2020s, Action-Adventure, Scifi, Uncategorized

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriters: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve

By Roderick Heath

Two and a half years since the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s bifurcated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic was released, the second comes charging out of the deep desert of current cinema-going, that vast and dread wasteland left to us by Hollywood. The first part came out amidst the throes of the COVID pandemic, managing to make a decent box office showing despite all that whilst gaining most of its viewers on streaming. Hardly the natural habitat for a pricey, spectacular science fiction epic, but it still made an impression on a mainstream audience plainly starved for big, ambitious genre filmmaking that doesn’t treat us all like eight-year-olds: if any property caught the first ripples of changing zeitgeist of that moment, more apparent now as the superhero movie craze rapidly wanes, it seems to have been Dune. An ironic fate for a movie adapted from a 1965 tome long described as unfilmable, with the previous example of David Lynch’s 1984 version usually offered as horrid warning for the unwary. Props to Villeneuve: for all my lack of passion for his vision in general and the way he applied it to Herbert’s story, he certainly seems to have pulled off a truly impressive feat in selling such an odd, byzantine story to a multiplex audience. This was particularly clear when I settled down to watch the second instalment, this time in the proper temple of a movie theatre, surrounded by a crowd of all ages. Doubly impressive given that the choice of splitting the book in half left the viewer at an important but unsatisfying dramatic juncture, but with the hook planted deep.

The upside of that choice was that much of what distinguishes Dune as a piece of fiction comes to fruition in its later portions. Those were portions that, for all its very real qualities, Lynch’s film couldn’t help but garble when trying squeeze it all into a workable whole – at least, once the Di Laurentiis editing was applied. The novel’s basic narrative structure of a young protagonist’s fall and rise, with the kind of messianic meaning behind his rise that’s long since become a mainstay of modern quasi-mythic storytelling, gave a solid narrative backbone to a tale that snakes and coils with weird and alien purpose in both key concepts and marginalia. So the second part of Dune was always going to be an intriguing proposition: having promised the audience the prospect of seeing Paul Atreides make common cause with the Fremen to avenge themselves upon the evil Harkonnens and win back control of the planet Arrakis, now they can be asked to wrap their heads around the novel’s most bizarre conceits running the gamut from high science fiction to far-out mysticism, from sentient unborn children to space-navigating mutants. Except that…well, I’ll get to that.

Dune: Part Two opens with confidence, at least: Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are being escorted to a Fremen underground city or ‘sietch,’ dodging and slaughtering Harkonnen soldiers sent out to hunt them down. At first they find themselves objects of suspicion and hatred as outsiders, especially as Paul has killed the Fremen Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) in the duel that capped the previous movie. But both Atreides soon find their place amongst the Arrakeens in their different capacities. Jessica is asked to replace the sietch’s dying Reverend Mother, one of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood Jessica was trained by and who inculcates the populace with religious doctrines and prophecies whilst actually purveying social control and selective breeding. Paul for his part determines to school himself thoroughly in Fremen ways and prove a valuable fighter. Sietch elder Stilgar (Javier Bardem) is already thoroughly convinced he is the prophesised leader who will lead the Fremen to Holy War, whilst young warrior Chani (Zendaya), daughter of the murdered Imperial biologist Liet Kynes and a Fremen, maintains a sceptical attitude and wants more practical approaches to ridding their planet of the Harkonnen yolk despite her strong attraction to the young stranger.

Their disparate viewpoints of the same goal at least temporarily intersect in the form of Paul, as he proves not just a good fighter but a wily tactician and an object of increasingly fierce veneration by his fellow ‘Fedaykin’ or elite Fremen warriors, offering the promise of unifying all the Fremen tribes and unleashing them in a grand spree upon the universe: the Fremen look to him as the “Mahdi” and the “lisan al-glaib,” deliverer figures distinct from the concept of the “Kwisatz Haderach” that the Bene Gesserit have been breeding, although the distinction is never elucidated. As a Reverend Mother, Jessica helps further the cause by proselytising to deepen the apparent fulfilment of the prophecy, but the act of drinking “the Water of Life,” a by-product of the infant sandworms that infest Arrakis that works like intensely purified spice, to become a Reverend Mother has the unintended result not just of opening Jessica’s mind to being filled with the memories of other Bene Gesserits, but also her embryonic daughter. Meanwhile, the Emperor of the human universe (Christopher Walken) nurses his unease after having arranged for the Harkonnens to wipe out the Atreides; his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh), also a pupil of the Bene Gesserit leader Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), starts to tease out the truth of this discomforting plot. Mohiam in turn encourages Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), increasingly irate over his kinsman Rabban’s (Dave Bautista) failure to bring the Fremen to heel, to instead place his vigorous but insane nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) in charge of the suppression.

For about its first third, Dune: Part Two rolls on with a force and purpose that suggests it really knows what to do in picking up midway through a narrative, and, moreover, seems to have liberated something in Villeneuve stymied by his earlier Hollywood ventures. There’s a strong early action sequence as Harkonnen soldiers, hunting Paul, Jessica, and Stilgar’s warband, have the tables turned on them despite their attempts to take refuge on a high mesa: Paul takes out a soldier but leaves his back vulnerable to another, only for Jessica to fall on the enemy and beat them to death. The mixture of emotionally volatile frenzy and suspicion of the Fremen towards the two is deftly depicted, setting the scene for the difficult journey that lies ahead. Similarly potent in staging, if a tad illogical, is an action sequence where Rabban, losing his cool, leads his soldiers into an ambush in a sandstorm and finishes up fleeing before Paul back to his ornithopters, barely avoiding being slain by a Fremen assassin during the wild escape. Why Rabban and his people don’t have infrared scopes, or future version of such, for such actions is left vague, but the staging of the scene is certainly effective, with the punchline being Rabban’s expressions of shock and profound disquiet as he comprehends just how fanatical the force he’s opposing is.

The strong early portion of the movie culminates in the vital mythopoeic moment when Paul first dares to ride one of the colossal sandworms, a feat he needs to complete as part of his initiation as a Fremen, but which proves another building block in his growing mystique, when he uses a worm-attracting ‘thumper’ and draws in a truly colossal worm that he manages to steer. This sets the scene for a marvel of special effects entwined with dynamic camerawork and staging to intensify the desired immersive effect, describing vividly the fantastical notion of snaring hold of and being dragged along on the back of an enormous, primeval beast as it cleaves through the desert sand. This in turn sets up the most impressive of the movie’s visuals, the moment when any fan of the material will be anticipating, when the Fremen warriors ride into battle on the backs of the worms, crashing through hordes of Harkonnen and Imperial soldiers in an awesome vision of primal power and animal will overwhelming even the most fantastically advanced human protection.

Rather than carefully slice up and feed portions to the audience promising the evil still lying in wait for the Atreides and the Fremen, however, the narrative shifts focus to the Harkonnens for a long chunk of the movie, stalling the pace in a manner the entry never really recovers from. Villeneuve wants to make a real impression of the menace of Feyd-Rautha, as opposed to the glimpses of Sting looking bug-eyed in leather shorts in Lynch’s take, even if this version ultimately, similarly emphasises the character as villain beefcake. So we get an introduction of Feyd-Rautha with his latex-clad concubines, casually slicing throats of luckless underlings, in scenes that look like they were designed for a particularly fetishistic mid-1990s fashion mag spread. Despite the (relatively) cooler tone of Villeneuve’s filming and the acting by Skarsgård and Butler, they’re actually even more cartoonish than the takes on the Harkonnens than in Lynch’s film, sapped of all their intellectual as well as physical pith and ruthlessness, leering, growling, raping, and butchering at whim. Villeneuve and Spaihts make Feyd-Rautha a sort of melding of wicked Roman Emperor traits – crazy and capricious like Caligula, fond of gladiatorial combat like Commodus, a matricide like Nero. But the aspect that Lynch emphasised, in a motif he would go onto reiterate much more intricately in Mulholland Drive (2000), that Feyd-Rautha is Paul’s dark double, the projection of his id made flesh, and the alternative casting in the matinee idol of political theatre stakes, is utterly beyond Villeneuve’s literalist sensibility.

Similarly, the Baron’s peccadilloes have been given a slight updating and upgrading in grotesquery – where in the books he had a penchant for sadistically raping and killing young men, here he’s glimpsed with a stack of mangled pubescent girls in his chambers. Villeneuve returns to the images of Skarsgård swathed in fake fat and swimming in glistening oil-like fluid after enjoying rapine and murder, to make sure we know these are not nice people. The “black sun” of the Harkonnen’s home planet Giedi Prime is exploited as an excuse to desaturate the exterior sequences to a virtual black-and-white palette, increasing the fashion spread-gone-evil aesthetic, and Feyd-Rautha goes into gladiatorial combat with some luckless Atreides captives with his guard of genetically engineered mutant men as backup. To be fair, some of this is striking and effectively nasty, reminding the viewer that a universe ruled by the Harkonnens would be a nightmarish hellscape, and indeed one where they’re tolerated is already too close to that status as it is, in this future that’s regressed politically into feudalism. Not that Villeneuve has anything to say about that: it’s just a vaguely techno-Ruritanian backdrop for the plot, a convention Herbert took from classic space opera, converted into an actual idea and conceptual frame, gave birth in turn to a generic convention via the material’s children like Star Wars (1977), and now isn’t going to be converted back into an idea.

Perhaps the most prominent victim of the adaptation’s choices and priorities is Herbert’s most bizarre and memorable creation of the early books, Paul’s sister Alia, who in the book is born as a fully sentient and cognisant Bene Gesserit. Regarded as an “abomination” by Mohiam for that reason and created contrary to all Bene Gesserit precepts, Alia plays a vital role in how the climax of family revenge plays out, presented as a mere vulnerable child to the Emperor and Harkonnen but able to kill Harkonnen with poison. The grown-up Alia is even more fundamental to the two follow-up novels, where she becomes the lover of the resurrected Duncan Idaho but is later possessed by the transmitted consciousness of her grandfather the Baron. Villeneuve keeps Alia to mere glimpses of her in a foetal state within her mother, having psychic conversations with her, and a brief appearance, in one of Paul’s prescient vision, of Anya Taylor-Joy playing the adult Alia – which is, admittedly, very apt casting. It’s not that surprising that Villeneuve would avoid the awkwardness of trying to realise the young Alia as a fully sentient and deadly toddler (although the very young Alicia Witt managed to play her in Lynch’s version to some effect), as well as trying to pare back the extra clutter of characters. But the fact that she’s absent but the narrative shoehorns in Lady Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux), a scheming Bene Gesserit acolyte who seduces Feyd-Rautha to get pregnant by him, makes that excuse feel a bit flimsy. I felt like Alia’s absence was more intended to remove some of the eccentricity and the complexity from the work: she’s too definite a presentation of Herbertian strangeness and provocation to sit easily with Villeneuve’s efforts to demystify Paul and render the story into a more standard parable for the dangers of fanaticism and power politics, as well as something likely to make the current mass audience uncomfortable.

Villeneuve’s cachet as a filmmaker to date – at least since he left behind French-Canadian art cinema for the heady climes of Hollywood – has been applying a formidable but facetious layer of stylisation to movies that proceed with highly programmatic and even banal dramatic beats. As made plain enough in previous films like Prisoners (2013) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Villeneuve has a love for diffused lightning, heavy filter work, and other atmospheric visual textures that recall the grand old days of Hollywood high style cinema from the 1980s but with a more contemporary spin. And, yes, compared to the sleek, almost painfully coherent and featureless style of CGI delivered to us by superhero movies in the past few years, Dune: Part Two does suggest new paths for contemporary visual effects to take. Villeneuve wields such texturing here, enabled again by cinematographer Greig Fraser, with intent to enrich the narrative with some sense of connection in the imagery – the way, for instance, he pays attention to the flicker of erupting fireworks penetrating the cavernous interiors of the Harkonnen citadel where Feyd-Rautha walks rhymes with a later moment when Paul and Chani spy the strobing light from artillery unleashed upon a Fremen sietch, marking the coming of Feyd-Rautha’s wrath to Arrakis.

Villeneuve meanwhile swathes Ferguson so often in cosmic chadors, hoods, and jewellery, and painted over with cabalistic lettering, that I started to wonder if he was indulging some sort of atavistic fetish, but decided that’s too interesting for him. This, even as Jessica’s role is minimised, with some of her dramatic function handed over to Chani. Villeneuve and his special effects team are sparing throughout Dune: Part Two, an episode where the source material was always going to offer up manna to the visually-oriented filmmaker. The desert filming is more effective in this movie than its precursor, with Fraser allowing more colour and texture to certain shots, the sands of Arrakis sometimes bleached and cheerless, other times permeated with lush ochres and governed by skies as blue as the eyes of the spice-gorged Fremen. And yet there’s something fascinatingly inert about the bulk of Villeneuve’s imagery, for all its polish and conceptual grandeur. There’s nothing expressive about it. Except for flashes here and there I gained no real feeling of entrance into a grand fantastical universe, but like that universe was being conveyed in the language of the kind of crisp digital gritty-pretty gloss of video games and AI-generated artworks. Only the repeated image of the titanic worm charging through the sand, one Villeneuve knows is dynamite and repeats at the very end, wields a truly arresting sense of might and transcendent power. A feeling of detachment permeates the film as a whole, and it stems from a more fundamental problem of attitude than simply to Villeneuve’s hyper-fussy aesthetics.

As an adaptation of a book, Dune: Part Two proves a crushing disappointment. Instead of Harkonnen’s comeuppance coming from an unexpected, mildly shocking and memorable place, it’s accomplished in the film in the most desultory terms. For any fans of the novel and its follow-ups hoping for more of the essential detail to make the cut this time, there is still no mention of the Butlerian Jihad or the Spacing Guild, or so much of the book’s imaginitive infrastructure. Just exactly why the spice is so important to this fictional world is left so fuzzy and poorly described that I’m not really sure anyone watching either part of Villeneuve’s diptych and who hasn’t read the books will have any real idea of it, beyond being a quasi-magical MacGuffin. The process of extracting the Water of Life from a young sandworm is shown in well-filmed detail, but the actual connection between the worms and the spice isn’t elucidated, and so the way it’s deeply wound in with Paul’s apotheosis is utterly garbled. The revelation that Jessica is actually Harkonnen’s daughter is dropped with all the grace of a soap opera. It’s always a delight to see Walken in a film and yet he’s oddly ineffectual as the Emperor: Villeneuve seems to have wanted him to embody the haunting, exhausting nature of vast power, rather than mere malice, but the necessary sense of a Machiavellian nature operating almost in spite of itself never comes across, partly because, well, Walken is getting a bit old. The crucial exchange between Paul and the Emperor in the climactic confrontation, when the Emperor coolly informs Paul that his father Duke Leto’s humane streak was exactly his weakness, fails to land as sharply as it should because Villeneuve doesn’t seem to have any clear emotion he wants Walken to express beyond the quality of being Walken.

More conspicuously, Dune: Part Two might well be the apotheosis of an increasingly depressing trend in modern genre storytelling where it’s assumed that underlying subtext or real-world blueprint of the generic metaphors are in some fashion the “true” meaning of what’s going on, and therefore anything that breaks down the distance in terms of interpretation is only dispensing with a nicety. In this paradigm genre storytelling only exists to sell ideas and messages to the great unwashed. Whereas the great power of genre metaphor is precisely the way it generalises, transforming aspects of reality into functional abstractions that can change and develop other meanings over time. In specific terms of Dune: Part Two, this means that Villeneuve has done his absolute best to ensure that we all know that Herbert’s story is a metaphor for oil dependency and the Fremen are not a future race eight millennia and millions of light years removed from us with retained aspects of the cultures that fed into their identity, but slightly coded representatives of Middle Eastern and other hard-done-by populaces. Leaving aside the faintly racist absurdity behind the assumption that a horde of Arabic people were just itching to up sticks and shift holus bolus to a whole planet of desert to hang out on, Villeneuve and Spaihts ram home the similarity to contemporary problems by inventing a new aspect to Herbert’s Fremen society by referring to certain sectors of the Fremen as “fundamentalists,” a word not used in the book and with no equivalent either. The Fremen in the book had their own, peculiar culture and interpretations of the religious ideas common to the Empire as disseminated by the Bene Gesserit, but they weren’t bumpkins. Villeneuve on the other hand subdivides them, between those who are bumpkins and those who, as represented by Chani, are more cosmopolitan (the film elides the fact that Chani herself is the product of personal and cultural mating, too). The film portrays Stilgar as a zealot and gullible stooge for the messianic project, rather than the serious and stalwart warrior in the book, now the kind of true believer who sees even Paul’s casual denials of being the Mahdi as proof he is – moments that, at least, give the film some of its few moments of ironic levity.

Chalamet, to his credit, grows nicely into the role of Paul in his second outing: if he didn’t wield a newly voluble and mature intensity as Paul takes command when confronting the Fremen elders after drinking the Water of Life, the film would fail entirely, but he delivers, even if he’s still not exactly the second coming of Kirk Douglas when whipping up the Fremen for battle. The completeness of the character’s transformation from the gangly manor-born whelp of the first film to the coldly victorious warlord by the end of the second is most coherently conveyed by his presence. The script however lets him down in too many ways. Whilst Paul isn’t displaced in narrative function, exactly, the film disengages from his experience when it really needs to be weaving its way deeply into his viewpoint to put across his blend of increasing desperation and hardening purpose as he sees every choice being cut off through his burgeoning powers of foresight. Villeneuve leans on the one, repeated image of people writhing in agony from the starvation incurred by what he might unleash. There’s no meditation on Paul’s accruing of hardened battle experience and emergent tactical genius, the edges he’s been gifted by being schooled by master warriors combined with the vulcanising heat of his experiences to create a truly formidable leader. Part of this stems from the highly truncated timeframe: in the book this took years, during which time Alia was born and grew, and Paul and Chani had a child who was killed by the Harkonnens. Paul’s prescient visions are boringly filmed and conveyed, and the crucial moment when he dares to grasp his destiny and drink the Water of Life is arrived at, and passes, without any real sense of climactic punch or truly dramatic meaning. Villeneuve’s lack of engagement with the quasi-mystical aspect is of course deeply connected with his general disinterest in the story’s more psychological, mystical, and symbolic aspects, and indeed his desire to have his messianic antihero cake and eat his interrogative parable about religious manipulation too.

Indeed, this reveals Villeneuve’s lack of real imagination underneath the superficial prettiness and conceptual indolence of his pictures. All he gives us is Chalamet staring at his hands and mumbling something about all the alternatives he can see now. Paul’s romance with Chani is also a victim of the fudging: if Chalamet and Zendaya have any chemistry, I didn’t see it, and as a result a love affair that’s supposed to root Paul to the present and upturn Chani’s sense of identity and loyalty remains a stillborn affair, a segue into fodder for the actors’ TikTok fans. Villeneuve and Spaihts moreover go a little further in imposing their own ideas of modernising upon Herbert’s text in a way that feels spasmodic and tacked-on, particularly in the attempt to refashion Chani into a sceptic towards Paul even as she falls in love with him and helps coach him during his initiation period. Zendaya is certainly evolving into a strong actress, and whilst I scarcely bought where this take on Chani insists on steering the character, I admired Zendaya’s attempts to make it palpable with her increasingly troubled and finally furious and agonised visage lending a note of emotional immediacy to the very end that the film otherwise lacks. Josh Brolin returns with welcome, grizzled gravitas when Gurney Halleck is revealed to still be alive and working with a squad of outlaw spice harvesters and smugglers, but his return to the fold isn’t conveyed with any drama in staging: Villeneuve simply reveals him amongst the ranks of smugglers. But Brolin is a canny actor, and he sells the moment of Gurney and Paul’s reunion, with a flash of authentic, potent emotion. Bautista is required to rant a bit. And Pugh, well, there’s not much she can do with a thankless role.

There’s something extraordinarily inefficient about the way the film unfolds, too. To be fair, Villeneuve seems to be trying to maintain something of the novel’s stately, careful progression towards ends that are literally preordained, and relative lack of described physical action. But the very guiding principle and pleasure of the book is the way each chapter is presented as a kind of intellectual chess match between various characters, where the conversations are forms of warfare by other means “I can kill with a word,” Paul declares at the end of a novel where words have been weapons right along – and where the battles in turn are laced with their own kind of dialogue, as in Paul’s final duel with Feyd-Rautha when he tries to understand the importance of his choice of costume. By contrast, here the dialogue exchanges here are bland and expository. The flaccidness of the script is underlined when it forces Zendaya to repeat her immortally clumsy opening line from the first film, slightly modified now in conversation with Paul — “Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low,” like she’s writing copy for a tourism advertisement rather than trying to convey one great source of passion in her life to another. Despite splitting the book and the second part being over two and a half hours long, the narrative never shifts into a higher gear. Excessive emphasis is given to aspects like Gurney showing Paul, Stilgar, and other Fremen leaders where he hid the Atreides stock of atomic weapons – which seems present mostly so Villeneuve can nudge the viewer with extra promise of an anti-nuclear parable as well as an anti-colonial and anti-Jihadist parable. And, worst of all, the rather curtailed final battle arrives as more than a bit of an anticlimax, as the grand vision of the worm-riding Fremen comes and is then disposed of.

But where Dune: Part Two subtly but cumulatively really derails the story is in how Villeneuve wants to have his messianic antihero and his sceptical, anti-zealot message too. Herbert’s book certainly comments on the way mythologies are constructed and used by both power and oppressed populaces, but ultimately the narrative hinges on the way it transmutes the desire for religious iconography, and figures who fit into the classical understanding of the word “hero” rather than its devolved modern usage, for a science fiction setting. Lynch’s Dune settled for purveying the ascension of Paul to virtual godhood as a cheeralong journey, robbed of its darker elements, but at least Lynch really got behind that, delivering his action climax with the enthusiasm of a classical war movie, and leaving off with a vision of the miraculous that wields nagging power, cutting to black from the awesome, Cecil B. DeMille-meets-Frank Frazetta vision of rain falling upon Arrakis and the Fremen hordes. Villeneuve won’t commit to dark revelry nor high tragedy nor roaring craziness. Paul is in some ways a false messiah for the Fremen, but also a very real one, and his coming to a certain extent only rides the wave of their worldview and capacity, which is, again, the product not of our world but of a futuristic realm where the religious and the scientific have long since fused back into a curious new singularity of outlook. The Fremen are inseparable from their faiths and warlike talents, and Paul soon learns to his chagrin that his revenge is inseparable from the unleashing of a tide of human potential, both glorious and horrific: no matter what he does in this regard, the tide will be unleashed, because it has been pent up too long, a phenomenon so often glimpsed in history when stable tyrannies end. The later books in Herbert’s cycle make it apparent that Paul resisted the ultimate choice which his son Leto II fatefully makes, to become a practically immortal human-sandworm chimera and strangle all human ingenuity and progress for millennia until the right moment comes to let it loose in a fresh torrent.

In Villeneuve’s filming, this all falls by the wayside so he can have his simplified take on the story in a way that sets out to court current-day collegian clichés about colonialism and capitalist exploitation and white saviours. The script refocuses Chani’s role in the story, in itself not a bad idea as she’s essentially only the hero’s love interest in the book, to make her at once Paul’s lover and vital helpmate – she helps train him in the ways of desert life – but also a bulwark against complete acceptance of his emergence as leader, turning her scepticism on the idea of the Lisan al-Glaib and Paul’s embodiment of it as an outsider. Again, this does flesh out something in the book, but which was more Jessica’s role, as both Paul’s guide but also an increasingly dubious figure – embracing her Bene Gesserit status means detaching herself to a degree from Paul’s project. By the movie’s end Chani turns her back on Paul as he ascends to the throne by marrying Irulan, ranting that she still wants free her people and that “This prophecy is how they enslave us!”, when, point in fact, it allows the Fremen to brutalise the rest of the human universe. It’s understandable that Villeneuve and Spaihts want to open up at least some distance between themselves and the book’s implication that everyone in the end is a servant to some kind of system, be it political, biological, social, religious, or fate itself, Paul as Kwisatz Haderach most of all, even whilst aiming for the lesser of myriad evils.

But it feels, like so many things today, more like a sop to contemporary progressive youth self-congratulation: I reject bad, therefore I am good. Moreover, Chani’s choice of flight is finally less an act of principled conscientious objection, but a peevish refusal of romantic compromise, as opposed to the book’s ironic last lines where Jessica and Chani, whilst locked in their nominal roles as mere concubines, will be remembered historically as wives, thus achieving their own subversion of the hierarchy much as Paul turns the imperial power structure against itself for his own ends. Herbert’s ahead-of-the-curve feminism was fascinatingly articulated through a reactionary future patriarchy, another potentially rich disparity that never gets explored. For all his trumpeted efforts to retain the darker qualities of Herbert’s concepts, Villeneuve ultimately swaps the cop-out of Lynch’s version for a different kind of cop-out, an indulgence of moral sentiment with political dimensions appended to a work expressly about how circumstances can sometimes refuse such indulgences. And this failure of nerve helps douse the secret fire of the story it’s trying to tell, keeping it arm’s length from its heroes’ experiences of moral terror as well as the flush of well-earned victory and the exaltations of quasi-transcendental experience, mastery of time and space at the price of peering into its dankest abyss. Villeneuve manages here what he also inflicted upon Blade Runner, sapping a property that runs rich and deep with poetic vision and rare imagination and imposing the most literal meanings upon it, even whilst affecting to maintain the façade of fidelity.

1980s, Action-Adventure, Australian cinema, Scifi

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) / Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Directors: George Miller / George Miller, George Ogilvie
Screenwriters: Terry Hayes, George Miller, Brian Hannant / Terry Hayes, George Miller

By Roderick Heath

The success of George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) prompted a sequel swift and true, emerging in 1981 under the title of Mad Max 2 in Australia. When it was bought up for distribution in the US by Warner Bros., who saw little appeal in linking it to the previous movie when distributor AIP hadn’t treated so well although it still gained modest cult impact, the film was rechristened as The Road Warrior after a repeated line in the movie’s narration, and this time scored a massive hit. Today it’s become convention to call the film by both titles combined. It’s possible to regard all the films in the Mad Max series as variations on a theme and a character archetype, or, in current parlance, “soft reboots,” rather than firmly sequential narratives, even before Miller was obliged to recast the lead role with Tom Hardy supplanting Mel Gibson for 2015’s extension Mad Max: Fury Road. As such the series stands closer in nature to Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy or many of the James Bond films than, say, the Star Wars films or most other franchise film series where continuity is regarded as an overriding value. Nonetheless Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, whilst leaping off into a more extreme and fantastical realm from the first entry, does pay heed to a sense of direct connection. Less original in its world-building than Mad Max proved as a whole despite its magpie borrowings, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior nonetheless went several steps further towards purifying and reconsecrating the temple of pure action cinema.

The follow-up’s leap in ambition and budget was marked by Miller hiring some major technical talents on the Australian movie scene, including future Oscar winner Dean Semler as cinematographer and multiple nominee Richard Francis-Bruce as editor. Miller, who had received offers to work Hollywood including, supposedly, to direct First Blood (1982), had also dallied with making a rock musical in collaboration with screenwriter Terry Hayes, but with everyone wanting a Mad Max sequel he and Hayes and a third collaborator, Brian Hannant, wrote a script, this time aiming for something more self-consciously elemental and classically heroic whilst extending their theme of social decline and resource shortage to a new extreme. This time the plotline could almost be written on a matchbox, mostly jettisoning the jots of sociological theory and satire that defined the first film in exchange for situational intensity and raw-boned and elemental drama. That drama harks back to classic Western films like Unconquered (1947), Escape From Fort Bravo (1953), Shane (1953), and the genre-adjacent Zulu (1963); John Ford epics like Drums Along The Mohawk (1939), Fort Apache (1948), and The Searchers (1956); and above all Akira Kurosawa’s films. But Miller and company stripped away supernal character analysis and social context found in such forebears, and concentrated on an elemental situation of besiegement and chase, mobility and immobility in perpetual dialogue as the essence of life and death and storytelling.

The film starts with a prologue that explains the background causes on the oncoming social breakdown that Mad Max only hinted at, or which could be taken as a slight situational revision, played out over a blend of documentary footage and scenes from the first film. An old man’s voice (Harold Baigent) recalls in sad and sullen metre how a crisis of fossil fuel supplies, exacerbated by confused reactions from global governments (“They talked, and talked, and talked…”), eventually led to conflict and degradation and eventual apocalypse, a downfall Max ironically weathered through his retreat into “the wasteland.” Meanwhile “only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage” prospered if they were willing to “go to war over a tank of juice.” Max roars into the film proper still behind the wheel of his V8 Interceptor, as if emerging straight out of the very end of the previous film but plainly with a long time having elapsed – Max now has grey on his temples, a brace around the leg The Toecutter shot him in, and a blue heeler cattle dog as a companion. He’s being chased down by highway corsairs after his petrol, with one of their number, the Mohawk-sporting Wez (Vernon Wells) with his comrade-pet-concubine ‘The Golden Youth’ (Jerry O’Sullivan) sharing his bike, about to provide Max with a special nemesis for the movie.

But Wez is only the lieutenant of the berserkers’ leader, the towering, bulbously bemuscled potentate known as ‘Lord Humungus’ (Kjell Nilsson), who hides a terribly scarred face behind a metallic mask, a flourish that signals him as down-and-dirty drive-in kin of Darth Vader. Max manages to outdrive his pursuers, with two of the berserker vehicles crashing, one hitting the road-straddling carcass of an abandoned semitrailer. Wez screeches impotently from his bike at Max and tugs an arrow accidentally shot into him by one of his own men, whilst Max hastily catches gas pouring out of one of the crashed berserker vehicles. Across the semitrailer someone has scrawled a new psalm – The Vermin Have Inherited The Earth, although the word “Earth” is the one actually written on the prime mover, a first hint this vehicle can be separated, reborn and repurposed as the encapsulation of hope, a fusion of Ark and Juggernaut. As he often did in the first film Miller touches on horror movie imagery as Max is compelled for a moment by the scream of a berserker trapped in his wrecked vehicle, his gnarled hand reaching out but falling limp, and then the gnarled and rotting corpse of the semi’s driver falling from the cab. Max also finds a music box mechanism that tinkles out “Happy Birthday to You,” a touch that recalls an entirely lost world of childlike innocence and Max’s own deep pain – and also one that recalls the leitmotif of the musical watch from Leone’s For A Few Dollars More (1965).

A little farther down the road Max comes upon a parked gyrocopter with a snake upon it, acting as a lethal antitheft device. Max is ambushed by its Captain (Bruce Spence), a gangly, whacky character who, like Max, is a canny survivor, but in his own, sly, effective if less commanding manner. The Captain springs out of the ground where he’s concealed himself and holding at the point of the crossbow he carries – bullets are all but gone by this point, and arrows have become the new weapon of choice. The Captain loses his advantage when Max’s dog springs out of the Interceptor and fells him. To stop Max killing him, the Captain raves about an oil pumping and refining station nearby that’s still operational, and Max takes his captive to check out the station: Max binds up the Captain and sets up an amusingly malicious trap for him as he rigs up his gun so his dog can pull the trigger with a toy in its mouth and tied to the trigger, the Captain sweating with particular anxiously when the dog spots a rabbit out on the wasteland. Soon Max and the Captain take up station on the peak of a hill overlooking the refinery, which proves to be operating just as the Captain said, with the petrol being stored in a petrol tanker that rather conspicuously lacks an engine to pull it. Another wrinkle is that the site is now being besieged by Lord Humungus’s flotilla of vehicles, manned by his small army of marauders, who have entirely given themselves up not just to the remorseless logic of raiding and chasing down what the Captain calls “guzzeline,” but have adopted a purposefully crazed and atavistic mindset (and wardrobe) to match, spurning the civilisation that’s left them high and dry.

By contrast, the assailed community working the refinery, equivalent to the hardy homesteaders and settlers in a classic Western, are clinging on to their remnant identities and aspirations, as they hope to use the fuel they’re stockpiling to make a long non-stop drive to a remnant corner of still-habitable earth in the north. Although not immersive and kinetic as the portions of the movie on either side of it, Miller’s style reaches an apotheosis of a kind in the lengthy vignette of Max and the Captain keeping watch on the refinery and the marauders. Miller finds eerie, quasi-abstract beauty in the vantages on the marauders roaring around the barricaded refinery, dust trails whirling in their wakes, hazy lights shining out as the sun dips and rises. Max and the Captain peer down at the scene, Max with binoculars and Captain with his large, vintage telescope – until Max forcibly swaps them – and absorb the basics of the drama unfolding silent movie-style and glimpsed from a distance. The provided theatre and spectacle entertains the Captain until some of the besieged try to flee the refinery in their own vehicles, only to be chased and down and crash. Wez and some other marauders assault a man and woman dragged from vehicle, pinning the man to an old tyre with crossbow bolts and making him watch whilst the woman is gang-raped and then executed by Wez. Once the marauders chase down the other escapees, Max descends, knocks out a guard left with the skewered man, Nathan (David Downer), and takes him to the refinery on the promise of a load of gas for saving his life.

But Nathan dies as Max delivers him, and Max is chained up and treated disdainfully by the settlers, who are led by the no-nonsense Papagallo (Mike Preston). Also in their ranks are the strident Warrior Woman (Virginia Hey), old-timer Curmudgeon (Syd Heylen), a pretty young woman (Arkie Whiteley), and The Feral Kid (Emil Minty), a bushy-haired enfant sauvage who wields a steel boomerang, has dug tunnels like a rabbit under and beyond the refinery, and delights in the music box when Max plays it for him: Max makes an instant friend when he gifts him the mechanism. The settlers assume, not without justification, that Max is another contemptible brute of the wasteland not worthy of their time or fuel, but his fate is made immediately moot when the marauders return. The Lord Humungus is announced, with an ingenious blend of medieval heraldic function, disc jockey shtick, and fight MC hype, by The Toadie (Max Phipps) as the “Warrior of the Wasteland, the Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-a!” Humungus tries to browbeat the defenders by displaying other captured members of their scouting expedition tied to the front of his battle wagon as grotesque figureheads, whilst promising to spare everyone’s lives if they’ll simply abandon the refinery and the fuel to him. The Feral Kid meanwhile starts hurling his steel boomerang at Wez, but kills the Golden Youth instead, much to Wez’s infuriation, and also slices off the fingers of The Toadie when he foolishly tries to catch the missile. Humungus leaves the settler to make up their minds, and when it becomes apparent the settlers risked sending out the scouts to try and find something to haul their tank of petrol, Max attracts their attention and promises to go and fetch the prime mover in exchange for a share of the gas.

Around the simple, space-and-objective defined forms of the plot, Miller weaves little flourishes redolent of personal lore. At one point the Captain fights with the dog over who will get to eat the snake that’s successfully guarded the gyro from a dead marauder. The Captain’s lamenting for the dear lost days when women wore lingerie contrasts the taste for violence, rapine and enslavement the marauders have given themselves over to. The Curmudgeon shows Max old postcards of the tribe’s intended destination – the Sunshine Coast – with the sales of pitch of it being “paradise – fresh water, nothing but sunshine, nothing to do but breed.” The contrasting mystique of heroes and villains is defined in the most basic way possible: the good guys wear white, the villains black, whilst also incidentally looking like the roller disco versus the S&M club. Whilst Miller sneaks in the virtually compulsory (for the era’s Aussie genre films) sex gag, as a rutting male and female marauder are revealed as their tent is ripped away to their surprise during one action scene, the landscape actually seems post-sexual, even antenatal, the marauders generally indulging homoerotic dominance and submission a way of getting rocks off and also creating a new, purified social order. The marauders include women, but they’re indistinguishable from the men. Although the marauders rape the female settler they catch, they quickly slay her, and save their real jollies for the men they’ve caught: those are crucified and emasculated in a foul ritual invocation by Humungus and henchmen, for the sake of terrorising the other settlers and announcing their own power. Humungus retains a sleek, powerful handgun kept in a lovingly tended case along with his last bullets and a vintage photo, perhaps an heirloom of his ancestors, whilst The Curmudgeon wears a vintage army helmet and uniform, a touch reminiscent of a different kind of post-apocalyptic movie, Richard Lester’s The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), itself perhaps another ancestor in Miller’s head, and other counterculture-era satires.

The settlers contrast the marauders not just in look but in social approach: where the Humungus is a rebirth of the warrior-king and tyrant, the settlers have a leader in Papagallo but still debate their purpose and choices, with fraught argument following the Humungus’s ultimatum as factions debate the merits of obeying him or fighting it out. Max’s intervention, with the promise of bringing back the prime mover, reunites them even as they have no idea if Max will honour his agreement and return, although they hope he’ll return for his car. Max eludes the marauders’ pickets and, on the march to the truck, comes across the Captain, dragging the log Max left him chained to, trying to get back to his gyro. Max, in a variation on the “two kinds of people” gag from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966), gets the Captain to carry the fuel he’s been lugging, but gifts him freedom once the truck is started, much to the Captain’s glee, declaring them partners. And he does indeed become Max’s invaluable supporter, dropping bombs on marauders and rescuing him when he almost dies during an ill-fated attempt to flee in the Interceptor. The Feral Kid presents Max with a surrogate for the son he lost, but he’s far from being some cute moppet, but rather giving a glimpse of the breed that might grow up in this ruined world – prelapsarian and preverbal, able to defend itself from a young age, at once savage but also curiously innocent, delighted to fits of eager panting when he sees Max waste their mutual foes. He could well be the embodiment of the audience, similarly tickled in the deep roots of the cerebral cortex.

The film’s ultimate revelation, that the Kid is in fact the narrator, recalling these events as an old man through the fog of intervening decades of fading memory and accumulating mythos, gives the drama perfect keynote. Not simply in finally, fully investing Miller’s project of rendering Max a new edition of the primeval hero, the kind of titan spoken about around campfires and multiplexes in tones of awe and aspiring delight, but in suggesting the impact Max still has almost in spite of himself – the survivor Max, the loner, the Road Warrior, is still nonetheless also still the social sentinel and father, inscribing his persona on the inheritors and becoming something much larger than the singular being he is. In this regard Miller built upon not just the figure of the lost quasi-paternal hero of Shane but also the oft-floated notion that Leone’s Westerns had been in essence Homeric tales of demigods at roam transposed to a more recent and specific setting. Miller advances that notion a little further, suggesting how such tales become rooted in societies and their chains of storytelling, their ideals and role-playing, and how these attach to parent figures. The utter weirdness of the world Max contends with, the blighted weirdoes and perverts and maniacs left fighting over the scraps of civilisation, seems to pull in a different direction to that kind of higher-minded theme, but actually helps underline it, particularly as the marauders embrace the bestial, berserker side of human nature, providing this world with the equivalent of the wicked pagan priests and cruel warlords besetting the existence of the hero.

