‘What is a cult film? A cult film is one which has a passionate following but does not appeal to everybody. Just because a movie is a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some cult films are very bad. Others are very, very good. Some make an awful lot of money at the box office. Others make no money at all. Some are considered quality films. Others are exploitation.’ From 1988 to 2000 Moviedrome was presented by Alex Cox and then Mark Cousins. Across that time, more than 200 features were shown, and generations of movie fans and filmmakers would be informed and inspired by the selection, alongside the wit and wisdom of the introductions that preceded each screening. Moviedrome was a portal into the world of weird and wonderful cinema. This two-month season features some of the most notable titles screened and wherever possible they are preceded by the original televised introduction.
Nick Freand Jones, season curator and producer of Moviedrome
Mark Cousins: Tonight, one of the best films about a serial killer, from one of the most maverick directors. Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye.
White of the Eye is a film about a very disturbed character called Paul White, former hunter and now a hi-fi engineer who may or may not be a serial killer. It was directed by Donald Cammell, one of the strangest figures in modern American and British cinema, I think. He was born in Edinburgh, he was one of the key figures in London in the sixties, friends with Mick Jagger etc. He co-directed Performance with Nicolas Roeg, and then went to America and worked with Marlon Brando through the ‘70s. In 1977 he made a film, Demon Seed, which we showed on a previous Moviedrome and 10 years later he made this film, White of the Eye. Throughout his life Donald Cammell was very interested in themes of suicide and therefore it wasn’t a surprise that at the age of 62, in his house in LA, with his wife China there, he shot himself in the head. He survived for between 10 and 30 minutes thereafter and apparently spoke lucidly and wasn’t in pain. This is of course a very dramatic thing to happen at the end of someone’s life, but in some way any other filmmaker it would have been a surprise, not him.
Donald Cammell used to say of himself that there was the professional Donald Cammell, the filmmaker, and then what he called ‘the uncensored Don’ and it’s a bit like Jekyll and Hyde, and of course Jekyll and Hyde was partly to do with the city where he was born, in Edinburgh; and what I think is so good about this picture is that it seems very much to come from the Mr Hyde side of his personality, the dark, the disturbed, the depressive side, the ‘life is a pile of shit’ side of him. And he’s not afraid to give a very unvarnished view of men and of America and things like that. And I think that’s what’s unusual and that’s what makes it a Moviedrome film. The book, White of the Eye, was brought to Cammell and at first, because it was about a serial killer, he wasn’t interested in it, but then he realised that he could make a movie which addressed some of the themes that he was really interested in.
One of the things about Performance, the film that he made with Nic Roeg, was the way that it tried to argue that all people are both masculine and feminine and men are damaged if they are too masculine, and therefore he made this film to be about such a character: a man who was scared of women, scared of his feminine side and goes out and shoots them because of it. You could say that there’s a touch of Oliver Stone about Donald Cammell, who’s very interested in Native American myths and the sense of foreboding that those myths could provide for his story. But at the same time, as well as being interested in things such as desert and the effect the desert has on somebody, he’s also interested in schizophrenia and the relationship between masculinity and femininity in people. This combination of themes – some very sixties themes but others rather timeless – crush into this film and make it a very visually rich tapestry.
The husband in the film is played by David Keith, a kind of Patrick Swayze lookalike, who was very surprised that the director allowed him to go as far as possible, while he wasn’t allowed to change any of the dialogue at all, he was allowed to act very extremely and he, I think, liked that a lot. The wife is played by Cathy Moriarty, who was in Raging Bull also.
Movies these days mostly suck up to their audience, I think, they try to be dead glossy and they try to make you have a very nice time, laugh and cry and all these things. This film is much tougher. It doesn’t really want you to like it, in a way. But it takes you into the mind of a character, takes you into an incredible landscape. It’s wholly cinematic, I think. It tells the story with the camera and that’s the best recommendation you can give.
Mark Cousins’ original introduction for Moviedrome. With thanks to moviedromer.tumblr.com
White of the Eye is Cammell’s most achieved solo work – though, even here, he relied on his wife China Cammell as co-writer. Based on Mrs White, a novel by brothers Andrew and Laurence Klavan (writing under the joint pseudonym Margaret Tracy), it’s by default Cammell’s ‘1980s’ movie. Just being a Cannon film locates it in the Reagan decade but it also dwells lovingly on its array of hideous mullets and fluffy perms – it’s even a plot point that all the women in the film except the straight-haired blonde heroine model their look on local rich slut Ann Mason (Alberta Watson). A burbling yet steely electro-acoustic score from Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason makes the film’s soundscape comparable to Michael Rubini’s work on Manhunter or Wang Chung’s on To Live and Die in LA. Even the 1970s flashbacks have a bleached-out look that screams 1987.
The plot of White of the Eye is squarely in the 80s tradition of Brian De Palma’s MTV Hitchcockery, talking-point slasher movies such as Fatal Attraction or Jagged Edge and ‘mad dad’ horrors like The Shining and The Stepfather. It skews away from crackpot male self-exploration and the objectification of murdered women, as exemplified by serial killer Paul White (David Keith), a sound expert who installs stereo systems in the homes of wealthy clients, towards a critique of the attitudes embodied in most commercial thrillers of the period, thanks to the livewire performance of Cathy Moriarty as Joan, Paul’s loving yet angry wife.
As the work of a European artist stranded in a hallucinated America, White of the Eye bears comparison with John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) or Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980). Cammell shifted the location from the Connecticut suburb of the novel to the environs of Tucson, Arizona. This enables him, like every other British filmmaker given the chance to put on a cowboy hat, to evoke the Wild West of the movies and also the myth’s latterday hippie incarnation as the playground of hallucinogenic Native American wisdom. It incarnates the New West in a cowboy-talking, Indian-sympathising protagonist who uses weird Apache humming techniques to map out the soundscape of a room before installing stereo speakers. However, he’s also a woman-hating murderer. Cammell’s work is shot through with mysticism of various forms but he was self-aware enough to have his heroine take a cold, clear view of her husband’s Carlos Castañeda rationale for disembowelling women and call bullshit on it.
Kim Newman, Sight and Sound, June 2014
White of the Eye
Directed by: Donald Cammell
©: Mrs Whites Production Inc.
Presented by: Elliott Kastner
a Cannon release
Produced by: Cassian Elwes, Brad Wyman
Associate Producers: Sue Baden-Powell, Vicki Taft
Production Manager: Sue Baden-Powell
Production Co-ordinator: Aron Warner
Production Controller: Marsha Koff
Location Manager: Harold Francis Enright III
Location Consultant: Bob Zache
Production Assistants: Mathew Gaston, John Peate, Douglas Miller, David Goodman
1st Assistant Director: Andrew Z. Davis
2nd Assistant Director: David Householter
3rd Assistant Director: Perry Husman
Script Supervisor: Jan D. Evans
Casting by: Pamela Rack
Extras Casting: Janet Cunningham
Written by: China Cammell, Donald Cammell
Based on the book ‘Mrs White’ by: Margaret Tracy
Photographed by: Larry McConkey
Lighting Cameraman: Alan Jones
Camera Operator: Douglas Ryan
Steadicam Photography: Larry McConkey
1st Assistant Camera: Adam Kimmel
2nd Assistant Camera: Mark Davidson, Edward A. Gutentag
Gaffer: Kevin Williams
Key Grip: Gary L. Dagg
Video Playback: Alexander T. Pappas
Still Photographer: Suzanne Tenner
Special Effects: Thomas Ford
Edited by: Terry Rawlings
1st Assistant Editor: Steve Cox
2nd Assistant Editor: Tim Grover
Production Designer: Philip Thomas
Set Decorator: Richard Rutowski
Set Dresser: Christina Volz
Property Master: Charles Stewart
Construction Co-ordinator: Douglas Dick
Costume Designer: Merril Greene
Costumer: Donna Barrish
Key Make-up & Hair: Jeanne van Phue
Make-up and Hair: Sharon Ilson Reed
Titles and Opticals by: Peter Govey Opticals
Processing by: Consolidated Film Industries
Negative Cutting Supervisor: Les Collins
Prints by: Technicolor Ltd
Music by: Nick Mason, Rick Fenn
Music Supervisor: George Fenton
Music Editor: Brian Lintern
Sound Mixer: Bruce Litecky
Boom Operator: Marshall Evans
Re-recording Mixer: John M. Hayward
Sound Editor: Jim Shields
Dialogue Director: China Cammell
Stunt Co-ordinator: Dan Bradley
Stereo Design & Special Consultation: Christopher Hansen
Camera and Lenses by: Panavision
Cast
David Keith (Paul White)
Cathy Moriarty (Joan White)
Art Evans (Charles Mendoza)
Alan Rosenberg (Mike Desantos)
Mark Hayashi (Stu)
William Schilling (Harold Gideon)
David Chow (Fred Hoy)
Michael Greene (Phil Ross)
Alberta Watson (Ann Mason)
Danielle Smith (Danielle White)
Mimi Lieber (Liza Manchester)
Pamela Seamon (Caryanne)
Bob Zache (Lucas Herman)
Danko Gurovich (Arnold White)
China Cammell (Ruby Hoy)
Jim Wirries (Grunveldt)
Kate Waring (Joyce Patell)
Fred Allison (TV newsman)
Clyde Pitfarkin (hairdresser)
John Diehl (Mr Dupree) *
Donna Barrish (Betty) *
Brad Wyman (killer’s Eye) *
UK 1987
118 mins
Digital
*Uncredited
Moviedrome transmission date: 2 July 2000
With thanks to
Sue Deeks, Simon Chilcott, Carl Davies, Josephine Haining and Andrew Abbott
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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