For the week of June 26th, Shout Select is bringing the much-awaited The Pink Panther Film Collection to Blu-ray. Pink Panther completists might balk at this set; as far as I can tell, it doesn't include the Pink Panther cartoons, the Alan Arkin-starring Inspector Clouseau, the Ted Wass-starring Curse of The Pink Panther, the Roberto Benigni-starring Son of the Pink Panther, or either of the Steve Martin Pink Panther reboots. What's the appeal, then, of Shout's boxset? All of the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers Pink Panther adventures, and for many viewers, those features alone merit a purchase. Blake Edwards was one of comedy's great populist auteurs, and his work here with Sellers provides the fullest expression of that aspect. To wit: the very title of this series doesn't stand for what you probably think it does. In 1963's The Pink Panther, the title refers to a priceless diamond that draws the attention of the film's nominal main character, David Niven's dashing Sir Charles Lytton. For the most part, this first Pink Panther is a sexy (for 1963, anyways) caper in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, and it hardly seems deserving of the comedy-classic status it has accrued over time. What laughs we can find come from the periodic interruptions of Sellers' bumbling French Inspector Clouseau, and there's the rub. Inspector Clouseau is very much a supporting character, but he's such an inspired comic creation that he overshadows Lytton to the extent that most people assume the title is Clouseau's nickname. That's Sellers' genius at work, and Edwards was quick to realize the value of this character. Edwards' Pink Panther follow-up A Shot in the Dark is a far stagier, less visually accomplished piece of work, but it's also infinitely funnier, and that's because Edwards and co-writer William Peter Blatty (yep, of The Exorcist fame) reconfigured a new mystery completely around Sellers. With Clouseau as the main character, Edwards could indulge in his (and Sellers') legendary facility for slapstick, whether we're talking about the jarring interruptions from Clouseau's manservant Kato (Burt Kwouk, who damn near steals these movies from Sellers) or the ways Clouseau unintentionally sends his Chief Inspector Dreyfus (a pop-eyed Herbert Lom) into fits of apoplectic rage.
From this moment until Sellers' death, The Pink Panther was The Peter Sellers Show, and a reliable source of cultural cachet for him and Edwards. Case in point: when both men found their careers on the wane in the 1970s, they churned out The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975 and struck box-office gold - ironically, this feature sees the return of Sir Charles Lytton (now played by Christopher Plummer), except he's now playing support staff to Clouseau and Dreyfus. The Clouseau/Dreyfus dynamic would reach its apex in 1976's The Pink Panther Strikes Again, which has my vote for best Pink Panther movie. It's practically a live-action cartoon starring Clouseau as an idiot Bugs Bunny and Lom as an increasingly deranged Daffy Duck; driven mad by Clouseau's buffoonery, Dreyfus engineers a nonsensical plot for world domination, and hijinks ensue. The Pink Panther Strikes Again is so over-the-top (it practically functions as a pre-Austin PowersJames Bond parody) that the rest of the series would struggle to reach its heights. 1978's Revenge of the Pink Panther, which finds Clouseau faking his own death to root out some dangerous killers, plays like Strikes Again warmed over, and as for 1982's Trail of the Pink Panther...well, it's as ghoulish a franchise entry as I've ever seen, given that Edwards completed it two years after Sellers died. From a film-history context, I see Trail of the Pink Panther's value. Edwards jerry-rigged the film out from the franchise's deleted scenes and outtakes, and well before such material existed on laserdisc and DVD/Blu-ray special features, so Edwards was providing a service that simply didn't exist at the time. The problem is, it's in service of as craven an objective as I can imagine (how can one profit off another person's death?). This is what you get from structuring a series around giving the people exclusively what they want. I'd recommend enjoying the first five movies and then using Trail of the Pink Panther as a coaster.
