Even more so than fellow bloviators Luca Guadagnino and Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino is mostly in the business of pitching movies these days, as opposed to actually making them. There have been so many Deadline press releases covering Tarantino’s unrealized projects over the years that they’ve justified their own Wikipedia page, ranging from recent hits like his hyper-violent Star Trek reboot and his “retirement” film about a vintage porno critic to his more classic threats to update titles like Halloween, Westworld, The Man from U.N.CL.E., Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic, and Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. One of the more promising projects in that pile of discarded drafts was Tarantino’s urge to direct the 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale, returning the pop culture image of James Bond to his 1960s roots. The project obviously went in another direction, hiring Daniel Craig to play the famous spy in a self-serious series of grim, grey thrillers set in the modern day. It’s easy to imagine the Tarantino spin on the franchise, though, with a new found extremity of violence in Bond’s international espionage, peppered with brighter colors & snappier dialogue in the stretches between world-saving kills. And thanks to the new straight-to-Shudder thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond, it’s even easier to imagine than ever before.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond approximates what the Tarantino version of a James Bond film would’ve been like, except it’s much less talky and even more absurdly, stylishly violent than what you’re picturing. One of the details from Tarantino’s Bond pitch was that he wanted to bring back Pierce Brosnan as an older, more grizzled version of the character than the typical suave playboy type. Similarly, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is as reflective as its title suggests, casting giallo veteran Fabio Testi as an octogenarian spy who’s struggling to enjoy his retirement, since a neighboring guest at his luxury hotel on the French Riviera has triggered memories of his more exciting past. The more typically Bond-like Yannick Renier appears as the younger version of the international superspy John Diman, as memories of a violent past and the calmer facts of the present mix in what plays like Alzheimer’s induced hallucinations. The movie alternates between the two timelines at a dizzying rhythm, with Diman reliving his sado-masochistic battle with a femme fatale diamond smuggler with such urgency & ferocity that the audience quickly loses track of what’s real and what’s imagined. And that’s before we’re introduced to another past, faceless enemy who kills his targets by tricking them to believe they’re living in a genre film, executing them with the calling-card appearance of the word “Fin” — bringing in another note of Tarantino-style meta theatrics.
I do not mean to insult the creative voices of directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani by focusing so much on Tarantino here. Cattet & Forzani are formidable genre remixers in their own right, having kicked off the neo-giallo revival of recent years in early titles like Amer & The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears long before lesser filmmakers got there (and having moved on to reinvigorating the spaghetti Western in Let the Corpses Tan after the rest of the industry caught up to them). There’s a delirious maximalism to the couple’s filmmaking style that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s work, even if their imagery exclusively traffics in the vintage genre ephemera of old. There have been dozens of proper James Bond films produced over the past 60 years (among other schlocky Eurospy knockoffs, some even starring Testi), and not a single one can claim to be half as visually stylish as what’s accomplished here. The screen-print silhouettes of classic Bond intros are animated in sadomasochistic fights to the death where diamonds serve as substitutes for both blood and ejaculate. Comic book panels, split-screen framing, and film projector layering rush to fill the screen with the coolest imagery possible every single moment. The blazing sun reflects off a nipple ring with the dizzying brightness of the lethal boat trip in Purple Noon. Black-leather ninja vamps extend razor-sharp claws through the fingertips of their motorcycle gloves to slash the faces of the goons who get in their way. Fragments of the classic Mission: Impossible clone masks wash up on the beach like a Dalí painting in motion. The femme fatale diamond thief announces her victim’s death by promising that, “Humanity will be rid of your fetid odor.” Cattet & Forzani may have a style of their own entirely separate from Tarantino’s, but as a trio they share a common goal: reviving abandoned genre filmmaking traditions by turning up the volume on every reachable knob until the audience begs for mercy.
The biggest hurdle for getting into Cattet & Forzani’s work is learning to let go of linear narrative logic and just enjoy their surface pleasures for what they are: cool as fuck. Personally, that loose grip on plot worked best for me in the giallo-nostalgic free-for-all of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, since they were working within a genre that’s always cared more about style than story. The Bond-era superspy picture is a little more rigid in its thriller plotting than the Italo murder mysteries they’ve previously pulled from, but they break away from that restriction by introducing a supervillain who tricks John Diman into believing he is starring in a film within the film, titled Mission Serpentik. That choice frees the movie up to hallucinate whatever hip spycraft imagery it pleases from moment to moment, including absurdly silly details like a disco-mirror paillettes dress that doubles as a wearable camera or a foosball table that doubles as an instrument of death (after its handles are likened to the throttle on a motorcycle). If there’s any one piece of filmmaking Reflection in a Dead Diamond‘s storytelling structure reminded me of, it’s John Cena’s “Firefly Fun House Match” with Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 36, in which Cena wrestled for the purity of his own soul within the liminal psychic space of his subconscious, untethered from the wrestling ring. Once you accept that John Diman is mostly thwarting enemies within his own mind, Cattet & Bruno are free to take the imagery wherever they please, following whatever whims a post-modern Eurospy picture might inspire. Even twenty years ago, the Tarantino version of a James Bond spy thriller likely would’ve been more grounded to the confines of reality than that, but I have a feeling he would’ve been drawn to very similar high-style, high-artifice imagery. It’s exactly the movie a modern fan of its genre’s retro glory days would want to see come to bloody life.
Topaz is the answer to the question, “What if Alfred Hitchcock made a James Bond movie?” Admittedly, Hitchcock had already been making spy movies for literal decades at this point, with this one premiering nearly thirty years after Foreign Correspondent. One of Topaz’s detractors, Pauline Kael, went so far as to write that the film was “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.” I don’t know that I agree with her about the first part, as this one feels quite different in approach to his other spy films that I’ve seen, but it certainly feels longer, moves more slowly, and doesn’t have the same panache. I watched it just a couple of days after seeing Foreign Correspondent at The Prytania, and although that film had a few moments where it started to slow down a little, it was also enlivened by the excellent mid-film car chase and windmill infiltration as well as ending on a high note with the spectacular climax in which a commercial airliner is shot down by German U-boats. In comparison, there’s nary a moment of spectacle in Topaz, with the suspense arising from the tension of international conflict and potential violence. On a more granular level, both films feature a scene in which someone is killed via being thrown out of a window and the audience is kept in suspense about the identity of the victim. In Correspondent, we watch the body being flung from a cathedral and it’s possible that our protagonist may be the one in danger, while in Topaz the body is merely found after the fact by the main character, and we’re initially led to believe it may be his son in law. It’s still excellently filmed and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also not very special.
