Westworld (USA, 1973)
Directed by Michael Crichton
Starring Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Alan Oppenheimer

People always complain about film adaptations of books never living up to the source material, and yet when novelists turn to filmmaking the results are hardly extraordinary. The problem is often that novelists are so attentive to verbal content that they neglect the visual characteristics of great cinema. Stephen King's adaptation of The Shining may follow the original story more closely, but it isn't half as scary or discomforting as the Stanley Kubrick version.With Westworld, the task is made doubly difficult by the sheer number of genres involved. Michael Crichton's first film contains elements of pretty much every genre apart from rom-com, musical and gothic horror. It's an odd little number, shifting rapidly from western and action-adventure elements into conspiracy thriller territory, borrowing from horror as it goes along. While it never quite comes through with the goods in the way that we would like, it remains an interesting debut effort and a decent 1970s cult film.

The first thing in Westworld's favour is its achievements on a technical level. It was famously the first film to utilise pixelated graphics, showing certain short sections of the action from the androids' point of view. Original footage shot on celluloid was scanned into a computer and processed digitally, creating a blurred and distorted image which makes Yul Brynner's killings seem all the more merciless.The old-fashioned effects are pretty good as well. To create the effect of acid being thrown into Brynner's face, the production team mixed ground-up indigestion tablets into his make-up; when water was thrown at it, it would fizz to give the impression of skin being dissolved. The make-up and prop-making in general is impressive, particularly when it comes to the robots themselves. Brynner's face mask is very life-like, and seeing his charred body stagger into close-up without a face is quite creepy.Westworld's chief significance, however, is in its influence on subsequent thrillers. Crichton would rework the central premise of an elaborate amusement park gone wrong for Jurassic Park, one of Steven Spielberg's biggest and best blockbusters. Yul Brynner's Gunslinger was the Terminator of its day, with the same jerky, mechanical posture and relentless desire to kill. And there is some discussion about robots being indistinguishable from humans and being used as "sex models", subjects which would later be tackled in Blade Runner.

The various worlds of the Delos complex allow Westworld to dip in and out of various genres, picking and choosing as it sees fit. It only becomes a conspiracy thriller in its third act, with the duel between Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin becoming the driving force of the plot against a background of total chaos. In fact, one of the weaknesses of Westworld is that it dabbles a little too much. It gets so distracted by the various sub-plots - for instance, the knights duelling in Mediaeval World - that when all hell breaks loose, you don't feel quite so threatened by it.The film attempts to address a number of ideas which have become archetypal of low-budget 1970s cinema. Most obviously, it deals with the idea of a perfect machine going wrong, and by extension how mankind's increasing dependence upon technology will eventually come back to haunt them. But whereas Kubrick approached this idea from a conceptual or philosophical platform in both Dr. Strangelove and 2001, Crichton is more interested in the mechanics of such a rebellion. It is not so much a case of discussing morality as predicting the course of destruction that would occur, with Crichton steering closer to the work of Arthur C. Clarke in his matter-of-fact treatment of technology.

The Delos complex functions like the robots which populate it. On the surface it may appear incredibly sophisticated and refined, but it is ultimately a very fragile creature, reliant on constant input and highly sensitive to changes in its surroundings. Long sections of the film focus on the scientists surrounded by computer banks, endlessly checking temperatures and humidity levels, tweaking the system to respond to individual needs and weeding out any renegades. The repair sessions which take place at night resemble the A&E ward of a hospital, with doctors working against the clock just to maintain the status quo.Westworld also tackles the idea of mankind's nostalgia for the past. Like Deliverance a year earlier, its characters make the trip to experience an alternative to their carefully ordered, incredibly dull lives. There is the same desire to 'be at one with nature' or live in the past, while at the same time romanticising it. If, as Alfred Hitchcock said, drama is reality with all the dull bits cut out, then Westworld contains all that is fun and jolly about the American West without any of the drawbacks - disease, death, boredom or hard work.Within this there is also a comment about the compartmentalisation of violence, and the difference between the simulated world and the reality. Part of what attracts our heroes to Westworld is the ability to get away with murder on a daily basis. They can go around firing off guns without fear of getting killed or being thrown out; when Richard Benjamin is thrown in jail, it is merely the set-up for the jokey stunt that gets him out. Yet when things turn nasty and reality intervenes, Benjamin runs instead of confronting Brynner; even though the latter is still a robot, our hero cannot bring himself to practice what he has preached up until that point.

