Ninja III: The Domination (1984)

 

Director: Sam Firstenberg

Screenplay: James R. Silke

Cast: Shô Kosugi as Yamada; Lucinda Dickey as Christie; Jordan Bennett as Secord; David Chung as Black Ninja; Dale Ishimoto as Okuda; James Hong as Miyashima

Ephemeral Waves

 

Only a ninja can destroy a ninja.

Out of the Cannon Group canon, Ninja III could be seen as one of their most infamous productions, where after Israeli expats and independent film producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan helped produce the eighties craze for ninjas, with Enter the Ninja (1981) and Revenge of the Ninja (1983), the cousins backed another production by director Sam Firstenberg with Shô Kosugi, the Japanese star who became central to considerable few of these ninja films in the eighties (such as Pray for Death (1985) and Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985)) in the United States. This one however would imagine what would happen if you were possessed by the ghost of an evil ninja.

The film does not slouch with a ridiculous opening which is yet, with hindsight to how Cannon Group were not a company able to throw a lot of money around, that is impressive with age. It becomes a far more ambitious and mad spectacle, especially knowing one of Cannon's ultimate swords of Damocles over its head was trying to spend too much on films which were not successful. In how the prologue establishes the evil ninja, assassinating someone on a golf course, it becomes a prolonged act a mayhem before he becomes the ghost that possesses Lucinda Dickey of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), slaughtering everyone including the police who chase after him. Alongside how long and extravagant the scene is on its small budget, there is the fact this was before CGI was prominent, so that is a real stunt person hanging off a real helicopter in a ninja costume at one point.

Eventually the numbers game is too much, but this ninja still survived having holes blown into him with firearms, even shotguns, and massacre a whole lot of the cops after him. This was just the prologue, eventually crawling along in the desert where he encounters Christie, Lucinda Dickey's character a telephone pole engineer in the day, passing to her his katana which contains his soul and possesses her. This is, undoubtedly, a bizarre film as it goes along, a reminder that Cannon Group were a curious beast, who funded so legitimately talented figures, including working with John Cassavetes as a director or Jean-Luc Godard, even if that later production King Lear (1987) was effectively a middle finger to Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. They also released films presuming they would be hits but coming from a complete naivety at points - Going Bananas (1987), a children's film, has the bizarre anecdote from Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) about Menahem Golan meeting with the handlers of Clyde the orangutan (Clint Eastwood's co-star from Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980)) to discuss a potential movie deal, only to eventually have to have a dwarf actor in an obvious suit. They could hit trends perfectly, like the original Breakin' film or cashing in on superhero films, but Ninja III does come from the studio being out of touch in a magical way for their productions.

Nothing is more of the eighties, of its moment, in one shot than within Ninja III where Lucinda Dickey is playing Tapper (1983), on an arcade machine she can somehow afford to own, in aerobics lycra. The film after its opening does, honestly, struggle at times with its own shambolic nature, but there is an infectiousness to the proceedings if you can appreciate this film, as Christie begins under the ninja's influence to kill the police officers who finished him off, one attempting to romance her by way of being such an annoyance she finally gives in. Alongside the question of whether pouring V8 vegetable juice on yourself can be considered sexy, which does happen in this film, the other obvious concern is that this definitely is not even like other American martial arts films from this period, in that this really does not focus on the martial arts, yet the idea here of a supernatural ninja is not as trivialising as you would think. This does evoke the cut-and-paste ninja films which made Hong Kong filmmaker Godfrey Ho's infamous reputation, with this in comparison managing a slicker nature in its eighties cheese than some of the productions Ho and his producer at the time Joseph Lai had, but still retaining the DNA. Its supernatural nature makes the comparison perfect, even riffing on The Exorcist with a much appreciated cameo by James Hong as a spiritualist who realises he is out of his depth with an evil ghost ninja. The film is not really even a Shô Kosugi work either as, whilst a name for the tale to sell it, he is a minor figure here, a good ninja out for revenge, for his lost eye and his slain master, travelling to the United States after the evil ninja and happy to perform his own form of exorcism when he realises the circumstances. Instead, this film becomes a curious hodgepodge of aspects and plot points of its own.

