Avildsen: The Formula (1980)

In the late 70s and early 80s there was no shortage of films anxious to tap into noir nostalgia. Nostalgic and elegiac for a bygone cinematic era, they took the most melancholy, wistful, reflexive fringes of the noir detective and ballooned them into lavish, operatic period pieces. They weren’t necessarily inaccurate in their tributes – or, if they were, it didn’t necessarily matter – but anyone wondering what happened to the more abrasive, antisocial side of the noir psyche would have to look elsewhere, usually in the direction of films and actors that were more about simply continuing the noir impulse than consciously recreating it. Perhaps no actor of the late 70s and early 80s clarifies that distinction between late noir and neo-noir as George C. Scott, who’d spent the last two decades perfecting a kind of disinterested disgust that was completely in keeping with the more jaded moments in Bogart, Mitchum and Robinson’s careers. By the time he’d arrived at Hardcore and directed a couple of films of his own, that disgust had been whittled down to a kind of plaintive contempt, the sense that he was begging every other character around him not to make him force back more tears of rage – the perfect register for the string of noirish, procedural roles that he started to embrace around this point in his career. And, as much as Hardcore might be the finer film, The Formula is perhaps the most exemplary in terms of Scott’s gradual transition to a procedural actor, simply because it is so formulaic, crafted with a pared-back functionality and a matter-of-fact disinterest in coherent or manageable narrative experiencethat marks it as a direct descendent of the noir impulse rather than a postmodern stylisation and simplification. And yet, as in some of the most convoluted noir narratives, the broad outline is elegantly clear, with Scott playing Barney Caine, a Lieutenant with the Los Angeles police department, who’s called in on his day off to investigate the murder of one of his colleagues. Forced to give up precious custody time with a son we never really seen, born of a marriage we never even hear about, Barney never shakes the frustration of working on his day off, even as the investigation spirals out to encompass the Los Angeles sprawl and Cold War Berlin. What’s striking about the film though, is that, for all the peripatetic energy – in some ways, the LA sprawl feels as orbital as Berlin – every scene feels like an extension of the opening crime scene, and the thicketed privacy of the Hollywood Hills, where it occurs. Suffused with the exotic, fetishistic quality that’s come to define Paul Verhoeven’s crime scenes – a body discovered on satin sheets, surrounding by ritual objects – but also with the ambient, dispersed xenophobia of the classic noir crime scene – The Big Sleep comes to mind in particular – it sets the stage for a series of spaces and conversations that become quieter and quieter, more and more paranoid as we proceed, until the film effectively plays as a stage production, with highly theatrical cameos from both Marlon Brando and John Gielgud. In other words, where neo-noir elegised the extravagant cinematicity of noir, here we have a kind of concession to the inherent theatricality of so much 1940s cinema, as we move from the openness of L.A. to the closure of Berlin expecting to experience some kind of contrast, some tribute to L.A. as a global city, but just find things getting more and more claustrophobic, cloistered and stagebound. Stylistically, then, it performs a kind of noir-in-reverse, taking us from the Hollywood Hills where Lang, Wilder and Curtiz ended their days to a proto-noir Berlin that’s still under the hand of Nazi theatrics, collapsing Scott’s very American fascism back into an older kind of totalitarian impulse and demand. It’s a wonderful twist, then, that this gradual regression also gradually moves us back towards the present as well, towards a new world order centred on OPEC and oil monopolies that’s as inadequate to the language of noir as noir itself was necessary for us to arrive at that inadequacy – and if the film has a twist, it’s that the twist occurs gradually, in real time, relinquishing the lavish pastness of neo-noir to rediscover the urgent, unbearable present so peculiar to classic noir, a present that leaves no room for the detective's presence once it's been discovered. 

