No Concessions: Scorsese, Polanski Still Crazy After All These Years

Film culture today, I muttered, as I waded through (and into) an unusually bothersome post on the usually half-annoying (but compulsively readable) Hollywood Elsewhere site. Look: Its OK not to get, or to enjoy, Douglas Sirk pictures like All That Heaven Allows (1955) or Imitation of Life (1959). Im not all that crazy about Terrence Malick or Wes Anderson, who have similar followings. But not to acknowledge Sirks continuing influence (on, among other things, Mad Men) or to back up what you believe and simply assert that womens pictures have cooties and melodramas are queerand then to attack Powell and Pressburger classics and Mildred Pierceis a low blow even for a pseudonym-ridden blog.

My mood improved with a thread in the Arthouse, World & Hollywood Cinema section of the superior Mobius Home Video Forum. The subject is directors over 70 still wielding their megaphones, and there are more than Id imagined, which is encouraging. Participating in both these discussions happened to coincide with me seeing Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer, from two senior, Oscar-winning cornerstones of film culture, Martin Scorsese (67, but, hey, he wouldnt mind keeping company with Clint, Woody, Bernardo Bertolucci, and the busy 101-year-old Manoel de Oliveira) and Roman Polanski (76, as his attorneys wont let us forget as he fights extradition).

The beancounters were ecstatic over last weekends performance of Shutter Island, a personal best, loot-wise, for Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, in their fourth collaboration. It held pretty steady this weekend, which represents something of a triumph over its marketing. The trailer and TV spots emphasize its twists and turns and horror film elements, which are present and accounted forbut by the end of its labyrinthine 138 minutes its as much a horror picture as Raging Bull is a boxing movie. (Just as 1991s Cape Fear, a master class in tightening the screws, registers as a meta-movie about gearing up a remake for a contemporary audience.) Not that Scorsese dislikes horrorthere are nods here to the psychological unravelings of Val Lewton-produced chillers of the 40s, like The Seventh Victim (1943) and Bedlam (1946), as well as the run of asylum-set movies, particularly Sam Fullers Shock Corridor (1963), which like the 1954-set Shutter Island trades in on the anxieties of its age.