Tag: Mig's Reviews

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)
Director: Michael Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An in-depth examination of the ways in which the Vietnam War impacts and disrupts the lives of several friends in a small steel mill town in Pennsylvania

[Author’s note: This will be the first in an ongoing series of reviews inspired by a book given to me as a birthday present by my long-suffering girlfriend.  Entitled Everyone’s a Critic, it challenges readers to watch a movie a week within a given category, then answer questions like, “Why did you choose this particular film” or “Do you feel this film deserved the award? Why or why not?”  Clearly designed to inspire discussion.  This category was “A Film That Has Won Best Picture.” This format is a work in progress, so I hope you’ll bear with me on future installments.

I am going to assume, for the most part, that most readers will have seen the movies being reviewed in this series.  Therefore, some spoilers may or will follow.  You have been warned.]


Once about every couple of years, I like to pick up and read Stephen King’s The Stand in its original uncut version.  My paperback copy runs to 1,141 pages, not including King’s foreword and a brief prologue.  Even Tolstoy would look at that thing and go, “Dude…edit yourself.”  But having read it numerous times now, I cannot imagine what could possibly have been excised from the edited version of King’s novel.  Every detail of that apocalyptic saga feels necessary.  Reading it is like falling into a fully realized alternate universe.

That’s what watching The Deer Hunter is like.  I can still remember the first time I watched it.  I knew its reputation as one of the greatest Vietnam War movies ever made, had heard of its harrowing Russian Roulette scene, and was intensely curious.  I popped it into the VCR, hit play…and for the first 70 minutes I got a slice-of-life drama about steel workers in a tiny Pittsburgh town (Clairton, for the detail-oriented) where, mere days before three friends ship off to Vietnam, one of them is getting married.  And the centerpiece is the wedding reception.  Ever watch a video of a wedding reception?  How high do you think a young teenager would rate its entertainment value on a scale of 1 to 10? 

I could not appreciate, as I do now, how vital this scene is.  Relationships are stated, expanded upon, and brought to a kind of cliffhanger.  Take the mostly non-verbal interplay between Linda (a luminous young Meryl Streep) and Michael (Robert De Niro).  Linda is clearly in a relationship with Nick (Christopher Walken), but it is painfully obvious that Michael and Linda have eyes for each other.  Mike watches intently from the bar as Linda dances at the reception, and whenever their eyes meet you can almost hear their hearts stop beating.  The oblivious Nick even pairs them on the dance floor while he visits the bar himself.  The awkwardness as Michael forces small talk and Linda shyly reciprocates is palpable.  And…is that Nick giving the two of them the eye at one point…?

As a kid, I wondered why this soap opera nonsense was necessary in a Vietnam film.  Of course, I didn’t know what was coming.  That’s the beauty and wonder of The Deer Hunter.  It challenges you to follow along with this miniature melodrama to give meaning to what comes next.

There is a key moment during the reception when an Army soldier wearing a green beret stops by the reception.  Mike, Nick, and Steven (John Savage), who are gung-ho about serving their country, yell their support and let him know how much they’re looking forward to killing the enemy.  The steely-eyed soldier raises his glass, looks away, and says, “Fuck it.”  It’s not terribly subtle, but the ominous nature of this moment always fills me with a sense of foreboding, even having seen the film many times by now.

But even after the reception is over, there is one more small-town pit stop to make before the movie gets to Vietnam.  (In fact, The Deer Hunter spends surprisingly little time in Vietnam.)  Michael and a group of friends including Nicky and Stan (John Cazale) go hunting for deer in the mountains as a kind of ritual before Nick, Mike, and Steven are deployed.  It is in this sequence that Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s talents are put to stunning use.  We are shown vistas of the Allegheny Mountains that are simply breathtaking, with Mike and his friends seen as mere dots in the mountainsides.  Choral music with a men’s choir singing in Russian is heard on the soundtrack, giving the sequence a majestic aura that must be seen and heard to be believed.

Then the hunt is over, and the boys all have one last drunken night at the bar owned by another friend, John (George Dzundza in an under-appreciated, realistic performance).  Here they all sing along to Frankie Valli and listen somberly as John plays a sad classical tune on his piano.  And then, in one of the film’s masterstrokes of editing, we slam-cut immediately to the jungles of Vietnam – no boot camp, no footage of them being trained or flown over there, just suddenly they’re there and the contrast between the carnage we experience in the first few minutes of Vietnam versus the rhythms of their lives in Clairton could not be more extreme.

In a horrific but mercifully brief sequence, we watch as a Viet Cong soldier calmly walks into a burned-out village, discovers a hidden pit holding terrified villagers, and remorselessly tosses a grenade inside.  We then watch as Mike, now a battle-hardened soldier, emerges from a hiding place with a flamethrower and burns the VC soldier alive.

The effect of this scene cannot be understated.  To witness Michael torching a soldier, even after that soldier committed a brutal act himself, is jarring.  And why is it so jarring?  Because we have seen Mike as a civilian, as a friend, as a would-be lover, during that lengthy sequence at the wedding reception and while hunting with his friends.  Admittedly, you got the sense that he could or would get violent if necessary.  (He’s clearly the alpha male of his “clique.”)  But this…I mean, damn.

Then, in one of those Hollywood conveniences that never get old, Mike is unexpectedly reunited with Nick and Steve who just happened to arrive at that very same village with another platoon of US soldiers.  And then, immediately after being reunited, they are captured by enemy forces, imprisoned with several enemy combatants in a riverside compound, and forced by their sadistic keepers to play Russian roulette with each other as the guards bet on the outcome.  Michael comes up with a horrifyingly logical escape plan: convince the guards to put THREE bullets in the chamber instead of one.

Much has been made regarding the historical inaccuracy of this scene.  To those arguments, I say: who cares?  As someone once said, riffing from Mark Twain, “Never let facts get in the way of truth.”  The truth of the matter is, the Vietnam experience was a modern-day horror show, leaving physical and psychic scars on its participants and on our country.  In my opinion, the Russian roulette scene can be interpreted as a symbol of how those soldiers, or ANY soldiers, must have felt every single day.  Going on a routine patrol in the jungle could have potentially lethal circumstances.  They rolled the dice every time they called in an airstrike, betting they didn’t get firebombed themselves.  Booby traps were everywhere.  How is life in a war zone that much different from being given a one-in-six chance at living or dying?

