32: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)

Owned version: The DVD released by Anchor Bay in 2002, as part of the Herzog/Kinski box set.

Acquired: 2005 presumably, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: Twice - once in 1996 (or thereabouts) from a VHS I'd bought used from a Blockbuster, and once from this DVD on March 7th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, and man did I write some dopey garbage back then. I was almost 30 already, you think I'd have learned some shit.)

The camera drifts from on high, through the clouds, until settling within view of a jungle mountain. On the mountain is a long line of tiny people, burdened and trudging like marching ants, fording their way over a thin road of mud and rock. Some are natives, kept in chains and made to bear the various possessions of the others, the conquerors who have enslaved them. Around this procession is naught but trees and mist and muck, dwarfing them and making the polished metal and fine clothing worn by the conquistadors seem foolish and incongruous. Already, it seems, Nature is doing its best to swallow these people whole.

Aguirre, one of the greatest - if not the greatest - work from one of our greatest - if not the greatest - living filmmakers, is a long and difficult journey towards an inevitable destination, as the hubris of Man finds no purchase within the implacable loamy soil of Nature. This is a theme that of course Herzog would return to again and again, but it was never so clear-eyed and pitiless and it was here. Man is represented by the Spanish conquistadors in general, with their absurd dreams of finding a legendary city of gold and complete unawareness of how to deal with the landscape, and Klaus Kinski's Aguirre in particular, a dagger-eyed ice-cold sadist straining at the power hierarchy he sees within his grasp yet never able to reconcile his own implacability with the far more implacable indifference of the country through which he storms. Noblemen become tinpot dictators, priests become inquisitors ("The Church was always on the side of the strong"), and a raft in the middle of the Amazon becomes a besieged island nation before then becoming a sinking sepulchre rapidly being reclaimed by the jungle in the form of mice, butterflies and what seems a thousand chittering monkeys. Aguirre, driven round the bed by his impossible ambition and the endless hostility of the immediate world around him, dreaming of sailing to and conquering Trinidad, stares unsteadily at a monkey he's managed to grasp before tossing it aside and croaking, "Who's with me?" Herzog then cuts to the Sun, beaming bright and dispassionate forever upon him.

So it's a tragedy, one built on vanity and imperiousness. But here's the thing: That cut is also objectively funny, a triumph of context and timing. Which leads into something I never really picked up on before, despite the general tone of most Herzog films - Aguirre is also a comedy, a bleak and mordant one that takes full advantage of the absurdity of the situation to find bitter laughs in a hopeless situation. Indeed, what jokes come are almost entirely rooted in irritation and/or exhaustion - there is, for instance, a great plant-and-payoff gag early on, for instance, involving Christian burial and ceremony that earns a shocked laugh when a frustrated Aguirre disposes of some troublesome unburied corpses by ordering a raft blown up. Later in the film, Aguirre's hand-picked Emperor gorges himself on fresh fruit as his underlings are forced to count grains of corn for sustenance, and the shot of the Emperor tearing through a mango is framed so that behind him, out of focus, we can see one man staring at him, unblinking, unmoving and scowling, as though trying to will his heart to explode right then and there, and the shot (and the actor) hold long enough that passes through ominous and earns a dark chuckle; another amusing bit sees Aguirre standing still and staring off into the distance, looking increasingly pained and annoyed as a native toots away on a pipe right near his ear. Even the famed decapitation sequence, a beautiful and grotesque burst of surrealism, is preceded by a one-liner. The distance between this and Nicolas Cage nattering on about iguanas on a coffee table is not so large after all.