Also from Shout comes Walter Hill's Trespass. Trespass was Hill's last great theatrical release (I'm disqualifying 2006's terrific Broken Trail because it's a miniseries), and the Blu-ray feels all the more vital coming on the heels of Hill's recent, awful noir thriller The Assignment. While The Assignment represents the nadir of Hill's long, slow decline, Trespass stands as a reminder that for a brief, glorious spell, no one made more rigorously composed B-movies than Hill. And a film like Trespass needs Hill's cool professionalism, given how incendiary the subject matter is. Working from a Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale script first titled The Looters, Hill fashions a The Treasure of the Sierra Madre riff, of all things, about two unscrupulous firemen (the late Bill Paxton and the equally great character actor William Sadler) who go searching through an abandoned East St. Louis slum for hidden treasure and stumble into a violent turf war (headed up by Ices T and Cube). However, while Hill always claimed he saw the picture more as a simple "adventure story that harkens back to a Jack London tradition," the juxtaposition of Paxton and Sadler's white good ol' boys against T and Cube's black drug lords gave Trespass an uncomfortable racial subtext that felt bracing in 1992 - Universal had to delay the movie's release given the timing of the L.A. riots - and is downright prescient in terms of reflecting America's current black/white cultural tensions. Push this story too far in any direction, and you risk making something appallingly racist, but Hill avoids that pitfall. That Treasure of the Sierra Madre connection proves incredibly helpful. As in that John Huston classic, greed makes scoundrels out of almost everyone, black or white. Sadler is a secret sociopath waiting for an opportunity to transgress; Paxton is almost comically ineffectual; Cube turns traitorous pretty much at the drop of a hat; and T's dignified, strong King James tries to peacefully resolve this increasingly brutal situation even though it's his criminal actions that started the whole mess. Only Art Evans, playing the Walter Huston equivalent, comes off as remotely sympathetic, and you can sense Zemeckis and Gale's typically playful screenwriting touch in how they let this gentle, wily homeless man achieve the moral high ground amidst these more conventionally "powerful" folks. Of course, it's Hill who comes out on top regardless. This kind of pressure-cooker situation lets him play to his strengths (there are moments when Trespass plays like the chamber-room version of The Warriors), and he lets the chaos unfold with economical precision, building the tension slowly before letting everything devolve into (spatially coherent) blood and death in the third act. He's so good here you don't notice how skillful his work is until the second or third viewings. I'm thinking of the ways Hill subtly draws parallels between Sadler and Bruce A Young's violent wild cards, or how he introduces more and more handheld camerawork until the onscreen aesthetics are just as fragmented as the moral/narrative ones. I lamented last week about why the death of the B-movie is the great, unsung tragedy of the Hollywood system. Trespass is proof positive of what we've lost.
Stephen Larson wrote that the film "becomes the urban equivalent of a Hawksian Western. Like the confined areas that the protagonists find themselves in Rio Bravo, Don, Vince, Bradlee as well as Lucky are barricaded behind doors and walls to ward off King James and his collaborators. Freeman Davies's editing is consistently crisp and tight. The audience has a keen awareness of the heroes' claustrophobia and entrapment. As he learned from his mentor Sam Peckinpah, Hill's violence is almost elegant in its stylized tone, filming the actors in ultra slow motion as they balletically grace through the air. Ice-T and Ice Cube have excellent on-screen chemistry together. King James is the boss but he has a reserved quality about him that lends to more methodical reasoning and philosophical introspection. [Cube's] Savon is more daring and would like to usurp King James but he has a certain amount of deference that holds him back. Family is of paramount importance to King James so he will get Lucky back at any or all costs. I did not recognize Glenn Plummer as the bespectacled sniper Luther and his performance departs from other roles he inhabited at that point in his acting career. Paxton's Vince really grows throughout the film so one sees hitherto unknown facets of his personality that burst out. If the film has a weak spot, it is that Sadler's Don is not written as well or explored to the point that we come to know him like we do the other main characters from both sides. Sadler does well with what he's provided but it's more of a one-note performance."
