Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Wim Wenders
Star: Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Hunter Carson, Nastassja Kinski

The first time I saw this was, approximately, 1985. At the time, I was a student at Aberdeen University in Scotland, and had not even been to America at that stage. Now, I’ve been living in Phoenix for more than 13 years, which is somewhere in the middle of the two main locations depicted by Wenders – Houston and Los Angeles – and contains elements of both. This may help explain why I appreciated the setting rather more now, Wenders bringing a fresh, European eye to the landscape in which this European is now located, and depicting how the quest for the American dream can turn in to the American nightmare. Even little things, like a scene set at the Cabazon dinosaur roadside attraction, later made famous in PeeWee’s Big Adventure, demonstrate the director’s eye for the different.

Travis Henderson (Stanton) staggers out of the desert and collapses. He’s carrying a business card belong to his brother, Walt (Stockwell), who travels from his Los Angeles home to collect Travis, despite his ongoing effort to keep walking, heading to an initially unknown destination, later revealed to be the city of Paris, Texas, where Travis has a vacant lot. Initially, he won’t even speak to his brother, but as the pair drive back to LA – Travis refusing to fly – he opens up, at least somewhat, though the question of where he has been for the past four years, remains unanswered. He disappeared after he and his wife, Jane (Kinski), had split up, leaving their son, Hunter (Carson), who barely remembers his father, for Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clement) to take care of.

Slowly, Travis reconnects with his son, and tries to remember what it’s like to be a “good father.” Anne reveals to Travis that Jane got her to set up an account for Hunter, and has been depositing money in it on the same day every month, from a bank in Houston. Driven by his new-found sense of paternal responsibility, Travis sweeps up Hunter and drives half-way across the country to stake out the bank, and wait for Jane to arrive. They almost miss her, but are able to trail her to the dubious establishment where she now works, setting up an incendiary and bitter-sweet reunion – or confrontation, it’s hard to be sure.

Having been thoroughly unimpressed with Falsche Bewegung, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sit through the near-140 minute running time here, but it proved more a pleasure than a chore. The main reason is Stanton, who delivers a wonderful and touching performance, taking a tragic and deeply-flawed figure, and imbuing him with almost heroic qualities of self-sacrifice and dogged perseverance.  Stockwell, too, does a very nice job as the dutiful brother: let’s face it, if a sibling dumped a four-year-old on my doorstep, the first call would be to Child Protective Services! Walt certainly goes above and beyond, and it’s a shame he is entirely forgotten for the second half of the film, as the scenes of the brothers’ road-trip were perhaps the ones I liked best, even if not possessing the emotional punch of those between Stanton and Kinski.

Kinski’s role is an odd one: she’s clearly pivotal to the drama, yet you’re a long way in to the film before she makes her first “live” appearance, discounting her scenes in old vacation footage watched by Travis, Hunter, Walt and Anne. Still, her radiant presence there (right) harks back to an earlier time, when she and her husband were genuinely happy. It’s perhaps seeing this which stars Travis on his doomed – perhaps emotionally suicidal – quest for redemption and to be reunited with Jane. But it’s the scenes where they face each other, separated by one-way glass, that pack the real wallop, laying their souls bare to one another, in a way they were unable to when they were actually together. Shot in long, unflinching takes by Wenders, it’s uncomfortable viewing, due to the raw intensity of the feelings being expressed.

Two aspects on the technical side must be mentioned, because they are absolutely integral to the film’s success. The first is cinematographer Robby Müller, who gives the landscape of tarmac and power-lines an almost mystical feel, turning everyday objects into a magical land, which Travis occupies, rather than living in. The other is Ry Cooder’s soundtrack, which almost becomes a character in its own right, and is based on Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground – interesting to note that Wenders would go on to make The Soul of a Man in 2003, a documentary film focusing on Johnson. Here, Cooder’s score does a magnificent job of capturing the loneliness of the long-distance walker that is Travis.

Finally, L.M. Kit Carson, the father of Hunter, took on the task of beating Sam Shepard’s work into shape, after filming had already started. According to Carson, the set-up in place when he took over was radically different:

[Wim] says, “I set up a great mystery at the beginning of this film, and then I explain it.” I said, “Okay, what are you talking about?” So he told me the two scripts that he had from Sam. One was a script where Nastassja [Kinski’s] father was a big Texas oilman like J.R., and he sent his goons, and they beat up Harry Dean [Stanton] and took her and put her in a penthouse in Houston. And the other version of the script was Nastassja’s mother was under the spell of a televangelist, who of course, in the great tradition, ran whorehouses and drug dens. So he sent his goons to beat up Harry Dean, and took Nastassja and put her in a whorehouse. Those are two versions, and how they separate, and how Hunter ended up living with his brother.

