The Highway's Jammed with Broken Heroes on a Last Chance Power Drive
FAST COMPANY
I don't know if you've ever bought any of the Blue Underground DVDs but you should. Blue Underground is the Criterion of drive-in movies: excellent transfers, restorations, original supplements, audio tracks, and the full panoply of promotional material. Founded by director William Lustig (MANIAC COP), Blue Underground searches out excellent and underrated maudit drive-in fare from the '70s and gives them Criterion-level treatment has at best works of art, and at least as important cultural artifacts, films such as BLUE SUNSHINE and DEAD AND BURIED. It's my kind of company. I've seen many if not all of the available films in the drive-ins when they first came out, during the course of many summers of a misspent youth.
For example, in my burg in the late '70s I took a trek out to the once glorious 104th Street Drive-In, now a condo development, to see FAST COMPANY. And not because it was a racecar movie, but because it was a David Cronenberg film. Everyone else in the open-air cathedral was there for the hot rod action. In fact, they were in attendance bedecked in automotive overalls (the subservient mechanics) or tight shirts and sunglasses (even at night) and with blonde compliant babes on their arms (the stars) and some of them raced around the perimeter before the screening, to the exasperation of the proprietors.
I would imagine that the film was a disappointment to them, insofar as it lacks the action of other car race movies, from LE MANS to DRIVEN. By today's standards the film could have used a little goosing from the Burt Reynolds school of car films. It feels a tad under-populated and a little underdeveloped. But FAST COMPANY is a quieter, more driven film, if you will, in its way very realistic about the world of the funny car and fuel car racing circuit.
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FAST COMPANY stars William Smith (doing a fair imitation of Jack Palance, with his slow delivery and his glances off into space symbolizing superhuman patience in trying times) as "Lucky" Lonnie Johnson, a fuel car driver sponsored by Fast Co., a gasoline additive. Johnson's nemesis is Phil Adamson (John Saxon), Fast Co.'s rep, who supervises the races and holds the purse strings. Naturally, the cold bottom line middle manager will end up in conflict with the earthy yet idealistic and brave Johnson. Here Saxon is playing something akin to his corporate role in THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, the image-conscious soulless executive, while Smith is the Robert Redford equivalent, stealing the object of everyone's attention (in this case, a fuel car), to "free" it from, corporate greed.
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FAST COMPANY provides everything that a drive in movie about cars is expected to produce: abundant racing scenes, car crashes, nudity, and violence. One of the nude scenes does not come from co-star Claudia Jennings, the late former PLAYBOY pinup, who plays Johnson's girlfriend. And the "violence" is little more than a tire iron to Johnson's head and a knuckle sandwich to Saxon's jaw. But there is plenty of funny car and fuel car footage, shot during actual events, and according to Cronenberg on his audio track, groundbreaking — no one had put a camera in a funny car before that.
Blue Underground's widescreen transfer of FAST COMPANY (1.85:1, enhanced) is exquisite — it looks just as it did when I saw it as a kid in the drive-in. The sound originally was "only" mono, but the crackle of the fuel car engines is piercing, especially in the additional DD 5.1 and Surround, and the DTS-ES 6.1. The musical static menu offers 24-chapter scene selection for the 91-minute movie.
The extras are just right. There is a detailed text only bio of Jennings, a poster and still gallery, the theatrical trailer, and two video interviews, one with Smith and Saxon, and the other with Cronenberg's then cinematographer, Mark Irwin.
There is also a full-length audio commentary track by Cronenberg. Speaking quietly but with authority, Cronenberg explains how and why he made the picture (though for a more detailed account, the reader should go to CRONENBERG ON CRONENBERG, from Faber and Faber). Among other things the director reveals how being around actual drivers informed the script, which he says he rewrote daily to incorporate their lingo. Among the interesting facets he incorporates is the mentality of the company sponsoring Johnson, which, Saxon's character admits, doesn't really want him to win: winning is expensive, but if he places even fifth or lower, the company still gets the advantage of advertising on his car and suit. The strategy rings true.
But FAST COMPANY also comes as a two-disc limited edition set. On the second disc are Cronenberg's early one-hour films (shot on 35mm), STEREO and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE. The whole thing comes in a transparent dual-DVD keep case. FAST COMPANY hit the street on April 27th and retails for $29.95.