While all of these ideas are enticing, they are somewhat undercut by the film's execution. Crichton, for all his skill as a writer, is not a brilliant director, at least when it comes to sustaining and building tension. Because the film was shot using anamorphic lenses on MGM's sound stages, it looks a lot more professional than something equally ideas-driven like The Clonus Horror. But the tone remains uneven, so that even when it works really well you can't help wishing the whole film had been as good. This is exemplified by Fred Karlin's erratic soundtrack, which dithers between subtle underplay and energetic bursts in the manner of Bernard Hermann.The performances in Westworld vary from the intensely memorable to the completely forgettable. Brynner is great, sending up his role in The Magnificent Seven right down to wearing the same costume. He exudes menace and tenacity, and his delivery manages to sound stilted without tipping over into comedy. His co-stars, however, fare less well. James Brolin - father of Josh - is decent but has little in the way of character development, and Peter Morgan is not charismatic enough to carry the final section on his own. Without the Gunslinger constantly hunting him, the film would fall completely flat.Westworld is an entertaining and insightful film hamstrung only by its uneven execution. Its campy visual style may have dated, and it isn't constructed half as consistently as many would have liked. But when it does pull itself together, it meets all the requirements of a decent 90-minute thriller, giving us enough in the way of both ideas and suspense to sustain our attention. A decent start to Crichton's career in film, which would culminate twenty years later.

Rating:
Verdict: Uneven but influential

Deliverance (USA, 1972)
Directed by John Boorman
Starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox

Every so often a film's image in popular culture is defined by a moment completely out of character with the film as a whole. One could argue that this is true for the ending of The Wicker Man, or the lengthy fight sequence in They Live. But there can be no better example of this than Deliverance, whose five minutes of light-hearted duelling banjos masks a gruelling, harrowing and edgy thriller that will haunt you for days on end.In another director's hands, James Dickey's novel about four wannabe "city boy" adventurers could have ended up as a very simple, nuts-and-bolts exploitation film: a clash of civilised and savages, townies versus hicks, and the last man standing wins. But in what remains his best film, John Boorman manages to take this limited narrative and turn it into both a frightening voyage of discovery and one of the best environmental films ever made.

Deliverance draws on a recurring theme in Boorman's work of man versus nature, or more precisely the unquantifiable power of the natural world compared to the humans who attempt to dominate it. In his later career, Boorman would make these kinds of points a lot more heavy-handedly: the sheer quantity of tree-hugging in The Emerald Forest makes Terrence Malick look like a gun-toting industrialist. Here, however, there is a very good balance between the film's political message and the drama of the characters through which such a message is communicated.As the film begins, we are introduced to our four modern men - modern in the sense that they live over and above the landscape and are imposing their authority on it even by the act of going on the river. The local hicks warn the men that what they are doing is stupid, but they dismiss such comments as superstitious crazy talk and stick rigidly to their plans. The car journey to the river is intercut with scenes of bulldozers ferrying rock from a quarry and huge cliff walls being dynamited, as if every action of Man against his habitat is one of exploitation or destruction. They even invoke the great explorers of old having just safely barrelled through the rapids.

