Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

Nicholas Ray's most enduring and iconic feature, Rebel Without a Cause resonates not only for its portrait of teenage alienation but its complex and warring thoughts on gender and filial roles in society. We meet Jim Stark (James Dean) not as the defiant image of youth we now see outside context but a drunken, morose boy so desperate for a stable vision of family that he curls up on a filthy street with a toy cymbal monkey, gingerly "tucking it in" with litter. Rent apart by the reversed gender roles of his parents, Jim will eventually craft his own nuclear unit out of equally disaffected friends, finding a human normalcy amid confusing and shifting family life.

Lest one assume, however, that this teen angst film is really a support of basic social conservatism, consider the complexities with which it handles its teenagers' confusion. While Ray presents characters striving toward a family of their own, he also shows that the world that grew out of such a basic social makeup is broken, so rigid it turned brittle and shattered from the force of incongruous modernity. What Rebel Without a Cause is, then, is something of an emotional "return to zero," to take a phrase from perhaps Ray's most noted admirer. By bringing its pariahs together to make their own funhouse reflection of conventional society, Ray offers a chance to begin anew, to take the basic building blocks of family, gender and normalcy to find new avenues to happiness. But even then, fate has other plans.

Apocalypse Now

The real stars of Francis Ford Coppola's troubled epic are not Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando. They're not even Coppola or writer John Milius. No, the real people behind the success of the film are cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound editor Walter Murch. Murch's fluid, deeply troubling sounds pervade the film, bleeding into one another seamlessly. Indeed, he grabs you in the first shot, when the sounds of helicopter rotors fade into the dull hum of a spinning fan. For the rest of the film, he skillfully combines Carmine's haunting, ethereal score with diegetic sound, to the point that you can't trust your own ears, much less the hell that unfolds on-screen.

If war is hell, then Apocalypse Now is as much an adaptation of Dante's Inferno as it is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Some may complain about its disjointed nature, particularly in the final chapter in Kurtz's compound, but Coppola isn't out to give us a simple story. He doesn't even want to make a film about the effects of war. No, Apocalypse Now is a film about the deepest, darkest levels of human conditioning, the kind we've spent our thousands of years on this Earth attempting to outgrow.

"Saigon. Shit, I'm still in Saigon," Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) growls in the first lines of the film. He signed up for a second tour and wants to head back into the jungle, but not for the clichéd gung-ho reasons. He's been back home, but Vietnam so changed him that he could not re-assimilate into society. His restlessness leads him to get high and destroy his hotel room, eventually cutting his hand on glass and smearing himself in the blood. In the very first scene, the notion of the poster boy multiple-enlistee has been viciously perverted, shown to be the victim of war, not the ideal man who stands above it.

He eventually gets a new mission, classified like all his others. A general invites him to lunch and assigns him the task of assassinating decorated colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who disappeared into the jungle after accusations of murder and built his own empire of natives to take the fight to the North Vietnamese without the setback of arbitrary rules of engagement.

Willard heads upriver to Cambodia in a PBR with a motley crew consisting of the surly Chief (Albert Hall), tripped-out surfer Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms), New Orleans saucier "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and 17-year-old "Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne). Apart from Chief, these sailors are all just kids, all spit and vinegar, ready to take on Charlie anytime, anywhere.

Their picaresque adventures through Vietnam are by turns horrific, absurd, hysterical and deeply, deeply unsettling. The film's centerpiece, an Air Cavalry assault on a NVA-controlled village, is as terrible as it is exhilarating. Led by the certifiably insane Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall, in a show-stealing performance), the sequence, famously set to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," must be the largest set piece ever constructed. Now, CGI fills the screen, and entire wars can be waged in a single scene, but the sense of placement, of meticulously construction, camera set-ups, and stunt co-ordinations required for this one 10 minute stretch demonstrate the true craft of filmmaking.

And Kilgore is more interesting than any of it. With a handful of lines, Duvall crafts the craziest SOB you'll ever see. Shells fall all around him and he doesn't flinch, and only when they come within inches does he react, and then only with annoyance. When Willard's boat runs into an operation already in clean-up, the captain can't get the colonel to pay attention long enough to relay orders from COMSAC, but the Kilgore perks up when he learns that Lance, his surfer idol, is among them. With only a small hunk of screen time, Duvall gets two of the three most memorable lines in the film: the hysterical call to arms "Charlie don't surf!" and the insane, poetic rant that starts with, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." As he commands his soldiers to break out their surfboards to ride waves that are still under fire, as mortar shells burst around him, he says with sadness in his voice, "This war's gonna end someday." We look on bewildered, but Willard knows the truth, that life will never be the same for any of them.

Elsewhere, Willard and Chef take a stroll through the woods looking for mangoes, only to be ambushed by a tiger. In the middle of the river, the USO erects a garish stage to host a couple of Playboy bunnies, and it appears to double as a thriving black market. The bunnies so rile the cheering men that some storm the stage and attempt to possibly rape the women, who run back to their helicopter and depart. In the scene that ensures that no member of the audience can mistake the movie for some fun epic (many point to the Valkyries scene as exciting over horrific), Chief orders a Vietnamese boat stop for boarding, and confusion leads to accidental massacre of all aboard, shattering the young boys and forever turning the Chief against Willard.

Storaro manages to make each segment look entirely different without losing visual flow. The reason so many of us love that Air Cavalry scene is that it's filmed from the POV of the soldiers. One must step outside of the film for a moment to look at it objectively to see how terrible it all really is. That scene with the tiger is funny in retrospect, but Storaro makes the lead-up as frightening as anything in a proper horror film. My personal favorite piece of the film, the Do Lung sequence, strikes me as being shot from the perspective of Lance, who drops acid shortly before the boat pulls up to this nightmare. As a result, light flows in and out, as flares arc over the trees, momentarily blinding before all is plunged back into darkness. Willard searches for the commanding officer, finally asking one of the entrenched soldiers, "Who's in charge here?" to which the manic kid replies, "Ain't you?"

Storaro's cinematography at Kurtz's compound alone earned him his Oscar: Marlon Brando got the job after convincing Coppola that he'd read Heart of Darkness, only to show up having read neither the script nor the book, as well as 40kg overweight. Already guaranteed $1 million even if fired, Brando created a dilemma for the director, which Storaro fixed by covering Kurtz in shadow. The night shots of the compound are bathed with a jaundiced yellow, reflecting the sickness and "slow death" of the camp and its leader. Shadow, in cinema, naturally reflects the moral complexity of a character, but Kurtz and even Willard are so enshrouded in these scenes that they're practically invisible. Willard remarks in his narrations throughout the film that the colonel's methods actually display a brilliance and ingenuity, and he's certainly got a number of deaths on his conscience, and he does not yet know whether he will kill Kurtz or join him.

Brando, difficult as he was, really was perfect for the role. In a mixture of scripted and ad-libbed dialogue, Brando captures the manic insanity of Kurtz. No, not insanity; I read an interview once -- I can't remember who said it, perhaps Grant Morrison -- that discussed the Batman villain the Joker. In it, the interviewee described the Joker as possessing not a madness but a kind of "super-sanity," one that worked on a level that was utterly mad but made sense on a level no normal person could process. Kurtz reached this level after witnessing the VC hack off the arms of every child in a village that his Special Forces team inoculated, simply because they refused that the children receive aid from the enemy. "If I had 10 divisions of such men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly," he intones. Kurtz, a decorated, respected officer who'd seen combat in Korea and in a previous tour of 'Nam, snapped not because of war but because the jungle brought out his primal behavior, the kind that resides in all of us.

There's no truly satisfactory way to end such a film, one that mixes the visceral here-and-now of warfare with metaphysics, but the juxtaposition of two ritual sacrifices, one of tribesmen killing a water buffalo and the other of Willard slaying Kurtz, the bloated, weakened king so that he might die with dignity, is brilliant. Willard emerges to a tribe of warriors already willing to bow to him, but he simply heads back to the boat with Lance and sets off, as Kurtz's immortal "The horror. The horror" plays over a shot of a stone face of the compound. While he's been completely broken by the experience, forever haunted by what he did and what happened to him, he stands as the better man, for he did not lose himself in the jungle.

According to some, Apocalypse Now stands as the last great American film (those who disagree cite Scorsese's Raging Bull). While I would venture to say that 2007's one-two punch of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood changed that, you could certainly argue that no other films in the interim combined the epic scale of Coppola's final masterpiece with its personal and psychological themes. Coppola began production on the film in 1976, seven years after John Milius completed the first draft of his screenplay. Three years, one heart attack, a hurricane and numerous other production delays later, it finally reached screens.

"What must people have thought then?" I often wonder when seeing a film ahead of its time. I know that Gene Siskel famously gave it a negative review when he first saw it, only to later perform a mea culpa and give it a positive review. Mainstream Vietnam movies had only just started getting releases, and they tended to convey how the war affected its soldiers, who were always brave and cruelly destroyed by a pointless war. Apocalypse Now dared to suggest that this war simply brought out the worst in us, that its soldiers were by and large terrified and looking for any chance to get home, that we were still responsible for our actions even if the government forced thousands to fight.

The film netted Oscars for Murch and Storaro, but it's safe to say that it was robbed in every other category in which it received a nomination, and how Duvall didn't get a nod for Supporting Actor will keep me scratching my head for hours. Apocalypse Now is more than the greatest Vietnam film ever made, more than the best war film period; it is a document of a part of man that no amount of conditioning and evolution will ever fully eradicate, and it's a beast that can emerge with only a strong push.

True Romance

I've mentioned the sad Weinstein spiral elsewhere, but certain films remind me of what a potent force they used to be. When they headed Miramax, they displayed a formidable ability to pluck the hottest unproven talent from the Sundance pool, pair them up with established heavy-hitters, then sit back and let the magic happen. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Good Will Hunting, in which then-unknowns Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (who'd both had acting work but nothing to launch them) wrote and acted under the direction of indie legend Gus Van Sant to great effect and critical acclaim. My personal favorite, however, the closest meeting of the minds, came when Quentin Tarantino, hot off the success of Reservoir Dogs, sold a script to hyperkinetic madman Tony Scott. It was a match made in B-movie heaven.

True Romance, Tarantino's take on romantic comedy, received positive, if muted, response upon its release: critics praised its visceral style and unrelenting bizzaro love tale, but criticized it for the same reasons. Scott and Tarantino later put out a director's cut infinitesimally longer, with only a few scenes placed back in or lengthened just long enough to show more blood, but the added schlock actually fleshes out the picture a bit, giving more time to minor characters (all of whom are played by some mighy familiar faces). What you're left with is a film by two craftsmen perfect for each other, yet just different enough to temper the weaknesses of the other.

Tarantino's dialogue overflows as it flies from the mouth of Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), an Elvis obsessive who is on his way to the art-house theater for a kung-fu marathon on his birthday at the start of the film. He tries to chat up a chick in a bar into coming with him, but she declines. Clarence takes it in stride, and he appears only slightly fazes by the rejection. Then firecracker named Alabama (Patricia Arquette) sits next to him in the theater and asks him to catch her up. Soon, they're sharing pie in a diner and they go back to his place. Alabama runs out afterward, and she admits that she's a call girl (not a prostitute, she says) hired by his boss to show the introvert a good time. Clarence continues to prove an unflappable character, and even admits he figured it was all too good to be true. A twist: Alabama falls for this dope's sweetness, and they quickly elope.

