MACBETH

(Roman Polanski, 1971)

Polanski made Macbeth in the middle of one of the greatest runs of films in the history of cinema. He also made it soon after his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family. Both are evident in the film itself, a hugely accomplished Shakespeare adaptation that nevertheless always plays and feels like a Polanski film, filled as it is with darkness, violence, grief and pain.
What is perhaps most impressive is the atmosphere.  From the first sequence of the Witches on a beach, performing a spell as they bury items, the score by the Third Ear Band - which could have been played at any time over the last few centuries - and the muted, painterly cinematography of Gil Taylor combine to create an awful, almost physical sense of foreboding. Jon Finch plays Macbeth as a man weighed down by everything, only truly free amidst the violence of the last scenes, and Francesca Annis makes Lady Macbeth ambitious and manipulative, yes, but never the evil villainess some other actresses have given us.
Polanski struggles to make a few of the dialogue scenes sing - Macbeth engaging the assassins to kill Banquo is a real low point - but each of the set-pieces is fabulous, and the film works well at conjuring up a vision of the ancient, weird Britain hinted at in the play.

MAD MAX

(George Miller, 1979)

This remains a tremendous oddity. Released at the tail-end of the series of "oz-ploitation" movies of the 1970s, it's exploitation roots are clear and part of its charm. It is full of unique idiosyncrasies, some of them supplied by Australian culture, others part of the narrative. Miller was still finding his voice, so there are plenty of clunky, clumsy, crude moments and scenes. But his genius as a visual storyteller is still more than evident.
The action scenes are largely terrific - visceral, brutal, exhilarating, and with a directness which is bracing, even shocking. Miller's style is so precise and powerful, it gives otherwise dull scenes a charge, even when the acting and dialogue is a little questionable. And it often is questionable. Scenes of Max (Mel Gibson) at home with his wife, sharing cute stories while Brian May's score ladles on the syrup can be hard to take. But then there is that weird factor. Max's wife plays the saxophone at home, for fun. His buddy Goose - the plot's sacrificial lamb, his fate a horror-movie death by fire revealed expressively during Max's visit to his hospital bed through gurgling sound effects, a single shot of a charred hand and Gibson's horrified reaction - enjoys a night with a bad nightclub singer. A stalk-through-the-woods sequence is revealed to be misleading (with a Boo Radley-esque figure) until it isn't. The chief of police waters plants topless, chewing on a stogie. The Toecutter's biker gang feel like they've come from another movie altogether, each of them chewing scenery, gurning, playing with props, each seemingly set on stealing the limelight from the others (no surprise to learn they were all Shakespearian stage actors, since their scenes feel much like an out of control improv session).
Against all this the splashes of horrific violence feel almost hallucinatory, and their impact is only increased. Gibson is all raw charisma and youthful beauty here, but you can see the star he would become. And yet Miller is the real star.

RANSOM

AKA The Terrorists

(Caspar Wrede, 1974)

Ransom wastes Sean Connery. Easily the greatest leading man of his generation, Connery was often misused in the decades between leaving the James Bond franchise and a sort of rebirth as an elder statesman megastar. Only Sidney Lumet seemed to understand his acting ability, and his outsized charisma and macho presence were really only truly capitalised upon by the series of brilliant historical adventures he made in the 1970s. Alongside those he starred in some odd misfires and oddities - thrillers and dramas of questionable value, of which Ransom is a prime example.
Following the machinations and politics around the handling of a dual hostage and hijacking situation in the nation of "Scandinavia" (which appears to be Norway), Connery plays the security chief of the nation who finds himself at odds with his own and the British Government about how to deal with the terrorists involved. Ian McShane plays one, though he, like everyone else, like Connery, has barely any character to speak of.
Finnish director Wrede is competent but his staging and style are inarguably dull; despite cinematography by the legendary Sven Nykvist and a score by the equally legendary Jerry Goldsmith, Ransom rarely feels like a movie, instead carrying a lingering whiff of television with it. The plot sees Connery arrange various plans to end the twin sieges, and even the action scenes feel flat, though there are a few moments of tension. The best thing here is the location work - wintry Norwegian locations are instantly atmospheric, and even the cynically-appropriated library material of bombing in '70s Britain adds to the feel of Europe during a low, dirty decade. Connery is always watchable, but his character, Nils Tahlvik, is a gruff military man who seems more irritated by the situation in which he finds himself than he is emotionally torn. The actor is capable of so much more than this film.

