ONCE UPON A TIME: HEARING ENNIO MORRICONE

In 2015, I watched Ennio Morricone conduct at the O2 center in London. The sound of that concert has stayed with me for the past five years, and it came back in all its magnificence when I heard Morricone had died. I wrote this essay about the evening, which you can read at Medium, using this link, which should by-pass Medium's pay-wall, though Medium is well-worth your support.

OUTSIDER CINEMA: SAM FULLER AND MONTE HELLMAN

NOTE: I found this essay in my files the other day. I wrote it in 2003, and by rights it should have been in my late lamented Crime Time column, but I have the feeling I might have been saving it for the first isue of Kamera, where I had a number of articles but not this. So here it is now, two B-movie toned studies of two of my favourite directors.

Lee Server’s book on Sam Fuller is really three small books in one, much like Fuller’s small but excellently formed B movies which he made in the 1950s. The first part is an interview with Fuller, who gives good copy as he goes through his career, which includes some remarkable films, some forgettable ones, and many which in retrospect appear to be object lessons in how to use film to tell a story.  The second part is an analysis by Server of the films: he is a solid critic, helped by his understanding of the man and his ability to put the individual films into the context of Fuller’s wider career.  Finally there are interviews with people who worked with Fuller on his films.  As cinematographer Joe Biroc says, ‘Some of his ideas were so crazy!’.  It’s funny how time and the critics have recognised Fuller’s special genius, but in the context of his times in Hollywood he was considered an energetic, talented, off-beat guy whose talent extended no further than B pix.  This was the way Richard Widmark, who starred in two Fuller films, including Pickup On South Street, which is arguably his best, described him to me when I interviewed him for the FT.  Widmark meant it with great affection and respect.

Fuller’s own cut of The Big Red One has been released recently, establishing him posthumously as an A director, certainly a benchmark for Spielberg and others who are lauded for ‘reinventing’ the war movie.  His crime films are extraordinary, starting with I Shot Jesse James, which is closer to White Heat than Stagecoach in tone.  It’s not that Fuller is a consummate pulpster, although he is. A film like House of Bamboo, ostensibly a remake of the noir classic Street With No Name, has everything that makes the original so great: betrayal, a strong homosexual undercurrent between the boss and his (betraying) new henchman, and gang violence. But it adds layers of cultural and racial clashing, uses of sexuality, and an implied comparison between the Army culture and the criminal underworld that make it a fully developed and satisfying story.  So too his other ‘Japanese’ film, The Crimson Kimono, in which the audience’s expectations for the white LA cop and his Nisei partner are constantly being reversed. 

That is the key to Fuller: he is always surprising.  Is there a more off-beat yet successful western than Forty Guns? (well, maybe, Johnny Guitar, but no matter) It’s what makes Fuller so important and what makes this book so entertaining. But it never answers the question I’ve been dying to know since I saw The Naked Kiss and realised there was another character named Griff.  There are Griffs in six Fuller films.  Why?

***

Monte Hellman is in some ways the antithesis of Fuller, even though stylistically you might say he follows in Sam's footsteps.  But where Fuller went his own way, content to write, direct and produce B features that left him with a relative amount of artistic freedom, Hellman has bounced all around the movie business, leaving footprints all over the town, but with only a few films credited to him as a director.  Some of those films are cult classics, and for good reason: The Shooting (written by Carol Eastman) and Ride The Whirlwind (written by Jack Nicholson) were shot back to back in 1966 for Roger Corman. The two westerns are darker takes on Budd Boetticher more than Fuller; both star Nicholson and Millie Perkins, and remain seriously underrated, if not ignored.  Even better, to my mind, is China 9 Liberty 37, released in 1978 with Warren Oates, Fabio Testi, Jenny Agutter and Sam Peckinpah (yes, Sam Peckinpah!), which combines Hellman’s own Sixties sensibility with another Sixties sensibility, that of a spaghetti western

This should be no surprise, since Sergio Leone himself offered Fistful Of Dynamite (aka Duck You Sucker) to Hellman (eventually Peter Bogdanovich tried to direct, then it was offered to Peckinpah, before Leone himself stepped back in), and Hellman is the guy who directed the ‘prologue’ sequence filmed for ABC television in the USA for Fistful Of Dollars. In this scene prison warden Harry Dean Stanton offers a back standing in for Clint Eastwood an amnesty if he will go clean up the town of San Miguel.  ABC had been unhappy with the moral ambiguity of the Man With No Name, and so settled for the Man With No Face!