The film is based on a novel by Leon Uris that was inspired by a real French-Soviet conspiracy that Uris’s friend had helped to foil, although the book took many liberties from reality and the film takes many from the novel. After an opening sequence in which a defecting KGB Colonel and his wife and daughter evade recapture by his countrymen in Amsterdam, he’s escorted to the U.S. in care of American secret agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). None of these people are our main character, however. That’s André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence officer who operates under the guise of civilian business ventures. Before we even meet him, his colleagues confirm that they agree he is too close to the Americans, and he proves them right almost immediately by agreeing to help Nordstrom get pictures of a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba on behalf of the U.S., without looping in his own government. He hires a fellow French expat named Philippe (Rosco Lee Browne) to bribe the secretary of General Rico Parra (John Vernon) of Cuba to get this access, and he immediately sets out to Cuba himself following this, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Nicole (Dany Robin). Nicole has heard gossip that Devereaux’s frequent trips to Cuba may have more to do with an affair he’s having with a woman named Juanita de Cordoba than with his duties to France and the free world, and although Devereaux denies it, we see that he goes straight to Juanita (Karin Dor)’s house the moment his plane lands. Some subterfuge happens on the island and Devereaux returns to the states to learn that his wife has left him and returned to Paris, that “Topaz” is the codename of a secret cabal of Soviet sympathizers within the French government, and that he’s being recalled to France to stand before a council regarding his extracurricular activities. With Nordstrom’s intelligence, he has to figure out who the leader of Topaz is before he’s called to stand trial.
Does that seem like it should take nearly two and a half hours? I’m not sure. Just two years prior, 1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice (my personal favorite Bond, albeit one of the more problematic ones), which clocked in at 106 minutes, and it certainly seems like a lot more happened in that film than in Topaz. And if that comparison seems like I’m leaping, bear in mind that one of the Bond girls in You Only Live Twice is Karin Dor, who’s one of the best parts of this film as Juanita. There’s a very clear attempt to ape the Bond house style here, with Devereaux having two love interests in the film, the focus on infiltration via impersonation, and most clearly in the prevalence of the gadgetry of spycraft, which the film spends a decent amount of time focusing on. When Devereaux arrives in Cuba, he brings along some cutting-edge photographic equipment along with long distance lenses and remote-control cameras with a range of half a mile. When he gets the information that he needs, information gets stored in a microdot disguised as a period on one of the keys of his typewriter, negatives are stored in the disposable razor blade cartridges, and film is hidden inside the spool of his typewriter ribbon. None of it is as outlandish as some of Q’s later gadgets, but it’s still neat to me, although I could imagine this kind of detail being tedious to others. Again, Kael wasn’t wrong when she said that Hitch’s spy flicks were getting slower.
That’s not the real weak element here, however, as the major problem is just how uninteresting Devereaux is. One of the more exciting sequences in the whole film happens as he literally watches from across the street, as Philippe poses as a reporter for Ebony (he would prefer to pretend to be from Playboy, and when Devereaux refuses, Philippe teases him for his lack of imagination) and infiltrates the hotel where Rico Parra is staying in Harlem as a show of solidarity with the Black community in America. Philippe lures Parra out onto the balcony to take photos of him waving to the throng that has gathered below so that Parra’s secretary can slink away with the case containing the Cuba-Russia memo. There are several tense moments in which it seems like Parra is going to notice the missing briefcase, and he always seems just on the verge of discovery, until Philippe has just enough time to get the information and deliver it to Devereaux. It’s fantastically tense and the performance from Browne is terrific, and it’s made all the better as this may be the only time I’ve ever seen a Hitchcock film in which a Black actor has been given so much to do. Vernon’s Parra is also an incredibly sympathetic character, all things considered, as Vernon very effectively conveys the internal turmoil that Parra feels when he realizes that Juanita, whom he considers above reproach as she is a “widow of a hero of the revolution,” has been involved with Devereaux’s activities. There’s an entire world happening behind his eyes when he kills her upon discovery of her assistance in Devereaux’s espionage, ensuring that she will not be forced to undergo the same tortures that he has overseen enacted on others. In short, despite this being a cast of less well-known actors than the caliber usually on display in a Hitchcock film, everyone is doing excellent work except for the lead, who’s about as interesting as a block of wood.
If you can get past that protagonist-shaped void of charisma, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The conspiracy itself is effectively convoluted, and there are a lot of individual moments that stand out. Juanita’s death scene, shot from above as her purple dress spreads around her like a flower or a pool of blood as she falls to the floor, is beautiful. There’s actual archival footage of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a sequence in which Devereaux attends a rally in Cuba, and that’s a lot of fun. The opening sequence, featuring Colonel Kusenov’s flight from the KGB, is marvelously tense, and although it doesn’t live up to the spectacle that we may have come to expect from the master of suspense, it certainly measures up in the suspense department. It seems that the presence of Devereaux’s daughter Michele (Claude Jade) and her husband Francois (Michel Subor) early on is merely incidental, only for them to come back in a major way in the film’s finale, with Francois’s remarkable skill at sketching portraits playing a huge role in the revelation of the identity of Topaz’s ringleader, “Columbine.” As a spy thriller, it’s constructed well, it just lacks the overall oomph that one expects from the director.
(Note: this review is of the 143 minute version of the film widely available in the U.S. and the U.K., rather than the 127-minute theatrical edition which doesn’t seem to have seen home video release in English-speaking markets since the 1987 laserdisc.)
I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it.
It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone.
After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy(and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast.
The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright.
The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple.
I am excited to watch what’s being marketed as the final chapter in the Mission: Impossible saga later this week, but I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to be able to clear an entire evening for it. Clocking in at 169 minutes of Hollywood action spectacle, The Final Reckoning is easily the longest Mission: Impossible sequel to date. Likewise, the most recent James Bond sequel, 2021’s No Time to Die, clocked in at 163 minutes as the longest of its own decades-spanning franchise. The Fast and Furious series is following the same trend, with both 2021’s F9 and 2023’s Fast X breaking the 140min barrier because two hours is no longer enough space to tell the epic story of black-market street-racers who found a second life as international superspies. I have no doubt that its own upcoming finale, Fast 11, will be even longer. It’s clear that these decades-running espionage thriller series have become bloated through the virtue of their success, racking up enough international box office to earn a blank-check approval for every imaginable indulgence, supercharged by the egos of Hollywood Elite freaks like Tom Cruise & Vin Diesel. In a roundabout way, though, their exponentially expanding runtimes do call back to the earliest days of spy-thriller cinema, both in the episodic “Until next time…” storytelling of pre-show serials and in the epic scale of Fritz Lang’s 1928 genre landmark Spies (aka Spione), which in its original exhibition ran for an impressive 178 minutes, putting all of its modern decedents to shame. Even its incomplete, surviving prints stretch past the 140 minute mark, trimmed down by half an hour but still meeting the modern Hollywood standard.
Despite its near-three-hour runtime, Spies is not an especially self-serious or prestigious work. Lang sets his espionage saga against the same kind of impossible, expressionist backdrops crafted for his sci-fi epic Metropolis the previous year, but it’s all in service of telling a low-brow, pulpy romance between undercover spies. If the film has earned any historical or artistic prestige outside the typically masterful imagery of Lang’s monocled eye, it’s all due to the fact that it is almost a century old. Co-written with his wife & collaborator Thea von Harbou, Spies pioneers a long list of genre tropes both big (referring to the protagonist only by his agent number, 326) and small (comically tiny cameras, disappearing ink, etc). As a result, it now plays heavily tropey, taking three hours to tell a fairly simple love story between two spies who work for opposing agencies. Our somewhat heroic Agent No. 326 (Willy Fritsch) is employed by the German Secret Service to thwart the criminal-mastermind plans of Haghi (Rudolf “Dr. Mabuse” Klien-Rogge) to intercept a top secret British-Japanese peace treaty. Not nearly as suave nor as talented as he thinks, No. 326 is already on the Russian enemy’s radar at the start of his mission, and he’s assigned to be taken down by the femme fatale counterspy Sonja (Gerda Maurus), who’s always two steps ahead of his plan. Only, Sonja is secretly a bit of a softie, blackmailed by Haghi to commit evil deeds. Naturally, she immediately falls in love with No. 326, constantly saving his ass in times of crisis and engineering a scheme to free them both from their professional obligations so they can spend the rest of their lives in each other’s arms.
This airport paperback plot doesn’t sound especially substantial in the abstract, at least not when compared to other, juicier Fritz Lang triumphs of its era like Metropolis, Destiny, and M. It’s illustrated with the same German Expressionist gloom & grandeur as those more infamous works, however, finding Lang at the height of his powers (long before he sleepwalked through late-career studio noirs like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). The opening prologue and explosive climax are especially stunning, kicking things off with a rapid-fire montage of espionage action and closing things out with a literal circus of violence. It’s at those bookends where Lang crafts isolated images in inserts that rival the beauty of any individual frame of classic cinema: a spy posing atop the rubble of an exploded bank wall, a low-angle close-up of an assassin on a motorcycle, a woman’s hands posed with gun & cigarette. There are a few other scenes sprinkled throughout the sprawling runtime that rival those images (namely, the makeup rituals of a creepy secret agent named Nemo the Clown and a boxing ring encircled by ballroom dancers), but much of the drama between those spectacular bookends takes on stage-play feel. Whereas Ernst Lubitsch would’ve turned No. 326 & Sonja’s ill-advised romance into a perverse romp (see: Trouble in Paradise), Lang & von Harbou craft a fairly somber story rife with blackmail, prostitution, opium addiction, and suicide. The old-fashioned sweetness of the central romance can’t help but be marred by the grim practicalities of spy work, which sometimes leads to bursts of violent visual poetry but often leads to conflicted players clawing their own faces in agony over who to be loyal to – lover or employer.
Even the relatively shortened Restored Cut of Spies was a little trying on my 21st Century attention span, which began to waver any time Lang strayed from grand German Expressionist spectacle to stage-bound melodrama. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of Ethan Hunt, James Bond, and Dom Toretto spy thrillers in recent years that are just as long but not half as cool. It would’ve taken the same time commitment for me to catch up with the most recent Fast & Furious film, which I never got around to because nothing from the previous, even-longer one lingered with me past the end credits; they even found a way to make a forgettably dull image out of the Fast Family finally launching a car into space. Meanwhile, there are at least a dozen individual frames from Spies that will be burned into the back of my skull forever, even if it’s telling an equally inconsequential story as most of its modern equivalents. All that these bloated spy-thriller sequels need to do to earn their ever-expanding runtimes is take a page from Fritz Lang’s book and craft some of the most fantastic, gorgeously composed images in the history of cinema. It’s that simple.
When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.
If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.
Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice. It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon & Britnee watch Notorious (1946).
Boomer: For many years, I’ve been calling Notorious my favorite film of the Hitchcock oeuvre. I’ve recently been filling in some blind spots—most notably The Birds and Dial “M” for Murder, which are pretty big ones in that canon—so I wasn’t sure if I would still hold this one in such high esteem, or if I had simply been trying to be cool as a teenager and cite a lesser known one as my favorite and had been, perhaps, wrong all these years (even if I were, I was still of a feather with Roger Ebert, who named it as his favorite work of the director’s). I still remember the first time I caught this one on TCM when I was in high school, with the requisite intro and outro presented by Robert Osborne. He drew attention to the way that the camera at one point provides a point-of-view shot of Ingmar Bergman’s inebriated driving, her view occluded by her errant hair, and how this was meant to give the viewer a sense of her drunkenness; he talked about how Hitch had received a visit from some men from the state who were curious about why the British director seemed to know so much more about uranium than one would expect for someone not involved in espionage. He praised the arch performance of Madame Konstantin and pointed out the way that the story is bookended with a Nazi’s back to the audience as he faces judgment. And, of course, there was discussion about all that Hayes Code-skirting kissing and nuzzling.
Notorious is a love story. Girl’s father is imprisoned for treason, girl meets boy, boy recruits her to infiltrate a cabal of expatriated Nazis who are living in Brazil, boy gets inexplicably jealous when she is able to ingratiate herself with the mark, girl and boy are able to solve the mystery of her new husband’s dealings. Tale as old as time. In more specific terms, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is, at the story’s outset, present for the sentencing of her father to a Miami prison for his sedition and espionage, and although we are never made privy to the details, his final statement to the court reveals that he is unrepentant. She has a party at her house to drown her sorrows, and is drawn to a mysterious handsome man named Devlin (Cary Grant). She finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by his calm stoicism, and her attempts to get him to crack escalate to her insisting that the two of them go for a drive, where her reckless speeding catches the attention of a motorcycle cop, who lets them go when he sees Devlin’s identification. The next morning, he reveals to Alicia that he has been sent to recruit her for a job in Brazil. Once there, the two of them fall in love, although their little state-sponsored honeymoon comes to an abrupt end when her mission is revealed; she is to ingratiate herself with one Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former contact of her father’s who, in the past, was infatuated with her. Devlin has a little pout about this and freezes Alicia out when she begs for some other way she could help, one that wouldn’t tear the two of them apart. It doesn’t work, and Sebastian proves to be an easy mark, and within a short time, he asks her to marry him. Alicia gives Devlin one more chance to speak up and pull her out, but he doesn’t, and she ends up the new Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband adores her completely, but his hard-nosed mother (Madame Konstantin) is more suspicious of her new daughter-in-law.
