Here's the pre-obit I wrote for Amazon's blog, Armchair Commentary, in 2009. I'm happy to say that Jewison outlived this piece by 15 years.
Along with genre-hoppers like Howard Hawks and Steven Soderbergh, director and producer Norman Jewison epitomized cinematic versatility. Like many of his peers, he apprenticed in live television in the 1950s and '60s before turning to film; first in London, then in his native Toronto, and later in New York, where he oversaw The Judy Garland Show.
In a 2009 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he credited the success of 1965's The Cincinatti Kid with Steve McQueen for allowing him to move away from light comedies, like Send Me No Flowers with Doris Day, to the big-screen dramas that were his true calling (Jewison inherited the formerafter producer Martin Ransohoff gave Sam Peckinpah the sack).
Jewison went on to direct best picture winner In the Heat of the Night with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, The Thomas Crown Affair with McQueen and Faye Dunaway, Rollerball with James Caan (which inspired an inferior 2002 remake), Jesus Christ Superstar, A Soldier's Story (with Denzel Washington, who would return for The Hurricane), and Moonstruck, which won Oscars for Cher, Olympia Dukakis, and writer John Patrick Shanley.
Unapologetically liberal, Jewison once said, "The movies that address civil rights and social justice are the ones that are dearest to me." Consequently, he had his detractors, like Andrew Sarris, who criticized his "strained seriousness," and David Thomson, who dismissed his work's "hollow prettiness," though Ephraim Katz praised his "superior craftsmanship," notwithstanding a career "that zigzagged between mediocrity and excellence" (and even Thomson found Moonstruck "charming"). The Hurricane (1999), a stirring account of wrongly-imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter, also took hits for some minor alterations to the historical record.
Despite his time in Southern California, Jewison never lost touch with his Northern roots, and founded the Canadian Centre for Advanced Film Studies in 1986. In 1999, he accepted the Irving G. Thalberg Award (nominated three times for best director, his movies won 12 Academy Awards). He also wrote a well received memoir, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me.
In addition to his many directorial and production efforts, Jewison deserves credit for mentoring Hal Ashby, who edited The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, In the Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair, winning an Oscar for the latter before making 1970's The Landlord, a film Jewison had intended to direct until Fiddler on the Roof came calling.
Norman Jewison was married to Margaret Ann Dixon for 51 years until her death in 2004 and to Lynne St. David for 14 years until his death on January 20. He leaves behind three children; Michael, an associate producer and location manager, Kevin, a camera operator, and Jennifer, an actress.
Oh night, conceal my pain, caused by being nothing and being alive.
--epigram that opens the film
Ce que j'ai fait, ce soir-là
Ce qu'elle a dit, ce soir-là
Réalisant mon espoir
Je me lance vers la gloire... OK
--Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer"
As a boy, Émile, the central character of former Cahiers du cinéma critic Paul Vecchiali's fascinating and disturbing film, was a cute, blond kid. Perfectly normal-looking. But then, late one night during a trek to buy a copy of the funny pages, he witnesses an act of misogynistic violence. It could have destroyed him, but it doesn't—it makes him, and he will grow up to be much like the strange man he encountered on the picturesque streets of Paris.
Years later, a "killer of lonely women" stalks the city. The Jack the Ripper-like figure has killed five women by strangling them with a white child's scarf, exactly like the faceless man in the prologue. On TV, newspaper reporter Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) describes the victims, according to those who knew them, as "sad and lonely" and "desperate and suicidal." He asks the killer to reach out to him, and provides his contact information.
Anna (Eva Simonet), who watched the broadcast, just after being dumped by her boyfriend, approaches the reporter--who is actually a police inspector--and offers to act as bait. "I have nothing to lose," she says. He brushes her off.
Unbeknownst to Anna, 36-year-old Émile (Jacques Perrin, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Donkey Skin) witnessed the entire exchange, and proceeds to follow her. He doesn't do anything except observe, faithful German shepherd at his side. It's broad daylight after all--but she's now on his radar.
By day, Émile works at a produce stand in sequences that appear more documentary-like than the rest of this pastel-hued film. It seems likely that Perrin worked at an actual stand, interacting with actual customers.
Émile's true vocation, however, is killing, and since he feels no shame, no remorse, he calls the reporter to let him know he feels fine. "I'm happy," he states. He kills because it feels like the right thing to do, but just as Anna doesn't know he's watching her, Émile doesn't know someone is watching him, and it isn't the reporter, but Le Chacal (Paul Barge), a petty thief.
