"This is a true story. No names have been changed. No events have been altered." This declarative opening text is set against layers of theater curtains that withdraw against a gothic soundtrack. Already, our trust in the film's truth is put on edge. A scene is revealed of a lavish movie premiere, where Betty Jones (Emily Lloyd) poses and flashes her smile for throngs of fans and press. Her gaze is captured by a large news camera, and drawn in, and we dissolve into a bedroom where Jones, in real life, is merely fantasizing about silver screen glory. It's London in 1944, and Jones piddles away her small life through poor work and frequent movie-going - her favorites are American gangster pictures, with glamorous stars committing dirty deeds to celluloid. While she has no chance of meeting Fred McMurray in her daily drudge, the next best thing happenstances into her: Karl Holten (Kiefer Sutherland), a young American serviceman with the swagger and stories of someone accomplished of both official and surreptitious careers. Holten says he's an officer, frequently engaged in secret missions, and a gangster while in America; Jones says she's an actress. Both of them drink in their mutual attraction and need for someone to indulge their fantasies, and start spending late nights tooling around in a military truck looking for action. Holten has no intention of telling Jones that the truck is stolen, and that he's a deserter, certainly no more than her desire to tell him she's worked as a stripper. Also absent is that Jones has another lover, a nice young woman with a nice family who think he's merely on leave. Jones delights in his willingness to engage in petty crime to please her, such as ripping the fur coat off of a stranger and smashing into buildings, and he delights in having an impressionable waif to dazzle, even if their misadventures have them dodging catastrophes of a London landscape still in the throes of the blitz. With nobody watching them too closely, they let their crimes escalate, at least until they pick up a hitchhiking woman with a plan to rob her, then things go terribly south. And this brush with fatal destiny will only cool them off, until one night when they take out a cabbie, and all their fantasies come to an end...
One of my favorite films is Paperhouse, a 1988 fantasy film about a girl who draws while stuck sick in bed, then dreams of visiting the literal landscape of her drawings. Seeing it for the first time in college was an important event, as it was one of the first and most important pieces of evidence I had that there were fantastic movies out there that very few people knew about. Its ingenious concept, visual invention and directorial intensity are still remarkable today, and I made a point of seeking out more films by its director, Bernard Rose. Rose had come to Paperhouse from the world of music videos, such as the provocative video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax", and the stretch of films he made shortly after Paperhouse were rich with visual presence. Rose's two best-known films were released in the early-to-mid '90s: the classic horror film Candyman, and Immortal Beloved, the only good Beethoven movie. After his 1996 adaptation of Anna Karenina bombed with critics and audiences, he left Hollywood behind to make small indie films on digital video, and has never returned to film and big budgets. That wasn't his first major flop, however, as he had another crater in his rear-view: Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, an ambitious period piece with hot young stars, teeing itself up to be British cinema's answer to Bonnie & Clyde and slicing into a water trap.
There were certainly many reasons the people behind this film thought it would be a success, not the least the talent and draw of its lead actors, Kiefer Sutherland and Emily Lloyd. Sutherland had been riding high from acclaimed performances in Stand By Me, The Lost Boys and Young Guns, and brings the ideal energy to this sort of character. Karl Holten is a hard shell around a quivering core, and Sutherland has the range and looks to swing between amoral flash and boyish fragility - Holten is a case study in how much mileage certain men can get with themselves, and certain women, playing the confident villain. Equally well cast is Emily Lloyd, who had wowed critics a couple of years earlier in the sad, absorbing period drama Wish You Were Here. Lloyd was only 16 when filming it, and is both exasperating and sympathetic as a bored, wild teenager who screws up with an older man and is forced to grow up faster than anyone should. That performance trained her especially well for this one, a similarly bored and unruly young woman who throws herself into criminality because it's viscerally elevating from the bleakness of her London life. And to their credit, both actors are as excellent as they are able to be - but then there is the nagging problem of the script, and the direction's failure to improve on its weaknesses and marry the various elements into a compelling whole.
As I alluded to in my opening, and what is apparent from the first frames of the film, is that Rose and company have elected for a grandly artificial approach to scenery, music and storytelling. Rose brings his great strength of swinging between fantasy and reality to this picture, and Chicago Joe is plush with bold visual concepts that both depict the dark fantasies of the characters, and scene-set their real lives in a London of modern myth. Everything is shot on soundstages, and the sets are deliberately stagey - cityscapes are shown through matte paintings and miniatures, rich in dark blues and blacks and featuring numerous barrage balloons. Production designer Gemma Jackson had created the stunning, surreal sets and props for Paperhouse, and this is another showcase of her great vision. This is a picture-book blitz-era London, resembling Tim Burton's Gotham City more than anything in England; that colossal smash was released while this film was in production, and one can't help but think they were influenced by its gothic neo-noir approach to the urban. It's also an apt comparison because Shirley Walker, who wrote the film's score, would go on to score more than 30 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. Walker had to share billing with Hans Zimmer for legal reasons, but the score was all hers, and it deserves wider recognition than it has gotten. Sure, there is a lot of big-band stuff, appropriate for the likes of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy film of the same year, but one recurring piece breaks my heart: the elegiac love theme, reminiscent both of the climax of Strauss's Death and Transfiguration and Dominic Muldowney's orchestral score for Michael Radford's film of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But they just don't quite adhere into an emotional whole.
I've seen lots of movies that swing between hard reality and the delusions of their characters, and the successful ones all work to make the real world feel real enough for us to move from it assuredly into the unreal. However, Chicago Joe's version of wartime London is performatively fake, and subject to nearly as many directorial flourishes and dream-like corners as the material we infer as the characters' imaginings, and as such we lack the grounding required for us to empathize with the people that inhabit either world. Rose's desire for visual sweep tends to get in the way of proper cinematic storytelling, and moments of flair tend to fall flat if they aren't concerned with Holten's criminal acts. One scene shows Jones looking out her bedroom window, watching for Holten to arrive for another nighttime trek; Holten never comes, as he's spending the evening with his other girl. This could have been a great scene showing Jones being betrayed by her own expectations of a man who cares less about her than he lets on, but the film uses the scene to zoom away from her face, as she blithely sings to herself, until we see her whole apartment building and the horizon behind it, all cluttered rooftops, balloons and spotlights. What the darkened cityscape has to say for her emotional state, or even the story's themes, I can't say, and it's just one of many moments where the film's style distracts rather than enhances.
And ultimately, what the style would be enhancing is a story of people staving off boredom and existential fears by lying to each other and committing pointless crimes - this concept requires an extremely observant eye on human character and the thickets of morality and historical contexts, and neither Rose nor the script had such an eye. The audience certainly sees what is happening, and the liabilities of lovedrunk abandon and sociopathy, but they're never brought to care about what happens to either of the leads. These are a Bonnie & Clyde who fail to bewitch us with charisma, and never draw us to feel their tragedy with convincing vulnerabilities - the stakes are too low, and when they are finally caught they spend most of their time afterwards merely disappointed rather than distraught. Other films with peculiarly heartless protagonists in true crime stories rely on supporting characters for insight and emotional anchoring, but the other people in Holten and Jones's London are slim sketches, having no personalities beyond their thumbnail descriptors. With few anchors in the story or visuals, we are left apathetic, muttering about how much material grandeur was squandered on such a tepid movie.
This article is a bit of a departure, as I normally write articles for movies I consider wholly worthwhile; however, the positive aspects of Chicago Joe and the Showgirl make it worth a wide reappraisal. Plenty of big-budgeted films that initially failed have found respectable latter-day audiences, some earnest fans and others rubberneckers, and Chicago Joe may yet gather both crowds. A good companion film to this may be Neil Jordan's 1989 remake of We're No Angels, a similarly ambitious period piece with lush visuals and music that fell like a lead barrage balloon. That film left viewers perplexed with its mix of light and dark humor, affectionate parody of classic film acting, and religious themes, and was not the way Jordan wanted to enter into Hollywood. It certainly has its share of faults, but is an interesting attempt nonetheless, and I enjoy it for its ambition and curious elements. There is a lot to admire in Chicago Joe's production, and Sutherland and Lloyd are swinging for the fences, though I wouldn't go into this with high expectations of emotional engagement. Indeed, I appear to be in a serious minority in liking the film at all, and it wouldn't be hard to convince me that I only care about it because I want another Bernard Rose movie to be great. I'm also likely in a minority of people by wishing it would get a video rerelease, as the last time it was available in the USA was for a no-frills, fullscreen DVD from Artisan Entertainment, now long OOP. This is a film that would do splendidly on Blu-Ray, where 1080p would let us see the depths of all those beautiful sets and we might get to see Rose, Sutherland and Lloyd talk about a collective dream of theirs that didn't find its audience. It would also be nice for Lloyd to get renewed interest for the brief time she was in the spotlight; a number of unfortunate factors, including mental health problems, dragged her away from what could have been a promising career, and I cherish the few times I've seen her at her peak.
Another favorite film of mine is The Fall, the 2006 masterpiece of Indian-American director Tarsem Singh. The Fall was a huge undertaking, costing millions of the director's own dollars and shot in a couple dozen countries, and has a similar gimmick of two lonely characters spinning fantasy together in order to bear the dreariness of their daily existences. However, we care deeply for them, and the movie is a triumph of imagination and humanity. Singh, like Rose, started out directing music videos, including the striking video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", and was aware of how the format worked and how different narrative fiction is. In the behind-the-scenes footage for The Fall, we see Singh talking about how important the core characters, and their relationship to each other, were, saying (paraphrased) "If that doesn't work, this is just a 25-million-dollar music video." Music videos are meant to adorn musical substance with concentrated style, and rarely have the time to function as stories unto themselves. Perhaps Rose wasn't equipped at the time to do the hard work of choosing the right directorial moves for what the story needed, a process that frequently involves sacrificing exciting ideas to let the one right tool do its job. Maybe it is just a 5-million-pound music video, one that made less than $200,000 back. But it still has a place in my heart, even if I can't defend the reasons why beyond its style and stars, pedigree and potential. In my book, it's always better to fail reaching beyond one's grasp than from a lack of effort, and even if Chicago Joe's dream didn't result in great returns and reviews, at least it wasn't as ruinous a disaster as the dreams of its protagonists.
~PNK
