A Boy and His Dog, etc.

Any list of the most disreputable science fiction films would have to include A Boy and His Dog, a 1975 exploitation movie that became a cult classic thanks mainly to its utter (and still remarkable) disinterest in being liked. Written and directed by character actor L.Q. Jones (The Wild Bunch), this adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s novella about a teenage drifter (Don Johnson) roving a post-apocalyptic landscape with Blood, his sarcastic, telepathic dog, is one of the bleakest comedies committed to celluloid. Even if you don’t like it–and considering its rabid, upfront sexism and stomach-churning brutality, who could blame you?–you can still admire its depraved integrity. Like El Topo, High Plains Drifter and other works of early-70s macho pulp, it creates a worldview so relentlessly bleak that the viewer is torn between giggling and throwing up.

Johnson plays Vic, a randy 15-year-old trying to survive in a shattered landscape where canned food is used as currency and the only mass entertainment is porn loops (a dated yet oddly nostalgic touch). Blood isn’t just Vic’s best friend, he’s also his brother, his father figure and his pimp; he sniffs out fresh females for his horny adolescent "master," and Vic rewards him with food. Vic’s fortunes change when he meets Quilla June Holmes (Susanne Benton), a promising prospect who turns out to be a spy for an underground society that kidnaps Vic because they need his sperm to repopulate the planet. That sounds like the ultimate boy fantasy, but no such luck: Rather than a nonstop orgy, Vic’s seed is obtained through a process that will be familiar to anyone who’s visited a corporate dairy farm.

It’s possible to read A Boy and His Dog as a satire on machine-age society’s urge to industrialize everything, including reproduction, or as a widescreen male persecution fantasy that implies that men are justified in viewing women as objects because the feeling has always been mutual. Or one could see it as evidence of a post-60s backlash by male heterosexuals against a world that demanded that they be sensitive and accommodating to the point where they feared they’d have to subsume or renounce their very nature. In any case, A Boy and His Dog is one of the grimmest films of its time–and therefore one of the most revealing.

–Matt Zoller Seitz

Tony Gatlif can take credit for re-imagining the movie musical. Since the breakthrough 1993 release of his widescreen epic Latcho Drom (a continent-hopping history of gypsy rhythm), Gatlif has regularly come up with striking, original presentations of world music culture. Vengo is the most recent to be shown in the U.S., but the new–and splendid–DVD release will give more people access to Gatlif’s vision.

Tracing the flare-up of violence–especially revenge–as is found in the folk music of rural Spain, Vengo does what few chroniclers of American hiphop have been able to do. Gatlif’s dramatization of a personal war between modern-day feuding tribes combines an anthropologist’s rigor and a movie fantasist’s pizzazz. For that alone, anyone interested in understanding how the art of a subculture becomes an alarm that disrupts an entire society (as in the battle royale myths of hiphop) should see Vengo and learn something.

Gatlif doesn’t lecture. His distinction as the most rhythmical director since the great days of MGM musicals comes from his visual imagination and the way he conveys the drama in music. His esthetic documents a kind of neo-realist approach to third-world social customs. In Vengo the singing of revenge songs describes a village’s machismo but also becomes a form in which grieving women can weep and a genre that presents a complicated, parochial heritage to the world. The way Gatlif displays this in a shipboard, gang-rival sequence is, really, not so far from the way Vincente Minnelli departed from the musical sequences in Brigadoon but conveyed the rousing energy and spiritual tumult of his contemporary characters in that film’s famous, non-singing nightclub sequence.

It’s possible that Gatlif learned how to translate the cultural essence of music from just such intuitive innovations as Minnelli’s. Vengo, like Latcho Drom, displays a wondrous sense of cinema. In truth, a big-screen presentation would be the ideal way to appreciate Gatlif’s art, because it is essentially a communal art and technologically designed to be seen and heard big. Gatlif’s cinema is consonant with the folk qualities of the music that fascinates him; it should be experienced in its purest, most authentic format. But I’d wager that ever a dedicated musical anthropologist like Charles Keil would be grateful to have Gatlif’s marvelous perceptions disseminated in any way possible. The Vengo DVD spreads the news.

–Armond White

In the mid-70s, producer Ely Landau tried to bring classic 20th-century theater to a new audience–one that might never get out to see a play and which he assumed (correctly or incorrectly) was tired of the steady diet of crap they’d been getting at the movies.

The result was the American Film Theater–movies that brought together a star-studded group of actors and directors to film works by Ionesco, Genet, Brecht, O’Neill and others. The idea wasn’t to set up some cameras in front of a stage–Landau wanted slick Hollywood productions that still maintained the integrity of the original texts. John Frankenheimer directed Lee Marvin in The Iceman Cometh. Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel starred in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

The experiment eventually ran out of money after 14 films were made–most of which haven’t been seen for 25 years. Just recently, Kino gathered them all together into three box sets. Set three includes Philadelphia Here I Come!, Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars and Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris–but the centerpiece is Joseph Losey’s interpretation of Brecht’s Galileo starring Topol and John Gielgud.

I’m hoping you all know the basics: Galileo discovers that the Earth revolves around the sun. Man’s position in the universe is questioned. The Vatican gets pissed. The Inquisition threatens to kill Galileo unless he recants. He does.

At heart, Brecht’s play is about the responsibility of scientists to speak the truth when confronted by ignorance. The play was originally written as the Nazis were coming to power, and Brecht’s position was clear–it is imperative that intellectuals speak out, no matter what the cost.

As Michael Feingold notes in his accompanying essay, Brecht would often go back and rewrite old plays when he changed his mind about things. Following Hiroshima, he decided that maybe there were times when scientists should keep their mouths shut if their discoveries could be used for evil purposes. Suddenly Galileo’s position became much more ambiguous. Losey uses Brecht’s later version as the basis for what is a very straightforward historical drama. The 1975 production was lavish, and the performances–especially Topol’s abrasive, opportunistic Galileo–are brilliant and subtle.

I’m not sure what theater snobs think of all this, but for a philistine such as myself, I was thrilled that it didn’t feel like a play. There’s no staginess about it, none of the traditional stuffiness you normally encounter in filmed plays. And Brecht’s point remains just as powerful on film. The print itself is crisp and vibrant, and the extras include the above-mentioned essay, a brief interview with Topol, and loads of background on ATF.

–Jim Knipfel