The Trouble with Big Trouble

A product of my time in Richard Porton's class, here's a piece on a "bad" film -- John Cassavetes' Big Trouble (1986).

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John Cassavetes ends his career as a filmmaker with an embarrassment that’s best left unsaid. That snap assessment is what most critics and cinephiles believe. Even Cassavetes believes it; he hated the film. Many would like to consider Love Streams (1984) as the proper conclusion to his oeuvre, one that features tender and emotionally raw works. Like the studio that released the film, Columbia, they would like to bury Cassavetes’ final work, Big Trouble (1986), so that no one would ever know that he directed this oddball picture.

Mild-mannered insurance salesman Leonard Hoffman (Alan Arkin) is having a bad day. He did not get the scholarship that would’ve financed the tuition for his triplet sons—all of them gifted musical prodigies—to attend Yale. At the behest of his anxious wife (Valerie Curtin), he meets the head of the insurance firm (Robert Stack), a Yale man himself, to see if he can pull some strings. Alas, strings are not pulled. Business calls, however, and Leonard goes to the home of a housewife (Beverly D’Angelo). He tries to sell her car insurance, but she informs him that her husband (Peter Falk), with a wink and a nudge and a sly suggestion, is sick and could die any day now. “His heart is surrounded by fat,” she says. Leonard sells her life insurance instead.

“If this sounds familiar, it's supposed to,” remarked Vincent Canby in his New York Times review. Big Trouble pastiches Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, with a dash of The Big Sleep, and—for the curious part—pitches the brew as a screwball comedy. The film isn’t really that funny though. That racist joke about a truck full of hungry undocumented Chinese migrant workers pulling faces at the suggestion of eating McDonalds sure hasn’t aged well.  To name more boils besmirching the film, Big Trouble has a soundtrack that’s even more odious than your average studio film from the Eighties. It manages to merge Wang Chung-esque Muzak synths with recognizable pieces such as excerpts from “La Bohème,” and Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Leonard’s triplets must’ve made the score.

 Despite its blemishes, Big Trouble is still a Cassavetes film, and traces of his touch are apparent. Although the studio tinkered with Cassavetes’ edits, molding the film to fit conventional continuity editing, his use of close-ups remains intact, capturing a variety of, often fleeting, facial expressions in shot reverse shot volleys. As one would expect from the filmmaker, the performances by all the main players (the odd man out, however, is terse and one-note Stack) are sturdy, able, and—for the material warrants it—broad. Although they’re doing nothing to stretch themselves, something Cassavetes did in his previous work, they’re competent. They seem comfortable in this romp. Poor D’Angelo though—Arkin and Falk’s dynamism overshadows her daffy, un-seductive seductress. Falk plays a blissed out fool, a “salt of the earth” type (who just so happens to live in a palatial estate) always trying out a get-rich-quick scheme. Arkin is the straight man who’s periodically stunned, catatonic, even apoplectic when rushed along on these hijinks with Falk.

If Big Trouble’s only flaws are its score and being an unfunny comedy (a deal breaker for some), why is the film forgotten, swept into the dustbin of history? Part of the reason has to do with its troubled production history and initial theatrical release. Andrew Bergman, who penned the earlier bloodless Arkin-Falk film, The In-Laws, wrote the script for Big Trouble and intended to direct it. Columbia fired him and Bergman removed his name from the credits, replacing it with Warren Bogle, a pseudonym derived from a W.H. Fields character. In 1984, the studio hired Cassavetes to direct. Skittish about the poor test previews, Columbia put the film on the shelf. Only later, in 1986, did Big Trouble get a small run, limited to New York initially and then eventually playing at other major cities, conveniently coinciding with its VHS release. Critics at the time gave Big Trouble lukewarm reviews, which did virtually nothing to extend the film’s theatrical life.

Although slight, Big Trouble doesn’t deserve complete neglect. It has qualities of legitimate merit. For the auteurists who abandoned this film during its release, they should give Big Trouble a look because the film bares his signature—it may be smudgy, but it’s there—especially when comparing the director’s aesthetic with Arthur Hiller’s hackwork in The In-Laws. Finally, Big Trouble mutates canonical noir films in surprising ways, which is something that cannot be said for the sleazy, blunt, literal-minded neo-noirs, Body Heat and Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

All Hail (Hail, 2011)

I’ve always been fascinated by shifts in texture, and the surface of the image, and juxtaposing textures in the context of a single work.  – Amiel Courtin-Wilson

 

Hail opens with a mythological painting, Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Åsgardsreien, and the twinkling grandeur of Moondog’s “High on a Rocky Ledge,” a song about a man climbing a mountain to his beloved maiden, his mountain flower, and only winning her love by falling to his death.  Like Alain Resnais’ Guernica, Amiel Courtin-Wilson animates the painting by shooting different spots of the artwork with his gliding camera: horses riding in clouds and huntsmen holding or dropping naked women from the sky.  “We’re so deliriously happy on our ledge where I pledge my / love to my Lady Fair,” Moondog croons.  On “deliriously,” the film opens with a blurry image.  Moving closer and closer, the camera comes into focus on a pair of eyes filled with anxiety, fear, or something else.  These are the eyes of our protagonist, Daniel (Daniel P. Jones), and today, he’s getting out of prison.  He’s getting out of a cage and into a bigger one, the world.  

