Adapted by Forsyth from the 1982 novel by Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping is an off-center tragicomedy about the social and emotional risks associated with nonconformity – not the passing nonconformity of youth, but that which lies so ingrained in some individuals that it can never quite be shaken, and which ventures to such extremes that others (reeling from their own pathologies and insecurities) will feel inclined to mislabel it as mental imbalance. Christine Lahti stars as Sylvie, a thirtysomething who inherits the custody of two young nieces, Ruth (Sarah Walker) and Lucille (Andrea Burchill) after their emotionally disturbed mother commits suicide by driving into a lake. Though Sylvie generates warmth and shows genuine love and concern for her charges, she doesn’t exactly fit the mold of an “ideal guardian,” by anyone’s standards; she amasses large quantities of newspapers in the house, thinks little of pilfering a stranger’s rowboat to go for a moonlit jaunt on the nearby lake, piles tin cans in pyramids throughout the house, and harbors some inherent objection to bright light.

Forsyth’s brilliance lies in never attempting to account for Sylvie’s seemingly capricious behavior; he realizes that such explanations would topple the delicate construction of the film, and indeed (on a more practical level) that it would be nearly impossible to account for the extreme idiosyncrasies of this woman. Like Robinson, Forsyth wisely posits the film in that most unhealthy of decades, the 1950s – where the weight of conformity reigns supreme and threatens to crush free-spiritedness into pieces. To the film’s credit, the mood for much of its duration waxes whimsical, quirky, and even on occasion hilarious (as in the scene with the rowboat) – and that mood is what saves it by keeping it fresh and buoyant, that rescues it from the doldrums. Over the course of the narrative, however, we recognize the film’s apparent frivolity as deeply deceptive, and a buried level of meaning and insight emerges via the growth and maturation of the two girls. As they reach adolescence, we witness their paths diverging. One evolves into a social butterfly and a conformist, the other into an awkward eccentric, like her aunt. This indefinite separation of the sisters – and the bittersweet conclusion of the film (which will not be revealed here) enables Forsyth to gamely pull off what Weir attempted to explore in Poets with the inclusion of that film’s suicide. Weir depicted a character whose insistence on acknowledging and clinging to extreme individuality led him to self-destruction when he felt unable to contend with the pressures of conformity; Forsyth implies that such an insistence on individuality can potentially lead to something worse - a lifetime of social ostracism and isolation. Yet at the same time, the film (via the tight bond forged between Sylvie and Lucille) reminds us that the opposite also holds equal weight – that acknowledging one’s own individuality means opening oneself up to the joy of experiencing what novelist Josephine Hart described as “the shock of recognition… as the twisted iron in our souls unlocks itself and we slip at last into place,” (the shock received from an encounter with a soul-mate) even if it arrives at the cost of mainstream social acceptance. Such is the bond that Sylvie and Lucille experience. That the film brings us to such a profound, deep and multi-faceted conclusion about the mixed prospects of extreme individuality is a remarkable accomplishment indeed - all the more so for achieving such profundity at the conclusion of a narrative radiant with unadulterated joy, warmth, and humor.

On an aesthetic level, the movie not only qualifies as one of the most deeply lyrical films of its era, but establishes a wondrous link between the “look” of its on-screen environment and its character arcs. Just as Forsyth uses screen time to reflect on (and observe) the passage of time wreaking irreversible change on the two young girls (a fork in the road that may permanently separate them for the rest of their lives) cinematographer Michael Coulter and production designer Adrienne Atkinson use the scenic environments of the Pacific Northwest to create a palette rich with the deep oranges and reds of autumn – indicative of a state of seasonal change to mirror the internal emotional shifts of the young women. Certainly, this is one of the most beautiful films of its era (Coulter shot it in the same region as the same year’s Roxanne) and it remains difficult to think of another Hollywood film with such a perfectly forged connection between its visual plane and its thematic tropes.