Key to the peculiar effect of this film, both in its tragic and comedic dimensions, is the staggering performance from Kinski. And that was another revelation - because for years I'd remembered the mania, the frothing and crazed ranting. Except... that's not what this performance is at all. Kinski does of course have his moments of outsized lunacy (there's really no other way to deliver a line like, "The Earth I walk upon sees me and quakes!"), but it's a far chillier and more nuanced performance than I'd given it credit for all these years - there's even room for moments of tenderness in it, like the last scene with his daughter Flores, a mournful prelude to his mad soliloquy among the monkeys. Said soliloquy, crucially, is also in fact a fascinating underplay - all but the last line take place inside his head, so the hissing, spiraling insanity we hear bears little resemblance to the confused, staggering wretch on screen. This is crucial because while his madness is manifest early on, it's balanced by a control born of understanding of his place in the hierarchy, so that he comes of as ruthless and determined rather than flamboyantly mad. He stalks and smolders and swaggers, only exploding on occasions where his facade of unflappable megalomania is, by circumstances, flapped pretty fucking hard. My favorite instance of this comes after the wife of an enemy, knowing all too well Kinski's ill intentions towards her husband, exclaims at him, "God will punish you!" Kinski affects a haughty, mile-long stare and a faint grin, as if to say, "Neither you nor God can hurt me, I'm fuckin' Aguirre"... and then he turns and walks directly into a horse, leading to an eruption of arm-flailing and a peeved, "Get out of my way!" Aguirre, the man who thought himself the wrath of God, the man who dreamt of being the god-king over all the New World, is a tragic fool who can't even control a single animal.

Speaking of single animals: There's another scene with Flores, an earlier one where Aguirre finds a small sloth. This is a small and beautiful scene, with a genuinely happy Aguirre regaling his daughter about this little animal's unusual life: "He spends his whole life asleep. He's never really awake." Could that be the unspoken cosmic joke at the heart of it all? Are we all just the fevered dream an ever-slumbering rodent?

19: An Act of Confession (1972, Anthony Spinelli [as "Sybil Kidd"])

Owned version: The 2014 DVD release from Vinegar Syndrome, which has it not only third-billed behind two other Spinelli films (Cry for Cindy and Touch Me) but relegated to a second disc along with the softcore version of Cry for Cindy. This is not by accident.

Acquired: May 23rd of 2015 from Vinegar Syndrome.

Seen before?: No.

What is there to say about a boring porn film? An Act of Confession doesn't have much to it - it's a series of sexual fantasies dreamed up by a novitiate nun, and despite the long fertile history of the naughty-nun genre, this one runs out of ideas roughly twenty minutes in. A case could be made that this is due to genre constraints, inasmuch as this is a straight fuck flick without any of the demonic-flavored aspects that crop up in wilder examples of the genre. But even accounting for that, this pales next to something like School of the Holy Beast - the perversity ended at the concept. Which makes for a dull watch once you realize that all you're getting is concept.

It's not like this is any fun, either. The pace if this is funereal, and any expressions of ecstasy are limited to the grimacing faces of the involved dudes. The nun whose fantasies these are may be a plank of wood for all the life she shows. Really, the attitude here can be summed up by the disclaimer that shows up prior to the title card, which is as follows:

All due respect, Mr. Spinelli, but you ain't no Boccaccio. Though, like a number of tales in The Decameron, this is structured like a dirty joke, building to one heretical (and, in retrospect, inevitable) punchline. The framing of said punchline is actually fairly inspired - the use of gauzy lighting is hilarious - but it's a long road to get there.

(I should also mention that this release, sourced from a 16mm print that is as of now the only known source, is trimmed of all penetration shots. I assume this is why it's been relegated to an extra on the release of two other films - while extra footage of thrusts and flying semen wouldn't really improve the product at hand from a filmic standpoint, the removal of its raison d'etre does mark this as a historical curio at best.)

18: Across 110th Street (1972, Barry Shear)

Owned version: The 2014 Blu-ray released by Kino Lorber under their KL Studio Classics imprint.

Acquired: July 30th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

"You wanna drink?"
"Oh no, I don't drink."
"You will, Pope. You will."

Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), the offering party in this exchange with the named young lieutenant angling for his job, drinks. He drinks for a lot of reasons. In this instance, he needs a drink because it's late and he and Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) have spent a long day('s journey into night) running through the rattled cage of early-'70s New York City. Matelli drinks because he's been running through this cage for decades, through many long days and nights like this, and the thread is getting to the end of the spool. He's been a fixture in the Harlem precinct for years - you can see it in how he deals with the public, how he wends his way through a crowd of aggrieved residents of the neighborhood and promises them he'll fix whatever has brought them to his station tonight, and how the residents react to him because they know his word is good. But he is now 55 and some of his more aggressive policing methods are rightfully going out of style and the top brass are not-so-subtly suggesting retirement. He drinks because he can feel the city shifting and changing around him, getting angrier and more violent, and maybe he doesn't know where he fits anymore. He drinks because he's getting old and soon there won't be anything else to do but that.

