Invasion of the Body Snatchers ’78: I saw this on Halloween right after Here down the hall. A chorus of coughs and sniffles throughout the theater, everyone catching the same cold that’s still making its rounds. Everyone a potential body snatcher, most in the audience unfamiliar with this Philip Kaufman remake of Don Siegel’s 1954 original; It’s a Carter Administration film, a brief streak of fixations on health food, the afterlife, and other new age bullshit explored, to greater and lesser success, by Robert Altman, Shirley MacLaine, Jane Fonda, Hal Ashby, and many more. Fonda produced and starred in 1979’s The China Syndrome, a chiller more concerned with violent repression in our own government as opposed to missiles from Russia or Cuba. Journalists are the heroes and Jack Lemmon the sucker in Fonda and Michael Douglas’ production.
Kaufman celebrates no one. His San Francisco is invaded from the start, and Michael Chapman shoots the movie as if he were one of the pod people: creeping dolly moves, startling handheld wide angle shots as simple as Brooke Adams walking across the street. Denny Zeitlin’s score is superb and the first reason this remake succeeds, the second Kaufman’s headfirst descent into paranoia and terrifying confirmation. It’s amazing such an unsettling and creepy movie could produce such a stupid meme.
Army of Shadows: The night before the election. Grim atmosphere from the beginning, a big crowd (with a surprising number of people speaking French), all beat from the cold everyone’s getting, so much unspoken written on every face in the lobby. Of course the air was the same in thousands of other places across America, but it still hit me as soon as I walked in. Jean Pierre Melville’s 1969 French Resistance classic was appropriate Election Eve viewing, with another inexorable collapse into capture and execution.
There are no winners here. Melville’s characters and their actors, especially Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret, are magnetic, and there were gasps when it was revealed that Signoret had been arrested and released. She needed to be killed—what had he said? Who had she ratted out? The remainder of the gang kill her in a drive-by shooting, before Melville illustrates their fates in a series of title cards that make it clear the murder of their friend and collaborator would amount to nothing, because they’d all be dead within two years.
The Big Sleep: Try and follow the plot of this movie and explain it to someone. Better yet, try to write it down. You can’t. I hadn’t seen The Big Sleep in a while and wasn’t sure if Howard Hawks’ many quotes about how “the movie doesn’t make any sense” are what drive this perception. I really tried this time, but gave up once I realized I miss Dorothy Malone (how?) and instead fixated on how every single actress in this movie is gorgeous and hilarious. Malone, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, and many other bit players are what keep this 1946 Philip Marlowe detective “story” contemporary. It’s amazing how sexy every interaction is and how much sexier it is than anything out today. It’s not even innuendo, it’s out in the open, exchanges more erotic than anything in hardcore pornography. Crass? Hawks and Bogart would never…
The coughing and sniffling continued.
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