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Saturday 7 September 2024
CINEMA REBORN - SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER - Dates for 2025, Committee Membership, Kurosawa retro, Venice Classics, Noir in Brisbane, Japanese Exhibition
Thursday 5 September 2024
Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (31) Other Western Europe - The New Spanish Cinema
Other Western Europe
Spain Luis Buñuel (65) b.00, Luis Garcia Berlanga (81) b.21, Juan Antonio Bardem b.22, Carlos Saura (78) b.32, Victor Erice b.40, Greece Michael Cacoyannis (76) b.22, Netherlands Fons Rademakers (79) b.20, Bracketed number indicates an International Film Guide Director of the Year
6 (31) The New Spanish Cinema
Government interest in a strong national film industry in Franco’s Spain did not become apparent until the early 60s when the first attempt was made by Spain to enter the European Common Market. It was recognised that a concerted effort was needed to demonstrate, at least culturally, that Spain was no longer the retrograde, fascist backwater of Europe.
Spain's transition from Francoism to democracy spanned three decades from the end of the war in 1945 to the death of the dictator in 1975. Spanish cinema played an important role in this process. The two leading Spanish filmmakers Juan Bardem (1922-2002, above) and Luis Berlanga (1921-2010, below)) collaborated on a neo-realist influenced comedy, Esa Pareja Feliz/That Happy Couple (1951), and a popular satire of the so-called national cinemas, Bienvenido/Welcome Mr Marshall (1952), in which an image of national unity is imposed at home at the cost of cultural and regional difference in order to be successfully promoted abroad as a distinctive 'national' commodity so qualifying Spain for a share of Marshall aid from the US.
At a conference at Salamanca in May 1955 Spanish filmmakers of both the left and right looked to Italian neorealism as the model. Bardem's first film as writer-director, Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a Cyclist (1955), the first Spanish film to win a prize at an international film festival, portrayed Spanish society as corrupt and complacent. Bardem employs a dialectic between neo-realism and classic Hollywood melodrama rupturing the audience-binding “star close-ups” of the latter with “neo-realist sequences filmed in deep-focus long shots.” Marsha Kinder concludes that “this dialectical opposition between the two foreign aesthetics helped to forge the subtle, indirect language of the New Spanish Cinema.” ( essay, Kinder in ‘World Cinema’ Nowell-Smith ed. 597)
Bardem was arrested and jailed during the filming of Calle Mayor / Main Street (1956), regarded as his best film, in which he bitterly explores life under Franco. His production company was responsible for the production of Viridiana (1961) marking Bunuel's return to Spain, the Franco government's intention being for him 'to return to the fold' to make a film of his own choosing (“they didn't even ask to see the script in advance”). It was hardly surprising for it to be condemned by the Church and banned by the censors for blasphemy causing a major upheaval and loss of jobs in the film industry. After Calle Major Bardem’s work went into creative decline as he tried unsuccessfully to make a Spanish film that would also speak to an international audience but in so doing he was the first to highlight the abysmal state of the Spanish film industry.
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| Betsy Blair, Jose Suarez, Calle Mayor |
Luis Berlanga who began his career with Bardem and “shared his colleague’s attempts to challenge the Franco myth yet with an opposite mode of discourse” ( Higginbotham 43). While Bardem challenged his audiences with somber carefully constructed plots in orderly narratives, Berlanga disarmed with rapid paced chaotic farces and comic ridicule of Spanish political situations and social types. While his career spanned three decades beginning with Welcome Mr Marshal which broke with the conventions of Spanish cinema prior to 1950, he nevertheless struggled to make films through the sixties, his scripts repeatedly rejected by the authorities. He managed however to complete two of his best, El Verdugo/The Executioner (1963), a black comedy about a reluctant public executioner “full of insights into the corrupt Francoist mentality” which achieved critical and international film festival success. In Tamano Natural/Life Size (1973, Michel Piccoli plays a chic dentist with an attraction for a life-like doll, fantasy in a permissive society taking on symbolic importance beyond the doll owner’s conceptions. “It carries to their logical conclusions [ Berlanga’s] most characteristic preoccupations - freedom versus power and the castrating woman” (ibid 55).
