Dillinger (1973).

Review #2382: Dillinger [1973].

Cast: 

Warren Oates (John Dillinger), Ben Johnson (Melvin Purvis), Michelle Phillips (Billie Frechette), Cloris Leachman (Anna Sage), Harry Dean Stanton (Homer Van Meter), Geoffrey Lewis (Harry Pierpont), John Ryan (Charles Mackley), Richard Dreyfuss (Baby Face Nelson), Steve Kanaly (Pretty Boy Floyd), John Martino (Eddie Martin), Roy Jenson (Samuel Cowley), and Read Morgan (Big Jim Wollard) Written and Directed by John Milius (#323 - Conan the Barbarian [1982])

Review: 

"Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker. You know, an egotistical filmmaker who thinks that they're doing God's gift to humanity or something – it's just entertainment. It's not really too much different than the carnies."

Sure, let's focus our attention to another writer-turned-director. John Milius loved to read and from a young age, he did his own short stories that he could "write in almost any style" (Hemingway, for example). One of his early loves was surfing (he once called it a religion of his), but he apparently was guided to film when encountering a marathon screening of the films of Akira Kurosawa.  He studied at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (as taught by Irwin Blacker) and persisted studying there even with an attempt at trying to volunteer for the Vietnam War (which did not work out due to asthma); he has stated that his writing style was guided by his favorite works in literature with Moby Dick and On the Road. Milius started writing scripts in 1968, and he soon found a job with commissions and the story department of American International Pictures. He did a few re-writes with The Devil's 8 (1968), for example. 1972 saw the release of two of his scripts into film: The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (he wanted Oates to play the lead instead of Paul Newman) and Jeremiah Johnson. He did uncredited contributions on Dirty Harry (1971) and thus wound up being the first draft writer for the sequel Magnum Force (which was radically changed). By this point, Milius wanted to be a director to have control with his scripts and thus asked AIP if he could direct a film for them, and the result was he chose to do a gangster film over other apparent choices in Blacula or Black Mama, White Mama; the result was Dillinger (1973). Over his career, Milius directed six more movies and wrote a handful of others, whether that was his efforts with the deeply personal Big Wednesday (1978) and Red Dawn (1984).

The real story of Dillinger (once described by Milius as a "pure criminal") goes as such: the Indianapolis native had done a handful of petty thefts before entering and later leaving the United States Navy. He served jailtime for nearly a decade on an assault he did in a botched robbery before becoming a more noted criminal upon his release in 1933 that would include the first of dozens of bank robberies (as done by him and his eleven known co-conspirators in his gang) that saw ten killed and plenty injured; Dillinger was charged with the murder of a cop in that time. The manhunt had agents of the Bureau of Investigation (which soon evolved into the FBI) involved such as Melvin Purvis, since one of Dillinger's crimes was stealing a car and dragging it across state lines. Dillinger was in fact shot and killed on July 22, 1934 after a tip-off. To quibble with the historical accuracy of fact meeting fiction with Dillinger can be researched for oneself (or just look at the "Historical accuracy" page on Wikipedia, I suppose^). Exploits of Dillinger proved an inspiration for various films such as Public Hero #1 (1935), Dillinger (1945; Lawrence Tierney played the title role), Young Dillinger (1965; Nick Adams played the lead), and even later on with Public Enemies (2009; Johnny Depp played the lead)*. Milius was clearly interested in making a folk tale about how people just gravitated to paying attention to a criminal as devastating as Dillinger. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the BOI/FBI for over four decades, wrote a statement renouncing gangster films prior to his death (which is read in the credits by Paul Frees): "Dillinger was a rat that the country may consider itself fortunate to be rid of, and I don't sanction any Hollywood glamorization of these vermin. This type of romantic mendacity can only lead young people further astray than they are already, and I want no part of it." In later years, Milius considered the film to be one that is "very crude, but I do find it immensely ambitious", one in which a lack of budget meant being creative with shots and timing.** 

