Studies in Film Genre
While other countries have genre cinema, no country has been central to so many genres as the US. There may be the Indian musical, the French policier and Mexican melodramas, but the Americans do them all: gangster films, musicals, westerns, horrors, melodramas and numerous forms of comedy. Halloween, The Wild Bunch, Good Fellas and This Is Spinal Tap are all fine examples of their respective genres, and by looking at scenes from each, we hope to justify why this is so.
There have long been horror films using point of view, and who can forget Norman Bates peering through his peephole at Marion in Psycho? And whole films have tried to tell the story from the exclusive perspective of the hero, like Lady in the Lake. But Halloween balances Hitchcock’s occasional and careful use of the POV with Robert Montgomery’s indiscriminate adoption that turned it into a gimmick. John Carpenter uses it frequently, but not exclusively, and very effectively offers it in the film’s opening sequence. Initially, the scene doesn’t quite indicate this is a point-of-view shot, but there is, in the prowling, voyeuristic camera, a feeling that this is someone’s perspective, as the camera passes through the garden and into the house. Then we see an arm just out of the frame reaching for a knife. We then see a shadow against the wall, and the figure then puts on a mask that creates a partial view in the camera, before a young half-naked woman, sitting, combing her hair in front of the mirror, turns and looks at the camera/character and offers an admonishing “Michael”, as she covers herself up a second before Michael knifes her.
Halloween was a seminal film, for several reasons. Firstly, it made money. It cost around $300,000, and Kim Newman noted that “this modestly budgeted quickie went on to earn $18,500,000 in the domestic market alone, becoming one of the most successful independent films of the 1970s.” (Nightmare Movies) It also created the archetypal ‘Final Girl’, Carol Clover’s term to describe a damsel in distress who fights back and survives, even if not always relying on her own acumen. Clover says its presence first became paramount in 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and reckons alongside other critics and commentators that “given the drift in just the four years between Texas Chain Saw and Halloween – from passive to active defence – it is no surprise that the films following Halloween present Final Girls who not only fight back but do with ferocity and even kill the killer on their own, without help from outside.” In Halloween, Laurie does get help from elsewhere: it is Michael’s psychiatrist who has earlier judged him pure evil, who takes him out with a gun. But if the slasher movie was seen as a misogynistic genre, Clover insisted that it could nevertheless suggest a gender complexity greater than the woman-hating it might seem to imply. As Clover lists various post-Halloween films and Final Girls, she says that “The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine she is not fully feminine – not, in any case, feminine in the way of her friends.” (Men, Women and Chainsaws)
The slasher film doesn’t only present predictable misogyny, Clover reckoned, but also unpredictable sexual categories, as the sub-genre modestly redefines gender expectations. The film also helped redefine horror as a particular gaze. Horror, from Rosemary’s Baby to Last House on the Left, Psycho to Night of the Living Dead, offered an account of events that were more victim-focused, as the camera would only occasionally implicate us in the slaughter. Even a sadistic auteur like Brian De Palma usually exercised his gift for cinematic omniscience, rather than putting us in the perpetrator’s field of vision. He enjoyed, in films before (Carrie) and after Halloween (Dressed to Kill), leaving the viewer aware of the impending without narrowing it down to the specifics of one perspective. The difference between Carpenter’s film and a De Palma one rests on the mode of manipulation, with De Palma offering the viewer’s angle and Carpenter the perpetrator’s gaze. There may be plenty of point-of-view shots in De Palma’s work, as we get a strong sense of central character Angie Dickinson’s perspective as she is killed off in Dressed to Kill, for example, but we also have split-screen, split lenses, and crane shots to dilute any subjectivity. De Palma is a stylist who wants to remind the viewer who is boss. His approach may be sadistic, but it isn’t quite implicative. Carpenter proposes that the gaze we adopt may be the killer’s view we haven’t yet comprehended. When the camera follows central character Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) along the wide suburban streets, is this the film, or Michael Myers’ angle? Carpenter, perhaps more than any filmmaker before him, plays on this conflation.
