Yeah, I spent an unreasonable amount of my weekend peering up at The Hollywood Theatre's screen during Noir City Portland. Do I regret it at all? Of course not; if I have any regrets, it's that I missed 3 of the 8 features, but sometimes a guy has things he's gotta do, y'know. Even so, those other priorities haven't kept me from spending a good deal of time thinking about and craving more noir and film noir related highs. For instance, after skipping out on the third feature on Saturday night, I still ended up streaming Gun Crazy at home on the Warner Archive Instant service.
DEADLY IS THE FEMALE aka GUN CRAZY
I was also pleased to stumble across the film noir episode of the fairly great 1995 PBS series American Cinema on YouTube. I hadn't viewed the series since it first aired on public television, so it was great to take another look at a series that, at the time of its release, had a strong influence in reinforcing my obsession with old films.
John Flynn's (Lock Up, Out for Justice) notorious 1977 revenge thriller Rolling Thunder has been discussed over the years almost as much for its unavailability on dvd as for the explosive acts of violence littered throughout it. Even though it was finally released last year via the MGM Limited Edition Collection (the studio's trumped up name for the orphaned films in their portfolio, dumped onto burnt dvds, often with questionable transfers), it'd be a crime to miss out this Tuesday night when Dan Halsted has a rare 35mm print of the film lined up for his monthly Grindhouse Film Festival event at the Hollywood Theatre.
Yes, Quentin Tarantino likes the film so much that he named his short-lived distribution company after it, which is all fine and dandy, but the real reason to pay attention to Rolling Thunder is Paul Schrader. Obviously, Schrader's best known for his screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, as well as for his work as a writer/director on such films as American Gigalo and Affliction. Rolling Thunder is Schrader at his prime, when his entire output seemed to be dedicated to investigating outsiders prodded towards acts both violent and transgressive. If you're a fan of any of the films dissected in Robert Kolker's"A Cinema of Loneliness", you owe it to yourself to catch this film.
Enough of my blathering, here's the press release for this month's Grindhouse event:
On Tuesday September 25th at 7:30, the Grindhouse Film Festival presents a rare 35mm print of the 70′s revenge masterpiece Rolling Thunder. Written by Paul Schrader around the same time he wrote Taxi Driver, this is one of the most underrated American films of the 1970′s.
Rolling Thunder (1977) William Devane stars as Major Charles Rane who returns from a long tortuous stay in a Vietnamese POW camp to find his wife married to another man and his only son wary of a father he doesn’t know. Tommy Lee Jones co-stars as a shattered POW survivor who finds it impossible to readjust to civilian life, and sees Rane as the only man he can relate to. When a crew of thugs invade Rane’s home, mangle his hand in a garbage disposal, and kill his son, Rane begins down a focused path of revenge. With a sharpened hook for a hand and a duffel bag full of shotguns, he crosses the border to Mexico with the only purpose he has left in his life.
Though the man has been making films for more than fifteen years now, it was in 2011 that Nicolas Winding Refn truly arrived with Drive; a cool distillation of 1980s Hollywood action and thriller tropes remixed by a cultural outsider. Many have already pointed out how Drive pulls from works associated with that decade by Michael Mann, Paul Schrader, Walter Hill and Brian De Palma
and, yes, there's absolutely something valid about those observations.
But it's a bit of a stretch to describe the film as just an homage to
films like Thief, Hardcore, The Driver and Dressed to Kill.
Refn may be pulling from identifiable sources here but he cuts those
materials with a post-modern detachment that's truly unique in its
assemblage; Ryan Gosling's nameless character (as well as most of the characters in the film) is less an individual than
he is a representation of codified behaviors and attitudes in the type of films being cited here.
The significant difference between the characters in Drive and those in, say, the most recent flick from someone like McG
is that Refn peels back any pretense that his characters are anything
but signifiers...of impenetrable cool, violence; whatever.
Note the way in which Gosling's "The Driver" and Irene (Carey Mulligan) interact in the film. There's more repressed sizzle between these characters than in any other film I've seen since The Remains of the Day (okay, scratch that, since In the Mood for Love).
And still, Irene is, akin to all the female characters in the cinema of Michael Mann, a
barely fleshed-out, wafer-thin excuse for what constitutes a person.
In Mann's films, the way he represents women is an insurmountable barrier to some viewers (count
me among them), making his films difficult to fully
enjoy.
But, in Drive, Gosling's protagonist is every bit as underdeveloped emotionally and in his back story as the woman to whom he is attracted, striking an odd balance of sorts that heightens the viewer's projections of desire for their coupling, delivering a vicarious thrill based in proximity and distance. This excitement springs from our understanding of how relationships like these in films like this are supposed to unfold; an expectation that Refn fully exploits while simultaneously denying the viewer a resolution to the tension that he orchestrates in the scenes between Gosling and Mulligan.
The result: an atmosphere of intensely-felt longing motivates almost every action in the film, from the crimes at the heart of the plot to the extreme acts of violence that have stuck with all who have seen it. Drive functions less as a proper thriller than as an immersive cinematic experience based in projection. Its success is located in the fact that, even when Refn's manipulations are made transparent, the film continues to vibrate with a curiously slippery energy that shocks every bit as much as it teases.
Drive will
screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art
Museum) on March 17th & 18th at 7pm. The film is part of the
retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.
