Reviews

Sylvester Stallone's Cobra (1986) is a delicious example of how a second-rate effort can illuminate a genre. Reportedly, Stallone had walked away from the lead in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) when differences arose regarding his input for the script. Many of his ideas were subsequently transplanted into the script for Cobra (much to Eddie Murphy's benefit).

Cobra provides a point-for-point demonstration of the mechanics of the ?action cop film. The movie starts big, introducing our hero via dramatic shoot-out in a grocery store only tangentially related to the rest of the movie. It is a unintentionally comic sequence, indebted to Eastwood's Harry Callahan, who first nailed he "urban western" that is the action movie. Except the derivative nature of the effort shows. Item after item that was intended to convey originality instead sounds a false tone. Stallone looks ridiculous posed behind mirrored over-sized Ray-Bans. He worries a cooking match in his mouth because, well, cigarettes are not cool. He sports a three day growth because, hey, it's the 80's. Next, the fetish handgun, again recalling Harry's .44 Magnum, Sly sporting a ridiculous Colt .45 with ivory grips, a la Patton, a silly gun that would never be chosen by anyone actually serious about such things.

Next comes the comic-relief partner, (played joylessly by Rene Santori, who did similar thankless work in the original Dirty Harry), and the hard-ass police captain with little patience for his rogue detective. ?The charismatic car, in this case, is Stallone's own 1950 Mercury coupe, which may be sort of neat in its own way, but looks absurd in the requisite chase scene. The "cool" bachelor pad is a converted warehouse in Venice Beach that just looks like space borrowed from the film lab that was processing the dailies, where Cobra lives on cold pizza he trims with scissors whilst keeping his lonely watch over the city in the smog. The female lead is a sadly dated Brigitte Nielsen, looking very 80's with big hair and skin-tight jeans, blessed with acting chops that are similarly stiff and tight. The bad guys are absurd, motive-less, frankly insane right-wing kooks—usually a safe "go-to" choice when it comes to bad guys, from Magnum Force (1973) to Lethal Weapon 2 (1989). But here they just come off as relentlessly stupid.

Of course, the depiction of traditional lines of authority as suspect, and of violence as a the chief instrument of morality is central to the movie and the genre. As with all other aspects of this movie, Cobra reveals the creaky stage machinery behind its derivative conceits. The climactic shoot-out/car chase is an illogical, patently ridiculous, gratuitous blood-letting that culminates in the villain being impaled on a hook and then burned alive, with our hero looking on with smug approval. It was a termination Himmler would have been proud of, and of which Cheney may still only dream.

I could go on about the poor quality of the script, the indifferent cinematography, and the rancid acting, but suffice it to say that all are in keeping with the rest of the product. After watching Cobra, it is difficult to go back and watch a decent urban action film without becoming aware of the clank and creak of genre's formula.

?Released in Britain in 1936, as the first drumbeats of World War II began with Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland, Things to Come was an epic science-fiction film, the first of its kind in English, full of presentiments of the coming catastrophe, and exemplary of the idealism of the decade that fueled that catastrophe.

The film opens projecting four years into the future, to 1940, in "Everytown" that looks suspiciously like London. It's Christmas and the world stands at the brink of war. When hostilities break out, troops are mobilized, and we see an eerily prescient depiction of the bombing of the city with mass pandemonium and destruction. Thousands of planes cross the cliffs of Dover, poison gas rains from the sky.

The war drags on for ten and then twenty years. A plague appears, "The Wandering Sickness." By 1966, Everytown is a ruin, the few survivors scratching out a bare subsistence among the rubble. By 1970, the sickness has burned out and an autocratic subsistence society has emerged among the wreckage of the previous civilization. This is the first post- apocalyptic dystopian movie, with horse-drawn autos and airplanes grounded by lack of petrol, small scale warfare continuing on horseback and on foot.

Then from the sky descends a futuristic aircraft piloted by a former resident of the town, played by Raymond Massey. His flight-suit is ridiculous by our standards, but cutting-edge by 1930's criteria. He represents an alliance of the pre-war engineers and mechanics, "Wings Over the World," banded together to reclaim the world from brigandage. Massey waxes poetic in describing his group: "The Brotherhood of Efficiency!, The Freemasonry of Science!"--an end to bosses and the rule of civilization itself. Seeming to be the voice of Light and Order and Science, Massey still represents his own brand of well-intended authoritarianism, banning private ownership of airplanes and local autonomous authority independent of his group. "A conspiracy of bus drivers," as the local boss derisively describes them.