Max amidst the settlers is plainly a man out of his element and opaque in his needs beyond resuming his self-sufficient wandering – the Captain, by contrast, acts on his desires by convincing the young woman to leave with him in the gyrocopter, only for her to demur at the last moment in deciding her loyalty to the tribe can’t be shaken off easily. This in turn opens the door for the Captain to stay with her and the others and inherit the role of leader, as signalled at the end. Papagallo, the leader with selfless ideals and a goal in mind, sets in motion the great quest and shepherds his flock towards a hopeful goal even with the possibility it’s illusory or impossible. He’s a figure from a slightly different age in human development, at once vital and effectual for the settlers but also vulnerable, encumbered, refusing to give himself up to a sharklike existence on the wasteland in the way Max has, which Papagallo sees as a surrender that makes him no different to the marauders. Papagallo is provoked to interrogative frustration by Max when frustrated by his determination to leave, pushing his buttons in turn (“What burned you out, eh? Kill one man to many? See too many people die? Lose some family?”) until Max decks him. Papagallo needs an Achilles like Max – only a man with his berserker edge can run the gauntlet of the marauders, but Max finally learns in gruelling fashion that once plunged into the situation he cannot easily escape, as when he does try to flee in his gassed-up Interceptor, Wez, The Toadie and other chase him down, Wez smashing his windscreen and causing him to fly off the road. Max, bloodied and bedraggled, barely manages to crawl away before The Toadie sets off his booby-trapped fuel tanks, blowing up himself and the wrecked relic. The Captain comes out on his gyro and picks Max up, as Miller communicates Max’s battered body and swooning mind through double exposures, before he’s carried high over the marauders and back to the stockade, a brief anticipation of a flight to heaven before returning to hell on earth.

Despite The Road Warrior’s derivations from international cinema classics, its essential Australianness is nonetheless still undeniable. This is particularly true of the way Miller found a clever way of rhyming one form of resource scarcity that’s perpetually shaped human interaction with the Australian land, the relative paucity of water beyond coastal regions, with another, the reliance on fossil fuel resources to power the metal-wrapped steeds of speed-freak dreaming. That reliance had taken a sharp, severe shock in Australia as elsewhere during the oil embargoes of the 1970s. In many ways author Randolph Stow’s 1962 novel Tourmaline, a symbolic and allusive novel about a dying town on the fringe of the expanding inland desert that turns to a wandering, seemingly blessed diviner to seek out water to save the town but who can only find gold, is as much a precursor to Mad Max as any of its genre film bunkmates. Another ancestor could well be Neville Shute’s On The Beach, filmed in 1959, with its presumption that the characteristic that’s always frustrated Aussies – the nation’s distance from the rest of the world – might be in the case of nuclear war some kind of boon. One could also count as a spiritual forebear David Crosby’s song “Wooden Ships” which proposed a more sedate but not that dissimilar vision of people surviving nuclear war by keeping perpetually on the move in boats.

Miller’s sense of cinematic largesse blended aspects of many of the filmmakers he was paying homage to – Siegel’s deep-focus shots and Leone’s looming visages meet Ford’s vantages over sweeping landscapes and frame-bisecting lines of action, and Kurosawa’s wipes and figure-gripping vistas. The greatness of The Road Warrior lies in how it sets its ideas in motion whilst barely slowing down, as one of those rare movies that manages to transmit its ideas through visuals and action. Even the quieter, reflective moments, snatched by the characters in between the mean business of living and dying, contribute to the film’s overall, headlong narrative thrust, like Max forging his bond with the Kid with the music box mechanism. Brian May, who had scored the first film, returned to provide the sequel with big, booming, self-consciously epic music that once more situated the drama somewhere at the intersection of raw melodrama and pop art retro pastiche, and also nimbly mediating the generic swerves within it from rampaging action to horror movie cues to strains at once grand and plaintive at the very end. The main action set-pieces see Max driving pell-mell through the marauder camp to get the prime mover into the refinery stockade, and then make the climactic breakout as Max charges out with the truck onto a remnant road, the tanker festooned with defenders, whilst the rest of the settlers break away, with their fast-moving roadsters under Papagallo returning to intersect with Max, and the Captain drops bombs from above.

Both of these scenes are intricate in staging and structuring despite the simplicity of the goals, cut and filmed with a maximum of dynamic impact. Like one shot that utilises a camera peering out from within one of the marauder cars as it speeds up and moves to intersect with the prime mover as it barrels by, the sense of lateral motion and spatial immediacy all but physically sweeping the viewer into the imagery’s midst. Miller assembles the roaring action with a precise sense of tactical intent even when the basic purpose is to go real fast and not stop. As Max dashes to the stockade, the marauders try to halt the truck by firing arrows into its tyres, whilst Humungus fires his pistol at the truck’s engine, trying to put it out of commission and nearly succeeding, but Max still manages to get the prime mover into the stockade and the sentinels at the gate annihilate the marauder vehicles luckless to get too close with mounted flamethrowers – a particular advantage they have as long as they stick close to their fuel source. The big chase sees the marauders picking off the defenders riding on the tanker, with Wez shooting the Warrior Woman with arrows whilst another luckless defender sets himself on fire with a Molotov cocktail. The marauders then try to clamber on board, as simply shoving the truck off the road is too risky to its precious load. Meanwhile those marauders stupid enough to occupy the abandoned refinery are consumed as charges set burning eplode and decimate the place.

Miller builds up to the breakout with succinct character grace-notes, like that between Max and Papagallo, as Max despite his injuries announces he wants to drive the truck out, and Papagallo, after a brief display of scepticism, hands over his gun and a satchel of shells for it, before the two men give each-other salutary nods from behind their respective steering wheels just before venturing out. The mechanics who repair the prime mover’s damage also affix a stout bulldozer blade to the front, armouring it against Humungus’s bullets, whilst the marauder lord keeps Wez literally on a leash to deploy to best effect when he sees fit during the chase. The Captain helps clear their path by dropping incendiaries on the blockade, and Max soon finds he has company as the Kid has stowed aboard, but the lad proves invaluable as he’s able to warn Max about attackers and even put his teeth to good use. The presence of the gyrocopter, zooming by high over the ground action, is visually exploited as it passes high over the charging vehicles, a tide of motion running at different speeds, all this steel and rage and flesh charging across the vast plain to ends at once urgent and illusory, the plain itself practically featureless, a cradle of surrealist dreaming. Max makes unique art out of marauders vehicles that get in his way, reducing them to pulverised masses of metal.

The imagery, like Humungus roaring down the road, mask in place and muscles bulging, still retains perfectly iconic punk-poetic force, and little squiggles of vicious, often ironic detail weave curlicues through it all, like Max getting an arrow through the thigh and a biker getting himself crushed under the truck when he tries to stab one of its tires. The two hapless captives on the front of Humungus’s roadster are kept blind through the chase with bags over their heads, only for the bags to be ripped off just in time for them to see they’re going to be crushed against the rear of the tanker. Humungus kills Papagallo with a hurled spear just as the settler commander cries out to Max that they’ve won. This climax is one of the greatest of its kind in cinema, all the more impressive and thrilling for the complete absence of anything but the most basic camera trickery. One indelible moment sees the boundary between art and life collapse, when a stuntman was accidentally hurled head over heels from a car and crashed to earth, breaking many bones but, thankfully, not dying: the stunt became a centrepiece of the sequence. The sequence also bears an interesting resemblance to the desert chase in 1981’s other immortal action film, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which also revolved around trying to commandeer a truck at speed, and sports a similar punchline about a character seemingly to be lost under the wheels only to reappear unexpectedly. Only in this case it’s not the hero but Wez, who, bloodied and shrieking, fights Max in a tug-of-war over the Kid, whilst Humungus, briefly knocked off the road, comes flying up only to see the oncoming truck coming over a rise, both vehicles moving too fast to swerve: the tanker crushes Humungus and his vehicle and Wez between them, but swerves and capsizes on the roadside in turn.

The sting in the tail: even Max seems to have been unaware that the mission was a deception, as the truck was loaded not with fuel but sand, the “precious juice” actually carried away in drums in the other settler vehicles, having made their getaway clean and having turned the warlike assumptions of the marauders against them. The Captain, whose gyro is wrecked during the battle, pulls up and gives Max a grin of relief: the smirk the battered, barely-standing Max offers in response has a queasy quality, an undercurrent of bewilderment over his inability to die even amidst such utter carnage and when it’s the only logical thing to do. The Captain takes his place driving the settlers away, whilst the Kid loses sight of Max left behind on the road, now with Papagallo’s roadster as his steed. The famous last shot, as Miller pulls back from Max in recreating the Kid’s last view of Max, silhouetted against the last light of day, nods to the introduction of John Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939) but deliberately reverses it, not just in the technical sense in pulling away from the stark figure on the road until lost in shadow, but also the dramatic idea: John Ford presented Ringo as the legendary taking solid human form, whereas Max finally melts back into the great dream. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is arguably the greatest film ever made in Australia, although it doesn’t entirely lack some of the problems that have dogged the country’s cinema, like some flimsy performances dotted amidst the supporting cast. And, of course, there’s a vaguely absurd aspect to the plotline as the marauders seem to have all the fuel in the world already to chase down their foes despite the total lack of apparent supply – it might have been apt, and amusing, if Miller had taken a lead from Battle of the Bulge (1965) and seen the villains simply run out of fuel for their pursuit, leaving the landscape littered with their less-than-useless jalopies.

The question of where alternative fuel sources might come from would, at least, inform the plotline of third film, before then being roundly ignored again in Fury Road. This element points to the way the themes and assimilated cultural ideas in the Mad Max films, so hip and timely when the original entries were made, had become rather quaint and retro by the time Miller got around to making his long-delayed fourth instalment. In any event, the third film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, sees Max having embraced different forms of transportation, crossing the wasteland now on a truck converted into a wagon and pulled by camels. Miller opens with an amazing aerial shot swooping down over a seemingly endless expanse of desert and over Max’s wagon. This shot is actually the viewpoint of another flying pest played by Bruce Spence, this time aviator Jedediah, who wings his way over the wastes in a light aircraft looking for things to steal, and takes off with Max’s wagon after dislodging him from its cockpit and jumping from his plane, whilst his son (Adam Cockburn) keeps flying. Max, who now has long, flowing, salt-and-pepper hair and a permanently dilated eye after his injury in The Road Warrior, keeps following the rough path he was travelling until he comes to an outpost of the new civilisation, Bartertown. This proves a place where the nominal ruler is the female warlord known as Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), aided by collaborators and minions including the trade-running Collector (Frank Thring) and chief enforcer Ironbar Bassey (Gary ‘Angry’ Anderson). But real power in Bartertown is wielded by a diminutive but ingenious man known as Master (Angelo Rossitto), who has built the town’s energy system and fuels it with methane gas obtained from the shit of pigs he farms.

Master, whilst obliged to subsist in his stinking underground abode as he runs his power-making operation, often asserts his clout over Aunty and the rest of the community whenever he senses he’s being encroached upon in retaliations he calls “embargoes” – a nice touch acknowledging Miller’s real-world inspirations – shutting down the city’s energy supply and demanding that Aunty publically acknowledge his authority. Wrongdoers in Bartertown are enslaved and used to propagate the pigs and shovel their leavings: one, Pig Killer (Robert Grubb), was as his name suggests imprisoned specifically for killing one of the swine to feed his family. Aunty, unsurprisingly, wants to wrest back ultimate authority from the short savant, but faces one special problem. Master is only one half of a practically symbiotic being, as the hulking, masked man known as Blaster (Paul Larsson) always carries him around and protects him – the two men together called, of course, MasterBlaster, without Stevie Wonder around to sue them. Getting wind of Max’s desire to get back his camels and belongings, sold by Jedidiah at the Bartertown markets, Aunty Entity makes him an offer after getting her goons to test his mettle: if he’ll pick a fight with MasterBlaster, he and Blaster will be obliged to duke it out in a ritual gladiatorial contest in an cage-like arena, the titular Thunderdome, a place designed to be the only one where violence is permitted and one inviolable rule is kept: “Two men enter, one man leaves.”

Beyond Thunderdome was criticised upon release and after for playing as more Hollywoodised and sentimental and far less gleefully raw and violent than its precursors. And that’s certainly true, to a degree, particularly in the finale which presents a reprise of The Road Warrior’s climax but without the same sadistic vivacity and relish. But it’s also, I feel, a film that demands much greater appreciation, and a vastly more interesting individual film and variation on the Mad Max theme than the subsequent Fury Road. Some of that might be nostalgic connection – it’s the first of the films I saw, as a child when it was indeed the only one of them I could watch. The imagery of the film haunted me, and still find retain enormous power, particularly the coda. Beyond Thunderdome was also a product of shifting expectations and life circumstances for the people making it. The success of the first two films had gained Miller, Gibson, and other crewmembers international attention. Miller had made his Hollywood debut directing easily the best portion of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), whilst Gibson was beginning his quick rise as a major star, having anchored several more Aussie hits before making his American debut with Mrs. Soffel (1984).

Now a serious injection of Hollywood cash and concomitant expectations for blockbuster reach were in play for Beyond Thunderdome, and Miller himself was feeling the first urges towards becoming not just the family filmmaker who would make the later Babe and Happy Feet films, but also one who would invest much of his career – too much, perhaps – playing the mini-mogul akin to George Lucas. By the time shooting started on Beyond Thunderdome Miller was also recovering from the accidental death of his stalwart production partner Byron Kennedy, an event that so rattled Miller he brought in George Ogilvie, with whom he had worked in television, to help direct the film. Ogilvie, whilst nowhere near as well-known as Miller, nonetheless did good work himself, with his 1990 film The Crossing well-regarded particularly and notable for providing the first starring role for Russell Crowe. Despite all such compromises Beyond Thunderdome comes out of the gate swinging, including that epic opening and once the action settles on Bartertown, a superbly-realised setting, grimy, shadowy, filled with the flotsam of the future wastes. Max gives swift, efficient displays of both his sceptical acumen – he resists a water seller’s overtures by waving a Geiger counter at his tank and finds it irradiated – and his dangerous pith when confronted by a guard he pulls his shotgun and glows off the crest on the guard’s helmet, and later bests several of Aunty’s goons including Bassey, whose enmity is earned and stoked.

The Thunderdome battle between Max and Blaster is a grand set-piece that starts with the citizenry of Bartertown clambering up its dome mesh for a view on the battle. Bartertown’s judge and auctioneer Dr. Dealgood (a splendidly arch performance from Edwin Hodgeman) acts as the event’s florid emcee, a touch that harks back to The Toadie in The Road Warrior but with a very different spin: Dr. Dealgood invokes the ritual meaning of the battle with philosophical undertones, and oversees a lottery-like spin of a wheel used to decide tricky matters of justice, like a conflation of high priest and game show host. The two gladiators bound around on suspension rigs at first and trying to grab for weapons dangling on high, the battle involving wielded chainsaws and swords and a huge mallet. Max by this time has discovered Blaster is extremely sensitive to noise, and after several near-fatal delays uses a whistle to paralyse Blaster in pain and swats him with the mallet until Blaster lies sprawled and unhelmeted, only to see that his opponent is a childlike being reminiscent of the long-lost Benno from the first film, and reveals the degree to which Max still retains his old scruples. Master intervenes desperately to save his friend, and Max refuses to kill him, but Aunty slays Blaster with a crossbow and after deciding Max’s fate with the wheel has him placed on a horse – with hands tied, facing backwards, and with a fibreglass head from some long-destroyed carnival attraction placed on his head. He’s sent into exile and likely death in the desert.

Miller’s referential streak is just as marked in Beyond Thunderome as in the earlier movies, with the enlarged budget this time stretching to hiring Maurice Jarré, most famous as the composer for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), to do the score and paying homage throughout to David Lean’s film, as well as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly again in Max’s desert exile, and the script even smirkingly has Dr. Dealgood call Max “the Man With No Name” when introducing him at the Thunderdome. Miller’s new epic lexicon also nods directly to Ben-Hur (1959), on top of Thring’s presence as one shared by both movies: MasterBlaster is a riff on that film’s crippled Simonides and the large, voiceless man who serves as his minder, and the Thunderdome itself can be seen as a version of the chariot race. More curiously, the script’s later portions – with Terry Hayes and Miller again credited as writers – have been seen as influenced by the 1980 novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Some common roots might have been in play there, particularly as the second half of the film turns towards Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies as touchstones. It’s also interesting that Beyond Thunderdome is the first of the series to actively invoke nuclear catastrophe as a cause of the collapse rather than simply exhausted resources and environmental stress, situating the third entry squarely in the legion of nuclear war angst dramas that proliferated in the last, fitful decade of the Cold War. There’s a disparity between the way the Mad Max films engage this vision compared to, say, Planet of the Apes (1968) – where that film and other Hollywood apocalypses evoke an American artistic tradition of going back to Thomas Cole, fearing and anticipating the collapse of all works and wondering what the ruins would look like, Beyond Thunderdome is the very Australian counterpart, coming almost with a sigh of relief after being sick of waiting for it, knowing it would come, a sentiment captured by John O’Brien’s classic Aussie poem “Said Hanrahan”, about a fretting farmer expecting every manner of disaster – “We’ll all be rooned!”

Max is rescued from the desert by Savannah Nix (Helen Buday), one of a tribe of children who have grown in a virtually paradisiacal sanctuary lodged in a canyon hidden in the desert – a grotto with water and trees which they’ve maintained a child’s wonderland. The children (whose ranks include future Aussie TV stalwarts Justine Clarke and Rebekah Elmaloglou) shear away Max’s long hair whilst he recovers from his ordeal. Max soon learns they think he’s Captain Walker, a rescuer they’ve been waiting for ever since they were left to fend for themselves in this place now grown to the stature of messiah, who can fly them out on his back to a place they call “Tomorrow-Morrow Land.” Beyond Thunderdome expands throughout on the notes sounded in The Road Warrior regarding storytellers and performers as constructors of social traditions. This is first in Dr. Dealgood’s role as voice of the law and philosophy of Bartertown. Aunty herself is as much a figure who dovetails performance and authority, and Turner’s casting introduces a faintly metatextual aspect, especially as the two songs she contributed to the movie, “The Living” as heard over the opening credits and the big hit “We Don’t Need Another Hero” at the end, serve as thematic extensions and commentaries that in their reproduce the motif of storytellers: Turner’s blazing vocals and the self-consciously epic soundscapes match the filmmaking describe the emotional experience of the characters. The notion becomes more insistent when Max is regaled by the tribe, who range between very small and late teens, with their story. The tribe have mapped out their history in terms of a legend, with paintings on the walls of the cave shelters recording the events of how they were evacuated from the city on a plane which then crashed after nuclear holocaust, and the adult survivors left them behind to seek out help.

Here Beyond Thunderdome makes linkages between primeval rock art and modern visual storytelling, science fiction and mystic atavism. Savannah serves as bard who holds a rectangular shape – a movie or TV frame – to become the portal to view the paintings through. Max is given a Viewmaster and flips through the captured images on the discs, including of some random airline pilot who has been immortalised as Captain Walker and a showgirl from some sexy cabaret who has been anointed as “Mrs Walker!” The kids then lead Max out onto the sand and stand upon the stranded hulk of the crashed 747, as grand and invested with meaning and utterly useless as any pyramid or ziggurat left behind by an ancient culture. There’s some kind of genius in this element of the movie, and it does much to offset the swerve towards a different kind of moviemaking to the series so far when it comes to the lost tribe themselves. Far from being as crudely developed and close to the animal as the Feral Kid in The Road Warrior, the tribe is instead only a little rambunctious, if still interestingly conceived with their skewed language and sense of the world, churning together the lost world of technology with the spiritual. Ethereal broadcasts from beyond, aka radio and TV signals, are referred to as “the sonic,” and some of the kids are utterly enraptured when Max introduces them to the workings of a retrieved gramophone, the disc on it reciting a lesson on how to speak French on vinyl, with the kids obeying the recorded voice’s injunctions to repeat the French phrases like catechisms of entirely obscure yet urgent meaning.

This element of Beyond Thunderdome also extends the theme of Max’s lost family and the appearance of surrogates for it, delivering an excellent pay-off for it as Max for all his hardboiled cynicism is provoked to protective instincts towards the children, even if at first these instincts manifest as domineering aggression. Max tries to convince the tribe they’re much better off where they are, and particularly doesn’t want them to venture near Bartertown. Savannah and some of the tribe, exhausted with waiting and realising that Max’s coming portends only the pointlessness of it, determine to leave the grotto. Max tries to intimidate them by firing off a rifle he finds amidst their possessions: appropriating their personification of Death in their legend, Max declares, “I’m the man who keeps Mr Dead in his pocket!” Still the group leave during the night, and Max, with three more of the tribe, sets out to track them down, coming across them as one child is sucked down into a sand void. During the night, they see distant lights that the kids think might be the elusive promise of Tomorrow-Morrow Land but Max knows is Bartertown. Knowing they can’t survive a retreat into the desert, they elect instead to sneak into the powerhouse complex, where they find Master has been thoroughly humiliated by Aunty and her goons by being stranded in a cage amongst his pigs. Max and the kids make hasty alliance with Master and the other prisoners, and Pig Killer sees a means of escape in Master’s engine, which proves to be an adapted steam engine still mounted on rails and with a carriage connected, and the fast-found tribe crash out of the city upon it.

It’s arguably in the concluding eruption of derring-do that Beyond Thunderdome actually, properly stumbles, as the action that ensues once Max and the kids invade the powerhouse confirms just how much Miller had filed down the teeth on his creation. Conceptually, the final chase only offer slight twists on The Road Warrior’s. Despite Anderson’s vividly pugnacious visage and the memorable look of his character (Bassey sports a Noh-like mask mounted on a stick jutting up from behind his back to make up for his lack of stature), he’s a pretty weak replacement for Wez, never allowed the kind of genuine ferocity and threat his predecessor wielded towards Max. Vignettes of the kids sliding down ramps and making violent but non-lethal havoc with Bassey and Aunty’s other thugs feel, as is often noted, closer in spirit to movies produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company than the earlier series entries. Many critics and fans were justifiably wondering how a series that started off with pansexual rape and familial homicide had now become a kiddie adventure tale. The final chase is slightly distinguished from its precursor not just in terms of the different brand of locomotion taken by the heroes, but also in the object of pursuit, as Aunty and her warriors come roaring after the fleeing train – knowledge rather than a limited resource, as Aunty wants Master’s intellect at her disposal, an interesting twist but one that just doesn’t have the same urgency. The mayhem unleased is a lot less bloody and concussive, with the vignettes that make up sequence less brutally impressive and nowhere near as densely packed. Instead of blasting his foes with his shotgun or crushing them under his wheels, Max is now knocking them around with a frying pan.

And yet it can also be said that if one is going make kiddie adventure, Beyond Thunderdome still does it just about as well as you could ask for. The staging and raw filmmaking values are still superlative, with Semler’s work in particular hitting a zenith in the awesome surveys of Aunty’s squadron of vehicle poised on a rise before plunging over the edge and carving trails across a vast plain: such shots have an old-school widescreen texture infinitely preferable to the obnoxiously graded imagery of Fury Road. Miller’s original concept of a blend of screwball comedy and fast car action comes to a different kind of fruition here, with one of the kids, Scrooloose (Rod Zuanic), commandeering an enemy car and working out how to drive it on the guy like his silent comedy forebears, and the sight of Bassey hanging off the engine’s cowcatcher as it barrels down the rails. The train finally comes a halt at the end of the line which proves to be right next to Jedediah’s cave home, and the pilot and his son are pressganged into saving the escapees in their plane. Trapped between a chasm and the advancing vehicles, Jedediah points out the lack of sufficient runway in either direction, so Max, with a selfless bravado that signals the restoration of his original spirit, rides a truck into the advancing foes to bash a gap large enough for the plane to take off.

Aunty laughingly leaves Max amidst the wreckage with plain admiration for his ballsiness, whilst the plane wings its way through a dust storm as Jedediah fulfils the tribe’s quest to reach Tomorrow-Morrow Land. The coda of Beyond Thunderdome opens up a new landscape and scale for the trilogy even as it dovetails its themes and images, as the children behold the ruins of Sydney, complete with fractured Harbour Bridge and gutted skyscrapers looming over an emptied Port Jackson, the atmosphere flooded with red dust. A depiction, finally, of the total devastation of the old civilisation, but with the embryo of another clinging on raggedly in its bowels. The film concludes with Savannah now resuming her role as the storyteller for a new, larger tribe of all ages, living within one of the deserted skyscrapers, recounting the legend of Max and keeping the ruins lit as beacons for him and all the others lost in the wasteland to find their way home. The very last image is again one of Max alone, this time on foot, carrying a set of spears as he wanders in the setting sun – having concluded his devolution into primal warrior, yes, but also now purified, the hero his old boss wanted finally and properly ensconced in the collective dream.

1970s, Action-Adventure, Australian cinema, Exploitation

Mad Max (1979)

Directors: George Miller
Screenwriters: James McCausland, George Miller

By Roderick Heath

Australians have always felt oddly comfortable with the prospect of apocalypse. Perhaps it stems from the experience of dealing with a capricious continent that offers such wealth of space without the assurance of plenty to match. Or from the history of European colonisation, flung out to the far end of the earth and trapped trying to contend with a land indigenous peoples had spent thousands upon thousands of years adapting to it and delicately adapting it in turn, building a modern country that has primeval roots but is also a tide pool of the world’s competing cultures, nestled between west and east and dogmas abroad in the world. George Miller’s Mad Max movies have always encompassed that experience in their metaphorical layers better than any historical film could ever approximate. Born the son of two Greek immigrants in Queensland in 1945, Miller’s industrious intelligence eventually gained him a private school education before attending the University of New South Wales as a medical student. In 1971, whilst in his last year of training in a residency at Sydney’s St. Vincent’s Hospital, Miller and his younger brother Chris made a one-minute-long short film, St. Vincent’s Revue Film, and he began dabbling more energetically in his moviemaking hobby whilst spending his working days dealing often with victims of terrible road accidents, the by-products of the country’s burgeoning passion for highway voyaging and speedy thrills.

At a film workshop Miller met Byron Kennedy, who would become Miller’s stalwart production partner and friend: the two men loaned their names to the production company they founded shortly after. Miller made experimental shorts and eventually the sardonic, satiric pseudo-documentary Violence in Cinema: Part 1 (1971), a work that made an impact with festival screenings and garnered several awards. Plainly, Miller’s destiny lay not in the A&E Ward but in movies, but it took another eight years before he got his feature directing career off the ground with Mad Max. Miller had developed the screenplay with James McCausland, a former finance editor of a major newspaper who had never written a script before, trying to forge something that could serve as a solid basis for the strange fantasy aesthetic Miller wanted to animate – action cinema, but drawing on silent comedy works by the likes of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and set in a vaguely futuristic dystopian world to justify the kind of wild, semi-farcical rampages he was envisioning, coloured by a morbid fascination for the carnage he was so practically schooled in.

Miller wasn’t the first Australian filmmaker to tackle the nation’s car obsession and its correlation with the country’s uneasy feel for its place in the world and fascination with existence on the unruly fringe. Peter Weir had made his debut with The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), which similarly envisioned bizarre, quasi-science fiction visions of monstrous vehicles unleashed on an outback Australian town, and Sandy Harbutt had a cult success with Stone (1975), a study of a countercultural biker cadre but focusing on an undercover cop who learns to live and die by their curious code. Australian cinema culture, which had been enterprising if shaky both in finances and aesthetics since the medium’s earliest days, virtually died with the coming of television, but suddenly exploded to international prominence in the early 1970s. As this success unfolded a debate emerged, pitting those who wanted to foster artistic quality and ambition – represented in evergreen fashion by Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) and other signal hits of the Aussie New Wave – versus those who argued it needed a virile genre film scene to actually, properly sustain itself. The urge to propagate the latter led to the spasm of eccentric spins on standard fare today often referred to as Ozploitation – an argument that still essentially defines the national cinema in all its perpetually spasmodic persistence. Brian Trenchard-Smith’s The Man From Hong Kong (1975) had unexpectedly opened the gates for international success for Aussie films with a genre bent, assimilating and freely blending tropes from both the burgeoning kung fun movie and Hollywood thriller styles.

Miller perhaps came closest to making the schism vanish, as Mad Max was undoubtedly the product of a superior filmmaking talent and a particular vision, and also one that courted, and gained, a popular audience: the film took in over $5 million at the local box office, easily recouping its $400,000 budget, and some accounts have it bringing in over $100 million when released internationally. Mad Max came out at a propitious moment. The classic venues for low-budget genre movies, grindhouse movie theatres and drive-ins, were just about to be supplanted by the oncoming age of home video, and the first two Mad Max movies were ideal stuff to bridge the gap. My father told me the first movie he ever saw on video was of course Mad Max, being screened in a Sydney pub – perhaps the closest thing to the film’s natural habitat. Mad Max was sold to AIP for US distribution, but had to weather the indignity of having American voices dubbed over the Australian actors, in part to mitigate the film’s very Aussie lingo. Mad Max nonetheless offered a practically fool-proof blueprint for other moviemakers to produce their own hard-driving neo-barbarian action flicks: soon imitations were being turned out everywhere, from those well-schooled in capitalising, like Italy (Enzo G. Castellari’s Warriors of the Wasteland, 1983), to the Hollywood-financed, New Zealand-shot (Harley Cockliss’s Battletruck, 1982), and eventually megabudget blockbusters (Kevin Reynolds’ Waterworld, 1996), and latter-day homages like Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007) and Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008).

Not that the Mad Max films lacked their own greedily harvested influences and imminent precursors. 1970s science fiction cinema had been littered with dystopian portraits of near futures riven with social breakdown brought about by metastasising trends of modern society from overpopulation to nuclear war to exhausted natural resources. Most immediately similar were the likes of Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), which also offered thundering vehicles in a future dystopia, although Miller’s approach proved quite different to Bartel’s even in plying a similarly cartoonish, pop-art-inflected style. Mad Max’s title and basic premise of a cop pushed to extreme measures by lowlifes paid immediate, semi-satiric homage to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), and indeed the first film’s plot can be described as a fantastically filtered version of Harry Callahan’s backstory, and also nods to Death Wish (1974) in portraying a vigilante hero avenging assaulted family. Miller also paid increasingly pointed homage to Sergio Leone through his three original Mad Max films, and for what was then at least a more officially elevated sensibility, much tribute to John Ford and Akira Kurosawa. Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1963) was perhaps the first film to connect the post-war phenomenon of violent youth gangs and the new, omnipresent dread of the nuclear age informing a lurch towards neo-barbarianism, although Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) is likely the more immediate influence. Miller may also have cherry-picked and amplified the spectacle of familiar consumerist objects becoming items of future reveries glimpsed in Planet of the Apes (1968) and its sequels. The blend of the post-apocalyptic and action rampaging in The Omega Man (1971) was also a forebear, as was the future gladiatorial frenzies of Rollerball (1975), as well as the likes of Cornel Wilde’s No Blade Of Grass (1970), Robert Clouse’s The Ultimate Warrior (1975), John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), Jack Smight’s Damnation Alley (1977), and the last act of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). And yet despite the obvious bricoleur nature of Mad Max, the film emerged as something original, even unique in tone and texture.

The appeal of the Mad Max films lay most obviously in the way they offered hard, fast, disreputable thrills that harked back to the glory days of the Western, but with that genre’s presumptions about history and community inverted, celebrating not the incoming of civilisation in the wilderness but its retreat, and imbued what once moseyed along with a hard chrome gloss and high-octane propulsion. This kind of movie could service different varieties of macho fantasy, from being the lone pillar of morality and heroism, to darker dreams of raping, looting, pillaging, and tearing about the desert in leather chaps. Miller also found a uniquely cunning way of bridging the concerns of the post-counterculture era of the 1970s and its social presumptions with the oncoming era of blockbuster flash fit for the 1980s. Even if the films themselves, or at least the first two, seemed like products produced in reflexive resistance to the homogenising influence of the mainstream precepts of the oncoming style, they were nonetheless essentially products of a similar sensibility to the one that created Star Wars (1977), not just in being preoccupied with narrative propulsion matched to delight in more literal speed and machinery, but in their boiled-down, would-be mythic narrative approaches (both series took significant inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces) and their deliberately pop art-like deployment of a self-consciously retro style, particularly apparent in their music scores with their soaring, romantic-melodramatic cues. Miller had an agonising time completing the film, actually quitting the shoot at one point and losing the respect of his crew, and yet it’s hard to believe given the movie as pieced together seems so utterly assured, the product of a cinematic prodigy.

On a parochial level, Mad Max captured the zeitgeist of an Australian culture of a very specific moment, and found a way of making different precincts of it talk to each-other – suburban “rev-heads” for whom the automobile was all but an object of religious fervour, thrown in with inner city punks and bikies. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior would add into the mix S&M freaks and leather daddies out of a burgeoning queer scene, albeit with the sarcastic purpose of constructing an almost post-sexual society where all the sensual energy and bristling muscle is turned towards violent contest and even the women are pretty macho. All conversed on a level of cultural memory sourced in the nation’s harsh and grasping colonial era: Australia was well-equipped to meet any future collapse of civilisation because civilisation, in the modern sense at least, was still a work in progress here. Miller took up the common belief espoused in a lot of ‘70s culture that social decline and collapse was imminent, whether from a left-wing viewpoint as the result of nuclear war or environmental damage, or the reactionary conviction that the liberation ethos had unleashed only increasingly wild and strange gangs of hooligans and emblazoned identities insidiously wielded in a fracturing body politic, particularly strong when the punks supplanted the hippies as the subculture of choice to embody mainstream anxiety. Such ideas had permeated movies like A Clockwork Orange and Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) and Nigel Kneale’s final, desolate Quatermass series, both of which emerged in the same year as the first Mad Max. The kind of raw and crazed behaviour that would define the age of the neo-barbarian would in turn spark increasingly fascistic and authoritarian responses, giving birth to new types of antihero from Harry Callahan to Travis Bickle and the comic book figure Judge Dredd, and Max himself, characterised initially as a future type of highway patrol cop as a member of the Main Force Patrol or MFP, or a ‘Bronze’ as the proliferating breed of highway berserker they regularly battle call them.

The peculiar world Miller and McCausland sketch out in Mad Max isn’t the desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape that the series would eventually become synonymous with, but rather a more familiar world where everything seems slightly estranged, heightened, sometimes edging towards the comic book, riven with decay and intimations of dark forces at loose in the world: a title simply states, “A few years from now…” The headlong force and pace of Miller’s style is immediately evinced in the first few shots, opening with a vision of the “Halls of Justice”, before shifting with a system of dissolves to a length of road littered with wreckage, another painted with a skull and crossbones, and then a shot of an MFP cruiser parked on the roadside of a stark stretch of highway with a looming sign pointing to “Anarchie Road – 3 km”. Immediately Miller orientates the viewer to his near-future as a place of decay and ambattled law and order: the Halls of Justice, which serve as the headquarters of the MFP, split the difference between citadel and Victorian workhouse, the letter ‘U’ in Justice hanging askew on the sign and foliage starting to weave around the gate, immediately signalling the decaying order of this world. The roads are established as dangerous regions and full-blown anarchy is just up the way. We’re immediately situated in a vaguely surreal culture where the law has become the besieged and society has been fragmented in blocs, touched with an abstracted, almost cartoonish directness.

All this information is conveyed in 10 seconds of screen time. And it’s not just the quickness of the shots that thrusts the viewer immediately into an off-kilter new reality, but Miller’s investment of motion even into these functional establishing shots, invested with a hypertrophied intensity by the zooms and tracking and wide-angled lensing in the anamorphic frame. Hints dropped throughout Mad Max that industrial society is on the way out, particularly in the way a V8 ‘Pursuit Special’ Interceptor is presented as the last of a kind, a pinnacle of mechanical achievement that won’t be seen again, and is pieced together by the worshipful repairmen who maintain the MFP’s vehicles. The Interceptor (actually a souped up Ford Falcon) is offered specifically to Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), the star of the MFP’s dwindling ranks, by their commander, Captain Fred ‘Fifi’ Macaffee (Roger Ward) and Police Commissioner Labatouche (Jonathan Hardy) as a lure to keep him in their ranks. Fifi, who despite his nickname is a towering, muscular, shaven-headed he-man, in particular believes Max can be something the force, and the world, desperately need even if they don’t realise it – a hero. Mad Max’s lengthy opening sequence immediately galvanises the entire proposition, hurling viewer into the midst of a high-speed chase as the Bronzes chase down a fugitive criminal, known as ‘The Nightrider’ (Vincent Gil), a sweaty, leering hooligan who, in the company of his lover (Lulu Pinkus), has stolen one of the MFP’s pursuit vehicles after shooting a rookie cop, and the pair are careening down the highway on a lunatic joyride that feels close to some sort of religious rite – a first intimation of a concept that would recur through the series and its late extension entry Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), where the denizens of this world have attached not just their lifestyles to the roadraging but their theology too, seeking apotheosis and transcendence in the prospect of great speed followed by a sudden stop. “I am The Nightrider,” the hoon declares, “I’m a fuel-injected suicide machine!”

A roadside sign notes that there have been 57 deaths on this stretch of Highway 9 over the year, and some wag has erased the ‘O’ in Force and rechristened the MFP as the Main Farce Patrol. Two bored MFP officers lingering on the road are stirred to try and intercept, distracting one, Roop (Steve Millichamp) from the pleasures of spying on couples copulating off the roadside, whilst the other, Charlie (John Ley), reacts with offence when Roop blasphemes (“I don’t have to work with a blasphemer.”), but eagerly roars off to chase down The Nightrider, with Roop making no bones about his delight at the prospect of taking out their quarry with a blast of his shotgun. Two more MFP officers, Sarse (Stephen Clark) and Scuttle (George Novak), are directly pursuing The Nightrider, who manages to evade Roop and Charlie’s attempt to ram him. Motorcyclist patrolman Jim ‘Goose’ Rains (Steve Bisley) joins the chase from a diner, but all three pursuers crash when The Nightrider charges with mad zeal past a toddler stumbling across the road and then a car with a caravan, whilst Roop and Charlie crash headlong through the caravan, Sarse and Scuttle finish up flipping their vehicle, and Goose slams his bike against a car. Only Max, who’s been alerted to the chase, stands between The Nightrider and escape. Miller offers oblique and curtailed glimpses of Max donning his black leather MFP uniform and gear and revving up his pursuit car, his aviator sunglasses as chitinous armour, his car exhaust throbbing with suppressed power.

A classically momentous heroic build-up signalling Max’s stature as the MFP’s front-rank warrior, the man born to do battle on the road with such reprobates. But he’s not seen properly until after he chases down The Nightrider, who, distraught at being outdone by Max in a duel of chicken, then slams into a stricken truck, him and his moll finding their Valhalla in a bloom of orange flame. Then Miller fully unveils Max in the form of the young Gibson, jumping out of his car and beholding the spectacle with shock, demonstrating at least that such events still have an impact on him. Miller dissolves to Max at home, delivering another of his oddball touches of humour and characterisation entwined as Max relaxes with his young son and listens to his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) blowing a hot blues number on her saxophone. A delightful moment that seems chiefly to be a kind of diegetic lampoon of the common lyrical manner of depicting ideal romantic liaisons, often scored in days of yore with sultry sax sounds, but also a moment that sets up a peculiar motif in the movie – later Goose is impressed with a leggy cabaret singer (Robina Chaffey) he watches perform and later sleeps with, with Miller using this musical motif to literally present the women in the cops’ lives as performing an alternative to their bruising macho occupation. Max and Jessie’s relationship is quickly but effectively sketched, as Jessie registers her melancholy at the prospect of seeing Max off to another potentially fatal day at work, but also engages in their private language of humour as she deploys sign language to tell Max “I’m crazy about you,” a gesture he repeats to her later.

