Brian De Palma: Murder à la Mod

Murder à la Mod, Brian De Palma's first proper feature following his 1963 student film The Wedding Party, shows the director further utilizing silent film techniques and New Wave stylistic innovations. Indeed, at times it plays like some mad combination of Buster Keaton and Jean-Luc Godard. A sleazy, post-sexual revolution take on Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Murder à la Mod shows the director still reliant (perhaps overly so) on film school techniques over any of his own innovation, yet it proves a major step up for the budding filmmaker.

Like the protagonist of Peeping Tom, Chris (Jared Martin) is an aspiring filmmaker and avid photographer. Where Mark released his sexual hangups and child abuse through gynocide, however, Chris works as a pornographer to deal with his own issues. He needs the money to pay for a divorce so that he might move in with his girlfriend, Karen (Margo Norton). Yet Chris does not sleep with Karen and makes neurotic references to his relationship with her as an artist-muse, suggesting he does not love Karen so much as the idea of her, having outgrown the idea of the first model he married. There's a bit of Psycho in such scenes (to say nothing of the violent content), as Karen's friend makes a huge withdrawal from the bank, some of which Karen pockets in an attempt to help her chaste lover break away from his marriage as soon as possible.

Soon, everything goes mad. De Palma may be using film school formalism and post-New Wave faux-verité, but he does so to highlight the artifice of the cinema. The first dialogue of the film, a disembodied conversation between Karen and Chris, is mirrored later in a radio soap opera with similar lines that De Palma plays over a repeat of an earlier scene. We get some of the first exposition through screen tests of actresses Chris must audition for his skin flick. the crosshairs of the camera viewfinder breaking up the image and revealing it to be fake. Long shots are distorted, warping the dimensions of those who wander into the background. Even the opening credits throw us off our game, presenting still photographs that are then juked out of place, showing the edges of their frames.

He employs various techniques to build suspense, only to undermine them with zeal. The scene of Tracy making her withdrawal stretches on for a ludicrous amount of time until we fear, as the bank manager does, that she will be mugged immediately after stepping outside. A cop threatens Karen with a parking ticket if she doesn't move Tracy's car, sending her on a chase for her friend that goes awry. Stories reach conclusions, then De Palma doubles back and shows the timeline from a different POV. He employs sped-up, silent film slapstick that isn't funny, but its extreme violence is. Nothing is concrete, everything you think you know about the story is but a lie conjured up by its creator, and De Palma won't stop until he drills this into our heads.

The only limitation here appears to be the nonexistent budget, as the director manages an admirable array of in-camera effects that suggest bigger potential. Some scenes drag on too long (particularly that bank manager bit), and the only actor worth his or her salt is William Finley as Otto, a deranged assistant in the amateur porno production who has lost grip on reality and lives as if a character in a movie. He carries with him two ice picks, one real and one prop, and De Palma even undermines a confusion between the two as he juggles them between his hands by freezing the frame and inserting titles with arrows pointing out which is which. Finley brings a manic creepiness to the character, who serves as De Palma's greatest piece of misdirection in the film.

Perhaps the most telling moment of the film comes early, as Chris angrily demonstrates his real line of work to Karen. He plays a disturbing tape of the porn shoot, as one of the filmmakers lashes out in some misogynistic frenzy and taping stops to throw him out. Chris then walks over to what appears to be the wall and tugs, revealing it to be a pull-down screen masking the set for the final scene of the skin flick behind it. It's almost like the reveal of the Wizard of Oz, but with violent pornography. The sexualized violence of the film seems more a lift from Hitchcock than a commentary in its own right, but it's interesting to see the way De Palma portrays most of the men as savage animals driven mad by the nudity they love so much.

Not much makes sense by the end of Murder à la Mod, though we get definitive answers. It plays the Brechtian card with as much glee as Godard, and there's something more decadently enjoyable about it here than in some placed of JLG's early career, the existential musing swapped out for a cheeky look at the filmmaking process. It's heavily flawed, but there's a can-do attitude here, supported by De Palma's rapidly developing style, that makes for easy digestion for fans of exploitation pictures and even a few surprises along the way.

Carpenter's Tools: Memoirs of an Invisible Man

When I say that John Carpenter is a director who does not try too hard, I mean that as a compliment. He manages an accomplished and tightly composed visual style without indulging himself, and he scripts his films with the barest of exposition. Hell, he's so taut he typically only has time for one or two good performances per film. When he quit the studio system for a time in the late '80s, you could hardly tell these lower budget films apart from the seminal cult work he made at the start of the decade.

However, you can see a massive difference in Carpenter's 1992 return to a major studio (Warner Bros): Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Given $40 million, almost twice the highest amount he'd previously enjoyed for a project, Carpenter could take advantages of breakthroughs in digital animation, which was so cheaply rendered in his other films that it looked outdated even compared to contemporaneous releases. With this extreme (for Carpenter) cash pile, the director and his effects team crafted one of the most impressive uses of digital animation in the early '90s, not as innovative or overwhelming as the work on James Cameron's Terminator 2 but nearly as clever.

Why, then, was the film such a big failure at the box office, halting Carpenter's momentum as he broke back into the system before he truly got started? Perhaps the casting of Chevy Chase and foreknowledge of the director's penchant for goofy, light satire doomed it, because it's important to note that Memoirs is not a comedy. Oh, it gets some laughs here and there, both from the script and Carpenter's sight gags, but Dana Olsen and William Goldman's screenplay is clearly meant to be a straightforward thriller built around the effects.

As such, it succeeds admirably. Chase plays Nick Halloway, a businessman without surviving family, a partner, many friends or even a committed work ethic. He simply is, until, after a particularly hard drinking session with a beautiful friend of a friend (Daryl Hannah), he passes out at the office as an experiment in one of its labs goes horribly awry. He wakes to find the building seemingly on the edge of collapse, missing huge chunks in the structure as if a bomb went off. Yet the walls are intact, merely invisible in places, along with our hapless protagonist.

Before any potentially comic situation arises, special agents arrive on the scene, headed by the amoral David Jenkins (Sam Neill, deliciously wicked without overplaying it). Jenkins and the rest of the response crew realize that a person has been affected when they spot a hat moving back and forth and screaming for help.