Many “mainstream” Hollywood films from the mid-late 1980s haven’t worn their age well. Conversely, Housekeeping has only improved with time. As one of the most unique industry films of any era, this is one to seek out and hold in the highest regard.

But while it may be up for debate whether Synapse or Dark Sky has released the definitive version of the film itself, it’s the bonus features on this two disc edition that make it a must have for any fan of the film. Blasting out of the barrel with a hard rocking, blood spattered rock and roll intro, the featurette “Deadbeat at Dawn: Half-Desperate, Half-Crazy, and Totally Dangerous” opens with an laid-back VanBebber discussing his influences and film background in great detail. After revealing the details about his first film - the unfinished 8mm masterpiece “Return of the Werewolf” – VanBebber moves on to talk about his love for animation and gets into great detail about the production of “Deadbeat at Dawn.” It’s an informative featurette with some great behind the scenes footage, and it’s amusing to watch the dancing beer bottles on the table behind VanBebber throughout the course of the interview. Three minutes of silent outtakes are goofy, gory fun, and a “Behind the Scenes” segment originally produced on VHS in 1986 and 1987 finds the filmmakers working on fight choreography, guzzling Milwaukee’s Best, and discussing shots. An additional image gallery is nicely presented, but the crowning jewel of this disc has to the inclusion of VanBebber’s shorts “My Sweet Satan,” “Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin,” “Doper,” “Kata,” and “Into the Black.” While “My Sweet Satan” was originally included on Synapse Film’s DVD release of “Deadbeat at Dawn,” this is the first time the four other films have been released to DVD and it’s great to see them included here as they truly allow the viewer to witness VanBebber’s growth as a filmmaker. “My Sweet Satan,” “Roadkill,” and “Into the Black” in particular offer a gruesome preview of things to come in “Deadbeat at Dawn” and “The Manson Family,” while “Kata” highlight’s VanBebber’s ongoing fascination with martial arts and “Doper” offers a rare glimpse into the his capabilities as a documentary filmmaker.

The version of “The Manson Family” included in this set is the same two-disc edition that was originally released by Dark Sky in April of 2005. In addition to offering a breathtaking transfer of the film itself, it also includes a variety of informative and entertaining special features including the documentaries “The VanBebber Family” and “In the Belly of the Beast,” an interview with Charles Manson, theatrical trailers, and a still gallery.

 
 
Liberally peppered with corny jokes, featuring appearances by local bands, and punctuated by vintage television commercials, Nightmare SINema delivers the perfect combination of laughs and thrills for insomniac, “B”movie-loving horror hounds. Nightmare SINema debuted on Detroit-area public access television back in July of 2007, and has been steadily gaining in popularity ever since. This coming weekend, the show makes it’s big debut on Detroit Channel 20, opening up Nightmare SINema to a whole new audience and providing the next generation of horror fans with dementedly delightful memories that will last a lifetime.

Hop on over to www.nightmaresinema.com for more info, clips of the show, and lots of other goodies… and to Detroit-area movie lovers who decide to stay up late this Friday night – I’ll see you at the haunted drive-in!

Every Thursday evening in April, Detroit area moviegoers are invited to come out to the Novi Emagine and experience the seedier side of cinema as we present a series of $7 double features featuring everything from punk rock zombies and flesh-eating schoolgirls to alien parasites, demonic heavy metal bands, debauched detectives, and gore drenched winos!

This isn’t Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse folks… this is the REAL DEAL!

The complete schedule follows the jump.

Thursday, April 3 @ 8pm:
Heavy Metal Horrors!
Rock and Roll Nightmare (83 min) and Black Roses (90 min.)

Thursday, April 10 @ 8pm:
Alien Terror and Horrific Hooch!
Deadly Spawn (78 min.) and Street Trash (91min.)

Thursday, April 17 @ 8pm:
Japanese Punk Rock Zombies and Killer Schoolgirls!
Wild Zero (98 min.) and Stacy (80 min.)

