Hey Good Lookin’ (1982)

Posted on April 20, 2013 at 10:22 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Finally available on DVD is one of Ralph Bakshi’s more obscure animated films, Hey Good Lookin’ (1982), his R-rated, semi-autobiographical reflection on street life in 1950’s Brooklyn. It’s a personal enough film to complete an informal trilogy begun with Heavy Traffic (1973) and Coonskin (1975), and though I still find both of those films to be superior, a revisit to Hey Good Lookin’ had me realizing this was a better film than I’d remembered, and a worthy capper to his earlier work. The plot is more of a hastily-scribbled sketch. Vinnie (Richard Romanus of Mean Streets and Heavy Metal) is an Italian-American greaser obsessed with his personal style and cool. His best friend is “Crazy” Shapiro (David Proval, also of Mean Streets, and later The Sopranos), a redheaded, Jewish, mouth-breathing personification of the Id. While Vinnie is reserved and smooth, Shapiro is loud, awkward, and ultimately delusional. Vinnie’s girlfriend is Rozzie (Tina Bowman, aka Tina Romanus), whom Bakshi’s animators relish drawing of such proportions that she threatens to explode her top, and her best friend is the plump and shy Eva (Jesse Welles, Wizards‘ fairy Elinore), whose passion for sandwiches rivals Wimpy’s for hamburgers. Over the course of a day and night, Shapiro’s antics lead Vinnie into deeper and deeper trouble, as he insists that Vinnie lead his gang the Stompers into a rumble with their black rivals, the Chaplains. The 50’s story is framed by the present, as a gravel-voiced stranger narrates to a middle-aged woman broken by some mysterious tragedy.

Rozzie and Eva at the beach, talking about boys.

The film was released marginally and reluctantly by Warner Bros. in October of 1982, and it seems oddly placed in Bakshi’s filmography, squeezed between the epic statement of American Pop (1981) and the grim-faced sword & sorcery of Fire and Ice (1983), both of which built upon The Lord of the Rings‘ (1978) technique of filming as much as possible in live action before applying animation. If the (mostly) rotoscope-shunning Hey Good Lookin’ seems to belong more to his early 70’s output, there’s a good reason. He completed his first cut of the film in 1975, and reportedly it was a very different movie. Bakshi had been experimenting with mixing animation and live action since his first film, Fritz the Cat (1972), and took it to stylistic (and visually stunning) extremes with Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. Increasingly, live action took a larger role in his films, such that Coonskin featured live action framing scenes in homage to its inspiration (and satirical target), Song of the South. Hey Good Lookin’ was to be dominated by live action, with animated characters intruding into the real world, a proto-Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Stills from this unreleased film are included in the book Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi by Jon M. Gibson & Chris McDonnell, which also reveals that one of the scenes featured a performance by the New York Dolls (!), and that the original soundtrack drew from Bakshi’s own vinyl collection.

A violent rumble climaxes the film.

But the film’s fate was affected by fallout from Coonskin – a picture that was passed from a balking Paramount to a smaller, less-reputable distributor when Al Sharpton and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) protested the film’s content and questioned its intentions. With Hey Good Lookin’, Bakshi suddenly found himself with a completed film that no one wanted to release. True, the film had racial elements, but hardly of the powderkeg variety of his earlier picture. Hey Good Lookin’ features a black gang, and Vinnie makes a racist crack at one point – mainly to get a rise out of the gang’s leader – but, as with Heavy Traffic, the writer/director is aiming at gritty realism; pointedly, the film’s most shocking moment is the sudden and violent murder of two black men, and Vinnie becomes the audience surrogate when he feels sickened and outraged. Ultimately, Bakshi moved on to Wizards, and cult movie fans are forever grateful. But he wouldn’t let go of Hey Good Lookin’, and financed its completion, now as a fully-animated film (I presume that the film’s single, out-of-place rotoscoped sequence, involving the Chaplains striking poses in the street, is animated over some of the original cut’s live action). When the film was finally released, it suffered only slightly from the revision: the original songs, by Ric Sandler, have aged poorly, and one misses the stellar (and more expensive) soundtrack of American Pop.