All this would guarantee Hellman a spot in my personal Hall of Fame, but his cult reputation rests on two more films, both of which showcased Warren Oates (well, actually Oates stole the first one, but never mind).  First was Two Lane Blacktop, arguably the most over-hyped independent film in American history.  The screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer was published as a complete issue of Esquire magazine, before the film was even released, billed as the greatest screenplay of all time.  It wasn’t, and the film could hardly live up to that kind of build up.  What it is is a portrait of American obsession on the road, and the model for any number of road movies (Spielberg's The Duel, anyone?) that followed.  Oates steals the show from crooner James Taylor, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and one-hit wonder Laurie Bird, not that  hard to do, and battles the cars to a draw.

Oates gave the performance of a career in Hellman’s Cockfighter --based on the Charles Willeford novel--certainly one as intense as Alfredo Garcia, but more controlled.  The story of Frank Mansfield, who has taken a vow of silence until he wins the ’Cockfighter of the Year’ award, is another one of obsession, and a particularly American, frontier type of masculine obsession.   Hellman regular Stanton is joined by Troy Donahue, Perkins and Bird to make up an interesting cast of talented character actors and Hollywood burnouts, just the sort of group you might expect Hellman to assemble.

I say expect because the most interesting part of Stevens’ story is keeping track of all the uncredited editing, scripting, directing jobs which Hellman has done, and all the uncredited changes which have been made to his films, most notably Cockfighter.  It is the story of a Hollywood lifer, not quite a consummate player of the game, but certainly a player, where a bit of drive and a bit of charm and bit of chutzpah can get you a long way.  Hellman seems to have lived his life with one project or another at some stage of development, and that is a particular sort of hell which Stevens manages to keep within the context of the work by which Hellman will be remembered.

Sam Fuller: Film Is A Battleground by Lee Server (McFarland, £22.50, ISBN 0786417005)
Monte Hellman: His Life and Films by Brad Stevens (McFarland, £23.50, ISBN 0786414340)

FRANCESCO ROSI: THE TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

My obituary of the great Italian director Francesco Rosi, appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 30 January. Because of the pressures of moving house, I missed it that day, but it is available online, and you can link to it here.

I remember seeing The Mattei Affair at the NFT, and being immediately enthralled. The sense of paranoia and conspiracy appealed to my own sense of politics, and the way the film moved through an ambigous area between documentary and drama was thrilling. Chasing down his films was difficult in those days, but I tried, while relishing the contrast with my other favourite Italian director, Sergio Leone. I made a comparison of the two, which isn't in the piece as printed, about their both making films with Rod Steiger. I'm sure it was Steiger's characteristically over the top performance as Al Capone in Richard Wilson's 1959 film that drew both directors to him.

After Hands Over The City, Rosi had made three features in seven years. None achieved wider wider success, though having just in 2018 finally watched the third of those, Many Wars Ago, he certainly deserved it. After that excellent World war I drama, which was seen as somewhat derivative of Paths Of Glory, Rosi returned to his metier, corruption, conspiracy, and greed, and his next three films, Mattei, Lucky Luciano, and Illustrious Corpses, may be his gritty best. I loved the contrast of Lino Ventura in Illustrious Corpses with Gian Maria Volonte, and Volonte would later draw on the sense of exhuastion and frustration Ventura projected. The film was based on the novel Equal Danger, by
the Sicilian Leonardo Sciacsia, whose affinities to Rosi are obvious. There was a separate essay to be written there, but I could indulge my favourite discoveries of the late Seventies, after I arrived in London, so far.

The films Rosi made after Christ Stopped At Eboli tend to be underrated, or dismissed as playing to the art house market internationally. But they all have remarkable virtues, and I specially had singled out Philippe Noiret in Three Brothers in my original copy. Adapting Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been problematic for directors, but Chronicle Of A Death Foretold may be the best, even if I'm not as convinced by Rupert Everett as the Telegraph was. In The Palermo Affair, whose script was part written by Gore Vidal but is not very tight, the acting can't carry the film. But The Truce is a loving adaptation of Primo Levi, with John Turturro bringing, oddly enough, a little Rod Steiger to the role.