A film like this would be even lower budget in the modern straight to streaming era, making one like this which got cinema releases at one point more fascinating. It has its lengthy dialogue scenes, but the strangeness of the production from Cannon Group does feel a one off, not a great film but a compelling one. The Godfrey Ho comparison is apt, and honestly, whilst the real Japanese ninja were people who disguised themselves to blend into surroundings, in Japanese pop culture they have taken ninja to their own exaggerated forms. Particularly in mind to The Kouga Ninja Scrolls (1958–1959), a novel by the Japanese author Futaro Yamada and its lasting impact on depictions in decades after, alongside the influence of cult pop culture media like video games, ninja in Japanese pop culture have been exaggerated as supernatural figures who have bee hives growing out of their backs, let alone their own infinite supply of shuriken like this film has. The difference is that, like the moody synth score by Udi Harpaz and Misha Segal, this has its own quirks from reinterpreting ninja in a Western hemisphere alongside its unintentional aspects, such as its extended aerobics sequence for comedy. Whilst this cannot hold a candle to the Hong Kong and Japanese martial arts films from this era, there is the fictional ninja iconography, like Japan's, which is quirky with hindsight.

The only real issue with this film, truthfully, is that it is exoticising Japanese culture, which is definitely problematic, and whilst his cameo is fun, undeniably a Chinese American actor in James Hong playing a Japanese character, or one who is ambiguous in his spiritual clinic's aesthetic whilst being able to understand a Japanese ghost, shows Ninja III has aged. But the film itself, with its legacy of infamy, is too gleefully weird to just dismiss, especially as it lives up to its mad reputation and does not feel too low budget to cop out of what it promised. The ninja fad as well of the eighties has an added quirk which is meaningful for myself in that, thanks to a certain person named James Ferman, the head of the British Board of Film Classification who started in 1975 and was thankfully ousted in 1999, we would have never gotten a film like this unless with severe censorship until the DVD era. I was too young for this to care, and Godfrey Ho's ninja films were the ones I got to first, but Ferman was responsible for numerous practices which are right to view of puritanical or just bizarre in British film censorship, one of them being he had scenes of things like nunchucks and shurikens removed from films under the fear of British children imitating them, which even compromised the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. This makes a film like Ninja III even more idiosyncratic, as the ninja fad is this strange eighties concept in terms of their Western depictions that we would have not gotten the full extent of. A film like Ninja III would have not been seen in its proper form, outside of bootlegging, until the DVD era here, and its additional time capsule nature of pure eighties oddness, mainlining some of Cannon Group's most charming but also infamous aspects in one production, was a huge experience for me even if this was less a great viewing experience entire for just the film, but the experience itself. Certainly it was an entertaining experience too as a film, not as weird as I had presumed in some ways, more with a greater sense of cheesy eccentricity that won me over, but this is definitely a case of a film which you need to appreciate a "cult" film to get the best out of this or you will think this is dumb. Those who can appreciate just that extended prologue on the golf course will be happy that, if that wins them over, the film will be a great experience for them onwards.

White of the Eye (1986)

 

Director: Donald Cammell

Screenplay: China Kong and Donald Cammell

Based on Mrs. White by Margaret Tracy (a.k.a. Andrew Klavan and Laurence Klavan)

Cast: David Keith as Paul White; Cathy Moriarty as Joan White; Alan Rosenberg as Mike Desantos; Art Evans as Detective Charles Mendoza; Michael Greene as Phil Ross; Danielle Smith as Danielle White; Alberta Watson as Anne Mason; William G. Schilling as Harold Gideon; David Chow as Fred Hoy

An Abstract Candidate

 

Because you can't change a channel, man. Future or past.

Your introduction to White of the Eye, a serial killer drama with a mystical and unsettled edge, is a series of shots within its setting of Tucson, Arizona, which alongside the soundtrack by Rick Fenn and Nick Mason, forces the viewer to experience the atmosphere of the environment, abstract in tone. The shock of the film soon after also sums up how unprepared you will be, even if the plot on paper is a traditional thriller, as the first murder scene of a suburban upper class woman continues the disconcerting rhythms and choices for shots. In a perfect white kitchen, among the glamour of the eighties in the cutlery and equipment within it, blood intermingles with the meat dish a goldfish is placed into, and wine and blood mixes against white walls and counters, all in a series of edits and cuts dismantling the imagery.

The films I have found myself obsessing over are those that cannot be easily defined - by genre and tone - and Donald Cammell's White of the Eye has clear things to its plot but undercuts it with a significant tonal choices. Margaret Tracy, the author of the source material, befitting a story about secrets is actually two men, Andrew Klavan and Laurence Klavan, Andrew Klavan of note as a crime and mystery author, one whose work has also been adapted into films like Don't Say a Word (2001). Irony is not lost that, Klavan the proud "unwoke" American conservative, ended up with his novel adapted by Donald Cammell, the complete and utter antithesis in persona in his tragically short life, but likewise, White of the Eye as with the other films, only four, in the director's career undermines the source material for a greater weight. Follow a person who is killing women, interconnected with the life of Joan White (Cathy Moriarty) and her happy marriage to her husband Paul White (David Keith), a supernaturally talented audio equipment specialist, you would find this plot in a paperback thriller and even a TV movie, not dismissive as comments from me but how graspable these plot points and the obvious plot twists you read into can be. White of the Eye, as with the few other films in Cammell's filmography, is a deliberately peculiar film, at odds with its standardised serial killer plot - someone killing women and performing gristly rituals in the aftermath - even in how only having two murder scenes are shown, in fragments and aftermath.

