Dead Man

BLOGGER'S NOTE: A slightly shorter version of this article appears at the Wonders in the Dark blog for their 50 Greatest Westerns Countdown.

Dead Man (1995) is the western that I always imagined David Lynch directing if he had any inclination towards the genre. It was, in fact, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and marked a significant evolution for the filmmaker thematically while keeping consistent stylistically with the rest of his body of work. Where his previous films managed to avoid any clear categorization, Dead Man clearly resembles a western, however, it still adheres to the road film structure that is synonymous with Jarmusch’s other efforts. Dead Man also continued his preoccupation with outsiders in its depiction of the misadventures of William Blake (Johnny Depp), a meek accountant who travels to the decaying industrial town of Machine with the promise of employment. When he is subsequently rebuffed by his prospective employer, he finds himself on the run after a confrontation with a former prostitute (Mili Avital) and her jealous ex-boyfriend (Gabriel Byrne). Blake ends up with a bullet lodged near his heart and meets a Native American called Nobody (Gary Farmer). Together they make not only a physical journey to the West Coast, but also a mystical, almost metaphysical one as well.

Jarmusch establishes a disquieting, almost Lynchian tone right from the get-go with sounds of machinery clanking and the steam hissing of the locomotive that takes Blake to Machine. It’s as if the director is suggesting that the Industrial Age is making its way out west, that it is as inevitable as Blake’s journey – a slow march to his own demise. The first (and only) person to speak with Blake on the train is its boilerman played by a coal-stained Crispin Glover who acts and speaks like he just came in from a David Lynch film to take a brief respite in Jarmusch’s. The man speaks rather cryptically, but is actually prophetically describing the last scene in the film. He rather ominously refers to Machine as “hell” and the “end of the line,” warning Blake that he might just die out there before many of the train car’s passengers suddenly fire their guns out the window at passing buffalo. This rather enigmatic prologue sets the mood for the rest of Dead Man and immerses us in a decidedly nihilistic world where life is brutal and short.

As Blake approaches Dickinson’s metal works factory, Jarmusch’s establishing shot is of an imposing structure, smoke billowing out of it. It’s certainly a nightmarish vision, which is reinforced by Blake’s journey through the town. There is a building whose façade is covered with animal skulls, their hides lying in piles out front. A horse urinates on the road and a prostitute is performing oral sex on a man (Gibby Haynes) who points a gun at Blake when he looks at him. Jarmusch presents much of the familiar iconography of the frontier town seen in countless westerns, but there is something not quite right about the place. Blake encounters outright hostility at every turn. The only person who shows Blake any bit of kindness is a former prostitute and she is soon accidentally killed by her ex-boyfriend.

Fortunately, this oppressive mood is punctuated by moments of levity, namely in the form of Robert Mitchum’s ridiculously macho John Dickinson, who talks to a big stuffed bear in his office instead of the three hired guns he’s brought in to find and catch Blake after he kills the factory owner’s son. Mitchum’s presence bridges the gap from classic Hollywood cinema, as the actor was active during that time, and the revisionist western in the way his character is portrayed. Dickinson is a sly parody of the traditional western tough guy, but the actor plays it straight in way that suggests Jarmusch is at once celebrating and critiquing the genre.

Dead Man opens up, both figuratively and literally, when Blake meets Nobody as he tries to dig out the bullet that is lodged near the accountant’s heart. Gary Farmer gives the film a rare, unfiltered portrayal of Native Americans. Not only does he rescue Blake, prolonging his life, but he is also the most intelligent, well-spoken character in the film. He quotes the poetry of William Blake (much to the so-called cultured accountant’s confusion) and is savvy enough to know that they are being followed by Dickinson’s hired guns. He’s about as far as one can get from the stereotypical savage usually portrayed in classic westerns, often by caucasions. In fact, Farmer is himself a Cayuga and also speaks in Cree and Blackfoot languages, which Jarmusch refuses to subtitle thereby having dialogue that only Native Americans will understand and appreciate. Nobody’s backstory, which explains not only his name, but where he developed his love of Blake’s poetry, is fascinating and tragic. Like Blake, Nobody is an outsider who doesn’t fit in anywhere.