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| Nino Manfredi (r) El Verdugo |
If Bardem did not further successfully develop the already referred to model of the dialectic between two foreign aesthetics (Italian neo-realism and classical Hollywood melodrama), as outlined by Marsha Kinder, he did provide, with Saura, the framework for “the subtle, indirect language of the new Spanish Cinema” (Kinder Nowell-Smith ed. 597). The opportunity was provided by changed political circumstances in the early 60s when the government, through the responsible minister García Escudero and a new general director of cinema, decided to officially promote this new art cinema abroad while still imposing censorship at home. Kinder notes that it was a Basque-born producer Eías Querejeta who pushed hardest against repressive censorship while creating a collaborative team of talented creative technicians. The best known of the ten works produced by Querejeta in the 60s directed by New Spanish Cinema directors, were those directed by auteur Carlos Saura. “They pioneered ‘la estetica franquista’, the ironic film style which came to characterise Spanish film during the Franco period.” (Higginbotham 29). Saura expanded the language of violence (an acknowledged influence on Peckinpah) along with politics, sex, and sacrilege. “Bardem’s voice of protest was, with its undeniable intellectual ring, too advanced for the general Spanish public.” Luis Berlanga came closer to creating a national cinema than Bardem. It was Bardem, however, who first defined the state of the Spanish cinema. His films are a continuation of that effort and are “the first serious attempt to awaken the national consciousness” (ibid 42).
The period 1963, under the administration of Escudero, saw the development of the ‘New Spanish Cinema’. “Well-intentioned as a whole, it was not disinterested,” being part of a political operation designed and directed from within the government, “to keep the outer and more showy aspects of the Spanish economic and social climate in tune with Europe.” The objective was to encourage certain new films of quality which would not raise any serious problems at home, a new code of censorship imposed while giving the impression abroad, especially at international film festivals, of a ‘new wave’. “It was, in short, simply an operation of political prestige” (Molina-Foix 18). The end result satisfied no one, least of all the ideological left, the voices for the new cinema which lacked audience acceptance, students and other critics of the state of censorship. Escudero’s position was dissolved for economic reasons and, although unstated, for his failure to control restless voices like an intense lobby group called the Sitgistas (Higginbotham 65). The tightly controlled experiment with art cinemas in urban areas for the screening of foreign language films was abandoned, apparently for lack of audience response.
Carlos Saura (1932-2023, above) was recognised as “the most direct heir to Bunuel’s film style and cultural perceptions” (ibid 77). He drew on Bunuel’s legacy of the “surreal documentary,” (Las Hurdes, L’Age d’Or), to convey reality indirectly so as to discredit the distortions of the Franco myth”, through metaphorical film language and syntax designed to confuse the censors (ibid). It did not confuse elements on the the Right, however, with militants firebombing a cinema showing one of Saura’s most affecting films in this mode, La Prima Angelica (1973), for its implied political critique of the Franco era. Saura was also criticised on the Left as a right wing collaborator because he was allowed to continue working. His career covered the whole period of the birth and development of the New Spanish Cinema with its urgent commitment “to reveal Spain to itself.”
In his first film Saura takes neo-realist ideas further than any other young Spanish film-maker in Los Golfos /The Hooligans (1959). A group of young men in a lower class area of Madrid with little prospect of employment, rob a factory to pay for the training of one of them as a matador with prospects of earning sufficient to share between them. As David Thomson notes at this early stage Saura is “far more affected by De Sica than Bunuel” - he had not then actually seen a Bunuel film.
Saura achieved the first of his international festival successes with his third feature, La Caza/ The Hunt (1965) in which the camera presides over the self-destruction of three middle class businessmen seemingly representative of the class that won the Spanish Civil War, their peasant guide, a ‘loser’ who hunts out of necessity. The focus on the characters in a closed situation and the violence of the hunt become motifs in an oblique allegory as the initially dispassionate relationship between the trio becomes unsettling then violent comedy in a tale of erotic obsession. Dedicated to Bunuel it is the first of a triptych in which Saura turned his attention from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in The Hunt, to another conflict in Spanish society - relations between men and women. Geraldine Chaplin plays a Vertigo-like double role, the object of a doctor’s attention in his search for an ‘ideal wife’. Peppermint frappé was also the beginning of their extended on and off screen partnership.