Thursday, April 24 @ 8pm:
Nightmare Noir Mayhem and Shotgun Revenge!
Thriller: They Call Her One Eye (Vengeance Edition) (89 min.) and Singapore Sling (115 min.)

There will be a ten-minute intermission between the films, during which we will screen various trailers from Synapse Films’ spectacularly entertaining 42nd Street Forever trailer compilation. Also, every movie screened during the “42nd Street Drive-In” series will be available for purchase on DVD, along with many other Synapse titles, at each screening.

We hope to see you there!

The narrative itself is simple: though in his mid-30s, wealthy Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet) spent recent years trapped in a state of perpetual, suspended adolescence – pulling brazen stunts more appropriate for a 17 year old, such as go-karting maniacally through the streets of Paris, and drinking himself into the ground. As the tale opens, Leroy has just completed detox at an alcohol clinic in Versailles, France; like most drunks when they finally decide to try sobering up, he’s not only alcohol-free for a time but also personality-free: he ends up hanging, suspended in mid-air – a listlessness building inside of him that leaves him with absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to cling to. And so, this human zero inevitably brings the bottle to his lips once again, which of course sends him plummeting over the proverbial cliff of self-destruction.

Yes, the story is profoundly sad, but, push Leaving Las Vegas and The Days of Wine and Roses out of your minds: unlike those films, The Fire Within isn’t depressing – not even for a second. Working on his trademark instinctive level, Malle (in a way that is profoundly difficult to explain) somehow manages to achieve a paradox: he pulls the audience inside of Leroy enough to fill every frame with the existential malaise that has suffocated the poor man’s world, and yet concurrently enables his audience to stay emotionally removed, as distant, detached clinical observers. To put it another way: on a tonal level, the director operates within a complete emotional void – mirroring the suicidal numbness of Leroy himself and rendering the film eminently bearable. I long believed that the film lacks an emotional subtext altogether; that may be a slight overstatement, in hindsight (when I watched the film at a Lincoln Center screening in 2005 at least a few members of the audience were audibly sobbing), but it does begin to drive at the film’s approach. Lest it sound like a terrible viewing experience, rest assured that the film, in fact, feels exhilarating: instead of being crushed with bathos, we retain a sense of emotionally dissociated fascination and richness even as we understand exactly how Leroy feels. How many other films could strike this seemingly impossible balance?

The picture also bathes us in a sumptuous, rapturous aesthetic. Malle shoots in high-contrast black and white, literally zapping the screen of all color, and films images with rigid perpendicular lines and an abundance of “modern” details. He also transports us to a world rife with its own idiosyncratic atmosphere: early ’60s France. Not the City of Lights that served as a staple of many a New Wave film, mind you, but Versailles, with its archaic and unmistakable buildings, shot under gloomy, foreboding, pre-storm skies hung heavy with clouds and imposition. This is the very same aesthetic glimpsed later in films such as Séance on a Wet Afternoon and The Pumpkin Eater, and the emotional implications are the same, where the inescapable state of clinical depression - the idea of teetering on the edge of complete destruction - is expressionistically reflected in the surroundings.

Stylistically, the use of long-focus depth also gains greater relevance here than it ever did in a Malle film; without ever over-enforcing its points, the film communicates, very subtly and effectively, that a busy, active world is constantly and lyrically unfolding in the distance, just beyond the confines of the frame (thus reinforcing the self-imposed limitations when Leroy, for example, opts to spend long periods of time inside of his little sanitarium room). And no scene is more powerful, in that regard, than the scene in which Leroy strolls out onto the terrace of his sanitarium and gazes off into the distant courtyards behind the building, where young children play with a ball and a woman shakes out her laundry. Malle lays a softly-knit Gymnopedie by Erik Satie over the sequence to give it the perfect sense of detached lyricism. And the scene is not an exception: in some highly unusual way, the Satie music and Ghislain Cloquet’s high-con cinematography not only accentuate but complete one another to form an organic, fluid whole blanketing the entire film.

