THE BAD BUNCH (1973)

Greydon Clark made his directorial debut and starred in this low-budget quasi-blaxploitation picture. It's not quite the real thing because Clark, a white man, is the point-of-view character throughout. It opens in Vietnam, represented by helicopter sound effects and some scrubby tall brush, as Jim (Clark) talks race relations with his black comrade-in-arms. This well-meaning person is about to reveal an idea he had for healing racial divisions when Charlie opens fire on the men, killing Jim's buddy. Stateside, Jim takes it upon himself to deliver a letter his buddy had written to his father, Tom Washington (Fred Scott). Arriving in Watts, Jim is immediately an object of suspicion and derision. Outside the old man's home, he has a tense encounter with a gang led by his buddy's brother, Tom Washington Jr. (Tom Johnigarn), or as he prefers, Makimba. As far as Makimba's concerned, it's Jim fault that his brother is dead, because Vietnam is a white man's war. The gang tracks Jim to a carnival and chases him down afterward. Before things get ugly, the cops show up. Then things get ugly, for the two middle-aged plainclothes white detectives (Aldo Ray and Jock Mahoney) are bigots looking for any excuse to take down black kids. Jim manages to defuse the situation but only earns the cops' contempt without winning any trust from Makimba.

Makimba might be the hero of a true blaxploitation picture, but here he's only a self-righteous asshole, kept from being an absolute villain only by the irredeemable racism of the cops and the audience's inferred understanding of the reality of places like Watts. He remains obsessed with getting some sort of revenge on the unoffending Jim. Meanwhile, Clark pads the film with an uninteresting love triangle involving Jim, his fiancee and a head-shop cashier he cheats on her with. You can't escape the impression that while he's supposed to be our hero, Jim's a bit of a sleaze who socializes at strip clubs, gets drunk and fears commitment. At the same time, Makimba is impotently resentful of the fact that his girlfriend has to turn tricks to pay the rent. Perhaps there's a faint echo here of the classic race-noir Odds Against Tomorrow, in which a white and black criminal who hate and ultimately destroy each other are shown to be pathetically miserable in their personal lives.

Somehow the plot contrives to get Makimba and his friends invited to a pool party thrown by Jim's friends in a Jewish neighborhood (Jim himself is Eastern Orthodox). It's an interesting scene that shows several of the gang loosening up and having fun with many of the whites while Jim remains gloweringly aloof. It's also an excuse for ample full-frontal female nudity, though as far as I noticed none of the men strips so completely before diving into the pool. An angry neighbor, offended at the site of "negroids" frolicking with whites, calls the cops on the party, forcing Makimba and friends to flee, almost missing the tardy Jim.

Makimba has only grown more paranoid about Jim because he's misinterpreted the white man's encounter with the cops at Tom Washington's funeral. Makimba's father had a fatal heart attack while scuffling with his son over the ammo for a rifle Makimba wants to shoot with. Jim wants to pay his respects and gets into an argument with the same racist cops from earlier in the picture. Seeing this from a distance, Makimba gets the idea that Jim has "fingered" him in some way. Thwarted at the pool party, Makimba desperately seeks another way to get at Jim, finally snatching the head-shop cashier and torturing her, despite the objections of his increasingly divided gang, to learn where Jim is. One of the gang is so repulsed by Makimba's mania that he actually rats his friend out to the racist cops, who race to the rescue only to get killed by the gang with knives, shovels, etc.

Now there's nothing left for Makimba to do but kill Jim, who has finally decided to go through with his marriage. Clark, who co-wrote the film, may have thought it a clever touch that Jim's overcoming his fear of commitment would prove his undoing, but since he does little, as actor or auteur, to make Jim an interesting personality, I doubt many in the audience cared much whether Jim got married or not. Unfortunately, I doubt many cared whether Jim got killed or not. For what it's worth, The Bad Bunch (also known as Tom or N----r Lover, after its title song) is a creation of its time, and so with characteristic pessimism it ends with Makimba killing Jim and a final split screen equating this murder with the death of Makimba's brother in war. While the film as a whole has a certain grungy authenticity that I appreciate in Seventies movies, its utterly one-dimensional treatment of Makimba undermines any point it meant to make about race relations. As an exploitation picture and a document of its time, however, it still has its moments of interest.

BLACK KILLER (1971)

As far as I can tell, "Black Killer" is the original title of this Italian western, even in its country of origin. That probably explains why the title creates a false impression. Based on what actor-turned-director Carlo "Lucky Moore" Croccolo shows us, the title probably should have been "Killer in Black." As the presumptive title character, Klaus Kinski is a man in black befitting his dignity as an attorney-at-law. He rides into Tombstone (pre or post-Earp?) with heavy law books dangling from his saddle. The books are his most precious possessions, and he gets antsy when anyone else tries to handle them. We see enough of one volume which flips open, apparently hollowed out, to raise our suspicions about James Webb's true line of work.

