For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s laidback stoner noir Inherent Vice (2014), adapted from the novel by Thomas Pynchon.
It’s been three decades since Toy Story diverted the animation industry towards computer animation instead of traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion techniques, and the world is mostly worse off for it. The CG animation era has largely been dispiriting, typified more by soulless corporate dreck like Bee Movie, Shrek, and The Secret Lives of Pets than more relatively artful corporate products like Across the Spider-Verse. It feels like the entire battlefield has been surrendered to lazy IP cash-ins so celebrities like Chris Pratt can collect easy voice-acting paychecks. I haven’t seen much genuine, personal art in the medium outside a few short films in festival showcases. The new debut feature from outsider 3D animator Julian Glander is a welcome glimpse of how that might change as the tools of the trade become more widely accessible outside the corporate offices of Disney & Pixar. Admittedly, Boys Go to Jupiter indulges in the same lazy celebrity voice-acting traditions of lesser, more expensive CG animated films, but this time the voice cast happens to be overpopulated with hip, talented people: Jeaneane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Elsie Fisher, Joe Pera, Chris Fleming, Demi Adejuyigbe, Sarah Squirm, and the list goes on. It’s also got a distinct visual style, an understated tone, righteous politics, and an authentic sense of genuine humanity — all things that are difficult to find in the average computer-animated feature. It’s a vision of a better world, even if it’s one that satirizes the corporate hell world we currently live in.
In essence, Boys Go to Jupiter is cozy slacker art. It follows the daily toils of food-delivery-app worker Billy 5000 as he spends every waking minute scheming to earn the $5,000 fortune of his namesake. He scoots around his bumhole Florida town on a Segway, cramming in as many deliveries a day as he can to exploit a financial loophole in his delivery app before the bigwigs at Grubster catch onto the grift. Most of his interactions with fellow disaffected Floridians are exceedingly low-key, as he casually bumps into acquaintances like his dirtbag friends, his religious nut neighbor, an overly dedicated hotdog salesman, and his fellow Grubster drones while scooting from doorstep to doorstep. His coming-of-age Bummer Summer lifestyle is only effectively interrupted by the intrusion of two supernatural forces: an E.T.-type alien creature invading from beneath the Earth’s surface and a potential love interest who works at her mother’s science lab developing impossible varieties of semi-magical fruits. It turns out that even these fantastical players are weighed down by the daily mundanities of labor, however, as the older girl he crushes on struggles to accept her fate as her mother’s successor and the underground E.T. creature is revealed to belong to a family of social media food bloggers who have to transmit Grubster take-out reviews to their followers back home to justify their vacation on the surface. Many pointless hangouts and improvised junk food jingles ensue, with all of Billy 5000’s many trivialities revolving around one simple truth: having a job sucks.
The rounded edges, overemphasized light-sources, and blown-out haze of Glander’s visual style belong to the kind of 3D art renderings you’d only expect to see in indie comics and homemade videogames. Specifically, it plays like a D.I.Y. videogame set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, so much so that I’m amazed it’s screening in neighborhood arthouses like Zeitgeist and not personal Steam Deck consoles. Whether Glander effectively applies that softly psychedelic visual aesthetic to anything especially unique or useful is up for debate. I didn’t find it had anything new to observe about gig-economy exploitation that wasn’t more successfully satirized in fellow low-budget sci-fi whatsit Lapsis, but it’s relatable & satisfying enough as a slacker comedy that its political effectiveness is a moot point. All I know is that I liked the way it looked, its laidback novelty songs soothed my addled brain, and I laughed every time Billy 5000 concluded a Grubster delivery with the fictional company’s signature slogan, “Have a Grubby day!” I know a lot of people had their faith in computer-animated outsider art restored by last year’s feline adventure flick Flow, but I couldn’t feel that future promise of the medium myself until I “went to Jupiter” (i.e. ate some junk food and sang silly songs on the beach) with the boys.
The morning after I saw The Roses in theaters, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had seen one of the least funny comedies of all time, but that I had followed that up with a screening of one of the most hilarious pieces of filmic art that I had ever been privileged to witness. Billy Wilder’s 1961 ruckus is entitled One, Two, Three, and by the end of it I was hoarse from laughter. Oddly enough, both this and The Roses contained a performance of the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a coincidence that made me feel a little bit like I was going crazy.
“Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is an American abroad, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin and trying to further the cause of democracy by working to get the beverage behind the Iron Curtain, or rather, he’s trying to leverage that major success into becoming the head of the London office. He gets a call from the home office in Atlanta and is told that he’s going to be responsible for his boss’s teenaged daughter for a few weeks while she’s traveling. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) arrives drawling, dim, and charming, and her short time turns into two months, to the slight chagrin of Mrs. Phyllis MacNamara (Arlene Francis). Just as her parents are about to set out for Europe, Scarlett reveals that she’s spent the past six weeks sneaking over to East Berlin and meeting in secret with Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a handsome young communist. Worse—they’ve gotten married. It falls to Mac to figure out how to split them up, which he does by getting the boy arrested by framing him for anti-Soviet leanings. Then, when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, he has to figure out how to not only spring the kid from an East German prison but also to make him a socially acceptable husband for the genteel Hazeltines before their plane lands.
