The initial conflict begins without any clarity or certainty of agency. The causes do not match the effects, an early primer for director Sam Fuller’s hard-headed humanism and his eye and ear for the absurdism of conflict and a life that doesn’t conform to our rituals. A kind of retrospective parody of the famous D-Day invasion from Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan – all gung-ho violence and viciously unsentimental grandiose hell-raising – The Big Red One’s opening scene finds a platoon of Americans disappointed that they’re fighting Vichy French (co-collaborators of the Germans, or at least those acquiescent to Nazi might). The Americans rush to a line of barbed wire. A French general orders his men to fire with a machine gun placement. His man disagrees. The general kills him. The general’s underling shoots the general, who falls on the machine gun, setting it off accidentally. A brief skirmish that mounts to nothing starts. It’s over as soon as it starts. Fate, or chance, or whatever, seems to stack the pieces in favor of assault no matter who tries to stop it, as though the universe wanted them to start a conflict and then pitilessly lost interest in the human’s actions immediately. Whether the men are competent or not has nothing to do with it. Continue reading
Ever since the truly sublime Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch “Salad Days”, Sam Peckinpah has been something of a punchline for critics who reduce him to the rampant Novocaine of violence opiating the masses. His only proper war film, Cross of Iron, is not a full-throated rejoinder to that criticism, but it certainly problematizes the animating cinematic thrill of, say, The Wild Bunch. It’s not an abandonment of violence, though, so much as a rough and rowdy revision, punchy in the typical Peckinpah milieu but more decrepit and alienated from its bloodletting.
Ahh, the wonderful world of John Boorman, that perennial cinematic oscillator between the realm of exhausted greatness (Point Break, Deliverance) and spirited atrocity (Zardoz and Exorcist II). The man just eludes categorization, except that all of his films seem to share a pure and unabashed self-centeredness. Yet many of his best films paradoxically stamp themselves in the director’s personality not through baroque visual extravaganzas but through thriller minimalism. His greatest achievements are not screeds radiating shards of discontent or phantasmagorical whirlygusts of excitement. Deliverance and Point Break are white-knuckle, certainly, but they are also thoroughly dog-tired, whipped features, spent forces rather than self-propagating fires of combustion. 
With Dunkirk making the rounds and tearing up the critics, I’ve decided to review a few (better) alternative WWII films that are not part of the official war film canon, or experience delayed entry to the minds of the public. Saving Private Ryan need not apply. 
The Black Dahlia
The obvious soul to siphon for Dont Look Back is Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, a comparison that is not circumstantial but, I suspect, intentional. After all, the mid-’60s films featuring and warping the Beatles public persona were revolutionary in their day, and they feel as ribald and restless today as they were then. These films not only utilized but mangled the burgeoning cinema vérité stylings of the French. They were markers of subversive anti-documentary documentary filmmaking that threshed out the interstitial regions between fact and fiction, narrative cinema and documentary cinema, and an untested wandering soul named D.A. Pennebaker couldn’t resist. 
Stop Making Sense is, and this is not nearly as common and ubiquitous a statement as you might imagine, a truly singular film experience. Sure, there are great concert films; Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is very likely a superior concert film with more to say about the nature of music as it exists in the ether. But Stop Making Sense isn’t a concert film, at least in the traditional sense. It is a film about cinema, and about what cinema can do to transform the ethos of a concert beyond what a concert is in person. If this extends it beyond the realm of a concert, it also does more to make us think about what a concert entails as a realm for voyeurism and socio-spatial art. Stop Making Sense does not merely hit the mark for a concert film; it transforms it. 
Edited
Martin Scorsese’s lived-in film adaptation of The Band’s legendary, star-studded farewell concert, cheekily titled “The Last Waltz”, is wholly at odds with the fundamental logic of the conventional concert film, and it is all the more fascinating for it. At the eve of their dissolution, Scorsese chose to film the Band warts and all. He captures, more than anything, their own distance from the music they no longer necessarily want to call home. You can feel his love for the energy of raw music, yet he uses this energy to capture a fundamental malaise. His camera becomes their most knowing fan, giving the film a live, human physicality even as it deals in the deadened decay of men too tired to care anymore. The Rolling Stones’ documentary Gimme Shelter, itself fairly stunning, is haunting for the way a single tragedy intervened and permeated the celluloid of the whole film. Here, however, we come to understand something more deadening: the perpetual tension of joy and melancholy of life on the road, something a tragedy wouldn’t so much break-up as become one small portion of. On this tension between the lively and the embalmed, the film presents a fascinating vision of humanity and performance equaled by few films. 
The Long Take 