In an effort to further its 4K Blu-ray presence this week of May 15th, Warner Home Entertainment is putting out an Ultra HD release of one of its most beloved catalog titles: Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning Western Unforgiven. When the film made its 1992 premiere, audiences and critics lauded Eastwood's bold, uncompromising approach to the violence of the Old West; with his story of a former gunslinger (Eastwood) who reenters a world of killing and loses his soul in the process, Eastwood seems, at face value, to repudiate the many casual Western entertainments that he once headlined. Here's the problem, though: Eastwood never appeared in that many "casual" Westerns. What critics missed was that outside of Rawhide and the first two films in the Man with No Name Trilogy, Eastwood was always interested in interrogating the darker recesses of the Western landscape, whether that's sketching Civil War atrocities in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or condemning vigilante justice in Hang 'Em High, injecting disturbing supernatural elements into his Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter protagonists, or even reflecting racial injustices and progressive developments in the American Family with The Outlaw Josey Wales. In that light, Unforgiven fits perfectly alongside his other thematic/creative obsessions. Eastwood actually dedicates the film to his mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, and you can sense him using the terseness of the latter filmmaker in order to deconstruct the violent avatars that the former created. From what we learn of his past, Unforgiven's Will Munny wasn't a million miles removed from the Man With No Name in terms of his violent acumen, but years of family-rearing and hog-raising have dulled Munny's abilities. Eastwood conveys the dissolution of this man with such narrative economy, lingering on the mud that's perpetually dried on his face or his inability to hit a target from a ranged distance. He's a man out of step with the times, neither compassionate like his friend Ned Logan (a touching, funny Morgan Freeman) or ruthless like the small-town sheriff (Gene Hackman, in one of his three or four greatest performances) who becomes his prey, and so long stretches of Unforgiven unfold like something out of a Beckett play as Munny and his makeshift gang stumble across a Western landscape that is equal parts absurd and horrifying. And sometimes at the same time: witness Hackman's sadistic, bloody humiliation of a notorious assassin (Richard Harris) whose reputation proves more inflated that his survival skills. To Eastwood, violence is less a state of mind than a malignant illness - it's always present, whether it's flaring up or in remission - and that toxic quality sours the end sequence, where Munny's character reacquires his fearsome capacity for violence to the horror of everyone (including us) around him. In fact, Eastwood is such an effective stylist of theme and character through vivid action that it's a little (stress little) dispiriting how often he uses characters as mouthpieces for screenwriter David Webb Peoples' central thesis towards killing (you might have forgotten how much speechifying Unforgiven contains - Hackman makes a meal of it, but Eastwood is a little less comfortable acting as thematic prop), but the dialogue is flavorful enough that you can appreciate the words even as the pace slows. And maybe a little lack of urgency is a good thing. Eastwood wants us to marinate in these ideas, to feel the weight of time and violence, and in those regards, Unforgiven is an unqualified success. One of the most important Hollywood Westerns ever made.
From Scream/Shout Factory comes another cult double feature: the 1971 rat-thriller Willard and its 1972 sequel Ben. For some, Willard might be the apex of the When-Animals-Attack! chillers of the 1970s. It's certainly the most psychologically interesting – Willard (Bruce Davison) is a shy loner withering under the pressure of both his overbearing boss (Ernest Borgnine) and harpy of a mother (The Bride of Frankenstein's Elsa Lanchester, of all people), but he begins to turn his fortunes around when he befriends white rat Socrates and brutish black rat Ben. It should not surprise you at all that Willard ends up using the two to control an army of rats, or that Said Army ultimately turns violent, but the mayhem they perpetuate is a lot of fun, and the bizarre love triangle between the three characters (Willard showers Socrates with affection, to Ben's mounting jealousy) proves more unusual/resonant than you normally find in movies of this ilk. I'm actually one of those weirdoes who prefer the 2003 sequel - Glen Morgan's direction is more stylish, and Crispin Glover is alternatively touching and charismatic in ways that Davison doesn't approach - but I get the novelty of the original. The same can't be said for Ben. It's a bad sign when the best thing about a movie is its title song, but the Michael Jackson-sung ditty is more memorable than anything that unfolds here. And that entertainingly syrupy ballad underlines Ben's chief problem: it's way too sentimental. Once-evil rat Ben protects his young human ward (Lee Montgomery) from bullies and helps him find his self-confidence, and sure, those elements were a part of Willard, but at least the title character there was such an anti-social creeper that his self-actualization came at a grim price. Ben treats the bond between the two characters as something that's practically Disney Channel-ready, interspersed with ineptly staged scenes of rat-on-human violence. It's a profoundly strange movie, and not necessarily in a good way.
As far as cult classics go, I get the love for Walter Hill's 1984 mélange Streets of Fire (which is finally getting the deluxe "Shout Select" treatment this week after a last-minute delay). Hill has never made a film as ambitious as this one; nominally the story of a soldier-of-fortune (the wooden Michael Paré) conscripted to save a rockstar (Diane Lane) from a venal motorcycle thug (Willem Dafoe, as electric as Paré is boring), Streets of Fire exists as some weird, singular mix of musical, action movie, and genuine fantasy. It feels like Hill is trying to exorcise every genre daydream he had as a fifteen-year-old boy, except he brings his considerable craft to the proceedings, not least of which is the stunning noir-pop cinematography (Andrew Laszlo's cinematography makes the film look like the greatest graphic novel that never was), Ry Cooder's atmospheric soundtrack, and a number of stellar action sequences, with the end brawl between Paré and Dafoe's characters ranking alongside the one-on-one fights in Hill's great directorial debut Hard Times. Any frame of Streets of Fire displays more visual invention than most conventional Hollywood fare, and as an A/V showcase, it remains a visionary piece of work. There's only one problem: the film makes no sense. Hill might claim that he's making a "rock and roll fable," but that designation doesn't account for how slack the pacing gets in between the action sequences, or how nonsensical most of the core character motivations are. What's surprising is that Hill has never had those two specific problems before. In films like The Driver and Southern Comfort, he displays such a hard, terse sense of plot and character that his works take on the quality of a Zen koan, but everything here feels flabby. There's no reason that the tension between Paré and Rick Moranis' sleazy manager should occupy as much screentime as it does (apparently the two hated each other in real life, so maybe Hill was trying to maximize their off-screen tension on-screen. It doesn't work), and while Lane is, as always, an arresting presence on screen, her character has an almost comical lack of agency. Plus, Cooder's score aside, the actual songs in the film are terrible, and completely nonreflective of the heightened reality Hill wants to create. I want to give Hill the benefit of the doubt, so I'm tempted to blame the film's problems on a number of post-production truncations - Hill had to trim the film to get a PG rating, and he intended this to be part one of a three-part story that never materialized - except given that Hill already made the ideal version of this story (his 1979 masterwork The Warriors), I'm at a loss for how he could whiff this iteration so badly. After a while, you realize what Streets of Fire really is - Hill's balls-to-the-wall, cash-in-all-his-chips misfire, and one that bears more than a few similarities to Zach Snyder's similarly stunning-asinine action-adventure-misbegotten feminist manifesto Sucker Punch. For some, that's good company, and I can easily say I'd rather watch a wild, unsatisfying slice of ambition gone awry than a boring, "safe" programmer like, I dunno, Jason Bourne. But that still doesn't make Streets of Fire good. It's just delightfully broken. Proceed with caution.
Stephen Larson wrote that "Willem Dafoe brings the requisite machismo as Raven in a terrifically sinister performance. Dafoe's acting in Streets of Fire reportedly made a great impression on Oliver Stone, who cast Dafoe as Sergeant Elias in Platoon (1986) based on his work here. Dafoe is so good that I can only wish that Hill had expanded his screen time. The biker boys scenes in the movie owe a lot to the Stanley Kramer-produced The Wild One (1953) in both costume design and choreography. This is what I think Hill and Gross were aiming for, although they could have made the material grittier had they not been so obligated by Universal Studios to maintain a PG rating. Another weakness is that there is a relative unbalance between the action and concert scenes. Streets of Fire's now-classic sound track contains ten original songs which I believe could have been spotlighted more aside from the two scenes that bookend the film. Even though the script is not a high point, Streets of Fire has aged fairly well and its visuals have influenced a whole slew of diverse films in the intervening years."
But the best film of the week might be Karel Reisz's criminally underseen drama Who'll Stop the Rain. The film has never been able to catch an even break - at the last minute, MGM changed the title of Who'll Stop the Rain from Dog Soldiers (which was the name of Robert Stone's original novel) because the studio a) was worried audiences would think it was about werewolves and b) wanted to capitalize on the Creedence Clearwater Revival song of the same name (and while Reisz uses a number of CCR tunes here to great effect, Who'll Stop the Rain makes almost no thematic sense as the title of this picture), and all before basically abandoning the film during its 1978 release - so we have even more reason to savor its richly deserved Blu-ray release from Twilight Time. As in Stone's source material, Who'll Stop the Rain remains one of the most interesting films about Vietnam, primarily because it pays special attention to the lingering trauma felt after the war (it's in the same company as Hal Ashby's Coming Home or the Hughes Brothers' Dead Presidents). To somehow punish the U.S. government for its involvement, war correspondent John Converse (Michael Moriarty, back when he was one of the most electrifying actors on the planet) puts together a huge shipment of heroin and hires merchant marine Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte) to smuggle it stateside. However, a trio of corrupt DEA agents/rival smugglers (Anthony Zerbe, Richard Masur, and Ray Sharkey) gets brutally involved, and Hicks finds himself fleeing across the California countryside, with only Converse's drug-addicted wife (Tuesday Weld) as his unlikely ally. The contours of what transpire take on the grit of an Elmore Leonard novel: you've got your funny-scary villains (Masur and Sharkey are a sociopathic duo for the ages) squaring off against a taciturn hero (a never-more charismatic Nolte) in a series of chases and shootouts. But the war gives the proceedings more nuance than you might expect. Moriarty's instigator struggles so hard to process what he's seen in country that he isn't aware of the devastation his actions will cause (I don't think Moriarty has ever been more sympathetic on camera), and that ambiguity is reflected in the singular union Nolte and Weld come to develop. He's a badass killer who studies Zen philosophy and has untapped reservoirs of sensitivity, and her surface innocence belies her crippling dependence on drugs (it's a testament to Who'll Stop the Rain's grand ambivalence that they're never more intimate than when he's administering her heroin to help her kick a painkilling addiction). No one gets away clean here, and the result is a thriller that invests in its characters as much as in genre. And in sociology, too: I love how Reisz and Stone use heroin as a symbol for the ills of the war, how the violence left in Hicks's wake becomes representative of the PTSD and political unease crippling the nation (if anything, this and First Blood would make a hell of a pairing). Who'll Stop the Rain might have gone missing in the 1970s, but it's ripe for rediscovery now.