Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Mikey and Nicky (1976)

I'd read of this little gem of a crime film a long time ago, but always failed to see it. I once had the Finnish VHS published in 1989, but I couldn't watch it, since the picture ratio was so wrong, my eyes started to bleed. Now I finally had a chance to see it on screen, and boy, was it good! Mikey and Nicky was ahead of its time as a crime film and hasn't aged as some other crime films of its era have.

John Cassavetes and Peter Falk play minor gangsters in the movie. In the beginning we see the freaked-out Cassavetes in a sleazy hotel room, seemingly afraid of everything. He thinks other gangsters are trying to kill him, and Falk offers to help him. It becomes a bit of an odyssey through night-time streets, dirty joints and movie theaters. Ned Beatty plays the hired killer who doesn't seem to get anywhere on time. There's a bit of a surprise twist near the end, but more essential is the actual ending of the film, very poignant and touching, with a nice touch in the dialogue.

The writer and director Elaine May let Cassavetes and Falk improvise their scenes (at least partly), and this brings life to the characters that otherwise might be stock. There's warmth, energy, fear, abruptness, violence and jerkiness to these guys, and while they are not very likable, they feel very real.

The improvisation led to film being burned, which made the studio angry, and then Elaine May sat on the results for three years and trying to bring the thing together, but then the studio decided otherwise, and the end result isn't what May had in mind. I don't know whether we'll ever see May's version of Mikey and Nicky. (The Finnish version, seen here after a five-year break in 1981, is slightly shorter than the original American print.)

Someone has said this is the best film ever produced in Hollywood directed by a woman. I don't know if this is the case anymore, but it may have been. At least Mikey and Nicky is different and interesting. Here's Jonathan Rosenbaum on the film.

More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog. (Hopefully.)

PS. Oh, I'd written about this and the goddamn Finnish VHS earlier.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Jesuit Joe (1991)

I'd seen this ultra-rare French northern film back in the day, in 1992 actually, and I saw it twice, even though it made only a short round in Finnish cinemas. I'd never seen it again, but for some reason or another it had stuck to my mind and having an opportunity to see it again on 35mm film (okay, I had a hand in organizing the screening) I jumped the wagon.

Saying "ultra-rare" means that Jesuit Joe has only been released on VHS in French with no subtitles and on DVD in French with no subtitles. It's never been shown in Finnish television and before this it was never shown on the Finnish Film Archive screenings. It seems from IMDb that Finland was the only country where the film was shown originally beside France. So not many have seen it. It's available on YouTube, but they have only the cropped VHS copy without any subtitles.

The copy on YouTube is in French, but the copy I just saw was dubbed in English, so the producers at least tried to make this international. The film is based on Hugo Pratt's 1980 graphic novel with the same title and Pratt also was writing the screenplay, but they did some extra and not so necessary changes here and there. The original graphic novel, for example, has no vulture buzzard giving a voice-over narration, as in the film. It works at times, at times it doesn't.

The whole film suffers from the same problem: at times it works, at times it doesn't. The aerial scenes of the wintery Canadian landscape (the film was shot in Canada) are breath-taking, but the actors are pretty bad almost throughout. The screenplay has some dubious explanatory scenes or dialogue, which are not necessary. The director, Olivier Austen, has done only some unit managing in some other films beside this, and it shows. There are some very clumsy scenes here and there. Even the soundtrack shows the same undecisiveness, with hard-rock themes suddenly bursting out.

Yet there's something intriguing about the unrelenting story about the half-Indian Jesuit Joe killing mercilessly those he doesn't like or approve - or not killing. Take a look if you have the chance - or can speak French and can suffer through the bad VHS copy of YouTube.

Todd Mason doesn't seem to be gathering any links to other Overlooked Film posts, but here's his blog anyway.