Billy Liar

Hi Aki,

Today I finished Billy Liar a movie I recorded, and watched about an hour friday, 20 minutes yesterday, the end today.

This was a play. Then it was a movie. Then it was a TV show. The writers really hit the jackpot with this one. John Schlesinger directed.

The story is set in a small town in northern england, early 60s. Billy (Albert Finney in the play version, then Tom Courtenay took over the role in the play, then Courtenay played in the movie) is a young man with big dreams. We open with a radio show just going on-air at 6 am. The host begins what he usually does: read letters and dedications that listeners have sent in.

As we continue to hear the radio show and the many dedications, we see exterior shots of houses, apartment buildings, all over town, as happy housewives react when their letters are read. These are all extreme long shots (the film was shot Panavision, black and white) from the street; the women are far away. Finally we end on a closer shot of a woman (Mona Washbourne playing Billy’s mom) behind a window. We go inside with her. she’s wondering when the radio show will ever get around to reading her letter and playing her record. The Mum, Dad, and Mum’s Mum are all around the breakfast table getting ready for the day. They occasionally shout upstairs to son Billy to come down and have breakfast or he’ll be late for work.

Billy, meanwhile, lies in bed, daydreaming of Ambrosia, the country he imagines. Ambrosia has just won the Great War, for peace and freedom and independence. We see Billy as the general who won the war, as the wounded leader of a wounded squadron, as one of the women recruits … all marching in parade before the general-king of Ambrosia (also, of course, Billy).

Billy at last goes down stairs, half an hour late. He gets in a fight with his Dad and Mum, his Dad especially attacks him constantly and in one flight of fancy Billy turns, now in uniform, and guns them all down with submachine gun (a recurring motif Billy imagines whenever somebody is giving him too much grief).

Another point of contention is the wardrobe in Billy’s room. His Mum wants to clean it, she wants him to unlock it, and why does he want to keep it locked for, anyway? When Billy goes up to get ready for work, he unlocks it, and we find out why: inside it are 200 or so calendars from his workplace, a funeral home. Billy was supposed to mail them out. Instead he spent the postage money himself, and now is stuck with all these calendars and no idea what to do with them other than hide them in his wardrobe!

Billy goes on to work (late, and yelled at for it) and along the way he indulges in some more fantasies. He imagines being caught for pilfering the postage money; thrown in prison, he dashes off an exposé on prison life that turns into a major best-seller before Billy even gets out of prison; the Warden thanks him, and Billy leaves the prison to universal fame and acclaim.

Being a writer seems to be the core real-world ambition Billy enjoys: he has a novel he keeps intending to begin, and he has sent sample scripts to a radio comedian who happens to be in town to open a supermarket; Billy is sure the comedian will hire him and take him to London. But the comedian doesn’t even remember Billy’s scripts and just gives him the brush-off when Billy finally does get to see him.

Real-world problems are mounting for Billy: he has gotten himself engaged, twice, to two very different girls: Barbara, the shy, repressed girl who really loves him but won’t even kiss him before they are married, and Rita, the brassy waitress who’s been shagging Billy. Billy gave Rita an engagement ring, only he got it back from her ‘to give to a jeweler for alteration’ and gave it to Barbara. Now Rita wants the ring back, and Billy is trying to get Barbara to give up the ring ‘for alterations’ to get it back to Rita. Only Barbara won’t give it up. To make matters worse, he has invited both girls to his home for tea on the same day. And, of course, he has told them both a pack of lies about his home life. And on top of this, an old flame, Liz (Julie Christie in her first big role on film) has come back to town.

Billy is telling everybody that the comedian will hire him and he’ll be going to London. This is his escape. He tries to quit his job at the funeral home only to have his obnoxious boss Mr Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter) let Billy know they are on to him and the calendar/postage gag, and he can’t quit until he’s worked off all the money he owes.

Billy goes in and out of fantasy. Walking by a stadium where a football (soccer) match is in progress, he dreams he is the Prime Minister of Ambrosia promising a new and better future for all (in best Winston Churchill imitation) to the mad cheers of the populace. But his real life is getting worse and worse. The two women are pressuring him for the ring, to see his parents. The comedian doesn’t know him and has no job for him. And when Billy shouts at his Grandmum, she has a bit of an attack, making his Dad even harsher on Billy.

That night the whole town congregates at the dance hall. Billy tries to avoid Rita and Barbara (he has dates with both, of course) but they meet up and the whole business of two fiancées and one ring comes out; the women fall into a catfight. The band though is playing a song Billy and a mate wrote, which is good – until the MC gives Billy credit and announces Billy will be going to London to write the radio show; more humiliation is bound to follow when this is revealed as a lie, and indeed, several of Billy’s pals are razzing him when the dance hall applauds him, calling out, ‘Billy Liar! Billy Liar!’

