1980 Week: The Elephant Man

          Here’s one of my favorite bits of movie trivia—Mel Brooks is responsible for unleashing David Lynch on the world. Sort of. After expanding an American Film Institute student project into the bizarre feature Eraserhead (1977), Lynch caught the attention of a producer at Brooks’ short-lived production company, Brooksfilms. This led to Lynch getting hired as the director for The Elephant Man, which Lynch did not originate but which completely suits the filmmaker’s dark style. Thus, a connection was permanently formed between the funnyman who filled the Wild West with flatulence in Blazing Saddles (1974) and the experimentalist who combined huffing and rape in Blue Velvet (1986).

          Anyway, The Elephant Man is in some ways Lynch’s most accessible movie, even though it’s black-and-white, set during the Victorian era, and profoundly sad. Notwithstanding some flourishes during dream sequences, The Elephant Man is entirely reality-based, so Lynch doesn’t rely on any of his usual surrealist tricks. Instead, he demonstrates an extraordinary gift for stylized storytelling, because Lynch swaths this poignant narrative with a perfect aesthetic of murky shadows, silky rhythms, and undulating textures. (Lynch and his collaborators create such magical effects with editing, music, production design, and sound effects that the film seems to have a tangible pulse.) The director also guides his cast through masterful performances.

          Based on the real-life exploits of Joseph Merrick, an Englishman afflicted with neurofibromatosis, the movie tracks Merrick from the indignity of life as a circus attraction to the period during which he was accepted by polite society thanks to the patronage of a sympathetic doctor. Renamed John Merrick in the script, the character is a paragon of dignity, suffering the exploitation of cretins and the revulsion of gawkers without manifesting the rage to which he was surely entitled. The saintly portrayal tips the narrative scales, to be sure, but this approach suits the film’s overall themes: More than anything, The Elephant Man is about society’s inability to embrace unique people.

          When the story begins, Merrick (John Hurt) is kept as a virtual slave by a beastly carnival barker named Bytes (Freddie Jones). One evening, aristocratic Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) sees Merrick on display and marvels at Merrick’s deformities, which include an oversized head, a misshapen spine, and various large tumors. Treves buys Merrick’s freedom and contrives to find Merrick a permanent home inside a London hospital. Later, Merrick is presented to society and shown a mixture of pity and respect that he perceives as love. Crystallizing Merrick’s acceptance is his friendship with a famous stage actress (Anne Bancroft), who visits Merrick regularly without ever evincing disgust at his appearance. The demons of Meerick’s old life aren’t so easily kept at bay, however, because Bytes and other tormenters forever threaten to ruin Merrick’s salvation.

          Despite being made with consummate craftsmanship on every level (the movie received 10 Oscar nominations), The Elephant Man is painful to watch, simply because of the amount of suffering that Merrick experiences in every scene. Yet there’s great beauty to the film, as well, particularly during the heartbreaking final sequence, which is set to Samuel Barber’s exquisite “Adagio for Strings.” Part character study, part medical mystery, and part morality tale, The Elephant Man is a singular film of tremendous power.

The Elephant Man: RIGHT ON

Midnight Express (1978)

          The hard-hitting 1978 prison drama Midnight Express shares dubious qualities with another acclaimed film of the same year, Michael Cimino’s Vietnam saga The Deer Hunter. Both pictures feature unflinching depictions of inhumane treatment during incarceration, and both pictures are bullshit. In the case of Cimino’s movie, the famous Russian roulette scene used to depict the savagery of the Viet Cong had no basis in reality. Similarly, the most brutal sequences in Midnight Express are fabrications, even though Midnight Express was directly adapted from a book by Billy Hayes, the unfortunate young man whose odyssey in a Turkish prison is depicted in the movie.

          So, while Midnight Express is unquestionably arresting (and sometimes riveting), the movie has a distasteful undercurrent. It’s as if the film’s producers, together with screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Alan Parker, felt Hayes’ real-life travails weren’t sufficiently harrowing, which is nonsense. Therefore, it’s impossible not to wonder at the filmmakers’ agenda—was the point of goosing the content simply to make Midnight Express more exciting, or was something else involved, since nearly every Turk portrayed in the movie is a sadistic monster?

