For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia thriller The Conversation, which recently screened at Prytania’s Classic Movie Series.
Every year, social media posts come out during that period of time between Christmas and the beginning of the new year asking what they’re supposed to do with their idle hours. Most years, those days are filled with companionship and social engagements, but I found myself with a completely unoccupied Saturday this year. I went to the mall to get my calendar for the new year from the kiosk there, took a long bath, and then went to my local video store, where I wandered the aisles for over half an hour before finally settling on The Lady Vanishes; I grabbed dinner from the birria truck that’s on the same block and went home, settled in, and quite enjoyed it. It was still early in the evening, however, and I convinced myself to go back to the video store and get another movie, since they operate on a monthly subscription model and you can, essentially, rent as many movies as you want, simply one at a time. While walking past the bar next door to the video store, I ran into some neighbors that I rarely see, and one of them was vehemently excited to recommend the recent Ripley series starring Andrew Scott. This, along with a recent trip to the Austin Film Society to see Cinema Paradiso and thus once again seeing the poster for Der amerikanische Freund that hangs above one of the urinals there, I decided to check out the Wim Wenders adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s third Ripley novel, Ripley’s Game.
The first thing to note about this film is that, despite first billing, Tom Ripley is not the main character. Also, the image that is conjured in your mind when you think of Ripley as a character—successful in his ongoing criminal enterprises and sociopathic activities due to his suave sophistication and urbane, well-cultured manner—is not the Tom Ripley that is portrayed herein by Dennis Hopper. This Ripley is slovenly, neurotic, unsure of himself, and unkempt, a far cry from the character as portrayed in the novels and in most adaptations. As in the novel (based on the summaries I’ve consulted; I only ever read Talented, and that was many years ago), Ripley is living in Europe off of stashed funds while continuing to grift. These days, he’s got an American painter producing “newly discovered” works from a deceased artist, which he then takes to Germany and auctions off to great profit. During the auction of the newest “Derwatt” piece, Ripley overhears Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz) attempting to convince his friend not to bid on the painting, citing that the colors are slightly off and that it may be a forgery. Ripley attempts to introduce himself to Zimmerman, but is rebuffed coldly, as Zimmerman does not shake his proffered hand and instead simply says “I’ve heard of you.” Ripley then learns from the manager of the auction house, Gantner, that Zimmerman was once a great restoration artist as well as a master frame-maker, but that his restoration work has suffered due to Zimmerman’s struggle with terminal leukemia, and Zimmerman’s wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) has had to come to work at the auction house to help supplement their income for his ongoing treatment.
When Ripley is approached by French mobster Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain) about a hit on one of his American competitors, Ripley sends him to Zimmerman out of spite over the latter man’s curtness, and even sends a forged telegram to Zimmerman that indicates his condition is worsening. Despite initial resistance, Zimmerman is lured to Paris by Minot with the promise of seeing a specialist there; documents are falsified that maintain the ruse that Zimmerman’s time is growing short, and he is eventually convinced to kill Minot’s rival. As Marianne grows suspicious of what is really going on, Ripley and Zimmerman meet again, and ZImmerman’s apology for his previous behavior leads to Ripley softening toward him, and when he learns that Minot intends to have Zimmerman perform a second murder (and one with a much higher risk of being caught), he tries to convince the gangster not to, unsuccessfully. Wracked with guilt but feeling the hand of death on his shoulder and desiring to ensure that his widow and their young son Daniel are cared for, Zimmerman agrees to the second hit. When he botches it, Ripley appears and saves Zimmerman’s life, and the two work together to get rid of the evidence.
