FLAMMEN & CITRONEN (2008)

If murder is just killing without a license, as Arthur Wilson says, that begs the question of the authority to license killing. In Ole Christian Madsen's film, the protagonists -- red-haired "Flame" (Thure Lindhardt) and sweaty "Citron" (Mads Mikkelsen) get their license from the Danish underground resistance to the Nazi occupation, and their boss, Aksel Winther gets his from London. With the pretense of a license come rules: the team can kill Danish collaborators, but not the German occupiers themselves. But one day Winther changes the rules and orders our heroes to kill three Germans, including a woman. Here Flammen draws the line; his personal code won't let him kill women. Citronen is willing but less expert; he wounds the woman in the arm but can't follow through. Flammen has to go in and finish her, but he has to turn her head away so he doesn't have to look at her face.

If it's open season on Germans, Flammen and Citronen would like to whack Hoffmann, the local Gestapo commander, but Winther places him off-limits. Meanwhile, one of the three condemned Germans persuades Flammen to spare him by declaring himself a member of the German resistance to Hitler. Winther calls Flammen a dupe and sends him back to do the job right. What is the truth? Does it matter? Is there a logic or a strategy to Winther's inconsistency, or are the targets chosen on an arbitrary basis? Or are they chosen with an ulterior motive? As they discover greater cause to question Winther's orders, Flammen and Citronen approach the moment when they'll authorize themselves to kill Hoffman or whomever their own sense of the national interest dictates. They begin to see themselves above the law in other ways. Citronen has a hard time supporting his wife and daughter as a resistance assassin. Eventually he decides to rob a collaborating grocer (though he refuses to take money from the register) so he can put food on the table and give his daughter presents. When he delivers the goods, his wife confesses to an affair. That's the sort of film this is. It develops an almost oppressive momentum; if anything bad can happen to our heroes, or if something can further tilt their moral balance, it will. Flammen falls in love with a woman who acts as a courier for Winther. Will she be a spy for the Germans? You'll at least be strongly invited to think so.

This movie, based on actual resistance fighters, grows in the shadow of one film in particular: Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969), a film condemned in its time for telling a resistance story in the manner of a gangster film but rediscovered to universal acclaim in the new millennium. Melville's film is a grim, suspenseful affair in his characteristic manner. Madsen can't match Melville as a thriller, but he can try to top the grimness and place more emphasis on the ethical dilemmas confronting irregular killers in wartime. This he does quite effectively, if he does also go on too long, nearly to the point of overkill.

What Madsen does most effectively is question the entire purpose or relevance of his heroes' exploits. He duly notes the postwar honors conferred upon the real men, but the film itself leaves you wondering what Flammen and Citronen actually accomplished. The director expresses this most forcefully when he portrays the Copenhagen uprising of late June 1944. For once it looks like actual warfare on screen, even if it's only street fighting, but the thing you really notice is how Flammen strolls through the action without lifting a finger to help his fellow Danes. He's under orders to do nothing until he gets further orders from London via Winther. This is what World War II is supposed to be: people fighting Germans. But it's the sort of showdown Winther has been at pains to avoid. If Winther and Flammen and Citronen seem to be fighting their own private war at times, I'm sure that impression was intentional. In our age of terrorism, privatized warfare and the idealized ruthlessness of special ops, this side of the "good war" seems more relevant than ever. Leaving aside temporary relevance, Flammen & Citronen is worth seeing for anyone interested in the ongoing cinematic exploration of the enigma of killing.

The English-subtitlted trailer from IFC Films was uploaded to YouTube by rando14.

THE MECHANIC (1972)

This review is a tale of two movies in one. I don't know how much money Michael Winner's film made in its initial release, but after Death Wish came out and Hollywood realized that Charles Bronson was "the most popular star in the world," someone decided that there was still money to be made from The Mechanic. That someone lacked confidence in the original title, perhaps assuming that people had mistaken it for a car-racing movie the first time around. So the film was reborn under the vaguely chopsocky-ish sobriquet of Killer of Killers, and the DVD includes a trailer under that title. So the film had two lives, enigmatic than exploitative, and those adjectives could well describe the two halves of the actual film.

Charles Bronson sees himself through a glass -- a shop window -- darkly in The Mechanic.

