F.T.A. (1972)

Before she hawked cosmetics, became a workout queen or married a billionaire media mogul, Jane Fonda was ‘Hanoi Jane’, a Hollywood radical whose heated polemics against the Vietnam war made her a bête noire of the right and propelled her to the upper echelons of Richard Nixon’s ‘enemies’ list, joining Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Gregory Peck and Bill Cosby. She was branded a traitor for visiting Hanoi as the conflict’s endgame was unfolding, resulting in F.T.A. being withdrawn from theatres after just a week.

Keen to escape the dynastic shadow of their famous name, the Fonda siblings actively engaged with the burgeoning counterculture and developed a social conscience which informed the work they did. Such flagrant partisanship was anathema to their venerable father, a small-l liberal who condemned his errant progeny for their extremism. The more they became associated with their activism, the more it was conflated with their onscreen personae.

F.T.A. - standing for Free the Army, or Fuck the Army - is probably the clearest expression of this synthesis. The film follows Fonda, Donald Sutherland et al. on a tour of military bases on the Pacific Rim, performing ‘political vaudeville’ for the dejected GIs fighting a protracted and increasingly unpopular war - sound familiar? Satirical skits and politically charged balladry from the likes of folk singer Len Chandler are interspersed with testimony from the ‘grunts’.

Depending on your political leanings, you’ll either find F.T.A. an inspirational reminder of a time when dissidence was deemed the only moral recourse, or an infuriating example of privileged dilettantes jumping on the bandwagon and feigning solidarity with small sections of the military for career gain. Nevertheless, F.T.A. is a valuable social document, capturing the disenchantment of those soldiers who believed the ‘red menace’ to be a flimsy pretext for an imperialist intervention, and that in their desire to escape poverty and/or serve their country, they had been exploited.

Much of the content of the show relates to the daily lives of the troops, which no doubt articulated their frustrations but obviously mitigates its impact and appeal to those on the outside looking in. Granted, these shows were never intended for a mass audience, but it does feel like listening to a string on in-jokes one isn't privy to. Some of the most affecting moments in F.T.A. are those involving the soldiers themselves, ranging from militant inner city blacks who feel a kinship with the Vietnamese to small-town Southern boys whose eyes have been opened by the grisly realities of war. The film would have been more coherent if it had focused on these interviews, rather than using them as a bridging device for the travelogue segments.

The trip to the US base in Okinawa provides a wider perspective for the political landscape in South-East Asia. Much like Vietnam, the strategically important island is a pawn in a wider struggle, passing from one sphere of influence to the next. The scenes in the Philippines are a powerful allegory for US economic imperialism, capturing slum dwellings in the shadow of a Coca-Cola hoarding and a totemic giant Coke bottle planted by the roadside. F.T.A. is at its best when it is documenting the interaction between the bases and the life surrounding them.

Sutherland is a brooding, ornery presence, highlighting what a perfect fit he was for Hawkeye Pierce in MASH (1970). Reciting passages from Dalton Trumbo’s classic anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939) in his sonorous, lyrical timbre, Sutherland brings a sombre air to the merriment, lending gravitas to the revelry. One of the more paradoxical moments occurs when a group of hecklers interrupts Sutherland - it struck me as bizarre and left a sour taste that rather than engage these dissenting voices, they are swiftly ejected for presenting an opposing viewpoint.

F.T.A. has much to say about the double standards of the military hierarchy and how the prejudices and iniquities of wider society are writ large on the chain of command. There are tales of racist invective being used with impunity, female soldiers being told that they are there solely to provide entertainment for their male counterparts and officers living in conspicuous opulence. This polarity is a microcosm for the upheavals occurring at home, where opposition to the war dovetailed into class, racial and generational tension.

Whatever the intentions of those involved, the F.T.A. tour serves to remind us how timid and cosseted today’s young entertainers are, shying away from using their influence to stand up to injustice. After all, dissent is a bad career move.

