Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe | The Red Drum Getaway / 2015

in a spin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe (directors) The Red Drum Getaway / 2015

 

For the duration of about 4 minutes, Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe’s The Red Drum Getaway patches together scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo with scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, and 2001. The result is somewhat silly, but given the supernatural and violent elements these six movies share, the mashup sort of makes sense.

       As the video explains, “Jimmy was having a rather beautiful day,” checking out the women from his apartment window—until suddenly he catches a glimpse, in the window across the way, of a murderer even more dangerous than Raymond Burr’s Lars Thorwald: Jack Nicholson from The Shining madly gazing back at him.

      Already a bit on the dizzy side after performing his “I look up, I look down” scene in Vertigo, James Stewart encounters horrible visions in every direction he turns, running into the gang member droogs of A Clockwork Orange down one San Francisco street, after catching another glimpse of the insane Jack Torrance. With nowhere to turn, he ducks into a club, The Red Drum, wherein he immediately encounters the circle of naked women of Kubrick’s last and worst film, Eyes Wide Shut.

       The whole experience is just too much for the former cop, Scottie, who immediately spins into his own vertiginous madness, falling into the desert plain where our simian forbearers from 2001 beat him to a pulp. Even the now tortured Malcom McDowell screams in horror at the spin of events, while other Kubrick and Hitchcock figures look on as if witnessing it on their television sets.

       If this is all rather trivial, it’s so well done that we almost wish the two directors, Hitchcock and Kubrick, and actors, Stewart and Nicholson, might have gotten together to make a grand spooky entertainment. In some ways, it almost seems that they might have enjoyed the results.

    And if nothing else, directors Dezaley, Delabaere, and Philippe remind us of just interesting found materials and be when collaged together into narrative.

 

Los Angeles, May 24, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2016).