Don't Talk, Shoot
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
As I wrote back in September, when the restored THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY was re-released, what a pleasure it must have been for western fans back in the late '60s to stumble upon the Clint Eastwood films made by Sergio Leone! For one thing the movies were unlike anything American directors were doing in the genre, with their brutal view of life and their visual delirium; for another, the trio of films appeared in the States fairly rapidly, in contrast to their original European distribution, meaning that Americans got to watch the films practically all at once. But what a special thrill it must have been to see the last one, THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, on the big screen for the first time, ignorant of the pleasures and joys it was about to bestow, and unaware that the film was about to both revitalize the genre and sound its death knell.
But then, the western has always attracted eulogists. As Scott Simmon shows amongst many other things in his brilliant new book from Cambridge University Press, THE INVENTION OF THE WESTERN FILM, industry writers were decrying the death of the genre as far back as 1911, when it was only a few years old. "There seems to be prevalent a sentiment that the Western photoplay has out-run its course of usefulness and is slated for an early demise," wrote someone in THE NICKELODEON in February of that year. There must be something elegiac and somber about the western to begin with; it's a genre that celebrates, or maybe merely observes, transitions, so it is perhaps only right that each new generation is ready to chant its obsequies. Then along comes a robust entry like GBU and the genre gets a second, a third, a thousandth wind.
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From its trilling, twangy opening musical theme to its elided obscenity at the end, GBU must have been overwhelming — simply too much, like ambrosia — for sensitive viewers. I can imagine it as being akin to CITIZEN KANE in its impact, showing budding filmmakers what could be done with a camera, with music, with pace, with moral geometry. Ennio Morricone's music contributes a lot to this, but it's also Leone's investigative close-ups, which actors loved, and his amusing "revisionist" undermining of stock conventions. Life is cheap in Leone's version of the west, but wit is plentiful.
But little did these initial American viewers know that the film they were seeing was shorn of about 20 minutes. This rich serving of lush, delirious western confection actually had a few more calories to offer.
As is well known, GBU is about three Southwestern rogues interacting with and against each other against the backdrop of the Civil War. At issue is a chest of gold buried in a cemetery. Blondie (Clint Eastwood, whose character's name may actually be Joe) knows the grave name. His disputatious partner in a clever reward scam, Tuco (Eli Wallach), knows the location of the graveyard. Also interested in the money is the roving hit man Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef, his character known as Sentenza in the Italian version), who is adept at insinuating himself into positions of power, such as that of a Union officer, when the need suits him. Over the course of many months these characters flirt with each other, until they all end up in the graveyard at issue, and face off against each other to see who gets the cash. While they are at it, they will make right those injustices visited upon each other.
How curious that today Eastwood is the least interesting element of the film. Though the series of Leone westerns made Eastwood a superstar, a perch from which he has rarely fallen, in fact today viewers are more likely to find him a cipher, while Van Cleef's character is morbidly fascinating, and Wallach's is the emotional heart of the film, a figura buffa who represents the everyman in the audience, like Jason Robards in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and Rod Steiger in DUCK YOU SUCKER.
Yes, the problem with the film comes with "the good." In other Leone westerns, the director posits a threesome: the noble caring hero, the grasping underling, and the ruthless villain. In DUCK YOU SUCKER, it's Coburn, Steiger, and a German general in Mexico. In FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, Van Cleef plays the noble guy, called Mortimer. It's as if Leone were constantly fishing around to try and get the formula right, finally achieving the perfect combo in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST — but by then no one cared anymore. In GBU, Eastwood should be the noble character. Though he evinces a few "caring" traits that suggest an interest in justice, the nobility here has been shifted to the tertiary character of a Union captain who wants a bridge blown up. This absence of real nobility in the primary trio creates a certain heartlessness that Leone tries to recompense by inserting sentimental scenes (the prison camp musicians) and fleeting manifestations of noble actions to make up for it.
