Northern Lights (1978)

          Earnest, humane, and political, indie drama Northern Lights tells the story of how Norwegian-immigrant farmers organized in North Dakota circa 1916 as a means of fighting back against abuse by politically connected businessmen. Codirected by first-timers John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, the picture has a miniscule budget, simplistic black-and-white cinematography, and a general paucity of visual spectacle beyond panoramic shots of wintry North Dakota skylines. Yet as is true of many respectable indies, the limitations of Northern Lights are also virtues. This is a story about small people living on the fringes of civilization, so the rudimentary presentation suits the material. Moreover, Hanson and Nilsson focus on performance, letting the faces of their actors carry the muted emotions of the storyline—another suitable choice, given the stoicism of the population being portrayed. In every important way, the filmmakers strive to put viewers inside the day-to-day grind of a specific population.

          Ray (Robert Behling) is a struggling young farmer eager to marry his sweetheart, Inga (Susan Lynch), but life has a nasty way of interrupting. Work, the death of Inga’s father, bad weather, and the rising conflict between farmers and businessmen all force delays of the couple’s nuptials. Meanwhile, life in general becomes more and more difficult with each passing month for the members of Ray’s community. Ray’s partner, John (Joe Spano), withholds an entire year’s crop of wheat after businessmen artificially depress prices, thereby creating privation on a point of professional pride. Not coincidentally, Ray gets drawn deeper and deeper into labor organization, especially after he watches a bank mercilessly foreclose on a friend’s farm. Northern Lights is partly a catalog of suffering, partly a hero’s journey in which Ray evolves from follower to leader, and partly a tribute to the tenacity of immigrants pulling a living out of rugged terrain. Northern Lights is also a memory piece of sorts, since the movie is framed by sequences of a 94-year-old man discovering Ray’s decades-old journal and transforming that journal into a book (which, ostensibly, provides the story of the movie).

          If all of this makes Northern Lights sound ambitious, that’s not precisely accurate. Although the movie dramatizes a large span of time, its scope is intimate—and that’s the beauty and frustration of the picture. Viewed favorably, Northern Lights wedges an epic story into a manageable shape. Viewed critically, Northern Lights is like a sketch for a never-completed painting. For every single thing the film accomplishes, some other thing is merely implied. This is not to say the movie feels incomplete, because it does not—but rather to say that Northern Lights epitomizes both the strengths and weaknesses of DIY filmmaking. A bigger version of this story wouldn’t feel as personal, but a bigger version would provide a more holistic examination of the historical events depicted onscreen.

Northern Lights: FUNKY

Bush Mama (1979)

          Context is everything. When it was released in 1979, indie drama Bush Mama was part of the “L.A. Rebellion” movement, which involved black filmmakers providing unvarnished glimpses at street life. Like the most celebrated example of this movement, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (which was completed in 1975 but not commercially screened until 2007), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama explodes with cultural authenticity and sociopolitical anger, so its myriad flaws, ranging from grubby black-and-white photography to a meandering screenplay, matter less than the relevance of the material. In the context of the late ’70s, Bush Mama might have seemed revelatory. Seen today, it comes across as amateurish and repetitive, even though issues explored in the film are just as important as they were in 1979, if not more so.

          Set in an L.A. neighborhood plagued by crime and poverty, Bush Mama concerns Dorothy (Barbara O. Jones), a wife and mother struggling to get by. Her husband, T.C. (Johnny Weathers), is a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD. Cops arrest T.C. on bogus charges, and he gets sent to prison. Then Dorothy must not only care for their child, but also decide what to do once she learns she’s pregnant again. Much of the film cuts back and forth between realistic scenes of Dorothy at home and stylized scenes of T.C. in prison. The Dorothy scenes feature clashes with social workers and encounters with friends who are similarly bedeviled by problems stemming from systemic racism. The T.C. scenes have a beat-poetry feel, with inmates delivering long speeches about oppression from behind bars. Taken together, these plot threads explain how and why Dorothy becomes radicalized, thereby articulating the underlying ethos of the L.A. Rebellion itself.

          Viewed as an artifact of vintage political art, Bush Mama is endlessly interesting because it juxtaposes humanistic and purely rhetorical elements. Viewed as proper cinema, Bush Mama much less impressive—though it must be noted that, like Killer of Sheep, this is essentially a student film. Gerima made Bush Mama while completing his MFA at UCLA circa 1975, four years before the movie gained a theatrical release. Perhaps that’s why some of the most effective moments in Bush Mama are the simplest. Whenever Gerima trains his camera on Jones quietly existing, the weight on her character’s shoulders painfully visible, he expresses as much truth as he does in long monologues.

Bush Mama: FUNKY

J-Men Forever (1979)

          Peter Bergman and Phil Proctor, two of the guys from counterculture comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre, wrote this silly flick marrying a new soundtrack (and a few new scenes) to selected clips from old Republic serials. Hence the juxtaposition of Captain America, Captain Marvel, Rocket Man, and other characters with verbal jokes about sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. There’s a plot, something about an evil DJ called the Lightning Bug trying to take over the world with mind-controlling rock music, but the narrative is just a way of stringing gags together. To Bergman’s and Proctor’s credit, they mostly avoid offensive and/or scatological humor, so J-Men Forever is family-friendly, or at least as family-friendly as a flick about dope-smoking government agents can be. Are most of the jokes dumb and forgettable? Of course. But criticizing the movie for failing to meet standards to which it never aspired seems pointless. Better to contextualize this as a (very) minor link in the chain stretching from What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) to Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and beyond. Repurposing old movie clips may not be the most imaginative style of storytelling, but it’s not the least imaginative, either.