It took some time for me to get into this one. It’s not what you would think of when you imagine a Highsmith adaptation. As mentioned above, Hopper is not the platonic ideal of Tom Ripley, and adjusting to that difference takes some time. What salves this change is that our main character here is Zimmerman. In the plot description above, Ripley’s name comes up a lot, but a lot of his action is invisible and offscreen, while the film follows Zimmerman for most of its runtime. What we see of Ripley is minimal; he’s neurotic, self-obsessed, and does little to ingratiate himself with those around him. For the first half of the film, what we know of him is that he’s a con man with no real people skills, and he spends his lonely hours recording nonsensical self-pitying monologues on cassette (which were largely improvised by Hopper) and then listens back to them later while driving around aimlessly. Zimmerman, on the other hand, has very clear motivations and beliefs, and watching his descent from loving father and husband to secretive, tortured man is heartbreaking.
At a NYE party, I mentioned having seen this one to a friend who I know to be a big Ripley appreciator, which led to a larger discussion about how Winders’s work (with which he is more familiar than I) is often quiet, solemn, and—depending upon the viewer—kind of boring, but with at least one magnificent sequence that makes it worthwhile. For Der amerikanische Freund, the standout sequence comes around the halfway mark, when Zimmerman, having just been given the (false) news that his health has taken a turn for the worst and opts to accept Minot’s offer in the hopes not of getting treatment but of making sure that his family is cared for after his death. There is a solid ten minute dialogue-free sequence in which Zimmerman slowly and purposely follows his victim as he transfers from one train platform to another and boards different metros, a reluctant stalker, before he finally works up the nerve to shoot the man. Once the deed is done, despite Minot’s instructions to simply walk away calmly and quietly and disappear into a crowd, Zimmerman flees the scene, sprinting like a madman, and we see this flight play out over closed circuit surveillance footage, at a remove. It’s fantastic, one of the greatest versions of this kind of scene that I have ever seen. It’s also a fun subversion of Zimmerman’s constant running throughout the film; virtually everywhere he goes, he’s never moving at a pace slower than a brisk jog, except when he’s with his family. This is a nice little bit of characterization, that he knows he has a finite amount of time left in his life and he wants to spend the quiet, slow moments with his wife and son, rushing through all of his other obligations to get to what’s important. Zimmerman never stops, and it helps propel the film forward, even in its quiet moments. It’s a strange chapter in the saga of Highsmith adaptations, but one that’s ultimately very compelling.
I really took my time picking out a movie at the video store last weekend. It was that Saturday between Christmas and the new year, and I had spent the day in solitude, which is not normally my way. I went to the mall to pick out my new sexy wall calendar for the year (you have to wait until after Christmas to buy one for yourself, otherwise someone may get one for you), idly wandered for a bit thinking about the lyrics of “Hard Candy Christmas,” and went to a coffee shop to see a friend who works there but who wasn’t there. I went to the home of a friend who had given me a very nice bath bomb for the holiday and offered up their modern, fancy bathtub for my use while they were out of town, and I sat on their balcony and stared into space. Then I wandered the aisles, trying to think of what I wanted to watch that night, with each DVD box that I picked up making me realize I would rather watch this or that with my friend once he got back to town. I spent a lot of time debating over the director wall and finally settled on a Hitchcock I had never seen.
The Lady Vanishes is the last of the master’s works that he completed in England before he came to the states and engaged with the Hollywood system. Released in 1938, the film follows the misadventure of one Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a Londoner who has spent her last few weeks of being single skiing with her girlfriends at a town in the fictional country of Bandrika. On her final night, she meets the charming Mrs. Froy, a governess who is returning back to England now that her charges have outgrown their need for her tutelage, and she also encounters the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave, father of Vanessa and Lynn, in his first film role), who is in the room above her and recording information about a local folk dance, which disturbs her rest. With the rail lines snowed in, two proper English snoots named Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, two of the most English names I have ever seen) are also forced to stay at the same inn, where they fret over the dwindling menu and the increasing unlikelihood that they will make it to any of the cricket matches that are on their agenda. That night, unbeknownst to any of the travellers, a serenader below Mrs. Froy’s window is strangled. The next morning, an attempt is made on Mrs. Froy’s life by someone pushing a potted plant onto her head from an upper window, but Iris is struck instead. Mrs. Froy helps her onto the train and they find themselves in a compartment together. Ultimately, the two wind up having tea and getting to know each other a bit better before Iris takes a short rest. When she awakes, however, she finds Mrs. Froy missing and, worse, everyone in the compartment claims that there never was a Mrs. Froy. As she searches the train for the woman, she happens upon Gilbert again and reluctantly accepts his assistance. The two of them also encounter renowned surgeon Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas), who attempts to persuade Iris that perhaps the whole thing is the result of her earlier blow to the head. Elsewhere, however, an English barrister named Todhunter orders his mistress (Linden Travers, cheekily credited as playing “Mrs.” Todhunter) not to admit that she saw Froy earlier, lest their involvement in an investigation reveal their affair. Who was Mrs. Froy? Where has she gone? Who is involved?