In rather sharp contrast, all the white men in Dead Man are either ignorant or downright savage, bickering and fighting amongst themselves. Take the three men that Dickinson hires to find Blake. Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd) is a young bounty hunter out to gain a reputation for himself, Conway Twill (Michael Wincott), is a motormouth in love with the sound of his own voice, and Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen), is a ruthless cannibal. In some respects, they echo the three hapless escape convicts from Down by Law (1986) as sources of humor. They are almost upstaged, or at least out-weirded, by another trio of rather eccentric fur traders played by Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris and who may have been out in the wilderness a little too long. These three characters are grotesque parodies that come dangerously close to breaking the hypnotic spell Jarmusch worked so hard to achieve up to that point, but he maintains the tricky balancing act and this scene actually rescues Dead Man from becoming too overloaded with the pretention of its overtly arthouse look.

Jarmusch had been carrying around a lot of notes for what would become Dead Man for years and had even collaborated with screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop) on a cowboy epic called Ghost Dog. For research on Dead Man, he had been reading about American Indians and while taking a break, started re-reading Willam Blake’s poetry. Jarmusch was struck by how similar Blake’s stuff was with what he had been reading about native tribes. He decided to incorporate Blake into his film. As often happens when writing a script for his films, Jarmusch wrote the two main characters with two specific actors in mind: Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer. Jarmusch had known Depp for some time, having met him while shooting Night On Earth (1992) with the actor’s then-girlfriend, Winona Ryder. They had remained friends over the years and Jarmusch felt that the character of William Blake was ideally suited for Depp’s talents.

Jarmusch had seen Farmer in a Canadian film called Powwow Highway (1989) and really liked what the actor had done with his role in that movie. And so, with that performance in mind, Jarmusch wrote the character of Nobody for Farmer. Nobody avoids the usual pitfalls that befall most Native American characters. This was very important for Jarmusch who wanted to get away from the Hollywood stereotype: “I wanted to make an Indian character who wasn’t either A) the savage that must be eliminated, the force of nature that’s blocking the way for industrial progress, or B) the noble innocent that knows all and is another cliché. I wanted him to be a complicated human being.” Fortunately, Farmer brings to his role a mix of anger, humor and wonder that makes Nobody one of the most fascinating characters in Dead Man.

On the technical side of things, Jarmusch scored a real coup by not only reuniting with cinematographer Robby Muller, but he also convinced musician Neil Young to compose and perform the film’s soundtrack. Young’s eerie, minimalist score perfectly complements Muller’s atmospheric black and white photography to create a grungy, dirty world that looks like someone actually went back in time and shot the entire film in the 19th century. Jarmusch met Young backstage at a concert in Arizona during a day off from filming. To record the score, the musician set up everything in a big warehouse with monitors and equipment running to a remote truck. Jarmusch remembers that Young, “recorded it direct to the picture, straight through the film like old-school accompaniment to a silent picture. He did that three times in two days. He wouldn't allow anyone to stop the recording session or the picture. That's very odd. It was Neil's idea, and it's a very Neil Young kind of approach.”

Dead Man premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 to a warm reaction from the European media and a predictably mixed reaction from the American press. In an effort to reach a broader audience, Jarmusch signed a deal with Miramax to distribute his film. However, the filmmaker clashed with the studio's headstrong owner, Harvey Weinstein, who wanted to change some of the content of the film to make it more marketable. Jarmusch said in an interview, “I did not expect Dead Man to be a commercial success. But I wanted it handled in a classy way. And it was handled, as one critic put it, with tongs by Miramax ... he bought a finished film; and then wanted me to change it. This was insulting to me and, ultimately, I felt punished  –  because I didn't do what he wanted, he didn't distribute the film in a classy way.”