Billy escapes the dance hall for a walk with Liz. They catch up on old times. Billy is amazed that Liz has left the small town so many times, but she says it’s easy, you just get a ticket and get on the train. Liz seems to really understand Billy, she knows all his faults and fibs and likes him anyway. They share a penchant for day-dreaming, and Billy reveals to Liz, the first person ever, his fantasies of Ambrosia. Liz wants to make love to Billy in the park, he proposes, really seems to mean it, and they lie down in the grass. Only Billy’s mates have followed them, and mock him. The secret of ‘Ambrosia’ is now out, and it’s a sure thing that by Monday night the whole town will know all about it.

Billy is furious but Liz tells him it doesn’t matter, those guys, the whole town, aren’t worth it. She tells him they can go to London tonight on the midnight train; that she’ll be on it, and she gets him to agree to meet her at the station.

Billy goes home, once more full of hope. At home though, unpleasantness awaits: his Dad tells him that Grandmum is in the hospital and Mum is there waiting for Billy. And they know all about the calendars and postage, and they’ve broken into the wardrobe and found Mum’s letter to the radio show dedication, which Billy never sent either. Billy tries to stand up for himself and stick to his promise to Liz, and he packs and leaves to go to the infirmary.

There he sits with his Mum. She is no less determined to keep Billy at home, though she uses gentler tactics. Grandmum dies, and Mum grieves, and Billy departs for the station.

He walks to the station, dreaming of his regiment’s military burial of his Grandmum in Ambrosia and humming a military tune. But the camera pulls away and reveals Billy walking down a dark city street, engulfed in shadow, his tune more like whistling in the dark. We know Billy is not going to London, even though he thinks he is, and is making every move to go.

At the station he finds Rita, dragging around one of Billy’s mates who is drunk. There’s also a young soldier who is going off to serve, and supported by older women relatives. And out on the platform he finds Liz.

They board the train and wait. Only minutes before it will depart. And Billy is feeling anxious. He tries to get Liz to ask him to go back out to get something to eat – she has packed sandwiches. What about something to drink? She doesn’t want anything. Some milk? She doesn’t want any. But Billy goes out to get the milk anyway.

He stands at the vending machine. The train will depart any moment and Billy takes his time. He holds two cartons of milk in his hand, his back to the platform. He could still make it but he waits until he’s just too late, and only then turns and runs, runs when it’s too late, runs just to make a show of trying to go.

In the carriage window Liz looks out, shaking her head. She knows Billy too well, is sorry he couldn’t come but doesn’t seem to blame him too much. She didn’t really expect him to go. She has left his suitcase out on the platform for him.

Billy walks home, alone on the dark streets. But he walks a bit faster, parade march, and behind him march in step the paratroopers of Ambrosia. Billy marches up to his house and inside, and the camera pulls back down the street, as the national anthem of Ambrosia rises on the soundtrack. Billy’s window is the only one lit in the house, far away, at the end of the street, as the anthem ends and closes out the movie.

It’s an excellent picture. Schlesinger was a terrific filmmaker for about 10, 15 years. The beginning, with the radio program and shots of the streets, has a nice, naturalistic feel, but it was a bit flawed in that it’s just an effort to ‘break out’ of the play, which probably opens on Mrs Fisher dusting and cleaning and making breakfast while the radio plays the other dedications.

The biggest challenge for the picture is bringing us in and out of the daydreams. This is done usually with sound helping: either we begin to hear Ambrosia before picture takes us there, or we go on hearing Ambrosia after picture brings us back into ‘reality.’ I wonder how it might have felt if they had had the budget and tried The Wizard of Oz gambit, putting all the Ambrosia/daydream scenes in color?

One thing that had my head turning while watching was thinking how Albert Finney would have been as Billy. Tom Courtenay is a frail, slight man, and so I interpret his Billy as the recourse of a weakling; when he interacts with others, telling lies, it’s like somebody who has this one defensive mechanism to help him through life. But Finney is much heartier, stronger physically. He was playing Tom Jones at about this period, so I have a good picture of what he was like in a somewhat similar genre (comedy of a young man against the forces of the established order). Finney as Billy would have been more cheeky, more aggressive, more mocking. He would have been lying more out of strength than weakness, or else more out of a boyish, Peter Pan, not-yet-grown-up personality. Whilst Courtenay is lying and fantasizing because life is too heavy and hard for him, Finney might have been doing it because, well, it’s fun! And to hell with everybody else if they can’t take a joke! Finney would have been more ‘dangerous’ if you will as a suitor in the scenes with Rita and Barbara. More calculating.

