In Cold Blood (1967)

In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967) The slaughter of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 by two random ex-cons was considered note-worthy—and shocking enough—that The New Yorker wanted to do a story about it. It was one of two story ideas offered to Truman Capote to write for the magazine. Capote's trip to Holcomb, accompanied by childhood friend Harper Lee, led to many interviews, 8,000 pages of notes and an escalating goal that Capote labored with until the publication of his book "In Cold Blood" seven years after the murders.* The publication became one of the best-selling books of the ghoulish genre and sparked debate over something that was called "New Journalism" where stories were written with the practices of fiction in mind, and what Capote, stoking his own embers, dubbed a "new art form, a nonfiction novel." Certainly it was different than a "just the facts, ma'am" account, but it was the first spurt in an increasingly lurid form of publication and presentation, where a moral center is replaced by an almost teasing glee for all the gory details. Just watch "Dateline" sometime ("Coming up, next...").

Richard Brooks, coming off the films Lord Jim and The Professionals, was reading drafts of Capote's novel, owing to their mutual friendship. Brooks bought the film rights for $400,000 and began the process of turning it into a film with an eye towards verisimilitude, noir theatrics, and, with the help of cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, a look of neo-realism—as much as possible, the filmmakers tried to film in the actual locations, including the house where the multiple murders took place.

Perry Smith (Robert Blake), newly released from prison, meets up with an old prison buddy Dick Hickox (Scott Wilson), who has word of "a big score" in Kansas, even though traveling there will break their paroles. Hickox has been told by another prisoner that $10,000 is being held in a safe by farmer Herbert Clutter, that prisoner's former employer. The film follows two parallel paths—of the day-to-day activities of the Clutters, and Smith and Hickox's travels up until the fateful night.

The next day, there's no answer at the Clutter household, but upon entering the house, a friend of one of the daughters' finds the family murdered. FBI Agents Alvin Dewey (John Forsythe) and Roy Church (John Gallaudet) arrive at the scene, stunned that the murders took place, with no fingerprints and only bloody footprints at the scene. They reveal that Clutter never kept large sums of money at the house, only writing checks in his business.

The film then follows the investigation, while tracking the path of Hickox and Smith as they make their way to Mexico and then, running out of money, back to California and eventually to Kansas. As Dewey and Church follow leads, particularly one from Hickox's old prison pal, they are joined by a reporter Bill Jensen (Paul Stewart), as they talk to family members and try to follow disparate reports to try and track down the two ex-cons. Eventually, the two are arrested, stand trial and eventually executed.

The film, in wide-screen black and white, manages to fit into the genre of noir—the things Hall does with the monochrome textures is amazing, but even though the film strives for authenticity to the point of ghoulishness, there is still something just a little "off" in the way Brooks presents it. The angles are too showy, too precise, and except for a couple of shots, does not give you a "You Are There" quality ala neo-realism. It feels staged and artificial, rather than gritty and naturalistic.

The film is also a bit off-center morally, too. Although much time is spent with the Clutter family before the murders take place, and the investigators are shown as diligent and professional, where the most work on the film is in the depiction of the lives of Smith and Hickox. They're the ones given the most focus and I'm not going too far and saying that they're given the most sympathy, as well. No one tries to "explain" the Clutters. No one dives into the histories of the FBI men. But, the perpetrators, the murderers, are given long sequences showing their bad backgrounds and their dysfunctional parents. At least, Brooks rejected the original casting ideas for Smith and Hickox—Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. As it is, Brooks saw fit to cast the parts with two relatively unknown actors, who still managed to make the most of their roles.

Conrad Hall's "lucky break" of the rain reflection.

 

Brooks saw the film as a damnation of capitol punishment, as it is. One cannot contemplate the title In Cold Blood without it reflecting both the killing of the Clutters and the state-sanctioned murders of those responsible. The death penalty's record of deterrence is only good for those that are killed, but looks mighty feeble when atrocities on the order of the ones by Hickox and Smith show up on the news every month when some wacko with a gun decides to make a name for himself (the choice of pronoun is deliberate—it's always a "him"). Bad guys should not be celebrities, no matter how low the bar for "celebrity" has sunk these days. And the justice system, built on politics, is so corrupt that one doesn't need "The Innocence Project" to speculate on how many innocent people have been killed in the name of justice. But, where's their justice? The system either works 100% of the time or we don't take actions that can't be taken back. Nobody is so infallible they can play God. That applies to good and bad alike.

