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Black Rain (1989)

Nora's Nite

Tom Mes on Yusaku Matsuda:

To gauge the impact and enduring popularity of Yusaku Matsuda in Japan, one need only walk into a Tokyo bookstore. In the cinema section, at least half a shelf will be taken up by photo books, essays, tributes and biographies of the late actor. Toyshops stock action figures and dolls, both vintage and new, based on his best-loved characters. In the numerous second-hand video stores of the Jimbocho area, it's easy to pick out Matsuda's films among the thousands of brightly coloured boxes: his are the ones that are twice as expensive as everything else.

Yusaku Matsuda is a phenomenon. His early death in 1989 at the age of forty has given him the kind of idolised immortality that the rest of the world bestows upon the likes of James Dean, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee. The comparison with these giants is valid in more ways than one. Matsuda had a bit of all three: looks, acting range, cool machismo and a flair for action.

Yet, Matsuda remains a virtual unknown outside his home country. His misfortune was to have shot to fame at a time when the rest of the world had virtually forgotten that Japan even had a film industry: Matsuda reached his peak in the 80s, the most maligned decade in the annals of Japanese film history as seen through western eyes. Whereas stars of previous eras - Mifune, Takakura, Sugawara, Kaji - deservedly enjoy adulation beyond their own borders, Matsuda - who should be mentioned in the same breath - remains hidden from Western eyes, his work relegated to the dusty basement of Japanese cinema where few white men ever venture.

His obscurity is a paradox however, since millions around the world have seen Matsuda's final screen performance as the slippery villain Sato in Ridley Scott's Nihon-noir cop thriller Black Rain. An atypical role in many ways, it is the proverbial exception to the rule. In the part of his career that has come to define him, Matsuda played brash, cool, rebellious heroes, his tall figure and chiselled features furthermore lending him a virility and sex appeal that none of his forebears could match. As indisputably charismatic as Toshiro Mifune, Ken Takakura, Koji Tsuruta and Bunta Sugawara were, there was very little about them that would make women swoon or that would make scriptwriters decide that they should get the girl before fade-out.

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Great teaser trailers for season two:

No Way Out (1987)

Stuart's nite. Finally.

Roger Donaldson via Popcorn Reel:

Roger Donaldson, an easygoing persona who looked relaxed and well-rested at a local hotel suite here in town, typically fills his films with energy, passion, sexiness and charm -- take "No Way Out" (1987) for example -- which he said he saw on cable television on a recent late night. He confessed to taping it and then watching it early the following morning. "Once I started watching it, I couldn't stop watching it! I suddenly saw it for what it was . . . I see why it succeeded as it did. The movie has got a great sort of cynical quality to it. It's sexy and it's funny and it's a good thriller. You're not sure how it's gonna turn out. And I think I saw in "The Bank Job" a movie with a similar sort of appeal to me." While the stories in both films are completely different, the director said that in tone the two films probably shared quite a lot in common.

Marathon Man (1976)

Stuart's nite -- but... he doesn't show up. Peter rescues the evening by transforming this into his nite.Conrad Hall obit via The Independent

One of Hall's teachers at USC was the Yugoslavian montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. After Hall's short film Sea Theme won first prize for photography in a USC amateur contest, he formed a small production company, Canyon Films, with some fellow students, and, after adapting a short story My Brother Down There into a screenplay, they raised money to make a movie version. Hall said:

When it came time to decide who would do what, we all wanted to be the director. We couldn't do it by committee, of course. So we thought about what other jobs would need to be done to make the movie: producer, editor, cinematographer. We wrote them all down and put them in a hat. I happened to draw "cinematographer" . . . Eventually I learned what a great opportunity it is to be able to tell a story visually. I've found that I can be a storyteller, like my father, by using visuals and not be in competition with him.

Canyon Films proved short-lived, and Hall then worked in several capacities in the industry, including photography, editing and production, contributing to commercials, industrial films and features, including providing 16mm footage for Disney's acclaimed "True-Life Adventure" The Living Desert (1953).

He was given his first screen credit as one of three photographers on a low-budget black-and-white thriller, Edge of Fury (1958), but he continued to serve as camera assistant and camera operator with such noted cinematographers as Ted McCord, Ernest Haller, Floyd Crosby and Hal Mohr. For Robert Surtees, he was camera operator on the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando.

Also in 1962, he worked with Ted McCord on the television series Stoney Burke for the producer Leslie Stevens. Stevens admired Hall's work, and retained him to photograph episodes of the science- fiction series The Outer Limits (1963-65), after which Hall was the cinematographer on Stevens's feature film about the occult Incubus (1966). Starring William Shatner, it was notable for having its dialogue spoken entirely in Esperanto (a would-be universal language developed in 1887) and though considered stilted and pretentious at the time the film now has a cult following.

One of the first major films on which Hall received sole credit was Morituri (1965) starring Marlon Brando as an anti-Nazi German. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, a German director working for the first time in Hollywood, the black-and-white film was poorly received, with only the cast (Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard co-starred) and Hall's strikingly vivid camerawork winning praise. The film won Hall his first Oscar nomination.

Another black-and-white film lauded for Hall's photography was Richard Brooks's true crime story In Cold Blood (1967), based on Truman Capote's book about two psychopathic killers. "I started off my career in a sort of naturalistic style, as opposed to an operatic style," said Hall, "and I've refined that over the years to fit the stories."

Hall preferred to work in black-and-white, but by the mid-Sixties most of Hollywood's films were being made in colour, and Hall's work on Harper (1966), The Professionals (1966) and Cool Hand Luke displayed his mastery of the form. Disliking the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, he favoured a naturalistic or impressionist approach. His superb, dream-like rendering of the Old West in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won him the Academy Award, and he also won the film's leading lady Katharine Ross, to whom he was married from 1969 to 1975.

Able to be selective in his assignments, he liked to work on projects about "moral and ethical dilemmas". "I look for stories about humanity," he said,about choices a person has to make. I don't like thrillers. They're not made about the human condition. They exist to torture you. I'd rather do something like Day of the Locust about the losers who don't make it in film, but make their lives worthwhile by pretending.

After shooting Marathon Man (1976) Hall spent a decade running a production company making commercials with his fellow photographer Haskell Wexler, though he shot Bette Midler's concert scenes for The Rose (1979). He returned to feature-film making with the thriller Black Widow (1987), and subsequent films included Love Affair (1994) and A Civil Action (1998).

Hall was to receive nine Oscar nominations during his 50-year career (and may well receive another for Road to Perdition). He won his second award for his surreal evocation of the world of a dysfunctional family in American Beauty. "This was Sam Mendes's first film," he said,

but it never felt like his first film. He's actually a kind of control freak. I mean that in a good way. It's one thing to be directing. It's another to be directing and to have a vision and communicate that. Sam has vision. I helped contribute to that vision and to that wonderful screenplay.

The dream-like shot of cascading rose petals featured in the film has already become an iconic image of Nineties cinema, but Hall confessed to some initial trepidation with the project. "I kept asking Sam, 'How are we going to light these people? They're all so unlikeable.' " He was also perturbed to discover how much was cut from the film in its final editing. Though he came around to the final version ("When he showed it to me on the big screen, it was a revelation") Hall hoped that some of the cut material would be put back for the film's DVD release.

In 1994 Hall, whose son, Conrad W. Hall, took up the same profession and shot The Panic Room (2002), received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematography. "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative," said Zanuck. "Connie was not known for his speed, but neither was Rembrandt. He was known for incredible genius."