The Iceman Cometh

John Frankenheimer – 1973

Being much more familiar with John Frankenheimer than Eugene O’Neill, I can’t say much about how well the former adapts the latter’s legendary play. Frankenheimer was one of the unsung geniuses of cinema, whose string of electrifying films in the 60s set him up to potentially be remembered as important as others of his generation like Godard and Kubrick, but whose failures in the late 60s and early 70s relegated him to making subpar action films for the rest of his life. His name evokes the daring and structurally radical styles on display in The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds and Grand Prix, in which he pushes cinematic stylization to its limits with jagged editing, quasi-documentary techniques, and stretched and fragment visuals. And yet he cited The Iceman Cometh – a single-set essentially filmed play – as his best work, the film of which he was most satisfied and proud. In his later years, he told interviewers that he dreaded The Manchurian Candidate being in the first sentence of his obituary, and that’s exactly what happened. He spent over forty years hoping to make a film more impactful that his 1962 classic, and sadly, never managed it.

The Iceman Cometh exudes a strange feeling. Yes, O’Neill’s text is all there front and center, and the cast is absolutely stellar, (especially Robert Ryan in his final role), but haunting the proceedings like a specter is the absence of pugnacity on the director’s part. On one hand, you could interpret this as a surrender, a deliberate falling back into the traditional director’s role as in the theatre and early television, i.e. basically a crossing guard for the actors, and an abandonment of his own auteurism. If this was the case, though, how could Frankenheimer have been so vocal about his happiness with both the process and the result? What could one of the most dynamic and visceral filmmakers in the world find appealing about a four-hour stage bound adaptation of a play about downtrodden barflies in the early twentieth century? Although the camera slinks about periodically to settle on a nicely composed shot of groups, pairs or single actors, for the most part, Frankenheimer employs the traditional “invisible” directing style of mainstream movies. You are never meant to think of anything other than the characters and their words. Nevertheless, I still can’t deny sensing the auteur speaking in a subtle but confident way throughout the film. By opting against almost any “cinematic” gestures, Frankenheimer creates the full antithesis of his work in Seconds and Grand Prix, two very different films but which are both personal expressions of Frankenheimer's art, politics and personality. Perhaps The Iceman Cometh is just as expressive of those things but in only a less obvious way. Having already pushed hard at the edges of film style, he could now take time to explore the opposite end; it’s not quite anti-style, but close. And the play’s portrayal of men and women clinging to “pipe dreams” while trying to ignore their doom with alcohol could correlate to Frankenheimer’s (and much of the world’s) feelings of defeat and impotence coming out of the vibrant 60s only to end up with a nightmare populated by Charles Manson, the Vietnam war and the Nixon administration. The titular “Iceman” is not only death but the upshot of any period of youthful optimism and ambition. Most of all, the film – despite its particulars – doesn't strike me as a retreat or surrender. Frankenheimer still comes off as intensely invested in the presentation of the material. It almost feels as if he is saying, “This is cinema too.”

The Mechanic

Michael Winner – 1972

The Mechanic is the film that made Charles Bronson a bona-fide star in the U.S. at the age of 51. He’d been increasing in popularity the previous few years in various French and Italian films, and his overdue debut as the lead in an American film allowed director Michael Winner to present him in The Mechanic as a fully formed persona, weathered and seasoned by decades of life experience, rejection and steady work in supporting roles in all sorts of films internationally. He appears in this film as a living conundrum; a craggy-faced statue who is still capable of sensitivity, a hardened loner strangely capable of gentle intimacy. Bronson replaced his rival Clint Eastwood’s antiheroic aloofness with a heart of gold, cementing the archetype still used in action films today of the man who wants to live in peace but can become a one-man-army if pushed too far. No wisecracks, no speeches, no crying – just that steely gaze that Bronson only needed to tweak by a hair to veer from pathos to bitter rage.

The original screenplay by Lewis John Carlino – author of Seconds and The Brotherhood – explores the world of professional contract killers. Bronson’s character, Arthur Bishop, lives a solitary life in a bleak world, beautifully established in the film’s famous 15-minute wordless opening sequence documenting Bishop’s meticulous execution of an assassination job. Aside from a mention of Bishop’s father having been a highly respected member of the underworld, there is no backstory on his life or what shaped his personality. This all prefigures Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Paul Schrader’s career-long examinations of lonely men with violent lives so fixated on their routines to notice that they are slowly cracking up. Even Bishop’s patronizing of a regular call-girl to simulate a longed-for but impossible life with a romantic partner feels like something that Schrader’s protagonists in Taxi Driver, American Gigolo or The Card Counter could easily relate to.

