La Fille de l'Air

In a quirky and quinessentially European take on the old boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl-back scenario, heavily pregnant Brigitte (Beatrice Dalle) has her home violently invaded by armed police looking for her partner Daniel (Thierry Fortineau) who is out providing for his family by robbing a supermarket, and both are locked up (in a heart-warming scene they get married whilst under lock and key). While Brigitte is released soon after having her baby, she is distraught to find that Daniel, who's escaped from prison four times in the past, has to serve all his sentences (because of the escapes his sentences cannot now run concurrently) and is therefore looking at 36 years behind bars. Not too keen on waiting that long for the honeymoon, Brigitte settles on an innovative way of getting him out - a hair-raising scheme involving a helicopter, a fishing rod and a toy gun.

If all this makes 'La Fille de l'Air' sound vaguely ridiculous, that's only because it's disturbingly easy to imagine the story as a high concept Hollywood movie. A comedy, in all probability. You can imagine the pitch: "It's 'Airwolf' meets 'The Longest Yard'. It's 'When Sally Sprung Harry'!" You can imagine the poster: Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn half-glowering-half-grinning at each other with a silhouetted chopper hovering over a PG-friendly prison. The tagline: "When they're not breaking up ... they're breaking out!"

Which is why it's worth offering a silent prayer to whatever higher powers may be that Hollywood didn't get their hands on the story and Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Bagdadi (director of the award-winning 'Hors la Vie'), working from an intelligent, sensitively crafted and non-sensationalist screenplay by Florence Quentin, brought it to the screen instead. A dramatisation of Nadine Vaujour's autobiographical book (yes, 'La Fille de l'Air' is a film based on a true story that's so crazy it sounds like something out of a film), its writer, director and cast deserve kudos for not letting rip with the visual, dramatic or stylistic excesses that could so easily have squandered the human angle of the project and mired it in crowd-pleasing/hi-jinks vacuity.

Having said that, an early sequence teases audience sensibilities with the promise of Luc Besson/John Woo style action as an armed police unit come crashing through the windows and skylight of Brigitte's house. The door is kicked down for good measure and the whole place torn apart. Furniture is smashed, knives hack into sofa coverings, a goldfish bowl and its occupant are swept callously from a table to shatter on the floor. It's about a minute's worth of kinetically edited heavy-handedness that makes 'The Sweeney' look like the Salvation Army and leaves you feeling like a tornado just swept across the screen.

An hour and a half later, Bagdadi stages a just-as-tense ten-minute set-piece detailing Brigitte's air-traffic-control-defying mission to rescue Daniel - and it's a damn fine piece of action cinema. But the real drama is encapsulated in what happens inbetween. The immediate aftermath of the police raid and the arrests is depicted from Brigitte's perspective. She deals with incarceration, has her child as a prisoner, finds solidarity with some of the other inmates; she's released and tries to facilitate a reprieve for Daniel through proper channels; her efforts are stonewalled; she learns that he'll be inside for 36 years. Things get worse. In setting her up with a criminal fraternity who might be able to help her spring Daniel by less bureaucratic methods, her brother Philippe gets involved in a robbery that goes wrong. The first Brigitte hears of it is when she gets news of his death. Likewise Daniel's "cousin from Orleans": he has a plan, he just needs to do one job in order to raise the funds. Brigitte, trying hold down a straight job, picks up a paper at work - his face is plastered over the front page; he's been killed in a shoot-out - and has to hold it painfully together as she realises another hope has been dashed.

Or maybe not. Hastily clearing out the apartment she set Daniel's cousin up with, she comes across details of the plan he was hatching. A plan that calls for a helicopter, a fishing rod and - at Brigitte's insistence; she wants no truck with actual firearms - a replica gun. Which is where we came in.

