Quentin Tarantino can be cocky and arrogant at times. But give the man props for he knows a lot of what there is to now about the history of movies and especially the American Cinema. At 60, Tarantino has caused a lot of speculation himself on what his 10th and final movie will be. Apparently, the Kill Bill movies count as one and the Four Rooms segment doesn’t count at all.
While he’s famous for taking his time during movies, such as the six-year gap between Jackie Brown and the first Kill Bill, he’s turned to the written work since the release of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood back in 2019. First he published a novelization of that movie reportedly expanding on things that he couldn’t include in the 160 minutes of run time including credits. While I don’t think Hollywood is one of his best works, Cinema Speculation is a wonderful critique of movies from possibly the past 60 years.
Similar to Stephen King’s On Writing, the book goes back and forth between being talking about countless movies, directors and actors and Tarantino’s own personal life growing up in the Los Angeles area with a single mother who would take him to movies other parents would never, ever consider. Tarantino’s recalling being a child watching the infamous rape scene in Deliverance leads you to wonder what was going through the young man’s mind as well as those around him. Such a thing had never been shown on the screen.
Tarantino keeps the subjects limited to the era of his youth, discussing the New Hollywood directors and also the actors from that era. He mentions how Brian DePalma was the only one who wasn’t a huge film fan like his contemporaries (Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese) as well as debating how Taxi Driver would’ve worked if DePalma had directed it.
One thing Tarantino mentions that I have never thought before is how Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is supposed to be a racist and hate black people. Yet, Bickle is supposed to be a Marine who served in Vietnam. He says if Bickle had served in Vietnam, he would not have the beliefs he has. Tarantino speculates that Bickle is an unreliable narrator and has purchased the jacket he wears at a surplus store and tells people he was in the service to get attention. In the movie, character actor Joe Spinnell plays a taxicab supervisor who is uninterested in Bickle until he mentions his military service, thus probably allowing Bickle to be hired. Bickle isn’t a smart person but he’s smart enough to know what to say to get people’s attention.
Taxi Driver, Tarantino writes, was a spate of movies that were released in the mid to late 1970s following Death Wish that he calls “Revengemania.” These movies focused on angry white men fighting back usually against black people and/or Hispanic/Latinos who had done them wrong. Yet, in Taxi Driver, the pimp, Matthew or Sport as he’s also called is played by Harvey Keitel. Originally, Paul Schrader had wrote Sport as a black men before Columbia Pictures demanded a white actor be cast afraid of backlash of a white man killing a black pimp.
But I think it had something more to do with the scene between Keitel and Jodie Foster where it’s implied off-screen that he has sex with her on a regular basis. Foster, who was 12 while filming the movie, is never shown engaging in any sexual acts, even though it’s implied she’s about to go down on a crooked cop in the firefight climax. I don’t think the movie would’ve played as well if it’s implied that she is raped on a regular basis by her pimp, who is black.
It might have changed the reaction to Bickle at the end. Bickle shoots the crooked cop in the head with his own gun while Iris (Foster) pleads “Don’t shoot him!” It’s a horrifying scene because even though Bickle thinks he’s saving Iris, she doesn’t see it that way and the audience shouldn’t either. Seeing Bickle kill a black pimp and two white men would’ve made him into a hero in the eyes of many moviegoers. But he’s just a killer. He shoots Sport unarmed. He shoots the seedy hotel owner when he’s unarmed. And he shoots the crooked cop unarmed.
Bickle isn’t a good guy. Scorsese understood this. That’s why when he, himself, plays the deranged passenger who is going to kill his wife because she’s having an affair with a black man, it puts the nugget in Bickle’s mind that someone like Iris is being raped by black men. Tarantino argues that DePalma would’ve kept Sport a black man. Tarantino also doesn’t believe in the idea of a white pimp, even though he wrote Drexl in True Romance who was a pimp. But Drexl thought he was black and acted that way.
Some of the chapters are kinda sloggish. He gives a history of the makings of movies like The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, which is detailed, as well as Rolling Thunder, which is basically Taxi Driver without the studio interference. The script was also co-written by Schrader of an Air Force major played by William Devane who was a prisoner-of-war with fellow Army sergeant, an underused Tommy Lee Jones, who return to Texas where everyone love them, but they’re not the same after returning from Vietnam.
