Capsule Reviews: In the Heat of the Night, Something Wild, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)

I put off watching this film for years because it struck me as Hollywood moralizing that would inevitably resort to stereotypes and a skewed sense of self-righteousness. (I know it's wrong to pre-judge a film, but come on, didn't I just describe 99.9% of Hollywood racial dramas?) But In the Heat of the Night was everything I thought it wouldn't be: even-handed rather than polemical, nuanced and not bludgeoned, artistic rather than cheaply ripped from the headlines. Virgil Tibbs, the displaced Philadelphia homicide detective, wants to get out of the Mississippi town in which he finds himself involved in an investigation as much as the local cops want him gone. The chief, Gillespie (Rod Steiger), doesn't hide his prejudices, but he also notes Tibbs' own to goad the officer he knows is talented into staying. He knows that a man like Tibbs would like nothing more than to solve the mystery and prove himself better than all these country hicks, and Poitier's steely gaze cannot hide his agreement with the assessment.

This revelation of Tibbs' own racial hangups is not an attempt to soften the whites but to deepen and humanize the racial commentary. Admittedly, Jewison's action scenes somewhat undercut the wisome and depth of the dialogue and acting with such on-the-nose visual cues as a Confederate flag emblem on the front fender of a car pursuing Tibbs to some obvious angling of shots of lynch mob members. Nevertheless, this is a powerful document of racial tension that has aged remarkably well, buoyed by two dynamic performances by Poitier and Steiger and scripted with intelligence. I'd like to mull this over a few more times before I'd write a full-length review, but in the meantime read Adam Zanzie's excellent piece on the film. Grade: A-


Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986)

Jonathan Demme's stylish descent into yuppie hell plays like a more class-conscious take on Martin Scorsese's After Hours. Where Griffin Dunne eventually wound up right back where he started, forgetting his mad fever dream, Jeff Daniels' Charlie does not get off so lightly. His corporate VP  gets swept away by a dynamo who goes by the name of Lulu (Melanie Griffin) and endures such a mad and, eventually horrific, plunge off the deep end that he must reevaluate everything he believes in. The three main characters (including a striking Ray Liotta as Lulu's insane ex-husband) are all white, but they move trough a background of multiracial and multiclass people, and Charlie's interactions with them change him. On the flip-side, the more they stick together, the more Lulu begins to domesticate, becoming the sort of bourgeois trophy wife that the normal Charlie would love to be with, though he's already become used to the wild minx version.

Demme turns the film into an exercise in duality: The film's tone switches from comedy to horror. The cinematography transitions from pastel-colored romp to cold, metallic tones so quickly the effect is at once barely noticeable and deeply unsettling. "What are you going to do now that you've seen how the other half lives?" Lulu asks, furthering the dualism by clarifying "The other half of you." The other film that makes for an easy point of comparison with the film is David Lynch's Blue Velvet, a connection made in their mutual view of small-town America as no bastion of morality in the face of rotting cities. Yet unlike Lynch's despairing suburban hell and Scorsese's expressionist frenzy, Something Wild has a real sliver of hope running through it, the idea of recognizing one's duality and finding spiritual middle class in the sharply divided racial and class system of the '80s. That's such a lofty idea I nearly forget you have to fight your way past a crazed Ray Liotta to get to it. Grade: A

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)

Howard Hawks' brassy, vibrant Technicolor musical at first glance seems a depiction of vacant gold-digging, but the more one pays attention, the more one can only see the film as a vicious attack on the commercialized notion of romance, a deconstruction brought about by its two female leads. Russell and Monroe are so dynamic and forward they seem to grab a hold of the camera itself and manipulate our view of them. They make an unstoppable duo, Russell's Dorothy consumes every hunk in sight, while Monroe (cannily satirizing her own public image) uses airy, wide-eyed bimbosity to set traps for rich schlubs looking for a trophy of her caliber. I don't know if a film has ever torn down the male gaze so thoroughly, not only hijacking it to show how women have sexual desires (the "fairer sex" has always been more sexually experienced than the men in Hawks' films, but here they are almost unfathomably to the males) but in the pair's manipulation of that gaze to position men right where they want them. Even if the men are sitting in a theater.

