Conspiracy Cinema at the IFI

The IFI is presenting a season of films this June playfully titled High Anxiety. As ‘filmnoia’ these are meant to encapsulate the post-Vietnam post-Watergate zeitgeist of chastened 1970s America. Invariably there is much idolatry of the faultless New Hollywood that was tragically killed off by Star Wars in this positioning, which regular readers of this blog will know I have little truck with. The truth is there are some great films here, some over-rated but good films, and by far the best film is the most defiantly Old Hollywood: The Manchurian Candidate, which is oblique in its violence, sexually charged without being sexual, and whip-smart and heart-breaking in its scripting; the kind of thing that Hitchcock might have directed on one of his darker days at the office. Let’s briefly trot thru the line-up of films in the season.

The Manchurian Candidate June 1st & 2nd @ 6:25pm

The pick of the bunch is the first out of the blocks. Catch this tonight if you can. A superb Laurence Harvey stars as Raymond Shaw, an unpopular soldier who unexpectedly returns as a war hero from the Korean War to the political machinations of his terrifying mother Angela Lansbury, a witch-hunting Senator’s wife. Frank Sinatra is his old army c/o trying to work out the mystery of just what happened in Korea that fills his men’s nightmares, and director John Frankenheimer ratchets up the tension as George Axelrod’s script satirically skewers McCarthyism while breaking your heart along the way.

Klute June 4th & 5th @ 4.50pm

Sex, lies, and audiotape. Widely regarded as the film that legitimised profanity as a hallmark of serious movies Alan J Pakula’s 1971 exercise in paranoia sees Donald Sutherland’s enigmatic small-town PI John Klute travel to the big city to investigate the possible involvement of his friend with Jane Fonda’s nervous call-girl, and her possible involvement in his mysterious disappearance. The sound design is extraordinary as ambient noise swamps the possibilities of recording the truth, and this arguably established the house-rules for all subsequent 1970s filmnoias. Keep an eye out for Roy Scheider’s ridiculous outfit in his cameo as a pimp.

The Parallax View June 6th @ 3.00pm & 7.05pm

Alan J Pakula again, this time Warren Beatty is the lead in a 1974 thriller about a journalist investigating the possibility that the powerful corporation the Parallax Organisation has been behind not only a political assassination allegedly carried out by a conveniently dead lone gunman, but the clean-up murders of all the witnesses of the assassination. The dazzling and famous highlight comes when Beatty is subjected to a test to see whether he fits the criteria for maladjusted misfit that Parallax likes to use for its lone gunmen. You know, people like say Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Earl Ray…

Chinatown June 8th @ 2.10pm & 6.30pm

If Roman Polanski’s film was just a little less self-regarding it would be a far better film noir. Jack Nicholson gives a terrific performance as the cock-sure PI suddenly out of his depth against Faye Dunaway’s ambiguous femme fatale and John Huston’s monstrous patriarch, and there are wonderful moments and lines throughout. The enormous self-importance of Robert Towne’s screenplay sinks the film from its potential heights but is unsurprising given that he reputedly told anyone who would listen that the success of the 3 hrs plus The Godfather was entirely attributable to his dialogue polish on one 3 minute scene…

The Conversation June 9th @ 6.45pm

Francis Ford Coppola’s small personal movie between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who finds a simple job developing into something much more disturbing, which eventually pushes him to the very limits of his sanity. Walter Murch’s sound design is extraordinary and best appreciated on a big screen, but I’ve never thought that Coppola’s script was good at making us care about the possible murder plot Hackman stumbles upon; the physical distance his camera maintains from the camera being sadly replicated as an emotional distance maintained by the audience from the characters.

Night Moves June 12th @ 5.00pm

A staple of late-night TV schedules (TV programmers can be very easily amused sometimes) this 1975 movie sees Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunite for a more subdued outing than their 1967 collaboration Bonnie & Clyde. Hackman is a defeated PI who discovers his wife in adultery, but is unable to satisfactorily resolve that situation or any other case he is working on. Perhaps a lament for the lost idealism of the New Frontier in the age of Watergate, or perhaps just another deconstruction of American myths by Penn that has aged far less well than his Bonnie & Clyde.

Rollover June 18th @ 3.15pm

Yes, Alan J Pakula for a third time. He never stopped making paranoia movies, and this 1981 effort may have had the amazing good fortune to become relevant thirty years after being dismissed as pessimistic and incomprehensible, because of the second defining event of the last decade, the credit crunch. Jane Fonda stars as a company director’s widow who romances Kris Kristofferson’s financial trouble-shooter, brought in to steady the corporation, who ends up involved in an extremely risky deal with Saudi Arabia that goes belly-up in such spectacular fashion that it leads to the meltdown of the entire Western economy.

Winter Kills June 25th & 26th @2.00p

Adapted from another book by Manchurian Candidate novelist Richard Condon, this thriller stars John Huston as Not Joe Kennedy, who after 19 years is told by his son Jeff Bridges that he finally has a good lead on who really assassinated Huston’s other son, the President Not John F Kennedy. Winter Kills had an extremely troubled production, with director William Richert having one of his producers murdered, so this is a welcome chance to belatedly see Huston chewing scenery in such a ripe scenario of what could be classified alongside Inglourious Basterds as the genre of fantasy historical revenge movies.

Missing June 25th & 26th @2.50pm

Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek star as the father and wife of an American missing in Chile, in acclaimed Greek director Costa-Gavras’ first American film. An attack on Henry Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik, here masked by hypocritical mutterings about truth, justice, and the American Way, this vividly recreates the feel of Pinochet’s Chile; a regime enabled by CIA connivance in the overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. There is a sense of kicking a dead donkey about this as Nixon was already out of power, but Costa-Gavras at least clothes his political points in empathetic flesh and blood characters.

The Goods

Jeremy Piven stars in a raucous comedy produced by Will Ferrell who also makes a cameo. Will Ferrell involved in a raucous comedy?! What won’t they think of next? Some sort of telephony device enabling you to talk to people who aren’t in the same room as you?

This is a film for people with simple expectations from comedies, like boobs, but unlike last year’s Sexdrive which turned out far funnier and subversive than it had any right to be this is a comedy which makes tasteless jokes without being hilarious or subverting stereotypes. Piven is obviously having the time of his life in the lead role of Don Ready, whose business card reads “I move cars mother****er”. Ready is the ultimate smooth-talking used-car salesman, whose speech about smoking on planes as an act of patriotism earns the applause of all the passengers before he turns the flight into the Zoo Plane from Bill Murray’s Hunter S Thompson film Where the Buffalo Roam. His associates are Ving Rhames and Anchorman stalwarts David Koechner and Kathryn Hahn. It is Ferrell’s cronies who raise concerns… Ready pimps out Brent Gage (Koechner) to the bi-curious Ben Selleck (James Brolin), owner of the car-dealership Ready is in town to save, leading to endless homophobic jokes. Meanwhile Hahn’s pouting redhead Babs Merrick spends the film lusting after a 10 year old boy who she tries to get drunk so she can ‘wrestle’ with him. The boy in question looks 30, thanks to a ‘hilarious’ medical condition (pituitary gland disorder), but acts 10. Still, obviously a comedic idea conceived before Roman Polanski got arrested.

There are good moments dotted throughout the film. There is a nice gag about the three types of girls who become strippers, Ready displays an admirable disregard for logic in his quest for a new woman and his long-lost son, and Charles Napier (Austin Powers’ General Hawk) has a number of godlike sequences including inciting a riot, and assaulting a Korean salesman in revenge for Pearl Harbour after Ready makes a speech about how their mission to save the dealership by selling the entire stock over the 4th of July weekend is the apotheosis of patriotism. Will Ferrell’s cameo is as bizarre and unfunny as his brief appearances in Starsky & Hutch and Wedding Crashers but even so he does deliver the line “Oh Christ, that dildo’s back” wonderfully well.

Piven is a talented comedy performer and he carries this film well. Director Neal Brennan has worked with Dave Chappelle but screenwriters Andy Stock and Rick Stempson are newcomers and they do not impress. This raises enough laughs in its incredibly short running time of just about 82 minutes if you’re looking for undemanding viewing on a drunken night in, but, just as its faithful adherence to clichés of comedy films make it feel longer than it is, the laughs that it raises are from profane outrageousness rather than genuine wit and will leave a nasty taste in the mouth afterwards.

2/5