The Mechanic first appeared at a time when Bronson was still bigger in Europe than at home, and in some way it seems tailored for a European audience. It's moody, ominous, and patient about getting to the big action scenes. It has that distinctive Seventies feel, that teasing sense that you might get to look at a moral abyss. But it's "the mechanic," the killer of killers, who does the looking for us, and we can feel Bronson flinch. Violence won't make him bat an eye, but in the film's most disquieting scene his would-be protege (Jan-Michael Vincent), the estranged son of a gangster (Keenan Wynn) whom Bronson has just killed, takes him first to a party full of idiot kids whose idea of fun is making crank phone calls, then to his girlfriend's pad. The girlfriend has threatened to kill herself, and Vincent has come to see if she'll follow through on her threat. As Bronson watches with uncomfortable impassiveness, she threatens and Vincent dares until she slits one wrist, then the other. Vincent is unmoved. "If you don't care whether you live or die, why should I?" he asks. She asks Bronson how long she has. He answers as objectively as he can, based on her weight. Time dissolves away. She starts to feel cold and shaky. Will Vincent let her die? He won't, but he won't help her, either. But if she wants to live after all, he offers her car keys so she can drive herself to the ER. She staggers out, and the two men leave a little later.

Jan-Michael Vincent goes blithely from his father's funeral to his girlfriend's suicide attempt, with a troubled but taciturn Bronson in tow.

Bronson's character, Arthur Bishop, is an observer by nature. We'd earlier seen him watching an argument between Vincent and Wynn with the same superficial impassivity. However he felt about the spectacle at the girlfriend's house, he felt no visible impulse to rescue her. A certain objectivity may be part of his job as a hitman, but his indifference is a cracking facade. Soon he'll have to be taken to a hospital after suffering a panic attack in an aquarium, apparently brought on by sensory overload. He seems to be breaking under the pressure of being an outlaw who lives by a special set of rules in a world that seems to be abandoning rules altogether. He's also nursing old hurts. You can feel his humiliation when Wynn laughingly recalls an incident when little Arthur nearly drowned, and you sense a vindictive streak when Wilson has to kill Wynn and does so in a way that forces the old man to run for his life to the brink of a heart attack. You're prepared to think of Wilson as a monster until he gets to know Steve McKenna, Vincent's character, better. Steve is a nihilist or a sociopath, contemptuous of his peers and his dead father, interested only in learning about the world of crime and murder from which his dad excluded him. After ample warnings, Wilson takes him under his wing as an apprentice, teaching him that even outlaws have rules. Well, they may have in his day, but Wilson's defensive cynicism is no match for Steve's absolute amorality. Murder, Wilson teaches, is just killing without a license, and everyone kills. He's thinking of the license that governments grant themselves and their soldiers, but Steve understands that Wilson also depends on a license, the one issued by the Mob. That makes him no real outlaw by Steve's lights. Once the student surpasses the master, Steve looks forward to killing only whom he pleases, when he pleases.

Arthur Wilson tries to see himself as a disciplined warrior whose honor resides in his observance of the rules of his trade. It's his own license to kill, one which Steve McKenna doesn't need.

All of this makes The Mechanic one of the grimmest American action films of the Seventies, and the mood takes you by surprise when you're only expecting a violent formula film. Eventually, however, Winner's movie lived up to my original expectations a little too much. For its last half-hour or so much of its sinister tension dissipates as the director focuses on well-staged but routine chase scenes. The mood's nearly broken entirely by a long motorcycle chase that looks for every excuse to stage a sight gag.

The screenplay by Lewis John Carlino (Crazy Joe, Resurrection, etc.) introduces the inevitable big twist a little too early and a little too implausibly. It seems unlikely after a nearly botched hit on his first outing that the Mob would hire a still-green understudy to take out the master, and the film would have been better off letting us assume that Steve will turn on Wilson and teasing the turn instead of making it obvious. But none of this makes the final act dull, nor does it mar the mood of the great earlier scenes. The first half of The Mechanic deserves a better fulfillment, but the film as a whole deserves a look from any fan of Seventies cinema.

Here's the "Killer of Killers" trailer, deceptively presenting Bronson's character as a vigilante, as uploaded to YouTube by ChopperTCB.

Wendigo Meets ATOM AGE VAMPIRE (1960-3)

It wasn't much of a meeting this time. For starters, Mill Creek Entertainment included this in its new Undead:The Vampire Collection box set in the same spirit with which an American distributor named it "Atom Age Vampire." It isn't exactly an accurate title, but how much more so is the original -- "Seddok, the Heir of Satan?" Worse, the Mill Creek copy is gravely mutilated. According to IMDB, Seddok in its original Italian form ran for 105 minutes. The American theatrical version, the original "Atom Age Vampire," ran for 86 minutes. You can see this version for free online from a number of sources, and you'd think that'd be good enough for Mill Creek. But no: they had to pick up what we presume to be a TV copy (which also seems to be partially letterboxed) that is all of 69 minutes long. A quick comparison of editions shows that the Mill Creek copy leaves out extra Atom Age Vampire attacks and nightclub dance numbers. But here's the worst part: My friend Wendigo and I looked at this appalling truncated edition -- and thought it was padded.