I’ve already gone into far more spoilers than I am accustomed to, so let’s just say this happens and that happens, Michael winds up making it back home, Steven is grievously wounded in the escape attempt, and Nick goes AWOL when, after making it back to a military hospital in Saigon, he wanders the streets at night and discovers an underground ring of lunatics who run a high-stakes game of Russian roulette.  And we’re still just at the mid-point of the film.

When we see Michael back home, the earlier sequences establishing the rhythms of small-town life and his feelings towards Linda, for example, all come into focus.  We need that reception and the hunting scenes so we can see how much Michael has changed.  For example, when Michael is arriving back home by taxi, still in full military dress, he spots a huge banner: “WELCOME HOME MICHAEL”.  He tells the driver to keep going.  In a hotel room later that night, he sits on the edge of his bed and rocks back and forth, winding up crouching against the wall.  He is completely unable to process how to deal with people anymore.  Or, at least, he doesn’t trust what he will or won’t say.  I watch that scene, and I feel such intense sympathy and empathy.  What he’s feeling, what he’s been through, what he’s seen, is so huge that he knows he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone who hasn’t been there.  He knows he’ll get questions like, “What was it like?  Did you kill anyone?  How are you feeling?  Where’s Nicky?”  I’ll never know what it’s like to fight in a war, but if I had gone through what he’d gone through, I wouldn’t have stopped either.

There is a heartbreaking scene where Linda, who is more than a little distraught that Nicky is AWOL, hesitantly suggests to Michael that they go to bed.  “Can’t we just comfort each other?”  Mike rebuffs her, but in a way that makes it clear he’d like to, regardless.  De Niro’s performance here is staggering.  As he walks out, he makes a statement, showcasing how much he is feeling but also how unable he is to articulate it: “I feel a lot of distance, and I feel far away.”  I knew exactly what he was talking about.

The very end of The Deer Hunter is one of the most emotionally shattering finales of any movie I’ve ever seen.  It ends with a simple song, first sung as a solo, then joined by everyone else at the table.  I will not reveal what happens to get us there.  Is it shameless manipulation?  Yes.  Does it work?  Yes, so I can forgive the “shameless” part.

One of the criticisms I’ve read more than once about The Deer Hunter is how “one-sided” it is.  To which I say, “Well, duh.”  The Deer Hunter is not presented as a history lesson or a lecture on the internal politics in the country of Vietnam during the war.  The Deer Hunter is intended to make us feel something.  It wants to show us what happens to a person who is exposed to the very worst side of human behavior and lives to talk about it.  It wants to remind us that a country can wave a flag and stand for what’s right and be willing to sacrifice its best and brightest souls for a righteous cause…but it must also be prepared for the aftermath.  The Deer Hunter is a somber prayer that our country remembers the cost it demands, and that it will take care of its own when the dust settles.

PIG (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Michael Sarnoski
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must venture to urban Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is, I guess, pig-napped.


Gotta tell you, that plot summary is one of the most bizarre summaries I’ve ever typed out.  To me, it’s on par with, “A file clerk working on the 7th-and-a-half floor of an office building discovers a portal that transports you into the brain of John Malkovich for 15 minutes before spitting you onto the side of the Jersey Turnpike.”

Who read the elevator pitch for Pig and thought it was worth filming?  Nicolas Cage himself is credited as one of the producers, so that’s a partial explanation, I guess.  The film has twenty other credited producers and executive producers, so it’s clear the financial burden was spread around.  But still…a movie about a guy looking for his stolen pig?  Is this a movie you should run out and rent/stream/buy?

Yes.  Yes, you should.  Oh, but let me tell you why.

Cage plays a scraggly fellow named Rob who lives in the aforementioned cabin with his pig, whose name is never spoken throughout the movie.  (Although when it was over, I had one or two guesses of my own, each as unlikely as the other.)  This pig excels at finding valuable truffles hidden in the shallow forest soil.  How valuable?  Well, the ones we see in the movie are black, and the current market price for winter black truffles runs from $300 – $1,300 per kilo, depending on the variant.  So…yeah, pretty valuable.  Rob apparently funds his meager existence by selling his truffles to a high-end buyer named Amir (Alex Wolff, Hereditary [2018]), a slick customer who drives a banana-yellow late-model Camaro.  I’m not sure how many Portland restaurateurs can afford Camaros, but it didn’t bother me until this precise moment, so I’ll let it slide.

One night, unknown parties break into Rob’s cabin, beat him up, and steal his pig.  At this point, I was reminded unavoidably of the opening scenes of John Wick (2014), and I thought we were in for another kill-crazy-rampage film like Mandy (2018).  But I was very pleasantly surprised.

It turns out Pig isn’t a revenge movie, or a weird Spike-Jonze-esque journey into absurdity, or a mind-numbing Bergman-esque examination of the human condition.  Ultimately, it’s about food.  Yeah.  Or the transformative properties of food.  Or maybe it’s just about cooking food.  It feels like the kind of movie Anthony Bourdain would have loved, if that’s not being too presumptuous.

Once he gets a line on who the thieves might be, Rob convinces Amir to help him track them down by driving him into the city.  First stop is a sketchy-looking guy who rebuffs Rob’s request for information and asks Amir, “Do you even know his real name?”  That leads to a hidden restaurant under another restaurant where we learn Rob’s full name…a name that brings shock and awe to the eyes and faces of everyone who hears it.  Who is this guy?

One thing I noticed during this film was the great economy of the storytelling.  Scenes that might involve pages of dialogue in other movies are handled in seconds with either terse dialogue or sometimes none at all.  For example, there’s a scene in Amir’s apartment.  Rob wakes up on the couch to the sound of a fire alarm.  The camera tilts up and we see Amir standing on the counter trying to fan smoke away from the alarm.  Cut immediately to a kitchen table, Amir slides a plate in front of Rob, and he says sheepishly, “I don’t cook a lot.”  I can easily imagine that scene in some other movie involving a setup showing Amir trying to cook, burning something, trying to put the fire out, all very comic and probably well-done…but ultimately unnecessary.  Asking the viewer to do the occasional heavy lifting is not the worst thing in the world.  Pig is full of moments like this.  It’s a welcome change when it’s done right.

