I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, by which I mean I recently rewatched Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour. Noir always looks different after watching Detour. The Poverty Row production values look dreamlike & otherworldly instead of limited & cheap; the femmes fatales seem more deliberately, deliciously vicious in their misandry; and, most glaringly, the tough-guy alcoholics at the genre’s center start looking like whiny babies instead of macho lone wolves. Apparently, David Lynch sees the genre through those same grubby Detour lenses. At the very least, his 1990s neo-noir Lost Highway turns the interchangeability of the genre’s drunken mopes into a kind of existential crisis. A Lynchian nightmare, if you will. He tells two loosely connected noir stories about two unremarkable, pouty men, then gradually makes it clear they’re just same story repeated. They’re all the same story, with the same miserable sad sacks circling the same drains.
Bill Pullman stars as a mopey saxophonist frustrated by his loosening grip on his straying LA hipster girlfriend (not unlike the down-and-out pianist who loses his girlfriend to her own Hollywood starlet ambitions in Detour). Until he doesn’t. Pullman disappears after the first act, inexplicably transforming into a young-dumb-and-full-of-cum teen mechanic played by Balthazar Getty, who quickly gets into his own girlfriend troubles when he falls for a gangster’s moll. With Lost Highway, Lynch twists himself in knots trying to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling in a second draft . . . and he eventually gets there, even if the slack-jawed, leather-jacketed drip needs a little supernatural help from a legit movie star like Pullman to pull it off. Of course, neither of these parallel losers are as compelling as the femmes fatales that get them in lethal, cosmic trouble—both played by Patricia Arquette—but then again they never are.
Because this is a David Lynch film, I’m zapping some of its magic just by “explaining” what happens and how it relates to larger genre filmmaking traditions. So much of Lost Highway is composed of hypnotizing highway lines, Skinimarinkian hallways, and UFO-landing strobe lights that reducing it to a loose collection of noir tropes is somewhat insulting and very much beside the point. Still, you don’t really need to hear that Lynch uses red velvet drapes to mark the boundary between reality & the dream world, or that the dream-logic procession of the plot(s) defies rational explanation; you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you get it. The only vivid deviations from his go-to formula are the temporal markers of when it was made: a Trent Reznor-supervised soundtrack, a Marilyn Manson cameo in a stag night porno, a mid-film spoof of road safety PSAs, etc. On that front, real-life monster Robert Blake might outshine Arquette as the film’s MVP, dressed in the usual ghoulish make-up as one of Lynch’s trademark specters of Death, except this time armed with a menacing camcorder that updates the usual formula with some weirdo 90s video art. It’s all very eerie, off-putting, frustrating, and strangely compelling, which is to say that it is a David Lynch film.
I do find it helpful to have some kind of a contextual anchor to help appreciate Lynch’s work. I don’t want to be the guy who “maps out” the identity shifts, time loops, and dreamworld symbolism of Lost Highway as if it were a puzzle to be solved, but I also find very little enjoyment in the late-career formlessness of projects like Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return, so it helps to seek a little guiding structure under the heavy layers of nightmare logic. It’s the Philistine position to take, but I truly believe Lynch was at his best in his early career, when his most far-out, for-their-own-sake impulses were still somewhat tempered by Hollywood storytelling conventions. With Wild at Heart and Lost Highway in the 90s, there was still just enough recognizable genre structure beneath Lynch’s loopy surface aesthetics that he hadn’t yet completely lost me. Hell, I’d even rank Wild at Heart high among his very best. He was already pushing his subliminal anti-logic to its late-career extremes, but I detect enough familiar noir DNA in Lost Highway‘s bones to not feel totally abandoned. And a lot of that has to do with how mopey & ineffectual its two parallel leads are at center stage, and how much fun Patricia Arquette has crushing them under her heels (when she’s not getting crushed herself by even more vicious bullies further up the Hollywood food chain).
Ten years ago, my friend Alicia and I walked into the Cinemark at Citiplace in Baton Rouge with a lot of excited middle-aged women to see Magic Mike, the then-new film directed by beloved (by us anyway) BR film icon Steven Soderbergh. Magic Mike had largely been marketed as an upbeat romcom about a hot dude raising money to start his own business by working as a male stripper. In the trailer, which starts out pretending that the film is about Channing Tatum as a cop before revealing his true profession, there’s a very 2012 needle-drop of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and some romantic tension with romantic lead Cody Horn that would lead you to assume that you’re in for a much different kind of film than the one that hit theaters lo these many years ago. The advertising focused on star power — not so much of Tatum himself but of his taut body and the promise of a tantalizing thrill ride that still featured a traditional “Guy wants more from life, girl wants him but doesn’t know if she can handle his past” plot structure. You know, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation but with a lot more dry humping.
That wasn’t the movie that we got that day. Instead, Magic Mike was kind of Diet Cola Boogie Nights, which is strange considering that we already had 54. The 2012 movie is one that spends most of its first half focused on Alex Pettyfer’s newcomer character and his introduction to the world of male stripping, and his narratively inevitable fall into the sex/drugs/rock’n’roll dark side of that lifestyle, while Tatum’s Mike is very focused on finding a way to grind—pun intended—-at whatever comes his way until he manages to rise above his current economic class. There are plenty of sexy dances, but they’re shot with a bit of a remove, and so what we’re left with is a tonal mishmash of cheesy rom-com dialogue, writhing torsos, and a storyline about drugs that doesn’t moralize further than “Some people can handle them better than others.” I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that it wasn’t what I was expecting or what I wanted, and that the deluge of Baton Rouge moms who walked out of that screening also seemed to think that something different was supposed to have happened in that multiplex that day.
Brandon is a big fan of the first follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, which eschews the first film’s director and direction, subbing in Gregory Jacobs for Soderbergh and, as Brandon wrote, “ditching its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy.” I understand the appeal, and I don’t think it was a bad idea to make a sequel that followed through on the unfulfilled promise of the first film’s marketing and also give it a lighter, fluffier narrative, and I find Donald Glover to be a welcome addition in anything that I’m watching, but it still didn’t connect with me. The first film purposely contrasted the dour realities of living under a broken economic system and the ways that people learn to cope inside of them with the larger-than-life stagebound fantasies that the boys got to portray. In XXL, the plot gets tiny little conflict injections as infrequently as narrative requirements allow while mostly taking the form of a goofy picaresque that mostly existed to hang strip sequences upon, and while I certainly understand the appeal, I just don’t connect.
There was a moment in the screening of Magic Mike’s Last Dance when I turned to my friend who had accompanied me and asked: “How is this the best one?” And it’s not just better than the others (in my opinion), it’s actually great.
