Exploding heads, white eyes, burnt corpses… welcome to the world of Scanners.
The plot? A homeless man with deadly telepathic abilities named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is picked up off the street by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan). Vale learns that there are other telepaths like himself called ’scanners’ and is trained to use his abilities to kill Daryl Revok (Michael Ironside), the leader of an underground movement whose goal is to unite all scanners. As the film progresses, Vale not only uncovers a conspiracy to create more scanners, but learns the truth about his own mysterious past.
I was not an early admirer of director David Cronenberg. My admiration grew with time, and finally coalesced with his last two films - A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises. Weaned on Spielberg and Lucas, Cronenberg’s phantasmagorical vision made me uncomfortable and tested my patience. Which is exactly what it was meant to do. Much like David Lynch, he’s an acquired taste. Revisiting Scanners increased my appreciation for the film, but also proved that some of my complaints as a teenager were valid ones.
At this point in his career, Cronenberg was somewhere between an amateur and a professional. His direction is solid from a technical standpoint, but his sense of pacing is terrible. His script is intelligent and imaginative, but contains virtually no characterization (reportedly the film was greenlit without a completed script and rushed into production). This is also evident in his casting instincts. On one side we have Patrick McGoohan, Michael Ironside and Jennifer O’Neill… not too shabby. On the other side, we have Stephen Lack as our lead, and his performance is simply dreadful. In future films, Cronenberg would compensate for these weaknesses, but Scanners is rife with them.
It’s easy to see how Scanners was a success in its day. The violence is still shocking, and the concept is still intriguing. But without characters you can care about, it’s an empty exercise.
Yesterday we lost one of the truly great composers from the Silver Age of film scoring - Maurice Jarre has died of cancer at age 84. A casual look at his credits will describe his greatness far better than I can. Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, A Passage To India, all for director David Lean. The Professionals, Night Of The Generals, Grand Prix, The Man Who Would Be King, Shogun, Witness, Ghost. And a couple of lesser-known but personal favorites - Tai-Pan and Lion Of The Desert 
In my annual pilgrimages to The Egyptian Theatre for their Film Noir Festival, a name that pops up every so often is that of director Andre De Toth. Pitfall and Crime Wave are, in my humble opinion, classics of the genre. His most famous film is undoubtedly House Of Wax, which was actually atypical for him - his output consisted largely of film noir and westerns. So when I saw his name on Day Of The Outlaw, I knew I would be well taken care of.
Violence is about to erupt when Captain Bruhn (Burl Ives) and his band of criminals blow into town and seize control. On the run with $40,000 in gold in their saddlebags, Bruhn destroys every gun in town and quarantines the women to prevent his men from mistreating them - but after a month on the run his men are impossible to control. Worse yet, Bruhn is slowly dying from a bullet he took during the robbery. Both Starrett and Bruhn know that when he dies, his men will destroy the town and everyone in it.
To save the town, Starrett decides to sacrifice his own life by claiming he knows a secret passage through the mountains, when in truth there isn’t one. With Bruhn’s silent approval, Starrett leads the criminals into the mountains to die of exposure.
The final episode of The Prisoner was so confusing and controversial that creator / star Patrick McGoohan reportedly had to go into hiding until the furor passed - and in the intervening years, the series has lost none of its power. Having just watched it for the first time, I felt compelled to find him and admonish him for taking me on such a bizarre, compelling, and ultimately frustrating journey. Of course, were he still alive, McGoohan would kick my ass.
For the uninitiated, The Prisoner is the story of a British spy who abruptly retires for reasons unknown. Almost immediately after handing in his resignation, he is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious island where ex-spies are held prisoner in a community known as “The Village.” He is assigned a number instead of a name - Number Six - and is placed under constant surveillance. Every week, a new administrator - Number Two - is assigned to The Village, and attempts to break Number Six with drugs, psychological warfare, torture, you name it. Unsure if he has been kidnapped by his own side or an enemy, Number Six staunchly refuses to answer any questions, but repeatedly asks one - who is Number One?
Due to his popularity on British television in the spy series Danger Man (in fact, some Prisoner fans theorize that Number Six is actually the same character from Danger Man, John Drake) McGoohan was given complete creative freedom on The Prisoner, and he certainly made use of it. The stories are elliptical, the dialogue is cryptic, the performances are theatrical, the camera is restless, the editing is frantic, and it blends just about every genre you can think of. One minute it’s a spy thriller, the next it’s a satire, then it’s science fiction - and in one episode, it even becomes a Western! It’s an allegory about power and free will, it’s a commentary on society, religion, education, nuclear war and just about anything else you can think of. It’s as if Patrick McGoohan realized he would never get an opportunity like this again, and poured everything he wanted to say and do into this one project.
As a result, you’ve got a wildly uneven show that sometimes strikes creative gold, and sometimes falls flat on its face. Out of the seventeen episodes of The Prisoner, half of them are downright terrific. The other half - in particular the final two episodes - are so determined to break with convention they end up completely alienating the audience. An apt comparison is Twin Peaks, a show that began with one foot in reality and one foot in David Lynch’s bizarre imagination, but eventually became completely surreal. Did I understand what McGoohan was trying to say in the final episode? Yes. Was it emotionally satisfying? No. Film - especially television - has to do both. 