Jenkins sees the immense potential of Halloway as A) the best CIA agent the world has ever (not) seen or B) a ticket to big money for another country to take advantage of Nick's possibilities. Nick overhears David's plan and manages to escape and heads out on the lam, pursued by a team of government agents operating without clearance from Langley so Jenkins can catch his prize. Carpenter manages the chase with the same skill he displayed in thrillers like Escape from New York, flagging for an odd bit of comic relief that actually serves more to examine Nick's state of mind than to wreak repetitive gags based on the premise.

Chase has never been so reserved, and as a comic actor he always excelled by projecting an aura of "I don't give a damn if you like me or not" swagger. Basing his career on this style of acting allows him to slip into the drama of the story with ease. Nothing about the story is particularly deep, but Chase almost makes you care when he off-handedly mentions in the voiceover how he'd always dreamed of being invisible as a shy kid; indeed, Jenkins looks over his profile detailing his lack of emotional connections to anyone or anything, and he remarks "He was invisible before he was invisible."

Setting aside such moments, as well as a largely unnecessary romantic subplot between Hannah and Chase that is not grating but also not relevant in any way other than to give Halloway his first real emotional tether to the world, Memoirs of an Invisible Man caters entirely to its Hawksian take on a Hitchcock wrong man thriller. It moves so quickly that it has no time for Carpenter's usual satire: vague references are made to Jenkins' involvement in a notorious operation in Iran, but such brief references are straight-faced, not peevish.

But let's go back to those effects. The opening shot, of Nick setting up a video camera to tape his titular memoirs, sets the stage for what's to come. To prove that he's not simply recording a voiceover for a shot of an empty chair, Nick unwraps a piece of bubble gum and chews it, the perfect cube of gum squishing and twisting around in the air before the outline of a tongue stretches it out and blows a bubble. It's such a simple thing, yet so striking (certainly for its time period), and it shows what might have been the start of a brilliant new phase of a career for the director of a handful of the best low-budget genre pictures of all time. Shots of Nick drinking an the liquid sloshing around where his stomach should be recall a bit of Cameron's work on The Abyss, though I did find myself wondering why Nick couldn't eat solid foods to avoid the ungainly sight of meals digesting when the average human carries several pounds of undigested meat in his intestines. I suppose anything that was in him at the time of the accident was made invisible with the rest of him, and now I find myself wondering if his first few trips to the bathroom afterward resulted in invisible waste, but let us not dwell on such matters.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is, like most of Carpenter's films, far from a masterpiece, but it's a terrific genre picture with enough twists to liven up the rigidity of the invisible man conceit. Hannah is a dynamic actress, too dynamic for a role as underwritten as Alice's, but Sam Neill is the best human villain in a Carpenter film since Isaac Hayes nearly stole the show in Escape from New York. Plus, it's interesting to see more comically oriented actors like Chase and Michael McKean of Spinal Tap fame (in a small role) either playing their laughs as semi-sophisticated -- a premature ejaculation gag involving McKean a notable exception -- and it's a shame the film tanked and earned such lousy reviews for Chase (just before his chat show came and went), who ran for cover to mugging goofiness and never looked back, only recently finding a good outlet for it on the show Community. It also must have stuck in Carpenter's craw something fierce, having won back some fans with They Live after Big Trouble in Little China underperformed and Prince of Darkness failed to make a splash, only to lose them once more here. But for those, like me, who assumed that the '90s were nothing but excruciating failure for the director, Memoirs is a nice riposte, not in the first tier of Carpenter's corpus but a surprisingly solid companion for a double-header with a good Hitchcock chaser.

Les Carabiniers

Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen) is an eerily perfect case of "be careful what you wish for." A contention I've held with Godard since first attempting to test his films is that his penchant for breaking narrative flow just to prove that he could is tedious in a world forever changed by his works, a complaint I haven't voiced as much since applying myself for this retrospective but one that still knocks around the back of my head. It's not fair to hold a director's own influence against him, but I can't (and won't) will myself to like something just because it's important. Well, I finally got to see an example of Godard playing it straight, and I learned this: his Brechtian disconnect isn't a cumbersome distraction to prove his intelligence and artistry. It's the playfulness that gives his movies verve.

Now, maybe this is because this is my sixth post in a span of less than 72 hours, but I've got almost nothing for this movie. I even slept on it, but that may have made matters worse. Les Carabiniers is so unlike the films Godard made previously (and, judging by Contempt, afterward) that it bears a mention, yet it's so dull, so plodding, so lacking in the self-assured cool of his other '60s pictures that I am flabbergasted to see that it was not imposed upon the director.

The titular riflemen are originally poor farm boys in a fictional country, recruited to serve the king in battle. The recruiters promise the two young jackasses that their behavior will be sanctioned by the government, that they can take what they want from the enemy, do anything to women and kill anyone who stands in their way, and at the end they can not only get away with it but receive a paycheck from their government.

So, the men head off to war, raping and pillaging through operational theaters as Godard flashes images of documented horrors, dismembered corpses and wanton destruction, as his two protagonists line up whole families and shoot them for fun. It sounds terrible, and it is, but Godard structures the film to sap all the energy from these scenes, robbing them of their impact. Eventually, the sights of corpses and the boys raping women become commonplace and tame, livened only when they return home to find that they've lost and are now considered war criminals.

One could argue that Godard structures the film not merely to comment on war but the war movie, particularly if we accept Jonathan Rosenbaum's belief that Godard used films as outlets for his film criticism. Its unlikable, rapacious, thieving protagonists, grainy film stock and use of actual war footage (shot on even grainier stock) and its overall lack of action could, then, be Godard's riposte to the bombast of war films and the pleasure they inadvertently give the audience. Yet boring the audience through repetitive, non-provoking violence is not a viable commentary on either combat or the films that potentially celebrate them. Godard, like Sam Mendes with his 2005 snorefest Jarhead (a picaresque film in the sense that if feels like you're staring at postcards for two hours), is so against letting the audience connect viscerally to recognize that, while war films occasionally bring out the bloodlust in us, we need that visceral response to abhor the fighting.

Godard's portrait of fighters committing crimes under the protection of one government, only to find themselves the criminals of another regime is a clever message that the crimes legalized by the West against the nations it subjugates might one day require payment, and that our policies of genocide and colonization deserve revenge. Yet the presentation is all wrong, and I'm reminded of a recent attempt at satire, Robert Edwards' Land of the Blind (starring Tom Hollander, Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland), a film that posited that most revolutionary leaders are tyrants in their own right. Both had interesting themes, but they fail to do anything with them, and believe me when I say that any comparison I make to Land of the Blind cannot be a positive one, lest I set the object of comparison in direct opposition to it.

