October 5, 1971 [The French Connection]

I took my son to see his first R-rated movie, The French Connection--not the worst pick, the movie its own kind of Boy's Adventure--with heroin as the treasure and villains with accents, plus challenges and tunnels, runaway trains and hair-raising chases--at least one, Popeye Doyle in a real-life Bumper Car near-missing babies and other innocents.

New York looks the part, too: under a dark spell, all shadows and wet trash at your feet, the subway platform grimy--but Popeye and his partner (Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, both of them expecting the worst while bullets and B.S. assail them) sip their cold coffee and wait--and wait and wait, the bad guys like King John in the Robin Hood stories eating and drinking while the heroes huddle in the rain.

But, as a boy's tale for grownups, The French Connection does not share the flippant almost-irony of the Bond movies. No, this one seems more interested in detailing the decline of New York, a city swarming with rats, its overworked exterminators persistent but not too hopeful. The sky lowers, the light feels dirty. My son had a good time, but I think it made him a little queasy, as though he'd eaten one of those curbside hot dogs Popeye jams in his mouth before bolting after vermin.

May 30, 1971 [Daughters of Darkness]

Poor Sharon Tate was beautiful in The Fearless Vampire Killers--but, despite the blood, Polanski was mostly interested in hybrids: horror-slapstick, stately nudies. Nothing new: The British vampire movies often remind us of the bite-a-bility of a full bosom, and even old Lugosi has a kind of Valentino eroticism, and the Vamps of the silent era still manage to whisper hypnosis in our ears.

But Daughters of Darkness goes one step further, into a blank opulence that lounges like a deep blue fashion spread but fades into blood-red, the vampires women but still craving the female neck, bosom, form. It begins with newlyweds--in a “love” story that tells a secret: that men want women to be slave-objects, posed just so, lipstick slick as wet plastic. Daughters of Darkness is pretty convincing in its assertion that the male heart is a mad thing, wanting only to trap and subdue.

What’s a girl to do? Just ask the stunning--and always-hungry--Countess Elizabeth Bathory; her Playboy-model Renfield all European faux-innocence as succulent as it is forbidden; and the “victim,” the masochistic blushing-with-bruises bride--all of them as Mod and luscious as a bowl of perfect wax fruit--not to demean them: Everything in the movie is ripe artifice: the abandoned hotel at the edge of the sea; the mysterious Van Helsing figure who grins, drops hints, and is gone; the young man who is not so much afraid of his mother as he is of himself--and she’s no mother. Everything stands on the brink of hysteria, but posed and arranged, gorgeous and overheated, like an orchid.

If L’avventura had a plot, it might have become Daughters of Darkness: beautiful people moneyed and bored, drifting without purpose into death and rebirth, in the end unnoticed as they wander through the remnants of a party no one wanted to attend.

March 21, 1971 [Get Carter]

I keep hearing the main theme, electric piano laid on top of harpsichord, a jazz science fiction cool buzz for Get Carter, both a groove and a threat. Jack Carter--Michael Caine with all the Alfie drained out of him--gets on the train to Newcastle, a long way from London; and he eats, he takes his pills, he wipes his spoon clean, he applies his nose drops, he keeps his eyes flat while he reads Farewell, My Lovely--a reliable tip-off: like Marlowe, Carter has his own ideas, and to hell with yours. His brother's dead, his niece--or is it his daughter?--needs attending, more and more as the movie walks with deliberate pace along a sick and inevitable path, justice strong-armed down the brick lanes, all the way to the rough shingle.

And there's pub songs and pop dance numbers, but it's Roy Bud's finger-snapping tune that sticks, that makes any sense with each knife-stick and gunshot and snarl, quick lays and dumped nude corpses syncopated with Caine's dead and crying eyes as he works out an improvised dance, the combo backing Carter, quick with a gun or a fist, unblinking as he dumps in the muddy sea anyone who looks anything like him.