The Bechdel Test was named for Allison Bechdel, whose comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 measured female presence in movies by employing three criteria: Are there two or more women in it, with names? Do the women talk to each other? About something other than a man? Far too many mainstream movies flunk this test, but in the month of September, I take a look at ten movies that pass.

Whip It (2009)
Directed by Drew Barrymore
Screenplay by Shauna Cross, based on her novel Derby Girl
Produced by Barry Mendel, Drew Barrymore
111 minutes

Whip It is like a Burt Reynolds redneck comedy spiked with female empowerment. In terms of consistency, it’s a brew that falls somewhere between The Longest Yard and Hooper, capturing the essence of Burt in the outtakes over the end credits and the realization that the people who made the movie had way more fun than the audience did watching it. A co-founder of the Los Angeles based Derby Dolls, screenwriter Shauna Cross amassed so much material that fellow scribe Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith compelled her to write about it. Cross pitched both a young adult book titled Derby Girl and a screenplay, which were optioned by Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen of Flower Films. Cross’s script nudged Barrymore into making her directorial debut. With Academy Award nominee Ellen Page attached to star, Mandate Pictures agreed to finance Whip It to the tune of $10 million.

Retaining the services of producer Barry Mendel, director of photography Robert Yeoman and editor Dylan Tichenor, Barrymore seems to have had the whimsy of Wes Anderson in her sights, but aiming for too many targets — sports comedy, high school comedy, mother/daughter comedy — she ends up hitting none. The compositions and set design are magnificent, but when it comes to writing about the misadventures of outcast teenage girls, Shauna Cross never gets around Diablo Cody’s Juno, which for better or worse, stood out from the pack, something Whip It never really manages. The consolation package includes the most talented cast any first time director could hope for. Set in the Lone Star State, proud Texans may be snake bit to realize that the picture was shot almost entirely in Michigan for tax breaks. In the end, setting the film in the 1970s might have given Whip It the glue it needed.

In the Texas Hill Country town of “Bodeen”, 18-year-old Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) takes the stage for a beauty pageant with radical blue highlights that her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) helped spike her hair with. The stunt upsets Bliss’s mother Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden), a former beauty queen pushing her daughter to excel. While on a mother-daughter shopping trip in Austin, Bliss encounters three babes on wheels handing out flyers to an exhibition roller derby game. Bliss convinces Pash to sneak out with her to see the show. Her friend returns the favor by shoving Bliss into the arms of a young punk rock musician named Oliver (Landon Pigg). Once the show starts, Bliss finds new heroes in the tattooed, surly Hurl Scouts: Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig), Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell), Rosa Sparks (Eve) and Smashley Simpson (Drew Barrymore).

Speaking to Maggie after the show, Bliss is invited to do more than worship the Hurl Scouts by trying out for the team. Digging her old Barbie roller skates out of the attic, she begins training and on tryout day, impresses the team’s coach Razor (Andrew Wilson) with her speed. Adopting the name Babe Ruthless, Bliss discovers that bad attitudes are encouraged among her teammates but as a result, they’re consistently on the losing end of matches against the Holy Rollers and their sadistic captain Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis). Bliss refuses to change her can-do attitude and helps her team actually win a game. She keeps her roller derby activities secret from her mother and father (Daniel Stern) but as the Hurl Scouts head for the championship game, Bliss faces a dilemma when the beauty pageant that means so much to her mother falls on the same day.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 18,991 users: 73% for Whip It

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 68 for Whip It

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Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

Repulsion (1965)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Roman Polanski & Gérard Brach and David Stone
Produced by Gene Gutowski
105 minutes

In the waking moments between Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni, between Psycho and Blowup, there’s Repulsion, a stark and stunning British film that’s almost certainly a thriller, though it seems to be missing a murderer. Taking place in the psyche, the picture drifts away from art and provides intense audience appreciation by piling up a couple of bodies, as well as jolts of terror so virulent you might fly out of your seat. The English language debut of Roman Polanski and star Catherine Deneuve was initiated when producer Gene Gutowski introduced the filmmaker to Compton Group, a London based exploitation picture maker. Polanski & Gérard Brach whipped up a draft for a female psychodrama in 17 days, which Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser agreed to finance for £40,000. Polanski would ultimately bring Repulsion in for £95,000.

