kirk douglas

Ace in the Hole (1951)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Within the first five minutes of Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas does one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: hitting the carriage return button on a typewriter and while holding a match to the machine, igniting it so that he can light his cigarette. It’s also the last thing he does before we find out what kind of man he really is, and our respect for him is going to vary a lot over the next hour and a half. Douglas is Charles Tatum, a newspaperman extraordinaire, who’s worked in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and every other major news center in the U.S., and he’s lost his job in every one because he brings about libel suits, gets involved with the publisher’s wife, or gets caught drinking “out of season.” He tells all this to Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), the editor, publisher, and owner of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, when he finds himself stranded in New Mexico. Boot, a man who is notably wearing both belt and suspenders, tells him that he’s also the town lawyer and edits every word before printing, that Mrs. Boot is a grandmother thrice over who would be flattered to be on the receiving end of Tatum’s attention, but that he won’t tolerate any liquor on the premises. Tatum sees this as an opportunity to start small and transition back to the big leagues, but after a year of dull news and a lack of anything exciting, he’s grown restless. 

He and the paper’s young photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) are sent on a trip to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but when they stop for gas in a place called Escudero, they find the station and its attached diner empty, save for a grieving older woman who does not greet or notice them. Realizing that there’s some ruckus going on behind the place at some nearby caverns, they start to drive up and come upon Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who tells them that her husband has been caught in a cave-in while exploring some “Indian” caves (the film never identifies the tribe other than a reference to the Minosa’s cafe selling Navajo blankets, and since Escudero doesn’t seem to be a real place, we don’t even have a region that would allow us to determine the tribe from a territory map). They drive up to the mouth of the cave and Tatum talks his way past the deputy and, given blankets and coffee by the buried man’s father, enters the cave, where he meets Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and, turning on the charm, convinces the man to trust him. 

Intending to capitalize on the potential human-interest story, Tatum sets up shop in the Minosa’s motel/gas station/cafe and gets to work, taking the story of a veteran trapped in a cave-in and pairing that with the sensationalist story that he may have been the victim of vengeance from “Indian spirits” due to his treasure hunting in the appropriately ominously named “Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” When he discovers Lorraine preparing to leave the next morning with the eleven dollars she takes from the till and convinces her to stay, at first attempting to appeal to her wifely love for her husband and, when this tack doesn’t work, promises that she’ll find herself rich enough to take off with a lot more than eleven dollars if she sticks around and plays along. Tatum manipulates all involved, as he charms the sheriff (Ray Teal) as well, promising him re-election as he will play the part of the local hero coordinating activities; the sheriff, in turn, manipulates the engineer in charge of getting the man out to switch from his initial plan of putting in supporting struts to secure the passageway and getting Leo out in about a day to a more involved, visually striking plan to drill down through the mountain to get him out, which will stretch the operations out to five to seven days. The whole thing turns into a media circus — literally at one point, as the number of people drawn in by the spectacle starts to enter quadruple digits and the carnival is brought in. As Tatum becomes more energized and starts getting calls from the big city papers again, he continues to gamble with Leo’s life (hence the title) as he tries to get back on top. 

This is a whip smart movie with fast, witty dialogue, so sharp that it could shave your chin. Douglas is phenomenal, bigger than life, so much louder and more boisterous than everyone around him that you can see clearly that it’s not just his ability to read people and offer them exactly what they want; it’s his pure charisma and the way that he takes up all the air in the room. Sterling’s performance, however, is the standout to me. You’d think it would be impossible to make us like a woman who’s willing to use her husband’s physical entrapment as an excuse to escape, but she so effectively captures the boredom and tiredness of being trapped in a desert nowhere. When Tatum invokes her need to repay her husband for marrying her and giving her a life, she tells that him that she was fooled by his promise that he owned sixty acres and “a big business,” with the acres amounting to useless sand and the business being a place where she “sell[s] eight hamburgers a week and a case of soda pop” while Leo continues to treasure hunt in a clearly unsafe cave. She’s been repaying him for five years, she says, and she’s ready to get out; she’s vain and apathetic about her husband’s situation, but she’s also got a point. 