Tony Servillo in Il Diva could be channeling Gian Maria Volonte, and I also mentioned Marco Bellochio's Good Morning Night as another recent Italian film influenced by Rosi. But go back to the Mattei Affair. It's available, in not great quality, on You Tube, but its themes resonate with today's world..

ELI WALLACH: AN APPRECIATION

It's ironic that Eli Wallach's most obvious legacy is his role as Tuco, the Ugly part of Sergio Leone's The Good The Bad and The Ugly. But it's a legacy he embraced, playing with the title in his autobiography, and it also makes sense because Wallach, who thought of himself as a stage actor keeping busy and making money in movies, became the kind of character actor who can carry a film.

You can see the better part of his movie career reflected from his first two films, Baby Doll (1956) and The Lineup (1958). Baby Doll was adapted from a Tennessee Williams one-act play (Elia Kazan claimed he, not Williams, wrote most of the screenplay, but then, he would). Wallach was a favourite actor of Williams'; he'd madehis name on Broadway in The Rose Tattoo, did This Property Is Condemned with his wife Anne Jackson (they had one of the great marriages of American theatre) and Camino Real.

The way the story goes, in 1953 Wallach nailed the screen test for the role of Maggio in From Here To Eternity, but passed on the film to do Camino Real on stage. Of course the way the other story goes is that someone made someone an offer they couldn't refuse to cast Frank. He and Jackson also played, with Zero Mostel, in the 1961 Broadway production of Rhinocerus; he'd already done Ionesco's The Chairs and The Lesson in 1958. I think he's perfect for Theatre of the Absurd. He, Jackson, and Alan Arkin were in Mike Nichol's production of Murray Schisgal's Luv, and around the time he did Rhinoceros Wallach and Mostel appeared off-Broadway in a version of Ulysses directed by Burgess Meredith. It's a same he never appeared in any of the American Film Theatre productions; it would be wonderful to have a record of some of his theatre at his very peak.

In Baby Doll, Wallach plays Silva Vaccaro, who owns a cotton gin which his rival Karl Malden burns down, and he retaliates by seducing Malden's wife, Carroll Baker, who's still a virgin due to a promise Malden made her father, and who parades infantilized self around in what we now call baby doll nighties. This is Tennessee Williams at his best. It was the first of his great sleazy ethnic roles; he's ruthless, he's charming, and, as when he played Tuco, he can physically express something rat like in Vaccaro's character. In contrast, for Don Siegel's The Lineup, based on a popular TV show, he's Dancer, a psychopathic but stylish professional killer, rounding up heroin stashed in tourists' souvenirs. It's a slick procedural which Siegel turns thrilling as Wallach is eventually cornered.

These characteristics of charm, violence, ethnic grease and style came together in Calvera, the leader of the bandits who comes face to face with The Magnificent Seven defending a poor Mexican village. Of course Wallach was coming off playing a cowboy role in The Misfits. There's little doubt Leone had Calvera in mind when he cast Wallach as Tuco, though Leone himself always said it was Wallach's playing a bandit in How The West Was Won that convinced him. Leone liked to cast method (or method-style) actors against 'natural' actors to great effect: Volonte/Van Cleef/Wallach against Eastwood; Jason Robards opposite Charles Bronson; Rod Steiger and James Coburn. In Wallach, he certainly got more than he bargained for. Compare Wallach's Tuco with Gian Maria Volonte's Indio from For A Few Dollars More; Volonte is all inward chaos and explosive violence; Tuco is all outward chaos hiding almost as explosive, if slightly less sociopathic, violence.

Wallach made three other spaghetti westerns, the best of which is probably Ducio Tessari's Don't Turn The Other Cheek, set against a Mexican Reviolution, in which he plays alongside Franco Nero and Lynn Redgrave (!). The others are Corbucci's late (1975) 'comedy' The White, The Yellow And The Black and Ace High (1968) with Terrence Hill (playing a character called Cat Stevens!) and Bud Spenser. Leone wanted to reunite Wallach, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Van Cleef; they were going to be killed off at the start of Once Upon A Time In The West. Wallach and Van Cleef had agreed, but by then Clint was feuding with Leone over both creative and financial issues, and it didn't happen. Luckily, the two reconciled, leading to Clint's touching dedication of The Unforgiven 'to Sergio and Don (Siegel)', both directors who got the best out of Eli Wallach.