Overall, Malle makes virtually no delineation between his own perspective and that of Leroy, and so the film as a whole existentially and nihilistically questions the purpose, value and meaning of life; therein lies its courage. For this reviewer, one sequence neatly summarizes the entire picture: a sequence in which Leroy, sitting half-dazed at a Parisian café, studies the average men and women passing one another on the sidewalk (as, again, a Gymnopedie quietly unfurls on the soundtrack). The shot continues for a couple of minutes and deliberately raises rhetorical questions that it cannot possibly answer as we witness the pedestrians staring blankly into the distance: Who are we? What is the purpose of our lives? Where are we going? Is there some larger scheme to give our actions meaning independently of the meaning we ascribe to them?

A desperation lingers beneath all of these ponderings – the desperation of futility, of the prospect that it may be impossible to find thoroughly satisfying answers.

As mentioned, this vital film suffered from not only unfortunate, but absolutely wretched timing. Le Feu Follet hit U.S. shores in February 1964 – or in other words, merely three months after the Kennedy assassination, when U.S. citizens faced a complete loss of innocence, an uncertain future for the country and a sense of inconsolable sadness. In retrospect, it should hardly come as a surprise that so many American viewers found the picture unbearable at that point. Now, of course, we can look at it with fresh and unbiased eyes. Le Feu Follet is a film crying out for rediscovery.

The story concerns children’s book illustrator Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) a woman who moves to a farmhouse near a local reservoir with her young daughter Rebecca (Katie Sagona) and airline pilot husband Paul (Aidan Quinn). Although Claire has been plagued with inexplicable psychic visions all her life, she now suffers from one recurring nightmare, where she finds herself inhabiting the body of a grungy adult man, and holds the hand of an abducted local girl as they stroll together through an ominous apple orchard. The man, it turns out, is a seriously disturbed local named Vivian Thompson ((longhaired Robert Downey, Jr., in a skin-crawling performance), who survived a grotesque onslaught of child abuse as a youngster (and a potentially lethal flood) and lurks on the outskirts of the community. Now a sociopath with a penchant for kidnapping and butchering young girls, Vivian also harbors the telepathic ability to enter Claire’s dreams, but soon extends his control over her waking life by abducting Rebecca after a school play. Emotionally shattered and racked with terror, Claire informs her husband that she holds the psychic connection to the kidnapper’s whereabouts through her dream life, but both Paul and a local psychiatrist (Stephen Rea) question her sanity and threaten to have her institutionalized. Indeed, Claire undergoes tremendous mental and emotional strain and begins to crack as twisted images and nursery rhymes from Vivian’s past increasingly flood her thoughts. But ironically, these clues may be Claire’s only hope of helping the authorities close in on the maniac and find her daughter, dead or alive.

Few American or European directors have visualized onscreen nightmare as deftly as Neil Jordan in this sadly overlooked effort from early 1999. Passed up by the director who first planned to helm it, Steven Spielberg, and unfairly relegated to the post-Christmas January landfill of mediocre A-budget dreck, In Dreams received almost unanimously devastating reviews in the US and opened and closed practically overnight, leading one to wonder if its critical castigation and box office failure weren’t more attributable to sheer unpleasantness than to narrative flaws and gaps. Indeed, the film qualifies as one of the most intrinsically disturbing and upsetting horror films to have emerged from Hollywood since Friedkin’s original Exorcist (1973), simply by virtue of its approach.

