirely by one supremely visual trait, his incredibly short stature.

China Girl (1987) dir. Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara’s 1987 Romeo and Juliet adaptation China Girl may seem a strange candidate for inclusion in the discussion of this site, but then Ferrara is a strange figure in general.  Most discussion of Ferrara’s work seems to paint him as a gritter little brother to Scorsese in his Mean Streets mode, a comparison that is almost born out by a small handful of Ferrara’s films — Driller Killer, maybe, but certainly Bad Lieutenant, the film he is most likely to be associated with now. It’s easy to forget, then, that Lieutenant was not only preceded by the so-florid -it’s-almost-abstract King of New York, and followed by the disastrous Dangerous Game,  a bizarre exercise in self loathing that managed to strand viewers in Ferrara’s twitching Catholic guilt without even the consolation of Lieutenant’s pulp narrative to help viewers through the murk (one of the benefits of the pulp ideom — viewers are willing to accept a certain level of  bizarre self-hatred from a coke addled corrupt policeman, but find it utterly inexplicable when asked to accept the same kind of behavior coming from a marginally successful director). Even earlier in the 1980s Ferrara worked on a few episodes of Miami Vice, and played a significant role in Michael Mann’s relatively overlooked follow-up series Crime Story; it is somewhere in the nexus of this all that we find China Girl.

Criterion Opens Zatoichi Channel On Hulu

more about "Hulu – Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman:…", posted with vodpod

Criterion seems to be expanding its use of online content quite a bit these days; the dvd industry has seemed like a sinking ship for a little while now, but this is certainly a good thing for the rest of us anyway. Especially since, for example, they’ve decided to open a Hulu Channel devoted to the Blind Swordsman series once released by their now extinct affiliate Home Vision Entertainment. It’s a terrific series, and they’ve picked some great episodes to go online; sooner or later readers of this site will be treated to longer writing about this character, actor Shintaro Katsu and the genre itself. We can’t say we love a lot of things about the “Hulu experience” but it may not be free for long, but free (legal) access to this content, even in this form, may look like a brighter and brighter time once it’s gone.

The Loveless (1982) dir. Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery

As Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 war film The Hurt Locker has just managed to win the Oscar for Best Picture, it may be a good time to start looking back at her fairly large body of work, which – especially the four films she made between ’82 and ’91 — are of particular interest to this website. Even The Hurt Locker fits well within the discussion — it is closer to those odd pulpy mid-budget war films, like Merrill’s Marauders or Attack!, than any other film of recent memory. And it would not take a great deal of imagination to see Jeremy Renner’s Sgt., if born in a different time, showing up on Miami Vice as one of Crockett’s old army buddies – “I know he seems crazy Tubbs, but…”.  Often completely overlooked in favor of her interesting vampire western Near Dark is Bigelow’s first feature, co-directed with Monty Montgomery (best know to most audiences as having played the “Cowboy” in Mulholland Drive), which we will start to discuss immediately after the jump.