The supporting cast are disproportionate caricatures, designed by the talented concept artist Louise Zingarelli, whose drawings were featured in the opening credits of "American Pop."

On the other hand, the hand-drawn animation has aged very well, particularly when viewed in the twenty-first century, when the craft is an endangered species. Bakshi weds memories of his Brooklyn youth to the beautiful grotesques of artist Louise Zingarelli, whose drawings were featured in the opening credits of American Pop. He embraces Zingarelli’s character designs, big-headed, oddly proportioned, saggy or scrawny, the weight of reality pressing upon them. Her style is most memorable with the image of the gangsters’ wives undressing on the beach, squeezing their flesh into their swimsuits, a celebration of the body at its most comically unlovely. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Rozzie, whose enormous breasts are often placed prominently in the frame; “I’ll let you squeeze my tits,” she purrs at Vinnie, fully aware of her greatest currency among these teenagers. She’s the doe-eyed prize in tight jeans and tight tops to be delivered to the coolest and the toughest of all the greasers, but Bakshi’s just setting up the denouement, in which we see her in unglamorous middle-age. We may be hot stuff when we’re young, but we’ll all be Zingarelli drawings in the end.

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Phase IV (1974)

Posted on April 14, 2013 at 10:30 am by Jeff Kuykendall

For a long while, Phase IV (1974) was, to me, that VHS box with the ant crawling out of a bloody hole in someone’s palm. It was a misguided Dalí reference, exploitation-style; and at the time it scared me away from renting the film, despite my underage ambition to rent every fantasy, horror, and SF film rated PG (in other words, that which my parents would allow). But finally there was nothing left on the shelf. I took it home and found the film less exciting than the poster art suggested, and over the years only remembered it as that movie in which scientists sit around a lab talking about mutated ants. Recently, I was surprised to find myself interested in Phase IV again. There were reports of a rare deleted ending, from the archives of director Saul Bass, screened in the summer of 2012 at L.A.’s Cinefamily. Jeff McKay posted on the Mobius Home Video Forum, “The sequence exceeded all my expectations. It was about 4-5 minutes long and was a visual and aural delight – one cool abstract and surreal image after the next…It will be hard to watch the theatrical version again as it will now always seem so woefully incomplete.” To see the words “Phase IV” and “delight” in such close proximity was almost too much for me (“woeful,” on the other hand…). I found myself in the position of wishing that I’d been in L.A. to watch Phase IV, of all things. Luckily, the Wisconsin Film Festival has always been good to Madison-based film buffs, and on April 13, Director of Programming (and cult movie fan) Jim Healy brought viewers not only a print of Phase IV and the alternate ending, but film archivist Sean Savage of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and the film’s very embarrassed star, Michael Murphy (of Manhattan, Nashville, and countless better films).

Michael Murphy and Nigel Davenport study some unusual anthills.

After the Q&A ended, Murphy – a great sport – audibly muttered, “Now I never have to watch that film again.” But I found myself being entertained by Phase IV, despite its obvious and numerous limitations. I cannot recommend it without a score of large caveats. If at all possible, the film should be watched in a theater. The photography of the ants, which put me to sleep when I was younger, is really quite remarkable on the big screen, and it’s endlessly amusing to watch those tiny actors hit their marks. These scenes were filmed by Ken Middleham, who had crafted a semi-documentary of insect life called The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), and would go on to shoot more “micro-photography” for another post-apocalyptic SF film, Damnation Alley (1977). One of the achievements of Phase IV is that it is always pretty clear what the ants are thinking and doing. In one unintentionally funny scene, Middleham and Bass even stage a “tragic,” Gone With the Wind-style shot of dead ants stacked and lined up in rows in one of their subterranean tunnels, implying that the insects are mourning their fallen soldiers. But that’s the other reason Phase IV is best watched at a revival screening. It is much easier to endure the film’s languid pace and pretentiousness if buoyed by the laughter of a packed theater. (The film was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 during that show’s run on KTMA public access in Minnesota.) I have had some pretty miserable experiences with classic films being spoiled by inappropriate laughter at revival screenings; but, really, Phase IV is asking for it.

Saul Bass lends a 70's-psychedelic quality to the film's more hallucinatory moments, most especially in the newly-discovered original ending.

The high-concept plot takes place on a near-future Earth which is undergoing environmental changes due to a vaguely-described cosmic event. Cryptologist Jim Lesko (Murphy) joins the isolated and possibly mad Dr. Hubbs (Nigel Davenport, of the similarly eco-horror-themed No Blade of Grass) in the investigation of a colony of mutated ants constructing geometrically-precise monoliths in Arizona (the exteriors were actually shot in Africa, as the producer had already made Born Free there). Hubbs takes a novel approach to stimulating the ant activity: he launches grenades at them. The ants turn hostile fast, attacking in swarms a local farmer’s family and surrounding the domed research facility. After accidentally killing the farmer and his wife by recklessly spraying the surrounding area with their ant-poison sprinkler system, the two “scientists” allow the teenage daughter (Lynne Frederick) to take shelter in the dome. Lesko tries to decipher the ants’ language as a means of communicating with them, but Hubbs quickly declines into violent, obsessive Ahab mode. As the super-intelligent insects take out the radio and air conditioning system, and build towers of bright reflecting light around the dome, Lesko begins to suspect that it’s the ants who are experimenting on them. All of this sounds like perfect fodder for a 70’s genre film: part disaster movie, part Andromeda Strain. But Phase IV is burdened by terrible dialogue and characters who seem to inhabit a sliding scale of stupidity – at the bottom being Lynne Frederick’s teenage innocent, who, in her first moments within the safe confines of the lab, destroys much of their equipment simply because she wants to smash ants (Davenport isn’t terribly bothered, for some reason). What should be an intellectual, mind-bending thriller is, instead, a guilty-pleasure cheesefest; and, of course, I don’t mind that in the least.

Murphy jumps over the sun, one of the many, many images from the deleted ending's montage.

But the ending, screened after the original cut of the film had played in its entirety, is truly a revelation and worth seeing at least once. More visually ambitious than most of the film’s ninety minutes, it’s a montage of impressionistic, abstract, and surreal images that reminded me, alternately, of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, M.C. Escher, 60’s and 70’s SF paperbacks, and, yes, Dalí. The finale is intended to represent the future of mankind as controlled by the super-ants. We see Murphy and Frederick running hand-in-hand over towers and cities constructed by their new masters. We see humanity confined within giant mazes (the visualization of one of Murphy’s lines – that he knows what a rat in a maze feels like), each person labeled with a number and wearing equipment on the head so the ants can better study the human brain. We see a pelican plummeting, for some reason. We see a boy sitting across from a baboon as if they are psychically communicating. We see a fish with human legs. We see Murphy flapping his arms through the air beside a bird, and jumping over the sun. We see his body merging with Frederick’s, and their faces join together in halves. We see giant ants lording over them all. As with the final cut of the film, the title Phase IV at last appears (the film has no opening credits). The entire deleted scene is a nutzoid, psychedelic freakout, reaching for the stars (or Star-Child); all of it is severely limited by the technology of 1974, the optical effects showing their seams – but it’s still a fascinating collage. If the film had been released with this ending, Phase IV wouldn’t have achieved any greater accolades, but at least it would have had something to hold it in the memory.

Murphy and the Academy Film Archive's Sean Savage discuss "Phase IV" at the 2013 Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison.

In the Q&A, archivist Savage noted that the studio – a Robert Evans-led Paramount (Murphy made a cocaine-snorting gesture) – tried to make the ending work by layering narration over it, but the end result was even more confusing and overwhelming; in the end, they cut it. A mistake. He also revealed that Bass had shot a prologue: a scene meant to indicate that the ants are communicating with some cosmic power, but which amounted to shots of ants, shots of stars, shots of ants. The scene was dropped and Murphy’s perplexing narration was added to the opening image of the cosmos instead. Murphy discussed the frustrations of having to loop all of his dialogue, and his disappointment with the end result: he felt more attention should have been paid to the acting, and that the film’s intriguing ideas were wasted. He recalled that Frederick’s breasts were tied down throughout the film to give her a more adolescent figure – until the final scene, in which she emerges from the sand to seduce his character. (The actress later married Peter Sellers, he pointed out.) Both Murphy and Savage expressed dismay that the film’s poster was not designed by Bass – Murphy held up images of Bass’s work, including the poster for The Man with the Golden Arm, to demonstrate the man’s talent as a designer. And, of course, the issue of a full restoration and Blu-Ray release was discussed: which is not happening at the moment, due to the expense involved (needless to say, this is a very niche film to begin with). However, there are early discussions of a Criterion box set drawing from the Saul Bass archive, and Savage indicated that if this comes to fruition, the Phase IV ending ought to be included. Stay tuned.

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The Shining (1980)

Posted on April 12, 2013 at 8:35 am by Jeff Kuykendall

It is a struggle to extricate The Shining (1980) from its iconic moments – to properly “see” the film. It has taken me many, many years, and I am almost there, but not quite. Much of this is the fault of Stanley Kubrick, who had a damnable knack for creating “pure cinema” that would sear itself upon the cultural imagination; it is still difficult for me to understand that someone had to actually assemble 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) from scratch (source material notwithstanding); it is easier to believe that they were conceived out of a Star Gate to which only Kubrick had access. I have always hated – and deny – the concept of something being “ahead of its time.” All things are of their time, and it is more insightful to see how a work holds a dialogue with its contemporaries; but the films of Stanley Kubrick were certainly forward-thinking, and made great, risky leaps into untested realms. But in their accomplishments for the medium, the films became over-familiar, sectioned into clips that would play in every clip show. For The Shining, it was “Here’s Johnny,” it was the twins in the blue dresses asking Danny to come play with them, it was “Redrum,” it was the axe and the hedge maze and “All work and no play…” – and on and on.  The first time I saw The Shining (as a teenager, on a VHS tape, shown to me by a friend who was already an acolyte of the film), I had two reactions. One was that I could only see those famous moments, so many of which I already knew from clip shows, and I couldn’t see how they all stuck together and formed a fluid story. The other was that it was scary as fuck.

Behind the scenes at the Overlook Hotel: Joe Turkel, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, and crew.

I warmed to it with subsequent viewings; whatever criticisms I had began to erode. Seeing it on the big screen, for example, accentuated the film’s hypnotic power. It means something to not be able to pause a film, to have it take up so much of your field of vision, to have it towering over you. I remember feeling the urge to look over my shoulder and down the aisle of the cavernous Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee, half-expecting to see a psychotic with an axe limping toward me. The film has a genuine effect of paranoia and choking dread. In anticipation of seeing Room 237 (2012), the documentary collecting conspiracy theories surrounding the film, I just rewatched The Shining to hold it fresh in my head. Even though I knew that was hardly necessary, because we all know The Shining and have it committed to memory, more or less. The only difference with this viewing is that it was on Blu-Ray, and the (excellent) high-resolution transfer creates a certain level of intimacy that I did not find on my old DVD. But, for whatever reason, I was drawn more into the narrative on this viewing, and in particular was able to better track the emotional lives – and psychic deterioration – of the Torrances. Yes, the story was fluid. Kubrick built his films with steel girders. The film holds up. Only the hammy “Heeere’s Johnny!” struck me as unnecessary. Why The Tonight Show? Why then? I suppose it doesn’t matter. Every home video release has the moment preserved on the cover, which says something for its popularity. You can’t argue with Kubrick, who knew what would stick.

Australian lobby card.

