Henry Fool

Henry Fool Directed by Hal Hartley (Columbia TriStar) Henry Fool is a movie about working. Not so much the routine of daily toil as the passion and doubt inherent in having a calling. In this case, Hal Hartley provides a case study of the artistic impulse, with his two main figures serving as shadow puppets illustrating the differing paths taken by the lonely man of faith. Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), a garbage man living in Queens with his mother and sister, meets Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a wandering intellectual in the midst of writing his Confessions, a masterpiece in the making, a self-described "pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions."

Henry convinces Simon to pick up a pencil and begin writing himself, nurturing him through the difficult process of artistic growth and professional rejection toward an unexpected success. Like stragglers out of Tristram Shandy (check the funkily allusive names), or David Mamet characters in search of a Camus novel, these outcasts debate issues of artistic responsibility while ranging through a freewheeling, almost epic narrative wholly out of place in American independent filmmaking.

Much like Mamet, Hartley's characters speak an oddly spare, affectless language easily recognizable as stemming from the bard of the tri-state area. What lifts Hartley's film over the morass of independent filmmaking of the 1990s, and over the remainder of the filmmaker's work, is its wide-angle vision of the world. Henry Fool embodies the life of the burdened working man and the all-knowing intellectual bon vivant, the drone who's never left home, and the wanderer without a place to comfortably rest his head. These roles, rather than being embodied by any one character, float freely between Henry and Simon, rendering Henry Fool a kind of tragedy of ideas, a debate, constructed by Hartley, about the necessity of the artistic impulse and the role of the artist. Simon and Henry befriend a priest, whose main responsibility in the narrative is to make clear the parallels between the two professions: idealists who doubt in the efficacy of their works while remaining hopeful of leaving a lasting impact. Hartley depends on ironic reversal and a taste for the sexual and scatological to leaven his sermon.

At every moment in this film when it appears clear who is the "real" artist and who is the charlatan, Hartley blurs the categories. Success, he is saying, is less a matter of talent than blind luck, but the drive to be remarkable is a constant. What unites the artist with the priest is the willingness to have faith where reason fails. As Simon responds when told by a snooty publisher to be reasonable, "Why?" At film's end, Simon repays the debt he owes Henry, granting him the recognition and adulation he has always craved, saving him, if only momentarily, from the grating desperation of the everyday.

?Saul Austerlitz

Fight For Your Life Directed by Robert A. Endelson (Blue Underground) Most viewers would recognize William Sanderson as "Larry" from the old Newhart show, or "Sebastian," the kind-hearted robotics engineer from Blade Runner. I'm guessing those later, gentler roles were his own form of penance for starring in this.

Fight For Your Life begins like any other mid-70s grindhouse action/revenge film: An NYPD van transporting three hardened cons gets into an accident and the cons escape. After that, though, well?let's just say there's something here to make every audience member cringe.

Sanderson plays Kane, the ringleader. He and his two cohorts (one Asian, one Hispanic) steal a car, drive upstate, rob some places, kill some people, then invade the home of a mild-mannered black preacher, taking his entire family hostage. (The minister's young son is played by Reggie Bythewood, who would go on to write Get on the Bus and direct Biker Boyz.)

This is where the fun begins. Kane, an insane hardcore racist, lets the epithets fly the minute he shoves his way into the house. And every time he opens his mouth after that, a new one comes out: darkie, jig, burr-head, Martin Luther Coon?

But it doesn't stop with crude name-calling. Nor does it stop with simple raping and killing (a small boy gets his head bashed in with a rock). No, Kane gathers the family together and, a la The Last House on the Left, humiliates and degrades them (making the father do a minstrel dance is the least of it). It's pretty excruciating?but fascinating at the same time. As a sleazy, low-budget action film, it's mediocre. But still, you can't stop watching it, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, wondering all the while how and why somebody made it.

Being a revenge picture, the minister finally reaches a point where he can no longer turn the other cheek, and the family fights back while screaming some racial epithets of their own. (Especially Grandma!)

And that's what leads to one of the more interesting things about "the most racist film ever made." When it was released in 1977, it was advertised with two radically different trailers. One, with a white narrator, treats it as a simple action film. You see cops and guns and smashed windows. Race plays virtually no part in it. The other, with a black narrator who calls it "a film that will make you proud to be a black man," focuses on white racists getting their comeuppance. These, of course, were shown in different theaters in different parts of town. It's an old technique, but here it's done both shamelessly and brilliantly. (Both trailers are contained on the disc.) I just have to wonder what audiences attracted by either trailer thought when they finally saw the film.

?Jim Knipfel