A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, July 11, 2025

Eureka (Nicolas Roeg, 1983)

Gene Hackman in Eureka 

Cast: Gene Hackman, Theresa Russell, Rutger Hauer, Jane Lapotaire, Mickey Rourke, Ed Lauter, Joe Pesci, Helena Kallianotes, Cavan Kendall, Corin Redgrave, Joe Spinell. Screenplay: Paul Mayersberg, based on a book by Marshall Houts. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Michael Seymour. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers. 

I'm pretty sure what Nicolas Roeg had in mind when he made Eureka were those blockbuster melodramas of the 1940s and '50s based on doorstop bestsellers with a touch of scandal, like Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942, Duel in the Sun (King Vidor et al., 1946), and Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956). They danced on the edge of what the Production Code would allow, but Roeg wasn't hindered by that. Still, he managed to get an X rating slapped on the movie (for, of all things, violence) that was only one of the reasons Eureka was pulled from distribution and failed at the box office. It didn't receive much approval from critics, either, although today there are some who think it an overlooked classic. Gene Hackman plays a prospector who strikes it rich when he discovers gold, buys an island in the Caribbean, and has a daughter (Theresa Russell) who marries a Frenchman. That's where his troubles have compounded by the time the film gets done with the backstory of his gold strike. Everybody wants a piece of his fortune, including his son-in-law (Rutger Hauer) and the mob, headed by a gangster named Mayakofsky (Joe Pesci). The whole thing culminates in a murder and a big trial scene that includes one of the most improbable cross-examinations I've ever seen in a movie. Oh, and there's also a voodoo orgy for good measure. It's a mess, barely held together by Hackman's professionalism as an actor, but it has the kind of perverse fascination that only a movie mess possesses.

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