W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
DVD REVIEW ARCHIVE
CABOBLANCO (1980)
LASERLIGHT DVD (region 1)
d. J. Lee Thompson; pr. Lance Hool, Paul Joseph; scr. Mort Fine, Milton S. Gelman; ph. Alex Philips Jr.; m. Jerry Goldsmith; ed. Michael F. Anderson; cast. Charles Bronson, Dominique Sanda, Jason Robards Jr., Fernando Rey, Simon MacKorkindale, Gilbert Roland (87 mins)
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Charles Bronson as a Hero in the Mold of Casablanca's Humphrey Bogart
Throughout the 1980s, actor Charles Bronson made a number of intriguingly bleak thrillers with director J. Lee Thompson.
Taken together, these films – 10 to Midnight, The Evil That Men Do, Messenger of Death, Kinjite and Murphy’s Law – comprise a provocative and under-rated group of inter-related works, toying with the notion of what might be termed “reactionary nihilism”. Indeed, they effectively make the Bronson / Thompson partnership one of the more vibrant teams to work in the disreputable exploitation B-movie field, perhaps second only in the actor’s career to his films with director Michael Winner in the 1970s. Yet the association between Bronson and Thompson also began in the late 1970s when they teamed for several unusual films that toyed with Bronson’s persona as something other than the vigilante that had been cemented in Michael Winner’s Death Wish. These initial works – St. Ives and The White Buffalo – attracted little critical notice or popular success although they peaked in the unusual re-think of Casablanca that was the peculiar Caboblanco (or Cabo Blanco depending on the source). Indeed, this film was perhaps a self-conscious attempt to cast Bronson as a hero in the Humphrey Bogart mold, even though Bronson was a far more rough-hewn figure. As different as Caboblanco was for Bronson, the expensive film befuddled the studio and soon flopped when eventually released.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
Caboblanco is set in the Peruvian fishing community of the title circa 1949. Charles Bronson plays an ex-patriot American (wanted for murder we learn) who owns and operates a bar / hotel / club by the oceanfront.
A British scientific ship is in the bay, and Bronson knows that despite the claims of British man Simon MacCorkindale, they are looking for a particular shipwreck and what seems a precious cargo. The community’s richest man, an ex-Nazi (Jason Robards) now protected by the Peruvian government, also has an interest in locating this particular shipwreck, and resents MacCorkindale, especially when the Englishman is befriended by Bronson. One day a woman (Dominique Sanda) arrives, in search of her lost husband, an acquaintance of Bronson. Her coming was perhaps anticipated by Robards, who uses his power over the local police captain (Fernando Rey) to take her passport and thus effectively keep her there: a prisoner, like them in a sense. Slowly, Sanda develops a relationship with Bronson, who wants to protect her, and soon believes that her missing husband told Bronson the location of the shipwreck. She tells Robards that Bronson knows and soon Robards is intent to get Bronson to talk, even if it means tearing up the community looking for him, and possibly also betraying Sanda, who mistakenly thinks that she has entered into a binding partnership.
ALTERNATE COVERS
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Serene Surfaces hide Torrents of Raging Doubt Beneath
Despite its seemingly convoluted plot, Caboblanco is a surprisingly low-key and slowly paced, almost brooding film. It works initially as a study in the threat of resignation and the inability to fully transcend the past.
Both Bronson and Robards have come to the town in order to effectively hide from some aspect of their past, but find not flight but confrontation. They indeed seem to be awaiting this confrontation, hence the film’s dreaded sense of inevitability. They are also always outsiders, despite making their home there, fugitives from external justice. Although the film slyly implicates South American politicians in the aid and sanctuary given to fleeing Nazis following World War Two, its real point is that no-one can ever be truly free. These outsiders battle over money and riches, Robards set in his belief that such will buy him freedom and safe sanctuary. Bronson doubts that such riches will solve the problems of the moment, although he may be effectively just biding his time until the right moment to act. Their unstated yet sub-textually resonant hope for a kind of sanctuary and absolution is paralleled throughout the film. Sanda is thus a catalyst, the one spark that will lead to the confrontation between the two fugitives. Yet what remains intriguing about the film is its subtle implication of its characters’ fears, especially regarding the sinisterly elegant Robards, who dominates much of the film even when his character is off-screen.
The film is arguably about driven men who seek serenity and peace as a cover for their inwardly raging fears and doubts. This is especially true of Robards, an enigmatic man who apparently has everything money can buy, but still fears capture by Nazi hunters: though for guilt or fear of retribution alone?