The Molly Maguires (1970)

In the world of the movies, distinct cultural locales have historically been rendered with such staggering ineptitude by Hollywood that one has to wonder whether those responsible for recreating these milieus had ever set foot outside the confines of Burbank, California. With a few notable exceptions, they ended up coming across like a gaudy Vegas resort or theme park attraction, co-opting a few key cultural signifiers to present a cost-effective approximation of authenticity. Even with the advent of the runaway production, the blight that is CGI has served to restore this factitious veneer to everything from Ancient Rome to the depths of space. Though it was shot entirely on location, the makers of ‘The Molly Maguires’ kindly imbued their production with all the folksy charm one has come to expect from anything with a whiff of ‘Irishness’ about it, in case anyone were confused as to its provenance. But despite its lack of historical verisimilitude, ‘The Molly Maguires’ is a superior piece of entertainment that kicks against its limitations to address some serious issues.

It is 1876 and life is tough, to say the least, for the denizens of a Pennsylvania mining town. A society of militant coal miners known as the Order of Hibernians has begun committing acts of sabotage on collieries under the name the Molly Maguires, in an attempt to bring about better working conditions. Enter James McParlan, an ambitious police detective and fellow Irish immigrant who, under the auspices of the Pinkertons, must infiltrate the Molly Maguires and prevent the next attack. Working down the mines and seeing firsthand the gruelling conditions under which the miners work, McParlan begins to sympathise with the Hibernians’ cause and falls under the spell of its inspirational leader, Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery). McParlan must decide whether to hand over Kehoe and his associates to the Pinkertons and work his way up the career ladder, or follow his conscience and take up the cause of workers’ rights.

One of the standout moments of ‘The Molly Macquires’ is its bravura pre-title sequence - lasting fourteen minutes and completely without dialogue, it compares favourably to the way in which Sergio Leone used silence to establish tone in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Unlike Leone, however, Ritt refuses to exult in beautified gore. Ritt brings a degree of reality to the film’s action sequences, an approach which forces the viewer to confront the consequences of conflict, something the merchants of stylised violence would recoil from. A deft and underrated director with an impressive body of work, Ritt could always be relied upon to provide assiduously composed shots packed with detail and subtle psychological pointers. The pace is deliberately slow, lingering on shots in a way that would terrify a less assured director - the average shot length is ten seconds. James Wong Howe’s cinematography captures the stifling atmosphere of this blighted landscape, breathing life into the autumnal palette of Eckley, Pennsylvania. Sadly, his good work is undermined by a production design that has a tendency to stray into cloying parody and an incongruous score from Henry Mancini, which adds unneeded grandiloquence to such a downbeat work.

Ritt was a master at getting the best out of his cast - evidenced by the fact that he directed thirteen actors to Academy nominations. Though ‘The Molly Maquires’ don’t quite live up to this pedigree, the two leads turn in performances that stand up surprisingly well to contemporary standards, unlike the majority of their best remembered roles. To me, Sean Connery has always been one of the great overrated British actors, an inert, one-tone performer whose legacy is being continued by the likes of Sean Bean and Clive Owen. But Connery’s lack of emotional dynamism is a perfect fit for the aloof Jack Kehoe, despite his conspicuously well-tanned frame - fresh from a golf course on the Bahamas, no doubt. Richard Harris, on the other hand, was always a captivating figure; few actors were, or are, as comfortable before the camera. He brings much needed credibility to the role of James McParlan, inhabiting the role in a way that goes beyond the brutal technicality and affectation of the Method, his dolorous eyes and beleaguered mien constantly dramatizing the character’s dilemma. Frank Finlay as Pinkerton officer Davis and Samantha Eggar as Mary Raines embody the forces pulling McParlan in opposing directions, with Davis encouraging McParlan to act in the interests of personal advancement and Raines exhorting him to accede to the dictates of his heart.

