Boys on Bikes

In preparation for The Bikeriders, I wanted to watch a kind of legendary old British biker movie I had heard about called The Leather Boys from 1965 that has a homosexual twist (or a homophobic one, depending on how you're looking at things).

Well The Leather Boys is not nearly as gay as I wanted it to be. It’s actually a very typical angry young man/woman drama from the 1960s. Lots of married young people yelling at one another and living in tiny rooms when they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. From the perspective of The Leather Boys, hanging out with the boys while riding around on bikes looks a lot better than going home to tea and baked beans from a can. But I’m not sure the movie really says anything about queerness or queer bike riders or any of that. This seems like a sort of strange addition to the angry young man genre. But it's clear that some of the men in the biker gangs just really don't do well with society—with going to college and getting a job and, like, raising a family and stuff—and then some of the men in the biker gang are there to wear leather and get their rocks off with other leather boys. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Anyway, that is how I prepared for The Bikeriders. And, well, it was fine. 

The Bikeriders is shot in a cool way—it reproduces a series of documentary photos taken by the (completely undeveloped) Mike Faist character—but I don't really understand what Jeff Nichols has to say about this gang of bikers. The character development for all of the men is pretty much nonexistent. We don't really know Austin Butler or Tom Hardy at all. Who are these guys? Why do they hang out together? What are they doing? They actually almost never talk about bikes, so it's probably not really that. But, then, they don't really talk about anything. They’re violent and awful and drink too much and fight for no real reason, but I guess we’re supposed to find that charming. But, like, why?? 

What’s strange is that The Bikeriders just doesn’t have much of a point of view about them. I think I know why, too. The film almost completely avoids politics—there’s one part where a guy gets beaten up because he says he wants to become a cop and another where a guy says he hates “pinkos” who go to college—but the film doesn’t agree with any of this stuff. It’s just sort of presented for us. The same guy who hates pinkos tells us that he really really wanted to go to be in the Vietnam War, except that he didn't really because he got super drunk the night before and then slept through his alarm the day he was supposed to sign up. These biker guys are counterculture dudes, right? They hate cops and the government and having a job and the man. This is what I understand. They're violent, and they think cops and firemen are schmucks, which is why they flout the law and start fights and stuff. It’s the only real reason I can think of for their antiestablishment antics. And it must also be what ties the men together. But none of them ever talks about any of that. And the film doesn’t ask them to. 

Consider, for example, the gang going to Brucey's funeral. Why does the family send their flowers back? And why does the old woman spit in Johnny's face? There's literally no reason for these old folks to hate this group so much—as far as we know. Have they done something horrible that we don't understand? The screenplay, in other words, leaves a very large lacuna in the center of the film. The Bikeriders just seems sort of there, like a documentary that never presses its subjects on anything they say.

As for my homo-preparation for this movie, I was glad I prepped with The Leather Boys. There's this crazy erotic sequence in The Bikeriders when Tom Hardy asks Austin Butler to run the club after he quits (although he's not quitting, so the scene's purpose is actually just for Tom to tell Austin he's his favorite person). But the whole scene is firelit, and they are just so close together that it feels like they should be kissing. They didn't. And I'm not actually sure why they didn't.

In Harm's Way (1965)

In Harm's Way (1965) is an epic WWII melodrama with an incredible cast (John Wayne, Patricia Neal, Kirk Douglas, Brandon De Wilde, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Carroll O'Connor, Franchot Tone, and more), and the melodramatic aspects of this actually make it quite enjoyable. It's clearly based on a kind of sexy, potboiler novel, and Otto Preminger has done a somewhat good job of keeping it sexy... although the romantic side plots often seem extraneous to the military drama that feels more in keeping with a John Wayne film. In truth, John Wayne, while still very very handsome, doesn't fit well in this kind of romantic drama. His performance feels forced, as if his persona just can't let him be part of a "woman's novel" like In Harm's Way (it was, in fact, written by James Bassett, but it has a lot of feelings).

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

I really objected to The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), and one reason is that it's unnecessarily long, but I also think it's because I didn't like so many of the film's characters. Ian Bannen, who somehow was nominated for supporting actor for this, has no big scenes and is not a central character in the movie. I have no idea why he was singled out by the Academy. The other actors and characters are super interesting, honestly, but the film isn't really interested in them. It only has eyes for its lead, and that's a problem.

The central figure in The Flight of the Phoenix is an old man from the old school played by James Stewart. Stewart is a dinosaur. He believes that the way he's always done things is the only way to do things. He tries to bully everyone around him into doing things his way, and when that doesn't work, he tries to reason with them. At almost every turn in the film, however, Stewart's character is flat-out wrong. I think the odd part of The Flight of the Phoenix is that the movie's perspective on this man isn't critical. He is the film's protagonist, and the film isn't really interested in a critique of this awful character so much as it is in heroizing him. In other words, I think this film thinks that he's somehow a good guy despite how awful and wrong he is. The film's central conflict – between an engineer who has figured out how to build a plane to help them escape and the captain, who just doesn't like that he's German and bossy and that he came up with the idea first – is the best example of this, of course, but there's another one that will give a good idea of how I feel about this captain.

