Film review

  • Reservoir Dogs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Quentin Tarantino (1992)

    Going to see Reservoir Dogs in BFI’s ‘Nineties: Young Cinema Rebels’ season was dealing with unfinished business.  When we watched Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature on video at home some years ago, we didn’t get beyond the early stages of the most notoriously violent sequence – the torture of a police officer to the catchy accompaniment of Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’.  I thought I should have another go because of the reputation that Tarantino, like him or not, has developed over the years.  I made it through to the end this time, though the ordeal of the kidnapped cop Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) – Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) slices off one of Nash’s ears with a razor, douses him in petrol and prepares to set him alight – remains exceptionally discomfiting.  I felt I’d be chicken to stop watching again but degraded that I declined to walk.

    Although the sequence epitomises what makes Reservoir Dogs morally problematic, there are larger difficulties viewing it in long retrospect and in light of Tarantino’s subsequent work.  I remember reading, at the time of the film’s original release, about his five years of employment in a video store.  I inferred that his imagination had been fed largely by spending his days there watching crime thrillers and other screen pulp fiction.  That oversimplifies things.  According to his biography on Wikipedia, Tarantino had other jobs before his stint at the video store (in Manhattan Beach, California).  His first job in Hollywood – as a production assistant, at the age of twenty-three – was six years before Reservoir Dogs appeared.  Even so, the idea stayed in my mind that he was someone who, thanks to being cooped up day after day in a world of movies, had created a piece whose moral parameters were dictated by the limits of such experience.  At this distance in time, however, it’s hard not to see his first film as setting the pattern for Tarantino’s persisting order of priorities.  The world on screen is defined in terms of cinema history.  The imperative of film-making bravado subjugates content to style.

    Their recurrence in later Tarantino movies has also deprived some details of Reservoir Dogs of the freshness they may have had in 1992.   The extended opening conversation in a Los Angeles breakfast diner includes competitive discussion among the men who’ll shortly carry out a jewel heist about the meaning of Madonna songs, and the principle of leaving a tip.  It’s not, of course, a fault that, when gang members talk about TV shows, their references to Pam Grier now feel like self-references (to Jackie Brown) on the director’s part.  This is hard to ignore, all the same:  the fetishising of pop culture that’s become a Tarantino trope muffles the novelty of his voice in this film.  That said, the dialogue still has more tang and variety than that of the nearly contemporary Goodfellas (1990), whose bravura depictions of (dis)organised crime violence encouraged comparisons between it and Reservoir Dogs.

    The structure of Tarantino’s story doesn’t compare so well with Scorsese’s film, though.  The cut from the discursive though edgy breakfast chatter to the immediate aftermath of the heist gone wrong has startling impact, as Mr White (Harvey Keitel) drives away from the scene of the crime at breakneck speed, trying to persuade the badly injured, profusely bleeding Mr Orange (Tim Roth), sprawled in the back of the car, that he’s not going to die.  There are plenty of dynamic action sequences to follow but we soon know the gang includes a stool pigeon and who that is:  presupposing we’re fascinated by his characters, Tarantino spends plenty of time describing in flashbacks how the team of robbers was assembled by mob boss Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney).   The scenes involving the undercover training of Freddy Newandyke (Roth), the LAPD officer who infiltrates the gang and becomes Mr Orange, are welcome in supplying some respite from the physical and verbal violence that’s gone before.  Other sequences, like the one where Cabot assigns the gang’s coloured names for the operation, are more self-indulgent.

    For a rookie director, Tarantino shows remarkable assurance in handling the cast, which also includes Steve Buscemi (Mr Pink), Edward Bunker (Mr Blue) and Chris Penn (as Eddie, Joe Cabot’s son).  Harvey Keitel manages to give Larry aka Mr White some emotional depth, not least in angrily distinguishing between professional criminals like himself and psychopaths like Mr Blonde.  Tim Roth is impressive too – interesting that he’s more convincing as the gang member Freddy is pretending to be than as the cop he really is.  Steve Buscemi shows his talent for making almost non-stop whining witty.  Tarantino himself plays Mr Brown.  It’s not a large role, which may be just as well.  He’s fine at a distance but, in this highly skilled company, seems too aware of the camera when it’s closer.

    Mr Brown and Mr Blue are both reported killed in a showdown with police at the heist scene.  Mr Blonde, just as he’s about to light the petrol poured over Marvin Nash, is shot dead by Freddy.  Nash is eventually put out of his misery by an impulsive bullet to the head by Eddie Cabot.  The mixture of fresh and drying blood all over his white shirt means that, by the closing stages, Freddy really is Mr Orange:  about to die, he confesses to Larry, with whom he’s developed a bond of sorts, that he’s a cop.  Larry, who insisted that wasn’t the case in the climactic standoff with the mob boss, sobs and puts a gun to Freddy’s head.  When the police arrive, Larry is fatally shot too.  The taking out of the Cabots, père et fils, generated some applause in NFT3.  I couldn’t help thinking at the end that Tarantino had a nerve killing off all the people – except for Mr Pink, who’s arrested – by whom he’s expected us to be entertained throughout.

    Much of the lethal action, including the torture of the officer, takes place in a warehouse.  The stark space and the speeches delivered there give the warehouse the quality of a stage set, and the impression that fundamental existential issues are being played out before us.  In a Sight & Sound interview with David Thomson in January 1993, Harvey Keitel said that he ‘felt Quentin was writing about mythological themes, universal themes of betrayal and redemption …’    Keitel’s interpretation may be welcome to admirers of Reservoir Dogs who don’t like the idea of commending an amoral technical feat but I don’t buy it.  This may, again, be a matter of looking at an apprentice piece through the lens of later Tarantino – through gore-tinted spectacles, in other words – but I think that Quentin, a film-maker turned on by mayhem, is showing off.

    7 July 2019

  • The Ghosts of Berkeley Square

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vernon Sewell (1947)

    BFI curator Jo Botting seemed a bit below par introducing this month’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ number.  As usual, she supplied plenty of good background information but sandwiched it between suggesting the most interesting thing about The Ghosts of Berkeley Square was its gestation and explaining she’d chosen it for reasons of personal nostalgia.  Watching Vernon Sewell’s supernatural comedy again now, she admitted, had proved a rather underwhelming experience.  I wondered if Botting was regretting and uneasy about her choice.  At any rate, I was soon convinced she was right that its development was more worth hearing about than the film was worth watching.  I walked out after half an hour.

    With a screenplay by James Seymour, adapted from the comic novel No Nightingales by Caryl Brahms and S J Simon, The Ghosts of Berkeley Square opens at the annual reunion banquet of ‘The Ghost Society’, very like an old boys’ association shindig (the ghosts are all male) and being broadcast on television for the first time.  The wonders of modern technology mean that the gathering is also invited by the presiding spectre, General Burlap (Robert Morley), to watch on a big screen above the banquet table the story of his and his pal Colonel Kelsoe (Felix Aylmer)’s ghostly story-so-far.  At 50 Berkeley Square, during the reign of Queen Anne, these two old soldiers – known as Jumbo (Morley) and Bulldog (Aylmer) – prepare to play a trick on the preening Duke of Marlborough, whose military success and celebrity they resent, and whose appetite for further warfare they plan to thwart.  Just as they’re expecting a visit from the queen, the trick goes wrong and kills the pair.  Receiving the news as she arrives in her carriage, the miffed Anne returns to the palace whence she came.  The ghosts of Jumbo and Bulldog are condemned to haunt the house until such time as a reigning monarch crosses the threshold.

    The film’s narrative comprises a series of sketches, set in various eras from the early eighteenth century down to the present day.  Jumbo and Bulldog repeatedly hope to get the curse lifted and repeatedly fail, so remaining confined to Berkeley Square barracks.  Their luck finally changes when Queen Mary (still alive when the film was made) makes it through the front door.  The sketches include ‘when the Nawab of Bagwash moves in, played by [Robert] Morley in blackface’.   The first part of the film at least includes some weedy attempts to show bureaucracy surviving the afterlife – something Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death had done with purpose and imagination only the year before.  Jo Botting mentioned that Vernon Sewell had plenty of experience in cinematic special effects but I saw no evidence hat he had any understanding of directing screen action or actors.  The pacing is lame.  I felt embarrassed for Felix Aylmer to see his talents so wasted.  Although Robert Morley is one of those performers whose personality often seems to proof them against the defects of a picture, even he seems to feel the strain here.

    It’s an odd thing.  Whenever I see a British film drama of the early post-war years, I seem to find things of interest, regardless of the weaknesses:  My Death is a Mockery, screened in this May’s ‘Projecting the Archive’ slot, is an obvious recent example.  Isn’t-this-a-lark British comedies of the period, more often than not, tend to lack redeeming features.  A few weeks ago, a friend passed on to us a DVD of C M Pennington-Richards’ Ladies Who Do (1963):  watching it through was so stupefying I couldn’t even manage a note.  (By coincidence, Robert Morley was one of the stars of that one too.)   The evidence suggests in this particular case that isn’t a reflection of changing tastes:  The Ghosts of Berkeley Square fared poorly at the box office seventy-odd years ago, despite ‘its stellar cast of highly respected character actors and its inventive use of special effects’ (Wikipedia).   Jo Botting confirmed this, noting that the BFI showing would be only the third public screening of the film since its original release.  That’s probably at least two screenings too many.

    9 July 2019

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