He is surprisingly calm, metaphorically like the waters on this oceanfront community hiding tremendous currents below. The film thus achieves an enviable sense of mystery and uncertain motivations for its main characters despite their plot-level interest in the sunken ship. The film tantalizing hints at, but only partially reveals, what it is these people may be hiding and indeed what atrocities they may be capable of doing. This makes for an oddly disconcerting movie which is very much about what remains unsaid between these unknowable characters. The moral uncertainty effectively transforms the movie in its latter stages into a kind of film noir. Always melancholic in feel, it essays the inescapability of the past and the fearful levels of human uncertainty behind apparently calm veneers. Thus, the serene peace of the village becomes a raging tropical storm by the end, as the repressed doubts struggle for expression and resolution. In that sense, much of the film is about the horror of waiting, the dread faced by psychologically scarred men before the inevitable day of reckoning they both fear and seek.
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The Dark Rains of Human Desperation
The DVD’s visual transfer in widescreen letterbox is a disappointment, but serviceable enough to capture the film’s clever visual design. It is deliberately drab and desaturated in look, with an emphasis on the white-out of bright sunlight.
THEME MUSIC
BY
JERRY GOLDSMITH
When combined with director Thompson’s emphasis on hand-held camera work, it makes for an uneasy visual surface. Slowly the weather threatens and darkness encroaches, and by the end of the film the sunlit, breezy world has been transformed into a restrictive, shadowy and rain-swept realm of human desperation. This segue propels the film into deliberately murky textures. The source print used for the transfer is worn and littered with scratches. Reel-changes especially reveal a slightly different image quality resulting in an inconsistency in color balance and lighting tone: it is wavy and has frame edge definition problems. At times the picture quality seems too close to video grade. The contrast between sunlit exteriors and shadowy interiors remains forceful though. There is a vibrant use of a red background in a bar scene, but most colors are downplayed. The descent into stormy night correlates particularly well to the film’s theme of repressed fears erupting into tumultuous action, effectively making Robards rather than Bronson the focus of the movie. The DVD distributor logo appears and disappears regularly in the bottom right of the screen.
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Descending into Ambient Psychosis
The sound transfer is listed as Dolby Digital stereo feels like very much like a standard mono exercise from the early days of DVD technology and is thus flat and centered without much distinction. Backgrounds feel downplayed at first so that voices are clear but still numb.
The music, however, makes for one of veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith’s most unusual and effectively nostalgic and frequently melancholic scores, finely balancing the sunny climes and the descent into fear and psychosis that Robards struggles with. The sounds of the local community make for a nice background and there is an ironic sense of serenity through much of the film, balancing the subdued intensity of the characters. A sly sense of muzak makes for some humor. Ambient details are somewhat limited in this transfer, although there are many quiet scenes of voices and minor sounds wherein the quiet becomes not serene but ominous. Overall, the sound quality is somewhat more consistent than the visuals, evolving effectively as it is carried by the score even though at times it borders on the monotonous. The final storm is effective and the film makes a good, if clichéd perhaps, use of thunder and rain effects, in addition to its rather old-fashioned sense of design (deliberately evocative of post-World War Two films). Nevertheless, the storm makes for a vibrant contrast to the preceding illusory calm through much of the film.
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Special DVD Treats Accompanying a Genuine Oddment
Caboblanco is a genuine oddment in Bronson’s career and all the more rewarding for it.
However, it is perhaps more interesting stylistically and thematically than it is dramatically successful, although far more than the mere Casablanca rip-off that popular guides consider it to be. In the way of special features is a very brief introduction and concluding word by Tony Curtis, as well as an original preview for The Great Escape (but no preview for Caboblanco itself surprisingly enough). Also included is an episode of the television series United States Marshall guest-starring a pre-stardom Bronson. Although this slice of episodic television is a useful indication of Bronson’s early career, before he catapulted into stardom firstly in Europe and then in America, it seems rather arbitrary and almost irrelevant to Caboblanco. Sadly thus, there is little background information about the film’s unusual fate or of how it fits into the actor’s career as suggested in the extras: nor is there any indication of what the filmmakers expected of it. Although this DVD release is marketed as part of a series of Charles Bronson Special Editions, the haphazard extras indicate a lack of real research and even a sense of marketing desperation. Part of an early wave of such DVD releases, before there was much of a consensus on special features packages, it was released without region-coding and was available cheaply in many countries.
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AMAZON.COM DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Caboblanco
AMAZON.CO.UK DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Cabo Blanco [Video to DVD conversion] [1979]
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