El jardin de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970) is the first of a series of political allegories which consolidated Saura’s reputation at home and abroad. “They are a skilful blend of metaphor which Saura had learned to master in La Caza. In them, reference to the family signifies both domestic and national life” (Higginbotham 84). In La prima Angélica /Cousin Angélica (1973) the protagonist makes a painful journey from Barcelona to honour his mother’s wishes that she be buried in her home town, near Madrid. On the journey Louis remembers as he is now and as he was as a boy; the two levels are merged, Bunuel-like, as to be indistinguishable. The extension of forty years of defeat and conflict into the present, and inevitably into the future, created considerable controversy as well as box office success. Saura, in response, stressed the psychoanalytic rather than the political context of Angelica - that he was only “echoing Adler, Jung and Marcuse” though “many Spaniards recognised the central character's search for identity as their own” (ibid 91).
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| Anna Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Cria Cuervos |
Greater “mesmerising introspection” on Saura’s part is evident with Chaplin playing opposite Ana Torrent in a strangely subdued but lyrically perceptive examination of a child’s world in Cria cuevros/ Raise Ravens (1975) set in the last days of Fascism. “ Intriguingly, the film suggests that the spirit of the dusty surrealism of Bunuel lives on in his native Spain” ( Phil Hardy ‘Time Out’ ). Like Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, Saura’s Cria cuervos with La prima Angéica identifiy as “Saura’s most original and spontaneous works, reflects reality through the eyes of a child memorably played in both films by Ana Torrent. Higginbotham further identifies Saura’s choice of the bitter Spanish proverb “raise ravens and they’ll pluck out your eyes,” as typical of a repressive, fearful, and conformist myth as that of the Franco regime.” She further sees this as “another attempt by Saura to demystify the terminology, for its protagonist, Ana, resists every attempt to initiate her into its rituals” (92).
The success of Saura’s films internationally, was apparently not matched in Spain where they were regarded as art films for an ‘educated minority’ (Higginbotham 96) and also inevitably diverted attention outside Spain from other landmark films such as Miguel Picazo’s La tia Tula /Aunt Tula (1964) based on a novel by Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno considered ahead of its time for its treatment of the theme of social hypocrisy in the definition of woman’s role (marriage or the convent), “an hypocrisy not only implicating the male power structure based upon the church but the entire provincial culture which represents more than half of Spain” (96-9). While now considered a classic of New Spanish Cinema, with 4 minutes then cut by the censor, no indication is given in available accounts of the film’s general reception in Spain at the time.
The early 70s were the years of ‘soft dictatorship’ (‘dictablanda’) leading up to Franco’s death in 1975 in which government censorship within Spain was finally relaxed. This coincided with major international successes for the New Spanish Cinema. On the other hand in 1975 the film industry was hopelessly in debt while the best of the New Cinema and the experiments of the so-called Barcelona School and its avant-gardism fringe, were barely visible in their own country where very little of world art cinema could be seen on Spanish screens.
This politically and socially unsettled franquista period yielded Saura’s Cria cuevros and what has become one of the most acclaimed films in the history of Spanish cinema, El espiritu de la colmena / Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Victor Erice (above) in his first feature, turned to the those of the horror film for new myths. Erice “does not see El Espiritu as a narrative film, but rather a work which has a fundamentally lyrical, musical structure and whose images lie deep in the very heart of a mythical experience” ( Molina-Foix 34).
Fernando (Fernando Fernan Gomez) and Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) seemingly in a state of self exile, he now a bee-keeper given to reflecting on the lives of bees, she an unrequited correspondent writing to a lover or lost child, “studies in haunted solitude,” living with their two daughters, 6 year old Ana (Ana Torrent) and 9 year old Isabel (Isabel Telleria). David Thomson conjures up the image of ‘the quite empty house where everything is like a magic breath on the embers of memory or metaphor.” Suggestive of Franco’s Spain in microcosm, the remote Castilian village is connected to civilisation by the travelling cinema where the girls see James Whale’s film of Frankenstein (1931, above and below), and by the train, its regularly imminent arrival at the station on the windswept plateau announced by its melancholy whistle and, as the sisters are aware, by vibrations in the rail tracks .
When Ana, frightened and moved by the duality of the gentle monster on the screen, asks her sister why he killed the little girl and why he too was killed, Isabel knowingly reassures her that it’s a movie trick, the monster is not dead and Ana can call him. “Corrupted Isabel” tells “profoundly serious Ana” that the spirit lives in an isolated, abandoned barn temporarily offering refuge to a wounded fugitive maquis. Isobel, wilfully through disturbing games, seals her vulnerable younger sister’s traumatisation. Erice’s decision for the whole cast to use their original ‘given’ names during the filming assumes full significance in the film’s final scene “as Ana comes out of her coma.”
