Many more action scenes. Cars explode. Cars are shot at. Cars land in trees. They fall out of trees. Remember those old serials where someone got killed at the end of an installment, but at the beginning of the next installment you see them leap quickly to safety? That trick is played three times in this movie. Whenever anyone gets blowed up real good, you wait serenely for the instant replay.
I guess you could laugh at this. You would have to be seriously alienated from normal human values and be nursing a deep-seated anger against movies that make you think even a little, but you could laugh.
Birds in Peru
(Directed by Romain Gary; starring Jean Seberg; 1969)
Oh yes, she has a lovely face. When the camera moves close and Jean Seberg arches that magnificent neck and looks into the middle distance and her lips part slightly . . . yes, Preminger knew what he was doing when he cast her as Joan of Arc.
So, yes, she has a lovely face. We see it for minutes on end in Birds in Peru. Looking up at us, down at us, away, in profile, turning toward, blank, fearful, seductive, nihilistic. It would almost seem that the face was Romain Gary’s reason for making the movie. So that with a camera he could worship the face of his wife. Alas, Gary and Miss Seberg did not get on well while the movie was being made, and shortly afterward there was a divorce. Ah.
The story goes that Gary wanted to direct this movie because he was so displeased by the two previous movies made from his books: Lady L and Roots of Heaven. Those were stinkers, yes. So Gary took his short story Birds in Peru and directed it himself this time. Now there are three stinkers made from his work.
His story involves a frigid beauty (Miss Seberg) who arrives in Peru in the midst of a round-the-world trip in search of fulfillment. She is accompanied by her husband and his chauffeur, who complete a masochistic ménage à trois. The morning after the carnival, we find her on a beach with the bodies (some dead, some alive) of the lovers who tried and failed last night. She wanders away in shock. Arrives at a bordello on the seashore. Makes love with the madam and one of her customers. Wanders away again. Meets a sensitive young artist. Waits with him for her husband and the chauffeur to arrive. When they do, they will kill her. Then the chauffeur has instructions to kill the husband. There is a houseboy involved, too, whose function is to look startled and run about.
This material could have been made into an interesting movie. What was needed was a sense of pace, less impersonal dialogue, and an end to artistic game-playing. In short, it would have worked as a movie but it doesn’t work as a photographed literary idea.
Gary holds his close-ups much too long, especially in the case of Miss Seberg; instead of providing dramatic impact and pacing, they drag the movie to a halt. Gary doesn’t like to move his camera much, either; his ideas of composing a scene are painfully elementary. Shots on the beach are invariably photographed by arranging his actors in a geometric pattern and having them march dreamily ahead.
The beach photography, by the way, was apparently meant to be surrealistic. We get long vistas of barren beach, with figures here and there in the landscape, old Peruvian masks and feathers and dying birds stuck in the sand, and strange rocks on the horizon, as if this were a Salvador Dali retrospective. But none of it works. The movie doesn’t grow. The characters drift through their vacuum. Rarely has so much pretension created so much waste.
But there is one, and only one, good cinematic moment. The woman and the artist are alone in the cabin. They embrace each other. Then they hear a strange sound: tap-tap . . . tap-tap . . . two quick taps, silence, two quick taps again. They look up. It is the chauffeur, come to murder them, impatiently tapping his foot.
The Blue Iguana
(Directed by John Lafia; starring Dylan McDermott, Jessica Harper, Dean Stockwell; 1988)
The Blue Iguana is as close to a no-brainer as you can get, and still have anything left on the screen at all. It’s a smart-aleck parody of private-eye movies, but it knows as little about private eyes as it does about parodies and movies. It’s the kind of experience where you sit in stunned silence, looking at the screen, knowing that even the actors can hardly be blamed, since if they had been allowed to improvise almost anything that came into their heads, it would have been better than the dialogue they’ve been given.
Horrible movies like this sometimes have a chance of working, in a perverse way, if they bring energy and style to the screen. We will never know, alas, whether energy and style could have saved this one. It’s an expensive professional version of the kind of inane spoofs that college students sometimes try to shoot on video—movies where the big thrill is seeing your pals in costume. The movie’s so bad, there isn’t even anyone in it who knows how to smoke. The hero, a private eye named Vince (Dylan McDermott), plays every scene with an unfiltered cigarette stuck in his mouth, and yet he doesn’t come across as a chain-smoker, he comes across as a nonsmoker who detests having this smelly thing under his nose.
Vince is broke, and so he accepts an assignment from the IRS, which wants him to travel to Diablo, a mythical Central American republic where a dragon lady (Jessica Harper) launders crooked money in her bank. The other players in this banana republic (none of them apparently Latinos) include James Russo as Reno, the local hoodlum, and Pamela Gidley as Dakota, who runs the saloon. The IRS agents, who follow Vince south, are played by Dean Stockwell, wearing thick glasses and a neck brace, and Tovah Feldshuh, who has evidently been spending a lot of time pumping iron lately and wants us to know it.
What happens in Diablo will be familiar to any regular viewer of the late movie on the cable station from hell. You know the one. That mystery station on your cable service that seems to show up in the unassigned gaps between the regular channels. The one with no name, no IDs, no number, and no call letters, that always seems to be showing movies that apparently do not exist. In those movies, as in this one, people drive around in old cars, shoot at each other, and say things like “I’ve got fifteen men out there!” The plots always involve coffins full of foreign currency, guys with mustaches, women with garter belts, and a voice-over narration in which the hero does a cynical whine.
I have no idea why this movie was made. I have no notions of what the actors in it thought they were doing. I have no clues as to whether the writer-director, John Lafia, thought it was funny. I do not know why Paramount released it. I do know that they say if an iguana loses its tail, it can grow another one. I do not know, however, if that is true. Wouldn’t you think that in a movie named The Blue Iguana, in which nothing of interest happens for ninety minutes, they’d at least answer a few fundamental questions about iguanas? But the only iguana in this movie is a cigarette lighter.
Blue Velvet
(Directed by David Lynch; starring Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper; 1986)
Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it’s easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what’s wrong with the movie. They’re so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest, and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that’s marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it’s all part of a campy in-joke.