A strange thing happened to me this time around. While I was enjoying and admiring the craft of the film from the start, the acting seemed stilted or (as we know is the case) over-rehearsed. Unnatural. Jack Nicholson, as Jack Torrance, smiling sweetly during the job interview – the weird pauses between each spoken line during this scene. The over-politeness when the Torrances arrive at the Overlook, Barry Nelson standing stiffly while he delivers his lines, beaming at them – all of this, by the way, really no different from the acting styles of 2001, also much-criticized. Mind you, I didn’t have a problem with this – it’s Kubrick, it’s The Shining, we all know what we’re getting by now – but what I was not quite conscious of this time around was just how much I was being manipulated. As the film progresses, we see Jack’s slow decline. We have learned that he is quitting alcohol after injuring his son; we know his marriage is on shaky footing, and his wife and son are afraid of him. We can see that fear grow as Jack begins to snap at them. We see him staring off into space, possibly “shining” with the Overlook. We don’t know for sure just what he is anymore. At a key moment about halfway through the film, Danny Torrance walks into Room 237. We’re screaming at him to get back on his Big Wheel and peddle down the hall, but curiosity overcomes him. (And of course it does. After all, Hallorann – played by Scatman Crothers – had told the boy not to go in there. Which means that any boy then would.) Kubrick here makes a crucial decision. As Danny walks into the room, and we see the lights lit within and suggestions of the interior geography, Kubrick dissolves away. He withdraws at the moment of greatest dread (my recollection is that Stephen King showed what transpired within the room, but it has been many years since I’ve read the novel). The dissolve takes us to Wendy (Shelley Duvall) inspecting the furnaces and the power, checking to make sure all gauges are level – essentially reading the temperature of the Overlook, which is about to spike. She hears a disturbing screaming, and discovers her husband having a nightmare. We haven’t yet seen him so vulnerable. Those masks he has heretofore worn – the seemingly rehearsed dialogue, the insincere politeness, the demonic sarcasm – are suddenly gone. Panicked, he tells his wife that in his dream he chopped her and Danny into pieces. Danny enters the room, his collar torn, red marks on his throat; he’s sucking his thumb, in shock. Immediately Wendy turns on her husband, who remains recoiled; she accuses him of hurting Danny again, and takes her child safely out of the room. Jack remains alone, his face frozen stiff – as it has been before, and will be, permanently, in the film’s closing images. The world, it seems, has turned against him. His only ally is the hotel. Enter Lloyd the Bartender, ready to pour drinks. By now, Kubrick had me completely in his grip.

Wendy (Shelley Duvall) discovers that her son Danny (Danny Lloyd) has been injured, and blames her abusive husband rather than ghosts.

Really, it was Wendy that did it for me. Duvall plays Wendy as a complete wreck, pitiful and doe-eyed before Jack’s wrath, unable to confront him. In this moment, Jack’s most helpless, she glimpses the scope of his monstrousness and abandons him. Of course, she is both right and wrong. Jack Torrance is a monster, and for her and Danny’s safety, she should leave him posthaste. But we know Jack is innocent of this particular crime. Somehow, it’s possible for the viewer to be in sympathy with both Wendy and Jack; but, importantly, we understand what will now drive Jack back to drinking, and – an even greater leap – we can believe that now drinks will magically be available (and on the house). Consider that Kubrick has spent the previous hour drawing every element of the story to this one critical turning-point. Repeated images, monotone line readings occasionally interrupted by loud, abusive insults, sudden hallucinations (Danny sees visions of the twin girls and their dead bodies), not to mention the ominous, unnerving score (by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind with selections from György Ligeti, Béla Bartók, and Krzysztof Penderecki), all contribute to a feeling of dislocation and paranoia, which prepares us for the film’s second half, in which ghosts can not only appear but hold long conversations. But Kubrick is also setting up the real story of The Shining, which is a domestic horror story about alcoholism and abuse. (King was wrong when he claimed Kubrick failed to get this theme across.) In the moment when Wendy accuses her husband, credibly, of an injury to her son that was actually committed by a ghost, Kubrick achieves what all horror films should strive for: an emotional center derived from the horrors of everyday reality, accentuated by the supernatural/fantasy element. The haunted house genre should elevate the emotional theme of the story, and it does. So, yes, The Shining most definitely works as a cohesive story, and it has taken me a while to see it. And the film is still scary as fuck.

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