The screenplay is brilliant in other ways.  It convincingly leads you down one path where you think you can guess what’s about to happen, and then it throws a curveball or neatly sidesteps your expectations.  At least, it did mine.  Rob visits the house where he used to live, where he has a conversation with a small boy.  Where are the parents?  Who knows?  Doesn’t matter.  Amir talks about his family life, about his very successful father who doesn’t believe Amir can cut it in this business.  Later, there’s a scene where Rob and Amir cook a fancy meal for Amir’s father, and the dinner service for that food has a huge emotional payoff I did not expect, and which is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Is Pig a good movie just because it’s unique?  No.  But unique it is, and it is VERY good.  Cage gives one of his most understated performances in forever, so if you have been avoiding this one because you didn’t think you could take more Cage-ian histrionics, you don’t have to worry.  He’s very low-key.  There are a couple of moments where you can see the anger boiling deep within Rob, or when you might expect him to overturn a table or throw a glass of wine in someone’s face.  But it doesn’t happen, and that works for this unexpectedly touching film.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Shaka King
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In the late ‘60s, William O’Neal, offered a plea deal by the FBI, infiltrates the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers to gather intelligence on party Chairman Fred Hampton.


By the time it was over, Judas and the Black Messiah made me think of that scene in Psycho (1960) where Norman is cleaning up after his mother and the car starts to sink in the swamp and then stops…and Norman gets nervous.  At that moment, I started rooting for Norman, getting in his headspace: “C’mon, car, sink.”  I was empathizing with the bad guy.  Neat trick.

That’s how I felt during Judas and the Black Messiah.  Instinctively, I know I’m supposed to be rooting for one character, but the movie empathizes with the “villain” character so well that I found myself rooting for him, too.

In the late 1960s, Fred Hampton’s star was on the rise in the black community.  As portrayed in a sensational performance by Daniel Kaluuya, Hampton is a fiery, charismatic, passionate public speaker who publicly advocates armed patrols of Black Panthers in black neighborhoods to keep an eye out for harassment from white cops.  When he is made Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, the FBI takes an interest.  Well…Hoover takes an interest, which pretty much means the FBI followed suit regardless.

Meanwhile, a petty thief named Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is arrested by the FBI, who gives him a choice: serve a 5-year stretch for impersonating an FBI officer, or…go undercover into Fred Hampton’s Black Panther chapter and bring out good intel that will help them arrest Hampton.  O’Neal agrees, and what follows is an exercise in classic cinematic storytelling and misdirection, done up with glossy modern cinematography that looks like the best movie Oliver Stone never made.

(…actually, “misdirection” is not the right word.  I’m not sure what the right word is.  I’ll explain.)

Fred Hampton is clearly meant to be the hero of the film.  Hoover even refers to Hampton as a “messiah” of the black movement.  This all takes place a few years after both Dr. King and Malcolm X had been assassinated.  (If things had turned out differently, Fred Hampton’s name would be synonymous with King and Malcolm X, but it’s not, and based on this movie, that seems distinctly unfortunate and unfair.)  He boldly walks into a local meeting of white supremacists and, incredibly, turns them around to his way of thinking, using a brilliant metaphor of America as a house on fire.  If that moment is not based on fact, it should be.

So, if Hampton is the hero, then O’Neal is clearly meant to be the villain.  Hampton is the messiah of the title, so O’Neal is Judas, the traitor, the informer.  As a direct result of his intel [SPOILER ALERT], the FBI makes several arrests, including Hampton himself, and eventually initiates a raid during which Hampton is killed in his bed with his pregnant wife in the next room.  (This is all a matter of public record, though it’s interesting that it took this movie to really make me aware of it.)

But it’s easy to make a movie with a two-dimensional villain.  Judas and the Black Messiah does something much more difficult.  It asks us to empathize with both Hampton AND O’Neal.  We see the conflict in O’Neal’s face when Hampton promotes him to chief of security for their chapter.  We see O’Neal’s fear when he is recognized by a member of a local gang.  We see how few choices he really has in his various meetings with his FBI handler (Jesse Plemons), who constantly reminds him that, if he runs, they will find him and put him in jail.  Hampton says numerous times in the film that if he were to die for the cause, it would be a life well spent.  O’Neal has no such ideals.  I’d go as far to say that, if that were me in O’Neal’s shoes, I might do the same thing to stay out of jail.  I know my limits.

So, the entire film, I was pulled back and forth between admiration for Hampton and his cause and feeling anger towards O’Neal; and feeling terribly sad for O’Neal and what he’s essentially being forced to do by the FBI.  In other films depicting the Jesus story, I felt no such sympathy for the Judas character.  Director Shaka King accomplishes what so many other films do not: total alignment with one viewpoint while also demonstrating that not everything is so – forgive me – black and white.

Frankly, for me, the movie is worth watching just for the closing epilogue alone.  We get a glimpse of the real Bill O’Neal being interviewed for a real PBS documentary in 1989, and he is asked what he might tell his son about his role in the events surrounding Fred Hampton’s death.  His answer feels like something he’s rehearsed and said all his life.  And then there’s a closing subtitle…and it’s devastating.

I feel like there is more I could say, but it would involve getting into much more detail about several plot points, and I would prefer to leave them for the viewer to discover on their own.  Judas and the Black Messiah is worthy enough to stand with Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) as one of the best films ever made about the black experience in America.

NOMADLAND (2020)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Chloé Zhao
Cast: Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, and a cast of non-professionals/actual “nomads”
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A woman in her sixties, after losing everything in the Great Recession, embarks on a journey through the American West, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.


Nomadland is one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve seen recently.  It mostly reminded me of Brokeback Mountain (2005) with its sprawling vistas of distant mountains, lonely country roads against a looming sky, and desert badlands illuminated by that elusive light that appears only during the “magic hour” so coveted by cinematographers and photographers alike.  It’s beautiful and well-made.  As a message film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2020…I mean…it’s good and admirable, but it didn’t quite get to me like it was clearly trying to.

As a piece of propaganda (intentional or not), I can see Nomadland being effective for anyone who has been disillusioned of the American Dream by financial troubles.  Set in 2011, the film follows Fern (McDormand) as she hits the road in a van after the gypsum mining company her deceased husband worked for folded, displacing an entire town, Empire.  Even the town’s zip code was discontinued.  Fern literally lives out of her van, which doubles as living quarters, bedroom, dining room, and (revealed in a shot that I was stunned to learn was real) bathroom.  She works seasonal jobs throughout the American West at various parks, restaurants, and even an Amazon warehouse during the holidays.