The clash of two peculiar subcultures preoccupies much of Mad Max’s first half – the MFP and a biker gang led by a florid, fearsome, Charles Manson-esque captain known by the memorable sobriquet of The Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Burn), who leads his cadre of brutes on bikes out into the boondocks to stir up trouble and attract MFP attention. Fifi tells Max, as they overlook one of the scenes of awesome road carnage that’s part and parcel of their job, that the word has gone out the The Nighrider’s pals want revenge for his fiery end. The gang arrives in the small town of New Jerusalem where The Nightrider’s remains have been brought in a small coffin. The gang sets about terrorising the locals, eventually chasing down a hapless couple (Hunter Gibb and Kim Sullivan) in a vintage Chevy and running them off the road: the gang takes delight in pulverising the car to pieces before raping both of them. Max and Goose, on patrol when reports of the disturbance come in, see the man fleeing across a field pantsless, ignoring the entreaties to stop, and then come to the wrecked car, where the find the woman distraught and leashed whilst a young member of the gang, Johnny (Tim Burns), lolls nearby, out of his head on drugs and unable to flee the scene.

Johnny is taken to the Halls of Justice. Goose, who babysits Johnny whilst Max and Fifi attend the court hearing for his arraignment, is stirred to wild rage when they return with some bureaucrats and release Johnny because no witnesses showed up out of fear of the rest of the gang. In his anger Goose almost punches some of the officials and does manage to get in a good blow to Johnny after tackling him. Johnny rejoins the gang, who gather on a beach, with The Toecutter using a mixture of vaguely homoerotic intimidation and careful corralling of his men’s violent tendencies towards their ultimate goal of revenge. Johnny sabotages Goose’s patrol cycle whilst he’s watching the performance of the singer. The next morning Goose climbs aboard and rides off to work: he crashes as Johnny intended, but emerges uninjured and takes off in the truck that comes to fetch him and his bike. The bikers gang waits in ambush for him, however, with Johnny throwing a wheel at the windscreen of the truck, and this time Goose crashes off the road and is trapped in the truck. The Toecutter terrorises Johnny into setting fire to the crashed vehicle with Goose inside, and later Max is called to a hospital where he’s appalled by the sight of Goose, still alive but burned horribly: “That thing in there ain’t Goose,” Max declares to Fifi and storms off the job.

Miller takes a truism about the similarities of cops and criminals to an extreme throughout the film – both the MFP and the gang are comprised of oddballs, many with a penchant for violence and velocity and an antisocial streak counting themselves above the peasantry. Goose regales a fellow diner patron when first introduced by relishing the gruesome details regarding a crashed driver who was “sittin’ there tryin’a scream with his face ripped off.” The opening chase portrays the MFP goons and their marauding quarry as both delighting in the chance to wreak some carnage, only with one side slightly corralled and focused by the aim of the job. Both gangs have physically imposing and charismatic leaders with espousing personal ideals, although where The Toecutter espouses the lawless freedom and might-is-right prerogative – “Anything you say,” says the intimidated New Jerusalem Station Master (Reg Evans), to The Toecutter’s beaming reply, “I like that philosophy.” – Fifi wants to give the people heroes to believe in once more, one possible curative for the collapse of the world. In this aim Fifi is Miller’s ironic projection, as that’s what Mad Max as a movie also aims to do, albeit in a sour, ironic fashion still touched with a hues of the 1970s antihero ethos. Max isn’t just the best of the MFP but the most mature and grounded, but this also makes him vulnerable. The Halls of Justice interior proves as dilapidated as the outside, with offices trashed and stripped, a picture of a Queen Elizabeth hanging crooked as paltry remnant of a falling order. Meanwhile the bikers take pot shots at mannequins and drag random victims along the road behind their bikes.

With Mad Max Miller helped establish the rarefied quality many would note about the Australian genre film style with the emphasis on stylised, overlarge, borderline cartoonish performances around the margins pushing towards a brand of comedy bordering if usually never quite fully becoming satirical, a tendency exemplified elsewhere by the likes of Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback (1983). Miller was more controlled than any of his fellows in deploying this element throughout the first three Mad Max films, however, as he contrasts the craziness of the world around Max with his increasingly taciturn demeanour and air of wounded and affected expedience persisting around the heart of an eternal knight, as if consciously playing off the classical hero’s stature against a profane setting inhabited by humans devolving back towards the simian. Keays-Burn’s performance as The Toecutter mediates the two extremes, an edge of prissy, theatrical showmanship simmering under the bristling physical intimidation and berserker affectations, delighting in such gestures of charged intimacy as thrusting a shotgun muzzle into Johnny ’s mouth or, in a teasing reversal, obliging Jessie to let him lick the ice cream she’s bought for her son. Throughout the film Miller uses birds as emblems often punctuating scenes of violence as he dives in for visions of their leering, cawing beaks and flapping wings, and sometimes pecking on the human roadkill.

The fetishism of masculinity throughout the Mad Max films is one of their amusing and weirdly vital aspects: the first film revolves around the extermination of the feminine aspect of life, as Goose is cooked after sex and Max ruthlessly stripped of his family life as precursors to the loss of civilisation itself. Any hint of erotic connection is virtually exiled from the equation in the follow-ups, and only starts to return either in a pubescent form or in the shape of an imperious antagonist (Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity) who at once plays up and subverts an affectation glamorous femininity (with her chainmail mockery of a showgirl costume) by the end of the third movie. The homoerotic aspect of the series is barely concealed, and some have even argued the first film is a fundamentally a portrait of a man surrendering to his secret queerness as the underbelly of the theme of loss and abandonment to wrath and ruin. Either way it’s knowingly sourced in, and also simultaneously making fun of, the macho precincts of Australian culture back in the day, reducing it to a lunatic caricature of itself and prodding the rhetorically vast but in practice tiny gap between that culture and the kind of camp that was verboten. The Toecutter’s grip on his men, particularly young Johnny , is laced with shows of seductive intimacy, although it’s more indicative of his contempt for any kind of polite society and a preparation for a rapidly oncoming future where the will to fuck and the fate of being fucked will become markers of power rather events of reproductive purpose, leading to the second film’s survey of “gayboy berserkers” on the warpath.

Whatever can be said about Gibson’s later successes and sins, his rise, downfall, and partial rise again, he was an inextricable aspect of the Mad Max series’ success, just as the series was for him. Any number of jut-jawed, hard-bodied young actors might have been cast, but Gibson, as a serious, classically-trained actor as well as a born movie idol, had something more. After establishing himself as a student at the National Institute of Dramatic Art and theatrical work including stints as a Shakespearean, Gibson had made his debut in the surfing flick Summer City (1977) and appeared as romantic young co-lead in Tim (1979) in the same year Mad Max emerged. Max isn’t a demanding part in the dramatic sense – he has a grand total of sixteen lines in first sequel – and yet demanded commitment, the capacity to inhabit a role and charge the screen through that presence, and Max inscribed the basic star persona Gibson would present variations on in movies like Lethal Weapon (1987), Braveheart (1995), The Patriot (2000), and even Hamlet (1990) – protagonists with something berserk lurking under the strained surfaces of civilised poise they try desperately to maintain. The Max we’re introduced to in the first film is riven with hints of something unstable and potentially maniacal registering in the glassy glare and kinescopic flicker of his eyes, even before Max Rockatansky officially goes mad. But Gibson’s youthful charm and quality of innocence are key to the first film as well, traits still persisting despite his experiences on the job, and emerging most properly when he talks about his father with his wife, signalling another path towards purgation beckoning to him.

The second half of Mad Max turns away from the theme of embattled institutions towards the more imminent threat of The Toecutter and his gang to Max, Jessie, and son Sprog (Brendan Heath) after Max quits the MFP and travels to the coast to try and knit his damaged soul and psyche together, which seems to start working as along the way Max confesses his vulnerabilities to Jessie. But the seaside locale they’ve come to proves, by way of extremely bad luck, to be the same place where The Toecutter and gang hang out. Jessie, after smiling her way through The Toecutter’s queasy come-ons, gets in a display of her own surprising pith as she shoves an ice cream in his face and knees him in the groin before fleeing, only later to find that the severed hand of one of the gang members is dangling from off the back, wrapped in the chain he tried to lash their wagon with. Later, the family camp out on the farm of old friend May Swaisey (Sheila Florence, an elderly stalwart who also notably appeared on the cult TV series Prisoner, aka Cell Block H), who lives with her intellectually disabled son Benno (Max Fairchild). After a stroll down to swim and sunbathe at a nearby beach, Jessie becomes unnerved by menacing figures darting through the forest on the way back, as well as the looming presence of Benno. Whilst Max descends into the forest whilst Jessie returns to the farm, only to be confronted there by the gang. May unveils her unexpected fortitude by facing down the gang with her shotgun, giving her, Jessie, and Sprog time to flee in the wagon, only to find the vehicle has been sabotaged and breaks down. Whilst May shoots at the gang, who blaze by unconcerned, Jessie runs down the highway with her baby, only to be casually run down and killed.

In this portion Miller veers into horror movie-like territory, echoing other hit ‘70s films like Straw Dogs (1971) and Last House On The Left (1972) as well as the likes of Death Wish (1974) as the narrative shifts towards the theme of A Man Pushed Too Far, whilst the style turns from open road stunts to more sustained suspense-mongering, particularly apparent in Miller’s expert staging of Jessie’s stalking in the forest, a little masterpiece of controlled perspective and fleeting menace. His capacity to wield exploitation movie zeal is confirmed in the sight of the gnarled severed hand dangling from the family wagon, but shift to a more judicious but also more effective and dramatically forceful approach, as he conveys Jessie and Sprog’s deaths through the most minimal of means, noting only a baby shoe and ball bouncing in the wake of the fleeing bikers upon the vast flat tarmac. The sight of May wielding a gun nearly as big as she is and blasting it off with warrior pith signals Miller’s penchant for unexpected, semi-comic disparities and is also an early sign of the increasing delight in tough females he would deploy in the sequels. In Mad Max however Jessie and Sprog’s deaths are the necessary blood sacrifice in Fifi and Miller’s shared aim of transforming Max from man to hero, a transformation that also destroys Max the man. At least, that’s how the series would play out – in the first film at least Jessie’s fate is left ambiguous as two doctors talk about her terrible injuries but also confirm that she’s still alive, whilst Sprog’s death is confirmed. Miller performs a deft little camera move from the medicos talking about it to reveal Max concealed by the doorway to the hospital ward listening to it all, blue eyes wide and haunted.

Max returns to his home, fishes his uniform leathers out of a trunk, and heads to the MFP garage to fetch his black-painted chrome steed, the as-yet untested V8 Interceptor, and heads out onto the roads to chase down The Toecutter and his gang in the prototypical roaring rampage of revenge: first he visits and brutalises a mechanic who does business with the gang, and rattles The Toecutter’s cage by leaving polaroid photos of his family and Goose on his bike, so he know what’s coming and why. The climax is structured in a way that plays havoc in its own particular way with the familiar rhythm of an action climax, however. Max lies in ambush for some of the gang as they steal fuel from a moving tanker – a brief vignette that nonetheless lays seeds for both the motion gymnastics of Fury Road and also the Fast and Furious films – and lures them into chasing him before turning and charging through the ranks of bikers with the Interceptor on a narrow bridge, leaving many sprawled and broken on the road, others launched off a bridge into a river. Johnny survives, having been left behind, and he rings up The Toecutter to warn him. The Toecutter and others set up an ambush in turn for Max: The Toecutter shoots Max in the leg and runs over his arm with his bike, but Max’s determination still gets him back behind the wheel of the Interceptor, and he chases down The Toecutter.

Miller’s sublimation of cartoonish effect hits most mischievously and memorably as he dives in for ultra-close shots of The Toecutter as he suddenly rides over a rise in front of an upcoming truck, the villain’s eyes bulging from their sockets Tex Avery-style a split-second before the truck hits The Toecutter’s bike and smashes it to oblivion, the truck’s wheels riding over his mangled body for special relish. Johnny’s comeuppance comes in a coda that plays out as a peculiar dramatic and emotional diminuendo, as Max comes across him scavenging on a car wreck, handcuffs his leg to the wreck, and leaves him with the alternative of burning to death or sawing his foot off (a touch that in itself lays seeds for a much later, popular genre creation by Australian filmmakers, the Saw series). The car explodes in the background as Max drives away. Johnny’s fate is then left ambiguous, as it’s rather Max’s that Miller finds an original and perturbing way of describing. Far from offering any kind of catharsis, Miller instead offers the sight of Max glaring dead-eyed out from behind the wheel of his car as he drives out into the endless flatness of the outback and regions marked by signs as forbidden for some reason – perhaps polluted or irradiated, perhaps meant to recall the Forbidden Zone of Planet of the Apes but also calling to mind the cordoned-off areas of the Australian outback where atomic bomb tests were carried out. Except that in the Mad Max mythos this becomes the place of sanctuary, the last resort of survivors of an oncoming armageddon. Miller might have had sequels in mind already, but the final note of Mad Max is unique in its forlorn prospect, the resolution defined by the very absence of familiar resolution. Slow dissolve to the endless black tar and broken white lines before Max, like reels of code comprising his new programming as the relentless wanderer, looking for some new stage to unleash his bloody talents upon — but perhaps to recover his humanity too.

1950s, Action-Adventure, Thriller, Western

Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) / Last Train From Gun Hill (1959)

Director: John Sturges
Screenwriters: Millard Kaufman, Don McGuire / James Poe

By Roderick Heath

Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill are likely the two best films made by John Sturges, although neither constitutes his most famous work. Very similar as stories, enclosing near-identical structures and ideas, both hinge on a central image and situation – the classic American Western town as an island, an outpost in a vista of land from frame’s edge to edge. A railway runs through it, tethering it nominally to a wider nation, a civilisation, delivering emissaries from that wider world, but the moral stands that must be taken are purely local and personal. Both movies are basically Westerns, although one takes place in the period immediately after World War II. Both make something coherent, even philosophical out an essential contrast in their settings and their dramas – the illimitable vastness of the landscape, its beauty, its capacious and enfolding promise, clashes with the small, limited, enclosed world the people make for themselves, the buildings they throw up to house their ambitions proving cramped, claustrophobic, insinuating cradles of sick little stories. Bad Day At Black Rock is defined by a rarefied balance, filmed in then-cutting edge widescreen and blazing Technicolor whilst tackling a story defined by an almost subliminal sense of menace slowly ratcheting towards an eruption of violence. The second, whilst similar in many story and style points to the other, is an intricate situational thriller with a more baroque visual and emotional palette.

Sturges has long ironically suffered from having to his name two films, The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape (1963), so familiar and beloved they’re more like part of the pop cultural psychic furniture than movies. As a result Sturges has never been quite granted the level of cool attached to rivals on the 1950s genre film scene like Samuel Fuller, Budd Boetticher, or Anthony Mann, whose reputations often had to be revived and fought for. Granted, too, Sturges’ oeuvre is also uneven: at his best there were few filmmakers as good in Hollywood, and some of his work remains badly underappreciated, but at his least he often resorted to half-hearted slickness. Sturges began his Hollywood career as a film editor and began directing documentaries and training films for the US Army Air Force during World War II. Sturges had a particular penchant for stories about gutsy people who take particularly hard stands and often pay the price for it. He made his feature directing debut with The Man Who Dared (1946), a portrait of Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor who took and died from a bullet meant for Franklin Roosevelt. Sturges made twenty films in the next seven years on the studio treadmill.

Many of Sturges’ early films, like Ida Lupino’s around the same time, occupy a blurred zone between character-driven drama and thriller. Others were low-budget but affecting and wistfully intelligent biopics about bygone heroes, The Magnificent Yankee (1950), a portrait of the renowned juror Oliver Wendell Holmes, and The Girl in White (1952), the story of New York’s first female hospital staff surgeon. Sturges continued alternating quieter dramas and flashy genre films for much of his career, and leaned toward a procedural brand of post-noir thriller with the likes of Mystery Street (1950) and Jeopardy (1953). Sturges finally demanded and gained A-list attention with Escape From Fort Bravo (1953), a portrayal of Union and Confederate soldiers obliged to work together when attacked by Native American warriors. Proving himself a lucid stylist and as well as a keen director of action, Sturges also confirmed his fascination with situations defined by extreme situations often involving characters suffering siege or locked in a standoff, usually with some rigid moral or existential principle involved. Sturges tackled this theme initially via dark character drama with The Sign of the Ram (1948), about a wheelchair-bound woman making her family’s life a living hell. Sturges soon recapitulated variations on this theme with Kind Lady (1951), about an elderly women trapped in her house with some unwelcome visitors, and Jeopardy, depicting woman’s attempts to save her trapped husband from drowning.

Stretching his legs as a major studio director, Sturges made a few glossy duds, particularly in the early 1960s when he tried to reorientate himself back to more quotidian subjects, like an adaptation of James Gould Cozzens’ regarded novel By Love Possessed (1961). But he also produced some terrific Westerns sustaining that concern with battle against the odds and uneasy entrapment, like The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). His film of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea (1958) is one of the few good adaptations of the author despite the limitations of trying to apply Hollywood style to a tale of crude authenticity, deftly matching the prose with epic imagery and readily subsuming the material into Sturges’ preoccupations. Much like David Lean, another former editor, if less ostentatiously, Sturges experimented with slow-burn structuring and a careful use of sound to create a slightly off-kilter variety of suspense, playing games with the tension between duration and severance, and whilst many of them were tepidly received upon release, some of Sturges’ later films like Ice Station Zebra (1968) and Marooned (1969) are marked by this, Marooned in particular, and it’s been rewarded by becoming a secret wellspring for realistic space movies like The Right Stuff (1983) and Gravity (2013): Alfonso Cuaron acknowledged the debt by featuring Marooned briefly in his Roma (2018).

The opening credits of Bad Day at Black Rock unfurl over footage of a high-powered ‘Streamliner’ train roaring along the railway tracks amidst the jagged mountains and sun-blasted plains of the California desert. The sleek form and thunderous motion of the train, amplified by Andre Previn’s dramatic scoring, mark it as the incarnation of modernity astride primal forms of earth and sky. Sturges immediately identifies and communicates a deep and fundamental tension within both the American landscape and the American project, one the narrative ahead will slowly tease out in a manner starkly at odds with the initial vision of nascent space-age force and confidence. Adjacent the railway line, a small, dark, festering melanoma on the sunburnt skin of the nation called Black Rock, a single street with some sun-weathered buildings, where the stopping of the Streamliner and the egress of a solitary passenger is a big enough event to pull townsfolk out to gawk: “Streamliner ain’t stopped here in four years,” comments the telegraph operator Hastings (Russell Collins). The moment is 1945, shortly after the end of World War II.

The fateful individual who alights, John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), strikes a strange figure in this locale, dressed in a dark suit that might as well as be astronaut gear in such environs, one arm permanently slotted in pocket. The hard stares and wary, boding postures of the onlookers swiftly begin to assume a definably sinister edge in having their afternoon interrupted: Macreedy finds himself being tracked by Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector David (Lee Marvin), and surveyed with less intimidating if no less loaded interest by the local veterinarian and funeral director, Doc Velie (Walter Brennan). Pete Wirth (John Ericson), the young desk clerk of the town’s hotel, its largest building, tries to fend off Macreedy’s attempts to take a room by telling him the rooms are all technically occupied, but Macreedy calmly ignores him and selects a room key from the well-stocked rack. Hector decides to see what kind of reaction he can provoke from Macreedy by going into his room and making like it’s his, but Macreedy seems quite scrupulously determined to avoid any kind of confrontation. Things become even more interesting when Macreedy mentions he’s looking for a locale in the vicinity called Adobe Flats, and the man who lives there, named Komoko.

Macreedy encounters Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), a man who seems to possess some mysterious gravity as a local feudal lord and rolls into town in his station wagon. Reno tells him that Komoko, as a Japanese-American, was rounded up and placed into an internment camp, and nobody currently knows where he is. Not dissuaded, Macreedy approaches Pete’s sister Liz (Anne Francis), who runs a gas station and repair garage and owns a jeep, seemingly the only vehicle in town apart from Reno’s station wagon. Macreedy hires the jeep for a trip out to Adobe Flats. There, he finds what was Komoko’s farm, the tiny house now a burnt-out ruin. A creepily creaking windmill spins in the breeze, straddling the mouth of a deep well. A strange thatch of wildflowers growing from a patch of ground nearby, a sight Macreedy later notes recalls many similar crops he saw during his wartime service, where flowers sprung from graves. The truth of what happened here in Black Rock quickly becomes as clear to Macreedy as the audience, all except the exact mechanics and supernal motives for it: Komoko was lynched at some point during the war by Black Rock locals, with Reno, Coley, and Hector likely involved. The local sheriff, Tim Horn (Dean Jagger), proves a badge attached to a dirty shirt and a much-abused liver, and he’s scarcely willing to get out of his own way, never mind help Macreedy as the visitor soon becomes justifiably convinced he won’t live to see the Streamliner come through the next morning.

The racing visions of the train under the opening credits give way to a particular awesome shot beholding Black Rock in its all its one-horse-town glory, a collection of about a dozen structures, something usually to be briefly glimpsed and forgotten from the windows of the train – the period equivalent of what is today often called a flyover state. Sturges returns to the same shot right at the end, but now with the train departing and the single street now filled with vehicles, offering an iconographic summary of Sturges’ reflection on the dark side of America, albeit one sweltering under the glare of the western sun. The running joke about the Streamliner stopping for the first time in four years proves a loaded one, four years being the interval between the outbreak of the war for the US and the murder of Komoko. As the story unfolds, Macreedy’s purpose in seeking out Komoko becomes clear. Macreedy served in the war alongside the dead farmer’s son, a “Nisei” soldier who was killed in the act of trying to save Macreedy’s life. The younger Komoko was posthumously awarded a medal for his gallantry and Macreedy comments, “I figured it was the least I could do to give him one day out of my life,” by delivering the medal to his father.

Bad Day At Black Rock’s origin was a short story by Howard Breslin, entitled “Bad Time at Honda,” published in 1947: the title was changed in part because it was too close to that of the John Wayne vehicle Hondo (1953). The story, in Macreedy’s motives for visiting the small town where a microcosmic battle for the soul of the nation unfolds, has distinct similarities to those explored in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), in following a survivor of the war determined to honour the dead and drawn into battling social evil, and the situation similarly compressed in locale and drama. Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill are also likely movies that owe their making to the success of High Noon (1952), with its insta-myth vision of a lone hero standing up for justice against the indifference, often spilling over into outright disdain, of the community they nominally serve. But in Sturges’ diptych revised that template to more overtly encompass elements of social critique and relevance. Both films encompass prejudice as a theme, manifesting in Bad Day At Black Rock in the focus on an explicitly racist killing and its permutations for the community it occurs in. In Last Train From Gun Hill, it’s evinced in the opening rape and murder of an indigenous woman, and the confident belief of the men who commit it they can avoid consequences of the crime, only to learn lucklessly that she was married to a sheriff.

Bad Day At Black Rock’s story could very easily have loaned itself to a film noir-like visual approach, much as Mann had done with Border Incident (1949), shot in black-and-white with a looming, chiaroscuro intensity. Sturges instead embraced the possibilities of filming in widescreen colour, a visual format still very new at the time and intimidating to many directors. But Sturges immediately displayed his talent for exploiting that space. The cleanly graphic, almost comic book-like aesthetic he brought to The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape was certainly a significant reason for their popularity, but also represented a curtailed version of what Sturges was capable of when working at his highest pitch when utilising the space of the frame, which he exhibits in his use of space and subdivisions within it in both Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill. In Bad Day At Black Rock the visual patterns are almost strictly horizontal and linear, in large part because that’s the shape of the world Macreedy lands in. The locations are inseparable from character. Macreedy visiting the burned-out Komoko farm presents a blasted ruin that seems to reflect and mock Macreedy himself, who confesses later to wanting to remove himself from society entirely in his bitterness over his injury, the black and twisted frame of the house contrasted by the still-standing and creaking windmill much as the parts of himself Macreedy still shows to the world contrast his grave, dark suit. Black Rock was actually a specially built set, but the air of a Potemkin village to the place suits it perfectly, a perversely transplanted zone where it’s literally Reno’s way or the highway, or, rather, railway.

The dramatic crux of Bad Day At Black Rock doesn’t involve its hero but its villains, as Reno gathers all the local men, those subservient, in cahoots, or scared of him together for a council of war, which ironically for a confabulation called to pursue a malevolent conspiracy doesn’t unfold in a shadowy corner or back room, but out where Black Rock’s one street intersects with the railway line. There Sturges engages in a careful game of blocking his actors as framed against the backdrop of meagre buildings and spectacular scenery, with a fine feeling for the contrasting physical forms – Ryan and Marvin’s tall, slim, arrogant postures versus Borgnine’s squat strength and Brennan’s slump – whilst forcing them into a surreal dialogue with the world about them, the seared flanks of the mountains in the distance perpetually capped by pregnant cloud, a promise of fertility eternally out of reach for the desert locale these people subsist in. Meanwhile Reno expounds his firm opinion, one he then necessarily obligates everyone else to share, that Macreedy is a source of trouble that has to be dealt with swiftly. Macreedy’s lame arm, his inescapable badge of service, nonetheless provokes a constant assumption from the thugs of Black Rock that he can’t defend himself, and indeed provides a sort of psychological as well as physical pretext for ganging up on him. Reno comments: “I know those maimed guys. Their minds get twisted – they put on hairshirts and act like martyrs. All of them are do-gooders – freaks – troublemakers…This guy’s like carrier of smallpox.”

Reno’s power over the tiny nation he commands is built not simply on intimidation and entrapment through guilt, but a system of rhetoric that’s rather queasily familiar thanks to the past few years of right-wing American political expression – he even wears a red cap in his early scenes. In particular, Reno’s desire not just to lash out at strangers and foreigners as targets for his wrath, but his more purposeful, rhetorical efforts to define anyone who might stir things up by acknowledging problems and protesting injustice is motivated by some personal lack, some virulent difference and source of sickness, which they will then impose on everyone else under the guise of that protest. More immediately, Reno’s grip on the locale is explained subliminally: everyone knows he’s a dictatorial psychopath who will do anything to maintain his power, a knowledge that whilst unspoken dominates every judgement, until the very end, when one character significantly reveals self-deluding obliviousness to it. Even people who had no part in Komoko’s killing and aren’t exactly sure what transpired, like Velie, Horn, and Liz, have absorbed the truth and the reality of their situation, by emotional osmosis. It helps that Ryan inhabits the role with his finest pitch at the nexus of smug assurance and insinuating threat, investing casual lines, like noting to Liz, “Do you have a licence to hire cars? Might get in trouble,” with a veneer of reasonableness coating pointed warning and implied consequence.

Tracy by contrast seems, superficially at least, ill-fitting in the role, looking as he was every one of his fifty-five years by this point when his character’s supposed to be a recent combat veteran. Tracy himself seems to have shared that misgiving, having tried to pull out of the role early on. But to a certain extent this plays into his characterisation, Macreedy’s aura of reluctance, of weathered and life-battered experience, coincides with Tracy’s specific gift for playing angry righteous without succumbing to sanctimonious. The extended game of tensely maintained appearances and decorum between Macreedy and the townsfolk keeps threatening to break down when Reno’s underlings try to provoke confrontations, particularly Coley acting like the world’s oldest school bully, whilst Reno himself is happy enough to wait for dark and a perfectly contrived situation before he makes his move. When Macreedy travels out to Adobe Flats and surveys the ruins of Komoko’s farm, Coley follows him out in a car and on the way back runs him off the road, and when Macreedy returns to town is faced with Coley’s accusations of being “the world’s champion road hog.”

Those efforts build to a head when two decisions collide: Coley becomes determined to find a pretext to beat Macreedy up, whilst Macreedy, musing over his situation with Velie, decides a certain show of force might buy him a little more time. So when Macreedy goes into the town’s diner, run by Sam (Walter Sande), Coley starts employing school bully moves in claiming the stool Macreedy sits on. Macreedy continues to acquiesce until Coley manhandles him and grabs his lame arm, whereupon Macreedy hacks him in the throat with an expert judo chop, and quickly and easily reduces Coley to a shattered and bloodied heap on the ground. One of the great worm-turns moments in cinema, one that amongst other things might well have helped inspire a strand of wu xia cinema like The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) in the notion of a seemingly crippled man proving a still-effective fighting force, and at once honouring and taking apart the classic Western motif of a covertly tough but externally pacific man pushed to a show of manly violence. Even when allowing himself to goaded into a show of force and reacting with authentic anger to Coley’s thuggery, Macreedy remains judicious and intending a specific effect with his display, delivering a warning Reno, Hector, and the rest in the same non-verbal way they’re used to that he’s a dangerous force, whilst also being very much verbal as he uses the moment of shock to outright accuse Reno of Komoko’s murder and warn him, before the others, he’s doomed to pay the price because he involved feckless fools in his crime.

Both Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill are studies in misshapen machismo and its ugly impact on communities and individuals, but also trying to understand what makes such men who inflict it, and are inflicted with it, tick. This is explored more completely in the later film’s portrait of a father simultaneously indulging his son’s worst traits whilst trying to correct them, whilst in the former Reno’s sense of inadequacy, whilst likely endemic, was exacerbated by being rejected by the army owing to some physical lack, an incidental reveal that lends subtext to his comments about “maimed guys.” Reno tells Macreedy, as they talk at the gas pumps outside Liz’s repair shed, that he tried to volunteer immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, and makes clear he considered Komoko just another enemy to be killed in a local edition of the war. Velie however later tells Macreedy of another motive – Reno leased the Adobe Flats land to Komoko, thinking he’d pulled off a nifty swindle, but Komoko made the land potentially fertile by digging a well with relentless labour until he finally struck artesian water.

Velie delivers a wry monologue explaining the usual cycle of life in Black Rock, with biting overtones of a more general meditation on the American pursuit of riches, which he alone is perfectly positioned to profit from. When Macreedy calls himself a potential customer, Velie muses, “I get ‘em coming and going,” and explains the town remains a magnet for gold prospectors who come in, buy land from Velie as a notary, strike small deposits and finally wither away trying to make the illusion of imminent riches pay off, and finally finish up being planted in the ground in Velie’s coffins. Velie nonetheless proves the closest thing Macreedy has to an ally in the town, with Horn too soused and gutless to make a move against Reno, who even strips off his badge when he feels like it. Velie offers to provide Macreedy with transportation out of the town, which proves to be a most mordant vehicle, his ancient hearse. But the hearse won’t start, and Hector makes sure it can’t be repaired by ripping out a wad of wiring.

The tight, seamy, shadowy space of the hotel, Black Rock’s largest building, provides Macreedy with his only real refuge and space of freedom, continuing the ironic inversion of the meaning of space. There’s some curious echo and anticipation in this inversion, if only my mind, of David Lynch’s exploration of seemingly banal structures and the subsisting ecosystem of underground life that subsists in them in small towns as explored in Blue Velvet (1986), a reef where stranger life forms can flourish. Sturges would, meanwhile, repeat the motif in Last Train From Gun Hill, where the hotel the hero is besieged in again becomes his citadel, creating a distinct impression that views the trappings of civilisation not as an unwelcome intrusion into the nominal freedom of the open landscape but as a thankful flourish of sanctuary from it as well: freedom is too easily accompanied by barbarism. Finally Macreedy and Velie manage to convince Pete into staging a personal insurrection, in part thanks to Macreedy pointing out to Pete that now Reno knows he’ll have to bump off every witness to the lynching. “You haven’t forgotten and you’re ashamed,” Macreedy blasts Pete scornfully when the young man is prodded into confirming his involvement and claims it still weighs on his mind: “That’s really noble of you. I suppose four years from now you’ll be sitting around here telling people that you haven’t forgotten me either.” Pete and Velie stage a trap to lure in Hector and knock him out, and Macreedy ventures out of the hotel to where Pete has arranged for Liz to wait for him in her jeep and drive him across the desert.

So ideal is Bad Day At Black Rock as a narrative ideogram, setting, theme, character, and plot all entirely entwined, each aspect shaping the others, that it’s been relentlessly copied and imitated. Quentin Tarantino paid it characteristically impudent homage in Pulp Fiction (1994) in weaving a variation on Macreedy and the younger Komoko’s experience into Christopher Walken’s monologue at the start of “The Gold Watch” portion, albeit with a sardonic contrast between the source material’s confirmation of the nobility of wartime fraternity and the more typical racism expressed by Walken’s character befitting a different wartime sensibility. Bad Day At Black Rock is one of those relatively rare films with a sense of form as concerted as its driving ideas. It’s barely longer than the average B-movie of the time at 81 minutes, but executed with A-list production values. The stringent sensibility, made plain in the camerawork and acting, is further amplified by Sturges’ use of Previn’s scoring, which, after the pounding fanfare at the outset, is kept to a few, scattered, moody passages here and there, and entirely avoided in the few overt action interludes, including the concluding, inevitable fight for life at the end. That scene sees Liz delivering Macreedy to Komoko’s old farm on the pretext of fetching some water from the well for the drive, only for a spotlight to fall on the jeep and Reno’s rifle to start firing on it, sending Macreedy scurrying for cover behind the vehicle.

Liz’s act of loyalty to Reno is nonetheless pathetically rewarded when Reno makes plain he knows he has to kill her while he has the chance, intending to pass her and Macreedy’s deaths as a car accident, and her attempt to run is the ideal cue to gun her down with cold-blooded concision. Macreedy, thinking swiftly with every participle of his military training and initiative, grabs an empty liquor bottle from the refuse lying about the farm, and fills it with gasoline by unplucking the fuel line under the motor and turning the motor over to fill it, keeping behind the flimsy shelter all the while. Reno starts stalking down towards the jeep, only to be hit with Macreedy’s improvised Molotov cocktail, instantly transformed into a writhing pillar of fire and collapsing on the sand. Macreedy, not wanting him to die, kicks sand on him as he screams for help,and then loads his fried carcass into his own wagon for the drive back to Black Rock. A terrific climax that’s all the better for the way Sturges refuses to alter his style, maintaining the same quiet, music-free, detail-dependent storytelling as throughout. Macreedy’s ingenuity and means of gaining victory in a dire situation are entirely believable. The setting finally swaps the sunstruck vividness of the rest of the film for a more traditional battle on the fringe of the human world, in both a literal and liminal sense, with cycle of fate leading both killer and intended victim back to the scene of the mutually compelling crime, out in a zone of moral nullity. The setting, the stark pools of light and the Technicolor textures diffused amidst the shadows, is touched with menacing poetry, punctuated by the eruption of a column of fire, like some Biblical miracle of retribution yet doled out on a most painfully small and effective scale.

Macreedy delivers Reno to Horn and Velie at the Black Rock jail, and delivers the awful news about his sister to Pete. A brief coda sees Macreedy leaving on the Streamliner, with Black Rock now invaded by the long-feared forces of external authority and exposing its infamy, but also with a note of optimism as Macreedy hands over Komoko’s medal to Velie when the old man suggests, “Maybe we need it – maybe give us something to build on.” Bad Day At Black Rock was a solid success for MGM, and it cemented Sturges’s career. The success of The Gunfight At The O.K. Corral two years later led to Sturges reuniting with that film’s star Kirk Douglas and much the same crew for Last Train From Gun Hill, scripted by James Poe, one of Hollywood’s best writing talents of the period – he excelled at portraits of increasingly mad quarrels and trips to self-destruction, penning amongst other films Robert Aldrich’s Attack! (1955), James B. Harris’s The Bedford Incident (1965), and Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). Last Train From Gun Hill contrasts Bad Day At Black Rock as this time Sturges opens with immediate portrayal of the racially-slanted act of violence that propels the story. Douglas plays Matt Morgan, a United State Marshall based in the small town of Pawley. His Cherokee wife Catherine (Ziva Rodann) drives in a horse buggy back from a visit to her family at a nearby reservation along with their son Petey (Lars Henderson). Two men, Rick Belden (Earl Holliman) and Lee Smithers (Brian G. Hutton), whiling away the day boozing in the copse lining the road and in the mood for provocative fun, catch sight of the pretty, passing lady, and mount up to intercept the buggy and make harassing appeals for attention.

Catherine, wisely realising that the two men are liquored up and dangerous, lashes Rick in the face with her buggy whip and tries to make a dash for town, only to lose control and crash. Rick and Lee corner Catherine and Rick strips off her clothes, whilst Petey, ignored, steals Rick’s horse and rides to town to fetch his father. Matt dashes back to the crash, only to find his wife raped and dead. Matt immediately knows where he can turn for information about the attackers, when he sees the initials CB emblazoned in silver letters on the saddle of Petey’s stolen mount, the logo of his old friend Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn). Rick is Craig’s son, and he and Lee return to the Belden ranch outside the town of Gun Hill, spinning a yarn about how Rick borrowed his father’s saddle and horse for a jaunt only to have them stolen whilst they were in a saloon in Pawley. Matt catches a train to Gun Hill with Craig’s saddle and returns it to its owner: Craig is initially overjoyed to see his old pal, but Matt quickly realises, once Craig explains Rick and Lee’s report, that the two men are lying and likely committed the crime. Craig, despite realising his son is guilty, bristles at Matt’s threats to arrest Rick, demanding that he leave the locale, or else face his wrath.

The attack that opens the film is one of Sturges’ strongest units of cinema, setting up the ensuing drama and depicting the speed with which a perfectly ordinary day can become a grotesque calamity. Sturges’s intensifying visual flourishes include use of a toppled, twisted log to provide a sort of captioning frame for the buggy’s crash. The still-whirling wheel of the toppled buggy is a distorting lens through which Lee’s leering face is viewed. Mrs Morgan’s red blouse comes off in Rick’s hand and her desperate, near-naked form squirms in the earthy filth trying to maintain a shred of modesty whilst the two rapists advance. By contrast, Matt is regaling Pawley’s young ‘uns for the umpteenth time with an account of his most legendary exploit, defeating the outlaw Bradley brothers in a shootout, the woodwork of his office still bearing the bullet holes of the confrontation but the one-time life-and-death battle now just a tale for the young boys to ween their heroic fantasies on. Last Train From Gun Hill is then like Shane (1953) a Western film about the idea of the Western film and its popularity with the audience of the day, but one that also more aggressively pursues its essential meaning. After promising to deliver quick and decisive justice to Catherine’s father (Charles Stevens), Matt departs for Gun Hill by train. On the train he encounters Linda (Carolyn Jones), who is obliged by a lack of seats, including two taken up by the telltale saddle, to sit by Matt. Linda is taken by Matt’s manners and distracted air (“You can always tell the ones that are married.”) but who also warns him about the potential welcome he’ll find in Gun Hill because “I know who that saddle belongs to.”

Sturges, whilst vague about the location of the Pawley and Gun Hill which lie within a day’s journey by train apart, emphasises the way both towns have been claimed by the spread of American domain, no longer defined by the mythic danger and chaos and openness of the frontier. This notion is subtly reinforced by aspects of the design, like the emphasis on the highly Victorian décor of the Gun Hill hotel with its plush red wallpaper, but with just enough crudeness about the edges to hint these are still places where wildness lurks under the surface, and perhaps will for decades, even centuries. The trains roll right through the middle of the town, a piquant detail that also has a significant impact on how the story plays out. Matt’s heroic past is just that, and now he’s a married family man, his old stories now just tales for boys, although his town is still happy to have its lawman. Craig’s grip on Gun Hill has succumbed to an even more advanced, if still pre-modern paradigm, as he is the veritable feudal lord, with command over its economic wellbeing and all that flows from that: “I own the sheriff, I own this town, I own everything in it.” I wonder how many times Bob Dylan watched the film as a teenager.

