{"id":19510,"date":"2023-01-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=19510"},"modified":"2023-01-15T20:54:17","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T04:54:17","slug":"the-journeys-of-john-boorman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-journeys-of-john-boorman\/","title":{"rendered":"The Journeys of John Boorman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A disembodied head appears in the corner of the frame. It is strangely attired, with a bright blue headdress and painted-on facial hair, and as it bobs around the screen it drops hints about what kind of story is about to unspool, putting the viewer on high alert that something bizarre is afoot and they are taking a trip unlike any they\u2019ve been on before. This is the opening of Zardoz<\/em>, John Boorman\u2019s sixth feature and one he embarked upon half a century ago. As he\u2019s entering his ninth decade (his birthday is January 18th), this is a good time to look back on his career and examine his penchant for following conflicted characters on journeys of discovery, one which started with his debut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Boorman accepted the assignment to direct a movie starring the Dave Clark Five, all the distributors wanted was a carbon copy of A Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/em> they could rush into theaters before the British Invasion retreated. What they got was 1965\u2019s Catch Us If You Can<\/em> (released in States as Having a Wild Weekend<\/em>), which cast the band as disillusioned stuntmen working on a campaign for meat with the nonsensical slogan \u201cMEAT FOR GO!!\u201d Its spokesmodel, the mercurial Dinah, takes a liking to Clark\u2019s Steve and goes AWOL with him in the middle of a TV commercial shoot at a meat processing plant. Their ultimate destination is the island she\u2019s bought on the Devon coast, but the point of the trip is Steve and Dinah\u2019s encounters with a cross-section of Britain\u2019s fringe-dwellers and the lyrical, wordless passages Boorman slips in along the way. However poignant, the notion that this \u201cboy\u201d and \u201cgirl\u201d (as the head of Dinah\u2019s advertising firm refers to them) have any future together is dispelled the moment they reach her \u201cisland,\u201d which isn\u2019t as cut off from the mainland as she believed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Islands are central to Boorman\u2019s first two American films, Point Blank<\/em> (1967) and Hell in the Pacific<\/em> (1968). The former begins and ends on Alcatraz Island, where enigmatic antihero Walker is double-crossed during a robbery at the decommissioned prison and left for dead by his partner and wife. They also leave him with a burning desire to claim the $93,000 he believes he\u2019s owed, a bit of score settling that requires him to fly to Los Angeles and work his way up the hierarchy of The Organization, which isn\u2019t equipped to deal with someone so ruthless and single-minded. Following Walker\u2019s lead, Boorman skips over anything unnecessary, stripping out the genre clich\u00e9s and providing star Lee Marvin with a showcase for his physicality and taciturn intimidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both came in handy when they reunited for the World War II drama Hell in the Pacific<\/em>, in which Marvin plays an American pilot marooned on an uncharted island with a Japanese naval captain played by Toshiro Mifune, who has more keenly developed survival skills. Like Alcatraz, their island is a virtual prison, and it isn\u2019t until they put their differences aside \u2013 and effectively ignore the language barrier between them \u2013 that they contrive a means of escaping it and reaching some semblance of civilization, the encroachment of which spells doom for their hard-won comradeship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


The most famous journey in Boorman\u2019s oeuvre is the canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in 1972\u2019s Deliverance<\/em><\/a>, which is undertaken by four friends from Atlanta who get more than they bargained for out of their weekend in the country. Among their number is self-styled survivalist Lewis, but when he\u2019s sidelined by a serious injury, the less-assured Ed has to step up to get them through the ordeal. By the time the group (which loses one member along the way) makes it back to civilization, they\u2019ve been changed by the experience in ways they\u2019re unable to articulate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The clash between civilized man and his primitive nature is at the heart of 1974\u2019s Zardoz<\/em>, in which Zed, an Exterminator from the Outlands, hitches a ride inside a giant flying stone head to the rarified realm of the Eternals and upsets their carefully balanced