Colour
It’s downright odd that one would take a bleak Scandinavian
crime thriller, full of gloomy and moody Swedes, and transport it to sunny and
bright Los Angeles.
It’s utterly peculiar that having taken this dark and
existential story, one would then cast a talented light comic actor like George
Segal in the lead.
No matter how witty the banter, one would normally be really
quite suspicious that the audience will find it distasteful to see male cops
wisecracking over a violent sex crime.
And it’s frankly and
maddeningly bizarre that amidst the bright Los Angeles sunshine (with all the
lingering shots of beautiful blondes in bikinis that implies), the charmingly
smiling leading man and all the jokes, one would not only keep the brutality of
the crime but try to hold onto some of the book’s existential angst as well.
All of the above makes the adaptation of ‘Roseanna’ a
distinctly head spinning experience.
Sometimes films are schizophrenic, sometimes films have two
distinct personalities struggling to get out. It’s not just that a film
struggles to find a tone, it’s that it’s so totally tonally deaf, so unable to
engage with its own subject matter, that it becomes a warped piece of cinema
that nobody is possibly going to get to handle on. I don’t want to mock the
mentally ill, I don’t want to joke about the poor souls who were hauled around
in cages a hundred years ago by shysters who charged the public a penny a
gander, but this is a freak film, a genuinely split personality, mad and
unstable movie.
And as you know by now, this website exists to put its arms
around genuinely split personality, mad and unstable movies.
In 1964 the Swedish crime writing team, Sjöwall and Wahlöö,
introduced their character Martin Beck In ‘Rosanna’. It’s a compulsive police
procedural, but a very dark and Swedish book which lays the miserabilism on hard.
It adopts a questioning and disorientated stand against the world, to the point
where there’s a police officer actually named Kafka. The story concentrates on
the sexually-motivated murder of a young tourist in Sweden and the way the case
gets under the skin of the team investigating it, obsessing them and torturing
them with the thought that the man who did this is still out there. In short,
it isn’t a crammed barrel full of chuckles. Whether when Sjöwall and Wahlöö wrote
this book they thought there was a film in it, I don’t know. But if they did,
they probably thought it would be made by Ingmar Bergman on one of his less
cheery days.
However, fast forward ten years and Hollywood decides to
take a bash at it.
At the time this wouldn’t have necessarily seemed such a bad
idea. A year earlier, Walter Matthau had scored a success with his version of
Martin Beck in ‘The Laughing Policeman’. That was also set in California (San
Francisco rather than LA), but managed to maintain the grim procedural
qualities of the book. Presumably Mr Matthau was unavailable for this second go
around, so instead another actor known for comedy roles was hired – George
Segal. Now this might also have been a good thing, it could have expanded his
range away from comedy to something with more depth. And as long as the plot
wasn’t messed around with (which substantially it isn’t) and the horror wasn’t
muted (which it is, but only slightly) then this may have been a gripping and
scary thriller.
Instead we get this bloody mess, a diluted thriller which just
wants to be loved and ends up being the awkward guy at a party – there to make
friends, but just a bit too creepy to succeed. I like George Segal, I think he’s
an engaging presence, but obsessive and moody brooding is not his thing. The
film does give him a few moments of staring at the Pacific with a furrow on his
brow, but it is only a moment – then the grin snaps into place and we’re back
to wisecracking. And that’s the problem, the film doesn’t trust itself to do
the serious material and so tries to make it more palatable with jokes. But because
it doesn’t actually tone down the serious material, the end result is either a harsh
film which inexplicable keeps racing off to do some clowning, or a comedy with
a far too dark and brutal heart.
Amongst Segal’s colleagues are an hilarious bunch of LA police
officers, forever telling jokes and joshing with each other – but more than
anything they show the warped and flawed sheer wrongness of this film. Watching
men stand over the naked body of a girl while joking about what their girlfriend
likes to do with ketchup is just too weird. Words cannot express how odd it is
to watch and how uncomfortable the audience feels as a consequence. The film
becomes even worse than the awkward guy at the party, now instead the awkward
guy at the funeral, trying to lighten the mood with some ill advised blue comedy.
The whole thing – the sunshine, George Segal, the jokes –
just twist what should be an unrelenting thriller completely out of shape . The
brutality of the plot is kept, but this film doesn’t have the palate to do
brutality, it can only do bright and primary colours. As such it fails at every
conceivable level. But then if ‘Dirty Harry’ had featured a scene in which
Harry Callaghan – just after having been to the mortuary – put on a Groucho mask, picked up a ukulele
and mugged frantically while singing a medley of show tunes to a simpering,
leggy, lab technician, that would have been something a fail as well.
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