FEARFUL SYMMETRY
Author(s): RICHARD COMBS
Source: Film Comment , JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008, Vol. 44, No. 1
(JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008), pp. 58-60, 62, 64-67
Published by: Film Society of Lincoln Center
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43458898
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F E A R F
U L S Y M
METRY
"Soylent Green is people." In the TV show
Millennium , Frank Black, a psychic investigator into
crimes of millennial dysfunction, uses the apocalyptic
warning from the end of Richard Fleischer's 1973
science-fiction film as his computer password. This
may not be the same as a critical validation of Fleischer,
but it is an endorsement of sorts, and throughout
his extremely variegated Career Fleischer enjoyed
some variegated endorsements. "Balm in Gilead . . .
always gripping, often pure joy, and classic in bits,"
wrote Raymond Durgnat in Films and Filming of
Fantastic Voyage. "Mandingo is a masterpiece of
Hollywood cinema," defiantly declared Movie of his
much-reviled 1975 excursion into Southern Gothic.
But the June 2006 Positif came out for critical
validation, with a special Fleischer dossier timed to
a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française. An
unplanned coincidence was Fleischer's death in March
2006, which was generally greeted with critical silence.
As Michel Ciment noted in his introduction to the dossier;
that had long been the response of Anglo-American critics
anyway, and validation had been left to Fleischer's
French champions, such as Jean-Pierre Coursodon and
Bertrand Tavernier in 50 Years of American Cinema .
So not too long after his almost-unremarked-upon
death, how do things stand for Fleischer? There's
certainly a consensus on him, and it might be summed
up in two opinions, stretching from Andrew Sarris's
scornful assessment of a career that "has stuttered,
alas, at less than 50 percent efficiency" to David
Thomson's regretful "once upon a time, Richard
Fleischer was a competent director of action pictures."
The anti-consensus is represented most substantially
by the Positif d ossier and, in a way, most characteristically
by the occasional opinions quoted above. What
these also chime with is a kind of hearsay evidence:
the number of critics one finds who harbor their own
favorite Fleischers and not always gilt-edged genre
classics like The Narrow Margin . Soylent Green
scores high here, but is perhaps trumped by The Vikings
(58), an extreme instance of a romp beyond genre.
The consensus and anti-consensus exist in tandem,
and more harmoniously than most critical disagreements,
because they do have quite a lot in common.
For instance, the received view of Fleischer as a hack for
hire - a view that certainly has its validity, especially
when one comes to the later part of his career, from
the early Seventies onward - is most succinctly
THE LATE RICHARD FLEISCHER: NOT QUITE AN AUTEUR BUT
MUCH MORE THAN A HACK FOR HIRE BY RICHARD COMBS
January-February 2008 I FILM COMMENT I 59
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put by Lem Dobbs in a review of Fleischer's autobiography, Just (Kirk Douglas), with his eye clawed out, and Eric (Tony Curtis),
Tell Me When to Cry, for Sight & Sound (Oct. 93): "Fleischer rode with his hand amputated. Such loss thrusts itself forward as
the showman's whirligig, his you-gotta-have-a-gimmick aesthetic aggressively as any 3-D image. Is the theme equally bodied forth
encompassing sequels, remakes, 3-D, Cinemascope, split-screen, in the story of Barabbas (Anthony Quinn) and the man on the
Showscan, Italian-made spectacles, Jack Palance as Fidel Castro, cross who takes his place and eventually seems, to Barabbas's
microscopic submarines and giant squids, people who eat people - despair; also to have taken away his death?