As a longtime fan of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, I had long thought very little about this film, as I assumed it would follow the same plot as that program’s episode “Into Thin Air,” which was likewise about a young woman who is told that an older woman (in this case, her mother) was never present at the hotel in which the two are lodging. This turns out to have a completely different narrative, but according to some sources, the novel upon which The Lady Vanishes was based, Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, was partially inspired by the urban legend of The Vanishing Hotel Room, which was also more explicitly recapitulated in the aforementioned “Into Thin Air,” so it turns out I wasn’t pulling that connection out of, um, thin air. I would recommend that episode as a companion to this film; it’s one of the most cinematic, and makes great use of the minimal sets that the TV production would have had access to. Visually, this is one of Hitchcock’s most striking and sumptuous of his pre-Hollywood era. Although the modern eye can’t help but notice that the Bandrikan town in the film’s opening is a miniature, it’s a very high quality one that allows for some beautiful sweeping shots that move from the train yard to the inn. The rear projection work for the scenes set aboard the train are very effective at conveying a perfect closed loop of a narrative intertwined with a constant momentum, which is quite a lot of fun.
Lockwood and Redgrave are fantastic together. When we first meet Iris, she comes off as a bit of a brat, being treated like royalty by the staff of the inn, who treat the milling crowd in the lobby as an afterthought. Gilbert, for this part, comes off as a cad from the outset as well, as it’s not unreasonable for Iris to request that his guests cease stomp-dancing on the floor directly above her bed. Their initial antipathy is the kind of electric interplay that the nostalgic crowd laments as lacking from contemporary film, and the way that it blossoms into a romance between them is what we go to the movies for, baby. Their interplay would be comic relief enough without the stuffy Caldicott and Charters, but the latter two are merely part of a truly iconic cast of supporting characters. I was particularly taken with “Mrs.” Todhunter, whose moral convictions and equivocations wield the power of life and death at points, even though she herself is unaware of the implications of both her silence and her admissions. Catherine Lacey, who comes into the film as the Nun late in the film, is also a world class addition, and I loved every moment we got to spend with her. The presentation is exciting, the cast is marvelous, and the mystery is wonderful.
I’m not especially interested in War Films as a genre, but André de Toth’s WWII thriller Play Dirty sneaks past those well-guarded genre biases and hits me where I’m vulnerable. Instead of being guided by the usual narrative maps of WWII stories about the valor of defeating Nazis or the horrors of what those Nazis achieved before defeat, Play Dirty is structured more like a heist picture that happens to be set on the battlefield. It’s a crime picture first and a war movie second, as explained by a British colonel who declares in an early strategy meeting, “War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals.” Those criminals are the men under his command: a gang of disaffected mercenaries who wear the British uniform but are more motivated by money & personal survival than they are by the prospect of defeating Hitler’s Germany. If it were an American film, it might’ve been received as a reaction to our country’s ongoing, pointless involvement in The Vietnam War, but its pervasive Britishness divorces it from such a strict 1:1 reading, extending its commentary to all war everywhere at every time. In Play Dirty, war is a sprawling, scrappy prison fight wherein you’re just as likely to be shot in the back by your own men as you are to be taken down by the enemy. It deliberately strips all valor from history’s most noble victory over a warring enemy, with the Head Criminal in Charge advising, “Forget the noble sentiments if you want to live.”
