Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Marquise of O

In Arthur Penn's seminal private eye film, Night Moves, Gene Hackman says that watching an Eric Rohmer film is like watching paint dry on the wall. Hackman is not a nice man in the film, so everything he says should be approached with caution.

Especially when Rohmer makes films as beautiful and stunning as his (only?) historical film, The Marquise of O (1976; the same year as Penn's film!). It's based on a story by Heinrich "Mikael Kohlhaas" von Kleist and it's about a widow who gets mysteriously pregnant after being saved from some village savages by a Russian count (played by Bruno Ganz). The sets are very well done, the compositions are beautiful (I believe Rohmer has stolen some images from the famous paintings of the era; see the image on the left), the dialogue is very funny in its pompousness and German strictness, and the story is moving. What more can you possibly want? The film is absolutely hypnotic, even without music (yes, this is an European art film without any music). My only gripe with the film is that the ending, the last line of the film seems a bit too ironical.

More Overlooked Films here.

PS. And oh, I could also mention The Jack Bull, a rather recent TV western I watched some weeks ago, because it's based on "Mikael Kohlhaas", von Kleist's best-known story. The transition of the 16th century Europe to the late 19th century Wild West is made quite well, but I didn't buy John Cusack as a Western character, for some reason or another. Recommended otherwise.

Roberto Faenza's Copkiller AKA Order of Death AKA Corrupt

Any movie that has Harvey Keitel beating Johnny Rotten and shouting "You want me to kill you? You want me to kill you?" is good.

Huh? Harvey Keitel and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols fame in the same film? Yes, it's happened once - and it's the only feature film Lydon appears in. "What film?" you ask. Ever heard of Roberto Faenza's Copkiller? It might be better known as Order of Death, the original European releasing title, or Corrupt (or even Corrupt Lieutenant). I hadn't heard of it, when I bought it for ten cents at a thrift store some months back. It had Harvey Keitel, and I thought, sure I'll buy this, even though the ugly VHS cassette looked cheap and ugly.

The film isn't very cheap, but it is ugly. Someone's killing drug cops with a kitchen knife. Keitel is a neurotic lieutenant in the drug department. He leads a double life, living in a luxurious (but empty) apartment with another cop. John Lydon is a creep, who gets obsessed about Keitel and starts following him. He comes to Keitel and claims he's the cop killer. Keitel beats Lydon and locks him up in the bathroom of his luxury apartment. Complications ensue. The ending is very, very baffling.

Copkiller is somewhere between an European art film (the director Faenza is Italian, a late-comer to the new Italian cinema, starting out only in the seventies) and a hardboiled American cop film, without any of the cop film clichés. Keitel's edgy nervousness is all over the scenery, and watching him one feels like he's ready to start punching anybody. No explanations to anyone's actions are given, not even in the end. There's a scene (with charming Sylvia Sidney as the grandmother) where Lydon's character's past is being explained, but in the end all the explanations are futile. This is a hard-hitting film that will leave you gasping for breath.

Copkiller is not an entirely successful film in the whole, but I think it has something to do with the film's troubled production history: it was made already in 1981, but released only in 1984, mainly due to the troubles Lydon had with his band, Public Image Limited. They had done the soundtrack for the film, but the studio was keeping the movie on the shelves for some reason or another. There were also some complications with some of the members of the band, and the soundtrack was never used. Instead there's a very nice and eerie score by none other than Ennio Morricone, using an electric bass, a horn section and some toy horns or some such. The versions available (I'm not sure if this is released in DVD*) are much shorter than the original length. The version I saw was somewhat over 90 minutes, while Faenza's cut was somewhere around 113 minutes. I believe the missing scenes contain dialogue between Keitel and Lydon - there's not much of that in the 90-minute version I saw, and yet someone complains at IMDb that the film has too much talk and not enough action. Those missing scenes might've explained some of the baffling stuff that takes place in the film. All this having said, I must say that some of the scenes are a bit clumsy and the action of the police in the end seems stupid.

This is based on a novel by Hugh Fleetwood. I've read the one Finnish translation from him, Melkein tavallinen tyttö (The Girl Who Passed for Normal, 1973), his first novel, but it was 20 years ago and I can't remember anything about it. Having seen this I'll try to find the book - and maybe some other novels by Fleetwood as well. I don't recall seeing any discussion on him at any crime fiction blog or other crime fiction venues. Fleetwood is also credited with the screenplay.

* Seems like it is, but under the stupid title Corrupt Lieutenant, in the series that's called The Bad Cop Chronicles. Looks like the film can be downloaded via many peer-to-peer sites, but I won't direct you to them. 

Greek film noir pastiche Singapore Sling

Well, to call Singapore Sling a pastiche is a weird way to put it. Certainly, there's a lot of pastiche and parody of film noir in Singapore Sling, but it's a very far cry from your usual neo-noir. Singapore Sling is a disturbing stageplay of great perversity.