Daniel reunites with his love, his maiden, his mountain flower, Leanne (Leanne Letch).  He finds a job in a car yard.  He struggles with a post-prison life.  His mind is back in there while he’s out there in the world.  “If I told you what went on in my head, you’d run a thousand fucking miles,” he tells Leanne at one point in the film. “I’m a danger to me.”

Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Hail achieves that sweet mix of social realism and lyricism (“-isms” that don’t do this film justice).  The film externalizes emotional states that fuel and shatter lives.  Courtin-Wilson does so by using the focus as a formal organizing principle.  The camera goes in and out of focus, giving the film tactility, an epidermal quality, making bodies turn into blurs, lines, and abstractions.  Indeed, the body is a nexus for figural transformation.  The DP, Germain McMicking’s camera captures straggly hair, a face’s wrinkles, and tattoo ink.  To cite a Marco Bellocchio film, Hail is all about the eyes, the mouth. 

At the center is Daniel and Leanne, the film evoking the moment-to-moment changes in their mood, perhaps similar to Terrence Malick 2.0, Malick post-Days of Heaven.  Pulling in and pushing out, Hail moves through liminal states, before entering a new realm.  When Leanne dies, we enter Daniel’s delirious headspace.  One moment shows him having what looks like a seizure: his eyes rolling to the back of his head, the camera peering into his gaping, crater-like mouth.  It’s as if Courtin-Wilson spliced in some of Philippe Grandrieux’s DNA into the film. 

In this latter half, Hail evokes Daniel’s vengeful rage, moving from pulsation to pulsation, from one sensation to another.  This part is all the more terrifying because his actions appear to be deluded, most definitely illogical.  He’s hell-bent on killing a man because he thinks he murdered Leanne, when we see her dead from (possibly) falling and hitting her head in the shower.

Hail comes from a long line of filmmakers dedicated to capturing surfaces.  Hail’s haptic brethren are a mix of filmmakers -- Andy Warhol, Stephen Dwoskin, John Cassavetes, Philippe Grandrieux, and Terrence Malick.  Like them, Hail knows where the action is.  It’s not under the skin, but on it.

Dandy Divine in a Lamé: Timothy Carey and The World's Greatest Sinner

Timothy Carey, the name has a certain aura to it.  Some cinephiles know this feeling, those who go out on a limb and watch what little role he has.  Carey, a character actor who zigzagged through the latter half of American cinema’s history, from A to Z pictures and everything in between, had a special talent.  He could make a thin role into something memorable.  He threw his 6’ 4’’ body around and spoke with a voice that sounded more like a cement mixer.  He stole scenes, evaporating the memory of those that came before and after it.

 

Only Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes managed to integrate Carey into their films seamlessly.  For both filmmakers, he appeared twice in their work.  For Kubrick: The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957).  For Cassavetes: Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).  They were able to rein in Carey, controlling his high-strung acting for maximum effect.  In Paths of Glory, in fact, Carey gives a career-performance.  An interlude from the psychotics he often played, as Private Ferol, Carey is a smooth man, someone who would fit in with Jack Kerouac and co., not WWI France.[i]  By film’s end, he becomes unraveled.  Along with Ralph Meeker and Joe Turkel, he’s one of the soldiers court-martialed and executed.  “I don’t want to die,” he repeats, sniveling, whimpering, and crying as he faces the firing squad.

For every friend, Carey had three or four enemies, people who couldn’t tolerate his brand of free-wheeling, combusting improvisation.  Fact and legend often blur in Hollywood history.  In Carey’s case, there seems to be more legend than fact.  His bouts with actors and directors are tabloid-worthy and tailor-made to his outsider persona.  Billy Wilder and James B. Harris fired him.[ii]  Elia Kazan dubbed his guttural lines.[iii]  Richard Widmark and Karl Malden beat him.  Marlon Brando stabbed him with a pen.[iv]  Always cheeky, Carey proclaimed that he was fired more than any other actor in Hollywood.[v] 

In 1962, Timothy Carey released[1] a film as nutty as the characters he played – The World’s Greatest Sinner.  Shot on the cheap (around $100,000) and partially self-financed[vi] [vii], Sinner makes up for all the bit parts Carey played previously and subsequently.  In almost every shot, Sinner is all Carey.  He plays Clarence Hilliard, a bored insurance salesman who becomes a rock icon, a presidential candidate, a dictator, but above all, a superhuman being.  This last one belongs to a cross-eyed, Nietzchean ideology that he promotes.  Now called God Hilliard, he proclaims that everyone is capable of being superhumans, of being their own God.  Of course, Hilliard is the leader of these man-gods.  He advocates eternal youth and bans death.  By film’s end, the power-hungry Hilliard even challenges God.

