OUT NOW: The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin, 2023)

In the early Eighties, the Von Erichs (Kevin, Kerry and David) were one of the most exciting and popular factions in wrestling.

Based out of Dallas, Texas, the Von Erichs (Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson) were the stars of their father Fritz’s promotion, World-Class Championship Wrestling.

Just when it look like the brothers were set to become the kings of the ring, tragedy struck…

This movie left me a bit cold.

I had seen the Dark Side of the Ring episode on the Von Erichs, so I was familiar with their story. That familiarity made certain scenes feel like madlibs, and certain foreshadowing come off a little obvious.

Part of that is my problem, but the second half of the film feels a little more like a series of vignettes, as we cover a greater span of time. 

The first half of the movie, covering the Von Erichs being drawn back to their father’s wrestling promotion, and Kevin’s romance with Lily James’ Pam, is stronger.

We never leave Texas, and we barely leave the Von Erichs’ domain (the ranch and the ring). We get a sense of the family’s close-knit ties, but also a sense of insulation and claustrophobia.

At times, it feels obvious in hitting its themes, and the way the characters talk to each other. However, these are characters who either cannot talk or are incapable of not speaking their minds. 

None of the brothers’ deaths are shown - the film’s strength lies in the way it shows their absence, and lets that fester through the family’s dynamic.

While it is not the focus, the film does a solid job of highlighting certain aspects of pro-wrestling (they shoot the scenes in wide shots that show off the physicality while also getting close enough to show the way the performers choreograph the match). 

What the film is more interested in is the family’s focus on physical health as the benchmark of success, and the way in which that focus on the body affected Mike (Stanley Simons) and Kerry (and the unseen Chris) when they experience life-changing injuries. 

The performances are good - despite the lack of screentime together, the actors have solid chemistry with each other. Zach Efron anchors the movie as the sensitive, emotionally inarticulate Kevin.

The other brothers do not get a lot to do - most of their impact is collective. What they all do is reflect the different ways that Fritz has made them incapable of dealing with the situations they find them in. 

The Bear’s White gives Kerry a live-wire, simmering rage behind a superficial calm. As his brothers die, and he loses his foot, he lets the facade fall.

Holt McCallany is effectively one-note as Fritz, an egotist who only sees his sons as extensions of himself. 

The film has many strengths, but there was a tipping point where it felt like the movie’s grip on the story becomes less sure.

As with most biopics, its scope is too wide for a feature runtime so it starts to feel compressed.

It plays like a disaster movie, imbedding the viewer in the family and their dynamic - and then David (Harris Dickinson) dies.

To an extent, the pace of the brothers’ spiral of tragedies after David’s death is an effect of the story. It is also the film trying to present the ways in which tragedy and grief compound.

That need to compress is overt in one respect - youngest brother Chris is absent from the movie entirely. Perhaps the filmmakers felt that another death would have made the movie oppressive and left viewers emotionally exhausted. Still, for a film about athletes doomed by their obsession with physical prowess, to ignore the one brother who struggled the most to fit the family mould, it feels off. 

There is one scene near the end that I cannot get my head around. 

After Kerry dies, the film cuts to the dead Von Erich Brothers reuniting in the afterlife, and embracing their eldest brother Jack Jr., who died as a small child. Cutting back to Kevin with Kerry’s body, the scene feels wrongheaded. Is it Kevin’s imagination? Is it meant to emphasise the brothers’ freedom from Fritz and their own pain? 

It strikes an off note, particularly since it is intercut with Kevin crying beside his brother’s body. They are free, while he is abandoned.

The Iron Claw is not a bad movie. It has many fine qualities, but I left it with the gnawing sense that something had been left behind. Maybe the family’s tragedies are cumulatively too powerful for a dramatic framework. 

I look forward to watching it again, but on this first watch, it felt too condensed. 

Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971)

Car deliveryman Kowalski (Barry Newman) has to deliver a Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in three days. 

Fuelled by benzedrine and a bet, he intends to reach his destination in two, all obstacles be damned...

After covering three seventies movies featuring car chases, I was keen to check out a few more.

While filled with more vehicular action than Bullitt or The French Connection, Vanishing Point is closer to a road trip movie than a thriller. 