Director and co-screenwriter Jordan punctuates the onscreen action with grotesque, bizarre acts of violence (such as the moment when Aidan Quinn’s character is stabbed through the eye) and builds his narrative progression on a gradual deterioration of logic that ultimately fuses with the insanity of its antagonist, sociopathic child murderer Thompson. Jordan beckons the audience to accompany his heroine come hither, as she rides the arc from the rational to the psychotic. He’s treading that hair-thin rail between absurdity and discovery — traveling the path of David Lynch, by making only occasionally successful yet consistently laudable attempts to break through the logical boundaries of the medium, striving for that surrealistic plane of dream fabric where anything is possible. The incredulity, the laughs from some viewers, are the price Jordan pays. What emerges is an onscreen realm where terrifying coincidences are not only commonplace, but inevitable and fated, where suffocation and heat-soaked, claustrophobic paralysis hang thick in the onscreen atmosphere. Unfortunately, the central narrative also suffers from the deliberate lapses in logic – becoming so hopelessly confused during the second and third acts that many viewers will leave feeling dismayed. It also lurches into the ridiculous a bit too often, such as the infamous sequence where Bening’s garbage disposal violently regurgitates apples. Nevertheless, the picture’s strengths partially compensate for these drawbacks. Jordan’s method of evoking horror is extremely impressive and original here: he interpolates a series of simple, childlike motifs (apples, nursery rhymes, swing sets) reiterated dozens of times until the images gain satanic connotations. And as some critics noted, In Dreams boasts a four-barreled, revelatory performance from Bening that should have redefined her career to the extent that American Beauty did, later that same year. In the end, the film remains uneven but truly fascinating. And those with strong stomachs, who are willing to go along for the ride and accept whatever twists it hands them, may well discover one of the only recent American films to return to the roots of horror by making viewers sick with fear.

The history of this terminally odd picture begins in the mid-1970s, when famed documentarian Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap and Out of Control) grew absolutely obsessed with the doings of notorious Wisconsin thrill butcher Ed Gein and his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, then decided to share his obsession with friend Herzog. In the book Herzog on Herzog, Herzog recalls that Morris spent an untoward number of hours interviewing both Gein and many residents of Plainfield, in preparation for a future documentary. Morris discovered that Gein had apparently not only killed a large number of people but exhumed a circle of corpses from the ground, and began to fixate on the question of whether Gein’s exhumations had included the body of his own mother. Eventually, he and Herzog decided to go to Plainfield together and dig in the ground to determine if Mrs. Gein’s corpse was still present! (They were both, Herzog recalls, “Very excited about it.”) Herzog indeed showed up, ready and eager for a grave-digging expedition, but Morris chickened out.

For even turning up in Plainfield (let alone scheming to dig through the bowels of the Earth) Herzog clocks in, once more, as the most courageous of all living directors – but the Plainfield story only begins there. He didn’t exhume Mrs. Gein’s body, but (genius that he is) he did catch the inspiration for a feature shot in Gein’s home town. Herzog later provided some insight into his inescapable fascination with Plainfield: “You have these points in the United States — for example, Las Vegas, or the Stock Exchange on Wall Street, or San Quentin prison — where the dreams and nightmares all come together. And I count Plainfield, Wisconsin amongst them.”

Most intriguing is that neither Gein himself nor Plainfield are directly named in the film (Herzog substitutes the apocryphal “Railroad Flats, Wisconsin” for Plainfield), but Gein’s aura is consistently present on-camera, and never once in a frightening way – present in the inbred, semi-decrepit appearances of the townsfolk, present in the way that Plainfield resident Clemens Scheitz forcibly removes one of his own rotting molars on-camera with a pair of toolshed pliers, and present in the barren and subhuman conditions of the town proper, with its stark, empty mudfields and rusty, abandoned railroad cars. Hence Scheitz’s assertion, “We’ve had four, maybe five murderers here in Railroad Flats.” It isn’t difficult for us to see how this environment could have produced a monster like Gein (perhaps even multiple psychopaths), and it is this environment that Herzog uses as a platform for his central character, Stroszek’s (Bruno S.), “failed American dream,” after the fellow moves from Berlin to Wisconsin. The surroundings are so disadvantageous that – when coupled with Stroszek’s ignorance of the American language and his simple-minded approach to life – they can only lead to his personal defeat and downfall.

And yet the film never once feels difficult to watch; it qualifies as a tragedy of the deepest and most profound sort, with a heartbreaking ending, but Herzog lifts it from the pit of despair by blending the inherent sadness with a surfeit of warm-hearted human comedy that runs throughout much of the picture and that redeems it from the devastating, potentially crushing weight of sorrow. Bruno S. himself (a grizzled German performance artist whom Herzog regarded as slightly schizophrenic) is a natural comedian – sweet, gentle, saintly and eminently loveable – and his unpredictable responses to nearly everything before him somehow justify our ability to laugh with him as he gets pulled into increasingly ridiculous and desperate circumstances in an attempt to keep his head above water. (Consider, for example, the character’s eventual assistance in the armed robbery of a barbershop – an act that leaves him with about $30.00 to buy groceries). According to Herzog’s wonderful commentary on the Anchor Bay DVD, the image that most people associate with this film is that of a dancing chicken in an arcade exhibit at the conclusion of the story — a sight that Herzog cuts back to time and again as a metaphor to underscore the absurdity of life – but far more profound and touching, for me, is an early scene set in Berlin, prior to Stroszek’s move to Wisconsin with his friends. Dismayed and downtrodden by the circumstances life has thrust onto his shoulders, he visits a physician friend in a German hospital for solace – who indeed provides an unusual source of encouragement. The doctor takes Stroszek into the maternity ward and shows him a tiny, prematurely-born human baby. The infant, as he points out, is a miracle of survival – tiny, fragile and completely dependent – and yet it latches onto the doctor’s finger with a steady grip – a grip so firm and tight that the baby can actually be lifted out of its incubator, by its hands, without ever once relinquishing its hold.

For this viewer, the preemie embodies the thematic core of the picture – a symbolic homage to human tenacity amid the absurd, the ridiculous, and the insane circumstances into which many men and women find themselves thrust on a daily basis. Throughout the film Stroszek projects the ability, like the very best of us, to somehow keep on trying in the face of despair and defeat. And though he eventually suffers from an inescapably tragic (and violent) fate, his end serves predominantly as a reflection on the impossibility of the world that has ensconced him. Miraculously, and in a way that I cannot explain, the conclusion feels completely real and credible and yet never risks negating the resilience that Stroszek has demonstrated for the better part of two hours, or undercutting the film’s tribute to the power of the human spirit in the face of absolutely insurmountable odds.

Looking for something hot to watch this weekend? Have not enough Dumb-da-Dumb-Dumb flicks been warping your reality as of late? If so – search no more! Do yourself a favor and step into the not-so-long-ago machine and unearth none other than Eddie Furlong’s fourth follow-up after Terminator 2 – Brainscan. This sucker is one hum dinger of a virtual reality horror flick that was forgotten at the time of release and stays forgotten even today.

So is it any good? Not in any conventional way, lord no – but it does have its big, bright, beautifully silly moments that make for delirious entertainment for kitsch video fans to dig into. After the jump, find out 5 reasons to dig this one out of cinema’s time capsule of shame. Have fun!

 

For all of these reasons and so many more – including a truly embarrassing appearance by Frank Langella - Brainscan gets A+ on the Dummy Scale. Watch it with Ghost in the Machine for a 1994 killer-in-the-computer flashback weekend. Just grab some chips and beans and have a blast – but don’t bother buying cheese, ‘cuzz Brainscan’s got enough of it to melt any hungry movie maniac’s heart. Viva la stupid!
 
 
Note: All Movie editor Matt Tobey had a band in high school that wrote a song about Brainscan, which is more than what could be said about the metal-heavy soundtrack - featuring not one song about The Trickster and his tricky, witchy ways.

Shot on a relatively low budget, Eddie Coyle takes a headfirst plunge into the Boston underground for a grassroots view of the inner schema of organized crime. In the process, the film consistently defeats the cliché-worn Hollywood notion that a criminal’s life is slick or serene, and never once succumbs to its genre’s proclivity for stale audience patronization. Here, character takes the front seat from first frame to last, dictating everything that unfolds before us, sans exception.

