Spoilers
Selected Film Reviews by Anne Billson
Part 1: 1989 - 1995
copyright 2012 Anne Billson
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Introduction
I wrote my first professional film review in 1980, for a short-lived London listings magazine called Event. The film was a porn movie called Insatiable, starring Marilyn Chambers, whom I'd heard of, because a couple of years earlier I'd seen her in David Cronenberg's Rabid, in which she'd developed a bloodsucking phallic growth in her armpit that had been instrumental in turning most of the population of Montreal into flesh-eating zombies.
Alas, there was to be no such excitement in Insatiable, a hardcore film chopped down for the UK softcore market, which meant there was little of interest left; porn superstar John C Holmes was in there, but the reason for his being famous wasn't, not after distributors had finished snipping him down to X-rated acceptability. But I was fascinated by Chambers's pubic hair (trimmed into a shape I described as Mohican, later to become known as a Brazilian) and impressed by the free gin and tonics.
Alcohol, I was to learn, was a rare luxury at press screenings, but in the years to come I would review little but softcore porn, bad teen movies and the sort of horror movies not even horror movie fans normally bother with. I would review them for listings magazines, free magazines and the Monthly Film Bulletin (which scrupulously insisted on running reviews of every film released, as a matter of public record). I would review them because no-one else wanted to, and because I needed the work.
Every so often, I would stumble across a little nugget of interest - a screenwriting credit for Barry Levinson tucked away in the credits of a low budget exploitation pic, for example, or a deliriously entertaining Dutch melodrama by a little known director called Paul Verhoeven. But it was three years before I reviewed a film the general public might actually have wanted to go and see (Flashdance) and another three years after that before I finally reviewed a film that I might actually have wanted to go and see (Aliens). I think that's known as paying your dues.
Since then I have written about film for around two dozen different publications, not all of which you will have heard of, and at least three of which went bust overnight, owing me money and requiring me to start my reviewing career all over again, from scratch. At one time or another, since the mid-1980s, I have been the official film critic for publications as diverse as Today, The Sunday Correspondent, Tatler, New Statesman & Society and The Sunday Telegraph.
I liked being a film critic - I got to see blockbuster movies weeks, sometimes even months before the non-film reviewing public, which meant seeing the movies before my appetite for them had been blunted by exposure to too many articles, reviews and overly explicit trailers. I also liked being obliged to see films I wouldn't normally have seen. I even enjoyed some of the bad films. Only twice did I find the job physically hard to take; once during a British film so dreary it gave me a panic attack and I was forced to go outside into Soho Square and take deep breaths in order to calm down, and another time, during a Chinese movie, when I didn't just nod off, but actually started to drool in my sleep.
Why publish this selection? Mainly because it occurs to me that I have now spent half my life writing film reviews, and I thought it might be nice to have something to show for it other than a pile of yellowing newsprint. Naturally I've tried to leave out most of the really embarrassing or boring stuff, but these reviews were written anything up to 20 years ago, so there are bound to be cringe-making moments. I've done a bit of subediting here and there, and I've deliberately tried to include reviews of films I liked but which otherwise seem to be universally detested (Alien Resurrection, Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho) simply because I think they deserve to have at least one dissenting voice out there, sticking up for them.
Despite the title of this volume, there are relatively few 'spoilers' in the following pages; I don't think the function of film reviews is to provide detailed synopses, much less give away all the best shocks or jokes in advance (though from time to time I do fall into this trap, and for that I apologise in advance). I think the function of film reviews is principally to allow me, the writer, to be opiniated and obnoxious, to demonstrate how erudite and intellectual I am by dropping in lots of high-tone cultural references and allusions to film history, to exasperate readers with my misfired shots at sophisticated wit and effortful attempts at limpid prose, to miss the point of the film entirely, go off at a tangent and generally make everyone wish they were reading Pauline Kael instead.
Anne Billson 2008
ETA: I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Gerard, Pedro and Leos.
Chapter 1: Dangerous Liaisons
Letter 176: The Baroness de Billson to the Marquise de Merteuil.
Madame, having long been one of your most devoted followers, it falls to me to be the bearer of tidings that will make you gnash your teeth. On the other hand, you may well bust a gut laughing, since we know your sense of humour is amusingly warped. How delightful to recall the smallpox scar make-up you wore on your last visit to Paris! How we chortled when that mischievous Choderlos de Laclos fellow put it about that this hideous disfigurement was divine punishment for your outrageous behaviour!
