Wider Screenings HomePage

W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
DVD REVIEW ARCHIVE
FOR DEVOUT COLLECTORS OF HOME THEATRE'S NEGLECTED VIRTUES
INDEXED ANALYTICAL CRITICISM OF PRE 9/11 CINEMA FOR HOME THEATRE ENJOYMENT
WITH ILLUSTRATIVE EMBEDDED VIDEO EXTRACTS, SCREENSHOTS, POSTER ART
SCHOLARLY POPULAR ANALYSIS WITH DVD TRANSFER CRITICISM

INTERACTIVITY COMING SOON: TITLE INDEX | SUBJECT INDEX | DIRECTOR RETROSPECTIVE | CAST RETROSPECTIVE | CHRONOLOGY

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The 1970s were a time of unrivalled genre iconoclasm. A group of directors with film school backgrounds known collectively as the "kids with beards" for their proclivity towards unkempt appearance and facial hair were transforming American film away from the domination of the studio into the age of the American "auteur".

1970s DETECTIVE CINEMA BENCHMARK
ROMAN POLANSKI & CHINATOWN

FACES OF PHILIP MARLOWE

1. THE 1940s - DICK POWELL

2. THE 1970s - ROBERT MITCHUM

As the director became the star of the movie, claiming ownership in possessory credits, there was neverthless a strong revival in traditional genres. Indeed, this clash between strict genre themes, structures, character types and iconography on the one hand and deliberate self-reflexive subversion and transgression of classical Hollywood narrative on the other led to a period of genre creativity, a burst of energy where for a moment it seemed as it individual film talents had truly mastered the art forms and narrative types that had gone before them and were invigorating them afresh, not simply re-discovering them but re-inventing them in a demonstration of genre's wonderfully cyclic self-renewal. Martin Scorsese tried the musical in New York, New York, Brian DePalma tried the thriller in Carrie (introducing author Stephen King to American moviegoers) and Francis Ford Coppola helmed the gangster movie update of The Godfather. And amongst the traditional genres getting the indie revamp and polish - as, unusually, the independent young maverick directors began to work within the studio system by the end of the decade - was the detective story.

Having birthed the filmmaking style known as film noir, the screen detective story originated with a generation of authors whose prose style had them collectively labelled "hard boiled": James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett amongst them.

DEBUNKING MARLOWE

Director Robert Altman's breezy 1970s riposte to the detective:
Marlowe can't even feed his cat in The Long Goodbye

It was this hardboiled film noir style - by the 1970s so familiar as to be almost a caricaturish way of filming - that detective stories of the 1970s toyed with in open acknowledgement of the joy in traditional aesthetic construction. Strict genre hommage was common, with noir icon Robert Mitchum returning to play Raymond Chandler's moralist/detective Philip Marlowe in two films, Farewell My Lovely, a period film, and The Big Sleep, a remake of the classic Humphrey Bogart film contemporized and re-set in London by Death Wish director Michael Winner. However, it was Roman Polanski who created the definitive 1970s detective movie in Chinatown. The acclaim and attention garnered by Polanski's film ensured the genre's popularity but meant that several intriguing detective film noir experiments bordering on the avant-garde were overlooked.

Visiting British director J. Lee Thompson (best known for the original Cape Fear and the Guns of Navarone) ventured to the US to make films, settling on the detective story for an offbeat pastiche called St.Ives starring Charles Bronson then at the peak of his career. Thompson was less an iconoclast in this case than he was a maker of travesty and ensured that the final film had a similar humour to the ill-fated Bogart / John Huston classic Beat the Devil, decidedly serio-comic and self-reflexive in intent. Correspondingly, quintessential American avant-garde filmmaker Paul Morrissey (who had worked with Factory pop artist Andy Warhol on some of the most influentially naturalistic experimental films to emerge from the decade) went to Britain to tackle perhaps the most famous detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes, and his most well known story title The Hound of the Baskervilles. Once again, Morrissey was intent on pastiche and let loose on screen two British comedians then known for their sketch comedy, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Less critically enduring than Chinatown but more popular at the box-office were a series of adaptations of the works of Agatha Christie, the decade seeing the introduction of two soon to be famous characterizations - Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile and Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd, the latter being used by its director Guy Hamilton as an excuse to explore the ill mix of Hollywood style into British detective fiction. While these films had a decidedly international flavour, home-grown US detective film noir found its most obscure last gasp in yet another serio-comic pastiche, this one based on a story by original Hard Boiled author Cornell Woolrich and starring Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry, who had earlier made an engaging appearance opposite 70s rock icons Meatloaf and Alice Cooper for the bizarre Roadie. This film, Union City, brough film noir to the age of disco rebelliousness and remains perhaps the decade's most intriguing and forgotten curio - a true neglected virtue of indie American filmmaking.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________