          Bergman and Proctor play “J-Men” in black-and-white clips that are shot to resemble the style of the Republic footage with which new scenes are intercut. They send agents (in the form of Captain America, etc.) to battle the Lightning Bug in his many guises. As for the jokes, the following should tell the tale: “You don’t know disco from Crisco!” “Good morning, Los Angeles, this is K-R-A-P!” And so on. The heroes’ office is in the “J-Men’s Room” of the Pentagon (in “Washington AC/DC”), and instead of yelling “Shazam!” Billy Batson shouts “Sh Boom,” triggering a cover of the old tune “Sh Boom Sh Boom.” The point seems not to satirize the Republic clips, but rather to use the clips as a means of taking the piss out of old-fashioned sensibilities in general. Fair enough. But seeing as how the pop-culture landscape of the ’70s also included National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live and the like, it’s easy to see why the gently derisive J-Men Forever failed to garner much attention.

J-Men Forever: FUNKY

Malcolm X (1972)

          By translating The Autobiography of Malcolm X into a visual document, filmmaker Arnold Perl performed a useful historical service, condensing and contextualizing the turbulent life that transformed troubled orphan Malcolm Little into black-power activist Malcolm X and religious messenger el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Within a tight 91-minute running time, Perl covers many of the important periods in his subject’s life, tracking Malcolm through a rough childhood and adolescence marked by abandonment and crime; a long period serving as an articulate emissary for controversial Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad; an incendiary stretch preaching racial revolution and vilifying the “white devil”; and finally the crucially important final period when, after making a pilgrimage to Mecca, he sought to reconcile his supercharged political rhetoric with the peaceful teachings of his religion.

          Framing the whole story, of course, is the grim reality that Malcolm was assassinated, so instead of being a hagiographic tribute to a mythic figure, Malcolm X represents a passionate delivery of the man’s message. Perl’s portrayal embraces all of the changes and contradictions that made Malcolm intriguing, and this portrayal underscores that Malcolm possessed one of the most agile minds in the history of American political life.

          The film opens on a somewhat heavy-handed note, with Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” (the lyrics of which describe the aftermath of a lynching) playing over a black screen. The opening salvo continues with Malcolm’s famous “by any means necessary” remark, as well as an epithet-filled spoken-word piece by the Last Poets that, prophetically, sounds a lot like rap. Once Perl gets into proper storytelling, he juxtaposes short excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as recited in voiceover by James Earl Jones) with a voluminous amount of archival footage. Sometimes, Perl illustrates points with newsreel shots of, say, civil unrest, but mostly he puts Malcolm onscreen.

          Appearing in public and on TV, Malcolm communicates with supreme eloquence and power, whether he’s expressing deference to Elijah Muhammed, disdain for whites, or a sophisticated synthesis of his past belief systems. As in real life, the Malcolm at the end of the story is the truly dangerous man, not because of his ability to drive people apart—anyone can do that—but because of his ability to bring people together. While stopping short of lodging a formal accusation, the film advances the prevailing theory that the Nation of Islam was responsible for Malcolm’s death. The notion that a black revolutionary might have died at black hands reaffirms the eternal truth that anyone with real power to alter the status quo exercises that power at his or her own peril.

          Prior to the release of Spike Lee’s epic biopic Malcolm X (1992), this documentary likely represented the fairest and fullest screen portrayal of its subject, and the existence of Lee’s movie has done nothing to diminish the documentary’s significance. Indeed, Warner Bros. (which released both projects) has on occasion packaged the movies together for home-video consumption. The films complement each other well, with Lee’s picture offering a personal view of a heroic figure and Perl’s documentary letting Malcolm speak his own truth. Accolades received by the 1972 Malcolm X during its original run include an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

Malcolm X: GROOVY

Hot Tomorrows (1977)

          Made as his MFA thesis film while Martin Brest studied at the American Film Institute, Hot Tomorrows has many of the silly hallmarks one associates with student films, such as an angst-ridden protagonist and pretentious flourishes reflecting the influence of classic European art cinema. However, the picture also demonstrates many of the things that Brest did so well in his subsequent Hollywood films of the ’70s and ’80s, notably offbeat characterizations and sly humor. (Let’s not talk about Brest’s dubious latter-day pictures, because if you’re a fan of 1992’s Scent of a Woman or 2003’s Gigli, we probably don’t share the same taste.) Shot in grungy black and white at unusual locations throughout Los Angeles, Hot Tomorrows is a dark comedy about a transplanted New Yorker trying to make it as a writer. Fixated on death, he spends a strange evening escorting a buddy from back home around the city, eventually landing in such unlikely places as a nightclub featuring weird performance artists and a mortuary that serves free coffee to the after-hours crowed. The plot also involves a cranky little person played by Hervé Villechaize and the life-sized figure of death—a skeleton in a black robe holding a scythe—that the protagonist uses for decoration in his living room. At various times, Hot Tomorrows is deep, funny, tragic, and weird.

          Michael (Ken Lerner) is a gloomy youth preoccupied with memories of his dead aunt, so he spends his time writing depressing stories and taking night classes exploring Eastern theories about death. Louis (Ray Sharkey), just in from the Bronx, isn’t having any of this. Protesting in his loud dese-dem-dose accent, Louis says it’s time to ditch the heavy stuff and party. Unfortunately, both guys are broke, so they best they can do is bum around town and hope to stumble into something fun. Michael takes his pal to a club called the Paradise, where a strange musical troupe (played by an early version of nerd-pop band Oingo Boingo) performs. At the club, Michael and Louis befriend fellow Bronx guy Tony (Victor Argo) and his diminutive friend Alberict (Villechaize). Peculiar misadventures ensue. Considering his inexperience at the time, Brest does a remarkable job pulling naturalistic performances from his cast and unifying them into a cohesive style. This movie’s at its best during simple scenes of people talking, whether they’re bonding or fighting, and this movie’s at its worst whenever Brest gets arty with flashbacks, musical numbers, and narration. As gifted as Brest is behind the camera, it’s telling that he’s only written two of his subsequent features, adapting the wonderful Going in Style (1979) from Edward Cannon’s story and crafting the not-so-wonderful Gigli by himself.

Hot Tomorrows: FUNKY

Tomorrow (1972)

          Texan playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote was involved with two of Robert Duvall’s most important acting performances, his early breakthrough appearance as mysterious recluse Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and his Oscar-winning portrayal of faded country singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies (1983). Between those projects, the duo collaborated on Tomorrow, the screenplay for which Foote adapted from the William Faulkner story of the same name. It’s a minor piece, rightfully overshadowed by Duvall’s mainstream films of the same era, notably The Godfather (1971). Still, those who respect Duvall’s extraordinary talent and Foote’s homespun poetry can find much to appreciate here, because Tomorrow is a sincere character study exploring the repercussions of a simple man’s clumsy attempt at forming a human connection with a stranger.

          Shot in black and white and mostly set in and around a ramshackle sawmill that’s inactive during the off season, the picture betrays its theatrical origins—Foote’s first adaptation of the Faulker story was a play, which he expanded into the script for this project—and some viewers will find the experience of watching Tomorrow claustrophobic and dull. The characters in this piece are plain rural folks, and Duvall plays a man who mostly communicates through physical actions, drawling his sparse lines in a guttural monotone whenever he actually speaks. Yet while the accoutrements of the piece are specific, the themes are universal.

          Duvall plays Jackson Fentry, a man who has rarely ventured beyond his father’s farm until he takes a job as the winter caretaker for a sawmill located deep inside a thick forest. Claiming he doesn’t mind the prospect of spending months by himself in the woods, he’s in fact painfully lonely, so he welcomes the surprising arrival of Sarah Eubanks (Olga Bellin), a young pregnant woman who stumbles upon the mill one day. Abandoned by her husband and shunned by her parents, she’s even more alone in the world than Jackson. He provides shelter, and over the weeks preceding the arrival of her baby, they bond. Jackson proposes marriage, despite knowing that Sarah already has a husband somewhere. Thereafter, fate intervenes in cruel ways.

          The intimate scenes work best, with Duvall’s repressed primitivism balancing Bellin’s vulnerability and warmth—she comes across like a backwoods Blythe Danner. Scenes involving outsiders are almost as effective, because Foote articulates how Jackson tries to protect his newfound love, only to get harsh reminders of his powerlessness. The wraparound bits framing the story have less impact, and probably could have been discarded entirely, especially since they add another layer of sadness to a story that’s already downbeat. If only because Duvall is in nearly every scene, anchoring the film with intensity and emotional truthfulness, Tomorrow merits consideration as one of his key films, but it’s not for everyone.

Tomorrow: GROOVY

1980 Week: Raging Bull

          Alongside Nashville (1975), Martin Scorsese’s almost universally revered character study Raging Bull is one of the few “great” American movies that I simply don’t get. To be clear, I have no difficulty appreciating the film’s artistry, craftsmanship, intelligence, and passion—Scorsese obviously bled his soul into the very grain of this picture, letting his visual imagination run wild even as he wrestled with personal demons through the prism of professional boxer Jake LaMotta’s rise and fall. Intellectually, I understand that the movie is a significant accomplishment. Emotionally, the movie leaves me so cold that I get bored every time I try to watch the thing. Perhaps because Scorsese and screenwriters Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader elected not to illustrate the central character’s formative years, I can’t connect to the movie’s version of LaMotta. He comes across like an ignorant thug who surrounds himself with awful people, which means his adventures are unpleasant to watch and not, to my eyes, edifying.

          Robert De Niro’s leading performance is supremely committed, so the pain that LaMotta feels as he stumbles his way through life is palpable. Alas, because the pain is mostly self-inflicted, for reasons that utterly escape me, generating empathy is challenging. Compounded with the excruciating brutality of the boxing scenes and the numbing repetition of coarse language, the opacity of the leading character makes me feel like I’m the one receiving constant jabs and left hooks while the movie unfolds, rather than the onscreen pugilists. The funny thing is that I should love Raging Bull because artistically, chronologically, and thematically, it’s the apex of the grungy loser movies that flowered during the ’70s. Yet there’s a world of difference between the humanity of films along the lines of Fat City (1972), a boxing picture I enjoy much more, and the relentless ugliness of Raging Bull. I take it on faith that Scorsese knows whereof he speaks when depicting the anguished lives of Italian-Americans stuck in the quagmires of male identity and religious guilt, and I freely acknowledge that his various movies about New York underworld types speak to a lived experience far outside my own frame of reference.