Since the film begins after he has already killed five women, Vecchiali depicts his encounters with victims six through eight, each a distinctly remarkable sequence. Émile kills one woman (Jacqueline Danno) after she has performed in a nightclub, singing a sad chanson about sailors while accompanied by dancers in navy-and-white striped tunics; a beautiful, once famous-now-forgotten actress (Hélène Surgère, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), who has made herself up as if she were expecting a gentleman caller, even though she isn't; and a stylishly-dressed ballet dancer practicing in an empty studio late at night. They don't deserve to die, of course, regardless as to their possible heartbreak, but Émile doesn't see it that way.
Much like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a possible influence, Vecchiali alternates between what we see of Émile and what he sees of the world (and whenever he drives anywhere, the action briefly shifts into hyper-drive).
This implicates us, but not necessarily as voyeurs. Except for the dreamlike opening sequence, the Corsican filmmaker--who produced Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles--doesn't linger over any of the killings, and nor is there any sex or nudity. None of this makes Émile sympathetic, though Vecchiali depicts Le Chacal as a colder character, since he could have tried to prevent the killings he witnessed or shared his findings with the police, but doesn't. Further, pawing through the still-warm victims' effects has no discernible effect on his psyche.
As the film continues, Vecchiali spends less time with Émile and more with his followers as Anna continues to pester Simon, while he continues to brush her off. Until he doesn't. They're all obsessed in different ways, and the four--including Émile--will come increasingly close to colliding with each other.
Though Émile insists to Simon that he's happy, and that he's "doing these poor women a favor," the way he reaches out to the reporter suggests otherwise, since he now has someone to talk to, and he seems to relish that, even as it jeopardizes his ability to kill indefinitely. In other words, he's lonely, too--but he's more sociopathic than suicidal. The situation grows even more complicated when the enchanted Chacal reaches out to the attractive Anna.
By this point, Simon knows enough to act, but doesn't, and Émile knows enough to stop, but doesn't. All of the actors are very good, and each brings a different color or flavor to the film. Throughout, Émile remains the most enigmatic, even as we catch glimpses of his memories and fantasies.
Though he sleeps next to a portrait of a white-haired woman who appears to be his mother, we never learn anything about their relationship (tellingly, the portrait is situated next to a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince). Other than his trusty canine sidekick, he's completely alone, and it appears that he always has been. Perrin doesn't play him as a sad sack or an incel, but as an introvert who has a set way of looking at the world, and lacks the ability to grow or to change out of his immature worldview.
For most of its running time, The Strangler didn't strike me as misogynist--or feminist--but a series of incidents towards the end shifted my thinking, one of which involves a group of street walkers who spend as much time strolling the boulevards of Paris as Émile (they look after each other in a way that felt Varda-esque).
Émile also gets careless, as single-minded serial killers are wont to do, but no matter how you think the film is going to end, you're likely to be surprised, since not one of the four players is exactly who or what they appear to be; the bad characters have good sides and the good characters have bad sides, and all of those sides will eventually--and eventfully--converge.
It's hard to say if The Strangler, which also saw release in 1970, was as much of a comment on women's lib as Rudolf Thome's Red Sun, in which women act as killers of men. Vecchiali's film is more of a character piece--and not a full-fledged giallo as some have claimed--and the central character is more obviously villainous, yet somehow not a complete monster. At Screen Anarchy, Olga Artemyeva compared the film to Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, with its dangerously naïve protagonist, and she's not wrong.
Émile proves capable of empathy, sorrow, and even love. In a way, that's the scariest idea of all: that such a seemingly decent person--the cute guy at the fruit stand with the dog and the shy smile--could also be the worst.
The 2K restoration of The Strangler, which made its US theatrical debut in 2023, is out now on Blu-ray through Altered Innocence. Roland Vincent's fabulous score has never been available on any format, which is a shame as it hews towards light and charming during the day and dark and jazzy at night--with generous helpings of organ, accordion, and reverb. Images: Mubi (Jacques Perrin), Film at Lincoln Center (Émile as a boy, Eva Simonet, and Julien Guiomar), Film Inquiry (Jacqueline Danno), and IMDb (poster).
Red Sun, a film primarily concerned with women, opens with a man. It will close with that same man--after his life has been irrevocably changed by the four women at its center.
With his shaggy hair and foppish cravat, Thomas (Marquard Bohm, Deadlock, Kings of the Road) looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and frequent Fassbinder player Gottfried John (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Berlin Alexanderplatz); handsome from some angles, less so from others.
In the opening sequence, Thomas hitchhikes from Hamburg to Munich to reconnect with Peggy (model Uschi Obermaier), a bartender with whom he once had a dalliance. This isn't about love; he may be attracted to Peggy, who looks like Twilight-era Kristen Stewart with her classic features and curtain of thick, dark hair, but it's mostly about finding a woman who will support him, since he has no desire to work, explaining rather hilariously, if accidentally poetically, "Work contradicts the rhythms of my life; it causes the body to waste away." Presumably, he's been doing this for awhile, bouncing from woman to woman, moving on after each one kicks him out.
It's the kind of thing a young person, like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, can do for awhile if they're pretty, charming, and/or persuasive enough.
Thomas has no other goals or aspirations, but the clock is ticking, and it's unlikely he can do this indefinitely, not least because he isn't especially charming. Amusing, perhaps, and the actor invests him with "a certain rotten charm," as Thomas puts it, but the guy doesn't otherwise have much going for him. It doesn't make him a villain, though. Plus, he knows Peggy is a soft touch. As her friends put it, "She mothers the layabout types."
After switching out his cravat with a tie, Thomas drops by Take Five, the high-end nightclub where Peggy tends bar. She seems neither thrilled nor disappointed to see him; but rather takes it in stride. Though she offers some light teasing, it doesn't dissuade him from embedding himself in her life. After a visit to the lake in her VW Bug, a sequence Thome will repeat at the end, they return to the flat Peggy shares with three other women.
Everything seems pretty normal so far, especially for 1970--whether in Germany or any other western country during the height of the sexual revolution--with one significant exception. At Take Five that night, Thomas passes middle-aged businessman Howard (Don Wahl) on his way down the steps to the club. Unbeknownst to him, the other women (Diana Körner, Sylvia Kekulé, and Gaby Go) lured Howard to the flat before he and Peggy arrived. Now he's bound, gagged, and hidden behind a closed door. Before the night is over, one of the four women will shoot him in the head.
The next day, they ask Thomas to help them move a large, covered basket--white like most of Peggy's outfits--from the flat to the street and into the Bug. It's obviously heavy, and he may be a layabout by trade, but he doesn't hesitate to lend a hand. It's a funny scene, because the audience knows exactly what's inside the basket, but the incurious Thomas doesn't, and nor does he care. So, he makes himself useful in the moment, but after Peggy decides she's had her fill--"You're lazy!"--she asks him to leave. He doesn't, and nor do they fight about it, but it's clear that he has signed his death warrant, because if he stays, he too could end up in a large, covered basket.
Oddly, Thomas sticks around, even after he starts to put two and two together. In fact, he joins forces with a local man whose brother went missing, vowing to remain until he catches the women in the act, at which point he'll alert the authorities and claim the reward. Sensing that the timid Isolde is the quartet's weak link, he attempts to gain her confidence. "We kill men," she states flatly, adding, "We thought it was right--they deserved it." Once again, as dark clouds continue to gather, Peggy asks Thomas to leave, even offering him money to go away, but he just won't take the hint.
Over the course of the film, four other men will die at the quartet's hands, which isn't a lot, but it's certainly enough, and Thome plays none of this for horror or suspense. Instead, he takes a matter-of-fact approach, largely free of violence or gore. If Thomas, a standard-issue layabout, isn't a villain per se, nor are the women. They're murderers, to be sure, and the director, by way of screenwriter Max Zihlmann, doesn't make light of that fact, but they aren't mean, nasty, or sadistic. If anything, they're just honoring a pact they made to kill any man with whom they find themselves involved after five days in order to sever any attachment that might develop, since that can only lead to dependency. They also believe they're doing society a favor by dispatching men who cheat, make sexist remarks, and the like.
Thome doesn't side with the men or the women. In interviews, he has stressed that Red Sun isn't intended as a feminist film, and I take his point, though he has cited Valerie Solanis's infamous 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto as an influence. Marleen Gorris's A Question of Silence, in which three women who had never met before spontaneously kill a male shopkeeper, is a feminist film, because years of patriarchal belittling and bullying leads the women to snap at the same time, but there is no snapping in Red Sun. This isn't Thelma and Louise either, and none of these women will be taking desperate measures to avoid persecution. It's just not that kind of film.
