Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  I realise Kubrick isn’t around to answer back, but tough, frankly, because I think the director is getting a woody from these scenes, and especially the scenes with female victims (who are all conventionally sexy), and that he’s doing his best to give male viewers a woody, too. There are endless pointless tit shots and the sexual assault scenes look like the nastier end of porn, but with better camera angles. In the first home invasion scene, Kubrick actually spares us the rape, preferring to focus on extraordinary fish-eye lens shots of the horrified Alexander looking on. But, by that time, we’ve already had a good look at the actress’s tits and fanny, watched her wriggle amusingly and fruitlessly, seen her rendered utterly powerless . . . by the droogs, by Stanley Kubrick. So I think we’ve gang-raped her anyway.

  All this is punched home by a pungent loathing of sex, which is constant in the form of ridiculous imagery – plastic coffee-tables in the shape of open-legged women, snakes crawling towards pictures of open-legged women, giant plastic white sculptured cocks, a sex scene filmed like ultra-fast silent comedy and backed by ‘The William Tell Overture’ in which Alex is revealed to have the infinite sexual appetites of 30 porn studs on Bionic Viagra. The giant cock is key in the second home invasion scene, as the woman of the house tries to fight him off and is comically pathetic, missing him by miles, whirling around uselessly – while Alex thrusts the enormous cock at her and laughs before stoving her head in with it. Subtle this isn’t. But man . . . what happened to poor Stanley to make him so repulsed by women and sex, and so in awe of men who can rape? In fact, the movie’s final shot appears to suggest that Alex fantasising about sex – not rape – is exactly the same thing as his love of violence. I mean . . . that’s just weird.

  Just to add to this . . . the incidental male characters (the only lead is McDowell) are full of the eccentricities and comic touches that Kubrick sprinkled throughout Dr Strangelove. Aubrey Morris’s vicious social worker P.R. Deltoid is especially funny and repellent. Yet the female characters are all non-characters, mainly there to be raped, killed, or fucked, unless they’re cold functionaries or idiot mothers. If you wanted to make one film the symbol of the wave of misogyny that saturated ’70s New Hollywood movies, A Clockwork Orange would even outstrip Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me and Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Thing is, they are all great movies, too. So are Birth Of A Nation and Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will. At least, so critics tell me.

  What I’m saying here is . . . there is something palpably sick and wrong about A Clockwork Orange, and I think Kubrick realised it. His neuroses are all over this film; but these kinds of neuroses are simply not present in Burgess’s novel. And the least you can do, if you unleash a beast, is take responsibility for it, which he didn’t. Great film-maker. Bit of a tosser.

  You know what supporters of the film are going to say. It’s that old ‘this film deliberately implicates its audience’ defence, beloved of intellectual purveyors of amoral imagery since the dawn of movie time. ‘It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen,’ Alex intones over a typical crime-thriller image of a chap being beaten bloody red by Alex-type droogs, and, yes, we get it. A film about how we’re being desensitised towards violence by our love of movie violence which rubs our noses in gratuitous movie violence . . . but ironically.

  Not buying it. Why? Because Kubrick takes too much pleasure in it all, that’s why. The first fight between Alex’s droogs and a rival gang is circus slapstick – the kind of fun boys have when play-fighting as a child. It implies that violence is a playful letting off of steam, rather than something that kills or maims. And Kubrick has far, far too much empathy with Alex’s love of rape, because the violent sexual assault that Alex and co. interrupt looks like jolly good fun.

  But, but, but . . . there is a great deal of irony within A Clockwork Orange, which, I would imagine, would be Kubrick’s more convincing get-out clause. The teen droogs becoming policemen and behaving no differently, their moronic violence now sanctioned by The Man. There is a large element of farce in Alex chancing upon his every enemy when being released from prison, and Kubrick plays it so, making the scenes look like parodies of sentimental British theatre and knockabout sitcom, encouraging wildly over-the-top performances from the likes of Magee. And that ending is a dark, dark laugh, as are ideas like Alex studying The Bible in prison to gain the law’s approval – but actually fantasising about being the centurion that whips Jesus as he carries the cross to his own crucifixion (this Bible scene also gives dirty old Stan a chance to show more pert young tits upon women with blank faces, apropos of a superfluous Roman fantasy scene). Alex’s manipulations of the old duffers of The Systemis what ACO shares with standard teen comedies, making it a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (see here) for sick fucks. Of which I must be one, I guess.