Matt and Craig’s first, amiable conversation suggests they were both at one time on the wrong side of the law: “I finally figured out the other side didn’t pay,” Matt admits when Craig laughs about him being a Marshall. “Kill him slow, the Indian way,” Catherine’s father urges Matt when he sets out to track down the killers, to Matt’s riposte that “I’ll kill him – my own way,” meaning with legal process. This seems like Matt is upholding civilised virtues and deploring vigilante justice, but as he makes clear to Rick later, relishing explaining to him the long, agonising wait to hung and then the intimate horror of the execution itself, that the legal way might be even more elaborately sadistic and ruthless, and Matt suddenly seems a rather more maniacal and possibly unhinged figure than Craig, whose chief defence is that for all his faults has a single, honourable cause in protecting his son, no matter how much his son deserves punishment. Which is an interesting twist in the story given that Sturges makes Matt otherwise a paradigm, contrasting Matt’s capacity to be playful as he indulges the lads of Pawley, contrasts Craig’s more baleful attitude to being a father, enacted in excruciating manner when Rick and Lee return to the ranch.

When Rick says the whip cut on his cheek, delivered by Catherine’s lash, was done by a woman, Craig is vaguely proud of his son’s battle scars from amour, but a quip from one of Craig’s ranch hands, Beero (Brad Dexter), about fighting men from now on raises Craig’s ire and he compels Rick to fight Beero on the point of honour: “Somebody insults you, you hit ‘em – I don’t care if you win or lose but you fight, you understand?” he demands. Rick promptly loses as Beero bests him, yet another moment in what feels like an untold number of small humiliations for Rick in trying to live up to his father’s idea of manly uprightness. Quinn doesn’t play Craig as coldly imperial, finding elements of furtive pride and delight in his son’s misbehaviour even in his anger at a provocation like staking off with his saddle simmers, and a streak of pathos when he comprehends how wasted his efforts have been Craig’s personal space in the ranch house is a temple of macho display with cattle horns, buffalo heads, racks of rifles, and a collection of spurs. Craig himself wearily admits to Matt that he was left raising Rick after his wife died many years earlier: “You spend all your life working for something – all of a sudden the reason you wanted it is gone.”

The similarities between Reno Smith and Craig Belden as antagonists are telling: both wield dictatorial power over a small town. Both set out to foil the justice with an unswerving sense of their own prerogative and rightness. Craig is carefully defined as far less monstrous than Reno, and has to some extent a sympathetic motive in refusing to yield to Matt, but his blend of imperious machismo and weakness is ultimately just as destructive. Rick embodies Craig’s fear of inadequacy, whilst bringing his own, nasty entitlement to bear. Rick and Lee both dismiss their victim to Craig as “just an Indian squaw.” “’Round here we pay a bounty for killing an Indian,” a townsperson tells Matt. Craig’s more ambivalent position and reactions are suggestive, as Lee’s dismissal sparks his fury, ordering Lee to get off the ranch before he kills him, and Craig tells his son, “If I was Matt I wouldn’t serve that warrant, I’d just kill you.” Matt’s consuming pain of loss and rage meanwhile leave him as riven through as Macreedy’s arm and wartime experience, with Douglas expertly playing the scenes where Matt affects casual joviality with Craig, until the penny drops and he turns glaze-eyed fury on his old friend, and Craig’s response is riven through a note of panic as his paternal instinct reacts far more quickly and vehemently than his good sense or feeling for his old friend. Matt stalks out, ignoring Craig’s warnings, and after asking around the town about Rick’s whereabouts, acts on a tip from Linda, heading to Charlie’s Place, a saloon and whorehouse.

Sturges fits in a surprisingly racy gag as Matt sneaks into through an upstairs window in Charlie’s Place, disturbing a woman sleeping unclothed in her bed, evidently a prostitute taking some time out: “Can’t a girl get some sleep?” she groans as if men climb in her window all the time: “Sorry. Don’t make any noise.” Matt requests, to her sceptical expression. As if by some dark cosmic joke, he immediately gets a chance to snare Rick, who’s been playing cards with his friends but just come upstairs on the hunt for a woman. Rick hides behind a corner when he sees Matt sneak into the place, but when someone calls out to Rick from the saloon, Matt notices Rick’s boots under the curtain, and promptly knocks him out without a struggle. By this point Matt has already learned he can’t look for any allies in Gun Hill just as Craig promised, with the sheriff, Bartlett (Sande again), warning him off. His only friend proves to be Linda, who has been shacked up with Craig for a long time, but he never sought to marry her. On the train, Linda alludes to her own recent stay in hospital. Eventually it emerges that Craig beat her black and blue after Rick badmouthed her to him. This offers another significant hue to Craig’s dark influence on Rick and vice versa, whilst also setting up a fascinating subplot involving Linda’s evolving desire to punish Craig and help Matt whilst maintaining a lingering affection for Craig that finally registers at the end as tragic loss. Jones more or less steals the film with her marvellous performance, with an air of premature and hard-won worldly wisdom invested into her sense of gesture, wielding the angles of her body for expression of tedium with wastes of time and exhaustion with being surrounded by bores and brutes: Matt being gentlemanly enough to take off his hat when Linda sits next to him on the train is contrasted with Lee carelessly plonking his ass in a chair before she does.

Last Train From Gun Hill is more generic in aspects than Bad Day At Black Rock, with a more familiar approach to formal elements like Dimitri Tiomkin’s characteristic scoring and less time for playing with time and narrative burn. But it becomes something of a master class in utilising a compressed setting, with a scenario reminiscent of Delmer Daves’ 3:10 To Yuma (1957) as Matt, with Rick in his grasp, must find a way of taking his charge to the titular train after abandoning the relative if besieged security of his hotel room. Last Train From Gun Hill’s sense of enclosure subtly contrasts the sprawl and claustrophobic space of the earlier movie. The first scene, which immediately sets the story in motion with a quick turn from sojourning play to ugly violence, takes place along a trail running along a stream surrounded by trees that frame and enfold the scene of drama. The sweeping vistas around the Belden ranch retain the promise of the land as an unfettered domain where titanic men can roam, and yet these are quickly swapped for the baroque machismo of Craig’s ranch and the pretence of the hotel interior. There Matt turns the imposed limitations to his own advantage, including setting up mirrors to let him keep watch on his the corridor outside his room and shoving Rick against the window to be a human shield against stray bullets. In similar fashion, Sturges finds freedom in the confines of Charlie’s and the hotel, subdividing frames in frames with viewpoints through doorways and stairways, constructing contrasts in visual texture that recall a Matisse painting.

Sturges’ lucid contrast of the natural and human zones, and the tension between them manifesting in a clash between confinement and freedom, would continue to be a motif in his best work. Most obviously it’s explicated in The Great Escape with the literal demand of the POW camp inmates to escape to liberty as represented again by soaring mountains in the distance, in that case the Alps. Whilst The Magnificent Seven simplified Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) to a virtual comic book level in a dramatic sense, it depended nonetheless on Sturges’s ability to make the space of the Mexican village matter as an island of civilisation amidst a wild and dangerous world, and with the Kurosawa film’s theme of social caste transmuted, as in much of Sturges’s oeuvre, into concerns with race. The Old Man and the Sea similarly took up Hemingway’s parable in presenting its hero in combat with the primal elements, a place where ironically he’s far more ennobled, far more powerful, than ever he could be on land, but also constantly forced to relive the same essential tragedy of his existence. Even something like Ice Station Zebra, often painted as Sturges’s decline into prestige movie dross, hinges on a sense of the violent contrast between a submarine’s pressure-cooker interior, at once point violated by icy ocean, and the open wilderness of Arctic climes. Marooned would take the disparity to its ultimate limit.

Sturges gives Douglas a great moment when Matt first captures Rick to display his trademark physicality. Matt descends the stairs in Charlie’s Plac with Rick’s unconscious form draped over his shoulder, and kills the barman and a Belden goon and injures another when they try to draw on him. This display of prowess also makes more than clear when Craig retains a sense of awe and fear towards Matt, and adopts wise caution in dealing with him in the high-pressure situation that evolves. Craig, venturing up to visit Matt in his hotel room where he keeps Rick handcuffed to the bed, reminds his friend that he saved his life and owes him something, but when Craig hurls a fixture at Matt whilst Matt fires on Craig’s men out in the hall, Matt spins about and glowers at Craig: “I oughta kill you for that!” he barks, in that inimitable way of Douglas’s for playing virulent anger, but tells Craig that’s his debt paid and lets him leave. Meanwhile Linda, after getting the full story of how everything transpired from Lee, resolves to fulfil Matt’s request for her to get him a shotgun, which he needs to make an escape. Linda does so, which Craig learns about with wild despair and anger, just as Lee sets fire to the hotel to force Matt to flee it.

The incredible last ten minutes of the film see Matt making his escape as the hotel begins to crumble about his ears, flaming debris tumbling about his ears, shotgun jammed against Rick’s jaw and finger on the trigger. The two climb aboard a wagon and roll down towards the railway landing, and Matt contrives to let the arriving train divide him from Craig and the other, stalking enemies. But Lee intercepts them and tries to force Matt to release Rick: Lee fires and accidentally kills Rick instead whilst Matt blows Lee away. With deadpan acceptance, Matt unlocks himself from the handcuffs that kept him tethered to Rick, but Craig, finding his dead son, demands a shootout in reckoning with Matt. Matt warns him not to try, but Craig insists, and a few seconds later lies by his son, dying, murmuring an appeal to Matt to do a better job raising his son without a mother than he did. Matt departs, watching from the train as it rolls out slowly as Craig’s body is cradled by a dumbstruck Linda. Last Train From Gun Hill is in the final measure close to the platonic ideal of the 1950s “adult” western, fulfilling its basic genre function and its broader neo-mythic project whilst scratching away in search of the perversely and pathetically human under the masks of such templates. And taken with Bad Day At Black Rock, it completes an ironic matched set, a portrait of an evolving America that perhaps hasn’t evolved that far.

1980s, Action-Adventure, German cinema, Historical

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Director / Screenwriter: Werner Herzog

By Roderick Heath

Werner Herzog’s career has been one of the strangest of great living filmmakers, fitting for a director always aware of the absurd element of existence and rapt by collisions of life and art. The young talent of the New German Cinema movement emergent in the late 1960s who caught the eye of critics like Pauline Kael even with his short films. The alien auteur on the international film scene in the 1970s and ‘80s. The incessant documentary maker. The internet age ironic pop culture meme, guerrilla film school guru, professional iconoclast, and latter-day character actor, careers sustained while still turning out unique but often ignored movies. All the same man, all displaying different facets of the same great talent and restless creative zest. Herzog, born Werner Stipetić in Munich to a German father and Austro-Croatian mother in 1942, was a child of a bleak age and a country defined by surreal disparities. His mother fled Munich to a remote Bavarian village when Herzog was only two weeks old, after the house next to theirs was hit by an Allied bomb. Even in their new, remote locale Herzog could see the flicker of burning cities lighting the horizon.

Herzog grew up over the next few years in a household without common utilities like running water or a telephone, in the company of other children who ran wild with their fathers off at war. He didn’t see his first film until a travelling projectionist showed on in the local schoolhouse. Although his father eventually abandoned the family, Herzog adopted his father’s surname because it sounded more impressive, returned to Munich with his mother and siblings, and when father and son were reunited many years later they literally didn’t speak the same language. As a teenager Herzog developed passionate interests, but the idea of becoming a filmmaker soon overtook all else. He stole a 35 mm camera from the Munich Film School, which he later characterised not as a theft but an act of necessity. He also developed a reflexive resistance to authority as manifested by bullying schoolteachers, and worked as a steelworker at night to finance his student film projects. Amidst various, sometimes near-fatal travels, he spent stints living in Manchester, where he followed a girlfriend and first started learning English, and in the United States as a student, the latter experience one he would channel into his notoriously caustic portrait of the immigrant experience, Stroszek (1977). He founded his own production company in the early 1960s, around the time he forged his first short film, Herakles (1962).

After several more shorts, Herzog produced his debut feature, Signs of Life (1968). His follow-up, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), gained attention for its evocation of the physically unusual and grotesque in portraying the disabled denizens of an institution taking it over, whilst Fata Morgana (1971), built around footage he took in the Sahara desert recording mirages, established his habit of casually collapsing the distance between poetic and documentary filmmaking. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) really put Herzog on the map, however, with is unsettling, perverse, inexorable portrait of the ill-fated Spanish Conquistador who vanishes in the Amazon Jungle after succumbing to ever-deeper delusions of grandeur, a process Herzog identified as the logical end of the imperialist project, in the face of a vast, inimical natural landscape. Herzog’s stylistic vigour, with his lunging, wide-angle lensing on hypermobile and often handheld camerawork, and his blending of the immersive and happenstance method of documentary shooting with a defined artistic viewpoint, left a permanent mark on artistically ambitious filmmakers henceforth, particularly on the likes of Peter Weir and Terrence Malick.

Every Man For Himself And God Against All, aka The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Stroszek, and Woyzeck (1979), continued to contemplate oddballs and misfits completely at odds with societies so alien to them they might as well have been parachuted in or otherwise drive them to crazed acts, all approached by the director with a blend of sickly estrangement and woozy compassion. Heart of Glass (1976) offered a bizarre portrait of the rural Germany he had grown up in and its medieval past that ultimately shaded into a fractured parable for the human condition. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) allowed Herzog to work through his obsession with F.W. Murnau’s original film and its oneiric imagery, converting its visual and thematic lexicon into his own as he blended high Expressionist style with his own cool blend of the naturalistic and the hallucinatory. When Herzog unearthed a scrap of historical information about the adventures of a Peruvian-Irish rubber baron named Brian Sweeney Fitzcarrald, a typical figure from the age of the “rubber boom” that gripped the Amazon basin from around 1890 to 1920, Herzog was fascinated enough to make his personal take on that story the subject of a film.

This one that would revisit the territory of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, specifically the jungle setting and a new investigation of Herzog’s preoccupation with the impossible effort of being human. He embarked on Fitzcarraldo but found his project metastasising into a test of determination and physical, fiscal, and artistic effort as he shot it on location in the Peruvian Amazon, locked in a hall of mirrors with the very subject of the film, the autobiographical dimensions of which emerged inevitably. Herzog weathered the departure of his first star, Jason Robards, and several supporting players, including Mick Jagger, who was playing a supporting role Herzog decided to excise completely once the singer-turned-actor left to go back on tour with the Rolling Stones. Klaus Kinski, who had worked with Herzog on Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Nosferatu the Vampyre and later became perceived by many as Herzog’s great creative muse, was eventually hired to replace Robards, but his and Herzog’s collaborations, always volatile despite the quality of their work together, became so fractious that Herzog later reported that one local tribal leader proposed killing Kinski for him.

Herzog himself didn’t escape the anger of the locals: one of his film sets was burned down by angry people of the Aguaruna nation, on whose land the movie was being made and who were working on the shoot, after several of their people were injured. Herzog found himself following in the footsteps of filmmakers like Erich von Stroheim, with Greed (1924) and Fritz Lang, with Metropolis (1927), and keeping company with contemporaries like Michael Cimino and Francis Coppola, as a filmmaker walking the tightrope of vision above the chasm of career suicide, as he might has well have been burning money to drive the engine of the steamship that features in the movie. The experience as a whole was recorded by the late Les Blank in his famous documentary Burden of Dreams (1982). Whether all that agony was worth the result is one of those grey zones of artistic effort, but the film itself is its own affirmation: the very crux of Fitzcarraldo as a story is that all human effort is, to some degree or another, a magnificently pointless expression of need, an urge that has no rational explanation, other to tilt against the scale and triviality of the universe. If Aguirre, The Wrath of God was the death dream concomitant to that viewpoint, with its voyage to the conqueror’s oblivion, Fitzacarraldo offers the mythical counterweight, a hymn to raging life and the enigmatic power of human energy.

Central to the film and its hero’s quest is an obsession with Grand Opera as the pure stuff of life, analogue to Herzog’s passion for cinema on the most obvious level but also persisting in weird and fascinating counterpoint to his actual efforts: how much effort humans expend to indulge the habits of the fantasias they weave with their minds in near-obliviousness to the actual world about them, the conviction that life without that extra level of the fantastic, the creative, the dream-enfolding, is without point, without differentiation from the old Hobbesian concept of the life as short, nasty, and brutish. Herzog’s anointed hero is Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Kinski), son of an Irish adventurer, his name transliterated to Fitzcarraldo to suit the local lingua and known to the few people close to him as Fitz. As an ultimate personal ambition, Fitz is preoccupied with reproducing the grand conceit achieved to unique and surreal effect by the Brazilian Amazonian city of Manaus, which built a marvellous classical opera house, in his chosen home of Iquitos, a far cruder city further up the mighty river in Peru. So desperate is Fitz to attend a performance being given by Enrico Caruso in Manaus that he and his lover and partisan, the brothel madam Molly (Claudia Cardinale), travel the 1,000 miles for the performance, and manage to talk a doorman into letting them into the already packed opera house. When Caruso points across the crowd as part of his performance, both Fitz and Molly are certain he pointed at him, as if the very spirit of destiny has chosen Fitz out.

On a more immediate and concrete level, Fitz wants to make himself a success in business, not purely for the sake of wealth or social standing, but to achieve his specific obsessions. Having failed to build what he called the Trans-Andean Railway in a bid to open up the Peruvian Amazon, he’s now set up an ice-producing concern utilising a well-known chemical process and which other entrepreneurs, like the immensely rich rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy), mock him for, seeing no market in Iquitos for ice. Fitz’s desire for opera is presented not as a bizarre fixation but as a natural urge, as urgent as any need for food or sex, one that fills his thoughts and lends shape to his many, often absurd enterprises, and the dream-world of the opera is the one that stirs him to such follies. Fitz’s frustration climaxes with him regaling the townsfolk of Iquitos as he dangles from the spire of a city church, ringing the bell like a wannabe Quasimodo or some devolved ape of god, screaming, “I want my opera! I want my opera!” People stand far below, gazing up at the priest of art in bewilderment and irritation, whilst some policemen assemble and bash down the locked door of the church to drag him out, a moment Herzog invests with deadpan humour, as if with some participle of his mind is back with the Keystone Kops.

The actual opera performance of Verdi’s Ernani Fitz and Molly behold in rapture is on one level an absurd spectacle, famous names performing in a pasteboard world of delirious romanticism and where the only thing thicker than the artifice is the makeup. The portly Caruso plays the young romantic hero and Sarah Bernhardt, hired because of her fame, must mime her performance to an offstage singer, her wooden leg hidden beneath her costume but already the talk of the town. But it’s also a world that has more reality to Fitz than the one he lives in, in a manner that corresponds to Herzog’s own desire to seek in his cinema a truthfulness beyond mere realism of the kind he found in conventional cinema verite fare, and one dream-world feeds another. In this regard Herzog at once honours and subverts a fairly classical mode of movie based around the gallant visionary who sees far beyond the limits of the immediately practical to envision, well, new limits of the practical, whereas for Fitz, who always dresses in a white suit, the impracticality is the very point. In the course of his scheme he comes close nonetheless to unifying two largely irreconcilable realms, the world-building, world-trampling zeal of the businessman and the soul-nourishing if often just as tunnel-visioned influence of the artist. Fitz’s fixation to a certain extent saves him even from the darker aspects of such compulsion, aspects Herzog would later meditate on with the mountain climber protagonists of Scream of Stone (1991), tormented by their own egos and pain before the gruelling challenge of a great rock spire in Patagonia, and more notoriously the animal lover eventually consumed by his ‘friends’ in Grizzly Man (2006).

Aquilano is the essential contrast to Fitz, a rotund vulgarian nonetheless entirely at his leisure in the palatial rococo interior of the Manaus Opera which he seems to have helped build and run, boasting of how it’s been built on land worth ten times what real estate goes for New York with materials like imported Florentine marble. It’s all an expression of the bristling demand for prestige on the behalf of his rich little town, raised suddenly out of a jungle outpost to become a great global hub of commerce and industry, and all of it flowing out the simplest labour and a natural bounty. Aquilano strikes matches on a bronze figurine decorating the opera house, declares the feeling of losing money when playing cards to be beautiful, and feeds a bundle of thousand dollar notes to a fish being reared in a pool on his estate, noting that his fish only seem to flourish in that taste. The fish, or one of its fellows, is itself later feed in turn to the assembled grandees of Iquitos. This last flourish presents a particularly inspired metaphor for the roundelay of capitalist endeavour, one that cuts out any aspect of adventure or vision of the kind Fitz purveys so relentlessly, the money seemingly wasted cycled back through the literal bellies of the rich. Here Herzog contemplates the relationship of artist and patron with a Dickensian sense of its absurdity, but the dynamic of supporter and supported is laced with contradictions: only the artist and the priest can break money out of the illustrated capitalist cycle of money spent to make more money. But priests failed to bring civilisation to the wild nations of the Pachitea: “Two padres finished up as shrunken heads,” Aquilano tells Fitz.

Despite the differences between them, Aquilano likes Fitz for his energy and enterprise. Fitz also inspires passionate support from Molly, and a flock of children he’s become a father figure to: they camp outside the jail where he’s kept for two days after the church incident, one sawing away incessantly on a fiddle, presenting a spectacle so pathetic it moves the jailer to release Fitz. Fitz lives in a hovel with a pet pig for a companion, and it’s the pig he promises to set up on a red velvet chair every night in his opera house. Meanwhile Molly’s steadfast faith proves most valuable. Her stable of well-trained, well-dressed courtesanas makes them a social fixture in this crude town despite the pretences of the nobs, giving her leverage to wrangle a chance for Fitz to pitch to those nobs for support for his proposed opera house. When Fitz irritates the party by playing them one of his Caruso records, they try to throw him out, resulting in a display of angry pride from him as he gulps down glasses of champagne, dedicating each one to an opera composer, before offering his personal manifesto of defiance. “I will outgut you,” Fitz declares: “I will outnumber you. I will outbillion you. I will outrubber you. I will outperform you. Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more than a rotten caricature of great opera.” Molly promptly marches her girls out like a troop commander. “Only a dreamer can move mountains,” she tells Aquilano when he interview them together in an office of the opera house, and later Fitz steps up to declare that his very object: “I shall move a mountain.”

When Fitz decides on Molly’s advice to follow up on Aquilano’s offer to help him get set up in the rubber trade, seeing it as the only way to make his vision reality, he and Aquilano travel together up the Ucayali, a tributary river branching off the Amazon to the east of Iquitos, where Aquilano shows off both his own, immense holdings and the natural barrier that prevents anyone exploiting the land further on: a violent cataract called the Pongo das Mortes, so rough and fast that no boat can traverse it, let alone one large enough to transport loads of rubber, and no other transport route is feasible. “The Indians call the rapids ‘Chirimagua,’ Aquilano tells Fitz, “The Angry Spirits.” Approaching the cataract gorge, they’re urged to be silent by Aquilano’s native guide: “We must be quiet,” Aqulinao tells Fitz with sceptical humour, “Whoever talks will be swallowed up by the evil spirits of the whirlpool…the bare-asses also said ‘The water has no hair to hold onto.’” Shown a map of the area by Don Aquilino, Fitz notices how another tributary, the Pachitea, runs parallel to the Ucayali on the western side of Iquitos and bends close to it at a point well above the cataract, with only a slim isthmus separating them. Fitz realises, without entirely explaining to anyone for a long time, that if he can transport a boat across the isthmus, he can then use it to bring rubber from his claim across the Ucayali, to then be shipped down the Pachitea. Despite the many immediate and theoretical obstacles such a plan entails, Fitz sets about chasing the scheme with new passion, taking advantage of government policy that seeks to develop unexploited land, but also warned by the notary (William Rose) who arranges the deal he must establish his control of the region “by deed and by proof” within nine months or lose the rights.

The real Fitzcarrald was not nearly as florid and ambitious as Herzog’s poetically intensified equivalent. The boat he transported across land was only 30 tons, and was moved piece by disassembled piece, and he died at the age of 35 when his ship sank underneath him some years into his successful business operation. Fitzcarrald was no romantic figure either, instead typifying the kind of exploitative spirit more commonly associated with the rubber boom, much as Herzog portrays Aquilano and the other barons, wringing forced labour out of the native peoples whilst treating them with contempt. Herzog avoids rhetorical asides in contending with this aspect of the story, allowing it to take care of itself, whilst noting his Fitzcarraldo’s efforts as an odd mix of tentative connections and mutual use. The symbolic menace invested in the Pongo das Mortes by Aquilano proves not just to be a folkloric aside in a story where the cataract is a plot element and a practical foe, but a motif of genuine consequence both in terms of his great need to take on the universe and come out the victor, and in terms of the alliances and understandings – even if no one actually, entirely understands them – he forges along the way. Molly loans him enough money to buy a ship, purchasing one off Aquilano that sits decaying and mudbound on the Amazon shore, but with a little hard work from cheap local labour the vessel, renamed the Molly Aida after the two special women in Fitz’s life, is quickly spruced up and painted white in mimicry of her owner’s sartorial splendour. Fitz takes on a captain, a Dutchman known as “Orinoco Paul” (Paul Hittscher) for his long experience sailing on that rival great river, and a crew, including the boozy, licentious cook Huerequeque (Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez), and a hulking engineer, Cholo (Miguel Ángel Fuentes).

The fully repaired and manned Molly Aida sets out up the Pachitea, but all aboard soon know that’s when the real trouble will start, as the Pachitea is a wild territory controlled by a nation known as the Jivaros, who killed most of the last expedition of missionaries and mapmakers who ventured up there. On the way to the Pachitea, Fitz stops at the one station he managed to build for his busted railroad because he wants to pull up some of the iron rails for use later. He finds one employee, the Station Master (Grande Othelo), still on duty despite not having been paid or visited for six years, and who’s formed a family whilst remaining on the job. The Master is jubilant to see Fitz, who’s utterly bewildered by the man’s presence, as he thought all the employees had been sent home. This tragicomic vignette this time dovetails the Dickensian with the Kafkaesque, in the image of the tattily officious master, forgotten by the vision that placed him there, lording it over a rusting, rotting outpost of failed industry. The Master becomes panicked when Fitz’s men start ripping up the tracks, worried they’re going to leave the one, rusting, already practically immobile steam engine stranded without even the pretence of its dignity, so Fitz spares him that mortification. Herzog’s camera finds an essential cartouche for his aesthetic in surveying the civilised pretences of the station and its stable of mechanical white elephants, quickly being swallowed up again by the jungle’s relentless and careless encroach.

Once they procure the rails, the Molly Aida and its crew start on for the Mission of Saramariza, where some missionaries are teaching natives, who, they claim, now irritably reject the title of “Indians:” an older missionary tells Fitz, “They said to me, ‘Indians are people who can’t read and who don’t know how to wash their clothes.’ Nonetheless, another, younger priest notes quietly as he recounts their ill-fate encounters with the Jivaros, “We can’t seem to cure them of the idea that our everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Fitz immediately states that, with his love of opera, he feels kinship with that viewpoint. This sense of kinship becomes a weapon he wields as he travels up the Pachitea. Fitz hears that the Jivaros have been wandering in the jungle for a couple of centuries, searching for the fulfilment of a prophecy, later clarified as involving a “sacred boat with a white god” who will help them lift a curse blighting the whole land. The Molly Aida’s progress is initially greeted by the din of omnipresent drumming, echoing out of the dense foliage and mists clinging to the surrounding hills, indicating the Jivaros are watching their voyage with a sense of defensive threat. The Molly Aida’s crew present a gallery of vivid grotesques who might as well have stumbled out of a classic Hollywood adventure film as made by John Ford or John Huston, particularly the perma-soused Huerequeque, who brings along his two female assistants/concubines to feel up along the way.

Aquilino obliges Fitz to take Cholo along to act, as the tycoon readily admits, as a spy, to make sure he doesn’t poach on any other planter’s preserve. Cholo is initially hostile and cynical towards Fitz’s efforts, is nonetheless entirely won over to his cause when he realises how inspired Fitz’s idea is. Cholo, a towering incarnation of the physical strength of the native peoples, has nonetheless adopted the hard and expedient attitude of one converted to the methods and philosophies of his colonialist masters, with that degree of extra faith that such converts often wield – Herzog would extend this fascination for such a divided character in Where The Green Ants Dream (1984) – nursing his bundles of dynamite to throw at the hostiles in the jungle and bluntly telling Fitz he wants to take the boat back to his usual employer when the time comes. The rest of the crew snatch up rifles and listen with hair-trigger tension before deserting, leaving only Fitz, the Captain, Huerequeque, and Cholo. Fitz’s answer to the frightening enigma is to start blaring out Verdi from his trusty gramophone, bel canto streaming off into the forest, bewitching the forest peoples with a power that’s neither an offence to their beliefs nor a threat to their lives, but simply a strange and beautiful conjuration of worlds beyond the world. The drumming stops, and the Jivaros begin daring to show themselves on the river in boats. Until, finally, they mass together in canoes and block off retreat down the Pachitea by felling huge trees.

Fitzcarraldo can be described in its way as a companion piece and riposte to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a film owed more than a little to Aguirre, The Wrath of God in the first place. Both films depict a journey upriver and a messianic foreign overlord manipulating local peoples into fulfilling his mission. But where Colonel Kurtz embodied a similar quality to Aguirre, the maniacal will to power wielded in the name of some nominal cause that finally becomes its own, self-consuming logic, embodying a dream of death, Fitz brings music, laced with overtones of connection and invocation for life-bringing that’s all the more powerful for having no actual substance, even if Fitz himself doesn’t entirely comprehend the resonances of his actions until the end. Fitz, learning about the Jivaros’ myths through the translations of Huerequeque, realises how he can place the Jivaros in service of his own ambition, without quite considering that they might do the same thing to him. The apparent leader of the Jivaros agrees to help Fitz in his scheme, which he finally unveils in the most thrilling way possible by having a platform built high in a tree, so he and the remnants of his crew can behold the small corner of the Earth they need to make subject to a manmade miracle.

Herzog’s early films had made a deep impact on the world film scene with his often beautiful yet unease-provoking imagery, his fascination and bewilderment before extreme natural landscapes, and sense of ironic contrast between the efforts of the human and the scale and impudence of the world. Aguirre, The Wrath of God famously opens with shots of the conquistadors and their native servants slogging through the teeming jungle like streams of soldier ants, making their inroads only with extraordinary effort. The blaring heroism of older films portraying social, political, and industrial conquest of the New World like, say, How The West Was Won (1962), was swapped out by Herzog’s acerbic conviction that such subjugation was both horrible and largely illusory, and if not illusory, then distinctly Faustian. At the same time, this was balanced by a conviction, half-appalled, half-admiring, that this was still the human mission, a mission communicated with the parable-like coda of Heart of Glass that reduced the human species to a race clinging to a rocky island, challenging the ocean in a boat. The boat motif, returned to here in the evident form of the Molly Aida, becomes the transfixing central metaphor and visual conceit of the film as Fitz and his helmates begin the arduous ritual of dragging up and over the isthmus between the rivers. Herzog’s viewpoint wielded a sense of the intransigence of modernity and western civilisation as crashing into other peoples as well as the natural, whilst harbouring its own neurotic and insidious forces within, like the accursed strain of vampirism that finally escapes into the world in Nosferatu the Vampyre.

Fitzcarraldo, with its portrait of the Amazon being disrupted by industry and portrait of the antipathetic attitudes of modern capitalism and ancient social and religious concepts, was fit for a time in the early 1980s when environmentalist concerns were becoming mainstream and worries over the Amazon in particular were heightened, and sparked a small clutch of films with similar concerns, including John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest (1984), Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), and John McTiernan’s Medicine Man (1991). Herzog’s woozily mesmerised fascination for the dark mark humanity leaves often on the Earth would climax in the documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992), with its awesome contemplations of the environmental havoc wreaks during the Gulf War with burning oil wells dotting the desert landscape. The side of Herzog’s art rooted in the approach of a documentary filmmaker is vital throughout Fitzcarraldo but also infused to the very root with its symbolic and aesthetic dimensions: Herzog’s capacity to film the real as, well, real – palpably, even pungently immediate, from its famous core image of the ship working its way with agonising effort up a slope on down to the backdrop of Iquitos with its plethora of rusting corrugated iron rooftops and the stains of authentic sweat and grime on Fitz’s white suit. Herzog pushed his immersive method of filming he espoused to its absolute limit, virtually forcing himself to live out the mania of his main character. Thomas Mauch’s cinematography, utilising the clear, lush, if slightly inexpressive palette of early 1980s film stock which aids the feeling of immediacy, particularly in the pivotal sequences of the ship-dragging, which collapses the boundary between record of an event and the conjuration of it for a fictional narrative.

Fizcarraldo can in its way be described as a particularly eccentric variation of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, which Albert Camus had also taken as the essential symbol of the existentialist concept of human endeavour, although it can also be argued that Herzog partly dismantles the metaphor in the unseen levels of drama he engages with, the world that his protagonists live in being one where effort isn’t necessarily commensurate with desired result. The film also, despite its setting and contemporary concerns, belongs to a very German artistic tradition. The figuration of the pristine, primal river and its guardians facing disruption by an intruding figure looking to steal the horde of gods reiterates and revises Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold – Herzog had already used that opera’s famous opening strains in Nosferatu the Vampyre so here makes do with Verdi whilst contrasting the grandiosity of the vocals with the alternations of momentous strenuousness and rudderless pathos Fitz’s story involves – whilst the early scenes of Aquilano explaining his empire to Fitz and presenting his own temptation whilst looking down on a ripe world from a high vantage evokes Goethe’s Mephistopheles seducing his version of Faust. Herzog would go on in Where The Green Ants Dream to pit the atavistic, as embodied by his take on Australian Indigenous people with a similarly boding and taciturn self-sufficiency to the Jivaros, against the technological and the apocalyptic, ending with a similar act of appropriation of a vehicle – in the latter film’s case a warplane – to achieve an act of spiritual rebirth. Scream of Stone portrayed the rock climbers’ efforts as at once a profane, media-age act riven with elements of ego and glory-chasing, and a sublime, almost ritual challenge to primal forces.

Fitz’s labours similarly persist on the two levels of cynical get-rich-quick scheme and expression of overriding need of the soul, and his and the Jivaros’ aims, which seem to be fatefully and tragicomically out of alignment, finally prove to be two different versions of the same thing. Herzog’s inspiration for the image of the ship being pulled over the isthmus was the works of ancient builders of Neolithic monuments, ziggurats and pyramids, who often dragged colossal stones great distances for their seemingly irrational projects, most often inspired by a form of mystic and religious zeal that converted into a permanent physical expression to posterity. This makes Fitz Herzog’s ironic priest-king, and the director as enraptured by the act of human forging colossal, nature-defying works with muscle and a bizarre blend abstract faith and practical commitment as Cecil B. DeMille was on The Ten Commandments (1956) and Andréi Tarkovsky in the bell-making chapter of Andréi Rublev (1969). In spite of the great stylistic and philosophical gap between the two filmmakers, Herzog and DeMille both behold the splendour of human ingenuity and will whilst also suggesting it’s all for nought in the face of immutable forces; like Tarkovsky, Herzog finds the meaning nonetheless in the act of creation itself.

But Fitz’s efforts are also destructive, requiring not just that he suborn the Jivaros to his project, but for a great path to be gouged through the heart of the jungle and the crown of the isthmus’ heights with relentless labour of axe and explosive, even before the real test of the possible can occur. When the Molly Aida starts its ponderous journey up the slope, Fitz tries using some hewn logs as a slipway, after the Captain dismisses the idea of using the rails, but veers about and crushes some of the Jivaros. The locals promptly walk off the job and begin their own act of mourning and reckoning with the forces they feel they’re challenging in this bizarre labour, standing and gazing for days on the flowing river, before briefly vanishing and then returning – all of it entirely enigmatic to Fitz and his fellows, although Fitz understands a gesture from the Jivaros, hovering at the edge of the field of light from the crew’s dinner table lanterns with their hands reaching into the brightness, as one of mysterious but intuitive assurance, even blessing. Fitz exploits the resources of the world he bashes through, utilising trees he knows to be as hard as steel to create a windlass to aid the ship’s progress, but it’s Huerequeque who comes up with the ingeniously simple plan of using the steam winch for the anchor, as powered by the main engine, to simply haul the ship up the slow under its own power.

The entire film winnows down to the singular, awesome, hilarious shot of the Molly Aida moving at a virtual forty-five degree angle up the mountainside, diagonally bisecting the cinema frame, a sight all the more compelling with the knowledge that Herzog took no shortcuts in achieving it, the ultimate expression of his desire to find a point where the authentic and the poetic collide. The task of bringing the ship down on the far side of the Isthmus is comparatively easy, the craft slithering down to the riverbank mud and, after a sick lurch close to capsizing settling into the water, sparks rejoicing. Fitz and crew get blotto as they celebrate with the Jivaros with their woozily rhythmic music, dancing upon the mud. That the native peoples have a deeply ingrained poetic sensibility is noted with sarcasm by Aquilano early in the film when he comments, “They call the rubber tree caoutchou, ‘tree that weeps.’ These bare-asses love flowery language. Gold, they call ‘sweat of the sun.’ Bees, ‘fathers of honey.’” This sensibility again coincides with Fitz’s obsessions, the sense of the physical world and its ethereal counterpoints, whether one conceives of them as purely products of the human mind’s subtleties or incarnate on a spiritual plain, are always in flowing dialogue.

The chief, ironic consequence of this is to bring about the ruination of Fitz’s efforts. During the night, with Fitz, Pete, Cholo, and Huerequeque all asleep on board, the Jivaro leaders cut the Molly Aida’s hawser, allowing the ship to float downstream. This deed, far from being malicious, fulfils their particular object in all this, the part they’ve felt anointed to play in a cosmic drama. This is their gesture to the furious spirits of the Pongo das Morte, a rite they hope will lift the curse on a benighted land, white god and sacred ship riding the waters of chaos. The men aboard the ship only awaken when the Molly Aida starts bashing against the stone walls of the canyon around the Pongo das Morte, too late to get the engine going in time to make headway, and they’re forced to ride out the churning, surging waters and hope the craft hangs together. Whether by miraculous grace or merely good engineering, the ship does survive the ride with a few cracked and stove-in timbers. The few inserts of model work interpolated in this scene do violate the carefully wrought veneer of the undeniably actual, although these are cut in amidst the genuine footage Herzog and a small crew dared to film on the freely drifting ship, Herzog’s gaze applied with a sort of punch-drunk wonder to footage of the ship thumping listlessly against rocky shores with operatic arias surging in disconsolate fashion on the soundtrack.