Here we have a low budget film that made a fortune and allowed the slasher movie to become a big box-office hit. It also suggested that viewers wanted to see young women killed on screen, which indicated a new level of misogyny, at a time when feminism had made inroads into patriarchal culture. But, according to Clover, this was only half the representational story. The other half proposed that this was an exemplification of feminism in the Final Girl having a high degree of autonomy, and where she wasn’t a victim. Add to this a camera that created an ambiguous relationship between camera and killer, and we can understand Halloween’s importance. It might not be as great a horror film as Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, The Wicker Man, Jaws, and The Shining, and remains pulpier and shallower than these other works, as it can seem little more than a brilliant exercise in audience manipulation. But to deny its effectiveness is to miss much that makes horror a wonderful cinematic genre. People will jump out of their seats watching the film as they wouldn’t reading the same thing in book form. The shallowness Carpenter accepts, as the characters are thinly drawn and the environment suburban and benign, all the better to bring out the threat from one source, allows Carpenter to offer something that can feel like pure cinema, unadulterated by the features we might expect from the other arts. “Halloween was an assignment. Some killer stalking babysitters is all it was,” Carpenter believed. He also reckoned, “Horror is a reaction; it’s not a genre.”(Interview Magazine)
To damn Halloween with faint praise would still be giving it more credit than Carpenter, though we might play on the pun and acknowledge horror is a genre that can invoke so visceral a response that people do faint. When Adam White looked at thirteen films that made people pass out, more than half of them were horrors, including Psycho, The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project. “Any good horror director will want their audiences gasping in their seats. Or covering their eyes. Screaming, even. What no one is aiming for, though, is full body collapse.” (Independent) But they are surely a lot closer to seeking this response than a director of a western.
Which leads us to Sam Peckinpah. If any director of westerns were going to induce such a response in the viewer, it would be the “bloody balladeer.” Before Peckinpah, in American westerns characters fell over dead; in Peckinpah’s work they smashed through windows, and fell, punctured off horses. They also danced to the tune of a gatling gun, as their bodies jerkily responded to being riddled with bullet holes. The apparently cleanest of ethical genres became a moral morass, with characters possessing the worst of motives, or the most ambivalent of feelings, often caught in conflicts that leave no one able to explore the better side of their nature. In The Wild Bunch, Deke Thornton is hired by the authorities to go after his former friend and partner in crime, Pike Bishop. Times have changed; law-abiding has replaced gun-slinging, and Pike and co. still act like they are in the 19th century and not the 20th. This is 1913, and while robber barons were still in existence and gangsters were about to become prominent, robbers and gunmen were becoming obsolete.
Is Deke the smart guy who realises Bishop and his gang are living in the past, and soon to die in the present, or a treacherous figure letting his friend down? Peckinpah says he can be both, and more besides. Thornton might appear to be on the side of the law, but the values of the bounty hunters he works with, and the corrupt railroad agent he works for, leave him more aligned with the old gang, where he can still see a hint of honour among thieves.
None of this is clear in the film’s lengthy opening scene, where the gang rob a railroad office: it is vividly logistical, but not at all narrational. The gang enter the town, some men on the roof have them marked, and we’re informed that the men on the roof won’t start firing until the gang exit the building. While the robbery takes place, we also have cuts to a temperance union meeting, as Peckinpah lays out the law and lawlessness of the land. There are the robbers and staff in the office, the men who may or may not be lawful on the roof, and the righteous who start singing and playing in the name of God. What interests Peckinpah in this scene isn’t laying out the plot, but insisting we comprehend the complexity of the situation from a social standpoint. This is 20th-century America still with aspects of a 19th-century mindset. Peckinpah looks at what happens when these worlds collide, and makes it literally explosive because that is what he does so well. He offers the chaos of compression as the outlaw meets the urban, the horse meets the car, the pistol and rifle meet the weaponry of the modern era. The western never really concerned itself with firepower, even if the gun was the central component of the genre. What mattered was how you used that weapon (the fastest draw in the west), and the dignity and honour that accompanied its use. In this opening scene, the director shows that there is no such thing as a clean bullet; only a dirty skirmish. The good guys aren’t so good, the bad guys are pretty bad, and the righteous are caught in the middle, as several of them are gunned down in the melee.
Partly what makes The Wild Bunch interesting generically is its formal newness. Peckinpah gives the western a form that isn’t predicated on the binary, but on the triangular. Usually, the western has the heroic, the villainous and the bystanders. The latter are frequently passive, as they hope for the hero to take out the villain; even if occasionally a small group may band together to fight off the bad guys (Stagecoach; Rio Bravo), the emphasis is usually on the importance of a single gunslinger (Shane; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), who can save the community against lawless individuals or gangs. Our purpose, however, isn’t to make broad generalisations about the western; only to note that Peckinpah wished to muddy the genre by making it clear that the wider community were no longer looking on, but often caught between rival factions. This gives to the opening sequence its complexity and its horror, and allows the form to become based on montage over vistas, over quick cutting rather than languorous action. Before Peckinpah, the western could hardly be called Eisensteinian: Soviet montage would have had no place. Yet Stephen Prince rightly invokes Eisenstein when looking at Peckinpah’s action sequences. He might insist that the Russian director is a lesser influence than Akira Kurosawa, but The Wild Bunch opening resembles Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, perhaps more than anything to be found in the Japanese filmmaker’s oeuvre. Sure, Prince says, “The Odessa Steps massacre in Potemkin, for example, features a complex orchestration of graphic, volumetric, kinetic, and temporal elements in a design whose intricacy surpasses the narrower range of manipulations Peckinpah carried out in his montages”(Screening Violence). But the emphasis on chaos through montage is similar. Peckinpah isn’t interested in who is winning the fight, but how many are getting killed in the process. One watches the sequence less by following lives than by witnessing a litany of death, as the director constantly cuts to people falling off roofs, crashing through windows, or getting shot in the back. We see the influence of Eisenstein in the repetition of shots in a crosscut. When a rider falls through a window after getting shot, Peckinpah cuts back and forth to the moment where another man falls off his horse in the street. At the end of these shots, he match-cuts as the two men tumble. In one image, the camera spins as a point-of-view shot shows a rider falling off his horse after being hit. At other moments, Peckinpah cuts away from the action to show kids looking on, less like the typical western bystanders, wondering if their hero will win out, than wondering what humans are capable of when given guns.
These are kids cowering from the mayhem rather than rooting for a cause. They are more worried about lives as collateral damage than who is winning or losing. Peckinpah knows, too, that animals were harmed in the making of the West, and cuts to their demise almost as readily as that of the humans. Roland Barthes would talk about the reality effect in literature, saying Flaubert shows objects that are “neither incongruous nor significant.” It would be a stretch to say that Peckinpah’s cutaways meet such terms, but they offer a reality effect of sorts to a genre that never much focused on collateral damage. Using Eisenstein and Kurosawa, he indicates that when you have the dying rule of the gun meeting the burgeoning rule of the law, and when you have greed, callousness and disregard for human life, this is what it will look like. That is a reality effect, alright, and Peckinpah did more than most to move the Western from its classical period to its modern revisionist one, as Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, and Ulzana’s Raid were all made in its immediate aftermath. Critics often saw in these films allegory: Brian Hannan says of Soldier Blue, “it was initially viewed as an allegory of Vietnam, specifically the My Lai Massacre of 1968. (The Magnificent 60s) Similar remarks were made about Little Big Man. “At the time much was made of the parallel between the murderous attack on the Cheyenne on the River Washita and the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. (NativeAmerica) Yet by invoking ‘L’effet de reel’, we see that it isn’t chiefly that The Wild Bunch and others were allegories of Vietnam, but that they possessed an interest in the specifics of violence that was part of fighting, and that classic Hollywood westerns had eschewed. These revisionist westerns (as they were called) insisted on acknowledging the brutality, and this coincided with what viewers were seeing on their TV screens, as the Vietnam War became known as the ‘Living Room War’.
