Part II, mind you! I can’t speak much for the movie because I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. I was completely distracted by the company and that intense high-school-era, first-date pressure. It was years later before I got around to seeing Part III.
The film starts on exactly the right foot by introducing a supporting thug played by Lee Van Cleef, entirely dialogue-free and looking astonishingly young. Here’s the thing: I love Lee Van Cleef. With a dash of Van Cleef in the recipe, I’m immediately having a good time no matter what I’m watching. I’m certain that he is the best thing to come out of the Leone spaghetti westerns, save for the Morricone scores and the Leone close-ups. But seeing him this young and in this role, throws a whole wagonload of new baggage on his roles in the Leone films. It’s easier than ever to imagine him as a young Sentenza (the second part of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly equation.) [I have to confess that it bothered me for a few minutes, trying to pinpoint who the young Lee Van Cleef was reminding me of – but My God, when it came, what a revelation! It’s true that Van Cleef in High Noon is the spitting image of a young Snoop Dogg.] Apart from Van Cleef, the film is stuffed with a ton of delicious and familiar character actors: Lloyd Bridges, Harry Morgan, Lon Chaney Jr. and even Jack Elam, who shows up as one of the three killers at the start of Once Upon a Time in the West.
Still there is one flaw that I need to pick at. The name of the flaw in this instance comes above the marquee, and it’s Gary Cooper. I’m sure Cooper is an excellent actor and a worthwhile addition to most movies he’s in. He emotes well and his eyes carry a sadness that lends a lot of gravity to whatever’s happening around him. Crap, he won an Oscar for his part in this movie. Even so, he’s clearly the wrong man to carry this movie. To start with, he seems much too old to play the sheriff, even if the sheriff is soon to retire (forget that he’s a newlywed!) We’re told that he captured and arrested Frank Miller (our villain) 5 years before the start of the movie, but this seems unlikely. If it’s true, then his energy and spirit have drained tremendously in the years that followed because Cooper has the passion of a piece of plywood. Worse still, he seems more like an office manager than a lawman, with the sort of face you’d find in a bank not in a dusty frontier town. This dissonance is most evident in a fistfight that happens at the mid-point of the movie. In action, Cooper seems stiff and decrepit, making the fight feel as stiffed and choreographed as most late-career Hulk Hogan matches. Only without the sense that Cooper could’ve won the scrap a decade earlier.
Perhaps it was like throwing a child on a roller coaster too early in life (another experience I can share, I’m afraid) but it was at that time that I recoiled against Conan and violent movies in general. It would be years before I could get the nuts to sit through any movie with unnecessary violence or gore. [Note: the distaste translated into a backlash later in life, where I chewed up as much violence and gore as I could get my hands on, channeling obscene amounts of Nightmare on Elm Street and Schwarzenneger movies in my parents’ basement. Making up for lost time.] Much, much later I would grow to love Conan and respect it as a piece of balls-out, fantasy storytelling. Even later still, I would watch it (sound off, of course) while I was putting my newborn daughter to sleep. Blood, guts and baby bottles, if you can imagine it. Full circle, sort of. Or not.
Funny then that I don’t really remember seeing E.T. for the first time. Like so many movies, I know where I watched it. I certainly remember seeing it at least two more times in the weeks that followed (one instance – my favourite instance – was at the 5 Drive-in with the unlikely partner of Night of the Comet.) However I can’t say that I have any memories of the actual theatre experience. It’s the days and weeks afterwards that stay with me instead, because the damn movie buried itself so deep in my waking mind that it was all I could think about. I was a kid possessed: E.T. sketches on my notebooks, E.T. posters in my room, E.T. toys, E.T. books, E.T. everything. I must’ve made quite a site in my grade 4 classroom, turning a potato art
project into a tribute to E.T. Though I couldn’t have told made the connection at the time, the final product probably looked a little like Andy Warhol’s famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but for E.T. heads in different colours spread across the paper. The obsession may have only lasted for months, but in my mind it went on for years. Later in school, people still remembered me as the "guy who really like used to like E.T." Not too freaky that label.
