“It was never meant to be a game”: A homage to Norman Jewison
It was with some sadness but no great surprise that I checked my socials one morning last week and saw that director Norman Jewison had died at the age of 97.
Jewison was amongst the last of the wave of directors working in American film in the sixties and seventies to pass. Born in Canada, Jewison got his start working in television in Britain in the 1950s, and moved to the US in 1959. His big screen career began at Universal with several comedies in the early 1960s, before he changed gears and took over directing duties on The Cincinnati Kid from Sam Peckinpah, who was fired for alienating the producer and wanting to film entirely in black and white. The Cincinnati Kid, released in 1965, was modest commercial success and set Jewison on the road to a string of hits.
There is not the room here for detailed discussion of Jewison’s film legacy. What I will say is that he could turn his had to virtually any genre of film and was adept at melding commercial appeal with stories that cloaked a more sophisticated and radical meaning, often in way that also tapped into the deeper cultural zeitgeist of the time. A great example is In the Heat of the Night, his 1967 examination of the impact of racism in the US deep south, wrapped in the guise of a small town murder mystery. The film includes the groundbreaking scene in which one of the town’s white elders, Endicott (Larry Gates) slaps black policeman Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), and Tibbs slaps him right back. I think about this scene a lot. Watch it on YouTube. It is still powerful now, imagine what it would have been like to see it in 1967?
My favourite of Jewison’s films is Rollerball (1975), a disturbing depiction of a future in which war and hunger have been eliminated and nation states have disappeared. In their place is a global network of six major corporations, overseen by an elite executive class. Society is strictly regimented, with executives at the top. Recognising that such a society needs an outlet for aggression, the corporations have developed a violent global sport called Rollerball. Largely derided as an exploitation film upon its release (the amazing poster by Bob Peak, with its connotations of both S&M and Black power, might’ve had abit to do with that perception), Rollerball is a critically neglected work and a prescient take on much that has come to pass.
Indeed, I like Rollerball so much that I wrote a monograph on it. This examines the making the film and its still visceral game sequences, where Rollerball fits in seventies science fiction cinema, and how it tapped into major debates taking places in the culture in the early 1970s: growing corporate power and the fear that violence was on the rise throughout much of Western society. I even invented my own term for the body of cinema in which Rollerball sits, ‘murder game films’. These are films in which killer game shows, reality television programs and ultra violent sporting events are broadcast as spectacles by despotic elites to entertain and cower their populations and maintain political control. This large and broad cinematic output, which I also examine at length, includes reality TV parodies, Italian exploitation cinema and B-movies, mainstream science fiction and YA dystopian films.
My Rollerball monograph is available for sale via its publisher Liverpool University Press, but also on all the usual other platforms, including Amazon, etc.
Of particular interest to fans of Jewison’s work and/or Rollerball, the monograph contains an extended interview which I conducted over the phone with the director, in late 2017. Jewison generously chatted with me for an hour or so about how he was swept up in making the game sequences as realistic as possible – perhaps to the neglect of other aspects of the film – and how shocked he was that after its release, people contacted him asking about rights to stage Rollerball games in real life.
Have you got a True Detective hot take?
A fourth season of the HBO series True Detective is currently streaming. While I have not yet seen it, I have caught the numerous hot takes about it and previous seasons of the show.
There is obviously a lot going on related to why True Detective gathers so much critical attention. My own ten cents worth is this is what happens when a show that normally appeals to a niche audience (those who like slow, meditative, incredibly dark noir that that does not necessary conclude by explaining everything, etc), breaks out of that confined circle and enters the mainstream. As a result, people who have not seen that sort of thing before and, surprise, surprise, don’t really dig it, form an opinion.
A similar dynamic was on display around David Fincher’s 2014 film version of Gillian Flynn’s hit novel Gone Girl. You might not remember, but that book and film were BIG hits, moving way beyond the usual audience for such fare. The result was that a lot of people, who had never clocked 1940s/1950s film noir narratives, which is essentially what Gone Girl reconstituted in a modern format, read the book/watched the film and were shocked and offended but how dark it was. There were think pieces, some of which even threw around the dreaded misogyny word to describe the film and its portrayal of the wife character (honestly, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Greer, Rita Hayworth, Ann Savage, and the other femme fatales of classic noir must have been laughing in their graves).
My own hot take is that I seriously rate all three series of True Detective I have seen (I wrote specifically about my love for season one for the Melbourne literary website Overland here), and have no doubt season four is good, too. Each has been challenging, effectively used its environment as a noir setting, and tried to do something interesting and different
For those who are watching season four, let me know what you think, but no spoilers please.
And, if you like True Detective, can I suggest you check out a three part 1983 television series called Chiefs. Chiefs is about three generations of police chiefs in a small southern US town called Delano, each of who tries to solve the murders of young white men stretching from the early twenties to the early sixties.
Will Henry Lee (Wayne Rogers, better known as Captain John McIntyre from the hit show, M.A.S.H), is the town’s founding chief. A former farmer who can no longer make a living off the land, he is a decent, progressive small ‘L’ liberal and acts in his new job accordingly. Not long after he takes the job, the body of a young white boy is found near train tracks on the outskirts of Delano. The boy was raped and there are signs he’d been beaten with a truncheon similar to that used by police. Soon, rumours surface about the disappearances of other young white men in the town’s vicinity.
The second chief is Sonny Butts (Brad Davis from the 1978 film, Midnight Express). Butts is a violent bigot who essentially lands the job because he was a hero in WWII. The third chief, Tyler Watts (Billy Dee Williams), is another ex-army man and Delano’s first black police chief. Two other characters are particularly important. Charlton Heston is Hugh Holmes, one of the town’s founders, its moderate ruling class patriarch and the head of the local bank. He is in all three episodes and his voice over provides the main cross-generational continuity for the story. Keith Carradine plays Foxy Funderburke, a World War One veteran and racist gun-toting recluse who is viewed by the majority of the town as nothing but a harmless oddity.
Chiefs is similar to a lot of the big budget, sweeping historical television sagas in the eighties. It exudes a generous dose of Pax Americana and is full of virtuous, benevolent white males (and a few women in supporting roles) standing up for what is right, including a free market version of racial equality. Parallel with this, however, is a nightmare world in which a lone man is able to get away with murder over several decades, largely because the local police are either too busy trying to keep down the town’s black population or fighting the town’s entrenched racism, to do their job properly. Also, and this is where the show is very similar to at least the first season of True Detective, the murder spree goes unnoticed because nearly all his victims are poor, powerless drifters. No one knows who these people are. No one cares. One can also read into the show a fairly strong undercurrent of domestic blow back from America’s participation various wars.
Chiefs was not available on DVD when I saw it but it is now and is well worth the effort of tracking down.
Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback
Lastly, just a reminder that my book length examination of post-war Australian pulp publisher, Horwitz Publications is now available in paperback from Anthem Press, at much more reasonable price than the back. You can pick it up via the publisher, Anthem Press, here or on virtually any of the various online platforms.
This is one of the few detailed examinations of a pulp publisher around, so if pulp is your thing and you have a few spare dollars/pounds lying about, you might want to consider picking it up. The book not only looks the genres Horwitz published, but the writers and artists who worked for it, including some ground-breaking research on Australian female pulp writers. It also reveals the hidden role that Horwitz, derided purely as a low rent purveyor of cheap, salacious fiction for most of its existence, had in the take up of the paperback by mainstream Australian publishers, as well as how Horwitz pulp was a key vehicle for powerful vernacular modernist currents that coursed through Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.