  Because I love A Clockwork Orange. The things that appal me are almost entirely overwhelmed by Kubrick’s compositions and visual designs, Walter Carlos’s synthesizer versions of classics, the language, the irreverence, and, especially, Malcolm McDowell, who goes way beyond anything you might label ‘acting’ here. Once you see him, eyelids pinned back, electronic gizmo upon tousled dome, blue eyes moving from moronic shit-eating grin to scared and sick to mask of horror as he watches films of rapes and Nazi crimes while the aversion drugs take hold and synthetic Beethoven skips merrily . . . that shit’ll stay with you. It’s among the most powerful and unforgettable images ever put on screen.

  Alex is the least teen-looking schoolboy in movies (McDowell was 27 at the time, and made no real attempt not to look or act his age). But what a performance! His finest work here is all done in voiceover and, especially, when performing, silently, straight to camera. Alex’s boiling, feral face as he masturbates to Beethoven, before Kubrick cuts to a montage of the ‘lovely pictures’ of stylised violence and destruction flowing through his terrible mind. The cobalt blue eyes lend something seductive to his vicious relish and cruel glee. He is something far more than the standard teen psycho, and nothing like the hard bastards you meet in real life. Alex is a (black) magical symbol of all the failures and confusions and leaps-forward and falls-backward of the liberal 1960s, connected so strongly to If . . . ’s Mick Travis (see here) that you understand that he is the same character rendered satanic: a bringer of chaos, a lover of pain, a prophecy of the fearless revolt against everything we projected upon Johnny Rotten a few years later . . . an anarchist and an antichrist. In these two career-making performances, McDowell’s every look, at co-star, at audience, is a dare and a taunt and a massive Fuck You. He goes big, always and brilliantly, and his eyes gleam and sparkle, and his mouth sneers and smirks, and his body coils and struts, and he is an unstoppable force. He makes the simple act of being fed while lying disabled in a hospital bed look like spitting in the eye of the world. Alex is not a revolutionary, nor even a rebel. He’s a sociopath. Yet . . . there is a charm, and something intensely lovable about him. I don’t think A Clockwork Orange was a makeable movie without Malcolm McDowell.

  So there’s McDowell, and the space-age interiors, and the insane pop-art clothes. Kubrick’s astounding ability to make the squalor of the council estate and the high-rise look like high art. The way he makes the squirming Alexander look like a bust of Beethoven as he uses Ludwig Van to drive Alex towards suicide. The way that, in one stunning image, Alex reaches down and out to us, his face a manic, blissful invitation to join him in his carnival of debasement and sadism. It all adds up to one inescapable conclusion: A Clockwork Orange is an indefensible masterpiece. Once seen, never forgotten, even if it should never have been seen at all.

  THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

  1971

  Starring: Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Randy Quaid, Eileen Brennan

  Dir.: Peter Bogdanovich

  Plot: Teenage wasteland in pre-rock ’n’ roll Texas.

  Key line: ‘Nuthin’s rea
lly bin right since Sam The Lion died.’

  It’s about the wind. Whenever I think of Peter Bogdanovich’s desolate coming-of-age masterpiece, it’s the sound of the wind that dominates. It’s a cold and constant thing, whistling through a deserted main street in a tiny Texan town, whipping up dust and blowing tumble-weed through the broken hearts of the inhabitants of Anarene, echoing the way that Jacy Farrow blows through the lives of the men of the town, picking them up and whirling them around without any thought or aim but a love of chaos. The wind doesn’t choose victims; it just is. Nothing stops it or breaks it. It rules this desolate place, and never listens to reason, nor shows any mercy. It overwhelms the characters, even though they are given life by some of the best actors in this book. It is the carrier of the cold horror of no escape and roads to nowhere.