Hawks' use of musical interludes in his films (think Rio Bravo and To Have and Have Not) has always been rich in character, and the grand sequences here are as clever and telling as they are dynamic and artistic. From the opening moment, as Monroe and Russell appear in ruby-red sequins to instantly monopolize the attention, Hawks positions the musical numbers to demonstrate their utter power over men and the uninhibited expression of their own desires. Perversity gets stacked on top of perversity here, but maybe I only use that word because it's so unorthodox to be shown the female desire instead of the male gaze. This is damn near a perfect picture, as funny as it is transgressive, and one of my three favorite Hawks pictures, along with Rio Bravo and Only Angels Have Wings. Grade: A+

Brian De Palma: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.

If Wolfe's roman à clef was meant to be a detailed account of '80s New York in all its schismatic glory, highlighting the split between the budding Wall Street aristocracy and the terror of crack-ridden streets below the high-rise apartments, De Palma's film paints broad strokes of weak satire. No, that's not right; the film only softens one side of the dichotomy between wealthy, oblivious whites and impoverished minorities. Which side gets it easier in the eyes of majority-baiting Hollywood? Oh, take a wild guess.

Tom Hanks, not yet moved beyond his lighthearted comic image, plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street investor who makes millions by the minute and enjoys living the life of luxury. Hanks, only a few years out from his dramatic breakthroughs in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, occasionally flashes an edge that he could have brought to the fore had the screenplay wanted him to truly delve into the seedier aspects of a Wall Street player. Instead, the film uses Hanks' comic charm, portraying him as out-of-touch but not particularly loathsome in any capacity, despite his general celebration of his garish lifestyle and infidelity with a Southern gold digger named Maria (Melanie Griffith). Even when the two accidentally drive into a crime-ridden area of South Bronx and run over one of two black men who accost them, the film does its best to absolve Sherman while placing any blame for the racist and classist attitudes brought up in the hit-and-run squarely on the shoulders of Maria, caricatured out of human recognition into a whining harpy.

This simplified satire might have worked had the same humanizing effect been given to the other half of the film's overview of New York. Instead, poor Sherman, in the wrong place at the wrong time, runs into the undiluted fury of the poor and minority bloc of the city, their grandiose anger exposing hypocrisies and self-defeating extremism while the privileged enjoy a charmed interpretation of white-collar oblivion. The caricature of Al Sharpton, Reverend Bacon, borders on the racist, with De Palma's low-angle shots of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils nearly framing actor John Hancock in minstrel poses.

Bacon rails against the notion of the unidentified driver of a Mercedes getting away with the cops' indifference, rightly noting that they wouldn't just drop the case if some black driver had run over a middle-class white family. But like Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, Bacon is as much a self-promoter as he is a civic crusader, and he clearly plays up for the cameras to make himself the focal point of the manipulated outrage. But he's successful, and soon he's got Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), the D.A. looking to for a way to win the minority vote after prosecuting minorities overwhelmingly, quaking in his suit. Abraham removed his name from the billing over a contract dispute, but part of me wonders if he did so after reflecting on his performance. If Hancock must make out the leaders of the black community to be nothing more than charlatans looking to crucify a white devil to maintain their stats, Abraham plays Weiss as a flagrant Jewish stereotype, greedily hunting power and also looking for a way to get one up over on the WASPs. When Bacon accuses him of letting the wealthy white go unpunished, Weiss frets over being seen as a "hymie racist pig," then muses aloud how the Italians, Irish and WASPs will love to see him squirm.

Obviously, this is satire, but it's paper-thin, and De Palma inserts nothing to offset the racist view of the city's minorities being wholly self-serving. Instead of flecking human beings with ironies and contradictions, he presents two-dimensional caricatures with comedy that isn't funny enough to absolve the troubling simplicity of their ethnic identities. Pointing out the class blindness that affects the underclass is a perfectly valid criticism, but here the blacks and Latinos come off as nothing more than a mob looking for a white scapegoat. And even when De Palma finally gets down to going after the elites—presenting them as entertained by Sherman's connection to such a pedestrian crime like Roman nobles approvingly watching enslaved gladiators torn to ribbons—he still lets Sherman almost completely off the hook. At the ridiculous trial that closes the film (presided over a black judge instead of the book's Jewish one so as to make Sherman's acquittal seem victorious rather than proof of the system stacked against non-whites), poor, frail Sherman is framed against a screaming, hissing, even singing (hymns, natch) crowd of the poor and pigmentally varied. Whether the De Palma meant it or not, and the swelling, unironic strings that accompany the verdict suggest at least someone did, the audience is meant to root for McCoy to get off Scot-free.

