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Great Films You Need To See – Sorcerer (1977)

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Three Rows Back

This is my latest contribution to The Big Picture, the internationally recognised magazine and website that offers an intelligent take on cinema, focussing on how film affects our lives. This piece about William Friedkin’s criminally underseen 1977 existentialist thriller Sorcerer was written as part of The Big Picture’s Lost Classics strand, although I am including it within my list of Great Films You Need To See.

Unwittingly foreshadowing the fate of its four displaced protagonists, William Friedkin’s existential follow-up to The Exorcist was doomed the moment a certain lightsaber-rattling space opera arrived in cinemas from a galaxy far, far away.

Still Friedkin’s most enigmatic and idiosyncratic film, Sorcerer’s bewitching spell deserves to be cast far more widely

Sorcerer (1977) has been cited by some as the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood movement. However, a giant nail had been hammered into its coffin several weeks earlier with the release of George Lucas’ Star Wars.

In light of this new paradigm of droids, Death Stars and Darth Vader, it’s no great surprise the film bombed on its release and disappeared without trace. That said, Sorcerer was (and still is) one of the most unashamedly offbeat big budget films ever released and was always going to be a tough sell.

Mexican assassin Nilo (Francisco Rabal), Palestinian terrorist Kassem (Amidou), fraudulent French businessman Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) and New Jersey gangster Jackie Scanlon (Roy Schneider) weigh up their options in Sorcerer

Although Friedkin insisted it wasn’t a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic The Wages Of Fear, financiers Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures didn’t share the same opinion, changing its name to Wages Of Fear and re-editing the picture for international release.

The plot is certainly familiar. Four criminals – a Mexican assassin (Francisco Rabal), a Palestinian terrorist (Amidou), a fraudulent French businessman (Bruno Cremer) and a New Jersey gangster (Roy Schneider) – flee the scenes of their respective crimes and end up in a squalid Dominican Republic backwater working for a dodgy oil conglomerate. When one of the firm’s wells is blown up by ‘terrorists’, the desperate quartet sign-up to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerin across more than 200 miles of unforgiving jungle to put out the resulting blaze and pocket a big payday. The only problem is the dynamite is highly unstable and one false move could lead to an abruptly explosive end.

Getting ready for a dangerous trip in Sorcerer

Friedkin has never been one to do things by half and employed the same guerilla style of filmmaking that won him an Oscar for The French Connection (1971) to down and dirty effect for what the director declares is the most important film of his career.

In his autobiography, The Friedkin Connection, he regales how scenes filmed in Jerusalem for the film’s globe-trotting first reel were given added authenticity by a real-life terrorist bombing that took place near to the shoot. In true Friedkin fashion, he made sure to train the cameras on the chaos that was ensuing rather than getting the hell out of there.

Crossing the most dilapidated bridge in the world in Sorcerer

This is nothing, however, compared to what comes later in the film. Five years before Werner Herzog dragged a steam ship over a hillside in Fitzcarraldo (1982) in the name of art, Friedkin risked life and limb by having the trucks cross possibly the most dilapidated bridge in the world. The panic-inducing drama as the trucks swing violently back and forth over a raging torrent through almost Biblical levels of rain is almost unbearable to watch and is given extra power by Tangerine Dream’s nightmarish score.

Death and violence seep out of every frame and Friedkin takes an unholy pleasure in stripping hope away from his damned characters at every turn. The look of madness that creeps into Schneider’s eyes as their journey descends further into hell is startling and the hallucinogenic final reel is genuinely unsettling.

Still Friedkin’s most enigmatic and idiosyncratic film, Sorcerer‘s bewitching spell deserves to be cast far more widely.

Great Films You Need To See – Red Rock West (1993)

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Three Rows Back

This is my latest contribution to The Big Picture, the internationally-recognised magazine and website that offers an intelligent take on cinema, focussing on how film affects our lives. This piece about John Dahl’s 1993 western neo noir thriller Red Rock West was written as part of The Big Picture’s Lost Classics strand, although I am including it within my list of Great Films You Need To See.

Cinema’s dustbin is littered with movies that disappeared between the cracks or didn’t fit neatly into any easy-to-sell marketing category.

Watched now, more than 20 years on, Red Rock West has barely aged a day and deserves its place alongside the likes of the Coens’ Blood Simple as one of cinema’s most ingenious neo-noirs

It’s a fate that befell the criminally underseen Red Rock West, John Dahl’s sophomore feature that, according to the late Roger Ebert, “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy”.

