The Neon Demon (2015) Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Nightbirds (1970) Director: Andy Milligan
In his foreword to the BFI Flipside’s release of Andy Milligan’s Nightbirds, Nicolas Winding Refn wrote about coming across Milligan biographer Jimmy McDonough’s collection of Milligan film materials on eBay. This haul included many very rare prints, including the sole surviving copy of Nightbirds.
The Danish director forked out $25,000 for the lot.
Refn and Milligan are very different filmmakers and I was a little surprised when I discovered NWR was such a fan. Refn’s movies are as glossy as Milligan’s are grungey. When Refn actors speak, their words tend to be sparse and sometimes enigmatic while Milligan characters are verbose and their dialogue is exposition heavy. Refn employs Hollywood royalty like Ryan Gosling and Keanu Reeves while Milligan tended to utilize friends and contacts from his early off-off Broadway theatre days.
Dubbed ‘Times Square’s Militant Auteur’ by Bill Landis, who devoted a whole chapter to him in his book Sleazoid Express, Milligan was amazingly prolific, punting out a movie every couple of months during his heyday. Despite being associated with New York’s 42nd Street scuzzy grindhouse circuit, he did make a move to London in the late 1960s. Here he shot five films in a period of a year and a half.
The first of the batch was Nightbirds, which until salvaged by Refn had largely been forgotten. It only made its debut on DVD/Blu-ray in 2012 on the always interesting Flipside label.
Nightbirds was shot in 1968 but this was far from the Swinging London of Carnaby Street and Chelsea’s King’s Road. Set in the East End around Spittalfields – an area where Jack the Ripper once operated – this resembles Bronco Bullfrog and Up the Junction rather than the pop art paradises of the capital often portrayed around this time. Smashing Time here? Not very likely.
Dink (Berwick Kaler) is a hapless and homeless twenty year old man. When we first see him, he’s disoriented, staggering down a street. Soon he is puking openly but rather than ignoring him, passer-by Dee (Julie Shaw) tries to help. Good looking and with a verging on posho accent, she takes him to a local cafe and then back to her uber-dingy bedsit. This must be Dink’s lucky day. Later he even describes her as ‘a Florence Nightingale of the streets’ but it doesn’t take too long before we discover that she might have ulterior motives.
Almost inevitably, a relationship ensues. This will be one of the most lopsided cinematic couplings I’ve ever come across. Dee is dominant in every conceivable way. She’s more sexually experienced than Dink and she’s smarter too. She’s also as manipulative as Dink is vulnerable and this points to a possible reason why she should choose him. He’s also naive to the point of being childlike for much of the time. A perfect victim.
To some extent, this relationship parallels the friendship between Ruby (Jena Malone) and Jesse (Elle Fanning) in The Neon Demon. Both Dee and Ruby display a vampiric viciousness when they fail to get their own way.
Nightbirds didn’t polarize critics. Critics never got to see it. Milligan’s work generally was often seen as a joke, unintentionally funny at best. Stephen King once went as far to dismiss The Ghastly Ones as ‘the work of morons with cameras.’
The Neon Demon also attracted plenty of flak from reviewers. The Daily Mail wanted the British Board of Film Classification to take action on the ‘sadistic horror show,’ calling it: ‘rancid, pretentious and downright creepy.’
You might reckon that would be the perfect recommendation to go out and see it for yourself but many liberal publications despised it just as much. According to the Observer it was ‘dumbfoundingly awful’ and Refn couldn’t direct traffic.
No mention of his great eye for composition or his startling use of super saturated colours – Only God Forgives from 2013 must be the ‘reddest’ movie since Dario Argento shot Suspiria – or his ability to conjure up an unforgettable scene: a mountain lion leaping around a cheap Pasadena motel, some stomach churning moments in a mortuary and the notorious shot involving an eyeball.
And could any other director have coaxed a better performance from Elle Fanning?
On balance, the Observer review somehow managed to be even more ludicrous than the Mail’s. At least the latter got it right with its ‘downright creepy’ description.
The Neon Demon is set in a world of equally narcissistic and superficial young women with the personality of automatons, all chiselled cheekbones and the kind of cadaverous bodies that look like they could do with a good plate of sausage, egg and chips.
‘I would never call you fat,’ Christina Hendricks, playing an demented but influential agent, tells Jesse during an early audition. ‘Others might, but I never would.’ This is surely both a very pointed putdown of the whole vacuous fashion industry and a comment on the real life, bizarre idea that Christina Hendricks is a chubster.
As I’ve written on here before when I chose the film in my 2017 Best Films of the Year list, agency heads and high end photographers uniformly adore Jesse and the more she is fêted the more she lets the flattery go to her pretty little head. Her looks, though, attract just as much jealousy as praise – rather than an exploitation film this is a film about exploitation. Mainly of Jesse.
Macabre and menacing, haunting and hypnotic, The Neon Demon is a far better piece of work than Milligan’s movie.
Discussing the merits of Nightbirds in the film’s commentary, Berwick Kaler noted: ‘It’s weird. It doesn’t really say much. It’s not that exciting but it sort of grips you.’ He’s certain that with more time and more money at his disposal, Milligan could have significantly improved Nightbirds.
I would guess he’s right. Maybe Milligan just tried to do too much himself and was unable to listen to advice. For his films he would generally write the scripts, cast the actors, scout locations, direct, assemble the soundtrack and edit. Even the outfits credit for Raffine is a reference to the boutique he owned back home in Staten Island. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he did his own catering but apparently he would send out for sandwiches between takes.
Oh the glamour of micro-budget filmmaking.
What unites Milligan and Refn is the fact that they both developed idiosyncratic directing styles early in their careers. In that aforementioned foreword, Refn speaks of how when you watch any of Milligan’s work you’re in no doubt whose film you’re watching and how he might not have been a conventional talent but how being unique is actually always more interesting.
Nightbirds is admittedly a tough watch at times. The sound is sometimes choppy, and the music selected by Milligan is never anywhere near appropriate. Kaler and Shaw put in decent, naturalistic performances but some of the other actors are amateurish. At times it closely resembles a play that’s been filmed.
During a 2015 interview with the Daily Grindhouse, Refn mentioned that he would be transferring his Milligan films to 4K and planned to bring more of his oeuvre back into circulation. Despite my reservations, I’ll likely seek some of these out. I’m sure any movie with a name like The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! or Fleshpot on 42nd Street can’t be any worse than the tsunami of summer blockbuster dross about to clog up my local multiplex.
For more on Nightbirds: http://www.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/nightbirds
formalcontentsonly.wordpress.com 