The film is pretty episodic, as our hero interacts with different sets of characters throughout his journey.

Made at the turn of the decade, Vanishing Point feels like a time capsule - yet its simple narrative prevents it from feeling of its time.

Our lead becomes a folk hero of sorts, with an electro-bard (Cleavon Little’s DJ SuperSOul) imparting his story to the masses.

Lead actor Barry Neewman does not get a lot to do, but he is fine. At a certain point, it feels like the car is on screen longer than he is. They become fused as one and the same.

The character is not even involved in any particular quest for a higher goal - he is transporting a car cross country, and plans to deliver it ahead of schedule because he thinks he can (with a bet thrown in, of course).

The character is not checked out of society in the same way as others in the movie (religious groups, hippies, SuperSoul’s pirate radio station), but as the film progresses, his inscrutability becomes a blank canvas for struggling against the system.

The film had to shorten its shooting schedule and was affected by budget problems. These issues are probably partially influenced by the film’s near-abstract sense of momentum, and then increasingly opaque lead figure.

We get a few flashes of the protagonist’s past, but these snippets only increase his status as an elemental, mythic figure. Kowalski's past as a veteran, racing car driver and cop ties him to iconography of action and speed. His past career as a policeman feels like the ultimate rejection of society's norms - here is someone who used to work for the Man fighting the Man. He is Bullitt if he had chucked in his badge because he would not play ball with slick politico Chalmers (Robert Vaughn).

Only one character - at the very end of the movie - is able to recognise him from his past life, connecting an act of righteousness that unmoored him from the establishment, and set him on this final course.

The movie’s explosive ending is established by the opening sequence - a flash-forward that sets out Kowalski’s race as inherently doomed - feels like a metaphor for the shift from the optimism of the sixties to the new decade.

His ultimate escape is immolation. The movie ends, the character is dead, but in his sacrifice his legend is cemented.

The Seven-Ups (Philip D'Antoni, 1973)

The Seven-Ups are a team of NYPD officers who go outside the rules and are known for arresting criminals who receive sentences of seven years or more.

Led by Buddy Manucci (Buddy Manucci), the squad find their reputation used against them when an unknown party begins impersonating plainclothes cops to kidnap wealthy gangsters.

With the pressure building, Manucci goes on the trail of the pair of killers (Richard Lynch and Bill Hickman) who have been masquerading as his team.

With the success of Bullitt and The French Connection, producer Philip D'Antoni had a unique streak of success in Hollywood.

After a career in television, Bullitt represented D'Antoni’s big screen debut, and he would only have two other theatrical features, The French Connection, and this one, which is also his only big screen directorial effort.

I had never seen this movie before. And aside from knowing there was a car chase, I knew nothing of the story.

With its familiar cast and locale, The Seven-Ups often feels like a spiritual follow-up to the William Friedkin film. And that is probably the biggest knock against it.

Featuring a great cast of faces including Richard Lynch and future horror icon Joe Spinell, The Seven-Ups is ironically let down by a lack of specificity. The plot is complicated, with an antagonist who is playing both sides against each other. 

The car chase combines the NYC locale of The French Connection with a similar concept as the chase from Bullitt. Some gags call back to the earlier chase sequences - the kids blocking  the street; Richard Lynch firing a shotgun at Scheider’s car during the chase.

Despite its scale, it feels a bit overlong, and lacks the visceral impact of Doyle’s race against the assassin.

More plot-heavy and less character-driven, the film feels like a programmer entry in the police thriller sub-genre.It is also hard not to see this movie as a sequel to The French Connection: Scheider as the lead; secondary antagonist Tony LaBianco as the mastermind.

In terms of D'Antoni’s direction, the film is more classical and formalist in style than either of its predecessors. There is none of immediacy of Friedkin’s documentary-style approach.

More fundamentally, the film does not have a clear take on the titular characters. There was an ambiguity to the way 'Popeye' Doyle was presented. While Scheider is solid in the role, Buddy Manucci is more of a placeholder action hero. Even the narrative possibilities of the having an antagonist use the Seven Ups' reputation against them feels undercooked.