In fact, Webb has one of the dumbest gunfighter gimmicks in spaghetti westerns. The books, or some of them at least, are hollowed out and carry guns inside. That's one way to conceal your firearms, I suppose, but Webb takes the gimmick too far. Although there seems to be no advantage at all to it, the lawyer keeps his weapons between their covers at all times, even when he's using them. He's so good a gunman, I guess, that he doesn't have to worry about aiming -- and for that matter, I'm not quite sure how he fires the things unless each volume has a hidden lever somewhere. At least Croccolo doesn't force us to worry about these practical matters until late in the picture. Until then, Webb is mostly a seemingly detached observer of the tribulations of the Collins brothers at the hands of the O'Hara gang that dominates the territory by stealing land from homesteaders. Peter Collins (Jerry Ross) keeps a modest but happy home with his Indian wife Sarah (Marina Malfatti), while brother Burt (Fred Robsham) has been made sheriff, at Webb's prompting, after killing several outlaws shortly after reaching town. In revenge, the O'Hara's attack Peter's home, killing him, injuring Burt and raping Sarah.  The murdered man's widow and brother become avengers, and say what else you will about this picture, it's a rare Italian western that gives us a fighting heroine, and a Native American at that. Sarah fights with bow and arrow (hitting her targets from sometimes impossible-seeming angles) and with guns, and even gets the drop on Webb when he acts suspiciously. She also provides some of the picture's gratuitous nudity, stripping to the buff so Burt can remove a bullet from her thigh. Most of the nudity is contributed by Consuelo the saloon girl (Tiziana Dini), who is as much an object of cinematic exploitation as Sarah is an exceptional heroine.

Alas, Sarah is made to sit out the final showdown pitting Webb and Burt against the remaining O'Haras, perhaps because "Lucky" realized that the Kinski character actually should accomplish something with his gimmicked lawbooks. I suppose you can read some kind of commentary into the gimmick on the inescapable violence at the heart of the rule of law, but I doubt anyone involved in this picture thought too much about it, and in any event Webb is not entirely a lawful character. He undoes the injustice of the land thefts, but keeps the gang's ill-gotten gains for himself, until Sheriff Burt demands a cut and gets it. At first this looked like one of those pictures Kinski would sleepwalk through, but Croccolo does a decent job exploiting the man's irrepressible presence as he glides desultorily through the proceedings. Webb isn't enough of a character to imagine a series of films about, and his gimmick really is dumb as a rock, but Kinski makes him fun to watch this one time without really doing much -- only just enough.

On the Big Screen: ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019)

Robert Rodriguez, once known for making exciting films on the cheap, had a ton of money thrown at him by James Cameron in order to realize a project that had been stewing in the latter's mind for about twenty years. Wikipedia reports that Cameron had been turned on to Yukito Kishiro's manga by Guillermo del Toro, but del Toro by now is too big a deal himself to be anyone else's hired gun. Rodriguez did an uncredited polish on a screenplay Cameron collaborated on, so the finished product is as much his interpretation of the story as anyone's. He deserves credit for how well it turned out, and I suspect that Alita will prove a no-lose proposition for him, since those who don't like it will most likely blame Cameron. I suspect a lot of people won't like it, and I'm not sure I can blame anyone who doesn't. It's not for everyone, even if it needs to be to break even; it lacks that jenesaisquois that makes Star Wars almost uniquely accessible to the mass audience for stuff of this kind. There's an audience guaranteed to enjoy this, but another more certainly guaranteed to resent its story's demands on their attention -- and a lot of them write film reviews.

While Alita is undeniably a work of great craftsmanship and visual dynamism, I don't know if it's possible at this point to do enough to differentiate the film's setting from other cyberpunk dystopias. If you're not into the concept at the primal generic level Alita could well look like just another of its kind to those for whom any one is enough. The film is also indisputably repetitive, presumably covering multiple episodes of the original Japanese strip. We get multiple go-rounds on the Motorball track -- the sport of the future is basically Rollerball on cyber-roids -- and multiple fights with an evil but relatively dull cyborg who's really no more than a tertiary villain in a hierarchy where the top is mostly unseen. We can question the pacing of the film, again arguably a consequence of biting off more of the original than it could chew. The cyborg heroine (Rosa Salazar) has a boyfriend (Keean Johnson) caught in an inescapable mortal predicament resolved by Alita decapitating him but diverting some of her own bloodstream into his brain so the head can be installed on a cyborg body. This looks like the setup for a happy ending of cyborg love, but just a few minutes later the boyfriend is off on a suicide mission and this time Alita can't save him. It makes you question the point of saving him the first time around. Meanwhile, while Cameron, Rodriguez and co-writer Laeta Kalogridis may have bitten off more than they could chew of the complete manga, the film isn't actually complete. While there's no cliffhanger, it does leave things open-ended with a promise of future battles between Alita and the nebulous big-bad (Edward Norton) if she finally acts on her centuries-old directive to destroy the villain's elitist floating city. I can imagine some people groaning at the promise of a sequel that I suspect will never happen, based on the sparse crowd I saw the movie with. But as far as I'm concerned the scene of Alita, now a champion-level Motorballer, raising her sword in apparent salute to the spectators but also in an implicit threat to the floating city, makes for an awesome ending.

