Alphaville (1965)

My enduring memory of Alphaville (1965) was the shot near the end of a Parisian freeway at night, the collection of lights in the darkness, a simple and low budget way of implying a future space. To travel to another galaxy as mundane as driving down a highway, yet still otherworldly in the grainy black and white cinematography. Before that, images of a post-war modern era – office windows at night, anonymous corporate hallways, gigantic computer banks – are used to contextualise the setting of Alphaville as a city controlled by a computer, Alpha 60. The present as future, the past now another world. The city at night is a galaxy. Alphaville is French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard in between the pretentious and the playful. Hard-boiled Eddie Constantine plays secret agent Lemmy Caution, undercover as a journalist in Alphaville to capture or kill the scientist who created Alpha 60, Professor van Braun (Howard Vernon). Caution also meets Natacha (Anna Karina), the Professor’s daughter and also the litmus test for the 1984-style society where poetry is outlawed and human emotion is streamlined. A blueprint for the cyberpunk iconography – the precursor to Blade Runner – in the collapsing of sci-fi and film noir, all of which was just Godard and his collaborators playing around and improvising, drawing upon the imagery of both genres to deconstruct and comment upon them. While the movie doesn’t move me so much in its testament to poetry or love, it excels as a celebration of faces and poses. That’s the poetry to me! Eddie Constantine, what a mug! Implacable, weathered. Yet whenever he takes a photograph with the tiny camera, there’s something vulnerable about that gesture. Anna Karina, charismatic and winning, even if they’re presented almost like a robot doll for the director to express on-screen his off-screen love to. The voice of Alpha 60 – provided by a man with a mechanical voice box – still has visceral impact. With this film, Godard once again makes art out of a vanguard idea that other film school dorks for decades onwards would try to copycat with mostly embarrassing results. As a low-budget, semi-improvised, experiment of the French New Wave, Alphaville was wonderful to revisit. The considerable throw-away style makes up for its half-baked plot. Available to stream on Kanopy in Australia (SLWA membership) and also on Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment. Recommended.

Point Blank (1967)

Lee Marvin in a series of dapper suits with a revolver in hand is enough for a 1960s neo-noir like Point Blank (1967) but the actor’s collaboration with young British director John Boorman offered them both a chance to push the crime genre into pop art experimentation. Revisiting Point Blank, it feels like Steven Soderbergh wouldn’t exist without it (and he made his own version of it with The Limey). It’s a classic example of style being used to take pulp fiction – Richard Stark’s crime novel The Hunter and his trademark character, Parker – into a sensory, temporal, subjective cinematic space; style becomes the substance. Of course, there are antecedents before Point Blank, whether it’s Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic take on Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly or the French New Wave’s delight in B-movies. The movie brings a European art sensibility to violent thieves and criminal organisations within the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Marvin plays Walker, left for dead in a deserted Alcatraz cell block, double crossed by an old friend (John Vernon) on a night-time heist, a double cross on top of another double cross, as his friend also runs away with Walker’s wife (Sharon Acker). Backed by a mysterious sponsor (Keenan Wynn), the surviving Walker sets loose in Los Angeles for revenge on those who wronged him as well as settling the score – his share of the loot, $93,000 – from the Organisation. From an opening image of Marvin’s face painted with psychedelic lighting, weary in a hectic night club, and the use of time cuts in the editing, there’s an impressionistic vibe that short circuits the usual plot moves. Walker is an implacable ghost haunting the corporate chain. Marvin’s performance allows for human deviations, expressing silent alienation to childish confusion, all of it in the face of TV commercials and boardroom speakers. Great support from Angie Dickinson, Carol O’Connor and James Sikking. There’s also a wonderful documentary Boorman made about Lee Marvin that’s worth checking out, Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait (1998), which displays great affection to the actor for throwing his star clout around to protect Boorman from the producers and guaranteeing the young director final cut on this cult oddity, right down to its weird anti-climax ending. It’s a very cool movie. Available to rent on iTunes. Recommended.