Russo & Russo: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Although Captain America has his own quirks, skills and attributes, what most distinguishes him is that he is the first genuinely historical superhero – at least in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe – as well as the first superhero consciously crafted by the government to prepare against an apocalyptic future. In Captain America: The First Avenger, that also created a superhero historicism that was rich enough in tone, style and palette to launch the Agent Carter spinoff, which in turn luxuriated in that hyperreal period backdrop in an even more extended and distended way. There’s something singularly, bleak, then, about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as Captain America (Chris Evans) arrives at the future projected by the first film only to find himself calcified into a Smithsonian exhibit in the midst of an almost unbearably denuded, digitised vision of Washington DC. That sense of a lost future is one of the key reasons why this also feels like the film in which the MCE accepts what it really is – neither an unabashedly pro-capitalist superhero narrative of the kind that emerged in the wake of 9/11, nor a putative genre critique in the vein of Christopher Nolan, but a capitalist realist concession and compromise, a sense that the world we live in only deserves to be saved by superheroes because it’s the only one that can possibly exist. That in itself is something of a contradiction – if we live in the only possible world, then why do we need superheroes at all? – just as the plot turns on the discovery that H.Y.D.R.A. has utterly intertwined S.H.I.E.L.D., but in a way that somehow doesn’t preclude wholehearted devotion to S.H.I.E.L.D either. In fact, the contradictions are so palpable that the film can’t ignore then, instead falling back upon the knowing tone that characterises the MCU – a peculiarly suffocating, constricting and joyless kind of knowing, chirpily reminding us of how unimaginative it all is while also forbidding us to imagine anything different. Critical to that sense of suffocation is the combination of digital action with an extraordinary amount of on-location shooting – especially around X and Z Streets – as if to position us in a steadily shrinking analog space, or to inhabit the very idea of the analog shoot itself as a steadily contracting position. Of course, that also means that the chases, both in car and on foot, are particularly impressive, as we move, seamlessly and digitally, through a selection of very real spaces that provide a quite stunning panorama of post-millenial DC. And in some ways the film’s pleasures subsist on what amounts to a sublime effort to reinvest the Capitol with the military-industrial supremacy it possessed half a century ago, when it was populated by the Greatest Generation that Captain America spearheaded. From the newly constructed Triskelion – the latest iteration of the city’s brutalist-classicist continuum – to the final “Battle over the Potomac,” Russo and Russo evince a taste for massive discrepancies in scale, figures against vast landscapes, that occasionally recall the moody vistas of 70s surveillance thrillers, especially once Robert Redford steps in to helm S.H.I.E.L.D. In some ways, then, it’s the most sublime of MCU films, but that also makes it the most sanctimonious as well, alternating perky self-awareness with mindless self-importance for what often feels like a lecture or business plan as much as a film, a critical juncture in the MCU Phase Two rollout. At the very least, it relegates cinematic immersion elsewhere, especially towards the massive digital fandom that seems to splinter scenes and shots into ready-made gifts, memes and tumblr avatars. Yet few recent films have captured the sense of a deflated, diluted present so perfectly as well, if only because that’s what every speech, spectacle and superpower is striving against, like a statement of unbelievable rhetorical bombast that’s continually collapsing in on itself, evacuating the very space it’s designed to expand and occupy: “You’re not going to put any of us in a prison because you need us. Yes, the world is a vulnerable place and, yes, we’ve helped make it that way, but we’re also the ones best guaranteed to defend it.”

Ramis: Caddyshack (1980)