I can’t help wondering what might have happened had Wenders filmed those original versions offered up by Shepard. Still, as is, it remains a genuine classic, and if it’s not top of my personal list, you can certainly see why it’s the highest-rated Kinski film on the IMDb. If anyone ever tries to claim Kinski can’t act, this should be Exhibit A in your counter-argument.

Dir: Tony Richardson
Star: Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, Beau Bridges, Nastassja Kinski

“Ms. Kinski’s bear costumes by Richard Tautkus.” That is, I feel fairly confident in saying, a unique credit in cinematic history. However, I can’t say I was too impressed by a film which seems largely like a Hollywood liberal’s wet-dream, nodding its head at the entire gamut of sexual relations, from inter-racial through homosexual to incest. Except rape. For some reason, they draw the line there. I’m still not sure of the era in which the body of the film is supposed to take place. It appears the early stages, where Win Berry (Bridges) marries Mary,  are set before the war, which would make the main section, with the oldest kids in high school… the late fifties or early sixties? Maybe the novel is clearer, but otherwise, it seems a much-more tolerant era than I’d heard.

The focus is on the Berry family and their five kids, mostly on Franny (Foster) and John (Lowe), and the saga as they open one hotel in New England, move to Vienna to open another, then come back to fame and fortune. They go through a series of, frankly, largely implausible escapades, involving everything from terrorists to air-crashes. Irving’s style is often described as “Dickensian,” but I was always much more of a Wilkie Collins fan myself (The Woman in White FTW, bitches!), so you probably have a better handle on what that means than I do. The Berrys seem intent on putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional”; the parents are likely the most well-adjusted, but where’s the interest in a normal, married couple? Hell, even the family dog is affected with perpetual flatulence – oh, hold my aching sides, for this is great literature! The film seems most fascinated by the bundle of neuroses which is Franny, along with her brother, who narrates the movie, and has an interest in his sister which would, under just about any other circumstance, be deemed entirely unhealthy.

What stops it from being entirely unwatchable is the quality of the acting, which is genuinely impressive and turns these (often sex-obsessed) caricatures into something approaching human beings. Even toward the bottom of the cast, there are a lot of people who would go on to achieve fame down the road: Matthew Modine, Joely Richardson, Amanda Plummer, and even a very young Seth Green, as the youngest of the Berry kids. Foster and, perhaps surprisingly, Lowe are both extremely good in their roles, but there is hardly a performance which doesn’t ring truer than the ridiculous characters they’ve been given by the script. Full disclaimer: I haven’t read any Irving, and on the basis of this, won’t exactly be rushing to do so. But I suspect director Richardson may have been too true to the source material, and one senses trimming some of the excess elements might have made for a less over-stuffed movie as an end product. Instead, it seems to tire of some characters and discard them, throwing new ones at the screen instead, before eventually growing bored with them too.

Kinski’s would be a case in point. She doesn’t appear until almost an hour in, playing “Suzie the Bear,” and some backstory is likely necessary first. Early on, we meet Freud, a Jewish entertainer who travels round giving shows with his trained bear. He heads back to Europe, leaving his bear in Win’s custody, but is responsible for bringing the Berrys to Vienna, where he is now blind (blame the Nazis!), and needs help running a hotel. He now has Suzie, an irritable young woman who is convinced she is ugly – pardon me if I give that the snort of derision it richly deserves – and, to avoid having to deal with other humans, spends her life dressed in a bear-suit. Yeah, in other words: the sort of bullshit act only characters in questionable novels actually get to pull off. She’s the focus for a small chunk, forming a brief lesbian relationship with Franny – though their scene in bed is shot so murkily as to be pointless – then heads off to one side, joining the pile of discards in the background. I was, however, taken by the similarity between this and Unfaithfully Yours, both of which have Kinski taking off an animal mask:

Unfaithfully Yours

The Hotel New Hampshire

I find these kinda hypnotic, and am sure that any furry Kinski fetishists will be in raptures for most of her scenes. Not being one myself, I was rather more luke-warm – though as should be clear by this point, that applies to the entire endeavor, rather than just her character. I’ll confess I did keep watching, somewhat engrossed to see what lunacy would be thrown at the screen next, which I guess is the basic tenet of story-telling. That, the acting and Jacques Offenbach’s hummable tunes on the soundtrack were just about enough to make for a palatable hour and three-quarters, though I was also reminded of why this made little or no long-term impression, the first time I saw it, almost 20 years previously.

Here’s the trailer. It doesn’t have much Kinski in it – and most of what there is, is in the bear suit. However, it does actually do a fairly good job at capturing the insanity of what unfolds. Personally, if I want to watch dysfunctional families, I’ll have rather more fun with a marathon of Jerry Springer episodes.

Dir: Howard Zieff
Star: Dudley Moore, Nastassja Kinski, Armand Assante, Albert Brooks

 Conductor Claude Eastman (Moore) appears to have everything you could want: a hugely-successful career and a loving, attractive wife, Daniella (Kinski). However, a slight linguistic mix-up around the term “keep an eye on her”, leads to a private investigator being hired to watch Daniella while Claude is out of town. The PI’s report shows an unknown man, wearing Argyle socks, leaving Claude’s apartment in the middle of the night, triggering a tsunami of paranoia in him, that his young wife is cheating on him? When he sees a colleague, concert violinist Max Stern (Assante) wearing socks, and Daniella apparently confesses the affair to him, he concocts a wild plan to murder the pair of lovers and get away with it. However, he is entirely unaware that it’s all a horrible misunderstanding: yes, Max is indeed having an affair, but it’s not with Daniella, and the assignation just happened in their apartment.

In some ways, this feels like a compilation put together from elements of Kinski’s previous works. Like Cat People, it’s a remake of a forties movie, in this case, a Preston Sturges pic with Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell and Rudy Vallee as the three leads. Like Spring Symphony, Kinski is again hanging out with a classical musician. And like… oh, just about her entire cinematic output thus far, but particularly Stay as you Are, Kinski is again involved with an older man, Moore being more than 25 years her senior. This leads to allegedly comedic references to Daniella being a “child bride,” which have really not stood the test of time very well. [There was something of the same in the original, but the age difference between Harrison and Darnell was rather less, at about 15 years.]

Obviously, this kind of comedic farce requires a certain amount of disbelief suspension, and needs some careful scripting. The writer needs to take successive elements that seem not to unreasonable in isolation, and use those as building blocks, to create a teetering tower of chaotic misinterpretation and subsequent poor decisions. It’s been some time since I’ve seen the original (also written by Sturges), so I can’t say how much of the apparent problem here were also in the original. But I think the point where I finally toppled over into “I’m so sure…” was with Claude’s plan, where we are expected to believe everyone would mistake the 5’3″ Moore for the 5’10” Assante, even wearing a mask, and especially considering that Kinski splits the difference nicely, at 5’7″.

Another major problem – and I do remember this from the original – is that Dudley Moore is much, much less than Rex Harrison. That’s not really intended as a particular slight on Moore, because just about every actor in the history of cinema is much, much less than Harrison, but it’s certainly an area in which the remake doesn’t match its predecessor. Indeed, that’s probably the main issue here: unlike Cat People, which warped its inspiration into a radically different direction, dragging it kicking and screaming from the era in which it was conceived, Unfaithfully Yours is a much more conventional remake. There’s very little here which doesn’t feels like it could easily have been filmed in the forties, leaving the entire exercise feeling rather pointless, except for cashing out on Moore’s unexpected box-office stardom, in the wake of 10 and Arthur.

Not that there aren’t some pleasures to be had here. The music is probably among the best of them: Moore was a very talented keyboard player, winning an organ scholarship to Oxford, and a renowned jazz pianist, so we don’t have to endure any of the “actor waves his hands above the keys” fakery. But Assante is pretty convincing too: I don’t know if he has any skills as a violinist, but he certainly gives that impression. Perhaps the film’s most memorable scenes has Claude and Max engaging in “dueling violins” at a restaurant, initially for Daniella’s attention, before it becomes more personal.  The whole sequence where Claude’s murder plan plays out in his (literal) mind’s eye, backed by what I think is a Tchakovsky violin concerto, is also well-constructed, and in sharp contrast to the much more messy reality which then transpires.

Kinski’s role is certainly pivotal, and it’s easily credible how Claude could be concerned about her fidelity, with Assante providing an alternative nearer her own age (at least by the standards of Kinski’s filmography, he being “only” 11 years her senior!). She’s playing an Italian, and does deliver the sparky intensity the stereotypes would demand from that country. Daniella – and, indeed, Max too – actually comes over as much more likeable than Claude, who turns into a shrieking bag of whining insecurities, for which it’s difficult to find much sympathy. His troubles are almost entirely of his own making, and if the ending does fit in with Daniella’s mercurial character, capable of bouncing from love to hate and back again in the blink of an eye, it still seems far too quick, bolted on for the sake of Hollywood convention, instead of flowing organically from what has gone before.

