Spring Night Summer Night: American Indie #12

Like Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn is a film obsessive. Not only does he direct and produce films, he confesses to having ‘collector-mania’, possessing a huge quantity of movie-related artifacts from quad posters through to celluloid itself. He loves to promote obscurities that he especially admires, and many of these can be found on his site byNWR.com.

There you can see Jac Zacha’s 1970 psychedelic saga Walk the Walk; Orgy of the Dead, an erotic horror scripted by Ed Wood and Night Tide, a sometimes magical movie about Mora, a woman brought up to believe she’s descended from mermaids.

Then there’s Spring Night, Summer Night from 1967. This has been said to have brought Italian Neo-Realism to Appalachia, and had been selected to screen at the 1968 New York Film Festival only to be dumped late in the day and replaced by John Cassavetes’ Faces. Oouch.

It’s the tale of a dirt poor family living on a farm in rural Ohio. This is the kind of family often vilified as white trash or hillbillies by folk who would normally claim to be against stereotyping. The film, though, certainly does little to combat some of these common perceptions, albeit it’s never malicious about the community it depicts.

At its heart is Jessie (Larue Hall). Her life lacks glamour and freedom in equal measures. Her days mostly consist of cleaning and cooking for her mother Mae, stepfather Virgil, stepbrother Carl, four younger siblings and grandmother.

Directed by Joseph L. Anderson, Spring Night, Summer Night opens with the sound of gunfire. Carl (Ted Heim) is shooting at a bucket attached to a tree, before turning his attention to the wing mirror of a rusting tractor.

Carl’s a rebel, probably without much of a cause.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Virgil demands to know. ‘You’ll pay for that,’ he continues before he receives an answer from son.

That night, a Saturday presumably in Spring, the family gather together to eat. They say grace before meals and then glower at each other across the kitchen table, the adults sucking every strand of tobacco from their ciggies. Mae moans about the food not having enough salt. Virgil barks out complaints about the lack of respect shown to him by his children.

Rather than taking his wife out to a local hootenanny, he declares that he’s taking his favourite bird to a cockfight. Yes, a cockfight. When Carl accidentally stumbles into the bathroom (or was it accidental?) his gaze lingers a little too long on his step-sister lying naked in the tub.

This is a film about a family that you likely wouldn’t want to watch with your own family.

Carl and Jessie head off to a bar. Spring Night Summer Night may have been shot as psychedelia was on the rise but believe me, Haight Ashbury this part of Ohio ain’t. Carl launches into a brawl with a boy dancing with Jessie. He then drags her out the hall. In the car he forcibly has sex with her – although she later says she could have stopped him.

He’s been talking of leaving for some time and the next morning he does so, hitching to nearby Columbus.

When he returns during the summer, Jessie is visibly pregnant and Virgil is unsuccessfully attempting to discover the identity of the father.

Carl tells Jessie he loves her, insisting that they should move away together. He speculates that they maybe aren’t even really related through a bloodline to one another. According to persistent local rumours, Mae hasn’t ever been the most faithful of wives and, when confronted, she finds it impossible to be sure who Jessie’s father was.

It’s easy to assume that this isn’t going to end happily.

Made on a budget that didn’t even stretch to $30,000, with most of the crew being pupils of Anderson at Ohio University, Spring Night Summer Night can be a gruelling watch but it’s shot beautifully with a striking cinéma-vérité feel. Anderson particularly excels at capturing movement with a handheld camera, whether it’s the younger kids whirling around during impromptu games or Jessie running through the woods in a wet dress.

It’s like a cross between Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and the short stories of Breece D’J Pancake, a writer from West Virginia who has been called ‘the Hillbilly Hemingway’. And yes, Breece D’J Pancake was his real name.

On its release, Spring Night, Summer Night was seldom shown beyond a handful of local screenings. Oblivion beckoned until some scheming distributors hit on the awful idea to re-cut the movie to play as the bottom half of a exploitation double bill on the grindhouse circuit where it would be renamed Miss Jessica is Pregnant. With no better options on the cards, Anderson obliged, shooting some new racier scenes to be shoehorned into his film.

Rediscovered in the 21st century, Spring Night Summer Night was eventually screened, in a restored version, at the New York Film Festival in 2018. It was belatedly greeted with much praise.

Okay, it’s not as good as Faces, but only a very small percentage of films are. I would guess that it’s far better than the majority of films chosen for the NYFF that year and I’d be surprised if any of the postponed blockbusters that were originally scheduled to playing now at our local multiplexes would be anywhere near as good.

Too Old To Die Young (Soundtrack Sundays)

If you ever happen to switch on your TV and come across a movie that you don’t know which has moody, damaged characters who say very little, hypnotic scenes with colourful palettes with red to the fore and plenty of visceral ultraviolence, chances are it’s been directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

The chances are also that you will experience a strong reaction to what you’re seeing.