This time around, we’ve got a narrator, and for reasons that don’t come into focus until the end of the first act, she’s young and has a British accent, and she’s telling the story of our old friend Mike Lane to catch us up on what’s happened in the intervening years. Mike’s furniture store folded during COVID, and he broke up with the woman he was presumed to have a happy ending with at the conclusion of XXL. Now he’s back to doing gig catering work, and he still hasn’t managed to claw his way out of his economic situation. While bartending at a charity event hosted by Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (Salma Hayek), who is recently separated from her media empire heir husband due to his infidelity, Mike is recognized by one of Max’s lawyers, who also happened to be one of the sorority girls from the party in the first film. To cheer up her boss, she recommends that Max invite Mike to give her a private dance, which he does after very little convincing. When the two wake up together the next morning, Max offers Mike a mysterious job, but he has to fly with her to London immediately. Once there, he meets her daughter—and our narrator—Zadie (Jemelia George) and their butler Victor (Ayub Khan Din), neither of whom approve of what Max is up to or, by extension, Mike’s presence.
Max tasks Mike with a challenge: she owns a theater that was in her husband’s family for generations, and she’ll give him $60,000 for one month’s work of “redeveloping” the play that is currently being performed there. It’s a dreary-looking love triangle Victorian-era period piece called Isabel Ascendant that is considered old-fashioned and misogynistic even in-universe, and Max wants Mike to use his supposed knowledge of how to give women what they want to turn the play into an erotic, hip-thrusting masterpiece. This means firing the play’s director and, as a quirk of actors’ union labor laws, keeping on the actress playing the titular Isabel, Hannah (Juliette Motamed), who turns out to be as free of spirit as Isabel was repressed. With only three weeks until the curtain rises, Max and Mike have to recruit sexy dancers from all over Europe to fill out the ensemble while also dodging the various obstacles thrown in their way by Max’s soon-to-be-ex-husband.
When I texted Brandon about doing coverage for this movie after I walked out of the theater, I was shocked to learn from him that it has such mixed reviews, but I think I have to chalk that up to … let’s politely call it “demographics.” Magic Mike wasn’t what it purported to be, sure, but it also wasn’t much of a fantasy either. Cody Horn is a gorgeous woman, but she’s not one with whom the presumed target audience of this kind of movie can readily identify. She’s hot, she looks great in her bikini, and she’s effortlessly cool. The same could be said of Amber Heard in XXL, and in neither movie is there ever any doubt about how the film will end and thus there are no stakes in those relationships, rendering them flat. Salma Hayek is also a gorgeous woman, and although she doesn’t look it, she’s 56, a full 14 years older than Tatum, and here she’s playing a woman with an ungodly amount of capital. I’m sure it’s not very common for someone’s wildest dreams to be about their partner cheating with their assistant, but there’s a lot to be said for the power fantasy of being a powerful older woman who can hire a maturing stud to create the ultimate sexy stage experience. Last Dance understands that better than the other two, and even though we know that the show will eventually have to go on, even if Max is rolling around in her overstuffed down comforters in a state of depression because it seems like her ex-husband has “won.” It’s called “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” We know there’s going to be a big sexy revue at the end (and boy howdy is there).
There’s a lot to really enjoy here. No one is more surprised than I am at how much I was won over by the ongoing subplot of Zadie and Victor. It would be so easy that it would almost be cheating to have Victor secretly be in love with his employer like something out of a Merchant-Ivory production, but there’s none of that nonsense here. I normally find precocious children to be grating and cloying in these movies, but it’s actually rather fun to watch Zadie have to occasionally step up and parent her mother as she goes through hard times, and for Victor to act in an unofficial grandfatherly capacity to get her back up to snuff. It’s not the stuff of Man Booker prizes—Zadie gets her mother out of the house and to the theatre for the finale of the film by finally addressing her as “Mum” instead of using her first name, which is a device that’s older than the hills—but it’s engaging in a way that I wasn’t really expecting for the third trip to this particular well. Hannah’s emceeing of the event is a hell of a lot of fun, and Motamed is a magnetic presence who leaves an impression on the viewer, standing out in a parade of male flesh that could easily wash her out of the mind completely, but she remains firmly rooted.
In another way of fulfilling the fantasy, we the audience get to sit in on and attend the auditions for the revamped Isabel Ascendant and see all of the dancers get selected for their various individual talents: breakdancing, contortion, modern dance, ballet, and, of course, good ol’ fashioned stripping. It’s a fun montage, but also because it’s a montage, we never have to learn any names or have to try and keep track of them and their individual narratives as we were expected to in the previous films. As Peter, Bjorn, and John sang so long ago, “Flesh is flesh,” and that’s all that there is to it. All we need to worry about is having a good time, and although I’m sure that theatre reeked just as much of creatine farts as the back of the van in XXL, there’s something very classy and fun about it. As promised, the film does end with Magic Mike’s last dance, and it’s truly stunning, a demonstration that as much as mainstream critics like to tease Tatum, he is an amazing dancer who’s lithe and fluid in a way that belies his athletic build and his himbo public persona. The stakes are never too high or too low in the narrative, and the film rides that sweet spot for all that it’s worth, ensuring that this series goes out on a high note.
When I think of movie sequels that best their originals, what come to mind are the ones that go bigger, broader, and cartoonishly extreme, exploding the comparatively timid premises of their source texts – titles likeGremlins 2, Ghoulies 2, Child’s Play 2,Paddington 2, Batman Returns, and Magic Mike XXL. In all of those examples, though, I still like the original films that preceded them, which is more than I can say for the volatile, twisty screenlife thriller Missing. Missing is a spin-off sequel to one of my least favorite entries in the screenlife genre, Searching (a film that I should note Britnee reviewed very positively for this site back in 2018). Searching wasn’t embarrassing in the way that lower-budget screenlife schlock like Safer at Home and Untitled Horror Movie can be, but I still resented it for cleaning up a trashy genre I love for its illogical technophobic fearmongering by turning it into safe, This Is Us-style melodrama. Laptop-POV thrillers should prey on the eeriness of life on the internet, not act as tech-friendly advertisements that constantly reassure parents their terminally online children are actually doing okay. It was basically Unfriended for the corniest of suburbanites, a perspective I was happy to see dropped in its much meaner, trashier sequel.