I don’t know if I would have liked Finney’s Billy as well. I certainly wouldn’t have sympathized with him, or pitied him so much. But Finney is an amazing actor, and I expect he would have won me over if not with pity, then with sheer ebullience and sense of enjoyment.

The other thing that struck me is one scene. It’s the scene where Billy enters Mr Shadrack’s office to resign (because he’s so sure that he’ll get the radio scriptwriting job). Mr Shadrack isn’t there, so Billy imagines a conversation with him. Billy goes on and on, talking to the empty desk, and I was sure that the scene would take a turn for the worse when Mr Shadrack appeared in the doorway behind Billy. Sure enough it happened, but not the way I expected. The usual way to do this, the ‘elegant’ solution, is to have the camera move to follow Billy. Generally camera movement is invisible to the audience when it is ‘motivated’ by something that happens on the screen. Billy walks screen right, and the camera follows him. This is invisible to us because it gives us what we want to see; our brains are hard-wired to track such side-to-side movement. The camera moves just as our eyes would move if we were sitting where the camera is.

The natural, ‘elegant’ solution to revealing Mr Shadrack then is to get the camera over behind the desk, looking at Billy; Billy walks to one side or the other so the doorway behind him is gone out of frame; then Billy walks back, camera follows, and there is Mr Shadrack, appearing as if by magic.

Schlesinger doesn’t do it that way. He moves Billy around the desk, and pans the camera after him, right enough. For several shots the doorway is offscreen. He then moves Billy back around in front of the desk. Still the doorway is offscreen. All Schlesinger needs to do now is move Billy a little bit farther screen left.

Instead, Billy stays put, and the camera, from an unmoving spot, ‘decides on its own’ to pan left, and find Mr Shadrack.

Now why did Schlesinger do it this way? I thought it was a ‘mistake’ at first. But in general it’s never the best approach for a critic to assume the artist is ‘wrong’ but instead assume he is ‘right’ and find some sort of reason why Schlesinger would want to prefer to do it the way he did; and then see if that reason might be valid, a ‘better’ solution to the problem.

When a character commands the camera – when the camera must follow him, and nobody else in the scene – that character acquires power. He is dominating the shot. This is generally true, and so the opposite is often true as well: if the camera ignores a character and moves against him, then the character loses power. Here Billy is ‘cut down to size’ if you will, when the camera, ‘on its own’ decides to ignore him and look over there – over to the door. (I don’t think this movement is motivated by a sound from Shadrack – say a footstep or clearing of the throat – but I can’t say for sure.) Since Billy has been fantasizing of himself as a big man, an important man, someone superior to the imaginary Shadrack, when the camera moves against Billy, it deflates this image which the filmmakers hope Courtenay’s acting will have won us over (after all, the audience should be on Billy’s side at this point, and who among us hasn’t daydreamed about telling off our obnoxious and petty bosses?).

Schlesinger’s camera move might, therefore, be a deliberate effort to accelerate Billy’s loss of stature, to tear us back into ‘reality’ before Billy himself is ready for it, or aware of his boss’s presence.

I still don’t much like it though. Because the second half of this scene, in which Shadrack enters the office and proceeds to tell Billy off, rejecting Billy’s resignation in no uncertain terms, will cut Billy down quickly enough. What after all is the first thing that’s going to happen in this part of the scene? Mr Shadrack is going to walk into the office, go behind his desk, sit down, open the letter of resignation, read it. Shadrack thus can capture and command the camera with his moves, and acquire power; the camera follows him and lets Billy go in and out of frame, undermining Billy’s power in this part of the scene. This sort of solution is generally used and preferred and considered more ‘elegant’ because it is invisible and organic – organic in the sense that it is invisible and the camera is following the blocking of the actors.

(4 May 2009)

In Bruges

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched In Bruges a ‘dramedy’ about a couple of irish thugs in Belgium.

Story involves the Laurel and Hardy of Irish hit men, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) who, after their latest murder, are ordered to go to the Belgium city of Bruges to lie low for a couple weeks.

Ken is older, an experienced, veteran killer. He enjoys sight-seeing in the town, which has preserved its medieval character. Ray is a young punk who is bored, doesn’t like history, and considers the city a shit-hole. Plus it’s coming onto Yule and the weather is just cold freezing fog all the time – pretty, but not pleasant. He only gets excited when he sees a movie production going on, crashes craft services, and chats up a pretty local girl who’s an extra. Though she’s a bit put off at his crass stupidity and insults to her town, for no obvious reason she drops her card, and Ray gets a date with her next night.

