|
The opening credits (following a half-obscured porn slide show) posit a kinship to Billion Dollar Brain with the antihero reading Raymond Chandler on the train, yet where Russell was keyed to Lichtenstein, Mike Hodges is a steely Diebenkorn, dry and dangerous. The London hitman (Michael Caine) goes to Newcastle to bury his brother, the funeral allows for a pointed view of the industrial landscape over cobblestone alleys, it's called a suicide but the visitor searches for answers, brutally. Old colleagues have become foes: John Osborne as a smut ringmaster provides suave rot and a Sixties point of reference (Inadmissible Evidence and In Time Present, say), the weasel gone respectueux (Ian Hendry) still has "eyes like pisspots in the snow." The seeker understands that physical manipulation can apply to pleasure as well as pain, after a long day of roughing up henchmen he teases his landlady (Rosemarie Dunham) by phoning his mistress back home, a citation from Touch of Evil to accommodate Britt Ekland writhing in black stockings. (The droll set-up pays off the morning after, the punchline has Caine bare-assed with shotgun as an all-girl band plays a kazoo version of "When the Saints Go Marching In.") "Clever sod." "Only comparatively." A constantly surprising composition—the "Demon King" (Bryan Mosley) envisions a restaurant atop a concrete tower, he's first seen at a jazzy teen bash (cf. Au Hasard Balthazar) in a Tati view anchored by a reveler puking in the garden pond. The mission is elucidated by a stag flick at a moll's flat, vengeance for the niece in the Lolita outfit (Petra Markham) is swift and pitiless. "I'm the villain of the family, remember?" Like Boorman before him and Soderbergh after, Hodges knows the limits of nihilism, the progress toward the truth leads right into the overcast ocean. With Geraldine Moffat, Tony Beckley, Alun Armstrong, George Sewell, Dorothy White, Bernard Hepton, and Terence Rigby.
--- Fernando F. Croce |