and talk to the animals." To which one might add a showman's
stunt that even ropes in God when Fleischer managed to film the 1. HIGH NOON
crucifixion in Barabbas (62) during an actual eclipse of the sun. in its full optical glory, Fleischer's relief form begins with
But turn this catalogue around and you arrive at something the 3-D rodeo film, Arena (53). But actual 3-D was a short-lived
insisted on in the Positif essays, especially in an article on The ride on the showman's whirligig - Fleischer would only hop back
Vikings by Pierre Berthomieu: Fleischer's formalist qualities. on in 1983 with Amityville 3-D. Immediately after Arena , howThrough
gimmickry - or otherwise - he arrived at a way of ere- ever, he made 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (54) for Walt Disating
images that were not just dynamic but might seem to be in ney, his first film in Cinemascope. Fifties Cinemascope evidently
3-D even when he wasn't using the optical process. The climac- lacked the depth of field of even standard screen formats tic
duel in The Vikings , up and down the sheer sides of a castle although it was sold to the public as offering the same experience
tower, alternating high and low shots of sea and sky, is a fair as 3-D, without the inconvenience of having to wear the glasses,
example. Berthomieu: "Fleischer shuns frontality. His composi- Fleischer, anyway, may have found it a more graceful and involvtions
revel in diagonals, variegated, simple or complex," his ing 3-D, and he was probably most a formalist and most a showframes
lead the eye on voyages into "multiple and centrifugal man in the ways he found to simulate the "relief" form,
dimensions . . . mingling the effect of 3-D with that of the pop- The Nautilus is equipped not just with portholes but a large
up, the porthole vistas on the Nautilus with the Amityville 3-D observation dome in its nose, which opens like an eye or a camsets,
a pure exercise in the 'relief' form." era lens for viewing the wonders of the deep. They're backA
topography of reliefs - among various allied forms - would projected wonders, of course, albeit shot underwater in the
as a result take precedence over the identification of themes in Bahamas, and the first spectacle is expressive enough: the crew of
Fleischer. Or perhaps the forms assimilate the themes, stamping the Nautilus , in fantastic but sensuously heavy diving suits, carry
them out with their own peculiar depth. For example, take the one of their number to be buried in a coal-encrusted sepulchre,
theme of the "couple" that can be followed and expanded on in The somber mood of the occasion is keyed to the character of the
many ways through Fleischer's films, and seen figured most Nautilus's commander, Captain Nemo (James Mason), a lonely,
vividly in the mutual mutilation of Viking half-brothers Einar wounded seer who has cut himself off from mankind because it is
60 I FILM COMMENT I January-February 2008
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not ready for the scientific blessings he could bestow. In particular,
it is not capable of making good use of the technological secret
of the Nautilus , its power source, a glowing core of energy. It's the
Great Whatsit a year before Kiss Me Deadly.
Captain Nemo's other half is Kirk Douglas's manic, mugging,
eye-rolling, banjo-strumming harpooner Ned Land. They're one
of Fleischer's most extreme couples, a pushmipullyu of energies,
and at times the clash between morbidity and exuberance makes
this a very uncomfortable children's adventure film. As for the
relief effects, it's not surprising that Fleischer would eventually
be using process photography in more extreme ways, pushing it
beyond another comfort level to create the contortions of size
and perspective in Fantastic Voyage (66), a film Berthomieu
thinks should have been in 3-D.
But it was Cinemascope that was to become the Fleischer
format par excellence, in which there were many ways to create
depth in the eye of the beholder. The adventurous diagonals of
The Vikings are one way, but so too is the careful mapping of
space, the delineation through lighting of depth and volume in
settings, and the way these are investigated and connected by
extensive camera movement. Fleischer may be the unsung Hollywood
master of the sequence shot, in which an edgy symmetry
can be opposed to Wellesian chaos let loose - witness the
mini -Touch of Evil opening to Bandido (56), in which a tracking
shot follows crowds of Mexicans fleeing civil war to a U.S.
border crossing, then reverses itself to follow Zachary Scott's
gunrunner back into Mexico.
In this respect, Fleischer's pivotal film is the one that followed
20,000 Leagues . Violent Saturday (55) was his first film for 20th
Century Fox, the home of Cinemascope and the studio for
which he worked most consistently for the next 15 years. There
are some crucial contortions of historical perspective here. Violent
Saturday is in essence the kind of crime film that had been
the staple of the first period of Fleischer's career, at RKO, from
1946 to 1952 (the end point and the high point of which had
been The Narrow Margin). Fleischer has remarked on how unusual
it was then to shoot a crime film in color, and also how much of a
boost it gave him at the studio to bring in a Cinemascope production
for less than a million dollars - which he put down to the
expertise he'd gained in RKO's B unit.
Violent Saturday is based on the not uncommon idea of combining
a centripetal thriller plot - three urban criminals arrive in
a small Western town to plan and execute a heist just before the
bank closes at noon on Saturday - with centrifugal storytelling,
following the lives of townspeople who will be caught up in the
heist. Fleischer turns this into the motor for any number of
tracking and gliding sequence shots, concentric circles turning
within each other. From gang boss Harper (Stephen McNally)
studying a relief map of the area in the town library we move
across to librarian Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), reacting to a threatening
letter from the bank about missed payments by scooping up
somebody else's purse (McNally takes in this little prelude to his
own grand larceny with amused disbelief).