Instead, it concerns itself with Paul and Joan White, Paul a potential suspect for the police, and Joan's romantic view of him slowly turning along the running time. Considering this was made by the Cannon Group, a company that brought legitimately great contributions but also contrasted them with pulpy films like the American Ninja films, this feels appropriately one of their productions, feeling like the two sides of their work bleeding into each other like some of their best productions did. It is a film, mostly in truth, about a family unit falling to pieces, which however is placed within a gristly psychodrama of the most elliptical and unsettling of ways. Even that the breaking point is when Joan suspects her husband is having an affair feels appropriate for even a made-for-TV weepy, but the tone sets the film out greatly alongside how the story, slowly, itself is told with far more disconcerting aspects, quirks and nuances. His co-writer and widow, China Cammell, deserves as much praise as the co-author, adapting a novel which has touches in general which, when a character starts talking about the television in his head, are strange but fit the tone. It has a lived in reality, with side characters like a cafe owner, allowed moments to breath, alongside moments which take one back on purpose, asking why the shots were there on the first viewing, like abruptly cutting a side character, a police officer, flossing his teeth for no seemingly necessary reason in extreme close-up.

Cammell, co-director of Performance (1970) with Nicolas Roeg, became more potent an author for that film, even if Roeg became a unique figure in his own right. The sense of unpredictability with the tone there is as much found here. One key detail to how this film is told is in the flashbacks with Jean's first lover Mike Desantos (Alan Rosenberg), complicated when Desantos appears again in the main narrative. A daughter is between them all who could be harmed by this is also the obvious dramatic tension, whether this was the film it came to be or "more conventional", but likewise emphasises the tragedy of what presents the idyll life - happiness, a home in the Arizona countryside, the pet dog and tranquilly - only it has been built on a psychosis.

What the film does however around this content is more ill-at-ease, more gradually paced. Filmed in the eighties - prosperity, ridiculous perms on both genders' heads, slasher films and the Italian giallo murder mysteries of the sixties and seventies at their most lurid when the eighties came - it misses the real meat to merely say it is a critique on American ideology. The location of Arizona feels like an outside world only connected by the fashion and trends of the era, and the country music in the soundtrack, sung or playing on the soundtrack, is far too clearly sincere, for a genre that can be mocked but is also a sincere and emotionally strong part of Americana, itself adding the ill-ease with a lot of the music about heartbreak and despair, it itself aptly a genre like the blues about the tragedy apparently found in tranquil life. This film is set in a place here instead abstract with expensive audio systems, cars and kitchens which is more general, that in this apparent bliss, regardless of era and nationality, regardless of how much the kitchens cost, people can be both wonderful human beings on the outside but psychologically psychopathic. The abrupt explanation to why the killer does what they do is simplistic; the monologue appears a really ridiculous giallo or another Cannon Group production, but it befits the shift into the strange already here. From the cut to the flossed teeth to a goldfish in a Pyrex dish, this film from the get-go is uncomfortable and is much so because it is weird as it is nasty. Here you can literally find the worse nightmare just in a certain part of the bath, in a scene that would not leave many viewers' minds involving a mere thread. The landscape outside is wonderful, from dunes to vast plains, but it is isolated, the drama between the co-authors warping a novel into a world where the worst in human beings can exist in the apparent complacency of public, commercial life.

Early on, you could have read a cheap dig at the author of Andrew Klaven which could reveal this author's politic beliefs, but honestly, with little knowledge of him up to creating this review, it is instead, for a vague figure now in my knowledge I may never met or have fleshed out at all, an apt jumping off point to talk about these type of serial killer films with White of the Eye. In the grand scheme, thrillers could easily be a cheap excuse to explain the world through a conservative, black-and-white morality of good and bad, the idea that Dirty Harry is the hero for shooting a serial killer when, even if the 1971 original film has its cake and eat it, it came from a muddy ground where, unfortunately, the only person that could fight a monster is a monster himself in his attitude. Giallo are inherently exaggerated, the id onscreen for good and bad in aesthetics, style and transgressions, whilst the idea of the mystery thriller about a serial killer could be argued as being far less defendable than the Italian cousins. Many, for film or television, feel like they happily placate a vicarious desire for morbid death and mutilation, with the clean cut notion a cop or detective being able solve it the escape pad to not feel you are just ingesting in delight over dead bodies.

