Straight to Hell

I recently rewatched Alex Cox's Walker, which I found held up quite nicely. No matter how leaden and glib the attempts at political satire might have been, a quality that I've found increasingly irksome in general these days, Cox's knack for arresting imagery, the idiosyncratic Ed Harris performance, and the way the chaos of the production bled onto the onscreen proceedings still made it an extremely compelling viewing experience. Like Walker, the movie Cox made right before it, Straight to Hell, had been received quite poorly during its release but built something of a cult reputation in the years since. Unlike Walker, when I'd first watched Straight to Hell, I'd been pretty lukewarm on the whole thing, but figured that coming off a pretty positive rewatch of the other movie, it was time to give this another shot and see if it worked better for me this time around. I'm afraid I must report that my opinion did not improve all that much.

I suppose I should start with the positive. Anyone who's seen him in interviews knows that Cox loves spaghetti westerns like nobody else. And from watching this, it's clear that at least on a visual level, he clearly understands he genre. Like some of the best spaghetti westerns, this is beautiful to look at, but not necessarily pretty. It's shot in sun-scorched widescreen cinematography that threatens to give you heat stroke just by looking at it. We alternate between brutal, unforgiving vistas, dilapidated buildings seemingly collapsing under the heat, and ugly, sweaty faces pushed uncomfortably close to the camera. (This contains an endless series of famous faces, and one wonders if Cox cast them in part for how unflatteringly he could shoot them.) And spaghetti western violence has a particular mixture of sadism and visual panache, and this is some Cox captures on a primal level, laying on the gunshots and squibs and having his characters get ripped apart in the carnage as the conflict spins out of control. (I watched the director's cut, which I understand added a number of special effects, including extra blood during the scenes of violence. I didn't find it distracting, aside from some crudely animated skeletons that show up twice during the movie and have no obvious relation to the proceedings.) For these last thirty minutes or so, I'd say the movie is well worth a watch.

Unfortunately, the preceding hour is less easy to sit through. The movie begins with a robbery one might say "went awry" were it not executed so sloppily in the first place. The robbers are played by Sy Richardson, who is the only actor in the movie to play a recognizable human and exercise any amount of understatement, Joe Strummer, who may not be a great actor but looks good scowling and sweating on camera, and the amazingly named Dick Rude, who is a nice softer counterpoint to the meaner characters around him. They're also joined by Courtney Love, who is pregnant with Richardson's child but seems to hold no great affection for him (the feeling seems to be mutual) and spends the movie whining and shrieking. They flee to a remote western town where they expect they can hide and keep a low profile. Alas, the locals do not welcome their presence so readily, and for the rest of the movie, they bear witness to a largely unmotivated series of cruelties, with characters being brutalized and/or killed over misunderstandings or often for the sheer fun of it.

There's definitely a strong element of play acting, enhanced by the way characters from a crime movie intrude upon a western milieu and the overly costume-y apparel of the supporting characters. (As Jean-Luc Godard recently passed away, certain passages from his movies are very much on my mind at the moment, and there are similarities between this movie and Godard's approach to genre thrills.) The problem is that when it comes to comedy, Cox has no sense of timing or how to structure a gag. There are jokes that work (there's a running gag about Strummer's affair with Miguel Sandoval's wife, made all the funnier by the fact that Sandoval's voice sounds a lot like Clint Eastwood), but so much of this is characters we barely know getting killed out of the blue, punchlines with no setup. Imagine someone shouting a bunch of jokes at you with taking even a moment to pause for emphasis (or take a breath in between), and also leaving out the beginning and most of the middle of the jokes so you just get the punchlines, and that's roughly the effect here.

One particularly off putting moment, which sets up the climax, involves a character played by Dennis Hopper coming into town, giving the heroes a shitload of weapons and then leaving right away. Hopper's character is named I.G. Farben, which is also the name of the corporation that manufactured Zyklon B for the Nazis during the Holocaust. It's been a while, but I remember an interview where Cox smugly pointed this out, asserting this was some brilliant act of satire on his part and suggesting that Hopper's character was meant to represent American meddling in Latin America. For how crude I found the satire in Walker, it's actually satirical in that it places its jabs in a greater context and attempts to holistically reflect in its narrative what it intends to criticize. This is literally a single scene in a movie that otherwise supports no such political reading. (Perhaps I'm extra annoyed here because I think Cox has expressed one opinion bad enough to disqualify him as a serious political thinker. For the record, I don't begrudge the man personally and think he's a pretty interesting artist, I just don't take him seriously on a political level, and don't think we should give artists a pass just because they roughly fall on the same side of the political spectrum as we do. But I digress.) I should note that this scene is greatly alleviated by the presence of Dennis Hopper, perhaps the least tortured and most coherent I've ever seen him, as well as Grace Jones.

So this is frequently annoying aside from a few chuckles, but that climax really makes up for it.