Still, some touches are nice. Godard relegates much of the action we might see in battle scenes to postcards written to the riflemen's family, passionless voiceovers describing their fights and some of the horrors of the big fights with humorous interludes ("Even so, it's a nice summer"). But this almost seems like Godard's vision of a Béla Tarr movie long before the latter even started making films: how much more interesting would this have been if Tarr had made the project, lingering on the horrors without glorifying them as he made a larger point about man's capacity for self-destruction? Asynchronous sound and politics have been a part of Godard's films from the beginning, what with Belmondo "firing" an un-cocked pistol in Breathless (not to mention the brilliant fractring of the score in A Woman is a Woman) and the highly critical views in Le Petit Soldat, and Godard doesn't do anything noteworthy with his minute experimentation here, and I find myself -- God help me -- wishing Les Carabiniers made a bit less sense.

Steven Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

If any limits had previously been placed on Steven Spielberg, be they financial or artistic, Jaws effectively blew them out of the water. Spielberg was king of the world 20 years before Cameron snatched the title, and anything he wanted was going to be immediately greenlit by studios desperate to have this money-making juggernaut working for them. His choice of follow-up proved that, even for the man who would push American cinema further and further away from art until it became nearly impossible to find, Steven Spielberg wasn't afraid to take risks.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind playfully teases its audience with the same suspense Spielberg wielded so masterfully in his previous feature. He capitalizes on his new fame by structuring the picture as a well-paced alien invaders movie, always slightly unsettling with its paranormal activity. Yet it all proves a feint, one long misdirection leading to one of the great twist endings in cinema, and one of the few that provides emotional resonance instead of audience manipulation: what if the aliens were benevolent?

Yes, Close Encounters marks the point where Spielberg's unabashed, occasionally counterproductive optimism took root, fleshing out the barely justified sentimentality in The Sugarland Express and making a case for this story's heartfelt emotion. It cements his motifs of rocky marriages and distant fathers, and if it was at all possible for his aesthetic to improve further from the technical perfection of Jaws, Spielberg somehow gets even better with a camera.

For where Jaws demonstrated a director with total knowledge of the camera, Close Encounters shows that same director given a heap of money to apply his vision with state-of-the-art effects (which have since been cleaned up further in subsequent editions of the film -- this review covers the superior director's cut completed in 1998). Upon its release, Close Encounters of the Third Kind officially became the loudest film ever made. Its use of light is no less overwhelming: at times the screen floods with orange glows and heavenly auras, alternately terrifying and alluring. This sensory overload never blinds or deafens us to the story, however; Spielberg is not trying to distract us from a weak narrative. He's trying to make us a part of it.

He ported over Richard Dreyfuss from his last film, after the actor lobbied for the part during all the downtime of Jaws and even helped Spielberg work on the script. He brings his brilliant comic timing to the role of Roy Neary, an electrical lineman in Indiana, one of a group of people who see something strange in the sky. Before we meet him, Spielberg opens with seemingly random scenes of inexplicable occurrences: a squadron of missing WWII planes is found in pristine condition in the Sonoran Desert an air traffic controller listens as two planes nearly collide with an object without markings. In Muncie, Indiana, a young boy, Barry Guiler awakes in his room to find his toys suddenly operating and runs outside as if chasing someone only he can see as his mother Gillian (Melinda Dillon) to follow after him desperately trying to snap him out of his haze.

Meanwhile, Roy sits with his family at night, largely ignoring his kids and displaying his immaturity by attempting to bond with them only over the things he likes. He sets up a model train to crash ostensibly to teach his eldest son math and, when reminded of his promise to take the family to the movies and to play mini-golf, he launches into a futile bit of reverse psychology to convince his kids to see his childhood favorite Pinocchio. A massive power outage suddenly hits the state, and Roy heads out to investigate the problem. As he stops to check a map, bright lights appear behind him; thinking it's a car, he waves them by and goes back to his map, failing to notice that the lights suddenly rise up behind the truck. But he notices a bank of mailboxes shaking violently, and he spots a strange object in the sky before it bursts into luminescence, flooding the truck with blinding light and sending the gauges haywire. He attempts to pursue the UFO, along with the local police force, but the brilliant flier disappears into the night after leading them on a brief chase.

Soon, the already-distant Roy begins to withdraw completely from his family. He incessantly spots some odd mound in everyday objects, such as a dob of shaving cream or a pillow. He forces his family to ride out to the spot where he saw the lights, but there's no evidence of anything unusual. "I remember when we used to come to places like this just to look at each other," his wife says as she tries to rekindle whatever passion they've lost with gentle kisses. Roy returns them, but you can see in his eyes that his head is in the clouds. His behavior grows increasingly erratic, to the point that his family fears for his health, and their own. Indeed, the shot of Roy's eldest son looking on at the dinner table as his father silently crafts his mashed potatoes into the same shape that fills his thoughts, barely able to contain his tears as he watches his dad slipping away completely, is perhaps the pivotal shot in the director's career. In that one shot is the totality of his subplots of neglected children and distant fathers, and only someone who'd been as funny in the rest of the film as Dreyfuss could be so heartbreaking when he realizes his family is watching him and, on the verge of tears himself, tries to reassure them: "I guess you've noticed something a little strange with Dad. It's okay, though. I'm still Dad."

He provides little evidence to support this, however, and Ronnie can't take it anymore when she awakens to find Roy upending plants in the yard and throwing them in the house along with dirt, garbage, and even the neighbor's chicken wire. He barely acknowledges his wife's protests and offers only a brief plea as she loads the children into the car and leaves. (Dreyfuss is magnificently funny in this bit, collecting himself as his family speeds away and he finally notices his neighbors gawking at him. With utmost dignity, he re-enters his house through the kitchen window before sticking his head out to grab the step ladder and, with one final look at the gathering crowd, shuts the window and kicks up a small cloud of dirt.) With his materials, Roy constructs a ceiling-high replica of the mound he envisions, just as a report comes on the television concerning a chemical leak at Devils Tower, a rock formation that looks just like the model Roy just sculpted.

