Frankenheimer: 52 Pick-Up (1986)

Based on Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name, 52 Pick-Up revolves around Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider), a successful car manufacturer who’s blackmailed by a gang of criminals after they discover that he’s been having an affair that might jeopardise his wife Barbara's (Ann-Marget) plan to run for City Council. However, Frankenheimer more or less discards the narrative, relegating it to a series of broad, expository dialogues, instead using the film’s peripatetic scope to conjure up the connective tissue of Los Angeles, where it’s set – in other words, conjuring up Los Angeles itself, a city of connective tissue. From the opening scene, there’s a continual recourse to short segments that can’t quite be described as establishing shots, since they often elaborate tableaux and spaces that are extraneous to the narrative, nor as montage sequences, since they’re not procedural in any productive way either. Instead, they form part of the film’s fascination with the growing convergence of production and exhibition – the blackmailers are all associated, in some way, with the porn industry, with the result that porn’s continually foregrounded as the cutting-edge of closed-circuit cinema, an industry in which films are shot, developed and screened in the same space, often at the same time. As emulations of this closed-circuit aesthetic, Frankenheimer’s interstitial tone poems frequently take on a lurid, hyper-real quality – they feel part of the cityscape they’re describing, offering themselves as both venues and objects of perusal. That imbues Los Angeles with the emergent wonder of a developing polaroid, but it also collapses Frankenheimer's camera into the vast infrastructure that it so exqusitely curates, as it swirls up and down, dovetailing lateral and vertical perspectives, often twirling around some infrastructural detail in the process. It’s appropriate, then, that Harry’s car company is in negotiations with NASA, and that Barbara is running for City Council on the basis of her work on the Clean Air Commission – faced with a screenplay that seems to offer little scope for his signature car chases, Frankenheimer colonises the space between the car roof and the lower atmosphere as a new horizon of the American technological sublime, until being in a car, or just being in a city where cars outnumber citizens, opens up a galactic, hemispherical pornography of space, the desert beneath the streets.