Canadian programmer and historian Kier-La Janisse wrote about Red Sun in her essential guide to films about women on the verge, House of Psychotic Women, a 2012 title that FAB Press reissued in 2022. Then, in 2023, Radiance Films released a beautifully-designed Blu-ray with abundant extras, including a 52-page booklet (Margaret Deriaz's 50-minute visual essay about the New German Cinema is particularly enlightening). These are only two examples, but I believe the film has remained relevant, though not exactly widely known, because it isn't a clear-cut polemic or a standard-issue exploitation item, but something slipperier and more ambiguous.
Nor is Red Sun the kind of cult item that made no impact upon release, only to become better known over time. Due to the participation of Obermaier and Bohm, it received a fair amount of attention in Germany, but it wasn't a hit like Detektive--and the model-actress never made another film.
In his commentary on the Blu-ray, which comes from an interview with Obermaier's then-boyfriend Rainer Langhans, Thome explains that his funders wouldn't back the film unless he secured the services of the two performers, a feat made easier by the fact that both appeared in his 1969 directorial debut, Detektive. This time, however, Obermaier played hard to get, asking for more money each time he asked her. Though not exactly a great actress--she's good enough--her status as a countercultural icon gave her clout, and she used it. In the end, Thome met her asking price.
Wim Wenders, for one, was a fan, and reviewed Red Sun enthusiastically in 1970—the same year his own directorial debut, Summer in the City, first made the rounds. At the time, Wenders was more arts journalist than filmmaker, so I'm not sure how much sway his words had, but he described the film as "intentionally superficial" and compared it, favorably, to a comic strip, possibly because of the way Thome uses vibrant shades of red, blue, and gold; in that sense, it also recalls Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A.
If Red Sun isn't heavy-handed in its politics, Thome's initial interest in Obermaier may have been intensified by her association--largely through radical writer and filmmaker Langhans--with the West Berlin-based Kommune 1, which would, in turn, inspire the formation of the infamous Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group.
The way the director concentrates his attentions on Bohm also confirms that Red Sun isn't a feminist film--not intentionally, at any rate--no matter how poorly Thomas comes across, though Thome may have also found it easier to work with the experienced actor. The less-experienced women are fine, but there's the sense that he hired them primarily for their looks, which is hardly a crime. It was the braless era, so even though nudity is kept to a minimum--Obermaier has a brief topless scene--the women's hip outfits don't leave much to the imagination, but nor are they overly revealing.
A more cynical viewer might dismiss the whole thing as a not-exactly-flattering satire about women's lib, not simply because the women kill men, but because the men just aren't that bad. They have their flaws, but they don't deserve to die. As author and podcaster Samm Deighan notes in her excellent essay for the Radiance release ("Guerilla Girls: Radical Politics in Rudolf Thome's Red Sun"), "While it was likely Thome's intention to present a parody of issues like feminism, commune life, and radical politics, Red Sun transcends these aims to become something stranger and more surreal."
If anything, the women are like praying mantises in that they fuck their victims before killing them (but do not eat their heads!)--a less cynical viewer might conclude that that's a pretty sweet way to meet one's maker.
About the music: Uschi Obermaier was an associate of krautrock pioneers Amon Düül II--a pretty cool credential--while the soundtrack combines rock and classical music (in her illuminating Psychotic Women review, Kier-La Janisse describes Obermaier as a groupie, which may be true, but I have some issues with that word).
Notably, most of the songs don't appear in the credits, possibly so that the low-budget production could avoid paying royalties. The acts/composers/ tracks include Jean Sibelius, the Small Faces, the Nice (Keith Emerson's pre-Emerson, Lake and Palmer outfit), and Remo Giazotto's "Adagio in G Minor," which Norman Jewison would later use in Rollerball and Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in Space: 1999, according to the fine folks at B&S at the Movies.
Radiance's restored, 2K version of Red Sun is out in the United States for the first time ever in a limited edition of 2,000. Though sold out at their UK site, it's available in the US through MVD. Images: IMDb (Uschi Obermaier), DVD Beaver (Obermaier and Marquand Bohm), McBastard's Mausoleum (Obermaier, Gaby Go, and Don Wahl), eBay (first edition of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto), Close-Up Film Centre (Anna Karina in Made in U.S.A.), and Retentional Finitude (Obermaier, Go, and Diana Körner).
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Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