Beyond that, despite her initially creepily cartoonish computerized face Salazar as Alita won me over with her fairy-tale Frankensteinian (or Pinocchian) good-little-death-machine personality, while Christoph Waltz, an on-and-off character actor, was quite charming as her surrogate father, a techno-nerd variation on his benign bounty hunter from Django Unchained. Jennifer Connelly was fine in a semi-villainous role and ultimately tragic role as Waltz's ex-wife, while Mahershala Ali often seemed to sleepwalk through a literally superficial secondary-villain role that required him often to play his own puppetmaster. All this aside, the real star of the film is Robert Rodriguez, one the great genre minds of our time, who somehow manages to foreground personality amid the massive production design while staging several amazing action scenes. If the overall film feels repetitive at times, Rodriguez knows when and how to escalate the action. You can see this in the difference between the scene where Alita is only an eager spectator for Motorball and the big tryout game where she's in the middle of the action, literally the target for all the other competitors. You can also see it in the way Alita makes relatively short work of her most frequent antagonist in their final encounter; by then, there's no need for them to have another long battle. Alita is a film that feels longer than it actually is -- just over two hours -- but it's a good kind of long, the kind that immerses you in a densely detailed and constantly strange cityscape and keeps your eye constantly engaged. It's a film that gets a lot done, and it left me, at least, sort of hoping that that sequel does get me. I'm just the sort of dope that likes this stuff.

A GHOST STORY (2017)

David Lowery's film steers a middle course between the temptations of terror and romanticism and ends up being one of the saddest films I've seen in awhile. This is the film with the gimmick that its ghost (Casey Affleck) goes through the picture, after the character's death, wearing the iconic white sheet with eyeholes that western culture has identified with ghosts for who knows how long. The gimmick requires Affleck, an Oscar-winning performer, to rely on the most constrained pantomime to express anything, but it confers a degree of universality on his character's experience, and the reduction of his individuality probably has a point as well. The dead man is an aspiring musician who'd just agreed with his wife (Rooney Mara), after considerable stalling, to move out of their home. Killed in a car wreck outside the house, he "wakes up" in the hospital moments after his wife has viewed his body. Mute and invisible, he travels on foot to the house, and from that point he seems bound to the property. He watches his wife grieve by gorging herself to sickness on pie and has a brief poltergeist episode after seeing her drunkenly flirt with another man. It's clear, however, that she misses him greatly, for all the good that does either of them. Communication beyond moving objects seems impossible; our ghost is capable only of telepathic communication (rendered with subtitles) with another ghost who "lives" across the way. This other ghost's plight portends a bad fate for ours; it's waiting for someone to return, but can't remember who exactly.

Finally the widow moves out, but feels moved first to leave a note in a crack in a freshly-painted wall. Painting it over, she drives away behind the moving van and it's clear that our poor ghost will never see her again. There's no following her and witnessing the rest of her life; instead, he remains in the house as it changes hands a few times, mostly torpid but sometimes hauntingly angry, until it is finally demolished. Whether Lowery intended it or not, the wife's departure is an ingenious role reversal. Since we'll never see her again or hear of what became of her, the ghost may as well be the widowed and bereaved one, permanently cut off from the beloved as far as we can tell. There is something beyond, as we saw when a sort of doorway into "the light" opened for him in the hospital, but for any number of reasons he turned it down. Now, however, he wants to get at that note, not knowing whether it was addressed to him, the house, the future or whatever. And in a brilliant bit of timing, the moment he manages to scratch his way to it a wrecking ball hits the building and soon the house is gone.

