I’ve got a pitch for you: QUICK CHANGE meets LOST IN TRANSLATION. Only our movie is nothing like that at all, really. You’d have to flip the premise of the first, and turn the second inside out. In QUICK CHANGE, Bill Murray played a depressive bank robber. In LOST IN TRANSLATION, he played a depressive movie star abroad in Japan.
In real life, Bill Murray was reportedly walking down the street when this happened:
The man in question had just robbed the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, which is the largest bank in Japan. The distraction provided by Bill Murray’s presence reportedly proved to be enough for police to apprehend the bank robber.
This may sound improbable to you, but do not underestimate the power of the presence of Bill Murray.
I have only been in the presence of Bill Murray once (that I know of), and it was on a press junket. Given the opportunity to ask Bill Murray a question, I shut down entirely. It wasn’t that I was nervous. It was that the decision was an impossible task for me. How could I narrow down all the questions that I have for Bill Murray to just one? There is so much that we can ask Bill Murray. God help you if you make it about GHOSTBUSTERS 3, son, because I won’t.
So while some Bill Murray stories sound like fictionalized rumors that become urban legends, I can absolutely believe that a Japanese bank robber would stop in his tracks at the sight of Bill Murray. It is a momentous decision, to become so desperate or so bold as to break the laws of society and venture into a bank to forcefully seize money not one’s own, but it is that much more a momentous occasion to encounter Bill Murray in the wild. One must accept each moment as it comes.
You know why this is showing up here now. This is here because, try as I might, there was no way I was going to be able to let 2012 pass without any comment on THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. That will be up soon enough.
But first, my thoughts on 2008′s THE DARK KNIGHT, since it was one of the first movies I ever wrote about online. As far as the public record is concerned, I never have gotten around to writing anything about 2005′s BATMAN BEGINS, though maybe I should.
What follows is a condensed version of two separate posts I wrote on the same movie — you’ll see as you read it how, even in 2008, I was trepidatious about voicing any reservations about such a critical and popular prize-hog. As some have since found out the hard way, my initial instincts weren’t too far off the mark.
People were in a frenzy over these movies before they even arrived in theaters. And then things got even worse.
For some reason, while many people seemed to be comparatively lukewarm on BATMAN BEGINS (I loved it, by the way), there are many who seem to take THE DARK KNIGHT and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES even more seriously than they do those two presidential elections that happened in 2008 and 2012. Let’s put it this way: I’ve never met an “undecided voter” when it comes to Nolan-Batman fans.
Maybe it’s fitting that fearsome madness should erupt around a character who primarily exists as a storytelling prism by which to examine madness and fear. But he’s also a character whose best stories involve conquering those twin demons, and that, I think, is why he means so much to so many of us.
So these are my opinions about some Batman movies. That’s all they are. You can agree or you can disagree. I’m sure I’ll hear about it either way.
Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Tommy “Tiny” Lister.
About THEDARK KNIGHT, an ocean has been said. My pontifications may be just another drop in that ocean, but it’s a pretty damn sincere drop. I love Batman. Have done ever since I was shinbone-high. This is a character close to my heart, so what the hell, here it is, my two cents on THE DARK KNIGHT:
Mostly, I totally loved it. There were a lot of great moments, and when I say great, I mean astounding. I can’t recommend strongly enough that this one be seen on IMAX, where the full-screen city establishing shots and most of the action sequences reclaim that overused word “awesome”. And hard as it is to do nowadays, ideally one should go in knowing as little about the plot as possible, because this movie has the power of surprise. I did as good a job as I could do of blocking out such knowledge prior to the fact, but it wasn’t easy. The pre-release thunder was deafening.
And it’s great.
But it’s not perfect.
It comes so close. THE DARK KNIGHT is the most like Icarus of all superhero films; it just almost touches the sun.