By all accounts, Caddyshack went through so many edits, rewrites and revisions that the end product was totally unrecognisable from what Harold Ramis started out with – and it shows. In fact, it’s hard to think of a more anarchic, chaotic, incoherent 80s comedy – at least a mainstream comedy – as we’re taken through a series of running jokes that are never given space or time to run, characters and character traits that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly, and a truly bewildering array of comic styles and signatures that never settle into a unified atmosphere or ambience. Nominally, it’s about the rivalry between two golf caddies – Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe) and Tony D’Annunzio (Scott Colombo) – over a summer at Bushwood Country Club, but we’re quickly distracted by supporting roles from Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray, as well as a mechanised gopher who was turned into something of a main character after all the footage was completed. For a film that was an inch less committed to its inanity, that would spell disaster, but the incoherence actually works perfectly here, plunging us into an anarchic flux that, like so many of the comedies released around this time, makes you feel part of the sheer fun of making it, with many of the scenes feeling like out-takes or as if they’ve been improvised on the spot, while the reactions of actors to other actors often feels as spontaneous and unscripted as in a live performance, especially when they’re not the ostensible focus of the scene. At the same time, the sheer incoherence means that every character is, inevitably, somewhat oneiric, which is perhaps why Chase, Dangerfield and Murray were elevated from cameo to central roles, since their performances all pretty much play as solo acts, or one-man SNL sketches, which can make it pretty disorienting when they have to pretend to talk or communicate with other people, let alone each other, but also poetically appropriate for the first and last scene between Chase and Murray committed to film following their falling-out – and tentative rapprochement – in the wake of Chase’s game-changing departure from SNL in the late 70s. And in many ways the film is about reframing Chase as a film actor, just as his character – an upper-class golfer – syncs most naturally with both this oneiric style and his own comic signature, as he wanders around the golf course with the idiotic, meditative calm that he did so well, speaking more or less on autopilot and often surprising himself – but only a little – with the last thing that’s come out of his mouth. Somewhere between a Zen audioguide for golfers and a somnambulist golf commentator, his platitudinous inanities nail the peculiar oblivion of the film more than even Murray and Dangerfield’s deranged monologues, not least because they’re more creepily post-oneiric, suffused with a slimy, sticky, stifling calm that always makes it feel as if he’s just masturbated, or that every pleasure is somewhat masturbatory, even or especially when it involves him communing or copulating with another person. That sense of an ever so slightly or recently ruffled reassurance was the role Chase would make his own with the National Lampoon films and beyond, but it’s even more self-effacing and minor in this formative moment, which also prevents Chase graduating into a lead character, as much as some of the opening scenes might seem to set him up that way. Like every other actor or bit player, he’s subsumed back into the crazy, inane rhythm of the golf course itself, so hyperbolic and incoherent that it often feels as if the film is as much about the inanity of golf as a spectator sport as anything else, driven above all by a will to reimagine golf as the most idiotic, kinetic, visceral spectator sport possible. And in that sense, Ramis succeeds – televised or cinematic golf has never been as fun before or since – and perhaps could only succeed by failing to rein in the superabundance and incoherence of comic spectacle on display here, still contagious some thirty years later.

Apted: Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)

Country music tends to be sceptical of neat epiphanies or total transcendence, which makes crafting a truly country biopic a bit of a challenge, since most musical biopics revolve around a series of epiphanies – the moment when the singer recognises their own talent, the moment when their peers recognise their talent and, finally, the moment when the world at large recognises their talent. Released in 1980, Coal Miner’s Daughter tells the now-mythical story of Loretta Lynn’s rise to fame yet manages to avoid its own mythology by keeping fairly clear of any of those epiphanies, resulting in a singularly graceful, gracious and generous biopic – fresh and frank in its unaffected immediacy as one of the songs that made Loretta so beloved among country fans. Opening with Loretta’s (Sissy Spacey) childhood in Van Lear, we move through her marriage to “Mooney” Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) at the age of thirteen, and then onto her life as a wife and mother before her musical career kicked off and propelled her to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry, where she formed a friendship with Patsy Cline (Beverly D’Angelo), only to sink into a creeping depression and exhaustion that she nevertheless manages to shrug off by the end of the film as well. In music biopics, epiphanies are often forged and framed in the midst of just these hardships, so it’s telling that the film never dwells on any moment in Loretta’s life as a pretext for tragedy, but instead gathers her many challenges into the country voice that she both inherited and made so indubitably her own – resilient, pragmatic, accessible and above all suffused with what Dolly Parton called “country dumb,” a kind of studied oblivion to how to milk her material for the pathos it seems to demand. Too artless to feel prodigious or precocious, her music comes from the heart in ways that preclude the kind of rags-to-riches or talent-will-triumph lesson that might be expected, with some of her most memorable and magical lyrics simply emerging gradually and organically out of her day-to-day routines – listening to the radio, singing lullabies to her babies, trying desperately to keep her children entertained. At times, it almost has a documentary kind of feel, especially in the way it transitions from year to year – in that sense, the choice of Apted is perfect – suffused with the undisguised plainness of a telemovie. At the same time, that naturalism opens up at just the right moment as well, as Loretta and Mooney embark upon a kind of radio road trip to start off her career – in some ways the most joyous and picaresque part of the entire film - travelling cross-country from station to station as they promote her first record, only to end up at the Grand Ole Opry itself. From thereon the film, like Loretta’s singing, feels slightly more “produced,” but it’s production of a careful, classical kind, as Apted sketches out a new traditionalist Nashville that feels like a riposte to Robert Altman’s postmodern driftscape, anchored in neon vistas, proscenium framing and swooping crane shots that reiterate, time and again, the cavernous, curvaceous co-ordinates of the Opry, which is translated from a radio to cinema venue in quite a remarkable way. Within that context, Loretta’s friendship with Patsy inevitably feels like something of a fantasy, but, then again, it never stops being something of a fantasy to Loretta either, like most of her career really – for all her rise to stardom, she always feels more attuned to the audience than to her fellow celebrities, which is what made her so popular with the country groupies that provide some periodic comic relief throughout the narrative. All in all, then, it’s one of Spacek’s best roles – her mercurial ability to appear about any age prevents her ever settling into either the role of ingenue or disingenue, capturing a celebrity who, by all accounts, was peculiarly and poetically unseduced by her celebrity.

