The Michigan Daily-Wednesday, March 14, 1979-Page 5
CRITICS' A TTA CKS UNFO UNDED:
'Hard Core'
fille with ferocious magic
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
Though I would like td be a rich,
famous and influential film critic as
much as any eager aspirant, there are
moments when such a position of in-
fluence seems so misused that I find
myself yearning to be a veterinarian, a
CPA or some such blandly non-
controversial niche.
That's my feeling about Paul
Schrader's Hard Core - a film faintly
praised by a handful of critics as "an
earnest effort," but condemned by
twice that number as an opportunistic
hustle lacking even integrity of pur-
pose, much less artistic merit. Their
accumulated hatchet job has had its ef-
fect: Hard Core will slink out of Ann
Arbor and elsewhere at the end of this
week, a box office exile done in my
media forces myopically insensitive to
the innovative, even courageous con-
tent of Schrader's work.
THESE WORDS come much too late
to help reverse an already lost cause,
but for the record, I think Hard Core is
one of the most thought-provoking,
cinematically stimulating films in
recent memory, and a breathtaking
counterbalance to the Grease-Foul
Play-California Suite anti-think
monopoly which now gluts the
American screen. To dismiss it as
cavalierly as most critics have is not
only myopic, but judgementally
irresponsible.
Hard Core reaches far beyond its
much-publicized foray into the murky
depths of the sex-pornography
business. It delineates nothing less than
a cosmic, cataclysmic collision of
cultures diametrically and permanen-
tly alien to each other. It's a symbolic
death knell to the concept of global
community, and I'm not sure I've seen
anything quite like it in American
movies, either in conteptiop or
execution.
MUCH - TOO MUCH - has been
made over the parallel between Hard
Core's midwestern protagonist, Jake
VanDorn and Schrader's own Grand
Rapids strict-Calvinist roots. The fact
is that Schrader has not used his film as
a tool for personal exorcism or other
such nonsense. He has utilized the life
he knows to tell a corking good, often
terrifying story of ideals in conflict.
Right from the opening credits, which
show a Grandma Moses-like sledding
scene with the film's blood-red title
superimposed over it, you know some
incalculable evil is going to render this
pastoral asunder. The palpable menace
hangs over snowbound Christmas-time
Grand Rapids, like an imminent in-
vasion from another planet - which, in
a sense, is just what it is.
We're introduced to Jake VanDorn
(George Scott), a successful furniture
manufacturer, secure in the
predestination conception of his Dutch
Reformed Church. He's strict, but
defi:ly a nice guy as well. We watch
as he lovingly sees off his teenage
daughter Kristen, bound for California
on a church youth group bus trip.
A WEEK LATER, during Sunday
dinner, Jake gets a phone call. Kristin
has disappeared. Jake walks entranced
back to the dinner table, his careful en-
vironment suddenly shattered. It's a
whole other world out there, and for the
first time in his life, Jake is forced to
face it. He flies to Los Angeles and hires
a private detective (Peter Boyle) to
find Kristen. Returning to Grand
Rapids, he sits and waits silently,
hoping for some news.
Iranians protest
Carter's mideast role
The days pass into weeks, then into
months. Then Jake gets a call from his
detective, who's just flown into Grand
Rapids. Escorting Jake into a local
peep-show porn store ("They've even
got these in Grand Rapids," he tells
him), the private eye sits him in a
darkened theater and puts on a hard
core sex film. The film is of Kristen.
Jake, who has never seen a porno film
in his life, disintegrates - his beliefs
and faith suddenly challenged as never
before.
DESPITE THE detective's assuran-
ces that his daughter is probably all
right, Jake can no longer stand his
agony. He flies back to California, fires
the slimy investigator and sets off into
the porn world to find Kristen himself.
Though shockable and unsophisticated,
Jake has the single-minded desperation
to adapt to his environment. Rebuffed
by the skin trade regulars when being
himself, he assumes guises - first as a
would-be investor in porn movies, later
as a hard core director supposedly
casting for a film.
Schrader displays an amazing
proclivity for black comedy and stark
drama laid side by side; many of these
scenes make you want to howl with
laughter at the same moment you're
cringing with revulsion, as Jake sinks
deeper and deeper into a neon Hades,
trying to maintain integrity threatened
on all sides.
I have no idea what critic Pauline
Kael means when. she asserts "there
may never have been another
American director as lacking in spon-
taneity as Paul Schrader." How does
she define spontaneous? Do the sterile
android-like works of a Herbert Ross or
a Sidney Lumet - works so
calculatingly, cynically geared to a box
office optimum - actually transmit
some great pleasures, while Schrader's
very original concoctions do not?