We all know by now what’s so incredible and superlative and timeless about this movie – Heath Ledger’s uniquely intense and committed portrayal of the Joker, about which I can write absolutely nothing that hasn’t already been said by more influential writers; the portrayal of Batman by Christian Bale, just as good yet way underrated by comparison; Wally Pfister’s crystal clear cinematography, even more breathtaking when seen on IMAX screens; the deceptively simple, sharp production design by Nathan Crowley; the fantastic score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard – a marvel of simplicity with its ominous theme for the lead character (that cresting wave of just two notes) and its even more ominous theme for his nemesis (that dirge of just ONE note) – and of course, the overall vision of Christopher Nolan, a director uncommonly interested in big ideas and engaging the widest possible audience with them.
By all rights this should be my favorite comic book movie ever, and in many of its many incredible moments, it almost seizes that title. But the flaws hold it back, for me. They are sizable flaws or I would not have honed in on them. There are three in total.
1. Two-Face coming up out of nearly nowhere.
Everybody noticed this problem; that’s how you know it’s a problem. The movie did a great job setting up valiant district-attorney Harvey Dent’s rise and fall, but then abruptly fast-forwarded him into the murderous Two-Face in the third act and [spoiler] killed him off. Why? Because somebody had to die. SOMEBODY had to pay for [spoiler] what happened to Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Obviously there was initially a plan to keep the Joker in these movies, so when real life events cruelly made that impossible, it was apparently deemed necessary by the powers that be (whether they be the Nolans or the higher-ups) that the other major villain had to die. This is part of the weird, hypocritically-puritanical morality of big-budget Hollywood movies. For some reason, the vast majority of these major comic book movies don’t seem to be narratively satisfied until they have blood; until they kill off a villain at the end. The Jack Nicholson Joker, the Danny DeVito Penguin, the Willem Dafoe Green Goblin, the James Franco Green Goblin, the Alfred Molina Doctor Octopus, and so on — all killed off, even at the weighty expense of the merchandising opportunities of the future.
So now this new Batman franchise has the terrible conundrum of having killed off a well-developed villain character onscreen, when the remaining well-developed villain character survives onscreen but has been tragically lost offscreen. (Don’t get me started on how awful that situation is.) And now the fans are heatedly debating which villain from the fifty-years-stale rogues gallery should be dusted off for the inevitable sequel.
My humble suggestion?
Forget Catwoman.
Forget the Riddler.
Forget the Penguin.
PLEASE forget the Penguin.
Forget them all, and let the Nolans create an entirely new villain. You know they can do it. They made Ra’s Al Ghul compelling, and who besides the most devoted fans and the working comics folk remembered him before BATMAN BEGINS? A new villain is the answer. The most important character in this series has always been Batman, and the first two movies have been built around him. The next one should follow suit.
2. The vacuum where a love interest should be.
The other major problem with THE DARK KNIGHT, and I hate to say it because I really have liked her in other movies, is Maggie Gyllenhaal. The character is what it needs to be, but the performance is a dead zone. If the smart, sarcastic, lively Maggie Gyllenhaal from STRANGER THAN FICTION had shown up for THE DARK KNIGHT, than there wouldn’t be a problem. But here she seemed entirely disengaged, apathetic, bored. I didn’t believe for a minute that both Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent would be so into this dull woman, and I didn’t feel her loss to be as tragic as it very much needed to be. On a narrative level, this movie needs the audience to fall in love with Rachel Dawes so that when we lose her, we understand why it sends Batman on the path he takes at the end. In that role, neither actress who’s played it has cut the mustard.
Why do these comic book movies have so much trouble finding an equally compelling female lead? Strong man need strong woman. Would we care as much about STAR WARS if Carrie Fisher didn’t bring cojones to Princess Leia? I don’t think so. Don’t cram a love story into my Batman movie if you can’t make me care about the lady involved.
Without that, no, you don’t have the greatest comic book movie ever. You have a very good comic book movie, but not The Greatest-Ever Comic Book Movie. That’s hopefully still to come.
Do I have a suggestion? Yes. Just off the top of my head: Michelle Monaghan continues to strike me as an easy answer to a whole lot of problems.