But Harry, their boss, called while they were out, and was very mad. Every other word in the message he leaves begins with the letter ‘f’ and he tells them in no uncertain terms to be there next night for his call. Ray still wants to go out on his date, so he bargains with Ken: if Ray will put up with another morning and afternoon of sight-seeing, then he can go on his date and Ken will stay home at night to take the boss’s call.

That day they visit an ancient church that is said to have a relic of Christ’s own dried blood which every now and then miraculously turns liquid before drying again. Ken wants to climb up to see the relic, and he does, but Ray leaves. On his own, Ray remembers the killing they did in London before they got sent to Bruges. The target was a priest, and Ray shot him over and over and killed him, but one of the bullets by accident killed a little boy at the altar. For this killing Ray still feels a heavy guilt and is moved to tears.

Ray gets his date at night, dresses up, and has various comic misadventures along the way, including meeting an American dwarf from the movie and beating a man and woman sitting at the next table in the restaurant. Just as he’s about to score with the girl, lying on her on her bed, and she’s stripped down to her slip, Ray feels a gun at the back of his head. It’s a guy threatening to kill him unless he hands over all his cash. Ray’s a tough guy and doesn’t take this too seriously; he easily gets the gun from the guy, but the girl tells him the gun only has blanks. Sure enough it does, but the guy is still threatening, so Ray shoots him in the eye, blinding him. Turns out the guy is the girl’s boyfriend – maybe former boyfriend – and the two of them had a little side business of luring tourists to her rooms and robbing them. ‘Christ! I knew it was too good to be true, that a nice girl like you would shag a guy like me!’ Ray exclaims. This profession of true love softens the girl’s heart, and though she has to take her boyfriend to hospital to see about his eye, she promises to see Ray again.

Meanwhile Ken gets the call from Harry, and it turns out the reason Harry sent them to Bruges was to give Ray a nice treat at the end of his life. Harry now orders Ken to murder Ray for killing the boy.

When Ray gets back in, the two lie about their evenings. Since Ray has stolen all the drugs from the girl’s stash, along with some live rounds for the boyfriend’s pistol, the two go out on the town, snorting coke with the dwarf and a couple of local whores before heading back to the hotel.

Ken says Harry didn’t call. But next morning he goes out to meet the local guy and get the gun to kill Ray. The local guy tells him the best place to kill Ray is in the park. When he gets back to the hotel, Ken finds that Ray has also gotten up early, and has gone to the park. There Ken watches Ray from a distance, makes up his mind, takes out the gun, and marches up behind Ray … to see that Ray is putting his own gun to his head to kill himself. Ken without thinking stops Ray from killing himself.

The two now have a heart-to-heart talk and reveal all. Ken takes Ray’s gun to save his life. He tells Ray to get on a train and go someplace else, and he’ll square things with Harry. Ray gets on the train and heads out and Ken calls Harry and tells him he didn’t kill Ray and if Harry wants to punish Ken for disobeying, he should come over to Bruges and do it.

But on the train the police stop Ray because the guy Ray beat up at the restaurant is pressing charges. Ray is put in jail and has to call the girl to bail him out. Ray promises to pay her back bail money as well as for the gun and the drugs he stole; the girl seems glad to see him.

Harry (Ralph Fiennes) is a cockney mob boss with a temper. He swears at his wife in a fit of rage when he gets the phone call from Ken, and heads out to Bruges himself. There he picks up a gun from the same gun dealer, and meets the half-blind boyfriend. He goes out to meet up with Ken. Together they go up top the famous bell tower to sort things out. But Ken knows he owes everything to Harry and tells him he doesn’t want to fight him, that whatever Harry has to do, he can do; he expresses his obligations and love for Harry, since years ago Harry killed the man who murdered Ken’s beloved wife, and has employed Ken in all the years since.

Meanwhile on the square below, Ray and the girl are having a fine time at an outdoor bar. The dwarf comes up dressed in a boy’s school uniform and tells them the shoot tonight is like a hell scene out of Hieronymus Bosch and they should come see it. They laugh and say they are going to go fuck instead. It looks like love.

In fact when Harry says he can’t kill Ken and starts down the bell tower stairs with him, it looks like everything will come out all right for all our heroes.

This is the second curtain, and the balance of comedy and drama were at this point upping the suspense for me. See, if a movie like this seems like it’s a tough gangster morality play (with a few laughs) then I figure it’s going to end in death. But if it’s a comedy about a couple stupid bumbling gangsters like fish out of water acting like tourists in a pretty ancient town (with a few dark tones) then I figure everybody is going to get away with whatever crimes and violence they’ve done, and there’s a possibility of redemption, or even of not taking anything seriously.

