Monthly Archives: September 2019

  • The Chase

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Arthur Penn (1966)

    Late in life, Arthur Penn expressed disappointment with The Chase:  ‘Everything in that film was a letdown, and I’m sure every director has gone through the same experience at least once.  It’s a shame because it could have been a great film’[1].  All kinds of famous talents were involved.  Sam Spiegel produced.  The large cast was headed by Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.  Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay, adapted from a stage play (and subsequent novel) by Horton Foote.  John Barry did the score.   It’s not hard to see, though, why The Chase, released just the year before Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, was a commercial failure.  Although the film is always a bizarre concoction, the narrative is arrhythmic and the tone uncertain for most of its 133 minutes.  Only in the last half hour or so does this noir-ish (though Technicolor) crime melodrama come to flamboyant, hysterical bloom.

    On a country road in Tarl County, Texas, two escaped prisoners ambush a motorist.  One of the pair kills the motorist, before making off with his car and leaving the other prisoner, Charlie ‘Bubber’ Reeves (Redford), stranded.  Calder (Brando), the sheriff of a small nearby town, takes a phone call informing him of the prison break.  The sheriff’s side of the conversation is overheard and the news that Bubber, a local man, is on the run and wanted in connection with a murder, spreads like wildfire.  In the first half of The Chase, Arthur Penn charts the fugitive’s difficult journey back to the town in alternation with descriptions of its mostly repellent citizens.  This Texan locale, though technically fictional, is meant to be quintessential.  The demographic includes a plentiful supply of vicious racists, as well as Val Rogers (E G Marshall), an oil baron whose boozer son Jake (James Fox) has been having an affair with Bubber’s wife Anna (Fonda) during her husband’s enforced absence.

    This isn’t the only troubled marriage in evidence.  Edwin Stewart (Robert Duvall) – like Jake, one of Bubber’s boyhood friends – is humiliated by his scornful, pleasure-hungry wife Emily (Janice Rule).  She makes publicly clear her lust for Damon Fuller (Richard Bradford), who’s married to Mary (Martha Hyer), a lachrymose lush.  Fuller is the smoothest of the town’s main nasties – not a keen competition when his cronies are Lem (Clifton James) and Archie (Steve Ihnat).  (This trio loathes the super-rich Val Rogers and mistakenly believes the sheriff is in Rogers’s pocket.)   As Bubber makes his way back home, the action there crystallises in a brace of set-piece parties – one a grandiose celebration of Rogers’s sixtieth birthday, the other a smaller but wilder affair, involving, among other, the Fullers and the Stewarts.

    This is a striking shindig in what might be thought Southern Gothic territory.  It announces the arrival of the 1960s sexual revolution even in small-town Texas and places The Chase at a precise point of Hollywood history.  On the one hand, the sequence, which goes on and on, feels like a hangover from the fruitless hedonism on display in La dolce vita (and lesser European films) a few years before.  On the other hand, it anticipates the in vino veritas miseries of middle-class parties in American cinema later in the decade, by which time the country was mired in Vietnam, political assassinations and self-reproach.

    Made during 1965 and released in February the following year, The Chase may be just too early to qualify as a shadow-of-Vietnam drama but it certainly reflects the legacy of the JFK assassination – in Texas.  The finale sees Bubber escorted by Calder to the town jail before being returned to the larger penitentiary he escaped from.  Archie fires a gun at the prisoner, killing him:  the sequence mimics the news film of Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald (not that either character corresponds to their real-life counterpart in any other significant way).   At the start of the story, Bubber Reeves plays dead to lure the would-be helpful motorist into too close proximity.  At the end, Bubber lies in the street – a corpse for real now.

    John Barry’s music has atmosphere, momentum and coherence.  The Chase lacks the first two qualities for much of its running time and the third throughout.  Arthur Penn, in trying to build from a realistic base to the outbreak of mob violence, is working against the grain of Lillian Hellman’s fulminating screenplay.  Hellman seems so consumed by the urge to foreground – and mythicise – Southern white turpitude that she largely ignores the need for motivation.  I didn’t understand why Bubber, with only a few months of his jail sentence still to serve, decided to escape in the first place; why the townsfolk were hellbent on bringing one of their own to justice; or why Val Rogers takes such drastic action as to join forces with Fuller and his fellow vigilantes in holding the sheriff prisoner in his own jail.

