The Prodigal Cinephile

Fear not: this is not yet another polemic weirdly way too invested in convincing you that Die Hard is a Christmas movie! It *is* part of our household’s regular holiday rotation, though, so I’ve been saving a December slot for it and the Chain Smoker from Sother Teague’s I’m Just Here for the Drinks. The pairing is, of course, inspired by Bruce Willis’s John McClane, who quaintly lights a cigarette immediately after disembarking at Los Angeles International Airport approximately two minutes into the film:

Then proceeds to consume at least a full pack before the end credits roll. Here’s how you make it:

2 ozs. Mezcal (Del Maguey Vida de Muertos)
3/4 oz. Dry vermouth (Dolin)
1/4 oz. Zucca Rabarbaro
2 dashes Cocktail Punk smoked orange bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and chain into a chilled rocks glass. Garnish with a flamed orange twist.

Teague describes the Chain Smoker as “basically a smoky mezcal Manhattan augmented with Zucca, an Italian aperitif, which has a natural smoky flavor from the dried Chinese rhubarb that serves as its base ingredient.” He notes that “the bitters add a subtle citrus note as well as another layer of smoke,” which is what dominates the nose. Flamed twists have always struck me as being more about theater than flavor or aroma, but both Teague and Frederic Yarm swear the burnt oils are a factor here as well. Regardless, agave and grape on the sip give way to a dry finish with roaring fireplace vibes, suggesting that Hart Bochner’s Harry Ellis could serve it with the “nice aged brie” he mentions while clumsily hitting on McClane’s wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia):

The image above and those which follow all come from my Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Die Hard Collection DVD set:

It’s also available on Hulu and Prime Video with a subscription.

The late, great David Bordwell suggested in 2019 that Die Hard “changed ideas of just how well-wrought an action picture could be.” One way it did this was through the “ingenious ways” it finds to “let the audience’s eye go with you” in its widescreen format, which begins with the scene that immediately follows the image that begins this blog post: Holly’s boss Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi (James Shigeta), president of Nakatomi Trading, addresses the company holiday party, but with his back to the camera because we’re meant to follow Holly as she wends her way through the crowd from the elevator (in its first of many appearances) at the right side of the frame at the start of the shot:

To the hallway at the left, which is where Ellis ambushes her with his offer of old cheese and flames:

Bordwell also lauds Die Hard as “one of the great rack-focus movies,” and that technique makes an early appearance as well during a telephone call when Holly’s daughter Lucy (Taylor Fry) asks, “is Daddy coming home with you?”

“We’ll see what Santa and Mommy can do,” Holly replies. The maneuver is reversed after she hangs up:

And followed by a cut to a close-up of a family portrait upon which Holly takes out her frustration with her husband, who hasn’t communicated his travel plans to her, by slamming it down:

The photo will reappear nearly exactly one hour later, making it perhaps the most prominent example of what Bordwell calls “felicities” which mark Die Hard as a “hyperclassical film” that “spills out all these links and echoes in a fever of virtuosity.” But I’m getting ahead of myself! First McClane rides in a limo for the first time and is introduced to the holiday classic “Christmas in Hollis” by his driver Argyle (De’voreaux White), who being new to the job also doesn’t realize that it’s customary for passengers to sit in the back:

Upon arrival at Nakatomi Plaza he discovers that Holly has started going by her maiden name again when he looks her up on a computer system that may be so advanced that “if you have to take a leak, it will help you find your zipper,” but isn’t much of a consistent speller:

McClane joins a storied cinematic lineage with this reaction to a sip of “watered-down champagne”:

And is in Holly’s office “making fists with his toes” with his shoes off to dispel his jetlag per the advice of the “Babbit [sic] clone” (per the screenplay) he’s sitting next to in the film’s opening scenes when suddenly gunshots ring out. Grabbing his sidearm and rushing to the door, McClane ascertains that a hostage situation is underway:

Then takes advantage of the distraction afforded by a topless partygoer to escape into what according to James Mottram and David S. Cohen’s Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History production designer Jackson De Govia saw as the “steel jungle” of the not-yet-complete Nakatomi building’s stairwells, thus setting in motion what he calls “a survival drama in the context of architecture that’s under construction.” As criminal mastermind Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) carefully lays his plans, which include wiring the roof with plastic explosives so that he and the members of his team (all of whom, as Nick Guzan details in a terrific blog post ranking their wardrobes, “have distinctive roles, attitudes, and aesthetics”) can eventually fake their own deaths:

And convincing the FBI that he’s a terrorist by way of manipulating them into cutting the power to the building and automatically releasing the last, otherwise unbreakable, lock guarding the company’s vault:

McClane adapts to his new environment. He uses an elevator as a duck blind to scout his foes without being seen:

Hides in the cave-like vents that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Sets traps:

And successfully navigates a shootout through a conference table that De Govia chose for the way it “moves like a river”:

That altercation ends with McClane taking a bag of explosives off the body of one of his fallen adversaries while he identifies himself to Gruber over a walkie-talkie as “just the fly in the ointment, Hans, the monkey in the wrench.”

