Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)

Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper in Out of the Blue

Cast: Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell, Don Gordon, Raymond Burr, Leon Eriksen, Fiona Brody, David L. Crowley, Joan Hoffman, Carl Nelson. Screenplay: Leonard Yakir, Brenda Nelson. Cinematography: Marc Champion. Production design: Leon Eriksen. Film editing: Doris Dyck. Music: Tom Lavin. 

You'd think that a film that begins with a truck barreling into a school bus full of kids couldn't get any worse. Out of the Blue does. The unpleasantness has only begun for the driver of the truck, Don (Dennis Hopper); his wife, Kathy (Sharon Farrell); and their daughter, Cindy (Linda Manz), known as Cebe -- short for "citizens' band," as in radio. Don goes to prison, Kathy is a heroin addict, and Cebe, in her early teens, does whatever she wants, which includes idolizing Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious, running away from home, and loving her father until she confronts the truth about him. The truth is not pretty. Despite the efforts of a child psychologist, Dr. Brean (Raymond Burr), to rescue Cebe from her dysfunctional parents and aimless life, the outcome is bleak. In the original script, Dr. Brean played a more positive role in Cebe's life, but when Hopper took over as director he was of a different mind. Let's just say that this is a painful, harrowing movie with some gritty performances and a grim determination to face the unpleasant fact that some lives are doomed. Is it a good film? Well, some films transcend such questions, and Out of the Blue is one of them. 

River's Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)

Cast: Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, Daniel Roebuck, Dennis Hopper, Joshua John Miller, Roxana Zal, Josh Richman, Phillip Brock, Tom Bower, Constance Forsland, Leo Rossi, Jim Metzler. Screenplay: Neal Jimenez. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: John Muto. Film editing: Howard E. Smith, Sonya Sones. Music: Jürgen Knieper.

I'm a faithful watcher of credits, even though today they're sometimes as long as the movie itself. I think if those people devoted their time to making the movie, they deserve a little of my time watching their names scroll by. Not really. The actual reason for watching the credits is that sometimes they reveal tidbits of fascinating information, such as this one for River's Edge: "trainer: Mr. Glover." I have to wonder what Crispin Glover's trainer did: It's not a particularly challenging role physically, so I have to assume it had something to do with keeping the actor from going further over the top than he does in his mannered and eccentric performance as Layne, an adolescent pothead who gets caught up in the aftermath of the murder of a teenage girl. River's Edge was something of a shocker in its day, variously interpreted as an indictment of American society's failure to provide a clear direction for bored and alienated youth, or as a critique of parenting or the school system, or just as a horror story masked as a true crime movie. The screenplay by Neal Jimenez has its roots in two news stories about teenagers in different parts of California who knew about the murder of one of their schoolmates but covered it up. It's not just the teens who get their share of blame: The adults include negligent parents, a half-crazed loner, an ineffective teacher, bullying cops, and the usual gaggle of reporters. That the half-crazed loner is played by Dennis Hopper links River's Edge with another and more celebrated movie of 1986: David Lynch's Blue Velvet. There are moments in Tim Hunter's film, especially when Hopper's character is clinging to his beloved inflatable sex doll, that rival Lynch's. Lynch, however, would probably not have been so tender as Jimenez and Hunter are to the lovers played by Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye, who lend a romantic John Hughes note to the film that dulls its edge.

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider

Wyatt: Peter Fonda
Billy: Dennis Hopper
George Hanson: Jack Nicholson
Connection: Phil Spector
Stranger on Highway: Luke Askew
Lisa: Luana Anders
Sarah: Sabrina Scharf
Jack: Robert Walker Jr.
Mary: Toni Basil
Karen: Karen Black

Director: Dennis Hopper
Screenplay: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
Cinematography: László Kovács
Art direction: Jeremy Kay
Film editing: Donn Cambern

In his book Have You Seen... David Thomson discusses all the ways in which Easy Rider became a landmark film, usually cited along with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) as one of the harbingers of the revolution in American filmmaking at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, movies that signaled the emergence of a new, younger film audience. And then Thomson calls Easy Rider "unwatchable." As one who was part of that new, younger film audience, I tend to agree. Except for every moment when Jack Nicholson is onscreen, launching one of the great film careers, Easy Rider really is unwatchable. The drug buy and sale that sets up the odyssey of Wyatt and Billy across America is clumsily scripted and filmed. The beginnings of their motorcycle tour is remarkable only for the nod to John Ford in the glimpses of Monument Valley, and the stay in the hippie commune is tedious. The one interesting moment comes when László Kovács's camera does a 360 degree pan across the faces of the communards, an echo of the similar pan of the faces sheltering in the barn in Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) and maybe of Raoul Coutard's pan around the farmyard in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), except that there's little of interest in the faces assembled in the commune. (The sequence only made me realize that the people gathered there are now, if still alive, collecting Social Security.)  But when Nicholson appears, the film snaps sharply into focus, only to sag back into its old tired ways. The scene in which George Hanson is murdered is awkwardly staged, so that we don't really know what's going on until it's over, and the rest of the film is just waiting for the inevitable demise of Wyatt and Billy. The acid trip in the New Orleans cemetery is little more than a collection of avant garde clichés. There are a few compensations, like the music on the soundtrack, and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper do a good job of delineating Wyatt and Billy, the latter dangerously volatile, the former more cautious and laid back. But Easy Rider is showing its age, looking more and more like a 50-year-old movie, while some of its other celebrated contemporaries wear their age with grace.

