Old Yorker

  • Blade Runner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (1982)[1]

    The future described in Blade Runner is now so close that it’s hard to resist assessing the accuracy of its predictions of life in Los Angeles in 2019.  Although it’s hardly a major feature of the dystopia that Ridley Scott describes, one quite funny inaccuracy is that people are still smoking in the workplace.  Watching Blade Runner with Her (2013) pretty fresh in the mind also creates a resonance between Scott’s ethnically hybrid megalopolis and Spike Jonze’s Los Angeles ‘in the near future’ – particularly the Oriental aspects of both locales (even if the East Asian elements of Jonze’s LA were largely the result of shooting parts of Her in Shanghai).   Blade Runner, adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples from Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is undoubtedly an impressive vision – or, at least, a feat of design that’s not only technically remarkable but also atmospherically compelling.  The production designer Lawrence G Paull, the cameraman Jordan Cronenweth and Douglas Trumbull’s visual effects team help Scott to meld his apprehension of the future – in which giant corporations rule our depleted, degenerated planet and beyond – with aspects of urban rot that were already part of the reality of big-city life in the capitalist world of the early 1980s.  There’s also a blending with film noir tropes:  Blade Runner takes place in spectacularly mean streets, in continuous rain and, mostly, in darkness – or air-polluted lightlessness, anyway.

    The kinship of Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard with private eye progenitors is amusing for a while and the world that Deckard inhabits looks so extraordinary that it gives a funny twist to a very familiar plot mechanism:  a seasoned pro is brought out of retirement to deal with just one more case.  In the aftermath of nuclear war and consequent radioactive poisoning, there has been mass emigration to ‘off-world’ colonies in space.  The Tyrell Corporation has created androids to serve human beings in the colonies but these bioengineered entities sometimes come illegally to Earth and the job of ‘Blade Runners’ like Deckard is to track down and destroy them.  Blade Runner is the story of Deckard’s quest to identify and eliminate four such ‘replicants’ – Tyrell Corporation ‘Nexus-6’ models.  Harrison Ford is in every respect the right man for the job.  Although Rick Deckard is a gloomy fellow, Ford, at this stage of his career anyway, had just about insuperable audience rapport.  The longer Blade Runner goes on, however, the more the shamus set-up contradicts the apocalyptic scale of the visuals and the powerfully oppressive atmosphere generated by them.  It’s interesting that Ridley Scott removed Deckard’s private-eye-style voiceover, which featured in the original Blade Runner, from the ‘final cut’ version but the discrepancy between the two kinds of movie that this is remains.  The prevailing mood of the film suggests that what’s left of civilisation is at stake but that’s not reflected in what happens:  Deckard’s hunt for the replicants really does seem to be just one more case.  Blade Runner is absorbing thanks to its surface rather than its substance and Ridley Scott himself seems to have become preoccupied with the ingenious production of non-humans.  The automata, which the lonely Sebastian (William Sanderson), a designer who works with the Tyrell Corporation, has created to fill his apartment and emotionally empty life, seize and hold your attention but they have no plot purpose – they’re merely an intriguing part of the set decoration.  This big film tells rather a small story.   You’re especially conscious of that in the protracted, gruesomely violent finale (during which the electro-sledgehammer score by Vangelis becomes harder than ever to tolerate).

    Blade Runner‘s standing as a sci-fi classic is based partly on the view that it explores seriously the profound question of what it means to be human.  For me, this didn’t go deeper than the interesting but less profound matter of casting – and the human reality, or otherwise, of the actors involved.  The ending of Blade Runner is famously ambiguous[2] and there’s a school of thought that Deckard is himself a replicant.  The idea of that is startling largely because of Harrison Ford’s screen persona:  he has a particular aptitude for being ‘our’ representative in an alien world, whether a galaxy far, far away or Amish country or science-fictional Los Angeles.  The four Nexus-6 replicants – named Roy Batty, Leon, Zhora and Pris – are played by Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Joanna Cassidy and Daryl Hannah respectively.  With his white-blonde hair and incredibly blue eyes, Hauer looks the part and is a memorable image but Roy Batty is meant to develop a tragic, as-if-human status and Hauer’s showy, hollow acting undermines what’s intended.  (The Nexus-6 model has a built-in lifespan of only four years and Roy demands that the big boss Tyrell (Joe Turkel) prolong his existence.)  Brion James’s ordinariness has the opposite effect.  In an unnerving episode at the start of the film, Deckard watches a video recording of another Blade Runner testing Leon’s emotional responses to check whether or not he’s android; when his interrogator asks Leon about his mother, Leon shoots him dead.  Joanna Cassidy’s Zhora, a strapping stripper with a snake, and Daryl Hannah, who shows a lot of wit as the punky Pris, are more plausible people (you’re shocked when Deckard kills them) than Sean Young’s Rachael – Tyrell’s assistant, whom Deckard falls for.  Rachael has the hairdo of a 1940s Hollywood femme fatale.  Sean Young’s blank face and expressionless voice hardly add up to a concomitant quality of mystery and danger but I guess they do help sustain the question of whether Rachael is human or replicant.