Steven Spielberg has never pursued dreams with the same veracity as, say, Terry Gilliam or Werner Herzog, but his corpus is vaguely defined (sometimes to its benefit, others its detriment) by dreams and desires. Those who experienced a close encounter are drawn, against their will, to think of Devils Tower and, if possible, to go there, but there is wonder in their eyes. They forsake the rest of the world because something about those blinking lights gave them more than just a weird case of sunburn: it gave them possibilities. Consider Roy's determination, as far as we know the first in his life, or little Barry (himself a bit alien; young Cary Guffey's body has yet to grow in proportion to his large head here) chasing merrily after that ephemeral force. Or look even to an early scene of a crowd in India who experienced an encounter as well, as they all chant the five-tone musical phrase that would define the film just as the "duh-dunn" motif defined Jaws. When asked where they learned this noise, Spielberg inserts a shot of dozens of hands all pointing upward. There's so much magic in Close Encounters that Spielberg had to drain the excess into another science fiction film.

Hell, you can spot Spielberg all over the place in this movie. Setting aside the themes and motifs that he would employ extensively over the years, various tidbits in the film pop up in later features. The shot of an initial gathering of those "touched" by the UFO spots a bright light coming over a hill, only for their fervor to die when they see that it's just a helicopter. Similar shots exist both in E.T. and A.I. (and, I believe, War of the Worlds, but I'm not sure), in those cases creating an effect of suspense and terror where we momentarily feel euphoria before realizing that the bright light was but mere mortals. Near the end, after the aliens land at Devil's Tower, a scientist panics and runs into a port-a-potty, echoing the lawyer attempting to hide from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. The almost ludicrous size of the mother ship, as well as the basic shape of the aliens (short, long necks), would be re-worked for E.T. The shape of the smaller saucers, as well as their lighting scheme, resemble the tiny alien aircraft in the Spielberg-produced *batteries not included. There's even a possible callback to Jaws in the musical exchange between the scientists at Devil's Tower and the mother ship, which slows down after a flurry of notes as the ship plays two low notes that sound a bit like William's motif for Jaws.

Maybe that's recycling, but there's so much power to Spielberg's direction that I can't fault him for mining the picture for subsequent endeavors. Forget the effects for a moment, if you can (though let's give the effects genius Doug Trumbell credit for once again outpacing everyone else in the industry) and focus on the emotional impact and the sublime skill at work here. A scene in which Roy and Gillian, both driven to Devils Tower after seeing it on TV, meet and embrace as kindred spirits as crowds flee the supposedly toxic area is just about the greatest demonstration of the rule of thirds I've ever seen, managing to crush the two in a panicking sea of people yet making them instantly identifiable by placing them at the top-right intersection. There is subtle cheek as well, such as positioning Roy and the French scientist Lacombe (New Wave pioneer François Truffaut, whose mere presence confirms the true artistry and cinephilia in Spielberg's crowd-pleasers) in front of the mother ship as Lacombe tells the protagonist of his jealousy concerning Roy's selection to go aboard the ship. Just as he says it, one of the countless lights on the ship blazes green behind them. For all of its family drama and otherworldly elation, Close Encounters never manipulates its audience in the way that Spielberg can in his weaker moments.

It retains its power because of what's left unsaid, which is why Spielberg's original re-edit of the film is so shockingly terrible. The director, despite his massive success, did not have final cut privilege during production as Columbia Pictures then teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and needed the film out as quickly as possible. Once it became a hit and saved the studio, Spielberg asked to re-cut the film according to his vision. Columbia agreed, but asked him to insert a shot of the interior of the mother ship. Spielberg hated this caveat, and rightly so: Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a film about wonder, more so than any other film in the director's career. The original cut, as well as the definitive Collector's Edition made 18 years after the first re-edit, allows us to feel that wonder because it leaves us to our own imagination.

As with Jaws, Close Encounters ends on a high note, but not necessarily a wholly happy one. Neary, who finally found a purpose in life, boards the mother ship to be with the aliens and learn from them, but in the process he's leaving his family for good (Spielberg himself said he would not have ended the film this way had he made it after the birth of his own children). Spielberg made a deal with his friend George Lucas, who struggled at the time with Star Wars' production and feared the film would tank at the box office, to trade 5% off the back-ends of each film's rentals, an agreement that certainly worked out better for Spielberg. Yet Close Encounters has aged far better than the original Star Wars, filled with equally stunning effects but bereft of the clunky dialogue that slows A New Hope down in its first two acts. Taken with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind solidifies Spielberg's technical sizzle and forms the perfect symbiosis between script and style, and it can still make you, as it says repeatedly during the film -- borrowing from Hawks' The Thing from Another World -- "watch the skies."

A Christmas Tale

Nothing in A Christmas Tale is so bold and funny as its title, a decidedly bland arrangement of two words and an indefinite article that suggests that this is a Christmas movie comme les autres. Any such notion gets chucked out of the window in the first half-hour of this dreamy 151-minute family drama, and while it may look like your average family troubles melodrama on paper, nothing about Arnaud Desplechin could ever make an average movie.

In fact, if I look to some prior reference as a base of comparison, I would have to bypass all the saccharine holiday flicks and go straight to two clear antecedents: Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums and Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Fanny and Alexander exerted at least an indirect influence on Desplechin's prior Kings and Queen, what with its usage of ghosts to flesh out a family crisis and existential doubt, but the entire structure of Bergman's most personal opus informs A Christmas Tale, albeit tinged heavily with Anderson's deadpan sense of the dysfunctional elite.

As with the characters in both Anderson and Bergman's films, the Vuillard family is wealthy (though not nearly to the extent of the Tenenbaums or the Ekdahls), highly-educated and aloof. Desplechin opens with a shadow puppet play recounting the family's history, of a couple, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) and Junon (Catherine Deneuve, in one of her finest roles), who had a son and a daughter. The boy, Joseph, developed a rare disorder, contracted leukemia and died, leaving behind his sister, Elizabeth, as the eldest child to two younger brothers, Henri and Ivan.

We then see the two dominant members of the family in the flesh separately: Junon, who collapses in her home, and Elizabeth, who expresses her inchoate rage and misery to her husband. Desplechin flashes back six years to gather all the family in one place: a courtroom. The middle child, Henri (Mathieu Amalric, proving once again that no one can play a drunken sophisticate quite like him), has gone bankrupt, and Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, who co-starred with Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) agrees to help bail him out, on the condition that he never contact her again. We don't know why she hates him so, but a desperate Henri agrees, only to find himself shunned by the rest of the family.

