NEXT SCREENINGS
This month at The Castle Cinema, Ciné-Real begins with a special tribute to the late Robert Redford, screening his classic con-movie The Sting, a dazzling tale of trickery and charm alongside Paul Newman.
The Sting - Thursday 16 October at 19:30,
The programme then takes a darker turn for Halloween, with a run of horror favourites projected on 16 mm, begining with Nicolas Roeg’s unsettling masterpiece Don’t Look Now.
Don’t Look Now - Sunday 26 October at 14:00
Then Umit's picked some of his favourite horror classics for a Halloween double bill with Wes Craven’s cult survival horror The Hills Have Eyes, followed later that same night by the slasher that started it all, Friday 13th. A perfect mix of tribute and terror, all on 16mm prints that almost feel alive.
The Hills Have Eyes - Thursday 30 October at 18:20
Friday 13th - Thursday 30 October at 21.00
The only question is, are you brave enough to watch them all?
THE STING (1973)
The Sting reunites the co-stars and the director of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," The director is George Roy Hill, and the stars are those two good old buddies Paul Newman and Robert Redford. This time, they play con men who methodically and with great ingenuity fleece a rich mark (Robert Shaw). Their methods are incredibly complex (it would take all of today's space to attempt to explain them.) A lot of the fun in the movie is watching Hill and his screenwriter, David S. Ward, keep the plot straight.
The movie is set in Chicago of the 1930s, and many of the outdoor scenes were shot here (including an effective platform shot at Union Station). We see a big, confused, lusty, brawling city where the big guys with the muscle are somehow always losing to the guys with the confidence angles. Robert Shaw never figures out what hit him. Shaw is a high-stakes gambler who first gets hooked during a poker game between New York and Chicago on the 20th Century Limited. Newman and Redford spot him, mark him and begin to manipulate him. He never figures out they even know each other, and that's part of the charm: They have to play a lot of scenes for him as complete strangers, as Redford casually lets drop that he knows the location of the biggest wire room in Chicago.
The idea, Redford explains, is to allow Shaw to win big on a fixed horse race in order to . . . but I wasn't kidding when I said the scheme is complicated. Paul Newman operates the wire room. Or should we say it appears to be operated by Newman. Or, more accurately, it appears to be a wire room, because the entire operation is simply a theatrical set, and everybody in the room is an actor, and the "broadcasts" from the track actually are being made up by an announcer in the back room.
The movie has a nice, light-fingered style to it. Hill gently kids the 1930s with his slight exaggerations of fashions and styles. He tells his story episodically, breaking the movie down into the various plateaus of the con game. And he's awfully good at maintaining a kind of off-balance pacing; we can never quite pin Newman and Redford down. They're always sort of angling into scenes, making enigmatic statements under their breath and staying at least a step ahead of us. Hill's visual style is oblique; instead of stationing his actors in the frame and recording the action, he seems to sneak up on it. Newman and Redford almost seem on their way to another movie. If that sounds like a criticism, it's not meant as one: The style here is so seductive and witty it's hard to pin down. It's like nothing else I've seen by Hill, and at times, it almost reminds me of Jacques Tati crossed with Robert Altman. It's good to get a crime movie more concerned with humor and character than with blood and gore; here's one, as we say, for the whole family.
Don't Look Now (1973)
The acclaimed adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story remains a visually immersive descent and a chilling portrayal of loss
In the opening sequence of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a little girl in a red raincoat drowns in a pond in the English countryside, as her parents are nestled comfortably in a nearby estate. Roeg cuts frantically between the girl tooling around the pond in her boots and her father John (Donald Sutherland) at work inside, examining a projected image of an Italian cathedral he intends to restore. The cutting works as suspense, leaving the audience utterly helpless to stop this inevitable tragedy from happening, but it has a much more sophisticated agenda than goosing our emotions. Through color and montage effects, tied to shots like a spill that bleeds over John’s slide, Roeg dramatizes the present and predicts the future all at once, signaling the heartbreak and terror to comeTime collapses in Don’t Look Now. The past and future are folded into the present. Anyone who has seen Roeg’s work from this peak period of his career – this film was preceded by the sensual Outback adventure Walkabout and the elliptical science fiction of The Man Who Fell to Earth – will recognize his intuitive, semi-experimental editing and how much it pushed the boundaries of commercial cinema. Yet there’s something special about the way certain patterns and visual motifs keep cycling through this film, a reminder that grief can strike at any time for John and his wife Laura (Julie Christie), no matter how far they run from it.
Based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story, the film moves quickly from the girl’s death to the couple relocating in Venice, where John has accepted a commission to work on the church. Roeg doesn’t specify how much time has passed, but it hasn’t been enough. John has thrown himself into this project to distract him from his guilt and grief, but Laura marinates in it, popping pills and looking overwhelmed with sadness. That makes her vulnerable to the influence of two elderly sisters, one a blind seer who claims to have a psychic connection with the deceased girl, which changes Laura’s mood. Meanwhile, a spate of murders are bringing a particular menace to the city’s canals and catacombs.