This is the gist of what I have learned. Do you remember persuading the Vicomte de Valmont to deflower the Volanges girl before the little slut could be married off to that ungrateful ex-lover of yours? Well, shortly after you retired from the public eye in order to compose your memoirs, many of the letters pertaining to this intrigue fell into the hands of a bounder named Christopher Hampton who, since he was a playwright, made a play out of them. His attempts at capturing your inimitable essence were surprisingly effective, though a natural bias towards his own gender resulted in the wretched Valmont being elevated perilously close to the status of hero. Instead of his well deserved demise being the consequence of sheer ineptitude with the epee, it was made to appear that he was a romantic suicide. His deathbed confession was presented as a moral triumph, instead of an act of cowardice and reprehensible betrayal of those sterner ideals to which he professed adherence whenever it suited his purposes.
Had it been left at that, my dear Marquise, you would have had little cause for complaint, especially as you yourself were portrayed on the stage by a certain Miss Lindsay Duncan as a charming creature of great beauty and amorality. But alas, the play proved such a success that it has now been made into a motion picture, and it is here that I fear you have been sorely misrepresented. Firstly, and in my opinion disastrously, you are played by Miss Glenn Close, who formerly achieved notoriety as the psychotic harpy in Fatal Attraction. Miss Close is, of course, lumbered with the baggage from this role, so that there will no doubt be many filmgoers who see you as nothing more than a frustrated matron, a pitiable bitch to be booed and hissed like a music-hall villain.
Miss Close, moreover, though she might conceivably be considered handsome in an impoverished backwoods community that prizes sun-darkened skin and freckle-faced candour above aristocratic elegance, is singularly lacking in sex appeal. Indeed, she looks positively plain when placed alongside Miss Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress cast as your chief rival and object of Valmont's absurd puppy-crush - the nauseating Madame de Tourvel. What with her bruised lips and moist eyes and voice all a-tremble, my dear, it is no contest; no man in his right mind, not even the ridiculous Valmont, would ever dream of casting such a cupcake aside as a favour to that imposter being passed off as yourself. To those of us who have had the honour of knowing you, Madame, this ludicrous deception stretches credulity too far.
As for Valmont, he is portrayed by Mr John Malkovich as a leering satyr, launching himself at women with a vulgar abandon that would get him banned from every respectable drawing-room in the land. Valmont had his faults, certainly, but lack of savoir faire was not one of them. Nor was lack of subtlety. Whenever Mr Malkovich and Miss Close tell untruths or utter double entendres in the presence of those not privy to their schemes, they smirk and twitch as if in the grip of Tourette's Syndrome, to alert us to their duplicity.
I could go on. I could mention the American accents that, although one is not averse to this New World way of speaking per se, are more redolent of thirtysomething-style let-it-all-hang-out than of sexual intrigue a la eighteenth century French aristocracy. I could tell you of the strangely underdressed chateaux, or of the perambulations that everyone takes in the gardens whenever Mr Stephen Frears gets bored with the great indoors and feels he should demonstrate that he is directing a film and not a stage play. Walk? In the garden? And run the risk of sullying one's pale skin with a plebian suntan?
I could complain about the lack of social or economic context which makes your boast of avenging your sex seem no more than a half-hearted nod towards late twentieth century Feminism, or about the film-makers' yellow-bellied concessions to popular sentiment, or about the inattentiveness to appearance in a story which is all about appearances. Instead, cast and crew have gone on record (and critics have backed them up) as saying it is somehow a good thing that the gorgeous, elaborate costumes are barely given the time of day. I know, and I know that you know, Madame, that to be a successful poseuse, one must always be acutely aware of the discrepancy between appearance and actuality.
Madame, I urge you to take action. If necessary, we could retrieve your letters and promote our own version of events, this time with a more suitable actress in the leading role. Some fifteen years ago, Faye Dunaway might have done you justice. Today, we might have... who? Genevieve Bujold? Catherine Deneuve? As the director, we might hire Ridley Scott, who I am told can be pretty nifty with the matching accessories.
Or how does Milos Forman grab you? Madame, I fear I bring more bad tidings. Even as I write, Mr Forman is preparing to unveil his own interpretation of your story. His title, alas, does not bode well. He plans to call it - brace yourself, madame - Valmont.