But although these men come from the same stock, we are slowly but surely introduced to little fissures in the group. Burt Reynolds' character seems to be more 'at one with nature' than the others, and feels genuinely sorry that the river will be flooded while the others are just there for the fun. Dru, played by Ronny Cox, is the most naïve and childlike of the four, bringing his guitar everywhere and spending the opening act riding through rapids with no life jacket and a beaming grin. Ned Beatty is overly cautious, being the most out of shape and reluctant to be ordered around, and Jon Voight has some pretentions towards being like Reynolds but is ultimately out of his depth; he carries a bow, but gets the shakes whenever he tries to use it.Aside from a direct warning against exploiting one's surroundings, there is a more subtle thread in Deliverance about the character of modern Man and how He is more or less incapable of returning to 'the old way of life'. All four men, even Reynolds, are at heart white-collar workers, who feel at home in their busy offices with paper and coffee, or in their large homes with loving wives. Their affection for nature is entirely playful, since none of them would choose to give up what they have to live like a hunter-gatherer. They enjoy pretending to be wild when in fact they are nothing of the sort, and as long as their journey is filled with beauty and adrenaline, their experience of 'nature' fits in with their worldview.But, as the darker, less merciful side of nature begins to rear its ugly head, these men quickly become overwhelmed by their surroundings, and we understand just how little they really know. If Reynolds et al are an expression of Man's desire for dominance of nature, mitigated by a faux fondness of its beauty, then the hicks or in-breds are a manifestation of nature itself: uncompromising, ruthless, set in its ways and not so much of a pushover. The crucial mistake of the gang is not being among nature of itself: their mistake is assuming that they are in control.The famous rape scene, in which Ned Beatty is made to "squeal like a pig", is an ironic role reversal based upon one of the film's opening lines. Over some long aerial shots of the river, Reynolds remarks that in building the dam, people are "raping" the river and the surrounding countryside - and here we have nature raping man, not in self-defence or out of vindictiveness, but because that's the way it has always been. Boorman shoots these sequences very sensitively; his camera does not revel in Beatty's humiliation, with a clever combination of wide shots and close-ups on his face doing more than enough to terrify us.Had Boorman not set up the themes of the story, and brought them out of the woodwork so accessibly (no pun intended), scenes like this would appear gratuitous or exploitative. But just like the ending of The Wicker Man, the brutality of Deliverance is justified because it vividly conveys the themes and ideas of the film. Scenes like this demonstrate that, under the right circumstances, visceral, gut-wrenching horror can say as much about a subject as a dozen boring conversations. As with The Wicker Man or Alien after it, the violence in Deliverance instinctively shocks but remains with you until its symbolic significance becomes clear.Those who are unconvinced by this need only look at a scene just before the rape sequence, in which Jon Voight is crouched behind a tree trying to shoot a deer. There is nothing tense or threatening about his situation, save for the small matter of finding breakfast. But even so, he hesitates, his hand shudders and the arrow flies off into the trees causing the deer to flee. The set-up is the same as before: Man assumes he is in control, attempts to enact that control, and finds that he can't.Deliverance is also a very well-directed piece of work and a lesson in great low-budget filmmaking. Although the film looks rough and ready in places, it also has a great drained-out beauty to it. This is achieved through Vilmos Zsigmund's trademark use of 'pre-fogging', in which the celluloid is partially exposed before shooting to create a muted colour palette. Because the budget was so low (around $2m), all the stunts are real, right down to Ronny Cox tumbling head-first into the rapids. Boorman's camerawork is inventive and precise, following the men above and below the water as they struggle to the surface and fight for breath.

Deliverance is also notable for its limited use of music. Aside from its duelling banjos at the start, there isn't really any soundtrack to speak of. The film is comparable with Get Carter, which introduces its jazzy theme in the opening minutes and then fleetingly revisits it at key moments to add tension or terror. The little banjo touches as the survivors float around the river are few and far between, and every time they pop up our eyes dart frantically to the trees, searching for further enemies who might spring out at any moment. Like any great Western, Deliverance knows how to use the stillness of the landscape to create tension, and its use of background noise like water rushing or birdsong will shred your nerves to breaking point.Deliverance is a great film with exceptional performances from its cast: Voight is every bit as good as he was in Midnight Cowboy, and Reynolds has never better, carrying himself in several scenes like a young Marlon Brando. It also remains Boorman's best film, being more substantial than Point Blank or Hell in the Pacific but also much less indulgent than his later works. Like Get Carter it isn't quite flawless, as things take a while to get going and still feels rough around the edges. But that's a small price to pay for a top-notch thriller which is intensely terrifying and terrifyingly intense.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: An endlessly tense environmental thriller