The Witches (Nicolas Roeg, 1990)

Anjelica Huston in The Witches

Cast: Anjelica Huston, Mai Zetterling, Jasen Fisher, Rowan Atkinson, Bill Paterson, Brenda Blethyn, Charlie Potter, Anne Lambton, Jane Horrocks. Screenplay: Allan Scott, based on a novel by Roald Dahl. Cinematography: Harvey Harrison. Production design: Andrew Sanders. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers. 

Roald Dahl hated the happy ending that was tacked on to this film version of his novel, and I understand why. The book's ending was a resigned acceptance to the way things turned out, a touch of maturity to an otherwise childish fantasy. (I say "childish" here with respect for Dahl's ability to peer into the dark side of childhood.) But what works on the page doesn't work on the screen; the raucous pace and the grotesque makeup substitute the filmmakers' imagination for the reader's. What stimulates the imagination on the page is lost in translation. The viewer needs more assurance that all will be well than the reader does. So The Witches mostly works for me, thanks to Anjelica Huston's performance, in which the menace persists even after the makeup is removed. Mai Zetterling is an endearing grandmother and Jasen Fisher a suitably plucky hero, with amusing character turns from Rowan Atkinson, Bill Paterson, and Brenda Blethyn. I'd have to know the grownup pretty well before showing The Witches to them, but children should be able to handle it.  

Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

 

Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton, Johnny Shannon, Anthony Valentine, Ann Sidney, John Bindon, Stanley Meadows, Allan Cuthbertson, Anthony Morton. Screenplay: Donald Cammell. Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg. Art direction: John Clark. Film editing: Anthony Gibbs, John Smedley-Aston. Music: Jack Nitzsche. 

I’m so used to seeing James Fox as a proper upperclass Brit in films like A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984) and The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) that it took me a while to identify him with the kinky gangster Chas he plays in Performance. In fact, it’s a role that writer and co-director Donald Cammell intended for Marlon Brando. But Fox, with his veneer of handsome self-assuredness, fits the film perfectly as the foil for MIck Jagger’s sybaritic rock star, Turner. It’s a film about outlaws from two worlds, the criminal Chas and the artist Turner coming together on the artist’s turf. It’s also a kind of Götterdämmerung for the swinging ‘60s, made during the ‘60s but held from release until the selfish ‘70s by a squeamish studio, its sex and nudity edited out but restored, at least partially, later. It’s visually and narratively challenging, with time- and place-switching editing to the point that it still provokes exegesis. It launched co-director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s career, and it may have doomed Cammell’s. In short, it’s some kind of important film, but no one has ever been able to pin down exactly why. The very definition of a cult film.

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, and Clelia Matania in Don't Look Now

Cast: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Leopoldo Trieste, Giorgio Trestini, David Tree, Ann Rye, Nicholas Salter, Sharon Williams, Bruno Cattaneo, Adalina Poerio. Screenplay: Allan Scott, Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Art direction: Giovanni Socol. Film editing: Graeme Clifford. Music: Pino Donaggio.

A beautifully textured film, Don't Look Now fills every frame with portents, making it one of the most influential "horror films" of all time. And like the best horror films, like Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), it doesn't rest content with simply scaring people. It's unsettling mostly because it preys not on our nerves but on our conscience, needling our sense of guilt, our self-consciousness about grief, our denial in the face of the inevitability of death. Its supernatural element is preposterous, but we accept it because each of us has our preposterous superstitions, our wishful fantasies, our falling away from logic and reason. Nicolas Roeg accomplishes a near-perfect integration of story and setting in his use of Venice, a beautiful, historic city, riddled with decay and threatened by time and tide. In his hands, it becomes a correlative for the dance between acceptance and despair that the Baxters, Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland), are treading as they try to survive the death of their daughter. I think the film falls apart a little at the end, with too much flashbackery to summarize what has happened to the Baxters, and it could have been leavened with the kind of wit that Hitchcock and Polanski resorted to in their films, but I'd call it a near-miss classic.

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)

Cast: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, Sandra Bernhard, Seymour Cassel, Leon Rippy. Screenplay: Dennis Potter. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: David Brockhurst, Curtis A. Schnell. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers.