          Yet at the same time, I look at the way I’ve made connections with movies about other cultures that are foreign to me, so I feel comfortable saying that the problem with some vintage Scorsese—and specifically with Raging Bull—runs deeper. I believe the right word is fetishism.

          It often seems as if Scorsese simply can’t tear his eyes away from scenes of thick-headed men destroying themselves, mistreating women, and starting pointless battles with enemies and friends alike. There’s more than a little bit of a pain-freak voyeur in Martin Scorsese. In the best of times, this tendency allows him to reveal truths in places other filmmakers find too frightening to explore. And, presumably, that’s what his advocates would say he does throughout Raging Bull. In any event, the unassailable elements of the movie include Michael Chapman’s muscular black-and-white photography, which is energized by Scorsese’s unexpected shifts in frame rates and his wizardly camera moves, as well as Thelma Schoonmaker’s meticulous editing. Viewed strictly from the perspective of how the filmmakers exploit and manipulate the very medium of film, Raging Bull is extraordinary. So let’s leave it at that.

Raging Bull: GROOVY

Effi Briest (1974)

          Watching this black-and-white period drama from iconoclastic German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I found myself getting pushed out of the story almost from the very first scenes. Since he usually shot his films in vibrant color, the choice to film Effi Briest in artsy monochromatic textures removed one of the tools Fassbinder customarily employed to create vivid realism. And while Fassbinder wasn’t averse to stylized compositions, many shots in Effi Briest put deliberate obstacles between the viewer and the subject, whether that means hiding actors behind gauzy curtains or peering at actors through mirrors and windows. Then there’s the peculiar rhythm of the picture’s storytelling. Quite frequently, Fassbinder halts scenes mid-conversation in order to fade to the next scene, interject a title card, or weave in narration. Seeing as how Effi Briest was adapted from a celebrated 19th-century German novel, Fassbinder may have felt obliged to include as much of the source material as possible. Furthermore, perhaps he wanted the style of Effi Briest to reflect a key tenet the original novel—the way social rules suppress emotion. Whatever his reasons, Fassbinder made a cold movie. It’s a respectable piece of work, no question, but it’s more of an intellectual exercise than a visceral experience.

          Based on Theodore Fontane’s 1894 novel, the picture tracks the life of an affluent young woman named Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) as she moves from her family’s home to her husband’s home. In clinical vignettes at the beginning of the picture, we learn about Effi’s various contradictions; for instance, she has little use for material things but demands only the best once she finds something she actually wants. Though only 17, the beautiful Effi accepts a marriage proposal from Baron Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck). Life with the Baron renders Effi into something of an art object, because he values propriety more than intimacy. So when Effi meets the charming Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel), she begins a friendship that leads inevitably to an affair. For the Baron, the shakeup in his marriage is a social inconvenience with minimal lasting repercussions, but for Effi, cuckolding her husband proves immeasurably damaging. Informing the storyline is the theme of repression causing misery among the ruling class. Also present is a component of modern-day feminism. Alas, the inherent irony of Effi Briest—a repressed film about repression—ensures that some viewers will have difficulty finding a way into the piece. Even appraising the acting is tricky. Fassbinder clearly asked his performers to underplay every moment, so the attractive visuals created by cinematographers Jürgen Jürges and Dietrick Lohmann sometimes carry more feeling than the portrayals.

Effi Briest: FUNKY

Winter Soldier (1972)

          While the Oscar-winning documentary Hearts and Minds (1974) is probably the definitive cinematic exploration of the Vietnam War to be released during the war, the lesser-known doc Winter Soldier is an important companion piece. Unfairly marginalized during its original release, Winter Soldier encapsulates a three-day press conference that Vietnam Veterans Against the War presented in Detroit in early 1971. During the event, dozens of vets spoke publicly about war crimes they had committed and/or observed in Southeast Asia, painting a horrific picture of U.S. troops murdering, raping, and torturing Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, sometimes with the tacit approval of officers and sometimes by direct command from superiors. Among the illusions the speakers tried to dispel was the notion that the U.S. military’s daily body counts included only combat personnel. According to the vets in Winter Soldier, even an infant killed by a bomb that a pilot dropped out of boredom was reported to HQ as a righteous “kill.”

          Given this film’s incendiary content, it’s remarkable that antiwar protestors failed to use Winter Soldier as a rallying point, and it’s telling that mainstream media ignored the movie, with all three TV networks refusing offers to air Winter Soldier. At the time this picture was released, huge swaths of America were still in denial about the nature of the Vietnam War. To be fair, the filmmaking collective that created Winter Soldier never intended to practice balanced journalism, per se. The film simply records testimony, along with evidence in the form of photos and film clips that soldiers brought home from Vietnam, with the goal of opening viewers’ eyes to war crimes. What’s more, the filmmakers take the stance that the soldiers giving testimony are themselves victims, having been indoctrinated during basic training to regard Asians as subhuman. This is one-sided agitprop, with the only dissenting voice being a black activist who argues that white soldiers are hypocrites for decrying racial violence abroad while ignoring racial injustice at home.