Even more controversial is Sam Peckinpah's 1971 masterpiece Straw Dogs, which Criterion is upgrading this week. Straw Dogs has the distinction of being, along with D.W. Griffith's alternatively masterful and racist The Birth of a Nation, one of the most reviled classic films ever made. Pauline Kael called it "the first American film that is a fascist work of art," and she's not necessarily wrong. Long fascinated by stereotypes of machismo, Peckinpah has crafted as queasy a study of masculinity as I've ever seen. His hero, David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), might as well be the Before picture on a Charles Atlas comic-book ad: he's short, bespectacled, and hopefully nerdy (he's a mathematician, natch), and he carries the stink of coward on him. The whole reason he's decided to move to the English countryside is so he can escape the social and political violence sweeping America. Hoffman certainly works overtime to try and humanize Sumner (he underplays masterfully, especially once all hell breaks loose in the third act), but Peckinpah couldn't be more contemptuous of this guy. What emerges is a criticism of the sensitive liberal that's as subtle as a flying mallet (TM Dieter), and if that treatment is enough to alienate half his audience, Peckinpah goes after the other half with his presentation of Sumner's wife Amy (Susan George). I'd wager no studio would greenlight Straw Dogs today solely because of how Peckinpah treats Amy; our introduction to her is a leering close-up of her braless chest, and when Peckinpah isn't stripping her down even further, he's having her highlight her husband's sexual shortcomings. On one end of the spectrum: Amy petulantly arguing with Sumner because he'd rather work on a math problem than have sex. And on the other end: Straw Dogs's most notorious setpiece, which intercuts Sumner impotently firing (and missing, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more) a shotgun on a duck hunt with Amy passionately succumbing to an ex-boyfriend (Del Henney) as he rapes her. The implication couldn't be clearer: if Sumner can't prove his manhood, then Amy will yield her body to a more virile dude. These sexual politics were grotesque in 1971, and they're even more so today. What's most upsetting is that the proceedings are so riveting you don't dare look away. Some might prefer The Wild Bunch or Ride the High Country, but I think Peckinpah was at the top of his filmic game here. The first ninety minutes are a masterclass in building suspense, with Peckinpah turning the screws on Sumner until it's unbearable for all involved, playing his protagonist's social anxieties and problems with Amy only a few degrees removed from squirm comedy. And the last half hour might be the director's finest hour. As David makes a desperate last stand to assert his authority, Peckinpah turns Straw Dogs into a full-throated horror movie and one that still has the power to shock, thanks to Hoffman's dead-eyed mania and the razor sharp edits of Paul Davies, Tony Lawson, and Roger Spottiswoode. In a way, Straw Dogs plays like the inverse of Don Siegel's great Dirty Harry, which lionized Clint Eastwood's Miranda Rights-abusing cop, except Siegel allowed for a far greater degree of thematic ambiguity. Yes, the cop is the hero and the hippie is the violent psycho, but Siegel seems to believe the system that created both men is broken, and he ends things on that haunting note where Harry tosses away his badge in disgust (ignore the sequels). The scary thing about Straw Dogs is that there is no such ambiguity. Sumner might kill a whole bunch of people and lose his humanity, but dammit, Peckinpah seems to be arguing, that's what men do, and for Sumner's troubles Peckinpah gives him a hero's ending, complete with triumphal music and a walk into the sunrise. Peckinpah's magnum opus AND his most problematic work, and somehow, that's exactly as it should be.
Svet Atanasov wrote thatStraw Dogs "is one of those rare great films that are basically impossible to like. Instead of telling a brilliant story it focuses on the rapid disintegration of an entire range of human qualities that supposedly separate human beings from animals. There are a series of events that prepare its crucial final segment where the violent disintegration occurs, but they are not used to examine the factors that trigger the process. And yet, interestingly enough, this is precisely the reason why the film is so effective - because at least for a short period of time it completely invalidates the popular notion that when compared to animals human beings emerge as intellectually superior creatures...After that it basically comes down to evaluating what the director and the cast were willing to do to make the transition into the animal's state of mind as authentic as possible. The big danger here is that the more effective the film becomes, the greater the risk is of erasing the line that separates fiction and reality -- and these types of films should never go that far."