She’s among the few people who can give Tatum a run for his money in the sass department, including an early defining character moment when he asks if they can put him up for the night and she responds with “Sixty beautiful rooms at the Escudero Ritz. Which will it be, ocean view or mountain view?” Tatum’s editor Boot can also go toe-to-toe with him on occasion, as evidenced by him pulling a nickel out of his pocket and handing it over to Tatum when they first meet and Tatum negs the Sun-Bulletin by way of leading up to the offering of his services. Perhaps most fun, however, is the one-scene appearance of Richard Gaines as Nagel, a fiery, tempestuous New York editor who makes J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson look like a bored Brian Williams. The people who can’t compete with him generally fall under his spell. The sheriff, for his part, is utterly guileless in his corruption and ability to be manipulated and goes so far as to have “Re-Elect Gus Krentz for Sheriff” painted on the side of the mountain one night, which is so comically odious that you almost have to respect him. He’s not as smooth or as clever as Lorraine, but he is devious, and willing to twist any arm that he can get his hands on, if it puts a penny in his pocket. 

The thing about gambling is that you can only ride a lucky deal for so long, and if you keep on going and keep on pushing, your luck will eventually run out. Tatum’s right about the cynical nature of the public—eighty-four people trapped in a mine is not as newsworthy as one man—but he’s also haunted by the same flaws that cast him out of the metropoles and into the desert in the first place, including his insistence that he doesn’t “make things happen, [he only] write[s] about them.” By the time he starts drinking again, he’s already lost his way completely, not that he was ever the most respectable member of the fourth estate. It’s not merely enough that he’s coercing reality into a narrative that he can sell, it’s that he’s also pushing the limit of Leo’s endurance, as he starts to develop pneumonia due to being unable to move for days, and he’s corrupting sweet Herbie all the while. 

There’s really only one way this could all end, but I won’t give it away, as this is one that should be experienced in its entirety. And if you know the Hays Code, you know that everyone here has to be punished for their sins, although how that plays out is still a fantastic watch, and this has become my new favorite Douglas performance. The film is marred by some casual racism; the widespread use of the blanket term “Indian” is definitely a product of a different time, and it’s worsened by Tatum’s treatment of a Native American employee of the Sun-Bulletin, whom he first greets with “How” and later calls “Geronimo.” Still, there’s a reason that this one was rediscovered after many years being treated as a failure. Openly critical of both the police and media, it was an embarrassment to the studio, only becoming more widely known since its 2007 Criterion release. It’s not perfect, but it is great. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Fury (1978)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

When watching The Fury, one gets the distinct feeling that it’s an adaptation of a Stephen King novel that King never wrote. This is perhaps unfair to novelist John Farris, given the width and breadth of his large body of work, which predates King’s. Then again, if you take a look at his Wikipedia page, The Fury is his only novel that actually has its own page; prolific though he may be, one must wonder whether or not his prose has much staying power. There are certain trappings that make The Fury feel like a King work, not the least of which is having Brian De Palma at the helm, just two years after he directed the first King adaptation with 1976’s Carrie (and a year before the second, Tobe Hooper’s made-for-TV Salem’s Lot). The film also features mysterious agents working for an unnamed government agency that is similar to the role played by The Shop in King’s works, Firestarter most notable among them; the paternal relationship that forms one of the movie’s emotional cores likewise echoes, or rather presages, that of Charlie and her father in that novel.

Of course, Firestarter was published in 1980, two years after the release of The Fury (and four years after its publication date), so take from that what you will. Did King rip off The Fury? Is the superficial similarity due simply to the fact that De Palma’s Carrie influenced the perception of King in the public sphere? Perhaps the similar theses of Firestarter and The Fury were simply born out of similar anti-authority distrust and anti-government paranoia that sprang up in the wake of Nixon’s 1974 impeachment and the spilling of government secrets that accompanied his fall. (Any similarities between the phrase “Firestarter and The Fury” and the title of a certain questionable-but-plausible book about another polarizing and demagogic American “leader” are unintentional, if interesting.)

The Fury opens with Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas, in his sixties and still obviously capable of beating the tar out of a man a third his age) and his teenage son Robin (Andrew Stevens) preparing to return to the U.S. after spending most of Robin’s life in exotic locales as part of Peter’s work with the aforementioned, unnamed agency; Peter is retiring. Robin is hesitant, not just because he barely remembers the states, but also because he has his doubts about the special institute where he will be enrolled upon his return, a kind of school for psychics. Peter is confident, however, that Robin will succeed in any environment. Their idyllic last days are interrupted by a seaborne attack from sheikhs with machine guns, and Robin is spirited away by Peter’s former partner, Ben Childress (John Cassavetes), while Peter is seemingly killed. He has survived, however, and sees Childress paying off the apparent attackers for their false flag operation; Peter shoots Childress, maiming him, but Robin is already gone.

A year later, Chicago teenager Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving) is noticed by one of Sandza’s old compatriots, who calls the older man to tip him off that he’s discovered another psychic, one who might be able to help him find Robin. This informant is killed immediately; Childress has been keeping tabs on him, and uses the phone call to track down Peter, who must flee from his hotel in his underpants. He makes contact with Hester (Carrier Snodgress), an old flame and his secret informant within the aforementioned psychic institute run by Jim McKeever (Charles Dunning), which has already recruited Gillian. Working together, can Hester and Peter rescue Gillian from Childress’s clutches? Can Gillian help them find and rescue Robin? And after a year of being honed and trained to be Childress’s psychic weapon, can Robin truly be saved, even if he can be found and freed?

I’ve lost count of the number of reviews I’ve written here where I note my love of seventies and eighties conspiracy thrillers. I’ve always been fascinated by the way that certain social events have a far-reaching and undeniable effect on the media of that time. The seventies were fertile ground for the genre, given the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Nixon’s actions that led to his impeachment, and the resultant collapse of the American public’s faith in its leadership. This was the fertile well that gave us Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, and The Parallax View, as well as countless others. It’s no surprise that conspiracy thrillers with a supernatural (or at least a  parapsychological or science fiction) twist would emerge as well: The Fury, of course, as well as the aforementioned Firestarter, but also Scanners (psychics created as the result of careless prescriptions with untested drugs, à la the tragedy of Thalidomide babies), Capricorn One (a faked space mission, the cover-up of which endangers the lives of the astronauts involved and the journalists who discover the truth), and others.

I would wager that, in spite of the similarities between The Fury and Firestarter, the latter does not plagiarize the former; they were both simply born out of similar sentiments and sweeping social (and sociological) anxieties. It’s also possible that future Class of 1999 director Mark L. Lester, when filming Firestarter for its 1984 release, took inspiration from the films that came before it. The novel on which the film was based mentioned that the use of psychic powers caused “tiny cerebral hemorrhages,” which simply doesn’t translate well to the screen. Lester instead invoked the image of the psychic nosebleed, a common trope now (see its use in many works as shorthand for strenuous psychic activity, most recently in Netflix’s Stranger Things); in fact, many people believe that this was the first use of this visual, but in fact it goes back at least as far as Scanners three years previously, and a bleeding nose is involved with psychic phenomena in The Fury, although in this film it is the result of a psychic attack, not a symptom. It’s a fascinating amalgamation of convergent ideas coming to bear in a short amount of time, and perhaps homage, but not evidence of intellectual theft.

With regards to The Fury itself as a film, this is a classic that deserves to be seen. The film features a great soundtrack by John Williams, fresh off of his Oscar win for Star Wars. There’re also some truly dynamite effects used to demonstrate the use of psychic power, the most effective being a shot of Gillian being fully transported into a vision of Robin inside the institute as she stands frozen on the stairs, the past playing out in a rear projection as the camera swims around her. It’s truly stunning, especially for 1978 and on a budget of a mere 5 or 7 million dollars (different sources conflict each other on this matter). One of the film’s greatest overall strengths is the way that De Palma invests time in the daily lives of the people who are tangentially affected or in some way attached to the agency and its pursuit of Gillian and brainwashing of Robin. We spend a few minutes with the family whose home Peter invades in his initial flight from Childress’s men, and we get to know a lot about their interpersonal relationships in a brief span of screentime. There’s even friendly banter between agents on surveillance duty about coffee and chocolate; these are small moments, but they paint the world of the film in vivid hues, giving us a lived-in sense of time and place where other, lesser filmmakers wouldn’t have bothered.

Getting back to the topic of anti-government paranoia in mass media, perhaps we will soon see a resurgence of films in this rhetorical space, given the current political climate. We are already seeing a revisitation of the Pentagon Papers with the release of The Post, and even 2016’s Zootopia got in on the action. Until this movement takes full flight, we can take comfort in the arms of films past that reflect the anxieties of our present. After all, if we survived it before, we can survive it again.

As of January 2018, we are still here, and The Fury is streaming on Netflix. Good night, and good luck.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond