“Every girl is beautiful… until they kill somebody.”

Wowie wow wow, the acting (or the dubbing) by our two leads is terrrrible. But I’ve seen this once before so I knew that and could focus on other things this time. Nice title music by Ennio Morricone, decent camerawork and good shot choices. Ultimately a stupid movie though, not half as good (or half as ludicrous) as Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. Worth watching only for Fuller completists like myself, or possibly for Claude Chabrol’s loony performance.

Bobby’s silhouette getting nabbed backstage:
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Bobby Di Cicco, who I don’t remember being completely horrible in The Big Red One, is a loser wannabe musician who sneaks into the orchestra every night and watches from backstage. He meets Véronique Jannot at the unemployment office and they decide to take revenge on the agents there who humiliate the two while failing to find them work. First up is a mustache-grooming woman they call Mussolini, then a pervert they call Tartuffe played with campy hilarity by Claude Chabrol.

C.C. wearing funny gloves:
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But when Tartuffe falls out the window (in an incident of neighborly peeping gone wrong) our two hero losers are on the run, assisted by Bobby’s music-shop-owning ex-con buddy and a girl they met while breaking into her dad’s house. These two accomplices (whom our heroes seem to barely know, but are willing to assault cops to help them get away) are nearly as awful actors as our heroes, but they have better voices… his is low and TV-cop-show-like, hers is small and airy.

Oh yeah, here’s Bobby:
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And what’s her name, Veronica:
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Presumably (or hopefully) the accomplices are arrested for being horrible liars. Our couple goes on the run. In a snowy small town rest stop en route to Spain, a loose-cannon ex-cop is introduced only moments before pulling out his gun and blasting away, killing Veronica. Bobby is wounded, somehow makes it back to Paris only to sneak into the orchestra, con his way onstage and die mid-performance… nice.

Movie isn’t a total waste of time – there are a few nuts scenes… some pretend-incest that seems to repulse/turn on landlady Christa Lang… Sam Fuller as “Zoltan” a jewelry fence and death-scene enthusiast with an eyepatch concealing a magnifying contact lens… the outer-space sound effects over Ennio Morricone’s score on the final scene.

Christa:
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Sam:
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Cameo as a brothel madam by Micheline Presle of some Demy movies, The Nun, I Want To Go Home and American Guerrilla in the Philippines:
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NY Times called it “a rather mediocre crime story about a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple.” The video box calls it a tribute to the French New Wave. I’m not sure how, exactly… unless the final shootout in the snow is in memory of Shoot The Piano Player.

One of three TV-movies Fuller made in ’90, a year after his final theatrical film Street of No Return (and I still don’t know where to find the other two).

Earnest photographer Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, Chabrol’s Dr. M) is in the Philippines in the mid ’80’s (soon before the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos) looking for shots of strife and poverty to bring global attention to the local slums. She meets up with her ex, opportunistic photographer Luc Merenda (a vet of 1970’s Italian cop movies who cameoed in Hostel II).

Highlight of the movie is this local kid they meet. He learned hardboiled American gangster-speak from the movies and follows our couple around calling her “doll” and him “frenchy” while keeping them out of trouble. Trouble comes when Frenchy snaps a pic of a military man shooting an old woman in the head for not giving up a rebel camp location. From then on, it’s a chase for that roll of film, with more screen time for Frenchy than Beals, even though she’s the “star”.

Christa Lang plays Mama, who runs a sorta casino-brothel. N. Vera says: “It’s got a good Filipino cast–Behn Cervantes is an old friend of Lino Brocka and a theatrical legend… Pilar Pilapil is (or was) one of the most sensual actresses in Philippine cinema.” Pilar plays a girl forced to “work” at Mama’s until boyfriend Behn can afford to buy her out. They seem sympathetic to our heroes’ cause until the end, when Behn is discovered to be a pro-Marcos spy and is machine-gunned in the middle of a rally by the kid – an event captured by both photographers, getting ’em well-paid cover shots for a happy ending.

