All or Nothing... Jonathan Demme Pt. 2: The '70s Features

This is a continuation of my new regular Pylon series, All or Nothing...,  in which I try to tackle the remaining films in a particular filmmaker's oeuvre that I have yet to see. I am kicking off the series with a multi-part cleanup of the filmography of the recently departed Jonathan Demme, one of the most important directors in my lifetime. In Part 1, I tackled his 1974 women in prison flick, Caged Heat. This time, since his 1976 Peter Fonda flick Fighting Mad is apparently nowhere to be found, I recently watched and am now reviewing Demme's final two films of the 1970s, one of which turns out to come mighty close to being one of his masterpieces...

Citizens Band [aka Handle with Care] (1977) Dir.: Jonathan Demme – If you have just happened to catch the late actor Charles Napier in scores and scores of movie and television roles over the past few decades, and you were wondering what his defining role is, look no further. I didn’t know it before I got around to finally watching Demme’s 1977 C.B. radio ensemble piece, Citizens Band, a couple of weeks ago, and saw how excellent Napier was in his role as the philandering truck-driving husband of two different women (who uses a third woman, and a truck-stop hooker at that, as a go-between). Before this, I would have given the award to either his high profile role as the lead singer of the Good Ole Boys, the band that the Blues Brothers trick out of playing at the Country Bunker (“You’re gonna look pretty funny tryin’ to eat corn on the cob with no fuckin’ teeth!”) or his role as the sadistic and impotence-twisted cop Harry Sledge in Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. (Seriously, Harry Sledge is an all-time fantastic villain. You just have to finally sit down to watch a Meyer picture seriously to believe this.) I would have been happy with these assumptions for the rest of eternity.

And then I watched Citizens Band…

To be fair, I thought for many years that I had already seen Citizens Band (also released as Handle with Care). The date of the film’s release (1977) played a part in establishing this belief, as the mid-to-late ‘70s were chockfull of films, music, and TV glorifying the CB radio craze and lifestyle. Of course, everyone thinks about the Smokey and the Bandit movies, C.W. McCall's song Convoy (which was turned into a movie by Sam Peckinpah in 1978), a zillion other songs (some fun but mostly stupid), and TV shows like BJ and the Bear and Movin’ On. The Dukes of Hazzard, too, came mostly out of this craze, kind of a combination of the CB radio, stunt car, and hillbilly genres that some would argue represents the ne plus ultra of ‘70s/’80s trash culture. Being a teenager at the time most of this occurred, I was not discerning one bit, and loved it all as much as anything else I watched, read, heard or collected.

Somewhere in this span, I watched a film called Breaker! Breaker!, which turned out to be the first Chuck Norris film that I remembered. (I also saw his square-off against Bruce Lee in Return of the Dragon around the same time, but I didn't really know who Norris was until Sneak Previews whipped me into a frenzy to see Good Guys Wear Black in the summer of 1978.)  What I did not remember was the title, and thought for a good while that Citizens Band was the real name of the Norris movie. When I found out about Demme’s Citizens Band years later, it got me to wondering if maybe I had seen both films. After all, I had taken in so much CB radio nonsense in those formative years of my youth; perhaps I had seen both and mashed the two together in the same way that I could have in my Caged Heat discussion in Part 1?

Not to be. Dialing up Citizens Band on Amazon recently, I was rewarded from the start with a simply stunning, opening title sequence designed by artist Pablo Ferro (more on him in a future Demme post), which immediately set the film apart from all of the low-budget fare Demme had done previously for Roger Corman. What that title sequence spoke to me was that Citizens Band was going to be a different breed of cat than I had been anticipating. Since I have not seen Fighting Mad, it is hard for me to find that line where the formative Demme stops and the fully developed director begins. If Citizens Band is not that film, then at the least, it certainly marks his finest work of the decade.

Citizens Band is an ensemble work detailing the lives of a great many characters built around the day-to-day lifestyle of those who cannot get by without using a CB radio at the center of their stories. It is easy to believe that perhaps Demme was influenced by Robert Altman in maintaining the balance between the characters that fill this movie; I have yet to find anything that states this, but the time was right for this to be so. Any director worth his salt in the mid-'70s couldn’t help but be influenced by Altman in some way, even if it was negatively. What is missing in Demme’s narrative here and elsewhere (until we get to Philadelphia and then his remake of The Manchurian Candidate) is the political drive behind Altman’s work (simply name-checking neo-Nazis as despicable douche-nozzles is not enough), though Demme would more than commit himself deeply to numerous social causes in his frequent documentaries about Haiti's struggle against a dictatorship, AIDs patients, human rights abuses, and other issues.

Most of the characters in the film are known only by their trucker/CB codenames. Paul Le Mat’s character, Spider, is a repairer of CB radios, but who also spends his time monitoring the airwaves as a volunteer for REACT (Radio Emergency Associated Communication Teams). His late night hours have him listening to truckers engage in their unique, stylized patter over their CBs, and he occasionally jumps in with a warning to one CBer about misusing the channel or the dangers of blocking emergency calls. Even the characters that you don't expect to be aficionados of the CB craze will surprise you with their connection to it. Until three months before the start of the film, Spider used to be engaged to Pam (delightfully played by the mostly always adorable Candy Clark), whom is now not just having an affair with Spider’s brother, Dean (a pre-Animal House Bruce McGill), but also likes to tease teenage boys, under the name Electra, with graphic discussions laced with erotic details over the CB radio.

Before we get to that love triangle, we get to the most complicated one in the film. We meet Chrome Angel, played by the more-than-square-jawed Charles Napier, a trucker who not only has two wives in different towns (who have the code names Portland Angel and Dallas Angel) that don’t know about each other at all, but is not shy about seeking out a third sexual partner, a down on her luck hooker in her late ‘30s who is nicknamed Hot Coffee. Chrome Angel opens the film ending up in a nearly fatal trucking accident, but instead only ends up severely injuring his forearm after Spider hears his calls and comes to the rescue. As Hot Coffee takes the lead in nursing Chrome Angel back to health, his two wives arrive in town. On the way there, they happened to meet up on the same transportation, and through a gradual revealing of details, come to the realization that they are married to the same man. Meanwhile, Spider takes up the fight against illegal CB operations, and ends up facing off against a white supremacist group of Neo-Nazis, and any number of other douchebags. All paths lead back to various characters in the film, much confusion will reign, and lives and loves will be altered forever, sometimes won, sometimes lost.

The best films are the ones that truly feel lived in, the ones where you can seriously believe that the roles are filled by real people with real lives, and not just mere actors on a soundstage. Citizens Band is one such film, where it almost feels like the cameras are just intruding in on the daily activities of the citizens of a small town area and seeing how everything is working out for them. I suppose this would be appropriate to the intent of the citizens band radio movement in the first place. A film about a product meant for use by the people really should be about the people who do use that product, and we, the people watching that film, should be given an opportunity to at least understand the people who do find themselves completely captured in that product. In looking back at a film from a full 40 years ago, I can’t help but think what a similar film about the internet would be like today. The racists, the pornographers, the people self-possessed enough they need to expand their egos over the airwaves by either trolling other users or taking over the technology for long chunks of time to where they need to be reminded to allow others the same chance, the people eager to clean up the airwaves for responsible usage… the basic building blocks of our situation today are there in this film, albeit using an entirely different and more basic technology. Then as now, there is nothing in this world that mankind can’t screw up in royal fashion; likewise, there is no problem we cannot surmount if only we apply the proper focus and energy to it and work together for compromise.

One thing that mankind did not screw up was this film, and the main man in charge, Mr. Demme, betrays a steady, measured sensibility that shows his growth and maturity since Caged Heat, his feature debut. Demme is aided immeasurably by the cinematography of Jordan Cronenweth, who filmed Citizens Band back-to-back with his work in Peter Hyams’ Rolling Thunder, long known as Quentin Tarantino’s favorite film. The camera work here is subtly showy and breathtaking at times, especially in the film’s quieter, more intimate moments.

There is a scene between Spider and the lost love of his life, Pam, inside the wood-lined walls of the local school’s gymnasium equipment room. As each one holds the handle on a pommel-horse and lean against it, they mildly argue but mainly spend the time staring into each other’s eyes, trying to see who will make the first move as it is clear they still have feelings for one another. The staring will turn into quick kisses, and eventually a much longer kiss with repercussions, but before that we are given the framing of the two with the camera starting out at waist high as it moves into the scene, and then effortlessly glides up to shoulder height. As Spider makes his case, the camera continues to angle ever so slightly upward and back so that we catch a ray of light pouring down behind them from a bright light perched above off the wall. The light looks very much like that which might stream down through the steeple window of a church at midday. With the tops of their heads tilted towards the light as they continue to argue, the light slowly and slightly obscures the features of their faces, as Spider finishes a line with a kiss, which Pam returns after saying another line. It’s a lovely moment, but it is worth noting that when the scene cuts back to them after establishing that Spider’s older brother (who has been seeing Pam) is about to enter the room, the almost wedding-like sense of the previous shot has turned to raw emotion as he enters the gymnastics room to find the two of them in a deep embrace as they passionately kiss.

Spider remains committed in winning back Pam, and she struggles mightily between fighting her own remaining feelings for him. She is also nervous about destroying him utterly with the knowledge of the affair with his brother. The complications between Napier and his two wives and prostitute pal might seem unwieldy in other hands, but come off as surprisingly tender and sensible here, if not totally believable in today’s world. (They were the Swingin’ ‘70s, after all.) Napier, despite his character’s philandering, portrays a mostly honest man who just couldn’t turn down sharing his love with multiple women that all trigger romance in his soul.  His character’s sincerity, as well as that of his lovers, who find a common bond between them, is deeply felt, and I myself are quite sincere in saying this really is Napier’s finest hour. Showy, violent character bits in bigger budget films may be how he is mostly remembered, but this is the film that proves he was perhaps misused as an actor for the most part by Hollywood. (Demme gave Napier parts in film after film over a couple of decades, as he did for other regulars.) Citizens Band gives us a chance to see Napier with different eyes than before.

Most of all, there is that cast. Top-billed Paul Le Mat may have had a bigger showcase in 1980 in Demme’s sublime Melvin and Howard, but I think he is just as fine here in the part of Spider. It is an equally rich role, but this is a slightly younger Le Mat and a little more energetic. It is great fun at first watching him run in circles trying to establish any sort of closeness with his father, Papa Thermodyne (a terrific Roberts Blossom, whom I got the chance to meet briefly before his death), reestablish his relationship with Pam, find peace with his brother, rescue people in trouble on the highways, and thwart those Neo-Nazis who are supposedly out to get him. As the pair of surprised wives, Ann Wedgeworth and Marcia Rodd both do a fine job, but I have to give the edge to Wedgeworth, because it was the one of the first times that I really appreciated her as an actress. (Growing up and seeing her appear all over television, she quite often annoyed me; I think that I am now old enough to give her a shake on occasion.) Alix Elias, unknown to me going in but recognizable, is a lot of fun in the hooker role, with her squeaky voice and Gracie Allen phrasing. (Apparently, she is unknown to a lot of people; she apparently doesn't even rate her own Wikipedia page, even though she has been acting since 1964 and continues to this day.) I adore Candy Clark as Pam, of course, and McGill turns in a sold, more dramatic turn as the brother.

But the film is best when it is just swinging with its freewheeling, playful concept, and the characters swing (sometimes literally) along with it. Jokes that fly just under the radar so that the laughs don’t come off cheap is also a benefit. When Chrome Angel tells Hot Coffee that the way to save her failing prostitution career is to “go mobile,” he convinces her to go shopping for a motorhome to accommodate her johns. Because Hot Coffee looks like nothing more than a dowdy, middle-aged housewife, the unassuming salesman gives his spiel: “Now, this model sleeps three standard, with a five to seven option.” When she chuckles and cheerfully replies, “Golly, that’s plenty. I never even done three,” the joke whizzes right by him, but not the viewer. She builds up enough reserve to ask, while giggling and snorting, if they have the capability to add a bidet to the bathroom, yet again, he thinks nothing of it because she just seems like a cute lady who wants something special for her new home. Despite this interlude, the film is most decidedly not a sex comedy, just a mostly gentle film with a mild bit of ribaldry and outrageousness to keep things interesting and modern.

The abuse that Spider endures from the white supremacist set is also intermittently shocking and meant to throw the viewer off balance, but as to the reasons why I will leave to your own viewing of the film. Mostly, the film walks the line between comedy and drama, mixes in some romance, and even becomes a thriller for a short while deep in the second half. The finale is over the top ridiculous, but still pretty much in line with something the characters involved would probably end up doing. Strangers to Demme may be frustrated by the abrupt tonal shifts in his storytelling, but it is nothing new to his acolytes. (I remember how frustrated some reviewers were, and still are, with the swerving tone of Something Wild in 1986, but it was exactly that style which drove me to a near frenzy over that film.) To me, his movies, however artificial some of the settings may seem, move and shift like life. Or life as I see it, where nothing is ever secure, not love, not happiness, but also not even tragedy. Life just keeps rolling. And it doesn't care about genre.

I can tell you this. I will not shy away from getting the chance to rewatch Citizens Band ever again. It is unfathomable to me now that I put if off for so long. This film played even better with me in this morning's revisit (my third watch, the second being yesterday), and it is a film whose appeal to me is bound to grow over the remaining years I have left. – TC4P Rating: 7/9, but it may go higher with time.

Last Embrace (1979) Dir.: Jonathan Demme – If I had actually seen Citizens Band back in 1977 when it was released, I think that I would have likely expected Demme's next film to follow fairly closely in its footsteps stylistically. Were I to then apply foresight, and I knew that three years down the road lie his Oscar-winning Melvin and Howard (which does have much in common with the first film), it would lend support to my belief that the film bridging the two would not fall too far from the quirky character study tree.

So how surprising was Last Embrace to me when I watched it not long after my first viewing of Citizens Band? Certainly once I saw that the star of the film was Roy Scheider, I did not expect the usual Demme film. Scheider had been known far more for his roles in action/adventure (Jaws, Sorcerer, Jaws 2, Blue Thunder), police shoot 'em ups (The French Connection, The Seven Ups), and conspiracy thrillers (Marathon Man). His Oscar-nominated role in All That Jazz (which came out a few months after Last Embrace) was the anomaly in his career, what with all that singing and dancing going on in it, but like most of his roles, it centered hard on the dramatics. A whole lot of drama in Scheider's filmography, and very little comedy. Still, Scheider could be a really charming guy onscreen, and it's not like he wasn't adept at delivering a funny line or three when he needed; there would still be some gravitas to it, but he could certainly stretch anytime that he needed.

Even more of the surprise could have eroded easily had I spent any amount of time with the film's poster before I watched it. As it is, I am only now truly looking it over, and it really tells the tale. Scheider is seen holding an actress by the hand (presumably co-star Janet Margolin) as she hangs dangerously over the roiling waters of a massive waterfall (and one does not need to presume that the location is Niagara Falls, because the poster tells us so.) The text on the top of the poster reads: "It begins with an ancient warning. It ends at the edge of Niagara Falls. In between there are 5 murders. Solve the mystery. Or die trying." You remember movie posters that said more than just three or four words about the plot of a film. Yeah, they really did used to exist. In the case of Last Embrace, it seems fairly clear to me that the studio didn't really know how to promote this movie, and so they built the poster up into the most proto-Hitchcock sell that they could, emphasizing a novel location for a dangerous stunt within the film that centers on the possible death of a lead figure or figures, pump the fact that there are murders and a mystery within the film, and also point to the possible doomed romance between the characters through the title and image.

And the studio doesn't lie in this case. All of that stuff is in the film in some form. Whether the viewer believes it works or not is up to you. For me, it does not. The poster is a true giveaway: the film is an over-the-top tribute/pastiche of Hitchcockian motifs. While as a Hitchcock fan, it might be expected that I would fall for it instantly, I have grown rather tired of director after director needing to prove that they too can hamhandedly mangle a suspense scenario that Hitchcock could pull off in his sleep (and probably backwards and on heels too), all under the guise of "homage" or "tribute". They are fun once in a while, but I would rather the director come up with an original tangent on an old idea rather than try to slavishly remount a scene from Vertigo or North by Northwest just because everybody has a social memory sense of Hitchcock's greatest hits. In the case of Last Embrace, which is apparently absolutely meant by Demme to be one of those tributes to the Master, we do get some interesting new angles added to the mix, and the set pieces relating directly to more famous scenes are well handled by the director, but the final product overall is just missing the soul that one normally attributes to Demme's best work.

