The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" ONCE IN A GREAT while, a movie flashes across the horizon with stupendous brilliance, a director or a star's career is launched, a public is created, and the movie enters the annals of popular...
...But for those who saw it, the effect was electrifying...
...The law is irrelevant to them...
...The two stars, Martin Sheen and Cissy Spacek, begin in a God-forsaken South Dakota town where he is a trash collector and she is an aspiring high school baton twirler...
...The movie glories in Jack Nicholson's 1930s suits and hair style, Faye Duna-way's 1930s dresses, hairstyle, and makeup, and everybody's 1930s cars and houses...
...But for the girl, there are limits, and after a while she wants out...
...The plot is supposed to be a terribly complicated story of terribly evil men raping their daughters and stealing water from parched farmers to gratify their evil instincts...
...Chinatown, Roman Polanski's effort at a Ross MacDonald/Raymond Chandler mystery story set in the 1930s is long-winded, boring, and showy...
...Like all great movies, Badlands has many great scenes...
...When Cissy Spacek's father bars Sheen from seeing her because of their age difference, Sheen kills the father, Spacek looks on blankly, and the murderous couple take off...
...Those of us who remember her grisly end in Bonnie and Clyde, however, may begin to wonder why Faye Dunaway ever allows herself to get into a car when there are guns around...
...For its sheer evocative power of the loneliness of the human condition, the movie is in a class with such as Citizen Kane and The Grand Illusion...
...At that point the movie begins gradually to shade away from its stark beginnings and fade into a kind of dreamlike quality...
...ONCE IN A GREAT while, a movie flashes across the horizon with stupendous brilliance, a director or a star's career is launched, a public is created, and the movie enters the annals of popular cultural history...
...Their egoism is so complete that morality and civilization serve only as toys to be broken to attract more attention to themselves, so that together, they can feel themselves to be heroic figures...
...It is supposed to be some kind of allusion to the dark and incomprehensible forces of human nature which are exemplified by the murky nature of life in Chinatown, but just how life in Chinatown is different from life anywhere else, except visually, is never made clear or even hinted at...
...It is an in-joke known only to Polanski and his intimates, if at all, and the viewer never gets the punch-line...
...The couple move into a forest and live there like beautiful feral children, living a kind of paranoid's dream—sheer luxury and lassitude while knowing that the whole world is looking for them...
...With his perpetual mocking, condescending, superior tone, Nicholson is exactly wrong as a hardboiled, earthy detective...
...But Sheen is after the kind of glory only death can bring...
...Luckily for the moviegoer who finds himself watching Chinatown, Faye Dunaway turns in a superb performance as the crazed centerpiece of the drama which never really gets off the ground...
...And to see the look on his face, when one of the policemen leading him to an eventual electric chair compares him to James Dean, is to know that Sheen has reached his goal...
...The movie is a lush attempt at a nostalgic film noir, but it never even comes close to portraying the depravity and evil of those much lamented grade B thrillers...
...Even the title is enigmatic and unedifying...
...Other times, such a movie appears and for some unknown reason flashes for only a week or two, then disappears...
...Unfortunately, the movie that was and is packing them in, is all surface and no substance...
...She notes, with the same obliviousness to what they have been doing that has marked the pair's progress throughout: "I decided that from now on I would not get involved with any hellraisers, no matter how handsome they might be...
...Unfortunately, the movie that was and is packing them in is all surface and no substance...
...All of the longing for intimacy, for recognition in an anonymous world, for the act of being someone important and cared about are evoked by the scene...
...Badlands was the second kind of movie...
...It is exemplary of the in-jokey nature of the movie that Nicholson plays most of the time with a large bandage and then hideous stitches on his nose...
...The movie is the premier commercial effort of Terence Malick, who wrote and directed it...
...Chinatown,Roman Polaski's effort at a Ross MacDonald Chandler mystery story set in the 1930's is long-winded, boring, and showy...
...Badlands is by no means a glorification of killing...
...Spacek records their wanderings in a kind of simple-minded but revealing oral diary: "Terror gripped the state, for who knew where Chris (Sheen) would strike next...
...Badlands is a thinly veiled rehash of the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the couple who spread death and terror across the American midwest for a couple of weeks in 1956...
...Even in some bygone age before the devaluation of verbal currency, Malick would have been called a genius for his effort...
...They become girlfriend and boyfriend, then lovers, with a certain surface casualness which heightens the underlying tension and violence which their loneliness and frustration have bred...
...It is an in-joke known only to Polanski and his intimates, if at all, and 'the viewer never gets the punchline...
...It is instead an entertaining delineation of two extremely sick individuals whose personalities have the flaws we all have but carried to a lunatic extreme...
...By one of those flukes of nature, the moviegoing public scorned the movie, the critics in the Big Apple were mixed, and it sank like a rock...
...As they become more actively pursued, their retreat into a dream world becomes more complete...
...Chinatown is a museum of a movie, full of interesting artifacts, but lacking any dramatic interplay to bring them together into a genuinely exciting or even lively movie...
...The photography takes on a lusher, richer quality, slicker somehow, in keeping with the growing realization of their dreams to be someone, anyone, even murderers, rather than nobodies in nowhere...
...Polanski's penchant for gore comes through too, as it does in all his movies, when he plays a small time hood who cuts off part of Nicholson's nose for no good reason...
...It is subtle, tender, and beautiful...
...One in particular, in which Sheen and Spacek are dancing to car radio music by Nat King 'Cole, in the middle of a deserted prairie lit by their car's headlights, is overpowering...
...All in all, it is a movie to learn from and be dazzled by...
...What possible point it serves is the true mystery of the movie...
...It is simply an exploitation of gore and nostalgia, as subtle and true to life as a tarantula eating a piece of angel food cake, but a lot less scary...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
