by Jamie Uhler
Hello everyone, welcome again to the Allan Fish Online Film Festival, now in our ninth year of remembrance. With each passing year, and subsequent week-and-change we do this, I’m reminded to again think about all the conversations and small community that thrived around these here parts just a few (god, almost decade) short years ago. It’s a nice reminder not only to go back through some of my favorite Allan pieces, the conversations they spurred below them, but also, now, remember that this yearly event is often the only time I’m able to converse again and read many of your own opinions, posts and cordial greetings. Perhaps this was always the hope of this thing in the back of my mind, but I certainly didn’t plan for such a personally felt reward, but alas, here we are again. I look forward to each and every one of your coming essays, watching the accompanying selection, and, when we close with Sam’s (as usual, I’m sure) great piece, next years’ Decennial anniversary!
Given I always have to start this, I’ve started attempting to use my slot as more of a rumination on things, how I’ve aged with the grief, or grief in general, how I’ve sought to celebrate his memory (I’ve used years to celebrate movies about films, movies about Allan and I’s shared love of football, around a Liverpool team that has, ahem, won the league again this year), or just as much praise Sam’s continued commitment to keep this series, and the blog site that hosts it, running (one year I selected New York set films around his on-going literature saga). This year was no different, I initially set up a conversation around streaming in general, how, the original linking mechanism to this Festival was how films could be connected via online portals, and how relationships can grow and nurture in such a space, amongst a slew of cinephiles that have never actually met in person. Little did I know that pretty much the entire industry would (I believe) disastrously move in this direction, greatly limiting the theater and physical media infrastructure born from decades old practices. Little did I know, that most things could be shared in this way now for the intent of this Festival, especially if one is willing to forgo one of the original rules that the selection must be technically free, provided one has access to the internet. Now, many apps offer movies free, with a small watching of ads interjected, myself getting this very idea with Tubi, one such streaming app I personally adore. It was on Tubi that I watched Shamus (1973), a Buzz Kulik directed piece of private-eye detective sleaze that I very much enjoyed. Starring the very lovable pairing of Burt Reynolds and Dyan Cannon, it plays like the yin to Robert Altman’s Long Goodbye yang from the same year. They both seem to be expressing ideas around Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, but while the Altman out-and-out admits it, Kulik and company don’t. But Shamus has several Marlowe-like (or -lite?) scenes, the most glaring of which is ripped from The Big Sleep, where Reynold’s must kill some time in a used book store by moving quick on a large breasted employee in a James Bond-meets-post Free Love era sleaze flirtation. In the end though, the crazy stunts and Reynold’s boyish charm won me over, it was just the fun evening at home I wanted (needed?) in the build up to this very Festival. But, given Kulik’s career, the streaming idea grew in my head—he went largely to television, becoming one of the hallmark TV directors before that medium became all the rage in our new streaming age. ‘Television’ now is more or less a misnomer, as ‘movies’ and it look essentially the same, using the same principal players, one just being an excuse to stretch content over hours instead of 90 minutes-and-change. It also means it has become the medium for the middlebrow, office work side conversations being had about what TV show you’re watching, instead of what landmark film is currently capturing the cultural zeitgeist. Gone are the days of Godard’s axiom that we look down to watch TV and up to experience cinema, an ordering of tastes that has sent me scurrying from such conversations, hoping to find similar weirdos to me who just want to watch these things and have the artists ceremoniously celebrated. But alas, Kulik ‘shrunk’ to the dining rooms and den’s of America and released a slew of decent, to great, or fun, movies on the boob-tube. There’s the most obvious two, the seminal Brian’s Song (1972), a movie where two Chicago Bear football players (Billy Dee Williams’ Gale Sayers and James Caan’s Brian Piccolo) are bonded over shared grief and support as Piccolo’s cancer diagnosis deals a fateful blow as Sayers recovers from a knee injury, and The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976). There, as masterful Anthony Hopkins portrays Bruno Hauptmann, the man executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindergh’s infant son. It was the media sensation of its day, and Hopkins increasingly human and tragic portrayal of a man potentially incorrectly tried offered an incredible watch over two nights in 1976. Of course I’m a sucker for two others as well, always the Horror hound, Bad Ronald (1974), where an ostracized teen takes to secretly living in a crawlspace of the Wood’s home after accidentally murdering a local neighborhood girl. It is an odd story, made even stranger when you consider Kulik was actually typecast for it; he’d made Crawlspace (1972) two years earlier, also a hit, about an elderly couple that find (trap?) a young man in their titual crawlspace and then attempt to reacclimate him to society. The early Seventies were apparently obsessed with films about males living in crawlspaces, a fact that leaves me dumbfounded why psychological thriller Hider in the House (1989), a truly wild, and insane guilty pleasure of mine starring the incomparable Gary Busey (and Mimi Rodgers) wasn’t a massive hit. Though that one wasn’t done by ol’ Buzz. In the end, I was just spiraling, thinking about old, made-for-TV movies of the Seventies, knowing that, for the most part, TV now is probably ‘better’, but I could very much care less.
Seeming too cynical, my mind drifted elsewhere. I then concocted thoughts about the past, as I opened this piece with, a potential discussion about the tried and true cinematic storytelling device of the flashback. I’d just rewatched both Mank (2020), David Fincher’s Netflix funded vehicle about the script development of Citizen Kane (1941), and Citizen Kane itself. For Kane it was the fifth or sixth full viewing, again being wowed by the condensing and then full expansion of time itself, dreaming of having a flashback to a time when cantankerous and lively discussions on films happened everyday for me and others in the wondersinthedark world. Citizen Kane is often celebrated for being a landmark film in this regard, but, I was reminded of Marcel Carné’s film of two years earlier, Le Jour Se Leve (Daybreak), a 1939 crime film landmark of poetic realism, where dayworker François fatally shoots Valentin and escapes to a nearby, isolated room where the police attempt to break in and arrest him. Initially they fail, but in having him trapped, they plan their next attempt, a time in which François’ mind drifts to a romantic, often heartbreakingly moving past that has led him to being imprisoned in this small, cramped room after committing such a heinous crime. It’s a remarkable film, both theatrical and cinematic, and helping push me to my eventual conclusion for an opening salvo for the Festival: I think so much about the past, of those times (and ones) lost, perhaps a natural thing to do as the world increasingly grows more and more dire rather than the here and now. But what would the past have thought of our now? How would we all have conversed and met in such a streaming age, would we have passed recommendations much more freely, would be have debated how good certain physical media companies are against others if they hardly mattered? Or, was the blog space itself a mere moment in time, perfectly captured for a few years before social media made all such discussion truncated, stupid and ripe for intentional misunderstanding? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever will. I’m glad, to a degree, that films are as easy to find as ever, same as communication with friends and loved ones, but then, why do both seem increasingly rare as the years pass?
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Compiler’s note: The films mentioned above can largely be streamed. Obviously as I mentioned, Shamus is on Tubi, free with ads, and I’d recommend anyone who doesn’t have this on their TV obtain it. But it can also be watched on YouTube, just as Brian’s Song, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, and Crawlspace can. Bad Ronald bounces around YouTube availability, but is easily found elsewhere. Mank is safely on Netflix, Citizen Kane is technically on YouTube in two parts, but deserves a real setting, so I’ll pass. The great Le Jour Se Leve can be watched in a pristine print on the Internet archive.
And, of course, if anyone wants to watch the massively fun Hider in the House, that’s available too.
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