Across 110th Street knows Matelli, like a lot of people, is getting old and being left behind by a society that's working to move past him and what he represents. The tension between the old guard and those trying to burst free from under the thumb of the old guard is what drives much of this sweaty, snarling film. It's a 24-hour period in the life of a neighborhood - and a city, and a country - in the midst of a fierce upheaval. As appropriate for a film about people of a certain age feeling like the world is moving past them, 110th Street races through its day-in-the-life at a helter skelter pace - it's not so much juggling its three major character groups as it is pitching them to the ground and letting them bounce, scoot and ricochet off each other. The opening scene, the inciting incident, starts as a business-as-usual situation, a monetary exchange between the black gangsters who control Harlem and the Mafioso who lord over the entire city, and as such the concentration is on business being done the way it's been done ten thousand times before: dexterous fingers counting bound stacks of cash, hands writing carefully in well-used ledgers, calculators tap-tap-tapping as ambient noise, dialogue limited to grunts and mutters. Then two men in cop uniforms show up and suddenly it's blaxploitation via Sergio Leone - the film rapidly cuts from tense face to tense face, occasionally jumping to a close-up of the barrel of a submachine gun aimed and ready to chew up the room. One wrong move, a suitcase falls; when it hits the ground, the movie explodes like a starter pistol and doesn't stop its mad sprint until the final gunshot.

Shear tends to use his crosscutting effectively like that, concentrating on speed and tension and going for head-knocking effect whenever possible (like the cut from a man screaming as he's knocked down an elevator shaft to another man jolting awake and screaming in junk-sick pain). He shoots handheld and restless, appropriate for a film seemingly wired into the nerves of a screaming city; his framing goes heavy on the closeups and body-crowded medium shots, often pulling in just close enough so that we can count the beads of sweat on the foreheads of the subjects. Yet he's also experienced enough to allow a moment to breathe when needed, as in the scene where Matelli and Pope have to break the news of a man's death to his wife, played by Marlene Warfield; she gets a closeup held just a beat longer than average for this movie, and there's a subtle loosening on her face, a practiced hard exterior slipping away in confusion and shock, that works beautifully as a moment of grieving humanity inside a whirlpool.

For all its lurid bombast, Across 110th Street sticks like it does because of its knack for these small moments and its willingness to push its characters in unexpected directions. It's there in the defeated embarassment that takes over Quinn's face when it's revealed he's on the take and beholden to the Harlem kingpin Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), in a crucial moment during the climax where ex-con Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) steals a glance at something behind him and loses what remains of his empathy, in the visible discomfort on the faces of Doc's chief henchmen as they witness unhinged Mafia enforcer Nick D'Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) drop a half-dozen racial slurs while stringing up a black man by his feet. The way the last bit cited there is cut, with three or four significant cutbacks to the two black gangsters looking halfway between offended and sheepish, led me to believe it would lead to an eruption of violence by them against the frothing D'Salvio; that it doesn't play out that way, that they stand by and let D'Salvio do what he will exchanging meaningful glances all the while, implies to me that they understand they don't need to act against this man - that he's already on his way out and his brutality is an extension of his moribundity.

It comes back to that, to the idea of being pushed out. Matelli is being forced out at 55, and D'Salvio is, at the age of 45, stuck doing the dirty work for an institution whose grip is already slipping. "We can't lose Harlem," says a Mafia Don at the outset, but it turns out it's already gone - Doc Johnson has more clout and more smarts than his ostensible Italian overlords and there's nothing a "punk errand boy" who's only where he is because the Don is also his father-in-law can do to stop this shift. He's being left behind just like Matelli, and he's none too happy about it. Power is a hard thing to have to give up, which leads Matelli and D'Salvio both to rage against their obsolescence in their own ways. It's a handy parallel... except it's not just that. Rather than a mirror, Across 110th Street has a triangle, as befitting the three main character groups. The third side is Jim Harris, the brains behind the opening smash-and-grab and a 42-year-old black man with multiple convictions and a crippling dope habit. Where the two aging white guys are acting out of the desperation of losing their perceived place in the food chain, Harris's desperation comes from having found a way out of the food chain in which he's perpetual prey. The opening rip-off was a foolhardy proposition from the get-go, but it's understandable as the act of a man with no recourse left to make something of himself, yet people died when they didn't have to, and that seals it for him. The tragedy of innocents caught in the crossfire, both literal and otherwise, pops up a number of times here (Warfield's scene, significantly, also has in the background a little girl); the tragedy of Harris, then, is his knowledge that, because it went bad and people died, the odds of him truly making it out are scant no matter how hard he fights or how far he runs. (A late-film exchange between him and his co-conspirator Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) sums up the fatalism: "Whatever happens we're gonna end up rich... or dead, man." "There ain't no better way.") Power is a hard thing to have to give up, but it's harder to never have had it in the first place, and either way you will be called to answer for the collateral damage you've left in your heedless wake.