With directors like Luis Buñuel and David Lynch, whose films regularly stray along the boundaries between logic and the irrational, between the waking world and dreams, between sanity and madness, you can always sense a central consciousness, a coherent vision, holding the film together. This isn't the case with Nicolas Roeg's Track 29, which falls apart as it drifts into weirdness for weirdness's sake. It centers on Linda, a neglected housewife, whose physician husband, Henry, spends most of his free time in the attic playing with his model trains, and at work is having an affair with his nurse, who spanks him while wearing rubber gloves. The doctor and nurse are played by one of the odder couples ever to be seen in a movie, Christopher Lloyd and Sandra Bernhard. One day, when Linda (Theresa Russell) is having lunch with her friend Arlanda (Colleen Camp), they're joined by a young man named Martin (Gary Oldman), whom we see at the start of the film hitchhiking along a country road and later being picked up by a trucker (Leon Rippy). Martin creepily admires the trucker's "Mom" tattoo, which sets us up for the even creepier assertion that he will make to Linda that he's really the son she gave up for adoption at birth. That Oldman and Russell are almost the same age should clue you in to the fact that nothing is going to make conventional sense in Track 29. Martin arouses more than maternal passion in Linda, but he may not even exist: Although Arlanda sees him in the cafe where he makes his acquaintance with Linda, in a later restaurant scene in which Martin plays on Linda's erotic obsession, we cut from the table where they're sitting to behind the bar and share the point of view of a waiter and bartender who see her sitting alone. Oh, there's much more, including a scene in which Henry addresses the attendees at a model train collectors' convention and stirs them to a frenzy with his speech. But you get the point: Track 29 is mostly an elaborate psychosexual fantasy, but it lacks a central vision to hold it together or carry it to any kind of satisfactory conclusion. It's never daring enough to explore sexual frustration and obsession in the many imaginative ways Buñuel does in Belle de Jour (1967). It could pass as satire if there were any larger point to its fleeting moments of insight or surprise, the way Lynch's Blue Velvet, made two years earlier, uncovered the seamier side of Reagan-era complacency. As it is, it's just, well, weird. 

Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, 1985)

Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, 1985)

Cast: Theresa Russell, Michael Emil, Gary Busey, Tony Curtis, Will Sampson, Patrick Kilpatrick. Screenplay: Terry Johnson. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: David Brockhurst. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers, Hans Zimmer.

The imaginary conversation, bringing together people who never really met, is a time-honored way of exploring ideas, which is what Terry Johnson had in mind when he wrote a play about the encounter of Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe McCarthy, and Joe DiMaggio in a hotel room in 1952. To emphasize the fact that it was a play about ideas, he didn't call them by their real names but labeled them The Actress, The Professor, The Senator, and The Ballplayer. They could have been called Sex, Intellect, Politics, and Muscle, for all that matters. What we have in the film version is a sometimes provocative but for the most part muddled intersection of people whose myths are larger than their actuality. In the movie's best scene, Marilyn uses some toys and balloons to demonstrate to Einstein that she actually knows the theory of relativity. Whether she understands it, she admits, is another matter. At this point, the film verges on something like an exploration of ideas, the relationship between knowledge and understanding. But that's too much for a film to explore and still hold an audience's attention, so mostly we are left in Insignificance with an exploration of personalities, riddled with flashbacks to scenes from the lives of Marilyn, Einstein, and DiMaggio -- but not, interestingly, to McCarthy's life, which makes his inclusion in this stew of celebrities a problem to be pondered. He's there primarily to underscore Einstein's sense of guilt at having come up with ideas that contributed to the creation of the atomic bomb and hence the Cold War that caused the rise of McCarthyism. There's really no way to resolve the various conflicts among the characters than to end with a fantasy scene in which the hotel room is destroyed in an atomic cataclysm -- only to reverse the footage of destruction for a scene in which Marilyn bids Einstein goodbye. In the end, the film becomes mostly a story about the loss of identity suffered by celebrities, aided by some very good performances but undercut by a surplus of images that demand but don't reward interpretation.

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

Cast: Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Harvey Keitel, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Massey, Dana Gillespie, William Hootkins, Eugene Lipinski, George Roubicek, Stefan Gryff. Screenplay: Yale Udoff. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Art direction: David Brockhurst. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Richard Hartley.

The jigsaw-puzzle narrative of Bad Timing makes for a film whose parts are more interesting than its whole. It never settles down to be what it is by nature, a psychosexual thriller, but loses itself in a lot of loose ends and red herrings. Which is not to say that it isn't a more interesting film than a lot from its era: I'd rather watch it again than, say, the year's Oscar best picture, Robert Redford's Ordinary People. The people in Bad Timing are anything but ordinary. Art Garfunkel, hardly a conventional leading man, plays Alex Linden, a "research psychoanalyst" who gets involved with a seductive young woman, Milena Flaherty, played with her usual sensuality by Theresa Russell. Linden finds out that Milena is married to, but separated from, an older man who lives in Czechoslovakia, Stefan Vognic (Denholm Elliott) -- whom Linden, whose sideline involves consulting work for American forces stationed in Vienna, is asked to investigate. You can sense at this point that the plot is going to wander off into eddies of intrigue that we can never quite bring into focus. But the precipitating event, as far as any central plot is concerned, is Milena's attempt at suicide, which brings an Austrian police detective named Netusil (the oddly cast but also oddly effective Harvey Keitel) into the picture. When Linden, who reported the suicide attempt, goes taciturn and evasive under Netusil's attempts to interview him, the detective grows more determined to find out about the relationship between Linden and Milena, which as far as the film is concerned only spurs more and more flashbacks. The evident determination of director Nicolas Roeg and screenwriter Yale Udoff to avoid anything like conventional thriller clichés while at the same time using them as a kind of cinematic subtext produces a film that's been either damned as a maddening muddle or praised as a provocative exploration of sexual obsession. To my mind it's a fascinating botch at best.