3. The mumbo-jumbo.
This is a tough argument to make, because it’s one of the things I appreciate so much about the Nolan approach to these movies. These are films built to house expansive ideas, about fear and heroism and governance. I respect that. It’s a far nobler thing, in every way, than the standard overheated empty-headed blockbuster. In a world of TRANSFORMERS movies, I can’t believe I’m about to complain about a movie being too smart.
But it gets to be a little much, I think. For my tastes, anyway. There’s SO much talk, so much speechifying. It’s not as if the terrific action scenes don’t make up for it, of course, but I feel like the movie is weighted down with a lot of weighty talk. Nowhere is this clearer than the prison barge scene, where the Joker threatens to blow up one of two ferries, one carrying civilians and one carrying inmates. After several fraught moments of dramatic pauses and much debate, the inmates make the first move to act — but properly. This is all very well-written and I do get what Nolan is trying to do — to portray the city of Gotham and its people as much as their caped protector. But, to me, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a long, very talky sequence in the middle of what, at its core, had better be an action movie.
In this movie, everybody’s got a whole lot to say about masks and capes and chaos and order and family and legacy — does anybody else feel like they’re auditing an undergraduate lecture in moral philosophy being given a guy in a Batman costume, or is it just me?
In light of these three not-minor complaints, I quietly suggest that this DARK KNIGHT is not exactly the perfect movie I heard tell of before I went in to see it, that best-of-year, best-of-decade, flawless masterpiece to be raved over for the last couple weeks and onwards until eternity. It’s a strong B-plus. It’s a flickering A-minus. There’s just a little bit of all-the-way excellence missing there. However: I do still feel that if we are yet to see a perfect Batman movie, Chris Nolan will be the one to deliver it. This time around though, my eyes, mind, and butt, and the A-plus grade of the movie itself, coulda used about twenty minutes shorn from the run-time.
And I’m going to stop there for now, because we’re on the internet after all. Here on the internet, people get threatened with death, or worse, for writing less offensive sentiments than the simply suggestion that THE DARK KNIGHT may not actually be the be-all and end-all of superhero movies.
Trust me when I say that I do not fear death, but nor do I much see the need to, before my time, invite death over for a chat about politics.
I haven’t posted much in a while. I alluded to the reasons here, in the post which so far represents the unintentional culmination of my October horror column (which I still hope to resurrect in some form before years’ end. This damn optimism will never die!)
The point is, sometimes life gets in the way. And sometimes life refuses to get out of the way. And occasionally, life mercilessly pummels your face in.
And I’ve certainly been thinking plenty. I’ve got enough thoughts stored up for several volumes worth of reviews and essays. There’s a lot of writing to come from me.
But one thing I’ve been thinking about is a particular movie I watched last year. I added VIVA RIVA! to my 2011 top ten list without any idea that a year later, it might have any parallel to my own life. Quick synopsis: A gasoline shortage in the Congo leads to violence and distress. Quick synopsis of the past month: A gasoline shortage in the Tri-State Area leads to violence and distress. I’m not saying we had it worse here than they have it in a third-world country. I’m only saying that it feels a lot less foreign to me. Hurricane Sandy gave us a small taste of what is commonplace in many places in the rest of the world. Having seen neighbors getting into screaming matches and fistfights over a tank of gas, I’ve had my perspective shifted just a little bit. It wasn’t scary to me, though it was to some (understandably). It was just weird. Strip away a few modern-day conveniences and you start to learn some harsh truths — and surprising virtues — about people.
Anyway here’s the trailer, and then what I wrote in 2011:
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VIVA RIVA! (Congo, released in U.S. in 2011)
What It’s About:
In a community where gasoline is a precious commodity, a devil-may-care rogue thief (Patsha Bey Mukuna) rips off a gas shipment from some very bad men, then runs into trouble when he falls for a local gangster’s girlfriend (Manie Malone.)
Why I Love It:
Because it’s electric.
