DESPERATE LIVING

d. John Waters (1977)

I'll be honest and admit that, up until now, I hadn't seen a John Waters film that predated 1988's Hairspray, mainly because I could never quite remember which one it was where Divine eats dog shit and that was a moment of cinematic history I was happy to miss. Dangerous Living doesn't go that far, although it does feature multiple murders, sexual assault, vomit, mass cannibalism and someone hacking off their own recently transplanted penis with a pair of blunt scissors. It seems obvious to say that the film is in bad taste, but actually it goes beyond taste, it’s just in a feverish zone of high camp and offence where anything goes, and you either like it or you hate it and want it destroyed with fire. For me, it’s grotesque and hilarious, full of memorable and baroque dialogue and, most of all, outrageous people behaving badly and having fun.

Mink Stole plays Peggy Gravel, a shrill, neurotic housewife fresh out of the sanitorium who amplifies every tiny experience into grand opera. When the neighbourhood kids accidentally hit a baseball through her window she takes it as an assassination attempt, shouting 'don't tell me I don't know about Vietnam'. When she finds her son and daughter playing Doctors she screams 'my daughter has been raped - and now she's pregnant'. This hysteria has fatal consequences when her husband tries to calm her down and Peggy assumes he is trying to kill her. The Gravel's huge, black, kleptomaniac, dipsomaniac maid, Grizelda (Anita Lane, absolutely the star of the show) intervenes, sitting on the husband's face and killing him. Peggy and Grizelda go on the run, just getting out of the city limits before being pulled up by a cross dressing cop. In return for their underwear and a couple of sloppy kisses the Cop lets them go on the understanding that they should put themselves in exile in Mortville, a shanty town populated by misfits and criminals, all ruled over by the cruel and perverse Queen Carlotta. All this accounts for about ten minutes of screen time and, in legend, was where, during the premiere, the critic from Good Housekeeping walked out.

What follows is an amazing cavalcade of pantomimic action, all filmed on a set made out of bits of plywood, cardboard and rubbish placed in a field in Maryland. Every actor is in  top form and top gear, all the time, emoting, screeching, rolling around on the floor, taking their clothes off or putting them on backwards. It sounds tiring but, actually, it's like watching a mad school play delivered by naughty children. There are adult fairy tale elements too, with the wicked snaggle toothed Queen and her retinue / army of well hung leather boys, not to mention a lot of lesbianism, some rabies, inter-gender wrestling, rat eating and someone having a gun inserted into their anus. 

Best of all, there's line after line of incredible dialogue. I have a number of favourites but I'll limit myself to one example that is now stuck to the inside of my brain forever like a piece of filthy discarded bubblegum:

'He's not a garbage man, he just helps pick up trash at the nudist colony'

A work of crazed and evil genius. 

OVER THE EDGE

d. Jonathan Kaplan (1979)

New Granada in Colorado is a planned community, an isolated new town full of vacant lots and half-built condos. The adults have moved there from bigger cities to give themselves and their children a better chance in life but, in fact, the environment is sterile, stifling and obsessed with rules and money. The biggest problem in the town is juvenile delinquency, or, more correctly, the juveniles themselves. With nowhere to go and nothing to do the kids, inevitably, make their own entertainment, much to the chagrin of the adults who believe they should be not seen, not heard and certainly not high.

The kids are drowning in boredom, and obsessed with drugs, drink, sex and vandalism. The cast are all so young and wholesome looking, it’s actually quite shocking to see a 12 year old boy swigging from a bottle of scotch, and both comic and disturbing to see the same boy at school flunking a test on Hieronymus Bosch (of all things) because the speed he thought he had taken is actually LSD. The parents are either preoccupied or don’t care, and the authorities are positively draconian: they don’t even want the kids to have a recreation center, and the Chief of Police is a blowhard and a fascist.

Bubbling tensions boil over after one of the boys is shot and killed by the cops during a prank, and the kids strike back: locking the adults into the school where they are attending a meeting about the delinquency problem and how it is affecting property prices. From 1933's Zero de Conduite onwards, there’s something very pleasing and cinematic about watching children getting their own back, and here the disaffected youths have a jamboree of destruction, channeling their frustration and excess testosterone and estrogen into trashing the library, flooding the gym, taunting their parents over the pa system and setting fire to vehicles in the car park. They know that at least some of them will get caught and sent to The Hill, the local juvenile correction centre, but they no longer care: so desperate for a change that even prison seems like a holiday. 

