Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 15, 2016

  • The Hit

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1984)

    The Hit begins in London in the 1970s.  A man called Willie Parker gets dressed, has breakfast and is hustled into a car by a group of other men.  They’re all obviously professional criminals; Willie is being driven to court to give evidence against other former partners-in-crime.   The latter sit in the dock impassively until, when Willie steps down from the witness box, they burst into a sarcastic rendition of ‘We’ll Meet Again’.   The action moves on ten years and to Spain, where supergrass Willie now lives, set up there by the British police and minded by a Spanish police officer.  Four local youths abduct Willie (killing his minder in the process) and hand him over to a pair of British hitmen:  their job is to get Willie to Paris and deliver him to the gangland boss whom Willie’s evidence helped put away – in other words, to deliver Willie Parker to his death.  The hitmen are Braddock (who’s seen it all and world-weary as a result) and Myron (a keen but hopeless novice).  They make a detour to what they think is a safe house in Madrid but holed up there are Harry, an Australian gangster, and his decades-younger Spanish girlfriend, known as Maggie.  Willie, determined to make things difficult, reveals his identity to Harry.  Because of this (I think), Braddock kills Harry and kidnaps Maggie before getting back on the road.   By the time the action reaches the Spanish-French border (and the end of the film), Willie Parker, Myron and Braddock are all dead.

    The opening sequences in London look to announce a conventional realistic thriller.  The block of flats from which Willie and his retinue emerge might be the ones you’ve seen in any number of British television police procedurals.  Once the action moves from England, however, The Hit becomes a very different movie, and an ambitious one.   Stephen Frears, with the help of his cinematographer John A Alonzo (best known for Chinatown), uses the Spanish landscape to express both the shift away from realism and a sense that Braddock and Myron – unlike the indigenous Maggie and the acculturated Willie Parker – are operating in a foreign country.    Willie is a voracious reader.  He has a book at the breakfast table before his appearance in court and his solitary life in Spain allows him to indulge his interest:  the home that his kidnappers disturb is crammed with books.  During his years abroad, Willie has had time and cause to think too, and he’s fond of philosophising.  His seeming acceptance of death – of the fatal revenge that the men he sent to jail will, sooner or later, take – makes him, from Braddock and Myron’s point of view, an enigmatic and disarming passenger.

    Frears and the screenwriter Peter Prince subvert expectations of the crime thriller and particularly of the lethally efficient way in which hitmen are assumed to operate.   There’s plenty of action in The Hit but the characters spend at least as much time talking.  Opportunities to dispatch Willie and Maggie immediately are repeatedly not taken.  Braddock and Myron never reach their destination.  The metaphysics of organised crime is an interesting idea; The Hit didn’t prosper commercially on its original release but, at this distance in time, it can be seen as an influence on Tarantino as well as on more specifically kindred British movies like Sexy Beast.  The Mr Big – his name is Corrigan – who wants to bring Willie Parker to criminal justice is played by Lennie Peters, of Peters and Lee fame.   (Corrigan appears only in the courtroom scene early on and doesn’t have a line of dialogue.)  Because Lennie Peters was known to have worked at one time for the Krays, his casting is resonant but some of the other casting and acting in The Hit undermines what Frears and Prince seem to be trying to achieve.    In one of his first screen roles, Tim Roth as Myron has a few good moments (such as drinking quietly at a bar where he’s being threatened by a group of young Spanish men) but, for the most part, he pushes too hard to convey Myron’s mixture of viciousness and cluelessness.  Bill Hunter’s lived-in features and seedy quality are right for Harry but his line readings sound like line readings.  I think this is also true, at a much more skilful level, of John Hurt as Braddock, although he’s marvellous at expressing in his face and bearing the man’s weltschmerz, Braddock’s increasing sense of his own futility.  Because these actors come across primarily as actors – people who talk and express feelings for a living – the novelty of metaphysically articulate hoods isn’t all it might be.

    Terence Stamp’s interpretation of Willie Parker is more successful, partly because Willie is meant to be anomalous, and knows it.  Stamp’s accent moves about a bit between Cockney and educated but that seems right too for the autodidact Willie.  Frears also uses Stamp’s star looks and magnetism to good effect (dressed almost throughout in white shirt and jeans, he’s back in Billy Budd costume).  When Willie stands admiring the natural beauty of a waterfall, it’s not surprising that Braddock can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.  Willie’s death is a truly sad moment for a mixture of reasons.  He is finally fearful (he was ready to die in Paris but not in the Spanish back of beyond); the moment is anti-climactic; and the light Terence Stamp brings to the screen has gone out.  As Maggie, Laura del Sol is highly effective.  Apart from some Spanish matron extras, she is the only woman in the cast and a powerful sensual presence:  as a result, the film’s ending – Maggie’s survival – feels like the outcome of a sexual battle.  There’s a startling sequence when Braddock and Maggie are alone in the car together, he in the front and she in the back.  She bites into his hand and won’t let go.   When Willie and Myron return the latter says he’s hungry and so must Maggie be.  ‘She ate earlier’, Braddock replies.

    2 April 2014

  • The Hi-Lo Country

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1998)

    Based on a novel by Max Evans, The Hi-Lo Country is set in New Mexico at the end of World War II but, compared with, say, Hud, this is only superficially a ‘modern Western’:  the cars and sex on the screen, the Country and Western songs on the radio – these bring into relief the familiar Western types who people the story but I couldn’t see that the film reinterpreted those types in any substantial way, other than in one, frustrating respect.   The story is rooted in the feelings of a callow young man called Pete Calder for a somewhat older man, ‘Big Boy’ Matson.  In the early stages of The Hi-Lo Country, you wonder – especially post-Brokeback Mountain – if these feelings are homosexual.  When America enters the War after Pearl Harbor, Big Boy joshes his friend about being a stay-at-home ‘wife’ although, in the event, it’s Pete who goes to fight.  When he returns in 1945, his reunion with Big Boy involves vigorous and extended rough-housing.  By the end of the film, though, the true nature of Pete’s feelings is still a mystery:  in his closing voiceover he speaks with loving, nostalgic admiration of Big Boy as an embodiment of old West characteristics and values, of the pair’s days of drinking, wenching, gambling.  (As we hear his closing words, we watch Pete heading off into the sunset and away from New Mexico in the direction of California.)  Nothing has happened in relation to the homoerotic theme in the meantime, except possibly in Pete’s rape of the supposed femme fatale, Mona, a married (then widowed) woman who becomes Big Boy’s sexual partner but whom Pete also desires.  Is Pete’s forcing himself on Mona an expression of resentment that she’s chosen Big Boy instead of him or that Big Boy has chosen Mona instead of Pete?

    Whether Pete is sexually attracted to Big Boy or hero worships him (or both), the scenario depends on Big Boy’s being at least charismatic – on the viewer’s feeling that and understanding why he means so much to Pete.  This doesn’t happen.  As Big Boy, Woody Harrelson, with his weird blonde hairdo and hard-edged aggression, has the look and menace of a screen Nazi officer who’s gay under his uniform:  Harrelson’s strenuous playing deprives Big Boy of any beguiling quality.  Billy Crudup, as Pete, is convincing as someone easily led (and by his feelings rather than his intellect) and who might be bisexual (although there’s no suggestion that he finds any men other than Big Boy attractive: shades of Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain).  But Pete is a frustrating first-person narrator:  his feelings seem so inchoate that it might have been better if Stephen Frears and Walon Green, who wrote the screenplay, had dispensed with the retrospective voiceover and its inherent implication that the speaker learned something from the experiences that he describes.

    Frears does a professional job in territory, both geographical and cultural, that you don’t readily associate with him.  The several fights between men and the moments of sexual intimacy, in different registers, between Pete and the two women in his life are well done.  But in sequences such as a card game for big stakes Frears seems to be straining to find something beyond cliché and failing:  the scene is merely slower and more drawn out than it would be in a more traditional, less pretentious Western.    Patricia Arquette is dull as Mona:  it’s unfortunate, given this actress’s voice, that she’s given the line, ‘I hate things that repeat on and on without changing’.  As the long-suffering Josepha, who loves Pete but finds herself playing second fiddle to Mona in his affections (maybe third fiddle overall), Penélope Cruz is very striking:  it’s remarkable now to see her cast as the supposedly less alluring woman in the story.  I liked her acting the best of anyone’s although this may have been because Cruz is playing the character that’s most likeable and sensible.  On the whole, the people in The Hi-Lo Country just aren’t interesting enough – they seem designed for a subplot rather than a whole movie.  In smaller roles, the likes of Sam Elliott, as a cattle baron, and Lane Smith, as Big Boy’s chief rival in the card game, give one-note performances (they are, respectively, smilingly malevolent and gloweringly malevolent); John Diehl does better as Mona’s cuckolded husband, the cattle baron’s foreman.  Katy Jurado has a cameo as a Mexican witch who foretells, unnecessarily, that things aren’t going to end happily for all concerned.

    I watched this film on television, with a friend who was seeing it for the fourth time and carefully explained its merits.  His knowledge of Westerns enables him to see it in a much larger and richer context than I can but I think he was also reading onto The Hi-Lo Country themes which may be implicit in the setting and character types of the story but which, for anyone other than a student of the Western genre, are barely realised on screen.   Carter Burwell’s music hovers on the edge of parody of Western score grandiosity but the (non-original) C&W music is one of the best things in the film, especially a number sung by Don Walser.  (The playing on the radio of Hank Williams’s ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Liked You Used To Do?’ brought to mind, for this viewer at least, The Last Picture Show.)

    28 October 2014

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