Mute, but not to be silenced

She’s introduced only at the end of the opening sequence, when her paternalistic douchebag employer dismisses her with a pat on the head. Thana (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) is a seamstress working in Manhattan’s garment district, her beauty woman-childish, her doe-eyes and pouting lips arresting but do not express confidence or wantonness or any interest in the superabundance of crudely catcalling lechers who form ogling hedgerows everywhere she goes. The epitome of a woman without a voice, Thana is mute. In no way is she “asking for it.” But she gets it. In fact, she gets it twice in the first ten minutes of Ms. 45 (1981), Abel Ferrara’s low-budget rape revenge cult classic, a definitive portrait of pre-Giuliani New York, a feminist exploitation film, if such a hybrid can be reconciled. Drafthouse has re-released the film in theatres (it plays Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Wednesday night) and on home video.

Written by Ferrara’s frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John, the well-calibrated Ms. 45 strikes a compelling balance between artifice—goopey fake blood, outlandish coincidence—with gritty realism—the brilliant location work—and bracing sociological critique—the ubiquity of rapacious males, not limited to but encapsulated by the pair who perpetrate Thana’s consecutive rapes, the first premeditated, the second performed as an afterthought when a robbery is interrupted. The narrative reason for the double-rape is utilitarian: it pushes Thana over the edge and into some fugue state. The rest is opportunity: Thana is able to stun her second rapist before spotting her hot iron—itself a gendered implement, an icon of homemaking—and beating him with it in a shot that would be quoted and grossly expanded upon in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000). Thana then appropriates her assailant’s firearm: the voiceless finds a vehicle for expression. She becomes a ventriloquist, the .45 her dummy. She quietly goes about employing it in a campaign that might initially seem guided by vigilante vision but gradually proves driven by pure misandry. Thana is only able to kill men, so even when a woman picks up a knife, wielding it conspicuously at cock-level, and moves to attack, Thana can’t fire in self-defence. Like the tragically programmed titular animal in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982), transformative trauma renders Thana single-minded in her deployment of violence.

As noted, Ms. 45 has been quoted, and it is itself riddled with quotes, from the obvious—Thana mirror poses with her gun recall Taxi Driver (1976)—to the curious—one shot recreates the poster tableau from Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)—to the provocative—scenes of dead body disposal and blood swirling down the drain recall Psycho (1960), and make us wonder if Thana isn’t to be regarded as some variation on Marion Crane, who this time around survives her attack but never recovers her wits. The film is a composite of politics, cinephilia and an almost documentary sense of place: the shit-faced panhandlers, the trash-strewn alleys and abandoned boxes butted up against aluminium fences, the bat-shit busybody landlady, the pimps shaking down their ladies for ostensibly hidden reserves. Young Ferrara—who, incidentally, has a cameo as Thana’s first rapist (!)—exhibits remarkable control over all of these resources while fully surrendering to the inherent trashy outrageousness of the material—a meat-grinder will make a memorable appearance. The striking Tamerlis Lund, meanwhile, is perfect, her fear near-palpable, her character sympathetic but not to be identified with. Tamerlis Lund had a woefully abbreviated career, one that included co-writing the script for Ferrara’s sleaze masterpiece Bad Lieutenant (1992). She died in 1999, at age 37, from heart failure prompted by cocaine use. She appeared on screen precious few times, but Thana is enough to burn her face into your memory forever. 

                       

Vanishing act

Few films put us on edge so quickly. Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) already seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the opening scenes of Seconds (1966), which follow the weary middle-aged bank executive on his train journey from Grand Central Station to his suburban Scarsdale home. He may be followed. The images seem taken from ankles or shoulders. Every space feels cavernous. The organ score seems lifted from a Vincent Price horror picture. The opening credits appear over images of gaping maws and distorted eyeballs, and if that first eyeball close-up makes you think of Marion’s face on the bathroom floor in Psycho (1960), you won’t be surprised to learn that this credit sequence was, like Psycho’s, designed by Saul Bass. 

The director of Seconds was John Frankenheimer. The film is regarded as the cap on his “paranoia trilogy,” following The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). The Cold War was at the forefront of those pictures, which dealt explicitly with brainwashing and political assassination. In Seconds, that same claustrophobic atmosphere is bleeding out of the seemingly everyday. Based on David Ely’s eponymous novel and scripted by Lewis John Carlino, this story is exceedingly intimate, even if it too alludes to something akin to a vast conspiracy. Arthur’s nervous because he’s received a phone call from a friend he thought dead. The friend is trying to help Arthur change his life—by changing his face, his body, his voice, his name and occupation. By killing off Arthur. All it takes is money, which Arthur has, and a corpse, which the company whose services he will be obliged to solicit will take care of. This company seems to know what Arthur wants, even if he doesn’t. Arthur is ushered to their headquarters after being led through a meat packing plant, an all too apt analogue for the company’s business of transfiguration. By the time they’re done with Arthur he’ll look like Rock Hudson. Which is to say they change Arthur Hamilton into a painter named Tony Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. It’s the heartthrob movie star’s most startling and impressive performance. (Another interesting parallel to Psycho: where that film had its star vanish 40 minutes in, the star of Seconds doesn’t appear until 40 minutes in.) Our hero makes a go at this new life. He even finds himself a gorgeous younger lover (Salome Jens) to wipe out the memories of the wife he could barely kiss anymore. But something about Tony doesn’t quite take. Inside, he’s still Arthur. And this makes the company uneasy.