Another slight demerit, which would have played bigger had I seen it upon its release, is that Last Embrace came sandwiched in between Mel Brooks' much loonier (and surprisingly thorough) satire of the same material, High Anxiety, the year before, and Brian De Palma's reshaping of Psycho (along with nods to various other Hitch films), Dressed to Kill, the year after in 1980. I, like many De Palma devotees, love that film for reasons beyond logic can explain; so what if even Hitchcock himself thought it was ridiculous. Still, how many Hitch tributes can you take in such a short amount of time? Why not just tell people to go watch an original Hitchcock film and do your own thing?

Scheider, as "Harry," is seen at the beginning of Last Embrace frequenting a restaurant with his wife in a rather romantic, idealized setting, atmospherically lit with the sound of violin music in the air. Suddenly, there is an intrusion by several gangster-looking types, including character actor Joe Spinell, strange looks pass between Harry and one of the men, and bullets are fired in great quantity across the room. At the end, Harry's wife lies dying. Time passes and we see Harry being discharged from a mental hospital, over the grief and loneliness he felt over his wife's assassination. His doctor, with whom he seems quite familiar about many aspects of his life including his job, tells him to ease back into his former life.

At a crowded platform, with a train hurtling down the line in their direction, Harry stands waiting with many other men. As the train passes the platform, we see Harry lurch forward as it pushed, but he is swung back around onto the platform. (The "Whoa!" noise he emits while spinning about confused me at first, because it made me believe the film was going for broad comedy at that point, and then I realized my laughing was unintentional.) Harry harshly grabs the throat of one of the men behind him on the platform (a very pre-fame Mandy Patinkin), throws him against the wall, and from the look in Harry's eyes matched with his determined grimace, not to mention his kung fu chop-ready hand pointed at Patinkin's neck, we know Harry is a very dangerous and paranoid man, even possibly a killer in the form of an assassin or secret agent. ALF's dad, Max Wright, talks him out of further violence, convincing Harry with "Nobody pushed you, buddy! You stumbled!"

After he makes a stop at a department store to try and get a message (in a lipstick tube) from a salesclerk who seems familiar to him, we realize that Harry is indeed an assassin/agent, or at least he believes that he is, and that he is desperately trying to make connections back to his handlers. But it seems they are intent on remaining hands-off with ol' Harry. One old friend is sympathetic even if she snubs him both before and after this exchange: "Harry, Harry... how are you?" His reply is a sardonic, "I don't know. How is Harry, Harry supposed to be?" He tells her that the hands-off approach and the attack at the train station make him feel like he "is being told a bunch of bad jokes and I don't get the punchlines." Harry goes back to his New York City apartment for the first time since the hospital and finds a strange young woman, Ellie (Janet Margolin) subletting the place. She has even brought in her cat (to which he is allergic) and has no idea that he is the same person she has been told owns the place. There is also the matter of a strange note that has been slipped under the door. Ellie tells him the writing is Hebrew or Aramaic, so he believes she must have left it if she can read it. She says she only knows what the writing looks like when she sees it, and can make out one letter, Gimel, because it appears on dreidels. (I believe that argument.) He storms out to his agency, where his handler (Christopher Walken, just after his Oscar win for The Deer Hunter) both keeps him at arms' length but tries to reassure Harry that he will be called in when he is needed.

Harry consults with a rabbi and finds out the note partially refers to an ancient Jewish "avenger of blood" named Goel. He continues to grow more paranoid as he walks around the city and slowly but reluctantly enlists the further aid of his new roommate Ellie, and their friendship slowly blossoms. Further information from Ellie's professor at Princeton inform him that there have been a series of savage murders across the city, all of them attributable to the same "avenger of blood". The professor tells Harry of other notes that have been found at the crime scenes, and that Harry's note is peculiar because he is the only target that has been left alive. Everything rolls onward from there, from the revelation of exactly why Harry is being targeted (it's actually one of the more stunning parts of the film and something that came out of left field for me, though it is not unbelievable), to the identity of the killer, to that perilous clinging to life at Niagara Falls.

The film is Hitchcock reference-heavy but Demme-light; even if Last Embrace is meant by Demme to honor Hitch, it fails in feeling like a Demme film at all. Last Embrace is Demme in full-on thriller mode, and while it acquits itself admirably in continuing to advance the story while hitting the proper suspenseful beats, the film rather drags at many opportunities. There is little in the way of humor except of the most circumstantial kind. It is undoubtedly Demme's darkest film until The Silence of the Lambs came along in 1991, but his sense of high, fun style and deeply felt humanity that made his films so terrific during his highly successful run through the '80s is fairly absent here. Even Lambs had Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling as an identifying marker of true humanity to keep us centered and hopeful, our light in the darkness as we sought out justice along with her. (If the Lambs film had never been filmed by Demme, and thus Foster would have never played Clarice, it is likely that Lambs author Thomas Harris might really have gotten away with his perverse ending to the third Lecter novel, Hannibal, where he has Lecter turn Starling into a brain-eating love doll of his own design. As it was, I and many readers and reviewers found this ending completely out of character for Starling and the most monumental leap of faith in a series which relied on huge leaps of faith. On a personal level, I wrote Harris off at that point, though it is interesting to muse on a point that the third Lecter book may never have happened if Lambs hadn't been made and turned into such a massive hit.)

Scheider brings highly nervous energy and his usual intensity to nearly every scene but a few with Janet Margolin, and while some of their exchanges border on cute, the budding romance with Margolin in the film doesn't ever really take off for me. Margolin herself is fine, I guess, here; I have just never really gotten her as an actress. The best I can say is that I like her in some scenes but she comes off as amateurish in others. I would like to mention her best moments in the film, but that would give away too much. Let's just say they are two thirds of the way through the film, and she is wearing a lot of lipstick. Most of the other actors are all in far too limited roles to really have made any impact on me, except for John Glover as Ellie's professor friend. His performance, with his character shaking with eager excitement in getting to share his knowledge with Harry, is the best in the film). As Demme often does, the director manages to work in some of his usual suspects here: Spinell, Charles Napier (a much lower key role than I would have guessed, given the circumstances), and Gary Goetzman; apart from Glover (who appears briefly in Melvin and Howard), Marcia Rodd is the other actor who had done only one other film with Demme (she was one of Napier's two wives in Citizens Band). Three other actors in this film also appeared with Scheider in All That Jazz the same year.

The opening of the film features a title sequence that is the complete opposite of the brilliant opening to Citizens Band. Consisting of a simple red type on a black background, it was astounding to read that the sequence is the work of Pablo Ferro, who not only also did Citizens Band, but many of Demme's titles throughout the years. (Most influential of all, he provided his archetypal hand-drawn lettering in the credits for Stop Making Sense, which also make their way into the promotional posters and soundtracks accompanying that concert film.) I am certain the spare introduction is meant to once again evoke memories of the Master's films, but I just find it rather dull. This may just be in comparison to what I am used to seeing spring forth for Ferro's imagination in title sequences over many decades, but I can't help but feel it.

Behind the camera once more is his most frequent cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, and I would guess that if there is one person in a Hitchcock tribute who gets to have the most fun (though possibly the heaviest lifting of all), it would be him. His work here is stellar throughout, though I only got to see a copy on the MGM-HD channel, and the print seemed rather faded (even with the HD appellation on the station ID). Perhaps in the future i will get the chance to collect the blu-ray version to give the film a fairer shake. But in terms of composition and in nailing the details in regards to bringing solid memories of Hitchcock sequences past, Fujimoto is spot on throughout. Demme brings in a ringer for the musical score, hiring frequent Hitch collaborator Miklós Rózsa to add his lush orchestrations to the film. He also used regular Coppola editor Barry Malkin to cut the film together.

Like any Demme film, there seems to have been talent to spare both in front of and behind the camera in Last Embrace. All of the elements are there, and it is perhaps just my own wishing that Demme had made this more fully his kind of film than simply his thesis about Hitchcock techniques that leaves me disappointed by the end. I kind of tailed off in my attention for the last 15 minutes both times that I watched the film, and it is not from my lack of trying to keep focused on the finale. That is a mark to a me that a film stopped having anything to say to me after a certain spot in the proceedings. 

That said, there is enjoyment to be in this film, the subject matter of the "avenger of blood" is certainly something I had not really encountered before in a major motion picture, and the details leading to that avenger's crusade is a queasy one that also struck me at least to have been rather unique to the time period. Finally, Last Embrace is a most interesting film to any film buff, especially to the Demme and/or Hitchcock completist. I have had my say on the film, but as always, I leave future viewings to tell me whether I had it right all along or really needed to see the film fresh again. I am intrigued by what I may have to add if I watch this again in, say, six months time. OK, it's a date. – TC4P Rating: 6/9.

All or Nothing... Jonathan Demme Pt. 1: The '70s Features

A couple of weeks back on The Cinema 4 Pylon, I wrote at length upon my devotion to filmmaker Jonathan Demme, who died in late April from complications involving esophageal cancer and heart disease, over the course of his career. While I invoked several of Demme’s films in the piece (which you can read here: https://cinema4pylon.blogspot.com/2017/05/this-week-in-rixflix-8-all-demme.html), I mainly sought to confirm that three of his films – Stop Making Sense, Something Wild, and The Silence of the Lambs – are always to be considered masterpieces in my personal canon, and that a fourth film, Melvin and Howard, was hugely influential on my development as a young film fan. With that film in 1980, my personal history with Demme began, and I naturally assumed in the remaining years that his work had not lessened in influence on me since.

As I worked my way through his filmography, however, I discovered that I may have been wrong in that assumption in at least one sense. While those films from 1980-1991 may have continued to capture my imagination and critical eye in the years since I first saw them, I started to get the feeling that perhaps much of Demme’s work, apart from the occasional film like Rachel Getting Married, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, or Storefront Hitchcock, had largely escaped my notice after Philadelphia came out in 1993. I realized that I had not been leaping at the chance to see the latest Demme film in all that time, waiting instead for me to locate a film or three once they reached video in an almost happenstance manner. The most glaring error was that I was also still missing out (again with a couple of exceptions) on having seen most of his earlier work throughout the 1970s before Melvin and Howard set him on my map. I had made sure to explore the early works of other major directors on my favorites list. So, why not Demme? Whatever was I going to do about this?

All or Nothing… Concept and Title

I had already been working on a new concept for the Pylon in recent months that involved a deeper dive into the works of directors or actors with whom I already had great familiarity, but still had a number of works to see before I had every possible title checked off their respective lists of films. Not a particular director or actor, mind you; it was meant to be a general concept that I could employ any time that wished. I had been working on the format for a couple of months, and had been researching and setting up entries for a number of filmmakers in that span. I had intended to begin with Wes Craven, as I had seen most of his films in my lifetime, but still had a couple of more obscure ones left. I was then planning to leap full body into the silent works of Alfred Hitchcock (for reasons that will become clearer this summer).