From this point forward they oppose each other more directly. First McClane retaliates against Gruber for firing a second anti-tank at an already disabled police vehicle just to make a point by strapping a bomb to a chair and dropping it down an elevator shaft, taking out two of Gruber’s men:

Then Gruber shoots Ellis, who not understanding what he’s up against, foolishly tries to convince McClane to turn himself in:

McClane meets Gruber face to face in a scene replete with unsettling canted angles when the latter goes to check on the explosives on the roof, but initially fails to recognize him when Gruber cleverly clocks a floor directory and pretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay:

Gruber also notices that McClane is shoeless and is able to hobble him by summoning his henchman Karl (Alexander Godunov) and ordering him to “shoot the glass”:

While McClane tends to some of the most painful-looking wounds in cinema history:

Gruber takes advantage of his absence to achieve his goal of gaining access to the $640 million worth of bearer bonds in Nakatomi Trading’s vault in a scene that Robynn J. Stilwell argues in a 1997 Music & Letters article “clearly constructs [him] as a sympathetic, heroic figure as aural and visual cinematic cues and narrative drive come together,” including the “rhythmic speech” of hacker Theo (Clarence Gilyard Jr.) building with the music toward a full-throated statement of Gruber’s Beethoven-based theme, a shot from a “low, powerful angle” of him rising “slowly, awestruck, to his feet, a little breeze ruffling his hair in the halo of the brilliant emergency light”:

Theo whispering “Merry Christmas” in another striking low-angle composition which dramatically sets him and his white sweater off against the pitch black of the rest of the frame:

And a euphoric tour of the vault’s contents that follows a shot of FBI agents Johnson (Robert Davi) and Johnson (Grand L. Bush) foolishly gloating that “those bastards are probably pissing their pants right now”:

Which makes sense when you remember that, as screenwriter Steven E. De Souza told Dan Frazier in an interview, “if you’re doing genre, the protagonist is the villain.” But while we may be “given every possible opportunity to read Hans as the hero of a caper film,” as Stilwell puts it, “classic Hollywood closure […] demands two things: that Hans die, and that Holly and John McClane are reconciled.” And so Die Hard doesn’t end here. Instead, McClane puts all the pieces together and heads back upstairs, where he battles Karl to the death, saves the hostages from being blown to smithereens, and leaps off the roof of Nakatomi Plaza:

Meanwhile, Gruber solves a puzzle himself when he discovers the picture we talked about earlier and finally figures out how a New York City cop came to be in position to interfere with his California heist:

“Mrs. McClane, how nice to make your acquaintance,” he says, setting the stage for a final showdown.

In his introduction to Mottram and Cohen’s book, director John McTiernan reveals that the inspiration for Die Hard came from a surprising source:

In this case, it was easy. It was right in Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of plays he called comedies. They weren’t funny ha-ha the way we mean it. They were fun. Basically, fun adventures. And I was pretty sure that one of them fit.

It was about a festival night on which something crazy happens–and for everybody involved, the world is turned upside down. The princes become asses, and the asses become princes, and in the morning the world is put back right and the lovers are reunited.

Now the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is way more complicated than that, but don’t look at that. Look at the totality. It was right there: Tell the story not of the cop and the terrorists but of the people who are part of the event. Let the audience sit back and watch the craziness as a whole. Let them enjoy it.

To Matt Zoller Seitz, writing on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary, this sense of fun is what makes the Die Hard great. Citing this shot of a S.W.A.T. team member pricking himself on a thorn as a particularly memorable example:

Zoller Seitz notes that “there’s a strain of satire coursing through the picture” and that “more often than not, what’s being made fun of is machismo itself.” He observes that “McClane is mostly spared this sort of scrutiny, but not always,” which to me is crucial to understanding its ending. First, there’s the specific manner of Gruber’s demise: he plumets to his death only after McClane unclasps a Rolex watch that Holly was given by her employer, which Roderick Heath describes as “a symbolic wedding ring to the new age of rootless money-worship” in a turn of phrase that reminds me of last month’s Drink & a Movie selection.

Afterward McClane spots the beat cop Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) who supported him throughout his ordeal across a crowded courtyard:

He introduces Holly as “my wife Holly . . . Holly Gennaro,” but she corrects him with a line that understandably rubs a lot of people the wrong way: “Holly McClane“:

In this moment they both clearly think they’ve changed, sure, but why should *we* believe it? After all, as Stilwell points out, “despite the ‘happy ending’ in this film, Holly is still not back ‘in her place’ in the sequels,” evidence perhaps that McClane has more John Wayne in him than Roy Rogers after all. Maybe, to paraphrase Puck’s final speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we should instead think but this, so all is mended, that we have but slumber’d here while these last few visions did appear. Certainly that would make Karl’s subsequent improbable reappearance easier to stomach!

