D: Alan J. Pakula (1990)
with Harrison Ford, Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia, Bonnie Bedelia, Paul Winfield, Greta Scacchi, John Spencer.
We’re on the plane, coming back from our vacation. They’ve just shown Shakespeare in Love, which I had never seen before. It was historically savvy, structurally impressive, lyrical, and great fun. Next they show Presumed Innocent, a presumably much-cheaper-to-license 1990 release. When Scott Turow’s courtroom thriller was first published, it made him a literary star; the film was a hit. In the story, a female lawyer is killed in the prosecutors office. She is presented as dangerous; she worked in sex crimes by choice. Chief attorney Dennehy appoints his top lawyer, Ford, to investigate. Although reluctant, Ford agrees. What he doesn’t mention to the boss is that he had a marriage-damaging affair with the woman. The investigation moves slowly, and Dennehy loses his office in the election. With evidence that seems overwhelming, the new district attorney charges Ford with the murder. This remarkably flat film is a perfect example of professionals, at the peak of their form, all doing the best job and failing to make the film they were trying to achieve. This film doesn’t work, despite some outstanding moments. This may be because I watched it informed by the book. I read Turow’s novel on the way to a junket for Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam and was completely taken in. I left my checkbook on the plane, I was so absorbed by reading. During the trip, whenever possible, I went back to the room to read. Sure, it is a legal pulp story, a contrived page-turner, but it was so absorbing. Compared to the book’s sophistication, the film’s much less ambiguous story is painfully flat. Worse, knowing more about the Ford character from the book made the screen character more difficult to understand. Pakula, who was killed in a bizarre car accident recently, began as a producer of films like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Up the Down Staircase (1967). He made his directorial debut with The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minnelli, in 1969. Despite some serious misses — Comes a Horseman (1978), Rollover (1981) — Pakula’s directorial filmography boasts Klute (1971), All the President’s Men (1976), Starting Over (1979), and Sophie’s Choice (1982). Given All the President’s Men, Pakula would seem the ideal director for this cerebral thriller. Instead, his tone is sluggish and the narrative seems lost in separate incidents. Beautifully shot by that artist of light Gordon Willis, the film’s look is stunning. The cast, including Dennehy, Scacchi, Bedelia, Winfield, and Spencer, all turn in terrific jobs. Ford is fine, but I blame the writers (Frank Pierson and Pakula) for the way the character came out. The end should be thrilling and disgusting. It should slap you upside your head. Here, it burps out and the film quietly falls into its end. —Louis Black
Guru the Mad Monk
D: Andy Milligan (1971)
with Judith Israel, Neal Flanagan, Paul Lieber, Jacqueline Webb.
If you had very little money to make a movie, wouldn’t you think a costume drama would be a bad choice? You could never tell Andy Milligan that, though; as in Torture Dungeon, he picked a medieval milieu for this truly lousy movie. The titular monk agrees to rescue a young liege’s girlfriend from the executioner, but there’s a price to pay, since he didn’t just do it out of the goodness of his shriveled little oil-cured black olive of a heart. The Guru is judge, jury, and executioner for a parade of sinners; a hunchback named Igor (of course) does his bidding, and a female character turns out to be a vampire, though there’s no apparent connection between that and the rest of the plot. Filmed in a Catholic church in Manhattan, the details of this movie are absolutely hilarious, since the scant plot goes spinning down the toilet pretty quickly. During the scenes in which Guru sears his victims with a branding iron (on the altar), the iron heats up in a barbeque grill! Guru’s papal hat crackles suspiciously when he takes it off! A curtain is made out of a Seventies-patterned sheet with 7″-wide multicolored flowers on it! As the priest walks out of a room, another man steps on his cape and rips it loudly! One priest’s costume consists of a ratty pageboy wig, a ladies’ stole, and an Iron Cross medallion! The one exterior shot has Manhattan traffic noise clearly audible in the background! Guru wears a pink ladies’ housecoat and a loud-patterned curtain wrapped over his shoulders!! I could go on, but you get the point. Aside from the Velveetoid costume design and production values, though, there’s the performance of Neal Flanagan as Guru the Fey Monk. Coming across like a hybrid of Liberace and a prissy social studies teacher, he’s definitely a lot more bitchy than evil. A scene in which Guru’s split personalities feud with each other as he stands in front of a mirror will have you wearing out your rewind button in disbelief as Flanagan spreads on the ham with a trowel. Andy Milligan’s stuff was notoriously awful to the point of being surreal, and Guru is no exception. Forget about the rest of the movie; it’s worth seeking out just to see the papist in the paper pope hat. This one is guaranteed to make connoisseurs of cinematic garbage rethink their definitions of “so bad it’s good.” Plus, I’ll bet you didn’t know they had tan corduroy Levis back in the 1200s. —Jerry Renshaw
This article appears in June 11 • 1999 and June 11 • 1999 (Cover).