‘Polarization, to me, is the key,’ Refn explained in a recent interview. ‘That’s the definition of success.’ He also claimed that creativity is not about being likable, which is good to hear in an age where many virtue signalling filmmakers seem keener on providing an inspirational message that promotes social justice and diversity than telling a fascinating story. Not that social justice or diversity are bad obviously. But characters behaving horrendously do tend to make for better drama. And there are plenty of characters behaving horrendously here.

In Too Old To Die Young, dialogue is sparse and the pace slow. Frustratingly slow at times. I watched Refn’s Pusher trilogy recently and it was striking how fast moving it was in comparison. And that characters spoke as near as dammit naturalistically. Another big difference was the lack of a Cliff Martinez score. And of the scores he’s composed for Refn: Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon being the first three, this is very probably the best.

Here, though, I want to feature some existing tracks used in the series.
In the final episode, one of the main characters decides that it would be good to dance to Goldfrapp’s Ooh La La. On her own, for the complete length of the song.

Ooh La La is certainly a great synth glam stomp to shake your stuff to. Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky is sampled, and there’s a strong echo of Canned Heat’s On The Road Again. Some early Giorgio Moroder and T.Rex have been thrown into the mix too, and I reckon I can detect a trace of Elvis in places and even an echo of Suicide in the keyboards. And I adore those disco angel vocals from Alison Goldfrapp.

Here’s the song live from Later… with Jools Holland:

Refn’s latest work is a sometimes brilliant and sometimes exasperating ten part series that explores the seedy underworld of crime in LA, and which occasionally takes up the story in Mexico with a drug cartel bigwig called Jesus (Augusto Aguilera). I’m sure Nicolas Windup Refn took a great delight in giving a brutal killer with a (dead) mummy fixation that particular name.

And believe me, you won’t have a friend in this Jesus.

If there’s a central character, though, it would be LAPD sheriff Martin Jones (played by Miles Teller), who is in a relationship with a seventeen year old high school senior, Janey (Nell Tiger Free). Janey has a brilliant mind, and according to creepy father Theo (William Baldwin), she’s a ten in the looks department too. Oh, and as this is California, having sex with Martin is illegal due to Janey’s age, although this doesn’t overly concern Theo.

Outwith his police work, Martin is also forced to carry out hits for Damian, a Jamaican American gangster, who loves vintage ska. Martin later comes into the sphere of Diana DeYoung (Jena Malone) a victim’s advocate, who feeds former FBI agent Viggo Larsen (John Hawkes), information about paedophiles that she has learnt about through her law work.

Viggo acts on this by killing the names he is given. Martin discovers this and luckily for Diana and Viggo, he believes that if a child abuser is killed, it’s a victim-less crime.

Does Martin believe in Homicide? Yes, he does. Absolutely. Does Theo like dad dancing to 999’s Homicide at a party for Janey’s eighteenth birthday? Yes, he does.

Produced by Martin Rushent (Buzzcocks, Human League), the sixth single by 999 was released by United Artists in October 1978 in Britain. Here it is live on The Old Grey Whistle Test, just as the craze in Britain for tight pink trousers apparently reached its peak:

Sadly, Homicide isn’t a part of the soundtrack album. Neither is Prince Buster’s ska classic Ten Commandments (okay, the lyrics are far from classic). Barry Manilow’s Mandy didn’t make the cut either – hurrah, but a nostalgic dirge called Elvis and Marilyn did – boo.

The Leather Nun are included, so hurrah again.

The Leather Nun were one of those acts whose name suggested that mainstream success was never very high on their agenda. The Sound of Young Sweden in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the band specialized in causing offence, especially with their live shows, where they were often accompanied by strippers with live adult movies being projected.

TOTDY utilises F.F.A, which doesn’t stand for Fast Filmic Action. If Grace Jones had teamed up with Bowie’s Lodger era band, they just might have come up with something not unlike this.

That’s Jesus with the whip, incidentally, in the video below and the brunette in the red leather trousers is Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo). Death follows Yaritza around to the extent that she proclaims herself ‘The High Priestess of Death’.

Maybe death is only following her around due to her cartel connections. But this theory doesn’t somehow seem to have occurred to her.

Here is a clip of F.F.A as it was used in episode 8. I didn’t mention the slow pace, didn’t I?

If you’re coming to Refn for the first time, then I’d recommend that you try Drive first. This series does resemble Drive in many ways, although Miles Teller is marginally less magnetic as Ryan Gosling and Jena Malone is nowhere near as good an actor as Carey Mulligan. But if you like Drive, you at least have a chance of enjoying Too Old To Die Young. If you dislike Drive, then watching this series will be a waste of thirteen hours of your life.

Nicolas Winding Refn could do with ditching the idea of letting himself be influenced by tarot readings from Alejandro Jodorowsky, but there is much to enjoy in the series from a psychedelic shooting rampage to a surreal skit on the crucifixion of Jesus (no, not the cartel Jesus) through to Monkee Puppet, a real cheeky little monkey who believes that ‘peace is only for hippies’.

Nightbirds & The Neon Demon

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