It would take more weight to deal with a serial killer, in real life or on a page, and many giallo murder mysteries are about corrupt people, usually middle class, bumping each other and a poor person finding themselves within as the improvised detective in the middle of it. Alongside how here the police are actually down-to-earth and alien to the trumped up notion of the arm of the law, ordinary Joes trying to work around these gristly murders, even butting heads with outside law enforcement, White of the Eye is compelling as it is entirely focused on a family disintegrating. The plot twist - [Huge Spoiler] that Paul is the killer [Spoiler Ends] - is incredibly obvious from the get-go, but that reveal is the start of the ultimate tragedy.   

Very little violence is shown. The most gore shed, reminiscent of Dario Agrento's Tenebrae (1982) and his fixation for pale white walls and blood, is a tomato sauce being splattered in the opening, the change still vile in suggestion of the brutality shown. A reminder of Peeping Tom (1960) that horrifies appears later on, with a mirror being shown to the victim of another sequence. Everything is ready to break into said violence without explicit mutilation. Paul White is not what he is expected to be, his wife showing her rage openly when it feels he has betrayed her, and Mike Desantos is someone who was violent before, released from jail and with apparent mental illness, comes as the wisest figure even when talking about a TV in his head. Summing up the reveal of the worse in a person, even if an absurd take on misogyny, as being stuck with reruns in the head TV if perfect, as flashbacks to the original relationships between the three bleeds into the current day, slowly complicating and showing the grim reality of the situation.

And then the film goes insane on purpose. The tone, even with its violence, before the final act was calmer, eerie with its score by 10cc's Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, but even their score starts to become tense, bringing a sense of growing horror to the situation in the narrative. That this even has a sense of humour, if a bleak one, is apt, where you find yourself briefly wondering if a character actually strapped hotdogs to themselves, something the daughter as a child presumes, only to consider the fact that it is dynamite inherently bizarre still in itself. The delirious tone by this point may be seen as out-of-place, except for the fact throughout the film there has been weird humour, strange touches, alongside the fact that Donald Cammell's tiny career has these strange and divisive touches for many - Performance where it cuts to Mick Jagger's song Memo from Turner and turns into a music video; Demon Seed (1977) and its premise as general, about a computer that ultimate wants to conceive a child with Julie Christie; Wild Life (1995) having an extended scene of Christopher Walken, as a crime boss, threatening to literally bugger one of his henchmen. The organised chaos of the tone that White of the Eye develops into still conveys the most animalist in people, even if the content is silly on paper. The acting has a rawness throughout, worth praising especially from Moriarty, turning into a madden frenzy when that finale takes place. When logical reality is replaced with the notion of heightened emotions affecting that reality, it has an immensely powerful effect. The result, far from ridiculous in an undermining way, is adding to the disturbing nature of what takes place.

The film switches through time periods with fluidity, blurring them together. The editing, a trademark in Cammell's small filmography, breaks scenes and moments to lingering pieces when needed. Cammell, in both scenes of violence and out of them, examines objects in extreme close-ups, adding a layer that makes them new. That the film looks like a glossy eighties Cannon Group film, going against the content inside, befits this. Night scenes are intentionally grainy and vague, creating a tone to even love scenes by the fire where it is all not it seems. The flashback tale is intentionally washed out in tone. The music by Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason adds as well to the film, atmospheric and adding a ghostly edge. The result, on paper, feels like a film anyone could make. The result, onscreen, called White of the Eye is not, which leaves with the aftershock of what has happened. As an expression of the failures of the family unit, it uses its distortion to startle.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Disturbing/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)

 

Director: Norman Mailer

Screenplay: Norman Mailer (with Robert Towne)

Based on a novel by Norman Mailer

Cast: Ryan O'Neal as Tim Madden; Isabella Rossellini as Madeleine Regency; Lawrence Tierney as Dougy Madden; Wings Hauser as Luther Regency; Debra Sandlund as Patty Lareine; Penn Jillette as Big Stoop; John Bedford Lloyd as Wardley Meeks III; Frances Fisher as Jessica Pond

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I'm a law enforcement officer, and it turns me on.

If I step back, I find the fact a Pulitzer Prize winning author helmed a Cannon Group released film, also produced by Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Films, is a strange thing to even conceive let alone know the notoriety of the film. The oddest thing is knowing Mailer, of a school of American literature, came to cinema first in a series of low budget and ultra improvised films alien to Tough Guys Don't Dance, where infamously in Maidstone (1970) actor Rip Torn came at him with a hammer for real out of annoyance and the footage was kept in. The background is as appropriately strange for a very odd film.