The comedy comes at a breakneck pace. Cagney is absolutely fantastic here, delivering some very witty dialogue like he’s got only minutes to live, and at other times bellowing orders at a successive list of underlings, Soviets, and haberdashers like he’s running the navy. The rest of the supporting cast is also a delight, with particularly great performances from Hanns Lothar as Mac’s assistant Schlemmer and Liselotte Pulver as his secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. The fräulein is great fun, as it’s clear from very early on that she and Mac are having an affair of some kind, and when he stops appearing for their “German lessons” (with “special attention to the umlaut”), she threatens to quit, and he must subtly rehire her by asking her to draft up an advertisement that includes “fringe benefits” that she immediately accepts. One of said benefits is an outfit that she saw earlier in the day, and when we see her join him in his misadventures in East Berlin to liberate Otto from the German police, she’s wearing exactly the dress and hat described; still later, when he gives his Soviet “allies” the slip to return Otto to West Germany, he leaves Schlemmer behind in her clothing as a decoy. Schlemmer himself has a habit of clicking his heels together, revealing his former involvement in his nation’s activities in the previous war (he first claims to have been part of the “underground” before it is later clarified that he worked on the literal subterranean trains).
Lots of the best comedy bits revolve around the supposed lack of ingenuity and progress behind the Curtain, but they become timeless because the film doesn’t rely solely on them. For instance, when attempting to bribe Mac to give them Fräulein Ingeborg, one of the Soviets offers him a “brand new” car that he then admits is exactly the same as a 1937 Nash; later, when a car chase to the Brandenburg gate involves the Soviet crew in hot pursuit of Mac and company, Mac’s chauffeur is surprised to see them being followed by an obsolete car, saying “It looks like a ‘37 Nash!” Said vehicle completely falls apart long before Mac makes it to the border, losing fenders and tires and arriving at the Gate rolling on one of its exposed axles. They still almost catch up, however, as Mac is detained before crossing, only for it to be revealed that the guards want to return the (now empty) bottles of Coca-Cola he had brought as proof of his profession (i.e., a bribe), which calls back to the beginning of the film, where one Mac’s complaints wasn’t that the East Germans were buying Coca-Cola in West Berlin and taking it across the border, not because he doesn’t want to sell to them but because their failure to return/recycle the empties was driving up bottling costs. It’s all very perfectly constructed, which only makes it funnier.
The film isn’t jingoistic in its devotion to finding comedy only in mocking the film’s communists, however. Some of the jokes, like Otto being tortured by being forced to listen to “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over again, cut both ways, but there are plenty of jabs made at American foolishness, especially in Scarlett’s extreme naivete. When Mac tells her that she might be found guilty of spreading anti-American propaganda due to her possession of signage that says “Yankees Go Home!”, she’s insistent that it’s not anti-U.S. but anti-Yankee, drawling that, where she’s from, “everybody hates the Yankees.” She’s also adamant that she’s going with Otto to the U.S.S.R. (“That stands for ‘Russia’!”) and that she loves washing his shirts while “he broadens [her] mind.” There are also some great digs in at European aristocrat culture in general, as part of Mac’s attempts to make Otto appealing to an American parent involves getting Count Waldemar von Droste-Schattenburg to adopt the young man, as his title will give him prestige despite the fact that the count himself is working as a bathroom attendant. It’s all very, very good.
Wilder considered this to be one of his lesser films; I read an interview with him later in life in which he expressed that he didn’t think it was actually all that funny or that it worked, but it’s just as much an overlooked classic in his canon as Ace in the Hole. People may remember him best for Sunset Boulevard or Some Like it Hot, but every time I dig further into his backlog, I love everything that I find. Track this one down if you can.
When we went to see Superman while I was in New Orleans in July, Brandon & I mentioned a couple of trailers that we were both sick of seeing and expressed our lack of interest in the films that they were promoting. One of them was Freakier Friday, which I ended up loving, and the other was The Roses. With apologies to my viewing companions who loved this, unlike with Freakier Friday, this one was just as awful as the trailer made it out to be.
Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) are at an inflection point in their marriage. It’s been ten years since they first met, when Theo escaped into the kitchen of a restaurant to cool off when another person took credit for his designs at a work dinner, meeting chef Ivy. The two moved to the U.S., where Theo’s just landed a major contract to design and build a maritime museum, and he uses the advance from the project to open Ivy’s dream restaurant, called “We’ve Got Crabs.” Unfortunately, the museum collapses during a storm as a result of his poor handiwork, but the same storm ends up stranding a huge crowd of people at Ivy’s usually-empty restaurant, including a notable film critic. As Theo’s career essentially comes to an end (not helped by his filmed reaction to the collapsing building going viral), Ivy’s suddenly explodes, and the two decide to let her be the breadwinner for a time while he raises their two children, Hattie and Roy. A few years later, the kids have transformed from fun-loving little moppets who ate sugar until they threw up to preteen athletes obsessed with performance and fitness, while Ivy’s empire has expanded through franchising of her restaurant. Although Theo was mollified for a time by Ivy’s funding of his design and construction of their (read: his) dream house, now that he’s done with that and ready to re-enter the workforce, their resentments toward one another eventually bubble over and the two start the process of a divorce, as acrimoniously as possible.
This film was directed by Jay Roach, whose early-career comedy success with the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises eventually devolved into making things like the poorly received American remake of Le Dîner de Cons in 2010’s Dinner for Schmucks and the toothless political satire The Campaign starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis. Screenwriter Tony McNamara has a better reputation around these parts, having written Poor Things (and having a hand in writing The Favourite), but while this script is serviceable, it’s not up to par with either of those works. In McNamara’s defense, this feels like a film in which the attitude toward adlibbing was a bit too lenient, although given how clunkily some of the film’s supposed zingers thud to the ground it’s hard to believe that this was the best that this cast could come up with. Andy Samberg doesn’t pull out any of his trademark charm as he sleepwalks through his lines with an identical and static “Can you believe this?” smirking energy, but at least he’s not as out of place as Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of his wife, an oddball whose desire to get into Theo Rose’s pants is as obvious as it is offputting. She does deliver the film’s best line, however, when she admits that she’s thrown caution to the wind because she’s old, her face is melting, and she knows her body’s “working up a stage 4 something” so she might as well live a little.
Both Samberg and McKinnon’s performances have the air of something that would have worked well if the film had been edited with a little more oomph. Their failure isn’t in the performance (at least not entirely) as much as it is in the pacing and the way that the camera lingers on them a little too long after they do a bit. The same cannot be said for Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, who are bafflingly unfunny in ways that I didn’t imagine possible. If you don’t recognize Chao from her voice work on Creature Commandos or know Jamie Demetriou from Fleabag, you’ll know them from the trailer as the couple doing the “We love your witty banter” bit, which is even less funny in the film than it was in the marketing material. Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Ivy’s head waiter, has a couple of good lines, but he’s also playing his character a bit broad; as I’m currently catching up on Doctor Who after losing interest around 2019 and was just coming to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I was a bit concerned that this would bode poorly for his turn as the title character (having since watched his premier in “The Giggle,” I can say that I’m very looking forward to his time as the Doctor).
I’ve never seen the Danny DeVito-directed original adaptation of this under the same name as the novel, The War of the Roses, but I can’t imagine that this improves on that one. For one thing, that film features DeVito as both a character (he’s a divorce lawyer) and narrator, and it also seems like that one gets into the actual conflict between the couple a lot earlier in the narrative than this one does. I suppose the omission of “war” from the title was actually a declaration that this movie wasn’t terribly interested in that conflict and would instead be a longer portrait of what is, for the first two acts, a fairly ordinary marriage. By the time Ivy’s making deepfakes of her husband confessing to intentionally botching the maritime museum in order to put the final nail in the coffin and Theo’s bashing the actual stove that belonged to Julia Child to pieces, there’s barely any runtime left. The film’s final moment is the most interesting and novel element, but it’s far too little and comes far too late to save this.
Over the past few months, I have consistently watched one to two classic episodes of Law & Order every night around dinner time. The ritual started as a fascination with the high cinematic quality of the show’s early seasons, especially in contributions from all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson and maniacally intense screen actor Michael Moriarty. Now that I’m about five seasons deep into the show, though, both of those notable names have departed, and I can no longer tell if I’m impressed with the craft anymore or if I’m just addicted to the storytelling format. There’s a hypnotic satisfaction to the show’s procedural narrative rhythms that soothes something deep in my otherwise anxious brain. It’s so hypnotizing, in fact, that every movie I watch just reads as different flavors of Law & Order now. The last time I went to a repertory screening was to see the grimy 80s crime thriller Night of the Juggler, which just played as an especially trashy episode of vintage Law & Order (with extended chase scenes that would’ve blown the show’s weekly budget). This week, I got to see a double feature of films by Akira Kurosawa and Spike Lee at The Prytania, and I still could only interpret them as variations of Law & Order. 1963’s High and Low? That’s classy Law & Order. Its new straight-to-AppleTV+ remake? That’s Law & Order as early-aughts melodrama, with some occasional twerking in the courthouse. Everything is Law & Order for those with eyes to see (and access to a family member’s Hulu log-in).
