Side by Side video: The Asphalt Jungle & The Killing

update 2/21: It's finally up!

I announced this video nearly a month ago but got distracted from it repeatedly. Then this weekend I finally dove in - and almost lost everything when my nearly-completed project wouldn't open Friday night. Thanks to the generous help of Nuno Baltazar, I was able to get it up and running again and so here today - finally - is my video comparison of these two classic films. The Vimeo upload and original intro (including a link to the essay that inspired the video) follows the jump. My previous entries in the Side by Side series were Twin Peaks & Neon Genesis Evangelion and Dial M For Murder & Rear Window. I've also made a YouTube playlist featuring all three videos.

Spade & Marlowe, Private Eyes (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, on page and screen)

Who is Sam Spade? Who is Philip Marlowe?

Well, for many film buffs, Bogie will always be Bogie. Granted, there's plenty of wiggle room within the Humphrey Bogart persona: the paranoia of Fred C. Dobbs, Dixon Steele, or Captain Queeg; the ruthlessness of those many gangster roles; the lovable grunginess of his turn in The African Queen. But when he dons his detective's fedora and lights his cigarette, there's an iconic continuity to the look, the mannerisms, the speech. One could justifiably assume that Bogart's iconic screen presence eclipses any individual character tics, whether he's supposed to be playing San Francisco sleuth Sam Spade (in John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon) or L.A. dick Philip Marlowe (in Howard Hawks' 1946 The Big Sleep). Yet at root, Spade and Marlowe are very different people - one might even say fundamentally so, despite the superficial similarities and notable overlap. Within the hardboiled detective persona, they represent different motivations and actions - at least as originally conceived.

Remembering the Movies, Mar. 11 - 17

 Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

Several interesting films make an appearance this week, as the release schedule picks up a bit. The early Lucas picture - arguably his most impressive formal achievement - is one, but it stands alongside a couple French films from the past few decades, a live-action Disney classic, an ambitious John Huston production, and a very early adaptation of Dante. Additionally, we shine a spotlight on a Latin Dracula and the Aesop-influenced antics of Bugs Bunny.

Remembering the Movies, Jan. 28 - Feb. 3

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

It's a colorful week: eighteenth-century French martial artists, shrinking women, and a liver-munching serial killer rub shoulders as we transition into the second month of the year. Actors include Fatty Arbuckle, Marilyn Monroe, and the very first film star, while a strong directorial field ranges from Hitchock to Huston to Sam Fuller. On another note, opinions are like assholes, and this week I happen to have one (an opinion, that is). So by popular request I offer my (brief) thoughts on the film highlighted above, alongside a memorable "Siskel & Ebert" exchange on the same movie. Break out the fava beans...

"What's the difference?" (The Asphalt Jungle & The Killing)

This is an entry in Adam Zanzie's John Huston blog-a-thon. It contains spoilers.

Maybe Sterling Hayden should just stay away from horses. In John Huston's 1950 noir masterpiece The Asphalt Jungle, Hayden plays Dix, an honorable but desperate "hooligan" who bets - and always loses - on the races. His bookie turns to him to provide muscle for a jewel heist; inevitable complications ensue and Dix winds up with an infected gunshot wound in his side. Like a haunted man, he flees his midwestern city for the countryside, loyal girlfriend Doll Conovan (Jean Hagen) at the wheel as Dix slumps in the passenger side mumbling to himself deliriously. What about? Horses, and not the ones you bet on. Rather, the ones you raise and ride, the ones you race perhaps, while other people bet on them, earning you money. As consciousness enters its last dissolve, Dix's car pulls up at a ramshackle Kentucky field. Earlier in the film, we heard him tell Doll about his happy childhood, a long lifetime ago, when he grew up on this free and open horse farm. Now it's gone to seed - and so has he, reeling and stumbling through this equestrian limbo until he finally falls hard onto the soil, dead along with his dreams: an Icarus who never even made it off the ground.

Johnny, Sterling Hayden's character in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 breakthrough The Killing never makes it in the air either, though he comes damn close - all the way to the airplane tarmac in fact. But let's rewind for a moment, an appropriate gesture given this film's chronologically fractured storyline. If Dix loved horses, Johnny treats them rather callously: he even hires a hitman to kill a certain Red Lightning, ahead in the final stretch of the seventh race of the day. His hope is that the pandemonium ensuing from the guaranteed spill will create a cover for his daring robbery of the racetrack. It's a meticulously planned job, and this time Hayden is not a mere hooligan, but the head honcho. His luck is no better, however, even if he makes it out alive this time. It won't be a horse that accompanies Johnny's failure, but a yapping, foppish little dog, whose collision with the luggage cart sends Johnny's suitcase - and with it the whole loot - crashing out onto the runway, whirled around by the propellers in a mad mockery of his planned flight. Hayden's expression is priceless as his girlfriend tells him to run and the film ends as he delivers the most exquisitely limp and pathetic closing line of all time. "Meh," he mumbles half-inaudibly, "Wasadifference..."

A Quick One - Behind the scenes of Reflections in a Golden Eye

[As December, and with it 2008, comes to a close, let me take a moment to look back on several recently viewed (but undiscussed) movies. Each "Quick One" will be a paragraph, with the open invitation for you to keep the discussion going by leaving comments.]

My thoughts on Reflections in a Golden Eye, a very bizarre film which could either be a surreal gem or a grotesque disaster - I'm not sure yet - will have to wait for another occasion. Perhaps after I read the Carson McCullers book and discover the original context for what comes off as, by and large, wilful obscurity on the screen. Or perhaps if/when I reach John Huston in the Auteurs series (was he an auteur? consider the series' title more a question than a statement). Anyway, when the movie was over, I perused the special features. There was only one to speak of, "behind-the-scenes" footage from the Reflections set in 1966. It lasted 25 minutes, accompanied by some plangent music, essentially a drawn-out home movie of all the tedium that takes place on a film set. And I loved every minute of it - truth be told, I found it far more compelling than the feature attraction. Elizabeth Taylor bundles up against the cold, Huston rushes in to show her just how he wants her to lean against a post. She disappears into a trailer which reads "Elizabeth Taylor Burton." Brando paces around, occasionally laughing in a show of humor that is altogether absent from his performance. A stand-in for Taylor, hair done up with the same headband, nervously watches crew members at work, seeming to hope that someone will speak to her and ask what they can do to help her career along. Morning mist shrouds the horse farm, Huston reads a newspaper with headlines about a Viet Cong attack, grips yank a car by ropes so that the sound of the engine won't disrupt dialogue recording. The music and the lack of sound accomplish a poignant distancing effect, and overall we seem to be peering into a vanished, yet briefly reborn, moment. Much as I love fiction films and structured documentaries, sometimes I wonder if film's greatest, most moving potential isn't fulfilled within the realm of the home movie. Call it "reflections in a camera eye."