In focussing on Brigitte's relationships with her family - her world-weary, slightly disapproving mother and her achingly innocent daughter represent the other points of the familial compass - and juxtaposing her grim determination with moments of absolute despair (there's a standout scene where she berates the helpless Daniel for Philippe's death), Bagdadi foregrounds character and motivation. The big finale, when it comes, is all the more tense as a result. He is also well served by a good cast, Dalle in particular casting off the voluptuous bombshell image that christened a thousand posters courtesy of 'Betty Blue' and proving herself a very capable character actor.

Tragically, 'La Fille de l'Air' was Bagdadi's last film; he died a year after its release, in 1993. The exact circumstances surrounding the manner of his death - a fall down an elevator shaft - remain unexplained. He was 43.

PERSONAL FAVES: White Heat

Again: SPOILERS. All over the shop.

Whoa! Did I say 'Angels with Dirty Faces' was eventful? That goes double for 'White Heat'!

Before we even get to plot synopsis, here's a checklist of set-pieces: train robbery; attempted police sting, escape and pursuit; undercover cop infiltrating gang; mobster's henchman plotting a take-over with the help of his boss's turncoat moll; prison break; wages heist. There are any number of crime films that have built around just one of these big dramatic conceits. 'White Heat' gives you half a dozen in one movie.

With no preamble or exposition, director Raoul Walsh opens with a clinically professional train robbery. Clinically professional, that is, except for the novice hood who blurts out gang boss Cody Jarrett (James Cagney)'s name in front of the cowering-at-gunpoint engineer and fireman. "Why don't you give him my address?" Cody snarls. He swiftly executes engineer and fireman lest they identify him later. Things escalate: two mail guards are killed, and the engineer, lurching back from the gunshot, collapses onto a steam release valve that jets a scalding blast into the face of one of Jarrett's crew. Brutal stuff and an early indication as to why a 1949 film carries a contemporary '15' certificate for home viewing.

Cut to: the gang laying low in an out-of-the-way cabin. In one scene - one scene! - it's established that Cody, not unlike Vic Dakin in 'Villain', is overly fond of his mother (Margaret Wycherly), that his neglected wife Verna (Virginia Mayo) is finding solace with Cody's ambitious right-hand-man Big Ed (Steve Cochran), that Cody is hip to Big Ed's designs, and that Cody suffers from debilitating headaches. The gang use a violent storm to quit the hideout and head for safety, but leave behind the poor unfortunately severely burned by the jet of steam. A pack of cigarettes left with him as cold comfort bear fingerprints that point the cops towards Cody.

With a tail on Ma Jarrett (the wily old gal shakes them; they only locate her through a dumb-luck wrong turn), the heat comes down on Cody. He decides to jump before he's pushed and pleads guilty to a hotel robbery (smaller take; no casualties) that occurred at the same time as the train job. Result: minimum sentence (1 - 3 years); alibi for the train robbery. The authorities don't buy it and straight-arrow copper Philip Evans (John Archer), injured by Cody during a shoot-out, arranges a plant in his cell: undercover agent Vic Pardo (Edmond O'Brien).

Vic gets nothing out of Cody, who instantly distrusts him, but is there when fellow inmate Palmer (Paul Guilfoyle) - in the pay of Big Ed - stages an assassination attempt against Cody in the prison machine shop. Vic saves Cody, who repays the favour when he busts out of prison during a transfer to a psychiatric facility and takes Vic with him. He also takes Palmer - at gunpoint - and locks him in the trunk of a car. When Palmer complains its stuffy, Cody aereates the trunk - with four bullets.

So why's Cody so keen to blow the joint? Well, it starts with a visit from Ma: she tells him she's caught Verna and Big Ed in flagrante and announces that she's going to take care of things. Cody, impotent in his inability to stop her, is left clinging to the bars that separate them in the visiting room, wailing for her to desist. Later he hears from a newly admitted con that she's dead. To say he goes beserk is like saying Oliver Reed went down the pub now and then.