At night, a fidgety, cold-ridden member of the gang (Lee
Marvin) is alarmed when he sees somebody apparently watching
their hotel. But this is only the bank manager, Reeves
(Tommy Noonan), on his way to consummate a fixation on the
local nurse by watching her undress through a back window.
Here he encounters Elsie disposing of the purse in the dark
street, and he threatens to report her theft, until she, realizing
what he is doing there, dares him to go to the police.
At this point, the film's circling movement and its expansive
character comedy has led us out of the Western light - the film was
partly shot in Bisbee, Arizona - and into this nighttime scene, and
a single compressed composition of the participants, that could be
pure RKO noir. Still, it would not be accurate to call Violent Saturday
a kind of film noir by default; it would be more precise to
say that it complicates the notion of film noi t, even goes some way
toward deconstructing it, at least the version that has become such
a generalized and lazy critical category.
The Walter Reade theater will screen Mandingo on February 23 and 10
Rillington Place on February 24 as part of Film Comment Selects. Violent
Saturday will play New York City's Film Forum February 28 - March 6.
62 I FILM COMMENT I January-February 2008
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Violent Saturday is a remodeling operation,
a modernizing, abstracting, and
reshaping of noir - and not only through
its lengthened horizon. It is not drenched
in shadows, but they are a significant and
visually defining feature - from the band
of shade under the brim of Marvin's hat
that obscures his face, to the shadows that
give weight and depth to space when the
crooks case the town, particularly the
police station, in the full light of day. The
film's "Bradenville" - part Bisbee, part
studio set - is stylized but not stereotyped,
with a depth and compositional care one
could call painterly.
Think of Edward Hopper in non-urban
mode: his painting entitled High Noon ,
which shows an isolated house in an indeterminate
plain, for which Hopper apparently
built a model just to study how light
would fall on it. Violent Saturday is such a
model, an artificial reality transfixed and
transformed by light. The three crooks'
eruption from the bank after their holdup,
the building and their bodies in flight
sharply etched in noonday shadow, is
another painting.
It's color; of course, that adds this
dimension, but even so, Violent Saturday is
not really a departure from the little
thrillers Fleischer was making in the late
Forties. In other words, even those early
films are not really noir in any of the standard
uses and abuses of the term. A key
film here, so low-budget, so minimally
fleshed out in every way that it is a very
bare model for itself, is Follow Me Quietly
(49), from a story co-written by Anthony
Mann (whose career crossed with Fleischer's
for about two years at RKO). A city
is stalked by a serial killer both austerely
vengeful - he calls himself "The Judge" and
totally faceless and traceless. This
drives the detective in charge (William
Lundigan) to construct a dummy out of the
few scraps of evidence for use in lineups (an
early rag-and-bone form of profiling).
At one point, in his darkened office, the
frustrated detective muses to the dummy
in a chair: "Tell me where you're going,
maybe I'll meet you there. How about a
date?" (This pair is Fleischer's strangest
couple.) After the detective leaves, the
dummy inexplicably shape-shifts into the
actual killer, who then puts the real
dummy back in the chair and slips away.
It's a shocking, elliptical move, outside the
genre, so "new" it's more Feuillade or
Twenties Fritz Lang than Forties thriller.
But even a relatively straightforward heist
film like Armored Car Robbery (50) features
a modern urban version of this kind
of phantasm: a villain who stays one step
ahead of the police by obsessively wiping
away all traces of his identity.
And The Narrow Margin (52), Fleischer's
apparent culmination in noir, actually
only begins in that idiom, with a
shooting covered in steep angles and shadows
on a staircase. All the subsequent
train-board action is more sleek and shadowless
(though with some mirror effects).
And the plot is an artfully deceitful reality
game: we're seduced into accepting what a
character played by an actor like Charles
McGraw would assume about a character
played by an actress like Marie Windsor.
It's a conceit worthy of David Mamet.
2. "A RIDERLESS HORSE,
STIRRUPS BACKWARD"
IT MAY BE THAT FILM NOIR HAS
acquired a solidity and respect
film criticism that it doesn't real
It's like an artificial country bolte
from different nationalities, a
now be time to break it up int
stituent parts and discard the
gether. There are qualities of abs
modernism in Fleischer - he's
modernist, one who can also be s
popular; spectacular optimistic
shares with Anthony Mann. Th
maladies don't have to do with g
social or psychic angst but org
dysfunctions, with contrasts an
between organizations on both si
law, and with organizational
(hence the undercover or T-men
they both made).