A bossy military officer played by Peter Finch keeps coming up with harebrained ideas for ways to get out of the desert. His first idea is that he wants to walk 100 miles. He asks who wants to come with him, but he volunteers his sergeant to come with him, even though his sergeant doesn't think walking 100 miles in the desert is a good idea. So the sergeant "twists his ankle" and has to be left behind. The captain judges the hell out of this guy for reasons I found unfathomable. Then in act three of the film, the officer (who has come back after nearly dying) decides to try to talk to some travelers who are nearby but who everyone thinks will probably kill him. He again orders his sergeant to come, even though this is certain death. His sergeant refuses. After they find the officer dead, the sergeant asks, "He's dead, isn't he?", and James Stewart's character punches the sergeant in the face. The film lets the violence end the scene without any criticality, as if somehow this sergeant who totally did the right thing was somehow in the wrong or at fault. I was yelling at my screen by this time. Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole? But I guess the real question is: who the fuck does The Flight of the Phoenix think this guy is? He's not a hero to me, despite the movie's approach.

Thunderball

I suppose it's silly to call a James Bond film bloated. The stock-in-trade of a Bond film is its numerous exotic locations and its series of setpieces. But Thunderball feels bloated, and it has a large problem. Much of it takes place underwater, where everything moves more slowly, more quietly, and with less clarity. This is interesting for the first three or four long sequences where this happens – mostly because of the novelty of the underwater activity – but having an underwater battle at the end of the film makes the climax feel a bit off, timing wise. 

Also this is a very violent Bond film. I was actually quite surprised. Many many people die and there is even quite a bit of blood. But harpoon guns just, like, keep going into people's chests and arms. I cannot believe this was rated PG. Connery is great, and is looking great, but Thunderball also has quite a few more little dumb one-liners than it needs, too.

All of the James Bond films are free on Amazon Prime right now, and Connery had just passed, so I decided to watch this one – there are only a couple I haven't seen.

Once a Thief (1965)

Never. Ever. Ever. Call the cops. Ever. They teach this in schools, right? Doesn't everyone know this? (I'm thinking this because of this film's end. As soon as someone called the cops, I knew our hero was in trouble.)

Once a Thief is a very good crime film from Ralph Nelson, the director of the excellent Fate Is the Hunter. Van Heflin, Ann-Margaret, and Alain Delon are very good in this. Delon is great in everything, of course. 

Once a Thief is also a good movie about San Francisco, and one of its highlights is surely Yuki Shimoda (who was a Japanese-American) playing a Chinese undertaker, speaking perfect Italian to Jack Palance (who was a Ukranian-American playing Italian-American here), and a Chinese store-owner character speaking to a white cop who understands him perfectly and speaks back to him in perfect Mandarin.

Something that Once a Thief articulates so well is the way that police and other state institutions make criminals. If the state decides you are a criminal, then you are one. A man can go straight, work hard, stay away from thieves and murderers, have a child, try to get his life together. But the state gets in his way, hauls him in to be questioned, forces him to lose his job, till he has no way to make money but to steal it. Then the state says see I knew it all along. You've always been a thief. This a surprisingly sympathetic and intelligent film. This is probably because it was written by Zekial Marko.

Another thing to say about Once a Thief is that the film refers to lesbians several times, although no lesbians are characters in the film. In the opening sequence over the credits, we are at a mixed bar and a woman hits on another woman, and we also see a pair of women who are clearly a couple. Later in the film Delon's cellmate, we find out, runs a kind of flophouse for lesbians, some of whom are heroin users.

In another queer twist, we get this odd bit of dialogue at the very end of the film:

Cleve: It's there! The end of the rainbow. Long cars and beautiful women.

Saragatanas: I don't dig women.

The Slender Thread (1965)

Wow wow wow. I actually find it sort of hard to believe that somebody (Sydney Pollack, in fact) made this movie in 1965 with two of Hollywood's biggest stars. It's a movie about a woman who wants to commit suicide and the man she calls at the suicide helpline. This is a fast-paced, seat-of-your-pants script that is brilliantly written, generously humane, and deeply poignant. It's truly excellent.

I watched this movie on Criterion – the fourth movie I've seen on the "Scored by Quincy Jones" channel. Jones's score is, of course, great.

The Red Lanterns (1963)

The Red Lanterns (Τα Κόκκινα Φανάρια), Vasilis Georgiadis's 1963 film is my kind of melodrama. In many ways this is even more of a successful film than Georgiadis's later, more political melodrama, Blood on the Land (Το Χώμα Βάφτηκε Κόκκινο), from 1965. 

The Red Lanterns is the literal title in Greek, but it refers to the red-light district, and the film surely should have been renamed for its U.S. release in 1965. Georgiadis's film is a portrait of one brothel in this red-light district, and we follow four or five different women who work for the same brothel. The stories are beautiful in their way, and, of course melodramatic. I really loved this movie.

Blood on the Land

Blood on the Land (Το Χώμα Βάφτηκε Κόκκινο) from 1965 is a very good old Greek movie about unionizing and land redistribution in early 20th century Thessaly. (Yes, I did just say a good movie about land redistribution.)

This is not quite as hard-hitting or smart as I Compagni, opting instead for a melodramatic approach. But it is a good film nonetheless, and it is a little odd that it was never released in the U.S. and doesn't exist for U.S. consumption at all.