Fuller no longer had the budget or prestige for a studio shoot, but B. Krohn calls Madonna and some other late works “great films, despite the loss of control from location shooting.” Functional cinematography except for a fun shootout at a movie house, the action on the screen echoing the firefight in the theater.

Music sounds like the percussion of the backing track to that “Oh Yeah” song from Ferris Bueller with some hideous keyboards over it. Fuller wrote the title song (movie’s alt title is Tinikling, named after a game played by street kids in the movie, like jumprope with bamboo poles). Nice lyrics actually, but there’s no adequate performance of it in the film – first the kid belts it out in a moving car, then this guy Samuel Euston puts too much heart and soul and lameness into it.

Oh I forgot to mention this guy Pavel, who’s sorta all over the place trying to cut deals, played by Patrick Bauchau (star of Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse 20 years earlier, also in The Rapture).
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The doll:
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Frenchy:
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Mama:
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Sam Fuller, nearly 80, wouldn’t direct again after ’90, but would stick around as an actor for a few more years in films by Gitai, Wenders and Kaurismäki.
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A bright-looking city movie about a single family, nice contrast to the dull-colored medium-shot rural Emitai. Rapid escalation of Sembene’s feminist filmmaking that would lead to the glorious Moolaade. Kine at first seems too harsh and rough to be a likeable lead, but after hearing her story and experiencing her kids’ party and meeting her ex-husband, she looks very much like a hero and deserves the happy ending she gets. Cool movie – I’d watch it again.

S. Gadjigo:

Faat Kine is a chic, sexy, and “liberated” woman. She is a forty-year-old single mother, born at the same time as Senegalese independence. From her humble beginning as a gas-station attendant constantly being harassed by male customers, Faat Kine has climbed a ladder reserved for men to become a successful station manager of a multinational oil company. She is financially in control, well-connected in the business world, and adept at manipulating the banking system. Le Credit Lyonnais keeps no secrets from her. When she needs it, she can afford boy-toys. She owns a car and a stylish villa littered with posters of Sembene’s revolutionary icons. She has adopted all the fetishes of the moyenne bourgeoisie, including telecommunication knickknacks, modern appliances, and, best of all, a servant who draws her a warm bath when she comes home from work.

The double success of her children is yet another achievement for Faat Kine, one which stirs memories of her own youth in 1981, “when Sanghor left and handed power to Abdou Diouf.” So, Sembene’s pendulum swings back to the time when Faat Kine was twenty, in her last year of secondary school, just months before her final exam. She had dreamed of becoming a lawyer. But this was not to be. Immaturity, perhaps, and weak social and educational safeguards conspired against her. She was instead seduced by Gaye, her philosophy professor, and left alone pregnant.

The foolishness of the past exacts its brutal price, Sembene reminds us, in the crippled form of Mammy who lives on in the present with Faat Kine, Aby, and Djib. She is Kine’s mother and another of Sembene’s pillars of strength. For once she was expelled from school, Faat Kine’s only protection at home came from her loving but powerless mother. When Kine’s conservative father wanted to kill both his daughter and her newborn, it was Mammy who shielded the children with her body from her husband’s vicious blows.

Crippled Mammy, ambitious Faat Kine, the fatherless Aby: Three generations of women, who have only each other for support in a world shaped by feudal and neo-colonial values, hold the keys to Sembene’s moral. At first to survive, then to succeed, Faat Kine entered a world forbidden to women. By breaking taboos, she unabashedly took control of her life. She faced the world, was rewarded with a degree of financial independence, and moved steadily toward the center of Dakar’s middle-class. What does it mean then, when Sembene lets the pendulum loose once more? Faat Kine becomes pregnant and is abandoned again. Her lover strips her of her savings and their son Djib of his paternity. Apparently, one lesson Kine has yet to learn is that independence can never be a gift. It is hard won.