The film is worth seeing for the cast alone. Nicolas Cage gives one of his most hangdog turns as Michael Williams, an ordinary Joe on the road to nowhere who rolls into dead-end Red Rock and is immediately mistaken for “Lyle from Dallas” by bar owner Wayne Brown (J.T. Walsh).

Michael Williams (Nicolas Cage) fools bar owner Wayne Brown (J.T. Walsh) he’s “Lyle from Dallas” in Red Rock West

Down on his luck, Michael keeps his mouth shut when he accepts $5,000 by Wayne to kill his wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle). He’s then offered double by Suzanne to kill Wayne after telling her about the contract. The plot takes a turn for the perilous with the arrival of the real Lyle (Dennis Hopper), a psychopathic hitman who dresses like he stepped out of a Garth Brooks concert.

Dahl, who co-wrote the script with brother Rick, throws in more twists than a pretzel factory and has a ball in the process. There’s an amusing running joke that sees the exasperated Michael continually trying to leave Red Rock but, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, is seemingly never able to escape.

Michael (Nicolas Cage) gets himself into hot water with Wayne’s wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle) in Red Rock West

There’s more than a little of David Lynch in the film, and not just because three-quarters of the main cast have worked with him. Hopper is in full-on Frank Booth mode, while Boyle exudes the sort of old school matinee seduction she displayed in Twin Peaks.

In a film of meaty performances, the tastiest is given by Walsh (who should have appeared in a Lynch film, but never did). In lesser hands Wayne could have been a stock villain, but Walsh imbues him with a banality that is all the more chilling for being so underplayed.

Dennis Hopper is in full-on Frank Booth mode as Lyle in Red Rock West

Dahl is one of life’s nearly men. Now predominately a director of high-end cable and network TV shows, his film career never garnered the commercial success it was due in spite of such entertaining fare as The Last Seduction and Rounders, the Matt Damon and Edward Norton joint that helped launch the current poker craze.

Released in the wake of Reservoir Dogs (1992), Red Rock West became a casualty of the rapidly changing landscape of American independent cinema post-Tarantino. Watched now, more than 20 years on, the film has barely aged a day and deserves its place alongside the likes of the Coens’ Blood Simple (1984) as one of cinema’s most ingenious neo-noirs.

Great Films You Need To See – One Day In September (1999)

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Three Rows Back

The greatest show on Earth proved to be the greatest showcase on Earth for a faction of radical Palestinian terrorists one fateful day in September during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

Despite a few rough edges here and there, One Day In September is a powerful and absorbing experience that grips like a vice and refuses to let go until its shattering climax

Following the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which had been turned into a Nazi propaganda tool for the master race, and less than three decades after the end of the bloodiest war in human history, West Germany sought to find some sort of catharsis through the Munich Games and move on from its recent past by projecting a positive image of itself to the world.

One of the Black September terrorists who held Israeli athletes hostage in One Day In September

The symbolism surrounding the event wasn’t lost on anyone – diabolical Nazi war crimes led to the foundation of a Jewish state following the war and now Israel was sending athletes to compete on German soil. Promoting itself as the Games of peace and brotherhood, security was intentionally lax within the athletes’ village, which meant it was easy for eight members of the Palestinian Black September organisation to make their assault and kidnap 11 Israeli athletes on 5 September 1972.

Kevin Macdonald’s gripping documentary recounts the awful chain of events that took place over the ensuing 21 hours, from the initial confusion over what was going on, through to the attempts at negotiation with the terrorists, the German authority’s botched ambush operation and the final, bloody firefight at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, which led to the massacre of all the hostages, a German police officer and five of the eight Black September members.

The bleak scene from within the Israeli athletes’ apartment in One Day In September

Macdonald doesn’t do anything particularly radical with the format – the film is made up of archive footage, talking head interviews and digital reconstructions of the final confrontation – but through skilful editing he has you on the edge of your seat throughout.

The film’s major coup was in securing the first known interview with Jamal Al-Gashey, the only surviving member of the terrorist cell who, still in fear for his life from Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad more than 25 years after the incident, appears on camera wearing a cap and sunglasses and with his face blurred.

The symbolism of an Israeli flag paraded on German soil at the 1972 Munich Olympics in One Day In September

Al-Gashey speaks to the mood of both his compatriots and the hostages during the crisis and clearly remains proud of what he achieved. Macdonald, however, possibly out of fear of losing his ace in the pack, makes little attempt to gain an understanding of precisely what led to his joining Black September and fails to put him on the spot to more fully explain his actions.