The math on this one was simple. I recently enjoyed plowing through McMurtry’s masterwork, Lonesome Dove, and I love the film Hud - so reading McMurtry’s first novel, upon which Hud was based, was an easy decision.
The other major difference between the book and the film is the character of Alma, the house maid Hud relentlessly tries to seduce, played brilliantly by Patricia Neal in the film. In the book, this character is black, and Hud’s advances are far more brutal. I’m not surprised that this character didn’t reach the screen intact - somehow, I don’t think audiences in the 1960’s would have accepted seeing Paul Newman try to rape a black woman.
Sci-fi fans are a pack of whiny little bitches. They slobber over the virtues of The Dark Knight, but when the movie adaptation of Watchmen comes along, they respond with nitpicking and ambivalence.
In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoyed Watchmen tremendously. It’s a bold, intelligent, handsomely made film. It’s also one of the most faithful film adaptations I’ve ever seen, judiciously pruning away subplots and smartly streamlining concepts that simply wouldn’t work on film (i.e. the alien squid). Like the graphic novel, it demands a lot of its audience - that you leave your preconceptions at the door, that you pay attention, that you think. 
First and foremost, everybody knows and loves Batman. Secondly, Dark Knight was PG-13. Watchmen is a hard R, featuring attempted rape, child molestation and graphic violence. Third, Dark Knight had well-known actors - one of whom died a highly publicized death. Fourth, and I think this is critical - Dark Knight tells you what to think, verbally explaining its characters and themes within the film, whereas Watchmen allows you to draw your own conclusions. 
None of this is meant to be an attack on Dark Knight. I think the film is overrated, but I did enjoy it. Drawing parallels between the two is my way of trying to determining what audiences - and fanboys - will accept and what they won’t. I believe that in the years to come, Watchmen will gain both popularity and prominence. It’s just a shame that such a unique, ambitious movie can’t get the credit - and box office receipts - it deserves right now. 
One of the few good habits I’ve acquired recently is a willingness to study a subject or pick up a book that I know little or nothing about. I spotted The Captain on a shelf at the Santa Monica Library, read the description - a tugboat captain helping to escort Allied vessels though enemy waters in World War II - and said, “Why not?”
I can only imagine what my reaction to Watchmen would have been had I read in in 1987 at age sixteen. It’s a dense, epic, revisionist comic book (excuse me - graphic novel) that deftly subverts traditional comic-book heroes and, at the same time, makes several pointed observations about American politics and history.
However, when it comes to characterization, this accumulation of detail is a virtue. Each of Watchmen’s supposed superheroes is a fleshed-out human being, and you care for them - even the psychotic ones. Indeed, Rorschach is the most endearing of the bunch, and he’s completely insane. And by delving so deeply into the characters and their histories, Moore generates a comic-book mythology where one previously did not exist - not an easy thing to do in twelve issues. 
As I’ve said in the past, one of the benefits of living in Los Angeles is that we have an active revival circuit - The New Beverly, The Egyptian, The Aero, The Silent Movie Theatre and The Nuart all help keep movie junkies like myself off our couches and in the darkness of a movie theatre.
Since that fateful day in 1979, my memories of the film have been fragmented; the corpse of a dead Indian shaman bleeding through his burial shroud – a woman falling into a campfire as she is attacked by vampire bats – ghosts in a cave dwelling – an eerie, silhouetted image of an Indian standing on a rocky crag in the desert at sunset, his arms held up in triumph. My adolescent mind was also transfixed by the sight of a young and lovely Kathryn Harrold bathing in a hot spring (as was my adult mind upon seeing the film again).
The movie truly is “Jaws with wings” – Nick Mancuso (an Italian pretending to be an American Indian) plays Youngman Duran, a New Mexico sheriff whose tribe, the Maskai, are being driven out by an ambitious Indian named Walker Chee (Stephen Macht, a Jew pretending to be an American Indian) who wants to drill for oil on their sacred land.
Duran’s grandfather, an aged Indian mystic, dies shortly before a colony of deadly vampire bats invade the territory - killing cattle, sheep, and reborn Christians! With the help of “vampire bat expert” Phillip Payne (David Warner), who is essentially a splicing of Hooper and Quint from Jaws, Duran tries to locate and destroy the colony only to realize via a drug-induced hallucination (don’t ask) that the ghost of his dead grandfather has summoned the bats to reclaim the land for his people.
Put simply, the film is lousy. It’s a perfect example of why A-list directors shouldn’t make B-movies. Director Arthur Hiller strained so hard to elevate the material that he neglected to make an entertaining movie. The only person who seems to realize he’s in a silly B-movie is David Warner, who hams it up gloriously. Otherwise, the performances and direction are so earnest it’s painful to watch.
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Upon completing the novel Lonesome Dove, I discovered that certain elements of the story are based in actual Texas history. My beloved protagonists, Gus and Call, are loosely based on two real cattlemen - Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, who drove two thousand head of cattle from Texas to Colorado, establishing the Goodnight / Loving trail. When Loving was struck by Indian arrows and died of blood poisoning, Goodnight carried his body all the way back to Texas for burial, as Call does for Gus.