    14 April 2015

    [1]  This note refers to Blade Runner: The Final Cut, first released in 2007.

    [2] At the time of the film’s original release, the uncertain outcome must have pointed towards a sequel but this hasn’t yet materialised.  According to Wikipedia, a follow-up, with a different but as yet unconfirmed director, is now due to begin production in mid-2016:  perhaps it will be released in 2019, to mark the arrival in real time of the year of its predecessor.

  • Blackboard Jungle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Brooks (1955)

    The music played over the opening credits is ‘Rock Around the Clock’, performed by Bill Haley and the Comets:  it was thanks to the success of Blackboard Jungle that the epochal song really took off commercially.  (It spent eight weeks at number one in the Billboard charts from July 1955 and was number one in Britain in late November-early December of that year.  Strange as this seems, the single, according to Wikipedia, had first entered the British charts in January 1955 – before it charted in America and before the release of Blackboard Jungle, in late March.)   Even before the music is heard, a scrolling prologue makes the filmmakers’ intentions very clear:

    ‘We, in the United States, are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communities and to our faith in American youth.  Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency — its causes – and its effects. We are especially concerned when this delinquency boils over into our schools.  The scenes and incidents depicted here are fictional.  However, we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem.  It is in this spirit and with this faith that BLACKBOARD JUNGLE was produced.’

    There is no denying the cultural impact that Richard Brooks’s film, based on a novel by Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain), made at the time.  Blackboard Jungle was controversial in terms of its themes, their presentation and the rock ‘n’ roll on the soundtrack.  Yet seeing it (for the first time) last night at BFI was the opposite of the experience of seeing Dance Hall earlier this week.  The relationships of the characters in Dance Hall gradually overtake its undoubted importance as a piece of social history.  In comparison, Blackboard Jungle, as a drama, is increasingly tedious.

    This is partly because the story of a schoolteacher who, through idealism and commitment, wins over a class of initially unpromising and antagonistic students is, by now anyway, a tired formula – although it’s interesting to see in Pauline Kael’s (largely favourable) note that ‘If you excavate Evan Hunter’s short story on which the rather shoddy novel was based, it’s no big surprise to find that in the original account, “To Break the Wall,” the teacher did not break through’.  But the film is hard going for other reasons too:  although Kael commends Richard Brooks’s script ‘as sane and well worked out’, the plotting is laborious; and much of the acting is painful.  As Richard Dadier (the surname seems to have been chosen just so that the kids can nickname him ‘Daddio’), the new English teacher in an inner-city high school, Glenn Ford is conscientious but monotonous.  (It’s a relief when, near the end of the film, Dadier briefly loses his temper.)   Both the two main, crudely contrasted women’s parts – Richard’s anxious, pregnant wife and a supposedly vampish teaching colleague – are poor and the actresses playing them, Anne Francis and Margaret Hayes respectively, don’t make things any better.  Richard Kiley has a taking sad earnestness in his early scenes as the maths teacher Josh Edwards but your heart sinks when Josh brings his priceless collection of jazz records to school with the inevitable results.  By far the best thing in the staffroom is Louis Calhern (in one of his last films – he died in 1956), as a drily cynical veteran of the teaching profession.

    The film’s treatment of the teenage delinquents is striking.  As Rob Nixon’s TCM piece, used for the BFI programme note, says:

    ‘… unlike films with similar themes and impact, such as Rebel Without a Cause …, this picture maintained a more moralistic tone, seeking not so much to understand and sympathise with the worst elements of society as to eliminate them.  …’

    In other words, there’s next to no suggestion in Blackboard Jungle that the antisocial tendencies of the youths in Richard Dadier’s class are the result of economic disadvantage or of being misunderstood by parents or by society more generally – even though these were clichés by the time Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke!’ (and West Side Story was first staged in the late summer of 1957).  The chief troublemakers, Artie West (Vic Morrow) and his sidekick Belazi (Dan Terranova), are presented as incorrigible – the way that hardened lawbreakers would have been in a conventional contemporary crime film.  The other delinquents, who join in, have the potential for salvation.  What unifies the boys in the class is that their behaviour comes across as strenuous overplaying, on the part of actors rather less young than they’re meant to be.   There’s one exception to this rule in Blackboard Jungle:  a twenty-seven year old Sidney Poitier is altogether remarkable in the role of Gregory Miller.  Miller looks to be the only black student in the whole school until Richard Dadier discovers him one day at the piano, singing ‘Go Down Moses’ with a few other African-American boys – and thus revealing a different side to Miller’s hitherto uncooperative personality.  Until he turns against Artie West, the script virtually ignores the question of how Miller’s ethnicity affects how the other boys see him – shared delinquency appears to transcend racial difference – but Poitier does a fine job of conveying the tensions at work in Gregory Miller.   His mannerisms as an actor are already apparent in this early role but he is, in terms of temperament, surprisingly exciting – and different from the inevitably honourable screen presence he would become over the course of the next decade or so (to such an extent that, by 1967, he was the alchemising teacher in To Sir, With Love).

    8 August 2014

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