Missing improves on the Searching formula in practically every way, most of all in how it maintains a healthy paranoia around modern tech even while explaining why it’s useful (and in how it’s willing to put its characters in actual, sustained danger instead of just pretending to). Storm Reid stars as the mouse-clicking, keyboard clacking internet detective du jour, a teenager who investigates the sudden disappearance of her mother—lost while vacationing in Colombia—from her laptop control room in California. Missing‘s tone echoes the hokey schmaltz of Searching‘s parent-child melodrama, scoring its petty mother-daughter tensions with heart-tugging piano flourishes you’d expect to hear in an engagement ring jewelry store commercial. Only, while Reid clicks away at the Ring cameras, location trackers, search histories, password workarounds, and username paper trails at her fingertips to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, she’s revealing more than just the speedbumps & heartbreaks of modern familial bonds; she’s also cataloging the tools of the modern surveillance state. The surface-level text of the film details the twists & turns of a Dateline-style “true” crime mystery and subsequent familial grief, while the glaring subtext is all about how deep privacy-invading technology has already seeped into our daily lives in ways we’ve learned to ignore, simply because it’s convenient.
One of the major things I love about screenlife thrillers (and one of the major reasons they’re dismissed as frivolous novelties) is their nimble ability to document of-the-moment trends in modern life online. It’s something most other genres are scared to touch for fear of looking gimmicky or dated, despite computer screens accounting for so much of the visual data most audiences absorb on a daily basis. There’s something fearlessly honest about engaging with that supposedly uncinematic imagery, but I also just like to imagine how incomprehensible screenlife aesthetics would be to earliest cinemagoers who were astounded by The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in 1896. For its part, Missing doesn’t have many updates in modern screenlife to document, except maybe the frustrating ambiguity of Captcha challenges and the low-key hostility of a thumbs-up emoji. It does have plenty notes about life outside of the computer, though, marking our cultural obsession with turning real life tragedies into true crime #content; zoomer teens’ uncanny savvy in navigating the back roads of social media; and our casual, collective acceptance of privacy invasion from vampiric tech-world capitalists. On a more practical, immediate level, it’s most useful as a showcase for Reid’s skills as a young actor and editors-turned-directors Will Merrick & Nick Johnson’s understanding of screenlife’s unique visual language, since those three collaborators account for almost everything we see onscreen. It’s a fun, well-staged mainstream thriller with just the right balance between social commentary, shameless sentimentality, and trashy what-the-fuck twists, when Searching only hit one of those three metrics.
I’ve been trying out a new strategy when purchasing Blu-rays & DVDs lately, and it’s resulted in my modest collection quickly filling up with smut. Instead of prioritizing tried-and-true personal favorites I know I’ll revisit in the future, I’ve pivoted to blind-buying movies I assume will never be accessible on streaming. The plan was to finally see some independent, arthouse obscurities that fall through mainstream distribution gaps and, thus, eternally gather dust of my watchlist, but in practice it’s only prompted me to purchase more & more vintage pornography. I can pretty safely assume that titles like Bat Pussy, SexWorld, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street will never populate on Hulu or Netflix, so I figure the best (legal) chance I have to see them is to own them. That’s not to say there’s no overlap between high-brow experimental art and vintage porno. In my casual, sporadic splurges on discounted discs, I’ve found plenty of artsy-fartsy filth to help refine my porno palate, including heavy-hitter titles like Equation to an Unknown, Pink Narcissus, Luminous Procuress, and, most recently, Wakefield Poole’s seminal classic Bijou. There is a three-way intersection between D.I.Y. independent filmmaking, pretentious arthouse mindfuckery, and prurient perversion in these films that you can’t find anywhere else in cinema, which somehow makes owning them feel like an academic pursuit rather than a masturbatory one.
In that arthouse porno context, Bijou is considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the best. There’s a girthy stretch at its warped, misshapen center where I totally understand that claim. I can’t fully vouch for its most stunning sequence’s lengthy bookends, though, which occasionally tested my patience despite their flagrant obscenity, as if I were watching Apichatpongian slow cinema instead of vintage smut. The opening sequence is effectively a non-sequitur, featuring our main POV stud (Bill Harrison) leaving his construction site job, witnessing a deadly car accident, and snatching the purse of the woman who was run over. He shakes off the guilt of that petty theft by masturbating in the shower, attempting to focus on the porno mag centerfolds hanging on his apartment walls instead of the tragedy he got himself needlessly involved in. It takes 20 languid minutes for our well-endowed construction hunk to give into his obsession with the mysterious woman, following an invitation in her purse to the titular Bijou theatre, when the movie finally comes (and comes and comes and comes) alive. The Bijou turns out to be less of a secret sex club than it is a phantasmagorical otherworld. After following a few Alice in Wonderland instructions (signs flashing “Remove shoes” & “Remove clothes” instead of “Eat me” or “Drink me”), our main man finds himself in an endless black void decorated only with smoke, mirrors, tinsel, and nightclub lighting rigs. His descent into the subliminal bowels of the Bijou is a gorgeous, disorienting display, recalling the funhouse mirror freakout at the climax of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. Then, a 30-minute orgy ensues among the “all-male cast,” gradually overpowering the D.I.Y. psychedelia with the monotony of a nonstop sex scene.
Wakefield Poole directed Bijou the same year that the Golden Age of Porno was supposedly kicked off by the mainstream success of Deep Throat, a film with much less pronounced artistic ambitions, to say the least. His previous film The Boys in the Sand was a similar cultural landmark, covered like a Real Film by the trades in a way no previous gay porno could have hoped for, despite its weirdly muted legacy as a porno-chic landmark lurking in Deep Throat‘s shadow. As a follow-up to that early critical success, Bijou seems less interested in mainstream attention than it is in academic pursuits. The way Poole transforms his tiny NYC apartment into an endless liminal pleasure realm can’t help but recall the arthouse porno sensibilities of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, which was filmed on the same kind of D.I.Y. “studio” set (although much less efficiently). In its best moments, Bijou plays like the scrappier, more brutish kid brother of Narcissus, doubling down on the abstraction & obscenity of Bidgood’s work instead of the sub-Technicolor beauty. Poole includes self-portrait camera tests and screen-test cast interviews as side-by-side slideshow projections, the kind of visual experimentation that was making waves in that era’s art galleries, not its porno theatres. The classical soundtrack makes even the orgy sequence play like a perverse parody of Disney’s Fantasia, the closest that studio has ever gotten to genuine pomp & prestige. In its most transcendent moments, Poole’s version of pornography can only be compared to art film experimentation, more often recalling Kenneth Anger than Gregory Dark (although all three directors likely had major influence on the music video as an artform). Unlike Pink Narcissus, though, Bijou isn’t entirely comprised of transcendent moments, and it takes a little patience to get to the core down-the-rabbit-hole sequence that makes it such a well-regarded all-timer.
I don’t know that I have the passion nor the stamina to make it as a full-on, well-versed porno sommelier (for that, I will defer to Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell, longtime Bijou advocate), but I do think it’s a genre I owe more time & attention, so it’s one I’m likely to continue collecting. Swampflix doesn’t have much of a guiding ethos beyond promoting appreciation for low-budget, high-art genre filmmaking, and there is plenty pornography that deserves to be discussed & exalted in that context, alongside more frequently cited genres like action, sci-fi, and horror. In that canon, Bijou is clearly a central, definitive text, even if its loopy, unrushed entirety can’t live up to the psychedelic transcendence of its best stretch.
I can only think of two feature-length porno parodies that I watched before catching the original films they “erotically” spoof: 1974’s Flesh Gordon (a parody of the 1930s Flash Gordon sci-fi serials and subsequent 1950s TV show, later adapted again into a fully clothed action-adventure feature in 1980) and now 1978’s SexWorld (a parody of the 1973 sci-fi Western Westworld, later adapted into a semi-clothed prestige series for HBO in the 2010s). In both cases, I basically got the gist (and the jizz!) of their parodic targets from their loglines and through general cultural osmosis. Besides, both of those vintage pornos are more interesting for how they reflect the mainstream sexual attitudes of their era than they are for their thin satirical commentary on their respective source texts. For its part, Flesh Gordon plays like a corny softcore holdover from the Russ Meyer nudie cutie era, shying away from taking full, explicit advantage of the porno chic movement that arose post-Deep Throat. By contrast, SexWorld is unmistakably porno chic. The Anthony Spinelli Golden Age porno shares some of Flesh Gordon‘s wink-wink-nudge-nudge cornball humor in its hardcore perversions of the Westworld/Futureworld premise, but its polished production values, abbreviated sex scenes, and vague gestures towards social commentary make it feel deliberately designed as a date-night dare for yuppie couples to giggle through, rather than pandering to the trench coat brigade. Both films soften hardcore’s harshest edges to make porno publicly palatable for curious-but-cautious mainstream audiences but, of the two, only SexWorld gave those audiences their money’s worth.
As you would likely assume, the titularSexWorld is an isolated luxury resort that simulates “a world devoted entirely to sex,” realizing its horned-up tourist’s “wildest” fantasies though sci-fi convention make-em-ups that are never fully explained in the plot (but are hinted to be a combination of hologram projections & shapeshifting animatronics). What you might not assume is that SexWorld’s high-end customer base travels to that resort via bus, a detail significant enough that it gets its own shout-out in the titular disco theme song. The bus itself proudly advertises the SexWorld logo to lookers-on—no brown paper bag covering the label in shame—which was apparently somewhat risky to stage, given that the bus ride montage is mostly composed of a few quick shots repeating in an endless loop. During that bus trip and subsequent interviews with the SexWorld staff, we get some insightful flashbacks into the dysfunctional sex lives and escapist fantasies of each tourist. The staff repeatedly remind their guests that the far-out, unexplained SexWorld technology can realize their wildest, most unfathomable fantasy fucks, referencing taboos like incest, BDSM, and water sports that no one takes them up on. The most transgressive their fantasies get are in exploring interracial taboos (including a bonus mini-parody of Behind the Green Door), but the less said about those particular vignettes the better. Otherwise, between the budget restraints and the presumed hetero POV of its audience, the actual sex in SexWorld is relatively tame, unless you’re somehow still shocked by mostly straight women indulging in some momentary bisexuality in an otherwise straight porno.
The sex looks great, though, and Spinelli makes the most of the production’s cheap sets with a few well-positioned gel lights and some complicated wallpaper. There isn’t much to the sci-fi conceit beyond a few SexWorld employees milling around in white lab coats, pushing useless light-up buttons on a switchboard to nowhere, but it’s all in good, hokey fun. As a cultural artifact, its greatest value is in imagining what hipster city couples were supposed to get out of seeing it publicly projected in its original porno chic context, besides the obvious visual titillation and transgressive thrill. Most of its characters’ fantasies are presented as quick-fix resolutions for common marital conflicts, to the point where it’s just as much couples’ therapy for straights as it is porno sleaze. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the film came with its own pre-loaded discussion topics on index cards for audiences to sort through as they travel from theatre to bed after the credits roll. Personally, my favorite two characters are the evil shrew wife who desperately wants her husband to be more forceful in bed and the phone sex addict who feels intense shame in her post-nut-clarity every time she enjoys a dirty call – the shrew (Sharon Thorpe) because she reminds me of Mink Stole’s legendary comedic performance in Desperate Living, and the shy phone-sex pervert (Kay Parker) because her pre-cure flashback scene is genuinely hot. It’s kind of a perfect porno chic movie in that way: a little sexy, a little silly, a little offensive, a little historically insightful, and—most shocking to anyone who grew up watching porn in the video or internet eras—a little considerate in its lighting & composition. You don’t need to have seen Westworld or Futureworld to understand the appeal of that.
I’m not yet exhausted with M. Night Shyamalan’s schtick, but I am beyond exhausted with the MPAA. Shyamalan could continue making corny Twilight Zone episodes for the rest of his life, and I’ll always line up to witness his latest stunt, even if they more often land as fun novelties instead of great cinema. When I think about him, I smile. Meanwhile, I’m becoming increasingly angered by the continued existence & influence of the MPAA, our modern echo of retro Hays Code moralism. With Knock at the Cabin, my backburner delight with Shyamalan has inevitably clashed with my overboiling anger with the Motion Picture Association of America, an archaic institution with the power to determine who gets to see his work. Shyamalan’s latest film is not only an earnest goofball headscratcher from one of Hollywood’s foremost earnest goofballs; it’s also the latest glaring data point in the MPAA’s long history of institutional homophobia.
I was already grumbling about recent MPAA offenses before I sat down to watch Knock at the Cabin the theater. In just this past month, the original cut of the animatronic horror comedy M3GAN was noticeably defanged to meet the MPAA’s outdated standards for a PG-13 rating, a threshold far below what young teens can freely access on television & the internet at home. Even more egregiously, the MPAA neutered Brandon Cronenberg’s sci-fi freakout Infinity Pool by cursing it with an NC-17 rating, forcing the studio’s hand in distributing a tamer R-rated edit that national theater chains would be willing to program (even though those chains could freely, legally ignore MPAA rulings whenever they want). Listening to Cronenberg explain in interviews that the MPAA review & appeal process still involves guiding input from Catholic & Protestant priests in the year of Our Dark Lord 2023 was flabbergasting. Much like how Blockbuster & Wal-Mart’s self-censorship against distributing immoral, ungodly pop media has guided what the movie industry was willing to produce in the recent past, the MPAA’s relationship with larger theater chains is still directly, purposefully limiting what art I can legally consume as an adult. It’s corporate, Puritanical bullshit.