          Questions about its journalistic approach notwithstanding, Winter Soldier is powerful, especially considering that most the footage comprises talking heads. The deeds the speakers describe are shocking. Throwing people out of aircraft for kicks. Skinning victims to send frightening messages to the enemy. Razing villages populated only by civilians. Raping women in the presence of their children. Collecting the ears of victims and wearing them like trophies. Most of the men who testify in Winter Soldier seem tormented by the experiences, and one vet breaks down in tears. Additionally, most blame the war itself, or more specifically the twisted politics behind the war. Left unexplored is the question of consequences. The vets claim they couldn’t do anything to stop atrocities, kicking the blame up the chain of command and thereby effectively absolving themselves.

          Considering the moral ambiguities of Winter Soldier raises forces the viewer to engage with the issues that made the Vietnam War such a gruesome international quagmire. As such, Winter Soldier is an essential historical document even though it’s more of a polemic than a dialectic. FYI, Winter Soldier received a significant reissue in 2005, pulling it from obscurity and giving it a place among the key documentaries about Vietnam.

Winter Soldier: GROOVY

The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971)

          More useful as a historical artifact than as a proper cinematic experience, politically charged documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton is two movies awkwardly fused together. When production began, director Howard Alk and his collaborators intended to make a piece about the Black Panther Party, with a focus on Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the party’s Illinois chapter. Whether Alk’s team envisioned the final result as balanced reportage or one-sided propaganda became irrelevant when, partway through filming, Hampton was killed during a police raid. Adapting to changed circumstances, the documentarians began compiling evidence and testimony relating to Hampton’s death, eventually forming the opinion that Hampton was assassinated by the Chicago Police Department. The final film begins with a walk-through of the crime scene, then proceeds through nearly an hour of footage from the first version of the production before shifting to an investigation into Hampton’s death. To call this editing approach awkward requires great understatement. One gets the sense that Alk either failed to collect sufficient footage to make a legitimate film about Hampton’s death, or that he simply lacked the will to reconfigure material he’d already filmed and/or edited.

          Whatever the case, The Murder of Fred Hampton is not especially compelling or persuasive as an activist expression, even though the simple facts of the case imply the Chicago PD used excessive force. Where The Murder of Fred Hampton has utility, however, is in documenting the anger and purpose and vitality of the Panthers during their period of greatest political currency. More specifically, the picture is a monument to Hampton’s efficacy as a messenger, the very strength that, according to the filmmakers’ thesis, made him a target for political opponents. Watching Hampton rap about education and ideology reveals the complexity of his political thought, making it impossible to dismiss him—and, by extension, the Panthers—as mere violent radicals. Like so many counterculture groups that took root during the Vietnam era, the Panthers asked important questions about American values in the age of the military-industrial complex. Unlike other groups, they took the racial aspects of such conversations seriously, arguing that toppling the white majority from power was the only way to deliver equality for minorities. Seen in this light, it’s easy for sympathetic viewers to accept this documentary’s underlying premise, that Hampton was eliminated as part of a systematic effort to snuff a revolutionary movement with the potential to change the structure of American society.

The Murder of Fred Hampton: FUNKY

Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971)

          Assembled by activist filmmaker Emile de Antonio partway through Richard Nixon’s first term as U.S. president, Millhouse—the title of which oddly mangles Nixon’s middle name, Milhous—seems peculiar when encountered outside its original context. At the time of its release, the intention was presumably to remind viewers of how crafty and ruthless Nixon could be, thereby galvanizing opposition as the president geared up for his 1972 reelection campaign. In that sense, Millhouse: A White Comedy is something of a precursor to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). Yet while Moore’s film endures as a vital record of the left’s reaction to changes in American policies that occurred during George W. Bush’s first term, outlasting its original utility as election-season propaganda, de Antonio’s picture was already obsolete by the time Nixon left office in disgrace. Given the seismic repercussions of the Watergate scandal, the issues explored in Millhouse seem trivial by comparison. Furthermore, while it’s impossible to mistake Millhouse for a loving tribute, the picture is not explicitly damning, so a Nixon fan could easily watch the movie, dismiss a few talking-head criticisms, and revel in Nixon’s resourcefulness.
          As for the subtitle A White Comedy, whatever significance de Antonio saw in those words has been lost with the passage of time, beyond the obvious irony of suggesting that Nixon’s political scheming is a laughing matter.

          In any event, Millhouse provides a succinct compendium of Nixon’s greatest hits prior to his successful 1968 bid for the presidency. Accentuating Nixon’s shiftiness right from the first frames, de Antonio begins with the famous 1962 press conference following Nixon’s loss in a California gubernatorial race, featuring the infamous words, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” This moment showcases Nixon’s persecution complex, his tendency toward grand political gestures, and his unfortunate habit of making statements that later proved disingenuous if not outright dishonest. Thereafter, de Antonio uses newsreel footage and other preexisting material to track Nixon’s ascendance from a law career to the U.S. Senate, his 1953–1961 tenure as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vide president, his failed campaigns of 1960 and 1964, and finally his 1968 election.

