The Long Riders

Repeated throughout Walter Hill's The Long Riders is the notion that, at their core, the James-Younger gang are belligerents, still doing their bit to fight for an already vanquished Confederacy. It's a phoney sort of romanticism that, quite apart from the aims of their parent herrenvolk, registers as an excuse; a way for these criminals to, all too easily, achieve a kind of folk hero status in territories still reeling from their abject and no doubt humiliating defeat. Written by Bill Bryden and Steven Phillip Smith, as well as the actors playing Jesse and Frank James, James and Stacy Keach, The Long Riders is a fragmented and episodic experience. It's an elliptical piece that simultaneously feels like a dog-eared bank robber rambling through their most beloved escapades and a much longer television series that has been chopped down to squib-riddled action and the connective tissue between these eruptions. Long Riders is a beautiful-looking film too; Ric Waite's cinematography often of a piece with Barry Lyndon or The Duellists in how verdant and untouched greens are used to state, definitively, that we are in the past. 

Largely focused around a series of cack-handed attempts by the Pinkerton detective agency to put an end to the James-Younger gang, Long Riders uses these strike-breaking mercenaries to generate a genuine (rather than just an assumed) sympathy for the central stick-up artists. The James-Younger gang are bold in their crimes while still adhering to a strangled sort of code of honour. By comparison the Pinkertons are bushwhackers who hide in long grass, shooting through anything or anyone who just so happens to be between them and their quarry. Children burn in their homes after malfunctioning smoke bombs are tossed, unannounced, through their homestead windows; pig farmers are blasted to pieces on their own land, judged instantly guilty by agents who haven't even established the presence of their prey. As in Hill's previous film, The Warriors, the establishment is presented as a lurking system of dehumanisation and cruelty, one so incredibly resourced and protected that it needn't worry about the particulars of anyone they are inadvertently exterminating. Long Riders goes one further too. Unlike The Warriors, which failed to draw a line between the actions of David Patrick Kelly's Rogues gang and an agitating NYPD, Long Riders explicitly links Jesse James' assassins with the Pinkertons. Nicholas Guest's Robert Ford is a spurned fanboy acting on shadowy orders and hoping to claim a substantial prize by betraying the man he formerly looked up to. 

The Driver

Sometime in the early 1970s jobbing Hollywood screenwriter Walter Hill put the word out that he was a big fan of director John Boorman and the film Point Blank in particular. This effusiveness was rewarded with a copy of Alexander Jacobs' mythical (in writing circles) screenplay. Hill has described the reading experience as revelatory. Jacobs didn't waste a word, rattling out scene directions as bursts of pure information; haiku compared to the flowering prose of his contemporaries.

Jacobs rejected standard screenwriting assembly, doling out detail in a manner that hewed closer to bullet points or pure, impartial data. Hill was impressed. Jacobs had created a document that wasn't simply an anonymous filmmaking blueprint. The writer clearly had a voice, a sensibility that demanded his work be read as a complimentary piece of art rather than a disposable outline. Hill resolved to bring the same terse, vital readability to his own work. The Driver stands as the purest example of those labours.

As filmed, Point Blank follows a spectral criminal fixated on the former allies who acted against him. The film presents its lead character as an emotion writ large, pushing closer and closer to the people who turned him into an undying engine. Hill goes a step further, boiling his characters down to even simpler motivations - their job and an attendant will to succeed. Ryan O'Neal isn't playing a heroic archetype struggling manfully against impossible odds, he is simply The Driver. His character defined by an unshakable belief in his own abilities rather than any romantic, interior ambitions.

Although Driver takes payment for his services there is no evidence that he does anything with the cash. His apartment is barren, the cars he uses are procured on-site and trashed immediately after they have served their function. Driver pointedly doesn't care about the money he accumulates, it's just part of a necessary transaction that brings him closer to an opportunity to excel. His opponent, Bruce Dern's rabid Detective, is similarly bloody-minded, willing to break the law in the hope of trapping his quarry. Their conflict exists in the abstract, rules and regulations are irrelevant to both of them, they are simply two experts testing their limits by colliding with each other.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - Winners & Sinners

Winners & Sinners is what happens when several of the world's greatest action directors decide to make their own, culturally specific version of The Blues Brothers or, maybe more accurately, the Carry On films. Briefly, Winners & Sinners is a broad, chummy comedy revolving around the misadventures of a team of criminals determined to go straight after a lengthy spell in prison.

