No one sent the Siren a PR notice, but we're having a Red Dawn moment. David Plotz of Slate has written a DVD review of John Milius's 1984 evergreen actioner that has Jonah Goldberg of the Corner and Dirty Harry really, really, really irritated. (The Siren recently had a very courteous exchange with Dirty Harry and she hopes he will understand that she's just trying to put Red Dawn in its cinematic place, not get him back to hating her all over again.)
The Siren once named this movie as a Howling Dog for the Ages, and by any aesthetic standard that's what it is, but no movie that retains such a hold on people after the span of almost a quarter-century should be completely dismissed. The Siren would love to defend Mr. Plotz's article out of her general tendency to resist mouse-wielding mobs of commenters, but he has, in fact, missed the point of Red Dawn. He does seem to realize it's no more about resisting Communism than it is about John Galliano's 2009 resort collection. Riddle me this. Why, before mid-movie, are we informed that Americans are fighting alongside China, and pointedly told that China's population is now reduced almost by half? This was 1984, Deng was in power, Wei Jingsheng was in prison and the laogai, to quote Scrooge, were still in their useful course (as indeed they still are). We're allied with those guys, to fight Communism? I don't think so.
But Plotz's Iraq comparison, which is what has people firing up the keyboards, doesn't withstand scrutiny, either. The Wolverines don't have to confront any part of a guerilla campaign's moral questions, even to ignore them as the Iraqi insurgents do. For one thing, the fact that partisan attacks on a ruthless enemy invite civilian reprisals is dispensed with after a couple of incidents. The Soviet commander is happy to turn Denver into a charnel house but eventually, we are asked to believe, sees retaliation against noncombatants as counterproductive. The Russians conveniently ship most everyone off to camps, so our heros need never deal with the reality of attacking soldiers in the middle of a still-fully-populated town. If Gillo Pontecorvo ever saw Red Dawn it probably sent him to bed with a sick headache.
So this film isn't a bold piece of anti-Communist agitprop, nor is it some sort of weirdly prescient view of an occupying force. Red Dawn--and this is the key to its appeal--is a me-too World War II wish-fulfillment fantasy, with Russia doing double duty for the megalomania of the Nazis and the treachery of the Japanese. You missed out on the Greatest Generation? Not any more, kids! Here's our old friend, the soldiers-lost-behind-enemy-lines movie, given a teenage twist (brilliantly smart marketing, the Siren admits) and gussied up with a bunch of Resistance-movie tropes for good measure.
Skeptical? Pull up a chair. (What follows is a mess of spoilers, if you still plan to see Red Dawn and believe that plot twists are bound to be part of its virtues.)
First there's the sneak attack, a la Pearl Harbor, and incidentally the movie's one really inspired visual sequence, as paratroopers descend on a high school campus. The sight of the soldiers dropping to the lawn is authentically chilling. But then we get into full WWII-nostalgia swing. There's the brave schoolteacher and the civilian executions, as well as the treacherous mayor (This Land Is Mine, with a dash of The Moon Is Down). Ordinary people retreat to the hills to resist (Dragon Seed). Kindly shopkeeper helps out with supplies (One of Our Aircraft Is Missing). Everybody sings in the face of the enemy (Casablanca). The Russians shoot people in the back (Gung-Ho). The Wolverines go through small towns laid waste by the enemy (Objective, Burma! and about a thousand others). They pile up huge enemy body counts using nothing but guns, hubris and spit (The Dirty Dozen). The Americans admit that they're just a bunch of scared kids, and discuss that several times more. ("I'm no hero, I'm just a guy," says William Bendix in Guadalcanal Diary.) The Americans fight to the last man (Wake Island and Bataan). Powers Boothe dies saying to the Americans, "Come on buddies! come and get 'em!" (Robert Taylor dies in Bataan yelling to the Japanese, "Come and get it, suckers!") And then there's Jennifer Grey's death, as she rigs herself as a grenade booby-trap, a remarkably direct crib of Veronica Lake's demise in So Proudly We Hail.
There's also a real-life reference in the phrase on the radio, "John has a long mustache," a code used by the French Resistance that also popped up in The Longest Day. Its placement here is, I suppose, intended to be lacerating irony since we're told the spineless Europeans are sitting this one out. But it doesn't matter, since this is a world where the references are not to real-life countries or issues, but to other movies, down to the Russian officer's name (Strelnikov, as in Doctor Zhivago).