Sinner is Privilege’s idiot cousin.  It’s hamstrung by flat performances and cheap sets.  The narrative bits collide into each other.  This gives the film an amateur feel.  Couple this with the surprising formal choices Carey makes (cutting before a scene ends, shooting scenes without sound, varying shot angles) and you have an example of naïve art reminiscent of Trent Harris and Crispin Glover’s work.  Unlike the ironic weirdness of Rubin & Ed or the mannered weirdness of What is It? Sinner is sincerely strange. It’s partly audacious and partly buffoonery.

Consider one of Clarence’s first attempts to address the public.  Before his tub-thumping politicking rallies-cum-concerts, Clarence is in the bowels of suburbia. After a few strums of his guitar, he says: “Everybody! Clarence Hilliard is here.”  Framed in a low-angle shot, an etched figure in front of clouds, he continues: “I’m not a preacher, and I’m not drunk, I’m just a politician.  He hears me.”  Clarence shoots out his index finger, pointing to someone off-screen.  Cut to a reverse shot, and we see one lone man walking on the street.  We hear the cries of a dog off in the distance.  “Does anyone else here me around here.  I formed a new party, called the Eternal Man’s party, even if I have to tell it to the dogs and chickens.  Everybody come on up out of your houses, Clarence Hilliard is gonna make you a superhuman being.”  More strumming as he tilts his head up in exhalation.  Cut to one of these lonely houses.  As soon as the door opens, there’s a sharp cut back to Clarence, swinging his body around in the opposite direction, pointing once more.  “There’s the first lady!”  The finger turns first, into a gracious hand, palm facing up, and then extending to the sky – a motion of power. “Lady, I can make you live forever.”

           

Hands play an important role in the film.  Hands extend out.  Hands ball into fists.  Hands shoot into the air.  Hands splay on the chest in a moment of fake sincerity.  These are the movements and gestures of that rhetorical wizard and mythic creature called God Hilliard.

Within a cut, a smattering of people appear before Clarence as if out of the air.  He gets on top of something to address the growing crowd.  From the back side, we see him gesticulating wildly, hands shooting out this way and that, pointing every which way.  The camera tilts down to reveal what he’s standing on -- a pile of bags with a sign that says: “Fertilizer 4 Bags 1$.”  Of course, Carey sells shit.  In his last project, a surreal play called The Insect Trainer, he’ll sell us farts.

From the toilet to the transcendent, that’s Sinner’s narrative path.  Near the end, God Hilliard challenges God. He pokes holes in “the body of Christ” to see if it bleeds, thereby confirming God’s existence.  Alas, no blood, there’s just a whole-y piece of bread, sending Clarence in a knee-slapping, cackling fit.  Clarence leaves the room and returns to his superhuman being headquarters – a building across his lawn.  A cut back to the wafer corresponds with feint moans heard over the soundtrack.  The camera follows a thick trail of blood across the grass.  The shot is startling, even entrancing, because the trail is so consistent in width, and because the camera hovers so close to it, so quickly.  From here, there’s a backward movement, back to the house, back to the room, and back to the wafer as Clarence runs to the trail’s source.  Opening the door, the black and white image switches to red.  Clarence shrieks and writhes.  This is one of cinema’s supreme miracle moments, up there with Ordet and Viaggio in Italia, and it’s found in the gutter.

           

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[1] Although screened in 1962, Carey would continue to tinker with the film for the rest of his life, re-editing and shooting new material.

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[i] Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Key Person: Timothy Carey - Killing a cockroach in Path's of Glory." Defining Moments in Movies: The Greatest Films, Stars, Scenes and Events that Made Movie Magic, edited by Chris Fujiwara, (London: Cassell Illustrated, 2007), 274.

[ii] Grover Lewis, “Cracked Actor: Timothy Carey,” Film Comment 40.1 (2004): 61.

[iii] Sam McAbee, Timothy Carey: Saint of the Underground,” Cashiers du Cinemart 12 (2012).

http://www.impossiblefunky.com/archives/issue_12/12_carey.asp?IshNum=12&Headline=Timothy%20Carey%3A%20Saint%20of%20the%20Underground

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Lewis, 59.