Despite the low budget, Polanski insisted on hiring Gilbert Taylor, who’d shot Dr. Strangelove and A Hard Day’s Night. The British director of photography amazed Polanski with his ability to calculate the amount of light needed for a given shot without using a light meter. It’s the self-assured precision of the film that holds our attention while nothing much happens for 45 minutes. Polanski dramatizes the tedium of a woman’s everyday routine and the heightened sense of her dreams so fluidly that we’re unsure what’s real and what isn’t. Praised as an accurate depiction of schizophrenia, the film is far from a clinical study and succeeds by being wet and wild with imagination. Polanski had help on his sophomore feature, with an eye catching credit sequence designed by Maurice Binder and a tumultuous jazz score composed by Chico Hamilton.

A Belgian living in London named Carole (Catherine Deneuve) ends another day at the salon where she works as a manicurist. On her walk home, the quiet girl is waylaid by Colin (John Fraser), an overeager cad who pressures Carole for a date, seemingly oblivious of her complete aversion to him. She returns to the shabby flat in South Kensington she shares with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) and is distressed to find a straight razor belonging to Helen’s lover in the bathroom. A married man who cancels the home cooked dinner Helen was preparing when he insists the couple dine out, Michael (Ian Hendry) finds his limited charms lost on Carole and suggests to her sister that she needs to see a doctor. Later that evening, sounds of Helen’s lovemaking awaken Carole and upset her.

Helen and Michael take off to Italy for a holiday, leaving Carole with cash to pay the late rent. Occupying the flat alone, her gradual descent into schizophrenia begins when she hears bells from the convent across the street tolling at midnight. So distracted at work that she cuts a client’s finger, she’s sent home. Running out of food, Carole’s delusions intensify. From the window, she sees a strange woman watching her flat. She begins to imagine cracks forming in the walls. A construction worker Carole has noticed on the walk home shoves his way into her room and rapes her. Men start visiting the flat at a very bad time for Carole, beginning with Colin breaking down the door for a chat and later, her landlord (Patrick Wymark), who suggests a way Carole could lower her rent. Both men leave the flat feet first.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 3,844 users: 87% for Repulsion

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

Bitter Moon (1992)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Jeff Gross & Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach and John Brownjohn, based on the novel Lunes de Fiel by Pascal Bruckner
Produced by Roman Polanski
139 minutes

It’s not clear whether Bitter Moon is a bad movie on accident or if its giddy banality was designed, but the end result is a debacle either way. Roman Polanski’s producing partner Alain Sarde had purchased the film rights to a 1981 novel by French essayist Pascal Bruckner titled Lunes de Fiel. Seizing on the salacious paperback cover, Polanski adapted a screenplay with Jeff Gross in Paris, while Gérard Brach and John Brownjohn drafted their own scripts separately. Titled Bitter Moon, the erotic drama was a French-English co-production shot largely at Paris Studios Cinema. While the finished film features only brief nudity and no graphic copulations, it struggled to find a U.S. distributor out of fear that it’s overall tone of degraded sexuality might draw an NC-17 rating. Fine Line Features ultimately released Bitter Moon in March 1994.

Like Showgirls, it’s arguable that the hokey dialogue and aberrant sexual situations were stuffed into Bitter Moon on purpose, maybe as a satire of holiday romances. One miscalculation is the casting of Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner. An adequate actress, Seigner lacks the charisma of Kristin Scott Thomas, who along with Hugh Grant — playing (what else?) a stiff, goofy Brit — are the redeeming factors of the picture. Peter Coyote (taking a role James Woods turned down) does such a good job basking his character in impurity that the act of watching him becomes repellent. The sexual encounters combine old fashioned sophistication with laughable sleaze, as if the men who cooked them up conducted their research at the Playboy Mansion. Vangelis contributed a musical score that comes off too overpowering for such a trifle.

Seeking a holiday after seven years of marriage, Nigel (Hugh Grant) and his wife Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas) set sail for Istanbul aboard a cruise ship in the Black Sea. Fiona comforts a distraught French woman in the loo and that evening, Nigel discovers her dancing in the bar, but the precocious Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) brushes off the stiff Brit. On the deck, a vulgar cripple named Oscar (Peter Coyote) reveals himself as Mimi’s husband and invites Nigel back to his cabin to tantalize him with tales of their love life. Oscar first saw Mimi on a bus between Montparnasse and Porte des Lilas. An American in Paris with grand literary ambitions, Oscar finds himself unable to write until he can reunite with his “sorceress in white sneakers”. Bumping into the apparition as she waits tables, Oscar asks Mimi to dinner.