Macdonald has greater success in his other interviews, particularly Walther Tröger, Mayor of the Olympic Village, who was among the first to encounter the terrorists, and General Ulrich Wegener, who rather hangs himself by adopting a somewhat glib attitude towards the tragedy (he founded Germany’s counter-terrorist unit GSG 9 in the wake of the incident).

The 1972 Munich Olympics went on in spite of the tragedy unfolding in its back yard

Indeed, the actions on the part of the German authorities seem clueless and Macdonald isn’t afraid to stack the blame on their shoulders. This hapless ineptitude was reinforced when tracksuit-wearing border guards with no experience of handling firearms were drafted in to retrieve the hostages at the athletes’ village, only to have the ill-conceived operation aborted at the last minute because their every move was being reported live on TV and could be seen by the terrorists.

Furthermore, the calamitous rescue attempt at the air base was given little or no chance of success when a group of German police officers waiting to ambush the terrorists voted at the last moment to abandon their mission, while snipers positioned at the air base had no way of communicating with each other.

ABC anchor Jim McKay, whose rolling news provides the commentary for One Day In September

ABC anchor Jim McKay, whose rolling news provides a sort of commentary for the film, gave the most fitting and sombre of epitaphs on hearing of the massacre when he said: “When I was a kid my father used to say ‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized’. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said there were 11 hostages; two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.”

It wasn’t just the German authorities who came in for flak; there was also anger that the International Olympic Committee decided to continue the Games in spite of the tragedy unfolding in its own back yard and only later bowed to intense international pressure to impose a suspension. The film also shows footage of athletes remarkably – and obscenely – sunning themselves just 200 yards away from where their fellow competitors were being held hostage.

The Olympic Games were forever changed following the tragic events in Munich in September 1972

It’s details such as this that set One Day In September apart and help to explain why the film won Best Documentary at the 2000 Academy Awards. As well as the exhaustive research that’s clearly gone in, Macdonald is also well served by Michael Douglas’ measured narration.

The film has come under fire, not least of which by the late Roger Ebert, for choosing to accompany a montage of pictures of the victims’ corpses with a rock score (specifically Deep Purple’s Child In Time). The scene would have worked better without music – the images speak for themselves – but in fairness this can probably be put down to the naive decision of a first-time filmmaker.

Despite a few rough edges here and there, One Day In September is a powerful and absorbing experience that grips like a vice and refuses to let go until its shattering climax.

Great Films You Need To See – Punishment Park (1971)

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Three Rows Back

This is my second contribution to The Big Picture, the internationally-recognised magazine and website that offers an intelligent take on cinema, focussing on how film affects our lives. This piece about Peter Watkins’ controversial docudrama Punishment Park was written as part of The Big Picture’s self-explanatory Lost Classics section, although I am including it within my list of Great Films You Need To See.

The Boston Phoenix may have predicted Peter Watkins’ potent philippic on the frightening consequences of unchecked power was a “cult hit waiting to happen”, but 40 years after its controversial release it’s still twiddling its thumbs waiting for the world to catch on.

Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park – “it’s striking just how resonant the issues of the film still remain”

Watkins’ pioneering brand of radical pseudo-documentary filmmaking was always going to leave him shouting at the world from the sidelines.

His 1965 BBC nuclear war docudrama The War Game was judged “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” by Auntie and shelved for 20 years. Set in a dystopic America that Watkins could see on the horizon, Punishment Park never recovered from the hostile critical reaction it mostly received and sank without trace.

The ‘prisoners’ find the going tough in Punishment Park

Dismissed at the time as nothing more than hyperbolic paranoia on the part of the director (The New York Times described it as “the wish-fulfilling dream of a masochist”), seen today it’s striking just how resonant the issues of the film still remain.

With the Vietnam War escalating, Nixon invokes legislation authorising a police state wherein those deemed “a risk to internal security” can be arrested and tried by a civilian tribunal. Presumed guilty, the hippies, draft dodgers and seditious types arrested for “hindering the war effort” are offered long jail time or three gruelling days in Punishment Park (or the option of signing a Hitler oath-style pledge of loyalty).

They fought the law, the law won in Punishment Park

Promised liberty if they evade the police and National Guard and make it across scorching hot desert to capture the US flag 53 miles away, the ‘subversives’ who choose this option little realise their blood-thirsty pursuers have no intention of letting them gain their freedom (or, in some cases, letting them live).

The screw is turned as the film, comprised of faux BBC news footage narrated by an increasingly splenetic Watkins, cuts between the one-sided kangaroo court (its chairman, a politician, gags a prisoner for getting on his nerves bringing to mind Bobby Seale), the terrified rebels in Punishment Park and law enforcement officers hungry for action. In a cruel irony one runner tells the camera crew “I don’t think they’re trying to kill us”, before Watkins cuts to a sheriff describing how best to shoot someone.