Before I get to what makes this film so thrilling on a cultural level, let me start out by promising that it’s a solid crime film no matter what part of the world it’s from. The plot relies on familiar noir tropes – the femme fatale, the murderous nemesis, the doomed hero – but where the story lacks in originality, the film more than makes up for it in atmosphere and intensity.
This is a low-budget movie shot entirely practically in a real community using primarily local talent, which gives the movie an added urgency and veracity. This isn’t some ROAD WARRIOR future where gangs battle over gasoline — this is really happening in the world right now. Imagine that; imagine the gasoline we Americans so take for granted being the currency that believably powers criminal enterprise in crowded, poverty-stricken villages.
But even amidst all that urgency and desperate verisimilitude, there’s also a harsh beauty to this movie. The nightlife in Kinshasa feels vivid and seeped in detail and danger, and the sexuality in this movie has a fierceness and forthrightness rarely seen in European cinema, let alone puritanical American movies. If there were rankings based on 2011′s most assertive (and acrobatic) cunnilingus scenes, this movie would have that position licked.
But it’s not just honest sex that makes this film so intriguing. VIVA RIVA! serves as nothing less than the ignition of a nation’s film industry. On the DVD, director Djo Tunda Wa Munga talks about how he specifically designed the film’s plot to be familiar and genre-based because there aren’t a whole lot of Congolese films out there, and he wanted this one to be as accessible as possible in order to gather the international appetite for more films from the Congo. With VIVA RIVA!, we’re seeing an entire film industry start from the ground up, and that’s an exciting thing to watch.
I wrote about the new movie END OF WATCH over at Daily Grindhouse. It’s a good movie, worth a look if you have the nerves for it, and I tried to do it justice.
Abel Ferrara is a controversial cult director who is probably best known for his most notorious movie, Bad Lieutenant. That’s the one that’s supposed to be super-violent and is widely-feared for prominently featuring full-frontal Harvey Keitel. I’ve never felt the need to voluntarily submit myself to that image, but I have seen Ferrara’s nearly-as-infamous film, King Of New York. And I liked that one, but not nearly as much as the Notorious B.I.G. did. (Biggie called himself “the black Frank White,” after Christopher Walken’s character.) Ferrara also directed the pilot to Michael Mann’s excellent 1980s TV series, Crime Story.
Knowing all that, though, I still didn’t know what to expect of The Funeral.
Turns out it’s a New York crime story, set in the 1930s, and centers around three first-generation Italian brothers. The brothers are played by Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, and Vincent Gallo. Their father appears briefly in flashbacks, but I have to assume that there were three very different mothers with the incongruous mugs on that trio.
The three are all members of a local crime family, but Walken is contemplative and a family man, whereas Penn also runs a bar, and Gallo sneaks out to radical union meetings. At the outset of the film, Gallo is in a coffin, and his two older brothers don’t yet know the identity of his killer. (Don’t read Wikipedia’s entry on this movie, by the way; they have it wrong.)
The Funeral is an increasingly interesting movie as it progresses, because while it starts as a loosely-structured collection of scenes – many of which not dissimilar to familiar mob movie clichés – it delves deep into the Walken and Penn characters and comes up with very much worthwhile results. Chris Penn, in particular, makes the movie absolutely necessary to watch, as he takes the traditional Sonny Corleone hothead character and turns it into a heartbreaking, horrific portrayal of real mental illness. It’s an amazing showcase for a much-missed character actor. And who knew the guy had such an incredible singing voice?
In fact, the acting bench is stacked way deep with great character actors. Annabella Sciorra, who also produced along with Russell Simmons (!), plays Walken’s wife. Isabella Rossellini plays Penn’s. Gretchen Mol is Gallo’s widow. Benicio Del Toro has a substantial early role as a rival gangster who may or may not have been behind the trigger. John Ventimiglia, the never-fortunate Artie Bucco from The Sopranos, plays Walken’s consigliere. Victor Argo, a great New York actor who Scorsese fans will immediately recognize, has a brief role as a spooky enforcer. Frank John Hughes (Wild Bill from Band Of Brothers) has a similar role. David Patrick Kelly (you know him from The Warriors) has one great scene as a union speaker. Edie Falco (Carmella!) has a cameo in there. So does Joey G (Vito!).
So yeah, if you’re a character-actor aficionado like I am, The Funeral is like a piñata full of goodness. David Chase obviously saw it.
I ended up digging on The Funeral, but I’m not sure if I’m a newly-converted Ferrara fan, exactly. Then again, Ferrara’s upcoming project, Jekyll and Hyde, was announced not too long ago, and it’s supposedly a re-envisioning of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Forest Whitaker as Jekyll and 50 Cent as Hyde. I will absolutely watch that movie.
For all those who enjoyed Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES, and even those who didn’t, here’s a somewhat lesser-known treat: John Milius’s DILLINGER, from 1973, starring Warren Oates as bankrobber John Dillinger and Ben Johnson as lawman Melvin Purvis.
There have been countless cinematic treatments of the Dillinger story, but this one is one of the most purely entertaining. It was written and directed by John Milius, a contemporary of Spielberg’s and Scorsese’s whose work is a bit of a fascination of mine. Milius co-wrote a DIRTY HARRY sequel (MAGNUM FORCE) and some scenes in JAWS, and directed the first (and best) CONAN THE BARBARIAN movie, among other things. He was also the inspiration for John Goodman’s character in THE BIG LEBOWSKI. So anything from the mind of Milius is worth parsing, to me.
As Michael Mann’s newer Dillinger movie illustrates, a cops-and-robbers flick is always at its best when it’s about two equal but opposing forces. Milius’s movie has two incredible character actors centering his Dillinger film. Warren Oates is best known to younger generatiosn as Sgt. Hulka from STRIPES, but in the decades before that, he built up a stunning career of dirty, often ugly character actor performances. He’s sure not the prettier Dillinger that Johnny Depp created, but equally compelling.
Against him is the eternal Ben Johnson, the definition of a veteran actor who worked for the majority of the twentieth century. Johnson was a large and amiable figure in literally tons of movies, mostly Westerns, mostly for John Ford. He’s not prettier than Bale, but he smiles way more often. Casting Oates and Johnson against each other is as watchable and as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. For fans of great movies, the casting has an added punch since only a couple years earlier, in 1969, Oates and Johnson played the marauding Gorch brothers in Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece, THE WILD BUNCH. That cinematic memory only informs the experience of watching DILLINGER – to fans of THE WILD BUNCH, DILLINGER may carrya vague feeling of brother-against-brother.
Like Mann’s movie thirty (!) years later, the earlier DILLINGER film is full of still-recognizable supporting actors, such as singer Michelle Phillips as Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette, Harry Dean Stanton as Homer Van Meter, Clint Eastwood regular (and Juliette’s dad) Geoffrey Lewis as Pete Pierpont, and Cloris Leachman as Anna Sage, the low-down whore who sells Dillinger out. Oh, and a very young Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson. You haven’t really enjoyed a manly gangster picture until you’ve enjoyed the spectacle of Warren Oates smacking around Richard Dreyfuss.
As that aforementioned pleasure implies, this is definitely more of a guy’s guy movie; whereas PUBLIC ENEMIES was constructed much more as a romantic story. But for fans of guy’s guy movies, DILLINGER is almost a necessity, and anyone at all who enjoyed PUBLIC ENEMIES will find the similarities and contrasts to be compelling.
DILLINGER is tough to find on DVD and rarely screens anywhere, but Netflix occasionally has it. Sometimes it’s available, sometimes it’s not. (Netflix and DILLINGER apparently have a stormy relationship.) Well worth the effort.
This piece was originally written and posted on July 7th, 2009. I stand by my recommendation.
LAWLESS is a couple weeks old now, but it’s still way worth talking about. It’s not to be confused with FLAWLESS, the Philip-Seymour-Hoffman-in-a-dress movie, nor is it to be confused with the upcoming DREDD movie, which as we all know is guaranteed to have a surplus of law.