Eastwood would bring him back in one of his best later roles; he absolutely kills the part of a liquor store owner telling the cops about an old robbery; Larry Fishburne and Kevin Bacon just stand there and admire him.

I'd like to mention a few other hidden gems from Wallach's career: everyone mentions his role in Godfather III, but he also played Don Vittorio in the much-neglected Crazy Joe, one of the best of the spaghetti crime films. He played ABC television's corporate boss Leonard Goldenson, the capo di tutto capi when I worked there, in the TV movie Monday Night Mayhem, about the creation of Monday Night Football. There's a 1992 episode of Law & Order, Working Stiff, in which he's hugely touching as a bitter old union man. He had a nice cameo in The Ghost, as a conspiracy-believing recluse on Martha's Vineyard. Ewan MacGregor can only look on in awe.

There's an interesting little bit of trivia I came across when I thought I might write Wallach's obit: his daughter Roberta played opposite Paul Newman's daughter Nell Potts (and Joanne Woodward) in the film Newman directed of Paul Zindel's The Effects Of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. It was sort of a like one of those neighbourhood projects, but I remember seeing it when it was released, and liked it then, and wonder if the kids' performances would hold up now. Nell Potts now runs 'Newman's Own'.

As I said, I was hoping to write Eli Wallach's obit for one of the papers. But when you're that talented and you reach 98 years old, your obituary had better be ready to print. As it happened, I couldn't resist writing my appreciation anyway. What I admire most about him is the way he always seems to be enjoying what he is doing; like many of the greatest actors, he doesn't seem to be taking it seriously, even though he is.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: LET THE BULLETS FLY

It might be hard to imagine Sergio Leone with a Chinese sense of humour, but if you can, you will probably enjoy Let The Bullets Fly, which plays in this year's London Film Festival and is one of the most entertaining movies on offer. With its knowing combination of plot twists, characters unwilling to take themselves too seriously, and homage, it turns 1920s China into a half-gangster, half-western romp.

Although it's based on a story by a Sihuanese writer, the screenplay's immediate model would appear to be Fistful of Dollars. In this case a bandit, 'Pocky' Zhiang, having blown up a luxury train carrying a con-man named Ma who had been appointed the new governor of Goose Town, takes over Ma's role. But Goose Town is controlled totally by a warlord, Huang. Zhiang, in effect, plays Ma off against Huang, in the tradition of Red Harvest and Yojimbo, but and former governors have found both little profit and short life-expectancy. In this case, the plot's twisting is, if anything, more intricate than its models, especially because Ma's wife continues to play governor's wife, with Zhiang. The Leone-ine roots are made apparent in the scene set of Goose Town, especially its clock tower, but also in the script itself, where the characters have to explain the English word 'dollars'--a knowing wink too at Chow Yun-Fat, who plays Huang, and of course is well known in the west, where he has made a lot of dollars.

What makes it work is the interplay between the three leads: Jiang Wen, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay, plays Zhiang as half thug half philosopher—not that there isn't a casual sort of violence and indifference, which is part of both the Leone and Chinese traditions. As Huang, Chow gets to indulge his great talent for comedy, playing against the expectations he brings to characters. He also plays Huang's double, recruited for his safety, and not the firmest noodle in the bowl—it reminded me of Chow in God of Gamblers, where he played his character regressed to childhood after being wounded in the head: a performance that conceded nothing to, say, Tom Hanks in Big. The beauty of the film is that Zhiang isn't really the man in the middle, it's the conman Ma, played by You Ge with a brilliant combination of cunning and weakness. He's played off brilliantly against his wife, played by Carina Lau (right), who turns out to be the real brains behind the operation, and even more adept than he is at changing sides, at least on the surface. Yun Zhou tries as Flora, who drums the ceremonial drums and is a prostitute charged with spying for Huang, but the role doesn't really allow her much room except as a putative love interest. Added to the mix of ambiguity is a fake Pocky, complete with pockmarks (which the real Zhiang of course doesn't have), with the result that all the action is played out as part of a battle of wits, exactly the dynamic that drove Fistful and its sources.