    They assault not only Calder but the African-American Lester Johnson (Joel Fluellen).  When Bubber makes it back to town, he seeks out Lester in the car junkyard where he works and asks him to get Anna to bring money and clothes there.  Fuller et al threaten Lester when they catch him outside Anna’s place.  Calder intervenes and puts Lester in the cells, supposedly for his own safety.  In the event, Anna comes to the junkyard, with Jake, under instructions from Calder to persuade Bubber to give himself up.   Val Rogers then drives in, followed by the vigilantes.  It’s not long before the whole town’s there – most of them drunk from whichever of the two parties they’ve been at.  They set fire to the place.  The congregation at the junkyard is laughable; the conflagration there is a visually powerful expression of the breakdown of law and order.  These sharply differing effects encapsulate how weak Hellman’s screenplay is in supplying a plausible framework for what happens, how compelling Penn makes its consequences.

    There’s some serious overacting in smaller parts, from across the generations.  As Briggs, an elderly estate agent who knows the town backwards, Henry Hull has a keen-eyed wiliness that’s soon tiresome.  (Not the actors’ fault but Briggs and his wife (Jocelyn Brando) walk round the town as if it were the size of a stage set.)  Miriam Hopkins, in her penultimate film appearance, gives the role of Bubber’s wailing mother everything she’s got, which is too much.  It’s no surprise that, when her son is heading back to jail, his face seems to express, more than anything, embarrassment at the racket his imploring mother is making in public.  Martha Hyer is as florid here as she was frigid in Some Came Running, though it has to be said Mary is a thankless part.  With even less to work with, Diana Hyland, as Val’s flirty daughter (I think: she’s called Elizabeth Rogers, at any rate), is even more OTT.  The better supporting players, whose roles are just as sketchy, are Robert Duvall, already a strong presence, and Angie Dickinson, as the sheriff’s loyal wife, Ruby.  (Even she addresses her husband as Calder:  he’s the man with no forename.)  Malcolm Atterbury does well as Bubber’s more quietly mournful father.

    James Fox, though surprisingly cast, is adequate as Jake but the acting in The Chase is all about the big three – especially at this distance in time:  it proved to be the only film in which either Jane Fonda or Robert Redford shared a screen with Marlon Brando.  Sheriff Calder’s disillusion with his job and the town soon starts to coalesce with Brando’s evident boredom with his role.  He seems increasingly submerged until he comes up with a confounding surge of great physical acting when the vigilantes beat Calder up – after which, you can’t take your eyes off Brando’s battered face.

    Redford is temperamentally miscast as a hothead rascal but it’s hard to mind.  He’s convincingly athletic when Bubber is literally on the run, swimming a lake or jumping from a moving train.  When he and Anna are reunited in the car junkyard, you can almost sense the two actors’ relief:  Fonda, for all her poise and presence, only really comes to life here.  (She might have arrived to rescue Redford from The Chase and transport them both to Barefoot in the Park.)  The junkyard episode becomes ludicrous as the whole cast foregathers there but it’s likeably funny before they do.  Bubber says, ‘It’s been a long day – it’s been a long two years’.  He tells Anna she looks good, which is right, and says, ‘I guess I don’t look too good’, which is not only wrong but, with Redford in the role, a contradiction in terms.  After all his exertions, his hair is still neatly parted.   It can’t be intentional that Bubber seems the town’s classiest, most intelligent citizen but Redford’s witty underplaying is a pleasure to watch.

    It’s hardly a turn-up when Bubber is shot as he heads back to Calder’s jail since the sheriff couldn’t even keep himself, let alone Lester Johnson, safe there.  Archie is roughly apprehended – he has to be, to complete the Jack Ruby effect – but what happens to him next is anyone’s guess and there’s no suggestion that his fellow lawbreakers will be punished for assaulting Calder.  How could they be?  The sheriff’s one assistant (Stephen Whittaker) is usually conspicuous by his absence.  On the morning after the night before, Calder and Ruby drive out of the place for good.  The image naturally calls to mind the departure of Will Kane and his bride that closes High Noon – and a reminder that Calder, in trying to uphold the rule of law, has fought a battle as solitary as Kane’s.  The latter’s allies serially deserted him.  In Calder’s case, he seemed to be the only lawman in town even before the mob ruled.