On her travels, she encounters a large community of fellow nomads.  Periodically (I think annually), they gather at a location in the middle of the desert to trade goods, share stories and nomadic tips, and basically support each other for a week or a month or whatever…it’s not made clear exactly how long everyone stays before they go their separate ways once more.  On this occasion, she meets a fellow traveler named Dave (Strathairn) who trades her for a can opener.  Over the course of the film, Fern’s and Dave’s paths will intersect again and again.  I thought we were getting the kernel of a corny love story, but not quite.  The purpose of their relationship is pragmatic, not romantic.

Another traveler Fern meets is Swankie, a lively woman in her seventies who hangs a skull-and-crossbones flag from her van when she wants no visitors.  Honestly, it made me wish I had a similar flag to hang from my neck to communicate the same thing in public.  Anyway, Swankie reinforces Fern’s commitment to this way of living by describing trips to Alaska, a visit to a large community of swallows nesting on a cliff while on a canoe trip, and by revealing one of the real reasons Swankie has adopted this lifestyle in the first place.  All with no bills to pay, other than gas, food, and vehicular upkeep.

The movie follows Fern from one place to another over the course of a little over a year.  We see her working, driving, talking with people she meets, cooking on her tiny gas stove inside her van, dealing with the cold in the winter, reminiscing over old photos and slides.  There are two interesting side trips when she can’t avoid reaching out to…well, I guess “civilization” is the right word.  One occurs because her beloved van breaks down and she has to get to her sister’s to ask her for repair money.  Another occurs when she takes Dave up on an offer to…no, won’t spoil it.

At times, I found myself comparing Nomadland to Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 film where Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) finds himself stranded on a desert island after a plane crash.  In both situations, the heroes find themselves isolated from civilization.  They must both learn to deal with an alternate way of life, and there is no alternative.  Adapt or die.  (When Swankie learns Fern doesn’t even know how to change a tire, she reprimands her.  “You can die out here.  You’re out in the wilderness, far away from anybody.  You can die out here.  Don’t you understand that?  You have to take it seriously.  You have to have a way to get help.  You have to be able to change your own tire!”  It’s a sobering reminder that, even though she has a cell phone (how she pays the bill is a mystery to me), Fern must be self-sufficient in order to survive.)

Furthering the similarities to Cast Away, there’s even a moment where Fern has an opportunity to sleep in a real bed.  We see her crawl underneath the covers…but in the middle of the night, she creeps back out to her faithful van to get a real night’s sleep, just like Chuck Noland sleeping on the floor of his hotel room.

But what does it all mean?  What is Nomadland trying to say?  I couldn’t shake the idea that Zhao’s film, based on a book of the same name, was an attempt, like Into the Wild (2007), to romanticize the concept of shedding our material needs, stripping ourselves down to the necessities, and getting back in touch with nature.  I have no doubt this notion appeals to many people.  Well, that much is clear because nearly everyone in the film besides McDormand and Strathairn are non-actors who are playing themselves, and they’re all nomads, too.  But is the movie simply showing me how and why a person makes this decision?  Or is it trying to convince me that I should do the same thing?  Is this one of Ebert’s “empathy machines” that allows me to live in someone else’s shoes for 107 minutes and experience life through their eyes, or, like Into the Wild, is it making the case that folks who haven’t made this decision themselves are slaves to a corporate system?

At one point, a gentleman named Bob, who is a real person and is one of the main coordinators of the community that meets once a year in the desert, makes a speech to the nomads who have gathered:

I think of an analogy as a work horse. The work horse that is willing to work itself to death, and then be put out to pasture. And that’s what happens to so many of us. If society was throwing us away and sending us as the work horse out to the pasture, we work horses have to gather together and take care of each other. And that’s what this is all about. The way I see it is that the Titanic is sinking, and economic times are changing. And so my goal is to get the lifeboats out and get as many people into the lifeboats as I can.

I’d be lying if I said his notion wasn’t appealing.  Who wouldn’t want to live a life of seeing the country, parts of which many of us may never see in our lifetimes?  Never being tied down to a job, to familial obligations, bills, taxes, the eternal quest for the almighty Dollar?  I get it.  But…if I didn’t have a job, didn’t earn a living, didn’t pay my bills, and have enough left over to buy a home entertainment system including the Blu-ray of Nomadland…I would never have seen this lovely film in the first place.

So, no, the concept of living as a nomad is not something I would seriously embrace…yet.  Life is good.  I have a job.  I have family.  I have friends who are as good as family.  I have the woman I love beside me.  I’ve seen Alaska, England, Greece, New York, Miami, and Key West.  Nomadland argues that, if any of that would ever change, there is an alternative to depression and slaving away and eking out a living in my retirement years in a 1-bedroom apartment.  Perhaps, on that day, I might re-evaluate my opinion of nomadic living.

But that day is not today.

Tomorrow is not looking good, either.

DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD (2020)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Kirsten Johnson
Cast: Dick Johnson, Kirsten Johnson
My Rating: 7/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 100% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A documentary filmmaker helps her father (and herself) prepare for the end of his life.


It’s been said that, to understand what a movie is really about, examine how the main characters have changed, and there you go.  When it comes to knowing exactly what a documentary is about, I would say: describe what you’ve learned after it’s over, and that’s what it’s about.

So, what did I learn when Dick Johnson Is Dead was over?

…that’s not so easy to describe.  Several years ago, documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson lost her mother to Alzheimer’s.  Not long after that, her aging father, Dick, started to show signs of memory loss.  She realized she was unprepared for how to deal with the reality that, one day, her father would die.  In the film, she describes how important he is to her daily life how the concept of losing him is “unimaginable.”  To help her process this looming fact of life, she decided to make a film about it.

But not just any film.  Aside from the expected footage of conversations with her father and her children and friends and family, Kirsten Johnson stages fictional scenes depicting her father dying or being killed.  Several times.  Starring Dick Johnson himself.  (And the occasional stuntman.)  In one scene, an air conditioner falls from an apartment building onto his head.  In another, he trips down a staircase, winding up at the bottom with a broken leg and blood pooling on the floor.  My personal favorite, adding a nice mystical touch, shows Dick napping in his favorite chair and ottoman…and he simply rises off the ground and out of the frame, chair and all.

