Gnaws for Thought

If you want to get a real sense of how the cinematic landscape has fundamentally changed over the years, you could do worse than look at the box office lists from way back when: films which to a modern eye look like the most campy, cheesy, amateurish pap turn out to have done as well in their day as major studio releases nowadays. Past examples we have mentioned include At the Earth’s Core, which was a top-twenty film in the UK in 1976, and slapped-together Bigfoot docu-drama The Legend of Boggy Creek, which, according to some reports, was #22 in the US chart for 1972.

Neither of these films did quite as well as Daniel Mann’s 1971 movie Willard, an extremely odd piece of work which nevertheless inspired a sequel, a remake, and several knock-offs, in addition to launching the career of Bruce Davison. It was just outside the top ten for the year, comfortably outperforming films like Play Misty For Me, The Beguiled, and Shaft. To be honest, this seems one of the inexplicable and bizarre facts orbiting the Willard movies, along with the bit of trivia that the sequel, Ben, features a young Michael Jackson on the soundtrack singing a song about his love for a rat.

This is less of a surprise once you learn that Willard is largely about what happens when a young man becomes a bit too fond of rodents, though it takes a while for this to become apparent. When we first meet him, Willard Stiles (Davison) is an awkward misfit stuck in a bad job at the company his father founded – his father having since died and the business having been taken over by Al Martin (Ernest Borgnine), a crass and ruthless money-grubber. Willard lives at home with his sick mother (Elsa Lanchester) and is seemingly without friends of his own – there’s a cringingly awkward scene early on where he has a birthday party, and everyone there is at least thirty years older than him, invited by his mother.

Still, Willard finds some escape when he forms a bond, of sorts, with the rats infesting his back yard: just one of them to begin with, but rats being what they are, soon there are dozens of the little blighters scurrying about. You have to hand it to Davison – I still think this movie is weird, but in all of the scenes which are basically two-handers between him and a rat, he is clearly taking things seriously. Willard trains the rats to do as he commands and forms an especially close bond with two of them, which he names Socrates and Ben.

This is intercut with the other stuff happening in Willard’s life – most importantly, his mother dies, leaving him the house and a pile of debt, although there’s another subplot about him making friends with a young woman who’s a temp at work (she is played by Sondra Locke, who despite everything clearly eventually figured out that working with Clint Eastwood was a better career move than doing a film about rats). Willard starts taking his rats to work with him, which you just know is going to end badly, while Martin hatches a plan to buy Willard’s family home and turn it into apartments, thus making a fortune. When Martin also engages in a bit of ad hoc pest control at the office, you know that this is going to push Willard too far…

The thing is that while everyone, especially musophobes, seems to agree that Willard is a horror movie, nothing especially horrific happens outside of the last fifteen minutes or so. Prior to this it just plays like a mawkish melodrama about an unhappy young man and the escape he finds through his friendship with the rats. It doesn’t look much like a horror movie – it looks more like high-end TV. In fact, considering the soundtrack as well, it looks most like the kind of live-action film Disney were making around this time. You can almost imagine an alternate Disney-made version of Willard where the rats help him sort his life out and everyone lives happily every after.

However – and, obviously, spoiler alert – it does not play out that way. Willard sics the rats on Martin, who panics and falls out of a window to his death. If this had happened earlier in the movie, you could imagine it as a revelatory ‘now I realise what I can achieve with these rats!’ moment of Willard embracing his destiny as a rodent-themed supervillain (not exactly a crowded field, but it does exist). But the film is nearly over and so, in an apparent moment of contrition, Willard rejects the rats, attempting to drown as many as he can and trying to rat-proof his house. Needless to say he fails, and one night dinner is interrupted by a visit from Ben the rat, who is revealed as an evil rat mastermind who does not forget betrayal. And Ben has company with him…

I’m honestly wondering if the sequel, Ben, isn’t a better prospect as a movie, as the idea of an evil rat mastermind plotting the overthrow of human civilisation sounds more promising than Willard, which plays a bit like Psycho with the horror elements cut down, sentimentality dialled up considerably and a lot more of the money spent on animal training. One wonders if it wasn’t one of these films which inspired James Herbert to launch his horror career with The Rats and its sequels (the actual Willard/Ben knock-offs focused on snakes, spiders and – somewhat more outlandishly – sharks).