As Oscar reveals the sadomasochistic routines the couple resorted to out of contempt for their co-dependence on each other, Nigel grows uncomfortable, but is compelled to stay and hear more. Seeking to end their relationship, Oscar concludes the only way to get rid of Mimi is to treat her as inhumanely as possible. After convincing her to have an abortion, Oscar books them a flight to Martinique, only to sneak off the plane and send her off alone. Two years later, a drunken accident cripples him. Mimi returns to Paris under the pretense of caring for her ex-lover, but uses his condition to exact a slow and bitter revenge. Oscar now gives Nigel his blessing to pursue Mimi sexually, but the Brit discovers his wife may be better suited to pushing the boundaries of marriage than he.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average: Not available

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

The Pianist (2002)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman
Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
150 minutes

A tale of an urban castaway that’s as powerful as it is restrained, The Pianist was Roman Polanski’s finest work in two decades. Originally published in 1946 under the title Death of a City, Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir of survival detailed the classical pianist’s six years under Nazi occupation in Warsaw. Seizing upon the book as his next film, Polanski selected South African born playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood — whose play Taking Sides also featured a composer caught in the maelstrom of World War II — to adapt a screenplay. France’s Le Studio Canal largely financed the €38 million (roughly $33 million) production in association with England’s Cadre Films and after Joseph Fiennes declined the role in order to remain on the British stage, Polanski arrived on Adrien Brody to portray Szpilman. The actor went from 160 to 130 pounds in six weeks to prepare for the part.

Filmed at Babelsburg Studios in Berlin, with additional shooting in the Braga district outside Warsaw, what sets The Pianist apart from WWII dramas like Saving Private Ryan or Enemy At the Gates is its simplicity and grace. Written immediately after the occupation, Szpilman’s story is resplendent in detail and confident enough in its truth not to employ artificiality or unearned sentiments. Turning genre conventions on their head, we meet Jews who are less than virtuous and at least one German who is more than pure evil, creating a landscape that provokes thought and feeling. A tale of genocide, the irony is that Polanski’s craftsmanship is so solid we wish the story kept going. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Adrien Brody (Best Actor), Ronald Harwood (Best Adapted Screenplay) and Roman Polanski (Best Director) all won Oscars.

In Warsaw of September 1939, pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is performing Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp minor for Polish radio when German artillery shells hit the city. Szpilman’s violinist father (Frank Finlay), mother (Maureen Lipman), younger brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard) and two grown sisters (Julia Rayner, Jessica Kate Meyer) rejoice with the news that Britain and France have declared war on Germany, but Poland quickly falls under Nazi control. Szpilman has time to take an adoring cellist named Dorota (Emilia Fox) for coffee before the city’s 360,000 Jews are evicted from their homes and sealed inside a ghetto in October 1940. Szpilman finds employment as a piano player in an upper class Jewish café and along with Henryk, rejects an offer from a family friend named Heller (Roy Smiles) to join the Jewish Ghetto Police.

When Henryk is arrested, Szpilman appeals to Heller’s ego to secure his brother’s release. He keeps his family from being deported by obtaining employment certificates for them, but these prove worthless when in August 1942, the Szpilmans are herded onto trains bound for Treblinka. Heller pulls Szpilman off the line, sparing his life, but the pianist never sees his family again. He survives by joining a Jewish work detail and buys enough time to arrange for his escape. Harbored by friends, Szpilman is reunited with Dorota, now married and expecting a child. Once the Polish uprising begins in August 1944, he’s near the brink of famine. Scrounging for food in the deserted city, Szpilman comes to face to face with Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann). Instead of being shot, the pianist is rewarded by an act of kindness after the German officer hears his music.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 107,318 users: 94% for The Pianist

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 85 for The Pianist

What do you say?

Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

The Ghost Writer (2010)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Robert Harris & Roman Polanski, based on the novel The Ghost by Robert Harris
Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
128 minutes

Humming with gleeful malevolence, The Ghost Writer could be considered a throwback to ‘70s political thrillers like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor if it wasn’t so much fun. Robert Harris had wanted to write about the relationship between a ghostwriter and a politician for 15 years. He found a story in 2006 when Tony Blair became dogged by war crimes accusations on his way out of 10 Downing Street. Moving one step further, the author imagined a British prime minister who was installed by the CIA and the truth being stumbled onto by the ghostwriter of his memoirs. Envisioned briefly as a stageplay along the lines of Sleuth, it became a novel instead. When Roman Polanski’s $130 million production of the author’s historical thriller Pompeii was shelved in 2007 over financing, Harris sent the director his manuscript for The Ghost.

Harris & Polanski adapted the novel in Paris and Polanski and his producers were able to raise financing from private funding sources in Europe at a budget of €32 million (roughly $45 million). Collaborating with cinematographer Pawel Edelman for the third consecutive film and editor Hervé De Luze for the sixth, Polanski’s expertise with the thriller chimes The Ghost Writer along like a Swiss clock that strikes cuckoo at the top of the hour. Shot at Studio Babelsberg for the interiors and the German island of Sylt for exteriors, the compound and the coastal wilderness where much of the action takes place sets the film apart visually, but it’s insidious wit that makes The Ghost Writer so enjoyable. Not many directors of political thrillers would pause to focus on a Filipino gardener raking leaves in a windstorm. Alexandre Desplat composed the film’s playful musical score.

An unnamed British writer we’ll know only as The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) lunches with his agent (Jon Bernthal) and is put up for the job of rewriting the memoirs of former prime minister Adam Lang when the body of the previous ghostwriter — a loyal aide to the politician — washes up on the shores of New England. A political novice, The Ghost passes the scrutiny of publishing exec John Maddox (James Belushi) and Lang’s D.C. attorney Sidney Kroll (Timothy Hutton) when he promises a memoir that the layperson can relate to. Dispatched to the desolate island of “Old Haven”, where Lang’s publisher has lent him his American vacation compound, The Ghost meets Lang’s personal assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall), his cunning wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and the charismatic Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) himself.

As The Ghost interviews Lang — a student actor who became interested in politics when he met his wife — the International Criminal Court announces an investigation into the ex-prime minister on charges he approved the kidnap and torture of four terror suspects from Pakistan. As media and human rights activists descend on the island, The Ghost is moved onto the compound for security. He discovers proof that Lang was politically active two years earlier than he claims and that the previous ghostwriter was the one who leaked the human rights scandal to British Prime Minister Richard Rycart (Robert Pugh). Sneaking onto the mainland to interview Lang’s mysterious college mentor Paul Emmett (Tom Wilkinson), The Ghost unravels a plot indicating that Lang may have been recruited and run by the CIA.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 7,950 users: 70% for The Ghost Writer

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 77 for The Ghost Writer

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
Screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
115 minutes

Whether drawing up a ballot of Best B-Movies, Best Science Fiction Films, Best Remakes or even Super Cinema of the ‘70s, oddly enough, the intoxicating 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers would land on any of those lists. Based on a 1954 novel by Jack Finney, the 1956 film version hit multiple zeitgeists in its day, arriving at a moment when Americans seemed obsessed with invasion, whether from outer space or the U.S.S.R. Directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted by W.D. Richter, the remake boasts far more insidious wit, characters as contemporary as they are compelling and a brilliantly pitch black ending that in its own way, puts a stake through the heart of the ‘60s. It’s gleefully written, perfectly cast, jarringly made and more than three decades later, looks a lot like a minor masterpiece.

The Body Snatchers beautifully exploits a paranoia that seems wired into the American psyche: fear that others are coming to eliminate your way of life. The 1978 version could be interpreted as a warning against feminism or urban alienation, take your pick. Kaufman cast thoroughly offbeat performers in Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright and too cool for school Leonard Nimoy; as opposed to movie stars, their survival is far from assured. Kaufman employs discordant camera angles and sound effects but instead of horror, focuses on the characters and their doomed love affair, making the story intense without much in the way of gore or cheap scares. Michael Chapman handled the stark lighting while Thomas Burman and Edouard Henriques executed the unsettling makeup effects.

