Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Born to Kill


Born to Kill, 1947 U.S. RKO (83 minutes) directed by Robert Wise, written by Eve Green and Richard Macaulay; based on the novel Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn; features a kibitz track with Wise discussing the picture with film historian Eddie Muller.
A coolly attractive woman in Reno for a quickie divorce falls for a striking, intense man, but the character actors are what make this gothic noir marvel sparkle.
Divorcée Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) first meets Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) across a craps table. Wild aggressively pursues what he wants. Their paths cross again on a railway siding leaving town.
The former Mrs. Brent is game. True to his moniker, Wild embodies a passionate, unpredictable, aberrant sexuality that attracts the ironic, appraising Brent. She holds the world at bay with sharp tailoring, manicured syntax and a raised eyebrow.
Wild wastes no time shedding his scanty self-control when someone comes between him and a subject of his desire. A housemaid later observing him through the crack of a kitchen door sums up his grim focus: ‘His eyes get me: they run up and down you like a searchlight.’
They really do.                                         
Brent and Wild travel by train together to San Francisco where she has plans to marry steel magnate Fred Grover (Phillip Terry), all dahlings and highballs. Wild, set on making himself ‘a lot more than I am,’ marries Brent’s sweetly clueless sister Georgia (Audrey Long) in his pre-Brent meanwhile. Georgia is heiress to a San Francisco newspaper (Brent was adopted).
But the dark lees of Wild’s sociopathic past shadow him to San Francisco in the person of one Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak), a middle-aged, proverb-quoting and jovially venal private eye with a Central European accent. 
Walter Slezak as private investigator Albert Arnett in Born to Kill (1947). 
‘I am a man of integrity. But I am always ready to listen to an interesting offer,’ Arnett helpfully tells a potential client.
His client is Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), the Reno landlady of the murdered Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), one of Wild’s former girlfriends. Palmer’s girlish but fatal mistake was to make a psychopath jealous. Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett to investigate the young woman’s killing after Reno police seem to lose interest in the case.
Dramatic studio lighting illuminates Brent as it shrouds the energized Wild. His dark side draws her to him, but also makes the narrative wobble a bit because the psychosexual high jinx had to be muted in the era the film was made.
But any gothic excess is more than offset by an outstanding ensemble of character actors who bring the story off, from Slezak’s Ecclesiastes-quoting detective—‘I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets and he who falls beneath her spell has need of God’s mercy’—to Elisha Cook Jr., film noir’s perennial ‘scared little guy,’ as Mart Waterman, Wild’s best friend and facilitator.
Best of all is Esther Howard’s Mrs. Kraft, the middle-aged landlady to Reno divorcées and friend of the murdered woman. Mrs. Kraft braves middle age drinking beer with her girls and flirting with younger men. After she hires Arnett to find Palmer’s killer, she follows Arnett to San Francisco to make sure that her money is well spent. 
Esther Howard as Mrs. Frank in Born to Kill (1947).
Mrs. Kraft has more lines, fills in more blanks, and moves the plot along as well as a Shakespearean clown. Her scenes are fun to watch, whether boozily flirting and playing hearts with a bellhop, trying to escape a killer in the dunes (and proving handy with a hatpin), or having it out woman-to-woman with Brent.
Back projection, a technique common to films of this time, is notable in this film, with great shots of the neon-lit ‘Biggest Little City in the World’ seen at night from inside the train as Brent and Wild blow town. There also are lovely shots of long gone San Francisco cityscapes and street exteriors seen through the windows of Los Angeles studio set interiors.
The credits appear in the final frame against a fetishistic under-the-table still shot of a woman’s legs in sheer black hose and dark pumps. The woman, seated at an antique side table, wears a dark gown open from mid-thigh, her legs crossed right thigh over left, the lower part of the gown draped on the floor beneath the chair. 