SORCERER

(William Friedkin, 1977)

They really, really don't make them like this anymore.
You can take that in two senses: that this sort of analogue spectacle, filmed on location in extremely difficult conditions and filled with set pieces which are extraordinary because they contain no digital effects, is now a monument to a vanished mode of filmmaking. Or that this sort of adult adventure film - existential, with themes and weight and aimed squarely at a grown-up audience - is no longer produced by a film culture eager to feed only a teenage audience raised on comic books and video games.
Either way: they don't make them like this anymore.
And that is a shame, for Sorcerer is something close to a masterpiece, tough, taut and poetic, made by a confident director at the absolute peak of his powers.
It is adapted from the same novel that was the basis for Clouzot's terrific The Wages of Fear. It follows four men from different parts of the globe until they converge in the jungle in South America, where they accept a job transporting six cases of dynamite needed to fix an oil rig. The only problem is that the dynamite is old and unstable, and the men have to deliver it through miles of jungle, when any significant bump will set off the whole lot. Cue an hour of sickening tension as lorries inch across ruined rope bridges during hurricanes and the men decide to use some dynamite to clear a blockage from the road.
These set pieces as astonishing; beautifully shot and edited, their combination of white knuckle suspense and beauty is utterly winning. It also helps that Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green have spent so much time establishing these men and their back-stories. For that is what the first twenty minutes of Sorcerer are; a series of terrific litte vignettes, each one showing us how and why these men ended up hiding out in a jungle hellhole. Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider, convincingly hollowed out and haunted) is part of an Irish gang that holds up a New Jersey Bingo haul run by the mob. A subsequent argument causes a car crash, killing all his accomplices. He limps off but the mob has put a price on his head and he has to flee the country. Other men flee financial irregularities in Paris (a terrific Bruno Cremer), a terrorist bombing in Jersualem (Amidou) and an assassination in Vera Cruz.
These vignettes are incredibly well-paced, filled with passages of pure cinematic storytelling, and rich with place and atmosphere. That only increases when the film settles down in it's dingy Colombian village; you can smell the sweaty dankness as these Western men stumble unhappily around, awaiting fate to choose their next blow.
That appears to be the key theme here; the way fate twists and decides our lives. These men are all doomed from early on. They just don't know it yet, though Scheider's cynical, exhausted Scanlon suggests a certain pessimistic outlook on everything.
The score from Tangerine Dream is terrific but sparely used, instantly adding a layer of smoothly rolling menace to a film which already has a healthy dose of dread in its veins. For all it's existential view on human relations and romantic loners, Sorcerer is at heart a thriller, and as such it is a great success;  suspenseful, intriguing and forceful throughout.

BOBBY DEERFIELD

(Sydney Pollack, 1977)

Bobby Deerfield - critically reviled and commercially disastrous upon its release in 1977 - is ripe for a remaking as a Nicholas Sparks-style youth weepie, starring Zac Efron and layered with pop music, aimed at teenage girls.
Bobby Deerfield was made in 1977, when they still made movies for grown-ups. It is based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, was directed by the consistently classy Sydney Pollack, and stars Al Pacino, arguably the great actor of his generation,  and Marthe Keller, a Swiss actress whose onscreen presence is complex and adult. It's an interesting film. A romantic melodrama with only three real characters, it sluggishly meanders along for the first two acts before the drama kicks in in the last 40 minutes and it becomes an accomplished tragedy.
Pacino is the titular Deerfield, an American F1 driver in 1970s Europe. He lives with his adoring girlfriend (Anny Duperey), but seems uninterested and untouched by more or less everything around him; yes men, mechanics, advertising executives. He wears sunglasses perpetually to avoid being 'mobbed". Indeed, an early scene finds him embarrassed and nonplussed by the arrival of his brother, seeking to arrange some inheritance issues. He seems determined to avoid any kind of emotional scene. This may be to do with the way his work brings him face to face with death, though he claims not to think about it.
The first race sequence is shot by Pollack documentary style - immersive and expansive, giving the audience a feeling for the atmosphere at a massive F1 meet. Pollack undercuts this almost instantly by cutting tight in on Pacino's eyes as he waits to start and eliminating the sound. This is a movie about this enigmatic, guarded man, not about racing, it seems to say.
Another racer crashes and dies in that race, and while Deerfield obsesses over the cause of the crash he visits an injured survivor in a Swiss clinic. There he meets Lillian (Keller), the very definition of the manic pixie dreamgirl before the term was ever coined. Impulsive, poetic, maddeningly unpredictable, she tags along South into Italy and over the course of their long drive he finds himself fascinated by her.
Eventually - after some routine bumps - they fall in love, and he discovers that she is dying, setting up that climax.
Pollack's direction is terrific - he makes Europe and its vistas look spectacular, while generally isolating Pacino in his big widescreen frames, underlining his solitude. There are long dialogue scenes here, filled with eccentric anecdotes and kooky attitudes, and Keller is somewhat miscast. Her cold beauty aside, it seems unbelievable that Deerfield would fall for her, when her behaviour is so irritating and baffling. But this is an ambitiously romantic story, full of grand gestures - balloon rides and picnics in the Tuscan countryside - and once Pollack gets his couple together, the story gathers its own emotional power.
Pacino is good with what he has been given, but both characters remain sad mysteries to us, a suggestion that they are perhaps underwritten. That is part of what makes Bobby Deerfield such a flawed, confounding film.

THE BLACK PANTHER

(Ian Merrick, 1977)

So controversial upon its UK release it was swiftly buried and was rarely seen for three decades, Merrick's low-budget true crime study of the criminal career of Donald Neilsen, aka The Black Panther, is a gripping, taut and sensitive film unlike anything else I've ever seen.
Largely forgotten now, ex-soldier Neilsen (Donald Sumpter, superb) was a burglar and armed robber who eventually graduated to murder and kidnapping, becoming the most-wanted man in England for a few years in the mid-70s, when his crimes terrorised the North and Midlands and the press fastened upon his sawn-off shotgun and black hood. Merrick and screenwriter Michael Armstrong begin with Neilsen already well into his career. He plans his crimes in fastidious detail, approaching each like a military operation, camping in the countryside outside a small town, breaking into a post office at night and taking everything in the till. Despite his preparation, he's not much of a criminal, and one of the strengths of The Black Panther is how consistently it underlines the gulf between how Neilsen sees himself and what he really is.
When his victims begin to resist, Neilsen reacts with violence, and his murders are committed in pursuit of paltry sums. His home life is odd - he bullies his wife and daughter, suffers from ulcer pains and mood swings, cataloguing the coverage of his exploits in scrapbooks and reflecting upon photos from his past.
The climax comes with Neilsen's meticulously planned kidnapping of a 17 year old heiress, which goes horribly wrong when the police leak it to the press and the ransom delivery is bungled. All of this is shot with a tremendously effective neutrality of tone - we simply observe Neilsen go about his days; planning, working out, casing locations, travelling, watching television. Merrick and Armstrong never seem to judge him, though it is evident he is a psychopath. Sumpter plays him like an inadequate fantasist, liable to fly into a rage whenever he is frustrated or stymied, demanding military discipline at home. All of this takes place against the backdrop of an unbelievably grim period in British history - the  oil crisis, the first mainland bombing campaign by the IRA and the three day week all coincided. Merrick accordingly evokes a crumbling, rotten country, its institutions letting it down - the police and press here are shown to be in collusion and generally incompetent; casual violence in the streets suggests a breakdown of social order which the actions of Neilsen reflect.
The cool evenness of tone does build suspense; there are no generic markers here, no melodramatic tropes tipping us off about what might happen next. All we have is Neilsen and what he did. From that raw material, Merrick made a film which is unique, fascinating and darkly engrossing. That it is not better-known and appreciated is a shame,  and one which the BFI's recent DVD release will hopefully rectify.