None of this necessarily makes Red Dawn a bad movie. No, that's the job of the stilted dialogue, the banal direction and the atrocious acting, as the young performers emote all over the place like they're doing sense memory at Interlochen summer camp. Indicating? My god, it's like watching a bunch of cars with their turn signals stuck. But what really makes Red Dawn a bad movie is the way all those old plot points are just applied willy-nilly to a different villain, with messy details like nuclear weapons waved away ("Whole damn thing's pretty conventional now," drawls Boothe). Pulse the old bread crumbs, shake and bake with a new chicken, like 1940s Hollywood sticking the Nazis into a Sherlock Holmes movie or a Western.
Now excuse me, I have a Kay Francis post to finish.
Here we are folks, the last call for Newcritics Wednesday Night at the Movies. This post in no way goes into everything that can be said about Serpico and 25th Hour--it's more like quick thematic notes, the whole truncated by some domestic goings-on chez Campaspe. But the Siren will be at Newcritics at 9 pm Eastern time tonight, and she hopes many patient readers will join her to fill in the many large blanks.
The past decade has proved that any idiot can set a movie in New York. Or a television show. Pan up the building, pan down the building, crowd shot, shopping montage, colorful locals, done. Is the rest of the country getting tired of this? The Siren sure is. She would really much rather see a weekly drama set in Pocatella, Idaho (which is very scenic) than another show set in New York City that reduces it to a few downtown exterior shots and some wildly improbable apartments.
Making a movie that gets not only the look of the place (for the last time guys, Toronto exteriors look like Toronto) but the unique mentality of the residents--now that's hard. Two filmmakers who've been able to do it many times over the years are Sidney Lumet and Spike Lee. And the two movies for tonight, Serpico and 25th Hour, embody a certain spirit that is completely characteristic of New Yorkers, whether or not the quality is uniquely their own. You could call it persistence, or even flat-out cussedness, depending on your attitude. The Siren likes to think of it as resilience. The earlier movie concerns the celebrated police officer who torpedoed his own long career on the force by simply refusing to take bribes. The later film is aboutdrug dealer's last day of freedom before he goes to do a stretch in prison. Despite protagonists on completely opposite sides of the law, the Siren sees the two movies as pendants.
First, Serpico. You just saw a post and thread where the Siren got all damp-eyed about the 1980s, which also, let's be real here, was an era of crime, class and racial resentment, and saddest of all, the AIDS epidemic, which means that some of the Siren's memories concern very beautiful, funny young men she will never see again. Well, no matter how nostalgic the Siren gets about the 1980s she can't equal the amount of nostalgia people around in the 1970s pour over THAT era--witness David Edelstein's piece for New York magazine. Serpico (along with The French Connection and most of the ones that Edelstein mentions) does give a sense of a city that was just that much grittier, less expensive and less uptight. Still, it was probably harsher even than the 1980s, a dark time when the city's fiscal and social underpinnings were rotting away.
Judging by Serpico, New York had a bad case of nerves in 1974. It's not really an action movie, it's more of a character study, with each incident clicking into place until Serpico has nowhere to go but the Times and the Knapp Commission. The movie has enormous dramatic tension throughout, some of it due to the audience wondering when Serpico is going to get shot, but also from looking for the next betrayal from the next seemingly friendly cop. Lumet ping-pongs back and forth from Serpico's job--a string of police precincts, each revealing its rotten payoff system with depressing speed--and his offbeat, arty personal life, full of high-spirited blonde girlfriends, books, opera and white wine. Both sides of his life become progressively harder to maintain. At no point, though, does Serpico seem to consider taking the money he's offered. He just keeps trying to find new ways of refusing it. 
As for 25th Hour, made in 2002--is anyone in New York ever going to be nostalgic for the early 2000s? What a terrible time, and the dark palette and somber mood of Lee's movie reflects that, from the memorial lights at Ground Zero right down to the mechanical, joyless partying in the club sequence late in the film. Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) is a drug dealer, betrayed by someone (he doesn't know who) and sentenced to seven years in prison. His terror of being raped and abused in prison marks his every action. The question of who betrayed him gets a fair bit of screen time, but it's subordinated to the real suspense--will Monty go to prison, or jump the bail his father put up for him and go on the run?
