Figures in a Landscape (1970)

          Any sketch of Figures in a Landscape is sure to intrigue adventurous cinefiles. Starring Robert Shaw, who also wrote the script, and the inimitable Malcolm McDowell, this cerebral action film was directed by the esteemed Joseph Losey, and it enigmatically depicts the travails of two men who run through rugged terrain while unnamed aggressors pursue them in a helicopter. All of this is photographed, with considerable artistry, in glorious widescreen. Alas, the gulf between the metaphorical masterpiece this description conjures in the imagination of the prospective viewer and the actual film is substantial. Figures in a Landscape is everything you might want it to be, and so much less.

          On the plus side, the film delivers one of Shaw’s most animalistic performances. (Rare is the project in which McDowell seems like the most restrained actor onscreen.) Additionally, some scenes have the intended quality of savage beauty, as when the two actors run from the helicopter while it buzzes them on a grassy hillside—the viewer can plainly see McDowell and Shaw in dangerous proximity to spinning rotor blades. On the minus side, Figures in a Landscape is excessively cryptic, because very few of the plot’s elements are explained. Yes, one can play all sorts of interpretive games with Figures in a Landscape, but there’s a fine line between creating mysterious art and simply befuddling viewers.

          Given the givens, a recitation of the plot is somewhat pointless, but at least the task can be completed quickly. When the movie opens, Ansell (McDowell) and MacConnachie (Shaw) are shown running through remote fields and hills with their clothes in tatters and their hands tied behind their backs. We learn very little about how they landed in this situation, though we do see the duo pursued by gun-toting mystery men in a helicopter. MacConnoachie, a rough-hewn war veteran, hopes to ditch the weak Ansell, but then—once circumstances allow the men to free themselves and secure weapons—Ansell gains possession of important resources. They press on together, surviving close calls with the helicopter and even encountering citizens and soldiers of the unnamed land through which they’re traveling, until forming a plan to storm their enemy’s stronghold.

          Even though Shaw delivers some lengthy monologues about his character’s wife, the lack of explanation for the characters’ predicament is maddening. As such, what Figures in a Landscape offers is atmosphere and intensity. The film is consistently eerie, thanks in part to the taut score by Richard Rodney Bennett, and the leading actors play moments quite well even if the sum is less than the parts. Obviously, viewers willing to fill in the blanks—or to let the blanks be—will derive more from the experience of Figures in a Landscape than those hoping for conventional pleasures. 

Figures in a Landscape: FUNKY

O Lucky Man! (1973)

          Throughout film history, noteworthy actor/director collaborations have produced fascinating results. Ford and Wayne. Fellini and Mastroianni. Scorsese and De Niro. Then there are collaborations on the order of a three-film cycle that British director Lindsay Anderson made with Malcolm McDowell. In if . . . (1968), O Lucky Man!, and Brittania Hospital (1982), McDowell plays a character named Mick Travis, although the films are not linked by narrative continuity. The character is more of a concept representing something about the identity of the average UK citizen, and Anderson drops the concept into whatever scenario each movie explores. Whereas the first and last films in the cycle are relatively straightforward allegories about specific institutions (namely boarding schools and hospitals), O Lucky Man is the cinematic equivalent of a sprawling absurdist novel. By turns, the picture is a comedy, a drama, a fantasy, a musical, a satire, and an impossible-to-classify experiment.

          The movie doesn’t work in any conventional sense, and it’s laughably overlong at nearly three hours. Yet O Lucky Man! is skillfully made on a scene-to-scene basis, and the gonzo extremes of the storytelling produce a few memorable moments. Trying to parse what it all means, however, seems a sure path to madness.