          Anyway, the story begins when Billy (Brad Davis), a cocky young American, straps two kilos of hash to his body before departing for the Istanbul airport. He’s caught with the drugs and thrown into a prison straight out of the Middle Ages, where physical abuse and rape are rampant. While ineffectual forces including Billy’s family and the U.S. consulate try to arrange Billy’s release, Billy makes friends in jail. His pals include hotheaded American Jimmy (Randy Quaid), who’s forever formulating escape plans; drug-addled Englishman Max (John Hurt), who knows secrets about the prison’s layout; and Erich (Norbert Weisser), a European with whom Billy forms a quasi-romantic bond. Meanwhile, Billy suffers the torments of grotesque jailers including sleazy trustee Rifki (Paolo Bonacelli) and vile head guard Hamidou (Paul L. Smith).

          Midnight Express is torture porn made before that term was coined, because the film’s “entertainment value” comes from watching how much abuse Billy can endure. There’s an old-fashioned escape flick built into the picture’s DNA, of course, since the real Billy did indeed flee Turkish incarceration, but Parker and Stone seem more preoccupied with cataloguing horrors than in truly developing Billy’s characterization. Make no mistake, Midnight Express is an expertly rendered movie, with Stone’s script racing forward at a relentless speed while Parker creates grimly beautiful tableaux and composer Giorgio Moroder adds otherworldly textures through his Oscar-winning electronic score. The acting is also quite good, with Davis using every bit of his limited skillset while slicker actors including Hurt and Quaid offer subtler work for balance.

          But particularly when the movie slips into hard-to-watch scenes that spring from the filmmakers’ imagination, like a vicious moment in which Billy rips the tongue from another man’s mouth, it’s hard to discern authorial intention. Is this a thriller or a horror movie? And if it’s a cautionary tale drawn from life, why so much fakery? No matter its peculiar contours, however, Midnight Express is highly memorable, as seen by one of its oddest echoes in the pop-culture universe—the scene in Airplane! (1980) during which a creepy pilot asks a young boy, “Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

Midnight Express: GROOVY

The Shout (1978)

          Offering a psychological twist on the ’70s supernatural horror fad, this bizarre British movie introduces viewers to a mystery man who says he can kill by screaming. Exploring that strange ability might seem like enough work for one movie, but the team behind The Shout tackles quite a bit more in terms of character and narrative. However, the filmmakers largely eschew definitive explanations for the strange things that happen onscreen, so The Shout ends up being thoroughly ambiguous. Some viewers may take the picture literally, some might interpret the story on a metaphorical level, and some will simply find the whole thing to be metaphysical hogwash. Yet in a sense, all three reactions are correct, because The Shout is such an abstract piece of storytelling (even though the progression of onscreen events is fairly linear) that it seems evident the filmmakers wanted to leave viewers perplexed.

          The basic story is that Crossley (Alan Bates), a swaggering stranger exuding dark charisma, worms his way into the lives of English music composer Anthony Fielding (John Hurt) and Fielding’s wife, Rachel (Susannah York). The Fieldings live in a remote coastal town, so the high fields and windswept dunes surrounding their house give The Shout a creepy, Wuthering Heights-esque atmosphere. This vibe is accentuated by the movie’s otherworldly electronic score, which was created by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford of the rock band Genesis.

          As the story progresses, Crossley captivates and frightens the Fieldings with stories of his training by an aboriginal mystic in the use of voice as a weapon, and eventually Crossley demonstrates his “gift” by screaming at a sheep until it dies. Furthermore, Crossley puts some sort of psychosexual spell on Rachel, thus emasculating Anthony and suggesting that Crossley wants to steal Anthony’s life (or his soul, or something). As directed by artsy Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, The Shout has some undeniably disturbing moments even though the sum effect is dulled by vagueness. Bates’ intensity makes up for a lot of shortcomings, and the image of him standing on a sandy hill beneath an overcast sky while he screams to the accompaniment of shrieking sound effects is weirdly haunting. The Shout is not for everyone, but it belongs somewhere on the pantheon of intellectualized horror that also includes The Wicker Man (1973).