          Consuming the largest amount of screen time is the full “Checkers” speech, a notorious TV appearance during which Nixon exhaustively explained his finances while trying to keep his VP run viable. Woven into de Antonio’s film are many tales of Nixon smearing personal enemies as pinkos. For those on de Antonio’s side of the political fence, especially those with knowledge of Nixon’s overall history, this stuff is enough to make the blood boil, or at least simmer. And that, more than anything, is the reason Millhouse has aged so poorly—the filmmaker’s bias renders the picture too one-sided to serve as political history, and yet the lack of a powerful viewpoint makes it feel almost toothless.

Millhouse: A White Comedy: FUNKY

The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978)

          Apparently this movie helped inspire Robert Redford to become a champion for independent cinema, and, indeed, there’s much about The Whole Shootin’ Match that epitomizes the anti-Hollywood ethos. Shot on black-and-white 16mm film with a slight budget near Austin, Texas, the picture eschews modalities that make big-studio projects feel false and manipulative. Tracking the adventures of two rural losers as they bounce from one failed get-rich scheme to another, the film never leaves the confines of the characters’ small world, and it never introduces wild contrivances that radically transform the characters’ circumstances. Put bluntly, the story never goes anywhere, in the sense of advancing the protagonists from one level of being to the next; although the dudes in The Whole Shootin’ Match end the picture with a deepened friendship, they don’t evolve much, and they don’t learn valuable life lessons. Both would have happened in a Hollywood treatment of similar material. Yet The Whole Shootin’ Match should not be misconstrued as some vital chapter in the history of American independent cinema, except perhaps because of its impact on Redford’s attitudes. The two main characters are essentially rough-hewn versions of “types” viewers have encountered in countless other stories. They’re cousins to, say, the scamps played by Lee Marvin and Paul Newman in Pocket Money (1972). Additionally, because filmmaker Eagle Pennell employs a jokey style and favors tidy conclusions at the ends of scenes, The Whole Shootin’ Match has more Hollywood in its DNA than might seem apparent at first glance.

          Frank (Sonny Carl Davis) and Lloyd (Lou Perryman) are uneducated guys staring down the barrel of middle age with little to show for their time on Earth. They run a light-hauling business in between failed entrepreneurial endeavors. Frank is married to Paulette (Doris Hargrave), though that doesn’t stop him from sleeping with every compliant woman he encounters. In some ways, his friendship with Lloyd is the most important relationship in his life—they keep each other alive, spiritually speaking, by convincing each other that their next scheme will pull them from poverty, no matter how many previous attempts have ended in disaster. Emboldened by the advice he reads in a self-help book, Frank persuades Lloyd the trick to wealth is “getting your mind right,” so they apply their newfound philosophy to a polyurethane roofing business. Typically, this goes poorly, because neither man has the tactical or technical knowhow, much less the operating capital, necessary for making the business soar. And so on. Open-minded viewers can find things to like here, since the acting and locations have authenticity, as does the Texan vernacular (“I’m so dry I can’t even spit!”). Nonetheless, this is a matter of low risk and low rewards. Pennelll’s filmmaking lacks ambition, beyond the inherent challenge of making a movie from nothing, and the insights his story presents are neither new nor profound. 

The Whole Shootin’ Match: FUNKY

1980 Week: Stardust Memories

          Woody Allen’s myriad remarks over the years that Stardust Memories is not an autobiographical movie are at least slightly disingenuous, the understandable backpedaling of a popular artist who was perceived as slighting his fan base. After all, Allen plays Sandy Bates, a neurotic comedy-movie auteur enduring an existential crisis after audiences turn on him for experimenting with drama. Any resemblance to Allen, who followed the crowd-pleasing Annie Hall (1976) with the dour chamber piece Interiors (1977), is purely coincidental. Yeah, right. Allen’s disclaimers notwithstanding, Stardust Memories is an extraordinary exercise in public self-examination. Questioning the purpose of filmmaking and the value of humor in world seemingly zooming toward destruction, Stardust Memories skillfully integrates jokes, melodrama, romance, and what might be called spirituality. (One must tread lightly there, given Allen’s endless proclamations of atheism.)

          Even the rapturous black-and-white images of Stardust Memories have a metatextual kick, since audiences embraced the monochromatic cinematography of Allen’s previous film, Manhattan (1979), broadly seen as his return to comedic form following the failure of Interiors. Like so many other things in Stardust Memories, the repetition of a trope from a prior film defines Allen as an artist not only willing but eager to wrestle with the potentialities of tropes by applying them to varying forms of subject matter. If black-and-white images mean such-and-such in X context, what do they mean in Y context? It’s all about digging deeper and asking more problematic questions. Whereas Allen’s beloved “early, funny” movies mostly eschew cinematic style in favor of gags and narrative speed, Stardust Memories represents the apex of an evolution that began with Annie Hall. While life itself is ultimately Allen’s main subject, with Stardust Memories he fully integrates the complications of his own reputation into his repertoire, and he does so at the very same career moment when he assumes full command of cinema as a storytelling medium.

          While all this critical-studies significance is a lot of weight to drop onto Stardust Memories’ shoulders, the movie can bear the burden.
          Filled with insights and ruminations and witticisms, it’s a singularly alive piece of filmmaking. Once again, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis create striking imagery, and once again, Allen pulls terrific work from an eclectic cast. (Watch for Sharon Stone, making her movie debut, in the opening scene.) Presented in a somewhat freeform style with more than a few touches of classic European arthouse cinema, Stardust Memories explores the fictional Sandy Bates’ life from myriad perspectives. Even as he juggles romances with challenging Daisy (Jessica Harper) and comforting Isobel (Marie-Christine Berrault), Sandy contemplates ghosts from his relationship with a troubled woman named Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling). More pointedly—since Allen spun a similar romantic web in Manhattan—the Sandy character allows Allen to ask what audiences expect from him, and why audiences resist change in his persona. In the picture’s most famous scene, aliens from outer space remind Sandy that his greatest gift is being able to make people laugh, and that humor may well contribute more to the human experience than Bergman-esque ennui.

          Left unresolved, of course, is the question of whether Sandy (or Allen, for that matter) can reconcile his clashing artistic impulses. Witness the incredible highs and lows of Allen’s subsequent output, wherein he has tried to merge what he does well with what he simply wants to do well. Like Bob Fosse’s extraordinary All That Jazz (1979), Stardust Memories is part performance review and part psychoanalysis. Not everything in Stardust Memories works, since Allen periodically succumbs to the very pretentiousness that disgruntled fans perceived in Interiors, but Stardust Memories is an essential chapter of the Woody Allen story. It’s also among the nerviest statements a popular American artist has ever made, a declaration of independence from expectations and preconceptions.

Stardust Memories: GROOVY

The Telephone Book (1971)

          Tempting as it is to call The Telephone Book highbrow smut, what with the film’s arty black-and-white cinematography and its peculiar collection of kinky characters, the film has many stretches that are indefensibly sleazy. For instance, an animated sequence features giant tongues probing between women’s legs. Rather than providing a frank look at human sexuality, The Telephone Book is a wannabe sex comedy that peripherally includes both artistry and a small measure of sensitivity. As such, The Telephone Book occupies a strange space between exploitation and legitimacy. Most serious movie fans will find the picture way too lurid and tacky, and chances are The Telephone Book lacks sufficient oomph to satisfy the heavy-breathing audience. As such, this film is best classified as an odd byproduct of the porn-chic period, during which “real” filmmakers engaged carnal themes in graphic (or semi-graphic) detail. The picture’s X-rating is appropriate because of wall-to-wall sexual content, although the rating suggests the film crosses lines that it actually does not.

          The premise blends elements of feminist self-actualization with traces of Penthouse Letters male fantasy. Alice (Sarah Kennedy) receives an obscene phone call so arousing that she falls in love with the voice on the other end of the phone, then demands his name so she can find him. He gives her the dubious-sounding appellation “John Smith.” Alice tracks down every John Smith in the Manhattan phone book, leading to encounters with various men. A fellow calling himself “Har Poon” (Barry Morse) invites Alice to join in a group-grope audition for a porno movie. An unnamed psychoanalyst (Roger C. Carmel) flashes Alice on the subway, then pays her to describe her sexual history. (In a somewhat clever bit, he rubs the money changer on his belt while she talks, spewing dimes all over the floor of a diner.) Eventually, Alice meets the John Smith who called her, and he wears a pig mask while providing, in exhaustive detail, the origin story that led him to find gratification only through aural contact. Interspersed with these encounters are “interviews” with obscene phone callers who explain their habits.

          As a viewing experience, The Telephone Book is disorienting. The visual style of the movie, excepting the animated sequence, is sophisticated, almost to a fault—rather than shooting conventional coverage, writer-director Nelson Lyon films the picture like a series of elegant still photos, all delicate light and meticulous composition. Leading lady Kennedy is so bubbly and warm she seems like Goldie Hawn, which has the effect of making the picture feel less overtly dirty. And several proper actors deliver interesting work in supporting roles, notably Carmel, William Hickey, and Dolph Sweet. (Jill Clayburgh, pre-fame, shows up in a couple of scenes as Alice’s best friend.) Still, how is one to reconcile the arty flourishes with the stag-reel stuff? And what is one to make of the fact that scenes featuring Smith in his pig mask have an almost Kubrickian level of creepiness, given the way moody black-and-white shadows accentuate the monstrous contours of the mask? Although there’s a lot to unpack in The Telephone Book, it’s open to question whether deep-thinking the picture is worth the bother.

The Telephone Book: FREAKY

Deafula (1975)

The low-budget horror flick Deafula is about exactly what the title suggests, and every line of dialogue is delivered by way of American Sign Language. The noble goal of providing entertainment for an underserved population notwithstanding, Deafula is an embarrassment. Peter Wolf, the picture’s writer, director, and star, evinces little talent in any of his craft areas, so the movie is amateurish, boring, and discombobulated. The gist of the piece is that Steve Adams (Wolf), a seminary student with pillowy blond hair and a fondness for turtlenecks, occasionally transforms into bloodsucker named Deafula. This often happens during the daytime, which is odd, and during the transformations, Steve’s hair changes color, he grows a gigantic prosthetic nose, and his clothes morph into a tuxedo with a cape. What’s the sign for “WTF”? According to the backstory that’s doled out in awkward flashbacks, Steve’s mom consorted with Count Dracula, but Steve grew up believing that he had a strange blood disease requiring regular transfusions instead of vampirism. While detectives investigate Deafula’s killings, Steve searches for answers about his identity, hence the flashbacks. It’s all very jumbled and silly, culminating in a ridiculous scene of Deafula chatting with Count Dracula in a cave. Peculiar stylistic choices regarding sound exacerbate Deafula’s other problems. Although voice actors provide real-time translations for the ASL dialogue, music only appears intermittently, and long stretches of the film are silent. It is an understatement to say that Wolf’s images do not command attention without aural assistance. Once in a while, Deafula is so misguided as to become compellingly awful. In one scene, Steve sits with a buddy in a bar and orders peanuts from the waitress. Later in the same scene, Steve says, “A moment ago, I ordered peanuts.” Again, WTF? In any language, Deafula is ridiculous.