  But it’s no real wonder that, when critics and film buffs discuss The Last Picture Show, the sound of the wind barely merits a mention. There’s so much else to talk about, most of it chronicled by the ultimate film-buff-as-director-and-self-mythologist Peter Bogdanovich. That Bogdo – we always call him Bogdo round these parts – was better known as a critic and programmer for art cinemas than as a director when selected as the latest protégé of BBS, the independent studio that produced Easy Rider, promoted Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, and gave birth to the late ’60s/early ’70s New Hollywood and the movie brat era of American rebel auteurs. That Bogdo saw Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show in a drugstore, liked the title, hated the blurb about growing up in Texas, but was given the book a few weeks later by Sal Mineo, one of the stars of Rebel Without A Cause (see here). That Cybill Shepherd was cast when Bogdo and then-wife and collaborator Polly Platt saw a picture of her on the front of Glamour magazine, and were intrigued by the girl who ‘looked like she had a sexual chip on her shoulder’. And the epic consequences of that chance glance, as Shepherd channelled the sexually destructive Jacy so thoroughly that she shagged Jeff Bridges, taunted Timothy Bottoms to distraction and then copped off with the director, managing to destroy Bogdo and Platt’s marriage in the six weeks it took to shoot the movie in Archer City, Texas.

  Then there was the death of Bogdo’s father during the shoot, and the fact that Orson Welles was Bogdo’s houseguest at the time and it was Welles’s idea to shoot the movie in black and white. And the skinny-dipping scene that showed real pubic hair and got the film briefly banned in Phoenix, Arizona. And the fact that McMurtry’s autobiographical novel was based around real characters in Archer City, who were expected to be welcoming to the Hollywood invaders while knowing that their very real dirty linen was being aired to the entire planet. And that McMurtry had changed the name of Archer City to Thalia, but Platt and Bogdo’s obsession with legendary director Howard Hawks led them to change it again to Anarene, which sounded a bit like Abilene, which was the cow-town in Hawks’s western Red River, which is the last picture show when Anarene’s cinema shuts down at the end of the movie, and also the name of Anarene’s leading stud. Keep up.

  Going back to sound . . . American Graffiti (see here) likes to pretend it invented a soundtrack entirely comprised of hits of the period. Nuh-uh . . . that would be The Last Picture Show, which plays out its doomy scenario to hits mainly from the voice and pen of Hank Williams, dispensing with incidental music entirely. Who needs music telling you what to feel when you have Hank’s lonesome howl and that goddamned wind?

  And finally . . . the small matter of eight Oscar nominations, with two statuettes going to Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson for supporting actress and actor. Of the film making stars of its largely unknown cast. And Bogdo and Platt deliberately setting out to mix the look and style of their directorial heroes Hawks and John Ford, and the sexual and verbal honesty of the French New Wave, and succeeding in spectacular fashion. Bogdo was all set to be his generation’s greatest director. But, having destroyed Platt’s life and bailed on his kids for the trophy girlfriend, Platt, of course, never worked with him again. And Bogdo never got close to making a film this good again. But then again, neither did Platt.

  In short, this is one of those movies where the story of what happened on set would make just as good a movie as the movie. As long as it was shot with the same eerie and uniquely beautiful Robert Surtees chiaroscuro monochrome that gives The Last Picture Show one of the most stand-out looks in the history of cinema.

  This is such a towering work that it’s rarely seen as a teen movie. After all, the teen movie genre is about exploitation, designed to be funny, scary, dirty and/or sensationalist enough to keep the attention of the young and restless. Even ‘serious’ teen classics like Rebel Without A Cause (see here), The 400 Blows (see here) and If . . . (see here) were based around the theme of rebellion, and therefore immediately appealing to the teenage obsession with bucking authority and declaring their parents’ generation uncool and embarrassing. The Last Picture Show is something completely different. It is slow, arty, novelistic and self-conscious about wanting to be seen as A Classic Movie. Its teen characters’ lives are entirely entwined with those of the surrounding adults, and they are no more or less heroic. Rebellion is not uppermost in any of the teens’ minds. The major nightmare of all teens – boredom – is more powerfully realised here than in perhaps any other teen movie; but the adults suffer more profoundly in its suffocating grip than the kids, who are still young enough to escape the nightmare of a place where there is no transient population, no stimulation, no culture, no future. In Anarene the only distraction is sex, and the film carries the faint odour of inbreeding and the overpowering stench of children condemned to repeat the mistakes of their imprisoned parents, if they don’t get themselves together and get the fuck outta Dodge. The only thing more boring than being outside in Anarene is being inside, gazing at a television that has killed the movie star, watching the urban middle classes doing things you’ll never do. Add the wind and the dust and the class conflict, and Anarene is a vision of a kind of hell that argues that hell is, actually, not enough other people.