Six years later, whatever animosity exists between the two siblings is but one thread in the tapestry of dysfunction: to regale you with but a fraction of feuds, secrets and pettiness besetting the Vuillard family would waste words and would have no effect on those who have not seen the film, as a mere list of names and grievances carries with it no impact. It would also place in your minds a pre-conception of the nature of the film, likely leading to a conclusion that A Christmas Tale is a film of family hijinks and loud yelling and terribly pedestrian comedy as we Americans have come to expect from holiday entertainment. But Desplechin wrings laughs from the darker moments and gives severity and depth to the lighter ones.

It's important, however, to know that Junon collapsed at the start because she suffers from the same blood disease that took her first son's life. She's a practical realist who knows how slim the odds are, yet she clearly feels something under her resignation, as she invites the entire family for Christmas, something she clearly hasn't done since they splintered six years ago. But does she invite them because she wants to see her family back together or if she just wants to comb her progeny for a possible match for her rare blood phenotype in order to receive a marrow transplant. All signs point to the latter, as everyone shows up to Abel and Junon's house with blood test results.

Desplechin loves to point out the artifice of his films: A Christmas Tale opens with that puppet show, it employs irises to highlight action and introduce characters, inserts titled chapters and features numerous scenes of characters speaking directly to the camera. There is even a moment of Henri reading a critical letter he sent to his sister that openly recalls the note left by the dead father in Kings and Queen. Yet the self-reflexivity has the opposite effect of the Brechtian alienation effect Godard so dearly loved, drawing us in closer with its trickery. The soliloquies to the camera have the effect of generating intimacy, as if they are confiding in us, yet these scenes do not stick out as theatrical because these characters are so brutally honest with each other.

Take one of the best scenes of the film, in which Henri and Junon smoke out in the snow-covered backyard. They flatly describe how they don't love each other, discussing their distaste without boring us with a list of past moments that would have no connection to the audience. Yet there is affection in their voices, as if they've become so used to sniping each other that a true love exists under their harshness. Junon later takes Henri's girlfriend, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos, playing a wry, schadenfreude-prone version of Erland Josephson's Jewish observer Isak in Fanny) shopping and mentions that she hates Ivan's wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's actual daughter) for taking away the child she loves and expresses approval for Faunia for taking the one she doesn't.

That sort of straight-faced contempt fuels much of the film's dark humor; Henri shows Faunia photos of his dead wife, who died in a car accident, and his girlfriend responds, "She was pretty." "Lousy driver," Henri responds, without missing a beat. Desplechin never plays up the penchant for any one of its tangled plots to lead into cloying self-pity and cheap emotional manipulation, admitting that, yes, sometimes families suck, but you've just got to laugh and keep on living.

Like Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale is lengthy, but it never loses momentum. Desplechin structures a largely plotless airing of grievances with precision: he presents the psychological issues of Elizabeth's troubled son Paul almost like the trailer for a thriller, with quick fades to black punctuated by bursts of action. His hand-held shots are at times distinguishable from more formal shooting only by the extremity of their angles. He does not have his colleague Assayas' smoothness with the camera, but Desplechin somehow gives verisimilitude to his arty technique. Like Scorsese, he's so adept at combining style with substance that his most self-indulgent moments are inseparable from the content of the film.

I found myself moved by the ending, which is weird because I'm not entirely sure what the hell happened. Like the rest of A Christmas Tale, it's both dark and warm-hearted, not given to easy explanations and capable of finding humor, pathos and redemption in anything. Perhaps the key to unlocking the film lies near its midpoint, as Elizabeth receives a golden heart charm from a family friend, and Desplechin zooms in on it as the screen fades to a shot of the Vuillard home's exterior. It may be somewhat hollow and coated in materialistic sheen, but this family has a heart, and without it Desplechin couldn't have made one of the most strikingly original entries into one of the most overplayed genres in film.

Steven Spielberg: Jaws

The troubled production of Steven Spielberg's breakthrough, Jaws, could (and has) filled books, not to mention constantly evolving documentary that continues to grow as it awaits distribution. Even the most casual of filmgoers knows a piece or two of the story, how walkie-talkies crackled with that damned chant, "The shark is not working" or how Robert Shaw could barely do his scenes for his seasickness or how Peter Benchley threw such a tantrum over the changes made to his book that Spielberg barred him from the set.

Indeed, the stories are legion now, to the point that some neglect their importance to the actual production. The constant malfunctioning of the mechanical shark altered the entire framework of the story, one that originally showed the beast at several intervals before the reveal we got in the final version. Waiting around for the effects engineers to fix the villain of the story, Spielberg and the crew did two things: they refined the script and, when they grew tired of sitting around wasting money, they decided to shoot much of the film without allowing us to see the shark.

One of the great "blessing in disguise" changes in cinematic history, this decision added mystery to a film that would have lacked it, ratcheting up suspense due to the X factor of the unknown. We see the shark's attacks through its point of view, a lens moving impossibly fast through the water as it rises on a pair of dangling legs, or from the top of the water, as its latest victim suddenly disappears under the waves with only a bit of froth for dissipating evidence. It can strike anywhere at sea, at any time and swim away without anyone knowing how to find it.

As such, the shark has become the great metaphor, used as a stand-in for villains of both sides of the political spectrum and military conflicts. It could be Vietnam, a vision of a guerrilla springing out of nothingness to attack and disappearing just as quickly. It could be big business, creeping up on the little guy to cut him off at the knees. Conversely, it could be the welfare state, taking a bite out of the wealthy to feed the poor. Political cartoons spoofing the iconic poster became de rigeur for a time after the film's release, most of them directly conflicting with each other.

To figure out what point, if any, the filmmakers themselves tried to make with the movie, we can of course look to the shark's victims. Its opening scene, of a group of drunken youngsters sitting 'round a campfire on the beach splintering to follow a young woman who invites a boy to go skinnydipping. The lad passes out from the booze as she takes to the water, swimming out just far enough to guarantee she won't come back. Suddenly, she jerks downward slightly, then she goes under and pops back up, then she is swirling around the area shrieking in pain and fear before being pulled down one last, horrible time. Can we infer from this attack that, like Halloween, the promiscuous and rebellious will be picked off, killed for the sin of violating traditional values? Well, no, because the next victim is a child and, after that, a man who attempts to help some boys swimming in the estuary. This shark kills without discrimation; it doesn't see the first victim as a sign of progressiveness that must be curbed or the child as an image of fresh-faced Americana. It's hungry, and it wants to eat.