          The movie opens with a black-and-white prologue presented like a short silent film—wearing heavy makeup and a cartoonish moustache, McDowell plays a South American laborer who gets caught stealing beans from a coffee farm and has his hands amputated. Next, Anderson cuts to a recording studio, where real-life British musician Alan Price (formerly of blues-rock band the Animals) leads his group through an on-camera performance of the film’s ironic theme song. And then the story proper begins, with Mick Travis graduating from a training program to become a coffee salesman. By this point, the basic mode of the film is set. Anderson uses vignettes of Price singing tunes in order to bridge episodes of Mick experiencing peculiar adventures, and the tone of the movie shifts, often quite shockingly, from episode to episode.

          Running throughout the piece is a generalized quality of social satire, since people in the movie don’t act like normal human beings. Adding yet another layer to the overall artificiality is Anderson’s trope of cutting to black not only between scenes but also during scenes. In many ways, O Lucky Man! feels like the sort of thing a first-year student at film school might make before realizing that resonant content usually delivers stronger results than insouciant affectations. That said, there’s something admirable about the youthful zest in Anderson’s experimentation, though his camerawork and dramaturgy are conventional. At times, the movie seems at war with itself from a stylistic perspective, but it’s just as possible that Anderson envisioned chaos as his guiding aesthetic. For instance, several actors—including the great Sir Ralph Richardson—appear throughout the movie playing multiple roles, even though McDowell only interacts with them as Mick Travis.

          Listing some of the random images in the picture should give a sense of its bizarre sprawl. On one of his sales stops, Mick attends a stag party where cheerful attendees demand to see the “chocolate sandwich,” an onstage sexual encounter between a black man and two white ladies. Mick volunteers for a medical experiment, only to flee when he discovers that the head of a fellow volunteer has been grafted onto the body of a sheep. Mick stumbles onto a military installation, where he’s violently interrogated while a vendor casually sells tea to his torturers. Mick romances a young woman (Helen Mirren) whose father (Richardson) is a super-wealthy businessman, and a job opening emerges at the father’s company when an executive jumps through an office window to his death dozens of stories below. Other items in O Lucky Man! include a blackface sequence, a conspiracy to obliterate African rebels with nerve gas, a judge who enjoys S&M, and a bit during which the lyrics to one of Price’s songs appear onscreen in multiple languages.

          O Lucky Man! is a colossally weird film, but at the same time it’s so deliberate and formal that it lacks the abandon of, say, a proper Ken Russell phantasmagoria. It’s simultaneously insane and tame. FYI, McDowell receives onscreen credit for coming up with the idea for O Lucky Man! One can only imagine how such an idea might have been articulated.

O Lucky Man!: FREAKY

Aces High (1976)

Stuck somewhere between old-fashioned melodrama and modern realism, this adaptation of the R.C. Sherriff play Journey's End explores the horrors of war through the relationship between a cynical veteran officer and a naïve new recruit. Although Sherriff’s play concerns infantrymen, the reconfigured Aces High instead follows pilots in the Royal Flying Corps, the World War I predecessor to the RAF. (Screenwriter Howard Barker also integrated elements from an RFC flyer’s memoirs.) The story begins at the elite Eton school, where Major John Gresham (Malcolm McDowell) speaks to a graduating class that includes Stephen Croft (Peter Firth), whose sister is Gresham ’s girlfriend. Because of this connection, Croft requests assignment to Gresham ’s unit once he’s commissioned as an officer. Yet the wide-eyed Croft is disillusioned to discover that Gresham is actually an embittered alcoholic with little interest in building emotional bonds because of the high fatality rate among new pilots. The picture comprises scenes of Croft trying to ingratiate himself to his senior officers, interspersed with dogfights in which the Brits battle Germans in the skies over France. While the underlying material is basically sound, Aces High is lifeless. McDowell’s interest in his performance seems to wane periodically, and Firth lacks a leading man’s charisma. Most of their costars are equally indifferent and/or unimpressive, so only Christopher Plummer—as the genteel commanding officer of the flying unit—lends humanity to the proceedings. And while it’s true that some of the dogfights are dynamic, the aerial scenes in Aces High rely too heavily on cheap-looking special effects including stilted rear-projection shots. The post-production shortcuts are a shame, because other physical elements, such as costuming and set design, are persuasive.

Aces High: FUNKY

The Passage (1979)

          Yet another lurid adventure flick set in occupied Europe during World War II, The Passage is mildly fascinating for what it lacks—depth and restraint. The plot is so thin that it can be described in one sentence without excluding any significant details: Members of the French resistance ask a farmer living near the French-Spanish border to help an American scientist and his family reach safety while a psychotic SS officer chases after them. That’s the whole storyline, give or take a couple of incidental characters, and the preceding synopsis also describes nearly everything we learn about the characters. Especially considering that the script was written by a novelist adapting his own work—a gentleman named Bruce Nicolaysen—it’s astonishing to encounter a narrative this underdeveloped.

          Furthermore, director J. Lee Thompson, a veteran who by this point in his career seemed content cranking out mindless potboilers, lets actors do whatever the hell they want. In some cases, as with sexy supporting player Kay Lenz, this translates to bored non-acting, and in others, as with main villain Maclolm McDowell, the permissiveness results in outrageous over-acting. Alternating between bug-eyed malevolence and effeminate delicacy, McDowell presents something that’s not so much a performance as a compendium of bad-guy clichés; he’s entertaining in weird moments like his revelation of a swastika-festooned jockstrap, but it seems Thompson never asked McDowell to rein in his flamboyance.

          That said, The Passage is quite watchable if one accepts the movie on its trashy terms. The simplistic plot ensures clarity from beginning to end (notwithstanding the lack of a satisfactory explanation for the scientist’s importance), and Thompson fills the screen with energetic camerawork, nasty violence, and, thanks to Lenz, gratuitous nudity. It should also be noted that leading man Anthony Quinn, who plays the farmer, invests his scenes with macho angst, and that costar James Mason, as the scientist, elevates his scenes with crisp diction and plaintive facial expressions. (The cast also includes Christopher Lee, as a gypsy helping the fugitives, and Patricia Neal, as the scientist’s frail wife.) Even more noteworthy than any of the performances, however, is the gonzo finale, during which Thompson’s style briefly transforms from indifferent to insane—for a few strange moments, The Passage becomes a gory horror show. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

The Passage: FUNKY

Royal Flash (1975)

          Fresh from his success with the two-part swashbuckling epic The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), mischievous director Richard Lester turned his attention to an original character created by his Musketeers screenwriter, George MacDonald Fraser. An Englishman whose work often combined history and high adventure, Fraser introduced the character of Sir Harry Paget Flashman in his 1969 novel Flashman. The first in a lengthy series of novels about the character, Flashman presented a 19th-century coward who by ironic circumstance stumbles into a reputation as a hero. A self-serving schemer who berates those beneath his station and swindles everyone above him, Flashman is a uniquely British contrivance whose identity is defined by the English class system. Given Lester’s penchant for insouciance, he was perfectly suited to putting the irreverent character onscreen.

          Unfortunately, miscasting proved the movie’s undoing: Lester gambled by hiring Malcolm McDowell, the gifted actor best known for his disturbing turn in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), but McDowell made Flashman’s unbecoming qualities far too believable. As he connives women into his bed, flees danger, tricks others into fighting his battles, and whimpers at the slightest injury, the movie version of Flashman comes across not as a clever survivor but rather as a feckless weasel. Accordingly, it’s difficult to care whether he survives, just like it’s difficult to believe he’ll end up accomplishing anything worthwhile. Had Lester gone whole-hog with the comedic aspects of the picture, casting a funnyman like Peter Sellers, Royal Flash might have worked as a farce, but since the picture includes scenes of genuine danger, the sum effect is middling.

          It doesn’t help that the episodic plot, borrowed from Fraser’s second book in the series, Royal Flash (1970), is a tired riff on Anthony Hope’s classic novel The Prisoner of Zenda. As happens to the hero of Hope’s book, Flashman gets recruited to impersonate an endangered monarch in order to flush out assassins, so Flashman spends half the story trying to slip away from his dangerous assignment, and the other half reluctantly joining rebel forces fighting the people who enlisted Flashman in the first place. It’s all way too familiar, and the complicated story causes Royal Flash to sprawl over 102 minutes that feel like three hours.