A young Michael Caine provides the most familiar face (and voice) here as a clean-cut military officer who naively takes command of this criminal unit. He immediately struggles to exert control over the undisciplined brutes, desperately pulling a gun on them whenever they refuse to obey his orders. Unbeknownst to him, the only reason he survives these altercations is because the most undisciplined brute of all (Nigel Davenport) has been promised a bigger payout for the mission if Caine returns alive, unlike the other officers who’ve preceded him. Their half-Inglorious Basterds, half- Sorcerer mission is to sneak behind enemy lines disguised as Italian soldiers and explode a critical Nazi fuel depot, expediting Hitler’s defeat. The rocky path to victory is high in tension and sparse in dialogue, often with a shaky handheld camera jostling the audience with the uneasy feeling that gunfire or explosions could erupt at any moment; they often do. On a character level, there’s no chance of meeting in the middle for Caine & Davenport, who represent opposing noble & savage philosophies of war. In order to survive the mission, Caine has to cheat & kill just like the heartless criminals under his command, while Davenport just knowingly smiles and scoffs at the supposed differences between “playing dirty” and “playing safe.” It’s by no means the only war picture that posits that “War makes monsters of us all,” but it is one of the only ones I’ve seen that frames that monstrous behavior as a lowly, scrappy crime spree.
Even if this gang of British soldiers weren’t sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as Italians, this would still clearly be the kind of cinematic relic Quentin Tarantino raves about through coke sweats at LA house parties to anyone who’ll listen. It’s got the exact haggard, macho hangout vibe he’s always praising in vintage genre cinema, and I’m sure he could rattle off the professional stats of all the various character actors who pad out the rest of the cast like a little kid who obsesses over baseball cards. The only woman among those macho brutes is a German nurse whose capture raises the tension of the group dynamic for obvious, hideous reasons, which reminded me why I don’t spend much of my personal time perusing this particular video store aisle. Even so, the rougher, confrontational approach to the genre did pique my interest in André de Toth’s directorial career, of which this was shockingly his final film. It’s got the showy, punchy impact of a much younger man with more to prove professionally, which speaks well to de Toth’s late-career enthusiasm behind the camera. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the horror & thriller titles in his catalog that speak more directly to my personal tastes (House of Wax, Crime Wave, Pitfall, etc.) almost as much as I’m looking forward to never picking up a gun on a battlefield, nor having a one-sided conversation with Quentin Tarantino.
A couple Halloweens ago, I was costumed as a creepy teddy bear and dancing to loud electronic music over cocktails at R Bar. Being a helpless cinema addict and not on the hunt for a Halloween hookup, I remember fixating on the muted, subtitled giallo that was screening on the walls of R Bar, fascinated. My body may have been politely gyrating to the DJ’s set, but my mind was racing trying to figure out what gorgeous giallo oddity was providing the party’s background texture, since it was one that I had not yet seen. Some light googling on All Saint’s Day led me to the typically poetic, overlong giallo title The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, which soon enough mysteriously appeared on a used DVD at a local thrift store. Is it the same copy they were spinning at R Bar? Was I being stalked by a giallo? What could this vintage Technicolor erotic thriller possibly want from me? The answer, of course, was nude photographs.
In retrospect, it’s funny that of all the gialli in the world, the above-the-bar selection that Halloween night was Forbidden Photos, since it’s not nearly as pronounced of a Horror Film as some of the more obvious titles from a Bava, or a Fulci, or an Argento. Director Luciano Ercoli is less of a household name because of that lack of horror fandom support, since this falls closer to the proto-erotic thriller end of the giallo spectrum than the proto-slasher end. With an atypically focused script from Ernesto Gastaldi and a softly melodramatic score from Ennio Morricone, Forbidden Photos is relatively straightforward and emotional for a giallo – trading in throat slashings from a leather-gloved killer for amateur porno shoots & sadomasochistic acts of blackmail. It’s stylish, swanky, sadistic and, ultimately, sad, with internal-monologue narration that invests in its female victim’s inner life more than most examples of the genre.