The film grows more expansively fantastic from here. Our ghost remains on the property as it becomes the site of an office building while a great city encroaches on the once-rural community. The neighbor ghost finally gave up the ghost, so to speak, shortly after the demolition, but ours holds on for what must be decades more, wandering through the corridors until it ends up on the roof. The cityscape he sees is our signal of a great passage of time. In response, he jumps, and to be honest I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish. Is he trying to destroy himself, or simply trying to escape his prison? In any event, he doesn't hit the sidewalk but plunges through history, landing nearly two centuries in the past as a pioneer family makes camp on the property. The daughter hums a tune resembling something the ghost wrote in life; did she inspire him from a distance, or is he possibly her reincarnation? In any event, she and her family are killed by Indians and from there history proceeds rapidly until the ghost sees himself and his wife moving into the house. We now see that he had haunted himself, having made the noises we'd heard wake the living man early in the picture. He reviews the post-mortem events, now a ghost of a ghost watching his sheeted self watch his wife until she once again departs. He knows now to get after that note promptly and finding it, he finds the closure that can end his earthly existence once and for all.

On the DVD, Lowery claims that he never knew what was in the note, having told Rooney Mara to write whatever she pleased, presumably in character. This suggests that the fact of the note rather than the content is what allows the ghost finally to let go of the property and break the time loop he seemed trapped in. Knowing this, each viewer can imagine the wife's message to your own satisfaction. It could be an ultimate disappointment like the feeling that led the other ghost to quit this sphere; it could be the ultimate farewell that he didn't get at the hospital; or it could simply have been an ultimate reaffirmation of his identity as something separate from the property that can freely depart from it. That's a good kind of ambiguity and appropriate to a movie addressing the mysteries of life's end. A Ghost Story's less-is-more approach proves very effective and helps it succeed on an empathetic level that transcends genre formulae. Some may find the sight of Affleck in a sheet hopelessly absurd or may be frustrated by the near-complete refusal of obvious acting -- Lowery actually could have kept a deleted scene of Affleck making coffee, as it establishes the stillness that characterizes the ghost -- but more, I hope, will see the film as testimony to the storytelling potential of the simplest image.

BLACK DEATH (2010)

Christopher Smith's film is a horror movie set during the mid-14th century plague that devastated Europe. It's a horror film by virtue of its treatment of paganism. Were it not a horror film, the village against which the knight Ulric (Sean Bean) launches a mini-crusade probably would be portrayed consistently as a utopian island of tolerance for many ways of knowing in a polluted sea of Christian intolerance. But because it is a horror film, the village's female ruler, Langiva (Carice von Houten) can be portrayed as just as vicious as Ulric's little band of secular inquisitors. They've heard rumors of a village that somehow has held the plague at bay, but allegedly at the cost of human sacrifice. They're guided to the place by Osmund (pre-stardom Eddie Redmayne), a monk recently freed from quarantine with an apparent clean bill of health. He's had enough of monastic life, however, and wants to run off with a local girl, Averill (Kimberly Nixon). Guiding Ulric to the mystery village will let Osmund keep a rendezvous with her, but it looks as if Averill is taken by local brigands whom Ulric's men barely fight off. Langiva's village looks like a welcome respite, even if it looks too clean and neat to be true to the experienced moviegoer's eye.

Sure enough, Langiva has drugged the wine she offers to Ulric's men and soon has them penned up for sacrifice -- unless they recant their Christian faith. She's not only as intolerant as her antagonists, but she has, if anything, less honor. When one of Ulric's men cracks and recants, she has her henchmen escort him away, only to execute him at a discreet distance from the village. What was the point of that but pure malevolence? Yet at the same time, there's a hint that Langiva has real power. She reveals to Osmund that she's recovered Averill's body, and later shows that she can resurrect the dead. And yet, unsurprisingly, something's not right about the revived girl. She can't talk and seems to have lost her mind. Convinced that she's suffering a fate worse than death, Osmund heartbrokenly restores her to the grave -- only for Langiva to torment him with the cruel truth. Of course she was a fraud all along and had simply pulled a Serpent and the Rainbow type stunt on Averill to impress her followers and Osmund. Averill had never actually died until her beloved killed her.

Needless to say, Osmund is a ready collaborator when Ulric finally makes his move, which proves surprising, plausible and cruelly vindictive. Earlier in the picture, he'd had to put down one of his own men who'd come down with the plague. Now, before Langiva has him quartered, the aspiring martyr reveals that he, too, has the plague -- and, presumably, so will much of the once-pristine village.  Of course, this means that a lot of arguably innocent people are going to suffer, while Langiva herself manages to slink away to an unclear fate.

Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here about the consequences of mutual intolerance, but because Black Death is a horror film it has the courage not to let anyone learn the lesson. Instead, the denouement shows Osmund as a remorseless, delusional witch hunter, torturing innumerable women, guilty or not, in pursuit of the elusive Langiva. I dig a bleak worldview like that, and the action and acting here weren't bad, either. It's no masterpiece by any stretch, but Smith's horror approach gives us probably the best possible Black Death that we could expect.