Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is the smartest movie Quentin Tarantino has made since Jackie Brown.

Margot Robbie stars in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.

First, a warning. You should know as little as possible about Quentin Tarantino’s new film before you see it. Though there are no actual spoilers in the following review, you still might want to wait until you see the movie before you read it. The title seems to be derived from Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America) but, significantly, there’s also the original, fairytale element to it.

As everyone surely knows by now, the film is set in 1969, the year, many believe, in which the cinema underwent a radical change as the filmmaking veterans, both stars and directors, were beginning to be replaced by a new generation who would take the cinema into a different direction. It was also the year that the hippie revolution went sour.

What started in 1966 with “gentle people with flowers in their hair” had, only three years later, been twisted and corrupted by drugs and crime into something quite chilling. Teenagers, especially girls, who had run away from home seeking “freedom” and sexual adventure, often found themselves in very dark places, the darkest of which belonged to those who joined Charles Manson’s “family”, who lived on an abandoned ranch that used to be used as a movie location just outside Los Angeles.

Tarantino begins his film in February that year, introducing three principal sets of characters. Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a former star of a TV western series, Bounty Law (cue for some sharply accurate pastiche), but his fortunes have declined and now he’s playing villains and resisting the suggestion of his agent, Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) that he try making spaghetti westerns in Europe. Rick’s decline in fortune materially affects his best friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Rick lives in a house in the hills and his new neighbours are the currently hot director of Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his wife, actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie).

Given this set-up it’s no wonder that the viewer experiences a sense of extreme unease throughout the film. Yet most of the movie is handled with a light touch, and a typical Tarantino delight in popular culture ephemera. The screenplay is light on narrative but filled with incident. There’s a visit to the Playboy Mansion (look! There’s Steve McQueen!). A meal at Musso and Frank’s, Hollywood’s most famous eatery. The Van Nuys Drive-in, which is adjacent to the vacant lot where Cliff lives in a trailer with his pit-bull terrier, is screening a double-bill of Lady in Cement and Pretty Poison. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, we even see a sequence from The Great Escape in which Rick might have been cast in the role famously played by McQueen.

While Rick, playing a moustachioed villain in a western directed by actor Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond in a spot-on performance), struggles to remember his lines, he’s upstaged by a precocious eight-year-old Method actress named Trudi (Julia Butters). Meanwhile, Cliff, who is rumoured to have a dark past, is on the set of The Green Hornet, where he falls foul of Bruce Lee (Mike Moh, startlingly convincing) as well as the film’s producers (Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell). Cliff also gives a lift to the alluring Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), a member of the Manson Family, and, in a typically suspenseful sequence, drives her to the Spahn Ranch where the presence of so many vaguely sinister young women, including “Squeaky” Fromme (Dakota Fanning), is deeply unsettling. Tension escalates when Cliff demands to see the elderly George Spahn (Bruce Dern), who seems to be in thrall to the Manson clan.

With Polanski in London, Tate, meanwhile, checks out the famous Bruin Cinema in Westwood where one of her films, The Wrecking Crew, with Dean Martin, is screening and she delights in the audience reaction to her klutzy character. She also visits a bookshop where she buys a present for her husband: a copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Polanski would direct an impressive film based on the book 10 years later). There’s a sinister foretaste of what’s to come when Manson (a very brief role for Damon Herriman) comes to the Polanski house looking for Terry Melcher (the son of Doris Day), the previous owner, and is sent away by Tate’s hairdresser friend (and, it’s hinted, lover), Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch).

Inevitably the fateful day of August 8 arrives, but Tarantino has some surprises in store that can’t be revealed. The direction in which he takes the film will no doubt provoke lively discussion at post-screening dinners, especially for anyone who remembers what happened that night.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is the smartest movie Tarantino has made since Jackie Brown. Consummately acted by an unusually fine ensemble cast, the film will provoke and enthral, a sure indication the director has succeeded in making not only a handsome and nostalgic movie but also a challenging and subversive one. And, by the way, it’s essential to sit through the end credits!

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (MA15+) 4.5 stars

Wide national release

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SUBLIMINAL SNAPSHOT OF A CINEMATIC PIONEER

Pioneering director Alice Guy-Blache (centre seated) on the set of La Vie du Christ (The Life of Christ) in 1906. From the film Be Natural: Alice Guy-Blache

I approached Be Natural, a documentary about one of the most interesting pioneers of cinema, with enthusiasm. Alice Guy-Blache (1873-1968) was involved in movies from the very start, working as assistant to Leon Gaumont when the Lumiere Brothers first screened their pioneering moving pictures, and subsequently directing dozens if not hundreds of (short) films in France and, after she married Herbert Blache and moved to the US, in America.

It’s great that filmmaker Pamela B. Green is telling the story of this remarkable woman, but it’s a shame that she seems to have skewed the narrative to make it appear that Guy-Blache was a victim of men who, allegedly, wrote her out of film history.

It’s certainly true that Guy-Blache isn’t mentioned in some of the early film history books, notably Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (1930). But that’s not, as Green suggests, because she was a woman, and she’s not alone; nor does Rotha mention Henry Lehrman, John Emerson, Stuart Paton or Willard Louis, all of whom directed films in 1916, the year Guy-Blache made The Ocean Waif (he doesn’t mention Cleo Madison either, a woman who acted in the films she directed during the same period and who is even less remembered than Guy-Blache).

The reason is that, until fairly recently, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to see the work of these early pioneers, apart from a few “big names” like Griffith and DeMille. So the relative obscurity of Guy-Blache is not because she was a woman, as the film asserts, but because the men (yes, they were all men) who wrote about early cinema history simply hadn’t seen her films.

Instead of showing lots of excerpts from the work of Guy-Blache that is now available, Green fills her documentary with fleeting interviews with dozens of female film personalities, including Geena Davis and Gillian Armstrong, who are, understandably, able to contribute very little.

On the plus side, there are some rare interviews with Guy-Blache, filmed not long before her death.

But the all-important films are shown in almost subliminal excerpts, offering today’s audiences little opportunity to assess the place of this remarkable woman in cinema history.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache (G) 2 stars

Limited release