Settling the score with Big Ed, but unaware that he still has two traitors in his camp, Cody puts the gang back together and plans a wages heist at a chemical plant. This time, though, the cops have the location and the inside man is about to be outed ...

'White Heat' was made eleven years after 'Angels with Dirty Faces'. Some things had changed, some things stayed the same. Gangsters still talk in rat-tat-tat bursts of smart-alec dialogue. Cops still arrive at crime scenes fully equipped with searchlights, tear gas and tommy guns. What's changed is the moralising. Who gives a fuck that Vic gets the "he made it to the top of the world and then it blew up in his face" final line? - you've spent the last half of the movie despising him as a stool pigeon anyway. Nor is there any of the human element that suffuses 'Angels with Dirty Faces'. If Rocky Sullivan is basically a decent guy who was let down by the system whilst in reform school and set on an inexorable path to a life of crime yada yada yada blah de blah de blah, then 'White Heat' makes no bones that Cody Jarrett is basically one royally fucked up psychopath.

What makes the film really interesting is that it also engages with his psychopathology. Cody's father "died kicking and screaming in the nuthouse" (it's suggested the psychosis is hereditary); he feigned headaches at a young age to gain his mother's attention away from the rest of the family; he treats his mother better than his wife; he admits to carrying on conversations with his mother after her death. I can't think of another film from this period that delves so deeply into its anti-hero's psychological make-up. James Cagney's Cody Jarrett is a precursor to decades of cinematic miscreants, from Dirk Bogarde's Tom Riley in 'The Blue Lamp' to Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in 'Psycho' to Tom Noonan's Francis Dollarhyde in 'Manhunter'.

Raoul Walsh, a stalwart of hard-hitting film noir and crime cinema with the likes of 'They Drive by Night' and 'High Sierra', made his masterpiece with 'White Heat'. Apart from the occasional flaw (the chemical plant shoot-out, although it seems to occur in real time, begins in broad daylight and concludes at dead of night), it's a film that puts to shame most contemporary blockbusters in terms of pacy narrative and well-handled set-pieces, and - in its iconic, amoral and plausibly empathetic depiction of villainy - echoes down the years in Scorsese's 'Goodfellas' and Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs'. A film that, in its apocalyptic ending, was relevatory for its time. The gangster movie, perhaps more than any other genre, has produced an astounding ratio of classics ... and 'White Heat' is one of the best.

Angels with Dirty Faces

Upfront: SPOILER ALERT (pretty much the whole article)

Leaving aside for a moment its moralistic ending, 'Angels with Dirty Faces' puts me in mind of a Jim Thompson novel. Thompson's stories often peak at what would traditionally constitute a denouement fairly early on, then develop into studies of aftermath. 'Angels with Dirty Faces' conforms to a three-act structure:

Act One is the origin story, in which the juvenile Rocky Sullivan gets in trouble with the law while his pal and fellow delinquent Jerry Connelly gets away. Rather than straightening out in reform school, Rocky becomes hardened; determined to kick against the system. A few stretches in jail make this wise-ass tough-guy wiser and tougher still.

Act Two is the rise and fall of the now adult Rocky (James Cagney). A whirlwind montage of bootlegging, shoot-outs, fast cars and dancing girls sketch in the pleasures and perils of the lifestyle. An abrupt cut to Rocky about to go down for three years emphasises the punishment. But just as Rocky didn't rat out Jerry as a kid, he keeps shtum about his current partner James Frazier (Humphrey Bogart), a bent lawyer to whom he entrusts $100k of stolen money with instructions to set himself up in "business" and make contacts.

Act Three is the aftermath part: Rocky gradually uncovering Frazier's duplicity - the lawyer's now in league with old-school hood Mac Keefer (George Bancroft) and both consider Rocky a liability - while lying low in the old neighbourhood where he strikes up a tentative romance with Laury (Ann Sheridan), reacquaints with Jerry (Pat O'Brien) and becomes a mentor to a gang of street kids (the "Dead End" kids) whom Jerry, now a priest, is trying to save from a life of crime.