The Shout: FUNKY

Watership Down (1978)

          Notwithstanding a few Disney movies with unforgettable tragedies—we hardly knew ye, Bambi’s mother—the British bummer Watership Down might be the most depressing animated feature ever made. Adapted from Richard Adams’ popular fantasy novel, which was originally published in 1972, the film depicts the travails of a group of rabbits living in the English countryside.

          When the story begins, a young rabbit named Fiver (voiced by Richard Briers) has an apocalyptic vision of his clan’s warren being destroyed. Fiver and his older brother, Hazel (voiced by John Hurt), share the vision with their contemptuous leader, Chief Rabbit (voiced by Ralph Richardson), who dismisses their worries. Sure that danger is looming, Fiver and Hazel lead a group of friends away from the warren in search of a new life. So begins an adventure that involves ecological devastation, existential quandaries, lethal predation, reproductive angst, social strife, and other heavy issues.

          Written, produced, and directed by theater-trained Martin Rosen, Watership Down is an elegant piece of work. The illustration style aspires to both Disneyesque levels of pictorial beauty and unprecedented degrees of realism. Animals are drawn to resemble their real-life counterparts as closely as possible, while backgrounds comprise resplendent watercolor tableaux of foreboding fields and ominous skies. Combined with a moody musical backdrop supervised by Marcus Dods, the visuals create a downbeat atmosphere reflecting the constant presence of death in the lives of these worried little bunnies.

          However, the narrative of Adams’ novel is extremely complex, so even though Rosen somewhat simplified the tale, Watership Down is still a challenge to follow. Clarity is further diminished by the choice to depict the rabbits realistically—it’s often difficult to tell one character from the other. Nonetheless, the seriousness of the film’s approach is impressive. Representing a genuine attempt to use animation for adult storytelling, Watership Down features equal measures of despair and gore and intelligence, never once pandering to viewers with cuteness.

          When the movie reaches full flight, which isn’t too often, one can see the lyricism Rosen must have envisioned. The opening sequence, a super-stylized prologue depicting the history of the world according to rabbits, sets a high bar of concision and potency the movie never quite reaches again, though a mid-movie montage set to the ethereal theme song “Bright Eyes” (sung by Art Garfunkel) is highly evocative.

          The movie also benefits from a voice cast including such reliable British thespians as Joss Ackland, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Nigel Hawthorne, Michael Hordern, and Roy Kinnear. (The less said about Zero Mostel’s screechy vocal performance as a helpful seagull, the better.) Briers and Hurt are especially good, infusing their work with palpable emotion.

Watership Down: GROOVY

10 Rillington Place (1971)

          Since Richard Attenborough is best known to American audiences for directing Gandhi (1982), and for portraying the grandfatherly developer in Jurassic Park (1993), it’s a shock to see him playing a psycho in 10 Rillington Place, a methodical crime drama about a killer whose crime spree scandalized postwar England. Yet Attenborough commits wholeheartedly to the role of John Christie, a working-class nobody who manages a grimy apartment building and habitually slaughters young female tenants, burying the bodies in a small garden adjoining his building.
          Directed by versatile but unstylish helmer Richard Fleischer, 10 Rillington Place matches several strong performances with persuasive physical details, creating a strong sense of everyday danger. The main focus is Christie’s relationship with his upstairs lodgers, struggling young couple Timothy John Evans (John Hurt) and Beryl Evans (Judy Geeson). Timothy is a simple man, illiterate and prone to angry outbursts, while Beryl is an unhappy housewife who knows she deserves more. When the couple becomes pregnant, they agree to an abortion but can’t afford to have the procedure done in a hospital. Their kindly downstairs neighbor Mr. Christie offers to help, claiming that he picked up medical knowhow during military service.
          The considerable tension in 10 Rillington Place stems from the ease with which Christie contrives means of disguising his murders as accidents; furthermore, the movie takes on a more insidious layer of intrigue once Christie frames an innocent man for his crimes. 10 Rillington Place eventually transforms from a murder story to a legal thriller, and the tissue holding the picture together is Attenborough’s chilling performance as a sociopath determined to get away with murder. His work is complemented by the equally good acting of Geeson and Hurt; Geeson communicates her character’s believable dismay at a dead-end living situation, while Hurt transitions gracefully from the bravado of a man lording over his household to the terror of a naïf trapped by incredible circumstance.
          Ultimately, 10 Rillington Place is as tragic as it is horrific, for while the picture doesn’t have many jump-out-of-your-seat jolts, the methodical way it illustrates Christie’s rampage demonstrates how easily an intelligent monster can hide in plain sight. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