So light ’em if you got ’em, or pour yourself another Chain Smoker if you don’t, and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

If you’ve been following this series from the start, it is no doubt obvious to you by now that when it comes to both drinks and movies, there’s nothing I prize more than thoughtful twists on familiar templates. I’ve been keeping one of my very favorites in reserve, but with fall in full swing it’s finally time to raise a glass to the Normandy Cocktail invented by novelist and famous tippler Kingsley Amis as a cheaper apple-based alternative to the classic Champagne Cocktail. As he says in his book Everyday Drinking, “Calvados is a few bob dearer than a three-star cognac, but the classiest cider is a fraction of the cost of the commonest champagne.” Amis originally penned those words in England in the early 1980s, and while they may not still be true today, his description of his creation as “a delicious concoction, deceptively mild in the mouth” absolutely is. Here’s how we make it using ingredients from closer to home:

2 ozs. Laird’s 10th Generation Apple Brandy
3 ozs. South Hill Cider’s Baldwin
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 tsp Demerara syrup

Stir the brandy, bitters, and syrup with ice and strain into a chilled champagne coupe. Add the sparkling cider and garnish with an apple slice.

The Normandy has an apple candy nose, but champagne flavors from the cider, which South Hill’s website accurately describes as “bone dry,” dominate on the way down. This includes toasty notes that I like a lot. The finish is all tart apple (“like a MacIntosh,” said my loving wife), though, reminding you what you’re drinking and of the season. The Cornelius Applejack I featured in my September, 2022 Drink & a Movie post is an even more local option for upstate New Yorkers, but I like the extra oomph you get from the higher ABV of the Laird’s; it does, however, result in a quite boozy cocktail that as Amis writes “tends to go down rather faster than its strength calls for,” so be careful lest you too end up with “heads in the soup when offering it as an apéritif”!

The movie I’m pairing it with also has an English provenance and is positively drenched in bubbly. Here’s a picture of my “Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc Collector’s Edition” DVD box set by Lions Gate which includes The Ring:

It is also streaming on Tubi and a variety of other free platforms, albeit not as many as I would have expected considering that it entered the public domain in the United States a few years ago.

Director Alfred Hitchcock famously referred to The Ring in François Truffaut’s book-length interview with him Hitchock/Truffaut as “the next Hitchcock picture” after The Lodger; as nearly everyone who writes about it inevitably notes, it’s also the only one in his long career that he ever directed from his own original screenplay (although most sources agree that his wife Alma Reville contributed to it as well). It begins with a series of images from a carnival that Christopher D. Morris characterizes as “a vertiginous multiplication of circles, of frantic and enforced gaity” in his book The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock that includes an opening close-up of a drum followed by a shot of children on a swing ride:

A point-of-view shot from the perspective of a woman on a gondola ride:

A grotesque extreme close-up of a barker’s mouth:

And two sadistic little boys throwing rotten eggs at a Black man in a dunk tank under the eye of a police officer that only becomes watchful when a higher, disapproving authority figure appears:

It becomes obvious in the very next scene that the fellow standing behind the two hooligans in the first image above, who we will eventually learn is named Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), is one of our main characters. He spots a woman through the crowd whom a title card identifies only as The Girl (Lillian Hall-Davis), but who a telegram will later reveal is named Mabel:

Alas for him, she’s romantically attached to her co-worker “One-Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), who takes on all comers with the promise that if they can last just a single round in the ring with him, they’ll win a pound:

In a scene that Raymond Durgnat praises in his book The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock for the way it “picks out the variety of types who make a crowd; none, in themselves, highly original or individual; but the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” a number of men either confidently step forward to fight Jack like this burly sailor:

Or reluctantly allow themselves be cajoled into do like this henpecked husband:

Corby appears to be a variation on that theme, given that he seemingly only throws his hat in the ring after Sander goads him into it when he spots him flirting with Mabel:

But we soon realize that he’s a different animal entirely from his fellow challengers through a device that Hitchcock (“winningly,” per Durgnat) sounds quite proud of when describing it to Truffaut: “at the end of the first round the barker took out the card indicating the round number, which was old and shabby, and they put up number two. It was brand-new! One-Round Jack was so good that they’d never got around to using it before!”