 

In Cold Blood was voted into the National Film Registry in 2008.

Remembering the victims: the Clutter family

 * Two movies about Capote with the Holcomb murders serving as the centerpiece were made, as well. Capote and Infamous

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The Ninth Configuration

The Ninth Configuration (aka Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane) (William Peter Blatty, 1980) Blatty started out his colorful career as a writer—turning out "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!", "I, Billy Shakespeare", and the first version of this story ("Twinkle, Twinkle, 'Killer' Kane!") before turning to screenwriting for films with Blake Edwards and others. He went back to novels after flirting with Hollywood, and his first, "The Exorcist" became a best-selling phenomenon, and the resulting film, which was the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, won him the Best Screenplay statuette that year.

 

Blatty returned to writing, taking his 1966 "'Killer' Kane!" book and re-configuring it as "The Ninth Configuration," shopping around a screenplay for a potential film but with the caveat that he direct it. There were no takers. So, Blatty put up his own money for half the film's budget—the other half funded by Pepsi-Cola*—and Blatty began shooting in Hungary without a distribution deal.

Which is crazy. But, then, crazy is what The Ninth Configuration is about. And some of it is inspired craziness.

"Some time in the 1970's" Colonel Hudson Kane (Stacy Keach) is being assigned to oversee an overcrowded veteran's mental health facility in the Pacific Northwest, with the mission to determine who's genuinely insane and who's faking it to get out of service. He is informed by the acting head Col. Fell (Ed Flanders) that the patients are all eccentric. Kane knows this already; when he arrived, the first guy who claimed he was in charge was an inmate and he was pretty convincing. It's no wonder the military staff is having a hard time keeping order. But, order is just an idea that a group of people agree upon. These guys can't agree on anything.

There's Lt. Reno (Jason Miller), who wants to put on a production of "Hamlet" but performed by dogs ("Someone has to do it!"). Maj. Nammack (Moses Gunn) thinks he's a super-hero. Then, there's Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), former astronaut, who, on the way to the Moon, suffered a mental breakdown. Kane takes a particular interest in him, as Cutshaw engages him in arguments about the existence of God and who seems to really want answers and challenges Kane on his own beliefs. When Kane asks Cutshaw why he aborted his mission in space, Cutshaw merely gives hima St. Christopher medal.

Kane decides that his best strategy is to let the lunatics run the asylum, which may not be effective, but is very entertaining. Blatty has an interesting trope in his writings and The Ninth Configuration is no exception—he starts out funny, softening the audience up, and then turns deadly serious into matters that far outreach whatever set-up he has. Blatty's Configuration stretches the scenario as far as it can possibly go before it snaps. The film has divided its very niche audience for decades (a problem compounded by the various edits of the film over the years), but it has some ardent supporters among the larger film community.

It also has some fairly amazing shots, that, at times, makes you snap your head 360° with just how audacious they are (Blatty was a first-time director when he made the film) and reminds one that his later film of Exorcist III was as good as the original, and probably better. If there is a weakness, it might be in Stacy Keach's performance that was directed to tamp down any telegraphing of what was going on at the film's core. 

And there is, at the core, that theological question—why is it easier to believe in the devil because evil exists, than it is to believe in a God with the presence of so much good. That's the central theme (as in The Exorcist) and it persists here, as well, with Cutshaw challenging Kane to give an example of a purely unselfish sacrificial act to prove the point of a deity. Kane doesn't have much of a response, but his deep dive for memory may be what causes later issues.

But, there is a neatly framed argument that he gives for the existence of God:

"In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God."

Blatty may be fudging on the numbers, there—it's something to ask Neil de Grasse Tyson—but it's an interesting argument, even with an infinite amount of space. It's certainly easier than getting dogs to play Shakespeare...or monkeys to write it.

* Pepsi had funds in Europe that could not leave the country of Hungary, so the filming took place in Budapest, rather than the location stipulated in the Pacific Northwest.

Hostiles (2017)

Outpost Traumatic Stress Disorder
or
"'Deserves' Got Nothing to Do With It"

Donald E. Stewart died in 1999 after a career as a screenwriter (you may remember his scripts for The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, A Clear and Present Danger, and Missing). Now, this is curious: he left a "manuscript" for a project for what was to be Hostiles in the 1980's and Scott Cooper (who directed Black Mass, Crazy Heart, and Out of the Furnace) took up the mantle of the film, seeing it through to completion last year.

