Heavy Traffic (1973)

Posted on March 27, 2021 at 9:43 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Following the breakout success of Fritz the Cat (1972), the X-rated animated adaptation of Robert Crumb’s underground comix, director Ralph Bakshi had the cachet to pursue the project he’d originally intended to be his first feature: Heavy Traffic (1973). Just as X-rated as Fritz – possibly more X-rated, judging by the content – the film is a stream-of-consciousness, semi-autobiographical portrait of an underground artist and those he encounters living the outcast, hardscrabble street life in New York City. Samuel Z. Arkoff purchased the project for American International, and was instrumental in keeping Bakshi around even as producer Steve Krantz tried to get the director fired. (Bakshi was convinced Krantz was pilfering all the profits from Fritz, and the bad blood boiled from there. These days a studio would label the fallout “creative differences.”) If the former film was a merging of two outlaw sensibilities – Bakshi adapting the work of another artist, as he would do off and on for the rest of his career – Heavy Traffic was pure Bakshi, and superior as a result. He aimed to please no one but himself. At the time, there was no other film like this, not Fritz, not anything, but Bakshi would follow it up with a series of purely American stories that act like sequels or prequels: Coonskin (1974), American Pop (1981), Hey Good Lookin’ (1982).

The domestic troubles of Angelo and Ida Corelone.

Heavy Traffic follows a young twentysomething cartoonist voiced – and played in a climactic live action sequence – by Joseph Kaufmann, who tragically died in a plane crash after completing his work in the film. His name is Michael Corleone, and the Godfather reference isn’t the only one in the film: Michael’s father Angelo (Frank DeKova) is proud to serve the whims of a grotesque and violent Mafia don. Angelo also wants his son to lose his virginity and become a real man. He cheats on his wife Ida (Terri Haven), and when he gets home, the two are constantly trying to murder one another (at one point, she shoves the unconscious Angelo into the oven and turns on the gas). Michael is smitten with a tall Black bartender named Carole (Beverly Hope Atkinson – who also gets to appear in the live action finale). Carole encourages Michael to try to sell his comic strips, which are brought to life in mini-movies animated in completely different styles: a raucous romance of rough sketches set to Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and a post-apocalyptic fantasy parable, using a slideshow of stills, that foreshadows Bakshi’s Wizards (1977). But Michael’s interracial romance with Carole infuriates his father, who goes to the Godfather to order a hit on him. All of these events are set thematically to a game of pinball, the characters bouncing off each other, firing and colliding and sinking, with Bakshi occasionally flashing to live action flippers and spinning silver spheres. A jazzy, haunting cover of “Scarborough Fair” performed by Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66 (best known for their pop song “Mas que Nada”) recurs throughout the film.

The “Mother Pile” sequence, bringing to life one of Michael’s comic strips, anticipates Bakshi’s later post-apocalyptic fantasy, Wizards.

One of the strengths of Heavy Traffic is that the film frequently cedes the spotlight to minor characters, always casting a humane and curious gaze on those navigating the seedy clubs, back alleys, moldering apartments, and decrepit dives. The Bakshi trademark of naturalistic banter, played out like field recordings from the street, parts like a curtain to reveal the individual souls caught up in the urban squalor, from pink-wigged transvestite Snowflake (Jim Bates) to legless bartender Shorty. The biggest gut-punch of the film comes from one of its many digressions, when Michael, helping manage Carole’s hustle as a taxi dancer (dancing with strangers for cash), encounters his drunken, dolled-up mother trying to take the same work. As she wanders through a background of live action stock footage, her monologue of recounted memories becomes a reverie until she sees an image of herself in joyous youth – unable, at first, to recognize the person. It’s a devastating moment that is accomplished with minimal animation, the slideshow in the background coming to fill the screen as the film becomes a family album; and then we see Ida Corleone staring up at the images, dwarfed by them. Something this technically simple becomes a major highlight of Bakshi’s work as an animation director.

Slow motion annihilation.

