The Pulpit #1: Robocop

An unavoidable truth: film production and special effects costing what they do, Hollywood has turned more frequently towards established franchises for their tent-pole pictures. Hulk and Spiderman get unrequested reboots; Harry Potter 7 and The Hobbit get chopped into two movie events, each sure to gross half a billion domestic. As the digitization gets richer however, and the specific details of comic book frames and fantasy novels comes to life on the screen, original screenplays have been forced to play by the same complex mythological rules. We need only look at The Terminator franchise, one of the most economically genius concepts in modern times (trust us, under that foreign body-builder's governor's actor's skin is a titanium exoskeleton) which went from one stoic dude with a gun to a full on apocalypse with cybernetic snakes and nuclear airships, to see how much things have changed. The original hit of the summer, Inception, used these snakes as narrative form, twisting and convulsing for over 150 minutes until the audience left confused and exhausted. Remember three guys in a boat hunting a shark?

Of course Hollywood couldn't sell Jaws to America today, at least not with the expectation of making their money back. What's in the trailer, some shots of Richard Dreyfus looking distressed? It's nice then, with the aid of Netflix instant, to return to a simpler time with a thrill machine like Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. Like The Terminator, it's a high concept science fiction movie executed on a middle of the road budget. Murphy (Peter Weller) is killed by gangsters, and his body is used in the prototype of the "new police officer" engineered by the corporations that runs law enforcement. Soon, however, memories of his human life begin to haunt him, and his search for justice leads him to uncover citywide corruption in a (slightly) futuristic version of Detroit.

The police (still in dress blues) are threatening going on strike. Bad men in expensive suits run the city. Criminals hide out in warehouses and steel mills. Whether Verhoeven is saying the future will be quite recognizable, or his limited budget had to be devoted to make-up and costume effects, the effect is ideal. We aren't distracted by a thousand digital details in the background, as in the disastrous Star Wars reboots. Technology was the window dressing, not the object being sold. Like Die Hard, The French Connection and Shane, Robocop is simply about one good guy with a limited number of bullets.

Science fiction does have its luxuries though - the filmmakers aren't required the head-fake to reality found in earlier genre films. Starship Troopers was about a war that never ends, and the mentality of the soldiers caught in such a struggle - Robocop is the fun of revenge, of taking down the powers that be, of a machine becoming a hero, all in 100 lean minutes. That "fun of revenge" is just fancy talk for giving us what we want - violence and sex, with thin justifications.

Of course there could be more to it; Robocop also touches on the conflict between analog and digital techonology when it comes to waging war. Coming as it did at the end of the Cold War, it hearkens back to the Westerns of the 50s, the ideal of one man making a difference, somewhat lost in the tumultuous 60s and paranoid 70s. It's pure Reagan-era image-making, stone-faced Peter Weller taking down the corporate giant that would have a hind-legged robot meting out justice. The only reason Robocop's gun is not permanently affixed to his hand is so that he may twirl it from time to time. The reckless braggadocio of the act reminds us of John Wayne, but more importantly, of pulling a trigger, somehow much more satisfying than pressing a button. The violence becomes more primal in the final act, as medieval weaponry like blunt objects and knives come back into play.

A statue of Robocop was recently built for the city of Detroit, to be erected in the near future. A movie directed by a Dutchman and shot mostly in Dallas and Toronto embodies the foremost ideals of one of the country's most hard-scrabble towns. Of course, steel or flesh, he is American-made.

The Vault #68: Don't Look Now

More often than not, movies dealing in the macabre find a few days of their shooting schedule in Italy. The medieval superstitions at the heart of Roman Catholicism pass for suspense in films like The Omen and The Order. Prayers are uttered in Latin, monks wear suspicious hoods, and weathered gargoyles observe all from on high. This is often all too easy for the filmmakers - a few dark churches, and a few whispers about Satan, and suddenly the everyman protagonist finds himself up against a political conspiracy and evil incarnate. And that's just in the first two reels.

Foregoing this well-worn territory of spooky sin and bombastic brimstone, Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now misses the forest for the trees in the best possible way. Though John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is restoring an old cathedral and working closely with the archbishop of Venice, he and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are too pre-occupied to worry about Christ's secret family or the location of the grail. They're on an extended vacation of sorts, trying to forget the death of their daughter Christine; the trip of laughter and forgetting interrupted by a blind psychic Laura encounters in a restaurant bathroom. Supplied with limited information and haunted by a specter in an all to familiar red raincoat, the Baxters are soon scrambling for their sanity as much as their safety.