[vi] Millie de Chirico, “Behind the Scenes,” TCM.com, Turner Entertainment Networks, INC.

[vii] McAbee.

In a Glass Cage (Nil by Mouth, 1997)

The film begins on a high.  Intercut with the opening credits, in close-ups, Ray (Ray Winstone) orders drinks at a nightclub bar.  He carries the tray of drinks over to where his wife, Val (Kathy Burke), and mother-in-law (Laila Morse) sit.  Ray spats with Val, but the words are nearly inaudible, drowned out by the club din.  He takes the remainder of the drinks to a table of men on the other side of the club.  Sitting down, Ray listens and contributes to a series of crude anecdotes tossed around in this boy’s club.

  

DP, Ron Fortunato’s handheld camerawork gives the scene an itchy, throbbing, intimacy, which moves to capture gestures as the men recount stories – hands drawing the narrative, eyes exaggerated for maximum theatrical effect, mouths contorted in laughter. 

So far, Nil By Mouth, the only film by Gary Oldman[1], recalls John Cassavetes’ work, particularly Husbands.  The kineticism and macho-bonding is all here in the first ten minutes.  Shortly thereafter, Nil’s mood changes a darker shade, (and not the existential kind seen in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie).

The revelry and exhilaration leak into the next day and night.  Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles), Ray’s brother-in-law, tags along.  The festivities become rambunctious, more rowdy, as the gang moves from an arcade to a strip-joint while taking drugs and an assortment of booze.  Finally, the night ends with a beating; Ray sucker punches a man who, in some way, did him wrong.

Back at home, after the night out, Billy shoots up with some of Ray’s heroin, the dope dealer that he is.  The following morning, Ray looms over Billy, who’s still asleep.  Ray erupts, thrashing Billy, screaming inches away from his face, wanting to know where his supply is.  The pressure that the film has been building explodes. The film’s rhythm quickens to the tension as Ray, this hulking brute of a figure, chomps on Billy’s nose.

 

Nil by Mouth splits its focus on these two male figures of a working-class London family.  It follows them when separate, and, explosively, when together.  Indeed, the film has what Adrian Martin calls a plateau narrative structure[2] - a slow build to a confrontation of bodies, a gradual decline, and then onto the next confrontation.   Like a vacuum, Billy and Ray’s family get pulled into their problems.  Billy’s mother supports his drug addiction monetarily.  In a drunken paranoia, Ray batters Val, who happens to be pregnant. 

With the domestic violence, Oldman appears to be in Kitchen sink realism territory.  But the film’s aesthetic betrays such characteristics of that type of filmmaking. Along with Cassavetes, Nil by Mouth is a heady cocktail, blending the manic-energy of Alan Clarke’s social dramas and the piss-yellow of Nan Goldin’s photography.

Oldman intermingles the uncomfortable intimacy, seen in the extended opening, with distance.  He balances the near and the far by using glass, which is one of Nil by Mouth’s visual motifs.  In Ray’s cramped apartment, for example, a glass partition separates the living room and the kitchen.  Fortunato often films the characters through either side of the glass.  It is like looking through a microscope slide, observing this family entrapped in their own private hell, which is ready to spill out into the public at any minute.  “Oh, mum.  I just don’t want anyone knowing,” Val says, black and blue after Ray batters her.

Now alone in the kitchen, Ray drinks, ranting to his reflection in a mirror.  The isolation too much for him, Ray obliterates this glass cage, tossing furniture around.  Earlier, we see Ray sitting at the kitchen table, watching a TV set that’s playing in the living room.  On the glass, we see the faint image of the program -- a family gathered around a dinner table, ideal domesticity.

In Billy, there’s an echo of Ray.  He’s distant from his family, yet dragging them down, financially, ethically, with his drug addiction.  As with Ray, visual motifs of entrapment correspond with Billy.  Walking through the hallway of a housing project, he’s seen in front of the vertical bars of a door.  He calls a drug dealer in a phone booth.  With his chums, he haunts a launderette.  We see him milling about the space through the window – the equivalent of the glass partition. 

Haven turns to prison when a knife-wielding man traps Billy and his friend in the launderette.  The next scene, Billy’s in an actual prison cell.  Unlike Ray though, he’s comfortable in his isolation, shooting up a smuggled stash of heroin.  He’s free to annihilate himself without involving his family.

With Billy locked away and Ray making amends with Val, one wonders if this family has achieved stability or if this is merely a temporary stasis for a chain of suffering that’s passed down, from male to male, through generations.

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[1]Oldman’s next project seems like the opposite of Nil – a big budget film about Eadweard Muybridge, Flying Horse.

[2] Martin, Adrian. “Driven.” Mesh 18.  2005. Web.  http://www.experimenta.org/vanishingpoint/download/EXP_MESH18.pdf