Indeed, there’s also a sharp change in tone between first and second halves, in terms of the style of humor which they use. The latter is much more slapsticky, with Claude staggering around, trying to put his master murder-plan into operation, only for just about everything conceivable to go horribly wrong. There’s something vaguely reminiscent of Fawlty Towers, not just in the Britishness of the leading man, but in the way he plows on towards his goal, even as its obvious he’s doing nothing but digging himself a deeper hole and causing further carnage, when the sensible thing to do would be to cut your losses and give up. Of course, it’s neither as well-written or performed, and unlike Cat People, this remake leaves me with a strong desire to track down and watch the original, and see if it’s really as superior as I remember it.

Dir: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Star: Gerard Depardieu, Nastassja Kinski, Victoria Abril,  Vittorio Mezzogiorno

We were born in the gutter.
In the water, the stars look at themselves.
— Opening lines

In my mind, Beineix is always linked with Luc Besson, both being French film-makers who burst upon the cinematic scene in the eighties, with the somewhat-similar films Diva and Subway respectively. Besson was the more commercial, and eventually turned into a one-man production factory, writing, producing and occasionally directing slick entertainment. Beineix’s output was more considered, and certainly much less numerous, with only half a dozen narrative features since Diva in 1981. Lune was his second, and demonstrates Beineix’s strong visual sense, though it’s also easy to see why it was a commercial flop. Indeed, when Beineix talked to producing studio Gaumont about releasing a longer cut of the movie, they told him almost all additional footage had been destroyed, seen as having no possible future value.

It’s set in the hellish environment down by the Marseilles docks, where Gerard (Depardieu) works, spending his nights gazing at the spot where his sister committed suicide, following her rape by an unknown assailant. Gerard dreams of finding the person responsible and extracting revenge, until the Channing siblings enter his world from their privileged existence uptown. Newton (Mezzogiorno) slums it, trying to forget his involvement in the car-crash which killed their parents by engaging in bizarre bar-bets with the locals – Gerard wins by eating through a block of ice. Loretta (Kinski) picks her brother up in her vintage Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder – one of the few times Kinski is comprehensively out-classed in the beauty department – but meets Gerard in the same bar, and there’s an instant magnetism. There begins a tempestuous relationship – one which leaves Gerard’s current girlfriend, Bella (Abril), more than somewhat disgruntled.

Beineix’s subsequent Betty Blue was a rather more successful picture of a damaged couple: here, it’s never particularly convincing, with Gerard and Loretta apparently intent on making each other as unhappy as possible. That may be the point, as no-one here seems exactly content: Bella’s insanely jealous of even the most innocent of interactions, to the extent that you can hardly blame Gerard for cheating on her, since he’s going to be accused of doing that anyway. He doesn’t exactly have the greatest of relationship examples around him, with his father stuck in a hellish one with a large, black woman, who berates him from pillar to post. On that basis, you can understand Gerard leaping at anything which offers a lifeline – it’s clear that the “moon” of the title is Loretta, but she is ultimately as unreachable as that satellite, from the gutter in which he lives. This is doomed from the get-go.

While the film never treats any of its characters particularly well, the film is shot through with an almost casual misogyny. Gerard smacks both Bella and Loretta around at various points: rather than telling him to go fuck himself, they both apparently accept it as the price of his company, and a cost they’re willing to pay. Just about every woman depicted in the film is a whore, a shrew, mentally unstable, or some combination of the above. Gerard’s sister is about the sole exception, and she’s dead; I’m not certain which categories cover Loretta. Not that the men come off as paragons of virtue. There isn’t much reason why anyone would want to spend time with them either, and that’s what makes this different from something like A Streercar Named Desire, where Marlon Brando imbued its flawed lead with a noble savagery of emotion.

What does work, and works to excellent effect, is the visual style. While largely disparaged at the time (and rightly so, for it’s certainly overlong, and often painfully dull), it fully deserves the César award it received for Best Production Design, because the hovels and slums are made to look absolutely stunning.  There are a few sequences which have a utter dreamlike quality to them, to a degree that there were times when I was left wondering if the entire thing is intended to be a product of Gerard’s deranged imagination, such as when he and Loretta are driving around the docks in her Ferrari. But it’s cinema as Turner sea-scape: something you might want to hang on your wall, yet not something capable of sustaining your interested for comfortably more than two hours. By the end, it’s hard to see how anyone has truly been changed by their experiences, and there’s a sense you’re right back where you started.

I was surprised to discover that this was not an original story, but based on a book written back in 1953 by American pulp noir author, David Goodis. His version was, unsurprisingly, not located in Marseilles but Philadelphia: the central character’s name was Bill Kerrigan rather than Gerard Delmas, but Beineix retained the name of the heroine, despite it being distinctly non-Gallic. One Amazon review says, “Kerrigan’s world consists of overcrowded tenements, rundown shacks and two-bit bars populated by has beens, never will bes, winos, hookers and derelicts of every description. This is a world completely bereft of hope, a world from which there can be no escape.” Beineix certainly nails that: between this and the similarly-grim Last Exit to Brooklyn, written by Hubert Selby and directed by Uli Edel, it seems downbeat tales of low-life love and loss have a certain resonance with European film-makers.

“Try another world” says the billboard (above), situated opposite Gerard’s home, in a particularly unsubtle bit of self-fulfilling commentary – in Beineix’s defense, it is in English, which likely makes it stand out more to non-French viewers. I guess the moral here is, just as advertising is not always truthful, the world you strive to reach might prove to be as ultimately unsatisfying as this one. That hardly feels much of a worthwhile revelation, personally, and perhaps I dare only whisper it, but Gaumont’s loss of the additional footage is probably no bad thing. The prospect of sitting through a reported four-hour version of this, would likely have me gnawing off a limb to escape.

Dir: James Toback
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Rudolf Nureyev, Harvey Keitel, Ian McShane

The Western world is breaking down. Socially, politically, economically, morally, aesthetically and psychologically. Really, if you look into your own lives there are only two routes of escape from this dark claustrophobic trap: art and romantic love. In the novel you are supposed to read by Monday, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe through his art reveals not only the ecstasy of romantic love but also the doomed consequences that necessarily follow. Driven by his excruciating passion to the brink of suicide, Werther, the novel’s hero, says to Charlotte: “Your hands have grasped these pistols, you have wiped them for me, those hands from which I’ve longed wish to receive my fate.” This language is straight from the German romantic tradition of the 19th Century, but the sensibility is of our time. As Leslie Fiedler writing about Werther comments: “Here is the final twist, the theme of the redeeming maiden, woman who was the angel of redemption becomes the angel of death. But for Werther, death is redemption. The only salvation he can use.”

That indigestible gob of exposition – delivered by writer/director/producer Toback himself, no less, in his role as an English literature professor – opens the film, and it’s soon painfully obvious that those are the themes which will be explored over the next 95 minutes. You’d be better off saving yourself the bother, and sticking with the Cliff Notes version above, rather than enduring this remarkably non-thrilling thriller, which should be Exhibit A for any film-maker who thinks it’s a good idea to wear as many hats as Toback. For the odds are, if someone else had been producing or directing this, rather than the writer, the massive flaws in both central aspects of the story, would have been noticed and addressed. Instead, producer Toback signed off on writer Toback’s script, and director Toback then assiduously committed the idiotic concepts it enshrines to celluloid. There was, apparently, no-one involved with the production, who was capable of raising their hand to go, “Hang on a minute…”

We’re neck-deep in “Kinski + older men” territory here; the three with whom her character is involved are played by actors who average 20 years her senior. The first is the professor mentioned above, Leo Boscovich, who basically stalks student Elizabeth Carlson (Kinski) out of college and back to the Wisconsin farm where she tells her parents she’s going to head to New York. On arriving, she soon gets treated to the scummier side of the city, being robbed on arrival, but things take a turn for the better when she’s discovered by photographer Greg Miller (McShane), while working as a waitress in a cocktail bar – sorry, my inner Human League escaped for a moment.  One quick montage later, she’s a top supermodel, whizzing all over the world. However, she is also being stalked again, this time by Daniel Jelline (Nureyev), a violinist who eventually tells her he is hunting a terrorist called Rivas (Keitel). Rivas is obsessed with Carlson, and Jelline wants to use the model as a lure, to bring the international criminal to justice.