The edge the kids tumble over is clearly a threshold: geographically, mentally, morally. There are a number of beautiful shots of characters walking towards to the horizon, usually in the sun streaked light of evening or early morning. There may be an implication that there is potentially something better over the ridge, but we know there’s just more of the same. The town itself is plonked in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mud, an island suburb, a prison. These scenes are accompanied by a Debussy-esque Sol Kaplan score, also used to great effect when one protagonist Carl is beaten up by two older boys to ensure he doesn’t snitch on them for shooting at a police car with a bb gun.

Often reminiscent of a more suburban Badlands, the film presents the vast mid-west as a place of stasis where the quest for excitement and movement often leads to crime, and where love and pleasure is fraught with danger, tied up with transgression. The script was co-written by Tim Hunter, who would later direct his own masterpiece of teen angst Rivers Edge (1987) and work on both the original Twin Peaks series and the marvelous Eerie, Indiana. 

Poorly distributed and rarely revisited, Over the Edge is now best known as the film debut of the handsome but gormless Matt Dillon, who was trying to sneak out of class when he was spotted by the film’s visiting casting director, a big break that he must still be pinching himself about. Ironically, the 15 year old Dillon is perhaps the least accomplished actor amongst the film’s excellent young cast, but he does look the part, and, in Hollywood, that’s over half the battle. 

TALK ABOUT A STRANGER

d. David Bradley (1952)

An unexpectedly fantastic little film, barely an hour long, full of shadows and suspense and atmosphere, great noir-ish shots and good performances, including one from Nancy Davis, in the year that she married fading star and rising Republican Ronald Reagan.

When a young boy (Billy Gray, who is great) finds his beloved dog poisoned, he is sure that his new neighbour, a dark eyed, beetle browed man with a foreign accent who keeps himself to himself and doesn't like dogs, is responsible. Billy channels his rage and distress into investigating the mysterious man, turning the rest of the town against the new arrival in the process. In the end, his obsession almost causes a tragedy.

This film pushes all the right buttons: it spends almost half of its running time showing us how happy Billy and his scruffy little dog are together, and these scenes are so amusing and touching that when the dog is killed, we are almost as devastated as Billy. From here on, the film gathers momentum, driven by Billy who seethes with anger and fizzes with the injustice of it all. The adults he comes across (with the exception of his parents), eager for sensation, rather irresponsibly stoke up this fury and soon the town is gossiping about the new neighbour, dissecting everything from his grocery order to the cost of his watch to the stubbiness of his thumbs - 'oh, and did you know that he murdered Billy's dog?'. You know how these things go in small towns.

In the end, disaster is averted and a perfectly logical (if rather dark) answer is found. Billy calms down and, in the process, acquires not only a new dog but a new sister and a new girlfriend, so it's a happy ending of sorts, just not for the old dog.

THE ATOMIC CITY

d. Jerry Hopper (1952)

The Atomic City starts with footage of test explosions and Hiroshima and of the men and women who live and work at the Los Alamos Atomic Research Site, their faces blacked out ‘for security reasons’. Obviously, they don’t really want to be developing weaponry with the capacity to destroy the world and everything on it, but, while the ‘spirit of aggression is not yet dead in the world’ they simply have to do it.

When leading scientist Frank Harrington’s son Tommy is kidnapped, Harrington knows immediately what the ransom will be: secrets. He and his wife try to handle things without informing the authorities but, very quickly, the Harringtons learn that they themselves are under constant observation, and even their best friend is an undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated their family in order to keep a close eye on them. What follows is a taut, well scripted story with some surprising flashes of violence and cruelty: a communist courier is killed by a car bomb once he delivers his message; Dr Harrington extracts a confession using his fists; the boy, Tommy, is bricked up in a cave in the Jemez mountains* and left to die (this last one is hard to take, he’s a nice little feller) .

The Harringtons are only interested in getting their son back, of course, but, for more or less everybody else the stated priorities are, in order of importance: maintain security; catch the spies; save the kid. Cold or not, it’s still a war. In the end, they manage to more or less do all three, but not until after a great climax in which Tommy is left hanging from a cliff face.  Even though you know it will work out in the end, it’s genuinely breathless stuff, particularly as Tommy is just so gosh darned cute.    

* This area is a designated national park, and the mountains, caves and the ruins of Pueblo American civilisation here are used to provide a fascinating and unusual backdrop to the action.  

THE LAST AMERICAN HERO

d. Lamont Johnson (1973) 

Jeff Bridges will appear in pretty much anything these days, but there was a time when he had a very specific appeal, a lot of it based around his youthful, open faced appearance and total insouciance. That lack of concern was always difficult to read: was he smart or stupid; self-assured or disconnected; natural or wooden: was he even really there at all?