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in The American Friend

Tom Ripley: Dennis Hopper
Jonathan Zimmermann: Bruno Ganz
Marianne Zimmermann: Lisa Kreuzer
Raoul Minot: Gérard Blain
Derwatt: Nicholas Ray
The American: Samuel Fuller
Marcangelo: Peter Lilienthal
Ingraham: Daniel Schmidt
Rodolphe: Lou Castel

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Music: Jürgen Knieper
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

When I called Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) "stoner noir" yesterday, I thought I had pretty much exhausted the genre with the exception of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973). But then I watched The American Friend and realized my error. Actually, the plot and milieu of The American Friend, loosely adapted from Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, is material more for a thriller than for film noir's brooding exploration of the lower depths of criminality. Here we are in what might be called the upper depths: art fraud and murder for hire. But mostly The American Friend is an exercise in watching the phenomenon that was Dennis Hopper, who came to the set fresh from the horrors, the horrors of working on Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). It is, as most of Hopper's performances were, an exercise in self-destruction. And perfectly cast against him, in what was his first important film, is Bruno Ganz, struggling to keep his head. Ganz and Hopper eventually came to blows off-set, and then spent a night drinking their way into a fast friendship and an entertaining tandem performance. There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it character to the film's set-up exposition about why mild-mannered picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann gets caught up in the manipulations of Tom Ripley and Raul Minot, but it doesn't matter much. Zimmermann's first job for Minot is beautifully staged, with just enough eccentric touches -- Zimmermann colliding with a dumpster and a stranger (Jean Eustache, one of the director cronies Wenders cast in his film) offering him a Band-Aid -- to make it more than routine thriller stalking. And the sequence on the train is a classic of cutting between on-location and studio set filming, culminating in Zimmerman's exhilarated scream from the view port on the engine. To my taste, The American Friend is a little too loosey-goosey in exposition and a little too self-indulgent in its director cameos, making it catnip for cinéastes but maybe not solid enough for mainstream viewers. The thriller bones show through, making me want to see the material done a little more slickly and conventionally. But as personal filmmaking goes, it's fascinating.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel  

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now

Capt. Willard: Martin Sheen
Col. Kurtz: Marlon Brando
Lt. Col. Kilgore: Robert Duvall
Jay "Chef" Hicks: Frederic Forrest
Lance B. Johnson: Sam Bottoms
Tyrone "Clean" Miller: Laurence Fishburne
Chief Phillips: Albert Hall
Col Lucas: Harrison Ford
Photojournalist: Dennis Hopper

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Based on a novel by Joseph Conrad
Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Film editing: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch

The familiar story of the confused and sometimes disastrous making of Apocalypse Now has been told many times, and never better than by Francis Ford Coppola's wife, Eleanor, in her 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. So it's not worth going into here, except to note that the subtitle of her film plays on both the current meaning of the word "apocalypse" -- i.e., a disaster of great magnitude -- and the original one: a disclosure or revelation. It might be said that the enormous expenditure and hardship that Francis Coppola experienced during the making of Apocalypse Now was revelatory, not only to Coppola but also to the film industry, which was reaching the limits of its tolerance of unconstrained visionary filmmaking. It would cross that limit the following year with Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's film that took down a venerable production force, United Artists, along with its director. Coppola's career, unlike Cimino's, would recover, but he would never again be the director he was in his prime, with the first two Godfather films. And American filmmaking would never again be as prone to take risks as it was in the 1970s. As for the film itself, Apocalypse Now remains one of the essential American movies if only because it epitomizes the nightmare that was the Vietnam War. Coppola deserves much of the credit for this embodiment of Lord Acton's familiar dictum: "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." But there are others who should share the credit with him, including screenwriters John Milius and Michael Herr, who made the connection between Joseph Conrad's tale of imperialism gone wrong, Heart of Darkness, and the war. The ambience of the film is largely the work of production designer Dean Tavoularis, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won a well-deserved Oscar, and Walter Murch and his sound team, who also won. And while Marlon Brando's Kurtz is a disappointment and Martin Sheen never quite meets the demands of his role as Capt. Willard, they are surrounded by marvelous support from Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Dennis Hopper, and a very young and almost unrecognizable Laurence Fishburne (billed as Larry), among others.

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Would there have been a Quentin Tarantino if there hadn't been a David Lynch? Blue Velvet represents an opening up of mainstream moviemaking to the perverse underside of American experience. It had been approached before, in 1940s film noir, for example, but only by suggestion. In the era of the nascent Cold War, unusual sexual behavior was typically presented as the product of decadent cities like New York and Los Angeles. But in Lynch's film, made at the height of the Reagan era, it underlies the wholesome atmosphere of a small town where the fireman smiles and waves as he passes by. The film noir detective was disgusted by what he saw, not fascinated and drawn in the way Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is. Jeffrey, barely out of adolescence, teams up to explore the mystery of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with a teenage girl, Sandy (Laura Dern), who is both disgusted and fascinated by what she learns. The use of songs like Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" suggests the way American pop culture, aimed at the young, floats atop a sea of darkness that it only thinly hides. In the end, of course, everything is cleaned up: the vicious Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) gets what's coming to him and Dorothy is reunited with her child. Even Jeffrey's father, incapacitated by a stroke while watering his lawn at the beginning of the film, is restored to health.  Sandy has earlier told us about her nightmare in which the horrors will only disappear when the robins fly down and bring a "blinding light of love." So in the end a robin appears on the windowsill, with one of the disgusting insects we saw at the film's beginning under the grass of the Beaumonts' lawn in its mouth. But Lynch mocks the happy ending by clearly showing us that it's a fake, an animated stuffed robin.