An aberration of the soon-to-be-implemented, puritanical Hays Code, Howard Hawks’ twitchy, rough-housed Scarface is a coarse rampage of firebrand cinematic verve, a sojourn into the underworld and death that paradoxically and perversely reflects cinema at its liveliest. Early sound cinema is often (falsely) denied vitality and dismissed as stodgy, but Scarface has a bullet or two to quell those who would deny it. Independently financed by Howard Hughes, Scarface trumpets its independent spirit as an ambivalently trashy social expose that wears its heart and its brain on its pistol. Cinema in the raw, it displays casual mastery of technique but invokes the shambolic one-take sloppiness of a killer Neil Young album. Continue reading →

In the early golden years of classical Hollywood, Universal Studios somehow always tempted, and summarily avoided, being left hanging in the lurch. Unlike the five major studios, all of which owned their own theaters and thus guaranteed distribution of their films, Universal wasn’t born with a silver spoon in its mouth. The spendthrift glamour of the MGM musical machine was but a cloudy daydream for a studio that, while hardly poverty row, needed to carve out its own niche to go toe to toe with the big boys. Rather than trying to assimilate to the studio heavies with facsimiles of their Dream Factory productions, Universal ensconced itself in the out-of-the-way places, the boondocks of cinema, testing out more unsavory realms befitting their more hardscrabble existence. Unwilling, or unable, to lull the masses with luxuriant A-picture opulence, the company decided not to soothe America to bed but to lower itself into the murk of mutated German Expressionism and raise a shrieking countermelody, the kind of rattling cadence that could wake the dead.
Continue reading →

Possibly the most explicitly thematic among the famously un-explicit Terrence Malick oeuvre, The New World’s de facto state of mind is the untamable wonder and bedeviling awe of the unexplored tracts of physical land and the unexplored mental topography of human longing and desire. Beginning with a human marooned in a strange world, the man’s only outlet to reformulate their essence is to couple the corporeal material of the physical world with his spiritual or extra-real essence of self-awareness within nature for the first time. This rigid “physical” and “mental/emotional/spiritual” dichotomy has historically been if not eroded then at least imperiled by non-Western cultures who have often adopted more fluxional conceptions of how physical, mental, and spiritual Western categorizations are instead more dialectical and interweaving, even possibly the same thing (materials are given use value beyond their capitalist physical money value). Malick’s own temperament has for decades obviously occupied a realm at least parallel to this distinctly non-capitalist mental wavelength. His films unstitch the iron-clad demarcations of the physical and the spiritual by basking in the ability of the human, untethered from their normative mental shackles, to approach new mental resplendence, new mental exultancy, by opening up to the capacious confines of the natural world. Continue reading →