I was at the point where I had the template worked out for the articles, but still needed to figure out an actual title for the series. I had run through several, of course – one thing where I usually never lack for material is in titling things or nicknaming people – but I was hitting the wall with this one. I was too caught up in finding a clever pun or a truly odd title. In a nod to my buddy Robear, I almost called it Grouting with the Greats – as in “filling in the cracks” of their filmographies, but I was having trouble coming up with the proper grouting tool to employ in the logo, so I gave up on that one. I hadn't found the right name.

When Demme died, however, it absolutely became a must for me to begin this series with a sharp focus on his works. I wondered how many of his films I had seen, which naturally led to me wondering the opposite as well. How many was I missing? Pulling his name up on Letterboxd, a total of 35 titles popped up that directly have his name in the major line credits, and using one of the primary functions on the site – which allows you to determine the exact percentage of films you have seen on a particular list – it showed I had seen 40% of those films (at the time that I first checked Demme's oeuvre on there). This 40% distressed me, as I thought I had seen far more of his films overall. Since Letterboxd uses as its primary source of information a site called TMDb (The Movie Database) and not IMDb (to which they would likely have to pay a premium to connect), I knew that the number of Demme films actually had to be much higher than just 35 films. I also knew he had produced a good number of films as well, and had done non-directorial work on several others early in his career. So, I went to IMDb and used their full filmography to build a list on Letterboxd that not only included every possible film with a Demme credit that I could find, but also added notes for individual films and put them in loose chronological order (alphabetically by year of release, but not strictly in order of filming). The full list came out at 87 titles.

Whew! That is certainly a huge list of films, so the next question involved my commitment to seeing such a project through to completion. I am not sure where the inspiration came from at all, just that I heard someone say the phrase “All or nothing” sometime after building the list – I think it was on the news, or "fake news," as assholes trying to destroy our democracy call it – which then got an old favorite Small Faces song from 1966, All or Nothing, caught in my head for the first time in a good while. Suddenly, there was that tiny explosion of wonder and excitement in my noggin. Everything made sense to me, and especially made sense for the new series. It is to be called All or Nothing..., as in "I either see all of the films this person has done or I might as well have seen nothing." If I were a gambling man, it could have just as easily been called Going All In, but luckily, I am not that sort.

The Rules...

So, here’s how we are going to do things moving forward with All or Nothing… It will concentrate only on the films that I had not yet seen by a filmmaker prior to watching each film for the series. My intent is to proceed through a filmmaker’s catalogue in order, but with the ability to break the films down into specific sections based on my own whim. In most cases involving directors, the first focus will be on films that were actually directed by the subject, and then if I wish to delve into films they wrote, produced, or on which they worked otherwise, that is up to my discretion. The main goal is for me to have seen every possible film they directed by the final chapter. That will be the “All or Nothing…” If there are smaller films that say, they executive produced and played no other part, once again, it is up to me if I wish to include them and eventually write about them. That will just be the gravy... if I feel the need to have gravy.

For Jonathan Demme, I looked at the films of his that I had yet to see, and broke them into handy categories. For Part 1 (this exact post) and its immediate follow-up (due to length), there were four films from the 1970s I had not seen (only three of which I could find; more on that later); after that, there were another four remaining feature-length narrative films which spanned the years 1998-2015. That will be Part 3. Then came the discovery that Demme had helmed nearly as many feature-length documentaries as he had narratives, but while there were more than a half dozen I had yet to see, I was able to track down only four films that were easy to locate in order to review them for the series. That will create Part 4. Finally, I have watched a few films that were outside of his directorial influence, but that he either wrote or did other work, so that should make a nice round Part 5. And if in the future, I happen to find that missing '70s flick (Fighting Mad) or the other documentaries (Cousin Bobby, etc.) then there may be a clean-up Part 6, but it could be years in the making for that one.

With all of the preliminary explanations and backstory out of the way, we are now ready to begin with the first official entry in the series:

All or Nothing… Jonathan Demme Pt. 1: The '70s Features...

Demme’s first professional credit in a film was as a music coordinator for a British production titled Eyewitness (aka Sudden Terror) in 1970. While still in England, he met Roger Corman, who was filming his Red Baron biopic, Von Richthofen and Brown, in Ireland. Demme ended up working as a publicist for that film. Corman and his brother Gene had recently started up a new production company called New World Pictures, and Demme turned in numerous scripts for the company. Corman had the most incredible knack for fostering talent in his “B” pictures; over the years, his films exposed the world to the early works of Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Allan Arkush, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, John Sayles, Curtis Hanson, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Kaplan, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, and James Cameron. (I won't even name the actors who cut their teeth on his films.) Demme had met the right man at the right time.

His early screenplays for Corman included a biker/hippie clash done Rashômon-style called Angels Hard As They Come, and a women’s prison picture titled The Hot Box. In 1973, Demme also delivered the story for another women’s prison flick for Eddie Romero at American-International (the Cormans’ old haunt) titled Black Mama, White Mama. During this period, Demme gained some early experience as both a second unit director and as a producer on some of these films and a couple of others. But, with his schooling almost behind him, Demme’s big break arose when Corman had him direct Caged Heat.

Caged Heat (1974) Dir.: Jonathan Demme – In 1974, Corman had Demme write and helm yet another women’s prison picture; the 1970s were rife with these things, and the reason was solely because they made for a solid investment. The films were perfect grindhouse and drive-in fodder for this very simple combination: "Guy" guys love T&A, they love women in some form of bondage or to be used badly or be in danger somehow, and they love lesbians, as long as they are of the lipstick variety, and as long as it is not in real life.