The frustrating thing is that M. Night Shyamalan is extremely accommodating to MPAA standards for safe, consumable art. I remember a behind-the-scenes DVD featurette for The Happening where Shyamalan declared himself to be “Mr. PG-13” and was showing squirmy anxiety over directing his first R-rated feature. In that film, Shyamalan went out of his way to earn the R, including an onscreen depiction of young children being blasted with a shotgun (which is exactly the shot he was setting up for in that “Mr. PG-13” interview). By contrast, Knock at the Cabin makes no overt efforts to earn its R rating “for violence and language.” If anything, its obscured, dulled-down violence and cautious “You piece of crap!” expletives play like the film has been preemptively compromised & edited down for a PG-13 rating, if not for a broadcast television premiere. Unlike his last one, Shyamalan’s latest widespread disaster film finds him working in “Mr. PG-13” mode, and I can’t help but assume that the only reason the priest-guided MPAA condemned it with an R-rating because its lead couple is gay. After all, the organization has a long history of rating sexless, violence-free gay content unsuitable for minors, including the even more innocuous titles Pride, Love is Strange, and 3 Generations (not to mention John Waters’s A Dirty Shame landing an NC-17 despite being relatively tame compared to the hetero Farrelly Brothers comedies Waters had indirectly inspired). Knock at the Cabin is just their latest target.
Beyond noting my personal, petty indignation, the reason the MPAA’s rating matters here is that it’s a real-world example of the fictional homophobia referenced in the text itself. The world at large is still violently hostile to the public existence of same-gender couples, which is what makes the selfless sacrifice asked of Knock at the Cabin‘s leads so politically loaded. While vacationing in a remote cabin with their adopted daughter, a married gay couple (Ben Aldridge & Jonathan Groff) are taken hostage by four doomsday zealots who met online (led by the imposing gentle giant Dave Bautista). The home invasion scenario quickly turns into religious parable, as the armed intruders explain that the hostages must make a Jellicle choice: sacrifice a member of their own family or watch the rest of the world suffer a Biblical apocalypse. The movie spends a lot of time debating the mechanics & validity of this supernatural scenario, approximating the exact middle ground between Richard Kelly’s sprawling Twilight Zone whatsit The Box and the Evangelical parable The Shack. Once those debates are settled, though, the real watercooler discussion questions posed to the audience get pretty thorny: Why should this tirelessly persecuted queer couple sacrifice themselves to save a world that spits in their general direction? How much grace & compassion do they owe to Q-Anon fascists, dive-bar gaybashers, and the institutional homophobes of the MPAA? Doesn’t the world, on some level, deserve to burn?
I am no priest, so I wasn’t part of the decision-making process for how, exactly, Knock at the Cabin “earned” its R rating. Maybe “Mr. PG-13” put his foot down on removing the one or two “F-bombs” that put the film over the cussing limit. Maybe the MPAA took a harsh stance because the film was largely self-financed—not pre-approved corporate product—and Shyamalan didn’t have the extra funding to fight their decision (another sin the organization often repeats). Maybe none of this matters at all. Shyamalan still got to screen his off-kilter camera angles, his off-putting cornball humor, and the stunning off-type performance from Bautista (whose hulking presence alone is a sight to behold, recalling the awesome image of Frankenstein’s monster gently, disastrously stooping down to relate to a little girl in 1931). The MPAA got to decide who’s allowed to see Shyamalan’s latest, but they didn’t stop him from making it, and they didn’t prevent it from earning the #1 box office slot on opening weekend, despite their efforts. Still, their harsh rating of the film reads like old-school, textbook homophobia to me, enhancing its themes in glaring, unintentional ways. I pray someone will Jellicle-choice them out of existence as soon as possible.
Paul Verhoeven is the great American satirist. There’s only the small matter of him being Dutch. In his 80s & 90s Hollywood heyday, Verhoeven was the master of self-satirizing American pop culture, riding a fine enough line between moralist condemnation and gleeful participation that his cartoon parodies of Hollywood schlock were often mistaken for the genuine thing. Titles like Showgirls,Starship Troopers, and Robocop were often overlooked as biting American satires in their time, mostly because Verhoeven was obviously taking perverse pleasure in the exact sex & violence he was chastising mainstream audiences for craving. He was making truly subversive art, in that he was subverting the meaning & intent of his oblivious Hollywood collaborators with a self-satirical exaggeration of the industry’s cruelest, most salacious smut. His mainstream films were, without hyperbole, among the greatest ever made and, as such, were often misunderstood by critics & audiences in their own time.
You did not need me to repeat that tidbit of recent pop culture history. Verhoeven’s subversive Hollywood works have been reassessed to the point where their covert satirical genius is now common knowledge (even if that cultural reassessment hasn’t translated to more robust budgets for his more recent, small studio works like Benedetta & Elle). What’s less often discussed—among American audiences anyway—is what Verhoeven was up to before he reached Hollywood, as his early Dutch features currently have no legal distribution in the US. If his semi-supernatural erotic thriller The 4th Man is any indication, Verhoeven arrived here as an already fully formed auteur, since the film essentially functions as a Basic Instinct prototype (with some light touches of Benedetta for added flavor). And if The 4th Man is not typical to the movies Verhoeven was making pre-Hollywood, you’ll have to forgive me for the assumption. I only got to see this one because a friend bought a bootleg DVD copy off of eBay; the rest remain a mystery.
Jeroen Krabbé stars as a hotshot alcoholic novelist who travels to a small town to big-time his fan club at a public reading of his work. He quickly falls in lust & bedsheets with the literary club’s treasurer, Renée Soutendijk, an obvious femme fatale who will quickly lead to the buffoonish author’s doom. He suffers bad-omen visions of his own death throughout his travels, but powers through them for the promise of hot sex, both with Soutendijk and with her younger boytoy lover, Thom Hoffman. Unlike in Basic Instinct, it isn’t the ice-cold blonde bombshell who’s a bisexual hedonist, but rather the himbo-dingus who trips all over himself lusting after her (and her accessibility to hot trade). Exactly like in Basic Instinct, whether that bombshell is a murderer or a sexually liberated innocent is a Schrodinger’s box game that Verhoeven teases the audience with all the way through the end credits. Only, this version of the story follows a different genre template, going for more of a small-town-witchcraft Wicker Man vibe instead of foretelling Basic Instinct’s cop-falls-for-murder-suspect neo noir revival.
Verhoeven’s meta-satirical exaggerations of Joe Eszterhas’s sleazy Hollywood scripts are artistically subversive. With no major-studio industrial tropes or morals to subvert, The 4th Man is, by contrast, simply artistically blasphemous. Verhoeven’s Dutch dry-run/wet-dream precursor to Basic Instinct is just as hyperviolent and explicitly horny as his later Hollywood films, but outside of the Hollywood system its shock-value offenses register more as a personal indulgence than an act of cultural satire. When Krabbé envisions Hoffman’s heaving, sweaty gym body rocking a tight red Speedo on the crucifix, Verhoeven is not exactly subverting cultural or religious norms. He is perverting them for his own amusement. When Soutendijk’s witchy femme fatale leads her boytoys to their ruin by the prick—sometimes snipping those pricks off entirely in castration nightmare sequences—Verhoeven is not subverting misogynist Hollywood tropes about women’s poisonous effect on men; he’s celebrating her transgressive power. The closest he comes to true subversion in The 4th Man is in an early sex scene, when Krabbé covers Soutendijk’s breasts to pretend she is “a boy”, thrusting into him, flipping the power dynamics of the traditional nude scene into something overtly queer. Even then, it still feels like he’s only doing so to delight himself and to shock the audience, not necessarily to declare something political about sex in cinema.
If there’s any way that Verhoeven doesn’t feel like a fully formed auteur in The 4th Man, it’s in the film’s similarities to Euro cinema of its era, from the bitter romantic doom of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse to the intense reds & witchy dream imagery of supernatural gialli (complete with an echo of Fulci’s signature ocular gore). He couldn’t reach his full power as a subversive pop culture satirist until he left Europe for America, where his blasphemous indulgences in sex & violence could punch upwards at Puritanical social norms instead of just delighting the man behind the camera. The 4th Man‘s greatest asset, then, might be cinematographer (and longtime Verhoeven collaborator) Jan De Bont, who stretches the budget with as many on-the-fly crane, zoom, dolly shots as he can manage to match the look & feel of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Judging only by The 4th Man, it’s clear that Verhoeven was already making great films before he reached America; all that really changed was finding a cultural context that made them feel politically dangerous instead of just deliciously perverse.
Maybe it’s a hacky move to constantly compare Indian action blockbusters to their Hollywood equivalents, but the latest wide-release Bollywood export Pathaan doesn’t leave me much room to avoid repeating the offense. Between its global spyware espionage, military-grade streetracing warfare, and 92-floor supertower heist sequence, it’s impossible to not compare Pathaan to the soon-to-conclude Fast & Furious saga – its most obvious genre template. At least it compares favorably. I want to call Pathaan the best Fast & Furious movie since Furious 7 in 2015, but that would be inaccurate. It’s only the best Fast & Furious movie since the Tollywood actioner Saaho in 2019, further proof that India’s various film industries are outshining Hollywood action spectacle in a way that hasn’t been seen since Hong Kong’s martial arts boom in the 80s & 90s. It’s no surprise that the basic thrills of the Fast & Furious saga would be echoed & warped in its Indian equivalents, since the streetracing-turned-espionage action brand has been one of Hollywood’s more successful global exports for the past two decades. Only, as the Fast & Furious saga has become self-aware of its situational humor & blatant disregard for real-world physics, it’s also become weirdly timid about sincerely pushing itself to an over-the-top extreme. Movies like Pathaan & Saaho are outperforming their American inspiration point because they’re willing to sincerely indulge in the cartoon physics that CGI affords their car-racing superheroes without any ironic “Well, that just happened” meta-commentary. They also take the thudding fight choreography of hand-to-hand combat seriously in a way American action films were starting to lose touch with (until the success of John Wick reinvigorated the practice), perfectly balancing the uncanny computer graphics and tactile physical brutality of the genre for thoroughly entertaining blockbuster spectacle – with music video romance & dance breaks.
What makes Pathaan special within these larger, global industry concerns is that it’s gunning for a second American action franchise’s genre template, beyond its debts owed to Fast & Furious. Pathaan is an overt, unashamed bid to establish a new MCU-style interconnected universe that unites several pre-existing action epics under one behemoth brand. It’s an origin story for its titular tough-as-nails superspy Pathaan (played by the immensely popular Shah Rukh Khan), but it is somehow not a standalone action thriller. Pathaan is the fourth film in a series that previously did not exist, acting as a better-late-than-never crossover that groups together 2012’s Ek Tha Tiger, its 2017 sequel Tiger Zinda Hai, and the standalone 2019 actioner War into what will now be called YRF Spy Universe, as if that were production company Yash Raj Films’ plan all along. Of the three previous entries in this brand-new series, I had only seen War, which made the mid-film cameo from the Salman Khan character Tiger and the obligatory post-credits “Assembling The Avengers” stinger hilariously incongruous with what was otherwise a functionally independent shoot-em-up. So far, this legion of superspies is only connected through their occasional employment by the government intelligence agency RAW (India’s CIA equivalent), which they frequently disregard to serve global justice outside of legal means. Both War & Pathaan detail the on-again, off-again bromance of two unstoppable supersoldiers who find themselves falling on opposite sides of the patriot-terrorist divide. Our hero, of course, is the jingoistic patriot who will do anything to uphold the sanctity & security of Mother India – in Pathaan’s case because Mother India adopted him after a tough childhood orphaned in a poor Afghani village. Naturally, our villain is the terrorist defector who has lost his way, using his training as an Indian supersoldier to take down his own country out of selfishness & bitterness. You don’t need to know much more than that to enjoy these car chase blow-em-ups, which generally have a pro-wrestling sense of face-heel dynamics that are easy to jump into with or without three backlogged films of build-up.
If there’s anything especially disappointing about Pathaan and its retroactive YRF Spy Universe brethren, it’s that celebration of jingoistic patriotism. War pulled direct inspiration from Hollywood’s vintage Jerry Bruckheimer & Michael Bay era of the 1990s, and its own nationalistic bent was indistinguishable from the rah-rah-America rabblerousing of that action blockbuster heyday; all that changed was the colors of the flag. That ugly streak bleeds into Pathaan, despite it finding a more modern, multicultural point of inspo in the Fast & Furious saga. Say what you will about Top Gun: Maverick‘s recent revival of Reagan-era American militarism, but it was at least polite enough to not name the home country of its enemy combatants. Every time Pathaan squares off against Pakistani terrorists, Somali pirates, and Indian defectors he demands to speak his only acceptable language—Hindi—there’s a sharp reminder of why American action greats like Rambo & Commando have been neatly quarantined as a thing of the past. Of course, that political queasiness does nothing to sour the in-the-moment pleasure of watching Pathaan whoop ass. Something modern Indian blockbusters get exactly right about their vintage Hollywood equivalents is their breathless, wide-eyed celebration of their titular heroes as the coolest motherfuckers to ever walk the planet Earth. Pathaan models aviator sunglasses in front of a high-powered music video wind machine; he pilots CGI helicopters inside enemy warehouses, flying away just ahead of a whooshing fireball; he locates & defeats international terrorists in the deepest corners of “the darknet”; he eats apple slices off the tip of his knife, accompanied by hard rock guitar & soaring synths. The movie reminds you how mind-blowingly sexy & cool Pathaan is in every single scene, even when that means backing his latent xenophobia. It may not be politically conscious art, but it’s at least more honest about its gleeful militarism than the more timid approach of Top Gun: Maverick. It may hit every single pulled-out-of-retirement, assembling-the-team, tough-guy-narcissism action cliché mocked in MacGruber, but it at least appears to do so with full-hearted sincerity. It may indulge in the worst IP-conscious industry maneuvers established by American brands like Fast & Furious and the MCU, but it at least delivers the goods when it comes to its over-the-top, jaw-dropping action set pieces. Maybe I should stop comparing these Indian blockbusters to their American equivalents, or maybe I should just stop watching the American ones entirely, since they’re just not keeping up with the competition.