One of the IMDB reviews is headlined “Nastassia Kinski: Super Model/Terrorist Hunter,” and damn, I’d watch that film in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that falls into the category of technically correct, but wrong on all the important details; in particular, the ludicrous way in which things unfold. The first main issues is the Elizabeth/Daniel relationship. Apparently, the way to a supermodel’s heart is to babble surreal nonsense at her, then walk away, followed by breaking into her apartment. That’ll hook her. Then, you leave incriminating documents around your apartment, fabricate an entirely fictitious backstory, because a relationship built on one-sided dishonesty can’t possibly fail? You’ll soon be running your violin bow all over her body. No, that’s not a euphemism for a body part: as shown on the left, one scene has Nureyev literally playing Kinski like a Stradivarius. I can only presume it looked better in the script.

Equally as daft is Elizabeth’s infiltration of the terrorist cell. Coincidentally, we watched an episode of Homeland immediately after, which has a rather more credible depiction of the uber-paranoid nature of terrorist cells. I dunno, this was the eighties, maybe that came with kinder, gentler terrorists as well as big hair. That seems the only conclusion, because it only takes our heroine a 15-minute chat and a McDonald’s value meal before she’s being led straight to the group’s hideout, where Rivas is planning a massive atrocity. What does he want? Well, Toback covers that as well, with a speech, which might have sounded better if you think of it being delivered by Dennis Leary, in the style of Demolition Man: “I’ll tell you what I want. Good food. Women. Good cigars. Good beds with fresh sheets. Hot showers in Hilton Hotels. New shoes, poker, blackjack, dancing. Clint Eastwood westerns. That’s what I want. And you.”

Eventually, Elizabeth leads her two lovers to face each other, leading to a chase past various Paris landmarks, and through remarkably-empty streets (no, really: I’ve been there, many times, and this might possibly be the least-plausible part of the entire movie), before a shootout by the Seine. If you want to figure out how everything ends, go back and re-read the opening quote again, because the movie basically spoilers itself at the beginning. It’s a shame it finished, because I would love to be a fly on the wall when Elizabeth tries to explain everything that happened to the French police. Maybe Toback was saving that for the sequel, Exposed 2: Supermodel in Jail. Heck, I’d certainly have been up for watching that, and Kinski could have used her experience from juvenile jail as a 15-year-old.

You might have been able to tell, but I didn’t enjoy this one very much. The main issue is the script; it appears to know as little about women, as it does about international terrorism: it might have helped if Elizabeth had been given a personal reason to take down Rivas, rather than the hand-me-down revenge providing motivation. But it’s not helped by Nureyev’s performance, which is stilted and entirely unconvincing. He seems to have realized these deficiencies, too, because he hasn’t appeared in another movie since, ending a career which started – and, to be honest, peaked – with his title role in Ken Russell’s Valentino. Keitel starred in Toback’s directorial debut, Fingers, five years earlier, and is his usual reliable self; it’s possible to see why the members of his gang are so committed to him, and he possesses the cold ruthlessness necessary for the role.

Kinski, however, is as worth watching as ever, and the film certainly works best when the focus is on her. There’s an early scene where she’s playing the piano to try and get a job, and she’s forgotten none of the training needed for Spring Symphony. Later on, alone in her apartment, Elizabeth is dancing around to the original version of The Shopp Shoop Song by Betty Everett – she’s a fan of that era’s music – and the unfettered joy that comes across is enough to drive from your brain, all thoughts of Cher’s shitty cover and the execrable Mermaids which included it. While I certainly can’t agree with Jeremy Richey’s assessment of the movie, where he calls it “close to being a major masterpiece,” and an incredibly inventive film,” I do concur there are numerous aspects of the character she plays, that must have resonated with Nastassja, such as a controlling father. He also points out “the near disgusted and exhausted look” Kinski gives when someone compares Elizabeth to Garbo, Lombard and Monroe. To me, it seemed to be her thinking, “Not that shit again…“ Ah, the perils of being beautiful. I’ll finish with a quote from Greg Miller’s character, along the same lines:

Different clothes, different looks, different selves – you thought you knew who you were. Now? You’re not so sure- everybody else is intrigued. Men inventing fantasies about your eyes, your hair, your month, your skin, dreaming about what it’s like to touch you. Women, posing in front of mirrors, thinking what it’s like to be you. And you, saying to yourself, “What do they see? What do they see. What do they see…”

Dir: Paul Schrader
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole

“Paul, I always fuck my directors. And with you, it was hard.”
— Nastassja Kinski, quoted in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

This will likely be one of the longer entries, because there is so much which can be said about the film: like One From the Heart, its making was an ordeal for many of those involved, and it fared badly at the American box-office. However, time has likely been kinder to this, and critical opinion these days seems more in line with the view expressed by Roger Ebert at the time, when he called it, “a good movie in an old tradition, a fantasy-horror film that takes itself just seriously enough to work,” and that Kinski “never overacts in this movie, never steps wrong, never seems ridiculous; she just steps onscreen and convincingly underplays a leopard.”

