So this is another Elia Kazan movie where he’s trying desperately convince the FBI that he’s not a commie? It wasn’t enough to snitch on all his friends to the HUAC, or the previous movie which was all about how eeeevil communism is — now he’s doing a movie about how evil unions are?
(But it’s just one specific union, of course, which is all controlled by the mob; not that Kazan is making a more general point. He’s such a weasel.)
It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan.
The film is widely considered to be Elia Kazan’s answer to those who criticized him for identifying eight Communists in the film industry before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1952.
And the answer was… “Fuck yeah! I’ll snitch on all of youse!”?
But as usual with Kazan’s movies, it really works. It’s totes gripping. I would have give it a ⚄, but the ending is so silly that I can’t.
This is a movie about a Czech circus, and it kinda feels like it’s been financed by the CIA? Was it?
It also feels like Kazan was thinking “now I’m finally gonna make one of those European masterworks” — some scenes are like Herzog 20 years later, or Lang 20 years earlier.
But it’s let down by some really bad performances.
I mean really bad.
Interrogation…
TO THE MAX!!!
A knife thrower practising with his wife, of coures.
Such expressionism.
But then there’s the less fun parts, like this scene, where his bitchy wife is being bitchy, as usual, and he slaps her around, and she goes, Ooooh, you should have done that a long time ago, and then they fuck and live happily ever after.
(Well. SORT OF.)
Somebody’s getting suspicious!
It’s a super duper mega pandering propaganda movie — it was made after he snitched on all his friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I’m guessing this was made to show them he’s really really really Un-Un-American — but the thing is, it works. It’s gross and manipulative, but that final scene is 100% gripping and moving. And the rest is pretty entertaining, too.
Oh! Renny Harlin! He’s a Finnish director who made a surprising career in Hollywood (FSVO), and I found him interesting at the time. He married Geena Davis (who’s great) and made a number of slightly off-kilter action movies before disappearing… Well, I don’t know that he disappeared, but I haven’t seen that name in decades.
I guess he never did disappear. I think the last movie of his I’ve seen is the 1996 Long Kiss Goodnight, which I think famously bombed…
I like Harlin. He did these oddball shots that nobody else would do, because they’re too artificial.
Best. Hairdo. Ever.
Is Harlin expressing all their personalities solely through their hairdos? I think he is!
What a kind-looking nurse.
Anyway, this isn’t as good as I’d hoped. The “Scare Scenes” are really inventive and fun, but then when they have to do the connecting scenes (to get irrelevancies like plot and stuff out of the way), tension just dissipates.
Yeah!
It’s a pretty fun horror movie — but it’s not actually scary at all. It’s also uneven in tone… so what’s the story behind this movie?
In an interview with Midnight’s Edge, director Tom McLoughlin said that after completing Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, New Line offered him the job on The Dream Master. His one caveat was that he wanted creative control. The studio could not adhere to the demand, specifically because they had already begun filming without any director. McLoughlin said,
“When I finished Friday, I was offered Nightmare 4 and went to New Line, met with them, and I said, ‘I love Freddy, I would love to do one of these, but I really want to do what I just did, where I had creative control’,” he explained. “And they go, ‘Well, we’re already shooting.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, we’re already shooting, we’re shooting like two different units for the visual effects’ and something else, puppets or something. And I said, ‘Without a director?’ ‘Yeah, we kind of know how we’re going to make these things.’ And I went, ‘That’s not the way I work.’ So I turned it down, which of course made (Nightmare 4 director) Renny Harlin’s career.”
Heh heh.
I’m now watching these excellent extras on this box set — they’re not the typical “one sentence from one guy and one sentence from another guy about how wonderful everything was” puff pieces. They’re very forthright and talking about how much they hated the other guy’s ideas, and so on. Like:
High praise indeed!
But is this a good movie? Nah.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Renny Harlin. 1988. ⚂
