Friday, June 24, 2011

EYES OF LAURA MARS 1978

There are some movies you fall in love with which seriously call into question your judgment, aesthetics, and sanity. These are the films that fall outside of the easy-to-rationalize pleasures of camp, the above-criticism-snobbery of cult, and the so-subjective-it doesn't-bear-discussion reverence of geek-culture franchises. These are the movies which appeal to you for reasons (in the words of Barbarella's Durand-Durand), "That are beyond all known philosophies."

Eyes of Laura Mars is such a film. A well-crafted, imaginative, suspense thriller whose flaws frequently loom so large that, over time, they start to take on the character of virtues.
Faye Dunaway as Laura Mars
Tommy Lee Jones as Det. John Neville
Rene Auberjonois as Donald Phelps: Laura's Manager
Brad Dourif as Tommy Ludlow: Laura's skeevy driver
Darlanne Fluegel as Lulu - a model
Real-life 70s supermodel Lisa Taylor as Michele - a 70s supermodel
Raul Julia as Michael Reisler: Laura's suspicious-acting ex-husband
Eyes of Laura Mars - you can tell the film is hip because, like a rock band that wants to be taken seriously, it dispenses with the article, "The" at the start - is a romantic thriller about a hotshot New York fashion photographer (Dunaway) whose titular eyes she happens to share with a serial killer. Not literally, like a Manhattan co-op, but psychically, at grievously inconvenient moments throughout her day, Laura Mars literally sees through the eyes of the killer. Targeting her friends and colleagues, the killer implicates the controversially provocative photographer by committing murders in ways that duplicate (inspire? Hmmm...) Laura's own death-fixated, violently erotic fashion layouts.

At its core, Eyes of Laura Mars may be just a another stylishly dressed-up pulp thriller, but BOY is it a pulp thriller that works!
The Eyes of Dunaway & Auberjonois
Movies built around a gimmick, even a clever one, can be problematic. Everything hinges on working the gimmick into the film as quickly and as frequently as possible, often at the expense of a coherent plot. Eyes of Laura Mars teeters on occasion with a screenplay committed to delivering the genre goods as honestly as possible (lots of red herrings, dark rooms, shock cuts, and people popping into frame out of nowhere), but with its tin ear for dialog, luckily it has the good sense not to take itself too seriously.
Faye Dunaway, in the first of many suitable-for-a-drag-queen roles that would soon derail her once-impressive film career, is actually rather good here and is given solid support by a compelling cast of New York actors.
Hunky Detective Tommy Lee Jones shows Dunaway the finer points of firearms while 
showing the audience a little open-shirt beefcake.
However, the film's greatest asset is its setting. Not since Blow Up has the world of fashion photography been used to such irresistible effect. Inspired by a real-life hot-button social issue of the late 70s: the emergence of violent, sadomasochistic imagery in fashion and advertising (specifically the works of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, & Rebecca Blake), Eyes of Laura Mars makes colorfully dramatic use of the mystique surrounding the fashion industry. All of which creates a credible backdrop for its implausible, "I have an ocular/psychic bond with a serial killer!" gimmick.
  
Released three years before the debut of MTV, Eyes of Laura Mars can be credited or blamed with paving the way for the glut of  80s thrillers which endeavored to hide narrative shortcomings behind an overabundance of visual panache. Many have tried, but few have been able to hit all the high notes that Eyes of Laura Mars does so effortlessly. A stateside version of the Italian "Giallo" thriller, it is at times loopy, obvious, and heavy-handed, but there are still enough surprises to go around and it is never for one second, boring. In fact, it's really a lot of lurid fun.

"OK America, OK world... you are violent. You are pushing all this murder on us, so here it comes right back at you! And we'll use murder to sell deodorant...so that you'll just get bored with murder. Right?"
  