I CAN'T think of another director
currently working who can capture the
gritty ruddyness of Middle America
quite so well as does Schrader. His non-
Californian roots turn out to be his
prime aesthetic asset - there is no
touch of the hip, the slick or the bland in
his work. He has eschewed much of the
technical awkwardness of Blue Collar,
yet sacrificed none of the electricity,
the excitement. His images of solid,
staid Grand Rapids are cloaked in such
a homely, rock-ribbed gingerbread
security that the eventual transition to
its very antithesis is gruesomely
memorable.
Schrader's eye serves him no less
well in the porn scene. Time critic
Richard Schickel complained that here
he visuallymissed the target, that "he
does not know (the porn world) in his
bones, as he does that other world."
Schickel misses the point: Hard Core is
meant to be an outsider's perspective -
distorted, heightened, bigger-than-life.
Jake's view is a phantasmagoric,
pilgrim's-eye view of a demonic new
world, a world that strikes us head-on
with garishly-lit, 20th century urban
ghouls and goblins. As Jake's quest
winds from city to city, Schrader and
master cinematographer Michael
Chapman (Invasion of the Body Snat-
chers) lead us on a journey through a
sensual hell, a red and purple montage
that builds with an almost unendurable
tension. Jake's odyssey is rubbed to an
even more jangling edge by Jack Nit-
zsche's terrifying score, which subtly
transforms church hymns into elec-
tronically distorted perversions.
SOME REVIEWS have criticized
Schrader's failure to focus more on
Jake's family, on Kristen's reasons for
fleeing her environment (we find out
much later that Jake's supposedly dead
wife also deserted him years earlier)
Such exploration would have been
ruinous. The search itself, the collision
of cultures, is the guts of Hard Core,
and an extended examination of the
"Daddy, why don't you love me?" syn-
drome would almost inevitably devolve
into dreary soap opera. Schrader
wasn't "ducking the issue" - he
merely knows how to tell a well-paced
story.
Hard Core's drawbacks lie in some of
its specific characterizations, an area
where Schrader's awkwardness still in-
trudes on his conception. Scott's
brilliant, wrenching performance as
Jake is enough to carry the film by it-
(Continued from Page 1)
Time was the only magazine he men-
tioned by name in this context. Time
reporter Roland Flamini said at the
briefing that the magazine had already
denied such charges.
MEANWHILE, firing squads
executed two generals, a legislator, the
former head of the national news agen-
cy and eight other men yesterday in the
purge that has killed dozens of former
supporters of the shah.
Eleven men were killed by firing
squads in Tehran and one in the holy
city of Qom, 100 miles to the south, after
secret trials without the aid of defense
attorneys.
Islamic revolutionary courts are
known to have ordered the execution of
57 persons, including 12 generals, for
alleged political and sex crimes since
the shah's government fell Feb. 12. The
shah is exiled in Morocco.
THERE WERE indications that the
new government is having success in
bringing the economy back to life. The
National Iranian Oil Company announ-
ced production in the country's oil fields
had reached 2.5 million barrels daily,
up from 1.6 million barrels a day last
week.
Before anti-shah strikes paralyzed
the economy, Iran exported about six
million barrels daily. The company
said all but 700,000 barrels daily was
earmarked for foreign consumption.
The company said it will resume
selling Iranian crude on a contract
basis to American, European and
Japanese companies April 1. In recent
weeks, oil has been sold on a spot basis
to the highest bidder. Spot prices are in
the range of $20 a barrel compared to
the OPEC price of $13.55.
IRAN YESTERDAY also confirmed
it was withdrawing from CENTO, the
Western defense alliance for west Asia
as the first move towards its intended
membership in the non-aligned
movement.
The confirmation came as another,13
men were executed by firing squad afte
swift sentencing by Islamic courts.
Nine of them were from the shah's
police and armed forces.
Western diplomats said the with-
drawal, anticipated two months ago
during the shah's final government,
would probably lead to the collapse of
CENTO (Central Treaty Organization).
Pakistan said last weekend it was
pulling out of CENTO.
The only remaining full members are
Britain and Turkey. The United States
is an associate member.
George Scott agonizes over the loss of his daughter in Paul Shrader's hard-hitting film "Hard Core."
self; yet Peter Boyle's sleazy detective
never seems to develop beyond the ac-
tor's standard semi-kook schtick. Ac-
tress Season Hubley, playing a young
prostitute who accompanies Jake
through the later stages of his journey,
seems only a slightly older version of
Jody Foster's Iris in Schrader's Taxi
Driver, and a fast-talking porno film
producer remains a stale comic-relief
stereotype.
SCHRADER STILL has trouble with
intimate conversation scenes, a few of
which seem so clumsy that they oc-
casionally bring the film almost to a
halt. Yet his overall conception, his
sense of cinematic pace and flow, or
colors and emotions, has become en-
thrallingly skillful. Hard Core's tex-
tures, its visual and emotional density
radiates the touch and control of a
newborn master.