In his book Making Movies, Lumet doesn't spent much time on Serpico and when he does, it's to remark that the title character, despite Al Pacino's towering performance, was rather irritating to him, "a kvetcher." Well, the Siren thinks poor Frank had plenty to complain about, what with constantly wondering if a fellow cop was going to off him and all. It has to be admitted, though, that Serpico does complain a lot, driving away his loving girlfriend and at one point his only real friend on the force (Tony Roberts). Monty, too, worries ceaselessly, doubting everyone around him and also tormenting his girlfriend, the improbably named Naturelle. (Rosario Dawson is one of 25th Hour's problems--she is all femme, no fatale, and so the question of whether she actually turned in Monty is never very convincing. Of course she didn't, she's just a real-life Jessica Rabbit.)
One of many things Lumet and Lee have in common is a general refusal to romanticize New York. They love the city as it really is--crass, tough, dingy, crumbling and perpetually in a pissed-off mood--not, as some might argue Woody Allen does, for its romantic illusions. Serpico was filmed in more than one hundred different New York locations, each grittier than the last. It's a feast for anyone who treasures small details about the city, like the way a banister in an old building will sway if you're rash enough to put any weight on it, or the marvelous fact that subway platforms used to have snack machines. Every painted surface is nicked or peeling and it seems that in the early 1970s there was no such thing as floor wax or maybe even mops.
Lee was dealing with a considerably cleaned-up, but far sadder New York. We first see Monty in Battery Park, now very different from the park we saw in Desperately Seeking Susan, the weeds gone, the benches all painted and the trash picked up. The characters hang out in high-end apartments painted dark, trendy colors, with huge picture windows and shiny fixtures. Even the scenes that are supposed to convey a more down-market feel (the Russian mobster's office, Monty's father's bar) are cleaner than anything in Serpico. The air of corruption is still there, however, as is the sense of hollowness left from the opening shot of that terrible hole in the ground.
In both movies, with the exception of Monty's bravura face-to-the-mirror rant about New York and all its many sins, New York's social problems are attacked obliquely. Serpico remarks to his girlfriend that if the cops poured the energy they use on maintaining the corrupt system into actual police work the crime problem would shrink to nothing. The ghastly Rockefeller drug laws hang over 25th Hour, another instance of a rotten system, although the laws aren't used to justify Monty's actions. He was a drug dealer, and his lousy choices in life are faced head-on by his friends and his father.
The Siren re-watched Serpico last night instead of the debate (and what a good choice that turned out to be, huh?) and was immediately struck by the movie's first shots, of Al Pacino, shot in the face, his head lolling back on the seat of the patrol car as he's taken to the hospital. Spike Lee has some remarkably similar shots of a bloody Edward Norton as his father drives him to prison. Ultimately, both movies are about moving past the wrongs that have been done to you--on a personal level, as with Monty's bust and the many cops who refuse to help Serpico, and on a larger plane, as with the top-to-bottom rot of the New York City police department pre-Knapp and the enormity of 9/11. Neither suggests that the past is healed, quite the opposite, just that forward is the only way New Yorkers know how to move. The movies are simultaneously depressing as all hell, and yet reassuring too, in the eternal-ness of their New York viewpoints.
The Wednesday Night at the Movies Open Thread at Newcritics starts at 9 pm Eastern time. Saunter over and join the party.
So when the Siren posted her list previously, it was pretty safe. Some people may dislike The Apartment, but nobody is going to jump up and down and scream about its inclusion.
With Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan from 1985, however, the Siren may be going out on a limb. Tonight we will keep it simple, as the Siren presents her list of reasons why this movie deserves the fond regard she still has for it.
Romance. Roberta (Rosanna Arquette, proving it's a shame her career stalled) is an unhappy housewife in Fort Lee, N.J., eating wedding cake at night and enduring a loutish, uninterested husband (Mark Blum). For fun she peruses the personal ads, which I suppose the Internet has replaced now. She has been especially interested in the ads that are "Desperately Seeking Susan," chronicling a woman (Madonna) who roams the globe but always seems to come back to the lover posting the ads. Naturally Roberta decides to go to Battery Park and witness the latest meeting, if it happens. She gets hit on the head, winds up with amnesia as well as being mistaken for the elusive Susan.