Bishop breaks his profession’s code by taking on an apprentice, the handsome son of his latest victim, Steve McKenna, as played by Jan-Michael Vincent. Carlino railed against the film’s censoring of the overt sexuality underlying Bishop’s interest in Steve, assumed to be a requisite for Bronson’s (or any star’s) involvement, but this element is still there in subtle form. The lingering looks between the men, and possibly just Vincent’s striking beauty on its own, are enough to suggest an attraction that intrigues and endangers both of them, as the older Bishop recklessly takes the young Steve under his wing, even while Steve’s cold ambition is barely concealed, leading to a confrontation that feels inevitable and satisfying despite its Darwinian tragedy.

Winner was a gifted journeyman director whose flair for action and dramatic camera work make his films compelling even as they’re slightly held back from greatness by his archness and weariness. He obviously had a great rapport with Bronson, whom he directed in several more films, including the monster hit Death Wish (1974), and the two men seemed to compliment without stretching each other, and arguably each of their best work is found in their collaborations. Like the more provocative Death Wish, The Mechanic is a model of the hard-edged, unaffected 70s crime thriller of which Bronson became the most iconic star, more than Eastwood, Lee Marvin or Steve McQueen, all of whom branched out into more diverse roles. Bronson remained a big fish in a small pond, becoming the auteur of his own brand, the laconic tough guy who’d prefer to spend a quiet evening at home but will murder you without blinking or breaking a sweat if you betray him or hurt his loved ones.

On the Departure of Kathleen Kennedy

Kathleen Kennedy was a satisfactory producer when working with Spielberg, Lucas and Frank Marshall. She’s never been an artist or a person of vision. After doing everything imaginable to obliterate good will towards the Star Wars franchise, apparently there’s nothing worse left to do and she’s finally decided to move aside. Her successors may do a little better, but it’s too late. Like the white unicorn in The Once and Future King, the magic of Star Wars has been pulled apart and reprocessed into soulless glop so many times that there’s hardly anything recognizable left to mutilate. For my generation, Star Wars was alone at the absolute apex of meaningful, inspiring, exhilarating top-quality art/entertainment, “the Holy Trilogy,” as Kevin Smith put it. Lucas himself began its corruption with his Special Editions of the original films and his own Prequel Trilogy, but selling off the IP to the Disney megacorporation in 2012 sealed its doom. The Disney-Kennedy empire, salivating over their new cash cow, immediately dismissed Lucas and his ideas and green-lit the safest possible reboot of the series, a beat-for-beat remake of the first Star Wars film. It was Kennedy who initiated the custom of hiring gifted young filmmakers to helm each film, and then micromanaging them to the point of insanity, requiring endless, costly reshoots only to end up with lackluster films anyway. It was Kennedy – as brutally roasted by South Park – who forced a superficially feminist agenda into every Star Wars film and TV show, at the expense of literally everything else, leading to the release of even more subpar projects that everyone hated. Kennedy had every right to make stories about innately superior girl bosses all she wanted, but she should have created her own new franchise to do so. Latching onto Star Wars like the parasitic face-huggers in Alien, implying that it was a flawed and outmoded property that needed fixing, Kennedy sneered while denying fans anything they might truly appreciate and proceeded to portray Luke Skywalker and Han Solo (and Indiana Jones) as pathetic old losers who needed to be lectured by 20-ish Mary Sues. Kennedy obviously resented playing second-fiddle to Lucas and Spielberg all those years, and instead of creating something of her own, chose to compete by hurling eggs at superior work made by actual artists and visionaries, all while taking cover behind a progressive social agenda that audiences repeatedly rejected and mocked, (including the blink-and-you'll-miss it lesbian kiss in The Rise of Skywalker). Tired of being deliberately insulted over and over again, Star Wars fans have seen through Kennedy's extremely expensive hypocrisy. While she lazily paid lip service to empowerment by wearing “The Force is Female” t-shirts for photographers and shoehorning a simplistic anti-male message into every project, we can’t ignore the fact that in fourteen years she never once hired a female writer or director for any Star Wars film. Like a true spineless, risk-averse corporate hack, behind the scenes she valued proven reliability over social justice and repeatedly brought in J.J. Abrams, Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, Tony Gilroy, Lawrence Kasdan and Ron Howard to get the jobs done, and still second-guessed and sabotaged them anyway. Under Kennedy’s leadership, LucasFilm, a division of the monolithic Disney conglomerate, has shown that it has no respect for Star Wars, no understanding of it, and no intention of doing anything other than relentlessly milking any idea that George Lucas ever dreamed up for every last cent it’s worth. Kennedy presided over the entire era that turned Star Wars into an embarrassing joke, something I never would have imagined was possible thirty years ago.

For Your Eyes Only

John Glen – 1981

As a child during the later Roger Moore era of Bond movies – For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill – Eyes was my least favorite of the group, partially due to its more subdued tone coming after the outlandish Moonraker and especially due to its grating, dated, TV-cop-show disco score by guest composer Bill Conti. The great John Barry’s absence from The Spy Who Loved Me is the only thing that mars that film's otherwise perfect status, so it’s incredible that the Eon team let him get away again so soon. Fortunately, he returned for the three following consecutive Bond films, through The Living Daylights. For Your Eyes Only has grown on me over time. It shows Moore’s Bond acting his age admirably, turning down advances from an amorous underage ice skater, and genuinely bonding with leading lady Carole Bouquet before kissing her. It includes some interesting Bond lore, such as a reference to his late wife Tracy from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; a final ignominious appearance from Blofeld in the pre-credits sequence, and a mélange of plot elements from various Ian Fleming stories that make it feel genuine on the whole. The film also marks the debut of Bond veteran John Glen in the director’s chair, promoted from longtime editor, who would attain the distinction of directing more Bond films than anyone else; all five from the 1980s – the last three to star Moore and then the only two featuring Timothy Dalton. For Your Eyes Only may not have one of the great villains in the Bond universe – Kristatos is a smuggler moonlighting as a skater’s patron? – but it does have a memorable second-tier villain in creepy speechless assassin Locque played by creepy Michael Gothard, whose car gets kicked down a mountainside by Bond in one of his most cold-blooded moments.

Outrage

Ida Lupino – 1950

As if two separate stories with radically different agendas were clumsily stapled together at the middle seam, Ida Lupino’s Outrage begins as a harrowing and effective drama/thriller told from a female perspective and somehow ends as a sappy religious tract and morality play. A college-age working-class woman is stalked and eventually raped by a brute who operates a lunch stand near her office. The event traumatizes her to the point that she cannot identify her attacker, cuts off her engagement with her fiancé, and is wracked with feelings of humiliation and shame. She senses her neighbors and even strangers whispering and judging her. She leaves town to escape the pain, but with no plan, and ends up in a small town being proselyted by a self-righteous born-again Christian who persuades the vulnerable young woman that she should just endure life’s hardships knowing that God has her back. This de-facto cult leader is so noble, in fact, that he rebuffs the heroine’s affection and insists she head back home to the world that made her miserable. I find the entire premise loathsome, not only for ethical reasons, but because the first half of the film is so strong and full of promise. It sets up two things that never happen; justice for the assault victim, and – more importantly – a final act that works cinematically. Lupino’s use of film effects to suggest the protagonist’s state of mind throughout the first 30 minutes is absolutely riveting. Camera angles, shadows, psychological editing and especially the aggressive use of sound all converge to produce a sensation of dread and indignation. You never want this woman to be rescued or “helped” to get over her trauma; you want her to either orchestrate vengeance on her foul rapist, or at least decisively move forward in life on a clear path, not because a virtuous man took pity on her, but because she built up her own resolve. None of this happens. She limps back to her hometown where her attacker is still at large, with no reason to believe that her psychosis is truly cured and can only hope that she’ll find more religious fanatics who will hold her hand when she needs it. Lupino’s sharp and rigorous style in the first half is replaced by a bland and artless approach in the second, making the film feel exactly as it would if Lupino was fired and replaced mid-shoot, or she just plain lost interest overnight. The first half is so good, though, that I want to encourage people to see it. You’ll know exactly when it’s safe to turn it off; it hits you like a two-by-four.

Wildflower

Matt Smukler – 2022

God help us from screenwriters who think that intelligent teen characters can only display their “intelligence” by being really snarky and sarcastic. Can't smart people ever be modest and courteous too, or can they only brim with grating smugness? If they’re so smart, why can’t they carry on a conversation productively instead of just spouting witty epigrams? Anyway, this movie is annoying and mediocre when Charlie Plummer isn’t on screen. He’s the only highlight in this otherwise insufferable and pretentious film.

The Shrouds

David Cronenberg – 2025

It feels good to be in the hands of a master filmmaker, someone who includes nothing in his film except what interests him and what relates to his themes, and who has no impulse to pander to audiences or boards of studio executives. It must be far from easy, but at 82 years of age, David Cronenberg still manages make films that no one else would or could, fusing philosophy and technology to create disquieting but fascinating scenarios about highly potent existential issues. In this case, the subject is coming to terms with death and mourning. Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) is a wealthy tech entrepreneur who has developed a means for customers to view their loved ones’ remains as they decay in their graves. It’s outrageously morbid, even sickening to many, but it’s a business that takes off, and Karsh finds it personally comforting as he regularly studies his late wife’s corpse remotely. As always, Cronenberg pinpoints – as only he can – a fine midpoint between behavior that is equal parts disturbing and poignant. Many of his films are tragic, but in The Shrouds, possibly because it’s so autobiographical - (to the extent that star Cassel even quite resembles Cronenberg) – he allows his hero to move on from his neurosis, though probably not permanently.