Not that it matters in the long run. GBU is a beautifully done film, one that, despite its awesome length, is actually very tight and cohesive. As Robert Cumbow shows in his study of the director ONCE UPON A TIME: THE FILMS OF SERGIO LEONE, from Scarecrow Press, the single best book about Leone's films thus far, GBU is a Rubric's cube of paired images and triplicate structures. Most things in GBU come in threes, from the three assassins at the start who try to jump Tuco to the triad of title characters themselves. Cumbow points out that the long opening sequence is designed to undermine our normal expectations of western tropes. What looks at first like a showdown turns out to be a hit. Tuco survives, of course, but the point is that Leone is making elaborate, loving, operatic jokes at the expense of the genre — and we all know that jokes are structured on "threes."
Also, as Cumbow points out, THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is the most violent anti-war film every made. Its "odd antiwar stance" is "a moral view that has nothing whatever to do with nonviolence." The Civil War in the film is more than just a backdrop or a contrast with the selfish greed of the characters, it's an actual impediment to them, and as Cumbow points out Tuco and Blondie blow up a bridge not because they want to give a dying Union captain a dollop of hope, but because they need to move a battlefield out of their way and the best means of stopping the Blues and the Grays from fighting over possession of a bridge is to eradicate it. Not only is life cheap in GBU, but also the human body is just so much impedimental matter, be it the solder handcuffed to Tuco or the resident of the grave where the cash box ends up being discovered.
Cumbow is very good at tracing all the things that come in threes in the film, but he also notes that Leone has imposed, consciously or not, a doubling throughout the film. Lines of dialogue are mirrored; a common statement in the film begins, "There are two kinds of people in the world …"; and one example of the visual mirroring is that the film contains two bridges, the one that the boys blow up but also one Tuco crosses in the desert, a rickety expanse over a dried up river that emphasizes Tuco's wearing down by the heat.
In the final showdown, the three is really just two, as Angel Eyes and Blondie are really the antagonists. Tuco is the buffoon easily eradicated from the pattern. In a corpse-ridden film, the final gunning down is somewhat anti-climactic. All it takes, in the end, is a bullet to kill a man. With a flourish, Blondie shoots so that Angel Eyes corpse rolls into a shallow grave, and then shoots his hat in after him. This is what Angel Eye's violent life has come to, the shitty end of a showdown to become one more anonymous body in a killing field.
The restoration of GBU was simple. All John Kirk had to was round up all the footage, find a version of the script in English, convince Eastwood and Wallach to re-record their lines (what Tony Curtis did for SPARTACUS) and find another actor (Simon Prescott) to mimic the late Van Cleef for his dialogue in his scenes (what Anthony Hopkins did for SPARTACUS by mimicking Olivier), figure out where the footage actually appears in the film, and convince MGM that it was worth all the money.
Well, it was worth it because in the course of his researches Kirk unearthed a sequence that few had seen, in which Tuco rounds up a trio of bandits to help him take out Blondie. In the release version, Tuco simply shows up with them while Blondie is cleaning his gun; in the new scene Tuco finds his way to a cave, where the trio hide out, and convinces them to do a job with him. In all, there are eight restored scenes, one of them appearing here for the first time, and seven of them already appearing on the MGM DVD of the film released in 1998 (and on the laser disc before that?), but in Italian with English subtitles, the English tracks having been lost.
Besides Tuco and the bandits, these new scenes include one in which Angel Eyes visits a Rebel camp in search of Bill Carson, the guy who holds the key to the money box; an additional scene in the desert when Tuco is torturing Blondie, in which Tuco washes his feet in a bucket of precious water; a scene after the desert torture sequence in which Tuco stops by a Rebel camp at night before going on to the missionary; a somber bit of chat between Tuco and Blondie on the desert trail before they are captured by the Union; a scene in which Blondie meets Angel Eyes's gang, and where Angel Eyes delivers a line about the number three that is crucial to all of Leone's films; more between the Union captain and Blondie and Tuco at the bridge; and more conversation in the water when they are rigging the bridge.