This is a film about spirits - spirits who walk, words and dream-images made flesh. But this spirit blows where it will, whipping like a shape-shifter; it is, variously, the spirit of the father’s beehive; the spirit of Frankenstein which has emerged from the movie screen to enter a girl’s mind; the spirit of war passes through this humble town, leaving its traces. The spirit is also the angel of death, and the temptation to evil as well as the temptation to exist. - Adrian Martin (Mysteries of Cinema 189)
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| "vibrations in the rail tracks" |
Vicente Molina-Foix concludes that its “huge success in Spain (and abroad) lies mainly in the fact that [Spirit of the Beehive] was the first movie in thirty years to offer a truthful view of the oppressive atmosphere of post-war Spain as seen from the loser’s point of view. And yet Erice achieved this through ellipsis and stylisation” (34).
Erice’s film is a singular achievement of the ‘franquista’ period in which the mystery of character is gradually revealed in a cinema of poetry “something like a free stream of image and sound events, akin to a certain kind of avant-garde cinema,” in which “narrative is given entry to this poetry only as a compromise or a constraint (Martin ‘Mysteries’ 170).” In contrast in the year of Franco’s death in 1975 two films - Ricardo Franco’s Pascual Duarte and José Luis Borau’s Furtivos/Poachers marked a culmination of four decades of Spanish cinema with the themes of exploitation, ignorance and violence analogous to the then antiquated marginal position of Spain in the modern world. Both equate the mother figure with Franco’s Spain, a motherland now corrupt and cruel unwinding the theme of matricide belying traditional Spanish machismo (Higginbotham 115).
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Marsha Kinder,”Spain After Franco” Oxford History of World Cinema Nowell-Smith ed. pp. 596-603
Virginia Higginbotham Spanish Film Under Franco 1988
Adrian Martin “Ball of Fire : The Mysteries” essay in Mysteries of Cinema 2020 ed.
Vicente Molina-Foix New Cinema in Spain BFI monograph 1977
Verina Glassner review of ‘Spirit of the Beehive’ Monthly Film Bulletin November 1974
David Thomson review of Spirit of the Beehive in Have You Seen… 2008
Adrian Danks “Victor Erice” Great Directors Senses of Cinema March 2003
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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links
Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more
Part Two - Defining Art Cinema
Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism
Part Four - Authorship and Narrative
Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles
Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror
Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke
Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms
Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE
Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry
6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group
6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent
6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard
6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel
6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice
6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson
6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati
6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer
6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti
6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One
6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism
6(20) - Rossellini in Australia
6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni
6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi
6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi
6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren
6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One
6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two
6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta
6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder
6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet
Sunday 1 September 2024
On the life and films of Andrew Leavold - Barrie Pattison digs deep and discovers THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG (2013) + PUB - THE MOVIE (2022)
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| Andrew Leavold |
We are not talking film school and a history of subsidised documentaries, when we consider the case of Andrew Leavold. In the best Tarantino tradition, his formation as a filmmaker was running a video store, managing to parlay Brisbane’s Trash Video into the hub of out of kilter film activity in the city - often the one place there where you could find whatever was weird or transgressive on VHS.
When the video business died, Leavold took his act on the road. The highlight of the presentation I saw him give was an Iranian film showing a villainous Salman Rushdie overcome by flying Holy Korans, which persuaded the debauched female lead to take up chador wearing. They were going to ban that one in the U.K. until Rushdie came to its defense.
Leavold’s idée fixe (why don’t people talk about idées fixes anymore?) was Weng Weng, the three foot tall Philippino composite of Bruce Lee and James Bond, star of all but forgotten dubbed Pinocheapos For Your Height Only and D'Wild Wild Weng. Seven years, a communications degree, three mortgages on the store and a model exercise in crowd funding later, Leavold turned this into the 2013 feature documentary The Search for Weng Weng, which hit the festival circuit worldwide.
But we are getting ahead. With minimal training and experience Andrew Leavold had taken a camera to the Philippines to record the Weng Weng story. He was filmed in the airport parking lot getting the news that his hero was dead. That he compares to the moment in The Simpsons when Ralph Wigum learns that his passion for Liza is not reciprocated and Bart, freezing the video, isolates the frame where you can see his heart break. There was plenty more heartbreak ahead when the only prospect for the Weng Weng project was to include it in Mark Hartley's Screen Australia 2010 Asian schlock compilation feature Machete Maidens Unleashed! - a choice offered as ten percent of a funded project or all of nothing.