Much of the fight is shown from Mabel’s perspective, which means we don’t actually see much since she’s watching from her post at the ticket booth:

But we do cut to an interior medium long shot for its final moments:

Mabel is initially pretty displeased at the result. “We were hoping to get married, and now you’ve probably lost him his job!” she tells the victorious Corby and his companion (Forrester Harvey):

But is all soft-focus smiles when they reveal who they are:

When they return that evening to offer Sander a job as Corby’s sparring partner, the latter presents Mabel with an armlet, which Hitchcock cleverly portrays as being part of a single devil’s bargain:

A fortune teller (Clare Greet) sees the whole thing and tries to warn Mabel (to paraphrase Don Henley and Glenn Frey) not to draw the king of diamonds, girl, because the king of hearts is always her best bet, but Sander blunders in and declares, “that’s me. Diamonds–I’m going to make real money now.”

He remains oblivious through the armlet falling into a pond right in front of him when Mabel explains that because Corby purchased it with money he won from fighting Sander, “it was really you who gave it to me”:

And the boorish toast Corby makes after Sander and Mabel finally wed: “I think the prize at the booth should have been this charming bride; anyway, now he’s my sparring partner I shall take my revenge”:

But it isn’t until the film’s near-exact halfway point that he finally gets wise and acknowledges that, “it seems as though I shall have to fight for my wife, after all”:

This is followed by another montage technique that Hitchcock claims credit for inventing in his interview with Truffaut: “to show the progress of a prize fighter’s career, we showed large posters on the street, with his name on the bottom. We show different seasons–summer, autumn, winter–and the name is printed in bigger and bigger letters on each of the posters. I took great care to illustrate the changing seasons: blossoming trees for the spring, snow for the winter, and so on.”

Sander is by now plagued by surrealistic nightmare visions of adultery:

But nonetheless manages to win his next fight, securing him a title bout with Corby. Mabel isn’t there when he arrives home to celebrate, though. He pours champagne for his friends, who stare at it as intently as starving men ogling the first food they’ve seen in weeks:

But expecting her arrival any minute, he insists that they wait. “And so,” as Hitchcock tells Truffaut, “the champagne goes flat”:

Not content with merely wasting their contents, an enraged Sander finishes off the glasses themselves when Mabel finally gets home by throwing a framed photo of Corby at them:

She uses the photo as a shield after he rips her dress a few seconds later and flees:

Sander goes looking for Corby and upon finding him continues his vendetta against sparkling wine by way of rejecting a peace offering:

They basically decide to settle things in the ring, and that’s where most of rest of the film takes place. In his monograph on Hitchcock, Patrick McGilligan calls this sequence, which is set in Albert Hall, “a triumph of illusion, indebted to the recently invented Schüfftan process, first exploited by Fritz Lang in Metropolis, and which Hitchcock had brought home from Germany as his most valuable souvenir.” Per McGilligan, this technique allowed the director “to stage scenes in public places, without the expense (or permission) of actually filming there, by blending live action in the foreground against miniatures, photographs, or painted scenery.”

The fight is also noteworthy for Hitchcock’s documentarian eye for things like canvas preparation:

And a film crew getting ready to record it:

The judicious use of first-person shots to heighten the drama of big hits like this one:

And another bubbly being opened and dumped on Sander’s head to revive him ahead of the penultimate round:

At this point it looks like our hero is on his way to another loss, but the tide turns when Mabel discards the fur coat Corby gave her and goes to Sander before the final bell:

“I’m with you . . . in your corner,” she tells him. What’s interesting is how he becomes aware of her presence. Here’s how Michael Walker describes it in his book Hitchcock’s Motifs:

By now, Jack is too dazed to realise she is beside him, reassuring him that she’s back, but as he looks down at his pail of water, he sees her reflection. In fact, Hitchcock films this subjective image ambiguously: since Mabel’s image in the water dissolves into a reflection of Jack looking at himself, it is not certain that her reflection really is there or whether Jack has conjured it up from hearing her voice.

This is, perhaps, why the tender look Mabel and Sander exchange after he knocks Corby out doesn’t seem to presage a happily ever after.

As Walker says, “the connection between Mabel and water suggests her elusiveness: she becomes as difficult to hold on to as her reflection.” Of course, although we fade to black, this isn’t the movie’s final shot! Hitchcock instead chooses to end with Corby in his changing room. “Look what I found at the ring-side, Guv’nor,” says a member of his team, holding up the armlet he gave Mabel:

Corby contemplates it for a single beat:

Then flips it back to the person who found it and resumes adjusting his collar:

“It’s this lazy, sharp, sensible, apathetic gesture which, retrospectively, gives the film its asperity,” Durgnat says. “Since the affair didn’t matter much to him, it shouldn’t have mattered much to anybody.” Jack E. Cox’s fight cinematography is decades ahead of its time; ending a sports movie with an athlete utterly unconcerned about his defeat either literally in the ring or symbolically in the game of love would be a remarkable decision even today. Which also describes Kingsley Amis’s inspired substitution of apple spirits for grape ones in The Normandy and is the very definition of “timeless,” is it not?

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.