What struck me on this most recent viewing is that this film is unhurried, and while an argument could be made that this is to its detriment, I think that true only insofar as one reads this as a thriller, and that it is to Notorious‘s benefit as a love story. So much of the romance is already raced past in order to establish Devlin and Alicia’s passion for one another, and I think that it might be a disservice to the believability of that love to try and abbreviate it any further. It’s fascinating that, as with the previous collaboration between Bergman and Rains, Casablanca, the things which sever our two lovers are duty and patriotism; except that in that film, released at the height of the war in 1942, our reunited Ilsa and Rick are rent asunder for what can be assumed to be the rest of their lives, while this post-war 1946 picture sees Alicia and Devlin get a happy ending (or at least are implied to have one). Spending this much time with the two of them means that the plot doesn’t really kick in until the midpoint of the movie, after an appropriate amount of time to lull you into forgetting that there’s something inevitably coming to rip the two lovers apart. It lends an air of tragedy and gravitas to their parting that they must continue to see one another but deny their passions, which Devlin does behind a screen of sex shaming while Alicia has a harder time concealing her happiness with his company, even when doing so arouses suspicion.
I’m not here to question the late master of suspense and the choices that he made, but I do think that there was room for at least one more close call for Alicia in the Sebastian manor. Madame Sebastian regards Alicia with a constant air of appraisal and unspoken but nonetheless present disapproval. The party sequence in which Alicia and Devlin, through some exciting near-misses, manage to enter the wine cellar in which the secret uranium is hidden and abscond with evidence, is a thrilling one, and there’s some truly magnificent camerawork that swoops over the great Sebastian house entryway, with its checkered tile pattern calling to mind a chessboard that Alicia must cross, before it zooms in on the tiny key in her hand. But I do wish that Alicia had almost been caught another time before or after this, to really build up the tension, although that would risk making the Sebastians seem more naive and less threatening, if she were able to get away with too much before they catch on to her. And when they do catch on to her, we get one of the great lines that I think about all the time, stated by Madame Sebastian to her heartbroken son: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.”
It’s interesting that this one comes right on the heels of the war, when the potential for a Nazi resurgence on another continent after a short breather was something that would have been on the minds of every member sitting in that audience. I’m hard pressed to think of a contemporary or even recent analogy for how that plot point must have felt for the people watching the film, for whom the revelations of just how depraved and barbaric the regime had been within its borders were still an unfolding series of horrors. I wonder, Brandon, if you feel that the way contemporary events were folded into the narrative is as effective now as it was then, if the film would function as well without that element (and instead focused on a fictional cabal of more generic evil plotters), and if you have any other thoughts on the matter?
Brandon: As you’ve already implied, this is a love story first and an espionoir second, with most of the thrills in the first hour generated through the bitter flirtation between Bergman & Grant. The dialogue walks right up to the line of spilling the details of Bergman’s loose morals every time they bicker, and it’s not hard to imagine Hays Code censors tugging their collars in the screening room. As for contemporary audiences’ reaction to the secret Nazi cabal in the second hour, it’s also not hard to imagine that feeling like a more immediate, chilling threat in the 1940s that it is all these decades later. I just don’t think Hitchcock is interested enough in their fascist violence or ideology to make the specifics of their villainy central to the text. Would the movie be all that different if it were made a few years later and our reluctant couple were spying on Cold War Russians instead of Nazis in exile? I have my doubts. Casablanca was specifically about the futility of attempting to remain politically neutral in the face of Nazi fascism, and it was filmed before America joined the war. Comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be parodied the specifics of Hitler’s racism & mannerisms while he was still alive and ascending to power. Besides the Brazilian setting and the Uranium smuggling plot, there isn’t much specificity to the Nazi presence in Notorious, except as shadowy villains whose suspicion raises the tension of the espionage romance that’s front & center. The specifics of exactly why that romance is so tense (mostly Grant’s closed-minded frustration with Bergman’s disregard for womanly virtue) also go unstated, but most of the fun of the movie is in watching Hitchcock chip away at the restraints that block him from fully vocalizing them. Most of his interest is in the fictional, bitter romance he’s created, not in the real-world politics.
The only way I really felt Hitchcock’s disgust with Nazi scum was through the ghoulish specter of Madame Sebastian, who radiates pure hate in every scene while her younger cohorts act like proper gentlemen. Most of the Nazi cabal’s villainy is hidden behind locked doors, but the matron of the house proudly parades her cruelty out in the open as a voluntary enforcer and a true believer in the cause. She can’t even crochet in her rocking chair without coming across as a Nazi piece of shit, which is a major credit to Madame Konstantin’s performance. Britnee, as our resident hagsploitation expert, I have to ask where you think Madame Sebastian’s legacy falls in the cinematic canon of evil old women. It wouldn’t be for another decade or so that Hitchcock literally put the “Psycho” in “psychobiddy” (speaking of menacing rocking chairs), but it seems he was already interested in the horrors of a hateful, overbearing mother here, assigning most of the onscreen evil to the elderly Madame. The question is, was she evil enough for the task? Did she give you the proper psychobiddy tingles?
Britnee: I’m honored to be considered a hagsploitation expert and will immediately add that to my résumé. With such powerful performances from Bergman and Grant, it’s hard to focus on anyone else, but Madame Konstantin earns your attention. I’m always excited to spend time with a mean old lady who wears fancy dresses, so I was riveted during her scenes. Her cold, emotionless tone & face alone gave me the chills, along with her being Nazi trash. The scene where Alexander wakes her up to tell her the news about being married to an American agent was gold. Madame Sebastian is covered in satin sheets and lights up a cigarette with a devious smile before she starts calling the shots in a “Mommy knows best” sort of way. Alexander’s mommy issues were the icing on the cake for this thriller. It created a very eerie atmosphere, especially in the latter half of the film when we’re stuck in the oedipus mansion with a poisoned Alicia. I got goosebumps when Madame Sebastian appeared in that creepy black dress while Devlin was rescuing Alicia from their evil clutches. Once again, this is more evidence that elderly women with horrible hair make wonderful villains, and Hitchcock knew it. He may just be the godfather of hagsploitation.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Notorious was made into a 5-act opera that premiered in Sweden in 2015. From the clips I’ve stumbled upon, it looks absolutely amazing!
