As part of Screengrab’s year-end List-a-palooza, we asked you, our imaginary internet friends, what topics you’d like to see featured in our weekly Top Twenty.
Janet immediately stepped up to the plate with the following suggestion: “Last week, Walker finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue, in my current reconsideration of all things Alex Cox. As I watched it, I kept thinking about My Best Fiend, which I had watched about a month ago. I realized that there were at least three films I could name that revolved around a White man traveling to Latin America and going crazy, and I started wondering if there were more. I'm not even sure if there are enough for a Take Five, but I count on your broader knowledge on the subject. So, if you would be so kind, I would love a list of White Man Goes to Latin America and Goes Insane movies.”
And so, in honor of Janet, this week’s list features plenty o’ white dudes livin’ la vida loca south of the border...but we also broadened our mandate to include all manner of fish-out-of-water stories -- from aliens in New York to city slickers in the Great Beyond -- as Screengrab travels the world (and the time/space continuum) to celebrate our favorite cinematic tales of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND!
WALKER (1987)
And speaking of strange, it’s hard to get stranger than the 19th century American soldier of fortune William Walker or the eponymous cinematic tale of his misadventures conjured by the determinedly peculiar British cult director Alex Cox a century or so later. The real-life Walker invaded Mexico and Nicaragua more or less on his own and was eventually executed by officials in Honduras for being such a colossal pain in the ass. Cox was inspired to make his film (starring Ed Harris in full, spooky glower) “in the middle of the US-sponsored terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people...with the intention of spending as many American dollars as possible in Nicaragua, in solidarity with the Nicaraguans against the yanks' outrageous aggression against a sovereign nation.” Although ostensibly a period piece, Cox filled his film with anachronistic elements like tanks and helicopters to show how “nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker's genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons.” Reaction, as they say, was mixed. Liberals were offended by Cox’s bizarre, slapstick take on the material (prompting Robert Redford to consider making his own preachy, ponderous version...a project that mercifully never materialized). Most everyone else was merely baffled by the quasi-biopic, and Universal essentially buried the six million dollar production, which barely grossed a quarter million dollars domestically...although, according to Cox, the movie was “extremely popular in certain places. It was the second biggest film hit ever in Nicaragua, after The Sound of Music,” thus making Cox's Latin American adventure about a zillion times more worthwhile than those of either Walker or North.
LOCAL HERO (1983)
Fish-out-of-water stories basically come in two variants: nightmares about characters who fall down a rabbit hole and land in Hell, or happier fantasies about some lucky bastard who happens upon Shangri-La. Bill Forsyth's beautiful little comedy, one of the few movies that might be called achingly charming, falls into the latter camp, but with a cruelly bittersweet twist. The setting is a seaside village on the coast of Scotland; the hero, Mac (Peter Reigert), is a young Houston oil company executive who is sent there to buy up the residents' homes so that the area can be despoiled. The residents are eager to get their checks so that the company can get on with the despoiling, but Mac, who in his native environment is so robotically detached that he has no trouble conducting a phone conversation with a co-worker who he can see to wave to through the other side of his glass office wall, falls so deeply in love with the place that when his boss, Happer (Burt Lancaster), flies out to connect with him, Happer doesn't recognize him. Happer himself is an amateur astronomer who looks deeply miserable sitting behind his desk in his lair atop his own personal skyscaper; he's outgrown his identity as a staid CEO, just as Lancaster had finally, fully outgrown his movie star identity as a grinning action hunk. Even in his suit and with his private helicopter, it's clear that he belongs in this magical landscape with its wide-open possibilities, just as it's clear that Mac, even with his new casual style and unshaven face, doesn't; much as he wants to, he still has his face pressed against the glass. The last scene, after Happer has blithely ordered Mac back to Houston so that the party can continue without him hovering at its edges, cuts deep.
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)
The British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg, who for a while made a specialty of eroticizing alienation, made his solo directing debut with Walkabout, a ghostly 1971 strangers/strange-land story about a proper white teeenage girl and her little brother who are stranded in the Australian outback. In this science-fiction film, Roeg extended his vision to cast the whole planet Earth -- or at least America, which to an Englishman trying to make a career in moviemaking in the 1970s must have seemed like pretty much the same thing --- as the strange land into which he drops his hero, an alien visitor (David Bowie) on a mission to save his dying planet from drought. On one level, the movie is a straight-faced joke on the idea that some of our most celebrated world-shakers, such as Howard Hughes, have scarcely seemed human at times. (Bowie's mission requires him to become titanically rich by bringing, and copyrighting, his civilization's advanced technologies.) But it's also a Christ story that happens to be set in a time so debased, and with such a short attention span, that the martyred hero, though he's able to have his purity corrupted through a developing lust for drink and television, can't manage to hold the villains' interest long enough for them to bother completing his crucifixion.
WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1926)
Lon Chaney and his favorite director, Tod Browning, made this silent version of the 1926 play Kongo, which is mostly set in what used to be called "darkest Africa." Chaney plays a married stage magician who loses the use of his legs after brawling with his wife's lover, played by Lionel Barrymore. Chaney, now known affectionately as "Dead-Legs," to his associates, relocates to Africa and sets himself up as the leader of a tribe of natives, who take his magic tricks for the mark of a peerless and dangerous witch doctor. When Chaney learns that his wife died in childbirth, he assumes that Barrymore was the father and sends for the now orphaned girl. He then proceeds to mistreat and debase her as cruelly as possible, with the intention of turning her into a broken animal; his plan is to present this ruined creature to Barrymore and then treat himself to the sight of Barrymore being treated to the sight of the natives burning the girl alive. You get one guess what the big surprise twist turns out to be. Kongo itself was later filmed as a talkie with Walter Huston; it, like Zanzibar and other films such as the weirdly stagebound White Cargo, belonged to a long-dead genre of films about white men in the jungle lording their superiority over the natives, unless they (like the juvenile character in White Cargo) are driven mad by the sultry, seductive powers of the helplessly sexy natives. Zanzibar is powered by the sheer, chugging hatefulness of which both Browning and Chaney were macabre masters, which is probably why it feels fresher now than those other films. The racial component, while never front and center, is more palatable today when it's presented as part of a horror fantasy, with the white antihero as twisted as anyone he's going to meet out there in the Congo.
IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (2007)
There's been a lot of ink spilled on Sylvia in the list-making blur we've all just emerged out of. Suffice it to say Sylvia is the rare movie not to capture the experience of traveling in a specific city or country, but just the essence of what it means to stay in one part of an urban European city for a few days and slowly begin to see the same strangers and places over and over again, acclimating slowly to the local rhythms. The fact that it's seen through the eyes of a young, self-consciously arty idiot doesn't matter one whit; with him out of the frame for maybe 1/3 of the film, it's as much a film about the weird pan-European charms of Strasbourg as anything.
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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov