Street of No Return (1989)

STREET OF NO RETURN  (1989)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Keith Carradine, Valentina Vargas, Bill Duke,

    Andréa Ferréol, Bernard Fresson, Marc DeJonge

Samuel Fuller's first rule of filmmaking was characteristically blunt: "If the first page of the script doesn't give you a hard-on, throw the goddamn thing away." Fuller viewed America as a human zoo and believed violence and racism were an inextricable part of it, no matter how much he or anybody else wished it were otherwise. "Street of No Return" plays into all of that, with a story about a womanizing pop star (Keith Carradine) who gets his throat slashed for fooling around with a gangster's girlfriend and ends up an alcoholic bum. Its opening sequence is a race riot. Its first shot is a close-up of a black man getting hit in the face with a hammer. Carradine's a witness, watching from an alley off the street, but more interested in what might be left in the broken whiskey bottles that are lying around than the rival gangs of thugs manically stomping and stabbing each other. The cops clear the riot and the bum gets arrested, triggering a chain of events that could lead to redemption (not that Carradine has any hope of that) and maybe even a chance to settle an old score. The setting's an unnamed American city, but the movie was shot on the cheap in Portugal, which gives it an otherwordly edge. It comes at you like a set of brass knuckles, but there's artistry in every frame. Fuller does a cameo as the police commissioner. (You only hear his voice and see his silhouette.) In an eye-catching music video segment, the gangster's girlfriend, played by Valentina Vargas, appears as Lady Godiva. This barely got released anywhere and video copies can be hard to find, but it's vintage Sam Fuller, and that's as good as half-crazed, hard-boiled pulp moviemaking gets. 

The Hit List: Keith Carradine

    By most accounts, John Carradine acted in more movies than any other actor in history. Over 500, give or take a few. Son David probably came closer to A-list stardom, thanks to television's "Kung Fu". But without getting quite as much mass-market attention, David's younger brother Keith could be the Carradine who ends up with the most substantial career, if he's not there already. 

    Working a lot with Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph in the '70s and '80s, Keith had great casting luck and an extended run playing shifty, enigmatic characters - artists and drifters and outlaws - guys you wanted to like but knew you couldn't trust. It's hard to imagine some of Rudolph's movies without him. 

    Over the years, he's rarely stopped working. He played Will Rogers on Broadway and got a Tony nomination. He continues to act in films, on stage and on TV. He's in his 60s now, and being a Carradine, seems likely to stick around and keep turning up in stuff roughly forever.

    If you're browsing through the video store, looking for a Keith Carradine movie, keep an eye out for these:

"Thieves Like Us"  (1974/Robert Altman)

Carradine plays a bank robber and Shelley Duvall's his girlfriend in a Depression-era take on "Romeo and Juliet".

"Nashville"  (1975/Robert Altman)

Keith sings his Oscar-winning song, "I'm Easy", while the camera zeroes in on the four women his character has most recently slept with. 

"The Duellists"  (1977/Ridley Scott)

Keith and Harvey Keitel duel their way through the Napoleonic Wars.

"Welcome To L.A."  (1977/Alan Rudolph)

Carradine's a songwriter in Rudolph's ensemble piece about the art of selling out in "the city of the fallen angels."

"Pretty Baby"  (1978/Louis Malle)

In Louis Malle's controversial period piece, Carradine plays the photographer E. J. Bellocq, with Susan Sarandon and an underaged Brooke Shields as  prostitutes.

"The Long Riders"  (1980/Walter Hill)

The James Gang rides again, with the Carradines - David, Keith and Robert - as the Younger brothers.

"Southern Comfort"  (1981/Walter Hill)

Carradine and some National Guard buddies go out in the woods too far.

"Choose Me"  (1984/Alan Rudolph)

What if you met the world's sketchiest bullshit artist, and everything he told you turned out to be true?

"Trouble In Mind"  (1985/Alan Rudolph)

Carradine gets an extreme makeover, as a decent young guy from the country who morphs into a cosmeticized urban punk.

"The Moderns"  (1988/Alan Rudolph)

Keith's a painter specializing in forgery and hanging out with Hemingway and the gang in 1920s Paris.

    Then & Later: Carradine's most memorable early role was a small part in Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971), as the kid on the bridge who just wants to go into town and buy a pair of socks. In 2004, he played Wild Bill Hickock in the first few episodes of "Deadwood". He played Buffalo Bill Cody in "Wild Bill" (1995), with Jeff Bridges as Hickock.

