Capsule Reviews: Head, His Girl Friday, Elite Squad

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

If you ever wanted to know what A Hard Day's Night might have resembled had Richard Lester teamed up with the Beatles post-Revolver, Head is the film for you. The Monkees, sick of their (not inaccurate) image as a gimmick, attack the issue directly, presenting a plotless skewering of their own image and the various capitalist forces that shaped them. The stream-of-consciousness, self-reflexive movie runs through genres that reinforce cheap ideals (Westerns, war films, '50s Americana), all of it filled with product placement—there's even a Coca-Cola machine in the middle of the desert. Cut with acid-tinged whimsy, Head is nevertheless as much a critique of the late '60s as it is a gonzo embodiment of its creative possibilities. Rafelson uses rapid, overlapping images and false-color to create psychedelic effects, and in the chaos are pointed attacks on the Vietnam War, police brutality and various other topics of the day. Not a lick of this movie makes sense, but it's still one of the best rock movies I've ever seen. Grade: A

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

Even faster than Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday doesn't reach the same heights but nevertheless displays Cary Grant at his comic best as a paper editor who speaks like a comic strip and wants nothing more than to undermine his ex-wife's planned second marriage. Rosalind Russell is no less fantastic as the woman who wants everything Walter represents but can't stand to be around him; the speed with which she falls into journalist mode undermines any pretense she has for leaving her old life. Hawks' gift for well-composed but unfussy compositions makes for perfectly staged but hands-off scenes that cede total control to the actors. Everything goes absolutely batty in the last act, but my favorite moment will always be the total aside of the mayor's dealings with a messenger from the governor, a ludicrous verbal run-around that hinges beautifully on the vaudeville chops of Billy Gilbert. Admittedly, the gags don't feel as timeless and physically huge as those of Baby or Twentieth Century, but comedy isn't about timelessness but moment-to-moment pleasures, and few films contain as many of those as His Girl Friday. Its last half hour is simply aces. Grade: A-

Elite Squad (José Padilha, 2007)

An artless piece of trash that stylistically rips off City of God and glorifies police brutality to boot, Elite Squad is so bad it's actually saved from outright offensiveness by how poorly constructed it is. Just as it nears the tipping point of fascism as cops viciously clear out Rio's crime-ridden favelas, the film gets sidetracked into a lengthy aside that makes light of police corruption after already showing some of its dark side. Take a page from GoodFellas: go from light to dark, not the other way around. But don't worry, soon it gets back to tearing apart the slums to prove that civil rights are impeding cops from doing the right thing and bashing in brains. The use of handheld cameras is some of the worst I've ever seen, so disoriented that even when a shot holds you can't make out anything. In some ways, that's a blessing. Grade: D

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century is so ahead of its time it serves as a precursor to two great types of Hollywood storytelling: the behind-the-scenes, referential melodrama and the screwball comedy. Even in the film's first segment, in which the dialogue tumbles out with the speed and visceral impact of a golf match, it still feels like the ping-ponged exchanges that would grace Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. Hawks' economic direction, his ability to eke the fullest energy from the simplest, barest setup gives even jazzes up the dim slurring of the drunken sot who moves around the demented Broadway world of the protagonists.

"Discovered" by Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore), an impresario who tyrannically parades around like a scarfed Caesar, a lingerie model named Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard) opens the film infuriating the rest of Jaffe's troupe with her awful acting. Cast in a melodrama, she proves incapable of conveying emotion. She transcends natural acting; she's so plain and starched she proves more suited to play the role of a bread loaf than a frenzied damsel. But Jaffe refuses to fire her, and though his insistence carries predatory desire, somehow his instincts prove correct and Mildred is reborn as star Lily Garland, and a cut across several years instantly hops from a tearful, overwhelmed "Hoboken Cinderella" to a jaded diva.

This time warp throws Hawks' camera forward with such force that it emerged with a momentum that propelled the director at double speed for the next decade. Throwing the lever into high gear, everything speeds up into lunacy: Lombard, whose stiff-mannered nobody couldn't even scream, now speaks solely in melodramatic flourishes. Not to be outdone, though, is Barrymore, who got lost on his way to an Expressionist film. Barrymore has no "natural" response to anything in this movie. At all times, Barrymore is ludicrous: even the mildest surprise registers on his face with such comic exaggeration he looks as if he just found a swaddled baby Quasimodo and got a peek the hideous creature underneath the blanket. He and Lombard engage in a warped romance that mixes sexual lust and power dynamics into a case of mutual love-hate dominated by jealousy and ego. It resembles a cosmic war of deities more than an affair, and the mortals caught between them are just so much collateral damage. Jaffe hires a detective to tap Lily's phones—"Tapping phones is our specialty!" the man crows—and the poor S.O.B. returns looking as if he ran across a puma on the way over.