As usual, Bakshi compiles a killer soundtrack (released on LP by jazz label Fantasy Records): in addition to Chuck Berry and Sérgio Mendes, the film features the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five” (later to feature in American Pop), and an alternately jazzy, nostalgic, and mournful score by Ed Bogas and Ray Shanklin. Though the images can be lurid or grotesque, Bakshi and his animation staff keep it dazzling by playing with techniques throughout, integrating live action footage with day-glo highlights; rendering the Godfather and his ghoulish goons in a nightmarish blur as the spaghetti he’s devouring is revealed to contain human souls twisted among the noodles; casually incorporating surrealism and fantasy with the kind of gritty images few live action films would be willing to depict. What unites the disparate techniques is Bakshi’s ambiguous attitude toward urban life – cynical but also enormously empathetic. Heavy Traffic is a film about survivors. It’s the most bold film that American International would ever release, and it earned Bakshi the best reviews of his career.

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Eraserhead (1977)

Posted on March 12, 2021 at 8:14 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

2021 is the 10th anniversary of Midnight Only. To mark the occasion, this imaginary, rat-infested, leaky-roofed theater is raising the curtain on historically important midnight movies.

The following was originally written for this site on July 21, 2015.

One of the most important images in David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead (1977) comes toward the end of a surreal montage, meant to establish a chain of strange motifs and to cold-immerse the viewer into the nightmare world of the film. It is Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) silently screaming in terror. Silently – inwardly, like a man collapsing in on himself, as the image of a squishy parasite-like fetus-thing floats superimposed out of his mouth. I can’t define what that thing is because Lynch likes to keep his nightmares indefinable. The most important thing is that it prods like a hot poker at a certain part of your brain – because your subconscious identifies it, and recoils. No matter how weird Eraserhead gets, we will always understand what that silent scream is about, and what Henry is suffering – even if we can’t put it into words ourselves. Lynch has never made a genre horror film, and yet he’s so well versed in the mode of nightmare that some of his pictures rank with the most frightening and unsettling ever made. It’s said that Kubrick loved Eraserhead so much that he screened it for the crew of The Shining (1980) so they could channel its bad vibes. Notably, The Shining also features a silent scream, Edvard Munch-style – this from a young psychic boy on a Big Wheel, with nothing to protect him from the great malevolent ether at the Overlook Hotel. Replacing his scream, and Henry Spencer’s, is the deafening noise of the soundtrack. (Like Lynch, Kubrick loved his sound design.) The environments of both Eraserhead and The Shining are paralyzing. The dread is incapacitating to its characters.

Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) meets the parents (Jeanne Bates, Allen Joseph) of Mary (Charlotte Stewart).

Of course, both films are also impeccably shot. It’s astonishing to see the quantum leap in style between Lynch’s cruder early films and his first full-length feature, though they all have clearly emerged from the same disturbed imagination. The perfectly composed images are rendered in lush black-and-white by cinematographers Herb Caldwell and Frederick Elmes. Eraserhead looks like it was filmed during the Golden Age of Hollywood – so its grotesque sights are like a viral infection, mutating and deforming the landscape. In the process, the kitchen-sink drama becomes a punk-art parody. A musical number is marred by hideous facial prosthetics and more squishy umbilical-like things dropping out of the rafters. There is a certain connection here with the Hollywood-parodying, taboo-breaking underground films of the Kuchar brothers and John Waters. No wonder the film became a hit as a midnight movie. And like seminal midnight movie El Topo (1970), the narrative is a symbolic one, and a loose framework on which can be applied a series of bizarre and sometimes shocking abstractions – perfect for late-night viewing. (Lynch has called it “a nighttime film.”) Everyman clock-puncher Henry, with a vertical coiffure and a pocket protector, is contacted by his estranged girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart – who, like Nance, would later be featured in Twin Peaks). Over the most awkward meet-the-parents dinner in cinema history, Henry learns that Mary has given birth to a premature baby – though she says, “They’re not even sure that it is a baby.” Henry is given a stern lecture to wed Mary and take responsibility for the child. “You’ll be in very bad trouble if you don’t cooperate,” Mary’s mother says. The film then reveals the infant, a skinless, moist, bug-eyed, mewling thing, and whose tiny body is hidden in bandages. Eraserhead finds its disturbing rhythm in sequences set largely in Henry’s claustrophobic apartment, of harrowing child care, domestic dissolution, dreams and nightmares.

