THE BLACK RHAPSODIES OF BRIAN DE PALMA

There does seem to be a bit of Brian De Palma blowing in the cinematic winds these days leading up to the release of The Black Dahlia, and it’s taking form in a lot of interesting posts and comments on the director and his films on some very smart blogs. I’ve already mentioned Slant’s Auteur Fatale series, as well as well-considered observations from That Little Round-headed Boy (whose piece on Mission to Mars even gets a mention from the oracle at De Palma a la Mod), Girish and Peter Nellhaus. Now you can add Peet Gelderblom’s two cents to the coffers of fine writers checking on De Palma. Peet muses about paradox in De Palma's work on his blog, Lost In Negative Space, an off-shoot of his excellent film criticism site 24 Lies A Second. (Peet also points to Soundtrack.net where snippets of Mark Isham's score for The Black Dahlia can be heard.)

(If anyone knows of any other good writing on De Palma that could use a link, please let me know!)

There’s so much interesting going on about De Palma that I had been regretting not picking up the ball and running with it myself. But then a message from Peet this afternoon reminded me that, actually, I had. I’d just left everything in the comments column of my recent post, "Brian De Palma: Critical Black Mass." The comments there, from Maya, Tom Sutpen, TLRHB, all add up to an excellent consideration of how this director functions (and sometimes doesn’t function), especially in a critical world that seems to value someone like Sam Mendes more than it does a true soaked-in-cinema provocateur like De Palma. But it was SLIFR reader Cerb Chaos who posed a query that finally got me into the fray:

”I not only dislike (De Palma’s) work, but am confused over the reception he has been given by critics whom I mostly agree with wholeheartedly. True, I have not seen such films as Carrie, Scarface, and Sisters, which are more often cited as his masterpieces, but after my experience I am not so excited to see them. Are they that much better?”

I hope that my own thoughts, intended as a response to Cerb Chaos, can function on their own as a general consideration of why De Palma’s films most often (but sometimes do not) work for me, and therefore might be considered a worthy contribution to the snowballing impromptu blog-a-thon-style discussion of this great director. But I also want to highlight those comments that I received that really serve to illuminate this director, who is so confounding and exasperating to some, and so exhilarating and compelling to others. To start, Maya connects the dots between Antonioni and Blow Out, a connection that goes well past a similarity in titles:

“Blow Out… reminded me of Antonioni, both in its forensic epiphany and the reference to what Girish has already identified as a ‘cinephiliac moment’: when the night wind blows through the trees, replicated almost with tenderness in the scene where Travolta is recording the night wind.”

Then Cerb Chaos checks in, reacting, I’m assuming, to the collection of rhapsodic writing referred and linked to in the “Critical Black Mass” post:

”I have seen three of De Palma's films, and in all likelihood they are not a correct representation. But I don't get the love he's gotten on the film sites I visit. Mission to Mars, which as mentioned has an essay by the always articulate LRHB, is quite simply the worst movie I have ever seen in theaters, and one of the ten worst movies I've seen. Period. This was the first De Palma movie I saw. It did not leave a good impression. I saw The Untouchables, which is entertaining, but nothing that I feel any kind of love for.

After discussing this with my father, he persuaded me to watch Dressed to Kill, which deemed to devolve into a game of “spot the homage.” De Palma's homages seem to me too obvious and take me out of the movie watching experience. After watching the movie my dad asked me what I thought about it. I admitted that I didn’t like it. He replied that he thought it had aged badly, losing what novelty it had when first released.I not only dislike his work, but am confused over the reception he has been given by critics whom I mostly agree with wholeheartedly. True, I have not seen such films as Carrie, Scarface, and Sisters, which are more often cited as his masterpieces, but after my experience I am not so excited to see them. Are they that much better?”

Then it was Tom’s turn:

”I'm not as great an admirer of DePalma's as some (though what films of his I like I have very high regard for), but I do understand why other cinephiles find much in his work to rhapsodize over.