Hawks himself helped stoke the flames between Barrymore and Lombard, all while trying to get Lombard more comfortable in her role. At this stage in her career, Lombard was known enough to get into the sort of party where Hawks met her but hadn't had her breakthrough yet. Impressed, Hawks had her come read for the film and test with Barrymore, where she bombed. Like Katharine Hepburn four years down the road, Lombard just didn't know how to handle the material, and she came off as flat, not wild like the part needed her to be. Rather than look for another actress, Hawks called her over and asked her what she'd do if a guy said something insulting about her. "I would kick him in the balls," Lombard responded, and Hawks told her that Barrymore had just said whatever would set her off. In a sense, Hawks' own dedication to keeping Lombard until she lived up to the potential he saw in her mirrors Jaffe's treatment of Mildred/Lily, albeit in a far more supportive manner. And clearly, the gambit worked, and not just because it launched Lombard into stardom, where she quickly became the highest-paid star in Hollywood. Lombard plays Mildred/Lily as if she's always on the cusp of hauling off and sending a gam flying up between Jaffe's legs, and her own histrionic sense of importance creates an equal sparring partner for Barrymore's madman.

The two enrage each other to the point that Lily quits Broadway for, naturally, Hollywood, sending Jaffe into a frenzy and leading to an absurd scheme to steal her back by intercepting her on her train, the titular Twentieth Century. The action thus compressed and contained, the film hones its banter into bottlenecked madness, expanding the cast to include Lily's new, put-upon paramour, and a mysterious old codger (Etienne Giradot) who speaks of having so much money he despairs not being able to spend it all and amuses himself by pasting apocalyptic stickers wherever he can put them. As Lily and Jaffe explode at and over each other in cramped proximity, the white "Repent!" discs proliferate like bacteria in a petri dish, adding a visual element of chaos to the war of gesticulation between the two sort-of lovers. Giradot's matter-of-fact attitude when placing these stickers is hilarious, as if this is his day job and he's just sticking crap to windows and unsuspecting people until the 5 o'clock whistle blows.

A host of great lines skewer the self-importance of the art crowd, my favorite being Jaffe's grim dismissal, "I close the iron door on you" stressed as if the increasingly disinterested minions at his disposal are about to be black-bagged and shipped to the gulag. It's such a hysterically overwrought condemnation that even those on the receiving end grow weary of its hydrogen-inflated doom. But like any jumped-up tyrant, Jaffe's unsparing power comes from an intense fear of losing it, and Lily's defiance drives him so wild not merely because of his obvious feelings for her (feelings he can never articulate because he hates her just as passionately as he worships her) but because she can shatter his myopic sense of totalitarian authority. Sure enough, the film concludes by closing the circle, Jaffe having swindled his leading lady back into subservience, but where we met a timid, insecure woman, now we see an embittered, hollowed-out diva arguing with the same instructions Jaffe used to bring out her latent talent. This new cycle promises to be even more ridiculous than the last.

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

One of the chief reasons Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby is the king of the screwball comedies because it never stops. It has a straight man in Cary Grant's hysterically put-upon paleontologist, but no one in the movie is at all normal. Hawks himself later criticized this after the film proved, amazingly, to be a complete flop, saying he should have had at least one person acknowledge the lunacy and provide some kind of sanity anchor. But that's what makes the movie so great: it never steps outside itself to note how ridiculous (and downright naughty) everything is.

Some of the first lines of the film are pure innuendo, showing Grant's David Huxley, framed in an unflattering, goofy Thinker pose trying to figure out where a brontosaurus bone goes and telling his fiancé "I think this one must belong in the tail." "Nonsense," she says, "you tried it in the tail yesterday." This sets the ball rolling on a flagrantly sexual movie that inverts gender roles, making Grant the creepily stalked object of affection of Katharine Hepburn, who flashes into the movie like a firecracker and only gets more spectacular from there. While David is out playing golf to woo a potential museum investor, Hepburn's Susan walks up and plays his ball. Then, she drives off in his car, dragging him along on the running boards. Take a deep breath, this is as calm as the film gets.