Hung's recruits include Stanley Fung as Rookie, the secretive straight man; John Sham as Curly, a political activist for hire who fumes every time one of his pals sleazes around his sister Shirley (Cherie Chung); Charlie Chan as Vaseline, a self-appointed lothario; and Richard Ng as Exhaust Pipe, a gadget loving thief who's convinced he can make himself invisible. Hung himself stars as Teapot, the group whipping boy who ends up winning Shirley's affections by playing it modest. Jackie Chan cameos as an overenthusiastic cop who's down for casual brutality.

Primarily a comedy, Winners & Sinners is a series of rambling vignettes with occasional action interludes. Unlike many Hong Kong films that attempt to juggle these two clashing tones, Hung's film largely hangs together thanks to a relentlessly energetic pace. The cast, especially Richard Ng, are funny. One sight gag involving voluminous smoke from one of Sammo's trick cigars is inspired.

Hung's setpieces are exciting and dangerous looking. An umpteen vehicle pileup caused by Chan's dogged pursuit of two pickpockets gets very close to John Landis levels of destruction. Hung and action co-director Yuen Biao continuously find new angles on two (or three, or four) bodies interacting, editor Peter Yiu-Chung Cheung making superb use of the absolutely exhaustive coverage.

Of particular note is a forty second exchange in a starkly lit food hall that instantly seems like one of the most exciting uses of montage I've ever seen. It's just so fast. Each shot carefully composed to deliver an almost subliminal glimpse of the action without ever losing the geographical whole, or derailing the hammering rhythm. The sequence even caters for the styles of the two star fighters. Sammo Hung gets to deliver concise devastation blows while Chan moves in and around a stick-up crew attempting to flee.

In many ways the confrontation flies in the face of traditional fight theory. Wides are seldom held, the cuts are very fast, at first glance it almost seems like the excitement has been constructed in editing. Look at the arrangement over and over again though and you start to see that everything has been repeated a great many times from a wide selection of angles, each consistent enough to build a spatially cohesive whole.

I took an ungodly amount of screencaps during this fight, so let's run it down.

Jackie Chan hurls himself in from the left, leapfrogging a goon or two to deliver a kick hard enough to send Vest Top hurtling towards the wall in front of him. Stash Man tracks alongside the group.

A lower angle on Chan using one of his catapult people as a human shield. Camouflage's arm looks like it's twelve foot long. Vest Top winces up against the wall. Stash Man starts to cower.

Chan and the human gymnastic equipment. Chan uses the momentum of the crumbling man to launch a kick at the Camouflage Goon. Vest Top has fully sunk to the floor across these two shots - another layer of movement. Stash Man has gone into a full dither.

A lightning fast shot of Chan accounting for the Blue Goon on his right, then pushing off to deliver a knock down strike to Camouflage Man. Chan instantly changes tact to kick another Goon trying his luck. Note the angle is lower again, making us perceive Chan's legs as longer.

Continuous on the same set-up - Camouflage Man hurtles towards the screen as Chan lines up his kick at a White Vest Attacker. Chan tucks his leg up then throws it out again to meet the incoming attacker. These two planes of movement meet with a crunch. White Vest is stopped dead in his tracks rather than being sent back the way he came.

Pushing off from the pause strike to White Vest, Chan angles his leg up to the Blue Goon on his left, the close-up of the impact matching the position of the leg in the previous shot. Just when you think he must be finished Chan flings his leg out again to hammer White Vest in the face and put him on his back. It's superfluous, excessive, and utterly thrilling.

While Chan struggles with two head-locked Goons, a New Challenger appears - Knife Guy! Please note Sammo Hung crawling around in the background, still stunned from Chan's initial, explosive launch towards the gang.

Before Knife Guy can make any significant gains Chan has him trapped with his Adidas Casuals. The next shot reveals Chan is again using his Blue Goons as leverage, allowing him to push Knife Guy directly into the path of Sammo Hung, effectively tagging his co-star into the fight.

The section I've highlighted lasts maybe twelve seconds, making up just under a quarter of this complete sequence. Straight after Sammo Hung gets his chance to shine, his set-ups are longer and arranged to accentuate the impact of his famously stiff blows. This bodily harm is intercut with Chan snaking around his flailing opponents delivering double groin punches, shot from his character's POV.

If it's ever talked about seriously, Winners & Sinners is usually discussed in terms of how it took Hung and Chan out of period brawlers and into a more contemporary milieu. What I'm wondering though is where did this particular style of shooting come from? Is this the first instance?

