The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

[The following is a belated Blind Spots entry.]

The precision of Raymond Chandler’s prose is rendered almost sleepily in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, trading the laconic for the lethargic. “Rip van Winkle” is what the filmmaker termed his version of Chandler’s most iconic creation in reference to how Elliot Gould’s Marlowe is a 1953 detective carrying on according to his period as he roams the radically different America of 1973, yet the sobriquet could equally apply to how punch-drunk, confused and tired Gould plays the part. Chandler’s books may have been mysteries, but like the best of pulp fiction they were intensely focused. The Long Goodbye, on the other hand, ambles along in confusion, puncturing Marlowe’s hard-boiled competence as both the narrative and even the cinematography seem unable to focus on anything, much less the task at hand.

Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973)

Mel Stuart's Wattstax, a document of the concert that gives the film its name, is not strictly a concert movie. Instead, it often moves from the concert to the neighborhood around it, touching on racial pride and tension the place that exploded these issues outside the Deep South. The music becomes simultaneous escape from and voice of the pain and anger on display, culminating in a performance from Isaac Hayes that focuses everything into one delightfully tacky gold chain vest.

Check out my full thoughts at Movie Mezzanine.

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

[This is my (very belated) August entry in Blind Spots.]

Don't Look Now begins with a fade out from rain cascading upon a puddle to shutter-shielded glass windows letting a few obscured rays of sunlight through the slats. These are soothing images, the first in a film filled with sights that would normally offer comfort and warmth. In Nicolas Roeg's hands, however, they become unsettling in a way that cannot be pinpointed or explained, an imperceptible dissonance that gradually creates discomfort. This mood carries through to the following scene, in which tranquil shots of a young girl, Christine, in a red coat playing by a pond are intercut with her brother riding on a bike nearby and her parents, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), working in the house.

Roeg sets up the scene with gliding camera movements and dives into and back out of cuts. It instantly establishes the movie as a gravity elevator, constantly sucked through the core, propelled back out and slowed by the pull until the camera begins to fall and start the process all over again. Reflective imagery inverts Christine, who is then warped further by a red-coated doppelganger seen in a slide John has of a Venetian cathedral he has been commissioned to restore. The vague intensity slowly building in these swooning movements and careful editing reaches its apex when the three separate but linked images run together: the boy runs over a pane of glass inexplicably on the ground and crashes his bike; the red-and-white ball Christine was playing with floating on the surface of the water as a stand in for the red-clad, white girl now dwelling under it; and John sensing something wrong when he spills some water on the image and the girl's Venetian "double" disappears in a thick streak of red. A suite of domestic horror, this opening scene captures the full feature in miniature and stands on its own as a complete action of mood, construction and tragic execution that would make for one of the greatest short films of all time if the movie stopped there.