OVERLORD

(Stuart Cooper, 1975) Overlord is about the Second World War, about a common soldier's experience of that War from training to battlefield, and about so much more besides, but it contains no scenes of combat, which is notable in a War film. In that sense and a few others, it's a quite unique piece of cinema. Part of its uniqueness stems from the circumstances of its production. It was produced by the Imperial War Museum, who have been heavily involved in the production of plenty of documentary films and television series - most famously with the superb "The World At War" - but had never before (or since, to my knowledge) produced an actual Feature Film. Expatriate American director Stuart Cooper, whose last film Little Malcolm had just won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, was attached, and he wrote a screenplay with Christopher Hudson which manages to tell the intimate story of one young conscript's journey through the months leading up to D-Day while also showcasing the Museum's unmatched collection of archive footage from that period. Cinematographer John Alcott, who was Stanley Kubrick's regular collaborator throughout the 1970s, was hired to shoot the film, and using vintage German lenses he managed to achieve a seamless blend between the archive footage and the material shot specially for the film. It is a visually lovely film, with Alcott's crisp photography and the perfectly-judged editing establishing a strange dreamlike mood I've never seen in any other film about War. As Tom, Brian Stirner is a sensitive lead, allowing his character some very human flaws in his prissiness and strange distance. The film is mainly concerned with his training and preparation for the Normandy landings, and Cooper makes much of the military as a dehumanising machine into which men simply vanish. Tom makes this explicit in a letter he writes but never sends to his parents: "The war machine keeps growing, and I am getting smaller and smaller". He drifts off into occasional reveries and daydreams throughout the film, many of them seemingly premonitions of his own death, which he sees as certain. These scenes are poetically assembled by Cooper, who uses repetetive, startling compositions for associative effect. Tom's final kiss with a girl he meets just prior to the invasion is depicted taking place upon a landing craft heading for a French beach. The film itself has its own reveries and tangents. It periodically drifts away from Tom and his friends to reveal the panorama of the War itself, always being fought somewhere, claiming and changing lives at every moment. All of the archive footage is breathtaking and some of it shocking. We witness London firemen fighting a firestorm which rages through streets, toppling buildings onto pavements. We see footage from the nose camera of a fighter plane, tracer rounds describing the arcs of bullets into planes, locomotives and buildings as tiny figures run for cover and eject into empty sky. We are shown bombs dropping slowly, terribly towards towns and villages, then watch shockwaves and explosions hammer the landscape as they find targets below. We watch the preparations for D-Day, men thrown about like dolls by the waves of the British coastline, huge War Machines designed to cut barbed wire and forge through minefields rolling on the beaches of England. German cities burn in the night, miles and miles of streets and factories on fire. Children boarding trains to escape London in the blitz, American soldiers flirting with an Englishwoman waving their train off, Tommys playing cards and boxing and idling as they wait for the invasion to begin. All of it fascinating and beautifully interwoven with Tom's story, which ends on the Red Beach at Normandy in a sequence with echoes of the photography of Robert Capa. There are also echoes of the work of Peter Watkins and Kevin Brownlow here, and even Gillo Pontecorvo, in the combination of stark beauty, poetic realism and honesty. It has a peculiarly distinctive and very British tone; sombre and almost quizzical, not remotely angrily anti-War, as was the fashion of many American War films during the Vietnam era. But it is a singular and brilliant film, and Cooper's relative obscurity since its release is puzzling.

PRIVATE ROAD

(Barney Platt-Mills, 1971) The story told in Private Road is an old one. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl slowly drift apart. End. Such a simple basis for a film could result either in something timeless or something cliche and dull. In the hands of writer-director Barney Platt-Mills, Private Road achieves a unique sort of timelessness; it is naturalistic and yet poetic, satirical yet gentle and funny yet painful too. The boy is Peter (Bruce Robinson), a young writer with a Public School accent who lives with his middle class bohemian mates in Notting Hill, smoking dope and plotting the revolution. He meets the girl, Ann (Susan Penhaligon) at his agents office, and their relationship lures her away from the bourgeois life she shares with her oh-so-square parents in Esher, Surrey to share a flat with Peter in London. Yet they find domesticity amplifies the differences between them, and their relationship starts to suffer. Forty years on, Platt-Mills film looks way ahead of its time. Social realism intent upon the middle classes and young people searching for a new way, it is almost casually shot and performed, but the director has a strong enough visual sense to conjure up a handful of stirringly beautiful shots throughout, from the young couples night walking the streets of a London (which is vividly captured throughout), to their getaway in the wilds of Scotland. It is also unashamedly arty; elliptical, unafraid of letting the camera just sit and observe, it allows its central relationship to develop subtly. Their early days are shy, tentative, filled with long silences while they stare at one another. Later those silences take on a different meaning alongside the suggestion that these people have nothing to say to each other. Robinson and Penhaligon create indelible characters who both ring utterly true - his laid-back, relaxed bearing changing as life and responsibility effect him, and her sweetness revealed as protecting a slightly more calculated nature. Platt-Mills surrounds them with vivid characters; his best friend Stephen, whose wacky good humour evaporates into drug addiction, another friend whose political activism brings him a humourless girlfriend, Ann's pompous, concerned, powerless parents. But it is the effortless trickle of the narrative that most impresses. Small things happen, they mount up, and lives gradually change. While Ann's parents may be slightly too caricatured, the main characters are tenderly satirised too, refusing to follow the life model of their parents but unsure of just what the alternative might be, and perhaps more conventional than they assume. Platt-Mills observational abilities are tremendous too; his camera watches Ann eat a bread roll over dinner without comment or dialogue, watches Peter's face as he drives home at night from Ann's parents house, all of his certainties unravelling. These young people want a new sort of personal freedom, but they're unsure of just what to do with it. The triumph of Private Road is that it locates this struggle within a universal story - boy meets girl - and does so with such charm and resonance.