Of course, what people fail to understand when they analyze what makes, say, a Hitchcock film so great, they focus too intently on his pop psychology and his sexual hangups. Interesting and revealing as such studies are, they fail to understand what makes Hitchcock's films classics is that they are thrillers that retain their power after multiple viewings. Jaws, the greatest film Hitchcock never made, retains its power across generations for the same reason: it's thrilling, it's chilling. It'll make you jump when you least expect it, even when you know what to expect.

Plenty of thrillers play on the comely, traditional village as a setting for horrific murders -- David Lynch built much of his legacy on it -- and Amity Island is as friendly and old-fashioned as they come. When the shark comes to this idyllic town, the public safety rests in the shaking hands of Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), once a cop in New York City, where he felt he had no impact on the city's rampant, pre-Disneyfication crime. So, the aquaphobic Brody moved his family to an island -- "It's only an island if you look at it from the water," he later says, his dopey optimism saying more about the characters and underlying emotion in Spielberg's cinema more than any biography ever could -- and he's the only one of his nuclear unit to enjoy the simpler life.

Of course, all the big city troubles can be found in small towns; the only difference is that grand corruption is replaced by mere pettiness. The shark attack threatens the tourist industry of a town dependent on those dollars, so the mayor (Murray Hamilton) ignores the problem and downplays it when he finally does acknowledge it. Using the same empathy he displayed in The Sugarland Express for its cops and criminals, Spielberg never fully condemns the man, though Hamilton certainly plays him like an officious prick, but the mayor's justifiable concern for the town's economy does not excuse his direct responsibility for additional deaths.

On land, Brody displays a level head worthy of a '70s New York cop: he calls in extra forces to scout the beaches and asks an oceanographic institute to send an expert before the mother of an eaten child causes a firestorm by placing a bounty on the beast's head. He's also humble and sharp enough to know when someone's smarter than him, ceding ground to that expert, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), on the subject of the shark. Some part of city life still burns inside Martin, as he takes to city-boy Hooper, a trust fund kid with a deep love of the sea, as if an old friend. The two share some wine with Brody's wife at Martin's house, investigate a caught shark together and ride out to an eerily damaged boat when they learn that "their" shark is still on the loose.


Their quickly bonded relationship helps flesh out the two and provides a yin for Robert Shaw's fantastically obnoxious, cantankerous yang as the drunken fisherman Quint. Hysterically, Shaw's performance isn't too terribly removed from his boisterous, carousing take on Henry VII in A Man for All Seasons (a performance that recalls more Brian Blessed's demented take on Richard IV in Blackadder than any formal appraisal of royalty): Quint is loud and irascible, chanting filthy limericks in Mrs. Brody's presence and spending most of his time in the film reminding the other characters of his superiority to them. Rarely has such a rambunctious asshole of a man been so immediately endearing, and Shaw tempers the more dynamic bursts of personality and scenery chewing with genuinely dramatic moments that would impress in the most straight-laced of Oscar bait.

All that downtime during production allowed the writers and actors to hone these characters, and no three people in any of Spielberg's subsequent features, indeed all of blockbuster filmmaking since this film invented the genre, have been so fully realized, so tangible or so perfectly played off one another. The trio head to sea in Quint's boat, the Orca (named for the killer whale, known to attack great whites on occasion), and immediately set at each other's throats. Quint, the grizzled old man who's never known a life of luxury and relaxation, mocks Hooper's "city hands" and all the fancy equipment the lad brings on the boat to find and capture the shark.

Each character juxtaposes nicely with the others, and they adapt to each other in the subtlest of ways. Quint eyes Hooper with derision, crushing a beer can with his fingers, to which Hooper responds by crunching a paper cup with gusto. Earlier, we saw Brody and Hooper head out to find that wrecked boat, and Hooper stuffed his face with snacks and cola. Quint, on the other hand, clearly has never enjoyed any sort of wealth. As he sits in his chair with his fishing rod, Quint nibbles on a single club cracker, and when he sees his line being tugged, he gently places the remainder in his shirt pocket to save it for later.

Yet the two slowly forge a respect for each other. Hooper may be a city boy sitting on his parents' money, but he's also hands-on and knows his way around a boat. Quint's method of catching sharks involves chumming the waters and shooting harpoons tied to barrels, preventing the shark from diving below the surface. Yet this shark, of course, cannot be stopped by normal methods, and when Quint's plan nearly destroys his boat, he gently turns to Hooper and quietly asks the scientist to use that equipment he so viciously mocked at first. They also find common ground over Brody, who is simply hapless at sea. They teach him knots and how to steer the boat, and when one snaps at him the other offers a quiet word of support ("You come get me the next time, Chief"). It's like a couple bonding over a puppy, or a baby.

Of course, the nexus of their character growth comes in the Indianapolis speech, one of the greatest monologues in cinema. It begins with the trio in the cabin, as Hooper gains Quint's respect as they compare scars they received through their maritime activities, until Quint mentions a tattoo removal. Hooper asks if it said "Mother" and collapses into drunken giggles with Brody until Quint nearly whispers that it was of the USS Indianapolis. A clueless Brody continues to chuckle, but the laughter dies in Hooper's throat, and Quint goes on to explain its significance. "We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte," he says, "Just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb." Torpedoes sank the vessel, sending all men overboard. For five days, they floated in the water, their whereabouts unknown because they couldn't send out a distress signal due to the nature of their mission. As they waited, sharks swarmed the survivors and picked them off one by one. Shaw's voice is cold and emotionless as he details the horrors, allowing for some flicker of lingering fear as he mentions the more poetic aspects of his suffering, those descriptions of "lifeless eyes." "So," he concludes, "1100 men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb."


This scene is no less horrific than the jolts placed throughout the film, and Shaw's terribly matter-of-fact delivery, embellishing only a few words here and there for maximum effect, continues to send shivers down my spine. Both Brody and Hooper heretofore viewed Quint as a crazy old sot and largely tolerated him because they couldn't argue with experience. But they realize with crystalline alacrity that the man has seen more than they could ever imagine, and they never disrespect him again. Spielberg recognizes the gravity of this speech as well, and his presentation is bare-bones, particularly in comparison to the rest of the film.