Is Zhiang really in it for the money? Is he after revenge, once his number one 'son' is killed? Will he be betrayed by Ma? Loaded with slapstick humour to playoff against its action, with martial arts and gun battles, and with the sort of twists that culminate in two groups of fake bandits wearing identical masks facing off against each other in a shadowy street, Let The Bullets Fly is immense fun, and remarkably satisfying. It is, apparently, China's biggest-grossing film ever, not least because Jiang needed a hit after his first film as director didn't do well, and it's easy to see why it was a hit. It played well at the Tribeca Film Festival (where Yun Zhou stole the show), and it should do the same here as well.

Let The Bullets Fly (China/Hong Kong 2010)
directed by Jiang Wen, screenplay by Jiang, Zhu Sujin, Shu Ping based on a story by Ma Shitu, plays the London Film Festival 19/20 October

STAYING UP ALL NIGHT TONIGHT? LISTEN IN...

I'll be guesting on Dotun Adebayo's Up All Night tonight, Radio 5 at about 0230 Saturday night/Sunday morning. Likely topics include Vampire movies (including the new Korean film Thirst), Sergio Leone, and maybe Werner Herzog's remake of Abel Ferarra's Bad Lieutenant.
Beats sleeping! Those of you outside Britain can probably listen on your computers, at bbc.co.uk...

WATCHING THE WATCHMEN

Watchmen created an interesting phenomenon; its reviews, particularly in the US, were as bad as any film's I can recall, including some every bit as gratuitously violent as they accused the film of being. At the same time, it was the top grossing movie in its opening weekend, despite, at two hours 40 minutes, being too long for the allegedly limited attention span of today's teenaged cinema audience. I heard one cinema manager explain that parents were arriving with six-year olds expecting something like Spider Man 23, given that the film suffered a two-thirds drop in the second week, word of mouth may have caught up with the fact that this isn't the film almost anyone thinks it is. At the most basic level,the bad reviews are very much a part of this inability to place, indeed, to understand what the film actually is, and this is a problem which has hung over Watchmen ever since the novel came out; first its writer, Alan Moore, and then potential director Terry Gilliam, both declared it unfilmable.

Watchmen is set in the 1980s. Nixon is in his fifth term as president, and costumed heroes have been outlawed, except for Doctor Manhattan, his body transformed in a nuclear accident, whose presence on the American side has thus far kept the world out of nuclear war. The Soviets are threatening war and Nixon is convinced the US could win nuclear armageddon, and someone has just murdered The Comedian, a member of the 1940s crime-fighting group The Minutemen, who stayed active with the Watchmen, and who, we learn in the credits sequence, has worked for the government doing any number of dirty jobs including assassinating JFK from the Grassy Knoll. Rorschach, who apparently has kept working as a costumed crime fighter, despite the ban, tries to reform the Watchmen to avenge the Comedian's killing.

Normally, it's not a good idea to review the reviews of a movie, but in this case, because I think the critics' reactions reflect the core difficulty the film presents, I will refer to two in particular: by AO Scott and Anthony Lane. Scott is the Bosley Crowther of this millennium for the New York Times, vainly fighting a rearguard action for literary values, mainstream entertainment, and artistic decorum. Scott finds it remarkable that the 'interminable' film 'freezes its frame of reference in the 1980s', saying it would appeal best to someone who was a college sophomore at that time, who had 'a smattering of Nietzsche and an extensive record collection'. While he's perceptive enough, which isn't saying much, to note themes of 'apocalypse and decay' (but not to realise the 80s was where these themes came together after being explored separately throughout the 70s) he also accuses the film of 'shallow nihilism', seeing its major conflict as the moral choice between killing masses and killing individuals; 'the only action that makes sense in this world is killing.'