Director Michael Curtiz powers through Acts One and Two with such energy and economy that they occupy just the first ten minutes. The rest of the film deals with Act Three. Again, Curtiz doesn't waste a frame of film. 'Angels' abounds with incident: there's Keefer's attempt to rub out Rocky; Rocky getting the dirt on Frazier and all his political contacts and turning the tables; a crooked cop who's in Keefer's pocket harrassing Rocky only for Keefer to call him off when he realises how badly Rocky's compromised Frazier. The genre elements are punchy and well-crafted, particularly an assassination attempt in a chemist's store and a climactic shoot-out complete with searchlights, tear gas and tommy guns.

But Curtiz weaves a human story around the gunfights and double-crosses. Rocky's human side is evident in his relationships with Jerry and Laury. Jerry is initially delighted that Rocky takes an interest in the kids (he sees this as the key to Rocky's redemption), but soon begins to worry when these pocket edition gangsters begin slavishly hero-worshipping a real one. And when he implicates them in his entanglements with Frazier and Keefer, getting them to hide the money he's forcibly got back from Frazier, Jerry decides he has to take a stand against his old friend.

It's hard not to feel annoyed at the last-minute subplot the film-makers shoehorn in. We've enjoyed tough-talking gangster schtick, a twisty-turny tale of double-crosses and dangerous deals, and a decent helping of earthy humour (Rocky refereeing at a basketball game, physically beating the kids into playing by the rules, is an inspired blend of archly ironic humour and laugh-out-loud pratfalls) ... and then someone goes and turns on the morality.

Late-in-the-game scenes of Jerry spearheading a public crusade against the criminal underworld and corruption in high places are rushed; not properly developed. Frazier and Keefer seem to sit back and let the groundswell happen before it even occurs to them to have the priest bumped off. But Rocky's still too attached to Jerry to let them go ahead. He's not unlike a Michael Mann protagonist in this respect: even though he's resolved the conflict with Frazier and Keefer, even entering into an uneasy partnership, and even though all are threatened equally by Jerry's crusading, it's Jerry to whom Rocky is most loyal. He doesn't deviate from his code of honour.

Confronted with Keefer's plans to send Jerry "floating down the river", Rocky's determination to protect his friend seals his own fate.

Tried, found guilty and sentenced to death, Rocky whiles away his final hours sneering at the prison warders, talking tough and promising he'll spit in their eye before he goes to the chair. Then Jerry visits him asks him one last favour: die yellow, die like a coward, stop being a hero to the kids. Jerry has almost lost them; he fears for hundreds of others just like them. He begs Rocky not to become a martyr they'll emulate at the cost of ending up on Death Row themselves.

Forget Jerry's morally uplifting final line as he leads the kids symbolically out of the darkness of their basement hideout and up into the light; the most memorable scene has Rocky initially refuse Jerry's request, then gleefully punch out one of the guards before he's lead to the chair. Defiance is written on his face. A tight shot shows Jerry walking by his side, the guards close behind them. During the long walk, Cagney conveys, just by his eyes and the set of his mouth, the struggle going on inside Rocky; the enormity of the decision he finally makes.

James Cagney double bill

Sorting through some boxes in the garage yesterday in search of my old VHS copy of 'Thief', it came as a revelation that I still own so many films on video that I've not yet replaced on DVD. Having already put aside a good two dozen crime movies from the DVD cabinet for possible inclusion in this month's Shots on the Blog project, I came away with half that number again on tape.

Two of the titles I came across were Jimmy Cagney classics: 'Angels with Dirty Faces' and 'White Heat', the latter on the personal faves list.

It's Sunday, I'm a week off getting paid so funds are low and the pub and the cinema not an option, so I'm having me a double bill today. I'll be watching 'Angels' this morning and blogging about it after lunch, then 'White Heat' this afternoon and posting an article in the evening. It's either that or mow the lawn, and I'd rather make it to the top of the world than the bottom of the garden.