I would like to extend myself some grace for mentioning my new Law & Order habit in yet another classic movie review, since High and Low and Night of the Juggler share a similar first-act premise that invites the reference. Both films start with a crazed criminal kidnapping the child of a wealthy businessman they envy & loathe, only to discover that they have abducted the wrong kid by mistake, complicating their chances of collecting the demanded ransom. While Night of the Juggler uses that premise to launch into a Death Wish-style campaign of brute-force vengeance against the scurrying sickos of NYC, High and Low is much more thoughtful & introspective about the wealth disparity issues of Yokohama, Japan. Longtime Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune stars as an executive at a ladies’ shoe manufacturer who’s in the middle of a complex negotiation to take over the company when he’s informed by telephone that his son has been kidnapped. Only, his servile chauffer’s son has been abducted by mistake, which corners Mifune’s hard-edged business prick into a tough moral quandary: whether to use his life’s savings to fund the purchase of his business or to fund the return of an innocent child whose father cannot afford the outrageous ransom demands otherwise. While he struggles to make his choice, his wife, his grieving chauffer, and the detectives assigned to the case look on in horror, amazed that he would consider for a second to choose shoes over the life of a child. He eventually relents.
Like all great Law & Order episodes, High and Low really gets cooking in its second half, after the crime has been fully defined and all that’s left to do is exact punishment. It’s not only satisfying to watch detectives zero in on a prime suspect by listening for evidence of specific streetcar rattles in his recorded phone calls or by staging stake-outs to catch him purchasing heroin in an American GI jazz bar, but the way the investigation’s success is dependent on how public sentiment plays out in the press adds another layer of tension to the on-the-ground drama. As the walls close in around the working-class maniac who takes a wild shot at a corporate goon above his station by fucking with his family, the “high” and “low” signifiers of the title become increasingly literal, recalling the geographically “upper” & “lower” class distinctions of Parasite. The businessman’s invaded home is revealed to be perched at the top of an otherwise economically dire neighborhood, a symbol of financial superiority that visibly mocks the struggling workers below. As cruel as the kidnapper is for threatening the life of a child (and murdering his accomplices with overdoses of pure heroin) while rocking ice-cold mirrored sunglasses, the source of his resentment is vivid, and the businessman’s innocence in their clash is proven to be a matter of law, not of morality. The Law & Order connections also become unignorable in the back half once the detectives start interviewing the kidnapper’s neighbors for clues while they continue to work their manual-labor jobs at fish markets, junk yards, and bus depots. All that’s missing is the show’s iconic reverberated gavel-banging sound effect to punctuate each change in locale.
I wish I could say I got as much out of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest as I got out of the Kurosawa film. His modernization of the classic crime picture is one of those conceptually baffling remakes that only invites you to question its changes to the source material instead of engaging with it as a standalone work. Lee casts Denzel Washington (one of the few working actors who could credibly be said to be on Mifune’s skill level) as a record company executive instead of the more logical hip-hop version of the original character: a sports sneaker magnate. Instead of mistakenly kidnapping the son of an anonymous employee, a disgruntled rapper who couldn’t earn his way on to the exec’s label (A$AP Rocky, holding his own against Washington’s trademark intensity) kidnaps the exec’s godson, as the chauffer in this version is a close family friend (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright). That major change to the central dynamic weakens the tension of the businessman’s moral dilemma, but Lee makes other changes elsewhere that feel more thoughtful & pointed. At the very least, the update from tracking public sentiment in the press to tracking public sentiment in social media memes helps make it apparent why Lee might have thought to remake High and Low in the first place (even if it appears that he hasn’t seen a meme in at least fifteen years). Likewise, when the record exec and his chauffer decide to seek vigilante justice outside of the official, sluggish detectives’ investigation, it opens the movie up to broader social commentary about how true justice is achieved. There’s also some interesting visual play in how Lee relocates the final showdown between businessman & kidnaper on either side of a plexiglass barrier from prison to recording booth, but then he stages that same showdown a second time in a prison cell anyway, so the point of the exercise starts to muddle.
Questioning Spike Lee’s every minor decision does not stop at how Highest 2 Lowest relates to its source material. It’s constant. The movie opens with the worst Broadway showtune I’ve ever heard in my life, with its title populating onscreen in a childlish Toy Story font. The first half of the story, before the kidnapping victim is returned, is scored by an oppressive strings arrangement that makes every familial heart-to-heart play like TV movie melodrama instead of a big-screen thriller from a major auteur. The whole thing reads as laughably phony, especially by the time Washington has one of those melodramatic heart-to-hearts in his teenage son’s bedroom, which is decorated with a Kamala Harris campaign poster. Again, baffling. At the same time, Lee does occasionally convey total awareness of how he’s trolling his audience, pairing Jeffrey Wright’s casting with a full art-gallery collection of Basquiat paintings, drawing attention to his casting of Allstate TV commercial spokesman Dean Winters by nicknaming one of Wright’s handguns “Mayhem”, and having Washington erroneously refer to Law & Order: “SUV” like a true out-of-touch millionaire. The most generous reading of these small, playful touches could link them to Kurosawa’s own jokey details, like staging his kidnapping during a child’s game of Sherriff & Bandit or delegating the police-artist suspect sketches to a child who can barely fingerpaint. Personally, I don’t find any comparisons between the two films to be especially flattering to Lee. He seems to be having fun in Highest 2 Lowest, and I suppose it’s overall worth seeing for his trademark fleeting moments of brilliance, but its lows are much lower than its highs are high. It resembles the modern, corny version of Law & Order I had assumed the show had always been, whereas Kurosawa’s High and Low recalls the classic, refined version I never knew existed until this summer (which is somewhat ironic given Lee’s professional connection to vintage Law & Order cinematographer Ernest Dickerson).
Welcome to Episode #246 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of Merchant Ivory costume dramas, starting with the company’s 1992 hit Howards End.
00:00 KPop Demon Hunters (2025) 08:17 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025) 10:52 Salt of the Earth (1954) 16:18 Weapons (2025)
27:09 Howards End (1992) 56:10 Savages (1972) 1:11:26 Quartet (1981) 1:23:04 The Remains of the Day (1993)
One of the easiest ways to evoke dread in a horror film is to fake a found-footage cassette tape, recoiling from the flat digital textures of modern cameras to instead seek shelter in the spooky analog media of old. Two of this year’s buzziest horror titles rely heavily on that aesthetic cheat-code to varying levels of success; both Together & Bring Her Back explain the practical step-by-step details of their respective supernatural rituals via vintage camcorder recordings made by the cults who practice them. It’s the kind of haunted-media aura that you’d assume was earned over time, the way that scratchy old records, faded celluloid, and dusty children’s toys become creepy as they degrade but were considered innocuous when fresh. Camcorder video is different, though. Like with Polaroids, homemade video tapes were immediately understood to have a creepy aura, since their production in private, unregulated spaces could document all kinds of unspeakable evils with relative impunity. You can especially feel it in the video-art experiments of No Wave filmmaker Beth B, whose early projects like “Belladonna,” “Hysteria,” and “Thanatopsis” layered eerie camcorder video footage over horrific text pulled from Sigmund Freud, Nazi scientists and, perhaps the most extreme of all, Lydia Lunch. The real shock among those video-art experiments is how much her mid-length 40min feature Stigmata uses the exact same editing tricks as recent horrors like Together & Bring Her Back, interrupting its central narrative with shocks of contextless camcorder footage, evoking evil without ever fully explaining it. That’s not a newly creepy aspect to camcorder footage that was earned over time, like the spooky toy telephone & Fleischer cartoon broadcasts of Skinamarink. It was integral to the medium from the very beginning.
The core of Stigmata is more PBS special than analog horror. Beth B interviews six recovering heroin addicts about their lifelong personal struggles in the same black-void studio space you’d expect to see on a talk show like Charlie Rose (or, more charitably, a Marlon Riggs video). “Brutal honesty” doesn’t begin to cover the candidness of these interviews, which detail the personal, familial, and medical circumstances that lure people into hard drug addiction. Subjects explain at length how shooting heroin can be an act of self-medication, an escape from the prison of everyday life, and a relatively healthy alternative to suicide. Their struggles with the drug are confrontationally foregrounded, so that the entire screen is filled with the pain on their faces as they each recall their respective rock bottoms. The only relief valve Beth B offers the audience is occasional cutaways to unexplained home video footage that I assume was shot on vacation in coastal Europe, most likely Italy. These interstitials’ relationship to the addict interviews might mean something personally significant to the director, but that connection is left open for the audience to ponder. The title “stigmata” evokes the near-religious ecstasy of heroin use, which Beth B emphasizes by superimposing the opening credits over what appears to be an Old-World basilican dome. The subsequent interviews drag that ecstasy down to the physical level of holes being punched into bodies, while other camcorder cutaways stir up more horror than transcendence or peace. Beth B is especially fixated on the image of a stone window leading out to a seaside village, accompanied by unexplained sirens in the distance. The more that image repeats, the more sinister it becomes, as if it were found footage recovered from a self-documented suicide. The camera and its unseen operator never leap from that window, but the tension of the image never relaxes, and its ambiguous juxtaposition with the interviews make the whole project feel like a cursed object.
Self-billed as “a film/tape by Beth B,” Stigmata is included on Kino Lorber’s collection of the director’s solo works, titled Sex, Power, and Money. Along with her early reality-TV experiment Visiting Desire and her sleazy dance-club music video for “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” it registers as the one of the most substantial titles on the set. Other shorts included there play with the same juxtaposition of confessional dialogue and video-art menace in more naked terms. “Belladonna” mixes found texts from Sigmund Freud case histories and war crime reports from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele with triple-exposed images of urban transportation in modern NYC. “Hysteria” similarly clashes outdated case reports from patriarchal gynecologists throughout history with confessional interviews in which modern women critique their own naked bodies, presented as headless reflections in an unseen mirror. “Thanatopsis” illustrates a Lydia Lunch spoken-word piece about macho violence with domestic images of the punk-scene performance artist lounging in her apartment. Those are exceedingly strict formal experiments compared to Stigmata, which is less academically declarative in its own methods. The relationship between the intimate confessions of addiction and the anonymous found-footage B-roll is much trickier to define, leaving it open to more poetic interpretation. There is a sinister energy that hums underneath all of Beth B’s solo video work (except in “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” of course, which is purely a party), but Stigmata stands out as the one that fully understood the evil power of its medium. It interjects home-video camcorder footage into its main narrative in the exact way that modern horror films do, establishing the visual language of current mainstream genre cinema in art-gallery experimental spaces decades ago. Beth B may be better remembered for collaborations with fellow no-waver Scott B on narrative titles like Vortex, but her solo documentary work convincingly verges on something new & lasting in its own right.
I had somehow never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural Law & Order before this year. Since the start of this summer, however, I’ve watched nearly 100 episodes of the series, as it quickly became my go-to nightly watch after I ran out of episodes of The Sopranos. As a result, nearly everything I watch these days is filtered through a Law & Order lens. It’s not just detective stories & courtroom dramas either. The show is so lousy with recognizable actors that I’ve already seen big-namers like Ann Dowd, Christine Baranski, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney repeat as multiple unrelated characters only four seasons into the show (among one-off stunt casting appearances from unexpected heavy-hitters like Elaine Stritch, Tony Todd, and James Earl Jones), like a local repertory-theatre troop with a globally famous cast. So, I like to think it’s somewhat justifiable that Law & Order was at the top of my mind during a local screening of the new Night of the Juggler restoration that’s currently making the theatrical rounds. Released a full decade before Law & Order premiered in 1990, Night of the Juggler is a grimy NYC detective story similar to the 1st-act investigations of my new vintage-television obsession. While it doesn’t share early Law & Order‘s more prestigious contributions from cinematographer Ernest Dickerson or mad-genius screen actor Michael Moriarty, it does overlap significantly with the below-the-line cast & crew, including Dan Hedeya playing a violently corrupt police sergeant in both titles. In total, there are 28 contributors who worked on both Night of the Juggler and Law & Order—mostly NYC-based character actors—which feels like a substantial number even if it doesn’t remotely compare with the 757 contributors who worked on both Law & Order and my previous nightly catch-up show, The Sopranos.
There is one major payoff Night of the Juggler offers that even peak-era Law & Order couldn’t afford: action. In most of the NYPD investigations on Law & Order, suspects who flee the scene are quickly apprehended by detectives Logan & Briscoe at the same shooting location where they’re spotted. The show is largely a crime-of-the-week soap opera that contains its scene-to-scene drama to a series of courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and holding cells. Night of the Juggler cannot be contained. It runs wild in the streets of New York City, staging multiple, lengthy chase scenes that hop from taxi to subway train to public park to porno theatre to underground cellar, leaving a trail of wrecked cars & hot dog carts in its wake. Its premise is typical to an early Law & Order episode, though, even if it’s one the show would likely save for a season-finale ratings spike. Cliff Gorman plays a run-of-the-mill maniac New Yorker who exacts revenge upon the millionaire real estate developers who gentrified his neighborhood by kidnapping one of the business pricks’ teenage daughter in Central Park. Only, he mistakenly kidnaps her doppelganger, the daughter of a tough-as-nails truck driver and former cop played by James Brolin. So, not only is there no way for the unscrupulous sleaze to cash the teen in for the demanded million-dollar ransom, but now he also has a crazed working-class brute on his tail who’s willing & able to punch him to death for the offense — as soon as he can catch up with him. Dressed more like a lumberjack than an ex-cop city boy, Brolin is a macho folk hero who takes a principled stand against the flagrant crime of late-70s NYC by chasing down the man who wronged him for vigilante justice while NYPD’s finest twiddle their thumbs (or, in the case of Dan Hedeya’s wild-eyed corrupt sergeant, attempt to take down the obvious victim instead of the obvious creep).
Night of the Juggler is the kind of low-budget, anything-goes filmmaking that’s most remarkable for the unpredictability of its minor details. Gorman’s unpredictability as the crazed kidnapper is especially thrilling. He’s introduced at a greasy-spoon diner, making a smiley face out of his bacon & eggs breakfast plate before dousing that culinary cartoon with excessive ketchup gore. He’s scary because his every move is impossible to anticipate, especially as he seemingly falls in love with his underage “Million Dollar Baby” kidnapping victim while making threatening phone calls to the wrong family about what he’ll do to her if they don’t pay up (including her sending her back home as “chunks of meat”). There is no shortage of NYC freaks on his level here. The city is overflowing with the criminally insane, making it near impossible for James Brolin to navigate his way back to his daughter before she’s torn apart by the horde. Despite drowning in that bottomless cesspool of cretins, both Brolin and his kidnapped kid continually express a deep, unbreakable love for the city and its people, which makes the movie oddly charming despite the frequent escalations of its violence. Sure, Brolin is on a similar vengeance mission as Charles Bronson is in the Death Wish series, but in this case the criminal he’s after is the racist lunatic, not the hero; Brolin generally loves the people of New York, chastising his ex-wife for abandoning the city for the safer, blander refuge of suburban Connecticut. When Mandy Patinkin appears as a vigilante cabbie, or Sharon Mitchell shows up to work the peep show booths on 42nd Street, or Richard Castellano stops his police investigation dead to instead inquire about how frozen yogurt is made, the Big Apple comes across as a great city spoiled only by its few bad apples, among which are the cops who care more about personal profit than the people they supposedly serve.
Night of the Juggler‘s recent return to theaters is a cause to celebrate among longtime fans who luckily caught it during its original run or during its subsequent late-night cable broadcasts, as it’s essentially become lost media in the four decades since. The new restoration is especially being heralded by genre-film junkies who watched the scuzzy, taped-off-the-TV scan of it that made its way to YouTube in recent years. That scuzziness isn’t totally inappropriate for a movie that mostly characterizes New York City as a collection of feral rats scurrying around underground jets of steam, but I imagine the pixelation of a low-quality YouTube upload would’ve made it borderline illegible during its multiple whirlwind street chases, so there’s never been a better time to catch up with it than now, really. Not for nothing, there’s also never been a better time to catch up with early seasons of Law & Order if you missed its original run, since it consistently aired out-of-sequence during its years of televised syndication. It also looks incredible streaming in HD as a relic from when major-network primetime dramas were shot on actual celluloid and featured contributions from world-class actors & cinematographers. Law & Order and Night of the Juggler: two great, greasy tastes that taste extra great & greasy together.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the 1943 suburban noir Shadow of a Doubt, which Alfred Hitchcock described as his personal favorite of his own films.
After a recent viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, I double checked to see if it had already been covered on the site (it had), since I had learned to do this recently after getting a couple of paragraphs into a review of the director’s Frenzy, which Brandon had also already covered. This made me wonder just how many of Hitch’s thriller features we had covered; these account for 40 of the roughly 45 films in his filmography (I say “roughly” since I’m not sure how we would count his earliest, lost films like Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle), and I texted Brandon that we had covered 13 so far, to which he noted that we had already hit 14 if one counts his discussion of Strangers on a Trainhere. I thought it would be fun to try and do all 40 sometime, and figured I would tackle the next one chronologically after The Lodger. Unfortunately, my local video store does not have a copy of Blackmail!, so I rented Murder!, only to find out that the LaserLight DVD they have in their possession is one of those quick and dirty late nineties/early 2000s releases of a very poor transfer (in fact, The Hitchcock Zone has a warning about this exact DVD). It was, in a word, unwatchable, and that’s coming from someone who buys every unlabelled estate sale VHS he sees just to see what’s on them. I was still in a Hitchcock mood, though, so I decided to see what he had available on the Criterion Collection and stumbled across Young and Innocent, one of his 1937 pictures. The description of the film gave fair warning that the movie did contain a sequence of Blackface, which made me a bit wary. The movie ended up being so much fun and so delightful (in fact, I started to wonder why it wasn’t more well known) that I had completely forgotten about this heads-up by the time that the last ten minutes rolled around, and boy did it negatively affect my perception of this feature overall.
The film opens on an argument between Christine Clay, a British actress returned home after having success in Hollywood, and her ex-husband Guy, who accuses her of “bringing home boys and men” and refusing to accept that the marriage is over. The following morning, young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is walking along a cliffside when he sees a body on the beach and climbs down, discovers Christine dead, and sprints away to get help. His speed is witnessed by two girls who had come down to the water to swim, and despite the fact that he did come back with the police, said coppers immediately decide to believe the teenagers’ interpretation that he was fleeing the scene and arrest him; it certainly doesn’t help that his raincoat was recently stolen and Christine was strangled with a raincoat belt, or that he and Christine knew each other from their stateside film work, where Robert was a writer. Their suspicions deepen when they learn that she has left him a substantial amount of money in her will, and he’s prepared for immediate arraignment. While detained at the station, he faints when he learns of this, and is revived by Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police commissioner, and is totally adorable with her Sealyham terrier named Towser and her beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. When he’s given a clearly incompetent public defender, he flees the overcrowded courthouse and escapes by hiding in Erica’s car. When she runs out of gas, he pushes the car to the nearest petrol station and uses his last few coins to pay for more fuel before hiding out in an abandoned barn. When Erica returns home, she overhears that he can’t get far since he only has thirty pence, and she comes to believe that he must be innocent, as he claimed. When she returns to the barn to leave behind some food and coins for him, the two barely escape discovery by a couple of her father’s policemen, and she ends up agreeing to take him to the boarding house where a drifting vagrant who supposedly has possession of his raincoat may be able to prove his innocence.