    16 September 2019

    [1] According to Wikipedia, a quote from Arthur Penn: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

     

     

  • Bait

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Jenkin (2019)

    The trailer for writer-director Mark Jenkin’s Bait has been showing soundlessly on screens around the BFI building for several weeks now.  The black-and-white images, especially the characters’ faces, are very striking.  More recently, the trailer, with soundtrack, has played in BFI theatres before the main feature.  The voices don’t do it any favours: when Sally saw and heard the trailer, she asked me if Bait was a spoof.

    In a recent Sight & Sound (August 2019) interview, Philip Concannon notes that Bait ‘contains a mixture of experienced and non-professional actors’ and asks Jenkin what he looks for when casting:

    ‘Because of the way I shoot, with a lot of big close-ups, faces have got to be spot-on, so a lot of it is looking at people’s eyes and thinking, “Put a light there and you’re really going to jump off the screen.”  I’m not really interested in realism in the performance necessarily, but I like there to be a lack of theatricality in it.’

    Hard to decide from that (‘I’m not really interested … necessarily’) quite how uninterested Jenkin is in what his actors do, as distinct from how they look, but my different reactions to the trailer – without words vs with – might seem to endorse what he tells S&S.  Only up to a point, though – the point at which cinema evolved from silent into talking pictures – and Jenkin doesn’t succeed in avoiding ‘theatricality’.  The film’s protagonist is Martin Ward, an angry Cornish fisherman, dispossessed of his boat and livelihood.  If you’re going to cast an inexperienced player as Martin and give him a line like, ‘It’s between me and the clamping company!’, better try and get him to sound natural rather than, as Edward Rowe does delivering the line, like a wooden actor.  If you’re going to involve seasoned pros, it’s as well to steer clear of the likes of Simon Shepherd, who overplays Tim Leigh, the patronising epitome of rampant touristification of the Cornish coast, which so enrages Martin.

    Yet the physical casting, as Jenkin intended, is spot-on.  Edward Rowe, Giles King (as Martin’s brother Steven), Isaac Woodvine (as Steven’s son Neil) and Stacey Guthrie, facially and vocally the most nuanced performer (as Liz Stewart, the village pub landlady), are all strong-featured.  Tim’s late-teenage son and daughter, Hugo (Jowan Jacobs) and Katie (Georgia Ellery), are no less effective for looking, respectively, foolishly wimpish and blandly entitled.  In visual terms, Bait is altogether potent.  Sequences describing the local fishermen at work, and often focusing on their working materials, are absorbing not least because the camera itself seems absorbed.  (Jenkin also photographed the film, as well as editing it.)  The sky-and-seascapes, judiciously rationed, have a dwarfing beauty.  Words may not matter much to Jenkin but non-verbal sounds matter plenty – especially artificially amplified ones:  the throbbing of boat motors, the heavy footfall of wellington boots.

    That amplification, in conjunction with ominous (uncredited) music, supplies an atmosphere that foretells a grim climax to the confrontation between the locals and the Leigh family – to whom Martin and Steven, from financial necessity, sold their father Billy’s home, Skipper’s Cottage, after the old man died.  Tim and his wife Sandra (Mary Woodvine) have bought up a row of what were once fishermen’s dwellings.  The Leighs, presumably from in or around London, use Skipper’s Cottage as their holiday home and rent out their other properties.  When Sandra welcomes a young couple (Morgan Val Baker and Mae Voogd) to their weekend retreat, there’s ‘a bottle of fizz and locally made cheese’ in the fridge and a cream tea awaits on the kitchen counter.  Parking outside the cottages is a particular bone of contention between the Leighs and Martin (that’s where the clamping comes in).  Jenkin also builds tension through bouts of insistent cross-cutting between what different characters are up to at the same time.  While Neil and Katie (a Montague and Capulet item) prepare pasta, Tim and Sandra enjoy a supper of lobster – courtesy of Hugo, who stole it from one of Martin’s traps (Sandra has twinges of conscience about this; Tim welcomes his drippy son’s showing ‘a bit of initiative’).  In the pub, Martin confronts Hugo and forces him to repair, there and then, the lobster pot he damaged.  This triptych pulses with foreboding.

