A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick (1971)
I was discussing High Rise (film of) recently with Paul Tickell and Phil Cairney, my director friends, and I compared it to Clockwork Orange. No, they both said, check out the theatricality of staging and acting in Orange, compared with High Rise (I paraphrase, of course; neither of them would say “check out”). They were right, naturally. The choreographed gut- kicking during the house invasion – “I’m SIINGING in the rain (thud)” – along with the cutting of Adrienne Corri’s cat suit, while Patrick Magee is forced to watch, and the attack on Dim to the Thieving Magpie music are theatre and opera, and I was going to say unique – then, of course, the attack by the nazis on the bouncer in Cabaret, that’s to music, but not choreographed – and I suppose West Side Story….. and just about every Ken Russell music biopic has a sequence of classical music with violence, or sex, or sex and violence… so not unique then, or even rare. But maybe uniquely malevolent and chilling.
For my money, the best line in the film is Magee’s; he is entertaining the hapless Alex and has come to realise that the youth he is sheltering was his main assailant: “FOOD (bellowed suddenly)……. Awright? (strangled attempt to get voice under control).
Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah (1971) – now available on DVD
Invaluable for its accurate and touching portrait of Cornish country folk in the 70s – a giggling, knife-wielding ratcatcher, a teenage nymphomaniac, rustic rapists, a mentally challenged killer, a drunken malicious patriarch (Peter Vaughan, prefiguring Robert Shaw in Jaws). Into the village to settle come Dustin Hoffman, nerdy American maths genius and his wife, escaped local girl Amy (Susan George, in a tight white roll-necked sweater), who disports herself innocently before the depraved locals (with one of whom she has “history”).
The inevitable, in cinematic terms, happens; Hoffman’s character is enticed away and Amy’s old boyfriend turns up at the cottage; a double rape follows. The furore about the film and its troubles with the censor arose from the fact that Amy appears to be enjoying and responding to the violent assault (the first one, by her old boyfriend, anyway). Peckinpah has form in this elsewhere; see, for example, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”.
What I find interesting, watching it again after 45 years (!), is that Hoffman is apparently unaware of the attack on his wife (he must be both blind and stupid). His defence of the cottage in the subsequent siege, his ruthless use of deadly violence, is motivated not by revenge, but by the territorial imperative. “This is my house!” he asserts, as he chucks boiling water, bashes brains in and wields the huge mantrap. Amy wants him to abandon the house and the mentally challenged killer (David Warner), who he is ostensibly trying to protect. She is VERY slow to blast the last assailant with a shotgun, when he attacks Hoffman from behind. So, not a revenge movie; arguably, the Amy character could have been left out altogether and the story would have worked – although the atmospherics would have been less charged… Unaccountably, Warner was uncredited in the cast, so I’ve made sure he gets a credit here.
More Prado
Impossible to go fully into the riches of the Prado (which I started last blog): so, two painters of whom I was aware, but only just, before seeing them here. First, Joachim Patinir (Charon, St.Jerome, Temptation of Anthony Abbott) – blue, lowering skies, small, strange figures in a landscape, something of Georgione about him, maybe.
Patinir – Charon crossing the Styx
Patinir – St Jerome
Then, de Ribera – grey-white distorted bodies, sprawling across huge canvases. his Tityus lunging towards you across the gallery. The obvious Caravaggio influence, coupled with a sort of dry abrasiveness of surface…
de Ribera – Tityus
de Ribera – Martyrdom of St Philip
Finally, Titian’s Andrians, having a fine old bacchanale, below; I like the little kid – is he/she about to urinate? Hope not, for the “relaxed” lady’s sake.
Titian – Bacchanale of the Andrians
Lake District
Blackpaint
20.6.17
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