MICHAEL MANN WEEK: Thief

Radiator Heaven's Michael Mann week concludes today. Kudos to J.D. for hosting a successful and fascinating blogathon. I've looked forward to logging onto the internet each evening to check out the ever-growing link list. Contributions have been varied, exploring all aspects of Mann's career, and the standard of writing has been consistently high.

Three things that have emerged as a through-line in Mann's filmography:

i) his protagonists are defined by rigorous masculine codes; no matter how bad the things they do (some of Mann's finest creations are career criminals), a sense of honour underpins their actions and the worst betrayal imaginable is the betrayal of the self;

ii) he immerses himself completely in the theme, setting and psychology of each of his films; his attention to detail is precise and what other directors would consider minutaie, Mann adopts as a raison d'etre;

iii) he is more interested in the accretion of incident and the momentum of events than conventionally structured narrative or exposition.

This latter can sometimes be a weakness. I'm probably in a minority, having read so many favourable reviews of it in this blog-a-thon, but I find 'Collateral' at best an interesting failure. Yes, the high definition digital camerawork allowed for noctural scenes that were at once dreamily disconnected and poetically vivid, but other sections of the film looked flat and amateurish. Also, with DV unable to achieve of the depth of focus of conventional film, set-pieces such as the shoot-out in the nightclub lacked any sense of spatial awareness. I thought 'Miami Vice' similarly afflicted and spent two and a half hours bitterly wishing Mann had shot it on film. Another flaw in both films was that Mann's visual experimentalism (an enquiry into the aesthetics of DV in 'Collateral'; a deconstruction of narrative perameters in 'Miami Vice') seemed glaringly in opposition to the thrilleramics of the scripts, the dynamics of the character interactions and, post-'Heat', audience expectation of cool intellectualism married to visceral action in a ceremony witnessed by sumptuously gorgeous visuals.

'Thief', Mann's second feature length project (after the TV movie 'The Jericho Mile'), is a thing of wonder to revisit*. It presents you, at the very outset, with all of Mann's strengths and none of his weaknesses.

James Caan (in a joint career best with 'The Godfather') plays Frank, a career criminal who specialises in relieving safes of diamonds. He works with a small and trusted crew, uses an equally trusted fence, and keeps himself to himself. When an associate encourages him to "meet some people", Frank's response is, "I want to meet people, I'll join a fucking country club." He runs a car lot as a front and has business interests in a bar. His relationship with barmaid Jessie (a never-better Tuesday Weld) is up-and-down, while his oldest friend and mentor Okla (Willie Nelson) languishes in prison and worries that he'll never leave the joint alive. Frank has the money - evidenced by the designer suits, the silk shirts and the gold watch - but with Jessie unable to have children and the adoption system not enamoured of Frank's prior stints in jail, it's what he can't have that stings the most.

Then his fence turns up dead, $85k of Frank's money lifted from his corpse. Frank goes after the money. He gets it back, but at a price that will soon prove way too high. In one fateful meeting, Frank goes from being Mr Anonymous to his reputation proceeding him. Mob boss Leo (Robert Prosky) makes him an offer: a handful of high-profile takes, maximum risk but big money and the cops and the judges paid off if the shit hits the fan. Frank's cagey but Leo sweetens the deal: he sets Frank and Jessie up with a house, arranges an adoption, plays the father figure.

But when Leo stiffs Frank on his cut after a daring heist (prompting Frank to lose his rag and announce that he wants out), a different Leo emerges. Earlier in the film, during the heart-to-heart that stabilises Frank and Jessie's relationship, he recounts his time in prison, in particular how he survived because he had nothing to lose. That sense of nihilism communicated itself to the other inmates. Frank has continued to live by this code on the outside. "I'm the last guy in the world you want to fuck with," he tells an antagonist at one point, pulling a piece on the guy and giving every impression that he's ready to use it. Later, pissed off at Leo's duplicity, he reacts like a bull in a china shop instead of exercising caution or circumspection.