Seeking escape from the surface of a dying world, alien spores drift into space and reach the Earth’s atmosphere, raining down on the city of San Francisco. Taking home one of the strange pink flowers than begin to bloom, biologist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) recognizes the pollinization of two different species to create a third. Unable to pry her dentist boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) away from TV sports, Elizabeth shares her discovery with Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), a health inspector and her close colleague at the Department of Health. Geoffrey’s alienated behavior the next morning prompts Elizabeth to follow him. Distraught by the sinister changes she begins to detect in her boyfriend and in the city around them, Elizabeth is assured by Matthew that a friend — pop psychologist Dr. David Kibner — will have a logical explanation.

At Kibner’s book signing party, Matthew and Elizabeth meet up with another one of his friends, struggling poet Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum). While Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) reveals that six of his patients swear that loved ones have changed into something less human, the doc believes our fear of commitment is at the root of the hysteria. Returning to the mud baths he operates with his New Age spouse Nancy (Veronica Cartwright), Jack drifts off to sleep and is wakened to his wife’s screams when she discovers a dormant being with an uncanny resemblance to her husband growing in one of the stalls. Matthew rushes to Elizabeth’s house and wakes her before she too crumbles to dust and is replaced by an imitation. The two couples realize that most of San Francisco is no longer who they appear to be and fight to stay awake long enough to escape.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 404 users: 89% for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Body Snatchers (1993)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. John, screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
87 minutes

With a mean and lean resume that included Ms. 45, the pilot episode of Crime Story, King of New York and The Bad Lieutenant, director Abel Ferrara was as bold a bet as any to bring a point of view to the third film adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1954 sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers. With Warner Bros. footing a $13 million bill, shooting wrapped in April 1992 … then nothing happened. Invited to the Cannes Film Festival in May 1993, Body Snatchers opened later that year in France and Germany before the studio snuck it into a dozen U.S. theaters in January 1994. According to Ferrara, the film fell victim to new studio management that had no stake in its success. At 87 minutes, it’s easy to imagine outtakes laying in a vault somewhere that might give the movie depth, but with few exceptions, it’s a flat, lazy effort given a shoddy release platform to match.

Body Snatchers isn’t so much a clunker as it just moseys around the block before the driver puts it back in the garage. Making a military base the landing site of the pods this time around, the script ignores what might have been a potent examination of the nuclear family and its meltdown to focus instead on faceless men in uniform who were acting like pods to begin with. Dinner table concerns in Smallville, USA seem as alien to Ferrara as alien beings and not much energy or thought is put into making either of them very compelling.  The makeup effects by the father and son tandem of Thomas & Barney Burman are excellent. There’s also pleasure in watching the shit hit the fan without a single computer generated image, but casting an actor as gifted off-the-cuff as R. Lee Ermey is indicative of how poorly managed this entire project was.

When her father Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is dispatched to a U.S. Army base to inspect chemical and biological weapons containment for the EPA, teenager Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) is welcomed by a wild-eyed infantryman who grabs her in a gas station bathroom and warns “They get you when you sleep” before he disappears. Ill at ease with her stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly), Marti marks time on base befriending a heavy metal girl (Christine Elise). At work, Steve is approached by Captain Collins (Forest Whitaker) head of the base medical corps, who reports patients with extreme delusional fixations in his infirmary. Some of them are afraid to sleep. Marti’s 4-year-old half brother Andy (Reilly Murphy) even bolts his preschool when everyone in his class but him produces the same finger painting.

Retrieving Andy and bringing him home to his sister is chopper pilot Tim Young (Billy Wirth). Before the flyboy and the new girl in town can get better acquainted, Andy walks in on his mom decaying in bed, replaced by an imitation exhibiting zero emotion. Marti is almost replicated by an alien pod sprouting in the attic above her. Steve grabs his children and bolts on foot, despite the growing realization that almost everyone on the base has been replaced by an alien invader. This includes General Platt (R. Lee Ermey) who has trucks loaded with pods bound for army bases all over the country. The survivors attempt to stay awake long enough to do something about it.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 170 users: 62% for Body Snatchers

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Tightrope (1984)
Directed by Richard Tuggle*
Written by Richard Tuggle
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Fritz Manes
114 minutes

Like a quarter shining in the gutter, Tightrope could stand a polish, but if you catch it on a rainy afternoon or late at night, this unabashed B-movie offers spills and thrills aplenty. Escape From Alcatraz scribe Richard Tuggle took his cue from a series of unsolved rapes in the Bay Area. His research resulted in a cop thriller sold to Clint Eastwood under the condition the screenwriter be allowed to make his directorial debut. Tuggle’s struggles on the set threatened his job security on day 1, but DGA guidelines — amended after Eastwood replaced Philip Kaufman as director of The Outlaw Josey Wales with himself — mandated that Tuggle remain on and receive a credit for directing. Whether you believe Eastwood collaborated with Tuggle from there or it was more likely the other way around, whoever directed Tightrope managed a good film that occasionally flirts with being a very good one.