OK, so it's a bit weird, but there's nothing that different from Pretty Woman, albeit knocked down a number of rungs on the social ladder. Then it all goes mad. Clarence tracks down Alabama's pimp, Drexyl, to inform him that Alabama will no longer be in his employ, which naturally ends in violence. Now on the run carrying a sack full of Drexyl's uncut cocaine, Clarence and Alabama try to unload the drugs to provide them with enough money to get away while staying ahead of both the cops and the mafia who funneled their drugs through the pimp.

Slater and Arquette, not normally scene-stealers, prove entirely capable of carrying this film, as you believe their warped but (as the title says) true love. The sweet, milquetoast Clarence can turn on a dime and become a truly intimidating character when someone threatens his beloved, while Alabama, sadly under-developed even in the longer cut, also has a darker side that bubbles to the surface without feeling forced. Both give the finest performances of their careers, and I can't see anyone else pulling their roles off half as well.

Aiding the two is a non-stop cavalcade of fantastic supporting appearances from stars both established and rising. Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper appear in a scene as a mob boss torturing Clarence's father, and their conversation, dubbed "the Sicilian scene" is Tarantino's second best chunk of dialogue following Jules' final speech to "Ringo" in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino received some (possibly justified) flak for what was perceived as unnecessary racist exchanges in Pulp Fiction (i.e. "Dead N-word storage"), but in this scene the writer displays a remarkably sly grasp of racism and how people can be driven by it. Clifford knows that the mobster bases his identity on his Italian heritage, and he also knows that he cannot withstand the torture and will unwilling divulge his son's location. So, he uses his final moments to regale Cocccotti with Sicily's history, specifically that the Moors (Africans) invaded Italy hundreds of years ago and "they changed the bloodline forever." The scene gently crescendoes until Clifford sardonically says that the Sicilians are "part eggplant." Coccotti laughs and engages in the usual "gedda look at this kid" mafioso cheek-pinching before suddenly pulling his gun and shooting Cliff dead. "I haven't killed anybody," Walken hisses, "since 1984." Never does this scene insist upon itself or play its hand too soon, and only at the end do we realize that this was Cliff's plan all along.

Walken and Hopper aren't the only memorable side-players, however; no, True Romance, as with Tarantino's best work, is ultimately an ensemble piece. Gary Oldman pours all of his off-kilter magnetism into Drexyl, the dreadlocked, gold-toothed pimp with such golden lines as "It ain't white boy day, is it?" Years before Tony Soprano thrust him into the spotlight, James Gandolfini plays a ruthless mob thug who "interrogates" Alabama, while Brad Pitt, still an actor of little note, absolutely walks away with the picture as the stoner roommate of Clarence's actor friend Dick (Michael Rapaport). His delivery of the line "Don't condescend to me, man" is as memorable as anything else he's ever done.

These loopy, minutiae-obsessed characters are kept interesting because Scott makes sure to throw in some gloriously overdone violence every now and then to keep people from getting to talky. Likewise, Tarantino's loquaciousness and attention to character gives the film actual roots that tether Scott's frantic style to some form of reality (though you could hardly call anything that happens in the film "realistic"). The various shootouts are all grisly and visceral, but the also carry some emotional weight thanks not only to the writing but Hans Zimmer's ethereal, subtly haunting score. His compositions are airy and light, as if recorded on wind chimes, and they have a disturbing tranquility when played over the shocking violence that underscores both the warped fairy tale nature of the screenplay as well as the general demented state of the action.

I read that someone recently re-edited the film to follow Tarantino's script, which offered up a more fleshed-out Alabama, a larger part for Samuel L. Jackson's virtually non-existent cameo and a non-linear narrative structured like Pulp Fiction. While the idea of seeing a more defined Alabama intrigues me, I highly doubt that the cut, which uses deleted scenes with noticeably less post-production refinement, will improve upon this. Though unquestionably a better filmmaker, Tarantino benefits somewhat from another hand guiding his project, and a slew of brief but commanding appearances, bolstered by the impressive performances from its leads, makes True Romance the most bewilderingly touching gonzo romance ever filmed.