The Bounty
This originated as
a David Lean project. He ultimately conceived it in two parts, and might have
spent 104 weeks filming it.
It fell to Roger
Donaldson, in eight weeks. It took John Frankenheimer six weeks to film the car
chase in Ronin. Donaldson might be said to have understood the task as
impossible, and so filmed it as a direct contrast of natural beauties vs.
Robert Bolt’s script.
On one of his 56
shooting days, he shot an insert of the Bounty’s anchor hitting
the bottom off Tahiti; he then filmed it at another angle, and used both shots
back-to-back.
I take this, and
some of the ways in which the actors are treated, to indicate a shorthand derived from Herzog (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes;
Fitzcarraldo). It seems extravagant, however.
No Way Out
Robert
Garland’s inspired screenplay generates surprising abstractions that are
visible in unusual performances like Gene Hackman’s, by means of an
invented conclusion. There is a second film here, quite different from the
first, which you see once you’ve seen it all.
Garland evidently
draws his screenplay from the novel (not John Farrow’s film) The Big
Clock by Kenneth Fearing, who wrote excellent poetry and once compared the
city to a shooting-gallery and “the only jungle in the whole wide world
where ducks are waiting for streetcars, / And hunters can be
psychoanalyzed...”
A
subtle variant of the famous Twilight Zone episode with Ed Wynn pitching
knickknacks to Murray Hamilton, or an adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon.
The car dealership has glass-block windows and razor-wire fences, the youthful
element is shaggy and overdressed, the salesmen are somewhere between Smile
and Glengarry Glen Ross, which is where Robin Williams incarnates the
trim mustachioed archetype having a bad day that amounts to a visitation.
Donaldson’s
economy with this perfect setup is to treat it as a Mickey Finn: he lets it
fizz over and subside to a canny drink. The hubbub is such that Williams is the
calm center, with Fran Drescher in more than expert support.
It’s the
slogan of the place that “nobody gets out alive”, and the
visitation serves to reverse that desperate nihilism suggestively in the manner
of Miracle on 34th Street. Admire, then, the setup, with
everything but the kitchen sink coming down on the head of the car salesman,
that proverbial and acknowledged “scum of the earth”, so that his
salvation worked out in fear and trembling is truly heroic.
Species
In this version
of Ninotchka, the girl is a genetic experiment (cf. George Pan
Cosmatos’ Leviathan) provided by aliens (who give as a sign of
their good faith a catalyst for methane energy production). She cuts a swath
through L.A. nightlife (at The Id) in search imperiously of a mate and dies in
the storm drains with a progeny of rats.
Dante’s Peak
The purpose of
the opening scene is to establish the previous experience of the vulcanologist
in Colombia and to quote the strafing scene in Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver.
Donaldson takes his
cue from John Ford and accomplishes his satire indirectly, ahead of Wiseman’s
Belfast, Maine, by filming a good deal of this with utmost incompetence.
He brings to a point the Colombian eruption, the initial earthquake and aerial rescue
at Dante’s Peak, the inspection of the town’s water supply and the
final sequence.
In a simpler
analysis than our critics are capable of making, Ibsen’s An Enemy of
the People is considered rather as in the light of Asher’s Return
to Green Acres. The key image is the NASA transmitter known as ELF, buried
underground the vulcanologist and the mayor and the latter’s two children
are rescued, the spirit of the town brought to bear upon its destruction.