Of course the Old Order and the New Order come to blows, but it's no contest. A flotilla of tremendous futuristic airships, looking like Jack Northrop's B-35 Flying Wing, trundle overhead and the New Order, ironically, gases the town, not with poison but with a gentle sedative mist, "The Gas of Peace." The Old Order quietly euthanized, the New Order paratroops in and sets things aright. "And now for the rule of the air and a new life for mankind," Massey intones to a great fanfare.

On cannot help note, though, that the soldiers of "Wings Over the World," dress in snappy black suits that recall the sartorial flare of the SS. They speak in a dynamic verbiage that the Nazis could have related to. What follows is a montage of the rise of the new age, but its not a placid sight to contemporary eyes, with great machines drilling and excavating and exploding, generators whirring, assembly lines churning, people in futuristic jump suits careening about. It seems that everyone exists just to service machines, wearing isolation suits as if the environment were not entirely healthy.

Flash forward to Everytown in 2036, which is mostly countryside now, with the buildings below ground in great arcades that looks like Bauhaus Art Deco fantasies. Everyone is materially satisfied and walks around in Greco-Roman tunics with padded shoulders, and short-shorts. A giant space-gun is being built to carry man to the moon, but a wave of populist Luddite reaction erupts in fear at the scientist's restless challenge of ever-expanding frontiers. Inflamed by a demagogue, using television, the mob rushes the space-gun, but the young astronauts manage to take off in the nick of time, continuing man's boldly going where no man etc. etc., despite the fact that the entire population of Everytown is storming the facility, placing their lives at risk should the launch proceed. I imagine NASA would have put a hold on the countdown until the Army had cleared all those little blighters off the launch pad, but their leaders fire away, casualties be damned.

What is undeniable by the end is what a profoundly anti-democratic and elitist work this is. The idealized future is seen as a stark and incommodious world where people live underground under artificial light, dressing in spectacularly uncomfortable get-ups that even George Jetson would have trouble carrying off, and jetting about on little hover platforms servicing vast machines. The general populous are seen as either casualties, idiots, or an irrational mob. All enlightenment comes from the few who value the ideals of "engineering and mechanics," and, most importantly, material progress. This elite rules ideologically and autocratically, apparently resorting to the sedative "Gas of Peace" whenever the rabble get out of line. While being portrayed as wise rulers, their unyielding, materialist ideology and willingness to suppress the masses forcibly are not far removed from the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that sprouted everywhere in the 1930's.

What is most striking about any era is how often lines of thought run in parallel. Just as in our time, waves of bloody-minded religious reaction sweep through many countries, so in the 30's Russia lived a Stalinist nightmare, Germany, Italy and Spain gloried in Fascist fantasies, and the scientific intellectuals in the West toyed with notions of a techno-science elite ruling as philosopher kings. Of course, when the techno-elite were actually convened by government, they opened the Pandora's Box of nuclear weapons and promptly handed it to the bureaucrats. This film is important in the history of film, and also as an example of the occultly frightening dreams of intellectual elitists. It would be repeated in later films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, When Worlds Collide, and the Star Wars series.

Peter O'Toole specialized in playing mad and gifted men in movies from Lawrence of Arabia through Becket, Lord Jim, and Lion in Winter, to The Stunt Man. In the middle of this run came The Ruling Class (1972), an oft neglected film, but as as dark and brilliant a comedy as they come. In the lead role of Jack Gurney, he garnered one of his, so far, eight nominations for an Academy Award. The movie is a scathing and vicious satire of the British Ruling class.

Jack is confined to a loony bin by his father, Harry, the 13th Earl of Gurney. Sadly, the senior Gurney—an abusive privileged, wog-hating, Old Empire Tory bastard—has his own psychological issues, including auto-erotic asphyxiation in a silken hangman's noose whilst sporting a tutu, a regimental red coatee and a saber, which, in Act 1, Scene 4, leads to his accidental demise.

So, unexpectedly, Jack becomes the 14th Earl of Gurney and chief beneficiary of his father's will. Jack, however, believes he is Jesus Christ, Son of God, which will not do for a proper British Lord. As a result, his family immediately begin plotting ways to get him put away again so they can get the estate into their own hands.

Crazy or not, Jack is by far the most charming of the bunch, and, as the God of Love, is the source of mirth, provided no one pushes too hard on his delusional system. When asked how he knows he is God, he replies with the classic line, "When I'm praying, I find I'm talking to myself." Prancing around the estate in a white linen suit and sneakers, spending nap time hanging from his own cross, singing "The Varsity Rag,"—how can you not love the guy?