Sure, one might think about Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in terms of sheer audacity, but Dillinger is a movie with quite the punch in crude mayhem that does not wish to sympathize with its main focus but instead just shows the chaos and appeal that could come with a man ready to rob the time he lived in. Oates was a regular in countless Western TV shows and movies and clearly was a pro when given material to actually work with, and this is a pretty neat highlight for his timing here. He has this energy to him that grabs your attention with a certain type of charm that comes with cocksure attitude that knows who to have eating out of the palm of his hand. Johnson actually was quite older than the actual Purvis***, but he is such a pro at this that one wouldn't even think about it because he just has that understated type of charm that might as well be playing in a Western to give it his efforts. It probably works best to see him in the scene where he questions a youth about their perceptions of Dillinger when compared to the government-men chasing him that might as well be a shadow in the eyes of the public that could only have wonder at an outlaw bucking the system (at least, up to a point, this isn't Robin Hood). The rest of the cast make a relatively fine ensemble in the bits and pieces you see them when interacting with, well, the larger-than-life Oates, whether that involves the worthwhile time observing Stanton or even seeing the soon-to-be-prominent Dreyfuss. It is an interesting type of folk tale of mayhem and the nature of idols that come from the meanest and leanest of sources held together by commitment from Milius and Oates to really make it a tale worthy of the drive-in and beyond.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

^Truth vs. Fiction: The Bank-Robbing Style of Warren Oates as Dillinger » BAMF Style. Also, if you like a different insight: Experience of my famous uncle, Melvin Purvis, with Hoover's jealousy and with Nazi Hermann Göring - PMC

*Incidentally, Roger Corman's New World Pictures was behind a semi-related Dillinger film with The Lady in Red (1979). He later produced the 1995 TV "speculative fiction" movie Dillinger and Capone that had Martin Sheen as Dillinger and F. Murray Abraham as Al Capone!

** One year after the release of the film, a television movie was written by Milius (albeit co-written by William F. Nolan) called Melvin Purvis: G-Man. It had Dale Robertson play the title role in the pursuit of Machine Gun Kelly. Dan Curtis directed it along with another TV movie involving Robertson as Purvis with The Kansas City Massacre (1975), although Milius was only involved with the first of the two (and didn't even like making it).

***Purvis was born in 1903, for example. He really did have a strange life when you consider that in the three decades after he left the Bureau, he served in the U.S. Army during World War II and even rose to colonel, bought out a person to solely own a radio station, and, well, dying in 1960 by the gun that his fellow agents gave to him when he left the Bureau. Compared to Hoover, Purvis sounds like a neat person. Also, before I forget, *Academy Award winning actor* Ben Johnson.

Repo Man.

Review #2338: Repo Man.

Cast:

Harry Dean Stanton (Bud), Emilio Estevez (Otto Maddox), Tracey Walter (Miller), Olivia Barash (Leila), Sy Richardson (Lite), Vonetta McGee (Marlene), Richard Foronjy (Arnold Plettschner), Susan Barnes (Agent Rogersz), Fox Harris (J. Frank Parnell), Tom Finnegan (Oly), Del Zamora (Lagarto Rodriguez), Eddie Velez (Napoleon "Napo" Rodriguez), Zander Schloss (Kevin), and Jennifer Balgobin (Debbi) Written and Directed by Alex Cox.

Review:

"Nuclear War.  Of course. What else could it be about?  And the demented society that contemplated the possibility thereof.  Repoing people’s cars and hating alien ideologies were only the tip of the iceberg.  The iceberg itself was the maniac culture which had elected so-called “leaders” named Reagan and Thatcher, who were prepared to sacrifice everything — all life on earth — to a gamble based on the longevity of the Soviet military, and the whims of their corporate masters."

Admittedly, it isn't every day you get to cover a director who basically used up Hollywood for a few movies and then got shuttered into independent work in the span of a decade. Cox was educated at the University of Bristol in film studies and got a scholarship to UCLA with its School of Theater, Film, and Television. Repo Man came about when Cox approached two UCLA friends about producing a film (since they were doing commercials), having failed to get a script about a World War I deserter off the ground. Cox wrote a script about nuclear blast veterans and thieves that was thought of as too expensive, so he then went on a script that was based on "my own personal Los Angeles horrors" along with a neighbor that happened to be a repo man. A key influence was also a script called "Leather Rubberneck" that had been written by an acting student named Dick Rude that had insight about punk culture (incidentally, Rude plays a minor character in this film). Eventually, "Repo Man" attracted enough attention to get Universal Pictures to do distribution, although the studio dragged its feet in actually releasing the movie for a time (to the point where the soundtrack probably had more to do with the movie getting out than anything). The movie was a light success at the time it was released in 1984. His second venture with Sid & Nancy (1986), a loose biopic of Sid Vicious and his relationship with, well, Nancy Spungen, has become a cult curiosity in recent times. Straight to Hell (1987) wasn't exactly a commercial hit (he elected to make it rather than Three Amigos), but any movie that tries to play Spaghetti Western with cameos that revolve from Dennis Hopper to the Circle Jerks can't be all bad. And then there was Walker (1987), a movie released by Universal Pictures that was filmed in Nicaragua during the Contra War loosely based on the life story of William Walker (a "president of Nicaragua") that received polarized reviews and got Cox on a "blacklist" from the major studios when it came to distribution. Cox could not find a job in Hollywood because of the failure of the film and also because he was blacklisted from the Writers Guild because of his work on scripts during a strike in the late 1980s. Cox persisted on with productions that would be made in a variety of places such as Highway Patrolman (which premiered in its native Mexico in 1991), Liverpool productions in Revengers Tragedy (2002), "microfeatures" in Repo Chick (2009) or crowdfunded ventures with Bill, the Galactic Hero (2014). Overall, Cox has directed thirteen films (with plans for a movie of the novel Dead Souls possible, even in his seventies) while also serving as a professor in film production and screenwriting at the University of Colorado at Boulder for a number of years.