Once-lovely Jeanette is disfigured for life, unless the Atom Age Vampire can save her -- by killing people.

Wendigo is happy to say without reservation that Seddok is not a vampire movie. There's no way around the fact that it's a mad-scientist movie of a very old sort. It's the hoary legend of the scientist with a sickly wife or child whose treatment depends on extracting some substance from living persons (e.g. spinal fluid, glands) in a way that kills them. In America it goes back at least as far as Boris Karloff in The Ape, and it was Bela Lugosi's stock in trade at Monogram. Wendigo has seen a version of the motif as recently as an episode of Supernatural. In many cases the scientist disguises himself as a monster in order to cover his trail. In Seddok, the mad Professor Levin (Alberto Lupo) takes this idea to atom-age extremes by mutating himself into a lumpy, hoodie-wearing stalker by injecting himself with Derma-25, a failed predecessor to Derma-28, the miracle compound (derived from glands) with which he hopes to cure disfigured nightclub dancer and car-accident victim Jeanette (Susanne Loret). So he's a monster, though naming him heir to Satan is still a stretch. But he hardly counts as a vampire if he's extracting a vital fluid for someone else's benefit. In fact, the whole "atom age vampire" gimmick is imposed on the picture in the English dub when an inspector speculates that a disgruntled Japanese radiation victim may be doing the killings -- "like a vampire of the atomic age," no less -- despite the prevailing theory that an escaped gorilla's doing it. This professor is a sharp character. He tells Levin at one point that he knows him "intimately," having read his writings and watched his TV interviews. But when the doctor offhandedly mentions his research, our top cop asks, "Which research, exactly?"

Dr. Levin ignores the love of his dedicated assistant (above), only to find himself reduced to picking up random streetwalkers while hopelessly pretending to be a hip youngster in his fashionable threads (below).

While Wendigo recognizes the obvious U.S. Poverty Row influences on Seddok (there's even those beloved mainstays, the mute servant and the nosy reporter), I saw that it was also a cheap knockoff on what was arguably the most influential European horror film of its time, Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face -- another tale of a doctor mad to cure a girl's disfigurement. And for all I know, the invocation of Satan in the title is a nearly-instant ripoff of the other most influential Euro horror of the era, Mario Bava's The Mask of Satan -- better known in the U.S. as Black Sunday. Director Anton Giulio Majano and his writers try to stake out their own sci-fi territory with Marvel Comics level buncombe about the mutagenic power of radiation. Their brilliant notion is that, since radiation disfigures people, it could be used to redisfigure or undisfigure already deformed people like our poor Jeanette. In the world of Seddok this works, since radiation is an antidote to Derma-25, as is the sadly limited and temporarily efficacious Derma-28. But I'm not clear on the limitations of Derma-28. Dr. Levin's attractive female assistant Monique shoots herself up with 25 in order to goad him into testing 28 on her arm. It works, and as far as we know it works permanently on Monique, but when he uses it on Jeanette's face the cure quickly wears off, requiring him to exhaust his supply of synthesized 28 and resort to lethal gland extraction. We're assuming that Monique's arm never turns nasty again, and that she'd never turn into a monster, but since Levin kills her for her glands (and for being clingy, needy and jealous) it's probably a moot point.

After a mutating Derma-25 treatment, be sure to clean yourself off with some good, steamy radiation. Be sure to open the container and release the radiation into the atmosphere when you're done.

We may seem to be describing some mad science and weird goings on, but you have to have a deep love of low-budget, brutally-edited, badly-dubbed, black-and-white, pre-sexploitation Euro horror to endure even the shortest edition of Atom Age Vampire. Even in its original form, Wendigo suspects that the project was uninspired on any level. Its completely derivative nature could be forgiven if the filmmakers or performers showed any panache, but neither the original creators nor the English dub scripters and actors show any imagination. It looks more like a cheap TV show of the time than a film -- and that's probably how most Americans first saw it. It didn't surprise us to learn that Majano mostly worked in TV afterward. It fails on even the simplest level: as the beautiful, doctor-maddening dancer Jeanette, Susanne Loret isn't even more attractive than Franca Parisi as Monique the jealous assistant. Wendigo could not take his mind off the star's beak-like nose, and he could not stand her dubbed whining and griping.