California Newsreel:

In a film permeated by commercial transactions, Faat Kine exemplifies a model of economic self-reliance tempered with charity; she frugally refuses to take bank loans at usurious rates or accept foreign currencies in clear contrast with African nations’ growing indebtedness to Western banks and lending agencies.

Yet Faat Kine may have become so accustomed to relating to people through money her children fear she has cut herself off from deeper emotional attachments. In Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas, for example, Linguère Ramatou, another businesswoman scorned by male society, retaliates by bribing a village to kill her dishonorable former lover in exchange for an international line of credit. Here, in contrast, Faat Kine decides to marry her male counterpart, Uncle Jean, a widower and businessman who has raised three children on his own.

This will finally be a marriage between equals as the unexpected last shot indicates. Held for a disquietingly long time, it shows only Faat Kine’s feet curled in pleasure. In contrast, to pornography where the woman’s body is fully exposed for the man’s pleasure, here we see only Faat Kine’s anticipated satisfaction. In fact, the audience could be seen as being placed in the unaccustomed position of the provider of that pleasure. This seems like an appropriate ending to a film which, after all, has been a tribute to women who for to long have had to do everything for themselves.

Movie is set on Sunday Nov. 16, 1981.

The President: “Screw church.”

The Vietnam War was a show for the Russians, which we intended to lose, just to prove that we had the will to sacrifice troops for no good reason. General Burt Lancaster knows this and is going to force the President of the United States to publically admit it on the air. This is our premise.

Wait, it gets better. Burt will achieve this goal by taking over a nuclear missile station and threatening to launch nukes at Russia unless the President obeys.

Burt breaks in:
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What goes wrong: Burt doesn’t count on the very evil military (who stay in power because of their legacy of secrets) being willing to kill his hostage, the President (who hadn’t even known about the vietnam conspiracy).

President Charles Durning (Waring Hudsucker, also in The Sting and Hi Mom):
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Lancaster’s buds are Burt Young & Paul Winfield. Young gets shot in an almost-successful anti-Burt operation towards the end, and Winfield is mostly on Burt’s side but manages to reason with him a little, convince him of the futility of launching the missiles.

Winfield, of White Dog:
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I don’t know a whole lot about Aldrich. This seemed a kinda low-budget effort, with a 70’s TV-movie look to it, except in the hugely stylish split-screens which sometimes divided into three or four simultaneous actions or angles.

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But wait, have I mentioned that Thee Great Richard Widmark plays Burt’s nemesis General MacKenzie?

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Widmark does go to church, seen below with his wife, one of the only appearances of a woman in the film.

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This was the final film of Charles McGraw (below), star of “The Narrow Margin”, appeared in “The Birds” and “The Defiant Ones” and “A Boy and His Dog”, and previously appeared with Burt Lancaster over thirty years earlier in “The Killers”.

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Other things:

Paul Winfield: “Jive-ass honky!”

Widmark’s pager goes off in church, back when that was socially awkward rather than business as usual.

Multiple product-placements for Coke.

Burt: “Gentlemen, we are now a superpower.”

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Portrait of a whorehouse at a certain point in time when politicians were discussing whether to outlaw the profession (voted the ban down at the end of the movie, but it eventually passed, some say as a result of the movie). Six or seven prostitutes all with different desperate situations. One has a suicidally depressing home life with sick husband and infant they can’t afford, one is trying to support her son who disowns her when he finds out what she does at work, one is a rich bitch escaping her controlling father, one is aiming to escape through marriage but her husband mistreats her and she comes crawling back, and one is bilking her clients out of extra money so she can quit and start her own business (the only happy ending here).

The same sort of feminine miserablism that I’ve come to expect from Mizoguchi after Life Of Oharu. This one has a more impressive look to it (the main house and the street outside, the costumes, the acting, all exquisite) but still a depressing movie that I didn’t enjoy very much. I may have liked it better than Ugetsu though… have to see that one again, and check out Sansho The Bailiff sometime.