But then…

But then the boyfriend sees Ray and the girl laughing it up at the cafe, and he goes up the bell tower stairs and tells Harry he’s seen Ray, he’s alive, he’s just outside in the square. Immediately Harry and Ken engage in a struggle; Harry shoots Ken in the throat and leaves him to go kill Ray. Ken drags himself up to the top of the tower, attracts a crowd, and leaps to his death. This brings Ray who has a few last words with Ken – Ken warns him Harry is in town.

Ray runs off, chased by Harry. It almost looks like Ray has made a getaway, too far off for Harry to hit him, but Harry’s aim is true and Ray gets blasted right through the chest. All the same he still manages to stumble on through the town, right in the middle of the movie shoot where actors are dressed up like visions out of the Last Judgment painting by Hieronymus Bosch that Ken and Ray saw while sight-seeing. Harry relentlessly follows Ray and in front of the whole set blasts Ray through the chest several more times. Ray turns to him and says, ‘The little boy,’ and Harry answers, ‘Exactly – for the little boy.’ But then Harry sees that his bullets have killed a little fellow past Ray, dressed in a school uniform. True to his earlier word, Harry prepares to blow his brains out on the spot for having killed a child. Ray tries to tell him it was a dwarf not a child, but he can’t get all the words out, and Harry tells him it’s for his ‘principles’ and kills himself.

The last scene is shot from Ray’s point of view as he is taken into an ambulance. We see the girl weeping over him, the medical team putting the oxygen mask over the lens, but all we hear is Ray’s thoughts as he makes up his mind that if he lives he will go to the mother of the boy he killed and confess all and take whatever punishment, even if it’s death. ‘Only I really really hoped I wasn’t going to die.’

The script treads a fine line between comedy and tragedy. It’s this mixing of genres that provides most of the entertainment and suspense. (The acting is also damn good by the three leads, all veterans.) If the movie seems more like a comedy, we don’t expect to see everybody end up bloody dead; and even though there’s lots of fake blood, the script treats the violence like a cartoon – there is no way that Ray shot through the chest by a dumdum bullet would be able to walk a few blocks; he’d be dead on the spot. And Ken is shot through the throat and bleeds a few gallons but still is able to drag himself up to the top of the bell tower before Harry can race to the bottom.

But then there’s the killing of the little boy. And most of all, Ray breaks out into tears of anguish over having done this – twice he breaks down. Stan Laurel broke into tears plenty of times in his movies, but the tears were over trivialities and treated for laughs; not so with Ray’s tears.

So the success of the movie in convincing you, one way or the other, that it’s a comedy in the second curtain scene between Ken and Harry atop the bell tower, is what makes the suspense work. Will Harry walk away? Even though he shoots Ken, he shoots him in the leg and it’s treated for laughs; we wouldn’t believe it if Harry let Ken of scot-free, but a punishment like a shot in the foot or leg seems like it should be enough, and Harry even helps Ken down the stairs. Meanwhile Ray and the girl are enjoying each other’s company and it’s looking good all around. The boyfriend (here allegorically half-blind) must tip the balance over into tragedy. The boyfriend himself is a character who could be a buffoon in a comedy or a dangerous punk in a drama, and the seed that this will not be a comedy after all is planted when Harry meets the gun dealer and the boyfriend is there. Then the boyfriend tells Harry that he will never see out of that blind eye again.

In a comedy, all wounds are healed and no violence is permanent, and therefore all can be forgiven. In a drama, wounds linger and fester and there may be no forgiveness; everything has its consequences and its price and all bills must be totted up and paid before the final curtain.

(18 April 2009)

All Night Long (1962)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched All Night Long a version of Othello set in the London jazz world of 1962.

Johnny Cousins (Patrick McGoohan) is a drummer in Aurelius Rex’s (Paul Harris) band. He longs to break off and form his own group, but there’s no chance unless he can coax former lead singer Delia out from retirement; since Delia married Rex, she stopped singing. Rex was jealous of her in the spotlight and would only marry her on condition she give up her career, which she was glad to do – only she does miss the spotlight, and the excitement of singing.

On the night of Rex and Delia’s first wedding anniversary, rich jazz fan Rod Hamilton (Richard Attenborough) arranges an after-hours party for the couple, and invites all the great jazz players in London at the time. In a neat little twist, and one of the main reasons why anybody would want to watch the movie today, these supporting roles are played by real muscicians like Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, John Dankworth, and others; several jam sessions are used as entr’actes between the dramatic scenes as the party goes on … ‘All Night Long.’ (‘All Night Long’ is also Delia’s signature song, which she sings at one point.)

