In short: Silent Running (1972)

The Future™. All plant life on Earth has been destroyed, or at least all forests have. The planet’s last bits of flora are dragged through space in hydroponic constructs. The mission is manned by hippie biologist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) and three jocks, for some reason. When mission control orders the astronauts to nuke the space greenhouses and return home, Lowell kills his plant-hating non-colleagues, fakes an accident, and plans on spending the rest of his life tending to plants, the fuzzy animals that came with the forest and the ship’s robot drones. Obviously things are not going to go that easily.

There are the bones of a really great, ecologically conscious, science fiction movie hidden somewhere inside this first of only two long-form directing credits of special effects master Douglas Trumbull, but they are buried under so much guff and grating nonsense. The script – credited to Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino and Steven Bochco, which is quite the mix – suffers from being so focussed on being “an ecological fable” – or something equally on the nose – it forgets to ground what it actually wants to say in any kind of recognizable reality. Thus, Silent Running is full of badly thought-through conceits and implausibilities.

Like: how is humanity still a going concern in its old-fashioned nature-destroying capitalist ways when all plant life on Earth has died? What’s the artificial food made of (is it Soylent Green?), or for that matter, how do they still breathe on Earth? How come crack biologist Lowell doesn’t know that plants need sunlight? Why nuke the greenhouses instead of just letting them drift? Why is there only a single biologist on board? Clearly, all these questions can be disregarded and answers replaced by yet another long rant of Lowell about Man’s nature-hating ways and that terrible radio-ready folk ballad that’s torturing our ears whenever Lowell feels particularly sad (so very regularly) and even a perfectly game Bruce Dern can’t express all of the bathos needed.

There’s just so little film here, anyway: the narrative never grips one with interesting questions or suspense, Lowell’s character arc simply doesn’t work, and once the ship is drifting through space, that’s what the narrative does as well. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the film had something interesting to say philosophically, spiritually, or psychologically beyond: destroying nature is bad. Which is rather too obvious to be worth a full movie, when that’s all you’ve got to say about it.

Black Sunday (1977)

A Palestinian terror cell have managed to recruit embittered and more than a little crazy blimp pilot Lander (Bruce Dern). Lander has a big plan: blowing up the traditional Goodyear blimp hovering over the stadium during Super Bowl, and killing as many people as possible with some godawful shrapnel contraption he has invented. The very volatile Lander is handled by Dahlia (Marthe Keller), whose job it is to cajole, mother and fuck Lander to keep him from imploding as well as from going on some kind of murderous suicide run before its proper time and place. She’s also going to help him with various preparation and clean-up missions.

A rather very early tape that claims responsibility for some huge and violent yet vaguely described deed in the USA makes its way into the hands of Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) who soon travels to the US to get the FBI as embodied by the not terribly competent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) on point and try to find out what exactly is supposed to happen. If they will manage to get to Lander and Marthe on time is anyone’s guess.

To my eyes, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday is a bit of an underappreciated classic. Slow-moving at first, this turns into the kind of paranoid and increasingly intense thriller Frankenheimer was so good at, until everything climaxes in a of finale of a style you simply couldn’t do anymore today. The amount of access Frankenheimer must have gotten to the Super Bowl is truly astonishing, particularly when one keeps in mind that the plot isn’t exactly the sort of thing any company would see as great advertisement. That Frankenheimer used that access to embed a series of absolutely crazy and improbable stunts in documentarian reality certainly makes the film’s finale very special indeed.

But even before that, Black Sunday often feels convincing in a way Michael Mann would – most probably does – appreciate, showing characters doing the planning and thinking parts of their generally dirty work as well as their plans’ execution in greater detail than a more streamlined film would, thereby creating a feeling of reality that helps build tension as well as, perhaps better than, simple, tight, suspense would.

Politically, the film is rather interesting as well, for in its world, everybody, independent of political stripe, is pretty horrible in one way or the other. To all characters in Black Sunday, the use of violence as part of politics has become so decoupled from any actual goals that violence now is the end as well as the tool of politics. None of the characters here come away looking good: Marthe and Kabakov are brutal sides of the same coin, Corley is incompetent, ineffective and helpless in the face of the violence, and Landers is so broken, even someone as hardboiled as Marthe has moments when she’s visibly afraid of him.