What is going on here?  Kirsten’s father is naturally willing to go along with nearly anything his daughter asks him because, you know, it’s his daughter.  But how is this helping Kirsten?  How is this helping her father?  What am I, the viewer, supposed to get out of watching those scenes staging his death?

Most of them are clearly fake.  Kirsten sometimes leaves the camera and sound running while she shouts direction from just off camera; when the scene is over, you’ll often see assistants run on and help Dick stand up and clean the blood off him, or remove his costume, or help him back to his favorite chair between takes.  But a couple of them took me by surprise and were mildly unsettling.

This is hard for me to explain.  I felt as if Kirsten was somehow taking advantage of her father’s developing dementia to help her deal with his passing.  It seemed…unseemly.  Of course, he is a volunteer, and he was never put in any danger or forced to do anything uncomfortable.  But…something about it felt wrong.  It felt self-indulgent in a way.  “I am having a problem dealing with your death, so let me put you in a coffin in a church so I can feel what it’s going to be like when it’s for real.  This will help me with my process when you die.”  I am probably being completely unfair with that analysis, but I would be wrong to omit how I felt at times during this film.

But.  On the other hand…

There are scenes of such lyrical beauty that I was glued to the screen.  One scene Kirsten stages is her father arriving in heaven.  Dick finds himself surrounded by actors wearing big black-and-white cutout masks of people like Bruce Lee, Farrah Fawcett, and Sigmund Freud.  (One wonders if she asked Dick who he would like to meet in heaven.)  And then, in a wonderful moment, a door opens, and in walks his wife, Kirsten’s mother…again, just an actress wearing a big cutout mask, but the picture is of her from when she and Dick first met.  And they dance together.  (With the help of some fancy editing because Dick is not as nimble as he used to be.)

Dick was born with deformed toes, a fact of which he was ashamed for his entire life.  In another wonderful fantasy scene, Jesus Himself anoints Dick’s feet, and presto, his toes are normal again.  The look of shocked delight on Dick’s face is priceless.  …even though, you know, it’s not real, but still.


Interspersed with all this are scenes showing Dick’s slow decline in the real world.  He was once a successful psychiatrist, but he was finally forced to retire when he kept double-booking clients and not showing up for appointments.  He closes his office in Seattle, packs up, and moves in with Kirsten in her New York apartment, which is just a few doors down from the apartment where her two children live with their father and his husband.  (That scenario deserved, I thought, more explanation, but I got none…sounds like the setup for a long-running sit-com.)  Kirsten hires a caretaker with experience in caring for patients in their last stages of life.  Dick starts waking up in the middle of the night thinking he has to catch a train to work.  Multiple times.

These scenes are undeniably powerful because of the extraordinary access we get via Kirsten’s camera.  We see the amused confusion on Dick’s face when she asks him if he remembers getting up in the middle of the night…he doesn’t.  But he laughs.  “Oh, my, your father’s a wreck, sweetheart.”  It’s all doubly poignant because of how his wife succumbed to Alzheimer’s.  And here he goes down a similar road at the far end of his own life.  Powerful stuff.

…and then two extraordinary scenes occur.  I won’t spoil them.  They’re not exactly “extraordinary”, I guess, but the manner in which they occur and what we discover after they happen makes them extraordinary, to me.  And it’s here at the end of the movie that I really started feeling torn.  Yes, it’s a somber, effective look at Death with a capital “D” and how we choose to deal with it.  But…but…a part of me felt like it was shamelessly manipulative, especially those last two scenes.

Perhaps I’m the wrong audience for this movie.  Both of my parents are still alive.  I have not yet experienced that kind of loss.  I’m fifty-one years old as of this writing.  To paraphrase Indiana Jones, I’ve reached the point where life stops giving and starts taking away.  I’ve lost both sets of grandparents, two uncles, and more theatre friends and acquaintances I’d care to think about.  But I still have Mami and Papi.  I am blessed.  And I cannot for one second imagine how my ability to deal with either of their deaths would be improved by filming my mother in a coffin in a church, or by filming a scene where my father is killed after a fall.

I dunno.  It was profound and well made, and it clearly resonated with critics.  Maybe I’ll watch it again in ten or twenty or whatever years when I’ve lost at least one of my parents.  Maybe then I’ll be more in tune with Kirsten’s frame of mind.  Until then…I recommend Dick Johnson Is Dead if for no other reason than it’s one of the most unique documentaries I’ve ever seen.

THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Robert Eggers
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 90% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity while isolated on a remote New England island in the 1890s.


tone poem
NOUN, a piece of orchestral music typically in one movement, on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme


As I watched Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, that term “tone poem” kept leaping to my mind.  It’s not told in a standard or familiar fashion.  There are scenes where we’re not sure, until they’re over, whether they’re real or not.  The Willem Dafoe character, Thomas Wake, makes references to behavior in the past by the Robert Pattinson character, Ephraim Winslow, that Winslow never committed…or did he?  We are certain that Wake is the character who is going mad, if he’s not there already.  But what if it’s the other way around?  Or are they both going mad?

The mood or tone of the piece seems to be insanity and how one might get there given the right circumstances.  In many ways, it has quite a bit in common with another sensational tone poem of madness, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

Two men, Wake and Winslow, are lighthouse keepers in the late 19th century.  They are brought to a remote island in the stormy waters off the New England coast and left to fend for themselves for four weeks until the next tender brings supplies.  Wake (Dafoe) is a crusty old veteran lighthouse keeper whose speech and mannerisms appear to be based on Long John Silver, right down to the gimpy leg.  Winslow (Pattinson) is a much younger and, let us be honest, handsomer gentleman who keeps to himself whenever possible.  He tends to his duties, sometimes grudgingly but mostly not, but wonders why Wake flatly refuses to share the duty of tending the actual light source at the top of the lighthouse.  That mystery lies at the heart of the film, but don’t expect all your questions to be answered by the time the credits roll.  Fair warning.

A key decision by director Eggers was to shoot in black-and-white and in a very old screen format, 1:19, so the picture area is a virtually square space in the center of the screen, with black bars on either side.  (The Coen brothers did something similar with their brilliant adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth [2021].)  This visual language creates a uniquely claustrophobic atmosphere, especially in scenes taking place in Wake’s and Winslow’s quarters.  The walls are closer together, the ceiling feels lower, and the actors’ faces seem much closer to the screen than normal.  Even exterior shots seem more constricted and confining.  Wide open sky doesn’t look as inviting as it might to someone essentially imprisoned on a storm-lashed island for four weeks.


Like all the best films, The Lighthouse begins its descent into madness slowly and gains momentum as time passes.  Winslow discovers a mermaid figurine stashed inside his mattress.  That night he dreams about a mermaid in the surf.  Or was it a dream?  We glimpse Wake standing naked at the top of the lighthouse, almost as if he’s worshiping the light itself.  When Winslow tries to get a closer look at what Wake is doing up there, he glimpses something…supernatural.  Or does he?  The film is brilliant at not only portraying mounting madness on the screen, but also at conveying the tone of madness in the cinematography and editing.  If we’re not quite sure what is happening, even when we see it happening, that’s on purpose.  The audience is meant to be kept off balance throughout the movie to put us in the heads of the two main characters.

Another factor that I found riveting was the acting workshop on display from both Pattinson and Dafoe.  We’ve seen this kind of thing from Dafoe before.  He chews the scenery with Nicolas Cage-like gusto, spittle flying, prosthetic teeth flashing in manic sneers, and that crazy piratical accent.  If it had been revealed during the film that his character’s last name was Osborne, and that he was a distant relative of Norman Osborne from Spider-Man (2002), I would not have been the least surprised.

But equally impressive is Robert Pattinson’s performance, which must be seen to be believed.  Here is an actor who is set for life after being a part of two of the most profitable film franchises in history (Twilight and Harry Potter) and who has just rebooted a third (The Batman [2022]).  But in this film, he easily keeps pace with Dafoe’s quirkiness, which is not easy.  As his character descends into madness (or does he?), Pattinson dances a jig while singing a sea shanty that devolves into complete gibberish.  He laughs like a loon.  He, ah, takes some time for himself while fondling that mermaid figurine from earlier.  It’s the kind of performance that might be described as “courageous.”  He swings for the fences with abandon.  In so doing, he helps to make The Lighthouse one of the most unique movies I’m ever likely to see.

But what is really going on at the top of that lighthouse?  Why do seagulls pester Winslow so often, seemingly unafraid of him in any way?  Why does he continue to dream about mermaids?  IS he dreaming them?  Is Wake actually a merman?  Did real foghorns sound like that?  Why is one seagull missing an eye?

Well, come on, I’m not actually going to ANSWER those questions, but those are questions that occurred to me.  The movie does answer quite a few of them, but not all.  The point of the movie, like The Shining, isn’t about solving the mystery.  It’s about conveying the mystery, creating a mood of dread, and wallowing in it for a good 110 minutes.  It’s not the happiest movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely one of the most original films of the last ten years or so.

COLOR OUT OF SPACE (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Richard Stanley
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A secluded farm is struck by a strange meteorite which has apocalyptic consequences for the family living there and possibly the world.


Some backstory…

Once upon a time, there was a film director named Richard Stanley.  He made a few unremarkable films in the early 1990s, toiling in relative obscurity, until he hit the big time in 1996 when he got the opportunity to direct his dream project: a remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau starring none other than Marlon Brando.  The story of that film’s troubled production inspired a documentary all by itself (Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau [2014]).  Stanley himself was fired after only four days of shooting and replaced by John Frankenheimer.  Rumor has it that Stanley secretly convinced the makeup crew to turn him into one of the background mutants so he could keep tabs on his dream project.  After Moreau bombed, Stanley’s career imploded, and he never directed another feature film.

…until over twenty years later when an enterprising film production company expressed interest in allowing him to direct another dream project: an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story from 1927 called The Colour Out of Space.  To say that Stanley redeemed himself with this film would be an understatement.  This is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen.  It was supposed to be the first part of a Lovecraftian trilogy, but alas, Stanley was accused of domestic abuse in March of 2021 and the trilogy was scrapped.  One hopes that someone like Guillermo del Toro or Jordan Peele might pick up the promising threads here.  [insert good mojo dance here]

Anyway, the movie.

Color Out of Space is, at first glance, an amalgam of previous horror films.  One can easily spot elements of The Thing (1982), Annihilation (2018), and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).  But when you consider the screenplay has been adapted from a 95-year-old short story, the movie takes on a prescient nature.  Here are all the elements of a solid contemporary horror film, in a story that was published the same year sound was introduced to motion pictures for the first time.  Remarkable.

The Gardner family lives on a secluded farm in the forests of New England, where the nearest township, Arkham, is an hour’s drive away.  (No, Arkham isn’t a Batman reference, it’s Lovecraftian…which might explain why the very name “Arkham Asylum” has always felt a little creepy all by itself.)  One night, a meteorite lands with a crash in their front yard.  This is no ordinary meteorite.  It glows with an unearthly magenta light, and by the following morning it has disappeared.  Shortly thereafter, the youngest son, Jack, starts hearing strange noises outside.  Mrs. Gardner (Joely Richardson), who is recuperating from cancer surgery, keeps getting disconnected from her business calls.  Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) takes a shower one day and discovers what looks like a cake of soap covering the shower drain.  He picks it up…and experiences something NO ONE wants to experience after picking up a cake of soap.

Things get stranger.  A local hydrologist takes some water samples and urges the Gardner family and their squatter, Ezra (Tommy Chong), who lives in a shack on the Gardner’s vast property, not to drink the water until he gets some test results.  Meanwhile, Jack, the youngest son, takes a peek down their well and watches as an alien-looking egg hatches and releases a magenta-colored praying mantis.  Mrs. Gardner gets distracted by…something…and has a kitchen accident with a knife.  Their daughter, Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), who dabbles in Wiccan rituals, hears a noise that makes her sick to her stomach.  Time passes in fits and starts.

And the whole time, new vegetation has sprouted up around the well.  All the same magenta color…

Experienced moviegoers might be able to plot the film’s course from A to B to the climax, and they might be right on.  But Color Out of Space has one or two surprises up its sleeve that elevates it into the same level as other modern horror classics like Hereditary (2018) or The Babadook (2014).

There are scenes involving a small herd of alpacas – oh yeah, they raise alpacas – that are as unsettling as anything from John Carpenter.  At one point, mother and son are caught in the “grip” of the alien color/light.  What happens to them sets up one of the biggest jump scares I’ve ever had in my life.  I yelled so loud and long that my girlfriend ran to the back of the house wondering what was happening.