The quieter irony here is that whilst the Jivaros wreck Fitz’s worldly scheme, they help him fulfil his aims on other levels. They set the seal on a legend that binds them together in a manner Wagner would have delighted in, proving the primacy of the dream-world over the actual. The voyage over land and the pacification of the troubled waters two entwined deeds that perform literal acts of beneficence, exhausting the obsession on Fitz and rendering, or at least proving, the Pongo das Mortes just another run of rapids, and providing an absurd contrast to the reign of greed over the land. Fitz, abashed and tired, nonetheless finds his own way of setting the seal on the story and fulfilling his ambiton at the same time, accepting Aquilano’s offer to buy back the Molly Aida and using the funds to hire a visiting opera troupe to enact their rendition of Verdi’s The Puritans atop the steamer, with Fitz himself playing the proud impresario, cigar in mouth, a red velvet chair for his pig on hand, and Molly awaiting him with a large crowd at the Iquitos dock. Mere success is the purview of business, but where incredibly laborious acts are undone with incredibly simple deeds and total failures are alchemised into grand victories, there lies the continent of the artist.

1940s, Action-Adventure, Thriller

Key Largo (1948)

Director: John Huston
Screenwriters: Richard Brooks, John Huston

By Roderick Heath

When the ranks of Hollywood directors who left the sound stage to contribute to the World War II effort returned home to their careers, many had made a personal promise to strike out with a more independent and purposeful brand of cinema. John Huston was one of them. Huston, already long-weathered as a screenwriter who rode into that career on the coattails of his actor father Walter, had been lucky to survive some of his wild and oft-inebriated adventures in the 1930s: not everyone in his company did. He recovered to make a startling directorial debut with 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, a work of machine-tooled efficiency that managed the impossible task of giving Citizen Kane a run for its money as the most significant debut film of the year. Huston was immediately ensconced as a major filmmaker. But he only managed two more movies – the Bette Davis vehicle In This Our Life (1942) and Across The Pacific (1942), a lumpy espionage thriller with the reunited stars of The Maltese Falcon – before he left to join the US Army Signal Corps as a filmmaker. He made three highly regarded documentaries during the war, Report From The Aleutians (1943), The Battle of San Pietro (1945), and the study of psychiatric treatment for shell-shocked veterans Let There Be Light (1946). But he fought losing battles to keep more critical elements in the second film, and the third was suppressed altogether.

When Huston finally returned to the fold at Warner Bros. he successfully battled a dubious Jack Warner to make The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). His comeback feature only gained mild box office success at first, but won plaudits including Oscars for himself and his father, and quickly became an anointed classic. More than that, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was a vital moment for American film. In style, Huston melded aspects of the pre-war working class melodramas Warners had specialised in, the French Poetic Realist tradition, post-war noir, and neorealist and docudrama elements. In terms of subject, it depicted the perpetually nagging and destructive nature of seeking wealth, into a mixture singular in its moment and near-endlessly influential, particular in the New Hollywood era: it’s been said that filmmakers from Sam Peckinpah to Robert Altman devoted themselves to remaking it again and again. The run of work Huston accomplished in the first five years of his resumed Hollywood career – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, We Were Strangers (1949), The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and The African Queen (1952), is one of the strongest from any filmmaker of any time, even if not every film was appreciated in the moment. Key Largo was the price Warner exacted from Huston for backing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: in a classic “one for me, one for them” trade-off, Huston was obligated to take on a less expensive and arduous property for a follow-up.

But Key Largo provided an ideal blueprint that let Huston find new stages to work through the preoccupations had winnowed on The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and kicked off a triptych of films concerned with claustrophobic criminal enterprise and group dynamics. Huston immediately followed it with We Were Strangers, a highly underrated study in revolutionary terrorism only really hindered by the miscasting of Jennifer Jones, and The Asphalt Jungle, a film that was to inflect 1950s crime cinema as much or more than The Maltese Falcon had set the scene for film noir in the ‘40s. Huston, never the most easy-going of personalities, was struggling through divorce and the lingering effects of wartime experience at the time, and was also facing a rapidly curdling peacetime zeitgeist. By 1948, the optimistic and reforming zeal instilled by victory in the war was slowly devolving into the tense and paranoid early days of the Cold War and the Red Scare. Huston and favoured collaborator Humphrey Bogart, despite their reputation as macho, hard-drinking hell-raisers, also represented the leading edge of the Hollywood progressive ethos at the time, and with Bogart’s wife and frequent co-star Lauren Bacall, William Wyler, Sterling Hayden, and others helped form a protests and resistance organisation aimed at defending the “Hollywood Ten” called as witnesses before HUAC. That resistance fell apart in the face of the orchestrated political aggression and, some of their defenders felt, the misjudged and showboating attitude of the Ten themselves.

As if rubbing salt into the wounds, Warner was making Huston film, in Key Largo, a play by the politically reactionary dramatist Maxwell Anderson, first performed in 1939. Anderson was a peculiar talent, fond of writing dramas blending hardboiled contemporary topics and personalities with a rarefied theatrical approach, sometimes even employing blank verse dialogue: his work was something of a bridge between the American theatre of Eugene O’Neill and that of Tennessee Williams. Anderson’s play Key Largo was ostensibly a chamber piece melodrama about motley characters, including a band of vicious gangsters, locked up in a hotel on the titular island together during a hurricane. The play was filled with dated geopolitical motifs by the time it was handed to Huston. Anderson was a noted political enemy of Franklin Roosevelt, whereas Huston was a committed New Dealer. As if by compensation, Huston got to work with Bogart and Bacall together for the first time, as well as another fiercely liberal actor, Edward G. Robinson, one of the many actors who had to pass on the Huston-written, Raoul Walsh-directed High Sierra (1941) before Bogart landed his star-making role in it. Huston worked on the script with Richard Brooks, another dynamic, hardboiled screenwriter about to become a director of note, and the creative team began to reknit Anderson’s play into a thriller with an edge of parable closer to their own bent. That Huston invested much of his own experience and perspective into the rewritten storyline is apparent as he makes the protagonist a veteran of the San Pietro campaign he had documented. Key Largo became one of the most famous Hollywood films of its time, not least for capturing Bogart and Bacall in their fourth and final on-screen pairing, a moment of movie star mystique dubiously celebrated in a hit 1982 pop song.

For Bogart, the project might have contained extra dimensions of irony. His first attempt to go Hollywood after a successful stage career floundered in the early sound days, and it wasn’t until he played the gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood’s play The Petrified Forest that he gained a vehicle that changed him from an actor typecast as Joe College types to a fearsome tough guy on either side of the law, the persona that would make him one of cinema’s perennial stars. Mantee had held up a diner in the middle of the desert. Key Largo saw Bogart now playing the hero in a similar situation (he would revert to the villain again in a third visit to the theme, 1955’s The Desperate Hours). He was also cast opposite Robinson, one of several stars who once had to pass on a script before Bogart could get it, and with whom he’d acted in films like Kid Galahad (1937) and Brother Orchid (1938), always playing heavies to Robinson’s protagonists. Anderson’s play might well have taken some licence from Sherwood’s, which presented the anxiety, all too keen and justified in the mid-’30s zeitgeist, that the world was being taken over by bullies, thugs, and crude avatars of a brutish age. Anderson’s play more explored the fears that cripple otherwise good people, preventing them from taking positive action in the face of such evil. Huston’s take angrily revised this to encompass a study of the fate of the wartime confidence in the face of old evils and lingering ghosts.

So, Anderson’s hero, who had served in the Spanish Civil War, became the former Major Frank McCloud (Bogart), whose life since VE Day has been unsettled, nomadic, and increasingly, cynically alienated. He can be seen as a version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s Fred C. Dobbs who weathered the awfulness of life on the bottom and has gotten his act together, but hasn’t quite kicked the slow poison of cynicism. Anderson’s protagonist was a deserter; Huston’s became a hero who shuns spotlights and finds himself resentful in being presented with yet another great moral quandary and demand for sacrificial heroism. The opening shots swoop down from a godlike remove to sweaty intimacy, setting in motion a movie laced with visual and thematic hints of the spiritual clashing with the all too earthbound. The camera eventually locates McCloud listening in as the police who pull over the bus he’s riding over warn the driver about a pair of brothers from a local Seminole tribe, the Osceola boys, who have escaped custody and are now on the loose. Huston pulls off a neat unit of visual economy in this scene, McCloud’s attentive face visible in a rear-view mirror whilst cop and driver talk, introducing McCloud via Bogart’s unmistakeable mug without a word, giving the sense immediately that he’s an attentive and canny person who knows when to keep his mouth shut and his ears open.

Already McCloud is being drawn into the peculiar mesh of events about to unfold as he nears Key Largo itself, the largest of the islands off the South Florida coast. The apparent note of threat sounded by the escaped convicts on the scene proves a red herring that also encompasses ironies that permeate the rest of the film: Tom (Rodd Redwing) and John (Jay Silverheels) Osceola are essentially harmless, young men who got drunk and “decided to take Florida back for the Indians,” but the law is wasting manpower and energy chasing them when far greater criminals are lurking in the wings. McCloud has come to the island on a personal mission, to visit the family of one of his former soldiers, George Temple, who died in combat but captured a medal for gallantry in the process. James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), George’s father, owns a large hotel on the Key Largo beachfront, and George’s widow Nora (Bacall) lives with him, helping run the place. Barrymore, because of leg injuries he had suffered in a fall, was by this time mostly acting in a wheelchair, and Huston exploits this to make Temple essentially an avatar for Roosevelt in the drama, the ailing but nobly humane paterfamilias whose house is invaded by the iniquitous.

In this regard Key Largo deals overtly with a theme usually left more abstract or suggestive in other noir films, in dealing directly with the problem of battling social evil on the home front upon return for ex-soldiers, and the lingering, disconsolate spirit of the war hanging over their lives. The cost of that war is still inflecting the lives of people who fought it and lost loved-ones in it. McCloud recounts to Nora and Temple the circumstances of George’s death, still vague to them as they subsist in a forlorn stasis. This vignette contains flashes of strange and numinous poetry, as McCloud mentions a story George told him about how he knew all the secrets of life and death before birth, but an angel left the dimple under the nose placing his lips there to silence him. McCloud also mentions listening to George throughout a long and terrible night under fire, listening to George rave on the field telephone from a forward post during bombardment. Later Nora tells McCloud George wrote to her about the same event, only with their positions reversed; which man was where is ultimately unimportant, for the hallowed George and the grimly overwhelmed and restless McCloud present a dioptre vision of those who served, and as the story unfolds they become increasingly blurred. McCloud also recounts his own experiences since the cessation of hostilities, following which he couldn’t stand his old profession as a newspaperman and has since then burned through jobs, including stints as a day labourer. Eventually McCloud steps into the vacated place of George as son and husband, but he has to pass through a rite of death and rebirth to do so.

McCloud and Nora converse as Nora gets McCloud’s help to tie up Temple’s cabin cruiser, the two treading out to the dock jutting before the hotel, as McCloud tells Nora about his wanderings and many jobs since demobilisation, “including day labour.” Key Largo has a score by one of the most employed and likely the most famous of Old Hollywood’s stalwart composers, Max Steiner, who was rarely exactly subtle in creating aural textures but also helped invest so many movies that rarefied quality of mythic grandeur that distinguished the era’s Hollywood product. Steiner’s swooning touch is particularly apparent in a seemingly minor moment, when Nora helps McCloud secure the cruiser for the oncoming storm, McCloud heaving the boat in close to the dock and making it safe with his nautical skill on display. Steiner makes the subtext of the scene, of the bond already forming between the former soldier and war widow, rather more overt with this florid scoring. The Osceolas and their Seminole nation clan row up as McCloud and Nora work, with a marvellous vignette of Nora introducing McCloud to Mama Ochobe (Felipa Gómez), an incredibly old matriarch of the clan whose age nobody knows: “She admits to being a hundred and eight years old, but she has a son who’s a hundred and twelve, so we suspect Mama doesn’t tell the truth about her age.”

McCloud, upon first entering the hotel, encounters a range of uneasy, sweaty men who seem about as much at home as a polar bear in the same locale, and are split between making their distaste for company plain or seeming a little too eager play nice. There’s the talkative Curly (Thomas Gomez), the nervously sniggering, funny papers-reading Toots (Harry Lewis), the silent, hulking Ralph (William Haade), and the glumly servile Angel (Dan Seymour). Also hanging around is Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor), a wilted former nightclub singer who loves drinking and betting on horse races, in that order. McCloud tries to avoid the men, but is happy to partake of a few drinks once Gaye forces Angel to serve. Curly insists on dogging McCloud’s footsteps and explaining their presence as the miserable result of a holiday gone bad, which Curley blames on one of their party insisting on bringing Gaye. The local sheriff Ben Wade (Monte Blue) and his deputy Clyde Sawyer (John Rodney) visit the hotel, seeking out the Osceolas, who arrive a little later with members of their nation looking to give themselves up. Not long after, Sawyer’s car is seen parked near the hotel, but Sawyer himself in nowhere to be found. Soon enough the truth emerges: the men hiring out the hotel are all members of a criminal gang headed by the former mob boss Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), who was deported from the United States but now has risked a return on an illicit venture, and McCloud, Temple, and Nora are all taken hostage at gunpoint, and hustled into Rocco’s room, where Sawyer is held at bay.

The first glimpse of Rocco is a quintessentially Hustonian shot that nudges abstraction and harsh and oddball realism simultaneously: he’s found immersed in a bath, a rotating fan obscuring his features before a careful dolly in to reveal him as a bulbous and bullfrog-mouthed ogre rising up to take control of the land he once played feudal lord over. Huston repeats the impression of queasy intimacy with a Dickensian grotesque later when Rocco launches on an extended rant waxing nostalgic and frustrated about his one-time capacity to easily manipulate the processes of democracy and officials. Rocco delivers this whilst he’s being given a shave with a straight razor by Angel, who seems well used to such contortions whilst performing such duties, filmed in a long, epic close-up that also provides a showcase for Robinson’s virtuosity. Rocco’s emergence from his lair once his gang have detained the others in the hotel sets in motion the central drama, which is defined by the way the three entangled innocents react in their own special ways to the situation. Temple is defiantly disdainful of Rocco once McCloud tells him who he is. Nora is fretful but driven to glaze-eyed and clawing resistance when Rocco makes repeated sexual advances on her, whispering in her ear with insidious purpose. McCloud for his part vehemently declares his lack of interest in the gangster’s presence: “Who difference does it make if there’s one more or less Johnny Rocco in the world? What do I care if he lives or dies?”

And yet McCloud’s inability to dampen down his acerbic phrasing and aura of hard-shelled sufficiency riles Rocco, to the point where he tries to bully the man he mocking calls “Soldier” into taking a gun he gives him and using it to make a break. McCloud refuses the chance; Sawyer instead eagerly snatches up the gun, only to find no bullets in it, but plenty in the one in Rocco’s hand. Sawyer’s body is dumped in the ocean as the hurricane rages. This drama is invested with a patently symbolic element, made overt when he has McCloud quote Franklin Roosevelt in commenting that the war wasn’t fought to go back to the kind of a world there was before it. Temple’s resemblance to the recently deceased president makes the connection even more explicit, whilst Rocco is identified not only with a bygone era of tabloid hero gangsters but also a sort of barbarianism associate with assaults on democracy and general civic corruption. Huston makes Rocco echo not just Lucky Luciano, who infamously helped keep the Nazis out of the docklands for the US government during the war only to then be turfed out of the country, but also political fixers like ‘Boss’ Tom Pendergast. McCloud prompts Rocco with the question of what he wants out of life, seeing as he’s still a rich and influential figure even in exile, and then answers for him: “More.” Rocco readily and enthusiastically concurs, imbuing the feeling that Rocco represents not just lingering barbarianism but also depicts the old-fashioned racketeer morphing into the modern entrepreneur.

Rocco’s deceit also results in the Osceola brothers being gunned down by the Sheriff, when Wade finds Sawyer’s dead body and Rocco slyly takes advantage by telling the Sheriff the two fugitives did it. This in turn sparks furious blame flung at Temple from both the Sheriff and the Osceolas’ tribe, nodding to a metaphor for the way all sorts of conniving and malfeasance gets laid at the door of the nation despite its best and most elevated intentions. The deaths of the Osceolas also proves a breaking point for McCloud: Huston moves for an electrifying close-up of McCloud after he learns of it, registering his virulent, oh-you-absolute-bastard offence and suddenly re-emerging fighting will to take on evil. Huston wrings Rocco’s gang for queasy humour: the gang regarded individually and without Rocco around have a quality reminiscent of a Disney animated film supporting cast in their variably oddball personas and tetchy relations, particularly Toots’ habit of reading out gags from comic strips to Curly’s irritation: “Explain it to us Toots,” Curly sneers after one too many, to Toots’ narrow-eyed irritation: “A wise guy, eh?”, a moment that writes a very rough sketch for the psychopathic brinkmanship of Goodfellas (1990). Only with Rocco marshalling this lot do they become anything more than a bunch of petty hoods, their varying talents, like Toots’ way with torture, given focus and purpose: here are shades of the oft-stated conviction many had that most of Hitler’s underlings were barely more than petty thugs and gangster poured into uniforms and roles of statecraft thanks to hitching their wagon to a great motivator.

Huston would return often to chamber-piece dramas with fare like Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Dead (1987), but Key Largo is a slightly ungainly film in negotiating all this stagy talk, nor ideal for a thriller. Yet Key Largo remains riveting despite its lumpier pretentions, in part because those pretentions have substance, and also because the metaphorical drama is plugged into something raw and human, as Rocco’s various sadistic provocations land – goading Temple into trying to stand up from his wheelchair and punch him, baiting McCloud with the gun, and trying it on with Nora until she gouges ruts in his face with her fingernails. Trevor won an Oscar for her part as Gaye, who’s been living with the aftereffects of Rocco’s cruel charisma all her life, left a nerve-shot alcoholic who nonetheless recovers some of her character when she’s made a spectacle of, particularly in front of Nora, who Rocco says reminds him of the young Gaye before he successfully subjugated her. Gaye is indeed the kind of attention-getting supporting turn it’s easy to imagine any waning star leaping to land. Trevor strikes an initially overblown note in the way she hollers “Give him a drink!”, as if we’re in for an extended piece of showy hamola, but quickly settles into a sustained performance filled with brittle pathos. The scene that likely won her the Oscar is extended display of both that pathos and Rocco’s sadism, as he urges her into singing the tune she used to warble in her glory days, on the promise of a drink at the end. Gaye complies and after an initially impressive start falters and becomes increasingly frayed in voice and manner, Rocco unhappily shaking his head at the spectacle and finally refusing her the drink for her poor performance, leaving Gaye shivering and broken. This however stirs a show of deliberate defiance from McCloud that’s also an act of mercy as he pours a drink for Gaye and gives it to her: he accepts Rocco’s rebuking slap to his face with barely a blink.

Key Largo constantly points out its own status as a work conscious of its genre and the tradition it’s both revisiting and helping evolve into something new. Huston offers many nods to the mystique of the 1930s gangster film, many of which he helped to write, through the presences of Bogart, Robinson, and Barrymore, who had won a Best Actor Oscar defending Leslie Howard for shooting Clark Gable’s hoodlum in A Free Soul (1932). Key Largo counts on the immediate recognition of Robinson as the ghost of Little Caesar (1930) as Huston confronts that familiar if dated mode with the post-war moment, Rocco the spectre of returning iniquity and tolerated evil, slipping almost literally in the back door. Walsh’s White Heat (1949) from the following year would take that further in climaxing with a miniature atomic holocaust that is also the apotheosis of the revelling gangster-barbarian king. Lewis’s performance as Toots nods to the impact of the previous year’s Kiss of Death as a variant on Richard Widmark’s tittering psychopath in that film, using that characterisation as a touchstone to note the evolution of the genre and the entrance into a rather more maniacal and unnerving age. Casting Bogart as a disillusioned and wounded warrior who regains his fighting pith obviously nods back to his role in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), where he was essentially asked to play a symbolic actualisation of the hardboiled, cynical America of the 1930s, still feeling burned by involvement in World War I but eventually recognising the current fight really needed its involvement. Here Huston adapts this emblematic standing, noting that peacetime needs as much commitment and passion as war.

Trevor’s role nods less to her parts in noir and gangster films, where she often played femmes fatale, than her other most famous role as the hapless prostitute in Stagecoach (1939). The way Huston’s casting plays on established personas and the elusive factor of audience recognition is to a certain extent subverted in Bacall’s casting, although she certainly serves the obvious purpose of providing Bogart’s love interest. But Bacall, so often called upon to play premature worldliness and audacious poise, here is cast as a relatively innocent figure, one who, whilst no naïf, is still recovering from tragic loss and lodged in the small world she keeps with the elder Temple. Nora is nonetheless no naïf, nor passive: far from reacting coolly to provocations from bullies as her character did in To Have And Have Not (1944), after Rocco and his men push Temple around Nora is stoked to glaze-eyed fury by the spectacle, launching on Rocco and slapping and scratching him, until grabs her and forces a kiss on her, calling her “little wildcat” in his delighted and aroused reaction, “Smell blood huh? Got your appetite up huh?”, in his conviction that such anger contains also the seeds of erotic excitement, that the diastolic relation of the two is a secret truth of life flowing under its staid surfaces, much like the simultaneous loathing of and desire for the dictatorial strength Rocco embodies. Interesting stuff, even if Huston can’t chase any of it as far as he might have.

Other aspects of the film however have a strongly anticipatory quality of where popular storytelling was going. Key Largo is an ancestor of First Blood (1982), where the embittered veteran and the hunted criminal would collapse into the same frame. The duel of wills and finally guns between McCloud and Rocco anticipates the more expansive version in John McClane and Hans Gruber in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), and the climactic scenes, where McCloud has to outwit and annihilate the criminal band, lays groundwork for that film and a slew of others in the action genre. The approach to Rocco and his gang, as embodiments not of a transitory barbarian phenomenon in American social life as they were usually viewed in the ‘30s gangster films but of something more insidious and perpetual and bound in with a sedimentary layer of venality and corruption, lays the groundwork for the mob films of Coppola and Scorsese. Whilst the actual purpose of Rocco’s invasion of the Keys is revealed to be peddling counterfeit cash, the location and the portrait of criminal traffic looks forward to the great days of the cocaine trade and the many cinematic portrayals of it, including Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1982) and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006). In this regard, a running joke in the film – the conviction of the gangsters that one day pretty soon they’ll have a new form of Prohibition to make them rich and powerful again – feels alarmingly accurate.

Huston’s reputation as a screenwriter turned director evidently who was fascinated by translating literary qualities into the cinematic has to a large extent hindered critical regard for him as a filmmaker proper. The play-like compression of his debut on The Maltese Falcon belied the edge of strangeness he was able to invest that space with, his as a character that encloses the humans, frames within frames that become strange portals, particularly the marvellous moment where his camera tracks over and above Bogart’s Sam Spade kissing Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy through a billowing curtain-framed window to glare down at Elisha Cook Jr’s lurking killer in the street, the impish embodiment of the falsity and danger in the relationship as if viewed through a portal into the psyche. Huston, as he told Michael Caine decades later, laboured hard to remove his filmmaking from the audience’s consciousness, which is a very different thing to not doing much of it. Through the 1950s and ‘60s, a time of thematic as well as artistic restlessness for the director that suggests personal connection with McCloud’s rootless search for new purpose, Huston experimented constantly with expressive modes in his moviemaking, including the earthy palette of Moby Dick (1956) and the saturated colours of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1966), the interplay of realism and surrealism in Freud (1962), and the shabby chic of The Misfits (1961), all of which would help set the scene for New Hollywood style in the 1970s. If The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had seen Huston perfectly fuse elements of film noir and neorealism, Key Largo asked for something very different given its tight and stagy focus.

Huston turned to the veteran cinematographer Karl Freund, who had shot films for F.W. Murnau and Tod Browning and made his own legendary horror movie The Mummy (1932). Freund’s familiar, unique way with visual textures, using chiaroscuro sparingly and with a curiously soft and powdery feel for light and shadow, help Huston imbue overtones of the mystical in the otherwise clammy drama. The furore of the hurricane crashing down on the keys anticipates the war-with-chaotic-nature metaphors of Moby Dick and The Bible…In The Beginning (1966), as the gangsters squirm through the night of its blasting force, scared by something larger than themselves and heedless of their insectoid infestation, even as the storm is also correlated with their brief reign of power. The death of the Osceolas is the film’s most vital visual interlude and one that also, given the socio-historical slant Huston has invested throughout, wields a deliberate associative power. The Seminoles have been waiting out the storm, shown earlier by Huston as the people wither and cringe under the onslaught of the weather, itself a powerfully suggestive image of those neglected and left out of the political process. The Sheriff, on the warpath after finding Sawyer’s body and reacting to Rocco’s wily miscue, marches out to the dock with his torch shining and gun drawn, picking out the grim faces of the tribe until catching sight of the Osceolas, who dash off into the dark only for the sheriff to gun them down.

Huston here manages to conflate many lines of enquiry. The image of the man of authority, picking out the faces of the insulted and injured gazing back sullenly with his torch, evokes both the imagery of the just-repressed fascist yolk, and of a more immediate, local, and ever-ongoing test of will between those imposing order and those seeking a chance. The ease with which the otherwise easy-going and liberal-minded sheriff is turned into murderous weapon by Rocco’s quick-witted exploitation of an existing tension is also just as pointed, as the association of Rocco with the dark side of politics is extended to make him a skilful in distraction through scapegoating. Finally the buyer for Rocco’s counterfeit dosh, Ziggy (Marc Lawrence), turns up and the trade is made, although Rocco is happy to let Ziggy get scooped up by the cops. When morning finally comes with the storm wilted and the shore a morass of rubbish and corpses, Rocco finds the captain of the yacht (Alberto Morin) who was supposed to take the gangsters back to Cuba has fled in fright not of the storm but of Rocco, so McCloud is obliged, under pain of threatened torture (“You’ll start asking yourself questions like – ‘What if I come out of this a cripple?’” Rocco assures McCloud), to take command of Temple’s cabin cruiser. The voyage means sailing through murky fog, again charged with a certain symbolic import – after the chaos, uncertainty – that is then transmuted into something transcendental at the very end, when Nora opens the hotel windows to let in streaming, revivifying sunlight, and McCloud sails back to her, emerging from the glistening fog.

The climactic scenes of Key Largo can be said to in part play as Huston’s tribute to two friends, Bogart and Ernest Hemingway: Huston nods to Howard Hawks’ loose adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not, which also starred Bogart, whilst also suggesting what his own take on it would have looked like — closer, sweatier, more intricate and intimate in the violence and interplay of dangerous men, and with a similar emphasis on Bogart’s character finally being pushed way too far by the thugs with their acts of violence and prejudice. The deadly confrontation unfolds on the confines of the cruiser out on the Caribbean brine. McCloud cunningly picks apart the criminal gang, luring Ralph into falling off the boat by faking a seaweed snare on the propeller, and gunning down Toots, who manages to wing McCloud himself before expiring. McCloud, though wounded, manages to kill Curly, and McCloud does the work of shooting Angel himself when the underling won’t venture out under fire. Rocco tries to buy McCloud off whilst trying to trick him again, but finishes up riddled with McCloud’s bullets when McCloud outwits his attempted doublecross, allowing McCloud to head back home, alerting Nora and Temple of his survival over the radio. It’s one of the great thriller film climaxes, highly influential on the later emergence of the action genre and also more immediately ripped off by many films, most egregiously by Andrew V. McLaglen’s Mitchell (1975), whilst the climax of Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) can be characterised as a tragicomic lampoon. As a whole, Key Largo holds an odd status, at once a flawed and hesitant compromise for its director but also one of the great studio-era films, Hollywood par excellence but also already fighting to keep itself defined in the face of new ways of making cinema.

1990s, 2010s, Action-Adventure, Scifi

Independence Day (1996) / Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

Director: Roland Emmerich
Screenwriters: Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich / Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich, James Vanderbilt, James A. Woods, Nicolas Wright

By Roderick Heath

Roland Emmerich was an unlikely candidate to become one of Hollywood’s biggest directors. Born in Stuttgart in 1955, the son of a wealthy manufacturer of garden machinery, Emmerich spent much of his youth swanning about Europe and North American before knuckling down and attending Munich’s University of Film and Television, initially intending to become a production designer. After watching Star Wars (1977) he decided to try directing too. Required to make a short film as his thesis project, Emmerich instead made a complete feature, the science fiction film The Noah’s Ark Principle, which gained a theatrical release in 1984, followed by two more German-language genre films, Joey (aka Making Contact, 1985) and Hollywood-Monster (aka Ghost Chase, 1987). Emmerich’s fast-evolving reputation as a technically skilled and visually impressive filmmaker soon landed him the job of directing Moon 44 (1990), a West German-produced, English-language feature about prisoners pressganged into serving a nefarious space mining company. Moon 44, not for the last time in Emmerich’s career, was critically derided for its derivative story and clunky dramatics, but it proved an international calling card. One member of the cast, Dean Devlin, would become Emmerich’s producing and writing partner, and it also gained Emmerich offers from Hollywood, making his debut there with 1992’s Universal Soldier.

The surprise success of Universal Soldier, a flashily-filmed tale about warring cyborg supersoldiers, helped Emmerich and Devlin get their next project off the ground. Stargate (1994) depicted a team of Earth soldiers, and one nerdy scientist, who travel via a wormhole opened up by a recovered piece of alien technology to a distant desert planet. There they find human inhabitants enslaved by spacefaring, body-swapping aliens resembling ancient Egyptian gods. Stargate proved a big hit with its blend of hoary sci-fi ranging from Doctor Who to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Erich Von Daniken, and old-fashioned action-adventure movie sweep realised with Emmerich’s colourful eye. It also climaxed with a consistent motif in Emmerich’s films, with the oppressed rising up against tyrannous and genocidal powers. From this point on Emmerich and Devlin adopted the adage “go big or go home” like a personal religion, and in obedience came up with Independence Day. Upon release in July 1996, Independence Day seemed a logical extension of the evolving special effects blockbuster style, but also proved the truest curtain-raiser for the next wave of that style, as it rapidly became the second highest-grossing film in history just behind Jurassic Park (1992), and made former rapper and TV comic actor Will Smith into a major movie star.

Emmerich and Devlin quickly moved to repeat the film’s success with their Hollywoodised take on Godzilla (1998), a goofy, mindlessly entertaining film that proved a weak box office performer, and one infamous to fans of the great kaiju for its disrespectful take on the creature’s lore and traits. Whilst Emmerich made segues into historical tales for The Patriot (2000) and Anonymous (2011), straight-up action filmmaking on White House Down (2013), and even the personal and relatively low-key activist drama with Stonewall (2015), he nonetheless remained synonymous with, and even infamous for, his continuing string of expensive, flashy, absurd, and variably popular blockbusters, including The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 10,000 BC (2007), and 2012 (2009), to a creeping feeling of diminishing returns on an entertainment level, but sufficiently sustained financial success. Emmerich remained happily tuned out of the tide of fashion in Hollywood aesthetics. Whilst his major rival in the ‘90s blockbuster stakes Michael Bay made his flashy, Ritalin-jagged, cubist-edited, advertising-and-video clip-derived style a new standard, and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) made vivid, unstable camerawork and immersive realism a hallmark of serious intent, Emmerich maintained his unerringly clean, visually legible visual approach, and preferred to keep his edge by constantly upping the game of CGI-era special effects and preposterously big thinking to go with them.

Emmerich resembles no lesser classic Hollywood forebear than Cecil B. DeMille in his both his love of grand scale in his subjects and filmmaking, and broad, stylised approach to the dramatic level of his movies, in trying to appeal to the biggest possible audience. DeMille’s quip that every time he made a movie critics’ estimation of the audience’s IQ dropped by ten points could well have been made about Emmerich. Both Anonymous and Stonewall were sharply rejected because despite shifting into material demanding more finesse Emmerich maintained his unsubtle and glossy approach, and the considerable virtues of The Patriot, with its astounding action scenes and more thoughtful concerns, were smothered in dubiously manipulative depictions of history and cornball sentiment. On the other hand, Emmerich’s films also have a habit as coming on as cartoonish at first but eventually revealing more interesting things going on under the surface. Devilin meanwhile sank much money and clout into the awful 2006 film Flyboys. In any event, after a few failures, Emmerich and Devlin finally reunited to make a signal to their biggest hit, and in 2016 Independence Day: Resurgence was released. But its reception, to say the least, was not a case of history repeating.

The first Independence Day remains one of the signal pop culture events of its moment, and indeed stands now as perhaps the most essential relic of the mid-‘90s mood, that time when modern history was taking a breather between the Cold War and 9/11, between fear of nuclear holocaust and fear of global warming, and when Hollywood was urgently looking about for sources of danger and threat for genre films whilst special effects were going through a rapid evolution. 1996’s Twister had already announced a string of disaster movies as new showcases for those effects delivered as event movie fare, of which Titanic (1997) would prove the zenith, and in many ways Independence Day belongs to that movement too. But Independence Day is also a sci-fi movie, a war movie, a buddy movie, a comedy, and a freewheeling travelogue through the whole idea of pop culture as it had congealed by 1996. Whilst the style and pitch of Independence Day rejected edgy alternative culture trends in independent film and music, nonetheless it took much permission from TV shows like The Simpsons in ticking off pop culture reference points in jokey, knowing, audience-conspiring fashion, and exacerbated the Quentin Tarantino-era post-modern craze in merrily assembling assorted bits of a few dozen older movies into one big moveable feast, or as Devlin happily called it, a “movie movie.”

Independence Day is essentially a supersized remake of Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953), stealing the basic proposition of an invasion of the Earth by blankly malevolent alien foes protected by energy shields that prove impenetrable whilst wielding annihilating force of their own. But where Haskin’s film maintained to some degree the thesis of H.G. Wells in portraying with vicious irony a mirror to the Western colonialist mindset and updated it with new atomic age logic as humanity is found completely helpless before the exterminating invaders, Independence Day is a paean to fighting pith turned on uppity enemies, turning towards Star Wars and old war movies in its last act. The film comes on with its pop culture referentialism carefully cross-indexed and counterweighted for maximum appeal. REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” heard near the outset box-ticks Gen X whilst a shout-out to John Lennon – “Smart man. Shot in the back, very sad.” – serves the Boomers. A gag based in a quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and a clip from The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) establish genre cred. The plot meanwhile is rooted in modern esoterica once restricted to obsessive fringe scenes but popularised in the decade by the hugely popular TV series The X-Files, like the 1947 Roswell “UFO” crash and Area 51, and the show is mentioned in the dialogue. The image of the Apollo 11 site being despoiled by alien intrusion signals the onset of millennium angst, breaking down the triumphal achievements of the Twentieth century zeitgeist in the face of an uneasy new historical nexus. Soft-target cultural satire drops like soaking drizzle, with gags about Los Angelinos firing their guns at the spaceship over their city, daffy onlookers hoping the aliens are going to bring back Elvis, and a character listing all the people he has to call and warn about the aliens including his lawyer – “Ah, screw my lawyer.”

This element of Independence Day, given its relative sparseness in Emmerich’s other movies, surely was Devlin’s special contribution, and whilst it hinders Independence Day from being the urgent genre classic it might have been, it also certainly helped mediate Emmerich’s delight in broad gestures and rooted his approach in a contemporary pop argot that even when dated still has an amusing crackle. It also recalls the way a ‘50s sci-fi movie could convince you a grand worldwide event was taking place on a shoestring budget with shots of extras supposedly in different places around the world listening to PA and radio broadcasts about the frightening new event. Emmerich pays heed to that tradition with a modern gloss, depicting the alien arrival through myriad TV news reports, and later including a montage of representative of different armed forces around the world craning their ears for low-tech Morse Code broadcasts setting up the last-ditch resistance. Emmerich’s visual exposition wields just the right sense of truly awesome things occurring, from the menacing opening shot of a massive shadow passing over the moon surface and setting the debris of the Apollo 11 landing shuddering, and the mysterious and eerie alien signal heard over speakers in an astronomical observatory. Independence Day keeps one foot firmly planted in its ‘50s sci-fi roots, also recalling Rudolph Maté’s When Worlds Collide (1951) and Fred F. Sears’ Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956). The images of the colossal, circular alien space ships descending on Earth and hovering over cities meanwhile blatantly pinches famous images from the 1980s TV miniseries V. Whilst Independence Day in many ways set the scene for the modern blockbuster to be less a proper narrative but rather a succession of gestures in spectacle grown out of intertextual awareness – or to put that more simply, a movie that counts on us all having seen a lot of movies and not minding – Emmerich still draws and delivers pleasure in obeying the ritual narrative form. He would do a similarly good job depicting war coming close in eerie shots of gunfire flashing amongst trees in The Patriot.

Those spaceships, fifteen in number, are disgorged by a gigantic mother ship that parks a short distance from Earth, and take up position over major cities around the world. The heroes of Independence Day are meanwhile flung together in a manner very reminiscent of 1970s disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Earthquake (1974), predestined to unite and fight for survival. Emmerich establishes each in turn. President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), ensconced in the White House, with his Communications Secretary Connie Spano (Margaret Colin) fretting over his sliding popularity, sourced in apparently vacillating performance. Her ex-husband David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), an environmentally-conscious MIT graduate and satellite expert currently employed as a cable TV channel technician in Manhattan, plays chess in the park with his former rabbi father Julius (Jeff Hirsch), and is soon called in by his boss Marty Gilbert (Harvey Fierstein) when the alien signal starts playing havoc with the station’s broadcasts. Marine F-18 fighter pilot Captain Steven Hiller (Smith) is on leave, sleeping in with his stripper girlfriend Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox), oblivious to the gigantic spaceship floating over central LA, even as her son Dylan (Ross Bagley) plays at shooting them down. Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) is a crop-duster pilot and a hopeless alcoholic, constantly tormented by his neighbours for his claims of having been kidnapped by aliens ten years earlier and used in their experiments.

Emmerich invests most of these introductions with notes of comedy that also help in differentiating the players. He delivers a jot of goofy slapstick as Russell lolls drunkenly against his plane, whilst his son Miguel (James Duval) berates him for dusting the wrong field. Whitmore dryly jokes on the phone with his wife Marilyn (Mary O’Connell) about confessing to sleeping with a beautiful brunette, actually his very young daughter Patricia (Mae Whitman) zonked out at his side. Levinson senior and junior talk with well-oiled, sarcastic New York Jewish humour. The joke of Hiller failing to notice the spaceship above is drawn out as he goes out to fetch his morning paper and slowly turns his head, seeing his neighbours packing in panic, at first assuming it’s over-reaction to an earth tremor. In a manner that services a need for character arcs but specially tooled for the ‘90s era with both its generational scepticism and anxiety about a waning sense of purpose, just about all of the heroes in Independence Day are in some way or another underachievers. Even the war hero former pilot president is a bit of a slacker in need of a new spur to action. Hiller, another great pilot, seems to be facing the stymieing of his dream of becoming an astronaut through his choice of partner. David, a scientific genius, claims to be very happy doing what he does, presumably because he feels he’s not participating in any worldly evil. Russell is redeemed from shambling wreck of a human to Christlike saviour of mankind.