At least he's willing to concede some sort of meaning. Lane, Oxford's man at the New Yorker, might be expected to treat it more gently, as Moore is English, and in this country critical reaction to Watchmen has been tempered by patriotism and the opportunity to show moral disapproval for rapacious Hollywood. But Lane is, in fact, even more dismissive than Scott, advising audiences to walk out after the credits sequence. He compares Watchmen unfavourably to Persepolis or Maus, the 'acceptable' face of graphic novels, saying Watchmen is stuck in 'cod mythology and rainy dystopias'. He too is bothered by the setting, though he's too mathematically challenged to understand Nixon is on his fifth term, not his third. He's also seemingly incensed by the fact that the movie's Nite Owl rips off Batman. His idea of the demeaning audience at which the film is aimed is 'leering 19 year olds' who believe 'America is ruled by the military industrial complex and whose deepest fear (even deeper than meeting an intelligent woman, he says) is that the Warren Commission might have been right all along.'

It's easy to see behind their dislike of Watchman's political perspective. Moore, of course, has dealt before in rainy dystopia; V for Vendetta is set very much in the British version of Watchmen's America, a cross of Thatcher and Orwell which five terms of Nixon approximates fairly well. Superman, remember, fought for 'truth, justice, and the American way', and this world view is one the novel and film present with irony. Remember too, war requires a suspension of super-hero disbelief: if in the 1940s, the Allies really had Superman and Wonder Woman on their side, why didn't they win the war overnight? The experience of Doc Manhattan (and the Comedian) in Vietnam shows us what this would have meant in 'real' life, and makes the bigger point. The superhero impulse does not solve problems, and its appeal is always, at heart, fascist. This, presumably, is what drew the sneering Nietzsche references from AO. But living in an era where a president sought virtually absolute powers to wage virtually perpetual war, it's quite a feat to ignore any metaphoric linking to the present, especially from the paper of Judith Miller. I mean, they even make fun of big business, can you believe it (!?!), as if prosperity weren't just around the corner.

The film is, if anything, more heavy-handed than Moore in ladling out the irony of the superheroes at the beck and call of a corrupt imperialists. The Comedian, who works willingly doing the government's dirty tricks, is also the only crime-fighter who understands, and accepts,his existence as the theatre of the absurd Moore sees it being. He answers Nite Owl's anguished cry 'what happened to the American Dream' by laughing 'this IS the American Dream', and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's playing of the character like Robert Downey playing Nick Fury (one of the models for him) makes that work. I think at least part of the vituperative critical response in the US (and the critical pleasure in the UK) comes from that raw expression of American failure. In this sense, the closest filmic equivalent I can think of is Godard's Made In USA, in which a Richard Stark 'Parker' novel is transformed into a little essay about how the US is in Vietnam because of the same impulse that caused Richard Widmark to throw the lady in the wheelchair down the stairs. Substitute comics for film noir, add a little entertainment value, and you've got Watchmen.

But the crux of understanding the film, and both these reviews, is Lane's harumphing at 'cod mythology', because Watchmen the novel is all about mythology. No less than Godard, Moore is aware of how the pulp fictions of a society reflect, if not shape, that society's behaviour. But he's reflecting comic books from the 'golden' and 'silver' ages, not film noir from the 40s and 50s. This mythology was always going to be the hardest part to convert to film. In fact, the most self-referential part of the novel, a comic within the comic, was eliminated (though it was filmed for a DVD bonus). This is why the setting, in the 1980s, is so important: the real target audience for Watchmen was born in the baby boom, and grew up reading Marvel comics, attracted to them by their adding of real-life angst to the daily lives of Superheroes. That's why the music of the film is so anchored in Sixties cliché (and here I have to agree with Lane that we should ban 'Hallelujah' from any further soundtrack use, ever. Ironic intent or not.) When Frank Miller revitalised Batman with the Dark Knight Returns, the films drew on that nihilism only slightly; though the iconography got adapted in many other parts of mainstream film making.

Remember too that, apart from Doctor Manhattan, none of the Watchmen is actually a super hero. They are costumed crime-fighters, but they posses no super powers (though Ozymandias seems to come very close in some ways). Nite Owl's being out of shape is only hinted at by one shot of his gut, then he seems back instantly to full villain-routing prowess, but these are very much people. Of course he's a copy of Batman, AO, that's what Moore was doing, playing with the tropes of the heroes, at the same time he was inventing so many more. And if the Comedian is his most perfect invention in terms of the role of the hero him (or her) self, it is Rorschach who, as his name implies, is the litmus test for the audience. With his constantly-shifting mask, but otherwise dressed like Mike Hammer, his Spillane-like voice-over frames the film, and it is his diary which will, at film's end, overturn the great good deed which the Watchmen have done. He is the spirit of pure vengeance, and as played brilliant by Jackie Earle Haley, with a Clint Eastwood rasp made all the more effective by the coincident release of Gran Torino, he is both the most violent and most sympathetic of the characters. This suggests another comparison, because what Moore and now Snyder are doing with comic heroes is very similar to what Sergio Leone did with westerns: The Man With No Name reflected, in some ways, an adult approach to the super-hero elements of the genre, a look at what things might really be like if you accepted the conventions of the genre and tried to make them work in reality.

Moore drew on existing comic characters besides Batman. Rorschach is his version of Steve Ditko's Question and Mr A, particularly the latter, with his uncompromising views of right and wrong. That so many of the other characters recall previous comics' heroes is intentional, but too esoteric for the mainstream movie audience; even modern comic nuts are unlikely to have seen Charlton comics, the Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and many more. So the backstory gets jammed into that entertaining credits sequence which Lane loved. We learn the fates of some of The Minutemen, heroes of the 40s, of whom the Comedian is the only one still active. Mothman went crazy; Dollar Bill was shot when his cape was caught in a revolving door. Lesbian heroine Silhouette was forced to 'retire' then murdered with her lover by an old enemy turned into a crazed sex killer by her 'perversion'. The similar fading to the background of gay Hooded Justice is passed over. But the depth of Moore's comic book universe is thus established right at the start, and to some extent, it's a question of how much the audience can accept it, and what follows, as history which underscores their appreciation of the film.

It has its flaws, though few of them are as serious as those that rendered Zach Snyder's previous film, 300, also a comic book adaptation, so one-dimensional. It is at times gratuitously violent: even if it is understandable that the basic fighting should been enhanced, to emphasize that, although lacking super powers, these are still heroes. Rorschach's prison scenes go on for too long, are too graphic, and don't need to be there; there's a similar indulgence in his explanatory stories. There is an adolescent and voyeuristic lingering over the attempted rape of the original Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), and when the somewhat wooden Malin Ackerman (who has the unfortunate task of trying to play a scene while being loved by two blue Doctor Manhattans while a third works in the next room) finally dons her costume and steps on screen I laughed out loud, because the costume was simply latex and high heels and she looked almost exactly like a blow up sex doll. The guys, except Rorschach, get costumes obviously engineered to assist them; while Silk Spectre gets fetish. This too reflects the adolescent male sexual world of comics and their audience, including AO Scott, who, oddly, found both Gugino and Ackerman's performances 'solid'. So latex has its artistic uses after all.

And on its own terms, the film is at its weakest as it tries to resolve its over-arching mystery, the bigger question of sacrifice and survival. Part of this is because the ethical dilemma is presented in exactly the kind of philosophy-lite that the critics complain about. Part of it (spoiler alert here) is down to Ozymandias really not being involved enough in the story to the point where he is revealed to be its linch-pin; this was a flaw in the novel too, though to a much lesser extent. And the destruction of Manhattan with nuclear devices is puzzling as well: it seems to have been specific enough to have left most of the island (including both Nite Owl's subway tunnel and Silk Spectre I's flat) unscathed (not to mention free of radiation).

Watchmen fails as a juvenile entertainment; it's too complex. It probably fails as a complex entertainment, in that its assumptions, and its biggest dilemma, are both too simple. The many-layered subtleties of the novel are, after all, based on readings of comic books, and although Michael Chabon has won awards for doing just that sort of deconstruction, not many others doing it will be praised by the New York Times. Time magazine, however, picked Watchmen as one of the 100 greatest novels in English, so go figure. The movie has the power to keep a sensitive, non-comic book reading, anti-violence, prefers-subtitles kind of movie watcher like my wife attentive throughout. It's a fine effort at adaptation, probably about as good as we could expect. I'd put it somewhere between Leone's Fistful of Dollars, a not-quite-perfect first effort, and The Good The Bad and The Ugly, a pulp epic (For A Few Dollars More is more of a self-contained and perfectly formed film) but it should be considered in the same way as we looked at Leone's westerns. Something different from the super hero movies you've seen before. That may well be more weight than the genre can stand, especially in the eyes of Mr Scott and Mr Lane.