Weekend links 645

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Halloween (no date) by William Stewart MacGeorge.

• Couldn’t Care Less: Cormac McCarthy in a 75-minute conversation (!) with David Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute, filmed in 2017 and recently posted to YouTube. Not a literary discussion, this one is all about science, philosophy, mathematics, architecture and the operations of the unconscious mind. McCarthy’s essay about the origins of language, The Kekulé Problem, may be read here.

• At Wormwoodiana: Douglas A. Anderson finds a 1932 reprint of an HP Lovecraft story, The Music of Erich Zann, in London newspaper The Evening Standard. The story had appeared a few months prior to this in a Gollancz book, Modern Tales of Horror which reprinted a US collection edited by Dashiell Hammett. The newspaper printing includes an illustration by Philip Mendoza.

• New Hollywood Vs Mutant Cinema: The flipside of US cinema, 1960s–80s. Joe Banks talks to Kelly Roberts, Michael Grasso and Richard McKenna about their new book, We Are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon.

• At Bandcamp: Rich Aucoin explains the army of synths on his new quadruple album. The battalion includes the bespoke modular setup known as T.O.N.T.O., a rig that few people get to play with.

• New/old music: Malebox, an EP of Patrick Cowley rarities coming soon from Dark Entries.

• Mix of the week: Samhain Séance 11: endleofon by The Ephemeral Man.

• The surreal photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

• “NASA team begins study of UFOs”.

Ghost Rider (1969) by Musical Doctors | Ghost Rider (1970) by The Crystalites | Ghost Rider (1977) by Suicide

Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka

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Do you detect a theme this week? The recent Pragueness had me watching this favourite film again. I unfairly dismissed Soderbergh after his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which I found to be two hours of yuppie tedium despite its winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes. The prize did enable him to make Kafka (1991), however, so I shouldn’t complain although I didn’t get to see this until it turned up on TV years after its release. The film was a major flop and put Soderbergh in the wilderness until Out of Sight (1998), his first outing with George Clooney.

Kafka is one of a small group of works wherein well-known writers become embroiled in stories which parallel their fiction. Joe Gores’ Hammett (filmed by Wim Wenders in 1982) did this with Dashiell Hammett while Mark Frost in his novel, The List of Seven, had a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle becoming involved in a Holmesian mystery. The screenplay for Kafka by Lem Dobbs has the author falling in with anarchist revolutionaries in order to solve the death of a co-worker and a bureaucratic conspiracy. This was obviously too clever for a general audience, being littered with references to Kafka’s life and work and also to German Expressionist cinema with names like “Orlac” and “Murnau” comprising key plot elements. Dobbs wrote a couple of other noteworthy screenplays after this, Dark City, a noirish fantasy that does what The Matrix did only with greater imagination, and The Limey (1999), another Soderbergh film with a great performance by Terence Stamp as a vengeful Cockney gangster on the loose in Los Angeles.

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Alan Bennett had already written something similar to Kafka in his 1986 TV film for the BBC, The Insurance Man, which concerns a dye worker becoming enmeshed in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute where Kafka worked as a clerk. Daniel Day-Lewis made a marvellous Franz Kafka in Bennett’s play, and was much more suited to the role than Jeremy Irons is in Soderbergh’s film. This is a shame since everything else about Kafka is excellent, from Walt Lloyd’s moody photography, and the fabulous cymbalom-inflected score by Cliff Martinez, to the cast which includes the wonderful Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm and, in one of his last performances, Alec Guinness.

Kafka is also the Prague film par excellence, making great use of the city’s Old Town and landmarks such as the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, a building which dominates the story as well as many of the outdoor scenes. In fact I find myself watching it as much for the settings than anything else. Soderbergh enjoys cinematic pastiche and Kafka owes a great deal to The Third Man (which did for post-war Vienna what Kafka does for Prague) and—inevitably—Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation, The Trial. Theresa Russell brings Vienna with her via Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, Joel Grey was in Cabaret, of course, and Alec Guinness isn’t so far removed from his role as retired spy George Smiley in the BBC’s John le Carré films. And halfway through the film there’s a great surprise which I won’t spoil here.

Kafka is available on DVD finally, although if you’re in the US you’ll have to import it. Soderbergh has talked about reworking the film in a longer version which I’d like to see if he ever gets round to it. Not an easy film to find but it’s worthy of your attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Kafka and Kupka
Alexander Hammid
How to disappear completely
Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
Giant mantis invades Prague
Nosferatu
Barta’s Golem

Kiss Me Deadly

Va-va-voom! Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles’s great Touch of Evil (1958) both came at the end of the film noir cycle in the late 1950s. Both films look into the dark heart of American life during that decade, with Aldrich tackling nuclear paranoia and Welles dealing with racism towards Latin-Americans and political and legal corruption. Both films have long been favourites of mine and both remain startlingly relevant now, as Alex Cox discusses below. Cox might have mentioned another film that borrows the motif of the baleful nuclear box, his own Repo Man (1984).

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kiss_me_deadly.jpgNuclear-powered nastiness
It’s one of the darkest noirs ever made. But, says Alex Cox, the classic Kiss Me Deadly is a parable at heart

It begins with titles that famously run backwards. Deadly … Kiss Me … Aldrich … Robert … Directed by … Then, two scenes in, a women we have assumed to be the heroine is tortured to death. This is no art film, though; no knowing homage. Instead, it’s the roughest, least compromising film noir of them all – Kiss Me Deadly.

The hero (if we can call him that) is Mike Hammer, a tough, no-nonsense detective created by pulp fiction author Micky Spillane. Spillane’s Hammer was of a different breed from the detectives who had gone before. Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op and Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe were tough and cynical, but also intelligent, decent and insightful. Spillane’s Hammer was an indecent thug. A product of Senator McCarthy and the blood-lust of the Korean war, he liked nothing better than pounding commie sympathisers’ heads against a wall until their eyeballs popped.

Robert Aldrich’s Hammer – played by the oddly named Ralph Meeker – is worse than Spillane’s. Aldrich’s protaganist is cynical and dumb; a thug without insight, a detective who fails to detect. In a way, he is a prototype for the automaton-hero played by Lee Marvin in 1967’s Point Blank, and done to a turn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. (More.)