It is, of course, a remake of the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur film of the same name from the forties. At the time, it was a B-feature for RKO, but has since become regarded as a classic of the genre of understated, lurking horror, that relies on the viewer’s imagination rather than explicit imagery. Of course, a good chunk of that was less conscious choice than simply a product of a much stricter era, with the Hays Code severely limiting what could or could not be shown. However, there’s no denying it was a well-made piece of cinema – though, personally, I prefer Curse of the Cat People for some reason.

My philosophy of remakes is that Hollywood often gets it wrong, because they remake good films, rather than those where there is room for improvement, or where the remakers can bring something new and interesting to the table. For me, the best is probably David Cronenberg’s The Fly, which does both: technically, FX had improved enough to do the concept justice, and Cronenberg brought in a lot of his own sensibilities, with the “body horror” elements for which he was renowned. Another good example is The Thing, which was part of the same desire by Universal to mine their back-catalogue of films. Again, the technical aspects had caught up with the story, and the paranoia John Carpenter added was a great additional dimension.

I’d rate Paul Schrader’s Cat People up there alongside those two. The transformations which were decades in the future for the original could now be shown, even if the work is still short of Rick Baker’s the previous year from American Werewolf. This version takes all the sexual tension that could only be hinted at vaguely in the original, and drags it right out into the open as what Schrader calls a “perverse love story” rather than a horror film. Perverse is certainly the word: between the bestiality, incest and bondage, there is hardly a kink not covered. But it’s also the epitome of the “have sex and die” film: having sex with Kinski will kill you. That could be seen as an early parable for AIDS (first officially acknowledged in LA’s gay community the previous year), but the heavy emphasis on sexuality’s destructive aspects is more likely an offshoot of Schrader’s strict religious upbringing – he didn’t see a film until he was 17. It would have been an interesting contrast to see what the originally-intended director. Roger Vadim, might have done with the material.

This lack of teenage rebellion perhaps explains what could be described as Schrader’s mid-life crisis in the early 80’s. I recall reading somewhere [but can’t locate the source] that he took cocaine virtually every day during the shoot, and then there was also his affair with his leading actress. Somehow, he ended up proposing marriage both to her and his long-term partner, Michelle Rappaport. Kinski broke off the relationship near the end of shooting: he followed her to Paris, where she delivered the devastating burn at the top of this article. As revenge, Schrader threatened to include more full-frontal footage in her in the film, causing Nastassja to run to studio exec Ned Tanen in tears. It wasn’t a tidy break-up.

“It’s not a remake in any fashion, at this point. I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to compare the two films, except indirectly. A remake implies that you’re redoing what has already been done. This Cat People is an update, which means I’m putting the story into a new context.”
— Schrader in Cinefantastique, Vol. 12, No. 4

Listening to Schrader’s commentary on the DVD, he regrets giving it the same title as the original, feeling this burdened the film with too many false expectations – as the above quote makes clear, he doesn’t feel it’s truly a remake at all. Though it has to be said, if he felt that way, then perhaps he shouldn’t have included wholesale, a couple of the most iconic scenes, such as where O’Toole’s character is stalked, first through the city streets, and then in a swimming pool, by Kinski’s jealous were-panther. Or where a woman goes up to Kinski, and greets her as “Mi hermana” – “my sister.” Avoiding those kind of things entirely, could have helped the film establish itself as a truly independent creation, rather than one tied on to the coat-tails of its predecessor.

He does have a point, for the new version is radically different, in a number of ways. The love triangle becomes a love quadrilateral, with Paul (McDowell) bringing his sister Irena (Kinski) to him, completely unaware that her true nature is the same as his. Specifically, whenever they have sex, they change shape, becoming panthers, and the only way to regain human form is to kill someone – typically the person they just had sex with. Before she discovers this, she meets Oliver Yates (Heard), a keeper at the local zoo; their blossoming relationship is a threat not just to Paul’s plans, but to Oliver’s current girlfriend, Alice (O’Toole). When Irena finds out the truth, the cat is certainly let out of the bag.