(First published in The Virgin Film Yearbook, 1989)
2008 addendum: Obliged to read Choderlos de Laclos's book at an impressionable age, I promptly concluded 'La Marquise de Merteuil, c'est moi,' and went on to develop that obsessive possessiveness reserved for one's favourite works of fiction. None shall touch! And if they do, they'd better bloody well get it right. In the end I much preferred Forman's Valmont,which presented itself as a cynical costume romp, starring the (then) little-known Annette Bening as Merteuil and Colin Firth as Valmont, though once again I was irritated by the latter character being presented as a romantic hero rather than the lily-livered snitch he'd always seemed to me. I also have a soft spot for Roger Vadim's 1959 modern-dress adaptation, starring Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philippe (and featuring Boris Vian, object of one of my lifelong crushes, in a minor role), as well as for Roger Kumble's delightfully trashy Cruel Intentions, a teen update starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Philippe. I even like the 2003 Korean version, Untold Scandal. And I still think the Stephen Frears film is the worst of the lot.
But Ridley Scott? I must have been mad, or, more likely, still enraptured by the memory of Mimi Rogers's walk-in perfume cabinet in Someone To Watch Over Me.
Chapter 2: Casualties of War
American movies set in Vietnam have not been noticeably packed with parts for Vietnamese actors. Nor have they offered a great many rewarding roles for women; it is unusual to be presented with a female role as substantial as the one in Casualties of War. But wait - the director is none other than Brian De Palma, whose CV includes Dressed to Kill (in which Angie Dickinson is slashed to death), Blow Out (in which Nancy Allen is choked to death) and Body Double (in which Deborah Shelton is drilled to death). Brian has a history of upsetting women's groups, and he doesn't let them down here. Thuy Thu Le makes her film acting debut as a Vietnamese girl whose forty minutes of screen time consist of being abducted, raped and murdered, and I for one wouldn't care to have a Method actor like Sean Penn looming over me with his pants down.
De Palma is keen to demonstrate his awareness that what happens is a Bad Thing, but doesn't seem confident that his audience will be similarly enlightened, and so bombards us with the girl's tear-streaked features to prove she's not enjoying her ordeal. Alas, this proves counterproductive, for when she is finally dispatched, it's not so much an outrage as a relief - for us to be put out of our misery. Lest anyone should still be in doubt about her status as innocent victim, her Big Death Scene (along with every other fatality and meaningful monologue) is swamped with emotional music from Ennio Morricone; the credits reveal the composer worked through a translator, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why a film about Vietnam should be accompanied by a score for Peruvian nose-flutes.
Michael J. Fox, as the 'cherry' who tries in vain to help the girl, is the latest in a long line of De Palma protagonists who are helpless witnesses to murder, though the director has always lacked the Hitchcock knack of implicating the voyeur, and has eliminated all potential for ambiguous dilemma with his casting; not for one second do we believe that Marty McFly from Back to the Future could ever do to a woman what America did to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Sean Penn's offscreen reputation as an obnoxious pugilist saves screenwriter David Rabe an awful lot of hackwork.
But all this Nam-bam-and-thank-you-mam throws everything out of kilter; it forms the protracted centrepiece of the film when it should have been swept out of the way in the first ten minutes. The cover-up and consequences are crammed in almost as an afterthought; instead of a gritty court martial, we get a mere few minutes of the accused soldiers trying to justify their actions. The film flirts with, but is never allowed to embrace, the dilemma of how to uphold moral values when your country is actively encouraging you to turn the enemy into chopped liver.
The screenplay is based on a real incident, and there is a provocative tale in there somewhere. But it has lost out to DePalma's insistence of painting in black and white when the dodgy grey tones would have been more interesting.
(First published in the Sunday Correspondent, 1990)
Chapter 3: Steel Magnolias
There are movies which move you, and there are movies which try so hard to move you they give you emotion-sickness. In other words, you feel like throwing up. It's not as if my heart is hardened against sentiment; you're talking to a girl who gets a lump in her throat every time Fred Astaire lifts a foot off the floor, who gets the sniffles five minutes into your average Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy sobfest, who has been known to weep uncontrollably all the way through The Curse of the Cat People. So what is it about films like Steel Magnolias that leaves me dry-eyed and gasping for slop-free air?
Robert Harling based his original play, so we are told, on 'his mother and sister's courageous acts of caring.' Now he has adapted it into a screenplay, and - following in the footsteps of David Hare and Willie Russell - has given us yet another less-than-galvanising version of how men reckon women think and behave. I'm not saying that women don't think and behave in this way; I'm just saying that life's too short to spend two hours of it in the company of the kind of women who do.
Or maybe it's the way all six above-the-title actresses play characters with names - M'Lynn, Clairee, Truvy - that sound as though they've been dictated by a dyslexic down a long-distance telephone line, or the way they talk with exaggerated Southern Belle accents; it's like watching an extended screen-test in search of the Scarlett O'Hara of the1990s. Or maybe it's the combination of - brace yourselves - Shirley MacLaine and Sally Field, starring together in a single picture. Let me know when you've stopped screaming and we can go on.
Sally is cast in the Shirley role, as the mother half of a mother-daughter relationship. Meanwhile Shirley, having already won a mother-daughter Oscar for Terminal Endearment, graciously cedes centre-stage in favour of a subsidiary role. But eek! she remembers - too late - Sally already has two Oscars, so Shirley must fight back by flaunting the signs of a serious actress - ankle socks, mussed hair and smeary make-up. Who's it going to be this time, boys and girls? Best or Best Supporting? Sally or Shirley? Shirley or Sally?
As if this duo weren't enough, we also have Olympia Dukakis, who gets the best lines ('The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorise'); Daryl Hannah challenging Shirley's serious act by wearing spectacles and a cardigan; Julia Roberts, sister of Eric and the lucky owner of a protracted sickbed scene ('It's no big thing; I'll just have a kidney transplant; I'll be fine...'); and Dolly Parton, who injects an extra syllable into every word ('Annelle honey, whaddaya sa-yay wee-ya toy-alk so-yum tra-yash?') and is the only one who doesn't act like she's slumming. Dolly, as the owner of the beauty parlour where much of the action takes place, can talk about frosting and streaking as if she really means it, and (bless her) she probably does.
What am I saying? Action? What action? The director is Herbert Ross, often described as being a Director of Actresses, which means he's OK at filming ballet but not so hot on exciting car chases, gory murders and the meaning of life. For action, read ponderous exchanges of dialogue arranged in theatrical format: Act Three, Scene Four - the saline drip gets wheeled out from the wings. Each scene takes place on or around a ceremony or festival: wedding, Halloween, Christmas, funeral... Waiting for each of the six actresses to trot out her ha'pennyworth in each of the scenes can get a tad wearisome; when years have passed, and we're stuck in the middle of an Easter Egg hunt and they're still trotting out their ha'pennyworths, one realises with a sinking feeling there is no real reason why this film should ever end. Why not Hogmanay? Whitsun? St Cecilia's Day? And then another wedding, and then Halloween again...
(First published in Tatler, 1990)
Chapter 4: Pretty Woman
What do women want? You may well ask. Screenwriters are every bit as flummoxed as Freud, and it shows. It shows especially in old-fashioned films that are masquerading as flashy new modish ones. The male characters grab life by the throat; they stockpile commodities, they rob banks, they have meaningful buddy relationships and heavy obsessions and they get metaphysical. But the female ones are just kind of there; occasionally they have babies or get leukaemia, but mostly they buy clothes and things.
Take Pretty Woman. This is not the sort of story that knocks you sideways with its originality. You know the score right from the kick-off. He is a top-bracket shark whose business is gobbling up companies, peeling off their assets and then spitting out the pulp. He stops his car on Hollywood Boulevard and asks her the way to Beverly Hills. She is a two-bit hooker, and by hook or by crook (but mostly hook) she ends up ensconced in his posh hotel suite, flexing his plastic whenever she feels like it, building up a colour coordinated wardrobe and tagging along to swanky power dinners as his decorative accessory. It's a business arrangement.
Naturally, they fall in love, though you have to take that bit for granted. On paper, neither is a particularly loveable character, but he is lucky enough to be played by the eminently attractive Richard Gere, who has got over his faded-matinee-idol phase and sprouted enough grey hairs and interesting wrinkles for people to start taking him seriously as an actor. And she has the advantage of being played by Julia Roberts, who thanks to crucial kidney failure in Steel Magnolias is the hottest dish on this season's menu.
Every successful film actress needs one outstanding feature, and Julia's is her mouth - it has such a life of its own that it practically goes walkies around the block, and it contains an enormous number of interesting teeth. I described these to my dentist last week, and he informed me that it is now common practice for go-ahead dental surgeons to equip their clients with laughing tackle that is a touch irregular, just enough to make it look like the real thing. One is not suggesting for a second that Julia's teeth are capped, but one can't help wondering what brand of toothpaste she uses to make them sparkle so.
Anyway, it's a fairytale swap; she gives him spontaneity and a joyous new desire to be nice to the companies he asset strips, while he showers her with strawberries and champagne, a trip in a private jet to see La Traviata in San Francisco and unlimited shopping opportunities on Rodeo Drive. Cinderella meets Pygmalion, even if the nearest she gets to culture is learning that a salad fork has three tines while a dinner fork has four. (Did you know that? I didn't.)