Subdued and with a lush score from Angelo Badalamenti over the idyllic coast of Provincetown, this feels Lynchian and comes off as one of the more perplexing touches to a film which defies a lot of genre. Effectively, whilst there are likely films within this ballpark from decades earlier, Tough Guys predates the stranger crime films like The Big Lebowski (1998) and Inherent Vice (2014) that would get popular, where ex-con Tim Madden, as played by a very dishevelled Ryan O'Neil, is suffering through his wife Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) leaving him only to end up in a labyrinth of backstabbings, murders and a weird horror edge. Set up as a series of flashbacks, with a sombre reconciliation with his cancer stricken father, the film sits on a knife-edge. The horror-like edge is there, with talk of ghosts in his house, pirates off the coast of Massachusetts, O'Neil's blackouts especially when he finds that there are parts of two bodies in the basement he does not know the origins of. And the séance which his wife decided to have, leading to her deciding to leave him.

Tough Guys Don't Dance was not well regarded when it was first released. Few, when it was, liked the film with one of the exceptions being film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Personally, I think this is a grower for me in that, whilst bad taste does streak the film, just for the end credit song alone, this is a compelling film; one where, if he did not admit it was as much a dark comedy, would be a surprise from Mailer as, contrary to its reputation for ridiculous dialogue and moments, it feels on purpose to be this perplexing in tone. A huge factor to consider in that, over this elaborate pulp narrative, a large part of its obsessions is with masculinity, a huge factor in Mailer's obsessions as an author. The film is crass and offensive in places - women get a short shrift and the homophobic slurs are used - yet it feels on purpose, as the men are neurotic, psychopathic and deceptive. A large part of this film, as with the source novel, involves these male characters not being comfortable in their sexuality, where the fear of being gay is drastically contrasted by an obsession and openly homoerotic borders.

And even the women in this film get to sling forth and back zingers in an over-ripe, profane language such as Debra Sandlund, whose filmography is not large at all, as a Southern wife of Madden who clawed and schemed her way to riches (including leaving an Evangelical preacher husband played by, naturally, magician and known sceptic Penn Jillette). Crime stories can something be as overripe as melodramas are, one usually targeted to a male audience whilst the other to women; gendering genres and types of cinema is deeply narrow minded and crass in general, but especially as Tough Guys Don't Dance posits that crime stories can be just as much melodramas.

A large part of the film is a lot of male ego, contrasted by powerful women, who are fragile and lot of angst as a result. As much of the film, as Madden is pulled in a strange course of events involving drug money and severed heads, is him being loomed over by the new police chief Luther Regency among other figures, as played by Wings Hauser in a role surprising subdued for a man know for cutting loose. Never was a film where masculinity is bandied about and bombastic, with Hauser of all the cast the most restrained for the most part, doing well playing a man close to an edge, until a break happens and you get an over-the-top moment involving facial paralysis and ridiculous mumbling. The notorious nature of the film is just how crass and over-the-top the dialogue can be but, as a melodramatic production, everything feels ripe with a legitimately strange edge. I have mentioned this feels like a predecessor to films like Inherent Vice, more arch and knowing films of that ilk, and honestly I wonder if Mailer had have made the film in the nineties or onwards, we may have gotten a more positive reputation for the movie.

Certainly, it has strange and illogical touches. The first flashback, in a structure which coils in on itself in medias res backwards, is as eighties as a Cannon Group production could be when the narrative begins at a party. Cocaine in lines being snorted on a table; eighties hairstyles and synth drum programming pop; a woman taking her clothes off down to a skimpy g-strip to greet Wings Hauser at the door; Debra Sandlund randomly playing a trumpet and then saying her golden pubic hairs were burnt by the college football team. Infamously, many know this production just for one scene, held as the worst line delivery in cinema, where O'Neil flatly shouts "oh God, oh man...!" in a sequence Mailer kept in. YouTube unfortunately is a format which reduces history to one clip without any context, and whilst that moment is an odd creative choice, in context it fits a film which is openly absurd. Mailer, if he has not deliberately made a dark humoured narrative, must have been amazingly oblivious to it, as so much of this feels on point. It is a film where the line "Your knife is in my dog" is spoken sincerely, but the random appearance of a pet dog is more perplexing for myself than the line, when we have never been introduced to Tim Madden having pets before then. The dialogue in that scene itself felt like a zinger a Coen Brother might have penned, and a lot of the film feels openly going for moments to shock or cause a viewer to laugh in a crime story of broad people self-destructing.

