Opens with a heist, Peter Fonda collecting money from the manager whose family is held hostage by his partner Deke (biker-movie regular Adam Roarke). Dirty drifter Susan George (Straw Dogs) gets in the way so they take her along. Sheriff Vic Morrow takes this pursuit personally and throws all resources into the chase. Car swappin’, fast drivin’, and drawbridge jumpin’ ensue, up to the requisite ’70s downbeat ending (our group is flattened by a train). Amazing to read that a lab error led to the movie being badly color-shifted for its first 30 years. Hough was mostly a horror guy, made The Legend of Hell House, the Cassavetes Incubus, and a Howling sequel.

Movie is known for its car action but I only gasped at this helicopter:

Rewatched for the first time since theaters.

I’ve been reading the Adam Nayman book on the Coens:

Nothing in the film is “original” except for the reconfiguration of elements, which is why the opening citation is more honest than it seems and, in its way, a signifier not of smarminess but of humility. The nod to The Odyssey admits that any artist in the Western tradition owes some currency of debt to Homer, and that to mount any story about homecoming is to reconnect with the roots of storytelling itself – to return to the primal scene.

Nayman:

“If it’s not new and it never grows old, it’s a folk song,” quips the hero of Inside Llewyn Davis, which is O Brother, Where Art Thou?‘s spiritual sequel. Taken together, the two films clarify the Coens’ relationship to a musical genre founded on familiarity. For filmmakers perpetually interested in circles and circularity, the cyclical proliferation and popularity of folk and bluegrass standards – songs largely without cited authors, passed down and performed by different singers through the generations – serves as a potent analogue to their thematic preoccupations.

Following Love is Colder and Katzelmacher, more crime plots with carefully composed scenes and actors with flat affect, though he’s beginning to allow Hanna Schygulla to be glamorous.

Harry Baer gets out of jail, sees all his people again, puts together a grocery store heist which goes bad because Hanna has tipped off the police inspector – in the meantime, every character sleeps with every other character.

Harry with Margarethe von Trotta and Günther The Gorilla:

Moran robs the bank where he works, gives the money to unwitting Roman. Laura Paredes arrives to investigate, makes life hell for the remaining bankers. When Roman can’t take the pressure, he’s told to drop off the money on a mountainside, where he meets and falls for Norma – and flashbacks reveal that Moran had previously fallen for the same woman in the same spot.

Only three hours long – I think the reason it’s divided into two parts is that Laura Paredes only appears in multi-part features. Suspicious dialogue about mysterious flowers.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

Broken into two acts, with a cast of characters whose names are obviously anagrams of each other, The Delinquents is forward with its gamesmanship, and if the eventual resolution of its central conflict seems unsatisfying, that may be precisely the point … At one point Román ducks into a Buenos Aires arthouse and catches a few minutes of Bresson’s L’Argent, a sign that Moreno is more than happy to lay his cards on the table, allowing the viewer to infer a game of three-card monty where there actually is none.

Ehrlich called it “arguably the first slow cinema heist movie.” Jenkins calls their employer “the absolute worst bank in the world.” Cronk says it jumps off “from the central premise of Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) — a touchstone of Argentine film noir that many cinephiles of Moreno’s generation grew up watching on television.”

Rizov: “It’s no coincidence that the bank vault and the prison Morán ends up have their hallways laid out in the same way, a rhyme that’s brought home by the same actor (Germán De Silva) playing both Morán’s boss and a prisoner who extorts money for protection.” Moreno: “At the end of the day, what I wanted to make was a fable. I had no obligation to reality — my debt was to cinema. So I said, “Let’s do it, let’s play this game. Here’s an actor playing two roles.”

Imprisoned bad guy Mak Kwan (Francis Ng of The Mission) gets sprung by his gang, so the Mad Detective (Lau Ching-wan) follows the baddie’s girl (Amanda Lee of Human Pork Chop), correctly thinking they’ll connect, while the escapee plots a big heist of a racetrack vault.