It could be argued that Goodfellas de-realised the gangster film as The Wild Bunch revised the western, with Martin Scorsese making play of what The Godfather had viewed with great sombreness. Yet this would be to misconstrue the director’s intentions, and to turn him into Quentin Tarantino, who turned the revisionism of Peckinpah and co inside out, and saw film action as movie entertainment, self-reflexively acknowledged. Scorsese’s film could be seen as part of that contribution, because one is likely to find some of the violence in the film horrifyingly funny. But if we put these two words together, it isn’t simply to use an intensifier redundantly, but to capture the complexity of affect Scorsese seeks. If viewers wish to see humour over horror, then that would probably say more about the post-modern moment Scorsese was caught within, and that Tarantino often brilliantly exploited, no matter the ethical baby that got thrown out with the sincere bathwater. Scorsese wants us to recognise the ambivalences of gangster life and the ambivalences involved in viewing a film about characters who are funny within their milieu, but where the environment would be horrifying for anyone who happened to wander into it. Goodfellas may have “anticipated the grisly blood-splattered dark comedy of Quentin Tarantino” (‘How Goodfellas Anticipated The Dark Comedy of The Tarantino Era’), as Nathan Rabin noted. But while Tarantino saw his characters as movie figures, riffing on other films, Scorsese wondered how one could capture the sort of gangsters he would have been aware of growing up with in Little Italy: people who could be hilarious from a certain perspective, but terrifying from another; and capable of shifting between the two. As the director insisted, “Some people don’t understand violence, because they come from cultures, or actually subcultures, from which it’s very distant. But I grew up in a place where it was a part of life, and where it was very close to me.” (Observer)
Where exactly does the humour reside in the scene from Goodfellas when the crazed Joey is having a laugh at central character Henry Hill’s expense? Whatever humour there is seems underpinned by a threat of violence that is far greater, as if humour is a flimsy attempt by this New York gangster culture to suggest community in a world where everyone is out for themselves. In this sequence, Hill tells a story about getting beaten up by a cop after the cop tries to get a confession out of him, and Joey won’t tell him anything. The cop keeps at him, and eventually Joey says he has something to offer: why doesn’t the cop go and fuck his mother? The cop beats him around the head; Joey is unconscious. He comes around, and the cop asks if tough guy Joey has anything to tell him. Joey acts surprised that he is there: didn’t he tell him earlier to go away and fuck his mother. Joey tells it at a bar with Hill and a handful of others round the table, and Henry can’t stop laughing, telling Joey he is really funny. “Funny how?” Joey says – taking it less as a compliment than a slight. Hill tries to explain, all the while aware that this isn’t a simple point of semantic disagreement, but the sort of dispute that could end with him in a body bag. Joey wonders if Henry is taking him for a clown, that Henry sees him as a source of amusement, and others look on with the occasional interruption. They have been here before, no doubt, and aware that Joey is the loosest of cannons on the lookout for fodder.
Henry is a relatively new member of the gang, and doesn’t quite know how to take Joey. But the impression is that one can never know because Joey isn’t inclined to consistency. Later in the film, he will blow a waiter’s foot half off after the man fails to bring him a drink. Joey, exasperated by the bloke’s mumbling excuses, pulls out his gun, and off it goes. If most people would tell the waiter it isn’t a problem, and very few would tell him to shut up and quickly get him a drink, Joey is in that luckily very small category, one that reckons disrespect and failure should be met by the most corrective of measures. Henry has reason to be worried, even if on this occasion Joey is having him on. When Joey says he is just having a laugh, everyone joins in, but this is far from easy laughter; it contains the unease of an environment where a sense of humour is useful, but a sense of self-preservation far more useful still.
It is perhaps central to gangster humour: the sort of joke that in other environments would be mirthlessly received becomes hilarious as the flunkies know what matters isn’t how funny the joke is, but how funny the gangster teller must perceive himself to be. If love and hate are famously deemed close cousins, Scorsese suggests that humour and violence are closer relatives still, and no film more than GoodFellas brought out this relationship. Others, like The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, The Untouchables, American Gangster and Carlito’s Way, emphasised the sobriety of the action, and though Brian De Palma’s Scarface had some funny moments, these weren’t because of how the characters interacted with each other; it was how the viewer couldn’t help but find amusing the excesses of Al Pacino’s gangster, with his broad accent spitting out expletives while he snorts Snowdonian amounts of cocaine. It is, if you like, non-diegetic humour, with the characters unaware of how funny they are to the audience. Pacino could say what Joey says to Hill: funny how, as he proves amusing to us as viewers, though he is no source of amusement to those in his vicinity.
Yet anybody who watches Goodfellas for a laugh is making a category error, a bit like going to a romantic comedy and expecting to spend half the movie in tears. You got to a romantic comedy for romance. If you find yourself having a bit of a cry along the way, that is sometimes all to the good. But if you want the lachrymose, we have the weepie for that: Stella Dallas, Now Voyager, Imitation of Life and Terms of Endearment. Genres often demand of us mixed emotions, but if we prioritise one over another, to the detriment of the film’s emphasis, we may have made that category error. It isn’t quite like wondering where the spaceship is in a western (Star Wars resolves that), but if genres usually have a primary affect, we should be wary of confusing one for another. A comedy expects us to laugh, a tearjerker to cry, a romantic comedy to blend the fuzzy with the funny, and a horror to make us jump. Goodfellas takes the horrifying aspects of the gangster film (the horse’s head on the bed in The Godfather; Capone wielding a baseball bat in The Untouchables; the numerous brutalities of Once Upon a Time in America), and makes them terrifyingly funny. But this isn’t to lessen the power of the violence (as Tarantino’s postmodern ironies risk), but to give a new twist to the banalities of evil. They are banal to the gang, which is why they think nothing of getting a slap-up meal from Joey’s mum after a hard night’s work of beating someone to death, and before burying him. While Henry is still the relatively new kid who can’t quite enjoy meatballs after murder, Joey can casually say he needs to borrow one of his mum’s kitchen knives (to carve up the body), and fellow gangster Conway says, when Joey’s mum shows them a painting with a man and two dogs, that the guy looks a lot like someone they know. It is the man they have just murdered. Joey’s mum is oblivious, but the lads laugh heartily. It might be a little at her expense, but nothing like the cost the dead man has paid for offering the wrong tone earlier in the bar.
What Scorsese seems to be getting is that central to the gangster world is that tone, and getting it wrong can leave you kicked to death on the floor, or having your toe blown off. The humour for the viewer often resides in disbelief, in a shocked laugh that can’t quite comprehend the level of violence given the apparent innocuousness of a given deed. Yet Scorsese captures well the nerve centre of the gangster, someone who is constantly threatened by law and lawlessness, by the authorities who will want to lock him up, and rivals who will want to beat him up – or worse.
Funny how isn’t a comedic genre question a film usually falls into (satire, black comedy, etc.) but a level of dehumanisation where murder can be a bit of a laugh. This is so in Tarantino as well, but he perhaps involves the viewer a little too much in that dehumanisation, as if the laughs are just a bit too easy. In Goodfellas they remain uneasy.
Our last example is undeniably a comedy, but the viewer could watch chunks of This Is Spinal Tap wondering if it happens to be a documentary about a competent but hopelessly un-self-aware heavy metal band. If someone laughs too hard watching Goodfellas, they might lack a sense of humanity; failing to laugh watching This Is Spinal Tap, they may lack a sense of humour. Director Rob Reiner plays it straight, but the laughter is lateral. The humour isn’t head-on. It is obliquely registered. One of the characters has an amp that goes up to eleven. The documentary maker, Marty DiBergi (played by Reiner himself, and inspired a little by Scorsese in The Last Waltz), says, why didn’t he just have ten numbers on the knob, and make ten the highest. Nigel Tufnell replies that is the thing; his goes up to eleven. Elsewhere, the band can’t understand why their new album cover showing a woman on all fours, led by a man holding a leash, might be problematic. It may rest partly on Nigel struggling to discern the difference between the words sexy and sexist.
There is a chance the film, flirting with the characters’ potential stupidity, risks being patronising. But Reiner shows the band members aren’t without talent, and he doesn’t simply mock their predicaments. They can play their instruments, and they can sing, partly why it takes the viewer a moment to see this is a comedy. The rivalry between the two main band members, Tufnell and David St Hubbins, feels real enough to echo numerous bands’ bust-ups (Lennon McCartney; Jagger, Richards; Ray and Dave Davies), while the songs are lyrically impressive no matter how ridiculous. “My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo/I’d like to sink her with my flesh torpedo.” The words don’t sound very different to many a rock song, and the behaviour of the band members clearly isn’t so very different from many a musician’s. As Reiner says, “I’ve been approached by so many different musicians over the years who say, “That happened to me,” or have a moment like that. Sting once told me, “‘I watched this movie many times. Every time I watch it, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Because they do see themselves in it.” (BFI)
This implies the film gets the balance right between sympathy and mockery, stupidity and ability, observation and condescension. Well aware of making the film about the unaware, yet it insists obliviousness needn’t be the same as stupidity, especially when the band in other ways can be astute about their own failings, and their often terrible reviews. Going through the history of their albums and the critical response, Marti quotes one saying, “They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality.” The band regards this as nitpicking. They can take criticism, but that doesn’t mean they won’t also half-ignore it. How can they not when they have to get up on the stage and perform to the people who do like their music, even if it becomes an ever-dwindling number as the film follows them on an American tour?