Certainly in terms of a pulp genre film, where the narrative once it is all explained is fully entrenched in clichés and tropes of the crime genre, the more overt and out-there aspects gain a greater sense of meaning even if there are eyebrow rising moments throughout. The amount of references to sex and masculinity, taken from the source material by Mailer too, feel intentional and his dialogue, as a legendary author, is so idiosyncratic it is compelling. The unexpected connections to David Lynch, whilst fully its own creation, really add an additional level as well. Isabella Rossellini, as the love of Madden's life Madeleine who he lost, fits the film's world fully, one where when after a car accident and losing her ability to have children it may seem strange for her to request cocaine from O'Neil in her hospital bed but, with her conviction and the tone already set up, feels fleshed out in its own mad logic. The music by Badalamenti, as naturally melodramatic as for Lynch, fits the tone perfectly as a score so emotionally welled up it almost at times feels like it will collapse into itself. That it sometimes does hit madness at some point does keep you on edge.

This is a film helped by its production quality. One of the most disarming aspects finally watching Tough Guys Don't Dance, contrary to the legend I had built up of a shambolic production, is that Mailer (who never helmed a film after this) helmed a solidly put together picture. One where he was aware of cinematic language, as an evocative moment using the camera really stood out, exiting a police station office from Hauser by moving the camera aware from him and the filing cabinets around him. So much is very well made it does make the stranger content even stranger. Again, everything in Tough Guys, for all its madness and legitimately odd tone, feels on point rather than a randomly thrown together production. Even in mind to Mailer's brief dalliance with Jean-Luc Godard - both walking off King Lear (1987) as Godard was hinting at an incestuous nature to the characters Mailer and his daughter Kate Mailer were to play, and that this film was released only days around Godard's - ominous seagull sounds, like those throughout King Lear, appear in one scene in a perverse synchronicity between the films as a result. That this film itself, in its apparently idyllic ending, which abruptly happens, has an uncomfortable edge of O'Neil staring almost to camera as he closes a front door to his new house, with ghoulish (almost screamed) laughter in the audio track, adds a sense of this entire experience provoking the viewer and keeping them on their toes.

Whether this film is digestible for most viewers or not, it absolutely needs a proper re-evaluation as a film that was belied against its will. The Cannon Group's later reputation, goofy yet fun b-pictures and weirdness, whilst as much of their charm, has accidentally not helped these curiosities from their cannon get wider interest - the John Cassavetes film Love Streams (1984) notwithstanding, what of this, King Lear, Robert Altman's Fools for Love (1985) or Raul Ruiz's Treasure Island (1985)? -  but the apparent view this was just a bad folly without looking back at it is an imp that needs to be exorcised off its shoulders. I openly admit that, the longer I think of this, I might grow to admire Tough Guys Don't Dance more and more as time goes on. I might even fall in love with the perverse bastard of a film.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

King Lear (1987)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy

Based on the play by William Shakespeare (I)

Cast: Peter Sellars as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, Burgess Meredith as Don Learo; Molly Ringwald as Cordelia; Leos Carax as Edgar; Julie Delpy as Virginia; Jean-Luc Godard as Professor Pluggy; Freddy Buache as Grigori Kozintsev ("Professor Quentin"); Woody Allen as Mr. Alien; Norman Mailer as himself; Kate Mailer as herself

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Do I need a name to see thy beauty?

It feels befitting King Lear's conception, as a film ultimately on the subjective nature of the word and image which is deceptive in how it can be read, was a contract signed on a napkin between the Cannon Group's Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan with Jean-Luc Godard. The napkin itself, not literally but subjectively, would form a divisive and curious production in Godard's career in its existence, especially apt as viewers can see that napkin themselves - whilst King Lear is dismissed, you see the contract in Mark Hartley's documentary on Cannon called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014), one film interlinking and weaving into this one as King Lear itself interlinks in a variety of ways to history (even if own notorious one) in profound ways.

It was not really necessary for a viewer to read King Lear, as whilst contrary to its infamy of a Shakespeare adaptation by someone who never read the play, the truth is more that it does have quotations from the play but Godard specifically stretches one moment, the rejection on the daughter Cordelia from her father King Lear, and transforming it into his ongoing issues with the notion of language and communication.