These scenes were deleted the first time around for the obvious reason that they could be viewed by a dispassionate editor as extraneous to the main plot and therefore the studio could maybe squeeze in one more showing a day of an already overlong movie. Personally I have encountered few suites of deleted scenes that couldn't have been easily put back in, especially on DVDs where running times are not a high priority (one movie, Stallone's version of GET CARTER, doesn't even make sense unless you watch the deleted scenes on the DVD). I think that deleted scenes should always be put back in, be they good, bad, or ugly. In this case, Kirk is simply following the director's vision: Leone didn't remove these scenes, the American distributor did. Do they make the film longer? Of course. Do they make the film feel longer? No, not to me, anyway. Do they offer any benefit other than to buff or broaden a little the various characters and their relationships? Yes. They show how carefully Leone was moving his chess pieces around the board, making sure that all the characters' actions were motivated and that the intricate machinery of his simple seeming plot was well oiled. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is a good, possibly great, film made much better by the diligence of a film restoration team returning the work to its original dimensions.
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The key thing about MGM Home Entertainments two disc, boxed set of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY: EXTENDED VERSION COLLECTOR'S SET is that it inserts some of the deleted scenes found separately on the firm's old DVD edition of the movie, and is a restored transfer. It's a nice widescreen (2.35:1, enhanced) transfer, and the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track is a real achievement, given that some of the dialogue simply didn't exist (due to Italian production procedures). Eastwood and Wallach recorded for the first time, last year for the restored version.
The major extra on disc one is TIME film reviewer Richard Schickel's audio commentary. It's a workmanlike track (Schickel was selected because he wrote a bio of Eastwood, but frankly Christopher Frayling or Robert Cumbow, two Leone specialists, would have been better). Schickel does evince, however, an unvarnished delight in the film.
A set of making of featurettes is confined to the second disc. "Leone's West" is a 20-minute history of the production, with video interview excerpts by Eastwood, Wallach, producer Alberto Grimaldi and English dialogue writer Mickey Knox. It's nice to have Knox on the disc; anyone who has read Frayling's bio of Leone knows that Knox is the unsung hero behind the DOLLAR films' success in the States.
"The Leone Style," at 23 minutes, is more of the same, focusing on the Maestro himself, but including anecdotes such as how the famous bridge blowing up scene got fucked up (it had to be rebuilt and blown up again). Meanwhile, "The Man Who Lost the Civil War" is a 15-minute excerpt from a large documentary about the historical background to the film's setting, that is, the Southwestern campaign of General Sibley. This excerpt is dry, but informative, and is really a plug for the larger doc and its companion book. There is also an equally informative 11-minute doc about the film's restoration, "Reconstructing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly." Meanwhile, "Il Maestro: Ennio Morricone and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," at eight minutes, looks at the composer's contribution, and is augmented with an audio essay by a VARIETY writer and film score specialist.
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Surprisingly, there are yet more deleted scenes. The first is an extended version of Tuco's torture scene that had elements the restorers couldn't work with; the second is a text-based summary of the lost "Socorro Sequence" in which Tuco commits a robbery while the elusive Blondie is in the sack with a blonde nearby. Bits of this lost sequence can be found in the French trailer that follows.
Finally, there is a poster gallery, the original theatrical trailer, an eight-page insert with an essay by Roger Ebert on the film, five lobby cards for the English, Italian, French, Japanese, and German releases, and a reproduction of the soundtrack album cover. Besides the Dolby Digital 5.1 (English) track, there is a monaural Italian track, and the movie comes with English, French, Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin subtitles. The whole package comes in a box. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY: EXTENDED VERSION COLLECTOR'S SET retails for $29.98, and hit the street May 18th.
Extending Credit
PAYCHECK
If a director has a great reputation in his homeland, but then comes to America and makes a series of dogs, you're going to wonder if the homeland films are still as good as you thought. That's the case with John Woo. THE KILLERS and HARD-BOILED remain influential and revered films, textbooks consulted by young American action directors the way Hitchcock's used to be. But Woo's American films seem pallid by comparison, paradoxically loud and sedate at the same time. HARD TARGET, BROKEN ARROW, FACE / OFF, WINDTALKERS all have interesting or intriguing elements but not cohere the way his Hong Kong films do beautifully. But are they beautiful? That's the nagging question that leads to re-assessment. Personally, I'm beginning to think that Woo is as overrated both here and there as much as Tsui Hark is underrated.
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That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed PAYCHECK, even through all three viewings it took to do this review. Based on a Philip K. Dick story, it dabbles once again in identity and memory, themes that vaguely link Woo and Dick, as it tells of a reverse engineer (i.e., a guy who figures out how things are assembled after the fact) named Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck), who is hired by his billionaire friend and contractor Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) to do one more job. Jennings specialty is that he is willing to have his memory erased, so that even he doesn't have any knowledge of the design he has broken. The new job, however, will take three years of research. Even though he has just met a hot blonde (Uma Thurman as Rachel), Jennings goes forward with the mission.
