Movie Madness with Richard Doyle

Richard Doyle's
MOVIE MADNESS

Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965).
A tedious and ultimately lifeless epic, adapted from Boris Pasternak's Nobel prize-winning novel. The central love triangle is not believable. We are supposed to accept that Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) are deeply in love because the film asserts it, yet there are no scenes that really show you how or why they care for each other. Similarly,
the relationship between the doctor and his wife (Geraldine Chaplin) is assumed, but nothing happens on screen to establish it. Therefore it is extremely difficult to care about the central characters, which leaves us with a 3 ½ hour travelogue of revolutionary Russia. Rod Steiger, Ralph Richardson, and Alec Guiness all turn in good performances, drawing vivid and interesting characters, but their roles are too small to carry the film.

Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975).

A very odd, but generally funny film about a coward (Allen) who marries his cousin (Diane Keaton), and then embarks on a mission to assassinate Napoleon during the latter's invasion of Russia. A parody of almost every great Russian novel, the picture mixes slapstick with dense philosophical discussions about the nature of morality. The movie contains many visual references to classic directors such as Eisenstein and (especially) Ingmar Bergman. Allen ditches his usual jazz soundtrack in favour of Prokofiev, with effective results.

New Jersey Drive (Nick Gomez, 1995).

Gomez followed his Brooklyn-based Laws of Gravity with this Newark-set study of aimless black teens on an auto-theft binge. While slicker than Laws, with significantly augmented production values, New Jersey Drive reflects the same semi-improvisational, verite-style ensemble approach. Here he concentrates on high-schooler Jason (Sharron Corley), who, after a couple of busts and a harassment campaign conducted by a corrupt cop, begins to lose his enthusiasm for the joy-riding exploits that often lead to injury, arrest, and, in the case of one friend, death. Gomez admirably avoids both cheap exploitation moves and conventional knee-jerk moralizing, preferring to let viewers draw their own conclusions.

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961).

An excellent ghost story, adapted from Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw. Deborah Kerr plays the sheltered daughter of a country pastor, hired by the uncle of two orphaned children to be their governess. She starts seeing and hearing apparitions somehow related to the former governess, who had a perverse relationship with a valet that resulted in their deaths. Kerr becomes convinced that the spirits are a threat to the children, and is willing to go to any lengths to save them. Marvelously atmospheric and ambiguous, the film opts to use suggestion instead of depiction in many key scenes, leaving key questions unanswered. Like the original The Haunting, or many of the horror films produced by Val Lewton in the 40s, it is a chilling and intelligent piece that succeeds with minimal effects.

Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

A sort of "Six Characters in Search of an Exit," Canadian director Natali's debut is an exercise in mind-bending gore sci-fi that finds a half-dozen disparate and increasingly desperate people stuck inside an elaborately booby-trapped cube. The sealed sextet include a pragmatic but tightly wound cop (Maurice Dean Wint), a shy young mathematical genius (Nicole de Boer), and a paranoid lefty physician (Nicky Guadagno). Clearly a metaphor for "the System," Cube lacks the infernal logic and precision of its ingeniously designed, multiroom set, ultimately degenerating into standard slasher histrionics and heavy-handed symbolism. It would have fared better as an hour long episode of The Twilight Zone. However, the solid cast works hard to lend credibility to their roles and their shared, legitimately scary predicament. Despite its flaws, Cube delivers enough shock value and intensity to make it worth a visit.

The Fly (David Cronenberg,1986)

A fine, scary performance from Jeff Goldblum as scientist Seth Brundle, who drunkenly spills the secret of his teleportation machine to journalist Geena Davis. They start a relationship, but then, in a jealous rage, Brundle takes a premature and ultimately disastrous teleportation trip. What happens next is well worth seeing for yourself. Cronenberg fashions a remake of the cheesy 1958 original that is by turns funny, poignant, repulsive, and intense. He plunges into some very primal territory, exploiting deep-seated fears of illness, aging, and other bodily treacheries. It's not every filmmaker who can work out his rawest phobias on screen, while entertaining us in the process.

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960).

The pre-Psycho world wasn't ready for a snuff-movie thriller, particularly one by a distinguished director like Powell, whose previous work with Emeric Pressburger included such beloved classics as The Red Shoes and Stairway to Heaven. The story concerns Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a victim of his scientist father's behavioral experiments, who feels compelled to murder women while filming them. That Peeping Tom was not just a chiller but a meditation on those voyeuristic impulses that make the film industry possible in the first place seems to have been lost on most critics of the day. Ocular imagery dominates, from a hooker's eye seen in extreme close-up through the murderer's lens, to Mark's three-eyed camera and cyclopean projector. Boehm is alternately timid and creepy as the camera-obsessed film technician, part-time pornographer, and full-time psycho, determined to capture the moment of death on film. Anna Massey, as Mark's sensitive, appealing neighbor, is herself at work on a children's book about a magic camera; she and Mark have a mutual attraction. Though there's no gore to be found, the bladed tripod makes for a terrifying weapon and the murder scenes are intensely intimate. The home-movie sequences feature Powell himself in a silent cameo as Mark's father. Unfortunately the great director had a celluloid scandal on his hands, with the English critics savagely attacking the film as immoral. It was only through the later efforts of cinephiles like Martin Scorsese that the critically devastated Peeping Tom eventually found the audience it deserved.