Director Garry Beaches Marshall (brother of Penny Big Marshall) is a veteran of the TV sitcom scene, and he doesn't have a whole lot of cinematic savvy. Within the first ten minutes, he and his writer are breaking every rule in the How To Write a Screenplay book; vital chat takes place on the telephone, acres of talky drama unfold in hotel suites or at restaurants or on the sidelines of a polo match. Do they think they're doing Noel Coward, or what? If so, it's Noel Coward without the nervously brilliant dialogue. Nobody ever got round to explaining a few basics, such as why Gere needs a bimbo to sit in on his power dinners in the first place.
And no amount of romantic banter can disguise the fact that this is a film about prostitution. Both of these characters are mercenary sluts, which is maybe why they get on so famously. She gives him scruples and he gives her good taste; Roberts pre-Gere is foul-mouthed and graceless, decked out in an unbecoming platinum wig and hideous peek-a-boob frock. But shazzam! Post-Gere, plus cash, she is instantly transformed into the incarnation of Vogue-ish chic, and we haven't seen her taking any Lucie Clayton lessons in the interim. The message is that money equals taste and this, as we know, is a whopper; the cheapest, tackiest chain store rags cannot hope to rival the costliest designer furbelows for unremitting naffness.
And then, the crux of the matter - what do women want? In a sudden access of squeamishness, the fille de joie gets the shock-horrors when Gere offers to put her up in a nice pad. But what does she want, then? To take pottery lessons? To minister to starving children in the Third World? To become Mrs Gere? The film-makers back off at this point, perhaps realising that marriage in this context means little more than legalised, respectable prostitution with fridge-freezers, designer frocks, unlimited supplies of champagne, a private plane, tickets to La Traviata and a complete set of Solti's Ring on CD.
But this is basically a showcase for La Roberts - she laughs, she cries, she takes her clothes off and she puts them back on again. And she's easy on the eye and ear (though the nudge-nudge close-up of Carole Lombard's star on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard is pushing it) and she gives good teeth. Keep an eye on Gere, though - he's solid gold support.
(First published in Tatler, 1990)
Chapter 5: Wild at Heart
There is nothing PR companies like better than film reviews that provide them with easily extractable cliches to reprint on their posters. If you have ever studied these critical puffs, you may have noticed that they, like everything else, are subject to the vagaries of fashion. For many years An Absolute Gem! or variations thereon, was the unassailable league-topper, with Riveting! and Razor-sharp dialogue! jostling each other for second position.
But the rest of the field has recently been outstripped by an exciting new challenger: Reminiscent of the world of David Lynch! I blush to admit that I too have been guilty of this one. What it generally means is that the film in question is arty and strange and packed with non-sequiturs. It also indicates that Lynch is now considered le dernier cri in cinematic weirdness.
After the debacle of Dune, he pulled off a career coup that, had it been planned, would have been hailed as a triumph of tactical diplomacy. Women like Isabella Rossellini are the reason men become film directors in the first place, and Lynch didn't just sleep with her, he also cast her in Blue Velvet. And she is not just the most beautiful woman in the universe; she is also the consequence of Casablanca being twinned with Rome, Open City. Thus, in one dazzling masterstroke, Lynch one-upped Woody Allen's alliance with Mia Farrow, daughter of a Hollywood actress and director, by securing himself an entree into one of the western world's major film-making dynasties: not just any old Hollywood actress but Ingrid Bergman, not just any European director but Roberto Rossellini. David is home and dry.
Any doubts that the film industry is run on dynastic lines can be dispelled by a glance at the cast list of Lynch's latest, Wild at Heart, which stars Nicolas Cage, nephew of Francis Coppola, and Laura Dern, daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, who appears in the film as her daughter's mother.
This is crazy love on the run with a pounding rock soundtrack, super-saturated colour (the lipstick is very red,and so is the blood) and a constant trickle of self-parodying pronouncements - 'This is a snakeskin jacket,' says Cage, 'and for me it is a symbol of individuality and belief in personal freedom.' (One wishes Dern had something similarly grand to say about the saucy undies she keeps flaunting.)
These two are in love - no, they're in lurve - and nothing can stand in their way, not even a succession of hitpeople hired by Dern's dotty mom; these include Willem Dafoe with a pimp moustache and Rossellini in blonde wig and Frida Kahlo eyebrows. As the director Christopher Petit pointed out in these pages not so long ago, directors such as Lynch are the means by which America has usurped the European art movie. Godard and Truffaut pinched Hollywood genre conventions for their Nouvelle Vague; directors like Lynch have swiped them back again and slapped yet another layer of movie-buff self-consciousness on top. Wild at Heart is Pierrot le fou and Weekend filtered through one of John Waters's recent teenpics, but with enough sex and violence to make the arthouse audience gasp. There is a notable lift from Yojimbo - a dog trotting by with a severed hand in its mouth - and there are a half-dozen direct references to The Wizard of Oz.