Hostiles is in theaters now and the promotion of it, the ads on television of it, has led to a lot of questions on my part—it's a Western (a rarity these days) but what type of "Western" is it going to be? Is it going to be myth or truth? Is it going be clean or messy? Tragedy or triumph? Is it Nation-building or genocide? Is it going to hearken back to Westerns of the past or plow new ground? What sort of animal is this "Western" going to be?

It's opening quote by D.H.Lawrence doesn't help much, except in retrospect: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."

Yep.

We're told it's 1892 in New Mexico and in a valley of scrub squats a naked farmhouse. Riders approach. Wesley Quaid (Scott Shepherd) is working when he sees the five horses appear over a ridge, his wife Rosalie (Rosamund Pike) is teaching adverbs to her daughters ("how where and when"), with the baby asleep in the next room, when Wesley busts in and tells her to run to the woods like they'd planned and don't look back. But, she can't. Wesley shoots, but almost immediately he is shot full of arrows and scalped. Running with the baby in her arms, she is horrified that her daughters are picked off with rifle-fire, but she still runs and hides. The Comanche raiders can't find her, but they set fire to the house. The baby is dead in her arms from a bullet that didn't reach her. 

Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) returns to Fort Berringer, New Mexico, after capturing an Apache family that has escaped. He and Master Sergeant Tommy Metz (Rory Cochrane) share a bottle and reminisce about their long campaigns fighting the South and then the Plains Indians; Metz has been relieved of his guns due to "melancholia" ("There's no such thing" says Blocker) and confesses he's going to retire, but the Army, as it always does, has other plans.

Berringer's commander, Biggs, (Stephen Lang) has orders—"a cause celehbray"—from President Harrison: one of the fort's prisoners, a Cheyenne Chief named Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), is dying of the cancer and Biggs wants Blocker—and no one else—to escort him and his family back to "The Valley of the Bear" in Montana so he can die in his homeland. Blocker is adamantly opposed to the idea and refuses, to the point of insubordination. As a conveniently expository reporter for Harper's Weekly informs us, Blocker has probably scalped more men than Sitting Bull "himself," and while Blocker acknowledges that it is not his place to disagree, he will not carry out the orders and would just as soon cut the throats of every member of the family. Biggs tells him to sleep on it; he leaves in the morning.

After a night straight out of a Terrence Malick movie where Blocker walks out to the prairie with a thunderstorm in the distance and screams his protests about it, he gears up and takes a squad with him: Metz (of course); buffalo soldier Corp. Henry Woodson (Jonathan Majors); a rookie out of West Point, Lt. Rudy Kidder (Jesse Plemons); and a Pvt. Phillipe Dejardin (Timothee Chalamet), who everybody calls "Frenchie." Once out of sight of the fort, Blocker stops the party saying "the fuckin' parade's over," takes out two Bowie knives and orders Yellow Hawk to dismount, offering him one of the knives. The Chief scrutinizes the Captain "I do not fear death" he says in Cheyenne, and Blocker orders the two Cheyenne males to be chained up for the rest of journey to Montana.

They don't get too far until they find the Quaid farm, still smoking, the dead unburied, and Mrs. Quaid sitting in the burned out husk of her home, still holding her dead infant, with her daughters tucked neatly into bed. She demands that they not be disturbed, and Blocker, with a career of dealing with tragedies like this, places the emphasis on comfort rather than pushing the realities of the tragedy on someone still in shock. Even the offer of burial of the loved ones is dropped...immediately...when the woman, in her grief, demands she do the job herself. She digs and digs why the soldiers stand by, finally pawing in the dirt (much like Blocker raked the ground in the "Malick segment") until assistance is gently offered and she acquiesces, allowing for a service to be performed just after the sun has dropped below sight.

This hasn't gone unnoticed by Yellow Hawk and his party. The old chief goes to Blocker and requests that he and his son be unchained to better assist in any defense against the Comanche renegades. He is entirely practical and sees danger for all parties "They are snake people," he tells Blocker in Cheyenne. "They do not discriminate." The words weigh on the captain but he will not relent. The chief may make sense, but not enough to soften his caution. For him, it comes down to deeds, not words. It is only after an encounter with the Comanche that leaves Woodson wounded and Dejardin dead (and three of the Comanche dead, one by Yellow Hawk running over him with his horse and another by his son, Black Hawk (Adam Beach) strangling him with the very chains that bind him does he relent. The Captain can be practical, too.  