The spectre of Bobby Seale looms large in Punishment Park

Interestingly, the non-professional actors were cast based on their own political beliefs and were told by Watkins to let rip against each other as if the situation were real. As a result the scenes within the tribunal tent crackle with tension as the prisoners and tribunal members have what might be called “a failure to communicate” and end up screaming at each other.

Echoes of Punishment Park (and Watkins’ previous diatribe The Gladiators) can be seen in such variable fare as The Running Man, Battle Royale and The Hunger Games.

Filmed in the aftermath of and coloured by the Kent State massacre when the US was ripping itself apart over Vietnam, Watkins’ hellish vision of an America consumed by war and whose citizens are judged by their loyalty to the state may have been branded paranoia, but 40 years on looks pretty prescient when taking into account the War on Terror, Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay and lends credence to that old proverb ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.

Great Films You Need To See – Primer (2004)

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Three Rows Back

We’ve all wished at least once in our lives for the opportunity to go back and do things differently.

Shane Carruth’s Primer – “a film that puts the science into science fiction and is quite possibly the last word in time travel”

We have to contend ourselves with the fact that hindsight is all we have, but in the movies where anything is possible, that wish can be fulfilled.

The gift that keeps on giving when put in the right hands, time travel has provided the backdrop to lots of great motion pictures over the years, most recently Rian Johnson’s action flick Looper.

Movies like Looper and the Back to the Future and Terminator franchises use the concept of time travel as the springboard to a popcorn-fuelled rollercoaster ride. On the flip side we have Shane Carruth’s serious, occasionally impenetrable but always absorbing Primer, a film that puts the science into science fiction and is quite possibly the last word in time travel.

The mode of time travel used in Primer (pic taken from the film’s Wikipedia page)

Made for just $7,000 and released to award-winning acclaim at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Carruth’s debut feature remains as much of an enigma today as it did when it first left critics and moviegoers scratching their heads almost 10 years ago.

At its heart a cautionary tale about the dangers of possessing ingenuity and an insatiable curiosity, Primer concerns itself with Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), white-collar engineers by day and amateur inventors by night who stumble on a means of time travel.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) with their time travel boxes in Primer

Primer is as far removed from big budget bombast as you can get. Aaron and Abe work from a suburban garage, while the device itself is nothing more than a box (no DeLoreans here), hidden away in a self storage lock-up. Carruth frequently shoots his characters in long shot, as if he’s eavesdropping on their rapid-fire, tech-heavy dialogue and this is reflected in the actions of Aaron and Abe, who coolly observe events around them from a safe distance.

Described by Abe as “the most important thing that any living organism has ever witnessed”, the pair are nervous at first, unsure of how best to proceed with their momentous invention. However, it doesn’t take long before greed and ambition take over and their “reverse engineering” of the past gets out of control.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) can't quite believe who he's warching in Primer

Aaron (Shane Carruth) can’t quite believe who he’s watching in Primer

The film’s tagline – ‘what happens if it actually works?’ – speaks to Carruth’s documentary-style approach while the decision to film on grainy 16mm, financial constraints not withstanding (this was before digital had become all-pervasive), lends a matter-of-fact realism.

The director (who also wrote, produced, edited and wrote the music for the film) cleverly shows how even the extraordinary can become routine with lines such as “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten until later this afternoon”, and “I think my body’s getting used to the 36-hour days”.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) wonder where to go next in Primer

Primer‘s cerebral, scientific approach to time travel will certainly infuriate many and leave most others discombobulated. Carruth makes no concessions to his audience and what little action there is centres on the two tech heads talking excitedly among themselves whilst tweaking a large metal box.

That being said, like most time travel films it largely avoids dealing with the thorny issues of causality and paradox (Looper, for example, jokingly shrugs it off by having Bruce Willis’ Old Joe Simmons refusing to talk about it to his younger self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) because they’d end up spending hours “drawing diagrams with straws”). Aaron refers to the age-old question of whether you’d exist if you went back in time and killed your mother before shrugging it off and stating that “it has to work itself out somehow”.

Primer is a fascinating puzzle that expects you to keep up (the final 20 minutes are almost maddening in their complexity). Those looking for crazy-haired scientists, killer robots or cool time machines are barking up the wrong tree here, but give yourself in to Carruth’s unique vision and it’s sure to stick in the mind long into the future.

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