THE OUTFIT

(John Flynn, 1973)

Director Flynn made a series of spartan, taut little b-movie thrillers in the early to mid-1970s. The Outfit, the first, was soon followed by Rolling Thunder and Defiance. They're all naturally streamlined, narratively curt and focused on characters who are utterly defined by their actions. In the case of The Outfit, Flynn had the perfect style and sensibility for the source material, one of Richrd Stark's superb "Parker" series of novels.
His Parker is renamed Earl Macklin and played by Robert Duvall as a grimly focused professional who takes on the mob after they kill his brother in revenge for a robbery upon a mob-owned bank some years before. With his girl (Karen Black) and old partner, Cody (Joe Don Baker) in tow, Macklin sets about ruining the mob by attrition, robbing card games, bookmakers and counting rooms across the country and killing anyone who tries to stop him. This naturally gets the attention of big boss Robert Ryan.
Flynn's style is simple, utterly unadorned, and his storytelling is correspondingly strong. He often finds a good master-shot and lets a portion of the scene play out that way, his camera subtly tracking characters as they move around. Those master-shots are plain; there are never any fancy angles, overly clever framing or ostentatious movements in Flynn's work.
That means that sometimes - when he's not quite on his game - scenes can play like tv, despite the (occasionally inspired) Bruce Surtees photography, which is particularly good at finding the dingy beauty in the dull, underlit interiors of hotel corridors and galley kitchens. But other times there's a muscular, tight efficiency to his work.
That's there too in the acting; Duvall is stone-faced throughout, the mask only cracking a couple of times when he seems amused by what he is doing, or more commonly by one of Baker's country boy monologues.
Everyone is muted; Black has a couple of scenes of emotional upset, but Ryan was born for this sort of tersely masculine material, and his weary, lined face alone suggests the long life of death and violence his character has been responsible for.
There is much violence here too; Duvall and Baker pistol-whipping and blasting their way through a savage road movie underworld. Every situation turns on violence or sex - the hillbilly brothers they buy a car from turn violent when Baker refuses the advances of the wife of one, Ryan avoids violence on one occasion to protect his pretty young wife who, he insinuated "treats me well", and even a routine police traffic stop goes wrong. It all ends quite satisfyingly in a big showdown, as it must, and Flynn delivers.
He's helped immeasurably by a terrific Jerry Fielding score; by turns funky, sleazy and tense, it improves this gripping, pulpy b-movie the way all great soundtracks do.

ROLLING THUNDER

(John Flynn, 1977)