A turning-point year for Japanese cinema: Mizoguchi’s final film, the beginning of the Japanese New Wave, and (according to Reverse Shot) the beginning of “more socially critical efforts” by Yasujiro Ozu. It’s also the year of The Burmese Harp, but I haven’t seen that yet.

Saw this one with Pia from work.

Ozu’s final film, released less than a month before he died. Only my second, after Tokyo Story. Another film about family life, with emphasis on the play between generations in the same family and neighboring families. I know, that’s what they say all of his films are about.

It again stars Chishu Ryu (star of most late Ozu films, who lived through the 90’s and appeared in Kurowawa’s Ran) as a father (Hirayama). His wife died young, oldest son is married (and having money trouble), younger son lives at home, and daughter is marrying age but stays home to take care of her father and brother. Hirayama’s friends tell him that he should marry her off before she gets too old, and learn to take care of himself. He soon sees the wisdom in this, and tries first to pair her with a boy she has a crush on, the older brother’s friend. But when the boy turns out to be engaged already, the father goes to a guy his friend had in mind (who I don’t think we ever see).

Some post-war bits (we find out Hirayama was in the army when one of his former soldiers recognizes him in a bar). Oh, and he goes to the bar because the barmaid looks like his late wife when she was younger… would be a sorta sad scene, him drinking alone and gazing at this woman, if not for the soldier distractingly (comically) playing battle hymns and marching/saluting along.

Apparently this was the part of Ozu’s career when he had started to sympathize with younger generations, instead of showing them to be lazy and disrespectful (see: Tokyo Story). Didn’t sympathize TOO much though, as the oldest son is spoiled and irresponsible, taking money from his dad and blowing it on golf clubs. Even only having seen one of Ozu’s films before, I was startled when the movie began because it was in color… I think of him as a black-and-white filmmaker. So happy to see that Ozu is the Master everyone says he is, that his movies are so heartfelt and wonderful to watch. I get that Jean Renoir feeling of well-being afterwards, even though Tokyo Story (and The Lower Depths) was mostly depressing. Looking forward to his other 40+ features!

The whole point of keeping a film journal is to write about these movies right after I see ’em, to preserve details, remember plot points, since I’m so quick to forget things like that. Moolaade is the kind of movie I feel comfortable waiting three weeks to write about, since I’m not about to forget any of the details. Maybe so memorable since I talked about it with Katy afterward or since we watched it in two parts spanning a week, but I think just cuz it’s a simply told and visually exciting and completely unique and memorable movie on its own.

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Collé is the middle of three wives, I believe, and has had what we’ll call “the surgery”. Sex is unpleasant, as it should be. Four girls run away from the pre-surgical ceremony and ask her for protection, and she offers it. As long as they stay in her household and she doesn’t utter the phrase to break the spell, nobody can touch these kids. The villagers throw every kind of intimidation at her… husband whips her in public, it is promised that Collé’s daughter (who has also avoided the surgery) will never marry (untrue, as the guy she was promised to marry is a well traveled man, liberated from local superstition), Collé is personally threatened, all women’s radios are stolen and destroyed, and eventually the merchant is murdered. One of the girls is captured and dies in surgery, but Collé saves three, and celebrates with their mothers at the end.

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All customs and beliefs in town are passed down through the ages with apparently little outside influence until the merchant and Collé’s daughter’s man and the radios start threatening the status quo with talk of modernity and primitive feminism… then the red-cloaked enforcers and village elders start cracking down and insisting on compliance with The Old Ways. It provokes an advancement of human rights, but a loss of (admittedly repressive) tradition and local custom. Funny how in movies, radio is almost always a good thing and television almost always bad.

Great movie – a shock after watching Black Girl first. Don’t know why I thought they’d be stylistically similar (since from the same director) although there’s forty years between them.