Movies : Drama : DVD Rip : English
Review 1.
For his second film as writer/director, Paul Schrader merged elements of his Midwestern Dutch Calvinist background, his cinephilia, and California post-'60s sexual decadence in the bleak drama Hardcore. Modeled -- like Taxi Driver (1976) -- after John Ford's seminal Western The Searchers (1956), Hardcore's story of a pious father's search for his runaway daughter takes an intense George C. Scott from his upstanding Michigan home through the sordid wilderness of the California porn world. Scott's revulsion is matched by the film's morbid fascination with the sex industry. Peter Boyle's unsavory private investigator and Season Hubley's strung-out hooker serve as compelling protectors and guides. True to the Ford antecedent, Scott's daughter resists her rescue, but the clumsily incongruous ending carries none of The Searchers' or Taxi Driver's expressive ambiguity. Even with its flaws, however, Hardcore's stolidly mournful, occasionally complex examination of a cultural dark side is almost everything Joel Schumacher's ultra-sleazy porn odyssey 8MM (1999) wants to be but isn't.
2.
February 9, 1979
Screen: George C. Scott Stars in Nighttime World of 'Hardcore':Pilgrim's Descent
By JANET MASLIN
Published: February 9, 1979
"YOU like showing me this, don't you?" snarls Jake VanDorn, the hero of Paul Schrader's brave and chilling "Hardcore." "I hate it," replies the private eye Andy Mast, with conviction. VanDorn is a stern Midwestern businessman, whose teen-age daughter has disappeared, and Mast has been hired to find her. All he's found so far is an 8-millimeter peep-show movie featuring VanDorn's daughter and two men. There's cause to wonder why he's forcing VanDorn to watch this abomination.
Yes, the early sequence in which VanDorn looks at only a few seconds' worth of film and then goes to pieces, makes for one of the most powerful moments in an already electrifying movie. But are there broader, less sensational reasons for "Hardcore" to include the episode? There are. Mast, played beautifully by Peter Boyle, may be something of a sadist, but he also senses VanDorn's crippling inability to look at whatever he doesn't choose to see. Mast is doing more than inflicting pain: He's helping VanDorn begin a journey that may provide him with a brutal — but perhaps necessary — education.
VanDorn's shock isn't wholly centered on his daughter, any more than "Hardcore," which opens today at the Loews State II, RKO 86th Street and Trans-Lux East theaters, is wholly about pornography. This is the anguish of someone who's devoted all his energies to controlling and limiting experience, only to fear that his efforts have cost him his resiliency and also been in vain. This is the grief of a devout man, a Calvinist, whose religious conviction has begun to look like smugness and may no longer afford him comfort. As he walks past the porno parlors of Los Angeles in search of his daughter, everything conspires to humiliate someone who has formerly been unassailable.
An early scene of VanDorn at work, one of Mr. Schrader's most compact, establishes that his interest in women is at best guarded (he asks a pretty employee if she still has her boyfriend, she answers that she does, and he counters with a crisp, "Nice fella, you don't want to lose him"); it also shows that he's habitually in control of situations even when he pretends not to be, and that he hates bright colors. A later, oddly parallel confrontation with an insolent employee in a lurid bookstore shows that for VanDorn, losing command may be the worst affront of all.
The role of VanDorn is played by George C. Scott, but Mr. Schrader has written it as a part for John Wayne. There's a lot of "The Searchers" in the story of this strict, cruel, self-denying man, trying to find a woman who's fallen into odious circumstances and refusing to acknowledge the things he sees along the way. Mast often calls VanDorn "Pilgrim," a nickname as reminiscent of Wayne as it is suggestive of VanDorn's religious zeal. But the insistence upon a John Wayne toughness eventually becomes the movie's undoing, even if the character retains his grit and his principles to the very end. The story line leads VanDorn to the breaking point, but Mr. Schrader won't let him even bend.
Mr. Schrader's insistence that VanDorn can search for his daughter, in bars and brothels up and down the California coast, for a period of months without being changed by the ordeal is dramatic suicide: The ending of the movie is disastrously unrewarding and dishonest in several ways. Mr. Schrader can't get the surprise he wants by playing fair with the audience, so he makes the beginning of the film deliberatly misleading.
By the time VanDorn teams up with a pretty young prostitute (played energetically by Season Hubley) who's desperate for his affection or anyone else's, Mr. Schrader has backed so far into a corner that he must choose between making VanDorn a cad or a sentimental sap; simple kindness has no place in the film's scheme. Neither does sex, despite the seamy milieu. Mr. Schrader, having paved the way for a story about a man who is forced to consider his own sexuality after being confronted by his daughter's, can't bring himself to explore this idea. There's a quick, funny and highly implausible subplot about VanDorn's posing as a porn film maker to find the men who acted with his daughter. But if a fiercely repressed character like VanDorn were to make a film revolving around sex, it might be just as perversely provocative, and yet as unyielding, as "Hardcore."
Mr. Schrader, who also wrote "Taxi Driver," has assembled enough ingredients of that film (including the superb cinematographer Michael Chapman) to make one mindful of what's missing this time. Once again, the action erupts into a violent and bloody conclusion, but the explosion makes less sense because the character is so incomplete. The sexuality of Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" was mysterious, too, but it was accounted for and linked inextricably with violence — if only in Robert De Niro's tiny gestures, as when, while watching television, he casually styles his thumb and forefinger like a gun, points it at the screen and pulls the trigger.
And unlike "Taxi Driver," "Hardcore" never gives in to the rhythm of its nighttime world, never swoons; Mr. Schrader doesn't seem capable of the perversely rhapsodic style his subject demands. But he does work with speed and intelligence, paying sharp attention to detail and making the movie as funny as it is quick and frightening.
Pilgrim's Descent
HARDCORE, written and directed by Paul Schrader; director of photography, Michael Chapman; music by Jack Nitzsche; film editor, Tom Rolf; produced by Buzz Feitshans; exective producer, John Milius; a Columbia Pictures release. At Loews State II, RKO 86th Street and the Trans-Lux East theaters. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is rated R.
Jake VanDorn . . . . . George C. Scott
Andy Mast . . . . . Peter Boyle
Niki . . . . . Season Hubley
Wes DeJong . . . . . Dick Sargent
Ramada . . . . . Leonard Gaines
Kurt . . . . . David Nichols
Tod . . . . . Gary Rand Graham
Detective Burrows . . . . . Larry Block
Taran . . . . . Marc Alaimo
Felice . . . . . Leslie Ackerman
Beatrice . . . . . Charlotte McGinnis
Kristen VanDorn . . . . . Ilah Davis
Joe VanDorn . . . . . Paul Marts
Jism Jim . . . . . Will Walker
Big Dick Blaque . . . . . Hal Williams
Stud No. 1 . . . . . Michael Allen Helie
Stud No. 2 . . . . . Tim Dial
SUBS INCLUDED