I recognize that E.T. is a strange movie to provoke this kind of roof-blasting reaction, but I must've been sitting bullseye for the target audience for the film. I was 9-years old. Most of my days were spent on my bike cruising the suburbs or exploring the woods behind my house. Nighttime was a scary place. There was no one in a better position to relate to the movie. But don’t misunderstand – I wasn’t projecting myself into the movie or even developing any "alien friend" fantasies like you might expect. I didn’t see the movie as any sort of daydream. Rather, I was delirious with what the movie did and where it took me. More than any other movie I had seen, it was the movie itself that ensnared the 9-year old. The overall experience of sitting in the dark theatre, with the smell of popcorn and the sticky floor and waiting for the lights to go all the way down: it was, if you don’t mind me rolling out the dusty cliché, pure magic. Bicycles over the moon kind of magic. The movie swept me away.
It was probably the first movie that I cried in. I know for certain that it was the first movie to frighten me. I was tense, emotional, excited, delighted and terribly sad. It was the first movie that didn’t have an easy handle or a quick solution for the question, what did you like about it? There was no shortcut like giant boulders or Wookies or Muppets. The movie sort of danced around me until I was dizzy, unsure what to isolate as the reason for the odd blend of feelings, and that made it an enigma. Not that I’m going to pretend that E.T. was any kind of Lynchian masterpiece, but I remember vividly that it was mysterious. Prior to seeing it, I had no clue at all what it was about. I didn’t know what an extra terrestrial was and from the TV commercials, I only knew that the boy in the red hooded sweater cut his finger on a saw. Then someone raised a hot poker towards it (after Raiders, I believed that the glowing finger was exactly that.) These were pretty fleeting impressions and tough for a kid to nail down. But there was also E.T. himself who seemed to look different to me in every photo I saw (different sculpts probably), lending to the feeling that he was part of the dream. As an adult, the movie has lost that complexity, but as a child, I remember that it was the most sophisticated experience of my short life.
Which brings me to adulthood. I was delighted by the opportunity to take my wife to see E.T. again in the theatre in 2002, with an amped-up digital soundtrack and a remastered picture. Forget about the crumby new CG effects (thank you Spielberg for leaving the original film intact on the DVD release), the treasure of seeing E.T. again on a monstrous modern screen was invaluable. The movie made very few bones at the box office, but I am so grateful for the decision to re-release it.
Seeing the film as an adult was startling, because it was like watching an entirely different film. I could see Spielberg pulling many of the strings that were invisible to me as a child, and I could appreciate the mastery with which he did it. The movie pushes buttons, there’s no question about that. But there was also an added layer to the film that I could appreciate as an adult: a sort of sentimentality about childhood that was sweeter for the fact that the movie figures so strongly in mine. It’s a rare experience for a film to allow an adult to revisit the world from the level of a child.
I think that’s what makes it special to me now.
Canadian films are a funny animal, no? I’ve tried to throw as many Canuck films into my Monday list as possible, but they are tough nuts to find. Very few carry the weight or reputation of being high quality, historically important, or (sorry to say) even entertaining. Looking for trust-worthy lists on-line is like sifting for gold. As a result, I’m afraid only a handful of Canadian titles are on my 500+ list of movies. Still, if anyone reading this post has any valuable suggestions, please please let me know.
So it is that the first Canadian creature to scamper onto my Monday nights is Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (1970.) Heard of it, gentle reader? Few people have it seems, though if the DVD packaging is to be believed, the title is "a superb movie, the finest Canadian effort ever, and excellent by any standards" (Montreal Gazette) and "a legend…a landmark in Canadian filmmaking" (Peter Feniak, Globe and Mail). In an effort to put this rep to the test, I asked a few people if they were familiar with the movie before I watched it. My father, who was 23-years old when the film was released and teaching Canadian history in Calgary, tells me that it never showed up on his cultural radar at all (which I can vouch was fuelled tremendously by the CBC.) And if he doesn’t remember it, I would suspect it was not top of mind among most Canadian moviegoers. Film critics, sure. Regular joes, not so much. [Still, I should point out that Shebib’s movie was note-worthy enough to be parodied in a famous sketch by SCTV, which he talks a little about in the commentary.]
So what kind of animal is it then? Well, close your eyes and imagine a Lars von Trier film shot in the early 1970’s on the streets of Toronto. Cinema verité to the extreme, shot guerrilla-style with no budget at all (to call $27K "shoe-strong" would be generous) and a 3-man crew: the film school definition of quick and dirty. Shebib explains in the commentary that the crew had no permission to film at any of their locations and no insurance of any kind. Case in point, from the production notes included with the DVD:
The car that features so prominently in the film was one great worry. The car was an old Chevrolet convertible, vintage 1960, which a friend of Shebib’s painted in outrageous colours. It was acquired without the remotest possibility of proving ownership; as it had passed through so many hands, its ownership history was a complete mystery. Nor was there time to get it passed as a roadworthy vehicle. While shooting it was discovered that neither of the lead actors, nor Shebib had a driver’s license. All in all, they were paralyzed by the prospect of being stopped by the police.