There are numerous scenes that pass for set-pieces in the film (a moment when one band member is caught in plastic shells that won’t open and needs assistance to blowtorch him out; another where they can’t find their way to the stage). But perhaps the funniest is the Stonehenge sequence. The band arrange for a replica of the famous stones to be made, and because Nigel screws up on the dimensions, the designer provides them with one that is about knee-height. They wanted eighteen feet, but Nigel marked down eighteen inches. It is too late to change it, so the manager goes ahead anyway. Cut to the scene as the band strikes up, dressed in their druid costumes. A few moments later, the stone is lowered to the stage, looking like the sign of pi, and the band members look on in disbelief, still playing. A couple of dwarves arrive on the stage to dance around what should have been a huge monument, and instead almost kick the thing over. Comedy has always played on scale, often in comedic duos where there is a larger figure and a skinnier one, exemplified by Laurel and Hardy. But sometimes too when a smaller figure beats bigger opposition or greater forces, and can seem like dribbling footballers going through a hapless defence. Both Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin used their diminutive size in often comedic ways. Part of the humour in Chaplin rests in his shuffling short legs. Others, like Jacques Tati or John Cleese, emphasise their height, and none more so than Cleese when he does his Ministry of Silly Walks. In this moment in This Is Spinal Tap, it is a dimensional catastrophe, a moment when the band thinks big but, because of their incompetence, arrives at the hilariously small. Afterwards, David attacks the manager, and he says it isn’t his fault that Nigel can’t distinguish between feet and inches. David says the manager isn’t as confused as Nigel, with Nigel sitting, looking, well, confused. It turns into a full bust-up between David and the manager, the manager resigns, and David’s girlfriend, guided by astrology charts, takes over.
Many comedies risk set-piece skittishness, as they chase funny moments and lose narrative momentum. Bananas, Airplane, Top Secret, and others often have great scenes but not a great sense of cohesion. One reason why This Is Spinal Tap plays like a documentary of an actual band, rather than a spoof of the genre, rests on giving momentum to the comedic moment. The Stonehenge sequence could have been a stand-alone scene, but it makes sense that it is predicated on Nigel’s fuzzy thinking (it wouldn’t have been half as funny if David had screwed up), and leads to the argument between David and the manager, and David’s girlfriend, Jeanine, taking over. This leads to further mishaps and creates even more tension between David and Nigel – childhood friends who now have this woman between them, not just as David’s squeeze, but also as their boss. The film makes us believe in the men’s friendship, and also conveys well the girlfriend’s ambitions. As the manager leaves, after David suggests he shares the job with Jeanine, he says there is no way he wants to work with an Australian’s nightmare, a reference presumably to Olivia Newton-John, whose style Jeanine’s here resembles. It is a pointed reference to the clothing, but one could watch the film purely for its sartorial detail, and find it funny. Whether it is Nigel’s range of T-shirts, tight trousers and absurd sleeveless tops, or David’s turned up jacket sleeves and the tousled hair, or both Nigel and David with herpes sores on their lips, this is observational comedy at its best.
The term world-building is often used in the context of fantasy and science fiction, but few comedies world-build better than This Is Spinal Tap, as the laugh-out-loud set-piece gives way to the gentle chuckle, and moves back and forth between them, while retaining the notion that this is a real band, modestly talented and likeable people who can generate a good laugh, but whom Reiner never quite allows to be reduced to the butt of humour. It is a fine line between comedic generosity and cruelty, rather like a line from the film: “There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” If the people were deemed too stupid, and the audience too clever, that line would have been crossed and the humour too brutal. Reiner refuses to cross it, and the film remains as human as it is funny, just as Goodfellas remains funny because it shows the depravity of the inhuman. Just as The Wild Bunch can sometimes seem as brutal as Halloween, so Goodfellas can sometimes seem as funny as This Is Spinal Tap. Yet to understand the genre-specificity of each film is to understand the primary emotion elicited.
© Tony McKibbin