David’s special talent forces him soon to abandon his wilful obscurity when, analysing the alien signal shimmering underneath the TV satellite signal, realises it’s coordinating between the positioning spaceships and its diminishing loop is more or less a countdown to something he guesses can’t be good. Needing to warn someone in authority, David decides to dash to Washington and get Connie to secure him time with Whitmore, despite their uneasy past: David socked Whitmore back when he was a candidate and thought Connie was having an affair with him. He gets his father to drive him, and when Whitmore realises what David has discovered, immediately has all the White House staff including Connie and Secretary of Defense Albert Nimziki (James Rebhorn), as well as David and Julius, flown out of Washington on Air Force One. In LA, Jasmine’s fellow exotic dancer Tiffany (Kiersten Warren) ventures onto the roof of a skyscraper to join a mob welcoming the aliens, whilst Jasmine and Dylan flee the city. Marty is advised to do the same by David. When the countdown reaches it end, powerful energy beams spume out of the spaceships and devastate vast patches of cityscape beneath them, killing Tiffany and Marty and everyone else within range in orgiastic spectacles of destruction.

Emmerich offers repeated references to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the preeminent example of a post-1960s countercultural viewpoint on the possibility of aliens as friendly and godlike, and the build-up to their arrival in a series of portentous, worldwide events. Emmerich depicts a vignette in a remote part of Iraq where the vast, boiling, blazing cloud around a descending ship is glimpsed, recalling Spielberg’s locale-hopping and visual portent of Biblical awe, but later mischievously despoiling Spielberg’s film when a helicopter is sent up to communicate with an alien ship with banks of flashing lights, only to be coldly blasted out of the air. A scene of Whitmore and his highest-ranking military leader, Marine General Grey (Robert Loggia), reluctantly agreeing to try using nuclear weapons on one alien craft, only for even that to fail against their energy shield, is a virtual carbon copy of the same scene in The War of the Worlds. The bluntly destructive and oblivious purpose of the aliens makes them perfect antagonists for an age crying out for a lack of moral complication in its big movies. One of the aliens, when Whitmore tries to communicate with it, tells him all they want humans to do is die. The images of the aliens blasting away at American cities, pounding the Empire State Building to rubble and blowing the White House to fiery smithereens, still have thunderous visual impact, and the latter was hailed as one of the key moments in modern special effects staging, as well as the movie’s most instantly identifiable image.

These scenes also channel decades of nuclear angst in a manner most mainstream movies had avoided, now finally making the subject of blockbuster silliness, before 9/11 would make it all too real again. The only victims of the annihilation we’re introduced to are Tiffany and Marty, both of them likeable but silly people, and Marty’s groan of “Oh, crap!” as he sees the fireball coming for him staves off the sense of horror with a note of absurdism. Meanwhile, David and Julius being hurriedly ushered onto Air Force One, which only just manages to take off ahead of the consuming fireball, nods to When Worlds Collide and its indulgence of a bleak but secretly thrilling fantasy, that of being near-pure luck catching a ride on the last flight out of the apocalypse. Jasmine and Dylan manage to find shelter off a road tunnel, with Emmerich making the chief point of suspense whether or not their pet dog can reach them in time to be saved. Spoiler: he does. Hiller and his fellow pilots are soon sent out to attack the ship over LA, but find the craft perfectly protected by a curtain of energy around it, against which both the missiles and hapless aircraft crash and explode.

The big ship disgorges a vast swarm of small fighters, also shield-protected, and the Earthling’s planes are swiftly decimated. Hiller’s pal Captain Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick Jr) dies in failing to outmanoeuvre one alien fighter, and Hiller vengefully leads the alien craft into a swerving chase down the Grand Canyon: Hiller manages to contrive the alien’s crashlanding by catching it in a detached parachute and ejecting just before his plane collides with the canyon wall, the alien ship striking the upper lips of the canyon and sliding to a halt on the ground above. Hiller lands, struts to the craft, and when the alien within suddenly squirms out of a hatch he promptly socks it, declaring with a vigour that instantly knits him into the pantheon of wisecracking movie heroes from James Bond to John McClane, “Welcome to Earth!” This scene of course inscribed Smith as an instant major movie star, in ways both familiar and new. Hiller is immediately confirmed as a classical all-American hero, utterly masculine and charged with swagger, reflexively daring, resourceful, afraid of nothing, and also African-American: indeed perhaps only a Black man could so thoroughly own such traits in an age officially sceptical of heroes.

Independence Day is filled with a specific sense of 1990s America as a newly multicultural place capable of absorbing once-radical elements and outsiders into its gestalt identity. Wilder, playing the role of the squadron’s joker and morale-booster, performs an extended imitation of politician and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson by way of celebrating the squadron, not in a mocking way but instead anointing Jackson as a worthy leadership figure for heroes of all colours in the same way a character in a World War II movie might imitate FDR. The everything’s-cool-now, end-of-history fantasising is extended to later scenes that depict warriors of all nations, including Brits, Israelis, Iraqis, and Russians all coming together under American leadership against the evil alien foe, and of course Whitmore’s conceit in his famous pep speech of repurposing the Fourth of July as the world’s Independence Day. Many of course outside of the US rolled their eyes very hard, but it also summarised something about the ‘90s island of stability in a Pax Americana, and most viewers simply went with the flow whilst jamming their mouths full of popcorn. Irony streaks Independence Day as a film made by a gay German immigrant with unabashedly progressive politics dedicating a hymn to American militarism and imperial standing, and yet Emmerich bends his sense of those virtues to a newly inclusive and broad-minded parabola. That unswervingly heroic concept of patriotic identity is counterbalanced by a familiar brand of shallow satire on bureaucracy and the more obnoxious side of government, represented saliently by Nimziki, keeper of national secrets.

Nimziki’s name was a poke at a former studio executive who gave Emmerich and Devlin trouble on Stargate, a bad habit that would be more infamously repeated on Godzilla when they named a dipshit Mayor after film critic Roger Ebert. The film’s best line, one that delivers a drier joke than most and also sets up a crucial story pivot, works in very large part thanks to Rebhorn’s delivery, as Julius harangues Whitmore and others for knowing about the aliens after the Roswell crash and hiding them at Area 51 per UFO lore: Whitmore says that’s nonsense, but Nimziki suddenly decides it’s time to let him know that, “Ah, Mr President…that’s not entirely accurate.” Turns out Area 51 really does conceal an underground base housing a crashed UFO, which proves to be one of the alien fighter craft, with its long-dead crew preserved. The site is overseen militarily by Maj. Mitchell (Adam Baldwin), a central casting soldier, and scientifically by the long-haired and kooky Dr Okun (Brent Spiner), who is so delighted by the President’s arrival and the recent activation of the long-dormant alien technology thanks to the proximity of the new aliens that he’s oblivious to the terror and destruction above. Theorising the craft crashed on some scouting mission, Okun also explains that the aliens’ fearsome appearance, with cobra-like hood and vaguely humanoid build with squirming tentacular appendages, is actually a biomechanical suit around a smaller, rather squishier being with similar weaknesses to humans but communicate psychically rather than vocally.

Meanwhile Hiller drags the still-unconscious alien he’s captured across a salt flat in Nevada. He encounters the Casses and other refugees in a huge fleet of mobile homes fleeing across the flats, and talks them into taking him to Area 51, which for some reason he’s aware of. Jasmine, wandering a devastated LA, starts helping survivors, and she find Marilyn Whitmore lying injured and bedraggled by the wreckage of her helicopter. Jasmine requisitions a flatbed truck and loads survivors in the back, heading to Hiller’s base and finding it destroyed, forcing her and her charges to camp out there. Along the way Jasmine bonds with the very different Marilyn – when she tells the First Lady she’s a dancer, Marilyn beams, “Ballet,” to Jasmine’s sheepish reply, “Exotic.” – and cares for her as her injuries take a toll, before they’re finally picked up by the army. The character relationships in Independence Day are clever not just in offering cheer-along arcs for the zeroes-to-heroes, but in having them all physically converge and unify or reconcile as well, made most immediately literal when David and Connie share a loving gesture whilst watching Hiller and Jasmine get married, at a time when just about every big Hollywood movie had to revolve around a sundered couple reuniting.

Smith and Goldblum were basically hired to do slight variations on their already-familiar personas, with Smith transferring the likeably cocky braggadocio, mixed with just a little awareness of his own jive and determination to keep dancing anyway, of his character from the TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to the big screen, with a new edge of more muscular and matured confidence (although it took his more nuanced variation on his persona presented in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation, 1995, to establish his movie acting cred and sell him to Emmerich and Devilin). David is another of Goldblum’s rambling, gawky-sexy savants after The Fly’s (1986) Seth Brundle and Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm. Relieved from any need to get too inventive, the two actors are effortlessly charming, and when finally flung together prove to have truly fun chemistry (“Forget the fat lady! You’re obsessed with fat lady!”). Pullman, who became a star for about ten minutes in the mid-‘90s after ages on the periphery with the likes of The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987) and finally gaining fans with the rom-com While You Were Sleeping (1995), gained easily his most well-remembered role even as I recall some critics calling his President Whitmore a loser. Given that Pullman’s more recently found his true metier as a grizzled character actor, white-bread lead roles clearly never really tapped his deepest strengths, and yet his fightin’ President Whitmore is a definite strength of Independence Day, projecting low-key charm and hints of a hawkish glint in his eye whilst plugging his stolid way through the work of being a politician.

The obvious but certainly effective casting continues down to Hirsch’s arch, scene-stealing performance as Julius, Rebhorn to deliver antagonism, and Quaid’s high comedy presence. Other actors like Loggia, Dan Lauria as one of his underlings, and Baldwin are plainly required to evoke the old, tough, gruff or young, square-jawed military men of old war movies. One actor notably playing against his most familiar role is Spiner, his moon unit scientist Okun a total contrast to his part as the cyborg Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he brings nutty energy to the film for his few scenes. The women in Independence Day have more thankless roles, by comparison, although they all do good work, particularly Colin, who never had such a high-profile part again. Where in late 1980 and ‘90s action cinema the figurative daughters of Ellen Ripley were becoming more prominent, Independence Day only points to Jasmine as a gutsy lady. The overall quality however is that the film absolutely requires every actor to walk a fine line, between total seriousness and a sense of crisp humour, avoiding campy knowing even as Emmerich and Devlin readily court that quality in their writing.

Whilst it sported plenty of known faces, Independence Day nonetheless didn’t have a colossal star at its heart. That proved to its advantage as it helped mint a new one, and also emphasised the ensemble aspect of its story whilst helping keep costs down on a movie that, whilst very high-budget, still wasn’t nearly as expensive as other blockbusters around the same time. The selling point of the film was its special effects, although, with a record number of effects shots required in the production, the end results are occasionally uneven. Still, images of the alien ships, streaked by fire in their descent through the atmosphere, hovering in banks of boiling cloud over cityscapes, retain their instantly transfixing sense of evil, epic beauty, and the dog fights between the human and alien fighter craft confirmed massive leaps in technical reach and know-how even since the grand space battle of Star Wars – Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983). Emmerich’s shots of American fighters massing high above the rocky forms of the American desert landscape in preparation for the desperate final showdown below have thrilling, epic force and an interesting visual lustre thanks to Karl Walter Lindenlaub’s cinematography.

As so often in Emmerich’s oeuvre, the mixture of cutting-edge technical skill and formal elegance in his filmmaking baldly contrasts his dramatic sensibility, his desire to enfold the movie theatre full of people in a manner that provokes their knowing whilst also quietly nullifying it. Emmerich does so with an aesthetic that can only be described as straight-faced camp, an attitude the film finally, joyfully exalts in the climactic scenes involving Russell, in which Independence Day succeeds in both delivering a grand thrill and also finally outing itself as a crazy comedy. If Independence Day offers the best example of that talent, if not his best film, it’s largely because the light-hearted and serious elements are in the finest balance, chasing each-other around much like the warring craft in the climactic scene, and have roots in that specific sensibility I’ve mentioned. Emmerich’s arsenal of recurring motifs, particularly nerdy or weak-seeming men proving themselves valiant without needing to undercut the more traditionally heroic figures around them, are both reliable as crowd-pleasing flourishes but also seem to have genuinely obsessive meaning for Emmerich. Emmerich’s follow-ups like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 have a more serious and nuanced tone, but that sits more uneasily with the increasingly silly, gotta-top-myself plotting and broader gestures, and Emmerich’s most recent works like Midway (2019) and Moonfall (2022) seems airbrushed in every regard to appeal to a decentralised audience, particularly the Chinese market.

After getting their asses kicked seven ways from sunset, the humans finally start getting their act together in Independence Day after Hiller brings the alien to Area 51: Okun tries to surgically inspect the creature, only for it to awaken and go on a rampage. Confronting the alien via the glass wall of the operating room, Whitmore communicates with it, as the creature has a tentacle wrapped around his throat to exploit Okun’s vocal cords, and also when the creature links with Whitmore to share awareness of human only being the latest in a long line of exterminated foes of the rapacious, locust-like species. Whitmore collapses upon such psychic intrusion, and Mitchell, after asking if the glass is bulletproof, blows the alien away. When Whitmore decides to nuke the bastards, David vehemently protests and gets drunk, and after the bomb’s failure he flails around in anger and disgust. When his father tries to convince him to get off the floor because he might catch a cold, David suddenly has an inspiration: testing his theory out on the captive fighter craft, he proves the alien systems can be briefly disabled with a computer virus, taking down their protective shields, but also says the only sure way to deliver the virus is to fly the captive craft up into the mother ship. Hiller volunteers to fly David up there, as he feels he has the best idea of the craft’s capabilities.

Once launched in initially ungainly fashion, David and Hiller find themselves drawn into the enormous mother ship with a tractor beam and docked deep within it, with an alien controller glaring out at them, forcing them to hide whilst David works his magic. Wells’ idea of the aliens brought down by a virus is updated for a digital age is an idea with a little wit but also tends to be one detail of the plot many object to as the aliens don’t seem to have Norton Antivirus, although it can be explained in various ways; more irksome to me is the question as to why, when they were willing to a few hours earlier and even load up David and Hiller’s ship with one, the humans don’t have atomic missiles ready to hurl at the other ships rather than poking away at them with tiny payloads from their fighters. Whitmore elects to lead the hastily assembled squadron of aircraft to attack the craft rapidly zeroing in on Area 51, with Russell rapidly sobering himself up to join the assault and adapting awkwardly to a modern fighter. Before taking off, Whitmore gives the gathering pilots a pep talk from the back of a truck in pastiche of the St. Crispin’s Day scene from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989), as Whitmore, with words not quite of Shakespearean beauty, nonetheless declares that “we will not go quietly into the night!”, to thunderous appreciation, with Emmerich diving in with gleefully cornball eagerness to note a pilot giving a vehement salute. David meanwhile encourages his father to return to his metier as a rabbi, and proves urgently needed as the end seems nigh.

It goes without saying that Independence Day delivers on all it promises in its climax, with flashes of real storytelling savvy in touches like the first shot the fighters take at the approaching ship sees the shield still working, but Whitmore, with a cagey squint, decides to give it another go and this time hits home. David and Hiller settle down to light up the cigars as if in accepting defeat after they can’t escape the dock, only to then become a pair of mischievous boys about to really ruin the aliens’ day as they fire a nuclear missile into the control bay. The flee at speed, just managing, in time-honoured fashion, to beat the enormous closing doors. And, of course, the spectacle of Randy Quaid saving the world. After the fighters fail to bring down the ship and are forced to engage in a colossal dogfight with the alien craft, Whitmore fails with his last missile to hit the vulnerable-seeming energy cannon under the ship, and Russell finds his last missile won’t launch, and so decides to ram the cannon with his plane, screaming in madcap and vengeful delight (“Hello boys, I’m back!”) as he rides to oblivion and glory at the weapon, which is about to unleash exterminating force on Area 51 in a touch pilfered from Star Wars and that in turn pilfered from The Guns of Navarone (1961). It’s the sort of scene that’s impossible not to laugh at whilst watching, but that’s only a part of its awesomeness. Russell’s sacrifice succeeds, the ship explodes, and with the vulnerability exposed all the other assaults bring down their targets near such locales as Sydney and Giza. David and Hiller’s payload also explodes, blasting the mother ship to smithereens.

Independence Day ends with another arch remix of very recognisable imagery, this time from Phillip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), as David and Hiller are glimpsed leaving behind their crashed ship with a strut of success, puffing away on their cigars and greeted by their adoring women whilst flaming wreckage of the mother ship streaks through the sky, providing the ultimate July Four fireworks display. Independence Day works because it conspires with the audience, seeking out that part of us that secretly loves the old goofy stuff, and indeed by now it might even be taken as goofy old stuff itself, as it has managed to outlive its chosen release window unlike many ‘90s hits. Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks (1996) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) provided immediate ripostes with their infinitely more sarcastic and cynical ransacking of Earth-vs-the-aliens plots, but of course, neither was anywhere near so popular. After a long time in development hell, a proper sequel came along almost twenty years to the day later, but Independence Day: Resurgence was doomed to be just a footnote to the original film’s success, particularly after Smith elected not to appear in it. Resurgence gained withering reviews at the time, but I mildly liked it: it certainly has a lot of problems, some sore lacks from the magic formula of the original, but some of those lacks ironically are woven in with aspects that are actually superior. Where the ‘96 film was sly and bouncy in its humour and general assurance to the audience that despite all the destruction and death this was just a fun bit of make-believe, Resurgence tries to take its ideas more seriously. This time Emmerich and his four (!) credited co-screenwriters including Devlin grapple with the notion of a rebuilt Earth, now armed with alien technology but having faced down an intervening two decades of disruption.

Where the original concludes on a note of unalloyed triumph and cheer, Resurgence states that parts of the world including central Africa faced years of vicious battle between humans and stranded aliens, and the landscape is still littered with the cavernous hulks of smashed alien death machines. The oncoming generation of warriors comprise orphans of the dead or those moulded by the conflict. Heroes like President Whitmore are now troubled and tormented by their encounters with the alien psychic ability, making them seem mentally unstable, whilst the imprisoned hordes of alien survivors, long catatonic, start waking up and celebrating when they sense more of their kind on the way. Most wrenching of all, Steven Hiller vanished during a trip to space, leaving his adopted son Dylan (Jessie T. Usher) as an anointed nepotistic hero in taking up his mantle as a pilot: bad blood persists between him and his former comrade Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) as Jake tried desperately to prove himself a better pilot in training and almost caused Dylan’s death. Jake, now flying transport craft in space, is at least still engaged to be married to Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe), who trained as a pilot alongside Jake and Dylan but now works as an aide to the current president, Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward), and cares for her father.

In the intervening twenty years Earth has known unparalleled peace and cooperation, with David Levinson (Goldblum again) having supervised exploitation of the alien tech to build defences and a controlling moonbase. As the twentieth anniversary of the assault looms, all hell breaks loose again when a spaceship approaches a moonbase and is shot down. Ignoring an order from Lanford to come home, David is helped to reach the moon crash site by Jake, who knows him through Patricia. The now-widowed David is accompanied by linguist and sometime lover Catherine Marceaux (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Floyd Rosenberg (Nicolas Wright), a government bureaucrat auditing David’s operation, Dikembe Umbutu (DeObia Oparei), a Congolese warlord who battled the aliens on the ground and whose insights into the aliens David and Catherine were studying, and Jake’s co-pilot Charlie Miller (Travis Tope), who grew up with Jake as orphans of the invasion. They retrieve a white spherical object from the moondust, just as a new, unimaginably large alien “Harvester” ship arrives and easily blows away the Earth’s new defences, before sweeping in over Eurasia, its gravity wake scooping up cities and scattering the rubble far and wide. Barely surviving as they’re dragged along for the ride, the team manage to get their find back to Area 51. David quickly recognises the Harvester intends to complete a process of drilling out the Earth’s core started in the previous assault. The recovered sphere is revealed to be an emissary of a cybernetic intelligence of a race that long since shed physical bodies, with the last survivor now leading a resistance against the aliens on a hidden planet and wanting to recruit humans to the cause.

Emmerich managed to bring back Loggia for a brief cameo shortly before his death, and Hirsch, Fox, and Spiner for surprisingly substantial parts. Spiner’s Okun awakens from a twenty-year coma, and after a little dazed stumbling around quickly turns his eccentric intelligence to the new invasion: like Whitmore, he finds he has an inchoate connection with the aliens. Emmerich had previously kept allowing his sexuality into the first film only in jokey asides like a fellow pilot throwing up his hands in disavowal when he catches Hiller and Wilder in a pose that looks like Wilder is proposing marriage, and in Fierstein’s nelly performance. Here Emmerich made Okun more pointedly queer, having been assiduously cared for his assistant and romantic partner Dr Isaacs (John Storey) in his coma, and when Isaacs is killed by marauding aliens, Emmerich manages an engaging flicker of pathos before Okun goes nuts and starts gunning down the monsters. Julius, in a touch Emmerich recycled from 2012, is making a paltry living selling his book called How I Saved The World in a tour of rest homes, in between kicking back on his boat, which gets washed ashore on a tsunami as the alien craft arrives.

Rescued from the rubble by some orphaned youngsters (including Joey King and Mckenna Grace) who are trying to drive out of the disaster area, Julius finishes up taking them and some other kids in hand and making for Area 51. Fox gets the least to do as Jasmine, who’s become a doctor in the interim and dies whilst saving patients from her collapsing hospital. With the aliens’ return stimulating Whitmore and Okun and others to new life much like the alien captives and the old machines, Whitmore tries to warn Lanford of the impending attack. Lanford and many others in the order of succession are killed when the aliens penetrate their bunker. William Fichtner is cast against his usually villainous type in playing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Joshua Adams, who also becomes President, although he doesn’t get any memorable speeches. Eventually the cyber-intelligence tells the humans that the aliens are actually ruled by queens, and no-one has ever managed to kill one of the queens that commander the Harvesters, which are incredibly big, smart, and tough, and obsessively dedicated to exterminating all of its hated cybernetic enemies. Realising this obsession is a crucial weakness, David devises a trap to lure in the queen and blow it up with an enormously powerful bomb that must be contained by a shield device. Patricia volunteers to deliver the bomb, but her father takes the ship carrying it instead and she follows in a fighter.

The least thrilling part of Resurgence comes ironically when Emmerich tries ever so hard to top the original’s city-levelling spectacle. He depicts the ridiculously large new alien ship, so big it spans about a fifth of the planet, tearing up cities and dropping pieces of Beijing and Kuala Lumpar on London, with the luckless heroes along for the ride. David sighs, “They like to get the landmarks,” as Jake narrowly dodges one of the Petronas Towers as it falls on Tower Bridge. The reasonably judicious effects in the ’96 film give way here to spectacular yet impersonal CGI and overlong sequences, and whilst the storyline throws up a range of intriguing new ideas and developments, the essential plot settles for an extended riff on the original. Both Hemsworth, who was being hyped at the time as his brother Chris’s edgier rival but has nothing like the same screen presence, and Usher are merely okay, whilst Trope is stuck with the modern cliché role of the overly-talkative and insecure guy. The pair constantly fall afoul of moonbase commander Jiang (Chin Han), whose stern disapproval Jake accepts as a good-looking rebel playing by his own rules. Where the first film was fleet and witty in setting up its characters and processing their various hang-ups in ideograms, Resurgence keeps stopping for clunky heart-to-hearts in the more familiar recent screenwriting style.

Another problem is inseparable from one of the more intriguing new choices, as Resurgence conjures an alternative reality to the real 2016. This one is filled with technology augmented or entirely changed by utilising the alien salvage, and an equally altered social and political landscape, allowing Emmerich to indulge a little liberal fantasising about an age of more environmentally friendly tech and gender and racial equity, even as he also works to darken the palette a little in noting the chaos reaped by the invasion. This development resembles some classic works of Japanese anime including The Macross Saga and Space Battleship Yamato, and the film overall sustains a live-action anime feel throughout. But the detail of this future is patchy, unsurprisingly given that Emmerich and Devilin’s conceptual thinking was never that advanced, making one wonder why with hovercopters and moon-hopping spacecraft are available most people are still getting about in old-school planes and motor vehicles (then again, access to technology has always been a many-tiered thing). The result compounds a feeling of blandness, missing the merry jingoism (in a film that also kisses a lot of Chinese butt for the sake of both financing and release there) without anything to replace it. Where the original’s humour drew so effectively from the zeitgeist of its making, Emmerich and Devlin have to use broader gags to try and fill the gap, like Okun wandering about with his rump showing through his hospital gown. The central trio of Jake, Dylan, and Patricia never get a chance to put their old camaraderie from training to work by coming together in battle.

What I feel the film does get right however is worth noting. Goldblum and Pullman slot right back into their roles as if no time had elapsed. Where many recent films extending old franchises have proven awkward and often infuriating to fans in bringing back old heroes, David and Whitmore, even with a lot more grey hairs and some rough times behind them, feel consistent with the people they were before, and are as vital to the story as the inheriting youngsters. There’s a nice gag when Julius, driving up to Area 51 with his young charges in a school bus and unwittingly threatening the well-laid trap, is alerted to a “tall, dangling man” waving at him: “Tall? Dangling? That’s my David!” Monroe, who had anchored the horror film It Follows (2015) and emerged as one of the most talented and interesting starlets of the moment, is the best new element as Patricia, more substantially conceived as a next-generation representative than Dylan and the others. Her heartfelt shows of caring for her father are balanced by a warlike edge that emerges in the climactic scenes as every inch her father’s daughter. If the film had focused more squarely on her, it might not have been more popular, but it would have been stronger. One moment that feels equal to anything in the original comes when the Whitmores converse over radio as they fly towards battle, the old President telling Patricia, “I’m not saving the world, I’m saving you.” Angelababy’s Rain is another kick-ass woman pilot, but barely characterised beyond being exemplary and the awkward love interest for Charlie, although her first appearance amidst a flocking crowd of adoring fans offers a neat touch conflating different forms of celebrity worship.

Emmerich interpolates what seems like an odd Vietnam allusion as Jake, Charlie, Dylan, and Rain fly inside the Harvester and try to blow it up, only to be foiled by cunning booby-traps and left tramping through the swampy undergrowth sustained within the vast hull’s contained ecosystem. There they battle aliens, with a neat reversal as Jake conspicuously fails to pull off the elder Hiller’s punch on an enemy. Finally they manage to escape in alien fighters, but find themselves locked into a swarm of such craft. Whitmore succeeds in penetrating the queen’s ship, which detaches from the Harvester to hunt down the cyber-intelligence. Whitmore blows the ship and himself up, in a fitting echo of Russell in the original, but the queen survives thanks to a personal shield, and returns to relentlessly trying to destroy her foes. Emmerich seems to be taking a second shot at Godzilla with the sight of the enormous queen stalking our heroes. Patricia, vengefully blasting the queen from on high, manages to knock out her shield, and Dylan and Rain, taking an enormous risk on Jake’s advice, manage to rip their craft out of the swarm and finish the queen off, causing the Harvester to depart. Okun excitedly tells the heroes that the cyber-intelligence is going to give them new technology including interstellar travel, and predicts, “We are gonna kick some serious alien ass!” just before the slam-cut ending. An amusing promise to leave off on, and one I wouldn’t have minded delivered on, but also likely to remain unfulfilled given Resurgence’s weak box office. Sometimes you just can’t go home again.

2020s, Action-Adventure

Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny (2023)

Director: James Mangold
Screenwriters: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, James Mangold

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers…

Sometimes, like desperate lovers, substance abusers, or obsessive questers, we cineastes know very well we should stay away from certain things, but can’t. Some journeys have been too long, too bound up with the way we think and see and feel. I’ve been an Indiana Jones fan since I was about five years old, when I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in a cinema on a university campus close to where my family lived and where my mother was studying at the time. It was a memorable occasion because I also saw Jaws (1975) on the same bill, and caught lice from some filthy undergraduate. But enough about my formative traumas. Cut to present day. Long after the successful but divisively received fourth instalment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Long after George Lucas sold his company Lucasfilm and the rights to all his brainchildren to Disney. That sale is long enough ago, the fruit of it so copious in amount if not so much in quality, that it counts as its own epoch now, including five Star Wars films of sharply declining returns, and a grab-bag of TV series. Indiana Jones was the last of their major properties to tap, and the idea of a fifth film featuring everyone’s favourite archaeological swashbuckler likely gained a new lease of life after everyone was surprised at Harrison Ford’s strong turn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). Even that was nearly a decade ago now.

Trouble was, Steven Spielberg eventually abandoned the idea of making the film himself. That was, to be blunt, the actual end of Indiana Jones. First and foremost, of course, the character of Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr and his adventures were inspired by B-movies and matinee serials devoured through a misspent youth. But Indy, as forged by a gang of filmmakers also including Lucas, Philip Kaufman, and Lawrence Kasdan and extended through his sequels, had nonetheless become Spielberg’s fictional avatar and foremost autobiographical figure. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) contained a wry, teeth-gritted portrait of Spielberg’s disintegrating first marriage and also proved an allegory about growing a social and historical conscience. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) offered at its heart an idealised expression of a father and son reunion, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull saw its hero find himself a family man at advancing age. The personal investment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull only became more blatantly obvious after Spielberg’s more recent The Fabelmans (2022). The way he and Lucas wound their childhoods and their manhoods, their fantasies and their experiences, into their adventurer’s maturation and aging was part of the inimitable texture of those films.

Without their direct creative participation, only two original, authentic elements remain to testify some of the deeper personality persisting with this extension to the series: composer John Williams, still able to forge a rousing score, and Ford himself, who, at age 80, can definitely say it’s both the years and the mileage. Back when Indy first appeared movie screens were pretty starved for old-fashioned heroes. Today there’s any number of other rock-‘em sock’-em action heroes of many creeds and callings riding on his bullwhip’s tail across movie screens. Even in his very specific line of work now there’s Lara Croft and Nathan Drake as heroes springing out the video game world, whilst still owing everything to Indy. But Indy still has a rare stature, a specificity elusive and taunting to the vast swathe of imitators and inheritors, with his trademark outfit and weapons of choice, his amusingly blended traits of rock-ribbed bravado and intellectual curiosity, of toughness and academic quaintness, his general fearlessness and needling weak points, and particularly his romantic streak, all put him at odds with contemporary taste for strictly delineated alphas and betas amongst macho protagonists, or, at the other extreme, the crowded field of physically impervious but utterly neurotic superheroes. In any event, Indy as played by Ford as an officially and undeniably old man has inevitably left many things behind.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny also arrives during a rather brutal season for blockbuster Hollywood cinema, with tired franchises staggering and dropping to their knees out of breath and out of inspiration, and the whole ecosystem of such movies in dismay. A large part of this undoubtedly can be put down to the damage wrought by concessions to the streaming age: when you know you can watch an event movie in your living room a month or even less after it hits movie screens, then it’s not an event movie. The corrosive effect of so little new, real imagination is also pertinent too. Nostalgia, familiarity, branding – all have been worked until the gears have started seizing up. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) signalled an easy way of wringing the drying sponge a little more by unifying diverse strands of franchise history, but it did so in a clever manner and exploited some conceptual conceits open to a sci-fi/fantasy crossbreed. The price paid has been several of these movies quickly working the appeal of seeing some old, beloved faces crash into some new, mildly liked faces into the ground. Digital filmmaking technology has evoked the spectre of big-budget cinema possibly devolving into an endless succession of intellectual properties and their original component players forced to persist forever, like the filmmaking equivalent of the eternal torture box of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.” Quite a few of these recent flailing movies have also been delayed and heavily reshot at exhausting expense in efforts to mollify multiple voices including presumed audience desire, and finish up looking exactly like the fairground chimeras they are. By all reports, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is one of them.

The Dial of Destiny is for its part relatively straightforward in exploiting that new realm by utilising digital de-aging technology to make Ford look once again like his forty-something self, in a lengthy prologue designed to offer the audience, at least for a portion of the new film, the illusion of an Indiana Jones restored to his glory days. At the very peak and end of his glory days, in fact, as the opening unfolds in 1945, just as the Nazi regime he fought so long and so well staggers on its last legs. This choice is at once salutary and annoying, bespeaking as it does the same assumptions by the Disney-backed Lucasfilm regime that made the revived Star Wars films so initially popular and left them so very quickly left without any steam at all. Star Wars is about Rebels versus the Empire, and Indiana Jones is a hero who fights Nazis – not just Nazis in spirit but the actual, literal Third Reich. At least in this opening portion there is a feeling of unfinished business being laid to rest. The object of contest here is the head of the Spear of Destiny, the weapon used to pierce the body of Jesus on the cross, supposedly a genuine relic of interest for Hitler and mentioned in Campbell Black’s novelisation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, giving this element an aspect of deep series lore as well as a pretext for the usual, thunderous action.

Indy is introduced, in the first of many ideas here rather too obviously recycled from the previous entry, held at bay by his enemies and with face hidden under a hood, as he’s dragged into a castle used as a Nazi headquarters. On the track of the spearhead, Indy is accompanied by his rather less formidable partner in this particular mission, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), an Oxford scholar without any adventurer chops but who still gets himself captured because he couldn’t bear the thought of just leaving his friend to his fate. Indy manages to escape, with the help of an allied bomb that plunges through the castle roof, and after various feats of derring-do and deception, boards a train loaded with plundered art and historical relics, commended by the scar-faced Colonel Weber (Thomas Kretschmann) and with physicist and rocket developer Dr Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) also on board. Voller has already noticed something Indy only learns when he gets hold of the spearhead, that it’s a fake. But something else on the train genuinely thrills Voller: a portion of the Antikythera, a device sources hold to have been invented by Archimedes and capable of using mathematical calculation to deduce where fissures in time will appear. Indy frees Basil, who’s been beaten and tortured by Weber, and during a tussle on the train roof Weber is shot by Basil after accidentally nicking Indy with a bullet. Voller, trying to recover the Antikythera device from them, is knocked off the train by a water pipe. Allied bombers knock out the train’s path and Indy and Basil leap to a safe landing in a river.

This sequence is well-done in most respects, with Mangold mimicking Spielberg’s action style to the utmost, but with a few niggling aspects off to a consequential degree, not least of which is that for people who complained about all the CGI in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, well, here’s a scene that seems to be about 95% digitally forged or enhanced. The de-aging for Ford is convincing as long as no specific emotion is required, and noticeably inexpressive otherwise. One of Ford’s great gifts as an action star, the one that helped make Indy so popular, was his ability to draw the audience in and along with Indy’s spasms of pain, rage, astonishment, and fear during the fights and cliffhangers. But I never asked for perfection in that regard. More aggravating is Mangold’s stop-start rhythm, never quite nailing down the uncanny sense of pace and flow that defined what Spielberg can manage at his height, and indeed, whatever else one might think about his tastes as a dramaturge, something Lucas was particularly canny in fostering in works he produced. The filmmakers repeat the same joke several times, of Indy advancing on to the next car of the train to be confronted by the next bunch of oblivious German soldiers, who seem to be deaf to all the gunplay down the hall. The casting is wearyingly obvious, with Mikkelsen, Kretschmann, and Jones playing exactly the same parts they have in other, recent blockbusters. That can be seen as honouring the old Hollywood creed of character actor typecasting, but that’s a blade that cuts two ways, as it also suggests a lack of any interest in fresh thinking.

When it comes to giving The Dial of Destiny some charge of personal meaning, Ford steps up to the plate. As the film moves forward to 1969, where most of the story unfolds, Ford allows us to see his body, creased and saggy and patently that of an old man if still some sign of fine muscle under it all, in a manner that’s surprisingly honest, even raw. Ford is now making a movie about his own aging process even as the CGI gods dangle the possibility of eternal buffness and beauty before him – a more interesting and potent Faustian allegory of the kind this series has long specialised in than anything in the actual script. The film’s official leitmotif is time, opening with the sound of a ticking clock and returning to it as Mangold notes Indy’s apartment in downtown New York. Later Indy is given a clock by his faculty fellows in celebrating his imminent retirement. Oh, and yes, the Antikythera and fissures in time and all that. Indy is out of place in a city now filled with those damn young hippies with their rock music and their long hair, a note Mangold hits in the blandest and most basic fashion as he has Indy bellowing at a neighbour to turn the music he’s blaring out – The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” natch – down, only to be dismissed because everyone’s spending the day partying, as the astronauts from the recent moon landing are being celebrated in a tickertape parade. Indy shuffles through a day of lame-duck suffering, trying to give a lecture to a bunch of students, whose boredom is comically overwrought in comparison to the rapt attention Indy once commanded of his students, particularly the female ones. Was Indy always a bad teacher only rescued by sex appeal? Why are his students taking his class if they’re so uninterested in what he’s teaching? Why did he leave the leafy groves of Marshall College for this place? He’s put out of his misery when someone wheels in a TV so they can watch the parade, whilst Indy’s attention is momentarily grabbed by a young woman who seems keen and to actually know what he’s talking about.

The young woman proves to be Basil’s daughter, and Indy’s goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). She’s lost her father, who developed an obsessive and destructive interest in the Antithykera, and she comes offering friendly reminiscence and a flash of connection with the past to Indy. Indy otherwise is suffering. His son Mutt has died after joining up to fight in Vietnam – first suggested when Mangold pans past photos of Indy’s father and son next to a folded American flag, which is nicely subtle, but of course it’s reiterated more baldly later – to annoy him, and the grief of that has corroded his marriage to Marion (Karen Allen) to the point where he has their separation papers on his kitchen table. This aspect of The Dial of Destiny is easily its most contemptible, treating the ideal place the last film left Indy in as a chore to be undone, tossed aside for franchise extension purposes and for some easy pathos on the fly, and having gotten wind of it before watching the film, it made me downright mad. But given my ethos of trying to take every movie as something deserving of assessment on its own terms, if not in isolation, I forced myself to move past that. Still: certainly Shia LaBeouf never took off as a star and has gotten in trouble since, but the part might easily have been recast. Meanwhile, with Short Round himself, Ke Huy Quan, having won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) with a performance that showed off amongst other things that his martial arts skills are prodigious, we ought to have had one or both of Indy’s sons in this film, to take on the heavy action lifting and continue the family motif of the series.

Instead, we get Waller-Bridge’s Helena. After initially playing the agreeable, gentle history savant with a soft spot for her dad’s old friend, Helena is eventually revealed to be a character very much like Indy was himself at her age. Or, at least, that’s what the filmmakers want us to say, as Helena is shown to be bit of a bad lot, affecting an attitude of cynical and money-hungry swagger, casting lustful glances at any good-looking dolt that passes by, and trying to sell off the portion of the Antikythera which she steals from Indy rather than honouring her father as she claimed. She also leaves him in the lurch when some goons on her tail barge through, slaying two of Indy’s work colleagues and pinning the crime on him. These goons include Klaber (Boyd Holbrook, basically repeating his role and performance from Logan , 2016, for Mangold), and Hauke (Olivier Richters), who presents the compulsory hulk opponent for Indy but, this time around, our hero just never quite packs enough punch to take down anymore. In one of several highly confused plot strands, these men are working in liaison with at least one CIA agent, but have decided to go rogue in working with Professor Schmidt, one of the crucial scientists involved in the moon landing. Whaddaya know, it’s Dr Voller, a little greyer but still, under the skin, a fervent Nazi. The pseudonymous Voller has used his new leverage with the government to get all his ideological friends assigned to help him get the Antikythera piece back. Klaber’s casual murders upset Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a member of the agent team and the film’s stand-in for Cleopatra Jones, or maybe Foxxy Cleopatra, and one who hasn’t been converted to Voller’s renascent fascist credo. She still tries to bring Indy to heel and argues with her nominal colleagues until she’s shot for, well, because the movie doesn’t need her.

Hiring Mangold to take over from Spielberg is one of those choices that seem, on the face of things, to be a safe bet. Mangold has dipped his toe in indie dramas, historical films, biopics, genre revivals, gimmick thrillers, and special effects-heavy franchise films since his directing debut with Heavy (1995). He likely got the job for making Logan, an incredibly overrated film that was nonetheless taken by many as the gold standard for delivering a weathered hero his righteous swansong. Some of Mangold’s better credentials for making this movie might be found in the rigorous period atmosphere and feel for star turns playing iconic figures evinced in Walk The Line (2005) and Ford v Ferrari (2019): the latter film in particular saw Mangold mating technical punch with storytelling and human values with real verve. But Mangold isn’t particularly imaginative as a stager of action scenes, and lacks that special talent for interlacing human matters with the necessary highwire dance of high adventure cinema. He’s the kind of solid, smart, sufficient director Hollywood always needed and needs more of today, but not a visionary, or even, really, a niche expert. He does a cover band job in reproducing Spielberg’s aesthetic, but despite the sharpness of the editing and shooting on display, no scene here takes on the wild and relentless joy of movement achieved in the desert pursuit in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the mining cart ride in Temple of Doom, or the jungle chase in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In fact, there is no special set-piece here despite the many would-be thrilling and very expensive action sequences. A mid-film chase through the streets of Tangiers, for instance, goes on so long I forgot exactly what was supposed to be at stake in it.

Indy’s escape from the goon squad in the midst of the astronauts’ parade comes closest to recapturing the precise conceptual and staging zest of the classic model films, particularly in the conceit of having the action ever so close to the eye of real history. But like the earlier train sequence, this bit peters out somewhere along the line without any grand comic or violent punchline, save the astronauts themselves glancing in bewilderment at the sight of Indy dashing by on a commandeered cop’s horse whilst he’s chased by Klaber and others. This feeling of exasperation becomes even more amplified as the film unfolds through a leisurely, clumsy middle act which, far from repairing the perceived faults of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in that regard, actually doubles down on them, and even gets worse as the film careens towards a splashy, spectacular, yet perversely anticlimactic and borderline senseless climax. Meanwhile the film only goes through the motions of detailing an Indy adrift in the 1960s zeitgeist, taking the laziest route of making him a grumpy grandpa and not someone who, say, has naturally evolved his passion for antiquities and their meaning for humanity into any kind of advocate or activist stance, which would have been in line with his personal growth. Whilst the cultural reference points in the previous films were deliberately cartoonish, they at least had meaning, most particularly in the ironic survey of 1950s in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with its pasteboard, mannequin-populated, atomic bomb-decimated town and its roaring hotroaders oblivious to the authentic dramas and deep-riven legacies still permeating the brave new world. The Dial of Destiny barely cares about its social backdrop.

At first glance, Helena doesn’t strike me as a bad concept at all – if the filmmakers could decide on which concept of her they want. Given the period and casting choice, Helena might have been characterised as a fiery young radical full of pith and vinegar attitude. But actually she’s entirely indifferent to her generational cadre, her affectation going no further than the rather groovy ensemble with a red velvet jacket and scarf she wears in her early scenes, and her liberated lustiness which, of course, cannot be indulged or illustrated in today’s movie climate, either from the pseudo-feminist perspective of not making her a sex object and fallible before men, or from the reactionary side of not making her seem overtly slutty. So, she will be nothing. Her traits are all over the place, as if the battery of hands involved in writing the script all had a different idea of what she should be. Shoehorned in at one point is the Moroccan gangster Rahim (Alaa Safi), whom Helena apparently promised to marry at some point and now is on the rampage when she and Indy stir things up in Tangiers. This is all played out in the midst of a frenetic action scene, as is just about every effort to characterise Helena, also including random shouting about her gambling debts. Marion’s introduction in Raiders of the Lost Ark was brilliant in the way it immediately outlined her as the ideal Hawksian woman to inhabit Indy’s world, tough, worldly, funny, and, most important, saying much in a considered but still very amusing way. Indy’s childhood nickname for Helena, Wombat, is a charming aside, but the way Helena seems to nurse resentment for Indy in failing to rescue her father from his spiralling obsession and later tardiness in looking out for his goddaughter again deserves some substantial treatment and never really gets it: similarly, her relationship with her own father, again intended to evoke Indy’s with his, is noted but never grappled with. The closest this film gets to the old romanticism, by the way, comes right at the end, between two senior citizens.

The script further pads Helena’s likeness to young Indy by sticking her with a young partner in crime, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), whose backstory is the same as Short Round’s was and is attached in loyalty to Helena. Trouble is, whilst Teddy isn’t as excitable as Short Round was to some people’s annoyance, he is annoying in the opposite way, always acting sullen, impatient, and generally like a lead balloon, present more as a box to be ticked in the narrative doubling and easy plot workarounds, including to be someone whose life can be made a dramatic stake since no-one’s around to be damsel in distress anymore. Waller-Bridge’s casting is one of those choices that can either make or break this kind of film. Casting an actress best-known as a comedy performer had a relative boldness I appreciated, and Waller-Bridge has a spry, off-beat energy that serves her well in the right parts. But here I quickly came to the conclusion she’s rather badly miscast. I dare say she’ll attract plenty of hyperbole henceforth from people sour at the entire idea of her role and presence, and from those with the opposite reflex. But the real frustration is that the film doesn’t entirely know what it wants from Helena as a character or Waller-Bridge as a performer. It wants her to be daring and thrilling, but not too much. It wants her to be a bit naughty, but not too much. It wants her to be a potential replacement for Indy himself, but she just doesn’t have the necessary brand of star energy or sexy charisma, and any contrasting, eccentric backbeat she might have wielded is smothered through incompetence. At least in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull any deficiencies LaBeouf had as a potential successor were kneaded into the story itself, in the fact Mutt was still a very young man with much to learn, his bluster and tough guy act tested and fractured even as his true grit began to emerge.

More immediately, Waller-Bridge doesn’t convince in any form as an action heroine, leading to a downright silly moment when she strips the torn arms off her fab red silk blouse to get down and dirty, but only revealing her pasty posh London guns. I wished the film had taken the different tack of making her more of her father’s daughter, a timid nerd who has to rapidly find her inner adventurer when thrown into Indy’s world, as mooted during her very first meeting with Indy. Indy, Helena, and Teddy, after a lot of dashing about in Tangiers, move on to the Aegean in search of a relic which can give a clue to the location of the other half of the Antikythera, which Basil apparently deduced was lost in a shipwreck. Indy seeks out old pal Renaldo, a great diver, played by Antonio Banderas in a role that defines the phrase “criminally wasted.” Indy, Helena, and Renaldo descend to the shipwreck and retrieve the code-etched tablet, only to find Voller and goons waiting above for them. Voller shoots Renaldo as a warning and Helena elects to go through the motions of translating the code whilst plotting leverage their escape with a stick of dynamite. Once the heroes flee on Voller’s faster boat, Indy identifies the deeper secret contained by the tablet. This sequence nods to several likenesses in the series, but stretches everything out to near-tedium.

Mangold has no feel for the comic aspects of this template, and the script gives little to work with. One or two jokes do land, like the inevitable twist on the old shooting-the-swordsman gag which this time sees Indy trying to pacify a room full of heavies by lashing his whip around, only for everyone to pull a gun and blast away, requiring him to duck with speed. Not much else hits the target however: I lost count of the number of quips that failed to elicit a response from the audience I saw this with. Meanwhile Mangold shoehorns in Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who’s moved to New York and lives with his extended family, for a scene that teases an interesting note of cultural evolution – Sallah is happy his kids have multicultural awareness – which momentarily makes something of an otherwise awkward and random cameo present for little more than a few easy nostalgia frissons. Rhys-Davies looks even older and far less spry than Ford, even if he seems to still have his singing voice as the refrain heard right at the end suggests. Despite its boldness out of the gate in dealing with the subject, The Dial of Destiny after that does little to really grapple with Indy’s feelings of being too old, too out of the loop to matter, and the ending, which seems to be aiming for a specific resolution, veers away from it in a manner redolent of cold feet. The ideal ending that came into my head for Indy would have been to see him find new stage, some new generation requiring his gifts, his knowledge, the aspects of him distinct from his physicality. But the film’s chosen arc steers firmly away from that.

Indiana Jones as a property is in an awkward position. Indy’s iconic name brand value, and the lustre of all the black ink in the old accounts books, are the sort of thing movie studios love banking on these days – the only thing they know how bank on. But this is one series that can’t be easily rebooted, too dependent on one star actor, the through-line of his life story specifically rooted in both historical setting and essential motifs, to result in any easy hand-off or new beginning. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles already ticked off Indy’s youth in detail. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had trouble weaving a fresh and satisfying narrative around all its compulsory tropes and refrains, but it had many other qualities to compensate. In that regard Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), very much the lightning rod for an increasingly heated war between franchise-reliant filmmakers and easily annoyed fans whose cash is being presumed upon, had the right idea in insisting the imprimatur had to evolve and change or die. The problem with Johnson’s film was that whilst it talked the talk, it didn’t walk the walk, settling for merely reordering and remixing previous ideas and scenes of the series rather than finding new ground, except in the most superficial ways. The Dial of Destiny is less ambitious, but it suffers then from a problem of wanting to get back to basics, and then forgetting what those basics mean.

As for the actual motivating element in the drama, the Antikythera itself, I liked that it was established by Voller as neither supernatural nor science fiction McGuffin as in earlier entries, but simply the product of Archimedes’ mathematical genius, capable of calculating the hidden weak points in reality itself. How the dial is put to actual use however is again clumsily developed. Voller wants to use it to travel back to before World War II and guide Hitler around all his mistakes, to ensure Nazism’s ultimate victory. Such selective travel proves impossible, however, with every fissure leading back to Archimedes’ time, with the scientist himself (Nasser Memarzia) desperate to attract any kind of intervention save his beloved Syracuse from the invading Romans. Which made me wonder why Voller thought he could set it so selectively in the first place: surely if the device’s algorithms are firmly encoded in its workings, someone with his mathematical skills should have deduced that when he was setting it. I might also still argue that the Antikythera, which is a real artefact though its use is still conjectural, has no known connection with Archimedes, and betrays the series tradition of utilising story-driving objects rooted in strong historical, religious, and mythical bases, rather than just being a fancy doodad attached to a famous historical name designed to work the necessary plot for the filmmakers.

The general mechanics of the plot are weak, too, in a way that sometimes borders on the truly excruciating. Indy following Helena to Tangiers requires a prompt from Sallah, entirely depending on his mysteriously good connections; somehow, also, Indy is able to simply catch a plane out of the country despite being a wanted fugitive. Voller and squad are able to locate Renaldo’s boat on the ocean for some reason. Voller’s method for deducing where Indy and company are heading after giving him the slip is a very long bow, and he later simply gets extraordinarily lucky in stumbling across Teddy. An important aspect of the climax depends on Helena prompting Teddy to try and fly a specific type of plane, only to let slip that she knows he’s never flown a plane. And yet Teddy is able to get this one in the air, the kind of smirking absurdity that seems to have stumbled in out a Jerry Lewis movie, and truly makes me wonder what the filmmakers thought they were doing. Even with that aside, the daisy-chain of quests to land the next piece of the puzzle is drawn out and substitutes too often for actual story. Spielberg and Williams proved in the map room scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark that what might have been a dull interlude between action scenes could be turned into an aria of dramatic intensity, weaving music and visuals together to supreme effect. To say that Mangold shows no such capacity for constructing something like that would be being kind. Or anything as majestic and intricate in thematic linkage linked as the twinned shots of the rising mushroom cloud and the lifting alien craft in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

There is at least a nice, fleeting nod to Secret of the Incas (1954), one of the singular early influences on the series, when Indy and Helena find Archimedes’ tomb, lit with sun-reflecting mirrors. A moment like Indy gently taking the gun from Basil’s hand as the timid scholar is stricken with powerful and clashing emotions after shooting Weber, his first act of violence, reminded me that Mangold has a real feel for picking out moments of finite emotional impact, and there isn’t enough of this. A brief flashback incorporated to illustrate a crucial moment shared by Indy, Basil, and the child Helena (Holly Lawton), revealing how wild Basil was being driven by his preoccupation with the Antikythera and the sight of the two father figures Helena had and lost, might have wielded some emotional grace, but instead just slows the film down and breaks up its structure. It shouldn’t be surprising that Ford would prove the best thing about the film, but then again he’s long been underrated, on top of his age seeming to prohibit against him adventuring too strenuously. Nonetheless he has a soulful quality now, and with the help of a few stuntmen and some calculated digital trickery, his Indy still passes muster. But I still felt the film would have been better if he was left a bit more like like John Wayne in his late vehicles, content to sit with a big gun to bring to bear as required and leave the rough-and-tumble to the kids. Again, the film interprets its mission statement with annoying literalness: Indiana Jones films are about Indiana Jones doing adventures, dammit. The Dial of Destiny nonetheless comes on armed with all the production might and gloss that Lucasfilm with Disney’s money behind it seem alone able to wield now, and this gloss almost singlehandedly makes the film a compelling experiment, apparent in brilliantly filmed moments like a hapless diver under Renaldo’s boat seeing Voller’s boat arrive above on the surface before his air hose is cut, and the sheer screen-filling vistas of the finale.

But it’s all for nought without an authentic sense of story drive and some genuine sense of what new world it wants to conquer. Perhaps the lamest element of the whole enterprise is one of potentially strongest: Mikkelsen as Voller. Mikkelsen is a terrific actor, and yet, as he did with his last-minute substitution as the villain in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022), he walks scornfully through yet another icy Nordic bad guy role. The film offers one faintly bewildering moment when Voller quizzes an African-American steward in his downtown New York residence whether he is happy in his nation’s victory in the war, to the steward’s slight demur. This is the sort of moment that reeks of the filmmakers thinking themselves daring and thought-provoking, but what it really provokes is deep cynicism: ah yes, genocidal fascists and struggling racial minorities, always finding the common ground. Voller is otherwise so listless a placeholder villain that I can think of nothing to say about him. He has none of Belloq’s status as the hero’s dark double, Mola Ram’s devilish glee, Walter Donovan’s deceptive charm, or Irina Spalko’s charismatic arrogance. Whilst daring to take different paths is as I’ve said generally a good thing, I couldn’t help but feel the way Mangold and his battery of fellow screenwriters fail to deliver the kind of memorably nasty comeuppance laced with Faustian overtones, that constant series motif, to Voller, betrayed their obliviousness to the kinds of morality plays that underpin the material. I’m not even sure how Klaber met his end: it all gets lost in a churn of stuff happening, something Spielberg and Lucas would never have allowed.

At no point in the film does it feel like Indy’s old spirit is being jogged back to life, no sense of him deciding to grapple with evil and take down new representatives of his old, hated foes: instead he’s dragged along for the ride, often with a downcast and disapproving tilt in dealing with Helena’s antics. Late in the film Indy is shot in the shoulder by the fascists and taken with them on the plane they intend to use to pass through a time fissure. This gunshot is rather more than a flesh wound but apparently rather less than mortal, and seems intended to evoke the one Indy’s father took in The Last Crusade – a wound that was indeed delivered to be fatal but only slowly so, giving Indy time to find the Holy Grail and save his dad. But, in a manner that again betrays reediting and changed intentions, Indy moves between being at death’s door and still strong enough to fight and then parachute jump. Meanwhile Helena chases after the Nazi plane and climbs aboard the landing gear, which would be a fun action movie moment if it wasn’t so obviously fake (and after Shadow in the Cloud, 2021, and Sisu, 2023, hanging off the underside of a plane fuselage has already become the new ultimate movie badass trick — come to think of it, those two movies actually did quite a few things this one tries, but better), whilst Teddy pursues in a stolen plane, ridiculous as already discussed. In what is actually quite a nice touch, the arrival of the planes during the siege of Syracuse by the Romans sees the attackers launching missiles at the aircraft, thinking they’re dragons, whilst Archimedes and his aides rally their defences. Trouble was, here again I could see in my mind how Spielberg would have handled the system of reveals required here for maximum effect.

For Mangold, well, it’s all just laid out, more random buzzes delivered more to the audience’s backsides than their brains. That the neo-Nazis insist on fighting it out with the seaborne Roman horde is incredibly silly. There never seems to be any urgent or immediate hazard to our heroes: Indy even repeatedly points out that Teddy isn’t in any danger, and the gallivanting isn’t sustained or ingenious enough to make this a non-issue. There are no stakes to drive a sense of down-to-the-wire drama: by arriving in this moment of history, Voller’s plan is already kaput. This leads to the amazingly frustrating punchline to all this, when Indy actually meets Archimedes. This is supposed to be the most incredible moment in a lifetime of incredible moments for Indiana Jones, our hero, our beloved movie protagonist and franchise linchpin. Here he is, acting out the ultimate dream of every historian who ever lived, encountering a man he would have read and learned about his entire life, a figure of legend permeating the history of western science. But there’s barely any conversation between them. No revelation, no idea, no exchange of emotion or meditation on time, fate, humanity, anything. Not even some pathos for Archimedes himself who will die at the end of the siege. As a scene I think this concluding encounter is supposed to echo the same flourish of melancholy grandeur as Indy’s encounter with the knight in The Last Crusade, an encounter that, as well as defying nature and the ages, saw Indy meeting his own ironic doppelganger, the anointed knight errant in the Grail Quest. No such likeness is found between Indy and Archimedes, who stares rather dully at the two time interlopers. And this is the worst crime of The Dial of Destiny, far overshadowing all others. It betrays its own, innermost kernel of potential richness. Instead we get Helena sticking herself between the the two men and trying to wave away the moment, telling Indy he has to get himself back in time or he’ll foul things up. Helena seems determined to act out the worst caricature of a common fan complaint, the weakly inserted substitute hero literally inserting herself, telling everyone in loud and certain terms where their proper places are, before punching Indy unconscious to cart him back to the future, somehow wielding enough clout to knock out a man giant bull Nazis and Thugees and Stalinists could never muster.

The film’s coda, with Indy and Marion reunited back in ’69, is the only part of the film that actually made me feel anything: dependent as it is on a direct call-back to the great “Where doesn’t it hurt?” scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, nonetheless here The Dial of Destiny captures some genuine connection and depth, particularly as both Ford and Allen handle the mix of powerful emotions apparent in Indy and Marion with masterful concision, only to be despoiled but another set of awkward gestures, as and Helena accompanies Sallah and his grandkids off for ice cream with a my-work-is-done-here backward glance, whilst Indy for some reason snatches his hat off the clothesline. Not to mention the brusque treatment to the actual resolution of the story. There’s no feeling of discovery, or even rediscovery, but instead an awareness of the filmmakers channelling through the characters their desperate clinging to the last thread of this franchise’s popularity. I never thought an Indiana Jones film would leave me feeling more depressed than thrilled, but here we are. The odd thing is that for its manifold deficiencies and disappointments, The Dial of Destiny is only a very ordinary movie, not a bad one, and only inadequate in being forced to compare itself to some of the greatest movies of their kind ever made. In visual lustre and production heft it’s certainly well ahead of Jungle Cruise (2021) or Uncharted (2022) and some of the other garbage served up in a vaguely similar style in the past decade or so. But it’s also a film that will likely prove the poster child for diminishing returns in modern entertainment, an overstuffed, indecisive, anonymously-made iteration of a property that came roaring out of a moment of supreme revivalist confidence. In archaeological terms, it’s a fake. You can tell by the cross-sections.

1960s, Action-Adventure, War

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Director: J. Lee Thompson
Screenwriter: Carl Foreman

By Roderick Heath

The Guns of Navarone began life as a story penned by Scottish writer Alistair MacLean, a former Royal Navy officer and World War II veteran. MacLean debuted as a writer with H.M.S. Ulysses, a gritty and nightmarish portrait of a doomed warship attached to one of the infamous Allied convoys supplying the Soviet Union during the war, based on some personal experiences. The success of his debut inspired MacLean to write another war story, but this time in a more adventurous and commercial mode. His story this time was loosely inspired by the Battle of Leros in the Dodecanese campaign, but also perhaps drew on memories of movies made during the war like Secret Mission (1942), Desperate Journey (1942), and The Adventures of Tartu (1943), slightly matured Boy’s Own tales about stranded warriors, secret agents and commandos eluding evil Nazis and destroying secret bases. The Guns of Navarone proved another bestseller when it was published in 1957, cementing MacLean as a preeminent popular writer of gamy thrillers until his death in 1987, with many movies good and bad adapted from his works. Enter Carl Foreman, screenwriter and film entrepreneur who had found fame writing High Noon (1952) just before being blacklisted and co-wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with Michael Wilson uncredited, only to see the Oscar they sould have received for it given to the author of the source novel, Pierre Boulle, despite him not speaking English.

Foreman began leveraging his epic Hollywood comeback by signing a production deal with Columbia Pictures as the blacklist was breaking down, and was given the book by an enthusiastic studio executive. Foreman was uneasy at first knowing it would be a hard movie to make, but he eventually pulled it off in grand fashion and made damn sure the movie was emblazoned as “Carl Foreman’s Production of The Guns of Navarone” in the credits and on posters. In adapting the novel, Foreman reshaped the material into something more ambitious and not so dissimilar to The Bridge on the River Kwai, introducing notes of ambivalence about war and greater depth to the characters as well as an emphasis on moral quandary that finally ends with a spectacular act of sabotage. Foreman also wanted to direct the movie, but Columbia refused, so he hired the great Alexander Mackendrick, of Ealing comedies and Sweet Smell of Success (1957) fame, who was on board with Foreman’s desire to make something more substantial out of MacLean’s material. But Mackendrick was fated to suffer repeated agonies in Hollywood, and a week before filming Mackendrick was fired with the evergreen “creative differences” excuse. On star Gregory Peck’s suggestion, Foreman then hurriedly hired J. Lee Thompson. Thompson was a rising star of British film with an array of recent, admired, superbly made films including the proto-feminist drama Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), the nuanced thriller Tiger Bay (1959) and blending war stories with adventure in North West Frontier (1958) and Ice Cold In Alex (1960).

The Guns of Navarone proved Thompson’s Hollywood debut and gained a Best Picture Oscar nomination, a highpoint of a long and violently uneven career. Foreman for his part bankrolled the success into his own, more overtly antiwar survey The Victors (1963), which fell afoul of studio interference. Viewed from today, The Guns of Navarone seems chiefly notable as a movie that mediated the evolution of the relatively straitlaced and realistic war movie popular through the 1950s towards the birth of the modern blockbuster action movie. The Guns of Navarone anticipated and perhaps helped leverage the following year’s debut of James Bond in Dr. No, and later presented an obvious template for Star Wars (1977), with its select band of specialist heroes setting out to assault a seemingly impregnable enemy base and destroy a deadly war machine, as well offering a specific blend of cliffhanger action sequences kneaded into a larger story building to a pyrotechnic climax. But what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone from the myriad films its influence is stamped on is that more elevated element Foreman wanted to explore. In that regard Thompson was an ideal collaborator for Foreman, as he was extremely good at balancing action with tight, tense interpersonal stories. The sort of thing more recent Hollywood event movies dismiss as a tedious chore Foreman and Thompson took very seriously and essential to such storytelling, and the result defies the idea that a potent adventure film can’t also be thoughtful.

The opening moments of The Guns of Navarone promise a hell of a ride, whilst also presenting itself as a work of contemporary mythologising, “the legend of Navarone” that perhaps excuses some embellishing and larger-than-life details. Dimitri Tiomkin’s grand score, perhaps the best of his career, surges over a pre-credits prologue whilst the Scottish actor James Robertson Justice, who within the film proper plays the M-like spymaster Jensen, provides narration. Jensen explicitly describes the events as akin to the ancient myths of heroes and monsters born of the Greek islands, a modern echo of Achilles and Odysseus and Hercules, whilst the camera explores the ruins of classical temples overlooking Aegean-washed islands. The legend as he describes it begins when Hitler, trying to bully neutral Turkey into repeating history and joining the war on his side, orders a small garrison of 2000 British soldiers who have been holding out on the Aegean island of Kheros to be obliterated in a show of purposefully absurd force. The British decide to send in a flotilla to rescue them, but face one deadly roadblock: the Germans have installed two, colossal 15-inch naval guns in an old citadel on the neighbouring island of Navarone, controlling the only open strait to Kheros.

With the clock ticking down fast and all other efforts failing, including a disastrous bombing raid that costs many airmen their lives, Jensen pulls together an infiltration team to land on Navarone and find a way to sabotage the guns. Jensen selects Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) to lead the team, assigning him demolitions expert Corporal Miller (David Niven) whose job it will be to destroy the guns, with partisan Spyros Pappadimos (James Darren), and Chief Petty Officer Brown (Stanley Baker) along for added deadly force. To get them to Navarone and help scale the seemingly impassable cliff face on the island’s southern coast, the only unpatrolled landing point, Jensen flies in Captain Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck), a former, renowned mountaineer who’s been leading partisan operations in Crete. Mallory arrives at Jensen’s HQ in North Africa just as one of the Lancaster bombers sent on the raid crash-lands. Mallory, surveying photos of the cliff, feels it’s a virtually impossible task, but still agrees to do his bit and asks for Andreas Stavro (Anthony Quinn), his uneasy ally on Crete and a ranking Colonel in the Greek army, to be brought out to help him, only for Jensen to assure him they’ve already done so. Jensen, Mallory, and Franklin listen to the crews of the failed air raid, including their truculent Australian squadron leader Barnsby (Richard Harris, in a memorable, even star-making cameo) who punctuates his tirade against the planners of the raid with saying “ruddy” every other word. Jensen admits to Mallory that he’s the one who put them up to the raid, knowing it was pointless but still had to be tried.

What war costs on both the most personal level and on the macrocosmic chart of human endeavour is a constant motif of The Guns of Navarone even as it sets up an officially heroic, thrill-a-minute story. Jensen muses with his adjutant Cohn (Bryan Forbes) on the grim necessity of someone in his job sending men off to die, fully expecting Franklin’s team to also be lost, the ships sent to rescue the men on Kheros to be sunk, and the garrison wiped out, whilst still being committed to try everything to prevent such ends. Jensen muses on the quality of the unexpected in such situations, the surprising, rarefied quality of the human that ironically requires such straits to emerge: “Slap in the middle of absolute insanity, people pull out the most extraordinary resources. Ingenuity. Courage. Self-sacrifice.” “With every one of us a genius, how can we fail?” Mallory frames it more ironically as he considers the team with all their particular talents, knowing well what a shit-show they’re heading into, in a war that generally seems inimical to individual identity and ability. Mallory finds Andreas waiting in his hotel room, a peculiar tension persisting between them despite being comrades who’ve been fighting alongside each-other for months. Later it emerges that Mallory gave a safe conduct to a German patrol to get their wounded taken care of after a skirmish on Crete, only for the Germans, desperate to kill Stavro as one of their most ferocious enemies, to shoot their wounded, go to Andreas’ house, and blow it up along with his wife and children. Andreas blames Mallory’s “stupid Anglo-Saxon decency” for his family’s death and has told Mallory he will kill him when the war is won.

Mallory also encounters Miller, who has a line in forced joviality and has long refused officer rank despite his many famous missions, through his deep scepticism for authority and the kind of moral calculus men like Jensen indulge. Spyros was born on Navarone and knows the island, but emigrated to America where he learned deadly arts as a petty hoodlum. Brown meanwhile specialises in killing at close quarters with a knife and has antifascist credentials going back to the Spanish Civil War, where he gained his colourful nickname “The Butcher of Barcelona”. “I’ve been killing Germans since 1937,” Brown tells Mallory, “There’s no end to them.” Trouble is Brown is suffering burnout from such Sisyphean labours, and can’t bring himself to kill anymore: “You shoot a man at two hundred yards he’s just a moving target. You kill him with a knife, you’re close enough to smell him.” Mallory also describes Franklin to Andreas as a man “who still needs to prove to himself he’s a hero.” Whatever attitude problems and neuroses are lurking under the surface of the omnicompetent team are nonetheless of little consequence at first as they’re gathered on the island of Castelrosso, halfway between Cyprus and Rhodes. On Castelrosso, the team are briefly billeted with the garrison commanded by Major Baker (Allan Cuthbertson), a snootily officious British officer.

When the team are installed in a grimy room in Baker’s army post, Andreas’ survival wits are illustrated as he insists on searching for microphones. Nor is he unjustly paranoid: whilst they discuss their plans, Andreas catches them being spied on by a young man (Tutte Lemkow). Baker is fetched and he tells them the eavesdropper is the HQ laundry boy Nicolai, who supposedly doesn’t speak English and only talks to Andrea in an obscure dialect, to which Miller casually but acutely queries, “Then why was he listening?” Franklin tells Baker he wants Nicolai held incommunicado until the mission is complete, but Baker insists Nicolai be released. In response Franklin tells Spyros to shoot Nicolai and Baker too “if he gets in your way.” When the aghast Baker realises they means it, he backs down and has Nicolai locked up. This tense scene sets in motion a theme that winnows through what follows, noting the different kinds of command displayed by Baker’s empty, privileged bluster, versus Franklin’s generally easy-going manner that masks that he knows exactly when to take ruthless action and apply pressure when it comes to fulfilling his mission, even if it’s likely just to make Baker pay heed. Mallory’s different brand of cool poise and sense of impact is also sketched out. When Baker makes appeal to Mallory, he replies that he agrees with Franklin, but also doesn’t need to have Baker shot, just speedily shipped home as a private with one call to Jensen, a threat that makes a more subtle but possibly deeper impact on Baker.

The next morning the team boards an appropriately banged-up fishing boat procured for them to voyage to Navarone, per Mallory’s request, a vessel that so alarms Miller that he keeps reminding Mallory he can’t swim. On the way they’re intercepted by a German patrol boat in an unexpected area, making Franklin suspect Baker let Nicolai go anyway. The team maintain their parts as poor fishermen until the right moment when they unleash with hidden weapons, slaying all the Germans and blowing up their boat. After the fight Mallory notices when Baker flinches from stabbing a German he didn’t quite finish up and gets up with his gun, only for Spyros to blow him away. Later Baker explains how tired he is of killing and tries to avoid it when he can, only to earn Mallory’s rebuke that none of them has the right to be making a private peace, not least because it makes him untrustworthy to the rest of the team. “I do my job sir,” Brown protests, to Mallory’s retort: “Your job is to kill enemy soldiers.” Mallory’s learned that the hard way, as he explains Andreas’ threat to him and the reason for it to Franklin, as they sail at night to Navarone. As they near the island coast, a vicious storm whips up, driving the boat onto rocks. The team laboriously rescue as much of their equipment as they can before a rogue wave rolls in, dislodges the boat, and sinks it.

This tremendous piece of staging, accomplished with all the physical craft and energy required of moviemaking in those long-gone pre-CGI days, comes in a dizzy flurry of pounding white water and even in the relatively safe confines of a studio tank looks dangerous for the actors. And it’s only the start of the team’s true ordeal. The boat’s destruction forces Mallory, who had been promised a spell of leave after delivering the men, and Andreas to integrate with the team for the duration. Mallory succeeds in the agonising climb up the rock face, meticulously hammering in pitons and finding rock forms to make the ascent easier. Andreas ascends to help him, cueing a tense moment when Mallory slips and Andreas catches him holding dangling over a vast drop, awareness of a perfect opportunity for Andreas to carry out his threat, but instead helping Mallory get his grip again. Reaching the top, Mallory and Andreas are surprised by a German on patrol: they kill him, but when Mallory tries to bluff his way through a conversation on a field telephone with the German HQ, he doesn’t succeed, with soldiers dispatched. Whilst climbing the cliff, Franklin slips and breaks his leg. Whilst the others bring him aloft, Mallory, now ranking officer and so forced into command, considers the options of leaving Franklin for the Germans, carrying with them, or, as Andreas suggests, shooting him: “Better for him, better for us.” Mallory elects to bring Franklin along on an improvised stretcher, knowing they can rendezvous with local contacts at a nearby ruin and get them to look after him. As they trek into rugged, snow-clad mountains, they’re pursued by German patrols. Franklin tries to shoot himself, only to be stopped by Mallory, who tells him that Jensen has said on the radio that commandos are going to invade Navarone in two days’ time. Whilst the two men talk, Miller anxiously fingers his own pistol, ready to draw it if it appears Mallory is going to kill Franklin.

From the outset of The Guns of Navarone we’re assured every member of the team has something to contribute, some skillset that makes them invaluable, even if this assurance is picked apart as the story unfolds. As every plan is tested and found wanting by both enemy connivance, covert treachery, and bad luck, every character is bent in a direction they don’t want, improvisation is constantly required, and the real worth of all those skills is tested. In this regard the underpinnings of the story recall heist movies like The Asphalt Jungle (1949) and Rififi (1955), and indeed that’s exactly what the story is at heart. This aspect also distinguishes it from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and its Hollywood remake The Magnificent Seven (1960), films that by and large invented the basic modern blueprint for action movies about a team of warriors. The Guns of Navarone feels to me like the more immediate influence on most subsequent men-on-a-mission tales, a mode that would be taken to variously strange and hyperbolic places by the likes of Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), Jack Cardiff’s Dark of the Sun (1968), Andrew V. McLaglen’s The Wild Geese (1978), and both Enzo Castelleri’s Inglorious Bastards (1977) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), as well as the likes of the TV series Mission: Impossible and subsequent movie adaptations. The film’s success also encouraged MacLean himself to recycle many elements for the script of Brian G. Hutton’s more serial-like Where Eagles Dare (1968). The Guns of Navarone’s influence even echoes in the early scenes of John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) and in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films and pervasively in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Its impact on Star Wars was reiterated by Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One (2016). And, of course, Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker’s Top Secret! (1984) couldn’t exist without it.

The vignette of Mallory trying to fake his way through the phone conversation with a German was the obvious inspiration for the famous scene of Han Solo doing the same in Star Wars, although the model plays it in a cagier manner, the German on the other end of the line slightly puzzled by not hearing the right code words, but not giving anything away until after the call is ended and then hitting the alarm. Whilst the climactic scenes surge with swashbuckling vigour, Thompson also does his best to keep the film grounded in realistic physicality and problem-solving wit from its heroes: nobody ever gets too clever, and when the characters take damage it’s hurt they feel. The characters are also treated with rare seriousness, in a careful set-up of dramatic stakes that don’t combust until the last third. The triangulation of Andreas’ sternly pragmatic, even ruthless sensibility, Miller’s humane and antiauthoritarian streak, and Mallory’s attempts to walk a centre path however crooked, provides a backbone of drama, amplified by less consequential but still substantial elements as Brown’s moral exhaustion and Spyros’ wild, almost berserker aspect when let loose in war, contrasting his rather boyish façade. His sister Maria (Irene Papas) proves to be their partisan contact on Navarone, catching the men unaware when they’re distracted by another female partisan, Anna (Gia Scala), who Spyros knocks out when they catch her flitting around their camp in a ruined monastery. Upon recognising her brother, Maria walks up to him with a smile of surprised delight, and then, remembering she’s angry at him for being away so long, slaps him in the face – a moment Spielberg conspicuously lifted for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Papas enters the film with her usual, leonine presence, a promissory note for a future generation of action heroines, holding the team at bay for a few moments with a machine gun before admitting they’re obviously not Germans. She cares for her friend Anna, who, as she explains to the team, was recently captured and brutalised by the Nazis – “They whipped her until the white of her bones showed” – but survived the ordeal without breaking and is now one of the partisans’ assets, although she hasn’t spoken a word since her captivity and has never shown anyone her scars. The two women join the team as they hike towards the town of Mandrakos, in the hope they can get medical aid for Franklin there. During a rest pause in an olive grove, Miller tells Mallory that Franklin’s leg has become gangrenous and needs amputation. Brown also asks Mallory to give him another chance as a fighter, as Mallory’s been relegating him to menial tasks. German soldiers roll up and start firing mortars at them, and Stukas bomb them as they flee up a canyon and find refuge in a cave. At last they manage to enter Mandrakos, Andreas, Maria, and Brown taking Franklin to a doctor, whilst the others sit quietly in a café where a wedding party is being held. But both groups are quickly captured by Germans, who zero in on them with suspicious exactitude.

Thompson’s career arc wasn’t a pretty one on the face of things, moving from being considered one of 1950s British cinema’s most exciting and truly cinematic talents to one often dismissed as downright bad by the time in the 1980s when he finished up making potboilers for the beloved/infamous Cannon Films in the 1980s. Thompson’s aura of professionalism was both a problem and a virtue when it comes to summing up his career, but his rock-solid visual force never degraded even when making Charles Bronson shoot-‘em-ups. Thompson was known for his peculiar, loose, almost improvisatory approach to filming, all leveraged on set through such force of personality that Peck called him “Mighty Mouse.” Thompson certainly made a lot of unremarkable movies during his career, as well as many that were terrific and more than a few that became worthy cult films. Thompson was particularly confident and innovative in using the widescreen frame, apparent throughout The Guns of Navarone in his constant attempts to keep the relations between the members of the team enclosed within his frames on the churn, and use of looming actions against deep focus shots. One great example of this comes when Spyros starts enthusiastically fixing a silencer to his pistol when Franklin orders him to kill Nikolai, Spyros in the foreground, Baker standing in between him and his prey with puckered anxiety, with Mallory gazing on impassively to one side: there’s painterly precision to Thompson’s images and yet they contain energy and barely stifled movement as well.

Thompson also displayed a consistent fascination with interactions with sharply diverging worldviews, whose collisions ultimately drive his best films. Tiger Bay revolved around the disparity between its child heroine’s perspective on a fugitive she falls in with and the reality of his situation. North West Frontier, nominally a straightforward imperial-era chase yarn, spared a deal of time and depth exploring its microcosmic characters and evoking the motives of its villain, a biracial Muslim desperate to prove his identity, clashing with the more officially humane but also smug personalities around him. Cape Fear (1962) was a film that anticipated both later slasher films and concerns with violence and vigilante reprisal in 1970s and ‘80s thrillers, as it portrayed a sleazy psychopath intimidating a prosperous lawyer and family man, trying to provoke him into abandoning his civilised ideals. Thompson would go on with his unexpectedly strong foray into Horror cinema proper, Eye of the Devil (1966), to a similar theme of a man sacrificing himself in a dark religious rite for the sake of fulfilling his role as lord of the manor. His perverse thriller Return From The Ashes (1965) hinged on the incomprehension of a holocaust survivor trying to resume ordinary life with the more petty brand of murderous zeal she encounters. Even oddities like his two entries in the Planet of the Apes series and the unique horror-western The White Buffalo (1977) would spend time allowing iconic representatives of warring factions in the American West to argue through their different perspectives on history and society. In The Guns of Navarone this proclivity found exactly the right material, as Thompson weaves the more serious concerns of Foreman’s script throughout, finally combusting when Mallory reveals to the team, after they’ve been forced to finally leave Franklin with the Germans, that the story he told him about the upcoming invasion was false, and he hopes the Germans will give him a dose of scopolamine to extract it from him, on the theory that it will spare Franklin torture but also to make the Germans commit their forces in distraction. Miller is appalled nonetheless when Mallory tells him this, questioning what would happen if they skipped the scopolamine and just went with torture: “Oh, I misjudged you – you’re really rather a ruthless character aren’t you, Captain Mallory?”