Grant had already established his comic persona that would serve him well for the remainder of his career, but he still plays entirely against type here. He's so good at being clumsy, using his acrobatic talents for the first time in film in service to magnificent pratfalls, that it's easy to forget that this is Cary Grant, sexiest man who ever lived and a powerhouse leading man. He submits entirely to Hepburn, who has never seemed more masculine despite the absence of her usual suits. Hepburn is the aggressor, sizing up the bumbling paleontologist and seeing that beneath his obscuring spectacles and stick-up-his-ass gait, he is indeed Cary Grant. Naturally, she'd like a piece of that, so she begins contriving wilder and wilder reasons to keep David from his wedding to the frigidly, ironically named Miss Swallow (who almost certainly has no idea what her surname references and would be appalled if she did).

The titular Baby of the film is not, as one might have guessed, a human child but a tame leopard Susan's brother sent back from Brazil for their aunt, the same patron considering the donation to David's museum. Before long, the whole world's gone mad, with David and Susan chasing around their leopard; another, far less agreeable one they let out of a zoo truck under the impression it's Baby; and George, Aunt Elizabeth's dog, who steals the brontosaurus bone David has with him and buries it. All the while, Susan's antics attract attention and her lies grow more and more fanciful.

Hepburn and Grant had already co-starred in two films, the even more gender-bending Sylvia Scarlett and the commercially disappointing but critically lauded Holiday, and they had another coming in 1940's The Philadelphia Story. Their familiarity each other makes for intense chemistry, even as both convince the audience they've never met before in this movie. By the same token, Hawks incorporates enough self-reflexivity—Susan using Grant's character name from The Awful Truth to identify him in an elaborate lie to the cops, the use of the star dog Asta for George—that the look of knowing on Susan's face from the moment she sets eyes on David suggests she has some of her actor's awareness. As fast as the film moves, the actors needed that past working relationship to let them feel so believably attracted. It's difficult to describe how the movie builds their romance even as it never flags, something the film itself points out when David says, "It isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you. But, well, there haven't been any quiet moments."

Not quite as fast-paced as Hawks' own His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby nevertheless feels the most breakneck of the screwballs even as it is also one of the most carefully composed. Obviously, it takes skill to move at this speed, but that wouldn't automatically make it good: think of all those showboating heavy metal guitarists who wow everyone by playing arpeggios over, and over, and over. Like, yeah, great, you can do scales, now when are you gonna be a big boy and write something? Bringing Up Baby doesn't simply assume that by pushing forward it is funny. It relies on a perfect cast of loony characters* to complement Grant and Hepburn, who crucially play their roles with conviction. Hepburn purportedly did not realize the importance of this at first, overselling her lines because she was in a comedy, but Grant, by then a close friend, set her straight**. If Bringing Up Baby is a film where no one is a reasonable, sensible human being, it is also one where everyone in it likes to think himself reasonable and sensible. That, fundamentally, is why it remains one of the most enduringly funny comedies more than 70 years after its release.

*My favorite side player is Walter Catlett's Constable Slocum, a bumbling sheriff so forgetful he finds himself in pleasant chats with those he seeks to arrest, only to snap back to reality and explode in rage at having been "duped" into treating the perps with pleasantries.
**For a far more thorough account of Hepburn's on-set evolution, read this piece by Sheila O'Malley.

Only Angels Have Wings

The rousing, boisterous opening of Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings is misleading in its jubilation, the shots of a bustling Latin harbor giving the impression of adventures to come. But the music fades out, and the peppy opening proves merely to be the setup to a decrescendo that lasts the rest of the film. With its romantic title and setting among pilots in hazardous terrain, Only Angels Have Wings seems the film that should be a classic melodrama. Instead, it communicates a deep, affecting melancholy, and also a keen sense of gallows humor that parlays the screwball credentials of its stars into something with more kick.