The one indisputably good thing about Willard is Bruce Davison’s performance in the title role, as he manages to be fairly convincing even given the most unpromising material. Ernest Borgnine is as good as you’d expect in a very Ernest Borgniney role (the question arises of whether he was cast because he suited the part, or if the part became very Ernest Borgniney simply because Borgnine was playing it). The rest of it is not very distinguished, the main problem really being the pacing – as a horror movie, it takes much too long for anything to happen, and as anything else, the plot takes a hard left turn into rat-attack territory near the end which nothing prior to this point has led the viewer to expect. It’s just clumsily structured and tonally odd – and yet it outperformed some much better films on its original release. It is a funny old world sometimes.

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New York State of Incarceration

All right, let’s go through our checklist for the latest old movie: director’s name above the title? Yes! Is Kurt Russell in it? Yes! Is Donald Pleasence in it? Yes! Does the music go ‘dum-diddy-dum-diddy-doo, dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dah’ and sound a bit like an old-fashioned ring tone? Yes! It must definitely be a John Carpenter film then.

For a director who I kind of blow hot and cold about – generally speaking, the more recent the film, the frostier I get – it does sometimes feel like I’ve spent an awful lot of time watching John Carpenter films and then writing about them. This time around it’s Escape from New York, which was released in 1981 and thus falls within the ‘early, good movie’ phase of Carpenter’s career as it is generally reckoned (for the uninitiated, Carpenter is held to have gone off the boil some time around The Thing (1982) or Christine (1983)). This has the unique distinction of being the only Carpenter movie to which the director did the sequel himself, not that this is necessarily a sign of quality.

Anyway. It’s Carpenter, so it’s a genre movie about a tough, laconic anti-hero. This is one of his high-concept efforts, with the opening narration (an uncredited Jamie Lee Curtis) explaining that in 1988 the crime rate in the USA quadrupled, leading to the entire island of Manhattan being walled off and converted into a prison colony, surrounded by heavily armed police officers – once someone is sent into Manhattan, they never return. Perhaps this seemed a bit more credible back in 1982, but I doubt the plausibility of it bothered anyone at the time.

The story itself kicks off in the distant future year of 1997, when the US is apparently at war with the other superpowers. A peace conference offers a glimmer of hope, assuming the US President (Donald Pleasence) turns up on time. So it is just the baddest of bad luck that the President’s jet gets hijacked by terrorists and crashed into a tower block inside the prison zone (as is always the case, any 20th century film or TV show about someone deliberately crashing a plane in New York is a slightly uncomfortable watch). Luckily, Air Force One is fitted with an escape pod and the President jumps out in it. But he’s still stuck inside a lawless hellhole into which the authorities fear to venture…

Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) has another idea when it comes to saving the President’s life and possibly stopping the war: decorated war hero and borderline sociopath Snake Plissken (what the hell kind of a name is that?!?) is about to be inserted into the prison following a failed bank robbery. (Plissken is played by Kurt Russell, who at the time was keen to reinvent himself after several appearances in family-friendly Disney films.) If Plissken will go into the city and bring the President back, he will be pardoned – and, just to incentivise him that little bit more, Hauk has explosives implanted in his neck that will go off in less than a day if he doesn’t succeed…

Apparently this is one of those cases of a director writing a script early in their career and then shelving it until they had the clout to actually get it made. Escape from New York was written in 1976, after Assault on Precinct 13 but before Halloween, and influenced by a mixture of real-life events (the Watergate scandal) and other movies (Death Wish). Helping Carpenter with this was Nick Castle, whose most famous association with the director is as the man in the Shatner mask in various episodes of the Halloween franchise. How good a screenwriter Castle is it is difficult to tell, as this is pretty much indistinguishable from most of the movies that Carpenter scripted single-handed. It is particularly similar to Assault on Precinct 13 in its tone, although it’s obviously much more of a sci-fi elaboration of that idea. In the earlier film the main characters were trapped, with the crazies outside and trying to get in, while in this case everyone is trapped together, crazies and otherwise, trying to get out. Certainly the film’s most effective sequences have the same kind of atmosphere as the 1976 film.

It’s certainly a striking concept for a movie – practically the definition of high-concept. The problem with the movie is that all the most interesting material comes at the start of the film, in the scenes establishing all of that. Once Plissken crashes his glider into the top of the World Trade Centre (again, hmm) and has to set about actually finding the President, the plot actually becomes pretty undistinguished and quite forgettable. All that really keeps the film afloat is the charisma of its various performers – I’m still not sure that Russell, at this point, is doing much more than giving a somewhat lightweight Clint Eastwood impersonation, but Carpenter surrounds him with people like Van Cleef and Pleasence, along with Harry Dean Stanton and Ernest Borgnine. And there’s Isaac Hayes as the bad guy, and Adrienne Barbeau as a sort of gangster’s moll. It’s certainly the case that you remember the characters more than the plot.