Caged Heat had been one of those titles that I had known about forever, but had always avoided for a few reasons. The first is that I really don’t like watching films that take place in prisons or prison camps, even though I have several personal favorites (Birdman of Alcatraz, A Man Escaped, Down by Law, Cool Hand Luke, Midnight Express, Papillon, Brute Force, Escape from Alcatraz… and The Shawshank Redemption, of course) that take place in such settings. It is just a matter of personal discomfort with what goes on inside them; it really is one of those “there but for the grace of a certain deity" situations.

The second reason is that I had seen other women’s prison flicks and found out that I am just not one of those guys who loves to watch them. Whatever discomfort I feel in the films featuring guys seem to amplify when women are involved. I believe the cause of this is the too frequent extreme violence involving women that surrounds such scenes, which I am apparently fine with if the movie is about a rampaging monster or a slasher killer. (We are all hypocrites in some such way, if not a great many ways. Accept that this be one of mine.) Finally, the third and most important reason: I find the genre so deadly dull.

No real relation...

This is not to say that I haven't seen a fairly decent amount of WIP films, from the 1930s through the juvenile delinquency '50s to the resurgence of the genre in the '70s and into the straight to video age. Because of this, I had mistakenly believed for several years that I had seen Caged Heat already, but it seems I was mixing the title up with other films of the genre that I had seen. I have definitely seen both Chained Heat (1983, with Linda Blair) and Caged Fury (1989) in my twenties, so you can see where I may have smashed the two titles together in my mind. (If there had been a further film called Chained Fury at the time, I would be even more confused by now; a quick check of IMDb reveals that such a title was released in 2003, a softcore Lloyd A. Simandl junker.) Out of an interest in cutie pie scream queen/scribe Jewel Shepard at the time, I had even seen 1994’s Caged Heat 2, which it turns out has no connection to Demme’s film except for a producer copping a title to make more money. However, I had not seen 1995’s Caged Heat 3000, a sci-fi actioner that apparently takes the WIP film to space (though that concept too had been done previously anyway).

As for the real Caged Heat, it turns out I had never actually seen it before; I had merely tricked myself into believing it. Outside of a few clips in documentaries about Roger Corman or about “B” movies in general, Caged Heat was wholly new to me when I finally watched it recently, even if the film does bear an unsurprising similarity to most other women-in-cages flicks produced during the time period. There were reasons the genre was growing popular with grindhouse crowds, and Demme and Corman largely stick to that formula. The plot is little different from most other WIP pics – a bunch of women who have been thrown in the slammer together experience physical and mental abuse at the hands of their captors, headed by a sadistic warden, and finally (mostly) decide to stop fighting amongst themselves and attempt to escape from their tormentors. Caged Heat has some lesbian overtones (but mostly downplays them in favor of friendship), nude showers, and S/M torture by prison officials sequences so prevalent in the genre throughout its history.

But – and this is likely where Demme’s touch, even early on in his directorial career, comes to the fore – there are some stylistic touches that distinguish it from the competition, albeit slight. Part of this is applicable to the crew behind the scenes on the picture. John Cale of the Velvet Underground contributes a score that begins like we are in for 83 minutes of down-home bluesy harmonica runs and accompanying guitar (which is not credited to Mike Bloomfield, but I have seen him cited as providing it), but suddenly becomes surprisingly daring in its abrupt switches in mood, and even fairly haunting during the film’s darker sequences. Tak Fujimoto, the Emmy-winning cinematographer of the John Adams miniseries on HBO, may be near the start of his own career behind the camera here but he still lends Caged Heat – the first of ten features he would lens for director Demme – at least a far more inventive eye than we often see in these affairs. Fujimoto would progress far beyond this, culminating in his work on The Silence of the Lambs (though sadly unrecognized by the Academy throughout his career - not even nominated once, even in a film that won all of the major awards).

Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, looking sad...

No matter the talent behind the camera, in the end, interest in an exploitation film of this stripe is going to come down to the actresses and whether they are interesting (or, as the producers would have it, naked and attractive) enough for us to stick around to purchase a ticket. Caged Heat has an exploitation level, all-star cast featuring an alumnus of Russ Meyer’s stable (Erica Gavin), solid WIP veterans (the spunky Roberta Collins, who had already starred for New World in The Big Doll House and Women in Cages), and blaxploitation pros (Juanita Brown, who would also co-star in Foxy Brown the same year). In a prominent role as the film’s truly oddest, most complex character we find Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, who would find herself starring in all manner of exploitation films throughout the decade and into the early ‘80s (my favorites being Laserblast, the softcore hit Cinderella, and Massacre at Central High) but would also find small parts in major studio films as diverse as De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (with Steve Martin), and Robert Mandel’s Independence Day. (She would also reunite with Demme in 1980 with a bit part in Melvin and Howard.) And somewhere in this mix in a tiny role is Desireé Cousteau, then just 18 and a few years away from becoming one of the most recognizable sex stars in the world.

I said Smith had the oddest character, but the strangest performance goes to horror vet and longtime scream queen Barbara Steele, in the role of the cruel, fascistic, wheelchair-bound warden. Steele’s character is highly sexually repressed, and if you couldn’t tell it at first from the way her blouse is buttoned up to her neck, her eyeglasses, and the tightly pulled bun in her hair, then maybe this will do the trick for ya: Accidentally turned on by the prisoners while they perform in a skit onstage, she closes her eyes and rubs her hands sensually across the blanket that drapes her legs in her wheelchair. (And she does this sitting in full view of every prisoner in the audience around her.) I understand the drive towards casting Steele in such a role; even as she aged, she remained voluptuous and sensual in her appeal. But I am really not sure what Steele is doing with the part at times. Her line readings and mannerisms seem off-kilter, and while she practically whispers much of her dialogue in most scenes, this is not to say she is underplaying at all. You could say that Steele’s always unearthly looks make it impossible for her to underplay anything, and this film may make the case for that. I love Steele in most cases and in all manner of parts, but she threatens to blow the film apart in almost any scene in which she appears, because the remainder of the cast seem to have gotten their notes on how to play things, but she may have eaten hers. And the scenery with it. Still, I would rather the film had her in it than not, and that may be exactly why she thrived so long on the fringes of the “B”.