As he's not presentable for guests and keeps on talking about giving away the family fortune to the poor, the family enlist his former psychiatrist for assistance. His final solution is to bring in a patient with an even more powerful delusional system. So, Jack's psychiatrist produces the AC-DC God, an Old Testament thunderer who thoroughly trumps Jack's New Testament God of Love.

Ripped free of his delusions, Jack blinks and looks well, saying "I'm Jack." Could all be well at last?

Not in this movie.

Unfortunately, he's not Jack Gurney, but Jack the Ripper. And, as Jack the Ripper, he fits right in. Cutting a figure in dark suit and bowler, he defeats his scheming relatives and is seated in the House of Lords to applause all around. But, instead of a pleasantly and charmingly delusional Jesus, he becomes a tortured, murderous soul who kills family and friend, ending the movie with one of the most piercing screams every committed to film, which segues into a darkly jolly rendition of "The Varsity Rag" as the credits roll.

Though, perhaps, overlong by today's standards, it is still a peerlessly black and savage comedy, eviscerating the British upper class and the class system in general. Peter O'Toole gives a performance only outdone in Lawrence of Arabia. Its blasphemous subject matters keeps off most of the cable channels, but a full length version is readily available on DVD. It's worth the price and worth repeated watching.

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Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day (1993) is as a film one would not have anticipated from a man whose previous films included Club Paradise, National Lampoon's Vacation and Caddyshack. These previous films were the broadest of comedies, thinly scripted and redeemed only fitfully by the talents of its stars. While still a comedy, Groundhog Day is a character-based story that, in the end, is a deeply moral film.

Bill Murray initially plays to type as Phil Connors, a shallow, egotistical, dead-ended weather man, sent to Punxsutawny, PA to cover the annual Groundhog Day event. It is an empty assignment for an empty man. In response, he is an arrogant prick to his film crew and the locals. Unexpectedly, the crew gets snowed in by a blizzard. Phil tucks in for the night in a B&B, but awakens in the morning to find it is still Groundhog Day. He is repeating the same events as previously, stuck in Punxsutawny, yet only he is aware of this.

The film loops through seemingly endless repetitions of the day (at least 33 depicted according to the Wikipedia, but implicitly up to 3600 according to Harold Ramis). At first Phil tries to take advantage of the situation, memorizing all the nuances of the day so he can better manipulate things. The principle target of his plans is Rita, his producer, played by Andie MacDowell. At first they are like oil and water, but as the day repeats he learns her favorite drinks, her dreams and desires. As the repetitions go past, each time he gets a little further in his seduction. At one point, he comes near to the perfect night, but takes one small misstep. From there on, his performance becomes more and more stilted until he realizes he has lost his rhythm and ardor for the pursuit.

He sinks into a deepening depression. Drunk and disheveled, he kidnaps the groundhog, Punxsutawny Phil, (no accident their common name, both trapped in a single day) carrying both of them to their deaths in gravel pit. Nevertheless, he awakens in the morning again on Groundhog Day. Multiple attempts at suicide fail similarly. He robs the bank, seduces waitresses, but life seems increasingly empty. Then he encounters a bum who dies in an alley, and he is moved to act. The next time, he takes the old fellow to a diner and fills his stomach, but still he dies. He takes him next to a hospital, but he still dies. Chastened by the finality of death, frustrated, he choses honesty with Rita as they have their morning breakfast. Walking her through his day, she almost believes him and they have a genuine day and evening together, though we he awakes his plight is the same.

The film is an enactment of the Kierkegaardian stages of life. Phil starts in the aesthetic stage, interested only in personal enjoyment and the life of the senses. At the start of the movie, he has already reached a dead-end with this approach. He is played out and at sea with himself. Midway through the movie he passes through despair and advances into the ethical stage, becoming aware of the moral implications of action. Despite the fact that his entire life is limited to a single day doomed to endless repetition, he resolves to make a difference. Daily he changes the flat tire of some little old ladies, catches a boy falling from a tree, learns the lives of everyone in town, takes piano lessons, learns ice sculpturing, teaches himself French, and actually becomes a thoughtful and effective weatherman. By the end, he approaches the religious stage, devoting himself selflessly to others. Only then does he realizes an authentic and spontaneous union with Rita. As a result, the next day he awakes with Rita back in real time.

The movie is among the most seriously moral films, a lesson in existential philosophy disguised as a Bill Murray comedy. He gives here the first glimpses of the subtlety he would later develop as an actor. The Writer's Guild has ranked the script 27th on a list of the 101 greatest scripts, and the IMDb rates it in the top 250 movies of all time. Snatch it up should you find it in your local remainder bin.

