Reviews

FILM

The Walker

Directed by Paul Schrader, starring Woody Harrelson (pictured right), Kristin Scott Thomas (pictured left), Lauren Bacall, Ned Beatty

Carter Page III is the black sheep of a blue-blood American family. His ancestors made a fortune from slavery and tobacco. His father was a grandstanding governor of Virginia. Yet Page, by contrast, leads a shadowy, semi-illicit existence as a "walker", playing the role of Gay Best Friend to the wealthy women of Washington DC.

He is pushing 50; his corn-fed good looks are just beginning to crinkle. Returning home, he pulls off his flaxen wig and stares critically into the bathroom mirror. It is a moment that stirs up bizarre echoes of Travis Bickle's iconic "You talkin' to me?" routine, all those decades before.

Writer-director Paul Schrader has described The Walker as the final installment in his quartet of "night worker" films, a series kicked off with his script for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and continued through American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. His hero is the existential American loner, the semi-detached member of a society guaranteed to turn its back at the first sign of trouble.

Beautifully embodied by Woody Harrelson, Schrader's walker is at once superficial and complicated, an insider and an exile. The women thrill to his catty gossip and cooing line in flattery. But when Page finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation, they can't drop him fast enough.

One could class The Walker as a thriller, in that it features a murder, a political scandal and a fraught chase that ends with a car crash. But these elements all seem a little rote and rudimentary. Instead, the film's real focus is on the character of Page and his perilous relationship with the world he inhabits.

The Walker slopes in years after it was first mooted, with its pockets rattling with foreign change. It looks tired, slightly soft in the middle, and yet there is a raw, hard-won honesty here that puts most contemporary US movies to shame. One has the sense that, in forging his own path, Schrader has finally reached a kind of wisdom. The screwed-up kid who once aimed a pistol at his enemies in the mirror now stares into the glass with a sweet, sad self-awareness.

The Guardian

DVD

The Pink Panther Strikes Again

Directed by Blake Edwards, starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom

This really has no right to be funny. If the gags have not already been done by now in this Pink Panther series (this is the fifth film), they're borrowed from another source. The Pink Panther Strikes Again is a White Elephant sale of slapstick and wordplay that somehow still manages to raise a chuckle. It's certainly not the material that's funny and I guarantee that a blank reading of Blake Edwards's script would be a rather dull affair. This gets laughs because of Peter Sellers's unique comic style and the enthusiasm of his screen nemesis.

The story kicks off with Inspector Clouseau's former boss Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) in a psychiatric home. Years of dealing with his bumbling colleague have reduced him to a blithering mess but after years of therapy, Dreyfus appears cured. That is until Clouseau pays him a visit, sparking yet another breakdown. However, Dreyfus escapes from the institution and after gathering a gang of goons and building a doomsday device, threatens to make countries disappear. That is, unless, Clouseau is delivered to him.

It's a plot straight out of a Bond film but the story is simply an excuse to let Sellers loose on a range of different set pieces. Watching Sellers try a dozen different ways to breach a castle is all the funnier because it doesn't seem like he's doing it to amuse us. But for as good as Sellers is, he does not carry this movie by himself and Herbert Lom is terrific as the crazed Dreyfus. Perhaps the best scene sees both of them together as Clouseau and Dreyfus giggle hysterically after inhaling Novocain. Again, it has no right to be funny, but it is. Ben Davey

(China Daily 08/15/2007 page20)