The Blues Brothers
Every hack has his
top ten list of classics (7) and pseudo-classics (3), but what they really
crave is pabulum. The Blues Brothers is hardly
that, so critical opinion may safely be ignored as not to the purpose.
The technique
required is somewhat beyond Landis, notably in a dance scene accompanied by Ray
Charles. Landis triumphs with this gag: Elwood and Jake are being pursued by
half the police cars in Chicago and a country band called The Good Ole Boys and
a bunch of neo-Nazis led by Henry Gibson, they stop halfway off an unfinished
elevated expressway, burn rubber in reverse and brake, pivoting their old
police cruiser up on its back bumper and into the air (Landis cuts to a long
shot), where it somersaults and soars in the other direction over the first car
in back of them. The chase under the El is electrifying, and there is Twiggy,
and there is Cab Calloway.
Trading Places
An entirely
arbitrary experiment is devised as a wager between two old coots, who are
sufficiently sketched-in to make the Nobel bid at settling Heredity vs.
Environment a contest of Imagination and Greed, the two being wealthy
Philadelphia brothers with a seat on the commodity exchange.
The Prince and
the Pauper, but also
Arzner’s The Bride Wore Red. The subjects get wise and overthrow
the laboratory by proving the only point made definitively, that insider
trading gives an unfair advantage to speculation.
The fractured
flickers aren’t deep one by one, but cumulatively make up a tally of
characters and situation. Everything is dissected by glancing blows, the satire
of a thousand cuts. A scrounging con man out of The Threepenny Opera
slowly awakens to a sense of his station in life as unwonted as that of the
Harvard man he displaces, who learns desperation, and both acquire independence
of the footling swindlers who keep the ball rolling in place.
The fix is in,
and Yankee ingenuity undoes it. Or, as the lazy student at the back of the
class said when asked how he scored an A on his Hemingway test, “The Scum
Also Rises”.
Twilight Zone: The Movie
Landis’s
bit is a classic tale of The Twilight Zone, curiously related to “The
Encounter”. A man greatly pressured by modern life complains
obstreperously, friends and strangers mock and insult him.
But he is the Jew
in the cattle car, the rescuer of Vietnamese orphans, the
hunted man, unable to make those around him perceive it.
Into the Night
The Lord is wont
to call his favorite city a wanton wife who has gone a-whoring, and then to
send Persians as an army for punishment.
Landis’s
Biblical epic begins like one of the minor prophets and follows the pattern.
Obviously the critics work on Sunday.
The eminence of
construction parallels Sekely’s Hollow Triumph, the masterpiece of
another director who stayed up all night in the city that does sleep. D.O.A.,
of course, and the penthouse from The Long Goodbye with Abbott &
Costello Meet Frankenstein on every TV and a boudoir of corpses, also the
beach house from Altman’s film inhabited by Paul Mazursky, Roger Vadim as
a thug named Melville, and on the expressive side, the eminence of Irene Papas
as a sinister Shahrahzad.
Landis’s
neutral technique is precisely keyed to Wilshire & Rodeo at three
o’clock in the morning. What he films is the city after the location
trucks have left. Compare the night shoot on the studio back lot, with a gag
from real life. Someone I know stopped to make a phone call on Pacific Coast
Highway when James Garner walked over and explained, “it’s a
prop,” they were filming.
Goldblum and
Pfeiffer pass through a low tunnel entrance to Farnsworth’s estate, and
she stops to take a nap because she’s tired and it happens in Invasion
of the Body Snatchers.
Spies Like Us
Admirers of The
Road to Hong Kong, that rare and curious spectacle, will be delighted by
this continuation of the series as a spoof of The Man Who Would Be King
(i.e., The Road to Er-Horeb), which has everything, including the
kitchen sink and Bob Hope, as well as a fantastical Cold War military plot (a
variant of Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May situated between
Panic in the City and The Fourth Protocol) featuring secret bases
under abandoned drive-in theaters in the Antelope Valley, and more filmmakers
in bit parts than you can shake a clapstick at.
¡Three Amigos!
What seems clear
is that Landis has “played the sedulous ape” to Blake Edwards, who
in his turn has devoted himself to a very precise study of the slapstick
comedians, one of the greatest of whom is Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau
(see the bedroom scene in The Pink Panther, taken from a Three Stooges
two-reeler, What’s The Matador?).
¡Three Amigos! absorbs its stars, its sets, a great supporting cast and
a good deal of technical skill (note the photographic re-creation at the
opening) into a very touching comic variant of The Magnificent Seven,
with most of the energy directed to a mockery of Hollywood hirelings, who are
“all show and no dough,” unless (like Keaton’s projectionist)
they “get in the act.”
Innocent Blood
There’s a
certain aspect of The French Connection which needed a touch of
clarification, and this is it (much as Dog Day Afternoon received Quick
Change).
Beverly Hills Cop III
Foley at the
computerized BHPD kiosk outside the new Babylonish civic center, whose recorded
voice offers English, Spanish, and Farsi, is a complete study in itself.
His partner in
Detroit is murdered, he follows the clues to Wonder World, “the largest
private security force in America” guards the terrible secret there, in
the confines of a closed ride, The Happy Forest. Uncle Dave has nothing to do
with it, the CEO and designer of the park is missing, they’re printing
something else beside Wonder World Dollars.
“Look at
what passes for the new,” says William Carlos Williams where he speaks of
getting the news, or not.
Amid the general
excellences of this film, it will be noticed that Paramount and Universal join
in the satire as part of the scenery.
Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project
A great portrayal
of Rickles, with the faggot at Pixar like Mel Brooks’
Dark Helmet playing with his Mr. Potato Head.