Perhaps this is the native Amer
as opposed to the European-influ
that the Positif dossier tries to
Fleischer. In the magazine's inter
the director; he states that he doe
that Europe was an influence on
animator Max - the latter had le
when he was five - yet Miche
detects such an influence in the work of
Fleischer fils: "The pessimistic oudook on a
society in decomposition" that reveals a
Middle European sensibility similar to
Lang, Wilder and Preminger. Mann, it
might be said, was led into this area- and
gained his noir reputation through his work
with the Hungarian-born cameraman John
64 I FILM COMMENT I January-February 2008
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Alton. It might also be said that while
Mann is the better^ or at least more consistent,
âirectoç Fleischer's films occupy a
more interesting position.
It's an understandable temptation to
apply the "society in decomposition" formula
- with its air of instant profundity
that characterizes so much writing on film
noir - to Fleischen It also instantly supplies
a rationale to one of the most heterogeneous
bodies of work in cinema.
Taking a related auteurist tack, critics
have isolated the four notorious case
studies of real-life homicides as reflecting
his most consistent concern, tracing them
back to his four years of medical studies
at Brown University when he intended to
become a psychiatrist.
Certainly the last three - Compulsion
(59), The Boston Strangler (68), and 10
Rillington Place (71) - are fascinating films,
among the best Fleischer has made. But
what looms behind them as prominently as
his psychiatry studies are his subsequent
theater work at Yale, and his experiment in
theater in the round ("It seemed to me that
that got closer to cinema"). In the dining
rooms of five hotels, he put on a different
play each week among the guests - an
experiment that apparendy led to his call to
Hollywood by an RKO talent scout.
Space takes precedence over psychology,
or, rather, psychology comes out of space and
much else besides. If Fleischer's is a formalist
art, then that's as evident in films
that would seem to be all content - like the
quartet of murder case histories - as it is in
the choreography of action. 10 Rillington
Place , the last of the four, is the only one
not in scope, and the only one set outside
the U.S., in a shabby area of London's Notting
Hill. The tighter frame tells the story.
"This was their little domain," explains
John Reginald Christie (Richard Attenborough),
escorting police upstairs to the tworoom
flat of Timothy Evans (John Hurt),
who has confessed to the murder of his
wife Beryl (Judy Geeson) and baby daughter.
Evans was hanged for the latter in
1950, though it was Christie who, beginning
during the war, killed a succession of
women and secreted their bodies in the
cramped environs of No. 10.
English critics complained at the time
that by focusing so tightly on Evans and
Christie, the film missed the bleak and
oppressive postwar context. But the context
is there, whether as a matter of scenic
abstraction, detailed domestic ambience,
or compacted performance (the two best
of his career, according to Fleischer). The
film's exteriors, shot in Rillington Place
shortly before the area's demolition and
redevelopment, reveal a street of forbiddingly
blank, shadowed windows demonstrating
that if the Hopper "line"
and gestalt is not confined to cities, it is not
confined to America either.
Fleischer's Evans and Christie are a
couple born for this place, two hollow
men, both fantasists. The former is illiterate,
with the mind of a child, and boasts of
aristocratic lineage and the "elegant but
passionate" women he encounters as a
van driver. The latter is psychosexually
crippled but maintains a wheedling air of
gentility that allows him to get away with
murder. (Attenborough's Christie insistently
proffers cups of tea, and having a
"little cup of tea," according to the book
by Ludovic Kennedy on which the film
was based, was also Christie's euphemism
for visiting prostitutes.)
But 'scope is made for show, for the
kind of display that is the theatrical and
legal context to murder in The Girl in the
Red Velvet Swing (55) and Compulsion .
In the first, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit (Joan
Collins) swings on, after being the cosseted
mistress of overweening architect
Stanford White (Ray Milland) and the
wife of unstable millionaire Harry K.
Thaw (Farley Granger), but when Harry
shoots Stanford, and she is frozen out by
the Thaw family, her venue becomes an
Atlantic City carnival, where both her act
and her fate were duplicated in the same
year by Lola Montés. With Billy Wilder's
regular collaborator Charles Brackett as
producer and co-screenwriter, Fleischer
does acquit himself well here in decomposing
society Weltschmerz.