Duel showed a director clearly capable of handling a thriller, but the visual acumen on display here puts him at the level of his more serious-minded peers -- Scorsese, Coppola -- even though he's making a B-movie. The opening tracking shot of the two teenagers running along the beach recalls Sunshine in its ability to traverse smoothly over hilly terrain. The dolly zoom of Brody realizing that he's watching a shark attack is arguably as noteworthy as the one employed in Vertigo. The director expertly handles crowds, navigating their unease and eventual hysteria and always looking out upon the ocean in an attempt to spot the predator coming. Everything mounts our discomfort, including those ascetic conversations such as the Indianapolis speech.

The decision to take the Orca far out to sea alone reveals his brilliance: he astutely recognized that any sight of land would undermine the suspense of the final act, as they could simply head for land when the situation turned south. It's why a scene like the one where Quint destroys the radio to prevent calling for assistance carries weight, as it shows a man who is willing to risk them all to kill this fish, as opposed to just a bit greedy.

And what of his ability to work around the malfunctioning shark? Those POV shots of dangling legs serve as a message: without faces to look at, we don't root for any characters or develop any bonds to them. Under the water with only legs to watch, everyone's the same, and all bets are off. On the surface, we occasionally see a fin (and then it's not always the shark), or we spot the shark through objects tied to it. One of the film's best moments, involving two local fishermen who attempt to catch the shark from a dock using a roast, is at first comedic, depicting the pair as fools who seriously think they have a shot at winning the hefty reward (one of them even nervously mentions that he stole the roast from his wife and is going to catch a tongue-lashing if nothing else). Then the chain attached to the hook tightens until the dock collapses. It's almost Keatonesque, until we see that one of the fishers is dumped in the surf as the broken dock speeds away before it turns around and chases after the man. Spielberg manages to repeat the trick later with the barrels and retain the suspense, and when Alfred Hitchcock later said that Spielberg was "the first one of us who doesn't see the proscenium arch" we can instantly see what he's talking about. There are no theatrics here, only a young talent taking the arthouse breakthroughs and placing them into the B-movies that inspired the New Wave in the first place.

Jaws actually stands as probably the most important film release since Godard kicked the budding New Wave into overdrive with Breathless. It was the first film to receive saturation booking as a release patten, as opposed to the old system of staggered releases that allowed word of mouth to build. The film became the first to make $100 million at the box office, proving the release format's worth as a business model that would eventually phase out limited releases until it reached its current method of releasing Oscar bait and smaller fare in L.A. and New York before moving it elsewhere. On one hand, it allowed everyone the chance to see the film at the same time, but it also led to the artistic collapse of '80s cinema and the emphasis on gross over quality seen today. So, yes, its impact on film was economic, not artistic, but that does not reflect on this film's quality, and if but a tenth of the subsequent blockbusters were as well-crafted, cinephiles would have far less to complain about concerning the paradigm shift.


It's scary, it's human, it's often quite funny. No actor hits a false note and the only unnecessary scene I can find after over 20 viewings over the years is the scene where Alex Kitner's mother slaps Brody after holding him responsible for not closing the beaches when he knew of the shark, despite us sitting through several prior scenes of him desperately attempting to do so, only to be shot down by the mayor. Ergo, there's a tedium running under the scene and it's easy to dismiss the character; however, she also manages to stop the vapid celebration of all the men who treat the capture of a different shark as just a good day fishin', reminding them that people died for the administration's incompetence. I just wish she pinned it on the town authority as a whole, not simply Brody as a means to motivate him later.

Yet this is a minor quibble, and everything else is perfect. Only those looking for technical gaffes will find something to complain about here (there's an eyeline match of Hooper looking out at the shark after it first pops out of the water that isn't possible, but honestly, at point are you satisfied if that gets to you?). I first saw Jaws at the tender age of 8, and I've looked at the ocean with distrust ever since. I really shouldn't, because that attitude led to a spike in shark hunting after the film's release, a horrible ecological result of people too stupid to differentiate fiction from reality. But perhaps that speaks to the gripping power of Spielberg's vision, one that can still make us jump when the shark first pops out of the water, only to make us laugh as Brody composes himself to say, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." The ending of Jaws is similar to Duel's in which the heroes manage to overcome the beast, only for the film to abruptly end without full resolution. If we read Jaws as a message of our ability to overcome obstacles, then maybe, for all his sentimentality, Spielberg adds these ambiguous endings as a cynical commentary. Yes, they triumphed over the stated enemy, but they've still got to swim to shore. It's a moment that sticks out now as I plan to carry through to his modern output, which is decidedly more downbeat, and I begin to wonder if people sold him short long before they accused A.I. of being sappy. But that is not important for now; Jaws is, simply put, the greatest thriller ever not directed by Hitchcock, a tour-de-force of editing, writing and directing, and I would not hesitate to rank it among the greatest achievements of New Hollywood.

Steven Spielberg: The Sugarland Express

What is it with New Hollywood and the romanticism of American outlaw couples? The movement unofficially "began" with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Terrence Malick debuted with Badlands and here Steven Spielberg, for his proper theatrical debut after Duel transitioned from small to silver screens, tells the story of Ila Fae and Robert Dent. The Sugarland Express details and, of course, exaggerates the Dents' prison escape and subsequent chase through Texas as they attempted to grab their son and head for freedom. He changes the Dents to the Poplins, Clovis and Lou Jean, but Spielberg clearly sees something in these impulsive criminals, something that other New Hollywood filmmakers saw in their rebellious subjects.

Perhaps the return to the outlaws of old can be tied to the influence of the French New Wave on the American movement. After all, Godard openly admired John Dillinger, and what is Breathless if not his take on the "lovers on the lam" picture? A more substantive explanation might touch upon the rise of more insidious crime. With LBJ and Nixon identified in the public consciousness as outright criminals, in the midst of a war without a clearly defined enemy force, maybe people, even the college-educated, supposed coastal elites who brought Hollywood to its artistic zenith with decidedly cynical pictures, needed to return to an era where the outlaws were easily identifiable and in a position where they didn't have actual power. You need to know who the villain is to have a hero -- without his Rogues Gallery, Batman is just a traumatized billionaire pummeling urban poor in some Randian masturbatory fantasy -- yet, ironically, these outlaws become heroic simply because they represent a romanticism that we lost in our modernization. As much as John Dillinger, Charles Starkweather, Bonnie and Clyde were ruthless killers who do not deserve their deification, they're as American as apple pie, and it's easy to root for them.

In the hands of an unabashed softie like Spielberg, this only becomes more evident. Compared to the largely soulless Duel, which completely dispensed with character development and insight, The Sugarland Express reveals the sentimentality we've come to expect from the director at the outset: Lou Jean (Goldie Hawn) visits Clovis (William Atherton) in prison, where Spielberg places Hawn in close-up as she cries about their son being taken away by child services for placement in a foster home. She manages to sneak Clovis out of the low-security penitentiary by dressing him in civilian clothes and conning an old couple into giving them a ride, and already you want them to reclaim their child: they're two ignorant hicks who wouldn't have a future even if they didn't just commit a felony, but they broke out without harming a soul and established a believable reason for the escape without harping on it (they're out of that prison well before the 10-minute mark).

What follows is a 90-minute chase that in some ways points to the sensationalization of police chases such as the infamous O.J. Simpson ride to freedom. It moves just as fitfully as the couple's first getaway car, a smoking old piece of junk to match its driver (hilariously, the old man's wife grips the dash as if holding on for dear life). When a cop pulls the slow-moving vehicle over, the Poplins panic and drive off leading the patrolman on a chase before managing to take the poor greenhorn hostage and commandeering his police cruiser to get themselves to "Baby Langston."

For an escaped convict and his accomplice wife, the Poplins sure don't feel the need to do anything in a hurry, even though they never plan a single action with any forethought. The running joke of the film pulls back the camera from their increasingly cozy life in the police car with their unwitting tag-along to an ever-growing line of police from various counties and states behind them. Eventually, the press joins in, then just your standard-issue rubberneckers, until it seems as if the whole of Texas is behind them. Yet Lou Jean still makes the entire convoy stop so she can pee, or Clovis will pull into a drive-thru for fried chicken. Much of the film builds comedy, not tension.

Ergo, it's too long at 110 minutes, cutting too harshly from the absurdist tone of the rest of the film in the final 20 minutes and undoing some of the hijinks with its gear-shift into severity. Yet The Sugarland Express is a more than passable piece of entertainment due to two important aspects. The first is the acting: Hawn and Atherton handle their parts with care, playing into some redneck tropes without fully slipping into a stereotype. The Poplins may have shit on their heels, but they're good people who just want their baby back and employ a relatively nonviolent scheme to do so. Yet Michael Sacks nearly steals the show as Maxwell Slide, the patrolman taken hostage by the couple. He plays straight man to their more manic personalities, a rookie who's nevertheless clever enough to see that the Poplins are good people with no real intention of hurting him, and he even forms a slight friendship with the two. After a time, he stops attempting to escape, sticking it out with the Poplins to try to knock some sense into them. He knows, and deep down so does the couple (or at least Clovis), that they will never get baby Langston. And even if they did, would they just go live a quiet life after being pursued by a miles-long police convoy, as Lou Jean thinks possible? He just doesn't want to see them get hurt and to reduce their inevitable sentence as much as they can, but reason flies out the window when you think you'll never see your child again.

The other boon is, of course, Spielberg's direction, which manages to leap so far ahead of the impressive work on Duel that it becomes readily apparent that the only limit to Spielberg's skill is the physical capital given to him for each film. His tracking shots are fluid and actually add to the comedy, such as the scene where the police bring in Clovis' father to attempt to talk his son into surrendering and the old man walks with the captain past such a long line of assembled officers that I began to wonder if Spielberg didn't slyly duplicate the original shot at edit them together like cartoons that recycle backgrounds for the ease of the artists. When Lou Jean and Clovis pull into a gas station and drive off without paying, the attendant yells after them and the police tail until news reporters arrive and ask him questions, and the man suddenly looks into the camera, as if it had been one of the news reporters the whole time. And while Spielberg does not handle the shift from comedy to drama smoothly at the end, his more suspenseful direction lets the skills he displayed on Duel to creep into the frame. As police snipers set up a trap for the Poplins, Spielberg uses a remarkable zoom shot as one shooter takes aim and the camera manages to zoom in on the approaching car through the window while barely changing the foreground.

The Sugarland Express showed off the director's penchant for sentimentality at the start, and the ending points a bit to the more cloying side of that emotionality that pops up here and there, particularly a shot of Lou Jean throwing a teddy bear out of the window as they speed to their doom that lingers on the bear being trampled by chasing cars in a shamelessly "INSERT METAPHOR HERE" moment. Yet Spielberg also displays that childlike wonder that guards himself from his own weaknesses: he knows that the Poplins will never win, but he does not look down on them. He does not exalt vicious criminals the way that Penn fed into the Bonnie and Clyde mythos: he presents two simple, earnest, desperate people who will not harm anyone. He also doesn't present the police as demons, showing a police captain who recognizes the Poplins' good nature and presenting only a few corn-pone, trigger-happy idiots who jump the gun. The only real political statement of the film concerns its depiction of the press as soulless hounds who just want a good scoop. Reporters find baby Langston in a foster home and ask if they can interview the child, who is but 2 years old; the foster mom brings him out, and the incessant snapping of flashbulbs causes the child to cry. Maybe that moment where Spielberg's camera suddenly serves as one of the newscasters', when that attendant looks into it and suddenly begins to feed the hype by embellishing his non-story, Spielberg also criticizes the contemporary tendency to romanticize criminals.

The Sugarland Express marks an important moment in the director's career, not simply because it's his theatrical debut. He consolidates his technique and introduces several of his auteurial concerns, and the ending almost sets up a sequel for a purely Spielbergian flick about Langston growing up in the aftermath of his parents' trek. The screenplay won a prize at Cannes, and Pauline Kael heralded the director as a young Howard Hawks. Most notably, The Sugarland Express began the long-running collaboration between Spielberg and John Williams, whose blues-tinged instrumentation stands in sharp contrast to the more boisterous orchestration that was waiting in the winds. The Sugarland Express is flawed, yes, and it introduces themes that it does not explore in favor of adding more comedy, but taken with Duel, it points to a must-see career even without prior knowledge of what he would go on to do. For the thematic shortcomings, Spielberg has a visual style that's too in love with what's on the screen to praise itself, and the director gets great performances from his young actors. Still, it's damn near impossible to look at this and predict what was just around the corner for our auteur...but that's a story for the next post.