In a community effort to show their gratitude, Devane’s character, Charles Rane, is given a free Cadillac convertible and a silver dollar for every day he was in captivity, which is over $2,500. Unfortunately, Charles’ wife has become distant and begun an affair with a local sheriff deputy who she wants to marry. But a gang of white men and Mexicans, led by James Best (in a great villain role) kill his wife and son and leave him for dead after putting his right hand down a garbage disposal to make him talk. He survives but decides to track down the gang when he recovers with Jones’ character who goes along without hesitation.
Thunder is like a lower-budget version of Taxi Driver. It was released through American International Pictures and doesn’t mince words with its implied racism. Best, who is remembered as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard appears in one-and-a-half scenes but is so realistic and evil, you wish he was in the movie longer. Just like Taxi Driver, the movie ends with all the bad guys getting shot and killed.
Tarantino has taken a lot of criticism over the years for his use of racial slurs in movies, even though they are mostly spoken by racist characters or even by black characters themselves. He talks about his mother always dating black men and how he hung around with black people, one in particular is Floyd, who he was too young and naive to see was a freeloader and sponge on those around him. But Floyd did help Tarantino develop his love for movies, even those which were obscure at the time. They would mock people who only thought of Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon.
I wouldn’t say Tarantino is racist, just because he writes about racist characters. He seems to address the issues involving Inspector Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry. The movie was loosely inspired by the Zodiac killing is almost Revengemania as the police track the Scorpio Killer (Andrew Robinson). In real life, Robinson had a fear of firearms that he’d have to overcome because he handles them throughout the movie. Dirty Harry isn’t a racist movie but I would say Scorpio is. He uses the N-word in one of his letters and knows just what to say to a black man to get himself beat up so badly he can blame it on Callahan.
But Harry Callahan isn’t racist. The doctor who treats him after he is shot following the bank robbery is black. I would argue the robbery was added after Clint Eastwood was hired because they wanted a sequence in which Harry guns down some goons to show off. Aside from the bank robbers (who are all black), Harry only shoots Scorpio at the end. They could’ve at least mixed it up the way the gang in Thunder is white and Mexican. Also the line from robber played by Albert Popwell is delivered racially with him saying, “I’s got to know.”
But when Callahan comes upon the scene of the young black boy killed, he is stunned a little when he sees the boy’s mother, played by Mae Mercer, is standing several feet away shocked and her voice breaking up as she tells the police his name and age. The scene rattles Callahan and is why he is so adamant on saving the life of the teenage girl played by Jo De Winter. Callahan may use unnecessary force to get what he wants but he’s color-blind in a department where his co-workers are racist.
Since Tarantino was heavily influenced by the 1970s movies, I think that’s why most of his works seem to be a reflection of that era. While Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown are all set in the 1990s, they have a timeless sense to them. The Kill Bill movies and Death Proof (his all-time worse movie) seem to be inspired by the Rape-Revenge movies whereas the rape is substituted for other things such as Bill (David Carradine) ordering the murder of the Bride (Uma Thurman) and her fiance and their friends and family. And Inglourious Basterds (which in retrospect should’ve won Best Picture at the Oscars), Hollywood and even Django Unchained seem to rewrite history.
I’d argue Django is also more of a revisionist Western, which became popular during the late 1960s and 1970s era as well as The Hateful Eight, which is the closest thing he has done to making a horror movie as a director. He may have liked the movies that were made in the 1980s, but he doesn’t love them he does other movies. The only movie that he goes into discussion on is The Funhouse, which is really an examination on the early career of Tobe Hooper.
After Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he made the campy Eaten Alive followed by the TV miniseries adaptation of ‘Salam’s Lot, which he said he doesn’t like. But this may be because Stephen King wasn’t a big fan of the Kill Bill movies. Tarantino also makes a shot at Creepshow which King wrote. The Funhouse, which is a different style of horror movie, unfortunately got shuffled in with the emergence of slasher movies from the early to mid-1980s. A novelization was written by Dean Koontz under the pseudonum Owen West which expanded a lot leading to speculation the movie was based on Koontz’s book. It’s about teenagers who get locked in a carnival funhouse with a deformed person.
But I could go on and on about whether I agree or disagree with Tarantino. If you’re not a fan of his works, you may find a lot of what he writes about to be boring. In an era when people talk about movies and directors all the time online, Tarantino was doing it before the popularity of the Internet and creation of Google, Wikipedia and imdb. He is a lover of movies. It’s his passion. It’s no different than people talking about cars and sports.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 