The next thing he knows is that he has succeeded with the project, but left himself clues from "the other side" of his memory to subvert the project, save himself, and reunite with Rachel. The bulk of the film is dual chases, Jennings probing his memory on the run, and Rethrick hunting down Jennings before he actually can remember what it was he did.
As with PANIC ROOM, the filmmakers acknowledge that Hitchcock is a big influence (Affleck wears a suit like Cary Grant's in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, among other references), but the main analog seems to be De Palma. That director's big theme is betrayal of one friend by another. Here, Woo borrows that theme, along with split screens and the corporate evil that pop up in De Palma's movies. Coincidentally, both have done MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies for Tom Cruise, and here Woo is still following De Palma's lead.
There are other influences, conscious or not, or coincidences. Thurman's character is like a secular, if you will, Storm from X-MEN, while Colm Feore's fixer reminds one of PULP FICTION (he's even named Mr. Wolf, in a trading of compliments with one of his disciples). TERMINATOR 2 figures in the proceedings, and along with STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE BIRDS, THE FURY, NEXT OF KIN, and especially previous Woo films, with its significant doves and Mexican standoffs (put in, he says, at the behest of Affleck).
Woo may prove some day to be an overreaching second unit director but Paramount treats PAYCHECK as if it is a major release, with an excellent anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) and with a dynamic Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. There's also DD surround, and a French track, and the animated, musical menu offers 22-chapter scene selection.
The movie comes with no less than two commentary tracks. One is by Woo and the second is by credited screenwriter Dean Deorgaris. I happened to listen to the writer's track first, and I think that is the way to go. Woo calls him "the writer" too, mostly not remembering his name. Deorgaris really makes you like the movie more as he points out linking thematic images and plot points that give weight to the film. He also points out that Woo can enhance a script just through the looks and glances that he instructs the actors to include (though the whole glancing thing is terribly overdone in the second meeting with Uma scene at the 21 minute mark).
Woo on the other hand embraces the now time honored "everyone was great to work with" school of yak tracks. Which isn't to say that he doesn't make a number of interesting points. Around the one hour-four minute mark he voices a diatribe against modern film scores, which all sound the same (PAYCHECK, by the way, has three credited composers).
The making of featurettes include "PAYCHECK: Designing the Future" (at 18 minutes) and "Tempting Fate: The Stunts of PAYCHECK" (another 16 minutes), plus seven deleted and / or alternate scenes (which in my view help the film), a two minute alternate ending (which doesn't), and a clutch of trailers. The disc comes in a keep-case and hit the streets on May 18th for $29.95.
By the way, the ending as it stands has the characters, now in hiding, winning a lottery ticket. They rush off to cash it in. If they are in hiding, won't cashing in the ticket reveal their whereabouts? I suppose that this weird possibility can be forgiven since this ending, conceived at the last moment, is better than the alternative and is much more in the spirit of the film's implications.
DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From FAST COMPANY: "There are people who don't know how this film fits into my body of work and they think it's some kind of anomaly. But I really think, if you made a thousand films, it still wouldn't equal one person in terms of all the interests and tones and shadings of things that you have going on, any person has going on. I have a lot of, there are a lot of things that interest me in my life that don't ever make it into my films. And so FAST COMPANY is really, to me, business as usual. It is an expression of something that I was very passionate about, and remain passionate about, even though it doesn't seem to correlate easily or critically with my other movies. I was really quite pleased to tackle the kind of classic mythology, and the good and bad on a racetrack and the 'shoot out on a drag strip' aspects of it. There was never any intention on my part to subvert it or to turn it into anything else. I really wanted it to be a kind of classic B movie with the things that are lovable about B movies."— David Cronenberg on how FAST COMPANY fits into his oeuvre, beginning 00:28:26 in the FAST COMPANY audio track.
NEXT TIME: BUBBA HO-TEP, JUNIOR BONNER, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, SMILES OF THE SUMMER NIGHT, THE WINDS OF WAR, and more!
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