The result is a remarkably natural film, showcasing Toronto as it must have been in 1969. Though I’m told in the DVD packaging that the film has been remastered for DVD, it’s astonishingly flat and colourless (note: it’s not black and white), riddled with film grain and overly dark sequences. It reminded me most of those great Hinterland Who’s Who segments that appeared on the CBC throughout the 70’s and 80’s, highlighting Canadian wildlife with scratchy newsreel footage. Or better yet, the movie feels sort of like your parents’ home movies, catching the atmosphere and authenticity of the early 1970’s, without ever feeling scripted or rehearsed.
It must be this authenticity that makes the film so appealing. The acting in the film is so naturalistic that it’s hard to imagine either of the actors behaving or speaking differently in their regular lives (perhaps this is the case, since only one of the leads was a semi-professional actor.) Nothing about the movie seems composed or directed. The expression that comes up again and again in the commentaries and extra features on the DVD is the "documentary tradition," which was the whole of the Canadian film industry prior to the 1970’s. Shebib himself had his most success with documentary films and so it is that this movie, his first foray into fiction, carries a lot of documentary baggage: stolen shots around the city, close-ups of non-actors, available lighting. Each of these components lend something to the striking realism of the film. The 3-man crew carried all of their equipment in the back of a station wagon and literally improvised the shots and set-ups as they came upon locations. Toronto itself is a character, a very real character, in the film.
The movie also does a nice job of snapping a valuable photograph of the city at that time. The skyline (with only one major skyscraper) is remarkable and the visits to Toronto landmarks (including the old A&A Records building on Yonge Street, which I believe is now the HMV Superstore) are appealing. More importantly (and this is something that clearly couldn't have been appreciated at the time, but is invaluable now), the movie captures the particular look and feel of the early 70’s in a refreshingly truthful way. Between the wash-outed wallpapers, the boxy TV sets, the cars on the street and the overall vibe of the film, I swear (even though I was born a few years after the film was shot) that I can remember when the world looked exactly like this. Unlike Hollywood films of the same period which were still only as sincere as Hollywood’s imitation (look at movies released this year for evidence of this reliability), the movie doesn’t seem to be projected through any filters. What you see is what you get. And what you get is a version of Toronto that only lives in books now.
Tell me if this sounds at all Canadian. A couple of hosers move from Cape Breton to the big city of Toronto, chasing their dreams and a sense of liberty that they can’t find in the Maritimes. What they get up to in TO is a cycle of drinking beer (out of stubby bottles, no less), looking for work, chasing women and sharing cigarettes in the frosty air. Amid all this, there's an awful lot of TV watching and nights out on Yonge Street. The fact is that not a lot really happens in the film; Goin’ Down the Road is extremely light on plot on relies instead on the atmosphere of Toronto, as well as the deflating expectations of these two Eastern losers. But it’s good that way.
The movie must have been good, because even though it took me most of the week to finish it (an indication of my timetable, not my interest in the film), I made the time to sit through both of the commentaries on the disc on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The commentaries were very worthwhile, especially Shebib’s insights into where a lot of the film was shot (location info like shooting at Yonge and Major Mac or Don Mills at Shepherd add to the distinctly Toronto flavour of the film.) Furthermore, there’s a 30-minute interview between the director and Pierre Berton which is a little ironic in light of the fact that Berton passed away this week. [As a point of interest, the Berton interview was shot in 1972 and in it, Shebib explains that one of his favourite Capra movies is It’s a Wonderful Life, which both he and Berton regard as obscure during the conversation. The interview clearly predates the proliferation of this film during the early-80s.]
Music plays a very important part in the film and I’m disappointed to hear (in Geoff Pevere’s analytical commentary) that the songs used in the movie will probably be hard to track down. The soundtrack was written (and largely improvised) by Bruce Cockburn and they soak the film with a certain sad and doomed optimism that is really touching. I’m anxious to include them on my Monday Project compilation. And so it is that I’m going on the hunt…