Beneath its mawkish exterior, ‘The Molly Maguires’ has some interesting points to make about the holy trinity of church, state and commerce that rules America. A telling moment is when McParlan, on seeing a wealthy industrialist called Gowan after a football game, comments that Gowan didn’t mind who won as he owns both teams, the game itself providing a metaphor for the way the system is rigged in favour of wealthy elites, a de facto class system. It is small moments like this that makes Walter Bernstein’s screenplay so interesting. ‘The Molly Maguires’ explores the dark side of America’s ‘land of opportunity’ mythology, positing that a life away from thankless toil is beyond the reach of most of its citizens, that the country’s prosperity is built on the backs of countless millions of anonymous drones. McParlan comments that he is ‘tired of looking up and wants to look down’, and it is this mood of duplicity that ultimately prevails. The film confounds expectations by refusing to wallow in phony heroism, notions of guilt and absolution being usurped by the idea that greed makes cowards of us all.

The Chase (1966)

‘The Chase's’ journey to the screen was a turbulent one. This infamous misfire was supposed to be an integral part of producer Sam Spiegel’s legacy, a prestige picture to rank alongside his previous landmarks ‘The African Queen’, ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. But it ended up being a protracted battle of wits between Spiegel, its meticulous writer, highly strung director and capricious leading man; fatally compromised by the egos it strove to appease. ‘The Chase’ was a failure from which Speigel would fail to recover, his reputation for efficiently steering high-profile pictures to completion forever ruined. Hoping to rekindle Marlon Brando’s waning enthusiasm for acting, Spiegel tried to shoehorn as much material into the ever-changing screenplay that would appeal to his star’s social conscience, much to the chagrin of its screenwriter, the redoubtable Lillian Hellman.

In ‘The Chase’, a small Southern town is thrown into turmoil when one of its former inhabitants, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escapes from prison. In the course of fleeing, Reeves accidentally kills a man whose car he is trying to hijack. Meanwhile, the town’s embattled Sheriff, Calder (Brando), tries to prevent tensions from boiling over between sections of the town’s denizens, all of whom agree that he is nothing more than a puppet for local oil magnate, Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall). Bubber becomes a mythical figure amongst the town’s youth, and his return threatens to blow the lid off an affair between Roger’s son, Jake (Edward Fox), and Reeves’ wife, Anna (Jane Fonda).

It’s difficult not to compare ‘The Chase’ to a film directed by Penn a year later. By going back to the ‘30s, Penn was able to make a much more radical statement about ‘60s ferment with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ than he ever would have been permitted to under the aegis of the tyrannical Spiegel. There are signs of this bravura in some of the set-pieces, but ‘The Chase’ feels staid by comparison. One of the few areas in which the film does excel is its cinematography; Joseph LaShelle captures a sultry Southern summer with aplomb. Away from the chaos of the shoot, the second unit was given a degree of latitude and captured some striking scenes of Reeves’ escape, injecting some excitement into the largely laborious opening act. In hindsight, many of the film’s other problems could have been ameliorated before the project was set in motion, had all the forces guiding the film been pulling in the same direction.

Redford is wholly unconvincing as the rugged con on the lam. Although his legendary screen persona had yet to be formed, he is just too inherently clean cut and suave a figure to be plausible and elicit sympathy for Bubber; there is no suffering on his face or privation in his voice. Equally, English actor Edward Fox was a strange choice to play the disillusioned scion of an oil empire, a casting blunder that was never reconciled. His on-screen relationship with Fonda is fatally stilted; the pairing come across as two actors with incompatible approaches struggling to make sense of the muddled material given to them. Fonda - whose acting here is as embarrassingly earnest as that of Bree Daniels in ‘Klute’ - gamely strives to invest her character with an inner life, but she wasn’t a gifted enough actor at this stage to overcome the script’s limitations. Brando looks tired and pudgy, his accent alternating wildly - a portent of his unintentionally hilarious, scene-sabotaging turn ten years later in ‘The Missouri Breaks’. His trademark mumble slowly winds down into a barely audible groan, as if  resigned to the fact that he was participating in yet another dud. Angie Dickinson is required to do little more than look pretty and not fall over the scenery as Calder’s wife and Robert Duvall is as reliable as ever as Rogers’ henpecked VP, a man trapped between the strict conservatism and growing permissiveness of opposing generations.