The director is playing to the gallery, and the Palme d'Or awarded to the film at Cannes earlier this year looks suspiciously like a retrospective prize for the superior Blue Velvet, which can't have been an easy act to follow. Thanks to advance publicity for the forthcoming TV soap Twin Peaks, public expectation for Wild at Heart has been whipped into a frenzy, but the media blitz has backed him into a corner; this man has only to show someone drinking from a polystyrene cup and everyone hails it as a triumph of surrealism, a quirky commentary on smalltown America's seething underbelly and consumerist tendencies.
Clocking in at more than two hours, Wild at Heart struggles to maintain the reckless pace of a road movie, and the world it portrays is so hyper-psycho from the outset that each grotesque new character or lunatic plot development is simply absorbed without a ripple; it passes painlessly, even pleasantly (though obviously not for anyone unable to tolerate the sight of exposed brain matter), but it's oddly disposable, sustained by flashy style and tongue-in-chic humour, but not particularly reminiscent of anyone's world, let alone that of Lynch.
(First published in the Sunday Correspondent, 1990)
2008 addendum: Was I really suggesting that David Lynch owes the latter part of his career to his relationship to Isabella Rossellini? Surely not, but I now find this clumsy attempt to shoehorn film-making dynasties into the argument rather endearing. And I still think it's his weakest film, Palme d'Or or no Palme d'Or.
Chapter 6: Goodfellas
I have fainted only twice in my film-going career, and luckily no-one noticed. The first time was during Grave of the Vampire at the Holloway Odeon, and the second was towards the end of Taxi Driver at the Leicester Square Theatre. When Martin Scorsese is firing on all cylinders it can sometimes get a bit too intense for those of us with frail constitutions.
And now, just when I thought I could watch a Scorsese film without flinching, here he is back on the home turf of Mean Streets, ploughing that same old furrow as if he'd never been away, except perhaps for an extended course of advanced flashy directing techniques. Goodfellas, adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, is based on the recollections of Henry Hill, who supergrassed on his fellow mobsters in exchange for immunity from a narcotics rap and a safe new anonymity in suburbia.
It's like Cinema Paradiso with a corpse-count; a nostalgic voice-over ('As far back as I could remember I always wanted to be a gangster') relating an everyday story of robbery, extortion and murder. Years pass, shirt collars expand and contract, and Phil Spector gives way to Eric Clapton; three decades of remorseless atrocity, and just because these guys don't want to wait in line like everybody else. Ray Liotta plays Henry with what one assumes is a deliberate lack of warmth, while Robert De Niro, Scorsese's actor-in-residence, takes the more shadowy role of his mentor. The flashy stuff is left to Joe Pesci, who makes such a strong impression as the local loose cannon that the film almost runs out of ammunition after his exit.
Whereas Coppola's incursions into mobdom play like I Vespri Siciliani, Scorsese's are bleeding chunks of rock 'n' roll ripped from the juke box. But mostly this is a movie about guys. Guys whose idea of side-splitting repartee is, 'Go fuck your mother.' Guys who marry girls with bad skin and too much mascara. Guys who murder the guys who insult them. Guys with execrable taste in decor, whose sole saving grace is that they know how to make a mean spaghetti sauce.
This is black comedy with a fearsome edge; innocuous banter can erupt without warning into lethal rage. No-one is glamorised, no-one sees the light. When Henry Hill turns snitch, it is not because he repents; it's to save his own skin. These are ugly people with ugly thoughts, and Scorsese piles it on like a latterday Hieronymous Bosch, whose crucifixion he 'quoted' in The Last Temptation of Christ. These guys make Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta look like men you wouldn't mind getting married to. Strange, isn't it, how a director of such integrity is always making films about people with no redeeming qualities.
Two hours and 20 minutes spent in the company of such creatures gets to be brain-numbing. But if there is one character more engaging than all the others, it's Marty's camera, manned by Michael Ballhaus. It swoops and glides and stop-starts; it goes walkies where no camera has gone before - along passageways, through kitchens, up and down and around. Boy, is it ever clever, but the cleverest thing is it's not just for show. Scorsese is one of the few film-makers who can convey a person's thoughts with a camera movement, and it's the unblinking lens that provides Goodfellas with a heart and soul.