Roeg: Bad Timing (1980)

Over the 70s, and especially in the wake of Last Tango in Paris, a particular kind of romantic chamber drama started to emerge, typically centred around sexually liberated characters in the process of retreating to apartments, bedsits and therapists’ couches as the sexual revolution started to subside. Falling back upon the fractured remains of a once collective sexual movement, their stories were typically fragmented, discontinuous and attuned to the unconscious, tendencies which crystallised in Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 experimental masterpiece Bad Timing. Set in Vienna at the height of the Cold War, it’s a romance told retrospectively, opening with the attempted suicide of Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), an American expat, and moving backwards by way of a police investigation, conducted by local Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel), to describe her relationship with Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel), an American psychoanalyst and self-professed voyeur with a particular interest in spying, secrecy and scopophilia. At first, it plays as a somewhat regular flashback film, impressionistic and non-linear in a manageable way, but Roeg gradually dislocates and dissociates each episode from the next, until it’s a bit like watching a film set at the critical cusp in any psychoanalytic intervention – the moment at which the patient goes from recounting his or her life to the therapist  as a functionary to actually engaging with and romancing the therapist as a fantasy. For that reason, the relationship between Milena and Linden only really makes sense in the midst of crisis – or seems in crisis even at its most relaxed and organic – a crisis that Roeg suggests rather than elaborates through his increasingly dissonant cuts and transitions, which often hinge on unlikely spatial and temporal analogues between apparently unrelated scenes, suffused with a Cold War taste for unexpected and paranoid propinquities. As in Woody Allen’s films, the convergence of romance and therapy turns dialogue into something of a talking cure, as Milena and Alex continually try to talk themselves out of the relationship, or to talk the relationship itself through to the bitter end, until it really feels like two competing monologues, two people talking past each other through accumulating layers of transference and counter-transference. Yet where Allen might opt for flamboyant, baroque verbiage, here the dialogue feels more and more subsumed into intimate silence even as it becomes more and more hostile, thanks in large part to Garfunkel’s voice – the chamber voice par excellence – which often feels more like a voiceover than a voice, moving in and out of the diegesis like bridge and troubled waters all at once. As in a live concert in which a familiar or standard piece is reworked, spontaneously, into something utterly unfamiliar, his performance – along with Russell’s – feels as if it was shot in sequence only to be hastily rearranged and reassembled at the last minute, which is perhaps why the film feels so fresh in its dissonances and bad timings as well, so close to the director’s final vision of how it should be, even if that vision tends to disperse any destination as it proceeds. The result is an open-ended therapy-time that can't - or won't - quite allow the film to ever arrive at any point of catharsis or consummation, forcing us to spend more and more time in Roeg's cuts themselves, as they confound all sense of past and present, trauma and symptom, raw footage and editorial intervention, with a disjunctive vigour that's as exhilarating as it is disorienting to hear Garfunkel without Simon in this most baroque, introspective and precious of chamber dramas.