'Something Wild' (1961) We come back to this film every few years and it never fails to hypnotize us every time we see it.
It haunts us like no other film. It stays stuck in our head days after we've viewed it. We didn't know what to make of it the first time we saw it.......and maybe we still don't.
Which brings us to the conclusion that it's one brilliant piece of cinema.
Call it a fever dream. Call it a tone poem. Call it a waking nightmare with a calm, restful ending.
This damn film so burns into our eyeballs that we're writing this post as fast as we can to get the damn thing out of our head.
At least for a while, anyway. Until we end up watching it again. Which seems inevitable.
Start with the opening credits. A clashing, crashing symphony erupts, an ear grabbing attack of sound written by American's master composers, Aaron Copeland. (one of his few film scores)
The visuals are equally stunning, a riot of black-and-white imagery of New York City......the teeming crowds, the roaring subway trains, the towering skyscrapers and lowly tenements.......with the shots coming at you as furiously as Copeland's cacophonous music, courtesy of the classic cinematographer Eugen Shuftan ("Eyes Without A Face", "The Hustler")
Then the film wastes no time hurling itself into its simple, primal story
Mary Ann, a lonely, innocent New York college girl (Carrol Baker) walking home at night, is grabbed by a rapist and brutally assaulted.
Telling no one, especially her harsh, domineering mother,(Mildred Dunnock), she has immediately internalized her trauma. She's now the walking wounded, an emotional zombie adrift in a cold, careless city that's oblivious to her pain.
Now a damaged lost soul wandering the streets, Mary Ann consigns herself to a tiny rented room that's like a solitary confinement cell. She takes a shopgirl job at Woolworth's, mocked for her remoteness by the other girls who work with her.
Her attempted suicide is interrupted by Mike (Ralph Meeker), an auto mechanic who takes her back to his basement apartment. And it doesn't take long before Mary Ann (and we the viewers) realize Mike is another damaged, lost soul, as cut off from any human connection as Mary Ann.
And here's where the film takes its most disturbing turns.
In as much pain as she is, Mike sees Mary Ann as some kind of lifeline for himself, his last chance to join the world as a fully functioning human. Incapable of any normal interaction with her, he briefly imprisons Mary Ann in the apartment. When he staggers home drunk and lunges at her, she kicks his eye out.
Fear and self-loathing simultaneously drives the two of them apart and brings them together.
Is it possible these two mentally storm-tossed people find a way to save each other? That's for the film to answer.........and whether or not you accept or tolerate the finale of this story.......well, that makes for a great conversation starter after you're done watching it.
Baker and Meeker are achingly superlative together, the oddest of odd couples ever seen. In addition to Dunnock, you can also spot "All In The Family"s Jean Stapleton as Baker's shrill tenement neighbor and Doris Roberts as one of the Woolworth girls.
In describing this movie, we always feel it comes off sounding like a fractured fairy tale.
And maybe that's exactly what it is.......unless you see it as something different.
To us, "Something Wild", with its raw nerve cast, astonishing score, photography both gritty and dream-like. remains forever.......something wild.
And for BQ, that makes is a 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS.
See it.
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