Probably better-known these days as one of Quentin Tarantino's favourite films than for any other reason, Rolling Thunder was originally written by Paul Schrader in his 1970s pomp, just a year after the (similar in a few respects) triumph of Taxi Driver. The screenplay was rewritten by journeyman Heywood Gould, but Schrader retains a credit, and you can hear his voice throughout the film.
His story follows Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane), who returns to San Antonio, Texas after seven years in a Vietnamese POW Camp. His homecoming sees him rewarded by his grateful hometown with a silver dollar for every day of his incarceration, a new red chevy, and the news that his wife is leaving him for another man. Things get worse when a gang of thugs invade his home, torture him for the whereabouts of those silver dollars - the meeting between his hand and a garbage disposal is unforgettable - then murder his wife and child and leave him for dead. So Rane sets out for revenge with the help of an old POW buddy (Tommy Lee Jones) and Mexico and gunplay inevitably ensue.
That plot makes the film sound like a typical piece of 70s B-movie pulp, and that is what Rolling Thunder is. But it is more interesting than a synopsis suggests. Alongside the sleaze and nastiness and the casually racist portrayal of Mexico, its depiction of its Vietnam veteran protagonists presents them as almost inhuman. Both Devane and Jones constantly - and with no little foreboding - wear sunglasses, their eyes hidden, faces unreadable. They are damaged men, utterly desensitised by the violence inflicted upon them. This gives rise to a few amazing scenes. If Devane's explanation of how to survive torture and consequent homoerotic re-enactment with his wife's lover is disturbing, then his explanation that he is "dead", that they had taken something from him and he would never feel anything again explains both that and his entire performance. He underplays throughout, mostly expressionless, only really seeming to come alive in the scenes of violence. His insistence upon living in the garden shed as if it were his cell in Vietnam contrasts with Jones' prison; he is suffocating within the warm embrace of his family, his haunted eyes flat in response to their banalities. Like Devane, his glee at the apocalyptic violence of the climax is nicely, frighteningly played. Where Devane is prickly and complicated, Jones is beautiful, magnetic.
But Rolling Thunder does succeed as a piece of pulp, too. Director Flynn works with a lean, muscular economy, like Walter Hill, only lacking his ambition and imagination, but with a similar gift for staging and even, at times, for composition. Noirish lighting and precise cutting add to the murky atmosphere, and the action scenes are terrific; brutishly, graphically violent and blunt in their clarity. There are some fine pulp details, too: the hissably awful villains, Devane sharpening his claw until it is a blade, Jones' lack of response with a whore turning into delight once the gunfire starts, and the gratuitous nudity at various points.
Easy then to see just what Tarantino likes so much.

DEEP END

(Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)

An odd and unique product of the British film industry from a transitional period in its history, this arthouse comedy-drama, directed by a Pole and influenced by the European cinema which had risen to International prominence during the 1960s, retains a timeless, utterly distinctive quality. The story of a 15 -year old school leavers first job, at a Public Baths in late 60s London, and his infatuation with an attractive, older, sexually liberated colleague, Deep End nimbly walks the line between its comedic impulses and the darker heart of the material while managing to remain both accessible and ambitious in a manner most modern cinema would never even attempt.
Skolimowski's direction is terrific, plainly the work of a man in love with the exciting possibilities of the medium. With the aid of Charly Steinberger's vivid cinematography, which fairly throbs with colour, he makes Deep End a fascinating, stimulating visual experience. The chief location, the run-down baths, is atmospheric and evocative, all flaking paint in bright shades of green and red, and Skolimowski capitalises on it to use colour and composition to echo his character's states of mind without ever effecting the power of his storytelling. The camerawork is largely handheld, making the emotional drama between the main characters sometimes uncomfortably intimate. The two leads - John Moulder-Brown as fresh-faced Mike, struggling with his sexuality and emotions, and a revelatory Jane Asher, complicated, intelligent, cruel and extremely sexy as Sue -are both great and their chemistry feels unforced.
Diana Dors' cameo as a lecherous older woman who basically uses a stunned Mike as a sex-toy in an intense, funny scene shot in what looks like one lengthy take puts her fading looks but unmistakably sultry appeal to excellent use.
Skolimowski finds surreal imagery in his environment throughout, giving the film a real charge of unpredictable cinematic energy. The final scene is perhaps the finest example of this. One the one hand, its an arty, almost pretentious visual metaphor. But the narrative and location make it work, make it unavoidable, even.
There is also Skolimowski's view of London to consider. His outsiders gaze finds coldness in its streets but colour and warmth in nocturnal Soho, and the use of many dubbed German actors - the film was mainly shot in Munich - adds a layer of distance to our experience of it. It has a markedly strange feel throughout, a great part of its appeal, as is the soundtrack. Can's "Mother Sky" is chopped up and used at different moments throughout, to memorable effect, alongside Cat Stevens, no less effective over the opening and closing credits.