The gang watching their bomb trap go boom:

Pretty good cops-n-robbers movie, in which almost everybody involved gets killed horribly. People love Ringo Lam, but I dunno. Sean Gilman’s letterboxd at least gives you something to think about, calling this movie The End of Hong Kong:

Sure the genre, and Hong Kong, goes on. But everything that follows, your Johnnie Tos and Andrew Laus and so on, is different. Less immediate, less solid. A level removed from what was. Films about films or ideas or ideas of films.

Mak Kwan’s great success, with a few minutes to live:

I thought it’d be funny for my last movie of the year to be called Running Out of Time. Better than A Hero Never Dies but still pretty mainstream-looking. The Mission came out only two months later, and seems more evolved, more of a signature To film, with more grounded characters – despite his cancer-death-sentence, Andy Lau is an unstoppable mastermind in this.

That’s not to dismiss the great pleasure of watching Andy Lau as an unstoppable mastermind. Hotshot cop Ho is Lau Ching-wan (a lead in Hero Never Dies and Life Without Principle, and the Mad Detective himself). Lau successfully and singlehandedly robs a bank, and uses that robbery to stage another robbery, settling a score with some diamond-dealing gangsters. Ho comes to respect the guy and even help him out – and will return solo in the sequel, since Andy’s cancer diagnosis wasn’t bullshit. Hui Siu-Hung is the chief inspector always fucking up his own crime scenes, Yoyo Mung the cute girl Andy meets, Waise Lee (Bullet in the Head) the gangster with lucky henchman Lam Suet.

also featuring: great disguises:

disguise-makin’ software:

A few guys get a job to camp out menacingly in a family man’s house until he retrieves some documents from his workplace, but the documents aren’t so easily retrieved, and somebody dies, and who’s really working for who? It’s that sort of movie, and I could do a whole plot rundown but it’s twisty and fun so I’d rather just forget the particulars and watch it again in a few years. I’ll say that everyone’s sleeping around, all the women are dangerous, the documents are about the auto industry wanting to avoid pollution regulation, and Soderbergh shoots the action with a widescreen lens that perversely distorts everything on the sides.

Besides the superstars, we’ve got family man David Harbour (star of the Hellboy remake which I accidentally bought on blu-ray for a few bucks thinking it was the original, dammit)… his wife, hostage Amy Seimetz (director of last year’s finest film)… and Ray Liotta’s wife is Julia Fox (Uncut Gems).

Not how you want to meet Don Cheadle:

You do not impress Bill Duke:

You don’t want Brendan Fraser pointing his napkin at you:

I’m sad that there’s bird killing in this movie, but at least it’s traumatic to young Bart, who remains gun-crazy but never shoots a living creature again. Going through a teenage Russ Tamblyn phase, he’s sent to reform school for breaking into a gun shop, and years later returns from the army as John Dall (just off playing Brandon-who-thought-he-was-god in Rope). Still gun crazy, he reconnects with his childhood buddies and sees the gun crazy Peggy Cummins (also love interest of Night of the Demon) in a circus. An impulsive Bart steals her away from drunken proprietor Barry Kroeger (Cry of the City) – they get fired, married, and live the high life with absolutely no plan until they end up broke in Vegas, and she talks him into doing holdups. On the run, they’re gonna give up the criminal life after One Last Job, a big one where they get hired by the targeted company and work from the inside. With no traumatic backstory to stop her, Peggy freely shoots civilians during their escape, and trouble quickly closes in when desperate Bart takes them to his hometown to hide out. Such great camerawork, especially in the car scenes.

Russ/Bart:

Pre-Body Snatchers Kevin McCarthy and his cheesehead buddy Jack Kelly (Forbidden Planet) scout Mickey Rooney at an auto race, clocking him as a capable driver without a big ego, and schmooze him for half the movie before even revealing that they’re planning a heist and need a driver. They hook him up with lovely Dianne Foster and he falls hard, while in private the beautiful people call him “a little ugly guy.” She has the decency(?) to tell Mickey they used him at the end, and cornered, he kills both of the heist guys. My first Richard Quine movie, and I have to keep reminding myself he’s the guy from television, not from the Voidoids (or Television).