Deputy Assistant Dwight Chapin zooms in on the Nixon White House in all-archival documentary (Super 8 film still, Dipper Films)
OUR NIXON (Penny Lane, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, August 30
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.ournixon.com
Penny Lane’s debut documentary, the all-archival Our Nixon, offers a compelling new inside look at the Nixon White House. The classic cautionary tale about power, corruption, and paranoia, which ultimately brought down the thirty-seventh president of the United States, has been told many times before, on film (All the President’s Men, Oliver Stone’s Nixon), in books (Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon), onstage (Frost/Nixon, Checkers), and even as an opera (John Adams’s Nixon in China). When Nixon moved into the White House in January 1969, he brought along three key figures: Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, Chief Domestic Adviser John Erlichman, and Deputy Assistant Dwight Chapin. And those three men brought along Super 8 cameras, prepared to document not only their daily lives but also how they were going to change the nation. During its investigation of the Watergate scandal, the FBI confiscated more than five hundred reels of footage, totaling more than twenty-six hours, taken by Haldeman, Erlichman, and Chapin, and these home movies, which belong to the Nixon Library and have been digitized specifically for the film, form the basis of Our Nixon. Director-producer Lane combines this deeply personal footage — showing alternate views of the 1969 inauguration, a White House Easter egg hunt, the moon landing, Trisha Nixon’s wedding, Nixon’s trip to China, the Republican National Convention, and other, more mundane events — with carefully chosen audio excerpts from the White House tapes, creating a unique audiovisual experience.
H. R. Haldeman takes home movies at the Great Wall of China in 1974 (Super 8 film still, Dipper Films)
Lane foregoes any political and historical experts in favor of having the protagonists do all the talking, through radio and television interviews (with Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, and Phil Donahue), oral histories, and the secret White House recordings. In addition, there are supplemental news reports from Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr, and others. As interesting as it is to see the home movies, the audiotapes are mesmerizing, revealing some of the behind-the-scenes manipulations that were often not nearly as planned as most people assume. It is actually both frightening and sad to hear Nixon talking to Haldeman about a just-completed short television address he gave to the nation, the president concerned about how he came off and upset that only one colleague called to congratulate him. And just wait till you hear what they have to say about Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Although Our Nixon offers no excuses or apologies for the actions of the Nixon White House, it does humanize, instead of demonize, these central figures, who might not have been quite as overtly evil as many people would like to believe. Of course, that doesn’t mean they come across as a group of cuddly teddy bears either. Our Nixon opens August 30 at the IFC Center, with the filmmakers participating in several Q&As on Friday and Saturday night.
Sam Peckinpah cemented his reputation for graphic violence and eclectic storytelling with the genre-redefining 1969 Western The Wild Bunch. When a robbery goes seriously wrong, Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), Angel (Jaime Sánchez), and brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector Gorth (Ben Johnson) set out to get even, planning an even bigger score by going after a U.S. Army weapons shipment on a railroad protected by detective Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and his hired gun, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is given nothing but “egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash” to work with, including the hapless Coffer (Strother Martin) and T.C. (L. Q. Jones). The aging Pike, who sees this as his last score, is worried about being in cahoots with the unpredictable General Mapache (Emilio Fernández), a local warlord battling Pancho Villa’s freedom forces. But at the center of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between Pike and Thornton, the latter determined to capture his former partner, who left him to rot in jail years earlier. It all comes to a head in Agua Verde, which might translate to “Green Water” but will soon be bathed in red blood in one of the most violent shoot-outs ever depicted on celluloid. Peckinpah fills the film with plenty of drinking and whoring, and even torture, while exploring friendship and loyalty, embodied by Dutch’s selfless dedication to Pike. The Wild Bunch might be famous for its intense violence, much of it shot in slow motion, but it also has a lot more going for it, from its Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Fielding to its terrific cast and suspenseful twists and turns. (Western fans might get a kick out of knowing that Mapache’s right-hand man, Lt. Herrera, is portrayed by Mexican actor and director Alfonso Arau, who later played El Guapo in John Landis’s comic Western The Three Amigos.) The Wild Bunch is screening August 30-31 and September 1 as part of the IFC Center Waverly Midnights series “Lone Star Cinema: Texas On Screen,” which continues through October 26 with such other Texas-set movies as Reality Bites, Blood Simple, The Getaway, Bottle Rocket, and the original and still champion Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The Bride of Frankenstein meets Scanners, Weird Science, and Re-Animator in Frank Henenlotter’s over-the-top horror comedy Frankenhooker. When Elizabeth Shelley (August 1986 Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen) is done in by a runaway lawn mower during a family gathering, her geeky engineer fiancé, Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz channeling 1980s star Andrew McCarthy, who is now one of the directors of the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black), decides that he has to put her back together again. But since much of her body has been torn to shreds, Jeffrey has to go out looking for compatible parts — and just might find them at a prostitution party with some rather explosive crack on hand. As Jeffrey works tirelessly trying to rebuild and perfect his fiancée, Zorro the Pimp (Joseph Gonzalez) is hot on his trail, wanting to know what has become of his ladies of the evening. Shot in New York by native citizen Henenlotter (Basket Case, Brain Damage), Frankenhooker is silly fun, even when it gets overly ridiculous, as it regularly does. But those bodies blowing up are a hoot, and the film features some rather strange cameos, including Shirley Stoler (Seven Beauties, The Honeymoon Killers) as Spike the bartender, Louise Lasser as Jeffrey’s mother, and Zacherle as the creepy weatherman. Ted Hope, who went on to form the production company Good Machine with James Schamus, presenting films by Ang Lee, Todd Solondz, Nicole Holofcener, Hal Hartley, and others, served as first assistant director, while the script was cowritten with former Fangoria editor Robert Martin. One of those films you hate yourself for watching but you just can’t look away from, Frankenhooker is screening August 30 & 31 at 12:20 am as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s midnight series “I Heart New York Horror.” 