Finally, we end with the big whiff of the week. Dax Shepard's CHIPS, which Warner Home Entertainment is putting out, is such a weird, weird movie. I think CHIPS wants to be a comedy. Ever the accomplished funnyman himself (if you're not a Dax convert after watching Idiocracy, I can't help you), Shepard has put together a group of very funny people like Michael Peņa, Kristen Bell, Adam Brody, Ryan Hansen, Jane Kaczmarek, Ben Falcone, Ed Begley Jr., David Koechner, and Maya Rudolph, and in the service of what I guess is a 21 Jump Street-esque farce that reboots its source material (the campy Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox-starring motorcycle-cop procedural of the same name) while adding R-rated absurdist humor throughout; Shepard's John Baker, for example, is a pill-popping, former X-Games dimwit with an unexpected sensitive side, while Peņa's "Ponch" Poncherello is a hotshot FBI agent with a thing for Yoga pants and a raging sex addiction. I say "I think/guess" because CHIPS isn't that funny. And not just in the sense of, the jokes don't work. Outside of some tired gay-panic gags (I hoped Hot Fuzz put the final nail in the coffin of that particular buddy-cop trope, but I guess not) and an extended riff on a particular varietal of oral sex, Shepard (he wrote and directed the film) hasn't included much in the way of jokes. Very little of the movie tries to be funny (of that cast, only Rudolph scores the most consistent laughs during her introduction, and then she promptly vanishes from the rest of the movie), and when it does, it's all about the actors' tones and inflection as opposed to what they're actually saying, like if they say their lines with enough vigor, we'll be fooled into finding them funnier than they are. I don't think I've ever spent so much of an ostensible comedy in anticipation of laughs that simply don't materialize. But an unfunny movie isn't weird. What makes CHIPS a deeply strange viewing experience is that when it's not aimlessly ignoring opportunities for comedy, it's functioning as a combination of Shepard Family scrapbook AND not-half-bad action movie. Gene Siskel used to get irritated with movies where it seemed like the cast and crew were having more fun behind the scenes than on camera, and at its laziest, CHIPS plays like Shepard conned Warner so that he and his closest friends could pal around on the company dollar. Besides Bell, who is his wife in real life (that's the motivation behind her character's one sorta-joke - we're supposed to find it hilarious that Bell, who by all accounts adores Shepard IRL, finds him off-putting on-camera), Shepard springs for appearances from his buddies (Hansen, Brody, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo Josh Duhamel) and former Parenthood costars (I counted Rosa Salazar and Mae Whitman; there may be more). Everyone seems super-happy to come to work. Pity almost none of that energy translates to the viewer. The only time CHIPS has a pulse is during the chase sequences, which are surprisingly impressive. Shepard has a good eye for staging and capturing stuntwork (he and Michael Bay's former DP Mitchell Amundsen keep their shots wide and high, and they always maintain clear spatial geography - the big third act chase is better edited and presented than anything in the Bourne movies), so much so that you wonder why he didn't just make CHIPS as a straight thriller and not muck around with the failed attempts at humor. But the more I think about CHIPS, the more I'm sure Shepard had no concrete idea of what he wanted to do. How else to explain the tonal mishmash, the wasted performers (why cast Begley and Koechner if you're not going to let them play?), or the bizarre hanging plot subplots? I'm still not sure how Richard T. Jones's helicopter pilot factors into the film, or why the movie stops dead for some genuinely heartfelt scenes between Vincent D'Onofrio's Big Bad and his heroin-addicted son (Justin Chatwin, adding nothing) just to abandon that dynamic for a grisly punchline ripped off from Ridley Scott's underrated The Counselor. None of it makes any sense. Buyer, beware.