Blood Feast (1963)

Herschell Gordon Lewis is a name I’ve often heard about but never really been keen to explore; the archetypal still from one of his 1960s-era movies in my mind’s eye is a leering sadist at a table where a nubile woman is submerged in shiny guts and paint-thick blood. Much like Troma cinema, I’m happy if this stuff gives you kicks but it’s just not for me. A key independent figure in the rise of the gore flick and exploitation cinema, I finally watched one of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ movies, Blood Feast (1963), his first major box office success. Much like Basket Case, these are horror flicks that I wouldn’t have personally sought out, but only watched on account of a recent mission to check off all the movies I haven’t seen from Danny Peary’s Cult Movies 2 book. It’s basically about a serial killer Faud Ramses (Mal Arnold in a truly eccentric performance, as if he’s trying to copy Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre in one go) who is dismembering women in an effort to hold a ‘blood feast’ to satisfy the spirit of an ancient Egyptian God. Shot on a low budget with non actors, this veers into Ed Wood terrain except for the fact that it’s in colour and it pushes the boundaries of extreme violence at the time – limbs hacked off, heads scalped,tongues ripped out, etc. It remains unpleasant (I kept thinking about the poor actors writhing around in the butcher shop meat used for entrails). Yet there’s also something quaint about this early splatter gore horror – whether it’s the grey paint hair of the killer, the actors playing the police seemingly reading or half-remembering their lines, or the pastel Fort Lauderdale colours where its been filmed. I actually liked it more than I thought I would. The sequence where Faud Ramses runs away from the cops in broad daylight through a garbage dump near the end had a certain primal artistic quality to me – like the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was surprised to read that even Danny Peary himself didn’t like the movie and found HGL quite sick as a filmmaker, and mainly wrote about Blood Feast due to its stature as a cult movie, a surprise cheapie hit that historically beat Night Of The Living Dead in terms of the escalation of gore/splatter horror on screen (and gained lifelong fans amongst other filmmakers such as John Waters). Streamed it from Kanopy.

Bay Of Angels (1963)

From the very first shot I knew I’d made the right decision to watch Bay Of Angels (1963; La baie des anges): it’s a shot of glamorous Jeanne Moreau standing in a street near the water at Monte Carlo, the camera immediately pulling away and racing backwards down the street. Directed by Jacques Demy, his second film and not a musical, this romance about gambling starts with a young clerk Jean (Claude Mann) who winds up addicted to playing roulette tables thanks to a coworker and friend Caron (Paul Guers). While holidaying in Monte Carlo, Jean meets Jackie (Moreau) in a casino where they both become intertwined over the spin of the roulette wheel while a thunderous piece by composer Michel Legrand reoccurs. With bleached blonde hair and a white dress, Moreau is completely iconic and mesmerising here, an opposite to Jean’s restrained neophyte; gambling is her religion to the point where she has a mini roulette wheel in her suitcase. As opposed to the French New Wave at the time, there’s something old fashioned here – it’s not really deconstructive or that postmodern really. It’s all about the chic fashions, black and white cinematography, and the glamorous bad romance of it all. There’s references to American dime store pulp novels, yet there’s no crime element – the danger is in the couple’s relationship and the frustration Jean has over Jackie’s pursuit of a reckless lifestyle. I really liked Bay Of Angels and Moreau is so wonderful here, an extravagant bombshell. All under 90 minutes as well with a closing scene you might accept as quickly as it happens or rethink continually about afterwards. Available to stream on Stan along with other Jacques Demy movies like Lola, Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin and more. Recommended.

The Coward (1965)

The Coward (1965) – also known as Kapurush – is a film by Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Having only seen Pather Panchali, I am still pretty clueless about Ray’s filmography and only heard about The Coward with the recent Criterion Channel’s spotlight on the director’s work. The story itself – a screenwriter encounters a past love while scouting for locations – and the brief running time (74 minutes) drew me into watching The Coward. Amitabha Roy (played by Soumitra Chatterjee) is a screenwriter whose car breaks down in the countryside. An enterprising businessman Bimal Gupta (Haradhan Bandopadhyay) who manages a tea farm offers Amitabha a place to stay for the night in exchange for his company. When they walk through the door to Bimal’s property, Amitabha is struck by the sight of Bimal’s wife, Karuna (Madhabi Mukherjee) – they used to be in love when they were in college. They don’t acknowledge their shared history and we follow Amitabha’s reverie into the past with occasional flashbacks and to his private conversations in the present with Karuna – she was the one that got away, or rather he let get away (hence the title). Taking place over one night and day, The Coward has an emotional heft comparable to Ingmar Bergman or Wong Kar-wai movies, a simple scenario that can contain big emotions, about regrets and memories, while also being a stark character study of a weak, regretful man. Not having seen many other Ray movies, I didn’t realise Chatterjee and Murkherjee were regular actors he would use – and they are so great in this movie – Chatterjee has such a haunted look which contrasts with his past cocky behaviour. Mukherjee is such a force, not giving anything away in terms of how she feels about Chatterjee’s character, whether she is happy or not in her current marriage. There is some commentary on class and social systems as well. It had the punch and pull of a sharply written short story (based on a story by Premendra Mitra). I loved how Ray used the camera – framing a scene and then pushing in, or stepping back to reorientate the frame and change the emotional current of a scene. Available to stream on Criterion Channel. Recommended.