Wendigo might think differently if he ever encounters the unedited Seddok, but Atom Age Vampire didn't even work as camp for him. He likes a good bad movie as much as anyone, but such a film has to be trying to do something, while this film only seemed to be trying to make a buck.

The trailer for Atom Age Vampire is far more entertaining in classic exploitation fashion. This copy was uploaded to YouTube by CrowTRobot1313:

FEMALE PRISONER 701: SCORPION (1972)

First-time director Shunya Ito has something to say about Japan in this Toei Studio manga adaptation, and it isn't nice. The movie opens with the raising of the peacetime red sun-on-white field flag over a prison, and that symbol is later equated with the blood shed in a woman's deflowering. The specific woman is Nami Matsushima, Matsu for short -- prisoner 701. She loved a narcotics cop. He used her as bait to entrap drug dealers. The dealers found her out and gang-raped her. The cop caught them red-handed. He then cut a deal with them; that's what he planned to do all along. Matsu was just the bait to give him some leverage over them. They don't mind the scam as long as "co-prosperity" results. Even Matsu gets some money, but it's poor compensation for her betrayal. She's in prison because she tried to kill the cop in broad daylight. She knows too much, but never told it to the authorities. That leaves the gangsters wondering, but no one orders a hit on her in prison. Maybe that's because this particular prison is a living death, if not a living hell, where Matsu is tormented by the trustees and harassed by the guards while she perpetually plots to escape.

Behold the widescreen awesomeness of Meiko Kaji as Female Prisoner 701, the metaphorical Betsy Ross of Japan.

Toei in the 1970s was the home (more or less) of Kinji Fukasaku, Bunta Sugawara and Sonny Chiba, the studio of gritty yakuza films and gory martial arts that I often equate with Warner Bros. in the 1930s. For me, this Toei outing is a flagrant change of pace. Grit and gore it's got, but Shunya Ito takes the proceedings to another level of feverish expressionism. He does stuff with color, lighting and set design that may suit this story's cartoonish origins but send the film reeling merrily out of the realm of realism. A location sequence of prisoners digging a massive crater into the earth is transformed by a gunshot into a setbound showcase of riotous red-painted sky. Matsu's backstory flashback features an erotic unwrapping arguably inspired by Singin' in the Rain, the flag/blood business I mentioned, a gang-rape filmed from below through a transparent floor, and rotating sets like something else out of a Hollywood musical. Matsu's trustee enemy Masaki, enraged by having a glass door pane slammed in her face, is transformed by lighting into something like a demon of rage until -- oops, she misses her target and puts the warden's eye out with a shard of glass. He's too annoyed to suffer and strangles her instead.

Ito's experiments in style are eclipsed in many viewers' minds by the human special effect that is Meiko Kaji. She's part of the Seventies pantheon of valkyries -- joining Pam Grier, Claudia Jennings, Angela Mao, Christa Lindberg, etc., who still set the cinematic standard of violent female empowerment. Kaji could wield a sword (in the Lady Snowblood films), a gun or whatever came to hand for killing or torturing purposes. In this one, she's hogtied in solitary and a trustee is torturing her by ladling hot miso soup on her body. How can she fight back. By catching an edge of a towel in her teeth and pulling it out from under the trustee so she spills the entire pot of boiling broth on herself, that's how. Matsu's resourceful that way, and once she's finally free the men who tormented her don't stand a chance. As her "Vengeance Song" plays she picks them off one by one, with only her once-beloved corrupt cop putting up much of a fight. As Matsu (aka Scorpion) Kaji's best known for her taciturnity. Apart from her narration of the flashback, she probably has less than a dozen lines of dialogue in the whole picture, and one of those is "You talk too much."

Meanwhile, this is the sort of women-in-prison film your parents warned you about. Every possible excuse for nudity is exploited, including a credits-sequence inspection that requires naked prisoners to climb ladders and cross bridges while male guards watch from below, presumably to watch for vaginally-concealed contraband but with obvious ulterior motives. Lesbianism is inevitable, with Matsu being the top of the tops. One hopefully intentional comic sequence has another prisoner attempt to seduce her. Our heroine quickly takes charge and proves herself no cool-hand Luka. The would-be seducer is soon groveling at her feet begging for more -- and she's later revealed to be an undercover cop who insists desperately on getting another chance to share a cell with 701.

