Beyond the Law

A vanity project of the most arrogant sort. Andy Warhol's EMPIRE would be far better to watch. The problem is the sound, not the poor camera-work. I can take shadows, bodies in front of speakers, off-kilter framing, but I can't accept a novelist-director allowing the dialog to be completely muddy, drowned out, and unintelligible. A boom mike expertly handled would have allowed us to hear many of the words. Our ears don't muddy sound that badly in a crowded police station. But Mailer never gave us a chance to hear any more than 5% of the dialog. I detest the word "pretentious," but that's the only way to describe this auditory nightmare. Certainly an oddity to be experienced but only for five minutes. Read his wonderful prose works instead of trying to understand what he and his characters are saying in this film. He was a master of description and written dialog, but here the words are lost in the wilderness of bad technology.

While I am sympathetic to this project, and the actors appear to be doing interesting things, this sounds like it was recorded on a < $100 small tape machine with a cheap microphone located (and its location was the most crucial variable), for inexplicable reasons, in the back of the room. It boggles my mind how Mailer can be so savvy and perfectionistic about some things (he was a trained engineer, and discoursed easily in technical matters--see his book on Apollo 11) could oversee such horrible sound. If I listen with headphones and jack the treble up, I still can only occasionally understand the dialogue in this strange film. Maybe it is "supposed" exist in some borderland of intelligibility.

Made before, after or the same night as the abominable Wild 90, Norman Mailer and buds take it up a notch in Beyond the Law. It is still terrible filmmaking but anything is an improvement over 90, an indecipherable mishmash of inebriated bravado not worth the celluloid it is printed on. In Law there is more of a storyline, a larger cast of characters, a variety of location and some sloppy jump cutting that is more frazzle than dazzle by auteur Mailer who chips in another incoherent performance along with his smooth operator pals.

Law opens in a NY precinct with a line-up in progress. Plenty of tough talk improvisation and poor recording render it banal immediately. There is more of the same in rooms with suspects being grilled by indecorous cops who believe physical force is the best motivator. The mayor (George Plimpton) visits to see if the cops are playing by the rules and walks away clueless and convinced they are. Off duty our heroes meet up with the ladies and juxtapose their down time with their on the clock shenanigans, quite prevalent as the Knapp Commission would later show.

Mailer has the bare bones of a decent story that might have had some traction in the hands of a semi-competent filmmaker but as in Wild 90 old Norm and cast decide to clumsily improvise their way around as a boom mike makes surprise entrances in scenes attempting to capture some of the garbled dialog while the actors attempt to keep straight faces. Plimpton in particular shot from ankle angle does a poor job at doing either. Mailer of course is not about to be upstaged and mid-picture he decides to adopt an Irish accent which also fails to make him any more intelligible to translate. Rip Torn as suspect Popeye offers up the film's only interesting character and decent performance but he's not around for long while the abrasive Mailer wallowing in stumbling self indulgence refuses to go away. Terrible film? Yes, but Mailer's done worse.

I watched the Criterion CD of "Beyond The Law" and discovered it was made of a pastiche of 16mm print and 35mm prints. Thus the reason for the bad sound and lousy digital transfer. Criterion evidently doesn't pay attention to their output...