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Not everything one loves about a film is actually up on the screen. Sometimes it's what we associate it with and what memories it evokes. Every time I watch this movie I think of the summer of 1978: the year I turned 21 and moved to Los Angeles on my own. One of my strongest first impressions of the city was the enormous Eyes of Laura Mars billboard on the Sunset Strip.
Not a photo of mine, found on the internet. But that's the billboard!
It was the same iconic Scavullo portrait of Dunaway used in the poster, but the staring eyes were illuminated and flashed on and off 24/7. It could be seen from blocks away and I was just thunderstruck by it. Seriously, it was like some 70's reimagining of The Great Gatsby with me as a bell-bottomed George Wilson mesmerized by the eyes of a female Dr. T.J. Eckleburg staring down from an advertisement.

  
PERFORMANCES
It's not easy being a Faye Dunaway fan. When she's good she's peerless, but unless handled by a particularly watchful director, she's prone to giving overly mannered performances (one recalls Jan Hook's hilariously spot-on Dunaway impersonation on SCTV). Hot off of her Oscar win for Network and in the first role requiring her to truly carry a film, Dunaway falls somewhere in between here.
Laura Mars on falling in love: "I'm completely out of control!"
Words that would come back to haunt Ms. Dunaway three years later on the release of Mommie Dearest.
My absolute favorite performance in the film is given by Darlanne Fluegel, portraying a sweetly ditzy model of the sort I once thought exclusively indigenous to Los Angeles. Hers is a disarmingly smart and funny performance keyed perfectly to the semi-satiric tone the film adopts for the modeling sequences. She is terrific.
Darlanne Fluegel - Pretty in Pink

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Were this thriller comprised solely of fashion shoot sequences and behind-the-scenes footage of Laura Mars at work (in some of the most flamboyantly impractical outfits ever), it would be enough.
Casual Fridays for Laura Mars
Each scene plays out like a little mini-film: kinetic, witty, and bubbling over with an unerringly precise sense of time and place. Unlike laughable sequences in movies like Valley of the Dolls that try to make modeling look glamorous and desirable, Eyes of Laura Mars is not afraid to mine the absurdity.
The elaborate/outrageous photo shoot sequences that are the film's centerpieces pose provocative questions about violent sexual imagery in advertising that Eyes of Laura Mars never satisfactorily address.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As a time capsule vision of late 70s chic, Eyes of Laura Mars is perfection (although the once-daring photos at the center of the plot look almost quaint by today's standards), which only adds to my overall enjoyment of a film that, for all its faults, continues to fascinate and entertain me through repeated viewings. Still, given the relative kinky cleverness of the premise, I might wish that the film's potential was better realized in the script. I don't usually need everything spelled out for me, but it does nag at one to have interesting ideas introduced and never expanded upon.
For example, I'm not sure it's ever explained why/how Laura came to share the killer's "eyes" and what, if anything, it all signified in relation to her photographs. Also, as the film progresses, Laura's attitude towards violence seems to undergo a change and she becomes more squeamish about the glamorized bloodletting she had once defended. Does this mean that her earlier "moral" defense of her work has altered as well?

In the end, perhaps these kind of questions don't ultimately matter in a film so preoccupied with visual style.
What I do know is that Eyes of Laura Mars has been one of my favorite films for the last 33 years.
A statement I proudly make without benefit of excuses, apologies, or rose-colored glasses...just with my eyes wide open.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