This is all bad enough, but various other additions weigh down the film in subtler ways. The film nearly approaches cleverness when Sherman attends a performance of Don Giovanni and clearly sees himself in the character, a point De Palma then drives him with a sledgehammer, ruining the one good part of the film. Bruce Willis, foisted upon De Palma and a noted pain on-set, plays the alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow, who desperately launches the hit-and-run case to give himself a popular story to justify the paychecks he drinks every day. Whatever role Fallow played in Wolfe's novel, he has no reason to exist here, and De Palma must resort to a framing device that awkwardly inserts him into the movie so Willis can deliver stiff voiceovers in that noncommittal drone of his.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is so clumsy that even the moments of pure De Palma fail to add some life into the film. A swirling overhead shot of Sherman and a coworker is an ingenious touch that makes great use of the striking floor design, but it only goes to show how little time the director spends in Sherman's corporate world. A split-screen between Bacon's self-aggrandizing harangues and a changing right image first showing an amused Fallow looking on then a nervous Weiss watching on TV feels like someone trying to ape De Palma with no regard for composition or juxtaposition. Even the elaborate, wildly entertaining tracking shot that opens the film, following Fallow as he arrives for a speaking engagement through the underground of a complex past admirers and pack reporters, fails to maintain its power when placed in context with the rest of the movie. When the film soon moves completely away from Fallow for an hour, the shot, maybe even Fallow's entire presence in the film, seems a self-serving addition.

After filming completed and The Bonfire of the Vanities went out to a critical and commercial savaging, De Palma finally admitted his error, even letting Julie Salamon come in and write a tell-all on the film's troubled production. I want to read that book as much as Wolfe's source novel: even a basic summary suggests studio tampering, uncooperative stars and wasteful expenditures. But hell, all of that is visible on the screen. It is stunning that a filmmaker as radical (aesthetically and politically) could make a film so firmly reactionary in its ultimate absolution of the luxury class—compare the subverted race roles of the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom! to the clearly demarcated racial cartoons drawn here. Almost as unforgivable, it's one of the director's dullest films. Even the "punchline"-lacking Untouchables (to take a page from Pauline Kael) felt more alive than this.

The only good thing I can say about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it sports simply one of the greatest shots to ever appear in a De Palma film, a perfectly, almost freakishly timed shot of a Concorde jet landing at sunset as the landing strip aligns perfectly with the descending orb. It is a stunning, arduously planned moment, and it's the best indication of how much better the film might have been had De Palma and his crew been given a better cast and screenplay. From what I can tell, a more accurate representation of Wolfe's novel might have been right up De Palma's alley; he would have delighted in tearing everything apart. Instead, he made by far his most reactionary film, a lighthearted spoof of the upper class and a vicious portrayal of the poor and disenfranchised. Had De Palma not made his mea culpa later, I might have thought he did this on purpose; his other big Hollywood spectacle, The Untouchables, is also conservative. But even the wide berth I give to De Palma's irony has its limits, and if The Bonfire of the Vanities was meant to be as bad as it is, well, mission accomplished.

Brian De Palma: Body Double

In some respects, Body Double may be the quintessential Brian De Palma film. This is not to say that it is his best, and it may not even mean that I even like the damn thing (there are too many clashing perceptions to sort out a coherent view on the first go). Instead, it summarizes the director's strengths and flaws to such an extreme that the film does not veer between brilliance and garbage so much as jump between the two without transition as if using wormholes for transportation. Only one film removed from Blow Out, Body Double develops the ideas of that film to their apex, mixing De Palma's anarchic form of brutalized Godardian experimentation with his corkscrewing thrillers.