The realism first confronts us on the most obvious level: that of location. Monash and Yates shot the picture on-site at Boston milieux ranging from the well-known (the old Boston Garden, the exterior of the Government Center T-Stop) to the obscure (a now-defunct early ’70s Beantown cafeteria, a south shore bank) to give it a sense of utter authenticity. Into these venues, the filmmakers drop an ensemble of wholly believable figures – both professional criminals and officers of the law – and remain defiantly loyal to the various strengths and weaknesses of the characters’ decisions (intelligent and ill-advised) that gestate from these qualities. And at the center is Coyle – an aging, two-bit hood who has simply grown far too world-weary and exhausted with his game to stay on top of everything. Coyle partially realizes this, which explains his instinctive need to get out of the “racket” - working around his last court appearance in favor of a cozy, crime-free retirement in New Hampshire with his family. But he is also rife with delusions – it seems that every step he takes to achieve his overarching goal is either futile or counter-productive. One of the characters with whom Coyle associates, a cop named Foley (played by Richard Jordan) puts it most succinctly in a scene late in the film: “The only one f—king Eddie Coyle is Eddie Coyle.”

The film does work organized crime into every scene and every line of dialogue, but it isn’t really about organized crime on a thematic level. Like the following year’s masterpiece The Conversation, this is essentially a character study, at heart, of a great modern, tragic hero – a Willy Loman for the late 20th Century whose intrinsic flaws will inevitably (and operatically) lead to his downfall. Expecting a high-wire thriller where the lead character emerges victorious? Look elsewhere.

Tension does exist in individual sequences of the film – the bank robberies (led by the character actor Alex Rocco) are among the most suspenseful in memory - but Monash and Yates make that suspense, and the direction of the narrative, entirely subservient to the demands and whims of the characters. Perhaps as a result, the film as a whole isn’t particularly suspenseful, merely low-key, mellow and sad. Those are the overtones for which it strives, and which it magnificently achieves.

Lest the lack of suspense strike one as disappointing, let me emphasize that there are glories to be found here that rival anything in more traditional “crime” pictures – wonders that lie predominantly in the five-star performances by Mitchum, co-stars Peter Boyle, Jordan, Rocco, and others, and in the raw craftsmanship of the picture. Narratively, Monash and Yates drop us into the center of everything and let us figure out the various loyalties, allegiances, and betrayals of the various criminals for ourselves. Razor-sharp sentences, constructed and fitted together as tightly as the gears in a clock, drop proper names right and left – “Artie Van… Scalise… Hollis Trucking… Sauter…” – without ever once pausing for full exposition or explanation of the rich Boston underworld street-slang. But slow it down, or stop and backtrack to retrace the arc of the drama, and every line of dialogue, and the movement of every character, falls exactly into place – a strategy capped by the final scene, which makes virtually the entire narrative structure clear and appallingly simple for us. And at this moment, we suddenly realize that it never seemed this simple when we were enmeshed within the byzantine web of character relationships. In retrospect, the picture’s final “revelation” gives us a firsthand understanding of the chasm of limited knowledge that prevented the naive Coyle from ever attaining a proper perspective about the goings-on and thus wresting control of the circumstances that ensconced him.

Sadly, and for reasons completely unknown to me, The Friends of Eddie Coyle has never received a video issue (on DVD or VHS) and is one of those small masterpieces just crying out for re-release. It aired several years back on Encore’s Mystery Channel, and invariably turns up again from time to time on other pay-cable movie networks. Until Paramount opts to change this situation, fans of Mitchum and of the crime genre per se should be advised to keep their eyes open for one of the film’s periodic broadcasts.

Something of an unofficial companion piece to the equally superb made-for-TV movie Adam, Without a Trace opens on a crisis: a 6-year-old Manhattan boy named Alex Selky embarks on a two-block walk to school one morning and doesn’t come home that afternoon. As his grief-wracked mother, Columbia University professor Susan Selky (Kate Nelligan) joins forces with a NYPD detective named Al Menetti (Judd Hirsch) and begins to exercise the various options in an attempt to locate her little boy, their attempts prove useless and fruitless. Eventually, after months and months with no success, a haunting call from an elderly woman leads Menetti to Connecticut, where Alex turns up, shell-shocked but very much alive, and held at bay in a decrepit house by a grotesque older man who has kidnapped the tyke and used him as a caretaker for his invalid middle-aged sister.