Winter of Frozen Dreams (2009)

WINTER OF FROZEN DREAMS  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Eric Mandelbaum

    Thora Birch, Keith Carradine, Brendan Sexton III,

    Dan Moran, Scott Cohen, Dean Winters

A true crime story set in Madison, Wisconsin, where in the late 1970s, a woman named Barbara Hoffman apparently killed two men by dosing them with cyanide. Hoffman, a prostitute and biochemistry student, was engaged to both men, who had made her the sole beneficiary of their estates, and (more significantly) their life insurance policies. Thora Birch plays Hoffman, and she's a good actress, but it's hard to get a bead on Hoffman from either the script or Birch's performance. She's a cipher, a blank-faced femme fatale in a frozen, dysfunctional universe. Trying to build the case against her are a crotchety police detective (Keith Carradine) and his rookie partner (Scott Cohen), whose easy, joking banter accounts for the movie's only believable relationship. Carradine, especially, with his pipe and fedora, looks like he should be nosing around in a Coen brothers film. But for all the snow on the ground, this is no "Fargo", and Schenectady, New York, where the picture was shot, is no Madison, Wisconsin. Which leaves the whole thing feeling a little disembodied, a place-specific story cut off from its own geography. It's not entirely clear what her victims saw in Barbara Hoffman, either. But it is clear that these were not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢    

    D: Hayao Miyazaki

A college professor and his two young daughters move to the country, where they make the acquaintance of both the local rice farmers and the neighboring spirits. An animated feature from Japan that should appeal to young kids, whose parents might not mind watching it too much, either. Some of the voice work in the English-dubbed version is kind of grating, but the bus in the shape of a giant cat really looks cool.

O'Horten (2007)

O'HORTEN  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Bent Hamer

    Bard Owe, Espen Skjonberg, Ghita Norby

Dr. Sporgersi,

I just saw a real good Norwegian comedy (if that's not a contradiction in terms) called "O'Horten", about an old railroad engineer adjusting to retirement. Very, very low-key. If you think nothing happens in some French movies, you should see this. It's like Jim Jarmusch on tranquilizers. Film as meditation. I liked it a lot.

Nick

Footlight Parade (1933)

FOOTLIGHT PARADE  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Lloyd Bacon

    James Cagney, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell,

    Dick Powell, Ruth Donnelly, Frank McHugh

Cagney plays a producer of stage musicals whose livelihood is threatened by the advent of talking pictures. So he takes to producing prologues: short, lively numbers that play on stage between movie screenings. There's some irony in this. The elaborate routines Cagney's putting on couldn't possibly be done on an ordinary theater stage, and it's movies exactly like "Footlight Parade" that are putting producers like this guy out of business. The will-the-show-go-on story sets up a couple of jaw-dropping production numbers: a pre-Esther Williams water ballet to "By a Waterfall", and the finale, in which Cagney and Ruby Keeler hoof their way through "Shanghai Lil". The choreographer on those was Busby Berkeley. That's all you need to know. 

W. (2008)

W.  (2008)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Oliver Stone

    Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell,

    Richard Dreyfus, Jeffrey Wright, Scott Glenn,

    Toby Jones, Thandie Newton, Bruce McGill,

    Ellen Burstyn, Ioan Gruffudd, Stacy Keach

Released just weeks before the election of Barack Obama, Oliver Stone's nonlinear dramatization of the life and career of George W. Bush is glaringly superficial, and that seems to be the point. Some significant chapters in Bush's story - the National Guard, 9/11, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina - are either mentioned in passing or ignored altogether, and for anybody who's been alive and awake since the election of 2000, most of what's here will be old news. You'd like to see a filmmaker with Stone's passion and conviction really mess with this material, shake it up, take a bigger risk, and sooner or later some other filmmaker will. But if W.'s resentment of his father is the sharpest insight Stone can come up with, it's not exactly groundbreaking. Maybe there's a dilemma when you're telling the story of somebody whose story hasn't completely played out yet, or maybe the key to George W. Bush is his superficiality. Stone's last shot is a tight close-up straight into Bush's eyes, leaving it unclear whether he's made a movie about a man whose inner workings are concealed beneath the surface, or (more likely) a man who simply has no depth at all.