There are few filmmakers, after all, who evince as complete an affection (albeit a critical one) for Cinema as Brian DePalma; and his engagement with it, as reflected in the films themselves, is never less than fascinating. At worst, yes, there are times . . . I number much of Dressed to Kill among them . . . when he overborrows and the whole thing sinks to the level of empty homage, but far more often he takes this prior material and redeploys it in extremely intriguing ways.
In Blow Out, for example, DePalma doesn't simply use the Antonioni material to create what Girish righteously calls a 'cinephiliac moment', he fully absorbs it into his own sensibility (a sensibility I think one can find in its purest state in his early comedies) and subtly transforms it in the same breath. He re-claims it in the name of the cinephile, if you will. On these occasions, DePalma's construction of the Thriller becomes as purely cinematic as Jerry Lewis's construction of visual gags; and far more personal. How could a cinephile not go gaga over it?

A brief word on The Black Dahlia: I can think of few artists who could more profitably collide than DePalma and James Ellroy (Ellroy, in his crime novels, applies a technique similar to DePalma's suspense numbers), but personally I would have liked to see what DePalma could do with a dense, maddening, gruesome novel such as Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. Black Dahlia seems almost too easy a challenge by comparison.”

And finally, That Little Round-headed Boy, celebrated and eloquent defender of Mission to Mars:

“I'm not blind to DePalma's weaker pictures, but what he creates on film (in his best films, at least) is something akin to a dream state, where you completely lose track of being a viewer engaged with a piece of celluloid and just become one with the experience (That's the same reason I don't dismiss Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which has many clunky passages and a bad performance by Cruise, but also has moments of haunting hypnotic poetry.) Any director who can do that with film simply cannot be dismissed so handily, or thoroughly rated in an up/down thumbs system. I understand consumer criticism that needs to rate the movie on all its elements, but the beauty of what we can do on blogs is explore films for more than that. Basically, it doesn't matter to me if a film is good or bad in sum, but whether it's interesting enough to stay with me, rattle in my head, or make me want to see it again. I think those are equally valid ways to discuss and understand film.”

Thanks, Maya, Tom and TLRHB. And thanks too to Paul C., who is a champion of both Phantom of the Paradise and Raising Cain, and to Peet for encouraging me to go back and make this an “official” unofficial blog-a-thon contribution. (Some might call it shameless recycling. But not you, right? Right?!)

But mostly, thanks to Cerb Chaos for being forthcoming about your disagreement with what seems to be (in this instance anyway) some kind of critical consensus that you're honestly seeking to understand. I’m not saying that the comments, above or below, will necessarily change your mind or anything. But I do appreciate the spirit in which they were put forth, and I’m glad to be able to say that they were, I think, received in the same spirit— one of furthering understanding of all points of view on a figure as complex and controversial as Brian De Palma. It was your comments that finally inspired me to try to briefly (ha!) put into some shape or form what it is about the director that I find so personally transfixing. That attempt is what follows here.

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De Palma is one of those filmmakers who seems to inspire either fierce devotion or fierce hatred-- there doesn't seem to be much middle ground when considering his films. (And considering his subject matter and his insinuating, exploratory, personally implicating way with the camera and story structure, should this be so surprising?)

I've always found De Palma to be a compelling filmmaker, particularly coming, as I do, from the point of view of a cinephile, even when I've found his work off-key or ill-advised. But since the release of Femme Fatale, I've come to realize with just how much esteem I hold this director-- he's surely one of my favorites now, and perhaps one of the two or three best American directors currently working. Yet I've never felt bound to look at his work with a blindly approving eye and, indeed, there are several movies in his oeuvre that, despite their clear thematical relationship to the rest of his work and to the history of cinema he draws upon, seem fundamentally uninspired, tired, atonal.

I'm thinking primarily of movies like Obsession, and also Body Double, which I recently revisited-- I revised my opinion upward slightly, but still don't think much of it-- and the absurdly overestimated Scarface, which Pauline Kael called "a De Palma movie for people who hate De Palma movies."