(First published in the Sunday Correspondent, 1990)
2008 addendum: It's difficult to write about a film as astonishing as Goodfellas after seeing it only once, and Ithink the tentativeness of the above review reflects this; I was still too stunned by Scorsese's dazzling technique and traumatised by the lethal unpredictability of the Joe Pesci character to approach it objectively. (Years later, I was fortunate enough to see Saving Private Ryan twice before writing about it, and therefore able to look beyond the stun-grenade effect of the opening half hour.) I didn't say as much, but I suspected Scorsese of revelling in, maybe even glamorising his reprehensible characters - something that seems incredible to me now, since subsequent viewings have only convinced me these scumbags are never depicted as anything less than sleazy, tasteless and morally bankrupt.
Chapter 7: The Silence of the Lambs
We live in fear of them. Thanks to increased mobility and the proliferation of mass media, they can strike anywhere, at any time, and with no logic discernible to the naked eye. They may be masquerading as perfectly normal pages of newsprint, and then, when our defences are down - pow! - they reveal themselves to be further examples of that terrifying phenomenon of the late 20th century: the Serial Killer Article. You can't pick up a newspaper or magazine without coming across someone wittering on about the nature of evil. And you've got one such page in your hand right now, which proves my point.
But serial killers are not exactly new, as any fan of horror fiction or splatter cinema will tell you. They've just gone mainstream. Ten years ago, careless table-talk about the exploits of, say, Ed Gein (necrophile, cannibal and real-life basis for Norman Bates) would have got you banned from every self-respecting dinner party in the land. Nowadays, though, serial killer repartee is virtually de rigueur at the dinner table. The catalysts responsible for bringing all this ghoulishness out of the morgue and in among the hors d'oeuvres are Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (DeSade without the jokes) and, this week's treat, The Silence of the Lambs. Lambs is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for sophisticates; not so much a film, more a case history in how to make a tasteless subject acceptable to a mainstream audience. Out go lashings of gore, killer's point of view and gratuitous use of heavy metal. In come directorial restraint, the feminine perspective and the presence of a well-respected theatre-based British actor (Anthony Hopkins) as chief villain.
This is the plot: Jodie Foster plays an FBI trainee who seeks the advice of one convicted murderer, Dr Hannibal Lecter, in order to catch another, a man who has been nicknamed Buffalo Bill because he flays his victims and stitches their hides into bodysuits. It seems almost churlish to point out that, technically, Lambs isn't about serial killers at all, even though the term is currently tripping off everyone's lips. Serial killers, surely, kill complete strangers at random, which is why they are so tricky to apprehend. Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, appears to have killed people he knew, and Buffalo Bill has his reasons. Multiple murderers, yes. Serial killers, no. But what the hell: serial killers sounds more exciting - coming next week, to be continued, snap, crackle and pop.
The consensus on Lambs - and I conducted a mini-poll - seems to be that you'll find it more effective if you haven't read the Thomas Harris novel on which it's based. This adaptation is so faithful that it never puts a foot wrong. But neither does it add anything in particular. Hardcore cinephiliacs, meanwhile, will drop wistful references to the 1986 film Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann and based on Harris' novel Red Dragon. Manhunter isn't as cohesive as Lambs; the narrative collapses, the ending is a flop and some people unaccountably failed to appreciate a soundtrack incorporating Iron Butterfly and Shriekback. And yet its images - an empty but blood-spattered bedroom, a blazing man in a runaway wheelchair - are liable to infiltrate your nightmares in a way that Jonathan Demme's Lambs, for all its studied gloom, does not.
Common to both films is the character of Lecter (called Lecktor in Manhunter), who in Lambs admits to having eaten a census taker's liver 'with fava beans and a nice Chianti'. Hopkins plays him, with lethal charm and accent filched from Truman Capote crossed with Katharine Hepburn, as a man whose aim is not so much to epater les bourgeois as to turn the bourgeoisie into pate. The performance has elevated Hopkins to magazine-cover status and established Lecter as a Great Screen Psycho of Our Time, to rank alongside the likes of Colonel ('the horror... the horror...') Kurtz, Jack ('Heeeeeere's Johnny!') Torrance and Frank ('Don't fucking look at me') Booth.
In Manhunter, Lecktor was played - and very creepily, too - by another theatre-based British actor, Brian Cox. Ever since the days of Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, Americans have rather enjoyed casting British actors in the black hat roles. The bad Romans in Spartacus were all Brits, James Mason was a real rat in North by Northwest and, more recently, Steven Berkoff and Alan Rickman have acted mean in movies such as Beverly Hills Cop and Die Hard.