Saturday, June 18, 2011

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? 1969

I know of many parents who indulge their young children - always sons, for some reason - by allowing them to watch PG or R-rated horror films and aggressive, comic-book action movies. In each instance the parent is quick to point out that it's always at the child's insistence, and (being the good parents they are) should things on the screen start to get hairy, they're at their kid’s side, reminding him it's all just fakery and only a movie. A sort of Parent's Magazine reversal of The Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, I guess. Terrific. More kids desensitized to, and made tolerant of, depictions of violence and brutality.
Since a great many of the films that have meant the most to me were films deemed "mature" for my age when I first saw them (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?- age 11,  Midnight Cowboy - age 12), I obviously don’t have a problem with young people being exposed to so-called "age inappropriate" movies. However, I do have two problems with the scenario described above, wherein a film's artificiality has to be routinely reinforced in order to stave off kindertrauma.
The Santa Monica Pier 1932
1) Movies are one of the few realms of fantasy that life still affords us after we reach the pragmatism of post-Santa Claus/Easter bunny adulthood. It thus seems a shame to rob a child of the transgressive magic of film by hammering them over the head with reminders of its contrivance. Yes, movie images are indeed "fake," but the emotions those fake images are capable of evoking are not. One's emotional response is the only real thing about the filmgoing experience. To watch something and be encouraged not to respond emotionally to what you see suggests training a child to be impassive and cut off from his feelings. 2) Why are the mature films these kids allowed to see always these loud, violent, brainless, ADD inducing, explosion-a-thons and never movies that promote empathy and sensitivity to the human condition?
Films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (which I saw when I was 12) should be mandatory viewing for all adolescents and a great many adults. A gut-wrenching contemplation on the fragile durability of hope in the face of life's ostensible futility, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? uses the allegorical setting of a grueling dance marathon set in Depression-era Hollywood (all the participants seem to be wannabe movie stars) to look at the devastating ways in which the human necessity to connect is so often thwarted by the equally human need to erect walls of defense to shield ourselves from the pain of living.
Jane Fonda as Gloria Beatty
Michael Sarrazin as Robert Syverton
Gig Young as Rocky
Susannah York as Alice LeBlanc
Red Buttons as Sailor
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is framed around a deceptively simple, character-driven plot - two dissimilar dreamers in 1932 Hollywood are thrown together by fate (the embittered, pessimistic Gloria and the naively good-natured Robert) to tragic effect. By placing the action within the unfamiliar, almost freak-show atmosphere of a marathon dance contest whose chief requirements are desperation and a masochist's tolerance for pain, the film makes many perceptive, still-relevant points about the way the dangling carrot of hope can be used to manipulate and exploit those most vulnerably in need.


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? both cast 1930s Hollywood (as embodied by the movie industry) as a Lilith leading men to their doom, but the films adapted from these novels differ significantly. While I love both movies, there is something so humane about director Sydney Pollack's approach to the material that makes it the more compelling piece. The penny-ante aspirations of the protagonists are never belittled, nor are their character flaws looked upon with anything other than empathy for the suffering that lay at their core. 
If the characters in The Day of the Locust are rendered grotesques due to their ofttimes willing surrender of their souls to valueless dreams; the dreamers in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? are guilty of little more than being misguided in their fruitless, potentially hopeless, quest for something to believe in.
Before Reality-TV: People are the ultimate spectacle
"The crowd has got to have something to believe in. Once they stop believing, they stop coming."

PERFORMANCES
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? represents the best film work of virtually every member of its talented cast, but the recent deaths of co-stars Susannah York and Michael Sarrazin add an extra layer of poignancy to two performances that already significantly tug at the heartstrings. Portraying two Candide-like innocents left broken and disillusioned by what could best be called the neutral cruelty of existance, the impossibly young duo are agonizing in their vulnerability and both give memorably moving performances.
Alice on the Edge: York's haunting breakdown scene
Robert...always seeking the sun
Gig Young, whom I had heretofore only known as an annoyingly glib presence in smirky sex comedies from the '60s, gives one of those naked, laying-it-all-on-the-line performances (like Ann-Margaret's in Carnal Knowledge) that seems to give vent to years of frustration at being a talent underutilized.
The same can be said of Jane Fonda, who functionally changed the course of her career with this film. Though perhaps a tad too beautiful and angularly delicate to physically embody the life-hardened heroine of McCoy's novel (imagine Ann Savage from 1945's Detour), Fonda is nonetheless emotionally right on target and gives off an edgy electricity that jumps off the screen. Hard-bitten and brittle, nervous and as alert as a junkyard cat, Fonda is impossible not to watch.


THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The only movie I know of to use America's short-lived marathon dance phenomena for a dramatic backdrop (I'd never even heard of a marathon dance before I saw this), They Shoot Horses, Don't They? confines itself almost exclusively to a single indoor set, yet still manages to be vividly cinematic. Employing an intimate, if not invasive, shooting style that makes imaginative use of hand-held cameras, a stiflingly claustrophobic environment of a precise time and place is evoked in a way that never once feels stagy or set-bound.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I have seen hundreds of films over the years, so it doesn't surprise me that I've forgotten so many. But what does surprise me (as the years pile up) are the films which have never left my mind, and the images that remain as clear to me now as the day I first saw them.  
Which brings me to the incredible "derby" sequence: a virtuoso bit of filmmaking employing music, fast cuts, and dizzying hand-held camerawork to create one of cinema's most powerful visual representations of hopeless desperation. It's my absolute favorite scene from the film. 
In 1969 the use of slow motion hadn't yet become the movie cliché it would eventually grow into, so the agonizingly protracted sequence depicting a cluster of over-fatigued individuals racing in a circle to a discordant calliope arrangement of the optimistic anthem "California Here I Come" (thus rendered a perverse, human merry-go-round), was an image so poetically grotesque, yet hypnotically beautiful, that I never forgot it.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is my idea of a truly "adult" film: a film of ideas and insight that compels you to be aware of and sensitive to the frailties of others. I can't attest to whether or not my youthful penchant for R-rated films ultimately did me more harm than good, but I'm glad that the mature films I did seek out were indeed that - films of maturity. I'd cried at movies before - at some sad action like Bambi's mother being killed or some hero shot trying to save his best friend, but They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"was the first film that made me cry just because the characters onscreen were so wounded and in so much pain.
"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. 
They got it all rigged before you ever show up."

Copyright © Ken Anderson

Saturday, June 4, 2011

DON'T LOOK NOW 1973

There is nothing like a good scare at the movies. I don't mean those jarring, throw-your-popcorn-in-air, dig-your-nails-into-your-partner's-arm, moments (ah, sweet memories of Wait Until Dark). As fun as they can be, those moments are over much too swiftly. What I refer to are those far more satisfying, lasting feelings of intensifying disquietude that overtake you the moment a movie starts to touch upon an anxiety or sense of dread that runs deeper than mere surprise in the face of the unexpected. Those moments when the passive role of observer — the moviegoer's emotional safety valvegive way to the more interactive role of the projected participant. Suddenly, you're relating to the film on a visceral level, and all the while an electric current running through you is taking great delight in your being brought to such a vulnerable state of apprehension by mere flickering images projected on a screen.  

It happened once when I was a kid and saw Rosemary's Baby and it happened again as an adult with Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. an opaque, atmospheric thriller that proves when it comes to scary stories, it's all in the telling.
  Julie Christie  as  Laura Baxter
  Donald Sutherland  as John Baxter
Hilary Mason as Heather, the blind woman with "second sight"
  Clelia Matania as Wendy

An off-season assignment to restore a decaying church in Venice Italy affords architect Donald Sutherland and wife Julie Christie the opportunity to leave behind mournful memories associated with their English country home—the site of a recent tragedy--the accidental drowning death of their young daughter. However, Venice in winter, a shuttered city blanketed in gray skies, desolate streets, and half-empty cafes and hotels, is so grim and foreboding it's hard to imagine a less suitable place to try to overcome depression. A feeling further intensified by the city being beset by a string of grisly, unsolved murders. With the “chance” meeting of a pair of eccentric elderly sisters, one blind and claiming to have a psychic connection with the deceased child, a chain of strange and uncanny events is triggered...events as labyrinthine and dark as the streets of Venice themselves.
                              The unforeseeable foreseen.
                              A sense of something not being right.
                              An accident. A premonition. A fate.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
What one considers scary is as subjective a designation as what one considers to be funny, so I'm aware my claim of Don't Look Now being one of the scariest movies I've ever seen is not the same thing as saying it's a scary movie. I'm certain that for many its premise and execution are far too leisurely and bloodless for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre crowd, and the label of "arty" would not be baseless in describing both its structure and visual style. But for whatever reason or whatever chord it struck, this darkly mysterious merge of the rational and paranormal just scared the bejesus out of me when I first saw it. And continues to do so even today.
Venice in Peril
A sign calling attention to the endangered status of Venice architecture also 
alludes ominously to the serial killer terrorizing the city.

PERFORMANCES
I claim no objectivity when it comes to Julie Christie. To the head-scratching bewilderment of my partner, who thinks she's fine enough but nothing to rave about, I find her to be an intelligently resourceful actress who brings an air of emotive conviction to everything she does. And it certainly doesn't hurt that she is a stone knockout, to boot. Her matter-of-fact naturalness proves an essential asset in a film such as this, lest her character be made to appear hysterical or unbalanced. Donald Sutherland underplays so well (usually, anyway) that the skill of his performances are often overlooked. In Don't Look Now he is at his relaxed best, making his character a believable skeptic in the face of the fantastic. Watch the play of emotions over his face as his character tries to sort out the mystery that his life has become. It's just the kind of in-the-moment urgency that is lacking in so many suspense films. Sutherland seems to be right with us, the audience, not a step ahead nor a step behind. I think he's fantastic here.
The much-discussed graphic sex scene between Christie and Sutherland is but one of many moments of genuine affection displayed between the couple. Moments that invest the film with a real sense of the pain of loss.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
There's a chilling sequence in which the couple venture out at night, looking for a restaurant they've heard about. The dark streets and alleys prove an insurmountable maze and they become lost and eventually separated. In the midst of this, an unearthly cry is heard and something terrifying is half seen. This scene just had my pulse racing. It is a brilliant bit of  cinematic tension.
Things only half seen and half heard.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The film's title is really splendid. No matter how you say it, literal or ironic, whatever you think it means, whatever punctuation you add, or wherever you place the emphasis; it remains 100% appropriate to the film's themes. It speaks of warning, apprehension, sight, and danger. All elements of the film evocatively rendered in the recurring perception motifs of eyes, watching, seeing, and reflecting.
A woman without sight watches.

The city is full of windows but no one sees the murderer.

A child drowns because no one is watching.

Much of  Don't Look Now concerns itself with the concept of perception. Most certainly self-perception (Sutherland's character's fatal flaw is ignoring his own sixth sense) and awakening to the danger inherent in not heeding signs of warning, not being watchful, not seeing, not looking. 
Don’t Look Now is one of those movies so rich in content that it yields dividends with each re-visit. This brief insert shot reveals details of Donald Sutherland's nightstand: a photo of his children with the drowned daughter's face obscured. A glass of water with a symbolically significant red base. A paperback copy of Der Stellvertreter (subtitled, A Christian Tragedy) by Rolf Hochhuth - a play alleging the Catholic Church turned its back on (failed to heed, refused to see) the warning signs of The Holocaust. Playing further into the themes of not looking and paying little heed, in a later scene, a Catholic Bishop pondering the violence in the world wonders aloud if perhaps God has "other priorities" or perhaps "we have stopped listening."

A thriller in every sense of the word, Don't Look Now is one of those rare suspense films that doesn't lose its punch after it's revealed its mystery. Indeed, that's precisely the point when more questions are likely to spring to mind. Whatever level it's approached by -- a mood piece, a study of grief, a psychic mystery, a ghost story -- Don't Look Now delivers as a chilling, remarkably effective, and atmospheric suspenser that's as much a treat for the eyes (Venice has never looked more hauntingly beautiful) as the imagination. But keep your eyes peeled.

BONUS MATERIAL
Don't Look Now theatrical trailer:


Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011