Leavold ended up buying back his footage to make his own In Search of Weng Weng, representing Weng Weng as action hero become tragic victim of exploitation, become Catholic icon. The result is surprisingly involving. It's remarkable that this one summons the know-how to convince audiences that it's not a put on, not an unhealthy cash-in on its sad little man subject and not something you should pass over for another look at Barbie.
The film itself is a shrewd mix of clips, interviews and accounts of its makers' adventures in the Philippines, which included being guest of honour at Imelda Marcos' 81st birthday party. Slowly, Leavold finds his way to the subject's low cost plot in the cemetery where the Manila homeless live among the grave markers.
Leavold went touring the planet promoting his documentary. The highlight of his attention-getting live introductions is always Leavold revealing the shoulder tattoo he had done in Manilla, showing Weng Weng in a religious aura.
Despite the interest that the project stirred, Andrew Leavold didn’t find himself deluged with offers to fund the string of projects for which he had deposited caches of material in cupboards round the planet. We never did get to see his study of the Philippino porn film industry, which at its height involved stellar personalities from their industry.
Instead he managed to get support, from ex-Chauvel Cinematheque organiser and Crypto speculator, Executive Producer Bret Garten, for his next documentary Pub - the Movie, a study of Melbourne identity Fred Negro.
It’s very hard to comment on Leavold’s new(ish) film. You have to locate it in a line that runs through the Sixties US Underground comics, Robert Crumb in particular, Robert Downey (senior), John Waters or South Park. It’s crude, juvenile and slap dash. This makes it a suitable rendition of its subject, Melbourne’s St. Kilda native Fred Negro, who drew a strip cartoon called “Piranhas in Love” and headed up a band called “I Spit in Your Gravy”, a name that used to catch my attention on gig posters before I found the back story.
Fred’s childhood was already out of whack. (“Dad was really disappointed that I didn’t want to be a tax accountant”.) Art school wasn’t all that successful either (“I did all my stuff in the pub”) and Fred was drawn into that entertainment scene. “Six foot trannies singing about fat bellies and black and white tellies. I’m staying here.”
He had an act called The Human Vacuum Cleaner, where someone would hold his ankles and push Fred across the floor licking up Twisties. Pretty soon he was masturbating on stage while he played guitar, recruiting bar waitresses to join the band and be photographed naked in the bath with him. He used the slogan “Objectifying women since 1989.” The local scandal sheet followed his activities with enthusiasm. “The Truth - they just loved us!” One of his entourage was starving, pounced on the roast chicken that Fred fornicated with on stage and found it was full of maggots. “It didn’t matter so long as you were shocking someone.”
This all went down big on the great St. Kilda Thursday Night Pub Crawl. One musician remembered Fred on stage with them “He wasn’t in the band. He just kept playing.” However, with fame spreading, the Gravies found themselves in the first half for Waylon Jennings at the Rod Laver Arena, facing a contract with Virgin and turning up in the Tamworth Festival artists’ area with Smokey Dawson. The chief constable told them “I love your act but if you ever play a note in Tamworth, I’ll throw you in jail.”
There’s footage to go with all this but it’s murky video with poor sound. I would have liked to have seen more of the nice animations Leavold spaces it with. There are interviews of the survivors of those days. The questions that I wondered about are addressed as the film goes on. We learn that “Heroine hit St. Kilda hard” with a lengthy montage of photos of musicians and sidekicks in drug deaths. Negro survived, going without food for days, and he raised a family. Rather than stories of neglect and abuse, his daughter describes him as the ideal dad who harvested her childhood scatology for his strip cartoon, with them wondering who exploited who.
But the lifestyle was not without cost. One of his fans saw Fred’s marginal occupations and commented “I think Fred is one of the best cartoonists in the world and he’s cleaning toilets.” His publisher (“I got complaints from the first issue”) finally had to drop his strip. (“Too many vaginas”) though Fred did manage to produce a Piranhas coffee table book - and he survived to front his own movie here.
Pub the Movie is not for everyone. It should come in a sealed plastic bag with a warning. It’s unpolished and parochial. The people who would find Fred Negro off putting in person are just as likely to reject a film about him but it is as authentic a representation of Australia’s notion of outrage as we are likely to get. Despite my initial reservations, I kind of warmed to it.