He's also different than most Western heroes. You know the type. Most of them are fierce subscribers to the idea of "Manifest Destiny," (as in "there's a wilderness to be tamed and, by God, I'm the one to do it"*). The wilderness is one thing, but the indigenous peoples living on it before them is quite another. Most of the time, we just get the settlers' view of things, but about 50 years after movies were created (and "the Western" along with it, scarce decades after the real thing happened), we started to get a thread of the viewpoint of the First Peoples' point-of-view which can be summed up as "there goes the neighborhood" or more contemporaneously "who let all these foreigners in here?" The making of the nation was pretty much boiled down to a governmental experiment combined with a continental race war. But, it really wasn't until John Ford made The Searchers in 1955 that we got to see the racial aspects of the Western, and it was write large when its top-billed star—John Wayne—played the character of Ethan Edwards, a complete and total (and unrepentant) racist.**

Your initial impression of Captain Joseph Blocker leads you to think he runs along the same lines—and director Cooper nudges the cine-philes in that direction by opening with a similar family massacre and a shot from the interior of the house that frames Nature in a doorway in the same manner that The Searchers did in its initial images. But, Blocker does not see things as merely black or white, but more of a shade of mordant gray. He's not a strict racist, per se (and his tearful leave-taking of Corporal Woodson is meant to dispel the notion), he just hates Indians—at least his experience as a soldier has taught him that that should be his first line of defense. He's seen too much death, and, in turn, caused too much of it to think that any business with Natives is not a good business. And it comes to him as naturally as putting on his uniform.***

And, as if to prove the point, Cooper takes it a step further; at a Colorado outpost along the way (where Woodson can be doctored) and Mrs. Quaid might take her leave, Blocker and his troop are given another task—escort Sgt. Charles Willis (Ben Foster) to Montana to be hanged for murder. He's given a couple more guards, and, despite the offer of sanctuary, Mrs. Quaid opts to continue to ride with the troop to Montana. And it is this portion where most of the reviews of Hostiles has been a might unfriendly.

Some of the accusations against Hostiles comes to its length at just this point—some folks think you don't need the Willis character, but I see it as a bit of reinforcement to shore up what might be a too-easy character arc for Blocker if it did not exist. Willis provides him a chance to look in a dark mirror, and see what might transpire of a man who goes down a wrong path. Willis—who once served with Blocker, and was at Wounded Knee with him—has taken his military experience and gone off the rails, murdering civilians, crimes for which he has been convicted and is on his way to be punished for. It may pad the movie a bit, but it does allow the alternative side to be heard from; Willis and Blocker are not the same man, but their paths are marked by similar times and occurrences, the accumulation of which have created the men they've become. Blocker could let those instances influence his choices, let the past influence the future, holding the names of the men killed under his command as a shield...or an excuse. His prisoner is the bad angel tempting him from the path he appears to be taking—made manifest (in all senses of the term) with his own destiny hanging in the outcome.

As you might be able to guess, I love Westerns. It's one of the two genres (besides science-fiction) that puts a mirror to our current age, speaking to us from the past (or the future), from the "when" about the present, about us and where we are today—about the "why" and the "how". Somehow, putting us in another frame of time puts us in another frame of mind, as well. The locale is different, but we can still recognize the human condition while it teaches us from a different perspective than the familiar, if we choose to recognize it.

Hostiles is of an age, 'way past the films of John Ford (although it pays homage to The Searchers), which dared to even bring up the matter of race in movies that were considered just "cowboys 'n injuns," to consider the Western as myth—and, as such, makes more than a passing reference to Eastwood's Unforgiven (even cribbing a line from it) and bringing a certain spin on the same director's The Outlaw Josey Wales—in how the battle to build a Nation exposes the best and worst of our natures, and, if we survive it, how, after the last echoes of gunfire fade, we choose to continue the journey—by looking back or looking forward? Do we continue it by building or by retrenching? Do we look to our bloody past or look to an uncertain future? Where is there security in either?  

Hostiles has a preference, obviously, but, in its penultimate sequence it still challenges those assumptions, by putting another challenge—another dark mirror—in the way of civilization...of nation-building. The choices are elemental, the ramifications complex, but it comes down to choosing sides...and what side you're on.

Like I said, I love Westerns, and I like them best when they're challenging. And Hostiles is one of the most challenging of the breed.

* See also: "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."

** If you could get past the fact that the character was played by traditional Western hero, John Wayne (which a lot of people couldn't). Some people see him as a hero without noticing that the one GOOD thing he does goes entirely AGAINST his previous intentions and inclinations...and that the movie basically shuns the character and bars him from civilization.

*** Christian Bale has a funny little character "tic" when his character is thinking—he rubs his scalp at the line of his hair...as if he's valuing it and saying good-bye to it for the last time if he thinks wrong. 

The Exorcist III

The Exorcist III (aka Legion) (William Peter Blatty, 1990) An odd little experiment in horror, more compelling than William Friedkin's chest-thumping original,* with more humor—Blatty had, previously in his career, written some quite funny scripts for Blake Edwards in the 1960's—and some genuinely unnerving moments that may not make one jump out of one's seat (well, one thing will), but will certainly creep one out.

It begins with a little bit of catch-up and two fine actors who did not appear as these characters in the original Exorcist—but probably should have. Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) is meeting up with old friend Father Dyer (Ed Flanders). It has been 15 years since the events of the original Exorcist, and the two men have had a steady friendship with shared lunches and grousing about their work-lives—Scott and Flanders are so good that they milk laughs out of lines that are as dry as a dessicated bone. When we see them, they're both trying to cheer each other up, remembering their mutual friend, Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller) on the anniversary of his death, sacrificing himself in the act of an exorcism. 

It's an off-kilter, unnerving way to start a horror movie, a little bit like starting a corporate speech by laying off your employees with a joke. And that odd humor occurs often, with stray one-liners and the bizarre visual touch, sometimes lurched into the foreground, sometimes folded into the cracks of a frame. It walks arm and arm with Blatty's atmospherics of weighted...pauses in conversations, shifting shadows, slight zephyrs of wind, and the occasional breath of laughter. Odd and unnerving are the two words that best describe The Exorcist III.

Kinderman is investigating a bizarre series of murders that have ties to the exorcism of Regan McNeil, and that bear the un-publicized M.O. of "The Gemini Killer," who had been executed 15 years before. As if that wasn't bizarre enough, the murderer leaves behind a different set of finger-prints at each murder scene. There is more than one killer with secret knowledge, and the investigation soon zeroes in on Georgetown's Catholic hospital, where in the bowels of the psych ward sits a chained amnesiac, named "Patient X," found wandering aimlessly 15 years before. When Kinderman's investigation takes him to this room, he finds the form of his friend, Fr. Damian Karras.

What is Karras doing there, and why? Kinderman soon finds that he's not just talking to Karras, but also the form the "Gemini," who to serve his "patron" exacted revenge on Karras by taking over his body and, now, with consciousness regained, the "Gemini" prowls the hospital looking for new hosts and new victims. 

It sounds absurd, utterly bonkers when relaying it in outline, but one cannot deny how effectively all this plays on the screen. What makes the film work is Blatty's assured direction, his devilish (if you will) humor and the total commitment of all the actors to the film and grounding it in some filmic reality. If you're going to believe in the spirit-world (as The Exorcist certainly does), you've got to wonder what happens when even a bound devil takes the gloves off and takes advantage of a truly evil spirit. Bonkers, yes, but not the way Blatty plays it.

The film was compromised somewhat by the studio's insistence that there be an actual exorcism (by Nicol Williamson's cameo priest), thereby muddling up the finale, but the film up to then is disquieting and in a far less bluntly hammering way than Friedkin's head-spinning original. Blatty's direction makes you not trust the film, and to be wary of what awaits on the other side of every edit he makes (and just when you think you have his pattern figured out, he will do something different).

He's not afraid to harness Scott's penchant for untethered behavior in his performances, but the kudo's for the best performance of the film belong to Brad Dourif. Quick as mercury, quirky as Hell, his performance as "Patient X" (a role shared by Miller and the voice of Colleen Dewhurst, the former Mrs. Scott), is a tour de force played mostly to the camera in long unbroken takes, with the odd touch of a tear that slides down the left side of his face, and the electronic manipulation of his voice to drop it into the lower depths. The movie starts to fall apart once Dourif departs (and when the studio-influence starts), but for most of its running time, it manages to rise above the other films in the series.

* And miles ahead of John Boorman's "sexy beast" movie, the deservedly reviled spawn of satan: The Exorcist II: The Heretic.