  The plot is narrow, soapy and pinched, reflecting the smallness of a town based entirely on Texas oil. It is 1951, and Sonny (Bottoms) and Duane (Bridges) are the joint captains of the local high school’s lousy football team. They are estranged from their parents, and share an apartment, spending most of their time hanging with father-figure Sam The Lion (Johnson), who owns the town’s bar, diner and cinema. Duane is going steady with the town’s teen rich-bitch vamp Jacy, who is more interested in rich kid Bobby. But Bobby won’t go out with a virgin. So Jacy uses Duane for sex, only to find out that Bobby has moved on to another teen sucker. While Sonny and Duane are road-tripping in Mexico, Sam The Lion dies. He has left the pool-room to Sonny.

  Meanwhile, Sonny has started sleeping with Ruth Popper (Leachman), the hauntingly depressed wife of the high school football coach, who is far more interested in his boys than in his wife. Jacy seduces the lover of her mother (Burstyn) and then steals Sonny from Ruth. Duane, who has decided to join the army and is preparing to be shipped off to Korea, smashes his friend in the face with a bottle in a jealous rage. An impressed Jacy invites Sonny to elope with her but has, in fact, detailed the pair’s plans in a note to her parents, ensuring that the pair are caught. Mrs Farrow confesses to Sonny that Sam was the love of her life and advises him to stay away from her daughter – who is, essentially, her Mini-Me – not for her sake, but his.

  Jacy goes off to big city college in Dallas. Duane and Sonny rebond and go to the final movie in a cinema killed by television. Duane heads off to Korea and Sonny’s mute little-brother substitute Billy is run over by a truck. A distraught Sonny goes to Ruth for comfort, only to get a barrage of abuse. But she comforts Sonny anyway, and the unhappy couple fade out as the wind and the dust and the abandoned cinema on the desolate main street overwhelm them.

  Admittedly, I’ve never read the original novel, but . . . this really is potboiler stuff, isn’t it? How this gets transformed into high art is entirely down to what those
critic types call mise en scéne and a commitment to the idea that even the most sordid and cowardly human action carries some kind of poetry. Bogdanovich falls in love with these characters – a little too literally, in one case – and gives them a dignity and charisma that transcends the banal betrayals and petty power-plays that drive their actions. And, unlike the vast majority of teen films, The Last Picture Show features teen characters who operate as the equals of the adults around them . . . not economically, perhaps, but certainly in terms of how much emotional carnage they can cause, and how willing they are to imitate the worst aspects of their elders while (un)happily having sex with them. It’s an uncomfortable, incestuous and semi-paedophiliac look at what coming of age may mean, and, while somehow never feeling remotely tasteless, taps into the kind of Oedipal fantasies we never want to openly discuss. It’s kind to the trapped and unhappy, and excuses their sins.

  This is done by virtue of scenes of classic cinema, many of which pay homage to classic cinema. Sonny peering over the head of his dowdy, gum-chewing girlfriend while he snogs her, enraptured by the aspirational beauty of Elizabeth Taylor on the big screen in Father Of The Bride. Cybill Shepherd’s delicious introduction to the world, looking straight at camera, at us sitting in the stalls gazing upon her beauty, amused at our lust and admiration, and purring, in Scarlett O’Hara sing-song southern accent, ‘Hi. What y’all doin’ back here in the dark?’ A lot of bare young breast, which still, perhaps because of the black and white, Grapes Of Wrath, look of the movie, carries the shock of such things being allowed in mainstream cinema as the anti-censorship floodgates finally opened in early ’70s cinema. A bra draped over the wing-mirror of a pick-up truck. The terrible, terrible sex between Sonny and Ruth, and Duane and Jacy, and between doomed mute kid Billy (played by Sam Bottoms, Timothy’s brother) and a fat hooker, and the film’s uncompromising refusal to romanticise. There’s never been a film so obsessed with sex yet so relentlessly appalled by its ugliness. Perhaps it told us more about Bogdo and Platt than his affair with Shepherd ever could.