The Phoenix Network:
 
 
 
About  |  Advertise
Adult  |  Moonsigns  |  Band Guide  |  Blogs  |  In Pictures
 
Features  |  Reviews
FIND MOVIES
Find a Movie
Movie List
Loading ...
or
Find Theaters and Movie Times
or
Search Movies

Tiger by the tail

The wild and woolly cinema of John Boorman
By STEVE VINEBERG  |  November 18, 2008

081121_pointblank_main
POINT BLANK: This Lee Marvin revenge thriller is so flamboyantly well assembled, you have to marvel at it.

“John Boorman’s Primeval Screen” | Brattle Theatre + Harvard Film Archive: November 20-24
John Boorman's most recent film, The Tiger's Tail, still doesn't have a US distributor, so there's an irony to the impressive four-day festival of Boorman films that the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle Theatre are hosting this weekend. Everyone knows the Boorman hits — Deliverance, Excalibur, and Hope and Glory — but fine pictures like his neo-Shakespearean comedy Where the Heart Is (1990) and the political adventure Beyond Rangoon (1995) opened and closed without leaving a trace. Boorman has a distinctive visual style — he loves wide, wondrous, prismatic landscapes — and he's drawn to material that interrogates institutions; in his early career he also loved mythology and pop philosophy. But his instinct for subversive visions has made him risky and usually kept him far from the mainstream.

The series includes neither Where the Heart Is nor Beyond Rangoon, and it's also lacking another memorable Boorman, The Tailor of Panama (2001), which improves on the John le Carrû novel from which it's derived. (The one other omission is his 2004 disappointment In My Country.) But it does provide a rare opportunity to see one of his least-known gems, his 1965 debut, CATCH US IF YOU CAN (HFA: November 23 at 9:15 pm), which was released in America as Having a Wild Weekend. This was a fitting introduction to his career: it came out in the wake of the success of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, but it wasn't the picture anyone was anticipating from the Dave Clark Five. Instead of showcasing the band, Boorman, working from a melancholy script by Peter Nichols, cast them as stunt men, one of whom (Clark) runs away with a famous model (Barbara Ferris) in the middle of a shoot. They're looking for escape from the sewn-up, commercialized city world, but the farther they venture from the heart of London, the more they discover that everything's been co-opted, and the only alternative appears to be competing forms of desperation. The movie is utterly remarkable — a eulogy for the '60s when they've barely begun that's lyrical and haunting.

Catch Us If You Can is unusual; most of the time Boorman isn't at his best when he makes an overt social or political statement — it dries out his imagination. (That's the problem with In My Country.) Take his 1968 film HELL IN THE PACIFIC (HFA: November 22 at 7 pm), in which Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune play a Yank pilot and a Japanese captain stuck together on an island during the Pacific War. Or THE EMERALD FOREST (HFA: November 24 at 9 pm), from 1985, in which a young white boy is stolen by Amazon tribesmen from his parents and raised as one of them. These are wearying and fairly idiotic fables whose only shared virtue is the glittering, sun-kissed cinematography. ZARDOZ (Brattle: November 22 at 10 pm; November 24 at 9:30 pm), a 1974 sci-fi extravaganza featuring Sean Connery in a loincloth, a Fu Manchu, and a braided ponytail, is even dopier, though it has moments of irresistible high camp. Then there's LEO THE LAST (HFA: November 24 at 7 pm), like Hell in the Pacific one of his earliest efforts, with Marcello Mastroianni as a naïf who inherits his father's mansion in a neighborhood grown poor and interracial and leads an insurrection against the powers of urban corruption. With its absurdist depictions of the ruling class, it's undeniably a period piece; released in 1970, it represents an era when people still took Jean Giraudoux's play The Madwoman of Chaillot, with its crazy street women pitted against the soulless suits, seriously. (Giraudoux seems to be Boorman's inspiration.)

1  |  2  |  3  |   next >
Related: What John did and saw, Christmas On Mars, Frontrunners, More more >
  Topics: Features , Entertainment, Movies, The Beatles,  More more >
  • Share:
  • Share this entry with Facebook
  • Share this entry with Digg
  • Share this entry with Delicious
  • RSS feed
  • Email this article to a friend
  • Print this article
Comments

-->
ARTICLES BY STEVE VINEBERG
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   BRUSH UP YOUR PORTER  |  September 16, 2009
    With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.
  •   MONSTER MAN AND MORE  |  September 08, 2009
    James Whale's career as a purveyor of marvelous film entertainments was brief.
  •   SINS OF THE PLAY  |  September 02, 2009
    The title of Israel Horovitz's Sins of the Mother (through September 13 at Gloucester Stage) is an ironic misnomer.
  •   SPLENDOR ON THE SCREEN  |  July 29, 2009
    The arc of Elia Kazan's professional life has its origins in the Group Theatre, where he was trained as an actor and performed in the original 1930s productions of Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy .
  •   WHAT JOHN DID AND SAW  |  June 16, 2009
    In anticipation of the July 1 release of Michael Mann's Public Enemies with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and as part of its week-long "Classic Gangsters" series, the Brattle is screening two rarely seen films this Sunday: John Milius's 1973 Dillinger and W.S. Van Dyke's Manhattan Melodrama.

 See all articles by: STEVE VINEBERG

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2009 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group