The film also shifts the setting from New York to New Orleans, which seems a lot more appropriate. The Big Easy is perhaps the most alien of American cities. In many ways, it feels more European than American, and the history of voodoo gives a sense that anything is possible. Schrader, working from a script by Alan Ormsby, also expands the mythos beyond the singular cat person of the original, creating an entire race, apparently originating out of India, with their own back-story. It’s this mythic quality that is among the film’s strongest suits. The original Irena felt more like a woman with a unique problem, rather than one member of a race living below the notice of normal humanity. There was originally more of this, with a sequence where Irena spoke to a half-panther/half-woman (played by her real mother, Bridgit Kinski), cut from the finished film.

You can also see elements of the Dante & Beatrice story in the Oliver/Irena relationship, which can never be happily consummated. This is explicitly referenced in a bust of Beatrice, and the poem by Dante which Oliver is reading just before he meets Irena, and the character does seem, to a certain extent, to be a projection of Schrader’s character: a shy intellectual, who distances himself from the human world, until he finds someone to whom he is prepared to commit whole-heartedly. There’s an oddly-pointless scene on the bus where a man – looking not dissimilar to the director – stares at Irena, and I note the presence on Oliver’s bedside of a book of poems by Yukio Mishima. Schrader would subsequently go on to direct a biographical feature about the Japanese writer and nationalist.

“She had to be beautiful in a nonregional, non-specific way. She had to be ethereal. She had to be totally credible as a virgin, because it is crucial to the piece, not just a plot point. She had to be twenty or able to play girlish. She had to be willing to do nudity, and she had to be able to act. Now that was a real fistful of qualifications. We looked at a lot of people, but there was never anyone else who hit six for six.”
— Schrader in American Film, April 1982.

Another strength comes from McDowell and Kinski as the leads. Both are incredibly feline, in both looks and action, and it’s impeccable casting. Witness Irena springing to her haunches on the bed, when her brothers startles her by crashing through the window, or McDowell patting the bed to encourage her to join him there. It’s little moments like that which succeed in convincing you they are capable of turning into panthers [as an aside, the animals used in the movie were actually a mix of the genuine thing, with leopards and mountain lions dyed black!]. Kinski has a raw, untapped sensuality, and it’s easy to see why the film arranged its production schedule around her availability: “No-one else came close,” said Schrader. As her brother, McDowell exemplifies the dark side, possessing a natural cruelness, like a cat that toys with a mouse rather than killing it, because it genuinely doesn’t know any better.

On the technical side, the two aspects which particularly stand out are the design and the soundtrack. The former is largely the work of Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who was credited as a “visual consultant,” for union-related reasons, but basically oversaw every aspect of the look and feel of the movie. It’s truly a treat for the eyeballs, with a marvellous palate of colours, and it’s easy to see why Scarfiotti would eventually go on to win a Best Art Direction Oscar, for The Last Emperor. Giorgio Moroder’s synth-driven music is also perfect – and one of the few soundtracks I will listen to, entirely separate from the movie, peaking with David Bowie’s title song. It’s fitting, as there are some overlaps between this movie and The Hunger, both sharing the elements of sex, death and Bowie.

It’s not a perfect movie, by any means. There are logical flaws: when Alice is being menaced in the pool, it’s implied that it’s by Irena in panther form. However, that would imply she both had sex with someone, and then killed, to return to her human form, and there’s no evidence presented for either. “Look, this is a fantasy film,” an apparently-grumpy Schrader told Cinefantastique when questioned about it. “If you really need an explanation, it’s Kinski making cat sounds.” Okay… The pacing is also odd, the main antagonist departing the film with half an hour left, and taking with him a large part of the dramatic impetus. As noted, the transformation scenes haven’t stood the test of time well, and Schrader’s use of reverse-motion (partly a homage to Jean Cocteau) works with what could kindly be called variable success.

The audience definitely didn’t respond well: at the US box office, it recouped only about one-third of its production costs, and Schrader’s career never really recovered. There was another high-profile failure when his Exorcist prequel was entirely re-shot by Renny Harlin, and he was last seen funding a project starring Lindsay Lohan on Kickstarter, which went about as well as you would expect. Still, the bottom line is that Schrader dared to do something different: even now, over 30 years later, there still hasn’t been another film quite like it, and for all its flaws, can only be admired as such.

“The day it opened at the Avco Theater on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, Jerry Bruckheimer and I went to the first evening screening and we sat in the back – there were a couple of teenage girls in front of us. When it came to the bondage scene, when Oliver is tying the naked Irena to the bed, so that he can screw her back into being a leopard, and David Bowie is singing all this primitive religious music, one girl turned to the other, put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, my God…” And I turned to Jerry and said, “I think maybe we went too far…” I love the fact that we went too far.”
— Schrader, on the DVD commentary