society. The year is 2293 and Zed\u2019s tour through the Vortex brings him into contact with subgroups of the Eternals known as Apathetics and Renegades, who seek release from the immortality they\u2019ve been cursed with. Their search finds its echo in the quest for the Holy Grail in 1981\u2019s Excalibur<\/em>, Boorman\u2019s mud-caked and blood-soaked rendering of Arthurian legend. In it, Boorman follows Arthur from callow youth to imperfect king, and finds parallels with Perceval\u2019s journey from squire to knight to finder of the Grail and a dark reflection in Arthur\u2019s bastard son Mordred\u2019s trajectory from evil boy to would-be usurper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boorman\u2019s next, 1985\u2019s The Emerald Forest<\/em>, was the first of several socially conscious films inspired by true events. Filmed in the Amazon rainforest, it\u2019s about an American engineer who has relocated to Brazil with his family while he\u2019s overseeing construction of a dam that has displaced some of the country\u2019s indigenous people. When his young son Tommy is abducted by a tribe called the Invisible People, the father spends the next ten years searching for him. \u201cYou would miss these trips if you found your boy, huh?\u201d asks the snarky journalist who goes along on his latest expedition, but even when he finds his son, now grown to maturity and known as \u201cTomme,\u201d he\u2019s so integrated into the tribe he has no interest in returning to his old life. Tomme does have to venture into the city, however, to find his father when the time comes to ask for his help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Made a decade later, 1995\u2019s Beyond Rangoon<\/em> tells the story of an American tourist in Burma separated from her group when the military dictatorship clamps down on the pro-democracy movement in 1986. As one of the few Westerners left in the country after martial law is declared, she bears witness to the soldiers\u2019 indiscriminate killing as she makes her way to the Thailand border with a group of fellow refugees. This is an eye-opening trip that forces her, like Ed in Deliverance<\/em>, to find her inner strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time Boorman directed 2004\u2019s In My Country<\/em>, about South Africa\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, its atrocities were firmly in the past, but they\u2019re brought to life by the vivid testimony of the victims and their families. These hearings, which take place all over the country, are covered by journalists both foreign and domestic, including a naive Afrikaans poet played by Juliette Binoche and a cynical Washington Post<\/em> reporter played by Samuel L. Jackson, a show of star power for what would otherwise be a hard sell. One of the Commission\u2019s slogans is \u201cThe Truth Shall Set Us Free,\u201d but the truth can be hard to hear, especially when it\u2019s backed up by irrefutable physical evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of Catch Us If You Can<\/em>, Dinah\u2019s boss reveals he found her by \u201ctrying to guess your next move and arrive at your destination before you, which I did.\u201d Dinah can only reply, \u201cBut you missed the journey.\u201d For Boorman, the journey is intrinsically more important than the destination. There are always other stories to tell, more quests to go on, and he rarely concludes his films on a note of finality (though there are notable<\/a> exceptions<\/a> to this). \u201cI am conscious that I have left loose ends dangling,\u201d he writes in the final chapter of his 2003 memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy<\/em>, \u201cbut that just happens to be the way things are, for the real world lacks dramatic shape.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been eight years since the film Boorman has called his last \u2013 2015\u2019s Queen & Country<\/em>, his second journey into his own past after his 1987 masterpiece Hope and Glory<\/em> \u2013 but he has not sat idle. He published his first novel, Crime of Passion<\/em>, in 2016, and his second memoir, Conclusions<\/em>, in 2020. In that book, as in Adventures of a Suburban Boy<\/em>, he recounts with candor his rough-and-tumble experiences in and out of the film business. Frankly, the fact that he got to make as many features as he did \u2013 17 in 50 years, and most of them on his own terms \u2013 is the kind of miracle of which Merlin himself would be proud. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To celebrate the visionary director\u2019s 90th birthday, we examine a key theme running through many of his films, starting with his first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":19512,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-19510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}