Boomer: I’m embarrassed to admit how late in my life I learned that Isabella Rossellini is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (this year!). I’ve seen Bergman in a couple of other flicks since learning this, but Notorious is the one in which I see the most direct ties to her daughter. Even though this one comes after Gaslight and Casablanca, both of which I have seen in abundance just as I have Notorious, her accent here is perhaps at its most undisguised. There are moments throughout where I can almost hear Rossellini speaking through her mother, as the more senior actress’s pronunciation here is the most like her daughter’s.
Brandon: Bergman’s intro in the opening sequence is magnificently badass. Who could help falling for a cop-hating lush with a death wish and a sparkly top that exposes her midriff? The fabulously talented pervert that he is, Hathcock puts just as much effort into establishing her character in this opening sequence as he does shooting the espionage payoffs in the final act. The hair-in-eyes effects shot while she’s drunk-driving is one of his great flourishes of camera trickery, and it’s immediately followed up by extreme, twisty Dutch angles from her POV while she sees the room spinning in bed, failing to sober up. As far as noir’s great femmes fatales go, I can only think of one ferocious character intro that outpaces Bergman’s here: Ann Savage’s relentless viciousness in Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). And even she was meant to be seen as less loveable than she was, uh, savage.
Awards “Season” is such an exhausting, never-ending cycle that I fear I’m breaking a sensitive taboo just by speaking its name so soon after this year’s ritual “concluded”. Any sane, sensible person should not be saying the word “Oscars” for at least another seven months. I promise that there is a point to the transgression, though, as I’ve noticed a couple immediate benefits to surviving this year’s Awards Season gauntlet, mostly due to the sweeping wins of the Daniels’ sci-fi action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. First, EEAAO is back in theaters again, and as much as its online fandom & Awards Season success makes it seem like a cultural juggernaut, it’s only been during this post-Oscars push that the its box office profits have finally surpassed the grim superhero origin story Morbius – a film sincerely enjoyed by no one. Even better, the Oscars marketing machine has also cleared some space for a wider cultural appreciation of Michelle Yeoh, who is currently both the subject of a Criterion Channel sub-collection of Hong Kong action classics and the inspiration for a theatrical re-release of the early-aughts Oscar contender Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I bring that up not only because it’s worth celebrating, but because in its own post-Oscars glow (landing four wins out of nine nominations) Crouching Tiger also cleared space for a wider range of genre cinema at the suburban multiplex, proving this post-EEAAO bump is no fluke.
In particular, I remember the post-Crouching Tiger marketing push for wuxia martial arts cinema bringing the films of Zhang Yimou to the US, with his films Hero and House of Flying Daggers reaching a much wider international audience than they would have without Crouching Tiger‘s Oscars clearing the way. Even concurrent to Crouching Tiger‘s post-EEAAO re-release two decades later, Zhang’s latest feature is currently screening in US theaters despite most modern Chinese blockbusters of its ilk not enjoying the same international platform. Full River Red isn’t even a wuxia fantasy epic the way Zhang’s earlier successes were; it’s not even technically martial arts or action. It’s being sold abroad on the strength of Zhang’s name alone – a name built on the back of Crouching Tiger‘s international success. Looking back to those early days of Zhang Yimou buzz isn’t entirely flattering to Full River Red, since his latest is proudly exemplary of the way that modern Chinese blockbusters carry a dual duty as both populist entertainment and as state-sponsored nationalist propaganda. Its title is a reference to a rabblerousing Chinese nationalist poem that is recited at the emotional climax with near-religious reverence, ensuring that all of the preceding cheap-thrills entertainment is contextualized within service & deference to the state. That’s not any different than the rah-rah American militarism of Top Gun: Maverick, the MCU, or Michael Bay’s entire oeuvre, but it does feel like a far cry from the escapist fantasy epics Zhang Yimou used to get away with as recently as the aughts.
Before fulfilling its patriotic obligations as a pro-military poetry reading, however, Full River Red has a lot of cheeky fun as a murder mystery of covert political intrigue. Set during a 12th Century clash between warring Song & Jing Dynasties, the film opens with the murder of a traveling diplomat and the disappearance of a secret-letter MacGuffin, a small token of widespread espionage. With only a couple hours to solve the crime before dawn breaks and chaos ensues, an enigmatic Prime Minister figurehead assigns two makeshift detectives to the case: a cunning lowlife criminal turned loyal soldier and a hothead commanding officer who’s prone to killing suspects in fits of anger – creating literal dead ends in the investigation. As the initial whodunnit premise gives way to a complex political puzzle of double-triple-quadruple crossings among the infinite sea of suspects, Zhang keeps the mood light with slapstick hijinks and the stakes high with vicious, horrific violence. The walled-in fortress where the investigation plays out looks perfectly designed for close-quarters fistfights, but that’s not the genre Zhang is working in this time around. He instead uses the setting as a labyrinth redesign of a classic stage play setup, with most of the “action” being restricted to wordplay, lies, and stabbings. As actors travel from room to room, it appears they’ve gone nowhere at all, which only makes the circular murder investigation and contraband search all the more maddening as the morning light approaches.
Stylistically, Full River Red finds Zhang Yimou as sharp as ever. He’s slightly held back by a lack of urgency in the circular plotting and by a muted day-for-night color palette but, overall, he delivers a viciously amusing shell game of 12th Century political espionage – one with an absolutely killer, operatic hip-hop soundtrack. As birds-eye-view tracking shots of characters swiftly marching from room to identical room play out to electroshocked revisions of classical Chinese music, it feels like Zhang is delivering something that you can’t find anywhere else in modern cinema. If Full River Red were a little brighter and a little zippier, it could’ve been an all-timer, both in Zhang’s catalog and in the greater whodunnit canon. At the very least I would’ve appreciated a few more pops of red blood or lipstick against the metallic, stonework grays that wash over most of the screen. It’s no matter. Instead of complaining about the few ways Full River Red falls short of its ideal self, I’d rather just celebrate the fact that it made it to big-screen distribution at the AMC Westbank at all. The movie would certainly exist without the Oscars marketing machine boosting its international profile, since the Chinese movie industry is sturdy enough on its own without the influence or support of Hollywood’s own nationalist propaganda muddying the waters. I just don’t know that it would have reached me, personally, without that lingering Zhang Yimou bump in wuxia’s brief moment of Oscars glory – something that was impossible to ignore while Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was simultaneously playing on the opposite side of the Mississippi from Full River Red at AMC Elmwood.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Hanna, Brandon, and Britnee watch Sneakers (1992).