Staging a haunting in Venice 50 years before Kenneth Branagh, Roeg and his ace cinematographer, Anthony Richmond, convert a romantic city into a gothic nightmare in winter, emptied of tourists and conspicuously overcast, with an emphasis on the rot chipping away at the façades. It’s a cliche to call a city a “character”, but Roeg certainly makes Venice a presence, hostile to these outsiders who are trying so desperately to find their footing in a new environment. There’s also a sense of the uncanny that creeps into the picture, especially for John, who is experiencing more premonitions of the kind that struck him in the moments before the drowning. The vibes in this city are decidedly not impeccable.
And yet, like a desert flower poking through concrete, Don’t Look Now also happens to include one of the sexiest love scenes in film history. During a rare break in the clouds, when Laura’s encounter with the seer gives her a temporary peace, she and John share a lusty hotel-room session that was remarkable, then and now, for its frankness, especially with actors of Sutherland and Christie’s stature. But in keeping with the film’s temporal loops, Roeg cuts between vigorous sex acts and the post-coital scene of John and Laura getting dressed for dinner. Twenty-five years later, Steven Soderbergh, a huge Roeg admirer, would modify the sequence for his own famously steamy rendezvous between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight.
The bliss is short-lived. Though John does see a diminutive figure in a red raincoat that reminds him of his daughter, his fitful extrasensory perception is hard to comprehend and may relate to his future as much his past. He attempts to throw himself into his work, but it’s unsatisfying and dangerous, and in the meantime he’s mostly detached from his wife, who seems to be chasing phantoms. The two are hung up in a kind of unsettling limbo that Roeg reinforces through recurring images that create a sense of déjà vu and a creeping psychological deterioration. The film may not be a supernatural thriller per se, but the action does seem dictated by forces that are mysterious and beyond comprehension, something much crueler than fate.
The mesmeric quality of Don’t Look Now has the effect of lulling the audience into a stupor, as if the patterns its characters are stuck in will repeat themselves forever. After all, John and Laura cannot shake the ache of losing their only child and the world seems to conspire to make sure those memories are always accessible and on-the-surface. And so it comes as an extra shock when Roeg pulls off a climactic jump-scare for the ages, when John finally catches up to the child-like figure in the red raincoat and the timelines converge in a breath-catching burst of violence.
Yet the way Roeg links this moment in Venice to the drowning in the opening sequence makes Don’t Look Now feel like a closed loop, an inescapable plague of death and loss. For as much as du Maurier’s story provides in otherworldly creepiness, the film’s insight into the nature of grief is its most lasting quality and among its most teasingly enigmatic. John and Laura are trying to process an incomprehensible loss and they carry an ache with them that asserts itself as acute pain at unexpected moments. That’s the real-life horror at the heart of this supernatural tale.
The Hills have eyes (1977)
Following his unexpectedly successful debut The Last House On The Left, Wes Craven ended up convinced to stay within the genre and cook up a worthy follow-up that would cement his stature as one of the up-and-coming voices in horror. Interestingly enough, he was initially quite hesitant because he feared he would paint himself into a corner. Little did he know that the corner he was painting himself into would be looked at with adulation by generations of filmmakers. That’s because similarly to George A. Romero, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper – his contemporaries – he had a knack for distilling social anxieties into his stories and elevating what could otherwise be disposable exploitation films to become cultural icons.
Craven’s sophomore feature, The Hills Have Eyes fits this description perfectly even though its genesis was, shall we say, tumultuous. It did not originate organically as an idea Craven was desperate to write down, but rather as an answer to a challenge from his producer to follow up his debut with something other than a Grimm fairy tale adaptation Craven wanted to make instead. This is actually quite an interesting wrinkle because it testifies to the likely possibility that a lot of socially-awake horror films of the time (or even in general) are not engineered to reflect the zeitgeist of the era. They are simply vessels for inspiration, wherever it may come from. Their thematic messaging is serendipitous and organically reflective of what the filmmakers were carrying in their souls at the time as well.
Therefore, it is equally valid to see The Hills Have Eyes as a direct response to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which Craven was a fan of. Notably, this could also be read as an instance of circular auto-inspiration-by-proxy because the rogue spirit of The Last House On The Left clearly carried over to Hooper’s film as well. However, the well of inspiration is much deeper than that and encompasses John Ford’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and an obscure Scottish legend about a clan of cannibals. At one point, the film was supposed to have a post-apocalyptic slant as well, which filtered partially into the finished product anyway, albeit implicitly.
Taken together, this soup of references added to something more than the sum of its parts because The Hills Have Eyes is not just a retort to Hooper’s masterpiece, but something else entirely. Although it carries distinct elements of structural and aesthetic symmetry with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Craven’s film taps into a completely separate stream of thematic anxiety permeating the society at large.
Hooper’s film could easily be read as a critique of the hippie culture and a veiled cautionary tale suggesting that young progressive liberals would be literally eaten alive by the raw and unbridled energy inhabiting America’s hinterlands. In a way, this is a variation on the melody carried by Craven’s own debut as well. The Hills Have Eyes circumvents any allegations of copycattery almost by accident by retaining a distinct post-apocalyptic tone. Even though the narrative template is essentially symmetrical to the one found in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the film immediately assumes its own unique atmosphere by paying attention to its setting. For all intents and purposes, Craven’s picture is not really set in America the viewers would immediately recognize. There is no sight of any signs of civilized life and the eerily unsettling desert landscape (that also seems to be effectively all-encompassing) has more in common with an alien planet. This film could effectively take place on Mars and nobody would be able to tell the difference. And this is exactly where its genius lies hidden because it’s not set on Mars.
As a result, this simplistic tale of ambush and survival becomes saturated with a cutting politically-relevant tone. In contrast to Hooper’s dandy liberals, Craven’s picture-perfect family is not assailed by a family of hillbillies who just happen to be cannibals. People they encounter are affected by the landscape they dwell in – the radioactive wasteland left behind by the US Government’s testing of nuclear weapons. Hence, The Hills Have Eyes becomes much more than a genre-elevated take on the culture wars America was grappling with. It is an incidental commentary on the fears which have at that point already become internalized by the global society – fears of nuclear armageddon.
It must be remembered that ever since 1949 – the year when USSR gained nuclear capabilities – the entirety of human civilization had lived with a gun pressed against its temple. After nearly twenty-five years and a handful of near misses, the most important of which was the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis, this anxiety recoiled into a fully internalized invisible fear. The status quo which, by the way, still continues to this day is effectively challenged in Craven’s film. Peace and prosperity don’t come for free and this thematic conversation is reflected in the form of a visceral conflict between a family of peace-loving postcard Americans and a tribe of deformed savages who want to literally eat their babies. Although this message is skillfully hidden beneath the primary narrative which also happens to keep the viewer occupied with the horror of torture and survival, it is nonetheless there. The Hills Have Eyes easily functions as an elevated cautionary tale about a very distinct possibility that the technological advancements which gave Americans nuclear weaponry will not save them from demise. Battered by radiation, the land will have its revenge eventually and the very people who have benefited from the serenity afforded by the nuclear deterrent will end up cannibalized by a sub-class of humans they don’t even know exist.
Thus, Wes Craven’s sophomore feature proudly builds on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, infuses its organic message critiquing class divides and obliviousness of the entitled upper classes with a more far-reaching commentary about the trajectory of the human experiment. What is even more frightening, The Hills Have Eyes remains relevant today, forty-three years past its release, because we still live under the gun of potential nuclear holocaust, our societies are ravaged by tribal polarization and entitled liberal elites continue to live in blissful ignorance of a very distinct possibility that unless something changes, a day will come when masses of disenfranchised savages will rock up on their doorstep with a desire to eat their children.
Friday 13th (1980)
The film that kicked off the franchise sees swimsuit-clad young adults picked off one by one in gruesome fashion at the site of an unsolved double murder.
Sean S Cunningham’s teen horror classic from 1980 is now rereleased: this is the original movie, the ancestral prequel or origin myth machine-tooled to create a franchise, that readies the noisome and mostly offscreen figure of Jason Voorhees as an almost supernatural surviving villain of the future series – although this went against the idea of his supposed death in this film as the premise for a more rational psychological thriller. This franchise clearly arose from the wild popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween, although Friday the 13th openly borrows from a much more venerable model, Hitchcock’s Psycho, in the screeching Herrmannesque strings and the oedipal complex behind the horror – although this one being rather ingeniously showed from the point of view of the mother, Mrs Pamela Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer.
The action of the movie now seems markedly, even experimentally slow, as the summer camp counsellors (that is, the young adult supervisors hired to look after the children) show up early on the fateful date to help with last-minute building and decorating work on the recently re-opened Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey. The site is an Edenic paradise but notorious for being the location of an unsolved 1958 murder of two teenagers who were having sex; this outrage is shown in flashback from the killer’s point of view.
The young people in the present day (including a fresh-faced Kevin Bacon) fulfil their narrative function by hanging around in swimsuits or underwear until they are picked off one by one, generally with gruesome prosthetics work: seeping slash wounds on the throat and a decapitation revealing a horribly meaty circular stump. And of course there is the “final girl”: the character who is revealed to have artistic skills and a more substantial inner life, and whose final ordeal takes place on the rippling lake itself. Plus there is broad comedy in the figure of Crazy Ralph, played by Walt Gorney, a cranky old-timer who hangs around predicting disaster for everyone involved in Camp Crystal Lake like Pte Frazer in Dad’s Army, telling the incredulous kids: “You’re all doomed!”
There’s some bizarre fun in this (almost innocent) film, but maybe the fanbase are the ones to get most out of a revisit.
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