Friday March 20th The Front Page (1975)
Billy Wilder’s stab at the story which gave us Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday is fine. It’s fine. Hildy goes back to being a man (played by Jack Lemmon), and this leads to a more agressively masculine vision of the newspaper business. The press room where most of the action takes place is a more claustrophobic enviornment. One can almost smell the cigarette smoke, alcohol fumes, and, it must be said, body odour. Whereas His Girl Friday was full of sass, The Front Page is full of crass. Jokes about masturbation and exhibitionism feature.
I only realised after seeing this version that there was a version that predates His Girl Friday from 1931. This one is also called The Front Page and has Hildy played by a man again. The 1931 version was directed by Lewis Milestone, who had directed All Quiet on the Western Front the year before, and went on to direct The Rat Pack in Ocean’s Eleven.
The Billy Wilder version is modelled more on the Milestone version than the Howard Hawks. Being pre-Code, the 1931 version includes some of the dirtier jokes, although they are still less crass than Wilder’s. For instance, the Wilder version ups the campness of the Bensinger character and uses him as the basis for a few homophobic jabs. Sometimes the crudness is overpowering, but Wilder’s version does have the strongest ending of the three films thanks to Walter Matthau’s brilliant performance as Burns.
Ultimately however, I still feel that His Girl Friday is the best version of the story. This is because of how the cast in that film really utilise a frenetic pace in dialogue delivery to amplify the humour. The camera also knows when to let the cast perform, and when to cut for effect.
Realise I’ve gone way off-tangent, talking about three films instead of one. I made a brief video of one scene from all three versions. Let me know which version you prefer and why.
(Sorry I couldn’t get the aspect ratios right. Still learning.)
Saturday March 21st Running on Karma (2003)
Would you believe me if I said this was one of the most spiritual films I had seen in a long time? In Johnnie To’s Running On Karma, Andy Lau plays an ex-Buddhist monk-turned-stripper/bodybuilder named Big who can literally see karma. He ends up helping out a CID officer played by Cecillia Cheung called Lee Fung Yee, and in an episodic manner they thwart other-worldy bad guys. However, Big knows something that Lee Fung Yee doesn’t.
Within the first five minutes we transition from a silly strip show to a gritty crime procedural and that kind of tonal whiplash sets a presecedent for the rest of the film.
Although Big plays the lad in public, privately he is tortured by his past, and by the knowledge he must possess through his ability to see karma.
The final third is just a complete trip in which Big must ultimately cofront himself on a mountain. The comedy is stripped away to something far darker and more incomprehensible. On Letterbox, Alyssa Heflin described it as “some Twin Peaks: The Return shit” and, well yeah, she’s right.
The hot pot of tones work well in conveying the central struggle that Big and Lee Fung Yee are both grappling with: how does one live morally in world when the mechanics of karma seemingly defy human comprehension?
The bizarre nature of the film prompted me to more seriously grapple with the spiritual dilemmas it throws up rather than laugh it off. It’s part of the reason why I tend to place value in the frivolous in my daily life, because surely such things tell us soemthing true about the human experience.
Anyway, this film really works for me on multiple levels.
Sunday March 22nd At Midnight, I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)
In the first edition of this newsletter, I mentioned that Paul Farrell recommended this film to me.
He was telling me about it as we were walking through Hyde Park to see India Song at the Institut Français in Kensington. I know, we sound like wannabe Bloomsbury Group fuckwits. Anyway, Paul has good taste and I finally got round to seeing what was apparently the first Brazilian horror film.
It’s about this undertaker guy called Coffin Joe. To cut a long story short: he’s a dickhead. An amoral atheist, he kills his wife by tying her up and setting a deadly spider on her.
Played by writer-director José Mojica Marins, Joe is on the surface a rather flat character who just revels in bullying, murder, and rape. That’s not to say he’s boring though. A brief, singular moment of kindness ocurs when he stops a man berating his young son. However, even this is informed by Joe’s distorted vision of the world as his atrocities are commited out of the belief that continuing the male bloodline is the path to immortality. If this film had been set in the 21st century, it wouldn’t be surprising to find Coffin Joe posting in the more evangelical threads on r/NoFap.
What I found intriguing about At Midnight, I’ll Take Your Soul is how it ties Joe’s amorality with his atheism. This suggests that if he had more in common with the superstious townsfolk he would be more decent. It’s not really stated, but I felt there was this underlying implication. As such it was difficult to shake from my mind that my awful year 6 teacher in Catholic school would probably use Coffin Joe as a cautionary tale about the misery of atheism.
Nevertheless, I am intrigued to see what other films in the Coffin Joe canon have to offer.
Wednesday March 25th Night of the Comet (1984)
I watched this in the early hours of Wednesday morning as part of the Quarantine Movie Club stream on Twitch with zero expectations. It was perfect 1am movie fodder.
Set in LA, two teenage girls wake up on Christmas to find that a meteor shower the night before has turned everyone into one of two things: dust or cannibalistic mutants.
So far so shlock right? But why does the film keep cutting to scenes with these creepy scientists?
Early on, the two heroines cross paths with this guy named Hector. One of the best things about this film is watching Hector use the apocalypse as an excuse to cosplay throughout the run-time. For the climacitc showdown with the creepy scientists he dresss and acts like a cowboy. I still can’t grasp why. He’s clearly living out his role-playing fantasies and you know what, good for him.
Thursday March 26th The Mission (1999)
The second Johnnie To film I saw this week, The Mission is a more meat and potatoes work compared to the cerebral Runing on Karma. It’s about five guys who are brought together to protect a triad boss from a team of assassins.
The action scenes are engaging as they place an emphasis on tactics and mind games over spectacle. This also works on a thematic level as it allows us to see how the team work together.
The greatest strength of the film reveals itself to be the way these five men interact with each other. A stand-out scene is when they are waiting for their boss in the corridor of a fancy office. Clearly bored, they silently kick about a scrunched up piece of paper, while female office workers intermittednly walk past. These hardened men revert to fidgety schoolboys before our eyes and it’s so endearing.
That’s it for another week. Coming up to a month since starting this newsletter which I am chuffed about. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read it.
Last week, I mentioned that the newsletter was a bit short because I was working on some stuff. One of those projects was my first piece for i-D which was published this week. It’s an A-Z guide on trans representation in cinema, and includes films, artists and critics you should check out.
From the outset I made a conscious choice that this newsletter would be a mini-oasis from the current state of the world. That being said, I don’t want it to come across that I am unaffected by it. Everything is scary. Just know that I hope you are all coping as best you can.
Always remember: