Look out! He's got a knife!

Malaysian vomit dueling

I keep intending to do something more coherent with this blog. Mostly I think of turning it into some kind of review archive, probably for cult & horror movies and hip-hop & country music. I just haven't been bothered.

Reading Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (thanks Janet, promise I'll give it back one day) has helped me work out how the rewrite of my novel will go. I should probably finish the first draft before worrying too much about that though.

Watched all three movie adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's short story The Killers this week. They were all good.

The first is a film noir classic, directed by German expatriot Robert Siodmak in 1946. It's probably the best looking noir film I've seen. It dispenses with the entire story in the first ten minutes, and the bulk of the movie "explains" the background to the story. The start is easily the best part, and is almost word-perfect to the story, but the rest of the movie is pretty great too. Burt Lancaster is brilliant in his first role, and Ava Gardner is as slinky and feline a femme fatale as there ever was. Edmond O'Brien, usually a very good actor, unfortunately plays a role that should have gone to Bogart. The whole movie looks superb, with deep dark shadows galore, and is as doom-haunted as you'd ever want.

The second is a 19 minute student film co-directed by the great Andrei Tarkovsky. Supposedly it was the first film made in the USSR based on American source material. It's even more faithful than the start of the Siodmak film, apart from being in Russian and subtitled. It doesn't really hint at the heights Tarkovsky was to climb, but it's pretty great anyway.

The third is the 1964 version - intended for TV but deemed to violent - directed by Don Siegel. This version barely touches on Hemingway, focuses a lot more on the killers themselves than the Siodmak version (they're played superbly by tough guys Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager), and replaces Lancaster's big dumb boxer with John Cassavetes as a race car driver. Most importantly, the thoroughly nasty villain is Ronald Reagan! (I'm a huge fan of Cassavetes, but I've never liked him more than when he's punching Reagan in the face.) Siegel, who's unfairly been labeled as a fascist for directing Dirty Harry, pulled off a major coup here because Reagan steadfastly refused to play villains throughout his career and this turned out to be his final role (two years later he was Governor of California - hmmm look who's there now). Angie Dickinson plays the Ava Gardner equivalent and while she's a lot less sexy, she's also nastier and more fun. The movie itself is trashy and cheap-looking, but also exciting, fast-moving, and vastly entertaining - as you'd expect from the very talented Siegel.

Posted by joey at September 23, 2005 2:45 PM