The obvious riposte is that all those things would happen to Franklin anyway and indeed the only way to save his life, but Mallory doesn’t take that out, instead stating it was the only way to get the job done, his way of living up Jensen and Franklin’s credo as a leader. “I just hope that before this job is over I get the chance to use you the way you used him,” Miller declares, and you just know he’ll get his wish. Thompson and Foreman also allow some hue of moral complexity to enter from the German side of things too. After the team is captured in Mandrakos, they’re interrogated by a cool, clinical officer, Muesel (Walter Gotell), who nonetheless disdains brutality. He is quickly supplanted by SS man Sessler (George Mikell), a more familiar kind of evil Nazi, who slaps Andreas when he claims to be a poor Cypriot fisherman forced into the team’s company, and provokes not just the heroes when he threatens to hit Franklin’s injured leg with his sidearm but also sparks Muesel’s angry outburst. “We’re not all like Hauptman Sessler,” Muesel comments to Mallory later, and also deftly stands up to Mallory’s threat to have him shot if he doesn’t give up information, “You would not hesitate to shoot me for any number of reasons – in any event I will not tell you.” Andreas proves the key to the team escape this seemingly impossible situation, with his fisherman act. He pretends to be violently ill and rolling around the floor when Sessler starts tormenting Franklin, angering Sessler and distracting the Germans sufficiently for the team to attack suddenly and overpower their captors. A terrific little part for Quinn that deftly conflates different kinds of improvisation: “What a performance,” Miller comments, to Andreas only waving his hand in a so-so gesture.

The team’s visit to Mandrakos also allows a slightly corny but tone-varying vignette of the men, all ill-shaven, hunched-over mystery, suddenly enjoying an idyllic moment with the townsfolk during the wedding celebrations, the island’s native culture and love of life still sustained amidst occupation. Spyros reveals a decent voice as he sings a verse of a folk song for village musicians (actually written by Tiomkin), and a small girl comes over to the team to hand them some flowers, unfortunately at the same moment Muesel leads in a detachment of Germans and levels guns at them, a moment of vaguely surreal contrast that crystallises the imminence of indiscriminate bloodshed. The team surrender, but Mandrakos suffers an ugly fate anyway, as the Germans destroy the town in reprisal for the team’s escape, an act of vandalism and contempt that eventually drives Spyros to wildly self-destructive acts. The narrative encompasses such constant knock-on effects of choices and aims even as the urgency of the mission and the moral imperative behind it aren’t forgotten, but different people have different ways of feeling their way through the murk, as Miller summarises when he angrily upbraids Mallory, “I don’t know the men in Kheros, I do know the man on Navarone.”

Spyros’ eventual death in combat in the climactic scenes provides self-satire aimed at the kind of shootout scene Foreman so memorably formulated on High Noon. Amidst the chaos unleashed by the team and their local allies as the climax unfolds, Spyros and a German officer confront each-other with glazed, fanatical facades after Spyros has killed the German’s men with a grenade and Spyros is looking for revenge for Mandrakos. The two enemies march at one another, letting spray with their machine guns until they kill each-other. “He forgot why we came here,” Andreas tells Maria when she asks him how her brother died. The scene reads as a moment of self-critique from Foreman, as if dismayed by some of the more straightforwardly reactionary readings of High Noon. Meanwhile the sort of love interest often jammed into such a story is presented only to eventually be given a ruthless twist. Andreas faces the slightly blindsiding confession by Maria that “I like you,” a marvellously oblique moment of courtship befitting two hard and worldly survivors nonetheless finding a connection. Mallory on the other hand has a passionate tryst with Anna when she sneaks out of the monastery chamber they spend the night in whilst he’s on guard duty, and she approaches him, growing teary-eyed as he communicates his angst to her after Miller’s tirade over Franklin, before they kiss. But when the presence of a traitor in the team’s midst becomes undeniable after Miller finds all his explosive detonators sabotaged just before they’re going to take their all-or-nothing assault on the citadel, Miller quickly winnows the likely culprit down to just one person – Anna.

The scene that follows is quite epic in its depiction of moral responsibility and brutally clashing viewpoints that close off all options but the worst. Miller is proven right when Andreas strips Anna to show she has no scars and she weepily confesses to having turned to collaborating because “I cannot stand pain,” and seduced Mallory because she needed to cover up her foiled attempt to sneak away. Miller argues forcibly that Anna can’t be left alive because she knows all their plans, and with relentless relish argues to Mallory that he should be the one to execute her, as the officer and gentleman who gets to make the hard decisions but leaves it to the little men to actually perform: “Why don’t you let us off for once? Come down off that cross of your, close your eyes, and pull the trigger.” Mallory, facing up to the challenge despite its ugliness, stands over Anna and pulls out his pistol: Miller moves to make a last-second intervention, but both men are forestalled when Anna is shot dead by her comrade Maria, whose execution is at once more truly fitting and even more painful. Quinn and Papas make a brilliant little moment of Andreas reaching out to comfort Maria as she’s hit by a squall of feeling after her stone-faced execution, only for him to not quite be able to meet her eyes. Of course Quinn and Papas would be reunited a couple of years later in Zorba The Greek (1964).

Niven and Peck are also at their best here, with Niven’s Miller given the crucial scene of theatrical bravura, first pacing through a pastiche of a detective’s drawing room exposure of a criminal, before being called upon to articulate Foreman’s scepticism with his signature spindly, hangdog charm turned to angry purpose. Mallory finally works up to a fine pitch of anger as the smoke clears, informing Miller that his free ride in terms of responsibility are at an end, waving his pistol at him and telling him to find some way of setting off his explosives: “You’re in it now up to your neck…You get me in the mood to use this thing, or by god if you don’t think of something I’ll use it on you!” A notable moment if not least for seeing Peck, who would win an Oscar a year later for playing the most equable of personalities, playing one here driven to a pitch of ferocity that is also focused enough to literally level a mountain rather than expend itself fruitlessly. At other points in the film Peck is more awkward: Mallory, who was a New Zealander in the novel, is also supposed to be fluent in Greek and German, but Peck obviously couldn’t quite manage that, but nonetheless he has just the right gravitas to play a thoughtful but grimly committed hero.

Despite all the quarrels Mallory’s gamble pays off: the commandant of the citadel garrison orders Franklin injected with scopolamine after Sessler’s had some fun torturing him, and with Franklin giving up the details in his subsequent daze, the Germans scramble the bulk of their forces out of the citadel and down to the shore, whilst Mallory and Miller drive in in a captured ambulance, almost getting crushed by tanks in the frantic activity. Meanwhile Maria and Brown head off to steal a boat to ferry them off the island whilst Andreas and Spyro set out to create havoc amongst the remaining garrison troops, gaining some help from locals who shuffle out of a tavern and start pulling tricks like using fishing nets to dismount motorcyclists. Mallory coolly kills a couple of guards overlooking the doors to the cavern where the guns are mounted, and he and Miller manage to get inside, locking the doors at the cost of setting off an alarm. Whilst the Germans outside try everything from sledgehammers to jackhammers and finally a welding torch to penetrate the doors, Miller plants several explosive devices, including one hidden under an elevator designed to be set off by the descending lift’s runner, as well as one disguised as a rat and hidden under one of the guns: when a soldier plucks it out, the device proves only to be a fizzing firecracker, burning out harmless to the soldier’s heavy breath of relief.

Of course, all discursion and complication in the film are only part of a long arc building relentlessly to a climax, which unfolds on multiple stages and finds punctuating tragic ironies in Spyros and Brown’s deaths. Brown meets his end as he again holds back from killing a German guard on the motorboat he and Maria set about stealing. When the guard begins shouting for help, Brown finally stabs him and muffles his cries, but the German retains enough life to pull the knife out of his gut and stick it in Brown, who expires on a note of desperate pathos. Miller and Mallory flee the gun cavern by sliding down ropes into the ocean and are picked up by Anna, whilst Mallory helps pluck the wounded and exhausted Andreas out of the ocean with a boathook, Andreas hesitating as he sees the deadly implement wielded at him by the man he threatened to kill, but finally grabs it and is rescued. Meanwhile a flotilla of British destroyers come sailing up the strait. Thompson saves special relish for building tension as the guns are finally glimpsed up close by the heroes, with Tiomkin’s music underlining the awe and fear of these weapons of mass destruction, Mallory and Miller dwarfed by them. After they escape, the Germans reclaim the guns and dig out all of Miller’s devices save the one in the elevator shaft, and tension mounts mischievously as Thompson keeps noting the lifts descending but stopping short of the trigger wires, whilst the guns let loose with all their hellfire and start straddling the British warships, forcing them to start manoeuvring.

George Lucas would directly pinch the moment of special relish here for Star Wars as the German commander speak the command to fire, this time certainly to hit and sink one of the destroyers, just before the lift makes contact and sets off the blast. The resulting explosion of the magazine rips the top off the mountain and the two mighty guns plunge into the ocean, whereupon the warships release whooping siren sounds and the sailors cheer the heroes riding to join them. Franklin in his hospital bed, roused by the sound of the explosion shattering the ward window glass, is gripped by tears of joy. Success breeds peace for the surviving heroes: Andreas and Miller both make their peace with Mallory, and Andreas offering his hand to Mallory to shake as he announces he’s heading back to Navarone with Maria to fight with the partisans. Even here the film doesn’t forget its diastolic quality, shifting to a mood of weary and stunned reflection, finding strange, post-apocalyptic beauty in the sight of the burning citadel of Navarone, a Pharos for the sailors seeking out their comrades. Miller and Mallory exhaustedly confess they didn’t think it could be done, viewing their titanic handiwork with the glaze of tired men, earth-shakers worthy of myth and just two more shit-kickers in the grand and impersonal business of war. Thompson interpolates ghostly images of the dead and absent members of the team over the ships passing by the burning mountain, with Tiomkin offering a gentle choral requiem on the soundtrack, and the film fades out with evocation of loss as well as triumph. A last flourish to remind that The Guns of Navarone is the quintessential wartime adventure film, and also more than that.

1930s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Romance, Thriller

Shanghai Express (1931)

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenwriter: Jules Furthman

By Roderick Heath

Josef von Sternberg’s collaborations with Marlene Dietrich perhaps come closest of all the products of classic Hollywood film to embodying an oft-conjured pop-art fantasia of what popular cinema once was like. Theirs was a cinematic world of glamour-touched amazons blazing in photogenic glory against backdrops that persist amidst dreamlike textures and expressionist shadows, a world forged on soundstages as Sternberg rejected realism in cinema in favour of generating his own, stylised pocket universes and exalting the notion that cinema was above all a foundry of dreams for a dull and seamy world gripped by Depression and war and other chaotic turns. The sort of thing more recent filmmakers and pop stars try to create pastiches of when referring back to that era’s cinema. Dietrich was the fetishised linchpin, the preeminent and eternal exemplar of Sternberg’s actress-sphinxes, transformed through both filmmaking technique and an array of carefully worked narratives into a confluence of female archetypes that blur the feminine illusion and the cinematic kind and merely become everything alluring and untouchable. Sternberg discovered Dietrich whilst making a sojourn to Germany to recover from commercial disappointments in Hollywood. Their first collaboration The Blue Angel (1930), was a variation on one of Sternberg’s favourite themes, of a man destroyed by his own obsessive streak, but this time with heavy emphasis on the saucy, amoral seductress who almost incidentally breaks down a cultured professor.

Dietrich and Sternberg’s first film in Hollywood, Morocco (1930), partly inverted that template, casting Dietrich as a nightclub performer who eventually discovers the mortifying bliss of selfless passion. Lucky perhaps for Dietrich and Sternberg that Morocco came out in America before The Blue Angel, establishing Dietrich not as a femme fatale but a romantic hiding within a sensual cynic, essentially the persona that would drive the next thirty years of her career. By the time of The Scarlet Empress (1934) Sternberg was charting the ironic shifts of the collaboration and their off-screen relationship, the gawking naïf eventually replaced by the imperious, cuckolding hedonist, and finally the all-sweeping conqueror who can only be regarded in awe and fear. Shanghai Express was Sternberg and Dietrich’s fourth film together, in a string of movies that moved purposefully between intensely imagined far-flung locales. It also represents another stream within Sternberg’s oeuvre, forming the first part of a loose quadrilogy that could be described as Sternberg’s Orientalist phase, followed by The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Macao (1952), and the actually made-in-Japan Anatahan (1953). Something in Sternberg’s imagination was set loose by such settings. Undoubtedly, this was partly sparked by proximity to exotic aesthetics and the promise of different ethical and cultural prisms, both things he was ineffably fascinated by in his ongoing rebellion against tepid mainstream aesthetics and mores, just before both public taste and Hollywood regimes would turn against what he was doing.

Sternberg, despite his mock-aristocratic airs and appended “von”, had come up the hard way, both as an Austrian Jewish immigrant and a Hollywood player. Sternberg was born out of wedlock in a Vienna to which he remained permanently, nostalgically attached, scion to a bullying father who was disinherited for finally, actually tying the knot with his mother. He recalled his family’s passage through Ellis Island and being inspected like cattle. He was a troubling youth, intermittently homeless and oscillating between Europe and America in a long and desperate search for something like a home. He dropped out of high school determined to teach himself, and changed his name from Jonas to Josef to please himself. He first started working with film during World War I when he made training films for the US Army, and afterwards rode a motorcycle around Italy to try and see all the country’s churches. Even the roots of his appended “von” are hazy, possibly handed him by a studio, or adopted as a tribute to his hero Erich Von Stroheim, whose favour he lost after he agreed to help MGM reedit the master’s The Merry Widow (1926).

Sternberg’s fascination for places and cultures meeting at points of flux in multicultural melting pots had then a persuasively autobiographical meaning. For Sternberg aesthetics weren’t just decoration, but the actual stuff of life, evoking the jostling mass of impressions and conventions and signifiers woven together to create an illusion of society, his cinematic frames points of converge for myriad signs and tropes and ideas. In none of his films is this more vital than with Shanghai Express, which might not be his greatest film, but is nonetheless perhaps his most essential and representative work. That’s in part because it’s one of his Dietrich vehicles, and also a sublime balancing act at once delirious and exacting, surreal and tactile, sarcastic and sincere, old-fashioned and fiercely modern. The basic material is harvested from some well-worn texts revolving around the ever-mythologised figure of the fallen but essential decent and redeemable prostitute, pinching the basic plot of Guy De Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” (which would also serve a few years later as a template for John Ford’s Stagecoach, 1939), with a little of W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Rain” and novel The Painted Veil thrown in for good measure.

The official basis however was a story by Henry Hervey, inspired in turn by a true incident that occurred in 1923. Known as the Lincheng Outrage, that incident saw a warlord out of Shandong capture the Shanghai-to-Beijing express and take everyone on board hostage, including twenty-five westerners, amongst them Lucy Aldrich, aunt of future filmmaker Robert Aldrich. After being held for two days, a ransom was paid and all the captives freed. Shanghai Express posits other reasons for such a waylaying. Warner Oland, the Swedish actor then very famous and popular for playing Chinese characters including the prototypical supervillain Fu Manchu and detective character Charlie Chan, is cast as Henry Chang, aka Number One, the leader of a revolutionary army who has mixed Chinese and European heritage, a detail Sternberg seems to have introduced in part to express scepticism with being saddled with Oland’s yellowface act, but also using it purposefully to meditate on the theme of divided identity in a film otherwise driven by clashing binaries. Chang becomes one of many projection figures for Sternberg as a portrait in will, a man who declares “I live by my own code,” and operates his army less as an organ with political aims than as an extension of his own will and ego, much like Sternberg’s approach to filmmaking.

Structural affinity here with disaster movies, and Shanghai Express is one, after a fashion, whilst also resembling the film that beat it out for 1932’s Best Picture Oscar, Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel, which similarly threw together an array of archetypes into a microcosmic setting that begets odd new realities. Where Grand Hotel is nascent soap opera wrapped in art deco chic, Shanghai Express is more classical melodrama, and a consequential hit of early sound cinema, establishing some stock situations and archetypes that would pervade the next twenty years of Hollywood product. Even Casablanca (1942) can be described as a variant. Furthman would recycle elements of his script for this for the likes of Tay Garnett’s China Seas (1935) and eventually for Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and as different as Sternberg and Hawks were, they had a point of intersection that Furthman helped draw out, in their fascination with characters who learn to live entirely by their own compass. Furthman would also recycle and amplify some of it, like the “To buy a new hat” joke made by the footloose heroine when questioned by pompous creeps about her reasons for travelling, in Hawks’ To Have And Have Not (1944). More immediately Shanghai Express sparked a wave of films set in then-fractious China, films like Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), Lewis Milestone’s The General Died At Dawn (1936), John Farrow’s West of Shanghai (1937), and Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937).

Sternberg opens with a rigorous sense linearity in tethering narrative to the train itself, depicting labourers making the train ready for is journey out of Beijing Station, or Peiping as it’s referred to here as per outmoded transliteration. Sternberg offers a brief montage of an engineer oiling mechanisms and a coolie washing windows, before the passengers begin to arrive. Some servants carry an opulent litter up to the train and out climbs Hui Fei (Anna May Wong), presented as an exemplar of Eastern status but also the first of the film’s two crucial women apart, granted prosperity and a measure of imperious independence at the expense of being considered socially unacceptable. Meanwhile the representatives of the West buy their tickets in a queue: old biddy Mrs. Haggerty (Louise Closser Hale) hands out cards for her boarding house in Shanghai and dotes over her dog which she smuggles into her compartment in a hamper, only to suffer his being stashed away in the baggage car. Bulbous businessman Yankee Sam Salt (Eugene Pallette) wears his wealth literally on his sleeve in the form of diamonds, only for these to prove to be phonies, the real ones never leaving his safe. Skinny old traveller Eric Baum (Gustav von Seyffertitz) brings a whiff of decadence and neurasthenia aboard: he calls himself an invalid and is grouchily insistent on avoiding all drafts, forcing windows to be kept shut and ventilators turned off. Major Lenard (Émile Chautard) is a French military man in full uniform, making his pleasantries to all but barely speaking a word of English. Missionary Reverend Carmichael (Lawrence Grant) comes aboard charged up with seemingly scornful passion for virtue. And there’s Chang, biding his time and playing the gentleman but always barely concealing his mordant and fatalistic vision.

Two other passengers of consequence also board the train: Captain Dr Donald ‘Doc’ Harvey (Clive Brook), a military surgeon being shuttled to Shanghai to perform an urgent operation on the governor-general of Shanghai, and Madeline, known to all and sundry by her nom-de-guerre Shanghai Lily (Dietrich). Lily is dropped off in the up-to-date equivalent of Hui Fei’s litter, a shimmering black Rolls Royce. She enters station, film, and our dreams, dressed as a fantasy vision, wearing a dress made of black feathers and a black mesh veil. She’s rendered a dark angel, a looming raptor, a creature of the night, every inch the maneater she’s characterised with by Harvey’s army chums and the fuming moralists aboard the train. Word of Lily being aboard is an instant topic of gossip and amused speculation, and Donald is forewarned to his affectations of sardonic disinterest and bewilderment as he’s told of this “notorious coaster.” When he asks what that is, he’s told, “A coaster’s a woman who lives by her wits along the China coast.” A high-class prostitute, in short. Donald maintains a level of cool detachment in the face of such notoriety close at hand, until he actually encounters Shanghai Lily and realises she’s actually Madeline, his former flame, the woman whose photo he still keeps a photo of in his watch case. “Married?” Donald asks, to Lily’s famous reply with its faint note of bitter humour and perverse pride, “No. It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.”

Even as he was adapting well to working with sound, Sternberg was a born silent filmmaker, who instinctively laboured to communicate through images. In true form, Sternberg condenses his metaphor for the world he’s portraying in Shanghai Express into a shot of the train rolling down a narrow Peiping street festooned with banners and crowded with shoppers and vendors, with the train it finally forced to halt because a cow has taken up station on the tracks, his aged owner in no hurry to move on for this chugging, blustering, smoke-spewing machine of modernity and its cargo of the rich and white. During the halt for the cow to be urged on Harvey and Lily meet and square off in the sharply divided image of a carriage window, shifting postures and attitudes, Lily framed with the edge of a bold and hard-edged Chinese banner, Harvey with a more tattered and discoloured standard, even as his trim, contained figure in uniform counters the inky wash of her black feathers. Once the train is allowed to creep onwards again, the contingent of soldiers riding atop the train lean over to spear food on the vendors’ stalls with their bayonets, in a sublimely cynical vignette that encapsulates with equal efficiency Sternberg’s opinion of military power and its part in this drama. Soon the Reverend Carmichael gets wind of the wicked ladies aboard the train, peering in on them like a bespectacled stork, and then warns Harvey, “Those two women are riding this train in search of victims…For the last fortnight I’ve been attending a man who went out of his mind after spending every penny on her.”

Whilst nominally a thriller and adventure movie, Shanghai Express is barely interested in that sort of thing, instead playing out as a series of entwined confrontations that all explore aspects of personal morality, finally winnowing it all down to a romantic quandary, being the fate of Harvey and Lily’s relationship. Both are still obviously charged with profound attraction from their first reunion and all the fluctuations that befall them. It’s a stock situation of course, cornball in almost any other hands, except for the way Sternberg frames it as only a slightly exaggerated take on the basic problem of men and women. It becomes clear during their many, angular conversations, filled with wordings and phrases that suggest some sort of elaborate semaphore, that whilst they were once engaged, Lily decided to test Donald’s faith in their love by provoking his jealousy, but the gesture backfired as Donald immediately left her. The push and pull between passion and disquiet, trust and suspicion enacted between Donald and Lily is the crux of all, with love posited as a form of faith as vital as, if not moreso, the religious kind. In that context it’s Donald rather than Lily who is the fallen figure, although at the same time he has a potency of will that distinguishes him from the men who go out of their mind after spending every penny on her. It’s easy to imagine Sternberg smirking more than a little when the film builds to the crucial moment when Lily prays for Donald’s safety in an apex of Hollywood cheese, and yet he deals with it with fierce earnestness, in part because of the heady power in that convergence of kinds of faith and, more importantly, in the images springing from it. Where Morocco found its famous zenith in the image of Dietrich striding off into the desert, facing a kind of degradation but also transcendence that took her to the verge of the mythic, Lily faces a similar pivot in which she offers her proof of faith in the most literal manner possible, with her body.

Sternberg couches this against the backdrop of the titular Shanghai Express, which is for the most part a moving stasis chamber for European sensibilities, drilling its way through a land in turmoil with its own ways of thinking and seeing and feeling. China at the time was a very different country in 1932 to the one we know today, notoriously beset by civil strife, regional warlords, clashing political factions, and overbearing Western influence. In the same year Shanghai Express was released Japan annexed Manchuria, and two years later Mao Zedong would lead the Long March. Not that Sternberg is interested in such political reality, although he and Furthman still arrive at a pretty sharp metaphor for a variety of petty, revanchist nationalism as embodied by Chang. Chang and Hui Fei are the only locals travelling in the first class compartment. Petty irritants proliferate, including Baum’s demands the ventilators in the dining car be shut off, but contain the seeds of awful consequence; big objections, like Carmichael’s complaints about the two hookers on the train, eventually prove negligible. At one point the train is stopped by government soldiers who inspect every passenger’s passports and papers, a sort of legal-official version of what Chang does more exactingly later when he scours every passenger for lies, deceptions, delusions, and hidden motives. During the sweep a tall Chinese passenger is arrested and spirited away by the soldiers: the arrested man is an agent of Chang’s carrying important information, and his loss provokes Chang to send a coded message to his soldiers up the line to wait for the train at the remote station of Te-Shan and be ready to capture it. The lush language of Chang’s coded message (“Blue Lotus lost – must have red blossoms at midnight.”) offers a flash of incidental poetry wrapped around dark meaning, and sarcastically mirrors the interplay of social codes and expressions that dance around the meat of each matter, including the way Donald and Lily’s speech waltzes around exact expressions of their feelings.

As the two fall into talking again on the carriage balcony, eventually resurging passion gets the better of both as Lily draws Donald down for a kiss, whereupon Sternberg cuts wittily to a shot of the loop on a mail pouch being held for a porter on the train to snatch as it rushes by: the old snare draws tight. “I wish you could tell me there were no other men,” Donald declares in exasperation after as he abruptly releases Lily, who retorts, donning his uniform cap in ironically subsuming his captaincy: “I wish I could too Doc, but five years in China is a long time.” When Donald glumly recites the life they should have had together and notes the things he wouldn’t have done if all that had transpired, Lily responds the only thing she wouldn’t have done was bob her hair. Delivered a telegram and asked by Donald if it’s from one of her lovers, she says no, and after she extracts a promise of belief from Donald hands him the telegram, which is indeed from one of her male admirers awaiting her arrival in Shanghai eagerly. Lily delivers the killer blow for both of them: “When I needed your faith you withheld it, and now that I don’t need it, and don’t deserve it, you give it to me.” The contrast in affect between the two, Donald’s glumness and Lily effervescent, accepting humour, betrays radically different ways of surviving an event that did damage to them both, suggesting that when Madeline became Shanghai Lily it was with a kind of heroic determination.

That determination shines out from her earliest scenes, as Lily is ensconced in her apartment with Hui Fei, the two hussies of radically different backgrounds and temperaments nonetheless obliged to meet in solidarity and silently indulge each-other. Lily has a gramophone from which she lets blare saucy jazz. When Mrs Haggerty comes around soliciting their custom for her boarding house with the promise she only allows the most respectable people in, Lily questions as she twiddles Haggerty’s card, “Don’t you find respectable people terribly…dull?” When Haggerty reiterates that she keeps a boarding house, Lily makes a play of mishearing her and alluding to the possibility she keeps a bawdyhouse, whilst Hui Fei comments that she doesn’t quite grasp Haggert’s definition of respectability. The sarcasm of the two women repels her and Carmichael, even as Donald, Lenard, and Salt are in their individual and worldly ways more gentlemanly: “Time to put on the nose bags!” Salt quips as he passes the women on the way to the dining car and gives Hui Fei a chummy squeeze of the shoulder. Palette is ingeniously cast as Salt, exploiting his bullfrog chin and croaky voice to embody a certain kind of stolid American canniness, sporting his showy jewels that declare his wealth, only to be forced to give them up, and then reveal they were fakes all the time: “The real ones are in a safe in Shanghai.”

Chang meanwhile tries to corner Hui Fei in her apartment, seeking an easy conquest from the courtesan. Sternberg films this crucial moment in one deadpan shot utilising the sliding compartment doors as an element of staging, as Chang slides shut a door with a curtained window as a screen, before drawing Hui Fei to him for a moment of shadow-play, only for her to resist and slide the door open again, shoving Chang back into the hallway and delivering harsh rebuke in Mandarin. When the train reaches Te-Shan, Chang’s hidden soldiers gun down the government troops protecting it in an interlude of pure Expressionist style, and gather the first-class passengers in the station building, a run-down and eerie locale hastily repurposed as Chang’s headquarters. Chang takes over an office and bunkroom and one by one summons the passengers up to be variously interrogated and robbed, and, when Chang thinks it proper, to be punished for their slights and injuries to him. In the process Chang ruthlessly exposes rips away all false guises including his own, becoming a kind of judge and also an authorial figure, ending the games played aboard the train and forcing a dramatic crisis. Chang robs Salt, prods Baum with the truth that he’s an opium merchant, and utilises Lily’s translating skills to extract Lenard’s confession that he’s been drummed out of the French army but still wants to maintain the illusion he’s a soldier for his sister’s benefit when he reaches Shanghai. Hui Fei is bundled into his rooms, raped, and kicked out again, dishevelled and dizzy. He even nimbly extracts from Donald the facts of his mission to Shanghai, presenting him with just the right point of leverage to force his agent’s release and return.

Chang waves a red-hot iron plucked from a brazier at Baum and using it to scorch through a hanging mesh veil as a grim promise of his intention towards the rude old man: “I’m not punishing you because you deal in opium, but for your insolence to me on the train.” The station is festooned with many such veils, creating a kind of spider’s web as well as exacerbating the dreamy atmosphere. Chang burning the veil also serves as an arresting visual metaphor for Chang’s function in burning away the veils around the other characters, and a note of authentic brutality that gives special urgency later when Chang makes even worse threats against Donald. After Lily aids Chang in translating for Lenard, Chang lets her take a nap in a bunk in his office, and then proposes that she come be his guest-cum-concubine for a spell. Lily however declares that she’s reformed, and when Chang becomes physical, Donald, waiting out his hostage time in a neighbouring room and overhearing, kicks down the door and wallops the warlord. In payback, even after his agent is returned by the government in a special train, Chang plans to burn Donald’s eyes out. Lily, worried when she’s thrown out of Chang’s rooms whilst Donald is held, is so desperate she asks Carmichael if he can do anything: Carmichael tells her the only thing she can do is get down on her knees and pray, and when Lily admits she might as well “if God is still on speaking terms with me,” Carmichael declares, irritably but also earnestly, “God is on speaking terms with everybody.” Carmichael then catches a glimpse of Lily retreating into a darkened compartment and praying.

What’s compelling about all this, which seems on the face of things to be a pure sop to Hollywood sentiment and the Carmichaels in the audience busy getting the Production Code imposed on movies, lies in the way Sternberg presents this turn not as an abasement of Lily but rather an apotheosis. Lily makes no appeal for approval to anyone except the Almighty, evincing a personal code just as strong as Chang’s, and it’s she who forces Carmichael to revise his ideas of morality rather than him working upon her. Hui Fei has a similarly rigorous sensibility, with an added lustre of patriotic zeal: when she finally realises who Chang is, she comments that it will “be a great day for China” when he’s captured and executed, and soon is given good cause to do it herself. Later she comments with cold zest, “He repaid his debt to me.” Sternberg had a recurring fascination with tales of redemption, transfiguring events that rescue characters from the cage of their ego, existing simultaneously to and sometimes in commentary upon his other fixation on self-destructive types who finally can’t escape that cage and go mad or are otherwise destroyed instead. The spectacle of Carmichael becoming Lily’s champion imbues the last portion of the film with unexpected new dimension, moving beyond a mere clash between the representative of happily sceptical erotic power and the joyless puritan, or the opposite, the fallen wanton beatifically reformed by the patronisingly virtuous, but with a sense of evolution in both characters and their worldviews: both are linked by their capacity to live up to implicit but difficult, even humiliating aspects of their credos. “Love without faith is like religion without faith,” Carmichael sighs with his customary brusqueness as he admits Lily’s point: “It doesn’t amount to very much.”

Dietrich had a slightly different energy in her early vehicles than she did by the 1940s when her persona had hardened along with her features. Dietrich was older than the usual run of movie ingénues, pushing 30 when Sternberg cast her in The Blue Angel and with a successful stage career already behind her, plus marriage and myriad adventures in Weimar nightlife. So her unique screen presence came ready-loaded with an impression of a personality well-honed, backing up the aura of bulletproof power and sly, provocative humour and pansexual power her characters so often displayed. And yet she was also just young enough to allow glimmers of naivety appear in her characters. Which made it all the more impressive when that veneer breaks down in the course of a movie, as Shanghai Express depicts, not shattered by external forces which Lily is well used to weathering, but by her true self, when faced with consequences for the things she actually cherishes, and the shattering of her veneer is not a loss but a recovery. Sternberg’s most electrifying and carefully crafted close-ups throughout the film portray the stations of this particular cross, as when he has her peer through the window of the Te-Shan station doors, eyes wide and blazing, her blonde bob now a little loose and wild, in the throes of fear for Donald, the spark of wild madness also rapture in the grip of authentic passion.

Wong, today a revived cult figure but one Hollywood sadly never really knew what to do with her in her own time, is just as fascinating a presence despite having a much smaller part. Shanghai Express posits Hui Fei as Lily’s accidental companion but also her fated doppelganger, even a kind of familiar, one who embodies and enacts the darker implications of Lily’s journey. Even more taciturn and self-contained, she’s untroubled by any lost love as Lily is. The mere sight of the two women in their compartment is compelling, the spectacle of their indolence in their detachment from all judgement and opinion outside of themselves, Lily playing her jazz and Hui Fei listlessly playing solitaire and smoking, the netherworld of hazily sensual and amoral delights each has repeatedly and bravely stepped into and still carry about them like a bubble, a state of almost alien exception Sternberg also rhymes with the ideal of cinema stardom itself. Sternberg and costumer Travis Banton present them as visual mirror images, Lily initially swathed in black only to eventually reveal her blazing hair, Hui Fei dressed in light, glossy hues with her black hair sliced in geometric precision. Shanghai Express isn’t exactly feminist in the modern sense, and yet its radicalism in certain regards still startles, viewing these two “fallen women” as the ones who command events on subtle and overt levels, and it’s the male characters who must get over themselves.

Hui Fei is unfortunately also exposed to someone like Chang, who feels no compunction in taking what he wants from her, where he’s more circumspect if scarcely less acquisitive with the Westerner Lily. When Hui Fei resists Chang sees it as a cue to abuse and humiliate, only to find the kind of pride and strength Chang seems to think is his personal province is also shared by the equally, potently vengeful courtesan. There’s also some sense of evil humour in the way Wong and Oland are cast given that Wong had played Oland’s daughter in the Fu Manchu film Daughter of the Dragon (1931). After Hui Fei is thrown out of Chang’s rooms with her formerly sculpted hair now loose and bedraggled, pawed at by one of Chang’s soldiers, she descends back into the train, trailed by Lily who grabs her when she plucks a dagger from her carrying bag and seems to be considering suicide. Instead, Hui Fei sneaks back into the station, lays in wait for Chang in the shadows, and stabs him to death when his back is turned to her: Sternberg films her through the hanging veils and shadows, transformed into a spectral presence by murderous zeal, only to return to her compartment on the train and resume her game of solitaire, only a slightly sadder gleam to her betraying anything happened in the meantime. By this time Chang has released Donald, having used the hot iron he was going to use on Donald’s eyes to first light his cigarette and then scorch through the bonds on his captive’s wrists to release him.

Seeing Lily in Chang’s company and assured by both of them that she’s going with the warlord willingly, Donald retreats with his gentlemanly pretences barely suppressing offence and anger, but when he learns from Hui Fei that she’s killed Chang, he grabs a gun from a superintendent sent to fetch him and dashes into the station to rescue Lily. Donald doesn’t have to shoot anyone, knocking out a couple of guards, returning to the train with Lily, and ordering a fast departure. Donald is an interesting romantic hero in the frame of such drama. He’s portrayed as an almost ideal embodiment of a certain kind of masculinity, so English you can smell London smog on him, combining the bravery of a soldier and a healer’s sense of care, one who readily jumps to the rescue even when he’s broken-hearted and furious. Sternberg plainly describes this creature he admires enormously to also critique him: Donald is also repressed and troubled by his memories of loving Lily, and his romantic failure is that he had no deep intrinsic sense of her loving him back, even as he wants to. Lily had not just an infamous career to retreat into but also an alternate identity, the costume of Shanghai Lily wrapped around Madeline, a privilege of womanhood. Donald’s uniform is the perfect outer expression of his inner spirit, tight and contained, gallant but held in check: the curse of manhood.

Brook, a mostly forgotten matinee idol who nonetheless also had the claim of starring in the following year’s Best Picture winner Cavalcade, has the relatively thankless role in the film that’s more about a man being loved by a woman, in which the hero is indeed more of an object despite his shows of bravura. And yet the film very much depends on Brook pulling off what Sternberg demands of him, to suggest what’s impressive about Donald and also what’s flaccid in him. Despite being freed in flashes of action, Donald is so often throughout the film locked into frieze-like postures, or as film writer Erich Kuersten neatly described, “cigarette ad abstraction,” in part because he’s constantly pictured with a cigarette squeezed between his fingers as tightly and tensely as a falcon’s claws about a fish, blowing out smoke in measured plumes. Such postures illustrate Donald’s frigid Anglo-Saxon restraint warring with his deep-flowing sense of erotic and emotional excitement when drawn back into Lily’s orbit, resulting in paralysis and sour frustration concealed by a veneer of flinty cool, reduced to registering expressions of pouty, desperate Englishness as he oscillates between sarcastic and urgently romantic pronouncements. Carmichael finally becomes as fuming mad at him as he was with Lily at the outset, not revealing the motives for Lily’s actions but mentioning her praying for him, planting disquiet in Donald’s mind. Meanwhile Mrs Haggerty derides Lily’s behaviour on the train whilst Lily announces her disdain for everyone else by playing her gramophone as loud as she can.

The real climax of the film isn’t Chang’s death and Donald’s rescue, nor is it the final clinch the lovers share in Shanghai, although that makes for a splendid afterword. The climax instead comes when Lily, with a carefully contrived appearance of flirty casualness, comes to Donald as he sits pensively in his compartment. Lily bums a cigarette and Donald notices her hands are shaking like she’s nervous, before noting that Carmichael told her about the praying, but appends with a curl of disdain, “Which I doubt,” and Lily, aggravated and with pride resurgent, says she would have done it for anyone and takes her leave. She retreat into her cabin, turns off the light, and leans against the wall, lit by a fanlight. An on-set still photo taken with this lighting set-up and Dietrich posed with eyes turned up to the light became famous, capturing the mystique of Dietrich as Sternberg had laboured so hard to fashion in its most iconic reduction. But the photo didn’t capture the specific emotion Dietrich is called upon to project in the actual scene, what makes it so memorable as a moment of cinema. The tiny quivers in Lily’s hands, the lines in her forehead and the expression of frayed desperation and anguish, the cost of what she’s done finally telling but still only expressed in private reverie. Here Sternberg does something very few other directors have managed, to convey a character’s inner life with every element available to their filmmaking – a highpoint of his labours, and Dietrich’s.

The train passengers all reach Shanghai and the terminus of their association, people who earlier were facing pivots of life and death together saying their farewells in varying degrees of rush, distraction, and eagerness to leave it all behind, except for Donald and Lily who receive gratitude for their actions: “I owe you my life and I’m not the man to forget it,” Salt tells Donald, “Although between you and me it isn’t worth very much.” Hui Fei gains her own, fresh, not particularly welcome fame as journalists quiz her about how she killed Chang, and very quickly and irritably moves to flee them. Lily buys Donald a new watch to replace the one with her image, broken in the melee, whilst Donald has her on his mind even as he exchanges pleasantries with others. Sternberg maintains his cinematic wit through these last shots as he makes odd use of dissolves, first to suggest how Lily is lingering on Donald’s mind even as he’s speaking to Salt and a military colleague, and then to weave their final union into the flow of life churning through the station. Finally, Donald gives in and places aside his doubts, finally achieving the odd state of grace Lily always demanded of him, allowing them to have their triumphal kiss before the fade-out, with the enticingly fetishistic final detail of Lily caressing and gripping the leather strap of Donald’s bandolier. All accompanied by jaunty jazz on the soundtrack, fanfare for people willing to take their leap into the strange new world.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Category Archives: Action-Adventure

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) / Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Mad Max (1979)

Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) / Last Train From Gun Hill (1959)

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Key Largo (1948)

Independence Day (1996) / Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny (2023)

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Shanghai Express (1931)