The plot simply does not bear further summary, it's screwball-complicated with nobody recognizing anybody and a Maguffin in the form of a pair of ugly but valuable earrings. But, while the Siren finds the scenes between Arquette and Quinn adorably sexy, the real romance here is the romance of New York. She began the series by discussing E.B. White's observation that the greatest of New Yorks is that created by the immigrants. Those immigrants don't have to come through Ellis Island, though. Often they come from the vast strip-mall desert of American suburbs. The romance is Roberta discovering New York, and therefore her true, gloriously offbeat self.
That's the New York that the Siren, and probably most of the people she knows here, came to seek. It doesn't matter what a misfit you were in Plano or Marietta or Toledo. In New York you can find your weirdness level, stick with it and be accepted for it. One minute you're wearing eyelet bib-collars and button earrings and the next minute you've got on a ratty 1950s prom dress and you're doing a magic act with a bird. Is this a great city or what?
Nostalgia. Seidelman's greatest accomplishment is capturing this particular moment in New York. Danceteria. Love Saves the Day (still there but the clothing section is almost nonexistent). The Bleecker Street Cinema--oh lord, I could cry when I see those scenes--where are the cinemas of yesteryear? An East Village that had squatters, artists and assorted wannabes, not corporate salarymen on the first rung of the money ladder. It was dirty (and you can see that in the movie) and frightening (muggings were common, and nothing will shake you up like a mugging--burglaries don't compare to having a knife pulled on you). But looking at the old stretch of Second Avenue, at Saint Marks and the Statue of Liberty covered in scaffolding, still gives the Siren an ache for that dear old dirty phase. It reminds her of Joseph Cotten's speech in The Magnificent Ambersons, where he talks of what we will lose with the automobile: "With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization." It's a cleaner, safer city now, one the Siren is happy to raise her family in. But something of its soul is lost.
Aidan Quinn. In Desperately Seeking Susan the men take the frequent female roles as objects and bystanders, in a nicely executed gender-twist that hadn't been seen that much since its heyday in the 1930s. (Mark Blum has the Gail Patrick part.) Quinn is the one who doesn't know what the hell is going on and spends a lot of time being bemused. It's kind of thankless but his reactions are so well-modulated. Plus, at the time there was no handsomer actor in New York, and he had a beautiful rich voice to go with those looks.
Madonna. Look, I haven't forgiven her for Evita either. She also owes me big time for the two hours I spent watching Shanghai Surprise. But she's just great here, an "indolent, trampy goddess" as Pauline Kael so perfectly put it. What the hell happened? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe the performance was a fluke, supporting Ivan G.'s Blind Squirrel Theory of Cinema. Maybe (and here I think of what I wrote about Paul Newman this week) she just wasn't willing to work at it like she worked at her music and her physique.
Still, I love to watch her as Susan and I always will. The tough-girl accent (so much better than the ersatz Lady Bountiful routine she's adopted now). The snapping gum. The total golddigger vibe, easing toward the door when she tries on a pair of boots she likes. Supposedly the talented Ellen Barkin was up for the part, but Barkin would not have had the same effect swinging her hips into the Daily News offices in a wifebeater, garterbelt and lace stockings slung over a pair of men's boxers. In fact, I am not sure anybody else on the face of the planet could have done that.
A fashion note: sometimes you'll see articles claiming that Madonna and this movie jump-started the whole underwear-as-outerwear thing we lived through mid-1980s. As if. She picked it up from the girls in the East Village who'd been doing it for at least a year or so. The Siren should know; she was one of those girls. It was a poverty-inspired look in part, based on the idea that a camisole or bustier looks pretty and usually costs less than a similarly frilly top.
The Siren always thinks that Susan herself was probably a Roberta at one point--if not sitting in a subdivision eating birthday cake in the middle of the night, then at least practicing her wiles on the local lunks and thinking, "There's gotta be bigger fish to fry."
All right, over to you. Do you see the same things in Desperately Seeking Susan that the Siren sees? or does its romance elude you?