Performance is again on show in the recreated
courtroom drama of Compulsion ,
the trial of two homosexual youths (Dean
Stockwell and Bradford Dillman) for the
kidnapping and murder of a schoolboy to
prove their superiority to society's laws the
1924 Leopold-Loeb couple in all but
name. In the renamed Clarence Darrow
role, Orson Welles is a grandstanding
rumbler, turning the proceedings into a
hearing rather than a jury trial, argued on
the issue of capital punishment rather
than the facts of the case.
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□ What If ffe I
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may be the black-and-white CinemaScope
- most unlikely and therefore most
mystical and transcendental of formats whose
deeper-focus views and cool grays,
in both interiors and exteriors, are perfect
for a procedural narrative. But they also
hold in suspension the hints of a Providence
at work in the manifestation of clues,
Stockwell's enthusiasm for the ideal Platonic
(if not Nietzschean) society, and
Welles's mighty peroration, that in pleading
for his clients' lives he is also "pleading
for the future." But to see the murder case
histories - in positive or negative terms - as
Fleischer's personal project, the only
auteurist credential of a journeyman director;
is to overlook the fact that the subject
may have been as much a gift of his studio
as Cinemascope. 20th Century Fox, after
all, had done the most for the "semidocumentary"
thriller - another of the
problematic strands of film noir - with The
House on 92nd Street , 13 Rue Madeleine ,
and Call Northside 777, all the work of
Henry Hathaway. Fleischer; who readily
acknowledged that he didn't initiate any of
his films, was carrying on a tradition,
although "real-life" crime in his case didn't
tend toward anything that resembled documentary.
It has moře of the stylization, the
semi-abstraction - the formalism, even- of
Follow Me Quietly (an extra-lean budget
can produce a severe formalism).
Fleischer worked in a plusher mode at
Fox, but in The Boston Strangler , the best
of his crime series - and one of the best
American films of the Sixties - he turned
in his most elegant scope composition,
severe and abstract in its way yet also a
moving piece of crime reporting. The
split-screen device, used here to represent
Boston terrorized by a psychopathic
killer of women between 1962 and 1964,
was universally dismissed as a gimmick.
But apart from its piling-up of images to
represent spiraling panic, it is used with
considerable variety, subtlety, and even
wit - sometimes to contain a shot/reverse
shot within one frame, or to extend a
sequence shot into something more "in
the round."
Its first use is even faux: a TV in one
corner of the darkened frame shows the
Boston parade for the Project Mercury
astronauts, before the rest of the screen
lights up to reveal the first murder scene.
This bleeding together of public and private
is repeated for the introduction,
halfway through the film, of Albert
DeSalvo (Tony Curtis), in a sequence shot
that circles through his apartment as he
watches President Kennedy's funeral on
television ("a riderless horse, stirrups
backward for the fallen chieftain"), then
follows him out on his next "job."
Light also persistently enters to break
up the screen: light that seems cold in the
bleak squad rooms; Olympian when it
pours through the Attorney General's tall
windows as he appoints scholarly,
removed John Bottomly (Henry Fonda) to
head the investigation; and even religious
when it frames Bottomly in the shabby
apartment of one suspect who proves to
be just another case of everyday psychosis
in need of succor ("Oh, I thought you
were going to help me!").
Light is everywhere, sourceless, in the
completely white hospital room where
Bottomly finally records DeSalvo's "confession."
This is more a therapeutic
mime, as DeSalvo is led to act out the
murderous self his consciousness cannot
accept. Which brings us back to Jekyll
and Hyde, a dubious "classic multiple
personality" diagnosis. But one might
interpret the extraordinary white-onwhite
mime sequence differently, as a
projection in a void - the void opened up
by the subsequent revelation that Albert
DeSalvo almost certainly wasn't the
Boston Strangler.
Does such indeterminacy constitute
another dimension? It might in real-life
crime. Even John Christie's execution and
Timothy Evans's "free pardon" (16 years
after being hanged) have refused to settle
that case, given the 1994 publication of a
book called The Two Killers of Rillington
Place . As for Rillington Place itself, in the
street that has replaced it there is no No.
10, just an empty lot between Nos. 9 and
11. In a city replete with plaques to the
famous, this is an eloquent amputation.
