The Grouchy Editor

There are three good reasons to check out Brian De Palma’s 1973 thriller, Sisters.  You are rewarded with 1) the fun of spotting allusions to Alfred Hitchcock movies;  2) a killer performance by Margot Kidder; and  3) one knock-your-socks-off murder – you can pretty much see it coming, but when it does, it punches you in the gut, anyway.

Kidder is all fluttery innocence as Danielle, a French-Canadian model/actress who recently, uh, parted ways with her twin sister, Dominique.  Or so it seems.  When Danielle’s apparently jealous ex-husband intrudes on her date with a handsome black acquaintance, things turn nasty.  A nosy neighbor (Jennifer Salt) sees a murder through Danielle’s apartment window.  Or does she?

De Palma has great fun weaving elements of Psycho, Rear Window, and even North by Northwest into the murder and subsequent investigation.  The first thing you notice when the credits begin for Sisters is the dramatic musical score by legendary Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.  Nobody did “disturbing music” better than Herrmann (he came up with the shrieking strings in Psycho), and his contribution to the mayhem in Sisters is a reminder of his value to Hitchcock.

Sisters’s low budget does come with a few drawbacks.  Some of the acting is less than stellar, some of the dialogue is less than sharp, and the final 15 minutes of the film, although visually engrossing, is narratively weak.  De Palma’s 38-year-old script also includes some rather dubious psychology regarding the nature of Siamese twins.  But, hey – get ready to be punched in the gut.          Grade:  B

Director:  Brian De Palma  Cast:  Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, William Finley, Lisle Wilson, Barnard Hughes, Mary Davenport, Dolph Sweet, Olympia Dukakis  Release:  1973

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You are walking down the street and you suddenly catch sight of the most morbidly obese woman you have ever seen.  She must weigh 600 pounds.  As you pass by her, how do you react?  Do you snicker at the fat lady?  Are you filled with compassion, thinking:  “There but for the grace of God …”?  Or maybe you feel disgust, wondering how many of your tax dollars, through this woman’s welfare check, went to McDonald’s.

Now let’s say you are deformed yourself; you have lost your arms.  When you pass by the fat lady, how do you react this time?  According to people who know and have worked with sideshow “freaks,” your reaction, whatever it might have been when you were “normal,” would be unchanged.  We are all of us curious about the unusual.

Tod Browning’s Freaks might be the most curious movie ever made.  It is a study in contradictions.  The plot, about a circus midget who is used and abused by a wicked, physically beautiful aerialist, is old-hat soap opera – but it’s absorbing stuff.  The actual sideshow performers Browning imported for his movie – Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, “Half Boy” Johnny Eck, et al – reportedly enjoyed their brief flirtation with the Hollywood lifestyle, circa 1932 – but nearly all of them were upset with the final film.  Browning’s script seems to exploit the freaks for sordid thrills, especially near the end – but the movie’s message of tolerance resonates 80 years later.  The climactic shot in Freaks is preposterous – but it’s a visual you won’t soon forget.

Freaks was made just before the Hays Code was introduced in Hollywood, during a brief period when the “talkies” dared to be different.  The story is simple, some of the acting is amateurish, and the film quality leaves much to be desired.  But it’s an astounding movie; there’s never been anything else quite like it.      Grade:  A-

Director:  Tod Browning   Cast:  Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Roscoe Ates, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Johnny Eck   Release:  1932

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Some movies are like discovering, in the attic, a box with brittle, eight-millimeter film footage shot by a long-dead relative.  The movie is grainy, the camerawork is amateurish, and the color is faded – but the content is fascinating.  Hey, who knew that your Uncle Zack was such a wild guy?

Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song is like that.  Everything corny and dated about 1970s cinema is on display:   self-conscious, artsy camera angles; reverse negatives; split screens; cheesy music; clunky fashion and some god-awful acting.  But the movie is never dull.  In fact, were it made today, some of it might be downright illegal.

Sweetback was embraced in 1971 by the Black Panther Party and other militants because of its ostensible message of “sticking it to The Man.”   Van Peebles, who wrote, produced, and directed, also stars as Sweetback, a black street hustler who rebels against the oppressive white establishment in Los Angeles.  He assaults some cops and spends the rest of the movie on the run – that’s the plot.  But it’s Sweetback’s outrageous sex scenes, not so much its politics, which resonate 40 years later.

The film opens in a whorehouse.  Young Sweetback (played by Van Peebles’s real son, Mario, then 14 and decidedly underage) loses his virginity to one of the working girls in a bizarre scene in which the woman simulates passionate sex while young Mario seems to be thinking, “What the hell?”  In a jump-cut, Mario is replaced from his position between the woman’s legs by father Melvin.

In an interview about his X-rated movie, the elder Van Peebles is refreshingly honest about “my most infamous scene”:  “The critics are giving me credit for this scene as ‘a well-thought-out metaphor, a tableau of the rites of passage.’  That wasn’t what happened.  The truth of the matter is … I was just being my horny self,” he says.  “What the hell, I’m only human.”

That’s evident in several later scenes, especially in what is likely Sweetback’s second-most infamous sequence, when Van Peebles does some unsimulated pumping of a white biker chick in front of an appreciative crowd of Hells Angels.  Uncle Zack was never that outrageous.       Grade:  C+

Director:   Melvin Van Peebles   Cast:  Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales, John Dullaghan, Rhetta Hughes, John Amos, Niva Rochelle, Lavelle Roby, Mario Van Peebles, Sonja Dunson, Marria Evonee, Joni Watkins, Maggie Bembry   Release:   1971

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How you feel about The Queen will likely depend on how you feel about a whole host of issues:  What do you think of the British monarchy?  What did you think of Diana Spencer?  The Prince of Wales?  Do you think movie “biopics” do a good job depicting real people?  Are projects like The Queen hopelessly biased?

I have strong opinions about a number of those questions, but I’m willing to concede that – being no English historian, and certainly no royal insider – I could be dead wrong on a number of counts.  All I can do is go by what I see.  What I see in The Queen is a captivating performance by Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, a woman charged with upholding tradition in a changing world.  When Diana dies in a car accident, Elizabeth is faced with a dilemma:  honor traditional protocol, or cave in to the will of the people?

Is Mirren’s portrayal accurate?  I have no idea.  Is it eminently watchable? Oh, yes.  In fact, Mirren’s Oscar-winning turn is the best reason to watch The Queen.  Most of the other characters are either unbelievably white (Michael Sheen as a too-good-to-be-true Tony Blair; you can practically see his teeth sparkle), or implausibly black (James Cromwell as a homophobic, misogynistic, bombastic Prince Philip).  Director Stephen Frears, who generally handles this material well, indulges in a bit of heavy-handed symbolism involving a hunted animal; who knew that traditional England had so much in common with a doomed stag?

For the record, I personally think that the monarchy is a ridiculously outdated institution.  But there are worse things.  The world has changed, whether we – and the queen – like it or not.  But as Elizabeth puts it to Blair: “That’s the way we do things in this country:  quietly, with dignity.  That’s what the rest of the world has always admired us for.”  If you buy that, is it something you really want to change?      Grade:  B+

Director:  Stephen Frears  Cast:  Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam, Sylvia Syms, Helen McCrory  Release:  2006

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