Dagmar Lassander stars as the tormented Minou, played with the sad, glassy eyes and stiff, vaulted wigs of a Cole Escola character. While her wealthy businessman husband is away on a work trip, she is physically assaulted by a mysterious brute who claims to have evidence that her spouse is a murderer (through the ludicrous method of artificially inducing The Bends in a business rival, then staging their death as a drowning). Drawn into the stranger’s web, she involuntarily sleeps with him to receive (and destroy) evidence of the murder in trade, then briefly becomes his “sex slave” once he produces photographic evidence of their tryst (i.e., her rape) which he again leverages as blackmail. Seedy pornography seems to be the criminal’s livelihood, as he appears as a performer himself in illicit photos owned by Minou’s hedonist bisexual friend Dominique (Susan Scott, who steals every scene she’s in). Only, he may not exist outside of the pornography at all. Minou quickly spirals as the master-slave relationship escalates until her blackmailer suddenly vanishes; she’s then unsure whether she’s being gaslit or losing her grip on reality thanks to her favorite snack & drink combo of cocktails & tranquilizer pills. That mental breakdown is when the film fully tips into supernatural horror territory, finally justifying its Halloween Night background programming.
In his interview on the 2006 Blue Underground disc I picked up, Gastaldi credits Forbidden Photos‘s unusual sense of clarity & cohesion to Ercoli sticking to the narrative of his screenplay instead of using it as a flimsy excuse for whatever visual indulgence happened to catch the director’s attention that day, as was giallo tradition. An incredibly prolific writer in his heyday, Gastaldi would know, having written over eighty produced screenplays – including such formidable titles as All the Colors of the Dark, The Whip and the Body, The Vampire and the Ballerina, and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. If you’re looking for the version of Forbidden Photos that takes wild, stylistic swings at the expense of narrative & tonal control, I’d recommend Fulci’s maniacal erotic thriller The Devil’s Honey, which is much looser in its forced S&M plot. Ercoli is more grounded & restrained in his approach, which means that this is the rare giallo where the reveals behind its central mystery (whether Minou is being blackmailed or experiencing a mental breakdown) actually matter to the audience, as opposed to being treated as a last-minute formality.
That’s not to say that Forbidden Photos is not dripping with classic giallo style. All of its characters live in sparse, swanky houses, which operate more as minimalist art galleries than traditional homes. When Minou reunites with her husband after her initial attack, he’s introduced through a pane of shattered glass, sharply calling his honesty & integrity into question. When she first enters her blackmailer’s apartment, she has to peer into his seedy world through Lynchian red-velvet curtains, like entering a fairy tale realm through a theatre stage. Her rape in that apartment is only visually represented in flashback, with the more salacious details punctuated by a severe “Chinese devil statue” that the brute keeps on display. Even more important to the picture is Minou’s genuine sexual tension with Dominique. Their first hangout together involves the two gal-pals browsing through a mountain of amateur pornography, much of it featuring Dominique herself. Dominique is such an aspirational antidote to Minou’s torturous lack of confidence that you actively root for her not to be involved with Minou’s potential gaslighting plot, since the story would be much more satisfying if they could manage to stay “friends.” I will not spoil the way that story turns out, but I think it says a lot that it’s a giallo with a mystery worth leaving unspoiled just as much as it’s worthy of being projected as a stylish Halloween Night mood-setter at a dive-bar dance party.
I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale. It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine. I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it. It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material. My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often. It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors. By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production. And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust.
I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame. Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged. Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears. The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos. A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way. It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for. Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.
According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation. If so, I was fooled. It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc. It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight. Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either. Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film. Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed. It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal. That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.
Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling. Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here. Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value. The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo. One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times. For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill. I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.