PRIME CUT

(Michael Ritchie, 1972)

Each of the films Michael Ritchie directed in the golden period right at the start of his strange directorial career expresses a degree of his satiric impulse. From the clear-eyed view of a competitive athlete in the superb Downhill Racer through the more explicitly satirical political subjects of The Candidate and Smile, irony and satire were part of Ritchie's default mode. Even Prime Cut, which is, on the surface, very much a pulpy crime thriller, has a broadly satirical, offbeat streak running through it.
The story follows Chicago Mob Enforcer Nick Devlin, under-played with macho cool by Lee Marvin, on a mission to retrieve a debt from Kansas City racketeer Mary Ann, a loquacious, charming Gene Hackman. Violence ensues.
In other hands that could be a generic piece of pulp, but Ritchie and screenwriter Robert Dillon twist everything just a few degrees off, which gives the material an unusual energy. The shift from the grimy urban desolation of 70s Chicago to the vast skies and yellow, sunlit fields of Kansas is vividly captured by Gene Polito's crisp cinematography, and Ritchie's great feel for place and atmosphere is evident in the portrayals of both locations. His early work all has a marvellously unforced, verite feel to it, and that sense in the context of a mob thriller gives the material a really distinctive charge. The rural setting for the violent confrontation at the heart of the narrative is put to good use in a series of odd set-pieces that flirt with satire themselves; from the scene where Marvin and Sissy Spacek are pursued across a cornfield by an enormous combine harvester to the gun-battle amidst sunflowers to the enormous destruction of a greenhouse, Ritchie makes his location work for him. Aside from the gentle satire of genre conventions, the film also suggests that crime and big business are much the same and makes a few vague points about people being treated like cattle (the opening credits capture a man being turned, literally, into sausage, and Hackman displays the young girls he trades in from his ranch in the stables). The characterisation is interesting too, from Marvin's quiet gallantry to Hackman's nervous chatter, and Dillon and Ritchie throw in some odd scenes which are not necessary to the narrative but do effect the mood and characterisation - notably a lengthy scene where Hackman and his brother roughhouse and wrestle, while mob bookmakers work away in the background but also some of the fairytale material between Marvin and Spacek. Indeed, the film plays like an action thriller spliced into a pop art fairytale, which may be the reason it is o little seen today.
None of that prevents the genre material from working, however, and Prime Cut contains a thrilling Final act, filled with chases, gunfights and the odd punch in the jaw.
All that and a great Lalo Schifrin score.

THE ASCENT

(Larissa Shepitko, 1977)

Shepitko was a special, luminous talent. In The Ascent she transforms a seemingly simple tale of the flight, capture, interrogation and execution of some Belarussian partisans during WW2 into a Christian allegory and an investigation of faith. Her two protagonists cleverly represent different worldviews: one grimly determined to survive at any cost, the other arriving at a zen-like acceptance of his imminent death which Shepitko portrays as an almost Christ-like state of spiritual enlightenment.
She combines fine storytelling - the film works, in it's first half at least, as a genre piece, with battle scenes which are brutal and adeptly shot and edited - with superbly incorporated experimentation with sound and image. White noise rises up on the soundtrack at key points, and ambient sound is used similarly, often to signal a moment of spiritual ecstasy or revelation, while she uses a mobile camera often in the first act before opting for more static shots later in the film. The journey taken by the characters is echoed by this stylistic change, and also by a different palette; the first half is blindingly white, snow covering landscapes with dark tiny figures trudging through them. The second half is much darker, mainly interiors, allowing Shepitko to shoot her hero in glowing chiaroscuro as his spirit lightens with death approaching.
She was a filmmaker capable of pure cinematic poetry, as this film makes clear. And yet, her humanism is apparent too, because The Ascent is, as much as anything, incredibly moving. Her characters struggle with their fates, with the moral issues the Nazi occupation confronts them with, and Shepitko addresses most of it in the interrogation scenes, where a Police Inspector takes on each man and reads their characters precisely. He is the horror of collaboration personified, and we see the effect he has as the men and other condemned prisoners discuss their experiences and options in the hours before they will be executed.
That execution scene, when it comes, is an intense, almost unbearable scene of martyrdom and waste.
Shepitko died in a car crash in 1979. The Ascent was the last film she completed before her death.