Boomer: I love the movie Sneakers. This movie has everything: government conspiracies, a villain with a praiseworthy goal, hacking, phreaking, a blind man driving a van, the creation of a voiceprint password by cobbling together pieces of recordings, two scenes with River Phoenix in a scrub top, significant anagrams, post-Cold War espionage, ancient car phones, crawlspaces, codenames, rooftop confrontations, extremely futuristic but uncomfortable looking furniture made out of wire mesh, call tracing, electronic toy dogs, complex mathematics, briefcases full of cash, intrigue, prestidigitation, and two-time Emmy, Golden Globe, and Oscar nominee Mary McDonnell. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times and I never, ever get tired of it.
Martin Bishop (Robert Redford), some twenty years after his friend and fellow idealist Cosmo was arrested while Martin was out getting pizza to celebrate some illegal but morally admirable money transfers, now works with a tiger team of “sneakers.” There’s Crease (Sidney Poitier), ex-C.I.A. and the group’s watchtower man; conspiracy theorist and electronics whiz “Mother” (real-life conspiracy theorist Dan Aykroyd); Irwin “Whistler” Emery (David Strathairn), a blind man whose hearing is so precise that it allows him to participate in the now largely defunct form of hacking known as phreaking; and young, pretty Carl Arbogast (River Phoenix), a hacking prodigy. Only two people know that Martin is actually the still-wanted fugitive once known as Martin Brice: Cosmo, who died in prison, and his ex-girlfriend, Liz (Mary McDonnell), with whom he is still relatively friendly. His secret, and his freedom, are threatened one day when Martin is approached by two men from the NSA (Timothy Busfield and Eddie Jones) who task him with stealing a “black box” piece of decryption hardware from a mathematician named Janek (Donal Logue, in his first film role). Although they succeed in obtaining the device, their payday is complicated by the revelation that they’ve actually been duped by former NSA operatives, now working for a person or persons unknown. Now, the team, including Liz, will have to use all of their wits to avoid not just jail time, but death.
Sneakers was a box office success. This is owed in no small part, I’m sure, to its all-star cast, which also includes James Earl Jones and Ben Kingsley in roles that are too spoilery to note in a synopsis. It’s got a great soundtrack from the late James Horner, who perfectly balances the film’s intermittent intrigue and danger with its larger comedic tone, creating something that is at turns triumphant, cautious, and playful. Director Phil Alden Robinson, who also wrote the screenplay alongside Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker (the duo who previously penned the somewhat thematically similar WarGames), seems to be seeking to correct the mistakes of 1985’s Fletch. The earlier film, on which Robinson was an uncredited screenwriter, is also one of intrigue with touches of comedy, but despite Fletch‘s modicum of success at both the box office and with audiences, I agree with Roger Ebert’s contemporary assessment of the movie’s star: “[Chevy] Chase’s performance tends to reduce all the scenes to the same level. […] Fletch needed an actor more interested in playing the character than in playing himself.” Here, Robinson banks on Robert Redford’s longtime association with the conspiracy genre (Three Days of the Condor, All The President’s Men) as well as his natural charisma as an actor to do some of the shorthand of making Sneakers work without having to do too much legwork itself. Of course, every actor is great here; Poitier could have been used more, but he’s the absolute center of every scene that he’s in, and my love of Mary McDonnell is long documented so I won’t repeat myself here. Aykroyd, bless him, makes a meal out of his proto-Mulder role as he effortlessly tosses off lines about increases in cattle mutilations and ties the (unsuccessful, he claims) assassination of JFK to the men behind the Pete Rose scandal.
Since I’ve mentioned Ebert, however, it bears noting that he was lukewarm on the film, calling it “sometimes entertaining […] but thin” and claims that it “recycles” older film cliches: “Redford’s team […] is yet another version of the World War II platoon that always had one of everything. […] the black guy, the fat guy, the blind guy, the woman[,] and the Kid.” Although he found parts of Sneakers cliche at points, he also praised Robinson for directing “with skill and imagination.” Brandon, I know that I’ve forced you to watch quite a few conspiracy films over the years; you were moderately positive in our discussion of Winter Soldier but struggled to find something nice to say about Undiscovered Country. Given that Sneakers is at its core a cyberpunk story like previous Movie of the Month Strange Days, albeit one with a cassette futurism aesthetic, and that I know how much you love The Net, I’m hoping you enjoyed this one. Did it work for you? If so (or if not), why (or what would you have preferred)?
Brandon: Like the last Mary McDonnell film we discussed as a Movie of the Month selection, Passion Fish, Sneakers mostly landed with me as an Afternoon Movie: low-key mainstream filmmaking best enjoyed while the sun is still out on a profoundly lazy day. It’s the kind of movie I used to catch on broadcast television as a kid, when commercial breaks would stretch the runtime out to actually take up an entire afternoon, pleasantly so. At the risk of participating in gender binary rhetoric, I’d say the main difference is that Passion Fish is a Mom Movie, while Sneakers is solidly a Dad Movie — the perfect basic cable background fodder to passively enjoy while your grandpa snores over the soundtrack. As a “cyberpunk” thriller about elite early-internet hackers, it is absurdly un-hip; it’s all cyber and no punk. I’ve come to expect my movie hackers to be young, androgynous perverts dressed in glossy patent leather, not middle-aged movie stars who tuck in their shirt-tails. However, as a big-budget Dad Movie that plays with the same 1990s cyberterror anxieties exploited in the much goofier The Net, I found it highly entertaining. It feels like a dispatch from a bygone studio filmmaking era when movie stars actually drove ticket sales, so that their importance on the screen is stressed way more than directorial style or production design — which are slick enough here but deliberately avoid calling attention to themselves.
As a result, I was more invested in the charm of the casting and the performances than I was in the actual espionage plot, which boils down to a global-scale hacking MacGuffin that has since become standard to most modern blockbusters in the MCU and Fast & Furious vein. We’re introduced to Redford’s motley crew of square-looking cybercriminals in two separate rollcalls: one in which NSA agents read out their respective arrest records to quickly sketch out their past, and one in which they individually dance to Motown records with Mary McDonnell to show off their personal quirks. I found the movie to be most vibrantly alive in those two scenes because of its general commitment to highlighting the eccentricities of its cast. Redford & Poitier squeeze in an obligatory “We’re getting too old for this shit” quip in the first ten minutes of the film, but outside of those two rollcalls it’s rare for the movie to acknowledge just how out-of-place and Ordinary its elite hackers look (at least when compared to other 90s gems like Hackers and The Matrix), when that’s the only thing I really wanted to dwell on. I could’ve watched an entire movie about Dan Akroyd’s awkwardly past-his-prime Mall Goth conspiracy theorist, for instance, since that role could’ve been much more comfortably filled by a Janeane Garofalo or a Fairuza Balk type without any change in demeanor or costuming. What is Mother’s deal? I’d love to know.