Dead Man received mostly negative to mixed reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave it one-and-a-half out of four stars and famously wrote, “Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don’t have a clue what it is. Are the machines of the East going to destroy the nature of the West? Is the white man doomed, and is the Indian his spiritual guide to the farther shore? Should you avoid any town that can’t use another accountant?” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “When Dead Man is imagining the Wild West as an infernal landscape of death, it is furiously alive. When it tries to reflect on those images, it begins to nod out.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “C-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Yet the film’s meandering quirkiness is, finally, a big bore, the desperate ploy of a filmmaker who is threatening to vanish down the rabbit hole of his avant-chic attitudes.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “His [Jarmusch] revisionist message, while gussied up in flip metaphysical finery, is essentially that of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven: The frontier was a hellhole.” However, on Salon.com, Greil Marcus called Dead Man, “the best movie of the end of the 20^th century,” while also praising Neil Young’s soundtrack.

With Dead Man, Jarmusch filters the western through a decidedly idiosyncractic approach that includes deliberate, off-kilter pacing, an experimental soundtrack scored by Neil Young, and several characters playfully named after figures in 20th century American culture that provoked film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum to dub it an “Acid Western” in his review for the Chicago Reader. As he points out, the film subverted several conventions of classic westerns to “conjure up a crazed version of autodestructive white America at its most solipsistic, hankering after its own lost origins.” Early on in the film, Blake has bedded down with a former prostitute and afterwards he finds her gun underneath a pillow. He asks her rather naïvely, "Why do you have this?" to which she replies, "Because this is America." This pretty much sums up one of Dead Man's central themes – America was born out of violence and continues to be that way, as if, despite all the modern innovations and conveniences, it continues on in the same wild, untamed spirit of the frontier west.

SOURCES

Chiose, Simona. “Dead Man Talking.” The Globe and Mail, May 23, 1996.

McKenna, Kristine. “Dead Man Talking.” Los Angeles Times. May 5, 1996.

Pulver, Andrew. "Indie Reservation." The Guardian. March 31, 2000.

Rea, Steven. “How William Blake Got Himself into a Picture.” Philadelphia Inquirer. May 12, 1996.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Acid Western.” Chicago Reader. June 26, 1996.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmusch.” Cineaste, vol. XXII, no. 2, 1996.

DVD of the Week: The Night of the Hunter: Criterion Collection

It is one of the great tragedies of cinema that The Night of the Hunter (1955) was Charles Laughton’s lone film directing credit. An acclaimed character actor by trade, he decided to adapt David Grubb’s 1953 novel of the same name into a haunting southern gothic horror film cum fairy tale. He enlisted film critic/screenwriter James Agee (The African Queen) to write the screenplay and hired cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons) to bring his considerable expertise to the textured black and white imagery. Sadly, audiences at the time were not ready for this atmospheric fable and it failed to perform at the box office. Laughton died seven years later and never directed another film. However, over the years, The Night of the Hunter was rediscovered by critics and film buffs and its reputation grew as people finally caught up to a film that was ahead of its time. Its legacy is now firmly established and the film is regarded as a classic. It is rather fitting that the Criterion Collection has delivered the definitive edition of this film.


One of The Night of the Hunter’s earliest images is a disturbing one as a group of children playing come across the body of a dead woman. All we see are her legs lying on steps leading down to the cellar of a house. There is something unsettling about how one of her shoes is twisted off an odd angle from her foot. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the film – that of innocence lost. We are soon introduced to Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a fire and brimstone preacher who preys on vulnerable widows – killing them and stealing their money, all in the name of God. He talks to God about his disgust for the feminine aspects of women and the next thing we see is him watching a curvy burlesque dancer swaying suggestively in front of him. Powell clearly embodies the dual nature of love and hate – the words of which are tattooed on the fingers of both his hands.

We meet John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) playing in an idyllic rural setting. Their fugitive father, Ben Harper (Peter Graves), arrives with the law hot on his trail. He has stolen $10,000 and hides it amongst his two children. He goes to prison and is put in the same cell as Powell. The crazy preacher finds out about the money but Harper doesn’t tell him where it’s hidden. After his cellmate is executed for his crimes, Powell gets out and makes his way to Harper’s hometown, traveling on an ominous-looking train by night. He ends up marrying Harper’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters) in an attempt to get closer to the children and find out what happened to the money.