Because of its similarities to the prior films, and the lack of anything new, the film comes off as a tad anonymous.

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Bullitt

The French Connection

The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)

New York police officers ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Gene Hackman) and ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider) think they have stumbled onto a massive drug smuggling ring.

But can they prove it? 

Far from the sunshine of Bullitt and the reassured cool of Steve McQueen’s persona, The French Connection is grim and claustrophobic.

Without the presence of an established star, the film is given a greater sense of unpredictability and stakes.

Unlike Frank Bullitt, Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle feels like a deconstruction of the loner lawman.

Doyle is a man who believes in his hunches.

Before the movie has started, he has a reputation for failing. He is a loose cannon with a specific skill set, but the film seems more fascinated by his mindset than endorsing it. 

In Bullitt, the character’s investigation was sidelined by scenes of his everyday life. Bullitt keeps his professional and personal lives separate - something highlighted in the moment when his lives cross, when his girlfriend stumbles onto a crime scene he is working.

By contrast, Popeye has no life - he is constantly working. Even when he and partner Cloudy (Roy Scheider) go to a bar for a drink, he uses it to surveil some gangsters at a nearby table. 

He is never shown at home or having any relationships beyond Cloudy.

While they create a sense of verisimilitude, sequences of process serve as signs of Popeye’s obsessive drive - stakeouts, the subway peekaboo with Charnier (Fernando Rey), the stripping of the car.

Doyle cannot let it go - even after he accidentally kills his nemesisFBI Agent Bill Mulderig (Bill Hickman), he staggers out into the void to try and prove his hunch right.

The elliptical finale leaves our protagonist in stasis as success slips through his fingers… 

A great movie, The French Connection moves like bullet even before Doyle gets behind the wheel.

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Bullitt

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968)

A director (William Greaves) attempts to film an audition piece in Central Park, while another crew films the film, and a third films the park.

I do not know why I bothered with the plot synopsis. 

One could classify Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One as cinema verite, but the omnipresent camera - and Greaves’ editing of the footage - is slyer than that easy label.

The movie starts with the initial attempt at an audition, cut together between different sets of actors.

The reveal of different cameras recording the scene and the crew recording the scene.  

Greaves himself plays the director as befuddled and inarticulate. 

According to what I have read, Greaves was unhappy with the production, believing that he had not created the conditions for a more complex and piercing piece. And then the crew presented him with the footage they had filmed on their own.

What Greaves did not realise at the time was that the crew had started filming themselves discussing Greaves and the project.

The crew are young filmmakers and have an awareness of film theory, which gives their conversation an added layer of meta-textuality as they discuss concepts that the film is wrestling with.

Graves cuts these discussions into the film, further increasing the film’s layers of self awareness.

The repetition of the audition, and the processes around it, draws attention to both the extreme artifice of ‘acting’, and the ways in which performance informs every aspect of the world around the central production.

The film is filled with cutaways of people becoming aware of being recorded. Part of the film’s impact comes from these moments and the way they are compiled to create a constant sense of surveillance.

Some of these moments are familiar - people, whether on the production or bystanders, ham for the camera, or become self-conscious. 

There is something timeless about these reactions - these moments made me think of two things - the early movies of the 1890s and 1900s, like the Lumiere Bros’ factory, and the way people perform on social media. 

Scenes are allowed to play out from multiple angles but before you can become immersed, the film adopts a split screen format to show the same scene from different angles.

He increases this sense of disruption and self-awareness by cutting away to the crew’s BTS discussions, creating more ironic juxtapositions and punchlines.

While we get various voices discussing the film and unpacking it’s potential meanings, the one voice we never hear is Greaves as himself. Everyone else is shown in medis res, between ignorance and awareness of the camera.

Greaves himself is the one person onscreen who never shows his hand.

The film feels like a mischievous joke - at the crew’s and the viewer’s expense.

The film’s final scene is worth watching the movie by itself - Greaves and his crew are confronted by a man living in the park. With his diction and theatrical deamenour, he is like the film’s intention come to life - both an over-cooked example of presenting a public face, and completely real.

In an era where we record every element of our lives, the line between private and public, artifice and authenticity, what is considered real and what is considered true, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One feels even more prescient. 

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