A lot of the Sammo Hung films I'm familiar with - Magnificent Butcher and his additional footage in the Chinese cut of Game of Death - were still using long, traditional choreography with an emphasis on limbs cracking against each other. 1981's The Prodigal Son, directed by Hung and starring Yuen Biao, does contain a few exchanges with a similar kind of editing beat but nothing this complicated, claustrophobic or experimental.

Up until now Jackie Chan had matched Hung's bone splintering with his own unbeatable underdog. This was a mutation that saw Chan putting his stunt skills to the test, barrelling through teams of heavies and desperately selling for his final opponent. Chan is always communicating a steep climb. Considering this excerpt relies pretty heavily on call-and-response actions between a team of stunt men, and given that Jackie Chan is happy to slum as a component in his own fight scenes, perhaps he is the primary architect?

It's worth noting that the scene has elements in common with the bathroom fight in Walter Hill's The Warriors, both scenes sharing a similar kinetic punctuation. We're no longer dealing with well-trained experts, these people are more like street fighters, so it makes sense to take a different approach. Is this Chan's take on those kind of ideas? Hill and his editors compiled their fight like an explosion, hurling shrapnel in every direction. Chan and his team instead have every element tracking back towards him - the centre. A deliberately chaotic brawl is reduced down to one determined individual managing and responding to assaults from several different directions.

Most likely of all, Chan, Hung and Biao were goading each other on, pushing themselves to deliver their best possible work. After a string of duds and failures, Jackie Chan must've been especially hungry. Take a glance at the respective filmographies and it feels like there was an arms race going on between the former school friends, each of the stars working like crazy to take fight films somewhere different. Although I'm by no means an expert this short exchange in a strip-lit mall, deep in a crude comedy, strikes me as something new and precious.

Tomer Hanuka's The Warriors

via Mondo.

The Warriors: Ultimate Director's Cut

Anti-definitive device! The cheap, literal comic book crawl added to Walter Hill's Ultimate Director's Cut of The Warriors completely fails to impress. Doubly so since this is the version that has made the leap to high-definition home video formats. The new preface is poorly and simplistically rendered; bright and bordering on luminous. It jibes badly with the neon simplicity of the Coney Island Wonder Wheel that used to open the film. The dull, muscled figures stitched in up front also have nothing in common with the malnourished, sinewy heroes marching home either. That's not all that has been added though. The film is now littered with freeze frames and artificially implemented panel shifts. The audience forced to literally read The Warriors as a comic book. These artless overlays rob the film of it's dystopian leanings and relentlessly puncture the film's sense of danger. When the Baseball Furies arrive this new edit blunders the moment, Hill preferring to make literal his own subtextual organisation of these competing archetypes, rather than just hold on the peril being generated by massing, warpainted lunatics. The Warriors used to be a soft rock take on A Clockwork Orange, now it's a shameless opportunist, jostling for pocket money with a misunderstood grab-bag of multimedia tricks. For shame.

Red Heat

What makes someone a great screen actor? In the essentials column would be the ability to communicate verbally, and spatially, the given tone of the scenes in which their characters exists. An actor is the most obvious means of dialogue between filmmakers and their audience. If an actor is off-message, it can confuse intentions. Frequently, it's as much what an actor chooses not to do. A well timed pause, or a silent stare can mean more than any length of dialogue. This also entrusts the audience with a degree of contribution. Just what is the character thinking?

With this in mind, how great is Arnold Schwarzenegger? He does nothing. As the first explicit entry in Schwarzenegger's crossover brand of comedy slash action, Red Heat utilises Arnold as a blank-faced non-reaction to Jim Belushi's incessant crudities. Typically Belushi will spew a venal little insight requiring Schwarzenegger to just stare impassively. It's a back and forth that casts Belushi as the comedian and Schwarzenegger as the straight man.

Unfortunately for Belushi, a still, silent Schwarzenegger is automatically just as hilarious as anything that can be said. His impossible symmetry is accentuated by a too-tall flat-top hairstyle; bulging biceps barely concealed within a cheap, lank suit. Schwarzenegger looks like some absurd manga muscle bomb character: all alert veins and blaring, psychotic eyes. In this context, monosyllabic responses become symphonies of blunt comic misdirection. The dialogue in Red Heat has an air of improvisation, conversations digress and ramble in and out of scenes. Belushi and Schwarzenegger fiercely competing for the last laugh. Belushi rarely wins. How can he? All Arnold has to do is stare straight ahead and say 'No'.