The Screengrab : hays code

Screengrab Review: "Alien Trespass"

Nick Schager — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Because simply loving them wasn’t enough, X-Files producer R.W. Goodwin chooses to actually make his own cheesy ‘50s sci-fi film with Alien Trespass, a saga too jokey and graphic to be taken as a straight homage, and yet also a touch too straightforward to function as loopy satire. The result of this indecisive approach is that his out-of-this-world tale – about an extraterrestrial who crash-lands on Earth and attempts to stop the people-devouring monster that’s escaped from his spaceship – merely coasts along limply, lacking ribald tongue-in-cheek humor as well as the unironic self-seriousness that epitomized its spiritual predecessors, of which The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are the most obvious. The prelude, in which a phony newsreel precedes (and hypes) the “feature presentation,” sets the off-kilter mood. Yet unlike with Grindhouse’s phony peripheral trappings, Goodwin’s intro can’t muster much in the way of laugh-out-loud humor or meta-cinema commentary. Instead, like the subsequent action, it just sits there, almost as lifeless and inert as the puddles of human remains that are left after the alien creature Ghota has eaten.

In California’s Mojave Desert in 1957, a meteor shower watched by nearby townspeople, including astronomer Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack), brings with it a plummeting UFO. Much to his horny wife Lana’s (Jody Thompson) frustration, Ted goes to investigate, and is promptly snatched by a towering, silver, Gort-like figure known as Urp who inhabits Ted’s body and goes looking for the one-eyed, tentacled, man-eating Ghota before it begins to reproduce – a process that wouldn’t stop until the global population had been consumed. Meanwhile, a pushy boy and his prudish girlfriend canoodling at a lover’s lane narrowly escape the Ghota (which can make itself invisible) and, together with a greaser buddy prone to spouting era-specific slang, try to warn their fellow citizens, which include Ted-infatuated waitress Tammy (Jenni Baird), cop Vernon (Robert Patrick), and chief Dawson (Dan Lauria). Corniness ensues, with Goodwin shooting in rich Technicolor, employing a spot-on orchestral score, and replicating his beloved genre’s rhythms and tropes with enough fidelity that his film soon reproduces the torpid pacing and distinct absence of suspense typical of crummy B-movies.

McCormack, Baird and Patrick all deliver predictably wooden and/or broad performances, but the Ghota (despite being seemingly made out of rubber) looks too good for a supposed cinematic relic, just as the sight of Lana showing cleavage and wearing lingerie, or a deputy’s discussion of the vomiting and bloodletting that accompanies radiation poisoning, are too explicit for what’s supposed to be a project produced under the watch of the Hays Code. Of course, exaggeration is an acceptable means of parody, but Alien Trespass never goes far enough to warrant such a designation, instead occupying a dull, purposeless middle ground. The film’s aimlessness is epitomized by Tammy’s climactic speech to save Urp from those who believe him to be a murderer, an oration that evokes the this-is-the-underlying-message sermons of likeminded sci-fi adventures, yet – because Goodwin hasn’t bothered to lend his material even a whiff of subtext – meanders about in search of direction. More tepid-cute imitation than captivating critique, Alien Trespass merely makes one pine for the un-self-conscious predecessors that inspired its creation.

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Ride Hard

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE MALTESE FALCON

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:15:00 GMT

The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are often considered the two greatest acheivements of detective noir prior to the post-war era. It's by no means incidental to their reputation that both starred the pitch-perfect Humphrey Bogart, nor that in both films, he portrayed a classic private eye created by one of the standout pulp witers of the previous decade. Though both have been rescued from dime-novel oblivion by later critics who were able to pick out their substantial literary talents from the low-level hackwork that comprised much of 1930s pulp, Raymond Chandler's reputation has outstripped Dashiell Hammett's, and rightfully so; Hammett was an outstanding technician and a keen drawer of character, but he lacked Chandler's transcendent style, his keen psychological insight, and his stunning sense of place and time. Still, he shared with Philip Marlowe's creator a love of language, and he was by far Chandler's superior in terms of complex, inventive plot, which made his books natural fodder for movie adaptations.

In his finest book, The Maltese Falcon, he combined this exquisite sensibility for clockwork plots with some of his most sinister and intriguing characters (the pathological lying femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the effete and manipulative thief Joel Cairo and the gregarious but sinister crime boss Kaspar Gutman), who he sent off in search of cinema's most memorable MacGuffin. Against them all he set the coolest, most calculating private eye in all of literature: the immortal Sam Spade. Much like its spiritual twin, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, despite a number of divergences from its source, achieves near-perfection and serves as an unforgettable 1941 movie adaptation that makes you appreciate the finer qualities of the novel all the more.

WHAT IT HAD: John Huston, one of the greatest directors of his era and the man who is far more responsible than either Humphrey Bogart or Dashiell Hammett for the film's success. Huston adapted the screenplay himself, stripping the story to its most raw elements, losing as little as possible while streamlining for the screen and keeping Hammett's understated, cooly cruel dialogue intact. An amazing cast with not a flat performance in the bunch -- aside from Bogart's iconic performance, Mary Astor gives the role of a lifetime as Brigid, Elisha Cook Jr. plays nicely against type as the furious gunsel Wilmer, Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo is endlessly entertaining, and Sydney Greenstreet's Kaspar Gutman is simply one of the best screen villains of all time.

WHAT IT LACKED: Very little. Thanks to Huston's top-notch direction and wonderful sense of timing, the parts of the novel which are left out are hard to miss, and the dialogue is so well-translated to the screen that you don't too much lament the loss of Hammett's fine style (as when he describes Spade, early on, as "rather pleasantly like a blond Satan"). Bits of exposition are left behind to no great loss, as well. Perhaps the major difference between book and movie can be chalked up to the Hays Code: censors of the day wouldn't allow Joel Cairo to be portrayed on film as he is in the book as obviously homosexual, and the book is far more violent than the film -- scenes where Gutman tortures his own daughter and is himself ultimately murdered by the betrayed henchman Wilmer Cook are deleted.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Both the book and the film are nearly perfect examples of their kind. Ironically, at the time the movie -- a huge critical success, then and now -- was made, the author of the the novel, Dashiell Hammett, was not taken very seriously. At the time, almost all pulp writers were considered low-rent hacks cranking out peurile entertainment for the masses. The movie, however -- which featured a screenplay by John Huston that mirrored the plot and dialogue of the novel almost exactly -- was hugely praised by critics both highbrow and popular. In fact, Huston received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, while Hammett would wait some 30 years (a decade after his death) to receive a serious reappraisal by literary critics.