"Really Nixon: faceless tycoons, tawdry protection rackets, dirty little wallets. You ought to be Dean Martin's scriptwriter"
Man of Violence, or Moon under the title card it plays with here, is an interesting curio though not one that I find particularly successful. This is an extremely unecessarily confusing gangster film-cum-spy thriller-meets-travelogue with a huge network of characters all regularly referred to by their surname only (for the tough gangster guys) or their nicknames (for the girls, or our hero) getting introduced with strange divergent plot twists that occur every five minutes or so until my head was spinning trying to keep up.
Our 'hero' Moon (we know his name because it gets said about twenty times in the first ten minutes) is a lowlife Yojimbo-esque amoral antihero (and, I'm choosing my words carefully here,
complete asshole!) who gets hired by both sides to watch over the other in some sort of Northern-Southern dispute over a construction racket and nightclub scam dispute. Yet this smalltime dispute between two bosses and their thugs plot gets embellished upon until it is almost unrecognisable as Moon finds out (through going to a gay club to interrogate a Diplomat and when he can't get the information from him, instead doing come hither looks and pumping his gabby, flamboyant young aide for information in the bedroom, in a scene which seemingly unintentionally throws bisexuality as a tool for information gathering into a spy's arsenal. Let's see James Bond do that in one of his cases!) about a teetering North African state whose gold reserves have gone missing, visits the embassy and meets up with the heroine who caused the whole convoluted plot by working in a nightclub in Marrakesh where she got involved with the President's son and when he was overthrown and executed came back to the UK with the President and all the gold reserves of the country and stupidly told the gang bosses all about them, so they are now fighting over who gets the money. This all gets thrown at the audience in nonchalant exposition dump scene as the hero and heroine, who've known each other for all of five minutes, casually get undressed to go to bed together in a seedy hotel room.
Then the film for some reason decides to throw in one of the bosses also managing some sort of boy band as a front to bring the gold back to Britain by getting them to go on a North African tour in their Volkswagen van with the band name "Flossie and the Crush" stuck on the side of their Mystery Machine. Why do we need the scene of him bereating his teenage daughter for falling in love with the Liverpudlian-accented member of the group? Is it just that it wouldn't be the tail end of the 1960s without a internationally famous Liverpool boy band in there? I guess the group's apparent fame works in allowing Moon to distract a group of (30-something looking) teenage squealing groupies to barricade the band inside a building so he can steal their van for himself!
All the above bizarre narrative stuff would be problematic enough, but the whole film is performed with dialogue that is so arch and winking, whilst obtusely skirting around anything that would come close to seeming like an actual conversation that two human beings would have, that it makes the film even tougher to sit through. For example see this exchange that takes place when one of the gang bosses has captured the heroine and is about to torture her (through forced lesbianism, which she seems pretty nonplussed about, so the threat of that seems to have missed the mark somewhat) for information:
"Humphrey Bogart will be remembered for those immortal lines "spill the beans". You might like to save Mr Bogart the embarassment of turning in his grave to hear me mutilate the majesty of those words"
"Very funny"
"Tell me everything you know sweetheart, or better still everything that Moon knows"
"He's as wise as I am"
"There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. Arranged in a motley manner they can be arranged to impart certain information. Which they shall!"
There is some fun to be had from the arch, pretentious dialogue, especially in the way that almost everything is done in the form of one-liners that don't really hit the mark at all, resulting in some excrutiatingly lame jokes hanging dead in the air. Combine that with the way that nobody else (especially the strangely blank female characters, even the, and I'm choosing my words carefully here,
stunningly thick heroine) reacts in any normal way to anything that gets said (not even a "what the hell are you talking about!"), and it is like the film is existing in some strange parallel universe in which the all of the terrible fashions, mannered line readings, hateful protagonists, cut price off season package holiday tourism and lame puns are treated as the epitome of uber-cool gangster chic and globe trotting adventure to rival James Bond.
I'm left with so many questions for the filmmakers: it is nice at first, but why use that blaring theme tune to punctuate every moment of action, or between scenes? I guess it is to show how exciting events are but it just makes the film play like a television episode such as The Avengers or The Persuaders, for all its heavy handed underscoring. Why did the filmmakers decide to use sped up motion for a couple of the action scenes, which makes what should be some of the more tense moments play out like Keystone Cops? Is the hero meant to be a cool loner or a horrible selfish monster? (I'm going with monster as only the worst kinds of people refer to themselves in the third person. Although wardrobe-wise I suppose Moon is able to pull off a salmon pink shirt and lobster red tie combination very well!) And what is the reason for the film's fascination for women's navels and liquids being shot at or smeared into them? Which gets replaced in the Marrakesh scenes with a similar fascination for every character holding single flowers to their noses and twirling them around during their dialogue scenes?
But I don't think such questions should really be asked of this film. It is the kind of film where the main character is introduced in a scene wiping blood from his face in the reflection of the glass of a picture, when there is a perfectly good mirror just feet away he could have used! Or where the hero again decides to abandon the Mystery Machine in Marrakesh, removes the "Flossie and the Crumbs" tacked on paper signs from the sides of the van, takes off the number plates and then just drops them in a heap on the ground next to the van! Why go to the bother! Those strange bits of business emphasise to me the way that the film is all about 'cool' postures and actions, in the same way that the dialogue is presumably meant to play like 'cool', sophisticated and sparkling repartee. Yet there is no actual thought behind exactly why the characters are doing what they're doing, except just to look 'cool'.
It sometimes feels like an improv gangster film in that sense, in which you can see all of the actors making up what their characters are doing from moment to moment. Perhaps best emphasised in the final showdown double crossing scene which somehow just peters out with half of the characters just slinking out of the scene at a loss for words!
Writing the film up I'm being harsh on it but it is certainly a unique film! I did particularly like the incredibly bleak ending that really seems to prefigure the final twist endings of Pete Walker's (much better) horror films, particularly that of House of Whipcord in the way that both films end wth the characters being led away to police cars. It is great to get a chance to see some of Walker's non-horror films, and to find out that this film has some of the same ideas within it.
It does also work as a very strange off kilter example of the kind of low-rent sex and violence British gangster film that was soon going to be utterly destroyed by Performance, and weirdly has a lot of similar obsessions to Performance in its bisexual sex, threats of sadism (as the heroine briefly gets threatened with a belt whipping when the lesbianism isn't having the desired effect) and bizarre halfway turn from urban gangster film to, in Moon's case a pop-star inflected trip to another country. But Moon handles its weird material more generically compared to Performance's extreme abstraction and fractured trip into the interior of a gangster's psyche.