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Getting back


Revanche (Getting Back) 2008 Austria Criterion (121 minutes) written and directed by Götz Spielmann.
The fates of two young couples collide in this modern folk tale when a daydreaming Viennese sad sack with a prostitute girlfriend tries to solve their existential problems by robbing a small town bank.
The story about these couples becomes a series of fascinating character studies of the four individual people who comprise these relationships, as well as an aged widower farmer, one of the men’s grandfathers.
This is the first feature film of writer and director Götz Spielmann, an established Austrian playwright and stage director.
Spielmann said in an interview that his title Revanche has a double meaning in German. Like the expression ‘getting back’ in English, ‘revanche’ can convey the sense of ‘revenge’; it also contains the possibility of retrieving something lost or getting a second chance. Characters use the word ‘revenge’ several times during the movie, but in these instances they say the German word ‘rache’ (vengeance) rather than ‘revanche’.
Alex (Johannes Krisch, a veteran Austrian stage actor) is a porter at the Cinderella Club, a Viennese brothel. He and his girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko), one of the club’s top ‘madels,’ are deeply in love.
In love and trouble: Alex (Johannes Krisch) and Tamara (Irina Potapenko) in Revanche (2008).
Alex has a minor criminal record and jail time which seem more a product of bad luck and poor judgment than criminal intent. He is not a ‘bad’ guy. He works hard on the farm of his maternal grandfather, ‘Old Hausner’ (Hannes Thanheiser). Alex’s good intentions and best efforts just never add up to putting him up on the straight-and-narrow.
Tamara, an undocumented Russian sex worker and illegal alien from Ukraine, appears to keep her life together by compartmentalizing its radically different parts and living them one at a time: her relationship with Alex, the daily sexual humiliation she experiences on the job, her religion, and regular telephone calls home to her family.
For Tamara, her job seems to come down to partying with men she does not have to like, mildly anaesthetized with drugs and alcohol. She ‘performs’ and has desultory oral sex, neither of which appear to her really to count; the money is better than she ever made before, and the work is not too demanding. But Alex knows that very shortly the club management will ‘break’ her: the party will end and she won’t be able to leave.
Tamara (Irina Potapenko) 'performing' for a client at the Cinderella Club.
Tamara tells Alex that she needs $30,000 to buy her freedom from Cinderella Club owner Konecny (Hanno Poschl). Alex needs €80,000 to buy a partnership in a bar on Ibiza in Spain’s Balearic Islands to spirit himself and Tamara away from Austria and the Viennese underworld.
During a chance stop at a Volksbank branch in a town near his grandfather’s farm, Alex imagines what little risk it would take to stick-up this folksy-friendly bank hard and fast before they knew what hit them. He would use an unloaded gun to make sure no one could get hurt. He would solve all his and Tamara’s money problems in one morning’s quick work.
‘Nothing can go wrong,’ Alex repeatedly reassures his disbelieving Tamara.
In this town, an intense young policeman sensitive to parental pressure to get on with his life dreams of making a dramatic arrest that will advance his career.
Robert Kargl (Andreas Lust), the fresh-faced, earnest cop, and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss), the owner and manager of a grocery store, are an attractive couple with good jobs and a nice new house, but they are frustrated by their inability to conceive a child. Their new nursery was finished before Susanne’s miscarriage, itself a ‘fluke’ because Robert is impotent.
A perfect life: Susanne (Ursula Strauss) and Robert Kargl (Andreas Lust) in Revanche (2008).
Against his better judgment, Alex lets Tamara go with him when he does the bank job. She stays in the car on the getaway route, sitting in the passenger seat, praying in a whisper in Russian with her eyes closed while he disappears up the alley.
At this moment, Officer Kargl, rounding the corner on a routine foot patrol, notices a vehicle illegally parked and taps on the passenger side window to tell the woman in the car that she cannot park there.
Robert walks to the front of the car after the passenger, a Slav speaking broken German, tells him that she does not have identification—and just as Alex nearly bounds back around the corner. 
The events which follow draw the characters together in unexpected ways designed to pinpoint each character’s soft spot.
Robert (Andreas Lust) and Alex (Johannes Krisch) in Revanche (2008)
One could object that it would not take long for the Austrian equivalent of the FBI working the case to solve the bank robbery and its outcome, but this story is not a police procedural. Spielmann said in an interview that the story he had in mind developed from a Jungian idea that one’s challenges in life arise psychically from what one has to learn as a human being.
Thus the story resolves more like a folk tale, in a ‘house at the end of the road,’ and it is in this way that each character ‘gets back.’
One of the most notable effects of this well made film is that the actors carry the drama without a clutter of music, as though on stage. Other than club music in the background in scenes at the Cinderella and actor Hannes Thanheiser’s improvisations on an accordion as the old farmer, Spielmann lets the actors’ Austrian dialect and broken German, the birds, the wind, nature and night speak for themselves.
Hannes Thanheiser as Old Hausner, playing for Ursula Strauss' Susanne in Revanche (2008)
Also, rather than show his audience plain or even telling objects they already have seen, such as photographs, Spielmann shows his actors’ faces responding to these things, letting his actors carry the drama.
The brothel scenes were shot in an actual club using its employees as extras. The women are almost always shot low looking up at their male customers and males who work at the club.
The sets in the country, especially on Old Hausner’s farm, are lit and the frames composed like classic Netherlandish genre paintings.
Included in CD set is Fremdland (Foreign Land), 1984, Spielmann’s first short film. A small boy has been sent to live and work for the summer on his family farm in the Austrian Alps alone with an intense, repressed farmhand. Dry—and spooky—as this may sound, this forty-three minute film draws one in by telling an intense and intimate, pitch perfect story in pictures.
The house at the end of the road in Revanche (2008).

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Moon tow


門徒 [Moon tow—Cantonese; Mén Tú—pinyin] (Protégé) 2007 Hong Kong (108 minutes) written and directed by Derek Yee [Yee Tung-Shing]
This is a good local story about heroin trafficking in Hong Kong, in Cantonese but aimed at an international audience.
The movie is something like a Hong Kong version of the 1989 BBC mini-series Traffik (Traffic 2000 U.S.), seen through the eyes of an undercover Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officer. It looks at the narcotics trafficking ‘industry’ more than the politics, as well as people the industry affects: addicts, police, and various levels of heroin traffickers, from Hong Kong ‘kitchens’ where wholesalers convert pure import for distribution to local dealers, to a warlord opium producer in Asia’s Golden Triangle.
The story reportedly is based on the experiences of Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officers. The narrative incorporates an engaging variety of authentic details involving the production, transportation, and distribution of heroin. There is no stylized action film ‘action’ such as acrobatic martial arts and ‘endless clip’ automatic weapons fire.
The film opens with a young uniformed policeman’s meditation on drug users. We then watch the same man, ‘Nick’ [Lee Chi-Lik] (Daniel Wu), in business casual attire quarterback a complex drug exchange on the fly and under police surveillance while talking to Narcotics Bureau police on a separate ‘burner’ phone. The quick-paced sequence is well-composed, deftly edited, and realistic.
Nick is an undercover officer in the Narcotics Bureau, a loner whose dangerous work is his life. He apparently has worked undercover his entire police career of seven years. In this time, he has become the right hand man—the ‘moon tow,’ or ‘protégé,’ of the title—to Lin Quin (Andy Lau), who controls half of Hong Kong’s heroin trade and whom Hong Kong law enforcement authorities want to bring down.
Quin’s mantra is ‘Never take risks.’ He is a businessman like Tony Soprano, operating every day in an environment in which the downside of the lucrative financial gain his business realizes is a long prison term if caught and convicted. And like Soprano, Quin has personal and family issues: the gangster is a diabetic in dire need of a kidney transplant, with a demanding wife (Anita Yuen) and a difficult tomboy teenager, among other things.
Nick’s boss, Police Superintendent Miu Chi-Wah (Derek Yee, also the film’s director), and other higher-ups praise Nick’s work. Nick’s dilemma, as a straight cop without any apparent proclivities for acquiring money and power or using drugs, is that his life revolves around ‘industry’ people he has got close to but ultimately is setting up to bust, and addicts in the mean streets where he lives to maintain his cover. 
As the story progresses, Nick gets involved with Fan [Pang Yuk-Fun] (Zhang Jingchu), a neighbor with an adorable toddler, separated from her husband. Fan is a heroin addict. Nick discovers her condition when they first have sex, when his fingertips find lesions which the camera shows us on the back of her legs behind her knees where she has shot up.
Nick is truly a good guy. The story plays out around his young man’s passion and inexperience, large enough to take on the seemingly impossible in shouldering a risky role in Hong Kong’s ‘war on drugs,’ and in trying to help a vampire-like neighbor with a small child ‘kick’ her taste for blood.
Quin’s deteriorating health and his questions about Nick’s loyalty after Hong Kong customs police conduct a ham-handed bust of Quin’s kitchen accelerate his need to designate a successor.
Note to police (and warning to squeamish viewers): do not fire live ammunition at close range at steel doors, especially with colleagues standing nearby; and do not reach through holes on steel doors when you do not know who, and with what implement, is on the other side.
Nick accompanies Quin, his family and amorous single sister-in-law (He Mei-tian) on a trip ‘to pay tribute to Buddha’ in Thailand, where Nick will be either ‘made’ or made simply to disappear.
In the vicinity of Mae Sai, a small town in the heart of the Golden Triangle, near the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos, Quin and Nick ride elephants to meet the genial drug warlord General Chachai (Nirut Sirijanya). The three discuss the industry Big Picture with the aid of ‘market research’ provided by the good offices of the United Nations in its 2005 World Drug Report.
The general notes that surrounding governments have begun to crack down on the industry. He points out a crater near his compound where rival international drug producers dropped a 2000-pound bomb to ‘make a point’ that the Golden Triangle has seen its day. Fields of American-style corn attest to the fact that foreign do-gooders now overpay farmers in relative terms to grow alternative crops. The general also is aware that the market is trending away from needle-injected heroin, toward psychotropic drugs such as Ecstasy and K (ketamine).
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Fan’s estranged, ne’er-do-well junkie husband (Louis Koo playing a Toshiro Mifune-like rogue) tracks Fan down house-sitting for Nick and trying to kick her heroin habit.
Without unnecessarily spoiling plot turns, the significance of Nick eventually sending Fan’s husband to Singapore as a drug courier is that this country executes people caught bringing in even relatively small amounts of illegal narcotics (at that time, 15 grams had been the heroin limit, though the law appears since to have eased). 
The story comes full circle to the young uniformed policeman’s meditations on why people use drugs; though this full circle begins a new cycle.