The baby.

Among the film’s many strange sights is the Man in the Planet, who seems to act as a kind of mute Chorus, bookending the film as he looks out his window toward the universe, sporting a hideous complexion, and pulling a huge lever like a laborer in Metropolis (1927). Across the cramped hallway from Henry’s apartment lives a sexy neighbor (Judith Roberts, Stardust Memories), who seduces Henry after Mary has fled back to her parents’ house. As the two embrace, they sink down into what resembles a smoking witch’s cauldron. The radiator occasionally lights up from within, revealing a stage framed by coils and encircled by footlights. Henry eventually has a vision of a singer with huge chipmunk cheeks, who serenades him from the radiator with the film’s original song, “In Heaven.” She seems to represent unobtainable hope and comfort, despite the alarming makeup. In what plays like a film-within-a-film, Henry dreams of being decapitated on her little stage, sprouting the head of his baby. His severed head is then found by a boy on the street, who delivers it to a factory where it’s used for the manufacture of pencil erasers. (The most iconic image of the film is Jack Nance framed by a cloud of eraser dust, white motes swirling about him against a black background like the film’s recurring starfield imagery.) Throughout, the soundtrack is persistent, offering little opportunity for peace – just like living in an apartment in the city. A roar of airplane engines. The whistle and rumble of a train. Henry tries to drown it all out by playing Fats Waller organ music, which nonetheless sounds like someone else is having a good time, long ago and far away.

Final embrace with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near).

There are connections to Lynch’s films past and future. The idea of a suffering male protagonist seeking motherly comfort and reassurance against a frighteningly adult world almost makes this feel like a sequel to Lynch’s 34-minute film “The Grandmother” (1970), along with the recurring images of roots and piles of soil (in the short, a young bed-wetter with abusive parents grows his ideal grandmother from a seed planted in an empty bed). The zig-zag pattern in the lobby of Henry’s building reappears in Twin Peaks. The stage inside the radiator is like Henry’s own Club Silencio, of Mulholland Drive (2001). Light bulbs flicker demonically and the shadows are always an all-consuming black. Lynch’s first feature film is from an artist fully-formed. He writes and films straight from his subconscious, with little filter. But there is a clear theme of domestic implosion which emerges from the delirium of Eraserhead. Lynch’s daughter, director Jennifer Lynch (Boxing Helena, Surveillance), has pointed out that she was born with club feet and put in a cast, a natural inspiration for the movie’s convincing moments of stressful child care (and bandages). And Lynch went through a divorce during the film’s production, which makes it tempting to read into the film’s scenes with the frustrated Henry and Mary. But Lynch has pointed out that the film is inspired by innumerable things, and should be left to one’s personal interpretation. There is also plenty of pitch-black humor which shouldn’t be overlooked – especially during the dinner with Mary’s parents. After the catatonic grandmother is left in the kitchen with a cigarette, miniature chickens are brought out on a platter. Henry is asked to slice the first chicken, which perplexes him: the long, curved carving knife dwarfs the meal. Then the chicken legs begin to twitch, and blood pours and pools from between them, an image of miscarriage or abortion. Mary’s mom begins to have a seizure – or an orgasm. Mary eventually bursts out crying, and her mother goes to speak to her in the opposite room. Father stares for a very long time at Henry, grinning in silence. Then he says brightly, “Well, Henry, what do you know?”

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The Harder They Come (1972)

Posted on March 6, 2021 at 10:01 am by Jeff Kuykendall

2021 is the 10th anniversary of Midnight Only. To mark the occasion, this imaginary, rat-infested, leaky-roofed theater is raising the curtain on historically important midnight movies.