Check out the trailer, it made LAWLESS travel that much higher on my want-to-see-now meter:
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Now, to read what I had to say about LAWLESS after seeing it (spoiler warning: it’s a lot of very nice things), you’ll have to click over to Daily Grindhouse:
On the poster above, Quentin Tarantino describes MILANO CALIBRO 9 as “Il piu grande noir italiano de tutti i tempi”, which translates roughly to “This movie is fucking incredible.” He also probably threw the N-word in there somewhere, but we try not to do that here.
The point is that Fernando DiLeo’s 1972 crime thriller MILANO CALIBRO 9, also known sometimes more simply as CALIBER 9, is a really, really cool crime flick, in a down-and-dirty and completely under-recognized way. It’s about a career tough-guy who gets out of prison and is pressured by his old gang into revealing the location of money he may or may not know about. The mob doesn’t believe him, the cops don’t believe him, even his fine-ass girlfriend (German actress Barbara Bouchet) doesn’t believe him. Things get ugly. That’s more than you need to know or care about the plot — not that the story isn’t worthwhile, but this movie has plenty else to recommend it besides its scriptwriting, I think. The camerawork by Di Leo’s regular DP Franco Villa is aggressive, visceral, even a little sloppy, which makes the whole enterprise have the feel of a punch to the face in a dive bar. The orchestral score Luis Enríquez Bacalov and the band Osanna is, most notably in the main theme, reminiscent of Morricone but with a bizarrely-awesome prog-rock twist.
It’s somewhere between documentary-style cinema-art and a brash, boistrous knuckle-dragging guy’s guy’s movie. Just check out the opening sequence, which starts on a blatant phallic symbol and progresses into a flurry of slugfests, dynamite. and the least relaxing shave ever:
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You may notice from that sequence that, no offense, but most of the guys in this movie look a lot like like apes. It has a lot to do with Di Leo’s apparent ambition with the picture, to portray crime as it probably should be portrayed – violent and animalistic and not as appealing as most movies paint it.
The lead actor, Gastone Moschin, who plays the excellently-named Ugo Piazza, is like a cross between Steve McQueen and Bruce Willis, but with a brow that weighs a ton. Outside of a role in THE GODFATHER PART 2, he hasn’t been in many movies you’d have heard of, but he’s a very striking-looking dude. Most movies wouldn’t think past casting a guy with this kind of looks (handsome but brutish) as a henchman, but it’s totally refreshing and probably necessary to have him as a protagonist. Pretty-boys have little place in badass crime films — you want a guy who looks like he can scrap.
Mario Adorf plays the gregarious but vicious and explosive Rocco Musco as a kind of proto-Billy Batts. Adorf was apparently Peckinpah’s first choice to play Mapache in THE WILD BUNCH, which tells you all you need to know about what this dude brings to the table. Rocco is loud and obnoxious but oddly charismatic and you sure won’t forget his face. Or his mustache.
Lionel Stander plays the ominous, malevolent crime boss. Stander was an American actor with a long television career, but he played his share of roles in Italian cinema — notably in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Lionel Stander, like Ernest Borgnine or Willem Dafoe, is the kind of actor who is impossible to imagine was ever a baby.
The cops in this crime flick, the detectives on Ugo’s case, are given almost equal screen time to the cons, although they hardly get to leave the station. They’re still compelling, played as they are by a couple of terrific journeymen actors who are well-remembered by fans of Italian cinema from the era. Luigi Pistilli is probably best known as Tuco’s brother the priest in THE GOOD, THE BAD &THE UGLY, but he also played against Lee Van Cleef in DEATH RIDES A HORSE, had a key role in the unforgettable spaghetti THE GREAT SILENCE, and also starred in the great Enzo Castellari’s EAGLES OVER LONDON. Meanwhile, Frank Wolff was an American who worked with Corman and Hellman before moving to Italy. Like Pistilli, he worked with Sergio Leone (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) and Sergio Corbucci (THE GREAT SILENCE), in the latter movie providing some much-needed sardonic comic relief as he does also in CALIBER 9.