If Scarface represented a sort of warning shot across the studios' brow, Body Double is outright war. De Palma views his opening shots as a means of putting the audience on-guard, never easing them into a movie via what he views as the boring, wasteful helicopter shots of city skylines or montages of neighborhood life.* Here, he opens in such transparently schlocky terms that for once no one can seriously believe what we're watching is not a put-on. With dripping blood titles and midnight-feature mise-en-scène, De Palma goes for broke, establishing a film-within-a-film so unbelievably campy that it's all he can do not to walk out like Alfred Hitchcock at the start of The Wrong Man and warn the audience what they're in for.

This reflexive opening shot moves over various tacky props that awkwardly and amusingly mix Western Gothic with Eastern mysticism before setting on a vampire sleeping in a coffin. As the music builds, he raises up in one of those cheesy vampire "blah" poses, and he freezes. The moment is uncomfortable: is this intentional? Why is this being held so long? Suddenly, we hear "Cut!" and a film crew takes the man out of the prop coffin, and we learn he's suffered a panic attack from claustrophobia. De Palma wastes no time building on the reflexive layers by suggesting the man had an attack less from the confinement of the coffin but from opening his eyes and seeing a camera a foot from his face. He also highlights the trashy nature of the upcoming film when he follows the actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) back home: De Palma frames him beside a ludicrous hot dog joint luring in customers with a mock-up of a wiener nestled in the bun from the side, making for an image so transparently sexual it scarcely counts as innuendo. Dejected and afraid he'll be replaced by his double and then cut out of the part entirely, Jake returns home, only to find his girlfriend in bed with another man. He's been replaced everywhere.

To do much more than give the most basic of plot information following this bizarre sequence would not only be a sidestepping of critical responsibility but also damn near impossible. This is a savage, uncompromising film, one that replaces the satiric wickedness of De Palma's early films with a brutal desire to shove his aesthetic and intellectual choices down the audience's throat. He tried playing their game with Scarface, giving the plebeian hordes all the blood and excess they could ask for with that movie and getting ignored in the process. But if the critics were going to willfully miss what he was trying to do and crowds would follow suit, then De Palma might as well tell them what he really thinks. In addition, he must have suspected he might be tossed out of the studio system, so he also strives to get in one last exercise of his pet themes.

Body Double folds in on itself routinely. Jake heads to an acting class to try a form of acting therapy to overcome his claustrophobia, and when he freezes up the instructor berates him with cries of, "You have to act!" But the artistically impotent and physically cuckold Jake is useless, and De Palma channels Wasson's exceedingly limited range and his lack of movie-star looks (he resembles a young Bill Maher with the least charming traces of Steve Guttenberg thrown in for good measure) to ensure the audience never connects with any one dimension of diegetic reality.

Having taken his suspense prowess to its zenith with Blow Out, De Palma sets about not only deconstructing suspense tropes and building blocks but demolishing them. Jake runs into another struggling actor, Sam (Gregg Henry) who just happens to need a flatmate for a house that no actor fishing for bit parts in B-movies could afford for all the sexual favors in the world. It looks as if someone made a house out of one of those tacky rotating restaurants designed to make eaters feel like royalty (or gods). Sam takes out a telescope to show Jake a woman across the way who dances erotically every night with her blinds open. It's obvious the woman dances for someone, obvious that the Rear Window framing of this voyeurism will lead to some kind of trouble and obvious that Sam, who disappears from the film completely for the next hour or so, is a bit too eager to point out this lady and get the hell out of Dodge.

If one is to connect on any level with Body Double beyond frothing disgust, it is necessary to step back and see how defiantly De Palma refuses to let the audience engage with this film. I admit, it's a tedious process; the "it's meant to be bad!" argument has become so ubiquitous I begin to suspect that bad movies no longer exist, only ironic ones. But De Palma has enough reflexive cred to back up the notion he wants the audience to see the film as it is being constructed and not simply accept the images before them. Wasson's inability to find the tragedy in his Vertigo-esque claustrophobia lends his Edvard-Munchian facial contortions an open comedy, and De Palma ensures that every panic attack breaks up the film: when Jake chases the (other) man stalking the woman he loves from afar into a tunnel, he seizes up, and the man stops as if waiting for him. When the woman, Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton) catches up and thanks Jake for recovering the purse the thief left for him, their kiss instantly shifts the background into poor-quality rear-projection that broadcasts its falsity.