          Still, costar Oliver Reed has a blast playing the German aristocrat who makes Flashman’s life hell, while Alan Bates savors a rare lighthearted role as a European who may or may not be Flashman’s ally. The production design is beautiful, with lots of desolate wintry fields and ornate European castles, and Lester stages action with his signature mix of slapstick and swordplay, an inimitable style no one has ever been able to replicate. Plus, in McDowell’s defense, he’s very funny playing a guttersnipe, and it’s not his fault Lester perversely elected to build the movie around a detestable characterization.

Royal Flash: FUNKY

Time After Time (1979)

          Boasting an outlandish premise culled form the worlds of history and literature, Time After Time marked the auspicious directorial debut of Nicholas Meyer, who mined similar territory as the novelist and screenwriter of The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1976). Whereas the earlier film imagined a relationship between Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes, Time After Time imagines one between legendary science-fiction author H.G. Wells and notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.

          The movie begins in Victorian England, when H.G. (Malcolm McDowell) discovers that one of his society friends is actually the Ripper. Eager to evade capture, Jack (David Warner) steals the time machine that wells built the basement of his London flat—in Time After Time, H.G. isn’t just a fantasist but also an inventor. Honor-bound to bring his onetime friend to justice, H.G. chases Jack through time to 1979 San Francisco. Once there, the 19th-century gentleman tries to navigate 20th-century culture, with sweetly overwhelmed bank clerk Amy (Mary Steenburgen) serving as his guide and eventual love interest.

          Working from an imaginative story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes, Meyer demonstrates all of his storytelling strengths: clever literary references, pithy light comedy, and pure escapist fun. Despite its preposterous storyline, Time After Time is thoroughly engrossing, an old-fashioned yarn with the classic formula of drama, romance, and thrills. The love story between Amy and H.G. is charming, because he’s a relic unprepared for the concept of women’s lib, and she’s a modern woman who swoons at his traditional manners. We believe they were meant for each other, just like we believe that Jack represents an even greater menace in modern times than he did in his own era: As he says in one of the picture’s best lines, “Ninety years ago I was a freak—today I’m an amateur.”

          Warner is elegantly menacing, creating several moments of genuine suspense because we believe him capable of horrific acts, and McDowell thrives in one of his few romantic leading roles. Plus, if his rapport with Steenburgen seems particularly convincing, there’s a reason: The costars married after completing the movie and were together for a decade. In another interesting footnote, Meyer recycled some unused bits of culture-clash comedy when he wrote the present-day scenes of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), which placed the crew of the Enterprise in, you guessed it, modern-day San Francisco.

Time After Time: GROOVY

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

          Laced with some of the most haunting images in cinema history, A Clockwork Orange cemented director Stanley Kubrick’s reputation as a misanthropic genius, even though the film’s nauseating violence is delivered hand-in-hand with pitch-black humor. A polarizing movie that turns some people off Kubrick forever, A Clockwork Orange is also a cult favorite that devotees return to again and again, despite (or perhaps because of) its gleeful depiction of a sociopath’s inner life. Adapted by Kubrick from a novel by Anthony Burgess, the movie depicts a horrific near-future Britain plagued by a random violence, and the worst offenders belong to an anarchistic street gang led by Alex (Malcolm McDowell). In one notorious scene, Alex and his “droogs” beat an old man while warbling “Singin’ in the Rain,” and in another, they assault and rape a woman with, among other implements, a giant pop-art penis sculpture. Dressed in matching white uniforms and black bowler hats, Alex and his droogs are like a roving art installation moving through Kubrick’s harrowing vision of psychedelic future in which youths drink at “milk bars” in between bouts of “the old ultraviolence.”
          The first half of the movie, showing Alex running amok and cheerfully embracing his psychological demons in caustic voiceover, is filled with clever imagery and deft wordplay; the second half of the movie, in which Alex is captured, tortured, and “reformed” by sadists including doctors who use him as a guinea pig for inhumane experiments, presents the shocking thesis that Alex’s giddy malevolence is child’s play compared to the clinical evil of “civilized” society. Every frame of A Clockwork Orange is deliberately provocative, and Kubrick wasn’t above using controversy to goose ticket sales, although the strategy somewhat backfired when the movie encountered difficulties during its British release. (After troubled individuals claimed the picture influenced their violence, Kubrick had the picture yanked from UK screens.) But even taking into account Kubrick’s hucksterism, A Clockwork Orange is a meticulously rendered piece of cinematic art, its power derived as much from Kubrick’s craftsmanship as from the innate vigor of the lurid storyline. Masterfully orchestrating contributions from cinematographer John Alcott, electronic-music composer Wendy Carlos, film editor Bill Butler, and others, Kubrick presents an overwhelming phantasmagoria of angst, dissent, rebellion, and violence, which helps explain why so many disaffected people connect with the picture.
          Ultimately, the film rises and falls on McDowell’s fearless performance. With one strategically placed false eyelash, he’s a nightmarish image while rampaging through the first half of the movie, and with his eyes propped open by metal clamps, he’s a pathetic victim in the second half. A Clockwork Orange typecast McDowell as a villain, which indicates the power of the performance but doesn’t suggest how entertaining and weirdly sympathetic Alex becomes in McDowell’s skilled hands.
          Abrasive, cruel, rude, and vulgar, A Clockwork Orange is so excessive that watching the movie for the first time is like getting bludgeoned, but it’s also one of the few truly unique narrative features ever made. It exists almost completely in its own context.

A Clockwork Orange: FREAKY

Caligula (1979)

Sleaze merchant Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, tried to buy credibility by financing a historical film about debauched Roman emperor Caligula, assembling a script by Gore Vidal and a cast including John Gielgud, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole. One suspects that Guccione sold the actors a bill of goods about making something provocative but respectable, sort of a randy I, Claudius; furthermore, Guccione had a strong precedent for his transition to the mainstream because his skin-trade competitor, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, produced Roman Polanski’s acclaimed film of Macbeth (1971). Alas, Guccione the pornographer trumped Guccione the patron of the arts, because the final film is as grotesque as anything that ever appeared in Penthouse, if not more so. Parsing Caligula to guess which bits were shot under the original auspices of making a “real” movie, it’s clear the project went off the rails pretty quickly, because even the straight dramatic scenes involving the principal actors are overwrought in terms of florid dialogue, undisciplined performances, and wall-to-wall ugliness. The bit in which a man’s penis is sliced off and fed to a dog is exactly as enjoyable as the scene of Caligula (McDowell) raping a Roman citizen’s virginal bride. (An equal-opportunity violator, Caligula also services the groom—with his fist.) Incest between Caligula and his sister (Mirren) gets plenty of screen time, as well. At least Gielgud and O’Toole exit before the film devolves into a stag reel, since their characters die early in the storyline. The behind-the-scenes story goes that after director Tinto Brass wrapped principal photography, Guccione decided Caligula wasn’t rough enough, so he recruited a cast of dwarves, grotesques, studs, and Penthouse Pets to shoot reel after reel of hardcore sex that was then intercut (often randomly) with the dramatic scenes. Vidal tried to get his name taken off the picture, and the leading actors were mortified that they couldn’t be removed from the monstrosity entirely. Genuinely vile from its first frame to its last, Caligula is morbidly fascinating as the most pornographic film ever made with name actors, but it’s about as fun as dentistry without anesthesia. FYI, there’s an R-rated version of the picture available on DVD, but what’s the point of that? The only reason to slog through this atrocity is to see how far Guccione really went when carving out his loathsome little niche of cinema history.

Caligula: SQUARE