3. ENDOWED WITH
UNGUESSED KINSHIPS
IF THERE'S NO NEED TO CONSIDER ONE OF
Fleischer's films as more personal than
any other; there's no need to insist on
thematic development as a center of
interest. The "couple" is a fairly static
entity considered as a theme, but it has
great complexity and adaptability in its
formal or structural function. This is- true
of even the most eccentric films, or,
66 I FILM COMMENT I January-February 2008
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indeed, of the eccentric films most of all.
Che! (69) makes of Che Guevara (Omar
Sharif) and Fidel Castro (Jack Palance) a
revolutionary odd couple: Che is the
uptight zealot, with world revolution in
his sights and a death list on his mind;
Castro is the slob, with a bottle in his
hand and a woman on his arm.
Most eccentric, though, is the historical
tableau of Tora! Tora! Tora ! (70), an
account of the lead-up to the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, which spends two
and a half hours not on the content of
the diplomatic maneuvers but on the
timetabling and prevarication involved.
The result, as the inevitable creepingly
approaches, has a certain minimalist fascination:
the Japanese characters spend
their time on ships looking through binoculars;
the American characters spend their
time in offices looking at pieces of paper.
But beyond this, are we back to the couple
as an overarching structure? This would
cast the Japanese and American establishments
- there's one noirish sequence, the
only one involving a woman, showing a
last-minute dash round Washington at
night to alert a complacent officialdom in
the roles of dissembling predator and
disbelieving victim.
Beyond the couple, what to make of
relationships in Fleischer? Again, they're
very hard to separate from spatial relationships.
One becomes aware of groupings in
courts, hospitals, police stations, or any
domestic interior (where lighting and decor
isolate irregular centers of interest), with a
careful staging of looks and postures across
the (ideally, scope) frame. In the investigative
context of The Boston Strangler , the
way characters in one shot can face in so
many directions away from one another
seems both a formal and a psychological
design. This scheme comes most into its
own, though, in Mandingö , where the close
quartering of masters and slaves, oppressors
and oppressed, immerses them in a
communal world, a warm saturation of
sepias and golds. But it's a world where
everyone is facing "off," where internal and
external realities are sundered (perhaps it's
Fleischer's truest film noir, in color).
Far harder to place, to come to terms
with, because in many respects it is so
uncharacteristic, is The Spikes Gang (74).
It is Fleischer's most extraordinary film with
a fair claim to being his best - perhaps
because it is working so much
against the grain. In the Positif interview,
he declares he has no great liking for
westerns, and thinks of his three examples
- These Thousand Hills (59), Bandido
, and The Spikes Gang - as not
"really" westerns. So the spirit of dryness
in the latter, a refusal to make it atmospherically
congenial, is not surprising.
This leads to a certain sparseness in
other respects: in place of tracking or
sequence shots, there are zooms or straight
cuts. When one of the three boys who have
abandoned life on the farm for the
romance of the West finally succumbs to
hunger, a sequence of quick cuts take us
from him fainting, to his friend pawning
his father's watch, to them all eating, to the
watch in the pawnbroker's window from
where they steal it back. It's a somewhat
Buñuel-esque western, written by Irving
Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who had
recently taken a simpler view of growing
up in the West in The Cowboys . That the
roguish charm of the boys' outlaw mentor,
Harry Spikes (Lee Marvin), will wear thin
is a genre given, but not the desolating
nihilism to which it leads, which makes the
unbending religiosity and brutality of life
on the farm something to dream of.
With an author like Cormac McCarthy
now so primed for movie adaptation, it is
shocking to find in The Spikes Gang a
nightmare landscape - where "all preference
is made whimsical and a man and a
rock become endowed with unguessed kinships"
- that is McCarthy before the fact.
In one respect, The Spikes Gang is pure
Fleischer: space as a beguilement and a
trap. For their big and inevitably botched
job, Spikes leads the boys on a bank raid in
the small Texas town of Uvalde. Scouted
from above, Uvalde is as real and detailed
as a model in the sun. But the bank they
enter seems huge, cavernous, stretching
out in all directions, a space too large for
these cowboy games.
It's a fine site for 3-D dreaming, where
other stories - both real (Pat Garrett spent
some time in Uvalde after the shooting of
Billy the Kid made him unpopular in New
Mexico) and fictional ("Uvalde - God forgive
us, we painted their walls with blood
that time, walked out of that bank with
$11,000": Dock Tobin in Man of the
West) - might cross paths. □
Richard Combs is a regular contributor
to Film Comment.
^ Y
IM)
HM
January-February 2008 I FILM COM
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