Here, he plays Elroy ‘Junior’ Jackson, a 'wild assed mountain boy' who is a prodigiously gifted driver and local enigma. Starting out by running moonshine (sticking it to the man is a vital element in these hicksploitation films), he needs to become  a breadwinner when his Pa is imprisoned for bootlegging liquor, so takes his fast wheels to market, starting off in demolition derbies before progressing to stock car racing and, ultimately, the most pointless of all American sports, NASCAR. Junior is just about the best there’s ever been at driving quickly around in circles for hours on end, and the film ends with him holding aloft his first championship trophy.

Loosely based on 50s and 60s NASCAR legend, Junior Johnson, the script was derived from an Esquire magazine piece by Tom Wolfe. The original prose was kinetic and hyperbolic, full of colour and energy, a gleaming sports car with a tank full of pop art and rocket fuel. Sadly, the film is a rather clunky hybrid, powered by red diesel.  At best, it’s rowdy and rambunctious, but is mainly light and inconsequential, largely down to Bridges under-written character and non-committal performance: Junior never really seems bothered, so why should we be?

ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN

d. Charles Barton (1940)

What a great villain Peter Lorre was. Here, he plays a man involved in 'the dirtiest racket ever invented': white slavery. His modus operandi is to recruit parolees, offering them a home and a job, before flying them to his private fiefdom, Dead Man's Island (there's a clue there, really) where he chains the men together and forces them to mine for diamonds until they expire of fatigue, disease or malnutrition or get killed by the brutal guards. 

The diminutive Lorre pads around the island on crepe soled shoes, wearing a boxy lounge suit and a pith helmet. He never stops smoking, and the resentful lighting of his cigarette by underlings is a recurring motif of the power he wields, and the hatred he inspires. He alternates between sudden, hysterical rage and a kind of somnolence, as if he is exhausted with his own evil. There's a telling little scene where he gets in a temper and shoots his housekeeper's monkey (not a euphemism, an actual monkey). Fury spent, his heavily lidded eyes close in ineffable weariness. He has a beautiful wife, who absolutely detests him, so he sits and listens to her play the piano and smokes and smokes and smokes.

A dedicated undercover agent (who apparently spends two years of his life in a state prison to maintain his cover) is on Lorre's tail and soon infiltrates Lorre's operation - and his wife. Interestingly, Lorre knows all about the agent and, in fact, has actively sought him out - in order, perhaps, to facilitate his own downfall.

An undemanding but satisfying film, this is an ideal choice if you like corporal punishment as there are literally lashings of lashings, or if you like to watch people being shot or stabbed in the back, because there's a fair bit of that too. It's undeniably all about Lorre's character, though, and, when he dies, stabbed by his monkey grieving housekeeper, you almost feel sorry for him - but not quite, he's a creepy little bastard and a rotten Boss.

PURE SHIT

d. Bert Deling (1975)

The darkly playful title refers to Heroin, a drug that continues to polarise public and private opinion but is universally agreed to be extremely more-ish. This very Australian fly on the wall documentary style film, compiled from real life junkie war stories, attracted major controversy in its time, with the censor forcing a name change to Pure S and the Vice Squad raiding the premiere. Watching it now, it’s easy to see what shook up the powers that were: the star of the film is Heroin, the pursuit of it, the taking of it, the dirty pleasure of it; when it's not onscreen the characters talk about it and crave its presence more than food, money, sex and love. 'H' is the sort of role the brilliant but ruthless egomaniac Kirk Douglas would have enjoyed playing: the undisputed centre of attention. 

The users live entirely outside of 'normal' society, only engaging with non-junkies and non-dealers when they are robbing pharmacies or prostituting themselves for cash. They are unwashed, extremely foul mouthed, obsessed with double denim and so trapped on the hamster wheel of addiction that they have no time for anything else, least of all dreams of a better future. There are no poetic and wistful monologues here: these junkies like being junkies and, of the alternatives, even a sudden puke covered death seems preferable to the hell of rehab and Methadone treatment.

It gets shrill and repetitive and muddled quite quickly, especially when the early narrative about the protagonists seeking heroin and never quite getting it goes off track. Within twenty minutes they all start clumsily and repeatedly jabbing needles into their scabby arms (I assumed that junkies would be better at injecting, or perhaps I’ve just seen too many glossy drugs films) and vomiting into buckets, revealing the full  scuzz of their grim drug addled life for all to see. These scenes are given added impact by apparently being real or, at least, seeming real, which is, after all, what cinema is about. I suppose the Aussie authorities were worried that Pure Shit might glamourise drug addiction or even provide step by step instructions on how to score and shoot up but, seriously, if you watch this film and think ‘cor, I don’t half fancy some Heroin’ you pretty much deserve what comes next.