I admired Without a Trace for many reasons, but first and foremost for its mature and intellgent method of approaching a seemingly insurmountable narrative problem that exists whenever the theme of a disappearance is present. For many of us, no event provides greater fascination than a missing person. We’re well aware that countless people vanish into thin air each year, and that a large number are never recovered. Stopping here just for a second – and pushing aside the sad actual fates of many of these people - one’s mind can be left to race through the intriguing array of possibilities as to the final whereabouts of each person. Within a fictional framework, though, this creates a central problem that is almost impossible to solve; set it up at the outset of a drama, and there is virtually no way to avoid letting the proverbial “monster out of the closet” by eventually presenting the audience with a resolution that (whether it breaks one’s heart with calamity or elates one with the joy of a person recovered) is bound to disappoint on some level by simply providing a concrete answer. Avoid providing this answer, and the audience feels cheated. See what I mean? A no-win situation.

One could wax exhaustively on the various attempts that producers have made to work around this, from the weekly narrative renewal of the television series Without a Trace (no relation to the Jaffe film) to the cliff-hanging absurdities of Jonathan Mostow’s thriller Breakdown (1997). Jaffe’s picture opts for the most intelligent and profound route: like Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece L’Avventura (and Lodge Kerrigan’s wonderful Keane), this film begins to concentrate on something far deeper and more interesting than a simple disappearance. Trace evolves into a psychological drama on the various ways in which survivors manage to cope with trauma per se. The body of the picture wisely and maturely shifts its narrative focus away from the actual investigation (never once do we get bogged down in the minutiae of suspects and false leads) and instead explores the emotional landscape that Susan, as the chief survivor of this calamity, must traverse. Jaffe and his screenwriter, Beth Gutcheon, leave intact all of the doubts, uncertainties, recriminations against her semi-estranged husband and others, and seemingly tireless hope that the mother feels, and trust the audience enough to let us explore this territory along with the character as she aggressively searches for answers regarding her son’s fate. In other words, the film as a whole strives for authenticity – and thus wins us over with its credibility, prompting more fluid and ready acceptance of the resolution by the time it arrives. The very best that can be said of this film is that – thanks in no small part to the first-rate performance of Nelligan – we ultimately become so enmeshed in the journey of Susan Selky as a character that the child’s return, immensely satisfying though it may be, begins to seem almost incidental when the closing credits finally appear.

Many perceived the film’s ending as its Achilles’ Heel; critics took the motion picture to pieces for providing a resolution that they perceived as both happy and unrealistic. For these reasons, they argued that the wrap-up ruins everything that precedes it. That reaction strikes me as shallow, sophomoric and naive. In 1983 (the tail end of a dramatic escalation in violence against minors that witnessed many child homicides), the resolution of Without a Trace probably indeed seemed artificial and contrived, but now – in the wake of cases such as the Elizabeth Smart abduction and the media-permeated discussion of Stockholm Syndrome – the film’s denouement attains a thread of social commentary that was hauntingly prescient back in the early ’80s. It still may not be typical for abductees to turn up alive and held captive in kidnappers’ homes, but these cases have clocked in as increasingly common during the past few decades – a realization that absolutely rescues the conclusion from allegations of contrivance. Interestingly, with these real-life cases in mind (recall - for instance - Smart’s assertion that she will be scarred for life by her abduction), I began to rethink the ending of Jaffe’s film and realized that for many families such as the one at the center of this picture, the real tragedy only commences with a child’s homecoming - an insight echoed by the film’s depiction of Alex as emotionally fragile and traumatized when retrieved by the cops. Happy, indeed.