The Harder They Come (1972) was a midnight movie hit shortly after its US release in April 1973, playing the midnight slot for over 6 years at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA. But it stood apart from other long-running films that screened for the late-night crowd. It wasn’t a head trip like El Topo, an ironic revival like Reefer Madness, or a transgressive underground movie like Pink Flamingos. Perry Henzell’s film, shot in 16mm, belongs to the Jamaican streets. The dialogue, spoken by its non-professional cast, is delivered in a thick, export-unfriendly Jamaican Patois. The star, Jimmy Cliff, was a singer who, at the time of the film’s production, was largely unknown outside his native country. And today, the film is chiefly regarded as the one whose soundtrack caused reggae to spread like wildfire outside Jamaica. It was a pop culture seismic event with a distinct Before and After. Bob Marley, a singer since 1962, released his seminal 1973 Wailers record Catch a Fire several months after The Harder They Come‘s soundtrack hit record stores. American and British bands began to incorporate reggae rhythms into their albums. The film’s longevity as a midnight item can be attributed largely to the popularity of its record – it was an opportunity for audiences to see the movie whose disc they were already spinning.

Jimmy Cliff as Ivan Martin.

Inspired by real-life Jamaican gangster Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, aka Rhyging, who was shot down by police in 1948, The Harder They Come delivers a contemporary Kingston setting for its Ivanhoe Martin, played by Cliff. Henzell, who co-wrote the film with Trevor D. Rhone, takes his time building toward Martin’s descent into criminal activity. He is, at first, steeped in poverty and scrambling desperately for work. On the advice of his mother he reluctantly takes a job with a strict and fiery preacher (Basil Keane), then exerts his considerable charisma on the man’s young and wide-eyed ward, Elsa (Janet Bartley). A delivery job to the local recording studio sparks Ivan’s interest in recording a single. Elsa loans him the key to the church so he can practice, which enrages her father, driving Ivan back into the streets. To top it off – shades of Bicycle Thieves (1948) – his prized possession, the bicycle he’s been working to repair, has been stolen, and he slices up the culprit’s face with a knife, earning him a brutal whipping by the police. But, catching a break, he does record his song, “The Harder They Come,” for a greedy producer (Bob Charlton) who won’t pay him more than $20. When the song becomes a radio hit, Ivan is already on his way to a life of crime – his friend Jose (Carl Bradshaw) gives him a job running cannabis through town – but following a betrayal and Ivan’s shooting of a police officer, he makes a decision to embrace his popularity among the impoverished community, taking on the police with devil-may-care enthusiasm. An early scene in which he watches Django (1966) mow down cowboys in the mud while the audience hoots and hollers forms the template for his own outlaw hero, albeit one who is clumsier, short-sighted, and casually tempts fate with hubris.

Janet Bartley as Elsa.

Henzell’s choice to make a film featuring an almost entirely Black cast speaking in their own local dialect, concession-free (though the film was subtitled when it was released in the States), fueled the film’s popularity when it was released in Jamaica: a simple choice, but extraordinary representation in line with the film’s message of giving a voice to the invisible. Henzell’s neorealist, documentary-like approach lets his fictional characters walk through unstaged scenes of life in poverty, at one point panning his camera across a landfill where the poor dig through trash while Ivan looks on. Contrasting with such scenes are joyous, carnal moments. Elsa daydreaming during church service of standing nude in the waves, embracing Ivan. Ivan taking her on a bike ride through sunny Kingston. Ivan’s theft of a car from a hotel, speeding into green grass while Henzell’s camera drifts high above. And, of course, the music – Cliff’s title track, plus “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” “Many Rivers to Cross,” and “Sitting in Limbo”; Toots and the Maytals performing “Sweet and Dandy” in the recording studio while Cliff looks on in pleasure; the hypnotic “Johnny Too Bad” by The Slickers. The Harder They Come isn’t quite a reggae musical, but it can stand beside other films of its era, post-The Graduate, that trade a traditional score for pop music. It would be a memorable film without the music – it would! – but the vibrant songs provide the story a resonant heartbeat. The music is Ivan’s soul, keeping him sympathetic through his transformation into a Cagney-like Public Enemy – even through his affair with Jose’s girlfriend, betraying the exasperated Elsa who eventually goes back to live with the preacher. The music also becomes the anthem of the people as they help Ivan escape pursuit from the cops, scrawling messages on fences mocking them. When Ivan inevitably falls – cornered, sweaty and exhausted, but defiant – Henzell keeps tempo, his camera staggering across the sand alongside the antihero, cutting to black as Ivan finally drops to the ground. If Ivan doesn’t get a send-off on the scale of White Heat, it’s because Henzell has kept the film grounded, human-scaled. Because it stays at that level, it soars.

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