Perhaps this is partly because they couldn’t afford to do anything particularly expensive – shooting in New York was apparently unfeasible, resulting in a search to find an American city which could pass as a lawless, dystopian hell-hole with a minimum of set dressing. (East St Louis was finally selected after the location manager went on ‘an all-expense-paid trip across the country looking for the worst city in America’.) To be fair, the production design is pretty good, with none of the cost-cutting measures feeling really obtrusive – back in the days when Carpenter could muster a decent budget for one of his movies, he generally spent it very smartly.

It’s really got all the makings of a pretty good movie – nice premise, interesting characters, good cast, decent production values. All it’s really looking for is a more memorable plot – as is the case with a lot of his films, it almost feels as if Carpenter is so in love with the idea of pastiching the style of Howard Hawks he forgets he’s making a more modern movie with the potential (and perhaps requirement) for spectacle that suggests. Escape from New York isn’t a bad film, it’s just one that’s only memorable for its basic premise.

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Wild on the Frontier

When I was a student, many years ago, one of the things that people did on a Saturday night was go to the weekly midnight screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. It became almost like a regular event for many of us – once every couple of months, we would go out for a few drinks and then turn up at the Odeon in Hull just as the normal screenings were letting out. At one point, as if to emphasise the slightly cultish nature of the event, there was something of a vogue for wearing the suits and dark glasses. This went on for literally years, to the point at which the actual prints of the film started wearing out. The film was originally released in the UK at the beginning of 1993 and was still enjoying this odd afterlife two or three years later, even occasionally resurfacing for a more conventional run. This was mostly due to the unique circumstances of this film, which was banned on video in the UK for most of this time, but such a long cinema run is still unusual. However, when it comes to violent ultra-masculine action thrillers that enjoyed unusually protracted UK cinema visits, then the film for you is undoubtedly Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 film The Wild Bunch, which ran in one London picture house for seven years.

The movie opens with a group of men in US Army uniform riding into a small town in southern Texas. The year is not specified but one can infer it is around 1913. As the group arrive at a railroad office, it soon becomes apparent they are not soldiers but thieves, led by the ruthless outlaw Pike (William Holden), along with his lieutenant Dutch (Ernest Borgnine). But the gang’s plan to rob the railroad payroll seems to be going awry, for their appearance has been anticipated: lying in wait for them on top of the building across the way are a motley group of bounty hunters, led by Thornton (Robert Ryan) – a former associate of Pike’s who has been offered early release from prison in exchange for his assistance in hunting down his former friend.

After a long, tense build-up, the thieves attempt to make their escape, and a full-scale gun battle erupts between them and the bounty hunters, with many members of the local town caught in the crossfire and casually gunned down. Pike, Dutch, and several of the other gang members manage to shoot their way out of town and escape, leaving ugly scenes in their wake as the hunters squabble over the spoils and pick over the corpses.

However, Pike and the gang are disgusted to discover the silver they planned to steal has been replaced by steel washers, and Pike’s authority over the group is challenged. He manages to hold them together and they head down into Mexico to plan their next move. Pike is aware that time is running out for men like them, and maybe the chaotic situation south of the border will throw up some opportunities. So it initially proves, as a tenuous deal is struck with a corrupt general, to steal arms for him from the US government. But Thornton and his posse have not given up, and a member of the gang has his own reasons for opposing the general. Pike and the others find themselves having to choose between personal loyalty, and self-interest.

The Wild Bunch showed up at the UPP in Oxford recently as the finale of their classic western strand – an entirely appropriate choice, given it is generally accepted to be one of the last of the truly great western movies. Showing just the previous week was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which I went to see with a friend – she thoroughly enjoyed it and asked if there were any other ‘cowboy films’ coming on. I said yes, but probably should have made it clear that this was a slightly different kind of film in its tone and outlook.

That said, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch have much more in common than you might initially think, even considering they’re both westerns (and thus naturally share a kind of generic resemblance). Both films are essentially concerned with the death of the old west, as it is generally conceived, and feature characters who are increasingly aware that the world around them is changing. Pike and his comrades see automobiles and machine-guns starting to appear around them; there is even talk of aeroplanes. There are a number of images and plot elements shared by both films as well – the pursuit of the main characters by hired killers (although in this case the leader of the posse is a more complex, sympathetic figure), the flight from the USA to another country, the climactic, bloody encounter with the army.