Johnny proceeds to lie, manipulate, steal, and connive to break up Rex and Delia and get Delia to agree to sing with his band he’ll form – because as booking agent Lou tells him, ‘I got too many bands, but if you can get Delia to un-retire, then you’ve got something.’

The producer also takes credit for production design, and the principal set is the warehouse place in which Hamilton stages the party, with balconies, stage area, circular staircase, rooftop, private office. The film is shot B&W and 1.66:1, though the version I saw was reformatted to fit 1.33:1 TV aspect ratio. I never got a sense I was missing anything in the compositions though, they seemed pretty effective and I didn’t catch any elements crowded off the sides of the frame.

In a departure from the play, Rex pulls back from strangling Delia, and she forgives him. Johnny is revealed as the lying sneak he is, Rex and Delia walk off into the dawn, so we can hope they patch things up. Meanwhile Johnny in a scene that isn’t in the play tells his own wife to go home and leave him ‘like all the rest of them.’ ‘But I love you,’ she says, and he answers, ‘You love me, he loves her, everybody loves everybody … except me. I don’t love anybody. Nobody – not even me!’ The last we see of him he is alone on the stage area, drumming wildly, madly, in total frustration and hatred.

Changing the ending is OK with me since Othello itself is more Iago’s tragedy than Othello’s. All Night Long pretty much pushes any racial concerns aside; at a couple of points in the movie I though they didn’t even need to cast a black man as Rex. Othello works as the Moor’s tragedy only insofar as he is driven to killing his wife, and ends an outcast, because he is black, and the Venetians cannot accept him, have never been able to accept him, as an equal. This movie leaves all that out; there seems no trace of racism anywhere; that leaves only Johnny as the guy who schemes and maneuvers and loses everything when he is at last found out.

McGoohan is the reason I wanted to see it; I’ve been a fan of his work since his TV show Danger Man and later on his masterpiece, The Prisoner. Here he plays a total, weak, sly bastard, smoking pot, trying to push pot on others to ruin their careers … he has no redeeming features in fact. There is no greatness in his character to feel pity for him at the end; he gets what he deserves, he was only a mediocre and envious musician who thought he was better than he was. McGoohan does struggle with the accent a bit – he calls himself a ‘white American jazz musician’ and I don’t know if he is trying for an American accent here, or just trying to cover up whatever vestiges of Irish accent he may have had.

(6 April 2009)

Trainspotting

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Trainspotting – oddly enough I’d never seen it before. I suppose Steve’s description of the notorious ‘toilet’ scene turned me off. I liked it though.

This is the kind of movie where story is less important than style. The writer, director, set designer, and editor just put together a flashy, fun, smorgsabrod of strange cuts, weird subjective sets and shots, camera lenses that distort without being obvious about it, garish colors. The actors join the writer with cartoonish performances of over-the-top characters.

Mostly what the movie does is give me a view into a world I’d never been in. This is one of the wonders of movies, to take us where we’ve never been. The book was a sort of underground cult classic, but mostly a series of incidents and snippets rather than a story. The script tries to salvage a semi-story out of this, but it remains more of a portrait of a kind of life, that of the poor, disaffected, heroin junkies of a dying Scottish city, rather than any sort of story. There is an attempt in the writing to give us a sort of redemption along classical lines, undermined with a bit of a sarcastic twist.

This has to do with taking a speech, ‘Choose life! Choose marriage and a job and kids and washing machine and a car and CD player…’ and moving it to the opening of the movie, over a scene where the junkies are running away from a store where they’ve stolen some goods to sell for cash for heroin, and plays very ironically. At the movie’s end, the hero, having just ripped off his mates for the proceeds of a big sale of 2 kilos of heroin, walks away blithely, while the VO gives us the same speech – this time as though he is going to embrace this lifestyle (on the basis of the stolen drug-deal money) which further undermines it. And yet the film leaves us wondering if this guy Renton is really through with smack or not; as his VO says when he takes his last onscreen hit, ‘There are final hits, and final hits … which one was this going to end up being?’

Along the way a baby, seen crawling around happily amidst needles and the remains and other trash of the junkies’ life in their main hangout, dies from neglect; one of the kids gets sent to prison; another OD’s and is put into cold turkey where we get the classic (since Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend in the 1940s) montage of the DT’s; the only one of them who is healthy and never does drugs loses his girlfriend (because our hero has stolen the sex-tape he and his girlfriend made of themselves) and takes up smack, only to contract AIDS and die of toxoplasmosis when the kitten he got to win his girlfriend back is sent back to him; the fiercest anti-drug pal (a totaly sociopath played by Robert Carlyle, the guy from The Full Monty here with dark hair and mustache) sends more than a few folks to hospital; and the hero dives into ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ in that famous scene. And yet it’s given to us from the viewpoint of the junkies, and tries to convey some of the pleasure and crazy-wild fun they experience. It’s a comedy believe it or not. This is very refreshing, although I doubt many censors saw this as a good thing.