What are we to deduce from this insidious siphoning-off of Britain's baddest and beastliest? Could it be a form of evil brain-drain? You have only to look at recent British cinema to realise that it has been desperately lacking in villainy; this is surely one of the reasons why the British film industry is in such a sorry state. The last really bad guy on this side of the Atlantic was Michael Caine as Mortwell in Mona Lisa, and even he didn't get enough screen time. Where are the Frankensteins and Draculas when you need them? Where are the Ernst Stavro Blofelds de nos jours? Lobby your MP today; stop this ruinous export of our nation's nasties.
(First published in New Statesman & Society,1991)
Chapter 8: The Hairdresser's Husband
I have a weakness for older men, but not the obvious ones, like Paul Newman or Warren Beatty. My mature sex symbols are not your average he-men. On an evening in December 1980, halfway through a screening of The Secret Life of an American Wife, it suddenly occurred to me that I had always wanted to go to bed with Walter Matthau. And there is evidently something about a lugubrious face that hits me in all the right spots, because the object of my other big crush shares that doggily mournful look with Big Walter. To the uninitiated, he may sound like a type of cheese, but I have adored Jean Rochefort ever since I saw him in a spate of frothy French films in the 1970s, the sort of comedy of adultery that always seemed to be playing at the Curzon cinema in Mayfair.
It was Rochefort's towering performance in Un elephant ca trompe enormement (retitled Pardon Mon Affaire for the English-speaking market) that made Gene Wilder seem such small beer in the American remake, The Woman in Red. And oh, how my heart ached when he attempted to hang himself from his own meathook in Ted First Blood Kotcheff's neglected masterpiece of nondescript Euro-comedy, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, starring Jacqueline Bisset as the world's best whipper-upper of Bombe Surprise. (How I love that film, and how I treasure Gourmet magazine editor Robert Morley's response to a suggestion that he publish a menu for The Last Supper - 'What next? The Andes Plane Crash Cookbook?')
Alas, such are the vagaries of foreign film distribution in this country that it is only now that I can once again savour the exquisite pleasure of Rochefort's pointy nose and solemn, ever-so-slightly pompous moustache. The Hairdresser's Husband is, from the first to last of its 80 minutes, a study of male sexual obsession, but you don't have to share that obsession to appreciate Rochefort, who, given his head, proceeds to do the hokey-cokey with it.
Director Patrice Leconte made his name in France with broad comedies, but his work was largely unknown in this country until the release last year of Monsieur Hire, a small but perfectly formed chamber piece, adapted from a story by Georges Simenon, about a lonely tailor's obsessive love for the young woman who lives in the apartment opposite.
The Hairdresser's Husband shares that film's brevity and Proustian concern for detail, as well as its sexual fetishism and Michael Nyman score, but its tone is less doom-laden. It's the story of how Antoine (Rochefort) attains his lifetime ambition by marrying a lady hairdresser called Mathilde. For a short while, they enjoy a romantic idyll, chatting with customers and drinking cocktails made from cologne. He likes to watch her cut hair, and has her clip his own so often he ends up looking like a shaved hedgehog. It is similar to, but jollier than, the reclusive folie a deux in Ai No Corrida, and the happiness is too perfect to last. Erotic obsession is a dead-end street.
Mathilde is played by Italian actress Anna Galiena - if it matters, and it doesn't really, because Mathilde is the sort of long-legged wet dream with sultry pout who exists purely to cater to men's desires, nipples standing to attention beneath her white overalls as she leans over to clip and spritz. She could have been played by any one of a thousand gorgeous European actresses. She has no past, no future, and no existence outside her primary function, which is to be beautiful and compliant.
Such is invariably the fate of woman in the world of cinema, but The Hairdresser's Husband is such an undisguised exercise in male fantasy fulfilment that it would be mean-spirited to take offence. Besides, while those who share Rochefort's persuasion are getting their locks off ogling Galiena, more discerning filmgoers are getting more than an eyeful of the man with the longest face in films.
Students of choreography might wish to take note, especially, of Rochefort's splendid dance routines. There is a special niche in my heart reserved for Great Moments of Music and Movement - show-stopping, barnstorming steps which you can practise at home with the help of repeated video playbacks. My line-up includes all of Fred Astaire; Rita Hayworth peeling off her glove in Gilda; Peter Sellers doing a deadpan rock 'n' roll, nonchalantly checking his watch in mid-pass, in Lolita; Pee-Wee Herman impressing a barful of Satan's Helpers by dancing on the toes of his platform soles in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure; Christopher Walken's striptease in Pennies From Heaven; Gwen Verdon shimmying in her lacy long-johns as she sings, 'I always get what I aim for/And your heart and soul are what I came for' in the Faustian baseball musical Damn Yankees; Tom Hanks doing an astonishingly vicious parody of Singin' in the Rain in the otherwise unremarkable Punchline.