10 Rillington Place: GROOVY

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

          Years before Peter Jackson adapted J.R.R. Tolkein’s beloved fantasy-book series The Lord of the Rings into an Oscar-winning film trilogy, a bad-boy animator best known for pushing the boundaries of good taste took a stab at the material that was smaller in scale but, in some ways, almost as creatively ambitious. Though ultimately a frustrating misfire, Ralph Bakshi’s movie, The Lord of the Rings, has many commendable virtues and a handful of memorable elements; it’s not difficult to see what the picture was trying to become, and its failure to reach a lofty goal shouldn’t completely overshadow the nobility of the attempt.

          After cutting his teeth as a hired hand on various mainstream projects, Bakshi became an animation rock star with his controversial movie Fritz the Cat (1972), the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll comedy that became the first X-rated animated feature. Suddenly in a position to get financing for his long-held desire to put Tolkein onscreen, Bakshi set out to film the author’s three Rings books as a pair of long features, to be titled The Lord of the Rings: Part One and The Lord of the Rings: Part Two. (Filmmakers including John Boorman had previously tried and failed to get live-action versions off the ground.)

          To execute his vision, Bakshi decided to use an elaborate rotoscoping technique in which live-action versions of scenes are filmed, and then drawings are traced from each frame of live-action footage to form the basis of each frame of animated footage. Had this massive project been fully realized, it might have been extraordinary. Unfortunately, all the usual problems got in the way.

          The script, by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, is a limp recitation of scenes from Tolkein’s novels, sort of a lifeless Cliffs Notes synopsis, so the absence of a distinctive point of view (either Tolkein’s or Bakshi’s) renders the narrative flat. The rotoscoping delivered some interesting results, but because not every character was animated in exactly the same way, the style of the picture is disjointed; the marauding Orcs look shadowy and surreal, as if comprised of moving Xerox copies, while the principal characters are standard hand-drawn cartoons. Arguably, the most unique and vivid scenes are the big-canvas battles featuring armies of Orcs engaging in bloody swordplay with dwarves, elves, and hobbits—Bakshi creates a weird vibe that’s neither pure animation nor pure live-action, but a dynamic hybrid.

          The biggest problem with the movie, of course, is that Bakshi never got to make Part Two. Therefore, this picture abruptly ends partway through the story, leaving the narrative unresolved. (For those who know the material, the film stops immediately after the battle of Helm’s Deep, leaving Frodo and Sam stuck on the road to Mount Doom.) Yet while the source material isn’t served well by truncated adaptation, some of what Bakshi puts onscreen works. The characterizations of hobbits Frodo and Sam are sweet and infused with lifelike movement (Billy Barty provided the live-action performances upon which the cartoon versions of both characters were based); John Hurt gives a rousing vocal performance as heroic knight Aragorn; and Leonard Rosenman contributes a big, romantic orchestral score. So, for fleeting moments here and there, this Lord of the Rings hints at the grandeur with which Jackson thrilled the world years later.

          FYI, this project should not be confused with an earlier animated take on Tolkein. Famed kiddie-entertainment outfit Rankin/Bass made a dodgy version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit for television in 1977; Rankin/Bass also adapted the final Rings book, The Return of the King, for a theatrical cartoon in 1980, as a sequel to the Hobbit project.

The Lord of the Rings: FUNKY