Film
Comic Cowboys and Other Heroes
Unusual roles for well-known actors this month: everything from John Wayne as cop to Mel Brooks as Governor?
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Rejecting the 1930s outlaw glamour treatment of Bonnie and Clyde and The Sting, and avoiding the too-precious sentimentality of films like Paper Moon, Altman has managed to make a film as compelling as those, and far more believable. So believable that although he evokes the time and the place (Mississippi Delta Lowlands) well, there’s not a trace of good-old-days nostalgia.
T-Dub and Chicamaw and Bowie are neither buffoons nor cold-blooded killers. They are just people trying to make a living, who find robbing banks easier than sacking groceries or pumping gas. (Not that cons could find work, especially in that era). Bowie (Keith Carradine) is 23, an inmate of a prison farm since he was sixteen. T-Dub (Bert Remsen) is a lame, soft-spoken man clinging pathetically to his dream of settling down on a New Jersey farm; his life is so empty that his only point of pride is the number of banks he’s cleaned out, and he recites each new total with the glee of a Hank Aaron counting his homers. Chicamaw (John Schuck) is an unhappy Mug-faced drunk who has always been an outsider, who shouts at children and once needlessly kills a hostage—vain attempts to vent his fury on an uncaring world.
Altman is no more concerned with the intricacies of the robberies than we are. The three of them draw more straws than diagrams when planning their heists (short straw drives the get-away car). Nor do we see any actual violence, although there is occasionally some gunfire. It’s the seeming “trivia” of everyday life that concerns Altman. During one robbery, we remain outside, with the getaway car, where the “Gang-busters” radio serial blares out its make-believe version of crime and punishment, and a girl hands out complimentary Cokes (which along with Levi jeans will survive us all). Meanwhile, pathetic old Chicamaw is cocking his hat in the rear view mirror, trying to look, I suppose, like Warren Beatty or Robert Redford in their 30’s get-ups.
Without resorting to shots of tin-cupped beggars or bread lines, the silent signs of Depression poverty are everywhere: chipping paint, peeling wallpaper, dilapidated screens, mirrors that badly need re-silvering. But Altman shows us, in this world centered around console-size radios, Coca-Cola, cheap magazines and cheaper whiskey, a deprivation more emotional than financial. And one which didn’t end with World War II.
Only Bowie and Keechie (Shelley Duvall), the girl he falls in love with, don’t feel deprived emotionally.
His courtship is awkward as a fifth-grader’s: “Do you know what the state animal is,” he asks, in a bid for her attention: “A squashed dog in a road!” So in love are they with love that he can ignore the homeliness of a girl whose ears stick out further than her breasts, and whose mouth barely accommodates her teeth. She in turn is willing to dismiss the murder he committed seven years before as simply “dumb.”
A fink finally reveals Bowie’s whereabouts, and the law surrounds the hide-out. After riddling the shack with enough fire to sink a gunboat, the officers bring Bowie’s body out, wrapped in his and Keechie’s love-making quilt—which seems a little heavy-handed until we remember that life is full of such ironies.
Keechie, witnessing the gunplay, agonizes in slow-motion, a technique usually reserved for the victim. It’s an appropriate switch, because her agony is more real than Bowie’s.
In the final scenes, after sitting in the train station looking shell-shocked, she eventually decides to take the train to Fort Worth, simply because it’s the next one leaving.
She blends anonymously into the listless crowd who are boarding the train like loading-pen cattle. Altman slows the motion, again, in this scene, and effectively conveys the feeling that the lonely, monotonous future she and all the others face is far more terrifying, desperate, and certain than a random encounter with a band of thieves, bullet-ridden bodies, or even a quick death. It is a sight we still see today, and tomorrow and the next day … thousands of people moving and traveling and searching, drifting dazed as sleepwalkers who can’t afford to wake up.
ZARDOZ
THE FOLKS AT 20TH CENTURY Fox who bring us Zardoz thoughtfully provided us reviewers a printed glossary of terms and names so that we could better understand a movie they claim is “part science fiction, part fairy tale and part adventure.” I guess the fairy tale part refers to the happy ending and heavy-handed symbolism, and the science fiction part to the futuristic setting (2293) and the invention of more kinds of heaven, hell and purgatory than you’ll find in Dante’s Inferno. But the adventure part is what puzzles me, because I had wilder adventures hunting the gasoline to get to the theater than I had sitting in it watching Zardoz.