Color Out of Space is one of the most effective horror movies I’ve seen in a long time.  Naysayers may refuse to watch it because of Nicolas Cage’s presence, but I can assure you, his “hammy” talents are put to good use and are always in service of the story.  It’s not for everyone.  It’s not for the squeamish.  But for those who dare…Color Out of Space is a horror-film lover’s dream.

SAINT MAUD (2019, United Kingdom)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Rose Glass
Cast: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Frazer
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A pious nurse becomes dangerously obsessed with saving the soul of her dying patient.


This is a review where the less I say about the plot, the better, so this will be a short one.

What happens when a horror movie that’s 84 minutes long is virtually all build-up to a shocking payoff in the last 10 minutes?  You divide audiences and critics, that’s what happens.  The handy-dandy Rotten Tomatoes website gives Saint Maud a hefty 93% critics score…but manages a substandard 65% from audiences.

I get it.  This film is an exercise in tone and mood.  In a word, it’s unsettling.  Look at it in hindsight and not much happens.  But this is one of those films where the destination isn’t really the point…it’s the journey.

Maud (Morfydd Clark) is a private nurse to a terminal cancer victim, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), who used to be a famous choreographer until she fell ill in her prime.  Maud seems timid and competent, but she is a recent convert to Catholicism and has taken its teachings perhaps a little too much to heart.  For example, when she prays in front of her makeshift altar at home to pray, she sprinkles unpopped popcorn kernels in front of her before she kneels.  This is based on fact: there is an outdated practice called Corporal Mortification where devout Christians would inflict self-harm while praying.  The sight of her knees settling on those kernels made me wince.  And I won’t even mention what she does to the insoles of her shoes.  She also experiences sporadic moments of religious ecstasy (what the filmmakers refer to as “Godgasms”, though that term is never mentioned in the film).  These mini-epiphanies have a disturbing tendency to end just as Maud’s face seems to stretch beyond any human capability.  Creepy.

(A brief prologue also insinuates that something horrific may have happened in Maud’s previous posting, but it’s left mostly in the background.  Mostly.)

Maud is taken with Amanda, perhaps physically, but mostly with the idea that she can help save Amanda’s soul.  Staring death in the face, Amanda has little time for religion, but she humors Maud’s prayers before meals and even seems to experience a tiny bit of religious ecstasy along with Maud.  But beneath everything is this undercurrent of dread or foreboding.  Director Rose Glass is an expert at framing simple scenes in a way that conveys much more than what is visible to the eye.  Lights flicker.  There are subtle focus racks reminiscent of Vertigo.  Occasional voiceovers give a glimpse into Maud’s mind about her faith in God and her doubts.

I could say more about the plot, but I think that would detract from the experience of watching the film.  The tension and suspense leading up to the film’s climactic outburst are expertly sustained.  …and that one single cockroach is creeeepy…

No doubt some viewers will walk away from Saint Maud feeling the same way the Rotten Tomatoes voters felt.  I can’t think of anything that might change your mind if that’s the case.  This movie is a master class in generating a suspenseful atmosphere on a budget.  There are some obvious visual effects, but they are used sparingly and effectively.  There are stretches where we are led to believe, due to years of conditioning from previous films, that something super scary is about to happen…and then it doesn’t.  This happens a lot.  But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  When done right, suspense in a film is a welcome experience.  To have a film where the entire movie is constructed out of suspense is a minor miracle.

Watch this one with the lights out and the doors unlocked.  I double-dog dare you.

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU (2018)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Boots Riley
Cast: LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Omari Hardwick
My Rating: 6/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In an alternate present-day version of Oakland, telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success, propelling him into a universe of greed.


[Author’s Note: In my mind, it’s virtually impossible to discuss Sorry to Bother You without making comparisons to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us.  But I will give it the old college try…]


Boots Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You, has been described by Riley himself as an absurdist dark comedy combined with magical realism and science fiction.  Talk about your genre mashups.  While other directors have proven this kind of filmmaking is not only possible but profitable (Being John Malkovich [1999], Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004]), Riley’s film feels like he bit off a little more than he could chew.  After it was over, instead of feeling like I had seen something groundbreaking and provocative, I felt like I had just sat through an ambitious student film.  At some point, it lost its way.

Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is an underachiever with an improbably gorgeous girlfriend named Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a performance artist who specializes in the kind of art that involves water balloons, spent bullet casings, and recitations from The Last Dragon (1985).  All righty, then.  Cassius is hired as a telemarketer at a company where the fact that he falsified his résumé and brought in fake trophies shows initiative.  On his first day on the job, the film shows flashes of promise.  As he makes the calls, his workstation magically drops into the homes of the people he’s calling, a perfect representation of the intrusion these callers make.  After repeated failures, an old-timer named Langston (an underused Danny Glover) gives him a tip: Use your white voice.  “I’m not talking about Will Smith-white.  That’s just proper.”  Now THAT’S funny.

So Cassius starts using a white voice (overdubbed by David Cross) on his calls, and wouldn’t you know it, he becomes the highest-selling telemarketer on the sales floor.  This is not fantasy, as far as I’m concerned.  I recently watched a documentary where a Latino man submitted hundreds of résumés while job hunting with no responses.  In desperation, he changed his name on his résumé from “Jose” to “Joseph.”  Presto…the calls started rolling in.  True story.

Anyway, Cassius gets a promotion and is moved upstairs to be a “Power Caller.”  Meanwhile, the other telemarketers organize and strike for better wages, so Cassius is derided as a scab every time he comes to work.  But then he discovers what he’s actually selling as a Power Caller.  It has something to do with a company called WorryFree, a system whereby workers sign a lifetime contract to live and work in a single communal location with no paychecks.  One of their slogans is, “If you worked here, you’d be home now!”

WorryFree is run by Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer at his smarmy best.  In the movie’s most pointed satirical moment, Lift invites Cassius to a party where he goads Cassius into rapping for his party guests.  “Come on, you’re from Oakland, I refuse to believe you don’t know how to rap!”  Cassius tries some feeble rhymes, and then he realizes exactly what Lift and his party guests want to hear.  His solution is controversial, provocative, and hilarious.  I won’t spoil it for you…it’s the high point of the film.