For a feature debut, this is a pretty slick movie. It will vary a bit in how much time it takes to really get into its satirical bent, but it ends up delivering a few good laughs with a worthwhile atmosphere that seems strangely in-tune to the times of now when it comes to the wide variety of characters one sees in the film that range from working men with habits (read: speed) to punks to strange travelers that wander in and out of the plot while one can see packages of food or drink with generic labels (evidently there was a time when one really could just buy generic-brand stuff at a market). Basically, it is the kind of movie that would fit right in being paired with Suburbia (1983) or a Roger Corman type of feature, complete with abject paranoia built right in. The days of living by codes or standards are flying by the wayside so one might as well live with the chaos that reigns free in "society among us". Estevez achieves that tightrope that arises in detached timing that sells the disillusionment that comes in growing youth and seeing hucksters all along the path that makes for a few good amusing lines, mostly because he sells the trip in actual commitment to what a punk looks like without just being a mug. Stanton has the disposition of a guy ripped out of a Western that he sells for a grizzled sense of charm and, well, humor in causal intensity, one that actually has a quote about hating ordinary people, which, well, it does kind of ring true for a certain type of working man. The rest of the cast is comprised of a few good kooks that range from Harris and basically being a man of both the background and foreground (consider where the movie jumps after the start) or the wide expression in Walter. The 92-minute runtime coasts along with confidence for its quirky characters and blend of genres for a fun time to think about when it rides off to the climax. Cox had an idea for a sequel in the late 1990s but never got to do it the way he wanted. Named "Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday", it was adapted into a graphic novel in 2008. In general, what we have is a pretty decent comedy that runs the gamut in punk flavor for expressing a howl at the times one is living in when it comes to consumerism and the presence of nuclear war in the face of all absurdities for a strange little fable.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Might as well update you with the upcoming stuff ahead as we march onto the last few days of New Director Month:

Pedro Almodóvar - Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 

Todd Haynes - Safe (1995). 

However, I have a special surprise coming up on Sunday, after not being able to do so last January. Be ready.

Rango.

Review #1557: Rango.

Cast: 
Johnny Depp (Rango), Isla Fisher (Beans), Abigail Breslin (Priscilla), Ned Beatty (Tortoise John), Alfred Molina (Roadkill), Bill Nighy (Rattlesnake Jake), Harry Dean Stanton (Balthazar), Ray Winstone (Bad Bill), Timothy Olyphant (The Spirit of the West), Stephen Root (Doc / Mr. Merrimack), Maile Flanagan (Lucky), Alanna Ubach (Boo Cletus / Fresca / Miss Daisy), Ian Abercrombie (Ambrose), Gil Birmingham (Wounded Bird), and James Ward Byrkit (Waffles) Directed by Gore Verbinski (#140 - The Ring)

Review: 
“I always wanted to do an animated movie. I find it to be incredibly liberating as a way of telling a story. It lends itself to more surreal concepts because you’re limited by expectations of total reality and I just think you can have a conversation with a peanut butter sandwich or Miyazaki turns the parents into pigs. You’re limited from the conventions of live action.”