The work's origins would have been fascinating to witness - author Norman Mailer as King Lear, Woody Allen as the Fool - as a Cannon produced film which, for the company's love and notoriety as the creators of the likes of the American Ninja franchise, comes from the period where they signed contracts with major filmmakers like John Cassavetes to Raul Ruiz for prestige and gave them some leeway as a result¹. The sense that Menahem Golan in particular was out of step to who Godard was becoming, dealt with in Electric Boogaloo as being dismissed by Godard, is when a real phone call from him to the Swiss filmmaker during its protracted gestation, where he wishes for it to be get premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is played in the opening over the words:

A

Picture

Shot in the Back

 

Whilst a playful film at times, King Lear is also a melancholic work. Beyond the constant seagull sounds in the soundtrack, there is a droning nature that appears here and there in the soundtrack, a vast tapestry, where the orchestral music on the score malfunctions constantly, and many voices interlacing and overlapping each other. It feels apt as, in this world set post Chernobyl where everything returned except art and culture, this follows Godard's ongoing issues with the state of the world in terms of cinema and culture in general. The film is from the second "mainstream" era of his career in the eighties, which is inherently deceptive as Godard, whilst a legendary filmmaker, was never conventional from the beginning, already slipping away from his original popular films in the sixties until his complete rejection of it in Week End (1967). The misbegotten Dziga-Vertov Group era, whilst with its virtues, took place and then there is the ultra obscure mid-to-late seventies era including extensive television work. This second mainstream era, from Every Man For Himself (1980) until into the nineties, is deceptive in that he works with name stars and fictional narratives, from a Isabelle Huppert in that film to Johnny Hallyday in the underrated Détective (1985), but his narratives are giving way to didactic essay structures which would eventually turn into essay films in his late years.

It could come off as an older man shouting at clouds, to paraphrase the Simpsons, as Godard complains of the state of culture, but this has clearly been something which enters his work very early in his career and took hold of him. But let us not forget that this is also one of the more perplexing things to exist, in context, which I also wish was more readily available. That, with its initial set up we follow William Shakespeare V, the ancestor of the Bard played by Peter Sellars, not that Sellers before anyone is surprises, the legendary British comedian, but the American theatre director who co-wrote this adaptation and plays a descendent, hired by the Queen of England and the Cannon Cultural Division, absorbing the producers of this film into its world, to recreate the lost texts of his legendary ancestor.

Its key plot points are that one of the people who can help him is Professor Pluggy, played by Godard himself as a barely coherent and yet wise sage whose assistants are a fire obsessed young man played by Leos Carax, soon to be the legendary director of the likes of Holy Motors (2012) and his girlfriend played by Julie Delpy. Godard in manner and acting, especially when he has the red woollen hat on, even with his trademark cigars and glasses, looks like a drunken character you find in a bar scene in a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film. His voice is close to it too and early in narration, you effectively get what would happen if he wanted to try a Michael Caine voice. That narration is there as Norman Mailer was briefly in the production, at the same time directing the notorious Cannon produced Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987). We see Mailer, proud as only a legendary Pulitzer Prize winning author can be with the tenor of his voice to match, completing the script to a King Lear adaptation set in the world of mafia, which is not absurd and blasphemous to consider when Akira Kurosawa just two years earlier adapted this play to Ran (1985) in the world of samurai and created a late masterpiece. Mailer left the production as, with his real life daughter Kate Mailer playing Lear's daughter to him, an incest aspect was being placed into the material. So instead, in stand ins to Norman and Kate Mailer, as much as playing King Lear and one of his daughters Cordelia, we get Burgess Meredith of the 60s Batman series as well as a prolific acting career, and Molly Ringwald of The Breakfast Club (1985).

King Lear from that could be held as a perplexing surprise as a result. It is actually a film of three sides - a serious film, a humerous film, and a later narrative Godard film, such as Hélas pour moi (1993), where the drama is fragmented in heavy analytical theories and references to other culture. One is that, yes, this cast and the context make the film one of the oddest to exist, especially as (whilst a figure cancelled in modern culture in the 2010s onwards) Woody Allen is in the film in a small cameo at the end still. Godard himself was a big figure so his own role, part Holmes film side character but with electric cables dangling out of his hair like dreadlocks, like a Swiss Techno-Hippy, is a cherry on the cake when he mumbles in English and, in one rebuttal to Sellar's Shakespeare, farts as his answer. This film not surprising befuddled many, a review from Vincent Canby of the New York Times saying that this is "as sad and embarrassing as the spectacle of a great, dignified man wearing a fishbowl over his head to get a laugh"², which I think Godard could have easily done here in character for a point. Poignantly however is that, alongside not being dissimilar to the rest of his films from the era, how this farcical light is contrasted by an ominous mood is palpable, where pig noises eventually hit the soundtrack, screaming, and one scene has a bed soaked in blood when the sheets are lifted up. For all the chaos and farce, the one aspect from King Lear kept, alongside quotations from the text, is itself a huge part of his film's heart. Cordelia, in the play, rejects her father King Lear's offer, which here has Molly Ringwald's word of wanting "Nothing" turned to "No Thing" in the Godard trademark of onscreen text. This is a prominent aspect of the film, its true narrative, because of how Shakespeare V learns how the image itself is subjective, its emotional effect more important but the image is not tangential, prominent as Shakespeare himself has to travel around and effectively recreate his ancestor's work from inspiration of those around him he meets.