The collective desire for renewal at work in Seconds had been made into story before—there is some crossover between it and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Marionettes Inc.’—but Ely’s exploration of this perhaps specifically American idea of total self-reinvention took this desire to a sinister extreme. The film perfectly synthesizes the novel’s trajectory with the tools of cinema. Brilliantly employing wide-angle lenses, James Wong Howe’s endlessly inventive cinematography makes the familiar eerie, and the casting of Hudson was a stroke of genius—thank god Frankenheimer didn’t get his first choice of Laurence Olivier, whose performance would surely have felt studied and possessed none of the despair and, ultimately, harrowing hysteria on display here. Frankheimer’s casting of numerous blacklisted actors contributes to a meta-reading that only increases a sense of condemnation of American falseness and fear-driven values. As Alec Baldwin describes it in one of the supplements on Criterion’s new edition of Seconds, the film doesn’t invite you in—“it takes you hostage.”

There will be blood... lots and lots of blood!

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Our ages or our hearts?

Harold and Maude (1971) opens with young Harold, played by Bud Cort, enacting one of his elaborately staged faux suicides, part of an ongoing, splendidly morbid art project for an audience of one: his mom. Okay, two if you count Harold himself, a Goth avant la lettre, with a pale, round face and a bowl cut that makes him look like he’s 12, though Cort was 20 at the time of filming. Harold hangs himself in the parlour, but his mom barely even notices. “Try to be a little more vivacious,” Mother suggests in withering tones, speaking in one of the film’s many puzzling Transatlantic accents. (It all takes place in the Bay Area.) Given the oppressive mother-son relationship and Harold’s shyness that hides a very, very dark streak, I find it hard to go back to the film for the first time in many years (the occasion being Criterion’s handsome new DVD/Blu-ray release) and not instantly think of Norman Bates. I must not be the only one to make the connection because many years later Cort would play a mentally disturbed parent-killer who inherits Norman’s property in the TV movie (and would-be series pilot) Bates Motel (1987).

If you don’t know this story already, Harold and Maude chronicles a love affair between Cort’s death-obsessed rich kid and a nearly octogenarian, wildly eccentric, always smiling, life-loving, funeral-frequenting Holocaust survivor who lives in a train and who’s also a car thief and drives like she wants to die spectacularly and take as many people with her as possible. That’s Maude. She’s played by Ruth Gordon, who was so truly, deeply frightening, as well as hilarious, in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for which she got the Oscar, and it’s such a curious thing to see her behave so similarly in Harold and Maude and yet be so utterly endearing. Her ongoing barrage of platitudes, most of which are of the carpe diem, elder hippy variety, stuff about singing and flowers and so forth, can grate on your nerves a little, but if you surrender to the film’s vibe it’s hard not to see how Harold could fall in love with her. Harold’s big on death and Maude’s relative proximity to it is no doubt a key part of her allure. But she teaches him to live. It’s sweet.

Hal Ashby’s second feature received a half-assed release from Paramount and didn’t do good box office at all, but it did become one hell of a cult film. By the time it reached me a couple of decades later I was in my teens and it was presented to me by an older girlfriend with the reverence one reserves for a first listen to Dark Side of the Moon or the loss of one’s teeth. People feel pretty strongly about Harold and Maude. I feel kindly enough toward it. I understand the sentiment. I still shed a tear at the end. I think it works best on the young. It’s also pretty corny, very much of its time, very much a generation gap movie, simply trading the “Don’t trust anyone over 30” mandate for “Don’t trust anyone between 30 and 75.” The result of this sensibility is that every single one of the supporting characters is a one-dimensional, one-joke, rather tedious cartoon buffoon: the mom, the priest, the shrink, the one-armed uncle in the military. Other than the two leads the only presence in the film that has any soul at all is Cat Stevens, whose songs are lovingly woven into the film’s highly memorable soundtrack and are rarely too on the nose.

Okay, actually there’s one other exception: Tom Skerritt in his un-credited cameo as a motorbike cop who tries to take Maude in on a reckless driving charge. His character is a doofus too, and for some stupid reason his gun doesn’t even work, but at least he tries to make something of his two goofy scenes and doesn’t tremble or salivate when he talks. Tom Skerritt is awesome, in case you forgot. I think Tom Skerritt should get a special award for playing more men in uniform—see War Hunt (1962), M*A*S*H (1970), Fuzz (1972), The Dead Zone (1983), Top Gun, Space Camp (both 1986), Knight Moves (1992), Smoke Signals (1998), Tears of the Sun (2003), or his roles on shows like Combat (1962-67), Twelve O’Clock High (1964-67) or Picket Fences (1992-96), and that’s just stuff I can remember—and playing them well, than perhaps any other postwar actor in Hollywood.