There can be quite a dual nature to the art of finding a way into filmmaking, which is equally appropriate for Gore Verbinski. His first profession was in music, participating in a variety of rock band in Los Angeles as a guitarist. He sold his guitar for a film camera and found himself taking direction for music videos and eventually commercials (you may or may not recognize one of his ads involving frogs for Budweiser). He made his directorial debut with Mouse Hunt (1997) and has continued on with a variety of genres and general use of visual effects, whether that involves horror with The Ring (2002) and A Cure for Wellness (2016) or adventure epic with the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films (2003, 2006, 2007). There are a variety of films that this film took some inspiration from, ranging from films from Chinatown (1974) to El Topo (1970) to The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968). This was the first animation effort from Industrial Light & Magic, who you will have recognized from several films over the years (such as the Pirates of the Caribbean films), with Hal Hickel as animation director. The interesting thing is that Verbinski wanted to capture something "kinetic" with the performances, which involved having the actors perform with costumes and sets to have them feel like they are part of the Wild West, with the audio being lifted for the film, which he aspired to do as a "small" film when compared to his previous features.

A group of Westerns in the era after its golden age of the past try in some way to borrow some of the characteristics from before with their own spin on what the frontier of the Old West means. In this sense, we have a film of identity that draws upon quite a few Westerns in some sensibility that generally works itself out handily in entertainment with some finely-tuned animation and a cast worth following along with in this tale of critters in the desert. It has a strange touch that will appeal fairly equally for adults and children (more so older than younger) without becoming tacked and tacky in execution and charm. Depp is precisely the voice one could want for such an intriguing title character - amusing, wonderful and quite adept at following along in growing confidence as the unlikely sly lizard of the moment that gives a good push without seeming like an eccentric bit for the sake of it. Fisher follows along with capable drive and a zippy rapport with Depp for some moments, while Breslin adds some familiar curiosity in parts. Beatty proves quite enjoyable with a familiar kind of schemer with a folksy voice suited for what is needed to hear on screen. Others prove just as useful, such as Molina or Nighy, while Stanton and Olyphant bring a worthwhile chuckle. On the whole, it generally works out with its humor without seeming too much for whatever particular audience it aims for, finding its stride in a search for identity with interesting animation and a game cast to make a 107 minute adventure that I can recommend without hesitation for some fun.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Escape from New York.

Review #634: Escape from New York.

Cast
Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken), Lee Van Cleef (Bob Hauk), Ernest Borgnine (Cabbie), Donald Pleasence (President), Isaac Hayes (The Duke), Harry Dean Stanton (Harold "Brain" Hellman), Adrienne Barbeau (Maggie), and Tom Atkins (Rehme) Directed by John Carpenter (#068 - Halloween)

Review
Some movies are just born to be awesome (the inverse is also true as well), and this is one of them. This is a dark movie, an unrelenting movie that never lets up on its dystopian outlook, with Plissken (played excellently by Kurt Russell) being the essential anti-hero for a movie such as this. The characters are jaded, but they still manage to be entertaining, such as Borgnine, he has a quirky charm in this movie, which contrasts well with Russell. The wire frame effect is in the movie for a few moments, but it does look impressive, and it is one of the highlights of the movie. That, and the fight between Russell and Ox Baker, or the car chase at the end, take your pick. This is at heart a thrill of a movie, it's an action movie that has fun in its own way, with a rouge gallery of characters and a good deal of sense. Now if you excuse me, I have some work to do. See you all soon.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Alien.

Review #530: Alien.

Cast
Tom Skerritt (Dallas), Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), Veronica Cartwright (Lambert), Harry Dean Stanton (Brett), John Hurt (Kane), Ian Holm (Ash), Yaphet Kotto (Parker), and Bolaji Badejo (The Alien) Directed by Ridley Scott (#100 - Blade Runner)

Review

Alien has its shares of influences such as (#519) The Thing from Another World or (#331) It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but beneath all that is a wonderfully dark masterpiece. The set design by Ron Cobb and Chris Foss is really well done, it doesn't distract from the movie, but it is wonderful. The alien (and other accompanying elements) by H. R. Giger works so well because the design doesn't look like a suit for somebody to be in, it's a big and long suit that is so unconventional and yet so cool looking. Ridley Scott does a good job directing, his best decision in this film is not showing all of the Alien throughout most of the film, which keeps the suspense and terror of the Alien intact. The actors (insert your John Hurt as the War Doctor reference here, which I won't do out of choice in the name of peace and sanity...oops.) are well suited for a film like this, especially Sigourney Weaver, who certainly can act with terror all around her. Even Bolaji Badejo does a good job, his movements of the Alien from inside the suit are more natural looking and menacing. This is a tense and effective horror film that would later have three sequels and a...film in the same universe as Alien but not a prequel. Whatever the case, Alien is still a terror to behold 35 years later.

Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.