‘The Chase’ is symptomatic of many films that emerged in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, articulating a deeply ingrained mistrust of the South and its culture - the South of ‘The Chase’ and countless other films through the ‘60s is a feral, retrograde place in danger of being overwhelmed by its own reactionary, inflammatory machinations. Reeves is a patsy who is playing for the town’s sins, with only Calder, a man of solid liberal principles, to protect him from the baying mob. ‘The Chase’ was a vehicle for Brando to promulgate his political beliefs - his decision to commit to the film was made on this understanding - but in setting out to encompass as many of Brando’s favoured causes as possible, the film ends up fudging its approach to each.

‘The Chase’ says nothing about race relations that wasn’t said with greater clarity in ‘The Defiant Ones’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and would be dealt with to great acclaim a year later in ‘In The Heat of the Night’. What began as the crux of the narrative is only alluded to, used as a plot device to propel the love triangle that ends up taking precedence over the film’s noble intentions. Who knows, maybe the film would have been a more effective plea for racial tolerance if Bubber Reeves had been played by a black man?

DiCillo Double Bill

Sundance darling and Jarmusch acolyte Tom DiCillo’s career trajectory has been riveting to behold. The director who set the indie world on fire in the early ‘90s with ‘Johnny Suede’ and ‘Living in Oblivion’ fell with equal rapidity after the humbling disaster that was 2001’s ‘Double Whammy’, which was hauled over the coals by the critics and failed to gain a theatrical release. His is an irksomely erratic and wilfully individual oeuvre. Both of these films find DiCillo following up these creative peaks and troughs.

Box of Moon Light (1996)

Arthouse veterans John Turturro, Catherine Keener and Sam Rockwell star in DiCillo’s third film. Al Fountain - Turturro - is an officious, detached electrical engineer from suburban Chicago who travels to a rural backwater for work. When his job is cancelled, he uses the opportunity to take some time away from his wife and child and visit the lake he briefly visited in his youth, which is the best memory he has of his unhappy childhood. Fountain begins to suffer from hallucinations where he sees things around him moving backwards. The trip brings him into contact with The Kid, - Sam Rockwell - a playful, scatterbrained, credulous young man striving for self-sufficiency who teaches him not to take life so seriously and enjoy himself.

‘Box of Moon Light’ was initially intended to be DiCillo’s follow-up to ‘Johnny Suede’, but when funding fell through he decided to make ‘Living in Oblivion’ instead. As is so often the case, the stopgap ended up being superior to the labour of love. But that’s not to say that ‘Box of Moon Light’ isn’t a stylishly presented piece of film-making, with its languorous pacing, slow pans and tracks and shimmering photography providing a perfect distillation of the sultry backdrop. The soundtrack is also effective in adding a folksy flavour to proceedings, with banjos, harmonica and tremulous guitars.

Turturro is in his element early on as the ill-at-ease boss struggling to engage with his employees and simmering with rage and frustration, but he fails to convince as the likeable, laid-back character Al is supposed to transform into. Turturro does conniving, creepy and intense with aplomb, but he’s no Jimmy Stewart. Rockwell is particularly grating as the slow-witted yokel who fancies himself as part survivalist, part shaman. At this point in his career, Rockwell was in danger of becoming an Owen Wilson-esque drawling slacker buffoon in a string of undistinguished supporting roles. Thankfully, he made some good choices and became one of the finest actors of his generation.

Turturro and Rockwell quickly ease into ‘fish out of water’ mode; the overburdened city slicker who overcomes his initial discomfort to throw off the trappings of his hermetic white collar existence and the noble savage who teaches him to appreciate the simple things. It’s a theme that has been endlessly recycled, from ‘A Good Year’ to ‘Doc Hollywood’. Catherine Keener and Lisa Blount are lumbered with stock ‘hillbilly simpleton’ roles as the bizarrely names Floatie and Purlene and appear merely to initiate the sort of contrived subplot that is the stock-in-trade of cloying romantic comedy.

There is a strange schizophrenia at play throughout ‘Box of Moon Light’, simultaneously mocking and romanticising the inhabitants of the town and the values they typify. The film presents an array of ‘local colour’ - inept local law enforcement, smutty waitresses, belligerent hicks, religious zealots - and urges us to laugh at their simplicity, yet it is also smothered in the usual supercilious ‘they’re stupid but happy’ platitudes.

In the end, of course, lessons have been learned, everyone is a better person with a new perspective, all is right with the world, balance is restored and demons are exorcized. All kinds of heavy-handed symbolism and soppy morals are conjured up to try and convince us that the film has said something important about the human condition; though it remains unclear exactly what, beyond the belief that adultery is good for the soul and any spiritual crisis can be remedied by getting naked, dancing and sleeping outdoors.

Delirious (2006)

It’s never a good sign when a film opens with a song as generic as the Dandy Warhol’s Rolling-Stones-karaoke hit ‘Bohemian Like You’. Five years after the ‘Double Whammy’ fiasco, Dicillo returned with his latest ‘offbeat drama’, which again struggled to find an audience.

Micheal Pitt - who was trying to erase the memory of his own career lowlight, the woeful ‘Last Days’- plays Toby, a homeless aspiring actor. In his daily wanderings, Toby happens upon a media scrum outside a nightclub, where a gaggle of paparazzo is waiting for the emergence of pop star K’Harma - Alison Lohman. One such paparazzi is Les, - Steve Buscemi - whom Toby latches onto and ends up working under in exchange for shelter in Les’s shabby apartment. Les and Toby manage to finagle their way into a succession of benefits and ceremonies, where Toby’s scruffy charm casts its spell on influential casting agent Dana - Gina Gershon - and, inevitably, K’Harma. Toby is thrown into the media spotlight, causing a rift in his relationship with Les.

The grainy, under-lit aesthetic and hand-held camerawork befits the down-at-heel scenarios in the film’s early scenes, but as its tone softens and it becomes little more than a romantic fantasy it soon becomes incongruous. Buscemi and Pitt are an effective pairing as the vainglorious, deluded bottom feeder and the callow, wistful bleary-eyed cherub; but one cannot shake the feeling that both are on autopilot here; replaying lesser version of roles they have performed countless times. Lohman is plausible as the put-upon pop commodity, bringing a vulnerability to the role that elevates it beyond the Britney parody it plainly is. Equally, Gershion does more with the slime-ball casting agent role than should have been possible. Elvis Costello makes an amusing cameo, sending himself up as a pompous, volatile prima donna; I’m not sure how much of a stretch that was for him.

‘Delirious’ picks easy targets to lampoon, but even these are handled with maddening ambiguity. DiCillo seems conflicted, or he simply didn’t have the moxie to bite the hand that feeds; on the one hand decrying the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry, while on the other revelling in its tawdry glamour. ‘Delirious’ descends into little more than a run-of-the-mill Cinderella story; dressed up with lightweight social commentary, Hollywood insider ‘dirt’, reflexivity and post-modern playfulness. The message seems to be that these radiant public constructs are what we little people should aspire to be; that fame’s warm embrace will heal all scars. More syrupy confection than savage expose, this is DiCillo’s last dramatic feature to date. Lessons have been learned, everyone is a better person with a new perspective, all is right with the world, balance is restored, demons are exorcized and so on and so forth.