The critical decorum for writing about the new high-style serial killer thriller Strange Darling is that you’re supposed to recommend audiences see the movie without reading a full description or review, which benefits the movie in two ways. One, it preserves the surprise of discovery as the movie walks the audience through various What’s Really Going On plot twists like a puppy on a leash. More importantly, it also saves the movie from having its themes & ideas discussed in any detail, so that critics are instead encouraged to gush over its candy-coated hyperviolence (“shot entirely on 35mm film”, as the first title card goofily boasts) without fretting about the meaning behind those striking images. That second benefit is crucial, since the actual substance protected by Strange Darling‘s candy shell is rotted hollow. There’s no color saturation level high enough nor any needle drop ironic enough to cover the taste of the misogyny molding at the core of this empty entertainment vessel, despite director JT Mollner & cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (yes, that Giovanni Ribisi) trying their damnedest at every turn. So, go ahead and swallow it down without reading the full ingredient list if you like, but be prepared to walk away feeling ill.
Kyle Gallner & Willa Fitzgerald star as a pair of beer-buzzed hedonists who meet in a roadside motel room for a kinky one-night stand. Several false-start openings (to bookend the several fake-out conclusions) tease the audience with awareness that a serial killer is afoot, which casts Gallner in an unsavory light as a macho brute who gets off on strangling women. But wait, it turns out the editor is not the only shameless tease warping the picture. The more time we spend in the motel, the more Fitzgerald’s strangulation victim is revealed to be a huge tease herself, goading Gallner into playfully abusing her according to a roleplay script they agreed to before booking the room, then repeatedly pulling back the exact moments when the violent foreplay is about to naturally spill over into consensual sex. There’s some hack Pulp Fiction chapter shuffling in how the story is ordered that maintains her innocence for as long as possible, at first characterizing her as a frustrating hookup who triggers misogynist violence in her date through unintentional sexual teasing. Eventually, though, it can’t hold back its condemnation of her as a “crazy bitch” and a “cunt” who deserves any violence Gallner exacts upon her in revenge, since she uses the general assumed victimhood of women in heterosexual partnerships gone awry to her advantage, so that she can get away with murder. The entire motel hookup kink scenario was a setup, you see, because you’re watching a Promising Young Woman remake that coddles Tarantino-obsessed MRAs.
Pushing the movie’s thoughts on consent, kink, and rape aside for as long as possible really does benefit its value as stylish entertainment. Its pride in shooting on film is a little corny in presentation, but the colors are gorgeously rich enough to excuse the faux pas. Ribisi has fun playing with his traditionalist camera equipment, delivering the kind of vintage genre throwback that’ll have movie nerds hooting & hollering at multiple split-diopter shots like salivating dogs. Barbara Hershey & Ed Begley, Jr. briefly drop by to lend the production an air of credibility as aging sweetheart hippies who are unprepared for how violently the War of the Sexes has escalated since their heyday. Car chases, shoot-outs, and intimate stabbings keep the adrenaline up once the motel tryst fully falls apart, spilling the intimate violence of that room into the 2-lane highways of rural America. The whole thing is pretty exciting, excitingly pretty, and then pretty atrocious as soon as it starts rebutting cultural assumptions about who’s the real victim when men & women fight. I’m usually not in the business of judging a movie entirely by its moral character—especially not as someone who regularly watches the vintage schlock this pulls direct visual inspiration from—but I couldn’t help but feeling like if Strange Darling were a person and not a feature film it would have some really specific, fucked up opinions about The Amber Heard Situation. Its vibes are just as rancid as its visuals are immaculate.
It may seem like we’re not far enough past the 2010s for the decade’s distinguishing cultural markers to be fully clear in the rearview, but recently returning to pop media from that time has convinced me it’s been long enough. They’re especially clear when watching episodes of reality TV shows from a decade ago, where the dated fashions & attitudes of the 2010s are already vividly distinct. You don’t have to be a freak like me to find those cultural timestamps in old episodes of Top Chef or Total Divas, though. Those shows are meant to be disposable fluff, not anthropological time capsules. Look instead to the 2014 road-trip thriller The Rover, which was only released ten years ago and already feels like it was made on another planet. A somber, stylish revenge mission set in Mad Max’s near-future Australia, The Rover should still feel like a relatively fresh take on a road-worn template, but it’s already coated with a thick layer of dust from the past decade of pop culture progress. A lot’s changed since we first cracked open a new decade, which is surprising considering that most of us spent the first couple years of the 2020s in a state of domestic stasis, avoiding the outside world.