It's Leo who brutally throws into relief just how far Frank has deviated from who he truly is: "You were one of those burned-out, demolished whackos in the joint - you're scary because you don't give a fuck. But don't come on to me now with that jailhouse bullshit, 'cause you're not that guy anymore. Don't you get it, you prick? You've got a home, a car, businesses, a family. And I own the paper on your whole fucking life. I'll put your wife on the street to be fucked in the ass ... Your kid's mine because I bought it. You've got him on loan. He is leased. You are renting him."

Ultimately, with everything he's sold himself out for at risk, Frank has no choice but to throw it all away. In what plays out like Tarkovsky's 'The Sacrifice' by way of 'Mean Streets', Frank tears down the artificial construct he thought was the life he wanted and reintegrates with himself.

Impressively constructed, tightly directed, atmospherically shot and crafted with perhaps the strongest sense of narrative evidenced anywhere on Mann's CV, 'Thief' manages to be, in its shattering denouement, a morality tale, a work of bleak existentialism and a fuck-off good action thriller all rolled into one.

*Although not necessarily in the director's cut. Tim's review at Antagony & Ecstacy will tell you why.

HELLRAISERS: Villain

Michael Tuchner's 1971 Brit crime outing 'Villain' came with one of the best taglines ever: "Meet Vic Dakin ... then wish you hadn't."

Vic Dakin (Richard Burton) is a vicious East End gangster with an appetite for rough trade and an almost unhealthy attachment to his mother. I'm guessing that Tuchner, Burton and scripters Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais were crossed off Ronnie Kray's Christmas card list soon after the film came out.

Burton, coming off bland historical epic 'Anne of the Thousand Days' and indifferent war movie 'Raid on Rommel', tears into the part, turning what could have been a hackneyed, one-note role into a symphony of hair-trigger menace and snarling contempt. When his nemesis Inspector Matthews (Nigel Davenport) announces he has witnesses against him, the caustic response is, "If I looked at one of them, they'd piss in their pants. Because I'm Vic Dakin!" Clement and la Frenais bring the same quick-fire patter to 'Villain' that they did to their sitcom scripts. Greeting Matthews as "Sergeant", the copper reminds Dakin of his promotion. "Come through, has it?" Dakin sneers, adding (without missing a beat), "That's nice. Bit more on your widow's pension."

It's tempting to describe their screenplay as a forerunner of their work on Roger Donaldson's 'The Bank Job'. Both follow the three-act structure of job gets planned; job is executed but with unforeseen consequences; various parties try to screw each other over in the aftermath. Both feature an effortless interweaving of subplots. Both depict peers of realm compromised by their extra-matiral shenanigans and in the pockets of underworld figures as a result. But whereas 'The Bank Job', notwithstanding its occasional moments of brutality, is essentially playful in its construction and knowingly ironic in its evocation of hard-edged 70s thrillers, 'Villain' is a hard-edged 70s thriller and what bit of humour Clement and la Frenais bring to the table is cynical, acidic and sparingly doled out.

The plot kicks off with Dakin getting some inside information from a disaffected wages clerk (James Cossins): a payroll, three heavies, ordinary car (the firm's awaiting delivery of an armoured van), £70k easy. Dakin's mind is more on his former squeeze Wolfe (Ian McShane), a bisexual hustler who's introduced pimping out his Home Counties girlfriend Venetia (Fiona Lewis) to sleazy but well-connected politican Gerald Draycott (Donald Sinden). Dakin's crew have their doubts - robbery's not their usual game - and to complicate matters the job would take place in someone else's "manor". Still, 70 grand is 70 grand (this is 1971, remember) and Dakin sets out get fellow mobster Frank Fletcher (T.P. McKenna)'s permission to operate on his turf.