Deafula: LAME

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

          Like a novelist practicing with short stories before attempting the grand statement of a first novel, the singular German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a number of documentaries and short-subject fiction films before mounting his first two fictional features, Signs of Life (1968) and this strange picture. Yet because he followed up these intimate projects with the ambitious Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), it’s tempting to look at early projects including Even Dwarfts Stated Small as the byproducts of apprenticeship. For while Even Dwarfs Started Small contains some of Herzog’s signature themes and is suffused with his idiosyncratic style, it’s trifling compared to the powerful allegories he made later.

          Plus, truth be told, Even Dwarfs Started Small is a gimmick picture, because it’s a black-and-white oddity featuring only little people. The limitations of gimmickry become evident as Even Dwafts Started Small trudges along: It’s hard to get emotionally invested in a fictional feature populated exclusively by nonprofessional actors playing interchangeable roles. There’s something bold about the way Herzog asks viewers to plunge into the deepest waters of his imagination, but boldness only goes so far.

          Set on a remote island off the northern coast of Africa, the picture depicts a rebel uprising at an asylum or some other sort of institution. The gist is that the inmates/patients/residents dislike the way they’re treated, so they cut off communication with the outside world and lay siege to administrators until chaos reigns. Despite copious amounts of dialogue, much of which is deliberately cryptic and/or peculiar, so it’s never especially clear just what’s happening, though the film seems to take an antiauthoritarian stance. (For instance, rebels toss rocks at an administrator while he speaks to them from a high rooftop.)

          Mostly, the threadbare plot provides Herzog with an excuse to capture weird images. A camel too groggy or ill to stand on its forelegs. Rebels shoving a car down a seemingly bottomless hole in the ground. A driverless vehicle spinning in circles. A man holding a tube of cream over his crotch and spurting the cream onto a nearby woman. And so much giggling. At times, it feels like half this film’s screen time is devoted to shots of characters laughing idiotically. Herzog has never been afraid to stop a story dead so he can linger on some odd tangent, but Even Dwarfts Started Small is nothing but tangents, and the lack of a larger purpose renders the whole enterprise somewhat pointless, beyond the inherent value of putting onscreen people whose life experiences are rarely explored in popular culture.

Even Dwarfs Started Small: FUNKY

Dionysus in ’69 (1970)

          Experimental theater being what it is, any document of this offbeat genre is sure to divide audiences. As such, something like Dionysus in ’69 can’t be appraised in only one way. Those with adventurous spirits and an eagerness to see postmodern rethinks of longstanding storytelling conventions will be able to appreciate Dionysus in ’69 as a form of artistic exploration. Concurrently, those who enjoy understanding what the hell they’re watching will lose patience quickly. Even those who seek out Dionysus in ’69 because of Brian De Palma’s involvement are likely to be confounded. The picture has a couple of significant connections to the director’s later work, but he didn’t conceive or singlehandedly helm the piece, at the execution is avant-garde in the extreme.

          Shot in 1968, while De Palma was a film student at NYU, the film captures a presentation by experimental-theater ensemble the Performance Group. Based on the ancient Euripides play, Dionysus in ’69 ostensibly tells the story of a conflict between gods, and layered upon the original text is a postmodern freakout written by William Arrowsmith. Actors strip down to jockstraps (or less) while creating sexualized tableaux onstage, up to and including a pair of lengthy and semi-explicit orgy scenes. In some scgments, actor William Finley (who plays both Dionysus and the role of actor William Finley) speaks in modern language, while his costar, Will Shepherd (who plays both Pentheus and the role of actor Will Shepherd), communicates largely in stilted "classical" vernacular. (FYI, Finley later starred in De Palma’s 1976 rock musical Phantom of the Paradise.) The live audience beholding the filmed performance of Dionysus in’69 becomes involved in the show, as well. Seated on the floor, in chairs, and on scaffolds surrounding the intimate performance space, audience members participate in dance scenes and receive dialogue and physical contact from the actors. All of this serves the familiar experimental-theater concept of transforming a play into an active experience rather than a passive one.

          De Palma, who shares an “a film by” credit with fellow NYU students Bruce Joel Rubin (later on Oscar winner for writing the 1990 hit Ghost) and Robert Fiore, employs one of his favorite cinematic devices, split-screen photography. Therefore, the entire 85-minute film comprises two angles of grungy-looking black-and-white images projected side-by-side. As with everything else about Dionysus in ’69, the split-screen effect is as headache-inducing as it is mind-expanding. Incidentally, Dionysus in ’69 received an X-rating during its original release, though its edgiest elements are full-frontal nudity, rough language, and simulated sex.

Dionysus in ’69: FUNKY