Following an intentionally vague global economic collapse, Guy Pearce solemnly spends his days in the Australian heat drinking hard liquor and neglecting to shave. His lonely, self-destructive routine is disrupted when his car is stolen by a small gang of reprobates, giving him an excuse to be destructive towards someone else for a change. The only lead on his stolen car is an injured member of the gang left to die in the road, played by Robert Pattinson. The two men reluctantly bond on a road trip towards dual, parallel acts of revenge: one for stolen property, one for heartless abandonment. The most readily apparent way the pop culture landscape has changed since The Rover‘s initial release is that this kind of relentless post-apocalyptic trudge is no longer as overly prevalent now as it was in the early 2010s, when it would have competed with titles like Take Shelter, Snowpiercer, These Final Hours, The Book of Eli, The Road,Mad Max: Fury Road,World War Z,The Walking Dead, and so on. It had a hard time standing out in that crowded field even though it’s more committed than most to distinguish itself with bleak tones and off-kilter character quirks (including an extensive sequence of Pattinson mumbling “Pretty Girl Rock” to himself that felt custom-designed for a David Ehrlich countdown video). That’s not the only thing that’s changed, though.
I assume The Rover was initially compared to the in-over-his-head antihero plot of Blue Ruin (since there’s a lot of crossover in the small group of movie obsessives who’d happen to catch both titles), given Pearce’s blatant lack of a Taken-style “set of skills” that would make him suitable to fight off a gang of thugs as a lone wolf. He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be extraordinarily angry about the theft of his car. At this point on the cultural timeline, though, no revenge mission movie can get by without being unfairly compared to John Wick, which was released just one year later. It’s unlikely that The Rover & John Wick would’ve been directly compared at the time, but John Wick has since set a definitive template for modern revengers that The Rover happens to fit into: stories about ultra-violent heroes overcorrecting seemingly petty wrongs. Usually that means slaughtered pets (the dog in John Wick, the pig in Pig, the bees in The Beekeeper, etc). In The Rover‘s case, it’s a stolen, unremarkable sedan that leads to a bloody body-count. Of course, there’s always a deeper well of Trauma hidden under those surface-level revenge missions, but the macho brutes at the center can only express themselves through Violence so it takes a while to gather the details. When Pearce finally confesses what awful incident broke his moral compass halfway through the picture, it’s not so much a major dramatic reveal as it is one more grim detail passing by in an endless parade.
Something else that’s obviously changed in the past decade is A24’s brand identity as a film distributor. They were already making bold acquisitions like The Rover, Spring Breakers, and Under the Skin in their first year, but they didn’t really become a recognizable, dependable marketing machine until 2015’s The Witch. It’s impossible to say whether The Rover might have been a hit if it had come out after A24 fully won over the hearts of the coveted Film Bro audience, but it is the exact kind of tough-exterior-soft-interior thriller that appeals to young men of that ilk, so it’s possible. At the very least, it was better suited for a cult audience than the similarly somber post-apocalyptic tale It Comes At Night, which lucked into a higher level of name recognition by arriving later in the A24 film-bro ascendancy. Releasing The Rover after Robert Pattinson’s recent turn as Batman couldn’t have hurt on that front either, considering that he was still mostly known as The Guy from Twilight in 2014. By now, anyone paying attention knows that Pattinson is a talented actor with good taste for adventurous projects, but the combination of this & Cosmopolis were only the early signs that was the case (to the measly dozens of people who saw them in initial release). The Rover is very much a film of its time, to its peril. Its distinctive virtues are just as apparent to a 2020s set of eyes as the difference between the current Women’s Division of the WWE vs the Divas division of the 2010s, which you can now plainly see in any random episode of Total Divas but was a lot more difficult to parse in the thick of it.
Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level.
In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live.
The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse.
There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward.
That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice.
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