To even sort out the titular issue of doubles, one must be prepared to find multiple splits within each major character. It starts off literally, with Jake fretting over his double replacing him on-set, then he becomes a double for the creepy man watching Gloria with murderous intent. When the assailant finally strikes, Jake soon finds another woman, a porn actress named Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) who dances the same dance that transfixed him. Tracking down Holly leads to a number of role reversals and newly fabricated personae (Jake, heretofore unable to act his way out of a paper bag, instantly slips into the role of porn producer). On top of all that, when you get a good look at "the Indian's" face, the garish creepiness of it is undercut by how it is obviously the result of makeup and masks.

These in-film splits define the constantly shifting nature of its meaningless reality, which De Palma uses not only to peel back the layers of film but expose how cynical the '80s love of materialism really is. By preventing the audience from looking at this movie as anything other than a movie -- from its splintered fragments of plot and genre to its outrageously bad ensemble casting, using not only unskilled actors but ones that don't even play off each other -- he points out the seediness of Reagan's America. This is especially true when De Palma does location shooting, the malls and clubs in which he films looking not all-together classier than the putrid pastels and leopard prints dotting the porn set Jake visits. The glass elevator of a mall ties in with that absurd Modernist house in which Jake lives, presenting the idea that yuppies deserve to be seen looming over those unworthy of bourgeois delights, while the gauzy nightclub where Jake goes with Holly could be another porn set.

Building off that, De Palma mercilessly takes the extremes of sex and violence to new nadirs here, rubbing the mainstream's nose in its shit. The sheer amount of screen time devoted to breasts suggests he felt the only way to get away with this heady exercise in lowbrow sleaze was to make it as sleazy as possible, and he frames the violence in outrageously suggestive terms. When "the Indian" comes for Gloria, he kills her with a power drill, and De Palma frames the fatal blow from behind to show the drill pushing down between the man's legs into the woman, and we see the grisly aftermath below as Jake sees the bit drive through the ceiling and blood spurt through the hole. This comes before Jake's descent into the porn world, but it stands as the most concise, vicious summary of De Palma's equation of the pornographic underworld with the seedy one that's taken root in the mainstream.


At least there are a few lighter jokes and sly allusions here to buoy the intensely confrontational nature of the blacker comedy. As Jake watches Gloria through a window in the mall, the store's owner calls security, but when a guard asks Jake, "Can I help you?" our man simply says "No thank you" and walks away without consequence. Later, when Scully moves into porn acting to get close to Holly, his bad acting in "legitimate" movies inverts when a producer responds to his ridiculous questions with, "What are you, some kind of method actor?" I also wondered if Gloria Revelle was a play on "se réveiller," meaning "to wake up." Of course, without the reflexive it would mean more along the lines of "to get it up," which she certainly does for Jake.

Throughout, you can see De Palma tearing down everything, and I found myself confronting my disdain for irony as a defense mechanism with this film, which is so bad on so many levels but clearly seeks to be unpleasant. But the difference between De Palma's style at its best and the sort of approaches I find tedious is that De Palma doesn't stand outside his movie and act as if he's above it. Instead, he puts himself right in the shit with the actors (and the audience), embodying all that he hates and digging deeper into his themes and issues because of it. It's essentially another iteration of the split between A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs: both are movies condemning fascistic violence in supposedly evolved social structures and privileged characters, but one looks down the with condescension while the other truly gets inside the moral abandon to find motivation. De Palma, like his clearest successors, the Neveldine/Taylor duo, works best when he throws his camera into the fracas and treats even the most brazenly reflexive moments with fierce conviction. He certainly like to have a laugh at his own films, but there's nothing more serious to a comedian than comedy.

By the end, everything collapses, the circular motion of the film from the coffin at the start to the open grave at the end proving what a self-involved exercise it all was. And when the villain starts screaming "You've got to act!" there's no way to find some kind of coherent logic to all this. The pieces don't add up, intentionally so, and you can practically De Palma asking "Oh, what do you care anyway?" as the credits roll over one last shot of breasts. This may be the most contemptuous I've ever seen a movie be to an audience, which is all the more disturbing because it might be, on some level, deserved.


*De Palma says this in an interview recorded between him and director Noah Baumbach for the Criterion Collection's superlative DVD and Blu-Ray release of Blow Out, which includes, among other things, a remastered, hi-def version of Murder à la Mod.