It’s a great cast, and a rambunctious, energetic movie overall. The ending in particular strikes like a loud howl and a gut-shot. Quite honestly my comfort zone is Italian westerns and not Italian crime films (outside of VIOLENT CITY, STREET LAW, and REVOLVER, all fantastic), but this one, widely-regarded as a high-water mark of the genre, has compelled me to get my homework done.
MILANO CALIBRO 9 has been screening all month at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.
Assault On Precinct 13 is screening this weekend as the IFC Center’s midnight movie. It’s a stone-cold must-see if you’ve never had the pleasure, and a terrific choice to watch in the middle of the night, its most natural habitat.
With respect to fans of Dark Star, Carpenter’s first major credit as director, Assault On Precinct 13 is the first true expression of Carpenter’s individualistic style and worldview. (Dark Star was a collaboration with Dan O’Bannon, an auteur of horror and science-fiction in his own right.) Carpenter wrote, directed, edited, and scored Assault On Precinct 13. Virtually all of his best-known and best-regarded works have seen him acting in two or more of these capacities. Assault On Precinct 13 is often underrated and overshadowed due to the massive success and influence of Carpenter’s next movie, Halloween, but it’s a significant film – ballsy, brutal, and still ridiculously entertaining.
The movie begins with a minimalist credit sequence — red titles on a black screen, with Carpenter’s own electronic score emerging out from the darkness. The second that score kicks in, you’re on notice that you’re inside a movie with its own vibe. It’s a horror-movie score, which is striking to this day because the movie is an urban crime film, a cops-and-crooks-with-guns action-thriller. At the time, these kinds of movies starred the likes of Clint Eastwood and Richard Roundtree and Charles Bronson — the music was more upbeat and stirring, done by composers like Lalo Schifrin and Jerry Fielding, or by R&B artists in the blaxploitation genre. You’re getting the news from your ears even before your eyes and your brain — this movie is different.
The story starts in with a very deliberate pace. Carpenter has suggested since that maybe the pacing is too deliberate, that maybe he’d move things along quicker if he had it to do over again. I think it works very nicely as it is. We actually start with the villains, a Los Angeles street gang who lose some members in a police raid and swear revenge in a blood oath. The gang are unusual for two reasons — one, they are a pan-racial gang, which is standard business for Hollywood, but rarely acknowledged directly. The police band in the movie makes specific mention of the multi-cultural make-up of the gang. The other, more crucial distinction is that these gang members are entirely without dialogue, almost entirely without character. They are amoral automatons, silent killers, precursors of the Michael Myers character in Halloween. Once their motive for revenge is set, there is no reasoning with them, no dissuading them.
The main plot kicks in when a suburban father and his young daughter stop in a bad neighborhood. The dad goes to make a phone call, and the little girl wanders over to an ice cream truck nearby. Wrong place, wrong time. The gang drives past, seemingly disappearing over the horizon. But just when all seems clear, they show up, almost supernaturally, beside the truck. Their business is with the truck driver, but the little girl decides to make herself known at just the wrong moment.
It’s still shocking today, since no matter how nasty that American movie violence can get, little kids are almost always spared from the carnage. This is probably the movie’s most infamous moment, and its post-script is equally haunting when you find out that the little girl grew up to be a reality-TV star. It’s a true-life turn of events that validates the movie’s unsentimental world view.
Driven mad by the sight of his little girl lying dead, the father grabs a gun and shoots down one of the gang members. He runs off, and they give chase. The father finally seeks refuge at the nearest police precinct, although he goes into shock and is unable to relate the events that brought him there. The precinct is no safe haven, however, as it’s set to be shut down and is only manned by a skeleton crew, led by Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker). Complicating matters is the fact that a prison bus bearing a handful of convincts has stopped overnight at the precinct due to one of them being deathly ill. So when the silent armies of vicious gang members descend upon the embattled precinct, Bishop has no choice but to enlist the craftier of the convicts to help fight them off.