Normally when dealing with the occult, screenwriters feel the need to include to the one expository scene or character that helps our heroes figure out the mystery, if only partially. Here the wizened priests and psychics seems as clueless as the rest of us. Despite some unnerving cutaways and close-ups of those who may wish the Baxters harm, these short scenes never add up to a larger plot. Writers Allan Scott and Chris Bryant either don't have any such larger intentions, or don't want us privy to them. The second half of the film practically places the audience in Sutherland's head, and his walks down abandoned streets and canals get our pulse pounding just as fast.

Compared to the torture porn and special effects shows we've come to expect from horror movies, Don't Look Now comes off looking like a no-budget indie. All we are given is empty streets at night, the sounds of alarmed footsteps and heavy breathing, for nearly two hours. Roeg has realized what the others have, that ancient, winding streets with a bit of fog create quite a bit of trepidation, but he doesn't feel the need to embellish the canvas Venice provides any further. The child's death provides the emotional hook - even when the characters are doing nothing we understand them to be mourning. What starts as disturbing is allowed to grow naturally into the unsettling, and eventually, the terrifying.

We might compare this film with others of its day, but not horror films. Don't Look Now has the newsreel immediacy of conspiracy films like The Parallax View and The Conversation, with Sutherland the level-headed man of reason drawn closer and closer to madness and revelation. Again, Roeg, Scott and Bryant are in no rush to fill this movie with details. What started as a Daphne Du Maurier short story stays at that scale, its dread and uncertainty stretched to feature length.

About 90 minutes, you start praying for the mystery to go unsolved, for us to slip out of frame with the Baxters just as bewildered and human as we (and they) entered. An explanation from beyond the grave would not only be unrealistic, it would defuse the sheer terror of the preceding film. Thankfully, our reluctant search for the truth is left wanting.

The Vault #67: Caught

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," wrote Jane Austen. Conversely, and far less romantically, a prospective wife must be in want of a man in possession of a good fortune. This principle presides over the entirety of Max Ophuls' ink-black melodrama Caught, in which a young woman (Barbara Bel Geddes) marries master-of-his-domain Smith Ohlrich (Robert Ryan), and gets far more than she can handle.

American-born directors might have trouble storming the democratic-capitalist castle so brazenly. Ophuls jumps right in with Ms Eames (Bel Geddes) changing her name to Leonora and attending a finishing school; these first moments indicate the final result of a long debate over whether or not to play the long con, although blink and you may miss them. Soon "Leonora" is sashaying through expensive department stores modeling fur coats and rubbing elbows with society's best, smile perpetually plastered across her face. We can see right through her from the start, but who else are we to sympathize with? Ohlrich is no fool - the only reason he marries her, or the only reason Ophuls gives us, is to prove to his psychiatrist that he can. If you came to the drive-in for some popcorn and light necking, your stomach may be beginning to turn.

In the matter of one cut, a year has past and Leonora finds herself abandoned in an endless Long Island mansion, not unlike Kane's second wife (Kane was originally to be based on the millionaire that inspired Ryan's character - Howard Hughes). Her husband is either absent or abusive, and soon he drives her out of the house entirely. She takes a job in Manhattan and soon finds herself in the arms of another well-off man, if not fabulously so, Dr. Quinada (James Mason).

Ophuls was known in Europe for his nineteenth century period pieces, works like La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de..., where courtesans and ladies of the court bounced between princes and dukes. Implicit in those films is that a rigid, aristocratic, social structure allowed for such a low treatment of women. The female protagonists in these films must develop cunning and deception in order to get what they want, which is usually more clothes or a baby, which is really just a long-term way of trapping the man. Transferring those same sorts of chauvinistic instincts to the American scene does not seem as alien as we might hope.  In this case, the duke or count in question is no dope; without a royal title to her name, Leonora is, indeed, caught.  The degree of cultural separation that always leant an air of satire to Ophuls work has evaporated - this society is our own. The mechanics of the domestic equation are laid bare - the woman is a prize for her looks, the man a prize for his money, the child a prize for the insurance each holds against the other.

There's not even the trace of romance to be found in Caught - a honeymoon is alluded to but never seen. That notion went out the door in the first frame, hovering over the finishing school brochure, guaranteeing students they would bag Prince Charming. After that, the camera prances from tracking shot to tracking shot through the beautiful mansion, around the landscaped pool, through the finest luxuries money can buy. The happy ending doesn't feel tacked on or disingenuous - it's a fitting piece of gallows humor. Leonora Eames gets everything she could have possibly dreamed of, but her dreams didn't involve any lofty ideals. Are the objects of her basest desires even worth having?