Fletcher's hesitant, though. The job's risky. Then a strike is announced which affects the payroll transportation dates, and it's make your mind up time for all involved: hit the payroll the next day or not at all. Fletcher comes onboard, along with his right-hand-man Edgar Lowis (Joss Ackland).

What happens next is one of the best botched robberies scenes in crime cinema. The guards handling the payroll twig to Dakin's box-them-in-and-force-them-off-the-road tactics. A frenetic barrage of squealing tyres, twisted metal and down 'n' dirty hand-to-hand ensues (in fact, with its punchy editing, realistic violence and backdrops of industrial wastelands, 'Villain' presupposes the in-your-face aestheic of 'The Sweeney' by four years). The money is booby-trapped. Steel spikes erupt from one of the cases, injuring Lowis. A gas canister spews choking orange fumes from another. Fletcher takes a pasting.

Miraculously, however, they escape the scene. Dakin, knowing the heat will be coming down on him (Matthews has spent the first half of the film harrassing him, seemingly on general principle), leaves what remains of the money with Lowis. This is where things start going wrong for him. In short order Lowis is nicked and Matthews arrests Dakin in front of his dear old mum.

Cue Wolfe, now back in the fold and putting up with the beatings that constitute Dakin's understanding of foreplay, and the dirt he has on Draycott. Alibis a-go-go and Dakin's back on the street, pissed off and wanting the money. But Matthews is just as determined to put him behind bars ...

'Villain' is a solid 70s crime movie: the script is pacy, Tuchner's direction taut and clear-sighted (it was his first film; sadly, everything he made subsequently was by-the-numbers), and the entire cast - including Colin Welland, Tony Selby and Del Henney relishing decently-written secondary roles - fire on all cylinders. Cinematographer Christopher Challis, a million miles away from the romantic musings of Powell & Pressburger (he shot seven of their films), colours 'Villain' grim. His vision of post-swinging-Sixties London is a masterclass in unloveliness: vast acreages of concrete, abandoned factories, soulless arterial roads and flyovers, broken-down lean-to's under railway arches. The poet Shelley wrote "Hell is a city much like London". Pace Challis. His London spawned Vic Dakin, and if that isn't proof I don't know what is.

Coming attractions / Shots on the Blog

Finishing off last month with a review of 'Manhunter' as part of Radiator Heaven's Michael Mann week has put me in the mood for a crime flick fest.

Until about a decade ago, Nottingham's Broadway cinema used to run the Shots in the Dark festival. This was a fortnight of crime-based genre films, from b&w classics to UK premieres. Most were introduced by guest speakers. Seminars and masterclasses ran concurrently. Guests have included Ian Rankin, James Ellroy, Mike Hodges, Evan Hunter, Ginette Vincendeau and - most spectacularly, just weeks after he'd picked up the Palme d'Or for 'Pulp Fiction' - Quentin Tarantino.

Meeting QT in Nottingham, on my way to a screening of Terence Malik's 'Badlands' and talking film with him for half an hour (or rather, listening to him talk film to me) remains one of the great moments in my life.

Unfortunately, Shots in the Dark is no more. Adrian Wootton, then director of Broadway, jumped ship for London's South Bank and took Shots in the Dark with him. Broadway continues to fly the flag for independent cinema in the Midlands and still hosts its fair share of workshops, events and introductions, but I miss Shots. I miss booking off half of my yearly annual leave entitlement around it. I miss pouring over the brochure to see just how many events I could conceivably attend. I miss the hastily grabbed junk food between events and the leisurely pints afterwards. I miss living, breathing, eating and sleeping cinema for two solid weeks.

They say nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but that's not going to stop me from trying. I'm resurrecting the spirit of Shots in the Dark. The fedora and the trenchcoat are on, the safety's off and my wife's giving it some femme fatale smoulder. Down those mean streets this blogger is about to go ...

Welcome to July 2009 to The Agitation of the Mind. Welcome to Shots on the Blog.