Nevertheless, this is a textbook example of how two films in the same genre can take similar material and produce totally different results. Writing about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid recently, I said that there’s a sense in which it almost doesn’t feel quite like a western at all – it’s a charming, romantic film that includes a lot of western iconography, but the focus is wholly on the central trio rather than the milieu in which they live. The Wild Bunch almost feels like a riposte to the other movie, an attempt to set the record straight – the real-life Sundance Kid was actually part of a gang known as the Wild Bunch, who were far from the inoffensive rogues beloved of most Hollywood depictions.

If there is any romanticism in this movie, it is of a very hard-edged kind. Pike, Dutch and the others are visibly ageing, grizzled and weather-beaten by their hard lives – Pike is half-crippled by an old wound, for instance. Charming they are not. Unlike Redford and Newman, this gang are ruthless killers when the situation demands it, showing little remorse for their actions – Pike has no qualms about finishing off one member of the gang who is too badly wounded to accompany them in their escape. You might therefore wonder how they can have any demand on the audience’s sympathy – shouldn’t everyone just be rooting for Thornton all the way through?

Well, Thornton himself comes across as an ambivalent, conflicted figure throughout, disgusted by the trash and scum he’s been given to lead. ‘What kind of man are we after?’ asks one of the bounty hunters, referring to Pike. ‘The best,’ Thornton curtly responds. Ryan’s performance makes it clear that Thornton hates himself for going after his former friend, and is only doing it to escape prison and the accompanying torture. Through his regard for Pike, we gain some ourselves.

And there is, of course, the fact that while the gang themselves may be crude, violent, ruthless men, Peckinpah still surrounds them with other characters who are appreciably worse. They live by some kind of code of honour, look out for each other, respect each other as men. And as the film goes on and we share in their small victories and the accompanying camaraderie, we do come to respect and care about them ourselves, even though they are obviously doomed.

When that doom eventually arrives, it is in the extraordinary climax of the film. Watching it again, you can’t help wondering about the extent to which Peckinpah is suggesting that these men are knowingly going to their deaths, opting to go out guns blazing. Is this really about their personal code of loyalty, or just a convenient pretext to cover a breathtaking outburst of nihilistic violence? At one point there’s a temporary lull in the slaughter and it looks like the gang may be able to get away with their lives – but Pike seems to make a deliberate choice to provoke a further surge of killing, this one uncontrollable. The director keeps it ambiguous. What is certain is that the Wild Bunch don’t get the gentle, sepia-toned freeze-frame-and-pull-back accorded to Butch and Sundance: they die bloody, in full view of the camera, but by no means alone.

You could probably argue that the final battle of The Wild Bunch was the shot heard round the world, in terms of finally extinguishing whatever innocence the western had left once Sergio Leone had his hands on it (well, more like several hundred shots heard round the world). Even today it is a remarkably intense nearly-five-minute sequence, a crescendo of blood as everyone involved seems to lose their reason and becomes fixated on killing anything that moves. The result is a kind of reflexive spasm of violence, made unforgettable by Peckinpah’s use of fast cutting, slow motion, and large quantities of blood squibs. Apparently the director’s intention was to shock the audience and confront them with the realities of violence, and he was concerned that viewers actually found it cathartic. Even today it is hard to decide which is really the case.

This kind of careful ambiguity extends through the movie, affecting how we view the characters’ motivations and identities. The result is a kind of studied amorality, which – when combined with the staggeringly violent sequences that bookend the film – could make it possible to dismiss the film as something technically competent, but with little to say for itself. I think this would be to do it a disservice. One of Peckinpah’s more striking choices is the sheer number of cutaways to women and children observing the main action of the film. They are there watching the gang ride in, they are present at the various villages they visit, they are taking cover during the final massacre, and so on. It looks like Peckinpah is making a point about the contrast between the men who are his main characters and the innocent lives damaged by their violence – but are they really so innocent? The playing children watching the gang’s arrival turn out to be torturing animals, while in the midst of the final battle, Pike is shot twice: first by a woman, then by a child. Whether you interpret this as representing masculine violence contaminating everyone exposed to it, or simply a sign that there is really no such thing as innocence, it suggests that Peckinpah did have moral ideas he wanted to express – just not very comforting ones.

Of course, you can interpret The Wild Bunch in terms of its presentation of violence and moral theme, or simply enjoy it as a terrific, hard-edged western. It has the epic scenery and rousing soundtrack you would expect of the best of the genre, and it really is about the classic themes of the genre – what it means to live as a man, in this particular setting. It’s still a challenging film to watch, but a challenge which it’s well worth meeting.

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