De Marney and Pilbeam are utterly charming in these roles. We know from the start that Robert is innocent, so even though Erica’s claims that he’s too sweet-looking to be a murderer are dubious at best, we also can’t help but agree when we see Robert’s boyishness, especially when we get to see the two together in all their on-screen chemistry. In a lot of these “innocent man pursued” pictures, Hitch’s leading men often get frustrated and agitated at their situation, and even though this is early in his career, it’s kind of refreshing to see a man who’s at least somewhat enjoying the ride that he’s on. That makes his flirtation with Erica and her eventual willingness to help him try and find the proof of his innocence a nice, charming romance, with two sweet leads who work quite well together. Once they do locate the homeless china-mender, Old Will (Edward Rigby) and enlist him in their mission, he adds even more charm to their little ensemble. Perhaps my favorite character, however, is Erica’s Aunt Margaret (Mary Clare), who appears when Erica and Robert are still heading to the boarding house where Old Will might be found, and she says that she’ll call her father so that he doesn’t get worried and start looking for her. Erica has forgotten that it’s her younger cousin’s birthday and she gets roped into attending her party. Aunt Margaret is a total busybody and a bit of a party bully, but she’s so arch and funny that she’s much more entertaining than she is frustrating. Her husband, Uncle Basil (Basil Radford, who would appear the following year in The Lady Vanishes), is less suspicious and can see that blossoming romance between Erica and Robert so clearly that he ends up helping them slip away.
The general light-heartedness of this one also makes for a very fun comedic outing, but it’s also not without its fascinating set pieces, either. Besides the aforementioned child’s birthday party scene, Erica’s home life with her father and several younger brothers is also quite charming. It’s clear that her relationship with her family is a loving one, and all of the boys get enough characterization that it’s a delight to watch them all play off of each other. There’s a studious and up-tight one with glasses, the more jocular and athletic middle boy, and the precocious youngest who ends up bringing a rat to the dinner table at one point. This makes the later more serious scene in which her father shows her the resignation letter that he intends to deliver that day (rather than arrest his own daughter, whom he knows has abetted an escaped inmate) all the more impactful. For comedic set pieces, there’s a very good one at the restaurant called Tom’s Hat where Robert’s raincoat first went missing, when a couple of vagrants get into a brawl with some truckers that they feel are giving away a little too much information about Old Will, with Robert forcing his way inside in order to try and save Erica from the kerfuffle, only for her to have already made her way out of the building without any of his help. On the more dramatic side, the abandoned barn makes for a beautiful location, and there’s also a great setpiece where Robert, Old Will, and Erica (and Towser!) drive into an abandoned mine shaft to evade pursuing police, only for the shaft to give way beneath them and swallow the car as they desperately try to climb out of it before it falls. There’s also a great dance sequence at the end where Old Will, having been given an offscreen makeover that he despises, goes to a fancy hotel with Erica to see if he can identify Christine’s killer there, and it’s a sight to behold.
Unfortunately, it’s this final scene in the hotel where the film gets a little too ugly to swallow. It wasn’t uncommon for live musical performances of the era to take advantage of the minstrel show aesthetic, and every single member of the ten-piece band performing at the hotel ballroom is in Blackface, and it’s quite awful. I know that I’m looking at this through a modern lens and the contemporary logic was that it would make sense for the killer to have a job where he’s in some kind of disguise, and being painted to look like a racist caricature made for an understandable method of hiding in plain sight during a time when that kind of entertainment was common. Still, I can’t help but be sickened by the final ten minutes, especially since this one was chugging along at such a nice pace up until that point. I was a little curious as to why the quality control on the subtitles for this film seemed to be barely up to snuff, as the caption “[inaudible]” appears more here than in any other film I’ve ever seen, over a dozen times. Sometimes it’s character names that perhaps the captioner didn’t feel confident in providing or slang of the time that a younger staffer at Criterion might simply be unfamiliar with (in the very opening scene, Guy tells Christine that he won’t accept her “Reno divorce,” which the subtitles render as “[inaudible] divorce”), but at other times it’s just fast child-speech that a trained ear should be able to hear or it’s totally clear dialogue. It made it feel like this was done haphazardly and lazily, and I was keeping track of what I heard in order to email Criterion to recommend an update, but by the end of the film, all of the wind in my sails had gone out after seeing the Blackface sequences, and I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of getting this up onto the Criterion Channel likely had the same deflation. I can’t say that I blame them.
Swampflix 