There are dozens of magic images:
Of Jake asleep like a baby in his safe
Grand Rapids bed just before his
existence is shattered; a slow pan away
from a youthful chorus on a TV
religious show across the windowed
perimeters of stark, secular LA; a
nighttime fight between Jake and a
murderous pimp slowly progressing
down an impossibly tilted San Fran-
cisco street, with Nitzche'% music
throbbing almost silently in the
background. Hard Core simmers, alive
in the thrill of a director's art.
AND YET THIS is the film that
Pauline Kael says "looks like a film
made by somebody who has no joy in
moviemaking." Did she and I see the
same film? Was I stoned at the time?
Was she? Could she spot no moment of
inspiration, of thoughtfulness, of
courage?
I'm not claiming intent is tantamount
to success. If good intentions were
everything, then the politically noble
but aesthetically incompetent Stanley
Kramer would be judged the greatest
film director of all time. The point is
that Hard Core succeeds on all counts:
It is an immensely ambitious, perhaps
radical thematic undertaking, coupled
with a surpassing, burgeoning
cinematic intelligence. How can there
be "no joy in filmmaking" in this con-
suming, astonishingly tender work?
' ROBERT MORLEY was probably
accurate when he said that "If the
critics were always right, we should all
be in deep trouble." The problem is that
if they're often completely, tragically
wrong, then the film industry and its at-
tending public are going to be in a lot
deeper trouble than they're in already.
By the not-too-distant future, when
we're all saddled with a strict diet of
Superman-Part Six and Star Wars-Part
Twelve,we may long for a Paul
Schrader. But by then he'll probably
have concluded a CPA's life is both
richer and safer - and certainly less
misunderstood.
The Ann Arbor Film Coorerstive presents at Aud.A
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14
LAST TANGO IN PARIS
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973) 7 & 9:15-AUD. A
MARLON BRANDO in his famous role as a sexually-aggressive expatriate who
embarks on a three-day affair with a young, modish Parisienne (MARIA
SCHNEIDER). The affair is purely physical, isolated experiences, and the apart-
ment an island in which certain aspects of human relationships are examined.
"A film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of
reviewing."-Pauline Kel. Music by Oliver Nelson and Gato Barbieri. In French
ana tnglnsf, with subtitles.
TOMORROW: Fellini's 81A
China threatens Laos
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(Continued from Page 1)
THE DECISION, made public Mon-
day, was a note sent to Chinese Foreign
Minister Huang Hua by Laotian Acting
Foreign Minister Khamphay Boupha,
asking the Chinese to "suspend the road
construction in northern Laos and to
withdraw all its building units as soon
as possible."
The newspaper said after the com-
plete liberation of Laos in 1975 Chinese
workers continued with the construc-
tion of Highway One and other roads in
northern Laos. The work was suspen-
ded after the Chinese launched an at-
tack against Vietnam on Feb. 17.
China said Sunday that Laos, under
Soviet and Vietnamese pressure, had
torn up Sino-Laotian agreements. It ac-
cused Hanoi and Moscow of "enslaving
the Lao people."
ESTIMATES'OF Chinese technicians
and others in Laos vary from below
3,000 to 5,000, most of them building
roads in the northern provinces under
an agreement made in late 1961.
Meanwhile, intelligence officials in
Bangkok said the Chinese still were
withdrawing slowly across the Viet-
namese border. But a highly placed
source has quoted Chinese officials
here as saying Chinese troops would
retain some Vietnamese territory.
Meanwhile, in Moscow Soviet
President Leonid Brezhnev said
yesterday China had been forced to halt
its Vietnamese offensive by the actions
of Vietnam, the Communist countries
and the pressure of world opinion.
SPEAKING AT a Kremlin dinner for
Polish leader Edward Gierek,
Brezhnev renewed the Soviet pledge to
stand by its Vietnamese allies.
"At present the Chinese rulers are
forced to sound the retreat. This is the
result of the staunchness and courage
of the Vietnamese people, of the combat
solidarity with Vietnam of the Soviet
Union . . . and other states of the
Socialist community and of the support
of world public opinion," Brezhnev
said.
Purdue's football players were
originally called either "Blacksmiths,"
"Rail Splitters" or "Boilermakers"
and wound up settling for the last of
those three.
WEDNESDAY IS MONDAY IS
"BA RGAIN DAY" "GUEST NIGNV"
$1.50 unti 5:30 TWO ADULTS ADMITTED
FOR PRICE OF ONE
ADUETS FRI., SAT., SUN.
EWE. t HOLIDAYS $3.50
MON.-THIURS. EVk. 5340
ALL MATINEES $2.50
CHILD TO 14 $1.51,
amvw
- -
CHILD TO 14 51.5.
- ~ I U
FRI. and SAT. LATE SHOW
STAT E "UP INSMOKE"
3 different shows nightly
£A 7, 9 & 11 through Fri.
/> l& Sunday. Saturday 1:00, 7:00
& 9:00 p.m. At the Old Architecture
Auditorium.
tickets: $1.75
series: $20.00
Michael Cacoyannis Festival
N1O% A TLJI dEI'