12: The Abductors (1972, Don Schain)

Owned release: The 2003 DVD put out by Monterey Video as included in the 2004 box set with the other two films in the Ginger series.

Acquired: June 13th, 2012 from Amazon - same order as Strip Strip Hooray, oddly enough.

Seen before?: Nope.

Seems appropriate that a film about a female detective whose main asset is her easy sexuality should turn into an object lesson on the perils of going too fast. Don Schain's The Abductors followed hot on the heels of his Ginger, the 1971 film that introduced Cheri Caffaro's sultry and savage superdick. Turned around quick enough that it also bears a 1971 copyright date, the chief problem with The Abductors is that the speed of production didn't leave any room for innovation - at every point, the reigning ethos seems like, "What if we just made Ginger again?" The biggest difference between the two, best as I can tell, is that this film drops the uncomfortable racism that's the most eyebrow-raising aspect of Ginger and replaces it with a second helping of uncomfortable sexual violence. Erasing ethnic slurs and doubling-down on rape - that's progress in these parts, I guess.

While I'd like to stop there and move on to the next film - this film, for all its discomfort, is intensely boring in the way that only a determined Xerox of a previous success can be - I suppose I should at least try and muck around with the sexual politics on display here. Ginger is strong and confident in her sexuality and takes pride in her desires - the opening scene sees her and her boss at the detective agency bantering, with Ginger making knowing cracks about her long history, e.g. "I'm lying flat on my stomach for a change," whereas the cheerleaders who are kidnapped at the film's outset are explicitly marked as virginal and thus easy marks for predatory males. So far, so standard. But the introduction of another detective, a younger woman who is also sexually confident and a judo champion to boot, complicate things a bit. Carter, the younger woman, is being used as bait to draw out the abductors, yet once her cover is blown, her strength fails her; while it briefly looks like she's going to use her judo expertise to fight her way out, that gets stymied pretty fast and earns her nothing more than some punches in the stomach and some rough tit-squeezing (there's a lot of rough tit-squeezing in this). Ginger, meanwhile, is also ensnared within the trap of the abductors, but she wiles her way out by seducing a gullible guard. It's not enough to be strong in the world of the Ginger films - to get the upper hand, you have to be able to weaponize your sexuality.

With that in mind, the surfeit of rape makes structural sense (though it doesn't make it any less gross) - in this universe, seemingly all depicted sex is also an act of violence. When one of the lead abductors attempts to break down an unwilling abductee by forcing his fingers into her vagina, that's an act of violence; when Ginger gets information out of a guy by handcuffing him to a tree, threatening him with a knife and fondling his junk, that's an act of violence; when the brainwashed cheerleaders cheerfully go to bed with the rich industrialists who've purchased them, that's an act of violence. Even the one seemingly innocent scene of mutual sexual enjoyment, in which Ginger and an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer-looking advertising executive (with whom she's been flirting in order to set into motion her scheme to infiltrate the abductors) make love on a white shag carpet, turns out to be an act of violence - the advertising man was of course secretly a part of the abduction ring the whole time. And there's no counterbalance scene that's simply Ginger getting some as she professes a love for - the closest she gets to that is her friendly back-and-forth with her boss. Sex is power and power is sex, and never shall the twain be separated. Between the rape, the handcuffing, the sex-slave-creating brainwashing, the multiple scenes where Ginger starts to jerk a dude off only to chuckle and blue-ball him by walking offscreen, the cheerleader with the whip and the general skeeviness (where Ginger appeared to have been filmed in a series of hotel rooms, this appears to have been filmed in a series of basements), I feel like I know maybe a bit too much about Schain and Caffaro's sex life.