CineLinkr #50: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Strictly Ballroom was originally a student play Baz Luhrmann made at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1984. It performed at drama festivals. An industry contact encouraged him to turn it into a feature film. Eight years later he did, using the same story and the same rooftop finale. That finale is still the best scene in his filmography -- including the ones where he threw considerably more money at the screen.

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🟢 Easy: Legends of the Old West

Movies: Once Upon a Time in the West · Unforgiven (1992) · For a Few Dollars More · Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Once Upon a Time in the West and Unforgiven make an interesting pair: Leone built the mythology and Eastwood, 25 years later, quietly dismantled it. Leone cast Henry Fonda as the villain specifically because nobody had used him that way before. Fonda spent his career playing good men, and Leone wanted audiences to register the wrongness before anything had happened. It works. The moment Fonda turns around and you see those blue eyes, the casting logic lands immediately.

For a Few Dollars More was the film that established the Eastwood-Van Cleef partnership. Van Cleef had spent the preceding decade working in TV westerns after his Hollywood career stalled. This was the film that reminded everyone he was worth watching. Leone cast him again in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who watched him in this one.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the highest-grossing film of 1969. William Goldman spent years failing to sell the script, then won his first Oscar for it. The film also received nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. The Academy liked it a great deal.

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🟡 Medium: Deaths played entirely for laughs

Movies: The Death of Stalin · In Bruges · Harold and Maude · The Lobster

Martin McDonagh visited Bruges as a tourist and found it oppressive. The medieval architecture, the canals, the sense that nothing had changed since the fifteenth century. He went home and wrote a screenplay about two hitmen stranded in the city with a body between them. In Bruges is very funny. It is also genuinely serious at the end, in a way that catches you off guard if you went in expecting only the comedy.

Harold and Maude was pulled from most cinemas within two weeks of its 1971 opening. It became a repertory staple over the following decades, screened at midnight in college towns, and is now one of the most cited cult films in American cinema. The central premise (a suicidal teenager falls in love with a 79-year-old woman) is presented without apology, and the film insists on two things simultaneously: she is going to die, and their love is real, and the first fact does not cancel the second.

The Death of Stalin and The Lobster are doing something formally related: both refuse to modulate their register downward for the material. A roomful of terrified men arguing over who is in charge of a corpse. A hotel where loneliness has a bureaucratic processing system and the alternative to finding a partner is becoming an animal. Everything played straight. The comedy lives entirely in the gap between the tone and what is actually happening.

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🔵 Hard: The dance is the whole argument

Movies: The Young Girls of Rochefort · Dirty Dancing · Suspiria (2018) · Strictly Ballroom

The Young Girls of Rochefort opens with a parade through a pastel town that tells you everything about the film before anyone speaks. Jacques Demy had the actual town of Rochefort repainted in vivid pastel colours for the production. The paint stayed for years after the crew left. The film is about yearning and missed connections, two sisters who keep almost meeting the men they were meant for. The opening movement announces all of it as colour and footwork before a word is said.

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria opens with a dancer collapsing into a taxi while the new student watches from outside. Inside the school, a woman dances herself apart while the camera stays with it. The sequence tells you what the school does and what the film will become without explaining anything. By the time the explanation arrives, you have already understood.

Dirty Dancing closes with a lift. The lift is not just a dance move: it is the end of one thing and the beginning of another, and the film earns both readings because it has spent two hours being specific about the summer that led here. The dance sequences are not intermissions in the story. They are the story.

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🟣 Tricky: Loves that never found their ending

Movies: Brief Encounter · In the Mood for Love · Brokeback Mountain · The Remains of the Day

Brief Encounter was filmed partly at Carnforth Station in Lancashire because the crew needed a location far enough from London to work without wartime blackout restrictions. David Lean adapted Noel Coward's one-act play and made the railway platform goodbye the emotional centre of the film. The final image most people carry is Laura in an armchair, her husband's hand on her shoulder, the entire affair behind her and the rest of her life unchanged ahead.

Wong Kar-wai shot over 30 hours of footage for In the Mood for Love. The final cut runs 98 minutes. The shot of Chow Mo-wan at Angkor Wat, whispering a secret into a hole in a stone wall, came from a news story Kar-wai read about a local tradition for confessing things you cannot say aloud. It was not in the original script.

Brokeback Mountain ends with a shirt inside a shirt. Ennis finds them in Jack's closet, months after the accident, and hangs them together on a wire hanger. The film does not ask him to explain anything. The Remains of the Day ends on a promenade by the sea where Stevens says, almost completely, what he spent his life declining to choose. Then the film cuts away before he can retract it.

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Four films about love, every one of them ending on the wrong side of the person the protagonist loves. That tricky category was designed to sit with you.

If you'd rather end your day with something that does not involve unrequited longing, today's PixelLinkr is running turn-based JRPGs, school-set games, and sequels that ditched the formula entirely.