Like a lot of people, I found Kyle Edward Ball’s childhood nightmare simulator Skinamarink compelling both as an experiment in form (especially in its layering of visual & aural textures) and as a breakout success story (from microbudget outsider art to TikTok meme to wide theatrical distro). Unlike its loudest, proudest champions, however, I can’t say I was fully captivated with it as a narrative or emotional experience. I found Skinamarink effectively, impressively creepy, but I can’t say I felt the revelatory breakthrough in form that my fellow horror nerds found in its darkened corners. I suspect that’s because I’m not a regular visitor to the spooky YouTube channels and creepypasta message boards where Kyle Edward Ball cut his teeth as a short-film director before making a splash in that debut feature. In a lot of ways, Skinamarink is the exact low-fi creepypasta horror that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was mismarketed to be, and its most ecstatic praise appears to be coming from creepypasta enthusiasts who are relieved to finally see their online obsessions projected at feature length on the big screen.
I mention all this because I recently did have a revelatory, emotional experience watching a film that shares formal similarities to Skinamarink; it just happened to be steeped in the visual art traditions of drag & genderfuckery instead of online creepypasta lore. Luminous Procuress is the sole feature film of visual artist Steven Arnold, whose own experimental short-film production & programming happened to be platformed at the legendary Nocturnal Dream Show screenings in 1960s San Francisco, not on YouTube in the 2010s. I recently purchased a DVD copy of the film’s 50th Anniversary restoration while playing tourist in San Francisco, unfamiliar with its history beyond its proud credit “introducing The Cockettes” – the genderfucked drag krewe that performed as carnival sideshow accompaniment for Arnold’s Nocturnal Dream Show programs. I was a little worried that a feature-length dose of Cockettes-era hippie drag wouldn’t be able to sustain itself, so I was oddly relieved when it turned out to be an experimental anthology of “silent”, psychedelic vignettes. Like Skinamarink, Luminous Procuress is a film composed entirely of vibes & textures; those vibes & textures are just slathered in acid & glitter instead of childhood fears & digital grain.
The titular Luminous Procuress is Arnold’s childhood friend & lifelong partner in art, Pandora, posing as a kind of drag queen sorceress in a California hippie commune. Two himbos wander into her pleasure palace looking for a good time, and the Procuress obliges by guiding them through a series of gorgeous bootleg-drag tableaus: the bejeweled-beard Cockettes posing in tropical Carmen Miranda drag and staging a Last Supper food fight; pre-Deep Throat hardcore sequences shooting straight & bisexual sex as if they were far-out geek show attractions; Kenneth Anger-inspired occultist rituals worshipping a stoic sci-fi futurelord. Their cumulative effect seeks psychedelic holy ground between the transcendent sensuality of Pink Narcissus and the thrift store glam of Vegas in Space. Besides Arnold’s auteurist vision as director, The Cockettes’ self-styled Old Hollywood wardrobe, and the glorious “hair creations by Nikki” (modeled by Pandora, naturally), the most important name among the credits is experimental musician Warner Jepson’s, whose noise music soundscapes are almost entirely comprised of synthy bird chirps & shrill baseball stadium organs. It was Jepsen who provided the film with its deliberately obscured, unintelligible Charlie Brown dialogue track, adding the texture of spoken language without any of the pesky words or meaning of traditional dialogue getting in the way of the tripped-out glam on display.
If there’s any legitimate reason to discuss Skinamarink & Luminous Procuress as a pair, it’s in their shared connections to the experimental cinema foundations of Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou. Kyle Edward Ball appears to make direct homages to that landmark surrealist short, both in Skinamarink‘s nonsensical time-passing title cards and in its ocular gore. Steven Arnold’s connections to Un Chien Andalou‘s history is much more direct, as Dalí was such a massive fan of Luminous Procuress that he took Arnold in as a protege in his Court of Miracles. In all honesty, though, any experimental, surrealist work made after 1929 owes some debt to Un Chien Andalou, so these films are likely only paired in my mind because I happened to watch them the same week. Both are largely silent, experiential pieces with only the barest of plot structures to justify their liminal-space tableaus. Of their two premises, I happened to connect much more deeply with a drag queen sorceress asking “Hey, y’all wanna see something weird?” than I did with a childhood nightmare simulation where all doors & windows disappear from a suburban home. What’s incredibly cool about the two films’ modern distribution is that they’re both widely available outside of the fringe event spaces where experimental works of this ilk would’ve been exhibited a half-century ago: art galleries, universities, and Salvador Dalí’s hotel room. Skinamarink may be a far-out, revelatory work in the context of niche internet media being projected in suburban multiplexes, but it’s also part of a long tradition of experimental filmmaking – including, apparently, 16mm footage of drag queens playing dress-up on LSD.
Swampflix readers, the internet has been essentially de-democratized. What I mean by that is that when you or I go online to look for the answer to a question or read one (1) article about a thing that we engaged with or enjoyed, we no longer get to interact with that article in a vacuum. Unless you’re VPN’d up every single time that you look for a movie review or try to purchase a replacement ice mold for the Rival snow cone maker that you purchased at an estate sale without realizing that it required a part that was not present, you’re going to start getting ads for snowball machines and your YouTube homepage is going to be flooded with think pieces and video essays about the film that you just wanted one critic’s viewpoint on. Well, that and advertisements and algorithmically driven content to make you stay on the platform longer, feel encouraged to interact with the content to drive engagement, etc. Like most Swampflix contributors, my interests are not fully in alignment with the zeitgeist, but every once in a while, they are; unfortunately, although that means that I was as excited aboutM3GAN as the culture at large was, discussion of her wasn’t omnipresent in the discourse of the YouTube channels that I haven’t blocked. But boy howdy did YouTube love that I lovedGlass Onion. Amidst a deluge of clickbait bids titled “[Number] Things You Missed in Glass Onion!”, “All the Secret Connections betweenKnives Out and Glass Onion!”, and the like, I have to admit that I did encourage the algorithm just a little by watching videos that talked about the various films and TV shows that had served as inspiration for the film, because I go through periods where mysteries are all that I ever want to consume. Frequently cited as a major creative jumping-off point for the film was 1973’s The Last of Sheila.
