Suburban snow job

Spoiler alert. Some of the key plot elements of Snowtown are discussed here.

Success comes in the most unlikely places. I saw Snowtown just after it got a rave review in the Adelaide Advertiser and was announced as the winner of the audience popularity award at the Adelaide Film Festival. Wiser heads from outside the jurisdiction told me to ignore this home town bias. So as the film about the bodies in the barrels in the bank screened in a Sydney preview theatre, I squirmed with the rest of the audience during its slow revelations of paedophilia, murder and a few other unpopular human activities and felt distinctly uncomfortable in its most brutal sequence, a long torture/killing during which the young man at the centre of the film finally joins in the mayhem. I kept wondering who would want to put themselves through the unedifying ordeal of watching this movie and indeed paying to be put through it.

I found it interesting that the film-makers were concerned to show their social and community concern and the press book, which a friend passed on to me, set out in detail not merely how the production had been informed by consultations with the community to ensure respect but also by casting locals in many of the parts including key roles. The mother and the son were both amateurs who were spotted somewhere in the vicinity. Earnestness of intention was manifest.

Added to that, there are two sequences during the film where the locals sit around drinking, swearing and discussing things and they focus on what should be done to homosexuals, paedophiles and other social undesirables to rid the community of them once and for all. In the second of these discussions the smiling visage of the protagonist serial killer is a smirking, slightly superior presence, goading and provoking those in attendance to be ever more explicit about their desires to take revenge and inflict physical punishment on perceived miscreants. They are scenes where the roots of frustration, ignorance and a predilection for violent solutions are unearthed among the working and under classes of the suburbs. They are I suppose also an explanation as to why there was no great community outrage at any mysterious or unexplained disappearance of gays and others from that local community. I suspect that any locals seeing the film might take exception to this portrayal of callousness and indifference arising from their homophobia.

It’s a rich mix as they say and not without its detractors. I saw one tirade against the film delivered by some fresh-faced ranting know all on morning television. The know all did make one point however in wondering why the film had not been classified R. I thought that it warranted that as well though I have for decades been told that I am a fuddy duddy where it comes to matters like watching a few fingernails prised from their sockets.

But the surprise to me is that Snowtown has opened to very good business indeed. This may be partly explained by the mostly very supportive reviews it has received and its prize at Cannes, described in a press release by the film’s publicist as the “President of the Jury Special Award Grand Prix 2011 Critics' Week”. The first weekend screen averages on its 16 screens were over $10 grand. It might rake in a million or more if it keeps going at that rate.

DVD Dialogue - You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, USA, 1936)

So why this film to kick off a new series?

A series? Hmm. We’ll see how far the enthusiasm of the new year lasts.

As a DVD it does several things brilliantly. The copy is superb. The film is a Walter Wanger production and without knowing exactly what’s happened there seem to a lot of Wanger’s productions being circulated in very poor copies. The bootleggers have had a field day issuing his films in cheap editions using very poor material. For years there were copies of Algiers and Scarlet Street being offered cheap but the copies were terrible. Even SBS played a copies of those films that were very poor indeed. I think Wanger’s productions may have gone out of copyright and anyone could put them out. The only problem was that the material available, which needless to say wasn’t being supplied by the legitimate heirs and successors of Wanger’s immensely high quality output, was in very poor shape. So it’s a pleasure to see that Universal has been putting Wanger’s productions out on DVD using material clearly close to the original negative.

As well the single extra on the film is magnificent. So credit where it’s due.

Was it a Wanger project or Fritz Lang’s?

Well according to David Thomson, it arose when Wanger and Sylvia Sidney bumped into Theodore Dreiser who said he was writing a piece about Bonnie and Clyde. Dreiser said it would make a great movie and Sylvia a great Bonnie Parker. After they had a script, Sidney suggested Lang. She had just been in his first American film Fury (1936) and no doubt saw him as perfect for the task of making a movie about a guy hit with the full force of the law for something he hadn’t done. The Bonnie and Clyde aspects got played right down. Henry Fonda, always brilliant playing troubled, virtuous men, is an ex-con trying to go straight but defeated at every turn. A decision, prompted by an excited new wife, to go house-hunting instead of turning up for work on time proves a fateful moment. Then there is the long elaboration of a robbery and its aftermath for which Fonda’s Eddie Taylor gets the blame. The sequence involving a pair of eyes looking through a gap in a car windshield in pouring rain, the attack using tear gas, the single unknown man who drives the armoured car away and the heard but not seen accident, is magnificent.

One of Lang’s best films?

Absolutely.

What about this single extra?

It’s a piece in which Claude Chabrol, all of 70+ plus, looks at the film on a viewer and analyses Lang’s film-making skills with quite remarkable perception. Chabrol is also interviewed and these sequences and bits and pieces of illustrative material from the film are incorporated into a very fine piece of film criticism. Whatever you thought you knew about You Only Live Once you know a whole lot more after seeing this. Chabrol has this fascination with Lang’s staging that enables you to get much additional meaning and much greater appreciation of Lang’s skills. This would not have been an expensive film. Most of it, even the outdoor post robbery and flight sequences are done in the studio or with back projection.

Chabrol’s analysis is most acute. There is even one lateral tracking shot, when Eddie is being escorted towards Death Row and is flanked by a guard and by the kindly priest Father Dolan where Chabrol notes how the camera loses the characters from the middle of the frame. He is perplexed as to why the shot is there in this fashion as he doesn’t concede that the clumsy look is intentional. This is film criticism of a very high order and, as I guess as I have been saying for ever, the opportunity that DVD has opened up for new methods and techniques of criticism has added immensely to the sum of our knowledge and broadened the way we can actually dissect films.

Chabrol was once a critic and has no doubt retained these skills.

Yes. Mind you very few film-makers outside that small coterie of French critics cum film-makers, mostly from the fifties and sixties, have ever had these dual skills capable of closely-argued and rigorous analysis and fine film-making. Maybe Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich qualify. Hasn’t been anyone else who has come to film-making from these roots for decades.

Chabrol actually made a film that seemed to be a homage to Lang’s Mabuse character?

Indeed. I think it was called Doctor M. I may be one of the few in the world to have seen, it at a market screening at a festival in the early 90s. The less said the better I’m afraid. Chabrol is a true inheritor of Lang’s legacy. As an imitator he failed.