Craig Lahiff’s film Swerve is better than thirty-five Hitchcocks and very much in the style. The very first shot, looking down from way up in the air at the dry dusty junction of three outback roads, is like the start of the crop-duster scene in North By North-West. The driving scene that follows is like some of the pre-Bates Motel sequences of Psycho. There are moments after that which remind one of Shadow Of A Doubt, Strangers On A Train, The Lady Vanishes and Vertigo….
But this is not to say it is a mere patching-together of old classic scenes from the forties, fifties, and sixties of the Master. It has a heartbeat, an erection, a nose for trouble of its own, throbbed along by Grabowsky’s fine, shrewd score.
It starts with a swerve, a three-car crash, a corpse, a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills, and the wary driving-home of one of the victims, Jina (Emma Booth), by another, Colin (David Lyons), before he meekly, unaccountably, takes the money to the police station and the head cop, Frank (Jason Clarke), of Neverest, a remote, eventless, played-out mining town, where a brass band competition is in preparation. The only hotels are full of trumpeters and cornettists, and Frank offers Colin a room at his farmhouse, where … he finds that Jina is Frank’s discontented wife; and she, swimming naked in the pool while Frank is briefly absent on that hot night in the town, tempts Colin, who narrowly resists her…
Booth is superb in this role, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, and January Jones in Mad Men, both worldly and startlingly young. She explains that Frank goes wild sometimes, and beats her, and nearly killed a fellow cop and was exiled here; and big, burly, grinning Jason Clarke, a bit like a handsome Paul Chubb, gets this genial-kindly mad-dog quality superbly.
A lot of murder ensues, while the brass bands march up and down the utterly empty streets, a corpse put down a disused mine shaft, another corpse discovered in it, a corpse recalled to life and vengeance, a train boarded that is full of cops and menaced by Charlie, a Steve McQueen lookalike (Travis McMahon), the man who was meant to receive the missing money and keen to see where it has gone, a good deal of struggling at the open door of the luggage compartment, and so on.
It all works very well. We see too briefly Roy Billing, Chris Haywood, Vince Colosimo and Robert Mammone, but the small town, outback, desert-under-mountains atmosphere, unique to the genre, which I guess might be called South Australian Gothic, is slowly rendered, magnificent framing by magnificent framing, in shots as good as those in Vertigo, moving sideways and breathing menace, unsurpassed in most American films, and superior to much of Hitchcock, Wilder, Hawks and Ford.
It is a pity that its release here (though not in America) was so quiet and crowded. Instead of, say, a Broken Hill premiere, and a couple of sessions on four weekends in the western suburbs and selected provincial cities, it was put out, as usual, in four sessions a day in multiplexes against Prometheus in 3D and Snow White and the Huntsman and The Way and Brave, where of course it was overwhelmed. I saw it in an empty cinema in Avalon, and it’s a pity.
I note that Craig, whom I’ve written films for, is casting well and directing performance brilliantly, at last. jason Clarke is Oscar-worthy, and David Lyons, the passive, wary, unadventurous Iraq war veteran wanting a quiet life, an ordinary job and a beer perhaps and a stray fuck, but not if it’s too much trouble, is reminiscent of the young Simon Burke. Which is praise indeed.
The editing, by Sean Lahiff, is as good as Dede Allen (praise indeed), the photography by David Foreman, better, I think, than any thus far in Australia, and Grabowsky’s score, augmented by Souza, and Verdi’s ‘Force of Destiny’, a quiet revolution.
See it, if you can find it, on a big screen. It’s very good indeed.
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The way you write about this movie makes me want to see it…it also made think of the memorable Wim Wenders film “Paris, Texas”…with Harry Dean Denton and the very beautiful Natasshja(?) Kinski…outback, sand and cheap motels and ugly American petrol stations…America seen with foreign eyes..
Harry Dean Stanton. And a beautiful soundtrack by the great Ry Cooder.
My favourite is, “she’s leaving the bank”.
Just as an aside allthumbs I read your question to Reader. If my advice means anything to you have a look at “The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction”
by Jonathan Culler.
let me know how you get on.
Step by step PD,Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality
is sort of easy to get to terms with, although I still have to concentrate, but thanks for the recommendation, now its back to Dialectics for Dummies.
Natassja Kinski, daughter of that rather extraordinary German actor Klaus Kinski, the man who brought Werner Herzog to the brink of madness on more than one occasion, and in particular during the making of Fitzcarraldo in 1981.
And thanks for the review Bob, and I’ll look for it in due course. I like your positive response to the work. Some of the offshore critics were having a bob each way. The Flinders Ranges must be a great backdrop to this piece of cinema.
I thought Fitzcarraldo a deeply unsettling film. I think at the time I had not seen anything quite like it.
Woyzeck was my favourite though.
Ask Bob about his work with Herzog, Green Ants.
It was unlike any other experience. I will write about it here in a month or two.
“superior to much of Hitchcock, Wilder, Hawks and Ford”.
Ford? Rubbish.
Daring to say superior to Ford is rubbish!
Liked Little Miss Smiles, Mother Machree, The Shamrock Handicap, Thank You, Upstream, Napoleon’s Barber, Born Reckless, Cameo Kirby, Up The River, judge Priest, Wee Willie Winkie, The Boat, The Adventures Of Marion Pride, Two Men And A Prayer, Sex Hygiene, Mogambo and The Last Hurrah that much, did you?
Say why.
I’m surprised you didn’t go back to 1914 when he was 19 and assisting on the one-reelers if you just wanted to make a rather strange point. And who knows, Swerve might end up just being like Ford’s The Scrapper of 1917. And while you have chosen early and late films of variable quality (and it was Four Men and a Prayer as you probably know anyway and I see Napoleon’s Barber is lost). Still, while I could easily just go along with the knowledge that John Ford has been cited as the greatest American director by Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and ‘countless others’, I am not just making a stupid point back and relying on them to stand up for the great John Ford.
I love his work, whether it passes the Australian Luvvies test or not (and it does seem to pass the critical test of others). It’s not that often a single director can set a standard or commence a body of work that personally turned the western into the most popular and enduring American legend, from the great movie of the unreal ‘fabulous five’ Oscar year of 1939, Stagecoach, to his final statem,ent on the west in Liberty Valance. As you know, he said it in Liberty Valance “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.
Other than that, (and
I am not blaming Lahiff for your exaggerations which would, no doubt, horrify him if he ever read them) when Lahiff has HALF of any ONE of Stagecoach, the Cavalry Trilogy, The Searchers or Cheyenne Autumn he will be doing just fine. As for other damned good movies, for mine They Were Expendable, Mr Roberts, Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, Young Mr Lincoln etc are up there as enjoyable, timeless and, to me, unforgettable movies. They are part of a director’s body of work which ran from his age of 22 to 75.
It’s also a great pity that we never ever had a John Ford to produce the films about the Australian story.
It is clear you have not seen Swerve and, breaking a house rule, have criticised what you have not seen.
You are therefore, regrettably, banned for life.
Just kidding.
Craig has read and liked them. Why would he not read them? What is wrong with you?
Are you, perhaps, a fool?
We do have a John Ford and a film by him better than all of John Ford’s: Jeremy Hartley-Sims. The film is Beneath Hill 60.
Discuss.