I read a book by Quentin Tarantino recently. It was called Cinema Speculation. Tarantino is a film maker I have always respected, almost admire, but never truly learned to love. His films contain many of the things which make cinema such a powerful and wonderful art form (and cinema is unarguably an artform – take a look at The Godfather Part II, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Barry Lyndon and you’ll see art, pulsing, widescreen, dense, thrilling, liberating, in much the same way you would standing in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Picasso’s Guernica or Veronese’s The Wedding Feast At Cana) and yet, through my eyes, he has never made a masterpiece. Some are great fun: Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, some are good but overrated: Reservoir Dogs, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and some are just hard work: Jackie Brown, The Hateful Eight. But look through his back catalogue and not one film shines through in the way that a cinematic masterpiece should (many would argue that Pulp Fiction is a masterpiece, but I would argue it is only his masterpiece, which isn’t the same thing). His ability as a writer is just as famed as his gift for directing but he is self-indulgent to the point that he never quite reigns himself in, so even his slightest films seem bloated and unnecessarily long. He is also an appalling actor. Still, a world with Quentin Tarantino, the film maker, in is far richer than it would be without, he just doesn’t give me goosebumps too often. Maybe it’s my fault, but by golly it’s not as if I haven’t tried.
Back to that book. Cinema Speculation is a great read. It is essentially a mixture of film reviews or reappraisals and an account of the author as a young cinephile. It is fast and funny, profane and occasionally profound, and if you have any interest in films in general I would urge you to read it (I would lend you my copy but let’s be honest, when was the last time we saw each other?). It won’t take long, it is highly consumable and easily digested, like grilled cheese on toast. As I read I began to absorb Tarantino’s considered take on a cluster of films from the late 60’s and 1970’s and in turn this made me rethink what I thought I already knew. Suddenly I saw more depth to Dirty Harry, more reasons to revisit Bullitt, more bafflement as to why Rolling Thunder isn’t better known and was left with a love of Steve McQueen that I never thought I had in me (the front cover is beautiful: a photo from the set of The Getaway, with McQueen and Sam Peckinpah discussing something or other – but probably not how to get chewing gum out of a carpet – both men are crouched down and it’s only on a second glance that you see McQueen is holding a handgun (a Colt M1911 .45, in case you’re interested) as casually and unconsciously as you or I would hold a pen or a phone – it is a deeply cool image and it is a pity the two men only made two films together but a blessing that both are superb (the other is Junior Bonner, one of Sam Peckinpah’s most gentle films and ample demonstration that his art spread far beyond the horizon of doomed men and a generosity of violence).
I like to think I know a bit about films but Tarantino knows a hundred times more, at least. He is a man who spent his childhood being taken to see a long list of movies, some brilliant, some awful, and many highly inappropriate for his age. It’s quite touching, in a rapid fire, very sweary way, to read about the films he took to his heart and held there forever and the films that (as he would put it) were a load of shit. Certainly, he knows his stuff, and if you needed an articulate and well versed champion for the notion that the 70’s were the best decade in cinema history (they were, and always will be) then QT is going to be the man to see. Of course, it isn’t always easy to agree with everything he has to say and I’ll never be able to get on with Blaxploitation, grainy kung-fu and cheap, nasty horror flicks the way he does, but even then it is worth listening to what he has to say. He even makes an effort to draw a line between films and movies, those which should be observed as art first and spectacle second and those which just work best on a big screen, wowing the audience into submission without over-intellectualising the whole damn business.
All of this made me reconsider (but not to the degree that I changed my mind a whole lot) what I think of when I think about films that make me sweat, gasp and laugh at the sheer audacity of their genius. Like albums, there are very few perfect films out there and naturally one must take into account that everyone has different taste (though anyone that counts, let’s say, Mamma Mia, as their favourite film has no opinion on film, or much else, worth listening to) but the great thing about films is that it can be the imperfections which make all the difference, the things that shouldn’t work but somehow make virtues of themselves; that cheap doesn’t mean bad and expensive the opposite. And this is also the reason why film criticism is such dangerous territory, except in those situations when it is plain for all to see that a film truly is a complete load of shit. All this cinema speculation didn’t make me completely change my perspective on any one film in particular but it did confirm, if only to myself, that there is one film that stands out as the truly best film (and movie), if not in my lifetime then of my lifetime, and that is what I was going to write about when I started to write about Quentin Tarantino. But just for now let’s leave things as they are, with a nod to suspense that even Alfred Hitchcock would tip his hat to. And just to fill the gap here are ten (other) personal favourite films from the 70’s that I would heartily recommend for a rainy August afternoon, such as it is. I haven’t included any Peckinpah because for me they might as well all be Peckinpah.
Badlands (1973), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Three Musketeers (1973), Sleuth (1972), One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Barry Lyndon (1975, and so good it gets mentioned twice), High Plains Drifter (1973), The Wild Geese (1978), The Duellists (1977), The Omen (1976).
G B Burton. 08.08.2024
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 