Little White Lies - 11.2019 - 12.2019

088 REVIEW

ccidental connections between movies arrange themselves all the

time. Model Shop, Jacques Demy’s first and only major motion

picture for a Hollywood studio, seems to function as the crest of a wave

representing that era’s consternation with, among other things, America’s

deadly occupation in Vietnam. Not long afterward, movies would begin

showing the boys coming home, and two very different films from the

early 1970s, George A Romero’s There’s Always Vanilla and Bob Clark’s

Deathdream, teased, via cosmic kinship, two possible fates for Demy’s lean,

happy-go-lucky, sun-dappled loser George Matthews (Gary Lockwood):

one a continuation of carefree, borrowed time, the other... not so much.

Yet, regardless of George’s sunny temperamentand reluctance to take life

too seriously, the spectre of death, entropy and lost time remains.

Lockwood’s near-destitute ne’er-do-well is fully invested in the Pacific

coast ideal, that if you ask for very little, and you just let the winds and waves

take you where you need to go, you won’t have to foot the bill. America has

other plans – the draft board is getting ready to punch his ticket – but in

the meantime George indulges in a bout of conspicuous consumption,

driving a dreamy convertible that’s due for repossession and spending

borrowed cash to make time with a photographic model (Anouk Aimée),

at first under a professional pretext, then hoping for something more.

As Kubrick had the year before, pairing him with an equally, humorously

indistinct Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Demy makes a virtue

of Van Nuys native Lockwood’s Bressonian blankness – although his

Californian-ness intimates a cornfed, midwestern undercurrent; Aimée’s

more classical, pre-method super-charisma cannot be diluted and Demy

knows he’d be a fool to try. JAIME CHRISTLEY

n some ways the inverse of John Ford’s longevity and abundance, the

directorial output of Sergio Leone is comparatively dense and brief;

its peaks scarcely covered two decades and a pair of (circumstantial,

one could say post facto) trilogies. This 1971 film is almost never

mentioned when discussing the hit parade that stretches between A

Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in America, but it’s not for a

lack of his strengths: an eccentric, iconic Ennio Morricone score that

breathes life even into the bankrupt term, “iconic”, a great, pungent

sense of humor that will transition (with miraculous seamlessness) to

operatic gravity, and an extraordinary control of complicated human

movements against a large landscape, all the while remaining mindful

of the twisting narrative machinery that binds his musical cornucopia

of hoodlums, bastards, and killers.

Perhaps there’s something about A Fistful of Dynamite that doesn’t

court classic-making as conspicuously as the movies that comprise the

“Dollars” trilogy or Once Upon a Time in the West. (An alternate title used

for home video was Once Upon a Time... Revolution.) Perhaps qualifying

with “Actually, Rod Steiger is not too bad, considering ” is not getting the

better bargain when the role is more or less bedeviled by the absence of

Eli Wallach. Perhaps Steiger and James Coburn – whose salt-of-the-

earth manner was never for a moment mannered – don’t an iconic duo

make. Regardless of all these things, A Fistful of Dynamite feels so much

stronger, meaner, and more entertaining than its veil of obscurity

would indicate. It’s the kind of movie that always seems primed to be

discovered – to be one’s own discovery, one’s own Sergio Leone picture.

JAIME CHRISTLEY

Model Shop A Fistful of Dynamite

Directed by 1969

JACQUES DEMY

Starring

ANOUK AIMÉE

GARY LOCKWOOD

ALEXANDRA HAY

Released 2 DEC

Blu-ray

AI

Directed by

SERGIO LEONE

Starring

ROD STEIGER

JAMES COBURN

ROMOLO VALLI

Released 25 NOV

Blu-ray

1971