As for the plot, Erica Gavin’s character is busted by the cops, ostensibly for drugs but I think it is actually for pairing horrible red knee socks with some truly unforgivable footwear. (They almost look orthopedic in nature.) The early scenes in the film see Gavin thrown into this nightmare world (though she is hardly an innocent) where the prison’s mad doctor (Warren Miller) immediately takes advantage of his position to abuse the new girls during their check-in physicals. Gavin’s character becomes our witness to the usual trappings of a prison flick: prisoners facing off against each other for dominance, shower scenes, and female bonding. (Luckily, Multiple Miggs is not around to flick spent jizz in her hair.) Gavin herself does battle against Juanita Brown (possibly the harshest and least sympathetic of the main actresses, and once more, I do not like her acting either) but eventually, they will come to grudgingly accept each other in pursuit of a unifying factor: escape.

Early on, Collins and Reid (whom I do quite like in the film) perform in a skit during a talent show that upsets the warden (that whole repression thing makes her leave the room in disgust, mainly with her reaction to it). The warden puts the prison on lockdown, and eventually, will go so far as to have Miller’s doctor torture Gavin (and other women) with electroshock therapy. (Eventually, the doctor will formulate a plan to cure Smith’s character of the suicidal thoughts and nightmares that plague her by drilling into her brain for completely illegal corrective surgery.) Gavin and Brown make it outside and seek out help, committing small crimes along the way. The film gets an added charge in the latter half by the inclusion of yet another veteran of ‘70s “B” flicks, Crystin Sinclaire, here playing Crazy Alice, a hooker who is paid to wrestle her johns (in her scant underwear) into submission. (The film almost threatens to go hardcore at that point but never does.) Gavin, Brown and Sinclaire then plot the film’s second escape plan: to rescue the rest of their friends from the clutches of the evil warden and doctor.

Violent, rough, touching at times, even tongue in cheek in a few scenes, Caged Heat is also graced by small character scenes that surely prove Demme was a young filmmaker looking to make his mark in tweaking an already established genre where its most common aspect is being content with feeding low-hanging fruit to the drooling masses. Demme seeks to do a little more, and you can noticeably feel him attempting to make fun of the proceedings almost as much as he embraces them to make his boss happy by reaching the bottom line. Most successful are Roberta Collins and Cheryl Smith; while not necessarily fine actresses, they do acquit themselves admirably, with Smith definitely having the tougher role to pull off convincingly. Where the acting (and casting) fails most for me is the inclusion of Gavin, who remains a cipher throughout and seems to have been hired only for those all-important shower scenes. Yes, she is physically impressive, but making her character the linchpin for building our interest in the life of the prison was probably a misstep. (I think Collins would have been the more natural choice.) From the outset, Gavin’s character is noticeably involved with committing a crime involving drug dealers, and acts illogically throughout the film. It is hard for me to engender any emotions at all for her. (Plus, her shoes really are a goddamned crime.)

Despite the excellence of certain elements and actors, the film never quite shakes its budget or low-rent look. Demme does the best he can with what he was given, but it is still hard believing in a prison, especially one that is as supposedly draconian as this one is, that doesn’t have a standard prison uniform; the girls all wear pretty much what they had on the outside (presumably), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were what the actresses wore to their auditions (once again, presuming they went to an audition). Likewise, the prison transport truck is simply a moving van. These elements and others (such as the generally poor, hollow sound and lack of lighting) take away from the film as much as the good parts elevate it.

As I have already said, the Women in Prison genre is really not my bag, but Caged Heat is just good enough where I understand how proponents of the genre (which I perceive to be mostly pervy guys who are into naked shower scenes and hot, non-lesbian actresses making out together… not that there’s anything wrong with that) hoist this film up as one of the handful of shining examples of the type. (The Big Bird Cage, The Big Doll House, and Chained Heat are often mentioned as well.) I do enjoy the film in this sense and readily agree with such an assessment, and I think as a time capsule film of where Demme started out as a director in order to contrast it with the remainder of his spectacular career, it is a “must see”. But at most, I can only give Caged Heat a rating of 5/9, which is above much other genre fare but just below calling it a genuinely “good” film. Perhaps with more time, I will come around; perhaps if I had first seen 25 years ago in my early adult years, I would have more regard for it by now. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Note: Demme’s second directorial feature, Fighting Mad, is proving elusive to find. A 1976 film which has Peter Fonda fighting corrupt land developers (or, more simply, just land developers), it is not available on DVD or anywhere online that I have found. Making things confusing is a 1978 Cirio H. Santiago film also called Fighting Mad, a kung fu revenge flick which I have seen on TCM Underground under the title Death Force. That one is all over the internet and available for purchase, but many places that claim to have the Demme film actually have the Santiago instead. If you notice a legal version pop up, please let me know.

There are two more films to cover in the next part of All or Nothing... Jonathan Demme: Citizen's Band [aka Handle with Care] (1977) and Last Embrace (1980). Stay tuned...