I also think less of The Fury than most De Palma enthusiasts do. To my eye, it's filled with images of sinuous, beautiful rage and the poetry of emotional agony, and it sports some terrific performances-- John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, Carol Rossen, Amy Irving. Yet at the same time it seems rather misshapen at times as a narrative, hurried and choppy in moments where it should be languid and seductive, and I think it fails to build up a true head of black steam by its conclusion, despite the memorable dispatching of Fiona Lewis and, of course, Cassavetes. It's clearly a classic De Palma in its concerns and its approach, and compared to just about any other similar effort from just about anyone else it's clearly technically superior. But compared to some of De Palma's other works from the same period I just don't think it's as perfectly crafted or consistently imagined. All that said, I still enjoy revisiting The Fury every couple of years or so.

But ask me what De Palma films I'm over the moon for, either with the kind of minor reservations I'd have for any filmmaker, or with none at all, and the list is much longer: Hi, Mom!, Sisters, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Mission: Impossible and Femme Fatale, with a second tier occupied by Phantom of the Paradise, The Untouchables and Raising Cain. Cain, in fact, is on my short list of De Palma titles I'll be revisiting soon, along with Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, The Bonfire of the Vanities and hopefully even Wise Guys before The Black Dahlia bows.

As Tom says, it's De Palma's engagement (hugely key word) with cinema and cinema history that, plainly enough for me, places him outside and above the class of copycats with whom he's so frequently grouped. He's using key influences (Hitchcock, of course, but Antonioni, Godard, Chabrol and Kubrick as well) not as signposts to clue movie eggheads in as to how smart and crafty he is, but as seedlings for the progression of his vision over the course of his career, as the foundation of a structured, astringently clear-eyed, yet sometimes subtly hallucinatory way of visualizing the world through the cinema. The audiences "sees" the cinema, but De Palma also uses the cinema itself to see, to reflect back on the world, on the audience, in a meaningful and not always comforting fashion.

De Palma's movies, sometimes because of their excessive stylization, can seem uneven, to have not "aged well." There are moments in both Dressed to Kill and Blow Out that seem thin, less well thought out. (Is it coincidence that they seem to be those scenes that feature Dennis Franz and Nancy Allen in one-on-one situations?)

But each movie, even within scenes that may not seem to be "working" for sensibilities that have have moved 20-25 years down the road, relies on relevatory visual strategies and cues that can often help the viewer past the occasional lumpy exposition or weak performance by engaging him or her in the film's structural purpose-- I'm thinking here of how De Palma uses the multilayered framing and levels of sound in the interrogation scene in Dressed to Kill to tickle our imaginations and stimulate our perception during an otherwise banal scene-- Keith Gordon eavesdropping on Franz's questioning of Allen-- seen through layers of windows, and through various and subtle deep focus/split screen techniques.

I think you're right on the money, Tom, regarding Blow Out as well. De Palma absorbs the Antonioni material, all right, and I'd suggest he goes far beyond what Antonioni was able to achieve, or maybe even what h was interested in achieving, in Blow Up by embracing the crude "plot" elements of the witnessed murder. Where Antonioni abandons this narrative line, for reasons either based in existential malaise, or perhaps a disinterest in exploring the possibilities of mere melodrama, De Palma grounds his film in it and expands the elements Antonioni abandons into a vision of political paranoia and personal responsibility that is far more potent today than are his fellow Italian's mod London mind games.

I cannot imagine sitting through the first 20 minutes of Blow Out and not being completely glued to the screen to see the rest. That's an opening 20 minutes that holds within it the gruesome, salacious comedy and fake-out gimmickry of the movie-within-a-movie; the stunning logo of the movie itself (scored with near-subliminal, prescient use of some of the most integral and agonzing sounds that will be heard later in the film); the enthralling split-screen under the opening credits, which contrasts expository information setting up the importance of the Liberty Bell Parade and the emergence of the Kennedyesque political figure with Jack (Travolta) preparing to record sound out in the field; and of course, that absolutely perfect sequence in which De Palma heightens every sound (the owl, the overheard pedestrians, the faint squeal of tires) in anticipation of the recording of the sounds of the horrific event that will kick the film's primary mystery into gear. You're damn right, Tom-- this cinephile is definitely gaga over it.

And it's impossible for me to see Blow Out and imagine coming away, despite the apparent influences of Antonioni and Hitchcock, thinking of it as anything but a De Palma film, a work of art that couldn't have originated from anyone else. To downgrade an artist because he acknowledges the whole of the history of his art form, and specific avenues of interest that have sparked his creativity in the creation of his work, would be to deny the manner in which artists in every medium have taken previously known works and expanded on them, turned them inside out, filled old wine husks with new wine. De Palma is a polarizing artist whose output has never taken a straight line-- he gets better with age, it seems to me, even if there are disturbing, uneven zags and zigs from film to film. And even his work for hire (Mission: Impossible, Mission to Mars), while sometimes hit and miss, is shot through with this director's fury, deftness with chronology, visual confidence and, in the case of Mars, belief in the lyricism and power of the image to overcome the occasional insufficiency of the spoken word.

I have no idea where The Black Dahlia will land on the scale of Brian De Palma's career, but I'm hard pressed to think of another director in 2006 whose work I'm so much looking forward to seeing.

SHORT ROUNDS: ALL ABOUT THOSE HIGH-FLYING SNAKES AND THE PLANE THEY RODE IN ON

You’ve probably heard of the movie Snakes on a Plane. Of course you have. You’ve been hearing about it nonstop for about six months. Or rather, you’ve been hearing about the unique studio marketing campaign designed to keep the Internet buzzing about its high-concept low concept. And in the long shadow of its less-than-spectacular opening weekend box office numbers, it seems that many of those in the fan base who were first seduced by the giddiness of producing an action movie under such self-aware circumstances are now checking in with theories about why the expected audience didn’t show up in huge waves, how the marketing failed, how it might have been approached differently, and whether or not interest in the movie peaked too early—would May have been a better release date, to capitalize on the intense anticipation as well as position it more like a Bruckheimer bash rather than a Cormanesque alternative to the offerings of genuine quality available during the dog days of August? (Insert arched eyebrow here.) Some of these discussions are self-serving slices of deep-dish 20-20 hindsight served up as tasty fodder for heated-up Internet message boards, and others are characterized with genuine curiosity about what some worry might become a template for furthering Hollywood’s obsession with achieving a sort of all-things-to-all-people nirvana. (Perhaps the disappointing Snakes numbers can at least dampen those fears a trifle.)

Unexpectedly low returns on aggressively marketed studio movies-- certainly not an unfamiliar scenario to have ever played out on the pages of the daily trade papers. The success of the touchstone campaign that got all the tails wagging over Snakes-- the grassroots is-it-real-or-isn’t-it Internet push behind The Blair Witch Project-- looks like it will remain, for the immediate future, the gold standard of virtual fleecing. But other attempts to whip up a priori consensus on Web sites and chat rooms have been far less reliable—just how many studio executives, after all, were convinced that Superman Returns was solid gold based on pre-release cyberchatter? Internet enthusiasm makes for great copy in puff pieces to be printed the Sunday before a big release, but it seems that once the film gets unleashed into the real world those figures relating to audience interest don’t always make the proper translation into actual box-office numbers.

Maybe New Line and all the Hollywood stat mavens just haven't figured out yet what “X” number of hits on Snakes on a Blog means in terms of actual people who will stop surfing the Web long enough to actually go out and see a movie, even one like this. And I think the marketing department found themselves confronted on opening weekend with a vast swath of moviegoers who wouldn't pay to see a movie they've prejudged (because of all the hype they've heard, studio-generated or not) to be bad, intentionally or unintentionally. Suddenly, New Line's marketing goals became a little more daunting, their "Look, Ma, no brains" strategy a little less like a sure thing. And now, with American audiences not nibbling as hard on the Snake bait, the studio is suddenly faced with selling an action movie in foreign markets that usually take their testosterone doses a little more straight up, markets where ironic distancing from the movie being advertised in the advertising itself is less likely to be understood, therefore much less effective.

But, really, enough about the sell job. The question that actually held my interest in the weeks and days before actually seeing Snakes on a Plane was (and this might strike some as rather quaint), what was the movie like? Was the movie being sold really a deliberately-so-bad-it’s-good postmodern smirkfest? Was it an indecisive, low-ambition thriller hamstrung by the kind of ineptitude that can’t be faked—in other words, was it so bad that it was just bad? Or was it maybe a self-aware attempt at recasting familiar action-adventure molds with a minimum of winks and nudges that had a chance at succeeding as a respectable thriller on its own terms?

Snakes was directed by David R. Ellis, who previously concocted the delightfully sadistic Rube Goldberg grand guignol of Final Destination 2 and last year’s hopped-up thriller Cellular, and my anticipation of this new movie was grounded firmly in what I hoped he could bring to the party as a sly coordinator of action-movie magic. As it turns out, Snakes hasn’t the sleekness of Cellular or the gonzo imaginative conviction that goosed the imagery in FD2-- it’s a much more straightforward piece of work, by design, and as such it’s not as gaudy a showcase for Ellis’ talents with clean action choreography as those other films. Instead, it’s merely a solid, well-paced, energized effort by this director, who will hopefully be able to parlay the attention drawn to Snakes into more and better opportunities to craft amusing and wizardly action fare in the years to come.

(I couldn’t help wondering, however, what Ronny Yu, the director who was originally attached to Snakes, might have done with the same material. Yu turned the potential turd of Freddy vs. Jason into a visually deft and clever, rock-‘em-sock-‘em genre standoff that was far more fun than anyone had a right to expect. He also helped shepherd the Child’s Play series from its creative dead-end as a straightforward slasher series toward the more fancifully rude and gasp-inducing meta-comedy of Bride of Chucky and writer-director Don Mancini’s peak follow-up, Seed of Chucky. Ronny Yu could have been just the guiding hand to send Snakes into the stratosphere.)

What Ellis does bring to Snakes, however, is the ability to balance on the thin wire that segments the movie’s well-documented concept—hundreds of snakes let loose by a Hawaiian gangster on a jumbo jet as a means of ensuring a plane crash that will kill an onboard witness to a gruesome murder—between sincerely meat-headed thriller and self-deprecating, over-the-top camp for the post-Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker age. And both the director and the movie benefit in this regard by having Samuel L. Jackson’s name above the title. This actor has made a career out of embodying the very concept of inspiring laughs while at the same time asking (demanding!) that his characters be taken surface-level very seriously, as intended. Jackson, as the F.B.I. agent who is escorting the murder witness back to Los Angeles and ends up spearheading the fight against the plane’s reptilian invaders, knows exactly how to pitch this material, and he’s never once caught winking at the camera, even during the delivery of that now-famous fan-inspired line, which has the feeling of being wedged into the screenplay by committee, all right, but which also plays surprisingly well, at least with the cheering Saturday night opening weekend crowd that surrounded me and my friends.

But as a straightforward measure of indicating what the movie might be against what it turns out to be, the ultimate effect of the Snakes marketing deluge can be said, I think, to be a textbook case of truth in advertising. The movie never once reveals itself to be anything beyond the claims of the title, and consequently it never accumulates an extra level of social satire or psychological subtext to which some of the best drive-in exploitation-type fare (like Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 or Lewis Teague’s Alligator) could lay claim. On the other hand, if you don't want to see a movie about snakes overrunning a plane and laying the bite, in some excruciatingly creative and funny ways, on a series of B-movie stock passengers, at least you have a fair idea of what you’d be missing.

The happy surprise is that it turns out Snakes on a Plane is not, in the Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay "tradition," an overinflated blockbuster full of B-movie allusions, but instead a bona fide heart-and-soul cheapie. (Sort of-- what $40 million doesn't buy these days, eh?) It's a real exploitation movie in the best sense of the word-- this movie often feels, sounds and looks like it could have come straight out of the disaster movie movement of the early to mid 70s. And so does that passenger list, which includes an insufferably haughty British prig, a high-maintenance model-type (complete with pillow-perched Chihuahua), a stoic flight attendant on her last run before a long-overdue career change, a young mother and her newborn, a pair of pre-teen brothers, and even a OCD-plagued hip-hop star and his portly entourage who all, refreshingly, have something more to do than stand around fleshing out racial stereotypes. It even does a good job (intentional or not) replicating the clunky narrative setups and exposition of a ‘70s disaster epic—the movie starts off feeling like it might not shed the veneer of cheese evident in these opening scenes, but it eventually takes flight and gets better, funnier and more exciting as it hurtles along toward its white-knuckle climax. And along the way the snake action—real, CGI, rubber, whatever—hits a lot of “boo!” bull’s-eyes and heights of genuine, slithery fear too.

Snakes on a Plane is a wild, chipper, economical good time, if you’re inclined to accept it on its own terms—that is, a relatively straight action thriller with a healthy sense of humor, not a Rocky Horror irony-a-thon ready-made for mid-flight audience condescension. It balances jolts and laughs in a fashion that rarely tips too far in the wink-wink, nudge-nudge direction, and I had a genuine good time in its company. And maybe even more importantly, I didn't feel unclean afterward, as if I'd been cruelly duped or abused by some cynical marketing campaign, or my own desire for cheap thrills. Snakes on a Plane may have been sold as though it was intended to be all things to all people, but thankfully it plays like a movie intended for true believers-- thrill-seekers in thrall to the kind of exploitation fare typical of a Saturday night bill at the drive-ins of 30 years ago. The movie is smarter than advertised too, and it has fun simply running full tilt with its goofy high concept, and that includes delivering a lot of the gore and nudity and tough, nasty talk that earmark its true roots.

As my friends and I all walked out afterward, we were happy to discover that we all enjoyed Snakes on a Plane to one degree or another. (Even my wife, eternal good sport and serial avoider of movie violence that she is, had to admit she had fun, though often with her eyes closed.) We hit the escalators to the parking lot and chattered amongst ourselves, and I realized I was coming off the same kind of thrill that I experienced after seeing something like Death Race 2000 on its original release, a piece of pulp widely assumed to be irredeemable trash that turned out to have a vitality and charge all its own. Snakes on a Plane has a similar sort of B-movie buzz, and a hiss and a rattle to boot, but only time will tell if it ends up having the kind of enduring appeal that movie has enjoyed amongst the genre cognoscenti. Whatever the movie's fate on the cultural landscape, I'd like to think that somewhere in the Movie Afterlife over this past weekend, the likes of Irwin Allen and Jennings Lang and William Castle, final box office numbers be damned, were observing, smiling and saying to each other, "Damn, I wish we'd thought of that!”

(Portions of this article first appeared as a comment provided to Jim Emerson's Scanners blog.)

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Apparently, though, for some genius the movie’s concept wasn’t high enough. In a move that would have horrified even William Castle, two live rattlesnakes were turned loose in an Arizona movie theater this past weekend that was showing Snakes on a Plane.

Good story, except for one thing: a day later police are claiming the "Snakes in a Theater" story is a bit of a hoax. And even in this follow-up story about what turned out to be a nonstory, there's still room to mention the movie's disappointing opening weekend grosses. Where's Howard Beale when we really need him?

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Blogger Dave Robidenza, who runs the show at American Waste, had a wittier, less potentially homicidal, 100% hoax-free way of having fun with the whole Snakes on a Plane idea. He details, in the afterglow of seeing the movie at the Mission Tiki Drive-In this past weekend, some imaginary recasting of Samuel Jackson’s testy F.B.I. agent and invites your contributions as well. This has the makings of a delightful parlor game, don’t you think?

BRIAN DE PALMA: CRITICAL BLACK MASS

The tip from David Hudson and GreenCine Daily is that Slant magazine is getting the ball rolling toward the September 15 release of Brian De Palma's latest film, The Black Dahlia, in a big way—they’re coordinating a symposium of critical writing designed to provide a more-or-less all-encompassing look back at the director’s fascinating, troubling and sometimes troubled oeuvre. (Personally, I’m looking forward to someone taking another look at Wise Guys and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Seriously. I'm curious.)

De Palma has always had a love/hate relationship with the critical establishment, one whose fires he often stoked himself. According to Eric Henderson, “The more critics got on De Palma's kinky nuts, the more he was provoked to act out his own worst (and by "worst," I mean best) impulses. Not unlike Carrie bringing down holy hell upon her classmates to the tune of "Plug it up! Plug it up!," De Palma's oeuvre owes at least some part of its brash vitality to the destructivism his critics sparked in the director's bruised ego. When modern critics attuned to his wavelength dare to make analogies to other auteurs, they don't name check Hitchcock. They go straight to Godard. With all apologies to Scorsese, Coppola, and those other guys, there's only one American director capable of creating a work of hate art as excoriating as Weekend.”

I can’t wait to start digging into what Slant is going to be coming up with the next few weeks. You can get started on Slant’s series entitled “Auteur Fatale: The Films of Brian De Palma” right here. And if that’s not enough to slake your thirst, check out Peter Nellhaus on The Wedding Party, Girish on The Fury, That Little Round-Headed Boy on Mission to Mars (thanks, TLRHB), and the spectacularly complete De Palma a la Mod for absolutely everything else.

(And thanks also to Eric for the wonderful shot of Sissy Spacek that I cribbed for this post from his terrific blog When Canses Were Classeled. Eric, I hope you’ll forgive my shameless pilfering, but that’s absolutely my favorite frame of that shot of Carrie White, immediately pre-telekinetic explosion. Someday, when I finally get my screen-grabbing program up and running, maybe I can return the favor?)

FRIZ FRELENG: THE TWEETY ANTIDOTE

The following is an appreciation of Friz Freleng, part of the Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon being shepherded by Brian Darr at Hell On Frisco Bay to commemorate the director's 100th birthday. My consideration of Freleng is based strictly on observations regarding two Tweety shorts—“Canary Row” and “Putty Tat Trouble”-- and two others featuring hapless gangsters Rocky and Mugsy—“Golden Yeggs” and “Bugs and Thugs”—all of which are available in the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume One box. I can't pretend to have a proper overview of Freleng’s career or his Warner Brothers output— it’s just too vast for a short post or my capacity to take it all in. I’m hoping to get a better view of the big Friz Freleng picture by reading the pieces submitted by my fellow Freleng blog-a-thonners. Like Brian said in his post, feel free to disagree with anything I’ve come up with here. When it comes to Friz Freleng, I want to know more.

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I came of entertainment age in the early ‘60s, and in so doing I was immersed in the TV cartoons of the day, all of which seemed to have leapt from the loins of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera or the Harvey comic book catalog. But as far back as I can remember, there were always Warner Brothers cartoons available, in some form or another, on Saturday mornings too, and those always trumped everything else. Come the morning of the first day of the weekend, it didn’t matter what else was going on—everything else stopped, all available Froot Loops and Cocoa Puffs and Crispy Critters were readied, and the dial turned to what I think of as TV’s original WB. The cartoons appeared on Saturday morning TV, in one form or another, from 1962 until well into the ‘80s, under various banners-- The Bugs Bunny Show , The Porky Pig Show, The Road Runner Show, The Bugs Bunny Hour and the most bounteous incarnation, in terms of program length, The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show, which claimed 90 minutes (including commercials) of Saturday morning CBS time. It was these showcases, which gave equal time to Bugs, Daffy Duck, Tweety and Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner and the entire roster of supporting characters and bit players, that was the introduction, for most of us who pulled up the tail end of the Baby Boom, to the joys of these short cartoons, which were originally produced by Warner Brothers to run theatrically, most of them dating from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.

(It wasn’t until I started seeing them show up before features at the local movie theater that I realized they had also frequently been cut by overzealous network censors looking to protect the youth of America from the insidious influence of stylized cartoon violence. I suppose until then I’d just chalked up scenes that seemed to end before they were supposed to, along with the mismatched sound and visuals that would frequently earmark the cuts, as by-products of bad prints—I was certainly used to seeing enough of those running at the local movie theater.)

But even when the Warner cartoons were cut, enough of their anarchic spirit and verbal/visual wit still shone through the roughshod splices to expose the rest of the network Saturday-morning fare as relatively innocuous and uninteresting. And even though the cartoons ran without opening credits, with only a cheaply produced title card cluing the kids in to what the cartoon was called, it became fairly easy, after enough exposure to them, to discern the styles of the various directors, through the differences in the curves and angles with which the familiar characters were rendered from piece to piece, to the varying speeds with which the directors would take them through their often grueling paces.

A Chuck Jones cartoon was often discernible by the whiplash speed of the characters’ movements in and around the frame, or the way that Bugs might address the audience with a sly aside or a brief, knowing glance before waylaying Daffy’s brainpan with the butt of a shotgun disguised as a bundle of flowers. Bob Clampett’s animation, which I was more familiar with from the Beany and Cecil show, highlighted a kind of fluidity, a literal roundness, both to the characters (he did, after all, do a lot of the original Porky Pig shorts) and the way they negotiated a path through their given space. The entire Clampett universe had a sort of malleable quality that resembled (a little too much for my taste) the sinister mutability of some of the rural-tinged Disney shorts. And Robert McKimson’s style, one of my favorites perhaps because he tended to work with my favorite characters, Daffy and Foghorn Leghorn, was marked by the elasticity of his characters in their reactions to other characters—it wasn’t unusual to see Daffy’s entire head, which already featured a bill and a face that seemed slightly larger in McKimson’s world than in Jones’, literally elongate with rage during one of his tirades. And McKimson would also play up hilarious rates of speed of action butted up against each other for maximum comic effect—the blink of an eye was all it would take for Foghorn to go from quietly considering, from a step or two away, the hound dog sleeping in his house, to holding him by his hind legs with his left hand and beating him mercilessly, at a rate of about five whacks per second, with a wooden plank held in his right.

Friz Freleng directed Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck occasionally, and he also handled minor characters like Speedy Gonzalez, but the cartoons he became most closely associated with in my mind were the ones featuring the Warner Brothers character I cared for the least—the insufferably cute Tweety. His relationship with the forever beleaguered Sylvester the cat was roughly that of the Road Runner to Wile E. Coyote, and though I was and am able to muster a sizable amount of sympathy for the food-chain follies of the cat and the coyote, I never harbored the kind of ill will toward the Road Runner that I did for Tweety. The reason, I think, is fairly simple. The Road Runner, though not blessed with speech, could often commandeer and bend physics to his will and manipulate circumstances to often outsmart Wile E. Coyote at his own game—eating bird seed tainted with gunpowder to no ill effect, or traveling down the Z-axis into a perspective mural of a highway designed to fool him and flatten him against the desert wall, for example. (Of course, Wile E. was a nemesis who again and again just as often outsmarted himself.) The very nature of Wile E.’s pursuit—constant motion on an endless desert highway—implies the action and movement are imperative to the Road Runner’s survival. But Tweety was often far too passive in the various cat-and-bid games in which he often found himself at the center. He rarely did anything but sit guilelessly by as Sylvester found one way after another to beat himself—Tweety was rarely an active participant in the action (the one exception I can think of being the cartoon in which he ingests a potion that turns him, without warning, from tiny canary to gigantic, hulking, Hyde-like beast of prey) and was always far too willing to let his cute speech impediment serve as and the be-all and end-all of his charm.

So I decided the thing to do would be to screen two of Freleng’s Tweety titles—“Canary Row” and “Putty Tat Trouble”—to try to discover what Freleng brought to the party that helped make Sylvester and Tweety such an enduring pair, despite an aversion to the yellow avian with the swelled cranium that I can’t help but suspect is shared by at least a few others.

The first thing that struck me about Freleng’s approach is that, as much as the other directors are concerned with speed of action and movement within the frame, his cartoons—at least these four—seemed perceptibly more measured, if only by a degree or two, in their pacing than those of Freleng’s contemporaries. Freleng doesn’t seem as concerned with the kitchen-sink approach to piling on gags that might suit Jon