With Sean Connery as the star, I expected to be entertained if not enlightened. You know, a couple of hours’ worth of slick sex and space-age violence, and bouquets of gorgeous girls giving up state secrets for a minute of Bond’s undivided attentions. No longer 007, Sean appears as Zed, the best and brightest of the Brutals (our glossary word for the mortals living in the polluted wasteland that once was the modern world). But something’s wrong. Where is the forceful Sean we knew? He seems docile and dazed … almost shell-shocked. And’you can forget about that magic visceral appeal to our baser urges; instead, we have a balding, thickly-adiposed man in floppy thigh-high boots, bandoleros criss-crossing his chest, and what looks like a red diaper hiding his prize specimen charms. He looks more like a hairy Barbarella than a conquering hero.
There’s not a touch of deliberate humor in Zardoz, but some of it is laughable anyway. Science fiction only works when it creates a unique environment, a place that looks and sounds alien, undreamed-of. But instead of elaborate beautiful 2001 sets and special effects, the world of the Vortex (where most of the action takes place) looks like the bargain table from a Big Studio prop auction. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief with only a few flashing lights, floating heads and fuzzy lens filters to represent a strange new world.
The most elaborate special effect is the stone godhead Zardoz, which resembles a 3-D befanged Greek tragedy mask. It floats through the air, informative as the Goodyear blimp, broadcasting anti-penis propaganda (“The gun is good. The penis is evil.”) and spewing out firearms, to the whooping delight of the mortal Brutals below.
The adventurous Zed somehow penetrates (symbol!) the insulated world of the Vortex, where effete snobs and intellectuals have gone Agnew one better: started a world devoid of death, taxes or dissension.
Here we learn, at director John Doorman’s stultifying leisure, all about the Eternals. And about the Renegades, persistent offenders who are aged for their sins and condemned to what looks like Arthur Murray Dance Studio life-membership. Then there are the Apathetics, who are so bored with everlasting life that even Zed copping a spirited feel of one girl’s breast does nothing to perk her up. There is, of course, no sex in paradise, a fact which may account for the spiraling Renegade-Apathetic drop-out rate. Maybe it’s because everyone’s so unattractive. The men have turned into mealy-mouthed wimps, and the girls wear their hair in yesteryear bouffants and beehives, and outfits showing more bulging midriff than bosom.
Charlotte Rampling, who does the best she can with the lines she’s got, is Zed’s leading lady; but though she was sexy in Georgy Girl, she comes off here as just another bitchy-butchy.
After a very long turtle-paced series of semi-adventures, Zed’s odyssey comes to an end, and all the liberated Eternals rush back to the world, either fornicating furiously or re-dedicating themselves to Death. I’d love to tell you the ending, but I don’t want to destroy the didactic denouement should you stubbornly decide to see it.
Let me just say that I became an Apathetic ten minutes into Zardoz, and might become a Brutal if forced to see it again.
McQ
MCQ IS WORTHWHILE IF YOU’RE really itching to see John Wayne out of the saddle and into plainclothes civvies. Yes, he plays a cop for the very first time, but that’s the only innovative thing about McQ. It’s still another predictable cop movie with explicit violence, suggested sex, tedious Dragnet dialog, and the obligatory chase scene.
Although John Wayne has aged, he hasn’t changed. He still talks in a sing-song and lumbers along like a tug-boat, leaving intimidated offenders in his wake. Like Serpico, McQ is honest as Boy Scout. Unlike Serpico, he’s got a touch more Nazi in his soul: not above roughing up belligerent hippies or fudging on due process.
Unlike some of his fellow cops, McQ never touches the heroin and other confiscated dope. But I personally suspect he’s a secret monkey gland addict; at an age (68) when most cops are drawing pensions and mobile-homing it in the sunshine belt, McQ rides around like a rookie thirsting for promotion. He can still out-shoot, out-run and out-bully any hood in town. And as for women well, …
That’s fortunate, really, because the only sensitive scene in the movie is one where Colleen Dewhurst, who plays a former girlfriend of McQ’s, tenderly makes his overnight stay with her the price for the information he’s requesting. Screenwriter Lawrence Roman deserves the Chauvinist Scriptwriter of the Century Award for having the attractive 40-ish Ms. Dewhurst apologizing to the 68-year-old Wayne for her looks, claiming she knows she “needs an overhaul.”
If you dearly love cop movies, or John Wayne, this one is as good as most French Connection re-treads. But don’t go expecting any motion-picture milestone more dramatic than the advertised switch from buckskin to tweed.
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