This leaves us with a situation where Australia’s hardest-charging filmmaker remains indigestible to all the processes that could make his life easier. In a period when suitable subjects for Australian documentary films are more clearly demarcated than ever, it’s hard to see the way forward. I can’t see Andrew Leavold making a tribute to the Matildas. He has learned his lessons the hard way, acquired his skills and not let one of the world’s most conformist environments grind him down. That’s a record that requires more attention than it's getting.
Thursday 29 August 2024
Streaming on Apple TV - Excellent crime adaptations - PRESUMED INNOCENT, BAD MONKEY, LADY IN THE LAKE
Adaptations are flowing thick and fast from Apple TV. For producers and editors commissioning stuff for TV's voracious appetite, there’s always some safety in knowing that the source material comes with a stamp of quality. Famous authors too. Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen and Laura Lippmann. I haven’t read any of the latter but the adaptation of her 2022 book Lady in the Lake is the best thing I’ve seen of its kind all year. The series showrunner and director is Alma Ha’rel
It’s Baltimore 1966 with a dip back to the late forties. Two minorities are the primary focus – the Jewish community of suburban Pikesville and the black community. The former is disturbed by the abduction of ten year old Tessie Durst and the subsequent hunt for her killer. Particularly disturbed is Maddie (Natalie Portman), a middle-aged woman who, we learn was once the girlfriend of the father of the murdered child. The relationship was frowned upon and went nowhere and Maddie Morgenstern married Milton Schwartz, a much less interesting and far more orthodox man. Tessie’s disappearance triggers enormous changes in Maddie – she departs abruptly from home, her son is permanently antagonistic and she embarks on an attempt first to do a little insurance fraud and then to get into newspaper reporting. Along the way she starts fucking a black cop.
Across town Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram) is trying to eke out a living as window mannequin at Hecht’s department store and as barmaid hostess at a black nightclub run by Shell Gordon, the black rackets king of Baltimore and a man to be feared. Cleo has an ambition to get into politics via a job on the staff of prominent local Congresswoman Myrtle Summer and is also trying to keep her son out of harm’s way as he embarks on a life of petty crime as a numbers collector. The collision of the two societies, separated mostly by a cynical police force and an even more cynical newspaper reporter makes for great drama. The ending must be as bleak as any in recent times.
Presumed Innocent is based on a book by Scott Turow, a Chicago lawyer, written in 1987 and filmed by Alan J Pakula back in 1990. I remember that Scott Murray drew my attention to the book and for quite some time I was a devotee of Turow’s very precise, slow boil legal/political/crime stories that peered into the politics and corruption of the fictional Kindle County, a part of the larger area dubbed I think the Tri-Cities. But we know it was really Turow’s Chicago. In a Balzacian fashion, characters bobbed up across the series of books from Presumed Innocent in 1987 to Reversible Errors in 2002. Cant say I’ve read any since.
The new series (showrunner is the amazingly prolific David E Kelley), a long eight parts, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Prosecutor Rusty Sabich, brings the story into the present. Back in 1987 there were no mobile phones and little CCTV to move the story along in the way that the new series does. It was complicated back then and the update piles on the clues that suggest at every step that we should have a sneaking feeling that Rusty may well have murdered his mistress. As far as I could see it doesn’t layout any clues as to who we finally learn did do it so the twist is a bit mediocre.
Bad Monkey benefits from taking its time. Carl Hiaasen is a great humourist, a great satirist but above all a writer with an implacable ability to open up the rotten can of worms that is Florida’s politics and law enforcement. The one previous attempt at making a movie of his books (at least his so-called ‘Adult Fiction”) was the stupendously mediocre Striptease way back in 1996. The TV series (showrunner Bill Lawrence) tries to capture Hiaasen’s jocularity first via Vince Vaughan’s one man running standup dialogue as Andrew Yancy, a cop who has been tossed off the force then reinstated as a food inspector. It adds to it by possibly outright pillaging or by attempting to copy Hiaasen’s prose via a commentary track where a minor character far too frequently seeks to add a little humour by pointing out what is otherwise mostly the bleeding obvious. Still it does get Hiaasen’s focus – Florida corruption, pathetic police force, the sheer indolence of so many of the inhabitants and the tendency for many to take whatever criminal possibility is on offer. That gets a bravo. More Hiaasen please.
In fact more adaptations of all three writers. Done as well as they were done here would be just the ticket in between seasons of Slow Horses.