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John Ford was the first to see the potential in John Wayne and helped shape his image in a series of a classic westerns, including Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is the most subtle treatment of Wayne's character, and represents one of his most fully realized roles, approaching the tragic in its depth. The film deals with the passing of the American West's values of freedom and independence. In many ways it is a summation and re-examination of the whole notion of the West as promulgated by Wayne and Ford. The story begins at the turn of the 19th century. Senator Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), is traveling by train to Shinbone, the town of his youth, for the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is a senior senator with presidential aspirations. Doniphon is an unknown. Stoddard and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles) go to the undertaker and stand before the plain box that holds Doniphon. Enter the local press. They must know why the Senator has gone out his way to attend the funeral of an unknown cowhand. There is an old stagecoach on blocks at the undertaker's—a reference to the stagecoach that marked Wayne's breakthrough role. Stewart hems and haws, dusts off the old stage. It looks like the one that brought him to Shinbone decades before. And so the retelling begins. It is the 1870's. Stoddard is a young lawyer journeying by stage to make his fortune out west. Bandits waylay the stage and Stoddard is beaten by the eponymous Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Stoddard is the symbol of eastern civilization, impotent in the face of Valance's lawlessness. In the next scene we see Doniphon entering Shinbone with the beaten Stoddard thrown into the back of his buckboard. Between the impotent Stoddard and the lawless Valance is the figure of Doniphon, the only man whom Valance fears, and pillar of the town, friend to the newspaper editor, beau to Hallie, and foil to the inept marshal (Andy Devine). Shinbone is a dysfunctional town. Legal authority, as embodied by Devine, is cowardly, gluttonous and corrupt. Stoddard, the man with the intellectual ability to bring law to the town, is devoid of authority. Doniphon, the man who has the physical power and respect of the town to give force to the law and bring order to Shinbone hews to a code of individualism that keeps him from committing to the notion of a civil society. The political climate is fertile; statehood is being discussed and will change everything, bringing the rule of law and threatening the open range. At the local meeting to elect representatives, Valance tries to disrupt the proceedings but is held in place by Doniphon. Stoddard nominates Doniphon as a man uniquely qualified to represent the region. If he accepts the nomination, he unites physical and legal authority, bringing order to Shinbone and relegates Valance to the periphery. But he refuses. Accepting such a role is incongruent with his notions of individuality. Stoddard and the newspaper editor are instead elected. Valance vows revenge. Instead of supporting Stoddard, Doniphon counsels flight. He arranges a buckboard to take Stoddard out of town before Valance arrives that night to have it out with him. Doniphon's abdication leaves Stoddard with the decision: leave the town in the clutches of Valance, or stand and challenge him. Stoddard calls Valance out. Valance toys with him, shooting the gun out of his hand. Stoddard picks up the gun. Valance takes aim. Stoddard fires. Valance falls dead. Miraculously, Stoddard has liberated the town, also winning the heart of Hallie. Wayne goes on a bender, drinking himself into a stupor, then burns down his home, symbolically burning his own hopes for the future. He has lost everything. But the depth of his loss only becomes apparent later. Stoddard goes to the state convention, heralded as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." On this wave of popularity, he is elected to represent the state in Washington, launching his career. As he is elected, Doniphon enters the hall. He is drunk and haggard. He calls Stoddard into a back room and confronts him. "You didn't shoot Valance, Pilgrim," he tells Stoddard, "Think back, Pilgrim." We dissolve to the gunfight in the street, this time from Doniphon's POV. He stands in an alley. As Valance makes his final shot, Doniphon shoots him, the shot simultaneous with Stoddard's, killing Valence, but in a manner without honor. In doing so, he loses his self- respect and violates the code by which he has lived. This illuminates his raging drunk. All is lost. Wayne approaches the tragic in this role. He was the best, but because of the limitations of his code, he defers acting against Valance and defers again. When leadership comes his way, he refuses. When events force him to act, he must do so in a manner that is dishonorable. Doniphon's only sin is that of pride—he will not stoop to the needs of the group and holds himself aloof. For this alone, he fails and ultimately transgresses against all he stands for. When Stoddard and his wife return to Shinbone for the funeral, their solemnity springs guilt. Stoddard has traded on the Valance shooting his entire career and he knows that he has lived a lie. Ironically, the reporter tears up the story at the end, saying "When the legend becomes the truth, print the legend." John Ford made the western what it is today. Here he gives us movie that is a complex and, at times sardonic, critique of the genre, while at the same time giving Wayne his deepest, most tragic role. There was not to be another western of equivalent depth until Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. It rewards repeated viewing and is a capstone to the career of Mr. Wayne.