    What’s in store is predicted too in a couple of early flashes-forward – to Tim, then Neil, laid out on the ground.  The eventual altercations that bring this about occur at different points of the story.  About halfway through the film (which runs 89 minutes), a fearlessly mouthy young barmaid Wenna (Chloe Endean) – her surname is Kowalski and she has a touch of the Stanleys – floors Tim, though he quickly recovers.  When, much later, Hugo pompously censures Neil for sleeping with Katie and the two young men come to blows, the consequences are much more serious and, though semi-foreseen, startling.  Neil falls from the quayside to some distance below; blood seeps from what’s clearly a fatal head wound.  This sharply changed the mood in NFT2, where plenty of the audience had been chuckling contentedly at Bait‘s lampoon of the Leighs and at Martin’s choicer expletives.  (Tim, in his favoured sportswear, is a ‘Lycra cunt’.)

    The finale’s implications are disturbing.  It’s not only Tim’s lot, ‘boosting’ the region’s tourist economy and helping make life for local fishermen even more financially unviable, with whom Martin is at daggers drawn.  He’s also fallen out with his brother, for using their father’s fishing boat to take visitors on coastal trips, and with Liz, who nowadays closes the pub out of season.  Martin, in other words, has become an outsider even within his own community but his aggressive intransigence is vindicated.   The townie invaders – the males among them anyway – really are nasty pieces of work.  That’s been evident all along (a dramatic mistake) in Tim’s lord-of-the-manor behaviour.  Hugo’s acts of stealing Martin’s catch and causing the death of Neil (who worked alongside his father and uncle) are vivid symbols of the effects of gentrification.  Realising his brother was right all along, it’s the grief-stricken Steven, not Martin, who trashes the pseudo-nautical décor whereby the Leighs have disfigured Skipper’s Cottage.  The ghost of Billy (Martin Ellis), with whom Martin has occasionally conversed in the course of the story, now puts in a last appearance (a silent one) to see his sons tragically reconciled.  In Bait‘s closing shots, as the brothers head back to shore in their father’s boat, Martin sees Neil waiting on the quayside – apparently uninjured, presumably the next ghost in waiting.

    The apparitions are the most unequivocal indicator that Mark Jenkin is ‘not really interested in realism’.  As such, they may also explain in part why reviews of Bait that I’ve read aren’t alarmed by the film’s message.  Although I found most of the acting too primitive to believe what was going on, I did believe that Jenkin wanted to express serious concerns about what’s happening in his native Cornwall.  He tells Philip Concannon that ‘if the fisherman [sic:  a Freudian typo?] like it that’s all that matters’.  The socio-economic crisis he presents is real, even if his method of dramatising it isn’t, for various reasons, realistic.  Another factor in the critical response is Jenkin’s highly distinctive aesthetic, created by means, and with results, that Jonathan Romney describes in his Sight & Sound review as follows:

    ‘[Jenkin] filmed … on 16mm black-and-white Kodak stock with a 1976 wind-up Bolex camera, and used unconventional processing materials including coffee, washing soda and Vitamin C powder. … This approach yields consistently extraordinary effects:  scratches, little tempests of spots on the on the image, flashes of solarisation …’

    BFI showed, as a very brief curtain-raiser, an archive clip from the 1920s of Cornish fishermen at work in Newlyn – much easier on this photophobic eye than quite a lot of Bait, even though I assumed Jenkin was trying to suggest the look of antique black-and-white documentary.  I repeatedly had to narrow my gaze or avert it completely from the recurrent flicker on the screen.  It seems that, not unusually, visual achievement and allusion are insulating cineaste critics from what’s uncomfortable.  They can admire a director’s technique and place the result in the safe context of cross-references to other films.  I can’t.  Bait is a very interesting piece of work but I found it disturbing to watch in more ways than one.

    12 September 2019

     

     

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