The struggle of artistic work, and the fact that language and images themselves are fickle, could sound like Godard is a fuddy duddy, but it has been a huge part of his work including the moral conundrums it also raises. He had probably been inspired to create the project years before, as Histoire(s) du cinéma's first "episode" appeared in 1988, but here in a scene in Professor Pluggy's editing room you have two tiny screens which splice and juxtapose different images, from a Tex Avery cartoon to the famous razor to the eyeball sequence from Un Chien Andalou (1929), a prototype of that project's M.O. Here I will admit that, having once in my early twenties hated most of Godard's work trying to watch it, and only becoming an admirer after a lot of adaptation and patience, I personally have never attempted to analyse Godard, and think even blasphemously that his cinema is as much improvised as it is razor focused. What you can grasp, and helped if you can get the references, does favours, as for a film with its absurd origins and content has a darkness felt in the juxtapositions of art by Francisco Goya, a bleakness of the state of the world. For all the dicey politics Godard has nearly shot his feet off with, one of the most noble found in Histoire(s) du cinéma, and evoked again and again in his later essay films of the Millennium, is that cinema failed civilisation when the World War II and the Holocaust happens, and to not turn this lighter hearted film review in a bleak one, his later years beyond his sixties feels like a man, after his ill advised Dziga-Vertov Group years, who has felt the weight of responsibility in his own films and grappled with the morality of filmmaking as a result of ideas like this of his.

King Lear is still bonkers, frankly batshit insane, and I do not think curse words in a Godard review is inappropriate. Godard as the wise Prospero of The Tempest, in his Swiss island away from the world making films like The Image Book (2018), would probably not find it an insult when the entire project comes from strange circumstances. (Sweetly, when interviewed by Katherine Dieckmann for an interview called "Godard in His Fifth Period", in the run up to his King Lear production, it does have the sentence from him saying "I haven't seen any of the movies they [Golan and Globus] financed, but I really want to see the Chuck Norris movie...", whichever that one was he was referring too³.) Yet there are snippets which reflect he was taking this film seriously. It does look gorgeous, even if you were stuck with a VHS rip for a film not easily available, as cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux imbues the film, shot in Switzerland, with both moments of serenity in the woodlands but also moodiness whenever indoors. The sound design is startling once you get past the seagull sounds.

And there is meaning here. Ringwald, on the Electric Boogaloo document, expressed confusion about the whole project, but her Cordelia is one of the more consistent figures. A figure of innocence, she rejects her father's love and is willing to endure the most of it. Her confusion is that as ours, looking at herself in the mirror in a green tiled room at herself, but when the film is explicitly referencing Joan of Arc (including Robert Bresson's 1962 adaptation) that is a loaded metaphor to place on the character. ([Spoilers] Especially as she is found dead on a rock sacrificed by the end, by a executioner with a spear, which is taken from the original play itself. [Spoilers End].) Even accidental connections have greater weight, such as Meredith starring in a Jean Renoir film The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), apt as Sellars' Shakespeare V is introduced at a restaurant with a book on film "auteurs", with no text, legends like Orson Welles without the context of their filmographies as he ponders on Renoir's father, the acclaimed painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, becoming more fixated on young women in his art as he aged.

That the film, for all its notoriety and dense difficulty, obtuse to say the least, has one legitimately beautiful and profound moment does spar it from any accusations of Godard pissing against Cannon's wishes. Breaking his own rules by presenting an actual moment of magic only possible in film, he shows the reconstruction of a flower, with its petals reattached, in reversed footage in a scene Jean Cocteau would have been proud of. That this act, in narrative, is from Godard's Professor Pluggy, sacrificing himself to do this act, and with his body dissipating into a reel of film afterwards is itself a profound image to leave on. That the film itself was never going to be a box office success was obvious, as Cannon should have realised even his eighties films, with narratives, were not like Breathless (1960) at all. But they should have been proud, for all their annoyances with him, for not being lazy either.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Moody/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

 

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1) Even if, as talked of by him in the Electric Boogaloo documentary, French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder had to take a chainsaw into the Golan-Globus office and threaten to cut his own fingers off to finish Barfly (1987) the way he wanted to, impressing Golan as a result.

2) Sadly requires a subscription to read, but the link to the original review is HERE.

3) From Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers) (Conversations with Filmmakers S.) from the University Press of Mississippi.