Even so, Frankenheimer also goes out of his way to repeatedly give each and every character some kind of human grounding, scenes when reactions to violence seen and committed are clear on the actors’ faces; thus, while the stunt work is often incredible and brutal, the violence never becomes cool or admirable but carries an undercurrent of terror and horror not many directors working in this realm could or would want to get away with. There’s a bitterness at the state of the world here that replaces any attempts at being patriotic or jingoistic, leaving Black Sunday with a disturbing air that puts it back to back with the great paranoid thrillers of the 70s, even though it gets there via a somewhat different route than the more obvious entries into that cycle.

World Gone Wild (1988)

 Fifty years after a nuclear war meant the end of the world as we knew it, what is left of it is suffering from the fact that all survivors are apparently either murderously crazy or total goofballs. Oh, and there’s no water anywhere, either.

Well, apart from a little place of car wrecks and a gas station turned into homes known as Lost Wells, where weirdo hippie Ethan (Bruce Dern) benevolently nods off taking mushrooms – he can murder you with a hubcap or a golf club if need be though – and the – perhaps last – schoolteacher Angie (Catherine Mary Stewart) teaches the wisdom of the four books the place has available. That idyll is rudely disturbed by the murder cult – based on the wisdom of Charles Manson, also taken from a book - of one Derek (Adam Ant), who kills a bunch of people and kidnaps those of the young and capable he can gets his hands on, with the promise to return soon enough.

Ethan has clearly seen one of the Magnificent Seven movies (this film’s too American to suggest Kurosawa), so off he and Angie go to the big bad city to hire themselves some guns. After a couple of misadventures, they get together a gang of Ethan’s old pupil George (Michael Paré), a cannibal with a thing for poisonous and venomous animals (Anthony James), the mandatory black guy in a leotard(?) who also happens to be really good at dual-wielding assault rifles (Julius Carry III), a pretty alcoholic cowardly sharpshooter who can’t really shoot (Rick Podell) and leather asshole Hank (Alan Autry). You know how the rest of the film is going to go, though, for a change, a surprising amount of these goons will survive.

If you didn’t know you needed a post-apocalyptic western with a pretty weird sense of humour in your life, your encounter with Lee H. Katzin’s World Gone Wild may surprise you.

Tonally, it’s a weird one, traumatized children, attempted rape, and an off-screen castration not usually sitting next to Bruce Dern goofing off as a post-apocalyptic weirdo, pop culture references and reworked western tropes. Katzin somehow manages to keep things tasteful enough to actually make the movie feel fun rather than unpleasant, mostly because he seems to understand that you can have a lot of divergent elements in your film if you know which ones to mix in any given scene and which one to keep apart. So there’s no joking about the truly grim elements of the film – murder is obviously fair game for jokes, because nobody, me included, cares – and the off-beat and pretty dark humour hits when you do indeed feel like laughing, or at least not feel like a horrible human being for doing so.

It helps that the film’s jokes are not original but genuinely funny, this future having turned into a place where elements of the past are regularly misinterpreted or used in absurd ways. Otherwise, the script clearly has quite a bit of fun with pushing western tropes against post-apocalyptic tropes, characters, situations and worldviews from different genres often mixing in interesting ways. Though, naturally, the morally more upright western usually wins out here in the end. And from time to time, the film’s even doing somewhat surprising things, like killing off the big bad through a character and in a way that’s atypical for both of its main source genres, and also shows a good appreciation of Hendrix doing Star-Spangled Banner.

While the characters are obviously paper thin clichés and walking talking tropes, the actors fill them with a lot of charm and a sense of fun (well, Ant’s creepy instead, but that’s only right and proper), providing just the right amount of goofiness to not make the film too ridiculous too care about. It’s still, pretty ridiculous, though, but in a companionable and pleasantly off-kilter way I found myself charmed by instead of annoyed. And from a guy who generally shies away from media that don’t take themselves seriously (because why should I waste my time with them, then?), that’s a big compliment indeed.

A Handful of Toughts On Family Plot (1976)

Alfred Hitchcock’s final film is generally, though certainly not universally, rather unloved. It’s not much of a surprise either, for this peculiar comedy thriller (thriller comedy?) most of the time doesn’t feel at all like the sort of films you think about when it comes to defining an Alfred Hitchcock movie, even though it is certainly working in a genre space Hitchcock very much helped define.

Which is why I rather like the film, I think. At the very least, I find it very difficult not to respect a filmmaker who has been making movies since silent film times, and in the late 70s still goes out to make a film that’s not typical of him. Family Plot is not a stone cold Great Film mind you - it lacks that slightly abstract crystallized and unmoving quality films marked with this word not seldom suffer under; it doesn’t feel like a part of a canon but like part of a life’s work that could have gone on from there.

The film’s great strength and its great weakness lies in its playfulness, the director’s willingness to let his very wonderful, very 70s cast – particularly Karen Black, William Devane, Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris – interact in often funny ways that suggest personal histories between characters instead of explaining them, and to let them show off-beat flaws, how the film suggests all sorts of interesting stuff you couldn’t get into a film that’s interested in tight plotting. For Family Plot really is a rather meandering kind of movie, with quite a few scenes you’d just cut if its aim were are tight unified experience but which are left in here to create more of a space for the characters to inhabit. The plot for its part is weird, rather intricate, but also not at all the point of the film.


There are two nice Hitchcock suspense set pieces to enjoy too, but what really lets this film stay in my mind is how little this is “An Alfred Hitchcock movie”, and how much the work of a veteran director of huge talents trying on elements of what the new kids have been up to in the last years.

In short: The Driver (1978)

A nameless man, let's call him The Driver (Ryan O'Neal), works as a highly successful hired-gun escape car driver for various criminals, if he deigns those criminals to be professional enough for him. The Driver doesn't like guns much, or rather, the people he works for actually shooting their guns, he's big on punctuality, as well as his prospective partners not being fools that'll get him killed or caught. In exchange for reasonable manners and a rather exorbitant fee, the Driver provides his business partners with near-miraculous escape driving that is too controlled to be called crazy, and highly successful.

So successful that a police Detective (Bruce Dern) has become rather obsessed with Driver, whom he dubs "Cowboy", and is willing to use highly unorthodox - even for a policeman who conducts all of his business, even interrogations, in a bar and a security van - methods to catch his prey. The Detective is even willing to press a small-time robber (Joseph Walsh) and his small gang consisting of exactly the kind of people Driver doesn't like to work with into organizing a bank robbery with Driver as the prospective escape driver.

Things get complicated and violent soon for Driver.

Walter Hill directed The Driver, his second feature film, in the middle of that phase of his career - ending after 1985's Streets of Fire - when he could do no wrong, and every film he made came out as some kind of classic.

In The Driver's case, it's a crime movie that pares every element of its plot down to its archetypal form, with characters that are nameless representation of their functions with no actual backstory even suggested (Hill often seems to prefer archetypes to characters). In this context, a film like The Driver actually looks like the Platonic Ideal of an 80s movie despite being made at the tail end of the 70s. Here, the hyper-realism and conscious grittiness of the older era turns into cool stylisation and a filmic language so composed (highly fitting for a main character who is always in control of himself when he is behind the wheel of a car) even the film's most chaotic car chases never look chaotic.

There's a distance between Hill's camera - and with it the audience - and the things it depicts that could - and later on, in different films, did - kill a film through its sheer lack of emotionality but here, this distance is exactly the point, as it mirrors Driver's cold, possibly sociopathic (really, he's closer to Westlake's Stark than most of the characters in actual Stark adaptations are) distance that enables him to live the life he leads in the way he leads it. The audience does share in Driver's emotions, it's just that he doesn't have many.

Ryan O'Neal is quite a clever bit of stuntcasting for a role that turns his weaknesses, an aura of professionalism and emptiness and the inability to emote convincingly, into the central points of his performance. And say what you will against O'Neal, he does hold his void-like ground against Dern and Isabelle Adjani, both much more classically able actors.

Oh yeah, the night car chases under neon lights are pretty great, too.

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