Helmed by director Herbert Ross and scripted by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim (the only screenplay credit for each), the film tells the story of film producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) and his plan to take several of his friends on a pleasure cruise aboard his private yacht. Their voyage begins, presumably not accidentally, on the anniversary of the death of Greene’s girlfriend, Sheila, who left one of his parties in a fit and was killed by a hit-and-run driver mere blocks from his house. An avid player of games of strategy and wit, Greene has planned out a series of mystery nights where his guests will go ashore with a set of clues and split up to try and solve a mystery. Each person aboard is also given a card that is to be their “secret identity” for the game, and the first of these that we see as characters open their envelopes are things like “Alcoholic,” “Shoplifter,” and “Homosexual.” Further, each of his traveling companions was there the night of Sheila’s death: Christine (Dyan Cannon), a film talent agent who’s full of wit and flirtatiousness in that a 1970s showbiz liberated way; glamorous but troubled starlet Alice (Raquel Welch) and her current beau, another film agent named Anthony (Ian McShane), who’s forever angling to get more involved with the production side of film; faded movie star and giant of another age Philip Dexter (James Mason) who’s now stuck in undignified commercials for dog food; and Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin), a screenwriter who’s been stuck doing rewrites on spaghetti westerns while his original work remains unsold and unproduced. The only person on the cruise whom we are explicitly told wasn’t there the night Sheila died isTom’s wife Lee (Joan Hackett), a kind but idle and neurotic heiress. The first night of the mystery game is largely a success, with half of the group getting to the secret while the other half is either too late or doesn’t try at all. On the second night, however, tragedy strikes, and when not everyone comes back to the boat, our cast of characters return to the site of the previous evening’s game and discover that someone from their number has died, under mysterious circumstances.
Excited as I was to finally see this film, at a full two hours, it starts to feel its length in places. The site of the second night’s game is an abandoned monastery where the gang has to don identity-revealing robes and remain quiet until they locate the confessional in which Greene is hiding, which makes for a lot of fun as characters pass each other without we in the audience ever really knowing with whom they’re speaking or even if the characters know; unfortunately, this runabout through the monastery feels much longer than the ten minutes of screen time that it occupies and unfortunately telegraphs that a twist is coming. For the first hour of the movie, the omnipresent implication is that Greene has arranged some elaborate plan to discover which of his guests was Sheila’s killer, but a savvy viewer will know that there’s simply no time left in the runtime of the film to go through five more puzzles, and so there’s going to be a complicating factor at any moment. You’re not surprised by the second death, merely by who is the unfortunate corpse. I’ll be the first to admit that I might have been spoiled (or had a certain part of my brain atrophy while another part grew three sizes) by watching some 250+ episodes of Murder, She Wrote in the past thirteen months, so I could be stuck on that formula, but an hour in feels like an awfully late place to stick your midpoint murder twist. At the same time, there’s no fat to trim here, no extraneous beats that don’t reveal something relevant about character, motive, time, and secrecy, it’s just that the relevancy of all of these narrative moments is often revealed late in the game.
If there are two performers who stand out to me, I’d have to name Cannon and Hackett. Every performance here is good, but Cannon is delivering a wonderfully understated performance as a woman who’s committed to living life as sensually and hedonistically as possible but whose dark past she regrets; she’s stunning. A whodunit like this doesn’t require the sincerity and humanity that she brings to her delivery of a monologue in which she confesses to having furthered her career by slipping some names to the HUAC, but it certainly elevates it. “Then those people didn’t work for a while,” she says. “Now they work. Sometimes I try and get them work. Sometimes I see them on the street and sometimes … they cross the street.” She tries to play off her guilt, but no one is convinced, least of all herself, and it’s magical. Also doing great work here is Hackett, whose frantic, nervous, chain-smoking Lee is clearly having a very hard time with all of this business right from the start as the only person aboard who doesn’t belong there, since she was hundreds of miles away when Sheila died. As the only person we can be assured isn’t a killer, she seems to understand the jeopardy of being on the boat with someone willing to cover up their hand in an accident that resulted in a death. After all, someone almost kills Christine by turning on the yacht’s propellers while she’s taking a swim; who’s to say there won’t be more “accidents”? The big stars are clearly supposed to be Mason and Benjamin, the actor and the writer, who take point on trying to spin out the narrative that would lead to the things that the group has uncovered and discovered—and let there be no mistake, they are both more than satisfactory, with Mason having the upper hand over Benjamin in the charm department—but it’s Cannon and Hackett that I’ll be thinking about weeks from now.
Let’s talk humor. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that, alongside the performances, the other tempering element that helps the movie feel like it’s got some pep in its step when it gets a little slow is the film’s comedic wit. Before she can even get on the boat, Christine complains about the lack of a drink in her hand by declaring “My mouth is so dry they could shoot Lawrence of Arabia in it,” which I’ve found myself saying every once in a while over the years without ever remembering its origin (it’s the pull quote used for the film in Douglas Brode’s compendium—and my longtime companion—Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers, where it ranks at 88th). Even the jokes that characters make that are supposed to be either unfunny or in bad taste within the text got a chuckle out of me, especially those that poke fun at Hollywood and celebrity culture. This includes Greene’s mocking of Tom’s body of work as a second set of eyes on Westerns by asking him to read from a section of Fistful of Lasagna (“or whatever it’s called”). Even if the references are a half century old now, the core truths in play keep the film feeling fresh, despite some major dissonance in other areas that it’s important to address: one of the characters is outed as a child molestor, which is bad enough, but the other characters don’t really seem to think that it’s a problem that needs to be addressed or even has a glimmer of an idea of reporting him to the authorities. If there’s one thing in this film that hasn’t aged well, it’s the casualness with which that horrifying little tidbit is dropped and the lack of reaction to it.
Already, I’ve risked giving away too much of the plot of this one, so I’ll wrap it up. Stellar performances, creative misdirects and clues, and clever jokes stashed away in little corners more than make up for the times where the film feels like it’s dragging the bottom. Although you can rent this one streaming, I’m sure your local library has a DVD that’s probably got some fun extras and easter eggs on it, so why not visit them instead?
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