Pickpocket
PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET
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Samuel Fuller was a type of movie director that you don't really see anymore. Loquacious, he was a flamboyant storyteller out of the Huston school, and his rough-edged movies challenged you either to recoil from their primitivism or to embrace their subtle and occasionally progressive cinematic tricks. Few directors used close ups as aggressively as Fuller. Most important, he was a guy who lived a life before he started making movies. He was a journalist, a novelist, and a war vet. His late film, THE BIG RED ONE, is explicitly autobiographical, but all of his films unveil some aspects of his life experiences, and at the very least dramatize the clashing opinions that filled his mind. PARK ROW, his film about New York tabloid journalism in the 1900s is, paradoxically, widely considered to be his most autobiographical tale. His films are torn out of the guts of his own lived experience, controlled tornadoes of anger, justice, and cynical realism. Of contemporary directors the only one who really evokes Fuller is Oliver Stone.
Criterion has now released PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, to go along with its previous Fuller issues, SHOCK CORRIDOR and THE NAKED KISS, part of an alliance with Fox films (which is already doing its own numbered Studio Classics series). PICKUP retails for $29.985 and it's the street Tuesday, February 17.
Fuller is often construed as a poverty row director like Ulmer, but in fact he was usually associated with a studio. He got on famously with Zanuck, and PICKUP was even nominated for an Oscar (for Thelma Ritter). But it is true that he seems to be most fully appreciated by kids at Saturday matinees and by budding French New Wave directors, who both appreciated his uninhibited visual dynamism.
PICKUP, his fifth film as a director, blends red scare spying and criminal lowlifes in a heady noirish stew of police procedural and criminal underworld tour guide. Snitches and commies clash as one day on a subway Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) lifts a packet from the purse of B-girl Candy (Jean Peters), only to learn that what he filched were government secrets, and that Candy was under the eye of two FBI agents tailing her to her connection. Candy, it turns out, isn't aware of what she is doing, only following the orders of Joe (Richard Kiley), with whom she has an ambiguous savior-disciple relationship. Skip was just released from the slammer and has slipped back into his old ways, but his techniques are familiar to Moe (Thelma Ritter), a professional snitch. The snitch, the B-girl, the commie, the FBI, and the pick up artist all come together in a complex, argot-driven concatenation that culminates in a spectacular fistfight in a subway.
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It's a fun movie, powerful and extreme and not conventionally "conservative" as some film scholars seem to suggest. Fuller's views are ambiguous, but he presents the anti-hero with an almost uncompromising ferocity. And Widmark is beautiful. With his sculpted face and high cackle of a demented laugh, he is the perfect Fuller protagonist (although they only made two pictures together). I love the way Fuller introduces him, emerging slowly from the crowd, which he is eyeing for an easy mark. Fuller and/or his camera love him, too, and his is framed in beautiful shadowy close-ups. He looks young and ravaged at the same time, and his eyes look smarter than the rest of his face.
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Criterion's disc (number 224, the last on their current list) comes with several features, but is lacking others that the DVD press seemed to suggest would be on the platter. There is a video interview with the late director conducted by an unseen and unheard Richard Schickel, (there is no indication of where this footage comes from, but perhaps it comprises out-takes from an unfinished and thus un-aired Fuller episode from Schickel's six-part PBS series THE MEN WHO MADE THE MOVIES). There is also a short French TV show of Fuller sitting in front of an editing machine taking PICKUP apart shot by shot, a master class in editing and the best kind of audio commentary track. There are also trailers for eight other Fuller films, two of which Criterion already has and the presence of the others makes the critical heart beat with the hope that Criterion might be issuing the others. What isn't on the disc is an excellent Independent Film Channel documentary from 1996 called THE TYPEWRITER, THE RIFLE & THE MOVIE CAMERA, but given that this film is distributed by the BFI and appears to be financed by the IFC I'm not sure how it could be on this disc. I suppose they could have licensed it, but they didn't, so it's not on the disc. Finally there is a 20 page booklet with an intro by Scorsese adapted from Fuller's posthumous autobiography, an essay by Luc Sante, another excerpt from the memoir, this one by Fuller, transfer info, DVD credits, and chapter titles.
Their Last Bows
THE SHERLOCK HOLMES COLLECTION VOLUME THREE
MPI's release of the Universal Sherlock Holmes films comes to a sad conclusion with the compilation of the last four, THE WOMAN IN GREEN, PURSUIT TO ALGIERS, TERROR BY NIGHT and DRESSED TO KILL. It's a sad conclusion because there were no more after this, but even worse, they are probably the worst of the lot.
Holmes purists probably aren't too happy with the series to begin with. First, the films transplant Holmes to modern London and have him battle Nazis. When Universal got bored with that idea, they reverted back to some of the original Doyle stories and returned Holmes to drawing room mysteries. In addition, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is bizarre, a blend of gay marriage, parental abuse, and ritual public humiliation.
The series started off good with THE VOICE OF TERROR, which has a noirish flavor, and some very good scenes. But the guy who would immediately take over the series and do all the rest, Roy William Neill, who was a more conventional helmer, did not direct it. Neill's Holmes films hit their height with THE SCARLET CLAW, from the second of the three sets, and though there are some good moments in these final four films they are for the most part lame.
But for those who want to drink in the alluring potions of Holmesian London, they are indispensable. Though shot on the Universal lot, they are redolent of fog, brick buildings on cobblestoned streets, of trick alleys and morbid docks. It's the London of parody, granted, with its eccentric collectors and Cockney cab drivers, but it still has a certain appeal as a place that is settled into itself, with only occasional spasms of disaster that Holmes can quickly rectify.
Like its two predecessors, this set comes in a boxy plastic digipak keep case (that tends to fall apart), augmented with a 16 page booklet insert with exhaustive essays on each of the films, an audio track over the first of the four films, and various photo galleries. There is also a newsreel clip of Doyle telling the world how he came up with the Holmes character. The black and white transfers were pleasing to this eye. The set hit the street on January 27th, and retails for $69.98.
The good news is that MPI is not quite yet done with Holmes. The company recently announced that it is also issuing the first two films to pair Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, both made at Fox, both to be released in March.
Spader Times Two
STORYVILLE; THE PENTAGON PAPERS
Now that James Spader is the best thing on network television, rejuvenating the moribund THE PRACTICE and probably pissing off all the remaining co-stars who should be appreciating him for making the whole thing watchable, catching up with some of his other less known work on DVD is enlightening.
For one thing, you learn that he is an actor with mannerisms. Like a Christopher Walken, he is a thespian full of tics and inescapable ways of doing common things, though not as extreme as Walken. He has a way of biting his lip, and also gliding in a certain way when he stands up or sits down. He has a manner of speaking that alternates acceleration with braking. What's great about his appearance in THE PRACTICE is that most of these mannerisms are gone, the remaining traits fully incorporated into Spader's character's manner.
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STORYVILLE (which was released last October 14th and runs $19.95) is lesser Spader. Concocted by Mark Frost, a TV guy who collaborated with David Lynch on TWIN PEAKS) and then later became a novelist, it's a blend of CHINATOWN and Tennessee Williams, with both the corrupt family doing a land grab and the alcoholic truth-telling mom and a passel of rapacious women. Sometime in the '80s, after THE BIG EASY, came out New Orleans became the cinema qua non of corruption and lassitudinous sex. Kim Basinger, Walter Hill, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone, Robert De Niro, Paul Schrader, Clint Eastwood, and John Woo all made films down there, all attempting to capture its Grecian aura of self-indulgence and easy sex.
In truth, there may be too much story in STORYVILLE. Spader plays a guy named Cray, the scion of a wealthy family. He is running for congress while at the same time investigating the mysterious suicide of his father, who was about to testify in a federal investigation. One night Cray is easily lured to a disco, where he meets up with an Asian beauty who then makes love to him in her Aikido studio. This liaison is photographed, but Cray is not blackmailed. Instead, the photographer, the Asian lady's dad, is killed, and she is accused of the murder. Cray, despite involvement in a tight political race, takes the case — even though he in deeply implicated in it himself!
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The plot makes more twists and turns, but at a snail's pace (though it is nice to see Michael Parks, of KILL BILL, in a small part). This is one of those indie type movies with the tinkling piano score and the occasional slide guitar that twangs its singsongy nonsense chords, and where people arrive at places (such as the disco) only to leave immediately, where every location looks like a set even when it is real, and where people show up at meetings whose purpose is obscured by empty dialogue. It would be hilarious camp fun if only there were more to substance it. There are no extras on the disc, which features a full frame transfer instead of a widescreen presentation.
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STORYVILLE was released in 1992, and THE PENTAGON PAPERS came out 11 years later, but Spader doesn't appear to have aged one iota. PENTAGON PAPERS is of course the story of political analyst Daniel Ellsberg and his leaking of secret papers to the NEW YORK TIMES at the height of the Vietnam War. This is a TV movie, but released on DVD by Paramount, on February 17, for $24.95.
In true TV movie biopic format, the movie zips the viewer through a significant portion of Ellsberg's life, from the '60s until about 1972. In this thumbnail sketch, Ellsberg goes from gung ho war strategist with a broody side to on-site disillusionment with the way the Vietnam war was conducted, to radicalized quasi-hippie mole at the very heart of the military-industrial complex, releasing classified monuments, the secret history of the Vietnam war as told by the Pentagon to itself.
Ellsberg's objection to the reports coming out of Vietnam was that they were obscure and, even worse, wrong. This is known as the "fog of war," unreliable information that hampers strategists from conducting successful warfare. An idealist, Ellsberg complains wonderingly how the president can come to good decisions if the facts are so misleading. A post Vietnam-tour sojourn in southern California introduces Ellsberg to pot and radical politics. As far as I can tell, the film chronicles the events surrounding the Pentagon Papers accurately, as they are recounted in both Ellsberg's book SECRETS and in Tom Wells's warts-and-all biography of him. The only thing not clear in the film is just what the Pentagon Papers were. What was the fuss about? What did they say that was so shocking and embarrassing to the government? The film doesn't convey that.
Ellsberg's memoir, SECRETS, makes a fine companion volume to Robert McNamara's IN RETROSPECT. They overlap in time and come at the same subject from different directions bureaucratically, socially, and morally. McNamara only mentions Ellsberg once in his book, even though Ellsberg wrote speeches for him. Ellsberg in SECRETS describes several encounters with McNamara, but Wells goes into much more detail about their complicated involvement with each other. THE PENTAGON PAPERS in its way makes a fine antidote to Errol Morris's for-hire movie about McNamara, which Alexander Cockburn has attacked both for what it includes and what it includes and what it leaves out.
This is not the sort of movie that you want to take pop into the DVD player when your hawkish Vietnam vet uncle comes over for beers. There is not even the semblance of an alternative view, of "balance" or equal time. But then, why should there be. After decades of propaganda via the three networks and all the mainstream dailies and weeklies, a meager little two hour film that offers the Ellsberg side of things is salutary. In any case, Morris's job-of-work film, which shockingly many old lefties actually express admiration for, is still dominating the attention of the media, so that once again, Ellsberg is, so to speak, working in darkness.
NEXT TIME: RULES OF THE GAME, John Sayles, and more!
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