Meanwhile, there are other scenes involving the strike, the strikers, an underground movement called Left Eye, a Claymation sequence, horses, and a nearly-naked Detroit wearing a costume that looks inspired by Janet Jackson’s infamous Rolling Stone cover shoot.  It’s all a little haphazard and cluttered and unfocused.

I believe this movie has a point.  I think it comes closest to MAKING its point when it deals specifically with how the telemarketing company and Steve Lift plan to transform their workforce to increase profits, and with how Cassius deals with the conflict between his steadily increasing paychecks and his moral conscience.  But in between those scenes are myriad other plotlines and side notes that were merely distracting rather than world-building.  (For example, did we really need those scenes where Detroit may or may not get involved with another man?  Was it necessary for Steve Lift’s party to devolve into an Eyes Wide Shut situation?  And in the name of M. Night Shyamalan…was that ending really necessary?)

Sorry to Bother You seems to have struck a chord with many viewers.  I am not one of them.  After it was over, I found it impossible not to compare it to other recent films like Get Out, Us, or even BlacKkKlansman.  Those films found their through lines, made their points, AND were also massively entertaining.  Sorry to Bother You feels like it fell short of the finish line with those goals in sight.

THE NAKED CITY (1948)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Jules Dassin
Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor
My Rating: 7/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 85%

PLOT: In almost documentary-like fashion, New York City cops investigate the brutal murder of a young woman.


It’s that narration.

If The Naked City hadn’t included that cockamamie narration, I might have given it a “9” instead of a “7.”  Here is a police procedural ahead of its time, a pre-television-era herald of popular entertainments from Dragnet to Law and Order to CSI.  The story is absorbing and engaging from beginning to end, even if some of the acting is not especially Oscar-worthy.  There are enough twists and turns in the search for a cold-blooded killer – or killers – to keep your attention all the way through.  And over it all, intruding where it’s not wanted, is a Disney-esque narration from the film’s producer, Mark Hellinger, who also produced a superior prison film a year earlier, Brute Force (1947), also directed by Jules Dassin.

Imagine a scene where foot-weary detectives are pounding the streets, making inquiries at jewelry stores, hairdressers, pawnshops, looking for leads.  As we watch the scene progress, we hear the narrator: “Are your feet tired, detective?  Not to worry, only 400 more jewelry shops to go.”

Or another scene where a detective looks wearily through a window at the city laid out below, pondering where to go for the next clue.  Cue the narrator: “There’s your city, Halloran.  Take a good look.  Jean Dexter is dead, and the answer must be somewhere down there…”

I hated the narration in this movie.  It reduced what I was watching to the level of one of those Disney animated shorts where Goofy is playing some kind of sport and the narrator describes the action while Goofy screws it up spectacularly.  Another example, as morning comes to the city: “The city is quiet now, but soon it will be pounding with activity.  This time yesterday, Jean Dexter was just another pretty girl, but now she’s the marmalade on 10,000 pieces of toast.”  Give me a break.  I fully understand how future TV shows made use of this kind of narration, but not to this degree.  It made a crime story sound like an industrial video.

So let us stipulate that I hated the narration.  The rest of this review will discuss the film as if the narration didn’t exist.  It’s best for you, it’s best for me…it’s best for us.

The Naked City opens with the murder of a young woman, Jean Dexter.  The rest of the movie details the police investigation and search for her killer.  In broad strokes, that’s pretty much it.  In its own way, it reminded me a little bit of All the President’s Men (1976) in that we’re focused exclusively on the process of investigation with very little cutting away to other participants.  The lead figures are a very Oyrish Lieutenant Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and the dependable Halloran (Don Taylor).  The chief suspect is Frank Niles (an impossibly young Howard Duff, whom you may recall as Ted Kramer’s attorney in Kramer vs. Kramer [1979]).  Niles raises so many red flags that I started to think he was an obvious red herring.  Under questioning, he lies and lies and lies again, even “forgetting” to tell the police he’s engaged to the dead woman’s best friend.  Can this guy be for real?  We have seen so many criminals in so many TV shows and movies who are so much better at lying to the police…but he’s so bad at it that he must be innocent by default, right?

The investigation continues.  Clues and leads are chased down.  Another murder occurs.  False confessions are heard and dismissed.  The dead girl’s parents come down to the mortuary to identify the body.  (That particular scene was notable for being filmed at an actual New York City mortuary, a first for its time.  In fact, the vast majority of The Naked City was filmed on location in the Big Apple, one of the first major Hollywood productions to do so.  It’s hard to conceive of now, but this caused a minor sensation upon the movie’s release.)

While the mystery of the murder is the real meat of the story, I got the impression that the goal of the film was to bring these mundane police procedures to the masses, to show audiences that, while you work and eat and play and raise your families and go to baseball games, the good guys are on the case whenever something goes wrong.  And this is what they do for just one murder case.  In a city like New York, who knows how many murder cases are being worked on at once?  As the closing narration famously says, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.  This has been one of them.”  (Okay, that’s the one bright spot in the narration, let us never speak of it again.)

I can even draw a direct line between The Naked City and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  In The Naked City, Halloran uncovers a possible connection between the second murder victim and the prime suspect in the first murder.  (It’s complicated.)  He gets permission from Muldoon to chase it down, despite how unpromising it is.  As he’s following his nose, Muldoon chases down a lead of his own, getting closer to the true mastermind behind this case.  In this way, there is a direct parallel in The Silence of the Lambs where Crawford takes a task force to a suspect’s house while Clarice follows a nearly invisible trail to Jame Gumb’s doorstep.

Everything comes to a head with a foot chase that leads to the Williamsburg Bridge, scenes that must have been a little mind-blowing for 1948 audiences as the camera seemingly defies gravity, climbing higher and higher into the scaffolding with the fleeing suspect.  (It should also be noted that the film perhaps romanticizes inner city life to a degree…as the suspect flees across the bridge, he breaks up a group of children skipping rope on the footpath.  Not the kind of thing I’d expect to see today, for sure.)

The Naked City is about as good as crime dramas in the ‘40s could get without resorting to the darkness and shadows of film noir.  This is, after all, a film about the good guys, not the bad.  Watching cops interrogate witnesses and compare notes about stolen jewelry isn’t quite as “sexy” as watching Bogie draw down on some hoodlums, but hey, that’s the kind of thing that really happens in the big bad city.