(25 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.

The Wicker Man

Hi Aki,

Last night I saw the original Wicker Man, a film that is surely a great candidate for a remake: great cast, intriguing idea, but bad direction (rather, wrong-headed direction) which spoilt it all, almost. Hard to really complain with any movie that mocks a strait-laced Christian prude who can’t get it on with naked Brit Ekland dancing in the next room begging him to come join her, or the couples fucking on the lawns, or naked girls jumping over fire, or Ingrid Pitt with a come-hither look as she lounges in her brass tub…

So here’s the story, and I’ll be spoiling it for you, as fair warning.

A Scots police sargent gets an anonymous letter saying that a girl, Rowan Morrison, has gone missing on Summerisle, and enclosing a photo. The cop flies his seaplane out to the island, but all the locals swear they’ve never heard of the girl, and don’t recognize the photo. But queer things are afoot in this island, and the people are clearly stone-walling him.

As he continues to investigate, the cop finds that Christianity has been abandoned here, and the whole populace have gone back to paganism with weird, mad rites (at least they look mad to him). He is sure the girl has been murdered, but finding her grave at last, he digs it up to discover – a dead hare in the coffin.

Act 2 ends on the early morning of the May Day festival. The cop researches in the library on the festival as it was practiced in middle ages, and leaps to the conclusion that last year’s crop failed, and that Rowan is alive … and will be ritually murdered in the course of today’s mayday.

This is the end of Act 2 because the detective has solved the case; it is also, in a story with a bad ending, the ‘bright moment’ when he is closest to understanding what is going on. He now knows what happened to the girl, who is behind it, and why.

He leaps in his seaplane to fly back to the mainland and get help, but the plane won’t start – sabotaged.

So he spends the morning and early afternoon going in every house and building, searching for the girl. An action montage of this search is sequence 7. He doesn’t find her, and instead steals the innkeeper’s Mayday costume – the Fool – and inflitrates the procession. More action as he is mute witness to the festivities, which end at the beach – where the girl Rowan is revealed, dressed in a white shift and tied to a post, clearly meant to be sacrificed.

(It’s possible that this moment is second curtain, and that ‘She’s not dead!’ could be the midpoint. I didn’t time it out.)

He races up to her. The girl is frightened, and begs him to save her. She says she knows the way through the caves behind them, and with the island mob coming up from the beach on the cop’s heels, there’s no other way to go.

Rowan leads the cop through a maze of caves, always upward. The islanders are behind them, but he throws her flower crown down a side-cave and tricks them. Cop and girl reach the top, and climb out on the hilltop…

End of sequence 7, twist into 8:

… to find the island leaders waiting for them. Rowan runs down to Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee in a bad wig) and asks, ‘Did I play it all right?’ ‘My child,’ he answers, hugging her, ‘you played it beautifully!’

Summerisle proceeds to explain the facts to the cop. This is a clever inversion of the traditional scene where the detective gathers all the chief suspects and rehashes the mystery, ending with ‘And you did it!’ Instead it’s the chief suspects who rehash the mystery for the detective, ending with ‘And you’re the sacrifice!’ (which is also a candidate for the twist; I often find things like climaxes, twists, are doubled, but the pairs are placed very close together – in this case, in the same scene. General examples would be the A storyline and B storyline will have their climaxes close together, B then A)

‘Our crops did fail, disastrously. The sacrifice of an animal is good, but a child is better. The sacrifice of a child is better, but better still the sacrifice of the right kind of adult.’

‘One who came to us willing,’ says one sexy wench. ‘One who is the representative of a king,’ says another; ‘One who is a virgin,’ says Brit. ‘One who is a fool!’

This scene is a trifle too long and wordy, complicated by the cop’s assertion that do what they will, they will never shake his faith, and he spits some of his catechism to them. To which Lord Summerisly replies, ‘And so we give you the greatest boon of your own faith, which is martyrdom … you will be able to sit with the saints in Paradise.’

The cop is then stripped by the sexy women, his wounds and dirt washed, his hands anointed, and dressed in a white sacrificial robe. He is then carried up to the bluff where at last is revealed The Wicker Man, a towering figure (Burning Man’s effigy is based on this movie’s close) in which are already tied up chickens and geese, pigs, a lamb, a cow. The cop is tied up in the effigy’s chest, and the whole set afire.