Much has been made of the general knowledge that Assault On Precinct 13 is a blended cocktail of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead. It would be apparent even if Carpenter hadn’t made it so explicit — both by confirming it, and by crediting himself as “John T. Chance” as the film’s editor (John T. Chance is the name of John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo.) Carpenter adored the films of Howard Hawks, which spanned genres, favored tough-guy banter, and favored uncommonly tough women. It’s why he remade a Hawks film a few years later (The Thing). Rio Bravo is a classic Western centering around an embattled lawman, the Wayne character, who jails the brother of a dangerous outlaw and has to rely on a trio of unlikely deputies, including Dean Martin!, to help him hold things down while they wait for reinforcements.
The parallels to Night Of The Living Dead are equally apparent: the traumatized victim seeking refuge from approaching hordes, the silent mob surging against the walls outside, the casting of a black man in the heroic lead and treating it like no big deal even though for the era it totally was. Like Duane Jones as Ben in Night Of The Living Dead, Austin Stoker as Bishop isn’t a swaggering badass like John Shaft or Truck Turner — he’s just a good guy in an impossible situation who proves to be the exact guy you want beside you in that situation. Of course, the ending of Night Of The Living Dead makes Ben’s blackness a hauntingly important matter after all — but in Assault On Precinct 13, Bishop didn’t necessarily have to be played by a black actor. He could just as easily been played by Paul Newman, to name just one. This is another reason I so greatly admire Carpenter’s films: He’s never been afraid of race, but it’s not a highly-politized issue to him. Some of the most charismatic, lovable, and heroic characters in his films are black, or Asian, or elderly, or female, and not for any great inclusive reason. His stories treat the people in them as people, not stereotypes or causes. This egalitarian, progressive spirit is laudable and refreshing, because of how terribly rare it is in American film, particularly in the horror and action genres within which Carpenter so often works.
And again, the fact that Assault On Precinct 13 is an urban crime actioner with the set-up of a Western and the soul of a horror movie is what gives it such memorable friction. Beyond his considerable cinematic facility, his eye for casting and his mind for contemporary myth-making, Carpenter’s particular genius lies in how he melded his disparate and recognizable influences into such dynamic and eccentric genre films. Assault On Precinct 13 is a spooky city-Western. In addition to the widely-acknowledged inspiration of Hawks and Romero, Carpenter also incorporates a subtle Sergio Leone influence into his methodology. At one point, one of the cons refers to himself as having “something to do with death”, which is a conspicuous nod to Once Upon A Time In The West. I’m not just talking about superficial referencing — I’m talking about a thematic kinship. All you have to do is look at the ice cream truck scene, and its spiritual ancestor in a similar scene in Once Upon A Time In The West: If Henry Fonda had never pulled that trigger, would Assault On Precinct 13 have been able to send poor Kim Richards to her fate?
Brutal.
I think what draws me so loyally to the films of John Carpenter isn’t so different than what draws me to the films of Sergio Leone: They’re entertaining as all hell, quotable, musical, packed with indelible moments, but there’s also a fierce philosophy underlying all the quips and the fireworks. Life’s hard for almost everyone, and frequently unfair. But you keep your head down and you keep your chin up, paradoxically: You weather it all, and you keep your sense of humor at all times.
In the final reel, you could be Dr. Loomis, still and always looking around in the dark for Michael Myers. All you get is what you started with.
You could be Snake Plissken, having gone to all that trouble for uncaring politicians. All you get is one last laugh.
You could be MacReady and Childs, out in the cold by a dying fire. All you get is a slug on a flask and a whole lot of unanswered questions.
You could be Jack Burton, having had the brief thrill of victory and experiencing the comedown. All you get is the open road (and a beast in the backseat).
All that’s how I read into it, anyway. If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s impermanence and uncertainty, sure, but it’s also, most crucially, stoicism. Maybe you’ll win in the end and maybe you won’t. Because in the end, nobody exactly wins this game anyway. That’s something to do with death.