Tightrope could either be considered a Cannon Films styled cop thriller like Cobra or Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects made with a real script and much better actors, or it could be considered just another Cannon Films styled cop thriller. The business of a serial killing rapist on the loose in a Red Light District is routine, repetitive and almost completely indistinguishable for a hundred other bad movies and TV shows. Where the picture shows life are its domestic scenes — where Eastwood’s chemistry with his 11-year-old daughter Alison glows — and the cop’s relationship with a rape counselor played by Geneviève Bujold. Eastwood relocated the script from San Francisco to New Orleans, and the offbeat French Canadian actress proves as alluring as the city itself. The killer is given no substance, but since the family he menaces is something we care about, at the very least, Tightrope provides a riveting ride to the finish.

In New Orleans, divorced police captain Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) cancels plans to watch the Saints game with his two young daughters (Alison Eastwood, Jennifer Beck) when a prostitute is found strangled to death in her home. When another working girl turns up drowned in a bathhouse, rape counselor Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold) presses Block to involve her office in the investigation. Prowling the brothels of The Big Easy to interview prostitutes, Block finds the time to indulge his dark side with a popsicle sucking tart (Rebecca Perle) and a nurse (Margaret Howell) among others moonlighting in the sex trade. Personal items Block leaves at his nocturnal activities — handcuffs, a necktie — begin to turn up alongside the bodies of the prostitutes he’s frequented.

Once she complains to City Hall about his lack of cooperation, Beryl Thibodeaux receives a visit from Block at the non-profit rape center she runs. The cop later seeks Beryl out at her gym and over an oyster lunch on the Mississippi, bluntly shares his attraction for her. She accepts his invitation to go trick or treating with his girls in the French Quarter and receives their approval to continue dating their dad. Meanwhile, Block and his partner (Dan Hedaya) trace glass fragments at the murder scenes to a local beer bottling plant. The killer responds by visiting Block’s daughters, killing their nanny and almost strangling Block. The cop narrows his manhunt onto one suspect in particular, but while he’s staking out the man’s apartment, the killer goes hunting for Beryl.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 11 users: 82% for Tightrope

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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High Plains Drifter (1973)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Ernest Tidyman and Dean Riesner (uncredited)
Produced by Robert Daley
105 minutes

Clint Eastwood’s sophomore feature as a director is every bit the exercise in efficiency, mood and supreme wickedness as Play Misty For Me, translating those qualities from a contemporary thriller to a western. Universal owned a treatment written by Ernest Tidyman, the white author and screenwriter who helped usher in the Blaxplotation genre with Shaft and its sequels. Tidyman expanded his western concept to a screenplay, which Eastwood brought in Dean Riesner to punch up. One of the pleasures of High Plains Drifter is the ambiguity of its anti-hero, credited as “The Stranger”, who could either be the relative of a marshal bullwhipped to death in a civic conspiracy or even better, the ghost of that marshal rising up to wreck supernatural vengeance. Which ever interpretation you prefer, it’s a hell of a movie.

The script has a hard hitting economy, with characters defined by what they are as opposed to who they are, but the film has a substantial moral universe pooled beneath the surface. When the hotelier’s wife warns, “You’re a man who makes people afraid”, The Stranger replies, “It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes ‘em afraid.” The action is styled less along the lines of a conventional western as it is on a community’s breach of the seven deadly sins and the divine retribution hammered down. The top-notch cast includes Verna Bloom and several actors who’d become Malpaso regulars. Exterior and interior sets were exceptionally well designed on location at California’s barren Lake Mono by Henry Bumstead, while the lighting by Bruce Surtees and musical score by Dee Barton set a spectral mood from the jump.