As the sun sinks, and the islanders dance and sing (the movie is perilously close to a musical, believe it or not) with joy on their faces, Wicker Man burns, and the cops spits and screams scripture, until at last the effigy collapses in flames, the sun sinks, and the credtis roll.

I didn’t time it, as I say, but my guesstimate is that it would be a page, 1.5 pages, to find out the seaplane is kaput;

• 1.5 pages of house to house search
• 1.5 pages at the inn to get into the costume and knock out the innkeeper
• 2, 3 pages of rituals
• a page of running through the caves
• 2-3 pages of confrontation with the islanders as truth comes out
• 1.5 pages of burning (maybe call it 2 pages with anointing, washing)

Running time is about 90 minutes.

Chief mistake in direction is to place us more in sympathy with the pagans than the cop. So we are laughing at the fool as he refuses to go on over and fuck Ms Ekland, that he can’t enjoy ogling the teen girls leaping naked over the bonfire, or offer to towel off the busty Ms Pitt, or even to get a clue. Thus, we can have no sense of the wrongness he feels he’s seeing, or the threat, and fear for the ‘madness’ of what is going on in this isle.

Not sure what writer Anthony Scheaffer had in mind. He might himself have been mocking the traditional Catholic, he might have considered the story prophetic at a time of rising paganism, back to nature movements, and the collapse of worship at traditional churches. Movie audiences would have been almost all boomers, hippies and the like, who had cheered the sexually promiscuous Dracula and mocked the virginal boyfriends in the Hammer films. But this makes the movie a more intellectual game, and to pitch us over to the islanders’ way of seeing things would require a total rewrite, letting us in on the secret from the start, and seeing the cop as a potential threat, and the game as dangerous if he manages to get back to the mainland and expose them.

Anyway – you see that act 3 is very short, and there’s very little that happens after the twist. Basically: he gets stripped, washed, and taken to the effigy, and burnt alive.

(26 January 2009)

Our Man in Havana

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Our Man in Havana another Carol Reed movie, from the Graham Greene novel and screenplay. Satire of cold war made in late 1950s – by the time they made it, the Cuban revolution had come, so they had to add a disclaimer before the titles.

Cuba, late 50s: Alec Guiness is a vacuum salesman who doesn’t make enough money to give his teenage daughter the rich life he wants for her. His wife has left them long ago.

He is offered the job of being a spy in Cuba for extra money, and for the sake of his daughter he agrees, only after his friend tells him he can just invent all the reports and agents who are supplying him with information.

At first it’s a big joke, and he enjoys it. The service pays his entry into the country club, his daughter gets a horse, and he’s on top of the world. But then he takes things a bit too far, drawing ‘secret military installations’ based on parts of his vacuum cleaners.

British intelligence takes this serious, and sends him a secretary, radioman, they want photos of the installations, etc. The Other Side also are spying on him, and they believe all this too, because british intelligence does. Before he knows it people are getting killed, and his own life is in danger. Somehow he must get out of it. He makes a clean confession to his secretary (with whom he’s fallen in love) and avenges the death of his friend, before being expelled from Cuba.

Upon returning to London, expecting a long prison term for treason, he is shocked to find himself promoted, given an official decoration, and the whole thing hushed up – nobody wants to admit they were fooled by a vacuum cleaner salesman. He sends his daughter to Switzerland finishing school, and goes off to marry his secretary.

It’s cute, but the best moments are the scenes where he goes to avenge his friend. Carol Reed shows himself far more sure of himself in directing suspense than comedy. The comedy itself is typically british, rather dry, restrained, no Jim Carrey-style broad slapstick, no fart jokes, no cursing, no pratfalls.

Shot in Cinemascope in black and white on soundstages with some exteriors done in what looks like a Caribbean country. The dvd unfortunately doesn’t capture the black and white correctly, scenes shift from bluish to beige-ish, which is distracting.

Guiness is good as always but it’s Ernie Kovacs as the hated ‘red butcher’ police captain who steals the picture.

It’s odd but 20 years or so later Alec Guiness would star in a series of television series as George Smiley, the master spy of John Lecarre.

She left them because she’s fed up with poverty?

It’s very strange – and written by an obviously older man, no younger man or woman would have written it this way. Guiness has been left by his wife, years ago, for no good reason that we learn. And secretary’s husband left her years ago for no good reason too. So they are both abandoned but still married with no idea where their spouses are. And at the end of the story they walk off hand in hand.

(written around 9 March 2009)