Britnee, were you similarly distracted by the movie’s casting & costuming of its “cyberpunk” hackers? Who were the highlights (or lowlights) of the film’s cast of characters for you?
Britnee: I have to admit that Sneakers took me by surprise when I realized it was a hacker movie. I’ve known about its existence for years. It was always hanging out in my local library’s VHS collection. Its cover is a sneaky look at Robert Redford with a group of middle aged pals, so I just always assumed it was about him owning a shoe store in New England or something along those lines. It turns out that I was way off.
Like Brandon, I always expect hacker films to have a cast of sexy 90s cyperpunks. Leather pants, spiky hair, and those tiny cyber sunglasses that make no sense but all the sense at the same time. The only other way I’ve seen a hacker represented in a movie is a gamer guy with a messy t-shirt or a girl with a tight black tank top and cargo pants. The group in Sneakers is far from what I’m used to seeing as hackers in film. They look like my great-uncle and his group of wacky friends. Maybe Hollywood is working with the dark web overlords to paint a false picture of what real life computer hackers look like (sexy 90s cyperpunks) so we don’t think to consider middle aged sports bar crews as real hackers. Phil Robinson and friends were probably risking everything to go against “them” to show us a glimpse of what real hackers are. That’s my Sneakers conspiracy theory, anyway.
All that being said, Robert Redford knocked it out of the park as Marty. He always beams so much charisma on screen, and in Sneakers, he does so while balancing being a hacking genius and a hero to dads everywhere. I actually thought the casting all around was amazing, but I would have loved to see a nerdy middle aged woman in the same garb as Mother as a member of the crew. That would be the only suggestion I would make regarding casting, and that’s just me being selfish.
Something that really fascinated me about Sneakers was the beginning and ending wraparound about taking money from Republicans to give to liberal causes. I was surprised to see that in the movie considering it being in 1992 (post-Regan and in the midst of Bush). And it did tremendously well at the box office! Hanna, was this something that surprised you as well, considering the political climate at the time in the US?
Hanna: Actually, I think this movie was a pretty safe political bet for Hollywood at the time. Sneakers was released just two months before Clinton’s election in 1992, and Marty—played by white, charismatic, red-blooded American Redford—is, in some ways, a perfect embodiment of the Third Way, a left-center political position that Clinton championed. Marty and his adversary both agree “money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it”; the antagonist wants (or proclaims to want) to completely destroy the binary of wealth by toppling the inherently corrupt economics systems across the globe; in his new world, billionaires will cease to exist. This is obviously an untenable solution, but at least it’s radical. Marty’s idea of economic justice, on the other hand, is moving millions of dollars from the Republican National Convention to non-profits and NGOs, which is a fun joke that doesn’t fundamentally change anything about who is able to wield power and wealth. I would love the RNC to be suddenly and inexplicably bankrupt, but I doubt that the Koch brothers would give up on their political machinations after the RNC’s funding wound up at Greenpeace in the Sneakers universe. The film seemed squarely settled in the camp of without actually challenging the circumstances fueling wealth inequality; the film’s solution isn’t to radically re-think a system that allows a few wealthy people to disproportionately control our political, social, and economic realities, but to periodically move million dollar donations from one (pretty unpopular) organization to philanthropic ones, like Robin Hood for CEOs. At the very least, I wish they had been funneling money from Unilever.
Did any of that have any impact on my opinion or enjoyment of this movie whatsoever? Absolutely not. I loved Sneakers, and crime comedies from the late 90s do not have any kind of responsibility to be politically radical. Like Boomer mentioned, Ebert was soured by Sneakers’s use of material recycled from other movies, and it does play like a movie designed identify every possible permutation of the crime comedy cliché; fortunately for Phil Alden Robinson, I was more than happy to lap it up. I love any and all heist/spy movies, but I especially appreciated the earnest absurdity of Sneakers, from the standard CSI mumbo jumbo (enhancing on the tiniest details of already blurry photos) to goofy spy nonsense involving a room fortified with temperature and motion alarms. These cliches are definitely animated by a stellar cast, and I don’t think this film would have worked quite so well for me if it weren’t for the performances, especially from Redford and Poitier. I was so tickled by Crease’s impassioned probe into the details of Janek’s secret funding at 52:42 that I had to rewind and rewatch it multiple times (“Don’t tell me you can’t do it, because I know you can! And don’t tell me you won’t do it, because I’ve got to have it! Dammit, I need to know, and I need to know now!”), and it couldn’t have worked without Poitier hamming it up. As others have mentioned, Redford perfectly captures a version of the Strong, Good-Hearted, Down-To-Earth Man with smoother edges (like Harrison Ford mixed with Alan Alda, kind of), a character that is equally irresistible to Dads and Moms alike. This is the kind of movie that should have been on annual rotation in my household, and I can’t wait to make up for lost time.
Lagniappe
Boomer: I’ve been singing this film’s praises ever since it was first brought to my attention some 5-6 years after release, when it turned up at a sleepover. It’s the rare (perhaps the only) film with expressly leftist views that my father tolerated watching more than once, and that should tell you something about its quality, if nothing else.
Hanna: This movie made me remember how much I enjoy anagrams. I know it’s not a practical encoding technique, but those anagrams in the opening credits really roped me in, and I was on the edge of my seat when Robert Redford started shuffling those Scrabble tiles around. Spy films need more anagrams!
Brandon: As much as I enjoyed this movie as a time capsule of mainstream 90s filmmaking, I’m convinced I would’ve fully loved it as a post-“retirement” Soderbergh heist flick. Pairing this caliber of movie star casting with the more playful, eccentric visual style of an Ocean’s 12, Logan Lucky, or No Sudden Move would’ve pushed it much closer to the style-over-substance ethos that usually wins my heart. As is, it’s handsomely staged, but maybe a little too well behaved. Maybe what I’m saying is that I should finally check out Michael Mann’s Blackhat.
Britnee: In 2016, NBC planned on making a TV series reboot of Sneakers, but to my knowledge, it looks like nothing came of it. I actually think a Sneakers TV series would be pretty great, so I hope something is still brewing.