Out of the desert, a horseman materializes and rides into the desolate mining town of Lago. Branded as The Stranger (Clint Eastwood) by the anxious townsfolk, his efforts to enjoy a shave and a bath are harassed by thugs employed to protect the mine. Establishing himself as the toughest hombre in town, The Stranger helps himself to a roll in the hay with the local sex kitten (Mariana Hill) and inherits a loyal assistant in a dwarf named Mordecai (Billy Curtis). The Stranger checks into the hotel, where he draws open contempt from the only person in Lago with any backbone, the hotelier’s wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom). During his sleep, The Stranger is vexed by memories of Lago’s former marshal (also Clint Eastwood) being bullwhipped to death by gunslingers in full view of the townsfolk, who refuse to help him.

Fearful that the marshal’s killers (Geoffrey Lewis, Anthony James, Dan Vadis) will return to wreck vengeance on Lago when released from a territorial prison, the townsfolk offer The Stranger carte blanche to protect them. He puts the men through rifle drills on moving targets, but their marksmanship skills and willpower fail to inspire anyone. The Stranger begins to wear out his welcome with the co-chairman of the mining company (Jack Ging) and the hotelier (Ted Hartley) who resist being taxed for the defense operation, which will have something to do with picnic tables and 200 gallons of blood red paint. It’s revealed that the townsfolk conspired in the murder of the former marshal out of fear he might close the mine. As the desperadoes arrive, The Stranger gives all of Lago a homecoming they won’t forget.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 24 users: 96% for High Plains Drifter

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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The Gauntlet (1977)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack
Produced by Robert Daley
109 minutes

Whether The Gauntlet is one of the lousiest action movies ever made or a wickedly funny satire of lousy action movies, it certainly ranks as one of the more bizarre Clint Eastwood ever made. The most expensive Malpaso production up to that point in time with a budget of $5 million, it boasted top notch stuntwork and two over-the-moon sequences in which a house and a bus were each wired to explode with 250,000 squibs. Somehow, it all manages to look and feel like a low down dirty B-movie, as if made by a film company traveling around on a bus, making things up as they went along. Taking a story as old as It Happened One Night and refreshed as recently as Midnight Run, the plot proceeds in such a wildly idiotic manner that scenes practically beg for the Looney Toons logo and fanfare to precede them.

The Gauntlet can be excused as a drive-in movie, with moments of high intensity followed by stretches where you can go for popcorn, wander around and then return to your car when it looks like something is about to get blowed up real good. None of the banter between Eastwood and Sondra Locke (taking a role the studio pursued Barbra Streisand to fill) has any thought put into it at all. Even when the couple elicits moments of genuine affection for each other, it barely makes sense within the wacky mechanics of the plot, which builds toward one of the most ridiculous action sequences ever conceived. Frank Franzetta illustrated a fantastic poster that offers a hint into how seriously this picture was taking itself, but judging by what made it on screen, it’s hard to tell whether the filmmakers were in on the joke.

As the sun rises in Phoenix, disheveled metro cop Ben Shockley (Clint Eastwood) reports for work and is ribbed for looking so sloppy by his former partner Maynard Josephson (Pat Hingle) who’s been promoted to a desk job. Summoned before new police commissioner Blakelock (William Prince), Shockley is dispatched to Las Vegas to pick up someone named Gus Mally, who the commissioner maintains is a nobody witness for a nothing trial. Shockley discovers that “Gus” is actually Augustina Mally (Sondra Locke), a feisty hooker who claims that not only is someone looking to kill her, but that bookies in town have actually put a betting line on them never making it to Phoenix. As dumb as he looks, Shockley discovers there is indeed a horse named “Mally No Show” with 50-1 odds that are getting steeper all the time.

Shockley sneaks Mally out of jail in an ambulance but comes under attack before they can reach the airport. The couple seeks refuge at Mally’s workplace, but when Shockley calls the commissioner to request an escort, the entire Las Vegas Police Department shows up and blows the house to bits. Escaping in a storm drain, Shockley and Mally hijack a constable (Bill McKinney) who gets them to the Arizona border before he’s riddled with bullets. Stranded overnight in the desert, Mally reveals that she’s to testify against a sadistic john that sounds a lot like the Phoenix police commissioner. Realizing he’s been played for a stooge by his superiors, Shockley commandeers a charter bus, reinforces it with steel and shares his route with the commissioner, who prepare a reception for the couple’s bus in Phoenix.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 16 users: 81% for The Gauntlet

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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