Off the boat sailing into the Andes port town of Barranca strides Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a piano-playing chanteuse, so confidently and forcefully that a fresh sailor winds up with a face looking as if a puma swatted it (hilariously, he acts like a cowed spouse, blaming his swollen and scratched eye on falling into a doorknob). Two American airmen, gobsmacked by the sight of this blond beauty in the middle of the teeming harbor, nearly fall over themselves trying to win her attention. She prepares to box them as well, until she recognizes their accents and joyously tags along with them, thrilled "to hear someone talking in something that doesn't sound like Pig Latin." They take her back to their home base -- a building that combines elements of a general store, bar/restaurant and air delivery service -- where they attempt to ply her with American luxuries such as steak. The place is run by Dutchy (Sig Ruman), named for his national origin, and his presence creates a marvelously Hawksian microcosm where different ethnicities casually rub against each other without comment, save for Bonnie's initial spat of racism, but then she is cast as the outsider even among the Americans.

The two men behave as if college lads on vacation, forgetting all their duties and sporting over the woman right in front of her. With Dutchy chuckling good-naturedly in the background as his employees cost him time and money, the atmosphere shifts fully from the confusing bustle of the harbor to a lively but homely setting, a place where all the various people populating this port town can meld into one friendly group. Fueled by a steady supply of machismo, Dutchy's store looks to be one of the most appealing groups of Hawksian individuals in the director's canon.

Then reality finally seeps into the picture: at last, the men can put off their jobs no longer and one of the two, Joe, heads out to fly a mission in the dense fog around Barranca, and on his return he crashes and dies. Suddenly, the carefree nature of the film turns deadly serious, and it never particularly lets up again. The word "Hawksian" exists because the director centered so many of his movies on the same topic: men walking the line between individualism and teamwork to overcome obstacles. Here, however, the only obstacle is death, and it is insurmountable. No matter how high those planes climb, they won't be able to stay up forever, and eventually they'll crash down into death's infinite maw. These men band together, sure, but only in mutual emotional support. They do not have a luxury of a villain: they struggle against inevitability.

Ingeniously, Hawks decides to rest the split between the lighter tone of the beginning and the more macabre feel of the rest of the film entirely on the shoulders of Cary Grant. For my money, Grant's entrance into the film eclipses even that of the most famous of appearances in 1939, that of John Wayne in Stagecoach. Where Ford's film made its impression by literalizing Wayne's magnetism by sending the camera so quickly at the star that it seems to have broken free of operator control, Grant's entrance here relies on his singular ability to stand back just far enough to let the wave of talent emanating from him crest and crash onto the camera.

Grant simply appears in a door frame as the two other pilots fail to contain their drooling over Bonnie, sporting a cowboy hat and gaucho as if he looked at the leather jacket and sunglasses of the stereotypical pilot and thought, "Too subtle." Where everyone else bustles around the place in Dionysian revelry, Grant's Geoff Carter gently saunters in from his mission, laconic even in body language. Things quiet down when he arrives, not because he intimidates anyone but because they want to see what he'll do.

The remove in Geoff's carriage becomes evident when Joe dies, his steeled emotions a defense against the constant risk of losing a friend. The others fall in line too, responding to Bonnie's anguish over the man's death with feigned ignorance, everyone acting as if Joe never existed now that he no longer does. Only a quiet gesture Geoff makes in private with Dutchy reveals just how badly he feels every time someone in his command crashes. But he cannot display that outside the room, and his emotional distance extends to Bonnie, who is incensed outwardly that Geoff is boorish to her and, inwardly, because he man be the first man in many years to ignore her.

Grant brilliantly plays Geoff in the manner that made him the most irresistible leading man of all time. I never could play hard to get. I was always too invested in the outcome, too reliant on that need for reciprocity. Most people strike me as being bad at playing the game, only ever succeeding when they genuinely do dislike the person pining for their affections, or are at least uninterested. At best, they're just scared of commitment and decide to waste time with a game they are never good at. But Cary Grant, to steal from Richard Schickel, never played hard to get. He was hard to get. He could stand in the corner seemingly oblivious to the existence of everyone but himself, at last leaning out of his solipsistic bubble to kiss the woman near desperation for longing for him. There are endless fantasies of the suffering man entreating his ideal love until she finally relents, but Cary Grant did his bit made up for the massive gap, letting potential loves come to him, never making the trip himself. Bonnie cannot wait to leave this flea-ridden cesspool, but Grant's presence allures her so much she eventually cancels her ride home to keep seeing him. Wouldn't you?

It is easy to lose sight of the entire film's copious rewards for the looming redwood that is Grant. It's difficult to even call him anything but his full name, as if to use Grant alone is akin to using Excalibur without its scabbard, a mistake that cost Arthur his life. The more I see of him the more I find myself unable to call him anything less than the greatest film actor who ever lived, and Only Angels Have Wings boasts a performance that cements itself among the ever-changing list of favorite Cary Grant roles. His Geoff retains some of the comic timing that made Grant famous, but even his interplay with Arthur, another screwball icon, is tinged with melancholy.

Where Grant always gave enough space to make love interests come to him, here the reasons for doing so are sadder, more vulnerable. Not only does Geoff have to consider the danger of his job, he must also take into account how that danger would affect Bonnie. His first wife left him because the stress of worrying about him made the constant threat of his death more difficult to bear than death itself, preferring Geoff to crash and die simply to let of her the damn seesaw. Bonnie, naturally, falls for Geoff, but this time he won't allow his feelings to intervene and break his terrible shield.

That same dour tone on romantic love extends to the platonic realm of the male interactions. Kid (Thomas Mitchell), Geoff's best friend, has grown old, his failing eyesight forcing a reluctant Geoff to ground the man to save his life. But what is life for a man who can no longer fly, who must return to the mortals after soaring above them for a lifetime? Kid's sadness turns to anger when a disgraced pilot, Bat (Richard Barthelmess), returns to the base. Bat bailed on a falling aircraft, trapping the engineer, Kid's brother, as the plane plummeted. Compounding the hostility of the men toward a traitor is the fact that Bat shows up with Geoff's ex-wife (played by Rita Hayworth, which can only deepen the sting). But even that level of ire cannot last, and a heroic act by Bat absolves him of his earlier sin, an act presented just as stoically as the more dire material.

That's the damnedest thing about the movie: it never lays off the gloom, even when it appears to lapse back into melodrama. Bat's triumph of platonic commitment reflects Geoff and Bonnie's budding romantic relationship, but both cannot lift the pall covering the film. Hawks maintains the fog around Dutchy's service, as if it were not merely condensing moisture but the ever-billowing smoke from the plane crashes around the perilous area, that mist reminding everyone inside of what awaits him someday.

That quiet tone allows from some understated beauty, such as Bonnie displaying her first touch of interesting humanity when she fails to detect the sarcasm in Geoff's voice when he meets her and condescendingly asks if she thinks airplanes make her think of birds. "No, I didn't," she responds with breathless awe. "That's what makes it so wonderful. It's really just a flying human being." Even Grant nearly breaks and lets on his attraction in the moment. That touching moment is contrasted with the chilling quality of Joe's flat voice over the radio when he attempts to return and crashes, his monotone not letting the audience relax or anticipate the worst. Occasionally, the humor comes through, such as the wordplay of Bonnie asking Geoff if he still "carries the torch" for his ex-wife and he holds up a cigarette and asks "Got a match?" There's also the time Bonnie uses a literal act to mock Geoff's macho proclamations: "I thought you never got burned in the same place," she sneers, and Grant's snicker lightens up the screen as if it were always a comedy. But the somber tone is unlike practically anything I can recall seeing out of mainstream Hollywood fare at the time. Only Angels Have Wings stops short of the cynicism of film noir but goes quite a bit further than the lavish emoting of a melodrama.

That is because the two primary relationships of the film, between man and woman and man and other man, are superseded by the connection of man to death. Gloom is rampant in Only Angels Have Wings, but it also contains the perverse optimism that comes with fatalism: when one knows of the finality of death, one strives to make the days alive count all the more. When Grant finally opens up, the promise of his relationship with Bonnie manages to overcome the burden of grief around them, something that might not have been possible had the film not earned that small breakthrough. But in classic Grant fashion, he cannot up and confess love to the girl: in the film's last act of stoic passion, Geoff leaves the fate of his relationship up to a coin toss, only for Bonnie to discover he rigged the game as he flies one last mission for Dutchy.

"I'm hard to get, Geoff," Bonnie says to him before the climax. "All you have to do is ask me." Any other man would have been on his knees an hour of screentime earlier begging, not asking, but that's the power of Grant, and of this film. It never screams or moans or wails. It just trudges on in its sadness, making the twinkling of sorrow in Geoff's eyes at the end as devastating as a full breakdown. That Only Angels Have Wings can somehow end this strain of thought on a happy, life-affirming note threw me so completely that I shall return to this, possibly Hawks' greatest masterpiece, in the hopes of figuring out how the son of a bitch pulled it off.