Upcoming Movies of the Month September: Britnee presents Hello Again (1987) October: Hanna presents Lisa and the Devil (1973) November: Brandon presents Planet of the Vampires (1965)
I wonder if anyone’s ever put together a definitive list of The Most Floridian Films of All Time. If so, I’d like to nominate Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar for inclusion in that canon. While other recent Florida-as-Fuck movies like Magic Mike, The Beach Bum, and The Florida Projecthave understandably centered their stories on the beach state’s burnout locals, Barb and Star dares to explore its function as the nation’s largest tourist trap. The hotel tiki bars, by-the-hour boat rentals, boardwalk souvenir shops, and Lisa Frank color palettes that overwhelm the screen are all hyperspecific to Floridian tourism. The authenticity of that setting includes the characterization of the titular tourists as well: two clueless but sweet rubes from the Midwest with absurdly superficial notions of what a getaway vacation adventure should look like. You could remake this entire film on a cruise ship without having to change many of its gags or locations, which is how you know it perfectly captures the tacky surrealism of the modern tourist industry. This is the fantasy version of Florida presented in all-inclusive vacation package pamphlets, and it’s wonderfully bizarre to see actual human beings navigate those flamingo pink waters.
Of course, the main concern of this absurdist buddy comedy is neither to capture the spirit of Floridian tourism nor to drum up tension in its superfluous sci-fi espionage plot. It’s simply trying to make you laugh, and it ably succeeds. Kristen Wiig and frequent collaborator Annie Mumolo co-lead as Barb & Star, a pair of middle-age, Midwest besties whose co-dependent life together has hit a spiritual rut. In search of a “soul douche” meant to rediscover their inner “shimmer”, the gals head off to the gift shop-lined beaches of Florida. There, they learn to have fun without hanging onto each other 24/7, thanks to the help of a sexy himbo staying in the same hotel (Fifty Shades of Grey‘s Jamie Dornan) and an exponentially out-of-place terrorist plot orchestrated by a James Bond villain (also played by Wiig). It’s a delightful throwback to a very specific type of absurdist buddy comedy that rarely gets made anymore, where a pair of Good Buds bounce inane in-jokes off each other, unaware of the deadly-serious crisis that orbits around them. I’m thinking of titles like Zoolander, A Night at the Roxbury, Dude Where’s My Car?, and Romy & Michelle’s High School Re-Union. Like all those previous examples of its ilk, it’s destined to gradually build a cult audience, one that will likely outlast the cultural impact of Wiig & Mumolo’s previous, more commercially successful screenplay collaboration, Bridesmaids.
If I have one complaint about Barb and Star, it’s that it’s one song performance short of being a full-blown musical. Why stop at two break-from-reality musical numbers? A third one would have really rounded out the show, especially a grand musical blowout finale. And no, Richard Cheese’s cameo as a boobies-obsessed lounge singer does not count. Otherwise, it’s a perfect, traditional buddy comedy – one bolstered by its excessively Floridian set design, which strives to outdo The Birdcage‘s commitment to that pleasure realm aesthetic in every new locale. This might even be the best vehicle yet for the normcore-parody comedic sensibilities Wiig honed on SNL, considering that most of her film work since that show has been focused on darkly funny indie dramas (give or take a MacGruber). Any minor complaints about where it falls short in its musicality or narrative structure are entirely besides the point. It’s simply fun. Or, in the movie’s own words, it’s “a real tit-flapper”.
It’s a shame that Hollywood didn’t know what to do with Anthony Perkins when he was around, except to keep recasting him as Norman Bates into perpetuity. I mean that both literally in the case of the three(!) Psycho sequels and figuratively in the dozens of Bates-knockoff characters he was asked to play besides. Whenever you catch a glimpse of Perkins venturing slightly outside the tiny corner he was typecast into, the results are always electric. I’m thinking particularly of the sweaty, bugged-out mania of his work in Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (which is admittedly just Norman Bates on an overdose of poppers) and the surrealist filth of his self-directed turn in Psycho III. It would have been nice to see Perkins given the freedom to play a role that couldn’t be described as a dangerous psychopath, but that just wasn’t in the cards. Instead, we have to search for scraps of variance in his frustratingly homogenous career, which feels a lot like being a fan of Vincent Price or Bela Lugosi or any other impeccably skilled horror icon who wasn’t given enough of a chance outside their respective genre boxes.
Pretty Poison is very much one of those post-Psycho roles where Perkins was cast as A Norman Bates Type. The movie even opens on his exit interview with a psychiatrist as he’s being released from a mental institution, so that the film could even play as an unofficial Psycho sequel if you squint at it the right way. Still, it manages to strike a tone that distinguishes this performance from Perkins’s typically deranged presence, even if his broader character traits play on the audience’s familiarity with the actor’s career. In Pretty Poison, Perkins’s expert conveyance of dangerous mental instability is played more for dark, sarcastic humor than it is for genuine terror. It’s a dryly funny movie with a wicked mean streak, allowing Perkins to find hints of sardonic wit within his usual Unhinged Serial Killer oeuvre. His anti-hero protagonist is still dangerously detached from reality here; it’s just that he engages with the real world from a place of distanced, absurdist mockery rather than cold-blooded revenge. In fact, once he’s confronted with a fellow lunatic who is willing to take a few lives while having her own fun, he’s not entirely sure what to do with her.
Tuesday Weld stars opposite Perkins as his young, erratic protegee. Perkins is enraptured with the teenage beauty and—unsure how to approach her in a direct, honest way—pulls her into his fantastical delusions as an unhealthy form of seduction. Perkins lies to the bubbly, seemingly naïve teen about being a secret undercover agent for the CIA, recruiting her for a highly-classified mission of vague intent. What he doesn’t account for is Weld’s potential enthusiasm for the violence of espionage, and she quickly escalates his playful spy fantasies into full-on murderous mayhem. By the time she’s rhythmically drowning an innocent old man between her legs on a riverbank as if she were masturbating to orgasm, Perkins is completely overwhelmed by the inversion of their power dynamic. He spends the rest of the film just trying to keep her indulgences in the bloodshed of their “espionage” to a minimum, completely horrified by how real she’s made the fantasies he used to entertaining as his own private, sarcastic amusement. Serves him right for tricking a teenager into bed, I suppose.
Pretty Poison is a little too weighed down by its era’s Cold War paranoia and teen-girl fetishism to be a total, enduring success. It’s fun enough as a tongue-in-cheek riff on the Bonnie & Clyde template, though, even if its New Hollywood sensibilities feel a little stodgy & forced (especially in the way it clumsily panders to Youth Culture in a throwaway gag about LSD). The real thing that makes the film worth a look is Perkins’s unusually playful performance at the center. He’s cast as yet another Norman Bates Type here, but he manages to find new, subversively comic textures to that archetype that he didn’t always get a chance to explore. Tuesday Weld ably holds her own as his bouncy, murderous foil, but I doubt there are as many movie nerds out there looking to track down her most idiosyncratic performances in the same way (give or take a Thiefsuperfan or two).
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