Directed by Nikos Nikolaidis, Singapore Sling starts with two women dressep up in sexy lingerie digging a grave and burying a man in there. It rains heavily down on this grim scene. It actually rains almost all the time through the film - one of the film noir touches in the film, an obvious allusion to The Big Sleep. These two women are a mother and a daughter living alone in a big mansion, talking about the killing of someone called Laura, a mysterious young woman who showed up in their house one stormy night. They restage the scene of killing her from time to time, as a foreplay to sex between them. From this point on, you know this film is not for everybody.

There's also a private eye (or a cop, it's never fully explained) who's looking for the same young woman, Laura (another illusion, this time to Vera Caspary's novel and Otto Preminger's film). The film uses a flashback technique to explain what has happened to the private eye, but everything is not fully out in the open. It's possible that Laura was a false identity to the young woman and she used it to escape the law - she seems to have killed someone. The private eye comes to the women's house, wounded from a gun shot, and is instantly taken into the weird sex roleplays the mother and daughter engage themselves in. There's a lot of bondage, whipping, vomiting, peeing and such in the film, and it's not very pleasant to watch, even though it's done with style, with a great detail in the costumes and such. The film is often quite funny, though, so it's not only disturbing. There's also less gore than one might imagine. Weird thing is that the private eye's private parts are never shown, even though the director doesn't shy away from showing a mother whipping her own daughter or the mummified father having sex with the same daughter.

There's just that the film seems a bit empty in retrospect. What's it about? What is the director trying to tell us? There are quite a lot of metanarrational techniques in the screenplay, and it's clear not everything we are shown really happens, but in the end the film seems just another postmodern pastiche ripe with empty irony.

Singapore Sling came out in 1990 and won some awards at film festivals, mainly for its direction and photography, which are very stylish. Then the film became more obscure and it vanished from sight, to be released on DVD in 2009.

Some obscure and more obscure animated cartoons

I've been watching some pretty forgotten or unknown animated cartoons lately. I don't really know why I like to waste my time on these kind of things, but hey, what else would I write about on this blog? Um.. was this blog supposed to be about pulp fiction? Or my writer's life? Nah, screw that.

And some of these I even enjoy.

The best of the bunch was undoubtedly a DVD collection of Gene Deitch's animations. Deitch is an oddity in the American animation business, since he skipped the US after having worked for Terrytoons in the late fifties and early sixties, and moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia to produce his films with the Eastern bloc animators and artists. Some of the stuff he produced with artists like Zlatko Grgic is interesting, surrealist take on the American animation's most familiar stuff, like a bigger animal chasing a smaller animal and never succeeding. Deitch has a big, black bird chasing a worm. The bird runs on its feet, it doesn't seem to fly (well, it uses some sort of a helicopter in one scene). There are some really surreal moments in these animations, while at the same time they are easily watchable like the Roadrunners or Tom & Jerry.

Deitch also made his own Nudnik cartoons - it's said that the character is based on his own creation for Terrytoons, called Floofle. These were also made in Prague in 1960-1964, and released through Paramount as theatrical shorts. Nudnik (Oiva Tumpeloinen in Finnish) is a small, human-like character who doesn't succeed in anything. He seems like a homeless person - occasionally he lives in buildings to be demolished. There's a feel of silent comedy in these shorts, and one easily thinks of Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton watching Nudnik. I liked these a lot, but Kauto got bored. Ottilia liked Nudnik to a certain extent. I had to watch these all by myself...

I don't think these have ever been shown in Finland - the DVD collection (Oiva Tumpeloisen seikkailuja 1-2) must've been the first instance, even though some of the Czech stuff Deitch produced was shown on telly when I was a kid. If anyone knows more, I'd really like to know.

Now, to a bore called David & Sandy. The film was made in Hungary, which is why I bought the old VHS cassette from a thrift store - I thought it might be one of those artsy Eastern bloc animations I have a great liking for. But no. No no no. It seems that this was an independent production - in Hungary in the late eighties that may have been possible - and that this was intended for international distribution. The film has a feel of American animation, but the art is worse and the characters are very unappealing, especially the kid, David, in the lead, with his bulging eyes and small nose. (And the humans have only four fingers - I find this almost repulsive, even though with ducks or mice it's perfectly okay.) The plot is stupid, with lots of stuff thrown randomly in, from space aliens to a toy museum of the future. Kauto seemed to be interested in the movie, but I solemnly swear I'll never watch it again. (The terrible Finnish dubbing may have something to do with my dislike of the film, but the art was still awful and the plot clichéd and stupid.)

Last but not least, Vuk or The Little Fox by Pannonian Studio, also Hungarian, seemed a lot better, with nice animal characters, but the Finnish dubbing of the ancient VHS cassette was so bad that it seems unprobable I'll watch this to the end. It's been said that this has been the second biggest box-office hit ever in Hungary. No wonder - the little fox, Vuk, is cute. If I have the time to sit through this, I'll report back.