John learns pretty quickly that not many adults can be trusted, especially Powell whom he figures out his true intentions early on. John also looks out for his sister as their mother and her friends are easily captivated by Powell’s charisma. This is beautifully illustrated in a scene where Powell tells the story of love and hate, quoting The Bible with a gusto that is pretty funny and brilliant in the way Robert Mitchum enthusiastically tells it. Normally cast as laconic soldiers (G.I. Joe) or film noir tough guys (Out of the Past) prior to this film, he cranks up the intensity with this role and is not afraid to look silly at one moment and viciously evil in the next. Powell is the film’s metaphorical boogeyman that ends up chasing John and Pearl across the countryside in pursuit of the money like if the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had been written by William Faulkner.

Laughton gets very impressive performances out of the two children, both of whom more than hold their own with veteran actors like Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. The latter is excellent as Rachel Cooper, a kind old lady who takes the children in and protects them against Powell. The showdown between her and Mitchum is one of the film’s best scenes.

With The Night of the Hunter, Laughton fuses a theatrical sensibility in the performances with a German expressionistic look that results in a fairy tale unlike any other. There are images that linger afterwards and haunt you for a long time, like the iconic shot of a woman bundled up in a car at the bottom of a lake. The Night of the Hunter explores the destructive nature of greed and the dangers of religious fanaticism while the eternal struggle between love, as represented by Cooper, and hate, as personified by Powell, plays out with the two children’s lives hanging in the balance.

Special Features:

The first disc starts off with an audio commentary moderated by film critic F.X. Feeney and featuring the film’s second-unit director Terry Sanders, film archivist Robert Gitt, and Preston Neal Jones, author of Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter. They point out that Laughton wanted the film to seem like it was being told from the children’s point-of-view, as if they were having a nightmare. The participants analyze the use of humor throughout the film and how it offsets the darkness of the Harry Powell character. They also get into a lively discussion about James Agee’s screenplay and how the original, longer version was very faithful to the source novel. There is some debate about how much of it Laughton rewrote. This is a very informative track, chock full of factoids, analysis and filming anecdotes to satisfy any fan of this film.

“The Making of The Night of the Hunter” is a 38-minute retrospective featurette that takes us through the genesis of the film as producer Paul Gregory talks about how he met Laughton. Interestingly, Laurence Olivier was considered for the role of Powell. Laughton worked closely with Davis Grubb and James Agee to make sure that the film was a faithful adaptation.

“Moving Pictures” is a 15-minute documentary about the film with interviews with key cast and crew members, including Mitchum, Winters and cinematographer Stanley Cortez. While this extra does repeat information from the previous supplement, it is nice to hear these details directly from the people that actually worked on the film.

There is a 1984 interview with Cortez about filming The Night of the Hunter. He speaks admiringly of Laughton and his ability to work with the actors. Cortez says that Laughton knew nothing about the technical aspects of cinematography and trusted him implicitly with the look of the film. Cortez also touches upon the use of light and how he lit certain scenes for a specific effect.

Also included is a theatrical trailer.

“Simon Callow on Charles Laughton” is an interview with the author of Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor. He talks about the man’s career and how The Night of the Hunter affected his life. Callow points out the irony that Laughton is known more for directing this film than his extensive acting career. He was very active in live theater and this is what led to his involvement in the film. Callow talks about what drew Laughton to Grubb’s novel and covers the production with an obvious emphasis on Laughton.

There is an interest excerpt from the September 25, 1955 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show where Peter Graves and Shelley Winters perform a scene not in the film. Willa visits Harper in prison, which sheds some insight into their relationship.

“Davis Grubb Sketches” is a collection of drawings that he produced for Laughton to help convey how he envisioned his novel. These sketches are juxtaposed with stills from the film to demonstrate how closely Laughton stuck to them while filming.

The second disc contains the crown jewel for fans of the film. “Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter” is two-and-a-half hours of unused footage and outtakes. There is a conversation between film archivist Robert Gitt and film critic Leonard Maltin that provides some backstory on how this footage was discovered. Gitt was given it in the mid-1970s but it was so disorganized that it took him several years to make sense of it all. Doing it piecemeal when he had the time, he and many volunteers worked away until they had eight hours of footage. He then edited it down to two-and-a-half hours and screened it at UCLA. This footage provides fascinating insight into Laughton’s working methods, especially how he got those great performances out of the two children. For fans of The Night of the Hunter, this is a treasure trove of material.


 

DVD of the Week: The Friends of Eddie Coyle: Criterion Collection

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) is one of those forgotten films from the 1970s. It’s a melancholic story of small-time criminals working on the fringes of Boston’s underworld. It’s not exactly the kind of feel-good story that lights up the box office but it is one of those fascinating, character-driven films that amazingly made its way through the studio system at a time when executives were willing to roll the dice on more challenging fare.

Eddie Coyle (Mitchum) is a minor league gunrunner who’s been around the block quite a few times as evident in a nice scene that introduces him making a deal with Jackie Brown (Keats), a guy who gets him all kinds of guns. The dialogue in this scene is well-written and delivered expertly by both Robert Mitchum and Steven Keats. The scene also provides some insight into Mitchum’s character as well as getting the narrative ball rolling. Coyle is looking at a stretch in prison for a job he did for Dillon (Boyle), a bartender who snitches to Dave Foley (Jordan), a cop. The film also follows a group of bank robbers led by a man named Scalise (Rocco) and his partner Artie Van (Santos). Coyle is trying to strike some kind of deal with Foley to stay out of prison because he has to support his family. Coyle supplies the bankrobbers with their guns and the question becomes, will he rat these guys out to save his own skin or will he give up Brown?

Paul Monash’s screenplay features the kind of conversational tough guy dialogue Quentin Tarantino wishes he could write. It’s strictly no frills and crackles with authenticity like you imagine the way criminals would really talk to each other. Almost every criminal interaction is rife with tension as we wait for someone to double-cross somebody else, especially in the scene where Brown buys a bunch of machine guns from three guys.

Nobody plays a world-weary yet savvy crook quite like Robert Mitchum who inhabits the role of Eddie Coyle effortlessly. Coyle is the kind of street-level crook that you see in a film like Mean Streets (1973). He leads the kind of blue collar existence that you could easily see him working in a factory instead of running guns. Mitchum is part of a solid ensemble cast that features the likes of Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco, and Joe Santos – all wonderful character actors who play their respective parts with complete conviction.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle presents an enthralling look at the levels of this particular criminal underworld and how it functions. There is nothing glamorous about how this world and the people who inhabit it are depicted. They are all just trying to get by. Peter Yates directs the film with the same no-nonsense approach that he applied to Bullitt (1968). The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a slice-of-life tale about a criminal in the twilight of his career trying to avoid a prison stretch and faced with some tough choices that he must make. If you’ve seen a number of crime films from the ‘70s then you pretty much know how this one’s going to end – most criminals either go to prison or wind up dead. However, this inevitability does nothing to detract from the superb way this film eventually plays out. Kudos to the folks at Criterion for pulling this one out of the archives and giving it the new lease on life that it deserves.

Special Features:

Unfortunately, the extras on this DVD are slim at best. As per usual, the accompanying booklet contains a well-written essay by film critic Kent Jones and an excellent profile of Mitchum published in Rolling Stone around the time of the film’s release.

There is an audio commentary by director Peter Yates. He cites The Friends of Eddie Coyle as one of the three favorites of his career because of the cast and the location. They shot entirely in Boston. Naturally, he talks about working with Mitchum and praises his style of acting. Yates says that they used as much of the dialogue from the novel as possible because it so authentically represented the rhythms of the way people speak in Boston.

Also included is a Stills Gallery of rare, behind-the-scenes photographs including scenes that were deleted.