I can fault some things about FP701 -- particularly the uniformly inept action whenever someone has to slap or punch anyone else, with most performers missing by a mile despite the sound effects, -- but it has an undeniable momentum, the kind that keeps you wondering what Ito's going to do next. It's ultimately just a nasty cartoon with a misanthropic streak, but it's perpetrated with grisly panache by all hands. It's worth watching as an exercise in pop-cinema decadence that few would dare imitate today.

This version of the English-subtitled trailer was uploaded to YouTube by asianwack.

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Here's a bonus. Following the custom of the time in Japanese cinema, Meiko Kaji sang the title song, "Urami Bushi," translated as "Vengeance Song" or "Grudge Blues." The original version plays over the end credits of the Kill Bill films. In this clip from sometime shortly after that film's release, Kaji performed the song in public for the first time in 20 years. It was uploaded by kukutxmuchu.

That Dirty Little Coward: Robert Ford at the Movies

"Ford is a young man, about 22 years of age, and looks like a verdant youth from the country. In appearance he is a mere boy, and is the last person in the world to be taken as the slayer of the famous outlaw."

The New York Times, April 4, 1882.

It was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward.

I wonder how he feels.

"Jesse James," American folk song.

Recording by Vernon Dalhart (1925), uploaded to YouTube by cdbpdx

Robert Ford is an archetypal American traitor. If an American Dante were to stock his Inferno with his fellow nationals, we might expect to find Bob, if not his brother Charlie, smack at the bottom, gnawed on by an icebound Satan along with Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. In his time, he was seen not only as a traitor but as a conspirator and a mercenary. The most interesting thing I found out while researching the historical side of this review was the way the "assassination" of Jesse James impacted the career of Missouri governor T. T. Crittenden. In 1886, four years after Ford killed James, Crittenden was being considered for a diplomatic post. President Grover Cleveland rejected him, reportedly explaining that people back east would object because of Crittenden's role in James's death. Regardless of what people thought of James, many recoiled from a politician's employment of hired killers to solve a law-enforcement problem. Imagine if an elected official today was revealed to have hired a hit squad to take out alleged terrorists on American soil. Some would lionize him, but many others would condemn him. The people who made the latter of the two movies discussed below may have understood or even encouraged the analogy; they at least play up the political aspect of James's death more than the other film does.

But while the men who did that theoretical official's dirty work might be vilified as mercenaries or mere thugs, they certainly wouldn't be thought of as traitors, even if they were "radical" Muslims turning on their own kind. Bob Ford endured as a villain in the American consciousness long after the scandal surrounding Crittenden was forgotten mainly because he was seen as a traitor of the most venal kind. But Americans also have a tendency to play devil's advocate. There's a curiosity about why people do wicked things, why they betray, even if it boils down to a banal assumption that everyone has his reasons. You see it in the reluctance in many Jesus movies to portray Judas as a pure villain. Of our proposed victims in the lowest circle of American Hell, probably only Booth is denied this kind of consideration (as far as I know). So it was probably inevitable that at least one writer would follow up on the folk singer's rhetorical wondering and attempt to reconstruct what made Ford tick, what he really thought of James, and how he felt about what he did to the bandit antihero.

I Shot Jesse James (1949) is Samuel Fuller's first film as a director. Despite the title, the movie isn't told by Ford in the first person or even fully from his point of view. Ford's story is sometimes overshadowed by the fitful romance of the two figures who with him form a triangle; his fictional girlfriend Cynthy the saloon singer (Barbara Britton) and sometime lawman Kelly, a figure very loosely based on the man who actually killed Ford in 1892. Kelly is played by Preston Foster, an implausible leading man at the time but top-billed just the same. Ford is played by John Ireland, who'd just made an impression in Red River the year before and would make another in All the King's Men. He looks a little old to play Bob, but that actually adds emphasis to the quasi-oedipal motivation Fuller gives him.

Bob Ford (John Ireland) is torn between two kinds of love, for Barbara Britton (above) and Reed Hadley (below) in I Shot Jesse James.

The liner notes for the Criterion Eclipse edition of I Shot invite us to see a homoerotic subtext in the relationship of Bob Ford and Jesse James. The film does leave room for speculation, but the vibe I got was more parricidal than homoerotic. Fuller's James is played by Reed Hadley, an actor out of radio with a voice of generic bland authority. He sports more of a beard than Brad Pitt will later and it gives him a patriarchal, Lincolnesque if not Jesus-like look. His most provocative scene has him taking a bath, Bob bringing in fresh hot water by the bucket. Jesse uses this occasion to give Bob a revolver as a present, not knowing that Bob is already studying to kill him. But Bob can't kill him with the loaded weapon while contemplating Jesse's naked back, and when the outlaw somewhat impatiently demands to have his back scrubbed, Bob obeys.

Why does Bob want to kill Jesse? It's nothing personal, at first glance; he wants the bounty money so he can afford to marry Cynthy. His tragedy throughout the film will be his repeated attempts to earn Cynthy's hand by all means necessary, his belief that going to the maximum, to the point of murder, proves the intensity of his love, even while his romantic ruthlessness repels her. By making Jesse's death the precondition of Bob's hoped-for marriage, Fuller makes it look as if Bob has to prove himself a man (to himself, that is) by destroying a paternal figure. Jesse's naked back in the bathtub doesn't represent homoerotic temptation as much as it does the oppressive intimacy of the family household to a cranky adolescent. Bob has to look at Jesse's clothed back before shooting him, but Fuller makes a point of having James say that he "feels naked" without his guns as he climbs the stool to adjust the painting. We don't get a flashback, but we can assume that Bob's thinking of that humiliating scene with the tub as he lays poor Jesse in his grave.

Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) seems almost by design the opposite of Fuller's film. Dominik's film is lavishly budgeted while Fuller's is an indy B film. Assassination is almost exactly twice as long as I Shot, and the proportions of pre and post-assassination story are reversed, 3/4 of Fuller's film playing out after James's death while Dominik dedicates only about 1/5 of his epic to the aftermath. At first, Assassination promises a drastically different interpretation of Robert Ford, but in broadest terms both films come to the same conclusion about him.

It worried me to see Ford (Casey Affleck) portrayed as an obsessed fan of Jesse James (Pitt), even though we know that Bob did idolize the outlaw as a boy. His use of the slightly anachronistic term "sidekick" to describe his desired position in the James Gang didn't exactly boost my confidence. It seemed as if Dominik was imposing a 20th or 21st century character archetype on a 19th century legend. Fortunately, Bob's character evolves, albeit under duress. His fandom (his collection of newspaper clippings and dime novels) becomes an object of ridicule within the gang, including brother Charlie, who humiliates him in front of Jesse by telling tales of Bob's childhood worship of the bandit. Amused, Jesse presses Bob for more stories, goading him into a painful recitation of a host of Lincoln-Kennedy type resemblances between Jesse and himself. All of this puts Bob on the road to another kind of parricide. Treated contemptuously as a child by his peers, he has to prove his manhood by repudiating his idol -- or destroying it.

Nearly everyone treats Bob (Casey Affleck, on the floor) like a child in The Assassination of Jesse James, including Jesse (Brad Pitt, on the couch)

In the middle of this, there's a bathtub scene, either a homage to the Fuller film or just another version of a historical incident. There's no back scrubbing, though. Instead, Jesse uses this moment to ask Bob, "Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?" By this point in the story, the answer is probably neither. The major difference in content between Assassination and I Shot is that the later film gives Bob plenty of reasons to repudiate Jesse. For all we know, Fuller's Jesse James is no more and no less than the folk hero turned patriarch. Dominik and Brad Pitt's Jesse is gradually revealed to us as a monster. His constant sense of bemusement emerges as a depthless contempt for everyone around him. He's a genial paranoid who infects everyone around him with fear and distrust of each other. It'll sound strange to some of you, but the long, brilliantly written and acted scenes when Jesse probes for weaknesses, embarrassments and self-betrayals reminded me of nothing so much as accounts I've read of the inner circle of Josef Stalin, where the dictator enjoyed seeing his cronies make abject asses of themselves, while they understood that the wrong word could cost them their lives. The big difference is that Jesse James settled scores in a hands-on manner; maybe he was more like Saddam Hussein in that respect. At the same time, Dominik's Jesse has a clear death wish, as if his paranoia about betrayal was in part a matter of wishful thinking. It's as if he felt there was nothing left for him but to wait for murder, so he might as well make a game of it and enjoy himself a little longer. Brad Pitt nails the subtlety of James's menace, playing the legendary outlaw as something more sinister than the legend without turning him into a blatant psycho. I've liked Pitt best in his smaller comic roles, when he abandons the cool of stardom (he's brilliant in Burn After Reading, for instance), but for now Jesse James is the best work I've seen from him.

So why does Bob Ford want to kill this Jesse? For self-preservation, mainly, since he'd killed Jesse's cousin Wood Hite and assumes that James will kill him if he ever finds out. For all he knows, Jesse might just kill him for no good reason. Killing James is also part of a bargain with Crittenden (an uncanny cameo by James Carville); a pardon for Hite's murder in return for killing Crittenden's enemy. At the same time, killing his idol is essential to differentiating himself from Jesse and thus, like John Ireland's Bob in Fuller's film, proving himself as a man.

Dominik's Bob also kills Jesse for fame just as he joined the gang for fame. Celebrity is the subject on which Fuller goes most astray from history. In real life, Ford toured the nation recounting his exploit and re-enacting it on stage. Dominik shows him leaping off the stage to attack a heckler who called him a coward. But Fuller shows us a Ford who can't make it through the first night of the tour without having crippling guilt-ridden flashbacks of the real Jesse. Fuller's Ford hits the boards just to make money, the same reason he does anything, while Dominik's revels in fame until the backlash against his "treachery" breaks his spirit.

Art imitates Art imitating Life: John Ireland prepares to make his exit (above), while Casey Affleck prepares to take a bow (below)

Both Fuller and Dominik show Ford struggling with guilt and defensiveness about his deed. Both films introduce a wandering musician who sings the historic folk song about the "dirty little coward" without knowing that he's serenading the subject of the song. In I Shot Bob interrupts the song in the middle to identify himself, then forces the reluctant performer to finish the tune before walking away. By the time a drunken Bob hears the song in a crowded bar in Assassination, most of his fight is gone after fights with hecklers. He listens to the full performance before identifying himself, throwing a gun at the singer's feet, correcting him on the number of Jesse's children, and taking a swing at a complete stranger that nearly knocks himself out. Fuller still has a lot of story to tell after the song, but Dominik closes his film soon afterward with a purposefully perfunctory narration of Ford's meaningless death. His Bob does eventually say that he's sorry for what he did to Jesse, but Fuller's Bob tops that. His dying words to Cynthy are "I loved him."

"People don't really like it that much."

Beyond its interesting conception of Bob's motivation and Ireland's earnest interpretation of it, I Shot Jesse James is weighed down by its lacklustre love triangle and the narrative limitations of a first-time director. It opens dynamically with an aborted bank robbery and has a fair climax as Foster enrages Ireland by showing him his back, but Fuller's early attempt at an adult western is a pale preview of the genre explosion unleashed by Anthony Mann and others just a year later. I felt that way before I saw The Assassination, so please don't think I'm judging a B movie in light of an A. As for Dominik's film, it lived up to its slow-building reputation as the best western of the past decade. It is lavishly visualized in classic widescreen style in a manner that had seemed to die with the debacle of Heaven's Gate. Roger Deakins's cinematography is stunning in nearly every scene, but particularly in an early train-robbery sequence that presents the passage of the night train through the woods as a spectral apparition attended by hooded spirits of the darkness. How's that for poetry? Trust me, Deakins's visual work is much more poetic, and dramatic. Kudos are also owed to art director Troy Sizemore and everyone else who contributed to the film's classic look. This is only Dominik's second feature. That may look like he's far ahead of where Fuller was when he made his Ford movie, but the older director's overall record is still something Dominik can only aspire to match for now. At least Dominik can say he made one of the best American films of 2007, that best of many recent years for American film. He has me looking forward to his future work.

Cinematography by Roger Deakins. How hasn't he won an Oscar yet?

Whether there's more to say about Robert Ford is another story. Based on what I've read recently I'd say there's room for another version that focuses on his adventures after James and his fatal feud with the real Kelly (or O'Kelly). What Dominik's film in particular tells me is that there's room yet for another full-scale account of Jesse James, whose most recent major biographer described him as an "American Terrorist." There may not be room anymore in the American consciousness for Jesse James the folk hero (see Henry King's 1939 saga for that), but if we still tell stories about James, Bob Ford will still "eat of Jesse's bread and sleep in Jesse's bed" as a footnote of American folklore.

Wendigo Meets THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

The next movie on the top of my friend Wendigo's vampire movie pile is The Forsaken. Perhaps understandably, he wanted to watch something else. He offered Christopher Lee's swan song in the role that made him a star. Many people feel he went out with a whimper, but Wendigo feels that Alan Gibson's film does some things with the vampire genre ahead of its time but doesn't get credit for them. For instance, Dracula becomes more of a cult leader in what would become the Jim Jones sense of the word, the sense of having an apocalyptic vision, than Robert Quarry did in either the Count Yorga films or The Deathmaster. Also, Dracula in his alias as Mr. Denham more successfully infiltrates mainstream society as a business magnate more successfully than modern vampires had yet done. It makes him more of a menace than if he spent his time preying on hippies or other outsiders.

English and American distributors differed on how to exploit this movie, the U.K. opting to emphasize Satanic Rites (above), the Americans Vampire Brides (below, caught in a romp with Joanna Lumley)

Satanic Rites is a direct sequel to Dracula A.D. 1972, using the same modern Van Helsing (Peter Cushing as usual) and some of his helpers from the previous film. Wendigo considers the later film a big improvement because, though Dracula remains reclusive, he actually partakes of modernity this time instead of lurking at the fringes. Rites is clearly designed as a modern movie with secret agent, biker and conspiracy elements -- not to mention the trendy satanism of the Seventies and the decade's ghastly fashion sense. The cult aspect of the Hammer Dracula had been around from the beginning, when the Count in Horror of Dracula is identified as the leader of "the cult of the vampires," but Rites is the most elaborate illustration of the premise since the Dracula-free Kiss of the Vampire.

"My revenge spans centuries!" Dracula blusters as his house burns down. If so, he should have invested more resources into recruiting (and outfitting) quality personnel.

Wendigo always likes to see authentic vampire lore in vampire films. Vampiric vulnerability to running water is demonstrated when Dracula's brides are destroyed by a sprinkler system in their basement lair, as it had been in A.D. 1972 when a vamp is killed in a shower. But Rites's most infamous use of authentic lore is its employment of a hawthorn bush as a mortal obstacle to vampires. Allegedly the raw material for the Crown of Thorns, its tangential holiness makes the hawthorn even more of a nuisance for the undead than it is for the living. Christopher Lee has had some sad finishes in this series, but being trapped, ripped and tripped by shrubbery before Cushing administers a merciful stake would seem to touch bottom for the poor man. But Wendigo advises: at least he never had to count grains in the road or succumb to other embarrassing vampire foibles. On the other hand, Dracula has foibles enough. He can't resist the temptation to taunt and boast until doing so ruins all his lovely plans for exterminating the human race by plague. Then, unable to resist being taunted, he lets Van Helsing goad him into that fatal bush

Lee was quite sick of Dracula but kept coming back for more, complaining to his fans all the while, until he was done with this one. At least here he gets a decent amount of dialogue compared to the growling and hissing written for him in previous episodes. On the other hand, he doesn't put in an appearance in a film in which he's the title character until about a half hour in, and then just for a perfunctory biting seen that has little to do with the main story. It seems to have been included just so viewers wouldn't feel ripped off by his not appearing for yet another half hour. By now, however, the public may have been sick of Lee as Dracula. This second attempt to set him in the modern world was the end of the experiment. The Americans didn't even want it until 1978, when they could exploit the anticipation of Frank Langella's Dracula film -- and even then they had to sell it with outrageous ballyhoo like "The King of the Undead marries the Queen of the Zombies!" I mean, that's not even real! Anyway, Hammer's next try was The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, once more a period piece with the added exotica of kung fu. Lee was invited to appear but finally found the will to refuse. Cushing's age also gives Rites the feel of a series that had finally run out of gas. You can see an effort at transition to a new generation of vampire-fighting heroes (including pre-AbFab Joanna Lumley), but Van Helsing's helpers don't have the great man's charisma.

The final battle between Lee as Dracula and Cushing as Van Helsing should be a major moment, but when people can turn vampires with crosses made out of just any old thing (as Michael Coles demonstrates below) it undercuts the drama a bit.

While Wendigo considers Satanic Rites an improvement on A.D. 1972, he admits that there really wasn't anywhere left for Hammer to go with Lee as Dracula, especially given Lee's attitude by this date. He thinks it's a better finale for a key Hammer series than Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, at least. On the other hand, Wendigo thinks the Hammer Dracula series was less than the sum of its parts. Horror of Dracula is fine and Brides (without Lee) may have been Cushing's finest hour as Van Helsing, but after those first films the sequels are uninspired in their use of Lee. Hammer's historic contributions (blood and sexuality, etc.) can't be denied, but the evolution they started can't help but make them suffer in retrospect. This last effort at least showed more imagination than most of what came between the beginning and the end.

Here's the original British trailer, uploaded to YouTube by gotohelltown:

Meanwhile,Surfintheater has uploaded but regrettably left a mark on the wacky but spoilerific American trailer for "Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride."