PATTY HEARST (Dir. PAUL SCHRADER, 1988)

The much publicised kidnapping and coercion of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army is the focus of Schrader’s 1988 film, a critical look back at the protracted complex political choices that underpinned the counter culture of the 1970s. It is an unusual film to have emerged from 1980s Hollywood cinema and is also one of Schrader’s most political works. Reconnecting with the proletarianism of Blue Collar, Schrader examines how the will to adopt and maintain a political posture is riddled with a gamut of intersectional insincerities that are class and race related. Schrader treats the first part like an exercise in Brechtian tableau, imbuing the SLA with an ideological sincerity while sympathetically framing militancy as wholly reasonable given the wider inequalities.

At the core is Natasha Richardson’s gruelling performance as Hearst who conveys the right degrees of ambivalence to make one uncertain of her motivations and ideological beliefs. Much of the film deals with the assimilation of Hearst, brainwashed to join the group, suggesting the decorative nature of counter culture was simply a momentary allure to middle class white people wanting to interminably escape the system while indulging in faux acts of sexual and political liberation. However, the government’s brutal annihilation of the SLA, carried out with impunity by the police, critiques the gradual erasure of counter culture militancy as something unambiguously ideological; a benign cultural struggle for political discourse, mainstream lifestyles and conformity.

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THE GREEN MAN (Dir. Robert Day, 1956)

Alastair Sim had that rare natural faculty, innately switching from pleasant English gentleman to scheming bastard, all with the quintessential shit eating grin. The Green Man, a cornerstone of Sim’s acting career, finds him playing a semi-retired assassin with an international reputation of bumping off third rate dictators. In what appears to be one of his last jobs, Hawkins (Sim) comes undone by the tomfooleries of vacuum cleaner salesman George Cole long before he morphed into Arthur Daley in Minder.

Robert Day’s richly dark comedy belongs alongside works like The Ladykillers; sinister, malevolent and nonsensical, that revels in the banal sexual and class repressions that fester serendipitously in post war British suburbia. The extended sequence in the two semis is deftly handled by Day, a comedy of errors in which dead bodies, mistaken identity and blood merge into a brilliant pastiche. A triumph through and through.

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THE MEAN SEASON (Dir. Phillip Borsos, 1985)

Long before Tom Cruise decided to patent the running on screen just to look cool thing, Kurt Russell was busting similar sprint speed marathons in many of his films. In The Mean Season, Russell really goes for it, bombing it through the streets of Miami so he can try and save his girlfriend from the clutches of a marauding copycat serial killer played by Richard Jordan. Russell was never really a major film star but he often put in some notable, overlooked performances.

The Mean Season, a pulpy Miami noir is perhaps one of his meatiest roles as an opportunistic, narcissistic journalist, who is contacted by a serial killer working his way through a spate of grisly murders. Concocting a sleazy ambience, makes for an exceedingly atmospheric work which is sadly somewhat at the expense of the mechanics of constructing an effective thriller.

The Mean Season begins with some promise, framing the media as a parasitic force but it lacks subtext, gradually taking a conventional route whereby the unmasking of the killer is not only anti-climactic but lacks the bite to make this genre piece altogether brilliant. Andy Garcia shows up as a disgruntled cop but is so much better in a similar role in later films like Internal Affairs and Jennifer Eight. Also, this film may have been a key influence on Fincher’s Zodiac (2007).

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BRUBAKER (Dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1980)

Along with Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker is one of director Stuart Rosenberg’s most popular films in a career which is criminally undervalued. Rosenberg seemed to have a knack of using genre to craft genuinely gutsy political cinema. However, a lot of his loosely structured films which are fuelled by a particular ambience, would easily see him being labelled as a hack, which of course is far from the truth. In the case of Brubaker, Rosenberg revisits the territory of prison and reform, and unlike Cool Hand Luke, as much a vehicle for Newman’s beaming charisma, this sentimental polemic not only aligns itself with the liberal politics of Redford but adopts a totalizing leftist stance that scorns the concept of political compromise, a concept that is situated as abhorrent and counter-productive to the development of a fair and civilised society. Rod Lurie’s 2001 The Last Castle, also starring Redford on auto-pilot, pays reverence to Rosenberg’s film, at times even parodying the anti-authoritarianism of Brubaker.

Rosenberg is arguably one of the few American filmmakers to have succeeded in detailing the morbid intricacies of prison life, often adopting a sort of quasi neo-realist approach in which action is supplemented by revealing political conversations, an undeniable star quality of W. D. Richter’s Oscar nominated screenplay. Perhaps even more terrifying is the ways in which the powers that be which Brubaker comes into conflict with, namely the prison board, and essentially a manifestation of capitalist corporate machinations, align themselves against his attempts to reform a system of perpetual dehumanization. The final catharsis of Redford’s sordid tears as the prisoners clap in unity is unreal, delirious and prodigiously orchestrated by Rosenberg’s characteristically intimate close ups.

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